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?
One of the motel’s TV channels offered this diversion:
Alas, no combination of keys on the overly complex remote fed themselves to tty1. That didn’t surprise me, but ya gotta try, y’know.
Contrary to what you might think, that’s a well-focused image. Apparently, someone, somewhere, aimed a crappy camera at a monitor and devoted one video input to the result.
I wonder what critical infrastructure runs a Linux distro that end-of-lifed in December 2009.
We’ll never know the rest of the story…
Returning from Rochester & Points North, I spotted something in the rearview mirror that could have been either a Yellow Submarine or a storage tank. As whatever it was got closer, the view got weirder:
Huh. Who’d’a thunk it?
A stiff crosswind pushed them all over the lane:
I hope they arrived at their destination with the shiny side up and the rubber side down.
Mary clicked the camera for these.
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…
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:
Shortly thereafter, she found piles of gibbage atop the retaining wall by the basement door:
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:
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:
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!
Looks like I’m getting the stinkeye:
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.
The 2016 Transit of Mercury, as seen from Red Oaks Mill:
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:
Astronomy mostly happens at night; this was an unexpected delight!
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:
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:
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.”
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 