Odd Lots
- You can anodize titanium to give it a color finish using ordinary household ingredients like Coca Cola and electrons. Lots of electrons. (Alas, I don’t have enough Coke here to dunk my A-12.)
- The more I look at devices like this, the more I feel that it represents the future of high-end mobile computing. I also think it will accelerate the evolution of mobile device UIs, which are not in any shape (currently) to be productive in content creation or editing.
- This seems just, well, nuts to me, but people are using Usenet as a backup mechanism. Just bundle your stuff up in an encrypted binary file and post it to any binary group at all. With Giganews now providing 1300 days (!!) of binary retention, it could work…if you encrypt it strongly enough. (I remember the time when binary retention was six or seven days.)
- Many people have never heard of the “lineman’s splice,” which is way of joining two wires so that the join is in fact stronger than the wire itself. Now that NASA has endorsed the splice, it may see a renaissance. Only one problem: The drawing in the article is wrong. Can you spot the problem?
- I’ve always been a fan of “hi-rails,” which are small railroad vehicles used to run around the trackage looking for damage to rails and ties. Today, as often as not, they’re street pickup trucks with added small liftable flanged wheels, allowing them to operate on both rail and road. In times past, they were often street sedans with big flanged wheels and even cowcatchers. I consider them Dieselpunk, but I’ve never seen them mentioned in SFF.
- Of course, in the Steampunk era (or if your railroad was especially cheap) you had to pedal around the tracks yourself.
- An answer to a question I myself have never thought to ask: Why does it take less milk or cream to lighten iced coffee than hot coffee?
- I don’t even tweet with a keyboard yet, but with an Arduino and my trusty straight key, I’d have a long leg up on tweeting via Morse code.
- This is not the kind of glow-in-the-dark index you want to be high on, trust me.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: electronics · food · hardware · history · humor · railroads
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As a boy, I learned it as a “barrel splice,” and called it that for several years before hearing the term “lineman’s splice.” Whatever you call it, it’s a great skill to have in one’s arsenal, especially when soldering is impractical or impossible. Speaking of impossible, the middle picture on the linked page has an Escherian twist, with the wires winding one way but ending up facing the opposite way…
The Morse code tweet is interesting, but after watching the video I think they ought to add a decent side tone to it!
My first “car” was a 1961 Corvair Greenbriar van. One of its features was that the track width was the same as railroad rail spacing. When I was in college at Michigan Tech, we’d slightly deflate the front tires and drive around on the abandoned mining railroad tracks. It worked fine! I didn’t even have to steer.
Though there were some hazards. One was crossing a highway, where motorists weren’t used to looking out for trains. Another was the occasional trestle that was sagging dangerously or even fallen down. Finally, we’d sometimes come to places where someone had stolen the rails (probably to sell for scrap metal. Smooth sailing and then “bumba-bumpa-bumpa” on the ties!
It was a real problem to turn around and get it back on the rails.