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 while riding along a rail-trail route west of Philadelphia. Evidently they left the catenary support structures standing over the trail to carry the (still energized!) power lines, but the I-beams webs across the trail have rusted completely through.
Verily, rust never sleeps… I wonder if they ran diesel locomotives along this part of the line?
The beams across the active railway seem to be in fine shape.
One of those midnight “I heard such a clatter” events: somebody or something was kicking a can all over the driveway.
Turned out that a raccoon found the stack of carefully rinsed salmon cans in the recycling bin and was puzzling over how to get them apart. Evidently he figured there was something really delicious hidden in there somewhere!
I had time to fiddle with the camera before he gave up and wandered away on his rounds…
These are in near-IR “Nightshot” mode with my ancient DSC-F717 and the 1.7X teleconverter. They’re automagic crops from larger frames, walloped en masse with ImageMagick:
for f in *jpg ; do mogrify -crop 1200x900+700+450 -resize 750x563 $f ; done
The gritty texture plays hell with JPEG compression, but that’s what the camera delivers. An incandescent spotlight on the driveway contributes the deep shadow, but an ordinary camera (my DSC-H5) produced completely black images, even with the high-power flash setting.
Memo to self: start keeping the recycling bin inside the garage. But will that just piss off the bears that are moving (back) into the county?
My PC makes a seasonal migration: to the basement during the summer, to the living room in the winter. Those moves provide an opportunity to vacuum the fuzz out of the fan grilles and heatsinks.
You’d think that, given the trouble caused by blocked air inlets, manufacturers would make it easy to get access to the grilles and trivially easy to remove the fuzz. Not so, alas.
This time, I decided to see what the intake side of the main heatsink looked like. Two screws secure the shell to the circuit board and provide clamping pressure on the CPU heat spreader. The heatsink is a massive affair with liquid-filled heat pipes; I’ve never taken it out before because removing the screws exposes the CPU heat spreader, where you do not want to get fuzz.
Oops!
A bit of work with the vacuum and a brush greatly improved the situation. I think I kept the fuzz out of the heatsink-to-CPU joint, but there’s really no way to know because, as nearly as I can tell, Dell didn’t include any of the CPU temperature readouts on this system board.
Memo to Self: Gotta do that more often …
I had our daughter solder up some circuit boards for me (as part of a clever scheme to get her trained up on circuitry) and we were discussing the projects. I used the term capsaspitator and she gave me a blank look … as well she might, because even Google doesn’t know what they are.
A long time ago, back on the IBM Video Disc project, Mad Phil and HH were chasing the gremlins out of a particularly tricky bit of RF-oid analog / digital circuitry. This task required a prodigious quantity of bypass caps and, at some point, Mad Phil announced that he’d had it up to there with those [obscene gerund] capsaspitators!
The term immediately caught on and I use it to this day in reference to any particularly obscure capacitor, particularly bypass caps that seem useless and are actually vital.
It’s pronounced caps-ASS-pi-tator, of course, and now everybody can find it on The Web…
Before you pull the tub out of the washer, you must disconnect the ground wire from the bearing behind the pulley. This isn’t impossible… it just looks that way.
There’s a notch molded into the pulley that provides access to the ring terminal. IIRC, it’s a Torx T15 screw and there’s just barely enough clearance for a magnetic tip holder in there.
For some unknown reason, the tapped hole on our washer was filled with steel filings that clogged the threads. I ran the screw in until it stopped, backed it out, cleaned off the filings, and repeated until it came out mostly clean.
The picture is after a few cleaning passes; the screw came out covered with filings the first time!
The magnetization comes from the holder I used for the Torx bit, but it certainly was handy.
Spotted this one in a stairwell while trotting upstairs for my annual physical.
The artist’s message would have been far more powerful had he (it’s always a he) not scrawled Learn along all five floors.
Maybe he never heard of KRS One?
I snagged this gem from the Deep Horizons spillcam site a while back; it’s a screen grab at 1600×1200 with all the extraneous junk cropped off. Scaling it back to fit a 4:3 screen doesn’t do it a bit of damage: it looks just as weird.
Something from Alien, perhaps?
I’m pretty sure that’s Sweet Babby Jeebus™ floating over there in the background…
[Update: Some “best of” the ROV video feeds, speeded up by a factor of 7, are there.]
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 