Notices by Emily Velasco (mle_online@social.afront.org), page 15

Someone should make an electronics breadboard shaped like a slice of bread

Overhead at the bus station: I don't give a fuck about love! I'm ready to kill a motherfucker!

I've gathered up all the things I need to try making natto this weekend

Start with soybeans, obviously

The plan is to use this ancient temperature controller and a lightbulb to keep inside of an insulated box at the right warm temperature (40C) for the 24 hours this requires

It's all going to go inside of this styrofoam box my brother found for me

The bulb is gonna sit like so

Let's see how long it takes for the bulb to heat the inside up.

Not very long at all!

I might have a little bit of a problem here. The thermocouple I have is not of the correct type for this controller, so the temperature it reads is wrong, which would be fine because I can see what the actual temperature is, but it looks like I cannot adjust the internal temperature of the box to be much lower than about 50C, which is 10 degrees too warm for making natto

I think I got it sorted out!

It's still holding steady at 40 celsius. I think this is going to work!

I added a small bowl of water as a thermal mass to simulate having soybeans in the chamber. It's kind of wild how much of a difference that makes. The temperature in the chamber would climb to 120F in maybe 30-40 seconds when it was empty. With the bowl of water in there, it's barely at 93F after 20 minutes.

Yeah, water has a high specific heat, but I didn't expect it to absorb heat from the air *that* fast

Checking things out with the thermal cam. As expected, there's heat leakage where wires and cords go into the chamber and at the joint between the top and bottom. I did not expect the controller itself to be so warm though

Thermal cat

@tubetime how are the hollow wires constructed? If they were basically little copper pipes, it would seem like they wouldn't allow the cable to be flexible enough to manipulate

My best loaf of the baking season so far. What a beauty.

@tedyapo No, but I saw that story about those wackos and the crazy thing they did

This homemade battery pack would be perfect for powering the headlight on my cargo bike, but I can't help but feel that it will be mistaken for a bomb if seen in public

Five years after giving humanity its first glimpse of a black hole, the astronomy team responsible is back with a new image of M87*

The new image, made with new data, helps confirm the team's original findings and serves as additional evidence for the validity of the theory of relativity.

It's my latest for work:

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/new-data-same-great-appearance-for-m87

Strongly worded dymo labels on office equipment: a photo essay of two photos