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?

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…

2012-07-07
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…

2012-07-01
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

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

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

Vassar Paths – Grass

2012-06-28
Choosing SSID Names

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

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…

2012-06-24
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

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…

2012-06-09
Forsythia Clearing

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:

Cleared Forsythia

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:

Forsythia root balls

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.

2012-06-04
Gas Flareoff

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:

Gas Storage Tank

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.

2012-05-26