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can't seem to buy a Tractive charger
Sunday, October 19 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I'm a glutton for punishment, so after the usual Sunday morning rituals, I again had my soldering iron fired up so I could again try to make I2C slaves that would hopefully spontaneously reboot less often. I looked through my containers of microcontroller boards to find ones that weren't part of the batch I'd just used (perhaps that batch was made using unreliable Chinesium). I found a number of such boards and then tried to make slaves. But now my new slaves weren't working at all. (I didn't realize until later that it was because I'd started swapping the SCA and SCL lines of the I2C bus.) Eventually I gave up and took the dogs for a walk.
This time Neville seemed to initially be joining us, but he dropped away early and I never saw him again for the rest of the walk. I headed east on the Lake Edward Trail and then, in the lowland west of the cabin, turned northward through some deeply-rutted (though otherwise flat) terrain, eventually finding my way to that enormous 15 foot tall rock stuck in a narrow cove near the southwest corner of the Great Sloped Hemlock Grove. I then continued along the south (uphill) edge of that grove, eventually passing at the foot of some interesting cliffs before reaching West Bifurcation Creek, which I followed to Woodworth Lake. I then walked along the lakeshore to our dock and cracked open a beer I'd left for myself yesterday. Just as I was leaving the dock area, Charlotte came running down the Mossy Rock Trail to look for me.
Back at the cabin, I managed to get an I2C slave to occasionally stay up for as long as 20 minutes on my Hotspot Watchdog, which was really all I needed for the time being. I then cleaned up the cabin and packed everything I needed to take back to Hurley in the Bolt. This included the African black-eyed susan, which is now covered with flowers and looks amazing (though it looked nearly dead back in the spring).
I should mention that the weather was finally both warm and beautiful for the first time this weekend just as I was about to leave.
I began the drive with 136 miles of rage and ended up using about 96 of them to get home via the Middleburgh route. I was eager to dive back into my projects when I got home, but Gretchen understandably wanted to hang out and chat after such a long absence. So we sat out on the east deck for a while chatting (the weather was gorgeous!) and then collaborated on making a dinner of Impossible burgers and hand-made fries. (We used the wrong kind of potato for the latter, and they ended up sweeter than I would've preferred.)
Before I fell asleep tonight, I told Gretchen about my recent experience trying to buy a extra charger for our small Tractive-brand pet tracker (which we keep on Charlotte). I'd wanted a second charger for the cabin, but three times I ordered it, it always failed to arrive. By third time, I was hip to an eBay scam I had been unfamiliar with, but which I have probably been the victim of several times. A large-volume seller happens to get two orders from two nearby places at about the same time. The seller claims to ship to both, but only sends a parcel to one while giving its tracking number to both. Both buyers see a package make its way to their neighborhood and both see that it has been delivered. But only one gets a package. The other might assume that a porch pirate stole it or that it got misdelivered and hope for it to find its way to them.
For the second time I'd attempted to order a Tractive charger, I'd called UPS to ask about the supposed delivery of my parcel. I was given an address to a different house in Hurley and was told a man named John had picked it up. In the past I would've assumed John got my package and might've even gone over to his house to ask about it; I actually did this once about a suspiciously-delivered Chromebook, but the recipient was not home. But now that I know the nature of the scam, I know that John just got his parcel and all I'd gotten was a copy of his tracking number.
Complaints in all these cases eventually got me a refund, though the time this seemed to happen with a $300 portable air conditioner sold by AliExpress, I had to get my credit card company involved. Clearly, though, this scam is worth doing for some sellers, as many people are too disorganized to notice they haven't gotten their packages. And if anyone complains, all you do it issue a refund and you're out nothing, particularly if the person you attempted to defraud, relieved at the refund, leaves good feedback. But when this happened for my third attempt to order a Tractive charger, I was fully aware of the scam, and I called out the seller repeatedly. And the moment I had my refund, I nuked their account with their second-ever bad feedback in which I detailed the scam. (I was discussing this further with ChatGPT when Gretchen came to bed, and that was how we got to talking about it.) Gretchen had never heard of this particular scam, but you can be sure she will be alert for it in the future. The only question remaining is why that particular product, the Tractive charger? I order things all the time and they usually arrive without issue. (I have no evidence that anything has ever been stolen from our mailbox or from the front of the house.) But the three times I ordered that thing, the seller tried the scam. Perhaps they are three accounts all controlled by a single bad actor.
A big sugar maple growing atop a big rock. Click to enlarge.
The huge eighteen-foot-tall rock in a narrow gulch at the southwest corner of the Great Sloped Hemlock Grove. Had it been 50 feet to the right, it would've gone bounding down a steep slope. Click to enlarge.
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