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.
Taking & making images.
“Our” Cooper’s Hawks have long since flown off, although one occasionally swoops through the yard on an urgent mission. I took this picture on an early July morning, when they were still being companionable:
Taken with the DSC-H5 and 1.7x teleadapter, zoomed in all the way, and dot-for-dot cropped. The birds look fine and the image looks awful…
We were in the Arlington Square exit, waiting to cross Rt 44 into Adams:
If we both line up on the traffic signal sensor loop, it seems to detect us; Mary’s on the right side of the loop, I’m rolling along the left side. This seems to be an old-school dipole loop, not a quadrupole.
Despite the fact that the mall entrance lane is to our left, across that substantial median strip and exactly where you’d expect it, a driver turned left from Rt 44 into the mall exit:
He obviously intended to use the lane we were occupying, because it’s the right-hand lane from his direction (where we were obviously not supposed to be), but veered away at the last moment:
Which was a good thing for all parties concerned, including the car approaching us in the proper lane:
Elapsed time: five seconds.
The driver then turned right, head-on against cars exiting from the parking lot and parallel-broadside with a pickup entering in the proper lane, and somehow didn’t collide with anybody or anything.
From where we sat, there was absolutely nothing we could do but watch death roll toward us.
I didn’t notice this at the time:
The camera runs at 60 frame/s, so the entire show spans a bit more than half a second: zzzzzip!
I think it’s a member of the Yellow Jacket wasp family, noted for their in-your-face attitude and repeat-fire stinger. They’re highly capable flying machines, that’s for sure…
We were pulling out of the local “health food” store with fresh-ground nut butters in the packs, nearing the end of a 17 mile loop on a fine Sunday morning.
Having had the weaker of the two surviving STK batteries die 36 minutes into a ride, I tested them all:
The X axis shows W·h, rather than the usual A·h, because that seems more useful in a world of constant-power supplies.
The test current is now 1 A, rather than the previous 500 mA, to more closely match the camera’s actual load. The CBA tester doesn’t have a constant-power mode; I think that doesn’t make much practical difference.
The orange curve (STK D) is the failed battery, ending after 1.4 W·h. At an average 3.2-ish V, that’s 26 minutes, which is close enough to the actual run time, given the different current.
The red curve (STK C) is the sole STK battery of the original four from last November that actually worked.
The upper two curves come from the mostly unused Wasabi batteries (F and G), also from November. They have lost a bit of their capacity, but show the highest voltage out toward the end, so that’s good.
The black curve is the lightly used Sony OEM battery that came with the camera. Although it has about the same ultimate capacity as the other three “good” batteries, the voltage depression suggests it’ll trip out early.
The others are pretty much debris by now. I suppose they might be good for LED blinkies or some other low-voltage and low-current application, but …
So I’ll start using all four of the better batteries and see how the run times work out in actual use.
This truck’s home base seems to be south of Maloney on Rt 376 and it occasionally passes me on the road:
My eye-blink reaction that it was a junker turns out to be completely wrong, as it sports a really great paint job (vinyl wrap?):
The junker aspect may not be quite what they expected…
I’m not sure that’s skeuomorphic, but I don’t know the proper term.
I generally ride somewhat further into the travel lane than some folks would prefer, but I have good reason for that. Here’s how bicycling along Raymond Avenue at 14 mph = 20 ft/s on a pleasant summer morning works out…
T = 0.000 — Notice anything out of the ordinary?
T = 1.000 — Me, neither:
T = 1.500 — Ah!
T = 2.000 — I’m flinching into the right turn required for a sharp left turn:
Less than half a second reaction time: pretty good, sez me.
T = 2.833 — End of the flinch:
T = 3.000 — Now I can lean and turn left:
T = 3.267 — This better be far enough left:
T = 3.333 — The door isn’t moving:
T = 3.567 — So I’ll live to ride another day:
I carry a spectacular scar from slashing my arm on a frameless car window, back in my college days: the driver flipped the door open as I passed his gas cap at a good clip. The collision wrecked the window, the door, and my bike, but didn’t break my arm, sever any nerves, or cut any arteries. I did discover human fatty tissue, neatly scooped from under my arm onto the window, is yellowish, which wasn’t something I needed to know.
Searching for Raymond Avenue will bring up other examples of bicycle-hostile features along this stretch of NYSDOT’s trendy, traffic-calmed design…
We are not dog people, so being awakened at 12:45 one morning by a large dog barking directly under the bedroom windows wasn’t expected. After a bit of flailing around, I discovered the dog parked under the windows on the other end of the bedroom:
That’s entirely enough dog that I was unwilling to venture outside and attempt to affix it to, say, the patio railing, where it could await the town’s animal control officer in the morning:
It’s not a stray, because it wears two collars: one with leash D-rings and the other carrying a black electronics box that could be anything from a GPS tracker to a shock box that’s supposed to keep it inside one of those electronic fences. If the latter, a battery change seems past due.
Being a dog, it spent the next two hours in power-save mode on the patio, intermittently moaning / growling / barking at every state change in the back yard: scurrying rodents, falling leaves, far-distant sirens, neighborhood dogs, you name it. We would be dog people to want that level of launch-on-warning, but we’re not.
If parvovirus were available through Amazon Prime, I’d be on it like static cling. By the kilogram on Alibaba, perhaps?
Grainy photos taken in Nightshot IR mode with the DSC-F717, which works well enough after I (remember to) jiggle the Memory Stick to re-seat the ribbon cable connections.
Hat tip to Sherlock in Silver Blaze.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 