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.
For reasons that aren’t relevant here, we have a CD bearing X-rays of Mary’s shoulder. Of course, they’re in DICOM image format and come with a relentlessly Window-centric viewer that won’t run in Wine and can’t export the files in a more useful format.
Imagemagick to the rescue:
convert /media/floppy/DICOM/997313/00100000 "Mary Shoulder 2.jpg"
They tell us she has great bones and everything worked out fine…
The balding Northern Cardinal continues to lose small head feathers:
The top of his black mask has lost some feathers near the middle:
The poor critter looks a bit like a vulture now:
These are tight crops from DSC-H5 images: 12X zoom with the 1.7 tele extender, taken from about 30 feet away, just before dusk. Turning off the focus assist LED let me stick the big lens out of the kitchen door, brace the affair on the door frame, and click away.
The bald cardinal still stops by the feeder in the evening. He’s now losing the smaller red feathers around his eye and above his beak. The black feathers bordering his beak seem unaffected, although it’s hard to tell through the window glass blur.
This image is a tight crop from the Sony DSC-H5, which has a lens about two stops faster than my Canon SX230HS pocket camera and is much better suited for evening photography. I’ll add the tele adapter to the stack and try to get a better picture from the door; I think the autofocus assist light spooks the poor bird.
That missing leg surely involves an accident, those missing feathers may be mites, but now we have a male Northern Cardinal with what looks like a tumor on his head:
It’s not obvious in that picture, but the black patch seems to be the rubbed-raw top of a growth.
Prior to these birds, in all the years we’ve been birdwatching we’ve never seen any damaged cardinals…
I dropped that lens cap and the sheet-metal disk popped out; evidently the acrylic caulk doesn’t really count as an adhesive. Cleaned out the residue, ran a thin layer of urethane adhesive around the rim, and applied some clamps:
Cleaned out the inevitable urethane bubbles that emerge from even the most minute opening and it’s all good.
Something weird is going on with the Northern Cardinals at our feeder. First a female missing a leg, now a male minus his head feathers:
A view from the other side:
A bit of searching with the obvious keywords produced that writeup, which suggests feather mites or other parasites. Given that this was in March, that cardinal is definitely not molting!
Those pictures are tight crops from a hand-held Canon SX230HS at dusk, through two layers of 1950-vintage glass. Sorry about that, but the bird spooks whenever I crack the door open for a better view.
Having rebuilt the rebuilt packs, the dead cells (with arbitrary IDs) look like this:
These are the bare cells, without the protection circuit in series, so the voltage is a bit higher than the camera will see. One is completely dead and two of them appear to have about 1 A·h of capacity, but the discharge voltage evidently drops below what the camera considers acceptable.
They’d work fine driving a less fussy load, though…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 