Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Despite its diminutive size, the white LED on the end of the Dell AC511 USB SoundBar lights up a dark bedroom surprisingly well:
Dell AC511 USB SoundBar – white power LED
That’s pretty much the only power-on indicator for the streaming players, so I didn’t want to just slap a strip of black tape over it. Instead, because white LEDs don’t emit much energy toward the red end of the spectrum, I made a cute little filter from a snippet of Primary Red gel filter material, surrounded by a black Gorilla Tape donut:
Red filter for Dell AC511 USB power LED
Two layers of Primary Red cut the light intensity to a dim glow that’s barely visible in daylight and completely inoffensive at night:
Red filter for Dell AC511 – installed
The blue activity LED on the SunFounder got the black electrical tape treatment, however, with just a sliver showing through to give a hint that it’s still active:
SunFounder RT5370 USB WiFi Adapter – masked LED
One of the other WiFi adapters has a pinhole over a red LED that’s barely visible. Another, seemingly identical one, lacks the red LED under the pinhole; when I asked the vendor about that, I was told it was removed “to save power.” Yeah, right. That was part of the motivation to try a different adapter next time around, with good results.
Of course, you must wrap an opaque black case around the Raspberry Pi to tamp down the red and green LEDs on the PCB. It’s possible to control them in software, with varying degrees of difficulty depending on which Pi you have, but …
Poughkeepsie lies under the southbound airliner routes to the NYC airports, so we often see airplanes high overhead. With a few inches of snow on the ground, a sunny day turns them brilliant white against a blue sky:
Air Canada Flight 706 – Embraer ERJ-190 – snow uplight
Feeding “Poughkeepsie NY” into FlightAware produces a map centered over us with (in this case) two candidates, one of which was Air Canada Flight 706, an Embraer ERJ-190. The obvious search produces pictures confirming the ID.
Air Canada’s current livery shows white paint on the bottom, but plain aluminum bodies shine brilliantly, too.
Back when I used to fly, light snow highlighted the networks of stone walls around all the old farms across the Northeast, from back when this area was NYC’s breadbasket. Those days are gone, but the stones remain where those farmers hauled them out of the fields.
Mary has been working on the Splendid Sampler project, with 56 completed blocks (*) stacked on her sewing table. We agreed that those blocks would make a nice background for our Christmas Letter, but the labor involved to photograph all the fabric squares and turn them into a page seemed daunting.
Turned out it wasn’t all that hard, at least after we eliminated all the photography and hand-editing.
The 6½x6½ inch blocks include a ¼ inch seam allowance on all sides and, Mary being fussy about such things, they’re all just about perfect. I taped a template around one block on the scanner glass:
Quilt block in scanner template
Then set XSane to scan at 150 dpi and save sequentially numbered files, position a square scan area over the middle of the template, and turn off all the image enhancements to preserve a flat color balance.
With “picture taking” reduced to laying each square face-down on the glass, closing the lid, and clicking Scan, the scanner’s throughput became the limiting factor. She scanned the blocks in the order of their release, while tinkering the auto-incremented file number across the (few) gaps in her collection, to produce 56 files with unimaginative auto-generated names along the lines of Block 19.jpg, thusly:
Block 19
The “square” images were 923×933 pixels, just slightly larger than the ideal finished size of 6 inch × 150 dpi = 900 pixel you’d expect, because we allowed a wee bit (call it 1/16 inch) on all sides to avoid cutting away the sharp points and, hey, I didn’t get the scan area exactly square.
With the files in hand, turning them into a single page background image requires a single Imagemagick incantation:
I figured the -geometry value to fill the 8 inch page width at 150 dpi, which is good enough for a subdued background image: 8 inch × 150 dpi / 7 images = 171 pixels. Imagemagick preserves the aspect ratio of the incoming images during the resize, so, because these images are slightly higher than they are wide, the height must be slightly larger to avoid thin white borders in the unused space. With all that figured, you get a 1197×1384 output image.
Bumping the contrast makes the colors pop, even if they’re not quite photo-realistic:
Quilt block montage – contrast
I’ll lighten that image to make the Christmas Letter text (in the foreground, atop the “quilt”) readable, which is all in the nature of fine tuning.
She has 40-odd blocks to go before she can piece them together and begin quilting, with a few other projects remaining to be finished:
Mary quilting
(*) She’s a bit behind the block schedule, having had a year of gardening, bicycling, and other quilting projects, plus whatever else happens around here. Not a problem, as we see it.
Those white eye rings help carry off the whole “insufferably cute” thing:
Red squirrel on patio – side
We often see them scampering through the pine treee out back, where they pause to strip the seeds off unopened pine cones and toss the empties on the driveway.
Taken through two layers of wavy 1955-era glass with the Sony DSC-H5.
Earlier versions of the comics graphic novel are on her blog, including several stories that didn’t make the final book cut.
Highly recommended; if you don’t have wet eyes occasionally, you’re entirely too hard-hearted.
You should read Ada’s Analytical Engine Programming Guide; that’s not her title, but that’s what she wrote. If you’ve ever done any assembly language programming, you’ll feel right at home.
Also, get historical documents, commentary, and Analytical Engine emulators (!) at Fourmilab.
Makes me wish I lived in that Pocket Universe, it does:
I rolled the bike around the corner of the garage, saw something move, and spotted an exceedingly agitated Ring-necked Pheasant atop the shredded leaf compost:
Pheasant in compost bin
He ran back and forth on the pile inside the cage, apparently having forgotten he had wings, while I fumbled with the camera. Just after I took the picture, he managed a short-field takeoff and flew away through the trees away from me.
A pair of female pheasants then emerged from the forsythia behind the pile at a dead run, made a hard turn to their left, and ran off in the general direction the male had flown. One of the pair seemed smaller and may have been a chick this year, but it’s hard to say.
We haven’t seen any pheasants in the yard before and hope they return …
Taken with the Canon SX-230HS through a layer of deer netting, alas.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 