Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
For obscure reasons, the Silly Season brought Sanders, Trump, and Clinton fille to the City of Poughkeepsie within the span of eight days. We know enough to stay far away from such events, but one of the contestants came to us!
A siren heralded flashing lights off to the left, coming up the hill from the bridge over the Mighty Wappingers Creek:
Candidate Motorcade – 0463
The police car jammed to a stop in the middle of the Red Oaks Mill intersection, directly in front of the cars (and bikes) that had just begun moving after the light turned green:
Candidate Motorcade – 0700
During the next minute, the officer managed to clear most of the traffic from the left-turn storage lanes perpendicular to us, after which two motorcycle officers led the procession:
Candidate Motorcade – 5015
Two ordinary SUVs with flashing light bars followed:
Candidate Motorcade – 5211
Two stretched SUVs with side window and marker flashers:
Candidate Motorcade – 5403
One blatantly inconspicuous black sedan running dark:
Candidate Motorcade – 5467
Two black patrol cars and a white patrol car, all with flashing lights:
Candidate Motorcade – 5792
The officer jumped into his car and rejoined the procession at the end:
Candidate Motorcade – 5992
According to my back-of-the-envelope, the motorcade moved through the intersection at a steady 20 mph.
Given where all the folks who merit such an escort were supposed to be at the time, I don’t know why they brought The Personage through the Red Oaks Mill intersection in that direction; the City of Poughkeepsie is to our rear, due north of Red Oaks Mill. Perhaps they’re following a randomly chosen route to confuse the unprepared, even though it’s longer and requires more traffic control?
Rumors from a Reliable Source indicate that not all trains travel on steel rails.
I suppose you eventually get used to having a couple of quiet people standing in every room with you.
One benefit of the inevitable news coverage: a few more people now know how to pronounce “Poughkeepsie”.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 