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?

Bicycle GPS Track: Diggin’ Deep and Flyin’ High!
At first glance, I thought Mary had taken a tour of The Great Swamp south of the Vassar Farm gardens:

APRS Bicycle Tracking – Flying High

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.
2015-05-17
Splitting Banana Skins

Over the last year or two, we’ve had several bunches of bananas that split their own skin:

Banana with split 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.

2015-05-16
No Affordance for Pulling

Well, I didn’t expect this:

Unsleeved USB memory

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.

2015-05-09
Bird Box Cleanout

The effort those little birds put into their nests never ceases to amaze me:

Bird box cleanout – old nests

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.

2015-05-03
Kosher Coke Season

Quite by accident, I spotted a considerable number of yellow-cap standard Coca-Cola bottles during a recent grocery ride:

Yellow Cola Cola cap – Kosher for Passover

As before, the main ingredient after fizzy water is good old sucrose, which is why it merits a yellow cap:

Yellow Coca Cola cap – Kosher ingredients

Four bottles spread out over the next few months will be about all I can stand…

2015-04-26
It’s Always Time for a Virus Scan!

Caught this one moments before the presentation started:

Slimcleaner – pop-up presentation overlay

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.

2015-04-25
Engineering Book Costs

Clearing off the shelves produced a book I haven’t opened in a loooong time:

Vector Mechanics for Engineers – cover

The price sticker shows that textbooks have always been expensive:

Vector Mechanics for Engineers – price tag

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.”

2015-04-19