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?
This showed up when I looked at our APRS tracks after a recent ride:
Poking around a bit showed the target:
Contrary to what I thought, it didn’t come up the Hudson River from West Point:
Knowledge of the Universal Law of the Conservation of Perversity informs you a balloon will never land in the middle of a putting green:
Apparently the launch is part of a regular class project at West Point. Good clean fun!
Spotted this on Rt 376 during a ride around the block:
A “Cannabis Energy Drink” without the obvious active ingredient seems like deceptive marketing to me, but, apparently, there was no law against that, even here in New York State.
It’s becoming obvious I don’t get out nearly enough.
A pair of barred owls have been doing call-response “Who cooks for you” chants during the late afternoon, we finally spotted one, and I have a Pixel XL in my pocket:
That’s with the camera zoomed all the way, so it’s blowing up the raw pixels by a factor of four. Cropping out the middle and resizing by 300% shows the result doesn’t have much detail:
We snagged the binoculars on the way out the door, so we got a better look than you do. The camera you have is much better than the camera you don’t, but big glass always wins over tiny optics!
It seems the rodents around here have lost their fear of enclosed spaces:
I cannot be bothered to conjure a mesh lid for the bowl, though.
Back in the day, HP scope probes had a rugged music-wire hook on the tip:
These days, scope probe tips use ordinary sheet steel punched into a hook shape:
By sheer bad luck, the first probe out of the bag had a mis-punched end with no griptivity:
Dunno what happened, but it was definitely sheared off in the factory.
After I finally recognized the problem, I shaped a crude hook with a safe-edge needle file and continued the mission:
A quick note to Siglent put a replacement probe tip in the mail, so it’s all good.
Thinking about springs to apply downforce on plotting pen holders suggested magnets, so I extricated some neodymium bars from my collection of power toothbrush heads:
A snippet of magnetic field visualization film shows a dipole pattern:
Snapping two of them together in line:
… produces a quadrupole:
Now, if only I had some magnetic monopoles, this whole thing would be easier!
This one took us by surprise:
“As Advertised”, indeed, although the flyer got it right.
We mentioned it at the Meat Department and discovered they don’t print the signs, so Mary reported it to The Front Office.
It’s not as if I’ve never run afoul of a heterograph or perpetrated the occasional typo …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 