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.

Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

  • LED Filaments: Whoops

    Five bucks delivered three sets of five warm-white LED filaments from halfway around the planet:

    LED Filaments - 3x5 sets
    LED Filaments – 3×5 sets

    Unfortunately, the “Top Rated Plus” eBay seller just popped three ziplock baggies into an unpadded envelope and tossed it in the mail:

    Unpadded LED Filament Envelope
    Unpadded LED Filament Envelope

    Which had pretty much the result you’d expect on the glass substrates within:

    Broken LED Filament 1
    Broken LED Filament 1

    Turns out every single filament had at least one break:

    Broken LED Filament 3
    Broken LED Filament 3

    Indeed, some seemed just as flexy as the silicone cylinder surrounding the pulverized substrate.

    I reported this to the seller, with photographs, and got a classic response:

    can you use?

    No, I cannot imagine a use for broken LED filaments.

    The seller proposed shipping replacements that would might arrive just after the eBay feedback window closed. I proposed refunding the five bucks. The seller ignored that and sent the replacements in an untracked package “as it is an economical shipping, we have to reduce our loss, so is it ok?”.

    No, it’s not, but he / she / it didn’t actually intend that as a question.

    Were the filaments intact, they’d pass 15 mA with 50 to 60 V applied in one direction or the other, for 1 W average dissipation. That’s probably too high for prolonged use in air (spendy bulbs with similar LEDs have argon / krypton fill for better heat transfer), but I can surely throttle them back a bit.

    Perhaps the replacements will arrive before the feedback window closes?

    I did order another batch from a different seller that might arrive intact before then. We shall see…

  • IBM 5100 APL: Nested Emulators

    A discussion about Raspberry Pi performance prompted this:

    IBM 5110 Emulator - Javascript on Raspberry Pi
    IBM 5110 Emulator – Javascript on Raspberry Pi

    From the inside out:

    Starting the show takes 17 seconds from clicking the Restart button (second from right, top row) to APL’s Clear WS prompt. I have no idea how that compares with a Genuine IBM 5100.

    I distinctly remember writing APL programs, but that’s about as far as my memory will take me. [sigh]

  • Rabbit Head

    Although we don’t think of this as a particularly tough neighborhood, this is the second severed head we’ve encountered in the last few years during our routine walks:

    Rabbit Head
    Rabbit Head

    We doubt a predator would do such a tidy job of parting the head from the body, then discarding it. The eyes surely went to a bird, though…

    It was across the Mighty Wappinger Creek, near the far end of Romca Rd. The Red Oaks Mill Civic Association is long gone and their building burned to the ground a few decades ago, but their name lives on.

  • Airliner Over Snow

    Poughkeepsie lies under the southbound airliner routes to the NYC airports, so we often see airplanes high overhead. With a few inches of snow on the ground, a sunny day turns them brilliant white against a blue sky:

    Air Canada Flight 706 - Embraer ERJ-190 - snow uplight
    Air Canada Flight 706 – Embraer ERJ-190 – snow uplight

    Feeding “Poughkeepsie NY” into FlightAware produces a map centered over us with (in this case) two candidates, one of which was Air Canada Flight 706, an Embraer ERJ-190. The obvious search produces pictures confirming the ID.

    Air Canada’s current livery shows white paint on the bottom, but plain aluminum bodies shine brilliantly, too.

    Back when I used to fly, light snow highlighted the networks of stone walls around all the old farms across the Northeast, from back when this area was NYC’s breadbasket. Those days are gone, but the stones remain where those farmers hauled them out of the fields.

     

  • Vista Point of Sale Terminal Boot Screen

    Spotted this behind the Customer Service desk at the local movie theater (or whatever you call ’em these days):

    Vista POS boot screen
    Vista POS boot screen

    I suppose those are the three things you do a lot of…

    The next time we passed by, the screen displayed a more-or-less standard screensaver.

  • The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

    We’re reading Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage as our evening story, so I gave a Lightning talk at the MHV LUG meeting last week:

    MHVLUG – Lovelace and Babbage – Book Report

    Earlier versions of the comics graphic novel are on her blog, including several stories that didn’t make the final book cut.

    Highly recommended; if you don’t have wet eyes occasionally, you’re entirely too hard-hearted.

    You should read Ada’s Analytical Engine Programming Guide; that’s not her title, but that’s what she wrote. If you’ve ever done any assembly language programming, you’ll feel right at home.

    Also, get historical documents, commentary, and Analytical Engine emulators (!) at Fourmilab.

    Makes me wish I lived in that Pocket Universe, it does:

    econ3_005 - Brunel
    econ3_005 – Brunel

    That picture is ©www.sydneypadua.com, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. There exist T-shirts & mugs.

  • Pheasant Sighting

    I rolled the bike around the corner of the garage, saw something move, and spotted an exceedingly agitated Ring-necked Pheasant atop the shredded leaf compost:

    Pheasant in compost bin
    Pheasant in compost bin

    He ran back and forth on the pile inside the cage, apparently having forgotten he had wings, while I fumbled with the camera. Just after I took the picture, he managed a short-field takeoff and flew away through the trees away from me.

    A pair of female pheasants then emerged from the forsythia behind the pile at a dead run, made a hard turn to their left, and ran off in the general direction the male had flown. One of the pair seemed smaller and may have been a chick this year, but it’s hard to say.

    We haven’t seen any pheasants in the yard before and hope they return …

    Taken with the Canon SX-230HS through a layer of deer netting, alas.