There’s nothing like a little unexpected video overlay action to spice up a high-production-value image:
Spotted overhead at the RIT Commencement, about which more later…
Category: Oddities
Who’d’a thunk it?
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Video Overlays
RIT Commencement – video status display -
Chipmunk Gibbage
Mary found the north end of a southbound chipmunk just outside the garden gate, at the foot of the utility pole that often serves as a hawk perch:
Chipmunk tail tip Shortly thereafter, she found piles of gibbage atop the retaining wall by the basement door:
Raptor vs. Rodent gibbage It looks too loose for an owl pellet, but hawks also blurp up the indigestible bits. We have definitely have a pair of Cooper’s Hawks nesting in the area again; most likely, this is what’s left of the south end of that chipmunk.
The next morning, we had a feeding frenzy out there:
Raptor vs. Rodent gibbage – feeding frenzy I’m not sure if the snail over on the right is a participant or a bystander. It’s certainly outclassed by the slugs, which are basically soft-shell snails.
As dBm points out, nothing goes to waste in Nature:
Raptor vs. Rodent gibbage – cleanup squad After the crowd left and the remains dried out a bit, one chunk had a tuft of brown-tipped fur with gray roots that definitely looks like it came from a chipmunk.
Good work, hawks: go, go, go!
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Groundhog on High Alert
Looks like I’m getting the stinkeye:
Groundhog being suspicious The extensive garden armor remains effective, although we know groundhogs can run straight up a chain-link fence when given sufficient motivation. They generally give up after encountering the galvanized chickenwire around the buried concrete blocks; the garden is just to the left of the picture.
The front-yard groundhog suffered a fatal automobile accident shortly after it finished excavating its burrow against the front foundation. This critter may have moved into the abandoned summer home near the garage at the back of the house.
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Monthly Image: Transit of Mercury
The 2016 Transit of Mercury, as seen from Red Oaks Mill:
Mercury transit – 2016-05-09 Hint: Mercury is (almost certainly) the tiny speck below and left of the crosshair.
The larger speck is (almost certainly) Sunspot 12529, one of the few in this part of a historically weak Solar Cycle. Its shape would be obvious though a real telescope.
If you know what you’re doing, you can measure the size of the sun and scale the entire solar system from observations like that. Takes more science than I’ll ever accomplish, that’s for sure!
I realized the show was on just before Greatest Transit (roughly what you see above), so I duct-taped a 1 inch spotter / finder scope to a camera tripod, taped a sun shield on the scope, bent some card stock for a screen, then assembled everything on the patio:
Mercury transit – 2016-05-09 – spotting scope setup Astronomy mostly happens at night; this was an unexpected delight!
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Makerspace Starter Kit: Shipped!
So I spent the last month (*) extracting the tools, parts, and stock I use on a regular basis, filling 20-ish boxes with stuff I wanted to keep:
Basement shop – right – before After I moved all those boxes out of the way, three very industrious guys (and two teens who gradually got into the spirit of the thing) from MakerSmiths devoted all of a Saturday and a bit of Sunday morning converting an entire basement like that into this:
Basement Shop – right The stuff filled about 3/4 of the floor space in a pair of 26 foot box trucks:
Each truck had a snug 10,000 pound load limit and the stuff didn’t stack well:
The strap under the pile of metal, plus some plywood stiffeners, prevented it from running amok during transit. As long as they didn’t flip the truck, everything seemed well packed and cross-braced.
Only a few minor injuries; all’s well that ends well.
Alas, most of the spatial memory that let me find a tool or a part is now wrong; it’ll take a while to re-learn the new locations.
(*) Samuel Johnson: “… when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
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Road Conditions: 2816 Rt 376 Northbound Sinkhole Patched
By my count, four NYSDOT repair crews, one sent specifically to repair this sinkhole, managed to not patch it during the last nine months:
Rt 376 2016-04-20 – Northbound milepost 1110 – sinkhole Good news comes to those who wait:
Rt 376 2016-04-21 – Northbound milepost 1110 – sinkhole It didn’t involve waiting: by random chance, a fifth NYSDOT road repair crew happened to be in that area when Mary rode by. She stopped directly atop the sinkhole and screamed at the flagger until he came over. She explained the problem and, wonder of wonders, this time they put asphalt in the right spot.
The patch looks hand-tamped and will pop out after a while, but it’ll be great while it lasts.
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Brother PT-1090 Tape Cartridge Innards
Mad Phil gave me his Brother PT-1090 labeler, which I’ve been using rather often of late. The white tape cartridge (the TZ flavor) ran out, giving me the opportunity to pry it apart:
Brother P-Touch TZ tape cartridge – disassembled Surprisingly, a few small pins molded into the cover, plus a few obvious latches, hold it together without a trace of glue or thermal welding.
A detail of the little factory that assembles the label from several parts:
Brother P-Touch TZ tape cartridge – detail Colored paper tape unwinds from the lower right and the top plastic layer from the lower left. Tape with thermal dye unspools from the upper left, the printhead (in the printer) heat-transfers pixels to the plastic tape in the opening right of center along the top, and the roller at the top right joins the just-printed plastic layer to the slightly sticky front surface of the paper tape. The used imaging tape respools in the gray cylinder near the middle.
For those concerned with privacy, that gray spool of used imaging tape contains everything you’ve printed in order:
Brother P-Touch TZ tape cartridge – imaging tape I thought the thermal dye was part of the transparent tape cover layer, but in retrospect that doesn’t make sense: the printed tape would turn black in hot environments like, say, your car. So the printer must transfer the dye from a separate tape.
The knockoff “ESD” tape cartridges from Amazon seem to have a slightly different tape path, probably to work around Brother’s patents. I’ll pry one of those apart in due course.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 