Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
These might be aftermarket hood stripes on a not-very-old Mini (or Mini Hatch):
Must be heartbreaking to watch that happen through the windshield.
On the other paw, given the Mini’s reliability record, they might be OEM stripes:
In 2015, Consumer Reports awarded the 2006–2012 Mini Cooper S the title ‘Worst Used Car’, saying that while it was “cute and delightfully entertaining”, the repair frequency was “heartbreaking” because the magazine’s surveyed owners reported problems in the areas of “engine major, engine minor, engine cooling, fuel system, body integrity, and body hardware have issues at an alarming rate”.
One hopes that puppy had fewer internal problems …
Having an aversion to getting slapped in the face by Blackthorn branches overhanging the Dutchess Rail Trail, I generally give up waiting for anybody else to do the job:
Starting from an SVG file set up for 3 mm material, apply the usual optimizations & tweaks to get a usable LightBurn file, then go nuts:
Spider Collection
The big one is two cross-laid layers of corrugated cardboard using up the better part of three Home Depot Large moving boxes:
Spider – LightBurn layout – 2x cardboard
That little bitty grid is the 700×500 mm laser cutter platform, so I just slap a sheet of cardboard in place, update the workspace from the camera, select the next layout, drag it over the cardboard, and Fire The Laser.
The smaller cardboard spider over on the left is built with a single cardboard layer and succumbed to the square-cube law: the legs are entirely too bendy for the weight of the body. Although it’s not obvious from the pictures, both cardboard spiders have a keel plate I added under the body to support most of their weight.
The brightly colored little spiders got a coat of rattlecan paint without any underlying primer and definitely look like that happened:
Spider Collection – detail 2
The edge-lit fluorescent green spider is sized around 2.9 mm material, the clear spider uses 2.3 mm acrylic, and the chipboard one in the background is at 1.8 mm:
Spider Collection – detail 1
The eyes are fluorescent red or green acrylic with concentric circles engraved to catch the light. They’re more effective than I expected, although they won’t look like much after dark.
We now live in a neighborhood with youngsters and Halloween this year will be so much fun …
The WordPress AI image generator caught the general idea of “cardboard spiders”:
The most recent Tide HE Laundry Detergent bottles seemed smaller than the one we were about to empty and, indeed, they were:
Tide HE shrinkflation – bottle labels
Call it 9% smaller, based on the volume in liters. I suspect the price was also 9% higher, but that would require more digging in the file cabinet than seems justified.
Note that both bottles claim “64 loads”, each with an asterisk (well, a lozenge ◊ symbol) explained on the label:
Tide HE shrinkflation – new load bars
That’s the new chart. The old chart was more explanatory:
Tide HE shrinkflation – old load bars
Note the “just below Bar 1 on cap” weasel wording. The term “meniscus” enters the chat, although laundry detergent doesn’t have much in the way of surface tension.
One might reasonably assume the bars on the new cap have gotten shorter, so that the volume of detergent used for each load would be smaller.
One would be wrong:
Tide HE shrinkflation – cap capacity marks
The blue cap on the right is one we’ve been using for the last few years, because I put black tape at the level of the first bar to match our “Medium” loads. I cannot imagine how much dirt would require filling the cap to Bar 5.
The clear cap on the left is the new cap. I filled the blue tap to the top of Bar 5 with water and poured it into the clear cap, where it comes about 3/4 of the way to the top of the new Bar 5. Evidently, the amount of detergent required to get grubby clothes clean has increased by 33%.
The old cap holds just shy of 4 fluid ounces to the top of Bar 5:
Tide HE shrinkflation – old cap bar 5 capacity
The new cap holds 5.5 fluid ounces to the top of its Bar 5:
Tide HE shrinkflation – new cap bar 5 capacity
If you have really crusty clothing, you’re now using 36% more detergent per load.
The obvious arithmetic shows the old bottle holds 23 “Bar 5” loads and the new bottle holds 15.
To the limit of my measuring ability, both caps hold 1.3 fluid ounces to the top their respective Bar 1 levels. I cannot vouch for the “just below” level, but I suspect more accurate measurements would show the new caps have slightly lower volume at that level, juuust enough to make the “64 loads” weasel wording come out right.
Earlier this year, a pair of House Finches chose the a pine cone wreath hanging outside our front door for their nest.
One day a Starling attacked:
Starling Attack – IM_00052
Starling Attack – IM_00053
Starling Attack – IM_00054
There’s a Youtube video of the action following those pictures:
Ms. Finch suffered a peck to the head raising a few feathers into a small topknot, but seemed otherwise undamaged. The eggs survived unscathed and a month later they fledged a quartet of new finches:
House Finch chicks – pre-fledging – 2024-05-18
Yes, they’re surrounded by a ring of bird crap: finch chicks can aim and fire overboard, but they don’t have much range.
The same finch pair abandoned their second nest after a Brown-headed Cowbird added an egg and punctured both Finch eggs:
House Finch nest – Cowbird egg vs punctures
Their third attempt failed after four eggs when a Cowbird added a fifth:
House Finch nest – Cowbird egg with 4 finch eggs
A few days after that picture, something tore that nest apart and destroyed all the eggs:
House Finch nest – destruction with feathers
The scattered feathers suggest a major battle with severe injuries.
Three nesting attempts produced only four fledglings: a bad year for those two finches.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 