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.
If you measure something often enough, it becomes science
As one might expect, the holiday season offers many suboptimal dietary choices and interferes with regular exercise:
I re-origined the skin-fold measurement series for the 2020 chart to move it further from the weight series. The 2 mm jump is close to the repeatability limit, particularly as I’m now eyeballing the measurement site based on a nearby freckle, rather than depending on a fading Sharpie dot.
Another year of being the Domain Expert of scam-by-mail gadgets, obsolete ABS codes, and water heater anode rods:
Plotting the log of page views against posts in descending order of popularity gives a power-law relationship of some sort:
The log-log view has odd discontinuities:
Overall page views are down 30% from last year: 205k vs 290k.
WordPress served 1 million ads (vs 1.2 million in 2018) on those 205k page views, nearly five ads per page view, which seems horrifying. If you’re not using an ad blocker, you surely have difficulty finding the blog post amid all the crap.
The implosion of on-line advertising continues apace, however, as WordPress paid only 63% as much per ad: $0.40 (vs $0.70 in 2018) per thousand views. Obviously, ads on WordPress blogs aren’t worth much these days.
Recommendations:
While I could pay WordPress their upgrade ransom to eliminate the ads, it’s better if you defend yourself by eliminating all ads, wherever they may be.
After a day of snow + sleet + ice, followed by overnight cooling, the bird feeder looked like this:
The ice generally doesn’t bond across the top, so the sheets slide off separately to the front and back. This time, they stayed together and began sliding off to the side.
The next two days were unusually cold and the glacier stopped sliding:
The temperature warmed enough during the day to let the glacier resume sliding, whereupon it fell and shattered on the patio.
The JB Weld epoxy I slathered on our trusty hand-held cheese slicer a year ago continues to withstand daily washing and occasional trips through the dishwasher:
The bottom is in fine shape, too:
Compare it with XTC-3D epoxy, which admittedly isn’t rated for continuous water exposure, after a year:
JB Weld FTW!
Mary made a batch of veggies in tomato sauce and froze meal-size portions as winter treats. The moist air inside the containers froze into delicate ice blades on the zucchini slices:
A closer look:
The blade cross-sections might be oblong hexagons, but it’s hard to tell with crystals melting almost instantly after the lid comes off. Some of the smaller hair-like blades reminded me of tin whiskers.
Yummy!
As a followup to the DOT-01 battery status, I found the last of the Wasabi NP-BX1 batteries in a drawer where they’d sat unused for eight months.
Recharge and test to get the blue lines, with the red lines from the DOT-01 batteries:
The double blue line came from a second recharge of that battery, just to see if more electrons would help. Nope, it’s still dead.
The Wasabi battery with the highest capacity also has the weirdly rippled voltage trace and, when I extracted it from the test holder, came out disturbingly warm and all swoll up. This is A Bad Sign™, so it spent the next few hours chillin’ on the patio and now resides in the recycle box.
After another two months:
The trend is definitely not uniformly downward, perhaps due to my increasing ability to accelerate (small) masses against the local gravity vector and, definitely, garden harvest season. My pants still fit fine, if that’s any indication.
I’ll add a skin-fold caliper dot to the weekly record after I can get repeatable measurements, perhaps by marking the test spot with a Sharpie.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 