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.
And kvetching, too
Fortunately, it’s hard to damage an aluminum-body “tactical” flashlight:
A keyboard and cylindrical cell charger arrived intact, with absolutely no credit due to Amazon’s careful packaging:
Sometimes, a box does arrive with a token scrap of padding dropped inside, but, as nearly as I can tell, it’s cheaper for Amazon to replace the occasional damaged item than to waste time and material stuffing the boxes with air pillows, eco-foam peanuts, or, heaven forfend, space-filling foam.
This arrived a week ago:
You cannot imagine my excitement when the actual survey arrived, complete with a crisp $5 bill:
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:
“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 pox on their collective backsides!
A long long time ago, we bought a kitchen spatula that’s served us well ever since:
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!
So we set out to buy a replacement.
Here’s what we’ve tried and rejected so far:
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:
This one gets deployed for burgers and their ilk, also in the cast-iron pan. The blade, although sharp enough, is completely rigid:
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:
This very thin plastic blade has similar problems with poor cut-ability and excessive flexibility:
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:
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:
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?
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 