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.

Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

  • Recipe Inflation: Hershey’s Cocoa

    My mother’s pantry disgorged a can of Hershey’s Cocoa dating back to the mid-90s (if I’m interpreting the 94P date code correctly). Their Favorite Hot Cocoa recipe is straightforward:

    SINGLE SERVING: Combine 1 heaping teaspoon HERSHEY’S Cocoa, 2 heaping teaspoons sugar, and dash salt in mug, add 2 teaspoons milk and stir until smooth. Heat 1 cup milk: fill mug. Stir and serve.

    Browsing in the grocery store revealed that the current recipe has considerably more stiffness: two tablespoons of both cocoa and sugar.

    One tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. How they interpret “heaping” I don’t know, but it’s under a factor of two. Maybe cups are bigger these days, but surely not by a factor of four or five.

    Zowie!

    The Official Recipe from the Hershey’s website lists 2-3 teaspoons of cocoa and 2 tablespoons of sugar. I love this suggestion:

    VARIATIONS
    Rich and Adult: Increase cocoa to 2 tablespoons …

    Adult cocoa. Who’d’a thunk it?

  • Hobo Data Logger Battery Life

    Another data point…

    I just replaced an Energizer lithium cell that I installed on 19 March 2008. The logger runs full-time, taking data points every few minutes.

    That’s nigh onto two years of life!

    I must conclude the battery life problems mentioned there (admittedly, in a different logger) were due to craptastic Renata cells, rather than the Hobo logger itself.

    Lesson learned…

  • The CD That Wouldn’t Play

    Misshapen CD Hole
    Misshapen CD Hole

    Mary popped a CD into the boom box, poked the Go button, and the display read “No Disc”… which was odd, as the larger player in the living room had gotten halfway through it with no trouble.

    A bit of diagnostic winnowing revealed a ding on one side of the CD’s hole, as though it had been mashed by a heavy object. These CDs (it’s 13 of 16 in an audio book) aren’t new, but they’ve been reasonably well treated by all parties. It looks like it might have been crunched in a player, which you’d think would be impossible.

    The disc seemed to seat firmly on the player’s hub, so I suspect the ding put the CD far enough off-center to defeat the player’s track acquisition and following algorithm.

    A long time ago I wrote exactly that firmware for a prototype video disk player: find a one-micron track with a one-micron beam while the track wobbulates a few hundred microns as the disk spins at 3600 rpm. After that, mapping the track eccentricity and following it around the disk was a simple matter of software…

    In this case, a bit of razor-knife surgery removed the plastic intruding into the hole and set everything to rights.

  • Money for Nothing: Nielsen TV Survey

    Just got a check for twenty bucks in the mail:

    Nielsen Survey Thanks
    Nielsen Survey Thanks

    That’s in addition to the ten dollars folding cash money enclosed with the survey as, I suppose, a motivation to not chuck the whole thing in the trash.

    The survey told us that our household had been “scientifically selected” to ensure a valid sampling of the TV viewing population, so it was very important to return the survey. I was astonished that they’d pay thirty bucks for a survey, but that’s probably a good indication of their desperation.

    OK, sez I, I’ll play along; every man has his price.

    It took ’em until Question 4 to get to the heart of the matter: how many television sets does our family own? Surprisingly, the first choice was “None” and, because that best describes our situation, that’s what I picked. Most of the other questions didn’t have a “Hell, no!” response, but I picked the smallest numbers, hours, and viewers they allowed.

    While there is, in fact, a TV in our house, it’s parked on a basement shelf with its cord wrapped around it and hasn’t been turned on in years. Sort of like the “iron phone” I keep in a box nearby; it comes out when I must verify that the phone company’s problem is upstream of the jack on the side of the house.

    And, besides, it’s an analog TV and we all know what that means: ain’t none of those signals on the air these days. Yes, we have a cable connection, but the only thing crossing the jack is Internet data and, IIRC, the Cablevision diagnostic channel.

    We have a lot of time for interesting & productive projects. They didn’t ask about that sort of thing, though.

    Our results were, most likely, something of a disappointment.

    [Update: OK, three times is enemy action. I will delete further comments asking to be signed up for the survey. ‘Nuff said.]

  • Corelle Sliver

    Mary found a sliver chipped from the outside edge of a Corelle dinner plate, which provides an opportunity to see something that’s normally invisible: the ceramic layer inside its glass coating.

    Overall, the sliver is nearly two inches long and about the same width as the plate is thick.

    Corelle sliver
    Corelle sliver

    Peering through the microscope at the left end, the glass layer is most obvious along the top edge. You can barely see it along the bottom, where the chip thins to a razor edge.

    Corelle sliver - detail
    Corelle sliver – detail

    On the right end the upper and lower glass layers are a bit more obvious, at least with the light arriving nearly horizontally and after some aggressive exposure hackage,

    Corelle sliver - side light
    Corelle sliver – side light

    The ceramic has a slightly higher coefficient of thermal expansion than the glass, so it puts the glass under a tremendous amount of compressive stress as the newly manufactured plate cools. Glass is really strong in compression (and terribly weak in tension), so the plate becomes remarkably hard to break. More details there and there.

    The plate rims do tend to chip, however, if you own them as long as we have. These are the long-discontinued Old Town Blue pattern: over three decades old by now.

    Oddly, they’re still under warranty: back in the day, Corning sold its then-new Corelle with a Lifetime Warranty. Nowadays, you get three years for the mid-grade line, five years for thicker plates, and a mere one year for stoneware (whatever that is). I suppose enough people actually took them up on the warranty to make it economically impractical.

    I ran a fine diamond file over the chipped edge and it’s OK. Eventually, we’ll break down and get new plates, but there’s no sense rushing a decision like that…

  • Rudy Sunglasses: Back From the Dead

    Clear lens installed
    Clear lens installed

    As expected, the uni-lens on Mary’s Rudy Project sunglasses cracked right up the middle as that stress crack above the nosepiece opened up. The sunglasses came with interchangeable lenses, so I swapped in the clear lens.

    Having used urethane adhesive to mechanically lock the defunct gray lens in place, the broken bits were pretty firmly bonded. I applied a brass hammer and small drift punch to the remaining tabs, pried the debris out of the temples, cleaned the adhesive from the recesses, and snapped the new lens in place. Surprisingly, it popped in and locked securely.

    The nosepiece has never worked satisfactorily: there’s nothing locking the flexible blue-silicone pad to the straight-sided posts that are supposed to hold it. As a result, it tends to pop off at the most inopportune moments.

    Rudy nosepiece
    Rudy nosepiece

    I dotted the posts on one side with cyanoacrylate and the other pair with epoxy to see if either will bond well enough to make a difference. If those fail, I’ll try urethane, although I’m not sure what will happen as the urethane expands in the sockets.

    Anyhow, she now has glasses suitable for biking on cloudy and rainy days… which is much better than a sharp stick (or a bug) in the eye, as we see it.

  • Chili Powder Beetles

    Mary cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, which entailed sorting out all the various spice jars. She thought the Chili Powder looked a bit odd and, indeed, it did: a whole colony of beetles and their larvae was a-squirm in there!

    The label states:

    All Natural

    non irradiated — no preservatives

    Frankly, I don’t see any particular problem with food irradiation.

    If you’re the sort of person who cooks your meals, as we are, then you’re eating plenty of denatured proteins and broken DNA anyway. In this case, snuggling that jar up to a nice warm Cobalt-60 slug for a few minutes would have been a great improvement.

    The main ingredient, of course, is “chili peppers”. The remainder doesn’t sound particularly life-sustaining, though: oregano, cumin, garlic, sea salt, and spices. Anything that can live off that brew must have a bad attitude, the way I see it.

    Being that sort of bear, I’d written the date on the label: 19 Aug 08. So, in round numbers, we use two ounces of Chili Powder a year. Obviously, we shouldn’t buy that stuff in bulk…

    Those are millimeters on the scale it’s crawling on, so these are little bitty bugs.

    [Update: Useful advice from the UC IPM folks.]