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?
We were sitting in the Credit Union and, as usual, I scouted out the WiFi situation:
Huh. Not what you’d expect to find in a bank lobby.
In case you haven’t seen what can happen with a thermostat, you can pwn a Nest.
Searching with the obvious keywords should provide plenty of reasons why the Internet of Things isn’t ready for prime time, not that that will slow it down in the least.
Apart from the Bakelite bases on octal tubes, I figured there should be no problem shining a light up through the glass envelope. Come to find out that some of the tubes with Miniature 7 bases have an electrostatic shield (?) across the bottom that pretty well blocks the light.
This 6BJ6 has a neatly trimmed octagon:
The shield plate, if that’s what it is, doesn’t have a standardized shape. This 6CB6 sports a simple square:
The Box o’ Hollow State Electronics contains one 6BE6 tube (a heptode with five grids connected to four pins) without a shield:
Yeah, those pins are rather grotendous.
And another 6BE6 with a semitransparent smudge not connected to anything else; it would look accidental if it weren’t inside the tube:
All the shielded tubes are pentodes, for whatever difference that makes.
These tubes may be a bit too small compared to the hard drive platters; Novals will work just fine for my simple purposes.
There’s obviously something going on inside the long-abandoned nesting box:
You’ve seen this happen to people, too:
How many sparrows can fit on the roof of a bird box?
There’s always room for one more:
Perhaps they were having a family reunion?
Taken with the Canon SX230-HS from the patio, zoomed all the way, and ruthlessly cropped.
I caught this just before it made a mess:
That container lives in the garage, where the air temperature pretty much tracks the weather.
When the air in the main compartment heats up, it pushes fluid up into the dispensing compartment. Although both caps were screwed on finger-tight, apparently the smaller cap leaks just enough that the pumped fluid can push the air out through the not-so-good seal.
Another few weeks and it’d be sitting in a puddle!
We spotted this upgrade on a recent trip to a Powerhouse Theater production:
Compared with the older version, I’d say it’s a great improvement:
Who says things never get better?
This truck’s home base seems to be south of Maloney on Rt 376 and it occasionally passes me on the road:
My eye-blink reaction that it was a junker turns out to be completely wrong, as it sports a really great paint job (vinyl wrap?):
The junker aspect may not be quite what they expected…
I’m not sure that’s skeuomorphic, but I don’t know the proper term.
We are not dog people, so being awakened at 12:45 one morning by a large dog barking directly under the bedroom windows wasn’t expected. After a bit of flailing around, I discovered the dog parked under the windows on the other end of the bedroom:
That’s entirely enough dog that I was unwilling to venture outside and attempt to affix it to, say, the patio railing, where it could await the town’s animal control officer in the morning:
It’s not a stray, because it wears two collars: one with leash D-rings and the other carrying a black electronics box that could be anything from a GPS tracker to a shock box that’s supposed to keep it inside one of those electronic fences. If the latter, a battery change seems past due.
Being a dog, it spent the next two hours in power-save mode on the patio, intermittently moaning / growling / barking at every state change in the back yard: scurrying rodents, falling leaves, far-distant sirens, neighborhood dogs, you name it. We would be dog people to want that level of launch-on-warning, but we’re not.
If parvovirus were available through Amazon Prime, I’d be on it like static cling. By the kilogram on Alibaba, perhaps?
Grainy photos taken in Nightshot IR mode with the DSC-F717, which works well enough after I (remember to) jiggle the Memory Stick to re-seat the ribbon cable connections.
Hat tip to Sherlock in Silver Blaze.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 