Posted 31 May 2024

The folks at TrueTheVote.org (the organization that used cellphone geotracking to expose widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election) put together a database to expose huge numbers of invalid voter registrations across the country. Most of these invalid registrations are due to the voter having moved out of their original voting district/county, but not removed by the responsible election board. While this seems pretty innocuous (and was, in earlier, less troubled times), this now represents a huge opportunity for fraud in the upcoming 2024 election.

Although the TTV folks have the data, they can’t do much about it without the help of concerned citizens who actually vote in those regions because local laws require that any voter challenge be raised by a voting citizen in that particular region.

So, TTV generated a website called ‘IV3’ which allows concerned citizens from anywhere in the U.S. to create an account and query the IV3 database for problematic voter registration records for their voting district/county. For instance, I live and vote in Franklin county, Ohio and my page on the IV3 site looks like this:

If I click on ‘View Active’, I get a page displaying the first record that matches the criteria, i.e. a voter still registered in Franklin county but who has since moved to an address outside of the County, as shown below:

If I want to challenge this voter’s registration in Franklin county, I would click on ‘Challenge this record’, which would display ‘Cancel’ and ‘Submit’ buttons as shown below:

Clicking on the ‘Submit’ button would remove the record from the ‘Active’ list and place it on the ‘Challenged’ list, which could then be exported in .CSV format for submission to the Franklin county board of elections.

It sometimes takes more than 100 seconds for the site to display a new record after each challenge submission, so this gets old pretty fast. After several days of plugging along while working on other things, I had managed to challenge about 600 records from the more than 42,000, a mere ‘drop in the bucket’. So, I started to wonder if I might be able to automate this a bit with a Python script; a web-bot of sorts.

After some research, I discovered a web-page automation API called ‘Selenium’ that could be called from a Python script, so I started learning how to use Selenium to do what I wanted. After the usual number of mistakes and appeals to StackOverflow for guidance, I got a working Python script together, as shown below:

Note that in order to use this script, you must have Python3 and the Selenium extension installed on your computer.

Even though I used ‘FranklinCountyOhioChallenges’ as the name of the main function, this script should be usable for any other location (or you can simply change the name, as long as the two occurrences in the script have identical names).

After getting the script working, I can now run the script to challenge any number of voters with a very simple command, as shown below:

On my windows system (and I’m pretty sure this holds for **nux systems as well) all I have to do to run another batch of the same size is to click on the ‘up-arrow’ button once and then hit ‘Return’. If a different batch size is desired, it’s ‘up-arrow’, edit the batch size, then ‘Return’.

I have found that doing a batch size of 100 takes about 90 minutes, so I can do several of these during the day while working on other things, and then I generally do a batch of 500 overnight. This allows me to do at least 1000 or so each day, so it will still take me around 42 days to challenge all the 42K or so registered voters who have moved out of the county. Your mileage may vary, of course :).

Each time I get a thousand or so challenges done, I click on the ‘View My Challenges’ button on the main page, and then on the ‘Export’ button as shown below, to download the challenges into a .CSV file that is directly readable in Excel (or any other modern spreadsheet program). I then use Excel to print out the entire batch (using Portrait mode and scaling to ‘fit all columns on one page’). Then I fill out and sign the cover form required by the Franklin County Board of Elections, attach the printed out challenge records, and physically submit the form and data to the BOE. As courtesy I also email the .CSV file to the responsible officer there, and so far they seem to appreciate the effort.

22 June 2024 Update:

My script started failing on me a few days ago, and I couldn’t see why. After using the issue as my ‘going to sleep puzzle’, I realized I could go back to my old manual process and see if it worked. If it did, then something in my script was bad. If it failed, then something had changed on the iv3 website.

As it turned out, IV3 had added a new ‘View Moved and Registered’ button, and moved all the qualifying records (which, it turned out, was all of them) into the new database. So, when I clicked on my normal ‘View Active’ button, I got ‘No Records Found’, which of course also killed my script :(.

So, the fix was to direct my script to the new button instead, and then all was well. I have updated the above script to the new version.

Stay tuned,

Frank

Almost three years ago I designed and fabricated some pill/caplet dispensers for the half-dozen or so prescription meds I have managed to accumulate over the last decade or so. A while ago, one of my prescriptions changed its tablet to a much smaller size, so I decided to update my design while fabricating a replacement dispenser.

Between the last project and this one I’ve been playing with OnShape, a web-based 3D CAD package, so I thought I would use it to see if I could do better than last time. I really like OnShape because it uses a 2D ‘sketch’ based design philosophy, which makes tweaks and/or modifications much easier – change a few 2D sketches, and the entire design changes along with it.

The previous design implemented a smooth collar that was a press-fit for the pill bottle cap which turned out to be kind of clunky. This time I thought I might try implementing internal threads on the collar so instead of a press fit it would simply screw on like the original cap, and I discovered that a ‘ThreadCreator’ extension existed for OnShape – neat!

So, I worked my way through the process, and came up with the following design, available to anyone with a free OnShape account

This design has internal threads for a 37mm cap with the standard 4.7mm thread pitch, so it will screw directly onto the pill bottle, ‘eliminating the middleman’. Here are some photos of the finished product:

And here is a short video showing the dispenser in action:

10 June 2024 Update:

Last night I attempted run two more prints of this model, as I have two additional pill bottles of the same diameter with older pill dispensers, but the prints failed catastrophically – bummer! I rounded up the usual suspects (bed temp, model arrangement, Z-axis tuning, etc, and finally managed to get another print going, at least through the raft and first few layers. After bitching and moaning about this for a while, it occurred to me that if I had documented the layout and settings more aggressively from the first print, I wouldn’t have wasted all those hours last night and today. So, once I’m sure I have a consistent print configuration, I will document it here.

I got a good print with the following settings:

• Flashforge Creator PRO II ID
• Left Extruder – Red PETG, 240C, 80C Bed
• Right Extruder AquaSys120 240C, 80C Bed
• 2-layer raft using support filament (AquaSys120)

See the following images for the full setup:

After a 3-hour side-trip into the guts of the Flashforge to clear an extruder jam, I was able to get the second print underway. As I write this it is about 6% finished, but all the way through all the support material parts (so it should finish OK).

17 June 2024 Update:

Not so fast! I realized that the threaded portion of the dispenser cap, while functional, was very poorly printed due to the lack of supports (and, as I found out later, also due to the resolution setting). In addition, the side walls of the V7 slide box were too thin and broke apart easily. After modifying the design, I attempted another print using the above settings, but the PVA dissolvable filament simply refused to stick to the print bed – arrrrrgggggghhhhh!

After going through the whole extruder & bed temperature search routine again yesterday, including replacing the heated bet PEI layer and even putting down blue painter’s tape with no success, I was perusing google-space for clues and kept running across reports where dehumidifying the PVA filament worked. I didn’t see how that would help me, as we control the relative humidity in our house to about 50% +/-, but hey, what did I have to lose at this point?

So, before going to bed I dug out my filament dehumidifier rig and left my filament in it overnight (and until about noon the next day for a little over 12 hours). Then I tried some prints and although not successful at first, the results were encouraging. I finally got two really good prints with the following setup:

• Slicer resolution: ‘0.15m OPTIMAL’ setting in Prusa Slicer
• Right (PVA) extruder: 220C
• Left (PETG) extruder: 240C (this was constant throughout)
• Bed: 40C
• Layer of blue painter’s tape on top of the PEI substrate

So, I think the big takeaway from this episode is: PVA must be explicitly dehumidified BEFORE each print session. Otherwise the PVA will not stick to the print bed, no matter what you do.

Stay tuned,

Frank

07 July 2024 Update:

After getting the threaded pill bottle dispenser cap working, I decided to try my luck with my two 57mm twist-lock pill bottles. The twist-lock cap geometry was considerably harder to design. Rather than trying to design and print everything as one piece, I decided to separate the dispenser piece from the cap mating piece, as shown below:

Posted 05 May 2024

My daily carry pistol is the M&P Bodyguard 380 in a ‘Sticky’ brand Holster, as shown below:

I carry this in my jeans front pocket, and it works great. I regularly practice smoothly drawing the pistol, activating the Crimson Trace laser, and getting the gun on target. Unfortunately after a year or so of use I started seeing occurrences where the laser wouldn’t activate, and investigation showed that the laser battery was dead. The first time this happened I just wrote it off to the normal battery life, but the second and third times were definitely too close together to be a battery life issue. I finally figured out that the laser was being inadvertently activated in the holster – clearly not a good solution. The good news is, it made me more determined than ever to not count on the laser. Now I practice with and without the laser (although I much prefer the ‘with’ scenario).

Thinking about the problem, I inferred that the ‘Sticky’ holster, when new, comparatively stiffer when new than after hundreds of cycles of inserting and removing it from my jeans pocket, and of course hundreds of dry-fire draw and shoot repetitions. Eventually the holster gets pliable enough so the normal inward pressure from my jeans pocket is enough to activate the laser at some point (and once is enough, as once activated it will probably stay ON until battery exhaustion). As you might imagine, replacing the battery in the laser module is a major PITA, as the pistol itself must be disassembled, and then the laser module removed to access the battery. Then the procedure must be run in reverse to re-assemble everything, and now the laser alignment must be checked and adjusted as necessary (another major PITA).

Thinking about solutions, I contemplated 3D-printing a holster insert that would replace the original holster stiffness (and I might still do this). However, I was struck by the idea that the real solution to the holster material pressing in on the laser activation button is to remove the holster material around the button; then the holster material thickness becomes an additional guard around the button. Instead of being the culprit, it now becomes the solution – cool! Here’s another photo showing the ‘Sticky’ holster with a (unfortunately crude) hold around the pistol’s laser button:

‘Sticky’ holster with material over laser activation button removed

After – once again – replacing the laser battery, I plan to run with this setup for a while and see how long the laser batteries last this time.

17 July 2024 Upate:

From May of this year until now I had no problem with laser battery life, but yesterday I found the batteries low/dead again. This indicated I was still getting inadvertent laser activation even with the laser button cutouts shown above. So, I decided to see if I could improve on the design a bit.

I went into OnShape, my 3D design tool of choice, and designed a hollow ‘holster bump’ as shown in the screenshot below:

The idea, as shown below, is to protect the laser activation button on each side of the gun, so it can’t be activated when in the holster

I then used hot glue to affix them temporarily to the gun to confirm their positions coincided with the holes I had previously mad in the holster. After this, I glued the bumps into the holes with superglue. We’ll see how this works.

Stay tuned,

Frank

Posted 05 May 2024

I and my wife are crossword puzzle addicts. To feed our habits, I signed up for the NY Times crossword puzzle archives and downloaded the Friday, Saturday and Sunday puzzles (the Mon-Thurs puzzles were too easy) for each week between January 2015 and December 2022.

Originally I would print out a puzzle as required by opening/printing the puzzle file using Across Lite, but this got old in a hurry. So, I decided I would create a program to automagically print an entire folder’s worth of puzzles in ‘batch mode’ utilizing two-sided printing – yay! Looking around for the best/easiest way to accomplish this, I ran across an application called ‘AutoIt’, specifically created as a shell-script generator to run Windows (or Mac) applications and system functions.

It took a while to work my way through the command reference and examples, but eventually I was able to create an AutoIt shell script to do what I wanted; The script prompts the user for a directory containing Across Lite *.puz files, and offers to print them all in equal N-puzzle batches, thereby allowing the user to print a batch and then move the printed puzzles from the output tray to the input tray for a double-sided result.

This worked great, with the only downside being that the user’s PC cannot be used for anything else while the script is running, as it grabs the mouse cursor to launch Across Lite and print the current .puz file.

Here’s the script, as it stands now in May of 2024 (saved on my system as C:\Users\Frank\Documents\Personal\Crosswords\Print Pending\240504 PUZ Print Script.au3):

And here is the output log for printing the contents of the ‘C:\Users\Frank\Documents\Personal\Crosswords\Print Pending\2015’ folder containing 156 puzzle files, printed in four batches of 39 files each:

After some time away from my autonomous wall-following robot, I have started spending time with it again. The first thing that happened was I tried a long-term run in my home, only to find that the ‘mirrored-surface’ feature I added some time ago caused the robot to enter an infinite loop, even when encountering a non-mirrored surface – oops! This eventuality was such a bummer that I stopped working with the robot for several months.

When I worked up the courage to address the problem, the first thing I did was to back out the ‘mirrored-surface’ code, reverting back to the state of affairs represented by the ‘WallE3_QuickSort_V5.ino’ Arduino project. This required quite a bit more work than I had anticipated; I had thought my process of incremental builds would shield me from that – NOT! Eventually I was able to use some ‘diff’ tools to work my way through the process.

After getting the code squared away without the ‘mirrored surface’ code, I decided to take my robot out for a walk – well actually it was the robot taking me for a walk ‘in’ for a walk around the house. Here’s a link to the (not-so-short) video showing the action. I have included this as a link to the video file on my Google Drive site, because it’s too long to fit on my WordPress blog page.