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?

  • Voting Machines: More Distrust Thereof

    As mentioned there, I have reason to distrust electronic voting machines, which stir the unreliability of PC-based computing into the boiling pot of election politics.

    Voting machine LCD miscalibration - Open Poll
    Voting machine LCD miscalibration – Open Poll

    Attempting to open the polls with the Administrative Menu on the LCD produced this incorrect response. Fortunately, the next screen in the Reports section had a Cancel option, so I could back out and try again by tapping the screen well above the Open Poll button. That worked.

    Later on in the day, for the first time in my experience as a Ballot Marking Device Election Inspector, a voter requested to use the BMD machinery to cast her ballot.

    Voting machine LCD miscalibration - BMD Audio Session
    Voting machine LCD miscalibration – BMD Audio Session

    Here’s what happened when I tried to start the somewhat misleadingly named Audio Session that invokes the BMD: Ballot Review turns on a mode that presents the scanned values from the next ballot on that tiny little LCD, one contest at a time.

    When I called the Board of Elections to get help, the tech said “Hmmm. That shouldn’t happen.” We did get the Audio Session started and the voter commenced entering her choices, eventually succeeding in producing a printed ballot that she found satisfactory.

    The tech sent to fix the situation (we Election Inspectors are not encouraged to fiddle around with the machinery, for well and good reason) was stumped. Eventually we scanned a ballot, using a live vote as a debugging aid, and managed to get the option turned off again. Obviously we hit a corner case, but that’s not what you want in an election with voters lining up behind a dysfunctional scanner.

    It was, of course, the one-and-only scanner in the polling place.

    While this does not directly affect the election results, it certainly does not inspire confidence in the architecture, the programming, or the operator training of the election system.

    Not a pleasant experience…

  • Wind Turbine on the Move

    Pulled into an I-90 rest stop west of Albany NY and saw what appeared to be a large water tank on a flatbed, parked next to … an airplane wing?

    Wind turbine blade and tower section
    Wind turbine blade and tower section

    Nah, this can’t be.

    Turns out that the “tank” (in the distance of the picture) was part of the mast for a wind turbine, with three airfoil blades on separate trailers scattered around the edges of the truck parking area.

    This being a Marching Band trip (returning from the NYSFBC Dome contest in Syracuse: 4th place), I deployed two bandies as measuring instruments. They put on their drill face, stepped 8-to-5 along the blade, and reported it as 120 feet, which agreed well with my uncalibrated 125-foot pace.

    Wind turbine blade - side view
    Wind turbine blade – side view
    Wind turbine blade - end view
    Wind turbine blade – end view

    Seen end-on, a blade doesn’t present much to see. The plastic-foam endcap is a nice touch, though.

    The hub and generator nacelle (and, most likely, many more tower sections) were missing from the collection, which leads me to think they’re marshalling all the pieces before delivery to a wind farm site. It’s also possible these came from a decommissioned installation, as they seemed somewhat weathered.

    A semitruck driver said they’d been parked in the lot since late last week.

    The placard on the back of the trailer reads, in both English and French (due to a Quebec license plate):

    CAUTION THIS TRAILER OFFSETS

    A bit of Google-fu (try searching for offsetting steering semitrailer -carbon) indicates that the trailer has self-steering wheels, which makes sense given that it’s a single unit rather than a double-bottom semitrailer rig.

    The tower section had a bogie wheel assembly strapped to one end (labeled “TOP” on the canvas cover) and a semitrailer tongue strapped to the other: no need for a trailer between the two, as a cylindrical turbine tower is certainly stronger than anything you’d find on the road.

  • Trust Multimedia Mouse vs xorg.conf

    This is the xorg.conf stanza required for a Trust MI-7700R multimedia mouse to set default left-hand use:

    Section "InputClass"
    Identifier      "Trust MM Mouse"
    MatchProduct    "Trust Mouse 15206"
    Option          "SendCoreEvents" "True"
    Option          "ButtonMapping" "3 2 1 4 5 6 7 8 9 10"
EndSection

    And then it Just Worked, including horizontal scrolling.

    I can’t vouch for the multimedia functions, though.

    Memo to Self: Weirdly, the AA cells are in parallel, not series. Put them in “normally” and you get a dead short across a 3-V battery!

    Maybe that’s why it’s obsolete?

  • Our Old Studebaker: Back in the Day

    In addition to those after-restoration images, here are some pix from an old family album that show our 1957 Studebaker President in its prime.

    I think these were taken around 1970, but I really don’t know. As with many family pix, I also have no idea why these were so important…

    The photos were in bad shape, as you can see in the lower-right image, with the magenta dye having faded very little over the decades compared to cyan and yellow; they’ve been brutally color-corrected and contrast-stretched. They were also printed on horrible satin-finish paper and that fishnet overlay is painfully obvious.

    If you need an original image for some perverse purpose, let me know…

  • Turtles on a Log

    If there’s anything to reincarnation, next time around I’m going to put in a request to be a Staff Turtle at the Vassar Farm Environmental Station.

    Vassar Farm Turtles
    Vassar Farm Turtles

    Taken with my Casio EX-Z850 pocket camera, underexposed 2/3 stop to avoid blowing out the highlights even more. This is a dot-for-dot crop from the middle of a much larger 8 MP image, crisped up just slightly. Terrible results, but it’s better than the big camera I didn’t drag along on a guided geology tour (which ended with a generous handful of fine clay from the stream a bit further along).

    And, yeah, I know the whole reincarnation thing says you get what you deserve, not what you want. On the other flipper, nobody really knows how it all works, so I’m not losing hope.

  • Erosion at Work

    Exposed cable anchor
    Exposed cable anchor

    Many years ago, I suppose Central Hudson (the local power utility) drilled a hole into this shale bank, poured in some concrete, and planted an anchor for a pole guy rope.

    Time passes…

    Perhaps this is the result of putting a parking lot behind what’s now the Adriance Library’s Arlington Branch; the asphalt level is two feet below the base of that exposed concrete slug and extends rather close to it. I wonder if the excavators took away too much shale and erosion has continued the process.

    The anchor looks bent, doesn’t it? The pole certainly carries more wires and cables than it did earlier in its career; that lower wire may be exerting more force than is strictly desirable.

    It’ll take a lot more time before this becomes a real problem…

  • Experimental Determination of Squirrel Sprint Speed

    So there we were, biking along the northern segment of the Dutchess Rail Trail, when a squirrel scampered up a fencepost a few hundred feet ahead of us and struck a classic tree-rat pose: standing up atop the post, tail arched behind, front paws together.

    As we rolled closer, the squirrel noticed us and, as squirrels are wont to do, panicked.

    *Must* *run* *away*

    Squirrels tend to escape up the nearest tree, which works perfectly with most predators. In this case, though, the squirrel was already as high as it could get on the post and there were no trees within jumping distance.

    Decision time: can’t run up, can’t escape to the side, must not run toward the threat.

    *Must* *run* *away*

    So the critter lit off along the top rail, hurdling over the protruding fenceposts in a dead run, as fast as its little legs could carry it.

    Which, as it turned out, was just over 15 mph. We stopped pedaling and coasted, but this section is slightly down-grade and we didn’t slow very much.

    The thing was running at my eye level, about five feet to my left, and kept pace with us for maybe a dozen fenceposts. Finally it decided this tactic wasn’t working and dove off the fence into the bushes beside the trail.

    Squirrels must produce adrenaline like I produce saliva.

    And I really, really need a helmet camera…