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.

Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

  • Pill Desiccant

    Pill Desiccant

    One of my Old Guy medicines has an elaborate desiccant container:

    Pill desiccant container
    Pill desiccant container

    Being that type of Old Guy, I weighed the container when I emptied the bottle, then left it sit in the kitchen cabinet with the scale for a week as the weight slowly increased.

    It started at 2.38 g and stabilized at 2.56 g, so it absorbed 0.18 g of water from the air after it got my attention.

    Peeling the label revealed an obvious joint:

    Pill desiccant - contents
    Pill desiccant – contents

    Looks like HO-scale coal in there!

    The desiccant weighs all of 1.20 g, so it absorbed something more than 10% of its weight. That’s less than I found with silica gel, but I don’t know the starting weight or how much moisture it already absorbed.

    A newly opened pill bottle disgorged a container weighing 2.42 g. The initial weight obviously depends on many variables, none of which would be tightly controlled.

  • As If Your Life Depended On It

    As If Your Life Depended On It

    Spotted on a scissors lift outside a grocery store being remodeled:

    Skyjack scissors lift warning labels
    Skyjack scissors lift warning labels

    The SkyJack instruction manual explains the symbols, although some of the Quick Start instructions remain baffling.

    We had great fun making up captions to suit the pictures …

  • Bathroom Faucets: User Interface FAIL

    Bathroom Faucets: User Interface FAIL

    The sink faucet in our motel room worked the way you’d expect:

    Grohe sink faucet
    Grohe sink faucet

    It pivots left-right to adjust the temperature and lifts to control the flow, which is Off when the handle is parallel to the sink countertop.

    Evidently, everybody assumes that’s the way the identical faucet handle works in the shower, despite the helpful label:

    Grohe shower faucet
    Grohe shower faucet

    Did you notice the minuscule red dot below-and-left of the handle or the corresponding blue dot just to its right? Absent the label, those provide all the hints you’ll get as to how the handle operates.

    The faucet body & plumbing were loose in the wall, as though many previous people had given it a firm yank to get water out of it.

    I’m 3.5 diopters nearsighted and can’t see those little dots. Mary is 2 diopters farsighted and can’t see the label or the dots.

    What did they think would happen with different valves having identical affordance?

  • Laser-cut Paper Pad Hooks

    Laser-cut Paper Pad Hooks

    Mostly because I could:

    Laser-cut MDF paper hooks
    Laser-cut MDF paper hooks

    Another pair of hooks support the far end of the sketch paper pad, all hanging on the end of the shelves holding laser materials & tooling.

    MDF isn’t particularly well-suited as a hook for anything weighing more than a dozen sheets of paper, but that pad is now out of the way where it won’t get curled.

    The shape comes from a bunch of rectangles welded together in LightBurn, with the obvious corners rounded off for stylin’.

  • Breaking Up Is Hard To Watch

    Breaking Up Is Hard To Watch

    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 …

  • Rail Trail Brush Clearing

    Rail Trail Brush Clearing

    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:

    Brush clearing B - 2024-07-14
    Brush clearing B – 2024-07-14

    They’re not all Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), but Ailanthus altissima grows like a weed around here and requires heavy cutback:

    Brush clearing C - 2024-07-14
    Brush clearing C – 2024-07-14

    It’s not just small branches:

    Brush clearing A - 2024-07-14
    Brush clearing A – 2024-07-14

    Apparently, there was no law against that …

    Brush clearing E - 2024-07-14
    Brush clearing E – 2024-07-14

    A recent storm dropped many trees across the trail and the maintenance folks deploy bigger saws than I can carry:

    Brush clearing D - 2024-07-14
    Brush clearing D – 2024-07-14

    Three months after we were told they had ordered replacement tiles, I’m beginning to think I must buy some on Amazon and do this job myself, too:

    Overocker ADA - continued disintegration - 2024-07-21
    Overocker ADA – continued disintegration – 2024-07-21

    Maybe it’ll get done when the weather cools …

  • There’s No UnDo Key For Paint

    There’s No UnDo Key For Paint

    Spotted in a parking lot:

    Misnumbered parking spaces
    Misnumbered parking spaces

    At least they caught it before the end of the row.

    Verily, it is written that Computer Science has only two hard problems:

    • Cache invalidation
    • Naming things
    • Off-by-one errors

    I hate it when that happens on my projects …