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?
Met this gadget outside a mall while my ladies were shopping for fabric. It’s certainly a distant relative of the snail I met near Adriance Library in Poughkeepsie some years ago with the same, then-new, camera.
It’s about a foot off the pavement on a brick wall. I fear it’s stuck, because the daytime temperatures are in the 50s and that’s pretty chilly for a cold-blooded critter.
But, on the whole, they’ve been around a lot longer than we have, so I left well enough alone.
Our daughter snagged some tchotchkes from a high-school career fair, including one that she instantly recognized as a flamethrower: Antibacterial Hand Sanitizer Spray, 62% Ethyl Alcohol plus some other junk, in a handy pump-spray container. Heck, it even says
Warnings Flammable. Keep away from open flame. Keep out of reach of children.
I was so proud of her…
After homework, she stuck a candle atop the garbage can by the garage and fired off a few shots while I ran the camera. Here’s the best one, converted to a low-speed animated GIF.
We’re pretty sure that’s Sweet Babby Jeebus™ in the next-to-last frame of the flare. Maybe Madonna. Could go either way.
Much as with the “movies” I made for trebuchets and tree frogs, I used ffmpeg to shred the camera’s mpg movie into separate jpg images, some bash to select the frames, then convert to stitch them back together into a gif.
The general outline:
mkdir Frames
ffmpeg -i mov04990.mpg -f image2 Frames/frame-%03d.jpg
cd Frames
mkdir flare3
for f in `seq 760 780` ; do cp frame-${f}.jpg flare3 ; done
cd flare3
convert -delay 50 frame-* Flare3.gif
If my bash-fu was stronger, I could feed the proper file names directly into convert without the copy step.
Now, kids, don’t try this at home. At least not without responsible adult supervision…
I can understand why it no longer has a button, but in which parallel universe does it make sense to put a clearly labeled Panic Button inside a high-school cafeteria, right next to the door?
Come on, now, really?
I managed to squelch the temptation to poke the remains of the switch stem with a pencil…
Took these pix while chaperoning the Arlington High School Marching Band trip to The Dome at Syracuse University. They’re warming up, if that’s the proper word for standing around in skintight uniforms on a 45-degree evening at Skytop, in preparation for their show.
The ISO 1000 setting on a Sony DSC-H5 produces absolutely terrible color noise, but sometimes it just doesn’t matter. These were taken under low-pressure sodium-vapor parking lot lights, with some mercury-vapor lighting in the background, so they’re basically monochromatic anyway.
The shutter is 1/8 second and the lights flicker at 120 Hz, so the rifles reflect 120/8 = 15 blinks as they spin. The similar included angles show that all the rifles spin at nearly the same rate: the Color Guard does very nicely synchronized tosses. They’re good!
Now, for one of my top-ten favorite pictures…
I moved around to put the mercury-vapor light behind her, which prevented flareout & added a crisp edge. The camera managed to get nearly the right exposure, even under considerable duress. This is a crop from a larger image.
She’s absolutely stationary with only her hands moving, exactly the way it’s supposed to be done.
Despite the slow shutter speeds, they’re both hand-held pictures. You simply don’t get to see my botches…
Oh, and by the way. The “rifles” are wooden dummies, carved out in a general rifle-stock shape, but without any metal parts or even a barrel. Frankly, I think the Color Guard should be trained up in marksmanship and carry actual rifles. Perhaps those would work well?
Found this on the long-disused stage of the former Martha Lawrence School, now the St Francis Hospital Daycare Center, hosting the polling place where I was serving as an Election Inspector. It’s a bit hard to read, even in the larger version, but I thought a one-year warranty etched into a brass plate was interesting; it’s screwed right to the side of the dimmer panel.
The warranty provisions require that the dimmer panel be properly maintained, regularly used, and kept clean. As you can easily see, it’s been a long while since anyone has put on a stage production.
I think the warranty ran out right around the time I was born, but I could be off by a decade or two either way.
This is on the “control panel” side of the Sequoia ImageCast Ballot Marking Device voting machines used in Dutchess County. I put my finger in the middle of the CLOSE POLL button and the panel misread a press on the REPORTS button.
That’s one of several misreadings of the day. Earlier, while setting up the machine for the day, it misread horizontally and gave me a STATUS report instead of a ZERO report.
Last year the same sort of thing happened. It’s always explained as “being out of calibration”, which makes me wonder just exactly when the panels are calibrated and what the criteria for success might be.
One of the few good things to come out of having a totally dysfunctional State Legislature is that New York has managed to delay and stall and fumble around until other states demonstrated the utter stupidity of direct-recording, no-paper-trail electronic voting machines. The ImageCast machines are a spectacular boondoggle, but far less catastrophic than what we’ve seen in Florida, Ohio, California, and …
Oh, and after a 16-hour shift as a BMD Election Inspector, exactly zero handicapped voters (actually, any voters) took advantage of the machine to cast their vote. A report from someone who’s in a position to know says that in the last election, the bottom line was $250 per vote on the ImageCast machines. I think that’s probably low.
My tax dollars at work, fer shure!
We stayed at the Syracuse Sheraton while chaperoning a Marching Band trip, which led to meals in the Regents Ballroom, a large space (potentially) divided in three parts by the usual folding partitions. The wall in each section had a bank of RJ-11 and -45 jacks…
Obviously, back in the day, a single room with 25 Phone jacks and one (red) Data jack made perfect sense. Or maybe the ballroom has 75 phones lines and three Data connections? Hard to say.
Judging from the overall crud accumulation, the jacks aren’t getting much use. I wonder if it was originally set up so they could run a boiler-room operation out of the hotel ballroom?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 