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?
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:
The next step, I suppose, will be to drill a hole in each ball for a stud and epoxy the things in place…
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:
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:
But even they won’t slash diagonals across a lawn just for students:
It turns out that WiFi SSIDs can be quite long and contain blanks:
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…
This just in: an offer to subscribe to The Economist at a mere $50 over sticker price…
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…
It was decided, in that place where what is decided must be, that the time had come to hack back the giant forsythia stand encroaching from the neighbor’s yard. The stuff tip-roots, so anything that stands in its way gets assimilated, and the only way to make headway is to tear it out by the roots.
We eventually clearcut a section about 15 feet wide and 40 feet long by the simple expedient of lopping off everything that stuck up:
Removing the roots required prying with a 7 foot length of 1.5 inch octagonal steel bar braced on a chunk of 4×4 inch lumber rammed up against the roots. With my full weight on a 6 foot lever arm, the roots would just barely break free.
A dozen wheelbarrow loads like this went atop the branches on the heap:
That’s my kind of outdoor work: kill them all…
Mary raked and seeded the debris field just before the next rainfall. It ought to be good for another few years.
While I was on that ride, I found this at the bottom of a smoky pillar rising along the Hudson River:
Turns out Central Hudson Gas & Electric has a pipeline under the Hudson at that point and I’d admired their spherical storage tank from ground level some years back:
I don’t know what they’re flaring off, but it looks messier than, say, propane. There’s another flare nozzle just out of the picture on the lower left, both along the edge of the circular concrete pad left over from a cylindrical storage tank, so they do this often enough to have some permanent infrastructure.
The Android version of the Dropbox interface (on the Kindle, anyway) lets you create a password like this:
ab&CDef{gHi
Come to find out that, although the web-based Dropbox interface doesn’t reject that password, it kvetches that your userid and password don’t match. Yes, even if you cut-and-paste from a text file copied through the USB link.
Fortunately, the web interface has a password reset mechanism that’s missing from the Kindle app.
Little Bobby Tables rides again!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 