Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Apparently they excavated around the smashed bases and sawed off the conduits:
Street Lamp Base – sawed conduit
Then they yoinked the concrete cylinders, installed new bases, re-connected the conduits, cast more concrete, and installed the posts:
Street Lamp Base – Rombout House Ln – detail
I think the two “Signal” box covers flush with the surface on either side of Rombout House Lane lie just beyond the edges of what will eventually be the repaved road at the intersection.
Street Lamp Base – Rombout House Ln – overview
Given how much damage the base at that intersection encountered, my visualization of the Cosmic All says that pole will not survive the year unless they install a few well-spaced bollards.
There’s another pole on the other side of the road I expect will have a full-on collision, too.
The L4-L5 pair are part of an extensive human anatomic model locating all the pieces at their proper coordinates, so these two hovered about 800 mm above the XY plane. I ran them through the Grid:Tool mesh editor to center them at the XY origin, then put the bottom-most point at Z=0.
Rotating them individually in PrusaSlicer and painting only the most essential support got them to this state:
L4 L5 vertebrae – PrusaSlicer
Each one take about three hours, so I ran them individually to reduce surface blemishes and maximize the likelihood of happy outcomes. Worked like a champ.
The retina-burn orange disk is not anatomically correct, because the InterWebz apparently does not have a model for spinal cartilage:
L4 L5 vertebrae – assembled – disk detail
Instead, it’s a rounded cylinder resized into an oval, with its top and bottom surfaces formed by subtracting the vertebrae:
L4 L5 vertebrae disk – solid model
The OpenSCAD code doing the heavy lifting:
// Disk between L4 and L5 vertebrae
// Ed Nisley - KE4ZNU
// 2025-03-07
Layout = "Show"; // [Show,Build]
include <BOSL2/std.scad>
module Disk() {
color("Red")
difference() {
translate([9,-18,36])
rotate(110)
resize([33,45])
cyl(d=50,h=14,$fn=48,rounding=7,anchor=BOTTOM);
import("../Spine/human-spinal-column-including-cervical-thoracic-and-lumbar-vertebra-model_files/L4 L5 vertebrae stacked.stl",
convexity=10);
}
}
if (Layout == "Show") {
Disk();
color("White",0.3)
import("../Spine/human-spinal-column-including-cervical-thoracic-and-lumbar-vertebra-model_files/L4 L5 vertebrae stacked.stl",
convexity=10);
}
if (Layout == "Build") {
Disk();
}
All of the magic numbers come from eyeballometric measurement & successive approximation.
The Build layout left the disk floating in space, whereupon I used PrusaSlicer to reorient it edge-downward on the platform with painted-on support for minimal distortion:
L4 L5 vertebrae disk – PrusaSlicer
Two dots of E6000+ adhesive hold everything together.
All in all, it was a useful distraction. I’ve been vertically polarized for the last five days and it’s good to be … back.
I asked for the images from recent X-ray and MRI sessions, whereupon a CD arrived in the mail. Popping it into my desktop Linux box produced this directory listing:
ll /run/media/ed/Feb\ 21\ 2025/
total 146M
dr-xr-xr-x 2 ed ed 136 Feb 21 13:14 ./
drwxr-x---+ 3 root root 60 Mar 2 13:40 ../
-r--r--r-- 1 ed ed 146M Feb 21 13:14 -NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso
It seems whoever / whatever produced the CD copied the ISO image to the CD, rather than burning the ISO directly to the CD. As a result, the CD has one file.
Raise your hand if you’ve never done that.
Well, I was going to save the CD as an ISO file anyway, so I just copied it to the file server.
Attempting to mount it produces an odd result:
sudo mount -o loop "-NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso" /mnt/loop/
[sudo] password for ed: <make up your own>
mount: failed to set target namespace to ISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso: No such file or directory
Oh, right, starting a filename with a leading dash is never a Good Idea™.
Rename it:
mv -NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso NISLEY-DMBG8yMQcf8qXcVj.iso
mv: invalid option -- 'N'
Try 'mv --help' for more information.
We didn’t get half a foot of any precipitation that day.
That is apparently the “Pixel At a Glance” app using info scraped from weather-dot-com. The other Google Weather app, the one that may or may not still have the Weather Frog, scrapes info from noaa-dot-gov and seems somewhat less uncoordinated.
The two apps generally disagree on what kind and how much precipitation will occur, sometimes absurdly, and rarely agree with the official National Weather Service forecast.
Sometimes the forecasts have not converged by the time the weather arrives outside the window.
Although we had considerable success trapping voles during the last half of the 2024 gardening season, Mary found a description of what might be a better technique: a box with small entrance holes taking advantage of rodent thigmotaxis: their tendency to follow walls. The writeup shows nicely made wood boxes, but I no longer have machinery capable of cutting arbitrarily large wood slabs into pieces.
I do, however, have a vast pile of cardboard boxes:
Vole Box – large
That’s a rat-size trap.
A smaller box has room for two mouse-size traps (one hidden on the left):
Vole Box – small
The general idea: plunk the box in a garden plot, arm the trap(s), close the lid, and eventually a vole will venture inside, whereupon wall-following leads to disaster. Apparently bait is optional, as wall-following inevitably takes them over the trap pedal. I won’t begrudge them a walnut or two, should bait become necessary.
Cardboard is obviously the wrong material for a box in an outdoor garden, but I figure they’ll survive long enough to show feasibility and I can deploy a lot of small boxes before having to conjure something more durable.
Yes, those are laser-cut rounded-rectangle holes: 30 mm and 40 mm, assuming voles care about such things.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 