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?

  • Braille Signage

    I passed a few minutes in the high school lobby (while waiting for the Fencing team to return from a competition) trying to decipher the Braille signs. I’ve always had my doubts about the utility of these things, but I suppose if you’re going to have signs, they may as well have tactile lettering, too.

    Anyhow, what little I knew about Braille (six dots, um, 64 symbols, um, tapers off after that) didn’t extend to actually knowing any of the letters, but how hard could a substitution cipher be? I figured out most of the letters in Stairway quickly, but some were obviously missing. Perhaps Braille includes symbols for common digraphs?

    Stairway
    Stairway

    The Library across the lobby provided more letters, with obvious mismatches that showed I wasn’t anywhere near as clever as I thought (a distressingly common situation these days). Perhaps the two leading dots indicate “Here be there text”?

    Library
    Library

    Then I found the Ticket Booth, which strongly suggested digraph symbols.

    Ticket Booth
    Ticket Booth

    Upon returning home, I did the obvious search and eventually wound up at the Library of Congress Instruction Manual for Braille Transcribing: a short introduction to a very complex subject. Poring through Appendix B provided all the correspondences I needed:

    • The basic alphabet is sorta-kinda decimal
    • Yup, digraphs have their own encoding
    • The two leading dots are a sticky uppercase shift marker
    • Fortunately, I didn’t encounter real contractions
    • There’s an 8-dot variant coming into play

    Some years ago we took an introductory course in American Sign Language when one of my not-quite-a-nephew (son of a cousin, whatever that is) went deaf. Without anyone for day-to-day practice we never achieved fluency, but that was a window into another world, too. We still pass a few basic signs to each other across a noisy room …

    Photography note: photograph signs from far enough off-axis that the flash hotspot on the surface is out of the image. If you must get a rectangular sign out of it, apply a perspective transformation to the image.

  • Refrigerated Semitrailer Warning

    Saw this one parked behind a local Hannaford grocery store.

    Must be some kind of king-hell bulbs in those fixtures. If there was ever an application for LED retrofit bulbs, this is it…

    Turn lights off to prevent fire
    Turn lights off to prevent fire

  • Little Brown Bat

    Brown Bat in Skinner Hall - Vassar
    Brown Bat in Skinner Hall – Vassar

    We attended a concert at Vassar College and found this fellow flitting about an upstairs hallway in Skinner Hall. He eventually settled down atop a door frame and I took this picture from across the hall; it’s a tiny crop from a much larger image because I didn’t want to spook him.

    He’s most likely a Little Brown Bat and perfectly harmless. Anybody who can eat that many insects gets a free pass from me!

    He was at least as scared of us as some of the students were of him. Flying in a hallway full of running people must be bewildering…

    Somebody called Campus Security and I suppose they wiped the little guy out during the second part of the concert.

  • Acrylic Sheet Thickness Variations

    Milling plate thickness
    Milling plate thickness

    So I measured the thickness of the black acrylic sheet I’m using for the Totally Featureless clock and machined the rabbets to match. Went to assemble everything and the rabbets are too shallow!

    Come to find out that the sheet varies in thickness from about 0.437 to 0.475 across the four pieces I’d cut and, of course, I’d measured the thinnest end of the thinnest piece. Makes no sense to me, as I’d expect the thickness to be pretty well controlled over a few feet of sheet, but that’s not how things went down.

    The simplest solution was to mill a flat on the inside of the case to match the rabbet, so all four panel ends were the same thickness. The sketch below has the straight dope.

    Acrylic sheet thickness fix
    Acrylic sheet thickness fix

    Milling with a 3/8-inch end mill at 2500 rpm, 10 ipm, in one pass with no cooling was OK.

    I’ll insert some brass shimstock into the rabbets to make the outside edges wind up flush.

  • Adobe Reader Default Toolbar: FAIL

    Maybe I’m misusing Adobe Reader, but I’ve always thought of it as a program that displays PDF files. In my case, that means data sheets for various & sundry electronic parts: I carefully squirrel both PDFs and parts away, having learned that physical parts can outlast both datasheets and company websites.

    So I open quite a few PDFs that reside on my file server in the basement.

    With that in mind, what’s missing from this row of toolbar icons?

    Adobe Reader Default Toolbar
    Adobe Reader Default Toolbar

    Go ahead, take your time…

    Hint: the only active button lets you “start an Acrobat Connect meeting and share documents”.

    This has been true for the last few versions; the Official Ubuntu Linux Version seems to be stuck at 8.1-ish. Let’s jump ahead a bit, fetch 9.3 directly from the Adobe download page, and install it:

    Adobe Reader 9.3 Toolbar
    Adobe Reader 9.3 Toolbar

    Now I can not only “Share documents and collaborate live within PDF documents”, but also “Click to create PDF using Acrobat.com”.

    What I can’t do is open a PDF file from disk by just clicking a button. That rarely used function is relegated to the File pulldown menu and, for those of us who can touch-type fairly well, hidden behind the arcane Ctrl-O keyboard chord.

    Reconfiguring the toolbar is a few minutes of clickety-click action, but it seems odd to me that none of the focus group participants suggested putting an Open File button on the toolbar.

    Although I never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, this continuing design decision does seem to require forethought.

  • Pupa from Thailand

    Banana stand pupal case
    Banana stand pupal case

    As part of the Great Kitchen Cleaning, I was charged with replacing a missing foot on the banana gallows we received as a gift many years ago. I found a tiny hole in the bottom that we’d never noticed before, most likely because we mistook it for an ink dot or an imperfection in the wood.

    The spot seemed to have something inside and a pass under the microscope showed the remains of a pupal case. I pried it out, destroying it in the process. The insect was, of course, long gone.

    Those are millimeter ticks on the scale along the top edge, so the hole is the better part of 1.5 mm in diameter. Perfectly round, of course, as only an insect programmed to drill holes can produce.

    The hole was 8 mm deep (likely deeper before the wood was planed), so the bug was qualified for gun drilling!

    The stand is marked “Made in Thailand”, but who knows where the wood came from or where it’s been? We’ve had the stand for many years now, but I’m pretty sure the critter was in there when we got it.

  • Our Old Studebaker

    1957 Studebaker in Police Livery
    1957 Studebaker in Police Livery

    Thinking of my parents’ 1957 Studebaker President (in the context of our mixer leaking oil) prompted me to do a search on the obvious keywords, which produced this link. Search for “police unit” and you’ll find a nice picture of a black-and-white President with a gumball machine on the top. Here’s that picture, just in case link rot sets in.

    That’s my parents’ car, right there!

    Turns out that Mom sold it to a Canadian firm (probably Fawcett Movie Cars and a deep link there) that supplies cars to moviemakers; she’d put an ad in the Hershey Antique Auto Show flyer and it worked. A guy showed up with a trailer, money changed hands, and he hauled the poor thing away.

    They transplanted a functional engine from a donor hulk, restored the dual exhaust system that my grandfather had the garage strip out (“Two mufflers cost too much!”), and did a perfect restoration of the rusted eyebrows over the headlights where road mud and salt always collected. While they had the hood up, they installed power steering; that thing always turned like a truck, what with a big iron V8 over the front wheels.

    On the way to Rebound
    On the way to Rebound

    The car appeared in Moonshine Highway in police livery and HBO’s Angel of Harlem (a.k.a. Rebound) in civilian dress. Here’s what it looked like on the way to the Rebound set.

    A private collector in Ontario bought it from the movie folks and found a registration card in my father’s name stuffed behind the glove box. A bit of searching turned up me and now I know what happened to it.

    So, if you just bought a nice black-and-white 1957 Studebaker President from a guy in Canada, there’s a bit of its history. I can tell you more, but nobody else really cares, I suspect…