Dad

Mostly on the social media for Dons these days.

@BCiechanowski FYI someone is a fan and you inspired them to make some fun art: fellerts.no/projects/epoch…

Mechanical Watch – ciechanow.ski/mechanical-wat…

This is a very strong biography telling a story of a deep commitment to public service and national defense. She’s running against one of the most malicious, ignorant, and least capable Representatives to have served in the U.S. House. One to watch!

Sounds like an advertisement….

@thatwafflegame the cookie that saves my settings seems to expire and revert to defaults every so often and that switches my timezone away from local and I end up having a day where I don’t get to play if I switch it back. :( Please fix? (Also, no Mastodon account?)

Wow

🌧️Be prepared for winter weather. Whether it's slick roads, snowstorms or heavy rain, a little planning goes a long way for your safety. Remember to slow down and leave plenty of distance between you and the car in front of you. MORE: multco.us/info/winter-tr… w - @MultCoEM

@davidgilmour This Wish You Were flash mob is fun in case you haven’t seen it. youtu.be/aNLI_S4Vp4c

Fun fact; In the outskirts of Portland is a nice little shop in an anonymous industrial park. You walk in to a little foyer with a folding card table and 9 thick, vacuum sealed Mylar bags, each about 1' long and 4" in diameter. They are sitting on top of about 70 pages of paperwork. This is the entirely daily production of this facility. Inside are a bunch of old Mori Seiki NLX lathes - the old ones, before Mitsui bank let Dr. Mori train wreck the company with the DMG merger. Aside from a little wear on the interior paint, the 7 lathes look like they just came out of the showroom. In fact, the whole place looks like a machine tool showroom - spotlessly clean, with a thick, perfectly level urethane floor that a product photographer could use as a mirror white background plane in an Apple ad. There are a few big things in our lives that are literally held together with a couple of fasteners. One example; every Boeing and Airbus engine is held onto the wing by only 2 bolts, and this is the shop that makes them. Boeing and Airbus both require multiple suppliers for critical components, so this is not the only shop that makes these bolts, but the nearest competitor is in Seattle (close to Boeing, but far enough away that the Cascadia Subduction Zone quake won't take both out). The shop bay next door is equally clean, but contains a vacuum furnace and the most through inspection lab I've ever seen. X-ray and magnetic particle inspection, CMM, optical comparators. In the corner is a cherry red custom painted Lista cabinet where raw blanks are stored. An identical Lista cabinet in Green is at the opposite side of the shop. Raw material comes in, gets inspected, heat treated, inspected again, and moves from the Red to Green cabinet, collecting about half the paperwork along the way. The blanks take about 3 days to go from a cylinder of Sandvik or Thyssen-Krupp steel into a bolt. One machine, the oldest, is used to rough the blank into a pair of concentric cylinders, the second oldest machine roughs the hex head, before the bolt is stress relieved and allowed to rest for 36 hours. Another machine finishes the hex and applies chamfers, these are final surfaces. The final step is the threads, where things get interesting. They are cut in 3 steps; roughed, semi-finished, and finished. The secret sauce here is that a new insert is always used as the semi-finisher, and the semi-finished state is very very carefully measured to compensate that exact insert. The final finishing pass is taken in one (surprisingly healthy) hit using the data from the semi-finishing pass to be on-dimension within about 2µm. The key insight they had is that you get a better surface finish off of a tool that has already taken a couple of cuts. The threads look like you wrapped a mirror around a spiral staircase; their process is so dialed-in that their work competes with thread-grinders for dimensional and surface quality. Even so, just before inspecting with old-school thread wires at the machine - the guy running the lathe spins it at about 500rpm and reaches in with a Bright Boy stick and touches them up, runs his fingers over them, and gives them the most important QC they'll receive. This guy has been on this machine for 15 years; nearly every aircraft passenger aircraft in the sky is held together by at least one bolt that has passed his touch inspection. Of course, the engineers in Renton or Toulouse won't just accept that Mitch in Gresham touched this bolt so it is good... so whole reams of paperwork are geared by regularly calibrated Zeiss metrology gear that does a complete dimensional inspection, another magnetic particle inspection (3 in total), and an X-ray. Having said that, Mitch rejects more than Zeiss does (about 2-3%). You want to pay more than $45 for each of these bolts.

@gak_pdx Great story!

@CaitlinPacific Thank you for "I’ll Tell You the Secret of Cancer." So well written. Moved me to both tears and laughter. Loved the ending :) theatlantic.com/health/archive…

@flowpoke Whew! I don’t remember but my recollection is that there was a guy reverse engineering the format. He had code on git that wasn’t complete but had a lot sketched out. I moved in to other projects because it wasn’t complete enough for me and I didn’t have time for that project.

@GeekAndDad Any luck?

macOS: Is there any way to access the Music.app’s local Music Library data without talking to the Music server API (requiring tokens and keys and whatnot)? I don’t want to access the current user’s Apple Music account. Just local music library. TIA

hey @BWBooks I appreciate that you're a B Corp and donating books and supporting non-profits, but I *really* wish you'd not send me books in *plastic envelopes* 😿 Lots of quality paper padded envelopes exist; even Amazon is moving away from non-recyclable packaging.

@jaimeejaimee 😂

Have you ever just looked around and thought, “what can I spray paint today?” I love painting things that go in the ceiling around the house (like those little ventilation covers and inset lighting surrounds). Most of these things start out beige but get yellowish over time. Clean + paint ‘em with heat resistant paint in fun colors instead of replacing them!

Excavator operator playing with a scrapped Learjet at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport.

It pains me to announce that I was fired from Apple today. I was the engineer responsible for designing the charge port at the bottom of the Apple car

@Lowes someone needs to fix your servers.

@trimethelp @trimet Thx

@GeekAndDad @trimet Hello we apologize but service for the Red line is still suspended. Shuttles are serving stations from the airport to Gateway transit center to connect to the Blue line towards downtown. Stay tuned to trimet.org/alerts for updates and stay warm and safe out there!

We want to thank you for your patience as our crews work round-the-clock to dig out from another historic winter storm. All TriMet bus lines scheduled today are running, but MAX service remains temporarily suspended at this hour. We join our transportation partners in encouraging people to avoid traveling, if possible, until after the next phase of the storm - the forecasted freezing rain - comes through tomorrow. If you are traveling by transit, plan ahead by checking trimet.org/alerts first and limit trips only to those that are necessary. Conditions on major roads have improved, and for those who do need to travel today, bus service is the best transit option. A few buses are still being detoured around trouble spots but most buses are not chained. For those buses that are chained for safety, we remind riders they can travel no faster than 25 mph and may not be on time. Buses are running on Sunday schedules in observance of Martin Luther King Day. You can follow the realtime locations of buses using the map on our website, trimet.org. Still expect some delays due to the conditions, dress warmly and check trimet.org/alerts for information about weather-related impacts. As of Noon today, MAX service remains suspended. Our crews are working to clear tracks and repair equipment, but we don’t have a timeline on when service will be restored. Shuttle buses are running on all MAX lines now, with most of the shuttles arriving every 45 minutes or more often. MAX riders should also consider using regular bus service if possible. These photos show the continued challenges with ice covering tracks in Downtown Portland, on SW Morrison and Yamhill, and near Providence Park. There are some spots where the rails are starting to peek through the ice or have been completely uncovered, but that is mainly a few feet here and there. Riders may see or have seen a MAX train running today as we make progress in clearing packed ice from our rails and switches, and get our MAX equipment working again. These trains cannot take riders, due to safety, as they are being used to test the system and clear the way for restoring service. For the most timely updates, please sign up for text/email alerts at trimet.org/email. ❄️

@jdrhyne I have a chunk of $FUV I’ll sell you ;) It was 20x as many shares before they reverse split to avoid delisting. Now they’re in delisting territory again…. I’m down -99% currently with little hope it’ll rebound. *OUCH* Not the same but…

@GeekAndDad Trading is always evaluating risk versus return. Those arguments have been the same for over a year and seem to be overblown especially at the current price point. I haven’t pulled the trigger yet but damn if it ain’t tempting.

Someone please prevent me from buying $BABA at this price point. What's the argument against buying it other than China and delisting risk?

@jaimeejaimee @jaimeejaimee so sorry to hear of the friction! What a terrible time of year to have this happen. 😿 Hoping for the best for you all.

Because everything that could go wrong with moving our shop... has. 🫠 Holiday Woes (Update): open.substack.com/pub/picturethi…