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?
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.
Clearing off the shelves produced a book I haven’t opened in a loooong time:
The price sticker shows that textbooks have always been expensive:
The first line looks like a date and, indeed, I took “Principles of Mechanics” in Spring 1974, so that book would cost $88.08 in 2015 dollars, based on the official CPI calculator.
It’s harder to figure college costs, but the old rule of thumb says it’s a factor of two higher than the CPI. A bit of successive approximation with a compound interest calculator suggests an annual inflation of 3.9% and 7.8% says the book would cost $403 today.
Which, it turns out, isn’t all that much higher than what our Larval Engineer has been paying for the fatter textbooks in her engineering courses.
Even using today’s worthless dollars, that’s still a chunk o’ change…
Memo to Self: As the bumper sticker puts it, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
OK, I’ll admit we weren’t on our bikes:
The next week, however, we were, and we leaned our bikes against the wall, because:
Thirteen months ago, that round table had self-enclosed:
We don’t have a good picture of the square table, but it had that same crater open to the central hole.
Other pictures show the topmost 14+ inches from that storm consisted of lovely, fluffy snow that cleared well, although I’d have settled for a bit less.
It’s winter in the Northeast US. Snow happens on a regular basis. I enjoy the shapes, not the shoveling…
They only come out at night:
Two raccoons took turns at the feeder, but I only caught one in the act:
Apparently they enter torpor, rather than hibernate, which means they’re getting hungry right about now.
Taken through two panes of 1955 glass with the Sony DSC-H5, using an LED flashlight for focus assist. Both culprits oozed off the far end of the patio when I opened the door…
A few more weekly snowstorms refreshed the patio tables mounds:
The spire under the square table nearly reached the cross brace:
That spire comes from snow falling straight down through the table, with a bit collecting on the struts:
Holding the camera over the table shows a thin glass rim around the edge of the hole:
I wouldn’t believe it, either, if I hadn’t seen it!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 