One year ago today: May 16, 2019, on the road again.
Five years ago today: May 16, 2015, over 78,000 hours.
Nine years ago today: May 16, 2011, calibrating meters.
Random years ago today: May 16, 2012, a lively post, indeed.
What’s not to love about the new FireFox update window? The one that slows down or even stalls your existing browser until you figure out how to delete the sumbitch. Good morning, and how about the ransomware demand over legal files including some claimed to bring down Trump. Ha, I say let them. Nothing about Trump is going to bother him in the eyes of voters who hate the Establishment. Plus it sends a message to the thieves. You don’t get paid, how’s that? And as for Mozilla’s “fix the Internet” startup lab, um, may I be the one to tell you, “It isn’t the Internet that is broken.”
It’s worse than we thought. Not only does he never use all those tools, the entire work area is air-conditioned and drywalled. Spotless. A setup I could only dream of. My work area is so cluttered I have to regularly move stuff out of the way. He’s got machine presses and lathes in there. This is the guy that worked for an airplane design company, but not as a builder. His barn is the size of a small airplane hangar and he’s got probably $40,000 worth of tools and machinery that I know of. This picture shows the west side of the barn, with the metal roof. It’s behind the trees behind the chicken coop, with a carport right up to the property line. None of it has ever been used. Yes, that is a second story, or really like a half-storey along the roof line. See the accumulation of dead leaves on the roof.
Clapper, that’s the name of the guy spilling the beans about the Russian and Ukrainian liberal stunts and fake impeachment. He says he was ordered by Obama to use government resources and agencies to investigate Trump, that the Democrats manufacture the Russian connection, and knew in advance there was no evidence for impeachment. Like I’ve said, if they don’t unseat Trump in November, their effectiveness as a political party may be crushed. It would give me much delight to see Obama dragged off in chains, but even more if it was to join Hillary and a few others. Yet, I still say I am not a political person. I’m just against stealing and lying.
I also like to see liberals get infuriated. And another Trump victory will work just fine. Watch them go ballistic as the voters-slash-peasants start inverting the natural order of things, which is the government at the top and everybody else marching in columns. The Constitution, say the progressives, is an outdated document that needs to change with the times and put liberals in control of everything and everybody. They almost had it made, stalling any immigration action until the illegals became a majority. Then along comes Trump with his voters and turns things topsy-turvy. Those idiots who wrote the Constitution to effect a weak federal government didn’t understand the way God wanted things to be.
Da Hong Pao tea plant.
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I watched another episode of “Have Gun Will Travel” and see the heavy influence of radio scripts on the early television adaptations. A good one is the stagecoach, which are one of the most uncomfortable rides invented. Your first ride makes you seasick. But after traveling all day to get to Carson City, which is the only city, in fact the only anything for hundreds of miles, the stagecoach driver calls out the name. One inconsistency that lasts to this day is the fastest gun paradox. The fastest gun can’t retire because somebody has to kill in to be next. The contradiction is that Paladin regularly kills them and nobody comes after him. Or Clint Eastwood, either.
Here’s a view of the chicken coop from standing atop the lean-to roof. This is a on-time shot, since once the roofing material is in place, the roof cannot be walked on any more. See how the kudzu has already taken over the entrance hatch and the chain link matting where the coop will be moved if I ever get some help around here.
The wall I build was 1/2” too high to fit under a tiny section of the shed behind the pylon. The good news is when I crawled in there to take the measurement, I found the missing piece of the drone quadcopter. You know, the down draft from that puppy is something else. Remind me of that if I discover oscillating bathroom fans cost too much. Sand. One corner of the new floor has already settled some. Overall, the project is half done and in this case the difficult half. The space is originally intended for storage until the house gets finished, but we’ll see. I’ve decided to fix the roofing sheets directly onto the roofing panels without purlins, in that the material exceeds the 1/2” minimum by a fraction.
At this point, I stopped and went over my e-mails concerning recent comments on the passive solar collector. Two questions have become focal. First, the holding tank. It must be above the heating coils, fine. But how much above, and must it be higher than any intended destination for the water? Second, several solar DIY sites say a collector receives 300 BTUs per hour per square foot of collector.and that 50% of this heat is recoverable. But none of them get to the point. How much temperature rise do you get from a regular 4x8’ collector with water flowing through it? I’ll say this once: only a prick would post an article on solar heating without this critical piece of information.
And pricks about it they are. They post with a scientific sounding title then spend half the video trying to sell you. Some places quote BTU collection rates “per season” or “per heating season”, like you are supposed to know what that is.
The second question is to what degree does the heated water need to flow linearly? The assumption seems to be that a proper system has the water flowing from cooler to hotter. But I say the concept of the holding tank says not necessarily. I would have no problem with hot water flowing into less hot water if the overall temperature of the system benefits. Hence we have the emergence of Experiment 517. Determining the heat rate of a single 4x8” DIY copper tube on flowing water. I will rely heavily on my weak background in physics rather than the Internet. I recall the Solar Constant is 429.7 BTUs per square foot per hour, but that is in outer space. (Yes, I’m aware it should be Btu and not BTU, but I use them interchangeably. BOP. That’s Blog Owner’s Privilege.)
In one of the few useful tidbits that came out of NASA, around half that energy reaches the surface. They say 283.6 BTUs per square foot per hour. Thus, on a 4x8” area (32 square feet), you get 9,075 BTUs per hour. That’s 151 BTUs per square foot per minute. What I’m after is the percentage of that which can be usefully collected. For example, if your collector was 50% efficient, a total guess, you’d get 75 BTUs per square foot per minute, meaning you could raise a pound of water by 75°F in that time. That means a gallon of water by 8.9°F in the same time. Since your average shower is two gallons per minute, this nearly works out to a number I calculated years ago, of 4.1°F per minute. In practical terms, that is “not enough”.
To the robot club, this means the only true test will be a working model. There is a budget of $200 for copper pipe, and in this case, a full size model can be considered the scale model. I’ll clear it with Agt. M, who already okayed the project once before, back in 2014.
ADDENDUM
Meccano, the Erector Set people. I’m reminded of them because they did the same thing as Vivitar—misleading pictures on the package. Meccano did it, so it’s not like the idea is new. Meccano is back again, sort of. Most of the wanted features of this drone on the box, not in it. That’s Meccano, or in the USS, Erector Set. Founded in 1908, the company was a somewhat success until the 1960s. Everybody (like Wiki) states the company failed due to a change in financial structure, but until they grow the balls to tell us what that means, I say the real cause was fake advertising. Although it was always a problem with Meccano, around 1960 they began intentionally placing pictures on the box of models that could not be built with the parts contained. They went under shortly thereafter. That’s the connection with this Vivitar drone. The packaging is misleading.
Meccano is still around, but it’s the Japanese version. Before, you bought a Meccano set and used your imagination. Now you buy a Meccano kit with just enough computer-counted parts to build one specific item or so. They now bill themselves as an “engineering and robotics” company. In reality the parts have become so expensive the model costs more than the real thing. They have had to post a video showing their current crop of users how to join two pieces using a nut and washer. Their web page is created by an outfit called Spinmaster. Sounds like a matching pair.
