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: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

House Finch Nesting Attempts
Earlier this year, a pair of House Finches chose the a pine cone wreath hanging outside our front door for their nest.

One day a Starling attacked:
Starling Attack – IM_00052
Starling Attack – IM_00053
Starling Attack – IM_00054
There’s a Youtube video of the action following those pictures:

Ms. Finch suffered a peck to the head raising a few feathers into a small topknot, but seemed otherwise undamaged. The eggs survived unscathed and a month later they fledged a quartet of new finches:

House Finch chicks – pre-fledging – 2024-05-18

Yes, they’re surrounded by a ring of bird crap: finch chicks can aim and fire overboard, but they don’t have much range.

The same finch pair abandoned their second nest after a Brown-headed Cowbird added an egg and punctured both Finch eggs:

House Finch nest – Cowbird egg vs punctures

Their third attempt failed after four eggs when a Cowbird added a fifth:

House Finch nest – Cowbird egg with 4 finch eggs

A few days after that picture, something tore that nest apart and destroyed all the eggs:

House Finch nest – destruction with feathers

The scattered feathers suggest a major battle with severe injuries.

Three nesting attempts produced only four fledglings: a bad year for those two finches.
2024-07-15
Drilled Sunflower Seeds

It seems the best bait for voles is to tie sunflower seeds to the trap trigger, but poking a needle through the seeds tends to split them.

Well, I can fix that:

Sunflower seeds – drilled

This is “shell drilling” of a kind I had not previously encountered:

Sunflower seeds in shell – drilled

Those are #52 drill holes, 63-ish mils in diameter, and pass a standard sewing needle with ease.

The traps have been baited and deployed amid a plague of voles and I await customer feedback …

2024-07-01
Antique Desk Chair Woodwork

A wood desk chair that I’ve known since I was a pup finally got some much-needed attention, although not a restoration. By and large, I’m finally sorting out that corner of the basement and needed to put the chair’s parts back together so I can work on something else.

The wood seat consists of several slabs glued along keyed joints, one of which had fractured into a rough mess. Amazingly, the two sides fit perfectly together, albeit with the bottom no longer a planar surface, and glued up just like they should:

Wood desk chair – seat clamping

The chair isn’t up to contemporary office standards, but it has a seat elevation screw, a backrest with adjustable angle & elevation, and even a backrest tension setting:

Wood desk chair – ironwork

It was the cutting edge of desk chair technology:

Wood desk chair – patented

I vaguely recall it rolled on long-vanished steel-wheeled casters. Somewhat less long ago, one of the legs broke enough to lose its caster socket (about which, more later), so I set about yanking the three remaining sockets:

Wood desk chair – caster socket removal

During that struggle, another leg revealed a neat woodwork joint:

Wood desk chair – leg joint

It’s easy to remove a caster socket when you can bash it from the top!

Gluing that piece back in place required Too Many Clamps™ aligning it with the leg:

Wood desk chair – leg clamping

But the end result looks pretty good:

Wood desk chair – leg glued

They did a nice job of matching the wood grain; I hadn’t noticed that joint while attacking the socket.

Pending restoring the broken leg’s socket, the soon-to-arrive new casters will clash horribly with the chair’s woodwork. At least it’ll roll again and its new plastic wheels won’t scar the floors.

2024-06-19
Squirrels Need Sleep, Too

Spotted outside a window:

Sleepy Squirrel

The one on the right stayed in that pose, with eyes getting heavier and heavier, until it nodded off. The other squirrel wasn’t quite that far gone and, after a minute, turned around to see what was(n’t) happening.

Those two squirrels have been chasing each other around the yard for several weeks, so they’re either siblings or a mated pair.

I’ve never seen a squirrel take a nap before and it seemed like a good idea for the afternoon …

2024-06-17
Terms of Use: Do Not Read

Attempting to use the guest WiFi network requires agreeing to their Terms of Use:

Guest WiFi signon – poor color choice

While it may be possible to read that, I pretty much gave up.

While one should never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, it’s also true that any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

2024-06-14
Optional Phreesia Authorization
Our medical practice has been Borged by Optum, which is, through a number of corporate cutout layers, owned by UnitedHealth Group, so (despite claims to the contrary) our doctors effectively work for a health insurance company. No, they may not be paid by UHG, but following the money in reverse shows the flow of influence.

Apparently this has slightly affected the original practice’s reliance on Phreesia for pre-visit sign-in information collection although, as before, Phreesia still really wants to scatter your precious personal bits to the far corners of the InterWebs:

Phreesia optional authorization – 2024 version

The wall o’ text is a bit shorter then the earlier version and cannot be scrolled or printed. It still admits:

There is the potential for my health information … to be subject to redisclosure and to no longer be protected by the HIPAA Privacy Rule.

Yes, I understand that’s the whole point of getting me to agree to release my private bits to Phreesia, so they can make money by selling it to the highest bidder(s).

What’s new is the previous page in the sequence, of which I do not have a screenshot, presumably coming from Optum, emphasizing in bold type that I do not have to authorize Phreesia’s data collection.

I infer this means two things:
- Optum / UHG has had their awareness raised about this nonsense
- Phreesia contractually requires that dark-pattern page
Yes, I understand that I have no privacy and should get over it, but somehow this sort of behavior rankles …
2024-06-13
Laser-marked Hole Drilling Spots

While setting up to drill holes in the aluminum base for the running light buck converter, I wondered if laser-marking the spots directly from the solid model would work better than my usual fumbling around.

The solid model:

Running Light – power box – bottom view

Export projections of the pieces from OpenSCAD as an SVG file:

Running Light – power box – Projection view

Import into LightBurn, set up for a very fast, very light cut and Fire The Laser:

Laser-marked hole spots – masking tape

That’s in ordinary masking tape on a hard-anodized sheet of aluminum from the pile, which looked better than I expected.

The same aluminum covered with blue tape:

Laser-marked hole spots – blue tape – hard anodize

Which looks much better in person than it does in the photo.

On a soft aluminum sheet from the Basement Warehouse Zone:

Laser-marked hole spots – blue tape – sheet aluminum

The dark outline is a comfort mark hand-drawn around a chipboard test piece to verify the layout fit between random holes drilled in the sheet during its previous life.

A closer look at a corner hole:

Laser-marked hole spots – blue tape – hard anodize – detail 1

And the center hole:

Laser-marked hole spots – blue tape – hard anodize – detail 2

The holes appeared in the right places after center-punching by eye, but the fragility of those four little tape leaves around the center point must be experienced to be believed.

And, yes, those are deliberately low-polygon approximations to a circle, because I’m a low-poly kind of guy.

I really need an optical center punch if I do more such silliness. The box with those HP plotter digitizing sights recently came to hand, so I suppose I should make something.

2024-06-12