Found this interesting SSID on a drive up Albany way:
I wonder how long it’s been like that? If the router’s owner doesn’t use WiFi, then it could last forever.
Rule of Thumb: Disabling admin access from the router’s WiFi port is just good practice…
Category: Oddities
Who’d’a thunk it?
-
Trouser Hangers: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
So I finally looked at why one of the trouser hangers made a nasty gritty noise. Turns out that, no suprise, when you rub steel against steel long enough, it wears away:
Trouser hanger – abraded steel Another hanger had a huge roller that worked wonderfully well:
Trouser hanger – elaborate roller That one was obviously over-engineered, but a simple roller also works well:
Trouser hanger – simple roller They cheapnified this one just a bit too much, because it’s not quite a roller any more:
Trouser hanger – ineffective roller A bit of rummaging turned up enough hangers with working rollers, so it’s all good now…
-
Hot Air Balloon Launch
The local Chamber of Commerce sponsors a hot-air balloon weekend that always seems to attract terrible weather; we got to see one of the launches at a nearby park on a hot afternoon before the storms.
The crew cold-inflates the balloon with a roaring gasoline-powered blower:
Balloon – cold inflation Way over there on the left, almost out of sight, one of the ground crew tethers the top of the balloon:
Balloon – anchoring the top When it’s mostly inflated, they fire the burners for the hot inflation:
Balloon – hot inflation And then the magic happens:
Balloon – liftoff The Montgolfier Brothers would be proud:
Balloon – up and away These are all hand-held with the Canon SX230HS at looong telephoto, with a bit of cropping & tweaking. They’re the usual low-res blog pix, but the originals aren’t much less gritty… the camera you have is better than the camera you don’t: we were out and about on other errands.
-
Dog Tick
There I was, in the kitchen, minding my own business, when I felt something crawling up my shin…
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 And in the ink tanks:
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 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 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 The next step, I suppose, will be to drill a hole in each ball for a stud and epoxy the things in place…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 