“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” is a common tech support maneuver that everyone already seems to know and apply to just about all the wonky tech in their life. But would you tell someone to apply it to a reservoir? Someone did, and with disastrous results, at least according to a report on the lead-up to the collapse of a reservoir in the city of Lewiston, Idaho — just across the Snake River from Clarkston, Washington; get it? According to the report, operators at the reservoir had an issue crop up that required a contractor to log into the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system running the reservoir. The contractor’s quick log-in resulted in him issuing instructions to local staff to unplug the network cable on the SCADA controller and plug it back in. Somehow, that caused a variable in the SCADA system — the one storing the level of water in the reservoir — to get stuck at the current value. This made it appear that the water level was too low, which lead the SCADA system to keep adding water to the reservoir, which eventually collapsed.
The blame game seems to be settling in on software as the culprit, but we’re not so sure. This seems to be the reverse of the “software fixes for hardware problems” trend (second item) we’ve been harping on recently. Sure, the contractor should have known that losing network connectivity could cause problems, and it’s not cool to release software to production that can result in variables left in an undefined state at startup. But this really seems more like a problem with the mechanical design of the reservoir, whose job is to safely hold water. Were there no fail-safe features like a spillway to channel overflow water away without causing damage? Blaming the software alone seems
Resin printers — seems like people either love them or hate them. Or maybe a little of both; the quality of the prints is pretty phenomenal, but oh, the stink of the photopolymer resins you have to use. The stuff just smells dangerous, like an organic chemistry lab, and with good reason. So if you want to keep your resin printer going safely, you might want to take a look at new guidelines for the safe handling of UV-curable resins. The guidelines are the joint product of the Photopolymer Additive Manufacturing Alliance (PAMA), the National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST), and RadTech, the Association for Ultraviolet and Electron Beam Technologies. The guidelines cover best practices in terms of clean-up, spill control, storage, and disposal of waste. It’s mostly common sense stuff, but given the chemically complicated nature of photopolymers, a little reminder of the basics is probably a good thing.
3D printers aren’t the only printers that can be dangerous, of course, as Canon helpfully reminds us to practice good data security when disposing of old printers. The suggested steps include deleting your WiFi credentials, which seems like an obvious step and one that could be accomplished by a factory reset. But according to Canon, that’s somehow not enough for at least 200 of its printer models. So once the ink runs out and you’re ready to pitch the thing and buy a new one rather than being extorted into emptying your wallet for new cartridges, make sure you take all the extra steps recommended to clear your data. It’ll be fun, really.
“Banana for scale”? Not anymore — behold the wonder of the online parametric banana generator. If you’ve been looking for a way to generate custom bananas of any size and shape, here’s your chance. You control the length, girth, and bend radius of the fruit, and the model does the rest. Sadly, surface texture and bruising aren’t supported, and it looks like only the now-ubiquitous — and possibly endangered — Cavendish banana is supported. So no plantains, please.
And finally, we leave you with “Unitree Go2,” a robodog that’s the “new creature of embodied AI.” It actually looks pretty cool, and at $1,600, it seems like a bargain, at least compared to a Boston Dynamics Spot, which will set you back like $40K. Go2 seems like the perfect little pet who will run up to greet you when you come home and “dance to pleasure you” too, if you’re lucky. There’s the fine print, though, of course — the pro model will run you $2,800 plus shipping, and a cool 25% duty if you’re in the US. But when you think about it, some purebred dogs go for about that much, and if you add in vet bills, food, and training, this just might be the right way to go.
Cut to the chase, here is the list of affected Canon printers…
https://canon.a.bigcontent.io/v1/static/affected-models_20230731_d04c0d9895124b65acd21ca68357dcdc
“the city of Lewiston, Idaho — just across the Snake River from Clarkston, Washington; get it?
For those that didn’t “get it” Lewis and Clark explored that area during their 1804-1806 expedition to chart Mississippi and Missouri River drainage acquired in The Louisiana Purchase.
Oh… haha…
Thanks for letting us know though.
Does Unitree Go2 also bark at delivery persons? or squirrels?
Squirrel? Where?
Now? Disasembled forever.
Johnny 5 says reassemble
Dunno, but it passed by all those trees and never sniffed at one or even hinted at lifting its leg, so…
Of course, I remember the fate of $ony’s Aibo.
Go2 is showing some pretty advance levels of CGI animation alright.
Seems to me maybe a different packaging and design will make resin printers easier to deal with. The customers will no more come into contact with it than they do with toner or ink.
The Unitree Go2 should be referred to as a “legged drone” to go along with the “marine drone” and “quadcopter drone”.
The swarm of Go2 at the end of the video is alarmingly similar to the swarm of replicators in Stargate SG-1.
as long as they dont interlock is ok..ish
It seems that Europe is blocked from first link:
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
1st link is 451’d here in Europe, anyone got a less crappy link to the story?
Use link to Idaho dam report and……..
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
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“City personnel have identified a cloud-based supervisory control and data acquisition vendor that would improve accessibility, security, reliability and functionality of the system at a lower cost, according to the report.”
Yeah, ’cause cloud-based SCADA is going to solve alllll of your security problems… Hacker-based overfill/collapse in 5… 4… 3…
And the Gros Michel! I remember when the tip of a banana was round not like a pig snout. European Ag standards list a minimum standard for curvature. No straight bananas are allowed.
I bought at Aldi’s a plastic clam shell banana container for a sack lunch that protects the banana. It has a simian character on the top half, the designer? It’s shaped more like the letter “J”, bananas won’t fit in it. Banana fail.
I see some 3D printer resins are calling themselves “Low Odor” “Safe” and “Plant Based”:
ANYCUBIC 3D Printer Resin with Low Odor and Safety, 405nm UV Plant-Based Rapid Resin with High Precision and Quick Curing for LCD 3D Printing (Grey, 1000g) 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,769 ratings Amazon’s Choice Overall Pick $24.99
https://www.amazon.com/ANYCUBIC-Printer-Plant-Based-Precision-Printing/dp/B07YZ7F55V/
Anyone have any experience with this stuff?
The resevoir oops isnt too different than the gas explosions in 2018 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosions
Caused by gas lines being moved over but not the sense lines, so the old unused and unpressurized lines were causing the system continually increase the pressure in the new lines until boooooom. Its how i learned that domestic gas lines are only about 5psi…..and they really dont like 75 psi.
Btw, the wikipedia article says someone was killed fleeing when a chimney fell…thats wrong – it was a kid who just got his drivers license that afternoon and was hanging out in the car in his driveway when the chimney fell.
I used to make the TweakScale mod for Kerbal Space Program. One of my crowning achievements was adding support for the Banana For Scale mod, noting that resizing the banana for scale will change the size of the entire universe and leave the banana alone.