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?
These look to be Maxell LR44 cells in OEM retail packaging, exactly as advertised, but … one cell seems odd:
A closer look:
The production values seem high enough to suggest that they’re Genuine Maxell products, hologram packaging and all, but you’d expect the Maxell end-of-line QC should pick out a flipped cell.
If one were the wondering sort, though, one might wonder why the Maxell USA website search function doesn’t return any mention of LR44 cells…
The library kiosk that handles paying your overdue book fines:
Now, you’d need to know a few things about what’s going on inside, but I’d say they’re pretty much rolling out the welcome mat for you to find those things out…
Wanna bet it’s running Windows, just like all the electronic voting machines?
We celebrate the start of Spring by cleaning the previous season’s nest(s) from our bird boxes, so this “improved” design caught our eye on a walk around the neighborhood:
Birds being the way they are, the most recent occupants surely piled more twigs & grass atop their foundation to make the level come out right. An industrious mouse might find a convenient route inside.
Well, a picture of plastic on my M2’s platform, anyhow:
I swiped that image from Digital Machinist‘s writeup of the Winter 2015 issue. They run 3D printing articles that are vastly more technical and detail-oriented than the usual glowing PR fluff pieces found elsewhere; I’ve been writing about G-Code and 3D printing for quite a few years now.
They could have used an action shot taken earlier in that sequence, but it doesn’t fit the cover’s vertical layout:
You’ll not hear me kvetching!
Two covers in a month: must be something in the water…
A cold snap in early January caught plenty of humidity inside the house and, in fact, the attic temperature dropped so abruptly that the nails protruding through the roof iced over:
You’d think they were coated with plastic:
The incandescent bulb lighting the attic highlights the crystal planes:
As nearly as I can tell, the ice sublimes or melts-and-evaporates, because the plywood floor under the nails doesn’t have the drip marks you’d expect.
Just like all those EULAs we click through without reading, nobody pays any attention to the Customs declarations on packages:
The pick-and-place strip across the top contains ten U.FL connectors, a few of which might make their way onto the Ham It Up board. They cost a grand total of $2.09 (not the $12.00 shown on the label) delivered halfway around the planet in a bit over two weeks.
I confess: I just couldn’t pass up some new fashion accessories…
Having turned on my old Kindle Fire’s “security warnings” just to see what happens, I’m confronted by pop-ups like this on a regular basis:
People who know what they’re talking about tell me there’s no way for ordinary civilians, such as I, to evaluate the validity of the “credentials” described by that pop-up. In this case, the credential apparently comes from DigiCert, which ought to be trust-able, and was issued to cmcore.com, an actual IBM subsidiary that apparently does Web analytics.
It works fine through my desktop browsers. The Kindle, however, can’t even find digicert.com, so the problem must be an Amazon thing.
The only response that makes sense is to continue loading: gizmodo.com might have cat pictures!
I should just turn off the warnings and be done with it…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 