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.
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…
Mary made me several presents early this year: a new belt pack, a camera case for the Canon SX230HS, and a touchup for the Zire 71 case:
The belt pack has an interior lining with many side pockets for the stuff I deem essential; it’s also large enough to hold both the camera and the PDA when I’m out biking around. The camera case includes a pocket nestling a battery against the camera’s front side, beside the lens cap. The Zire case, well, at some point I suppose I’ll be forced to get a phone, but, until then, this will suffice.
They’re all made from coated pack cloth, not that I expect to dunk myself in water (or that it’d do any good), but it seems to never wear out.
*hugs*
(And, yes, it probably should be “Therefor”, but …)
A female cardinal missing her right tarsus has been part of the mixed flock visiting our feeder this winter:
She looks a bit frowsy; it’s hard for a bird to groom herself with just one leg.
I managed to get eight seconds of video that look significantly better after applying Youtube’s video stabilization:
It’s a quality of life issue, but making do with one foot is probably better than starring in a window strike:
All the pix were hand-held through two panes of 1955-era window glass with the lens set for maximum telephoto.
Happy Holidays to one & all!
That’s the great tree in our neighbor’s front yard, taken on the crystal-clear morning following Snowtober, carefully framed and cropped to exclude all the snapped branches and downed trees surrounding it. Beauty is where you find it…
[Update: Starting in early December 2012, this post had plenty of hits based on search terms similar to “pine tree”, “pictures of snow covered trees”, and suchlike. If you arrived here by search engine: welcome! Do, please, note the Creative Commons copyright terms described there. If you want the high-resolution image, that link also has the contact form. Thanks…]
The batteries I rebuilt for our much-beloved Sony DSC-F505V camera back in early 2010 have faded away with constant use. Having already sawed the cases open, rebuilding three of them didn’t pose much of a challenge; this time I added a short tab of Kapton tape to help extract them from the camera socket.
Three batteries seems to be about the minimax for ordinary use:
You (well, we) can’t keep track of more than three: it always seems one battery gets overused and another gets lost in the dark. We’ll see how three works in practice; there’s a set of six more raw cells lying in wait.
The new batteries produced these results on their first two charge-discharge cycles:
One battery didn’t come up to speed on the first charge, but after that they’re all pretty close.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 