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?
Spotted this at the local credit union branch:
There’s no obvious mechanical damage at the center of the orange blotch, so it must be something internal to the LCD panel going bad. The fading along the left edge might be part of the same QC glitch.
Confidence-inspiring, this is not, even though it has nothing to do with the credit union itself…
At first glance, I thought Mary had taken a tour of The Great Swamp south of the Vassar Farm gardens:
Having helped put the fence up, I’m absolutely certain nothing growing in the garden could get her to 4373 feet, much less boost the bike that high.
Before that, it seems she did some high-speed tunneling:
2015-05-10 18:17:31 EDT: KF4NGN-9>T1TP4X,WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1,qAR,KB2ZE-4:`eP}nAIb/"/k} type: location format: mice srccallsign: KF4NGN-9 dstcallsign: T1TP4X latitude: 41.67466666666667 ° longitude: -73.88283333333334 ° course: 345 ° speed: 42.596 km/h altitude: -371 m symboltable: / symbolcode: b mbits: 101 posresolution: 18.52 m posambiguity: 0
The bike’s altitude began falling while she was on the way to the garden, from a reasonable 66 meters on the entrance road, bottoming out at -371 m as she hit 42.6 km/h (!), rising to 1341 meters with the bike leaning against a fence post, and returning to 53 meters as she started riding home.
Obviously, you shouldn’t trust consumer-grade GPS tracks without verification: it can get perfectly bogus numbers from fixes with poor satellite geometry. Altitude values tend to be only close, at best, even when you’re not too fussy about accuracy.
We experienced small-scale jitter in New Jersey and a friend carrying a commercial satellite link experienced similar randomization. Trust, but verify.
Over the last year or two, we’ve had several bunches of bananas that split their own skin:
Apart from the slightly dried section directly under the split, the banana is perfectly edible.
Not sure what it means, other than that we‘re probably not causing it. We don’t recall it happening in the Good Old Days.
Cavendish bananas will probably vanish in a few decades, so enjoy ’em while ya got ’em.
Well, I didn’t expect this:
Turns out the only thing holding that case in place was a blob of hot-melt glue on the bottom of the PCB. Hot-melt glue doesn’t bond well to anodized aluminum, the RPi had been sitting outside on a winter day taking time-lapse bird feeder pictures, and the USB connector seemed a bit more snug than usual.
So I slobbered more hot-melt glue on the end of the PCB, jammed the case back in place, and that was that.
The PCB has two snap lines to accommodate shorter cases, with corresponding activity LED locations; it seems I got the long-case version.
The effort those little birds put into their nests never ceases to amaze me:
Last year it was the same story. Of course, if we didn’t clean out the boxes, the birds would do it on their own, so perhaps we help them get started earlier.
Quite by accident, I spotted a considerable number of yellow-cap standard Coca-Cola bottles during a recent grocery ride:
As before, the main ingredient after fizzy water is good old sucrose, which is why it merits a yellow cap:
Four bottles spread out over the next few months will be about all I can stand…
Caught this one moments before the presentation started:
The “1-Click Scan” (doesn’t Amazon have a patent / trademark on 1-Click?) will occupy a large pop-up screen overlay featuring a host of dashboard-style data that nobody really cares about, triggered by a smaller modal dialog box that’s impossible to work around.
Yes, that appeared on the screen projector, too. I don’t know if “Presentation Mode” should inhibit these things, but, somehow, I doubt it.
Pardon the blurred focus… the laptop sat halfway across the room.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 