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?

  • Dog Tick

    There I was, in the kitchen, minding my own business, when I felt something crawling up my shin…

    Dog Tick - Ventral
    Dog Tick – Ventral

    It’s 5 mm from snout to rump, so it’s most likely a dog tick, not a deer tick, not that that makes me feel much better. It’s stuck to a strip of adhesive tape to prevent it from going anywhere and was flat enough to have not fed on anybody recently.

    One could develop agoraphobia…

    That picture didn’t require focus stacking, although I gave it a try anyway with inconclusive results. I must conjure up a much more rigid camera mount before that works well; a mini tripod isn’t good enough.

  • Canon S630: Bulk Ink Rot

    Something has gone badly wrong with the yellow bulk ink that I’m using in the Canon S630. Over the winter a precipitate formed in the bottles:

    Sediment in ink bottles
    Sediment in ink bottles

    And in the ink tanks:

    Sediment in ink tank
    Sediment in ink tank

    But now that the Basement Laboratory has warmed up, not only does the precipitate remain, but some of it is growing:

    Growth in ink tank
    Growth in ink tank

    The picture doesn’t do it justice; it looks like pond scum in there. Only the yellow ink behaves like that, so it’s likely some contaminant in that batch. Because I buy ink in pint bottles, it’s a long time since that batch arrived and there’s no point in kvetching to the vendor. IIRC, I actually got this bottle from a friend who scrapped out his S630; he’d been refilling cartridges from the same source, too.

    I ordered four sets of five tanks (CMYKK) from the usual eBay vendor for 20 bucks and will toss the old tanks & ink when those arrive.

    There’s a set of four bulk ink bottles from a long-dead HP2000C printer on the shelf, but I suspect the ink chemistry differs by enough to ruin the Canon’s printhead… which is discontinued, so when the head dies, the printer dies, too.

  • Another Dirac Delta: Moen Faucet Repair (?!)

    Can anyone explain how it is that, all of a sudden, Yahoo! Image Search generates 466 hits for my post on repairing our Moen bathroom sink faucet, a sleepy post in my Long Tail that’s been ticking along at one view per day since last December?

    The flash mob was here and gone within the span of an hour:

    View spike for Moen faucet post - 2012-04-05
    View spike for Moen faucet post – 2012-04-05

    Does Yahoo! Image Search have something like a featured image of the hour? I can’t find anything obvious, but I cannot imagine what else would cause that many views of a single page that lacks buck-naked celebrities, jackass stunts, or hideously embarrassing personal revelations.

    Given that all of their “trending image searches” show (typically female) human faces, I doubt that the grubby innards of a faucet would appear in that gallery.

    This has happened before from the same source…

  • Garden Dragonfly Ornament: Eye Re-Repair

    Alas, urethane glue didn’t hold the eye marbles in the garden dragonfly ornament for very long. Although the cured glue had a wonderfully smooth surface where it contacted the balls and it had plenty of contact area, that wasn’t enough.

    This time, I used acrylic caulk that should stay gummy enough to maintain a good grip:

    Garden Dragonfly ornament - re-reglued eye marbles
    Garden Dragonfly ornament – re-reglued eye marbles

    The next step, I suppose, will be to drill a hole in each ball for a stud and epoxy the things in place…

  • A Fork In the Path

    The original path curved away from the new Nutt MECS Center at Trinity, but even engineering bears won’t follow a path that leads in the wrong direction:

    Fork in the path at Trinity
    Fork in the path at Trinity

    An old story has it that [name of administrator] at [name of new college] had the architect remove all but the most obvious walking paths from the new campus plans. After the first year passed, then they paved the routes that people actually used.

    Vassar College has a good example of that design in the residential quad:

    Vassar Paths - Paved Quad
    Vassar Paths – Paved Quad

    But even they won’t slash diagonals across a lawn just for students:

    Vassar Paths - Grass
    Vassar Paths – Grass

  • Choosing SSID Names

    It turns out that WiFi SSIDs can be quite long and contain blanks:

    SSID Names
    SSID Names

    Now, if I wanted to capture your private bits, I’d put up a public access point with a friendly name and no security at all…

  • Magazine Billing Network: Same Scam, Different Name

    This just in: an offer to subscribe to The Economist at a mere $50 over sticker price…

    Magazine Billing Network - Not A Bill
    Magazine Billing Network – Not A Bill

    Apart from the name, everything matches that Subscription Billing Service scam: same layout, same (non-toll-free) phone, same address.

    Perhaps the SBS name became too hot to handle?

    At least they’re not the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned telephone scammers…