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.
Who’d’a thunk it?
That gas tank has evidently reached the end of its life:
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!
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 …
A Hummingbird Moth recently visited the Butterfly Bush:
They’re heavy-bodied moths and, unlike those butterflies, never alight on the flowers to dine. Their wings are clear and never stop moving:
It’s impossible to not see a face looking back at you, even though that’s a proboscis down the middle:
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.
Painted Lady butterflies seem to be spreading northward, along with the Giant Swallowtails, and three visited the Butterfly Bush at the front window:
The underwing shows four eye spots as distinguishing features:
Painted Ladies have odd-looking “faces” on their front end:
The proboscis works wonderfully well on deeper flowers than these, but they’re not passing anything up:
Another view:
The refueling tube stows neatly for flight:
One had a few notches taken from a wing:
You can’t ask for prettier colors:
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!
The paving along Rt 376 just south of Raymond Avenue developed transverse ridges; evidently the old concrete roadway below the more recent asphalt cap is shifting. Bumps in the travel lane are not to be tolerated, so they milled off all the ridges. Problem solved!
Of course, the remaining asphalt isn’t thick enough to withstand any stress and promptly crumbles:
Although the shoulder may appear to be wide enough for bicycle traffic, the debris strewn along it makes for a perilous journey: the larger chunks are bigger than my fist. Several of the milled joints along the unimproved section of Raymond and that stretch of 376 are disintegrating, so it’s not like they got just this one wrong.
Doesn’t bother the DOT one little bit, because their idea of a “shared use facility” is a sign with a picture of a bicycle, labeled Share The Road. As long as the travel lane seems mostly passable by automobiles, their job is done.
For reasons irrelevant to this discussion, I wound up looking at http://widestat.com/softsolder.com, which gave this view of my blog (typos in original, emphasis mine):
Softsolder.com has #12,773,578 traffic rank in world by Alexa. … Out of the 6 unique keywords found on softsolder.com, “chicken ark” was the most dense. … This site has Google PageRank™ 3 of 10.
OK, so it’s not a high-traffic site. I can live with that.
But … chicken ark?
If you search herein for chicken you’ll come up with zero hits (apart from this one) in the posts. Unleashing Google with site:softsolder.com chicken digs up some comments, none of which discuss arks. I have absolutely no idea where Widestat came up with that, which makes me distrust their conclusions even more.
Two turkey hens have formed a creche with seven chicks; if that seems a low number compared with the five in that clutch, we may have just seen the reason.
The turkey flock came foraging across the back yard one evening while we were eating supper on the patio:
The hens began behaving oddly and the chicks went into periscope mode while looking in all directions at once:
After a moment, we saw this tableau:
The red fox entered from the left, then made a great show of ignoring the turkeys while scratching an ear, licking its nuts, and examining the ground as the hens postured and threatened. The fox eventually trotted off to the right, through the grove in the rear, and away.
The flock required a few minutes to stand down from the alert:
And then they moved on, searching for yummy things in the grass as usual…
The pictures are crap from the Canon SX230HS, hand-held at long telephoto, and ruthlessly cropped; the high-res originals aren’t much better than these. I’d expect better results in shaded sunlight, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t move any closer or pause to fetch a tripod. The fox tableau seems perfectly focused on the garden netting, which is what you’d expect from contrast-based autofocus; even if using manual focus would help, the bad picture you get is better than the good picture you didn’t.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 