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?
Saw this in the Syracuse Sheraton: every stringer in the stairwell had a torch-cut opening so they could bolt the flight to the landing.
I don’t know if the flights came pre-assembled (minus the concrete, I assume), but the cutouts definitely have that “WTF do we do now?” aspect about them, don’t they?
Ah, well. I’ve been there & done that, too.
Haven’t you?
Even half an inch of masking tape forms an impenetrable barrier for small creatures; you could splurge on 2-inch tape to get more surface area if you’re squeamish. I did see a spider stepping daintily along a barrier, but, for the most part, all these specimens became mired within a few millimeters of an edge. That made it easy to decide which direction they were traveling: incoming insects stuck near the floor and a (very few) outbound insects stuck at the top, just after leaving the non-sticky surface.
This is, we think, a well-fed first- or second-instar bed bug caught on a tape barrier; it’s not quite the right shape for the book louse seen below. A powder trap caught the only other bed bug in our collection.
In addition to that sole bed bug, the tape barriers captured a steady stream of critters that were not bed bugs. The trick is sorting through all the false positives…
Given the number of books in the house, we caught many book lice. These have a disturbing resemblance to bed bugs, but are basically harmless to humans. You don’t really need books to have book lice, although we captured most of them adjacent to our bookshelves.
This scary critter is a carpet beetle larva. They survive on any fabric surface and can infest upholstery as well as carpets.
Dust mites, at least for their first few instars, are transparent little bags of bug stuff. The first instar may have six legs, just like a first instar bed bug, but successive instars have eight.
Here’s a close up view, showing it has eight legs:
We have no idea what this cute little thing might be. It’s about 0.5 mm in diameter and, to the naked eye, looks like nothing so much as bed bug crap. But it’s alive!
This terrifying apparition sprinted across the (non-isolated) kitchen table, whereupon I mashed it with a magazine. It’s most likely not a bed bug; we’re guessing a spider of some sort. That stylet in its proboscis doesn’t look spider-ish, though.
It might be related to this eight-legged critter; the lancet on the front end is similarly scary. The legs aren’t the same, though.
All in all, we found a bewildering variety of insects, bugs, and spiders wandering around in our house. None of them are particularly harmful, although I now have a (most likely pyschosomatic) allergy to dust mites.
We’re not entomologists: if you know what the mystery critters are, I’d like to hear from you!
Up next: a Hot Box that might forestall all this excitement.
Although I’m not a big fan of tree rats squirrels, I’ll admit this one was having a tough time of it during a recent rainstorm. He (she?) sat motionless on that stub of a branch for well over half an hour, no doubt thinking gloomy thoughts.
Taken through two layers of mid-1950s window glass, so it’s not the sharpest image in my collection, but I’m not going out in the rain just to take a picture of a squirrel!
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.
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.
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…
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?
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.
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.
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?
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…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 