Shallow Thoughts : : misc

Why shred, when you can make paper bricks?

What do you do about all that mail -- junk and otherwise -- with incriminating information on it? You know, the stuff with your name and bank account numbers and such that you don't want an identity thief to get? If you toss them in the recycling (or, worse, the trash), who knows what might happen to them between here and the recycling plant?

Some people buy a shredder -- an electric lump of a thing that sits in a corner and turns paper into streamers. I guess it sounds kinda fun, but it costs money, uses electricity and takes up space. Or you can take all the assorted bits of paper and burn them in the fireplace or barbecue, but that's kind of a hassle and it makes a lot of ash and smoke.

A few years ago, Dave came up with what we think is a better idea: we make the paper into condensed paper fire-bricks, which we then burn the fireplace. They burn much cleaner and more slowly than those bits of paper, and they're fun to make. Here's how.

First, you collect a lot of paper -- we keep a separate wastebasket where we crumple all the papers (no need to shred them).

When you have enough to start a batch, put the papers in a bucket or other container, and fill with enough water that the paper is covered.

Let that sit for a while -- a week or two -- stirring occasionally (maybe twice a day). Ideally, you want the paper to break down to a soup in which you can't read any of the incriminating text. But if you get impatient, you can move on to the next step little early as long as all everything has gotten soft and the paper is starting to break up.

Once everything's soft and soupy, you want a mold of whatever shape you want your eventual brick to be. Cardboard ice cream containers (pictured here) work nicely, or you can use a bowl, a small bucket, practically anything.

Transfer the wet mush into your mold, squeezing out as much excess water as you can. The drier you can get it, the less time it will take to cure. Pack it into your mold as tightly as you can (understanding that if you're using a cardboard ice cream container, it can't take much packing of wet stuff).

Put the mold in a sunny place in the hard to dry, if possible. You can speed the process along by using a mold that lets excess water drain, or by compressing the mush every so often (once or twice a day) and letting any water run out. Early on, we put weights on top to keep the mush compressed, but it doesn't seem to make that much difference.

When it seems quite dry, remove it from the mold. (This mold is an old microwave popcorn making bowl that cracked, so it's no longer good for making popcorn.)

Early on, we thought it might be interesting to pack in some other flammable material, like bits of wood and nutshells left over from feeding squirrels. That gives you a lumpy breccia (the lower brick in the picture) that doesn't burn very consistently, because it's full of holes. Not a good idea, as it turned out.

The upper brick in the photo is what you get if you let your soup dissolve for a long time and don't add any lumpy stuff to it: a nice smooth brick of pressed paperboard. It's okay to add a bit of small soft stuff like dryer lint. But skip the nutshells -- those can go in the compost bin or yard waste container.

Your final brick, removed from the mold, should be a nice homogeneous piece of paperboard. It's still fairly light and not very dense ... but it burns smoothly and cleanly, and doesn't send sparks up the chimmney like those original bits of paper would have.

Save on heating bills? Well, if you make paper bricks all summer, by winter time you'll probably have saved up enough to burn for ... maybe an hour or two. No, this isn't going to heat your home. Still, it's an amusing, inexpensive and electricity-free way of disposing of that pesky printed privacy-pilfering paper that plagues us all.

Tags: recycling, privacy
[ 09:43 Sep 13, 2011    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Slanted signs on dirt roads -- what do they mean?

I like to travel in out-of-the-way places. On desert back roads, one often encounters mysteries of one sort or another. And the mystery under consideration today is a prosaic one: road signs.

Dirt roads, especially in the desert, seldom have much in the way of signage. You're lucky if you get an occasional signpost with a BLM route number (which invariably isn't marked on any of your maps anyway).

And yet, quite often out on deserted dirt roads, you'll see odd, slanted signs painted yellow with black stripes. No numbers or letters, and not every road has them. What do they mean?

They don't always seem to slant the same way. I've wondered if they might point to underground cables or other hazards -- but there are usually much clearer signs for such things. Sometimes they run along a fence ... but not always.

Sometimes they come in pairs -- and sometimes the pairs are at right angles to one another, or at some other angle entirely.

Sometimes they seem to be aimed primarily at traffic coming from one direction; sometimes they're posted on opposite sides of the same post and clearly meant to be viewed both ways.

Try as I might, I haven't been able to detect any regularly in where the signs appear or which direction they slant.

And I can't figure out how to search the web. How do you search for "slanted sign with strips on dirt roads"? I've tried, but I haven't had much luck. I've found lots of compendia of standard signs for paved roads and construction areas, but nothing that covers off-road symbolism.

I've seen them in the Mojave, in deserts in other states like Arizona and Utah, and even a few along I-5 through the California central valley. They're clearly a widespread phenomenon, not a regional thing.

Of course, there are lots of mysterious dirt road signs besides the slanted ones: I don't know what the little round ones mean either, nor the little houses on thick posts.

Can anyone decode the signs and solve the mystery?

Tags: roadsigns, desert, travel
[ 10:19 Apr 06, 2011    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Happy Holidays to All!

Happy holidays to everyone! Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it, and if you don't -- just go ahead and be merry anyway, okay?

Tags: gimp, mushroom
[ 16:18 Dec 25, 2010    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]

BAM Indoor R/C Flying

I gather indoor R/C airplane flying is fairly common in some areas of the country. But here in the Bay Area, there's been a lot of demand and not many opportunities to do it, so there was great excitement at a recent opportunity to rent Sunnyvale's community center gym for some Sunnyvale Indoor Flying.

Indoor flying has come a long way. I remember a couple of years ago when most of the indoor planes were either "3-D" planes like my skunk plane that can stay in a small area by hovering, or weirdo concoctions like the Mini IFO. There were a few pioneers who used microminiature actuators and other fancy hardware to build tiny lightweight custom planes, but that was an expensive and difficult proposition.

But lithium-polymer battery technology and advances in tiny servos and brushless motors have created a revolution in super lightweight micro flyers, led by the Parkzone Vapor (Dave's is pictured at right). At a flying weight of half an ounce, the Vapor makes it easy for anybody to fly in a small gym or even a large room.

For folks who want something a little faster and more aerobatic, the Mustang is a bit heavier at 1.2 oz, but still flies well in a gym. And of course, there are the hundreds of micro-helicopters that are popping up everywhere over the last year or two.

Pretty cool stuff! Anyway, we had a great session on Friday flying these planes, and amazingly avoided any serious carnage (unusual for indoor flying where there are so many walls and basketball hoops to smack into). I'm a little out of practice and found the flying a bit intense, so I took a few breaks between flying sessions to shoot photos.

For the new year this is going to turn into an AMA-chartered club, BAM (Bay Area Microflyers). Watch the BayRC forums for more details.

Tags: planes, radio control, indoor flying
[ 14:13 Nov 22, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Fossil Hunter -- Real Tools!

(I meant to blog this last month and never got around to it, but it was so fun and silly that I want a public link to it.)

For my birthday, Dave got me this Dinosaur Fossil Kit. With REAL TOOLS! proclaimed the package.

(A few weeks later I was at the dollar store looking for something else, and found out where he'd bought it.)

It's an egg-shaped clod of mud. The REAL TOOLS are a little plastic pick and a paintbrush. You pick away the mud to reveal little plastic dinosaur bones, which you can assemble to form a dinosaur.

Okay, it's stupid. But it was also kind of fun. I have the little dinosaur sitting on the stand beside my terminal.

One of the foot-tabs is missing on mine, so it doesn't always stay in the stand. But that's just one of those hassles that we paleontologists put up with. Not every skeleton will be 100% complete. We scientists also know how important it is to document every step of the process.

Tags: humor, fossil, dinosaur, paleontology, toy
[ 18:38 Oct 17, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]

On the difference between techies and non-techies

It's so easy as a techie to forget how many people tune out anything that looks like it has to do with technology.

I've been following the terrible "Station fire" that's threatening Mt Wilson observatory as well as homes and firefighters' lives down in southern California. And in addition to all the serious and useful URLs for tracking the fire, I happened to come across this one: http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/

Very funny! I laughed, and so did the friends with whom I shared it. So when a non-technical mailing list began talking about the fire, I had to share it, with the comment "Here's a useful site I found for tracking the status of California fires."

Several people laughed (not all of them computer geeks). But one person said,

All it said was "YES." No further comments.

The joke seems obvious, right? But think about it: it's only funny if you read the domain name before you go to the page. Then you load the page, see what's there, and laugh.

But if you're the sort of person who immediately tunes out when you see a URL -- because "that's one of those technical things I don't understand" -- then the page wouldn't make any sense.

I'm not going to stop sharing techie jokes that require some background -- or at least the ability to read a URL. But sometimes it's helpful to be reminded of how a lot of the world looks at things. People see anything that looks "technical" -- be it an equation, a Latin word, or a URL -- and just tune out. The rest of it might as well not be there -- even if the words following that "http://" are normal English you think anyone should understand.

Tags: tech, humor
[ 20:48 Sep 01, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Breaking out of the Walgreens Infinite Loop

Ever get caught in the Walgreens Infinite Loop?

You're phoning in a prescription refill, going through the automated prompts, everything's going fine, and you get to the point where it asks you, "If you will be picking up your prescription tomorrow, press 1. If you will be picking up your prescription today, press 2."

And you mistakenly press 2 when you meant to press 1.

Now you're stuck. "Please enter the pickup time in hours and minutes." Except it's already past 11pm, and anything you try gives you "Please allow at least one hour. Please enter the pickup time ..." No option to switch days or go back to an earlier prompt. You can't press 0 for an operator -- they're closed, there's nobody there. But you can't just hang up, either -- what would happen to your order then? What if they marked it against one of your allowed refills and ... gave it to someone else! Oh no!

But I found the solution after some experimentation: pressing 0, when after hours, breaks out of the loop and schedules the refill for 10am the next morning. Sorry about the rush order, folks. Honestly, I would have been fine waiting another day. I just couldn't find any other way to break out of the loop.

Tags: misc
[ 09:36 Aug 11, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Back up: sorry for the downtime

File under "Is it really worth running your own server?":

About a week before we'd planned to leave for SCALE, our router/firewall started acting flaky. Every could of days it would just stop routing, for no apparent reason. A few days before a trip is no time to debug a problem like that, so we re-purposed another router we happened to have sitting around. It seemed to work fine; we tested it from both inside and outside over several days, and everything was working fine.

We drove down to LA as planned, spent a few hours hanging out and having dinner with family, then decided on a quick email check before bed. Um ... check where? There was no shallowsky.com on the net ... nor any of the other domains we host from that server. Lovely. Down less than 7 hours after we'd left, and no way of fixing it until we got home a week later.

Luckily for me, a friend was generously willing to host my mail for the week I was gone (including the associated bucketloads of spam). That didn't solve the web downtime, but at least in theory I wouldn't miss any important messages that came in. At least, I wouldn't miss mail that happened to come from servers that checked the new MX record; turns out a lot of servers don't, and just keep re-checking their cached address for days or weeks, bouncing messages accordingly. Not much I could do about that.

Anyway, now I'm back from SCALE (the conference went well) ... and it wasn't the router at all. The repurposed router is chugging along just fine; it was the DSL modem that coincidentally chose our departure day to stop talking to the net. Never underestimate the power of coincidence.

Sorry for the downtime! Maybe it really is time to move this domain to an ISP.

Tags: blog, downtime
[ 20:03 Feb 23, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry | comments ]