Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
You cannot imagine my excitement when the actual survey arrived, complete with a crisp $5 bill:
GfK MRI Survey
These folks are cheapskates; Nielsen paid better, although I haven’t gotten anything further from them.
It didn’t take long to fill out; my fat Sharpie slashed through the NO columns at a pretty good clip. I did attach a note saying we didn’t have a TV and regarded all TV programs as crap, just in case they didn’t get the message.
Now they know.
FWIW, I did not fill out the form that would enter us in a drawing for one of five $500 prizes, because that would let them associate my name with my response without fattening my wallet. The survey itself probably encodes my identity, even though it didn’t have any obvious bar codes or other ID; they could simply print the questions in a unique order in each survey.
This appeared on The Mighty Thor’s phone during a Squidwrench meeting:
BofA Phishing
“To maintain a secure banking environment” seems diagnostic of a scam.
Discouragingly, some of our banks still send emails with clicky links using third-party mail servers, so checkonlineinfo.com doesn’t seem any more suspicious than, say, Schwab’s customercenter.net.
A long long time ago, we bought a kitchen spatula that’s served us well ever since:
Spatula Search – original
To give you an idea of how old that poor thing is, the back of the handle bears a Japan stamp. I’ve re-set the rivets several times, the blade has rusted as badly as you think, and we recently, very reluctantly, decided it has passed its best-used-by date.
The 3 x 4.5 inch blade is 19 mil = 0.45 mm plated carbon steel, stiff enough to remain flat and springy enough to bend a little, with a 9 inch = 230 mm steel handle ending in a plastic overmold.
These days, it’s essential to the cutting, flipping, and serving of the morning’s omelet-like substance, made of eggs, bacon, veggies, green leafy things, plus this-and-that, in the cast-iron pan. Mary chops the disk into quarters with the reasonably sharp edge, maneuvers the reasonably bendy blade under each quarter, flips them over, tops with bacon & cheese, pauses for consolidation & melting, then pops them onto plates. Yum!
Omelet in cast-iron pan
So we set out to buy a replacement.
Here’s what we’ve tried and rejected so far:
Spatula Search – overview
I’ve used this one for many years to flip pancakes on a succession of non-stick griddles, a service at which it excels. The edge isn’t sharp enough to cut the green-and-leafy and the completely inflexible blade cannot be maneuvered under the omelet quarters:
Spatula Search – heavy solid plastic
This one gets deployed for burgers and their ilk, also in the cast-iron pan. The blade, although sharp enough, is completely rigid:
Spatula Search – heavy slotted metal
On the other paw, a slightly concave 7 mil = 0.18 mm spring steel blade is much too thin and, well, springy. Although very sharp, you cannot apply enough cutting force without suddenly bending the blade and, if the omelet quarter isn’t positioned exactly right, the blade will bend underneath it and dump breakfast on the stovetop. The alert reader will notice a missing weld between the blade and the bottom wire handle:
Spatula Search – thin spring steel
This very thin plastic blade has similar problems with poor cut-ability and excessive flexibility:
Spatula Search – thin springy plastic
This one looked really promising and worked almost perfectly. Regrettably, its nylon blade bears a 400 °F rating and the bottom of the omelet reaches nearly 450 °F. You can see what happens to the reasonably sharp edge as it scrapes across the pan:
Spatula Search – heavy slotted nylon
The omelet cooks at the temperature it cooks at, which part of the specifications is not subject to further discussion.
So, we’re stumped. Having trawled the usual online and big-box stores, we’ve been unable to find a replacement. Simple steel blades aren’t available. Trendy silicone-bonded stainless steel blades combine the worst of all worlds: won’t cut and won’t flip. Pretty nearly anything you don’t see above seems obviously unsuitable for our simple needs: too big, too small, or too melty.
We’ll consider all recommendations and suggestions! Thanks …
We were sitting in the Credit Union and, as usual, I scouted out the WiFi situation:
IoT Thermostat in the Credit Union
Huh. Not what you’d expect to find in a bank lobby.
In case you haven’t seen what can happen with a thermostat, you can pwn a Nest.
Searching with the obvious keywords should provide plenty of reasons why the Internet of Things isn’t ready for prime time, not that that will slow it down in the least.
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?
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0018
T = 1.000 — Me, neither:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0078
T = 1.500 — Ah!
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0108
T = 2.000 — I’m flinching into the right turn required for a sharp left turn:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0138
Less than half a second reaction time: pretty good, sez me.
T = 2.833 — End of the flinch:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0183
T = 3.000 — Now I can lean and turn left:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0198
T = 3.267 — This better be far enough left:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0214
T = 3.333 — The door isn’t moving:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0218
T = 3.567 — So I’ll live to ride another day:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0232
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:
Dog on patio
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:
Dog upright
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?
The Little Machine Shop 5200 lathe package includes DROs on the cross slide and compound cranks. The readouts report the position of the crank, not the slide position, which isn’t a major problem on a lathe.
Unfortunately, the compound collides with the DRO on the cross slide:
LMS Mini-lathe – compound vs DRO
That is a major problem on a lathe.
When you can’t turn the cross slide more than 45° from parallel with the bed, you cannot set the compound to the (typical) 29° degrees required for (traditional) thread cutting. That’s measured perpendicular to the bed, so it would be 61° on the compound rest scale, if the scale went that high:
LMS Mini-lathe – compound way
This mess doesn’t have a trivial fix, because the DRO body under the (non-removable) display doesn’t quite clear the compound screw:
LMS Mini-lathe – compound vs DRO – bottom
As nearly as I can tell, removing the entire DRO is the only way to slew the compound beyond 45°, but the DRO replaced the usual manual scale around the cross slide knob, so there’s no analog backup.
The DRO mounts to the cross slide with three screws, so you can’t rotate it 90° to the side to get better clearance:
LMS mini-lathe – DRO mounting screws
The other four screws presumably mount the DRO encoder housing to the outer shell.
The setscrew sticking up from the sleeve anchors it to the cross slide shaft. The slit milled into the shaft captures the end of the setscrew:
LMS mini-lathe – cross slide leadscrew shaft
The knob slides over the shaft, with a screw in the end holding it in place by friction against a split lockwasher; you can apply enough torque to turn the knob under the lockwasher in either direction.
Removing the DRO doesn’t produce more cross slide travel, because the DRO body sits flush with the back side of that large disk.
I think the cross slide knob collides with the compound DRO, but I put it all back together without any further exploration.
Actual 6 inch DROs based on linear encoders seem to run $40-ish and other folks have fitted them to their mini-lathes. Verily, I don’t do much threadcutting, so I’ll just put this mess on the far back burner.
That DRO ticks me off every time I look at it, though…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 