iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The ISA-18.2 recommendation for alarm priority allocation is nice.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

It kinda ended with the theme from Alien. The villain wasn't the aliens, it was AeroTech.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I wonder if the raised ride height from crossovers and huge trucks could explain why everyone started stopping 1.5+ car-lengths behind the car in front of them at red lights, totally wrecking traffic light timing.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I understand the backlash from this was so severe that they redid G.I. Joe: The Movie so that Duke only suffers a coma after Serpentor throws a snake javelin through his heart.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I went to watch a soccer game and every car in the stadium parking lot was backed-in, so I just did like everyone else. The reason became clear after the game when everyone was leaving at the same time. The lot emptied very smoothly when nobody had to back out.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

If submarines count, Carter deserved his.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I just now noticed the sandals for the first time. I must have been distracted by something else.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

One of the cooler Ideas from a plant I remember was one where the backup generators could either run off of natural gas lines from the gas utility, or draw from the gas sphere collecting methane from the digesters. They still kept the flame stack running 24/7.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Is there any utility in reporting radiation readings only in counts per minute (CPM)? Isn't that worthless without knowing what formula to convert CPM from your scintillator or Geiger–Müller tube into a meaningful dosage number? I could be missing something obvious. I'm not a physics person.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Too busy dealing with RO ass projects to clean up PFAS.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Thanks to all the Bluesky folks for talking up The Dish because of Sam Neill. Watching for the first time and it is delightful.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Happiness is replacing a dodgy radio telemetry link with a fiber optic cable.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Don't get me wrong, alarm notification is good. If something goes wrong in the middle of the night at a plant that isn't staffed 24 hours, you want someone to know. But that leads to... "These digester blowers sometimes trip out and you just need to reset the fault. Let me do that from bed."

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

The trend I've seen is them just asking their systems integrator to make it so they can operate the plant from a cell phone.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Towards the end of the Space Shuttle program, NASA put out some fantastic Hollywood film parody posters for each mission.

A NASA mission poster for STS-125, the final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. It is titled "Atlantis 125" and is in the same style as a movie poster for the Hollywood film "Oceans 12"

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

It's a private (not publicly traded) company.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

It seems like it's a lot easier to spot differences in design for wastewater than water plants, since the latter stuff is normally indoors. "Oh, wow! They've got a BNR process!" vs "Who knows what's in that building. They've got some chemical tanks outside. Might be RO, might be MIEX; who knows?"

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Arabesque No. 1 immediately started playing in my head as soon as I saw this post.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

When the guy from this other company visited the plant and saw what I had done, he went ballistic. He was claiming it was his data and he was going to sue everyone. (I'm of the opinion this is a work for hire and the tank level data is the intellectual property of the water utility.)

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

So I write a custom module for my industry standard SCADA software to open that file, scan down to the last line, parse out that data field, scale and output the value. Boom, now we've got the tank data where the customer wants it. I also copied their old history files and backfilled years of data.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

If you wanna move into my turf with your software, I'm gonna look at your files, and what did I find? You're logging your historical data in semicolon delimited text files. I take a look and find a data field that scaling 0-255 to 0-100% matches the tank level data your janky software is reporting.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

This tank monitoring system predated us upgrading the plant for several years, so when we came in to automate the plant we put in a new computer. The other company decided to put their software on the new computer we provided. Ok, cool. It's the customer's computer at this point. Whatever.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

This other company doing the tank telemetry had a bespoke system with small batch PCBs and software that looked like it was done in Visual Basic. That was separate software they had to run alongside the software we were using to run the plant. The customer asked if we could get some of that data.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Yeah, that panhandle through the pine forest is longer than you think. I used to go between Huntsville and St. Augustine annually, so I feel you.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

I'm gonna be thinking about this guy the next time I turn the knobs on my manual antenna tuner.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

I am amazed at how clearly this old film explains SWR and impedance matching. I wish I had watched this years ago. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dovu...

youtube.com

AT&T Archives: Similiarities of Wave Behavior (Bonus Edition)

YouTube video by AT&T Tech Channel

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Blue Origin was awarded a contract for the Artemis 5 lander in 2023, so they're presumably already working on that.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

From the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual:

When the round explodes, it spreads more than 300 fragments over a casualty radius of five meters.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

I remember listening to the early local radio shows on September 8, 2009, when Obama was going to give a Presidential address to schoolchildren. People were losing their minds; keeping their kids out of school that day, so they wouldn't have to hear a black man speak from a position of authority.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

I'm used to the VFD vendor sending out a person to set up the pump curves and stuff, and then giving me the Modbus addresses to interact with.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

I'm just an systems integration / SCADA contractor for wastewater plants and get the usual anecdotes from operators about weird stuff getting trapped by the bar screens. Mopheads, turtles (!), etc; but the most chilling thing I ever heard was the explanation for why one plant had an old incinerator.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Is there any chance The Onion might have a braille edition through something like the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled?

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Awesome! NASA used to make some cool mission posters.

Mission poser produced by NASA for STS-125. The poster is done in the same style as poster advertisements for the film Ocean's 12.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

It's in Pittsburgh, but it's also very old. They didn't have to switch to a W prefix, despite being east of the Mississippi.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

I suppose KDKA was grandfathered in.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

I was hoping the recent polar vortex weather bringing temperatures way down might show an increase in activity per my muon theory, but it's actually been a little low. I've got another Geiger counter kit, so maybe I'll stack it on the current one and combine them to identify muon strikes.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

This reads to me more like a response to a scheme akin to Operation Plowshare to nuke a glacier to access copper deposits below the ice.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

Being more active on the radio did not, as I assumed, reduce the measured levels of radioactivity in my ham shack.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

So what else can trigger a G-M tube more often in winter than in summer? Is it Muons created by cosmic rays in the denser cold winter atmosphere? I'm thinking it's Muons.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

I got the ham radio bug again in September/October last year and activated my station in the shack since then, checking into regular weekday nets and hunting DX contacts on the weekends. The shack has never had so much ventilation before. I figured this should wipe out the winter spike, but nope.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

Prior to this past September, I pretty much only went into the shack during mowing season to access the mower and yard tools. The idea that maybe radon was just getting trapped during the winter months and increasing the measured radiation dose seemed reasonable. (I live in karst area.)

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

Searching for an explanation, I read that radon is the largest contributor to background radiation. This tube can't detect alpha radiation, but the decay products from radon will still set it off as beta and gamma.

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Curly Shuffle @shuffler.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

Since 2017, I've had a 1990's vintage Soviet Geiger–Müller tube in my tool shed / ham radio shack reporting in to my home SCADA system. It puts out CPM and, with a little math, µSv/hr. In SCADA, I fed that µSv/hr reading into a totalizer to get a daily µSv total. The daily totals seem seasonal.

Graph of historical data showing µSv/hour and daily µSv totals for a five year period. The recorded values show an annual low point during the summer and a peak in the winter.

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