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?

  • ALSA Sound Samples Are Monaural

    The Arch Linux setup guide uses the ALSA sound samples in /usr/share/sounds/alsa to verify that everything’s working:

    aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

    Which, as it turned out, worked perfectly: a female voice front-and-center.

    Flushed with success, I tried some of the other samples:

    cd /usr/share/sounds/alsa/
ls -l
total 1212
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 137134 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Center.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 142128 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Left.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 146990 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Right.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 135202 2009-10-20 05:26 Noise.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 130096 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Center.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 126064 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Left.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 146480 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Right.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 134868 2009-10-20 05:26 Side_Left.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 129966 2009-10-20 05:26 Side_Right.wav

    All of which played front-and-center.

    Come to find out that they’re all recorded in Monaural mode, so the file names don’t really mean anything.

    soxi Front_Left.wav 

Input File     : 'Front_Left.wav'
Channels       : 1
Sample Rate    : 48000
Precision      : 16-bit
Duration       : 00:00:01.48 = 71042 samples ~ 111.003 CDDA sectors
File Size      : 142k
Bit Rate       : 768k
Sample Encoding: 16-bit Signed Integer PCM

    Definite disappointment, that… it’s not Arch’s fault, they’re monaural in Ubuntu,too.

  • Digikey Full-Line Catalog

    For the first time ever, Digikey sent me a full-line catalog.

    Digikey catalog
    Digikey catalog

    It’s 2778 pages long, three inches thick, and weight 2 kg.

    Some time ago I made the mistake of replacing our large rusted-out mailbox with a much smaller one: the catalog presented a solid wall of paper when I opened the door.

    Here’s a closeup…

    Digikey catalog vs Arduino Duemilanovae
    Digikey catalog vs Arduino Duemilanovae

    Now, I’d love to have you believe I’m such a high-rollin’ kind of engineer that Digikey spares no expense on my behalf, but the only explanation for this embarassing situation I can come up with is that their customer service system blew a gasket in my general direction…

    What makes it even more ironic is that they’d recently sent me a survey asking how I’d like to get their catalog. I’d emphatically replied that I did not need a paper catalog or a USB stick with the PDFs. Just let me do the on-line searching and occasionally refer to the appropriate PDF pages and I’ll be fine.

    The damned thing is basically useless; I hate to just toss it in the recycling, but I can’t think of any reason to keep it around.

    I just removed my mailing address from their list, presumably leaving my account info intact; we’ll see if that sticks.

  • Recipe Inflation: Hershey’s Cocoa

    My mother’s pantry disgorged a can of Hershey’s Cocoa dating back to the mid-90s (if I’m interpreting the 94P date code correctly). Their Favorite Hot Cocoa recipe is straightforward:

    SINGLE SERVING: Combine 1 heaping teaspoon HERSHEY’S Cocoa, 2 heaping teaspoons sugar, and dash salt in mug, add 2 teaspoons milk and stir until smooth. Heat 1 cup milk: fill mug. Stir and serve.

    Browsing in the grocery store revealed that the current recipe has considerably more stiffness: two tablespoons of both cocoa and sugar.

    One tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. How they interpret “heaping” I don’t know, but it’s under a factor of two. Maybe cups are bigger these days, but surely not by a factor of four or five.

    Zowie!

    The Official Recipe from the Hershey’s website lists 2-3 teaspoons of cocoa and 2 tablespoons of sugar. I love this suggestion:

    VARIATIONS
    Rich and Adult: Increase cocoa to 2 tablespoons …

    Adult cocoa. Who’d’a thunk it?

  • WWVB Antenna: Oops!

    Ferrite inductor cores are notoriously fragile: they do not withstand much abuse at all. Given the amount of fiddling I’ve been doing with the Totally Featureless Clock, it was inevitable that I’d manage to drop the antenna…

    Broken ferrite bar antenna
    Broken ferrite bar antenna

    Gluing it back together with cyanoacrylate demonstrated that some things just never work the same. The antenna depends on a continuous flux path through the winding and even the minute gap introduced by the adhesive is enough to ruin the antenna.

    What they say about hearts and wheels is also true of ferrite bar antennas:

    “Once you bend it, you can’t mend it…”

  • Money for Nothing: Nielsen TV Survey

    Just got a check for twenty bucks in the mail:

    Nielsen Survey Thanks
    Nielsen Survey Thanks

    That’s in addition to the ten dollars folding cash money enclosed with the survey as, I suppose, a motivation to not chuck the whole thing in the trash.

    The survey told us that our household had been “scientifically selected” to ensure a valid sampling of the TV viewing population, so it was very important to return the survey. I was astonished that they’d pay thirty bucks for a survey, but that’s probably a good indication of their desperation.

    OK, sez I, I’ll play along; every man has his price.

    It took ’em until Question 4 to get to the heart of the matter: how many television sets does our family own? Surprisingly, the first choice was “None” and, because that best describes our situation, that’s what I picked. Most of the other questions didn’t have a “Hell, no!” response, but I picked the smallest numbers, hours, and viewers they allowed.

    While there is, in fact, a TV in our house, it’s parked on a basement shelf with its cord wrapped around it and hasn’t been turned on in years. Sort of like the “iron phone” I keep in a box nearby; it comes out when I must verify that the phone company’s problem is upstream of the jack on the side of the house.

    And, besides, it’s an analog TV and we all know what that means: ain’t none of those signals on the air these days. Yes, we have a cable connection, but the only thing crossing the jack is Internet data and, IIRC, the Cablevision diagnostic channel.

    We have a lot of time for interesting & productive projects. They didn’t ask about that sort of thing, though.

    Our results were, most likely, something of a disappointment.

    [Update: OK, three times is enemy action. I will delete further comments asking to be signed up for the survey. ‘Nuff said.]

  • Corelle Sliver

    Mary found a sliver chipped from the outside edge of a Corelle dinner plate, which provides an opportunity to see something that’s normally invisible: the ceramic layer inside its glass coating.

    Overall, the sliver is nearly two inches long and about the same width as the plate is thick.

    Corelle sliver
    Corelle sliver

    Peering through the microscope at the left end, the glass layer is most obvious along the top edge. You can barely see it along the bottom, where the chip thins to a razor edge.

    Corelle sliver - detail
    Corelle sliver – detail

    On the right end the upper and lower glass layers are a bit more obvious, at least with the light arriving nearly horizontally and after some aggressive exposure hackage,

    Corelle sliver - side light
    Corelle sliver – side light

    The ceramic has a slightly higher coefficient of thermal expansion than the glass, so it puts the glass under a tremendous amount of compressive stress as the newly manufactured plate cools. Glass is really strong in compression (and terribly weak in tension), so the plate becomes remarkably hard to break. More details there and there.

    The plate rims do tend to chip, however, if you own them as long as we have. These are the long-discontinued Old Town Blue pattern: over three decades old by now.

    Oddly, they’re still under warranty: back in the day, Corning sold its then-new Corelle with a Lifetime Warranty. Nowadays, you get three years for the mid-grade line, five years for thicker plates, and a mere one year for stoneware (whatever that is). I suppose enough people actually took them up on the warranty to make it economically impractical.

    I ran a fine diamond file over the chipped edge and it’s OK. Eventually, we’ll break down and get new plates, but there’s no sense rushing a decision like that…

  • Chili Powder Beetles

    Mary cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, which entailed sorting out all the various spice jars. She thought the Chili Powder looked a bit odd and, indeed, it did: a whole colony of beetles and their larvae was a-squirm in there!

    The label states:

    All Natural

    non irradiated — no preservatives

    Frankly, I don’t see any particular problem with food irradiation.

    If you’re the sort of person who cooks your meals, as we are, then you’re eating plenty of denatured proteins and broken DNA anyway. In this case, snuggling that jar up to a nice warm Cobalt-60 slug for a few minutes would have been a great improvement.

    The main ingredient, of course, is “chili peppers”. The remainder doesn’t sound particularly life-sustaining, though: oregano, cumin, garlic, sea salt, and spices. Anything that can live off that brew must have a bad attitude, the way I see it.

    Being that sort of bear, I’d written the date on the label: 19 Aug 08. So, in round numbers, we use two ounces of Chili Powder a year. Obviously, we shouldn’t buy that stuff in bulk…

    Those are millimeters on the scale it’s crawling on, so these are little bitty bugs.

    [Update: Useful advice from the UC IPM folks.]