The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Author: Ed

  • Mushrooms

    Mushrooms

    We spotted a plump mushroom cluster nestled at the base of a neighbor’s tree:

    Mushrooms at tree - A
    Mushrooms at tree – A

    Eight days later they’d started curling:

    Mushrooms at tree - B
    Mushrooms at tree – B

    Mushrooms growing on tree roots generally mean the tree is in trouble and, indeed, it’s a battered Black Locust.

  • Jonas Peeler Repair

    Jonas Peeler Repair

    The blade on one of the Jonas vegetable peelers cracked, which suggests it’s the counterfeit version:

    Jonas Peeler - cracked blade
    Jonas Peeler – cracked blade

    I grooved the metal pin running through the handle:

    Jonas Peeler - shaft grooving
    Jonas Peeler – shaft grooving

    A brass tube from the Little Tray o’ Cutoffs and some epoxy should hold things together forevermore:

    Jonas Peeler - epoxy
    Jonas Peeler – epoxy

    The rainbow colors come from an instantly aborted attempt to silver-solder the parts together. The fact that I even tried a stunt like that shows I’m definitely not the brightest bulb in the chandelier these days.

  • Lyme Disease

    Lyme Disease

    For reasons that made sense at the time, two weeks ago I ventured outside the house. A few days later, this appeared:

    Lyme Disease - arm rash
    Lyme Disease – arm rash

    The pallid skin over on the left comes from a bike glove. The central bump is one of those annoying sebaceous hyperplasias appearing after a Certain Age and not relevant here.

    Having been around this particular block a few times, Mary recognized the diffuse red rash, sleeping 30 of 36 consecutive hours, and a day-long 103 °F fever as Lyme disease. I’m currently taking 100 mg of doxycycline twice a day and (after a week) feeling better, while sleeping a lot more than usual at random intervals during the day.

    We’re both highly aware of Lyme disease: Mary routinely dresses in a complete overlayer of permethrin-sprayed clothing and I generally strip-and-shower immediately after any yard work in similarly sprayed, albeit less enclosing, attire. In this case, we think a tiny Deer Tick nymph affixed itself to the outboard side of my wrist, where I could neither see nor feel it, and (because I didn’t take a shower after being outside for only a few minutes) remained attached long enough to infect me.

    Caught and treated early, Lyme disease generally does not progress into “post-treatment Lyme disease”, an ailment rife with what can charitably be described as serious woo, despite some evidence of actual disease.

    Some of Mary’s Master Gardener cronies have endured co-infections of Babesia microti and we’ll be watching for those symptoms after doxycycline tamps down the obvious problem.

    I’ll be puttering very carefully around heavy machinery and posting irregularly for a few weeks …

    Memo to Self: the Basement Shop has a lot to recommend it!

  • UPS SLA Batteries: Old vs. New

    UPS SLA Batteries: Old vs. New

    For completeness, all of the surviving UPS sealed lead-acid batteries compared with a new battery:

    UPS SLA 2021-10-22
    UPS SLA 2021-10-22

    They’re all discharged at 4 A, far higher than the nominal “20 hour” rate of 450 mA = 9 A·hr / 20 hr, but an order of magnitude closer to the rated UPS output of a few hundred watts which would call for a few tens of amps.

    The new battery delivers 73 W·hr under those conditions, perhaps 50% more than the 50-ish W·hr from the used batteries, and with a much higher overall terminal voltage during the discharge.

    Nothing unexpected, but now we know …

  • Small Spider vs. Marmorated Stink Bug

    Small Spider vs. Marmorated Stink Bug

    Spiders know how to handle much larger prey:

    Spider draining Marmorated Stinkbug
    Spider draining Marmorated Stinkbug

    Apparently the stink bug’s armor doesn’t count for much when the spider has the luxury of attacking through a weak spot in the underbelly after the critter stops struggling.

    Stink bugs cause considerable damage to crops (notably apples) in the Hudson Valley, but they haven’t been the existential catastrophe we all expected when they first arrived.

    Hooray for spiders!

  • OXO Not-salt Grinder: Aluminum Shaft

    OXO Not-salt Grinder: Aluminum Shaft

    Having recently emptied the OXO pepper grinder we (mistakenly?) bought as a salt mill, I took it apart for a deep rinsing and cleanup:

    OXO salt-pepper mill - aluminum shaft
    OXO salt-pepper mill – aluminum shaft

    It turns out the somewhat corroded square shaft is aluminum, neither the cheap steel I expected nor the stainless steel it should be. Perhaps OXO cost-reduced the shaft, discovered aluminum is a poor choice in a saline environment, and changed the packaging to compensate?

    Removing / installing the Jesus clip requires careful whacking with a hollow-tip punch against the shaft, with the whole affair laid flat on shop towels, the handle held down to prevent rotation, and the wrap-around body capturing the escaping clip.

    Shaft corrosion as of Summer 2020:

    OXO Salt Mill - corrosion
    OXO Salt Mill – corrosion

    Soaking the body in hot water got rid of salt crusts and filled the shell with water. There being no way to completely dry the thing, I parked it in the sun for a day, refilled it, and was unsurprised when the (dried) salt turned into an assortment of moist crystals.

    We obviously need a real salt mill …

  • Clearing the Noto Font Clutter: Again

    Installing Atkinson Hyperlegible reminded me to clear out the Noto font clutter in this (relatively recent) Manjaro installation. Of course fonts now appear in slightly different locations with slightly different names, so this remains just a serving suggestion:

    cd /usr/share/fonts/noto
sudo chmod a-w NotoSans-*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSansMono*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSansDisplay*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSansMath*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSansSymbol*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSerif-*
sudo chmod a-w NotoSerifDisplay*
sudo chmod a-w NotoMusic*
sudo chmod a-w NotoMath*
sudo find . -perm /u=w -name \*ttf -delete

    Get rid of some other clutter:

    cd ../TTF
sudo chmod a-w DejaVu*
sudo chmod a-w Inconsolata-*
sudo find . -perm /u=w -name \*ttf -delete
cd ../droid
sudo chmod a-w DroidSans-Bold.ttf 
sudo chmod a-w DroidSans.ttf 
sudo chmod a-w DroidSansFallback*
sudo chmod a-w DroidSansMono.ttf 
sudo chmod a-w DroidSerif-*
cd ../adobe-source-han-sans
sudo rm *otf

    For unknown reasons, we now have two font cache updaters:

    sudo fc-cache -v -f
sudo fc-cache-32 -v -f

    Now font selection in, say, LibreOffice doesn’t involve paging through a myriad fonts in languages I cannot recognize, let alone read. Admittedly, Inconsolata does have more variations than I’ll ever use.