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?
Got one of those painful, bloodless slices:
From, believe it or not, the razor-sharp edge of a fillet of cured green Loctite:
Of course, it didn’t stay bloodless for long: every time I put pressure on the ball of my thumb, the split gets longer.
I hate it when there’s blood all over the workpiece…
The main aisle at the Trinity contest is a busy place, but that didn’t seem to matter. This guy came ambling along, tapping on the keyboard, walking slower and slower, until he just dropped to a dead stop(*) in the middle of the lane:
Everyone gave him plenty of clearance until he eventually rejoined consensus reality and moved on…
(*) There’s a song about that, but you’re gonna have to find it yourself.
The bald cardinal still stops by the feeder in the evening. He’s now losing the smaller red feathers around his eye and above his beak. The black feathers bordering his beak seem unaffected, although it’s hard to tell through the window glass blur.
This image is a tight crop from the Sony DSC-H5, which has a lens about two stops faster than my Canon SX230HS pocket camera and is much better suited for evening photography. I’ll add the tele adapter to the stack and try to get a better picture from the door; I think the autofocus assist light spooks the poor bird.
That missing leg surely involves an accident, those missing feathers may be mites, but now we have a male Northern Cardinal with what looks like a tumor on his head:
It’s not obvious in that picture, but the black patch seems to be the rubbed-raw top of a growth.
Prior to these birds, in all the years we’ve been birdwatching we’ve never seen any damaged cardinals…
Perhaps this indicates most folks can’t configure network encryption with known parameters, but advising everybody to just turn that pesky WEP stuff off seems, well, misguided:
Sniffing a guest’s private bits from an unencrypted link doesn’t pose any challenge at all and, given the hotel’s location in Hartford’s hot urban core, I’d expect absolutely no security-by-obscurity whatsoever.
On the other paw, Dragorn of Kismet points out the triviality of a man-in-the-middle WiFi attack no matter what encryption you might (think you) have in effect. So maybe it doesn’t make much difference.
And if you think the wired network is inherently more secure, that should change your mind.
Those panic buttons in the high school cafeteria still beg the question: who thought panic buttons would be a Good Idea? I recently served as a judge for the Science Fair qualification show and found some variations on the theme.
One seems in good shape, although I don’t know if it’s been repaired:
Several have missing buttons, but the innards seem intact:
In the event of an actual panic, I suppose you simply yank the cage off the wall:
I cannot imagine what logic justified protecting one button and leaving the others to the tender mercies of the student population.
Our tax dollars at work, for sure…
Although I don’t often block-quote other sources, for this I’ll make an exception:
The Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS, off since June 2011) was powered back on on March 16 based on the unanimous agreement of the review board at the CAPS turn-on review held on March 8. All went as planned for both the instrument and the spacecraft during the turn-on. The high rail to chassis short internal to the instrument that was part of what prompted it to be turned off last June was not present, and no changes were seen in the bus voltages or currents when the turn-on occurred. On Tuesday, March 20, the high rail to chassis short in the CAPS instrument returned, generating the same condition that existed at the time the instrument was turned off. However, based on the tin whisker model developed by the NESC team, this condition is believed to be understood and is not expected to cause any problems for either the instrument or the spacecraft. The CAPS instrument has been left powered on and is sequenced to operate as originally planned for the 75 kilometer Enceladus flyby coming up on March 27.
Having seen a forest of tin whiskers myself, that’s a pretty scary diagnosis. One assumes NASA takes extensive precautions, based on their experience, but … 15 years in hard vacuum and free fall will do odd things to spacecraft.
Remember those Toyota unintended acceleration problems? Guess what caused some of them: yup. Read their report to find out what makes metal whiskers so hard to detect. Hint: combine a minimum threshold voltage with a very low current capacity.
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The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 