AirTag

Posted on by September 23, 2022

I found a STL for using an AirTag to track your pet but it was in two pieces with tiny screws in it. I played around with it in Tinkercad and made about 6 test prints but ended up with a one piece print that I was able to work with.

I used the flexi TPA filament so I could squeeze the AirTag into the mount. I could have printed it at a hight density or with a smaller tip to get a smoother print but I was happy with my first successful mod. It worked well until our cat slipped out of the collar and it got hung up under some fallen timbers. To it’s credit, the air tag is still checking in months after it was lost.

Robot Tommy takes a tumble

Posted on by September 22, 2021

This is a long one but it has an audio component I hope you can appreciate. First I need you to hear the first few seconds of this video:  Almost everyone will recognise it as the opening notes from the song “Land down Under” by Men at Work. But to me it has another meaning altogether.
We moved a lot when I was a kid and on one occasion my new bedroom was on the third floor up a tight twisty old staircase. I was only allowed to bring my most prized possessions with me: some books, some comics, a box of cool rocks I’d found and balanced on top of all that was Tommy the Atomic Robot. One of my uncles gave me Tommy. Tommy was older than I was but still sorta worked. When you activated him he would light up and say “I am the Atomic Powered Robot! Please give my best wishes to everybody!”(At least that’s what I think he said, Tommy slurred his words most of the time.
I was trying to be very careful going up that stair but being a chubby little kid one of my belt loops caught on the end of the railing and put me off balance. I fell back a step and the entire stack of items slipped off the bottom-most book, tumbled down the stairs, and bounced out of sight below. I’m sure I yelled Noooooooo! as the stack slid out of my hands and poor Tommy hit step after step making musical mechanical noises all the way down.
I am here to tell you, that Tommy made the exact same notes on the way down as the opening notes of Land Down Under! I felt alternating waves of horror and surprise as he went ‘ping ping pingy ping!‘ all the way down and out of sight.
My mom was at the bottom of the stairs and heard me shout and saw all my stuff come crashing down towards her. She  shouted up “Are you alright?” I replied That I was, but couldn’t stop alternately laughing and crying over Tommy’s last performance.

Cheers,

FlashJ

 

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Bianca and Space Ken

Posted on by October 23, 2023

I saw the name Bianca someplace today and it reminded me of playing with my cousin Shelby once when I was a kid.

Shelby was my Aunt Katherine’s daughter about the same age as me. She had two dolls; one a normal looking Barbie and another off brand doll from much the same mold that she had named Bianca. The only thing I remember about Bianca was that she had red hair and she was named after a friend of her mom’s. Aunt Katherine insisted I go play with Shelby while she and my mom played rummy. I did not want to play dolls with a girl but boredom took over and I tried to join in.

She gave me a beat up and weathered Ken doll that was clearly not as well loved as the other two. At some point I shaped some aluminum foil around Ken’s shoulders like a short jacket, gave it some peaks or fins down the back and declared he was now an astronaut. Shelby disliked my deviation from her narrative and took Ken away. She also took the foil off of ‘Space Ken’ and put it on Bianca instead and declared she was now ‘Space Barbie.’ I still tried to suggest a few ideas to Shelby but she rejected them all in turn:

“How about we pretend that Ken is from another planet and is visiting Earth for the first time?”

“No, Space Bianca is a princess, and princesses don’t hang out with aliens.”

“Okay, how about this:, Space Ken is Space Barbie’s robot protector and he can shoot lasers from his eyes.”

“That’s stupid,” Shelby said. “Bianca is a Space princess, and Space princesses don’t need robot protectors.”

“Well, what’s your big idea for Space Barbie and Space Ken?”

“I want to play with my dolls the way I want to play with them. Bianca and I are just fine without Space You.”

Later that day, my Aunt Katherine asked me why I wasn’t playing with Shelby? I told her the whole story, including how Space Ken was MY idea and that Shelby had rejected everything and didn’t even want to play Space anything, let alone Space Barbie and Space Ken.

Aunt Katherine listened, and then sniffed critically at me and said, “She can do what she wants with them dolls, but I’m here to tell ya Bianca could never go to space, she smokes too much, if you ask me.”

Eureka! A (specific) Gravity test

Posted on by March 13, 2021

Credit to mdfuk
Zero your scales and weigh the object you want to test, make a note of the weight. This ring weighed 3.91 grams.
Place a cup of water on a set of digital scales that are accurate to two or more decimal places. I’m using a Clear plastic cup as it’s the lightest one I have that is clear so you can see what’s going on, but something like a plastic cup from a coffee vending machine is lighter. Heavier glass cups will tip your scales over. Reset to Zero, on my scales this is the Tare button.
Tie the object to a piece of cotton of something similar, I’m actually using a bit of string that came off the netting that comes around oranges as it’s very light and non-absorbent. Suspended the object in the water, just below the surface so as little as possible of the string is added to the equation. Wait for the scales to settle and take the reading. In this case with the ring, it was 0.25 grams.
Simple Math
(Weight of the object) divided by (weight of water displaced)
In this case :- 3.91 / 0.25 = 15.64
Metal Density
Gold 19.3
Silver 10.5
Platinum 21.4
Palladium 12.0
Copper 9.0
9ct 10.9 to 12.7
14ct 12.9 to 14.6
18ct Yellow 15.2 to 15.9
18ct White 14.7 to 16.9
22ct 17.7 to 17.8
Sterling Silver 10.2 to 10.3
950 Platinum 20.1