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 one on the outside of an old-style school building while working as an Election Inspector in the recent primary.
I’m guessing: the person who typed this up heard the word, but never encountered it in actual use.
The correct word, of course, is annunciator, as defined there. Not exactly a homonym, but a pretty close match.
Wrong word, used properly, and spelled correctly. It’s not like I’ve never made that sort of mistake, fer shure!
Found this toxic spill while I was looking for a gadget on another shelf: it seems I left an alkaline D cell standing on my electronics parts & tools carousel for much too long.
Amazingly, although the cell’s leakage blistered the paint pretty badly, it didn’t affect the steel carousel!
I wiped most of the crud and dead paint off, then applied white vinegar (which is essentially dilute acetic acid) to neutralize the cell’s potassium hydroxide. The grabber tool sticking out from between the boxes had a pretty good dose of corrosion up the side, but soaking it in vinegar (wow, the bubbles!) removed that and a shot of penetrating oil expelled the rinse water.
It’s definitely not Duracell’s fault: the cell had a best-used-by date in 1997.
Memo to Self: throw ’em out!
So Verizon seem determined to spend as much money as it takes to bury us in FiOS Triple Play mailings. For the last few months, we’ve been getting at least one mailing a week with exactly the same offer. Perhaps they think we’ll eventually get fed up and buy the damned thing, although rumor has it that the offers keep coming even after you do that.
Anyhow, I called the number (877-896-3354 this week) to ask:
Come to find out that:
At this point we’re spending $50 for Optimum Online cable 13/2 (more or less) internet and nigh onto $30 for a Verizon landline phone without “long distance” calling (which we do by VOIP these days). They can do a bundle for something like $80/month with a brief teaser discount, but no better than that. So we’d wind up paying more for basically the same thing.
After a pleasant conversation he asked if I would recommend Verizon to my friends & relations. I said “Absolutely not” and he asked if I wanted to talk to a Quality Assurance representative. Figuring it’d be good for a laugh, I said yes… and then went directly to the usual interminable wait-on-hold.
The QA guy asked why I wouldn’t recommend Verizon, so I gave him a few reasons:
He actually tried to claim that I can’t get FiOS speeds from cable. I pointed out that the difference between 15/5 and 13/2 isn’t “This is FiOS. This is BIG!”, it’s just barely discernible and not guaranteed anyway. Oddly, in the last few months, Verizon has quietly bumped the base FiOS speed from 12/2 to 15/5, which I infer means they found that trying to sell a slower speed to cable customers wasn’t working out that well.
I also infer this whole FiOS thing still isn’t going as well as they’d like. If it was, the incessant offers would stop.
The QA guy said he’d call me back if they could do anything about the price; there’s evidently a New & Better Deal coming out in a few weeks. Of course, since we’re on the DNS list, we’ll never know…
I told him here’s what it would take to get me to switch: paying less than $80/month for internet + phone. I figure $60 (plus the mystery charges) would save me maybe $10/month. I’ll geek for that if they don’t screw me over for installation and suchlike.
Failing that, we may just shoot the landline in the head and go with the cheap prepaid cellphone deal. Google Voice seems to be a reasonable solution; I got a local number that’s very close to our current landline, so maybe it’s time to print up a stack o’ cards and send out some notices.
Our dishwasher door started making an odd gronking noise when it was opened or closed. It had done this before, so I knew what was going on: one of the sound deadening sheets inside was creeping down around the enclosure and jamming itself into the spring.
It turns out that a layer of adhesive holds the sheets in position and, in hot weather, the weight of the sheet pulls it right over the edge. They’re made of asphalt or something equally black and sticky and heavy, just what you want to dampen vibrations on those big unsupported enclosure sides.
Oddly, this is the only sheet that’s on the move. The others are pretty much stuck where they started. I don’t know if it’s hotter on this side or what’s going on.
The situation was much worse the last time; I had to hack off a huge chunk of the sheet that had buckled around the right side of the dishwasher under the fiberglass insulating blanket. The spring was pretty much encased in shredded asphalt. Not a pretty sight.
This time the sheet traveled only a few inches, just enough to hit the spring with the door about half-open. I broke off the offending part, crudely flattened the rest, and moved the entire sheet back up to the top of the enclosure.
A few strips of duct tape should hold the sheet in place until the heat relaxes the bent areas and improves its contact with the enclosure. I hope that, with most of the remaining sheet on top, rather than hanging off the side, it’ll stay in place until the dishwasher goes casters-up for the last time.
Saw several of these critters on our tent while we were packing up in the morning; I’m in favor of anything that eats small insects, so Harvestmen get a pass. I don’t know if those frogs eat ’em, but that’s something they can work out without my attention.
Then I found another Harvestman on a window when we got home. Not having seen the underside of one in quite a while, I was struck by the “alien face” pattern. I suppose the reddish dot under the alien’s nose is the Harvestman’s mouth, just like it looks.
Eeeek!
They’re actually pleasant to have around and tickle mightily when they crawl up your arm. We gently deport them from the house and generally manage to deposit them undamaged on a plant, where we presume they’ll be much happier.
So we did the HersheyPark thing on the way back from our bicycling vacation and our young lady rode seven of their eleven roller coasters. Not being all that strong of stomach, I wimped out after two and contented myself with taking pictures.
I had decided to not lug a Big Camera and the tele-adapter along, seeing as how we’d be camping for four nights. That turned out to be a wise decision: it rained every night and everything we carried was damp. So I took pix with my Casio Z-850 pocket camera, which had been sealed in a ziplock bag most of the time, and that had to be good enough.
The Fahrenheit coaster is, they tell me, 121 feet tall and I was standing outside the fence about 100 feet from the base of the drop; the slant range was maybe 150 feet. I had plenty of time to set up and practice the shot, as the line was half an hour long. I filled the equivalent of two rolls of film with pix of people I don’t know while exploring a nine-dimensional parameter space & scrutinizing the results; pixels are cheap.
Most digital cameras, this one included, have a long delay between pushing the button and getting results. However, it has several “continuous shutter” modes and I picked the “high-speed” version that records three images in quick succession. There’s no indication of how much time passes between exposures, which probably depends more on the SD Card’s speed than anything else. The timestamp resolution is 1 second, which isn’t much help.
Anyhow, poking the shutter button when the train came over the top consistently produced one good picture as it descended.
I fought all the other automation to a standstill:
The camera picked ISO 200, probably as a result of the “high speed” continuous shutter setting, and warned me that it wasn’t happy about doing that. This being a bright, sunlit day, the nominal exposure for that ISO speed would be 1/200 @ f/16. Two stops faster shutter and three stops bigger aperture should work out OK, as the subjects were on the down-sun side of the coaster. The camera has just two apertures (big and little) that, of course, vary with the zoom setting, so I didn’t have much leeway. I figured I could fix any minor exposure issues in the cough darkroom.
The tele end of the zoom range is equivalent to a 114 mm lens with 35 mm film, which is better than the beer-can-sized zoom on the SLR I used to lug around back in the day.
In round numbers:
Cropping the interesting part from the frame, goosing the gamma a smidge, and applying a touch of Unsharp Mask says that’s about right: you can see the expressions on their grainy little faces. National Geographic quality, it ain’t, but it’s OK for a pocket camera and pix of relatives.
Memo to Self: Would forcing the ISO down to 100 reduce the graininess a bit?
The instructions for our Weber gas grill would have us lavish more care on it than we do on our car, which isn’t actually saying much. Nonetheless, once a year I gotta clean the crud out, whether it needs it or not, because not even I believe heat kills that stuff.
Used to be, that was a thoroughly disgusting job of hand-scraping carbonized gunk and scrubbing gooey muck in cramped quarters. Having acquired a pressure washer, cleaning the grill is almost enough fun that I might do it more often. It even gets the mildew (or whatever that schmutz might be) off the wood handles & platforms, which I would have bet was impossible.
However, if you’re even a teensy bit fussier than we are about the looks of your castle, you might want to not lay the grates & “flavorizer bars” on the driveway to blast ’em clean. Turns out that the overspray strips the grunge right out of the top layer of asphalt, leaving a white trail behind.
Looks a lot like those Nasca peteroglyphs, doesn’t it?
The pressure washer does a great job on the white resin plastic chairs, too, which go from really grubby to chalk-white in one pass.
Can’t imagine how I got along without it…
Memo to Self: Next time, use the sawhorses.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 