Found this deep inside a college fieldhouse not too long ago:
Given the slight emphasis drawn into North, the author may be poking fun at the Track & Field team, but …
Category: Oddities
Who’d’a thunk it?
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Logitech Dual Action Gamepads: Mac vs. PC
Turns out that there’s no difference between the Mac and PC versions of the Logitech Dual Action Gamepad:
Logitech Dual Action Gamepads – Mac vs PC I picked up a Mac version cheap from the usual eBay seller and discovered that LinuxCNC / HAL was perfectly happy. That wasn’t too surprising; they have the same model and part numbers. Most likely, the only difference was the CD and maybe the Quick Start Guide that I didn’t get in the opened retail box…
So now I have either a hot backup for the Joggy Thing or one for a different box.
Most likely, it was cheap because nobody wants a blue-and-black peripheral next to their shiny white Mac…
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Captchas Gone Wild
This is probably a browser compatibility issue:
Captcha 1 Let’s refresh the page to see if a better combination comes up:
Captcha 2 I took that to mean I’m not sufficiently human to post a comment…
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Trinity Home Firefighting Robot Contest: 2013 Edition
Dressing the Granny Doll I’ll be volunteering at the TCHFFRC this weekend, so if you happen to be near Hartford CT, drop in to see some high-pressure robot debugging.
You’ll find me behind the Robot Inspection Table, making sure everybody’s building robots that meet the same specifications. That’s a step up from a few years ago, when I got to dress the Granny Doll used in the RoboWaiter Contest…
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Windows Update: Updating the Updater
This sort of thing happens with Free Software, too, but I prefer Microsoft’s phrasing…
Windows 7 Update Update Let’s see… that’s various forms of “update” used as nouns, proper nouns, adjectives, and a gerund…
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Cooper’s Hawk at the Door!
We almost stepped directly into this scene:
Hawk at the Door – first sight A closer look at the carnage, seen diagonally through a pane of 1955-era glass:
Coopers Hawk – on door mat The Cooper’s Hawk remained frozen in place while I got a better view from outside:
Coopers Hawk – with prey It then flew away with the gibbage in its claws, leaving us a doormat covered with feathers.
We’re not sure if the meal was a mockingbird or a Downy Woodpecker, but we’re apparently short one bird…
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Sawhorse: Cap Bracket Repair
While extricating the sawhorses from the garage, one of the bright yellow cap strips fell off. Whether by coincidence or not, it was the same one I’d previously repaired after sawing completely through the poor thing, but this time the failure came from what’s called inherent vice in the molded bracket-and-pin feature that holds the cap in place:
Fractured sawhorse top pin I filed a flat on the top of the bracket, drilled a 4-40 clearance hole, and then held everything in place while drilling a 4-40 tapping hole into the sawhorse. There was just enough plastic to make all that work, at least for the not very strenuous conditions it should experience around here:
Fractured sawhorse top pin – with screw While trying to reassemble the cap, I discovered why the bracket broke. The yellow cap has a bulkhead with an opening for the pin, plus a solid bulkhead that butts against the hinge along the top of the sawhorse. The bulkheads lie too close together: you simply cannot get the opening over the pin on this end with the cap parallel to the top of the sawhorse, which you must do in order to get the pin in the corresponding hole on that end.
Evidently they had the same problem at the factory and “solved” it by melting the bulkhead with a hot blade:
Sawhorse top cover – factory bodge That didn’t really help me, but I carved off a few more slices to weaken the solid bulkhead enough to bend it around the hinge. I think the strain involved in the original assembly, plus what happened when I had to take it apart to fix the sawed-off end, weakened the bracket enough to snap off at some point over the winter.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 