Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

Our Old Studebaker

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

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…

2010-02-16

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.

2010-02-14

Digikey Full-Line Catalog

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

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.

2010-02-12
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?

2010-02-03
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

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…”

2010-01-30
Money for Nothing: Nielsen TV Survey

Just got a check for twenty bucks in the mail:

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.]

2010-01-17
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

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

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

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…

2010-01-12