After three years, the temple screw on Mary’s oldest and most-battered “reading” glasses worked loose. A dab of low-strength Loctite should hold it in place forever more:
That brass stake pin certainly adds a Steampunk flair to the proceedings …
Category: Home Ec
Things around the home & hearth
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Eyeglass Temple Re-re-repair
Reading glasses temple repair -
Lathe-Turned Almond Butter
Pure almond butter comes with the somewhat stilted admonition “Must stir product. Oil separation occurs naturally.” I’d just opened a new jar and was busily (and laboriously) stirring when I realized we have the technology:
Lathe-turned Almond Butter I installed the chuck’s outside jaws to grab the jar lid.
About three hours at 50 rpm, the lathe’s slowest speed, did the trick. We now have the smoothest, creamiest, best-mixed almond butter ever.
In a month or so, I’ll chuck up an unopened jar to see how well it works without any manual intervention.
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Doing Biz On eBay
I’ve always wondered what the Chinese-script company names on eBay meant, so I fed some into Google Translate (clicky for more dots):
Chinese eBay Company Names Huh.
As the saying goes, ol’ Deng must be living “… modestly, if the kind of money he was getting out of me meant anything to him.”
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Monthly Science: USDA Inspection Stamps
I recently bought a pair of pork belly packages, one labeled “Local” at an additional buck a pound. They were packaged skin side downward, so the USDA inspection stamps came as a surprise:
Pork Belly Skin – USDA Stamps Turns out the digits give the “establishment number”, which you can look up online. These came from a processor in Pine Plains.
We presume they keep track of their pigs …
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Crispy Skin Slow Roasted Pork Shoulder: Whoops
The previous times we slow-roasted a pork shoulder, the smoke alarm went off well before the skin crisped. We’d drained the drippings from the pan before crisping the skin, but the residue still smoked up a storm; this time we we left the pool in place to see if it kept the surface cooler and reduced the smoke.
Well, no, it didn’t. This happened in the five minutes between one rotation and the next:
Roast Pork Shoulder – Smoked Kitchen Knowing things would get at least a little smoky, I’d closed the pocket door (on the left) and hung a beach towel across the opening into the laundry room (to the right), which kept most of the smoke out of the rest of the house. The smoke detector in the laundry room didn’t go off until I walked through the towel, so my precautions worked pretty well.
Wow, was that skin crispy:
Roast Pork Shoulder – Crispy Skin Plenty of smoke and no fire; the roasting pan has narrow slits for that very reason. Took a couple of hours to vent the house, during which the yard smelled downright yummy.
Next time, we’ll plunk the roast on a lined cookie sheet (with a rim!) and see what happens.
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Lightning Talk: Bose Hearphones
The PDF “slides” for a lightning talk I gave at this month’s MHV LUG meeting: MHVLUG Lightning Talk – Bose Hearphones.
You don’t get my patter, but perhaps you’ll get the gist from the pix.
Hearphone – Detail Summary: I like ’em a lot, despite the awkward form factor and too-low battery capacity. If you’re more sensitive to appearances than I, wait for V 2.0.
FWIW, I tinkered up a beamforming microphone array with GNU Radio that worked surprisingly well, given a handful of hockey puck mics and a laptop. Bose does it better, of course, but I must revisit that idea.
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Another Failed CFL Bulb
Unlike the last CFL failure, this time I noticed the faint smell of electrical death near the Electronics Workbench, but I couldn’t track it down until the can light over the the Bench didn’t start:
Another Hot-Failed CFL Bulb The date code suggests it’s been in the fixture for over a decade, so I can’t complain. Having two unrelated bulbs fail within a week, after years of service, is surely coincidence. If another fails within a week or two, however, it will definitely be Enemy Action.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 