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.
Other creatures in our world
A decorative snail emerged from within a large garden lettuce:
It seemed interested in its new surroundings:
And eventually set off on an adventure:
We returned it to the Great Outdoors, far from the garden goodies, and wished it well.
Sometimes, having eyes mounted on stalks would be advantageous, but I’m unwilling to give up opposable thumbs to get ’em.
The Wzye Pan camera overlooking the bird feeders attracted the attention of a Downy Woodpecker:
The camera sits on a “guest” branch of the house network, fenced off from the rest of the devices, because Pi-Hole showed it relentlessly nattering with its Chinese servers:
In round numbers, the Pan camera tried to reach those (blocked) iotcplatform domains every 30 seconds around the clock, using a (permitted) google.com lookup to check Internet connectivity. Pi-Hole supplied the latter from its cache and squelched the former, but enough is enough.
I haven’t tested for traffic to hardcoded dotted-quad IP addresses not requiring DNS lookups through the Pi-Hole. Scuttlebutt suggests the camera firmware includes binary blobs from the baseline Xaiomi/Dafang cameras, so there’s no telling what’s going on in there.
The Xiaomi-Dafang Hacks firmware doesn’t phone home to anybody, but requires router port forwarding and a compatible RTSP client on the remote end. Isolating it from the rest of the LAN must suffice until I can work out that mess; I assume the camera has already made my WiFi passwords public knowledge.
The side of our house seems to attract Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Wasps during nesting season.
One pair of wasps built this impressive structure behind the patio door, beside the bathroom window:
The female wasp built six tubes over the course of an August week, carrying blobs of mud the size of her head and abdomen from sources about 30 seconds away (1 minute round trip). Each blob produces half of one serration around the tube, with a seam running down the middle, and requires 20 seconds to smooth into place. We got tired just watching her!
Each tube has many compartments, each containing a wasp larva and a paralyzed spider, with a mud cap inside the end:
We watched the wasps attack, sting, and remove spiders of a specific size from the corners of our window frames.
The young wasps in the innermost tube may not make it out alive, because they must chew through at least one outer tube before flying away:
Perhaps layering the outer tubes around a central tube makes for a more compact and durable nest, with the possible sacrifice of offspring in the center.
The new wasps will likely emerge next spring.
We’re accustomed to seeing geese with goslings and turkeys with chicks around this time of year, but we didn’t realize excavators have a similar breeding season (clicky for more dots):
The adult seems very protective …
Spotted on the Vassar College campus, in front of the dining hall.
A yummy carcass on New Hackensack Rd near Wappinger Falls attracted a pair of vultures, one barely visible on the right just beyond Mary (clicky for more dots):
Half a second later, they’re both airborne and flapping in unison:
The one on the left swooped around the bushes and we both anticipated a collision, but it decided against returning to the carcass until we passed.
Bon appétit!
After several years of seeing few-to-no Monarch butterflies, last year we managed to save a single Monarch egg, raise the caterpillar, and release it:
This year, we’ve seen more, if not many, Monarchs in flight. They’re not abundant, but perhaps there’s hope.
A Monarch evidently laid eggs in our milkweed patch, with at least two offspring surviving:
We decided to let them seek their own destiny; may the odds be ever in their favor …
This parts collection appeared atop the driveway wall, arranged just as shown:
It seems something snagged a large bee (not a honeybee!), ate the contents, and left the wrapper behind. We’ll never know the rest of the story.
Puts one in mind of Turner in Count Zero, though.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 