The Ornithopter

Interesting fig phenomenon I noticed today: after rinsing a ripe fig with water, pressing it slightly on the sides made it emit a sort of buzzing sound out of the little hole at the tip. Each time I pressed (lightly) again, the buzzing would start, and each time I let up it would stop.

It almost seemed like there might be an insect inside, complaining about being pressed. But it seemed more likely that pressing on the fig made it expel air, which made the noise. It was surprising how long it kept doing it, though. I'd have thought all the air would have been expelled much sooner. Maybe it was sucking air back in each time I released the pressure. After repeated light pressing on all sides, probably squishing the fruit too much, the sound finally died down. Upon cutting it open, it was a normal fig inside; no insect.

I've never noticed other figs to do that. I tested a few other figs after that one, and a few had similar sounds, but quieter and much shorter lived.

In my spice cabinet was a jar of garam masala which my brother left here 15 years ago. Other than perhaps once (after which I wrote "spicy sweet" on the jar), I never used it because it's too spicy hot for me. It smells good like Christmas spices, but on the rare occasions when I want something to be spicy hot, I don't want it to taste like cinnamon and cloves. I realized that while browsing the spices recently, so I put the jar on my counter, intending to finally get rid of it.

A few days ago I was looking for something to pep up my meal. It occurred to me that spicy ketchup would go well on it. I didn't have any. But I had ketchup, and that jar was still on the counter. So I mixed garam masala powder into ketchup, and ta-da, spicy ketchup! It tasted just like the Maya Kaimal ketchup I remembered.

The jar went back into my spice cabinet, as now there's something I can use it for in the future.

Last night I cooked yellow squash. I finished late, and it was still warm outside so I couldn't open the windows to air out the cooking smells from the house.

Today I opened all the windows to air it out. With the A/C off, the temperature got up to 88 inside, but felt nice to me with the fans on. So I left the windows open all day.

As the windows were open, I washed a load of items with mildew and other stains along with 2 bleach tablets in the washer. (My use of chlorine bleach is seldom enough that liquid bleach usually degrades before I can use the bottle up. Tablets don't have that problem.) The windows being open prevents the bleach smell from bothering me.

As the windows were open, I also baked some things from the freezer in the oven. It seemed a good idea as the heat and baking smells could dissipate out through the windows, without making the A/C use more energy (since it wasn't on).

Coincidentally, part of the reason I wanted to use up some of the things in the freezer is because there's always the slight worry that if the power goes out for a long time, the food will melt and go bad. The strong storm we had on June 25 only made my power flicker a few times (although it ripped some siding off my soffits), but my mom's power was out for 11 hours. Before that, my power was out for 2 hours from a storm on June 14.

This evening, several hours after the baking, my refrigerator started beeping and showing the Too-High-Temperature warning icon. Uh-oh. I hadn't had the door open more than usual, and I hadn't put any hot food inside it. I wasn't sure if it could be due to the house temperature being higher than usual. This isn't the first time I've had the windows open in warm weather, but it's the first time the refrigerator had a problem with it. I closed the windows and turned the A/C back on. I took the grate off the bottom of the fridge and checked the coils. I vacuumed some dust out, but they didn't look too bad. I took the back panel off the fridge to check back there. The fan was still running. The compressor was very hot. The finger I touched it with didn't get burned, but it was hot enough to make me jerk my finger back.

The fridge kept giving the high temp warning for over an hour, but then it finally stopped. That's a relief.

I wonder if that was a sign of the refrigerator being too old to handle a warm house, or if new refrigerators would have the same problem. The fridge is 41 years old. 88 degrees inside really doesn't seem that high to me. I suspect that in the old days, people got refrigerators before they got air conditioners.

My mom got a phishing (or malware) email made to appear like it was sent from Amazon:

Your Prime membership is renewing on Thu, June 26, 2025. However, we noticed that your default payment method for your membership is no longer valid.

To avoid losing your benefits, we'll try charging other active payment methods associated with your Amazon account. If we can't process the charge for your membership fee, your Prime benefits will be suspended.

Thank you,
Amazon Customer Service

The rest of the email looks like a normal Amazon email (although I don't have a real one to compare against). There are several obvious indications that the email is fake: an empty subject line, a non-amazon sender email even though it is shown as name "prime@amazon.com", and it only including an email address, not a name, in the "To" section and greeting.

The link provided in the email for updating her payment information is what I find curious. It is in this format:
https://mobile.mail.yahoo.com/apps/affiliateRouter?brandUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fgoogleads.g.doubleclick.net%2Fpcs%2Fclick%3F
followed by a bunch of characters and some other parameters at the end.

I asked MS Copilot about the URL and it provided the following details.

The base domain is mobile.mail.yahoo.com, which is a real Yahoo domain. But the key is in the query parameters — especially brandUrl and adurl.

The brandUrl parameter encodes a redirect to a Google Ads click tracker (googleads.g.doubleclick.net), which itself contains another redirect via adurl=... to a suspicious final destination: ....

This kind of multi-layered redirect is a classic phishing tactic. It uses trusted domains as intermediaries to:

Evade spam filters and security scanners.
Trick users into thinking the link is safe.
Obfuscate the final destination, which may host malware or a credential-harvesting page.

Everything after the ? is a query string made up of key=value pairs separated by &.

brandUrl: This is a URL-encoded link to a Google Ads click tracker (googleads.g.doubleclick.net). It contains its own nested parameters like xai, sai, sig, and adurl, which are used for ad tracking and redirection.

appName=YMailNorrin: Likely identifies the Yahoo Mail app variant or interface being used.

partner=1: Could indicate a specific affiliate or partner ID — possibly used for tracking referral traffic.

locale=1: Might refer to a language or region setting, though 1 is a bit ambiguous.

buckets=6oDiyy...: This is probably a session or experiment bucket ID — used for A/B testing or feature rollout tracking.

fbs_aeid=[gw_fbsaeid]: This is a Facebook Ads tracking parameter — possibly spoofed or copied to mimic legitimate ad traffic.

adurl (appears twice): This is the final redirect destination — in this case, a suspicious .pe domain. That’s the real payload of the phishing attempt.

This URL is a layered redirect trap:
Starts with a legit Yahoo domain.
Redirects through Google Ads infrastructure.
Ends at a potentially malicious .pe domain.