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?

Faucet Washers

The slop sink in the rental house developed a drip and, unlike our kitchen faucet, required only a new washer. Of course, choosing the right size from that assortment posed a bit of a problem:

Slop sink valve with washers

The old washer is in the upper right; you can see the indentation from the valve seat.

There’s a variety of sizes & shapes; these represent just the closest matches. I have no idea what 3/8, 3/8R, and 3/8L might signify, but they’re all slightly different, some with conical cross-sections that may also be slightly different. Worst case, of course, you can sand down the rim of a too-large washer to make the diameter come out right.

[Update: a table of sizes mentioned in the comments.]

The washer just in front of the old one has information molded right into the back: GOLDEN STATE 10¢ 1/2. Now there’s a show of confidence in price stability that you don’t see much any more!

I found one that fit snugly in the recess of the valve stem, turned the screw tight, and it’s all good.

2012-10-03
Glass Wine Corks

The Locust Grove / Morse Estate (yes, that Morse) holds Sunset Sensations fundraisers throughout the year, wherein local restaurants and caterers prepare three food samples based on what’s growing in the historically accurate gardens and a local wine store selects matching wines. Mary and I volunteer as servers and they generally assign me to the wine table; being one of the few volunteers with Y chromosomes, I’m good at toting boxes and yanking corks.

The most recent event featured Cusumano Insolia wine in bottles with glass stoppers:

Glass wine corks – natural light

Front lighting with the flash makes them even more glittery:

Glass wine corks – flash

I’m thinking one of these atop a little box with an internal LED would make a dandy nightlight. Maybe etch the stem surface to add a bit of diffuse illumination?

Perhaps I don’t get out nearly enough…

2012-09-23
Bus Maintenance?

Refilling bus tank

Saw this at a rest stop along I-90 during the Semiannual Migration of the College Students…

He’s pouring water into a small funnel with a large paper cup, which explains all the spillage. I couldn’t hoist that 5 gallon bucket over my head, much less pour its contents into the tiny opening, so what he’s doing has a certain internal logic, but …

I think he’s refilling the toilet flush tank and, if so, I hope the bus designers made the drain tank much larger than the flush tank!

2012-09-22
Dismantling a Gas Tank

That gas tank has evidently reached the end of its life:

Cutting up spherical CHGE gas tank

Many of the nearby gas pipelines end in open stubs and a concrete crusher worked over one of the pads for a long-vanished cylindrical tank, so it looks like they’re scrapping the whole installation. I think the project to install an elevator for the Walkway lands nearby, which may explain everything.

I took the picture from the Walkway, aligning the SX230HS lens through the chain-link fence. Occasionally a small lens wins over more glass!

2012-09-17
Spammers vs. Turing Test: Inching Along

Most of the dozen or so spam comments I delete every day consist of little more than gibberish. At best, a spam comment will have a poorly worded paragraph or two touting pharmaceuticals, handbags, shoes, or other junk, with absolutely no relation to the post. It’s easy to tell they’re generated by a script: keyword-heavy verbiage, bogus usernames, junk websites, and so forth and so on. Boring, is what they are.

Recently an interesting comment appeared in response to that post on KG-UV3D audio levels which Akismet tagged as spam:

The microphone and radio matching capabilities are terrific. Adjust the wide-range input level for optimum drive to the built-in microphone amplifier […]

Fluent, idiomatic English that started out pretty nearly on-point for the post! The rest of the comment sounded like advertising copy, though. Well written ad copy, but ad copy nonetheless. Feeding a representative chunk into Google produced a link to the description of the W2IHY Two-band Audio Equalizer on the Official Website.

Now, as it turns out, Julius lives up the river from here and I’ve met him several times. I also know he’s not spamming me, because the URL associated with the post points to some weird-ass Angola gold mining fraud that’s all too familiar from previous spammage. Oh, and the IP address resolves to a Tor server.

As I observed there, eventually the spammers will become bright enough to hold an intelligent conversation and then they’ll be provisionally human. Depending on what they want to talk about …

2012-09-14
Hummingbird Moth!

A Hummingbird Moth recently visited the Butterfly Bush:

Hummingbird Moth – left side

They’re heavy-bodied moths and, unlike those butterflies, never alight on the flowers to dine. Their wings are clear and never stop moving:

Hummingbird Moth – wing

It’s impossible to not see a face looking back at you, even though that’s a proboscis down the middle:

Hummingbird Moth – front

They don’t stay very long and are extremely flighty, so the picture are catch-as-catch-can: hand-held with the DSC-H5, roughly dot-for-dot crops, and only the last one got any color correction. I didn’t have time to set the usual one-stop underexposure, so the colors washed out a bit. I really like the first picture; almost all my mistakes canceled out.

2012-09-09
Painted Lady Butterflies

Painted Lady butterflies seem to be spreading northward, along with the Giant Swallowtails, and three visited the Butterfly Bush at the front window:

Painted Lady – dorsal

The underwing shows four eye spots as distinguishing features:

Painted Lady – underwing

Painted Ladies have odd-looking “faces” on their front end:

Painted Lady – front

The proboscis works wonderfully well on deeper flowers than these, but they’re not passing anything up:

Painted Lady – proboscis

Another view:

Painted Lady – right side

The refueling tube stows neatly for flight:

Painted Lady – proboscis curled

One had a few notches taken from a wing:

Painted Lady – left rear

You can’t ask for prettier colors:

Painted Lady – right front

These are all hand-held with the DSC-H5 wearing the 1.7 teleadapter, underexposed by 1 stop to keep the dark background from burning out the butterfly colors. The images are very close to dot-for-dot crops from much larger pictures, with a touch of unsharp mask, and no color fiddling at all; bright daylight and a gorgeous subject come out beautifully!

2012-09-08