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?
I’ve always wondered what the Chinese-script company names on eBay meant, so I fed some into Google Translate (clicky for more dots):
Huh.
As the saying goes, ol’ Deng must be living “… modestly, if the kind of money he was getting out of me meant anything to him.”
Page views for 2017:
Plumbing and car troubles continue to plague folks in Search Engine City.
If I could monetize my broom handle thread IP, I’d be rich, I tell you, rich.
Some interesting (and rounded) numbers from the ads you (presumably) don’t see, because adblocking.
The blog gets just under 30 k page views/month, call it 1 k/day. Because most of the traffic arrives from search engines, each viewer looks at only 1.6 pages. Dividing the two suggests 18 k viewers/month.
WordPress now shows 90 k ad impressions/month. Dividing 90 k impressions by 18 k viewers gives 5 ad impressions/viewer, which is about what you’d expect from the three ads appearing on the main page and each post seen individually: 3 ads/page × 1.6 page views/visitor = 4.8 ads/visitor.
Before the big WP advertising push, they reported 15 k ad impressions/month for roughly the same 30 k page views/month and 1.6 pages/visitor. At one ad per page (which I don’t know for sure, but it seems reasonable), 30 k views should produce 30 k ad impressions. I can’t account for the discrepancy.
Those of you using ad blockers (which I highly recommend!) don’t know what you’re missing.
Onward, into the New Year …
I spotted a piece of jewelry during a recent walk:
The other side shows off The Shiny Bit:
I seem to have swapped the “front” and “rear” labels; the flat side faces the LED / HID bulb.
It looked even better after extraction and casual cleaning:
It seems someone with a relatively new car had a fairly high energy accident just north of Red Oaks Mill. The remainder of the debris consisted of shattered engineering plastic. We’ll never know the rest of the story.
Both lens surfaces have a slight nubbly finish, perhaps to produce some side light around the main beam. The rectangular opening apparently shaped the low beam and doesn’t appear movable, so perhaps the car had separate headlights for the high beams.
I’m not quite sure what to do with a chipped condenser lens, so it’s sitting on the windowsill (in a sun-safe orientation) along with many other glittery bits of glass I’ve collected over the years.
You’d think architects would know better:
The washroom has in-the-wall towel + trash stations at each end of the counter, but they’re obviously inadequate for the purpose. Fortunately, the counters slope away from the attractive stacks of paper towels.
A light snowfall revealed plenty of overnight traffic on the patio:
I should set up an IR camera to watch what’s going on out there!
NYS DOT repaved the section of Rt 376 between our house and the Red Oaks Mill intersection during a mid-October week, doing most of the work overnight to avoid jamming traffic to the horizon in all directions. Having nothing better to do, I supervised the proceedings …
They prepared the surface by milling off the old pavement during three successive nights, which was just about as noisy as you’d think:
The asphalt spreader sported bizarre LED lights:
Southbound paving began with a crisp new truck:
He would look the same rolling a highway straight through Hades:
The short truck cleared the overhead wire:
Then they chucked up a series of longer Flow Boy trailers:
Despite all the machinery, the job requires guys with rakes and shovels.
All the pictures come from the Pixel, hand-held with automagic exposure and HDR+.
My tax dollars were definitely awake and hard at work during those nights!
I recently bought a pair of pork belly packages, one labeled “Local” at an additional buck a pound. They were packaged skin side downward, so the USDA inspection stamps came as a surprise:
Turns out the digits give the “establishment number”, which you can look up online. These came from a processor in Pine Plains.
We presume they keep track of their pigs …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 