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?
Sacrificing a scrap EMI shield from a junked PC as the electrolysis anode, I grabbed a tab with the battery charger clamp:
Turns out it didn’t survive the encounter:
That white blob extends around to the other side:
Yeah, it got hot enough to melt a blob from the 6 gallon plastic bucket before burning through.
I tossed that into the garage so I wouldn’t forget it aaaand here we are …
Both of us began sniffling and sneezing in early October, long after the outdoor flowers faded away, and finally remembered to check the Mother In Law’s Tongue:
It’s that time of the year again: we’re both wildly allergic to a houseplant with weird flowers. Even after cutting the stalk off and deporting it outdoors, we’re still sniffly.
The blossoms produce so much nectar that the droplets near the base of each flower eventually fall off, making a mess on the floor if the stalk tilts over far enough.
We kept it when we helped Mom move out of the Ancestral House, long ago, and it’s still going strong.
Saw this after fat-fingering my PIN at a drive-up ATM:
That’s off-putting, isn’t it?
A hawk, perhaps an immature Red-Tailed, landed on a branch outside the kitchen window while we were eating lunch.
After a minute or so, a squirrel ran up the maple and began taunting (?) the hawk:
The hawk obviously had no clue what’s going on inside that critter’s little brain:
The squirrel alternated between inching out on the branch, closer each time, and dashing back to the tree trunk, for maybe ten minutes. It eventually reached the rightmost patch of lichen, a foot from the hawk, without suffering any damage, after which it ran down the tree and away. We have no explanation.
Perhaps this is the same squirrel as before? All we know: (over)confidence goeth before gibbage.
Taken with the DSC-H5 near the end of the adventure; it took me a while to deploy the camera. The first picture looks diagonally upward from the kitchen, through three layers of 1950-era glass. The second comes from the back door, zoomed about 10x, with no tele-adapter. Obviously, good color correction didn’t happen here…
This clearly demonstrates that the world is even more weird than I imagined (clicky for more dots):
I don’t measure that many big cylinders that I can’t figure out their diameter by hand.
The prices suggest folks who need Pi Tapes need them bad.
I left a time-release melatonin pill in water for a day:
Perhaps an acidic environment would be more to its taste?
Here’s another pill after a day in vinegar:
In both cases, poking the somewhat dissolved pill separated it into gummy chunks, so it’s probably working as designed. I suppose the usual stomach churning would help.
This being a quack nostrum, there’s no way to tell what’s inside or how much you’re getting, but I didn’t expect to get way more B6 than you’d expect from the large print on the label. Lesson: always read the fine print, no matter how well it’s concealed.
0/10 – would not buy again.
As before, the results do not differ significantly from placebo, so this is a triumph of hope over experience.
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.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 