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?
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.
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:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 