Tag: Engineering

Postal Scales Now and Then

I’ve tried to stage it properly. But it just looks sad. Functional – and not inspiring: The white plastic casing already starts to yellow at the top, from years of bombardment with UV photons. Its function in our office had been replaced … by not sending invoices or contracts on paper anymore. Edit: The original…
Magneto Compass – Inverted Art

It has been quite a while since I have drawn my antique rotary phone as “negative art”. This phone features white letters on black background. At that time I had no idea that white gel pens exist, for drawing such letters. So, I “invented” inverted art – as usual, only to discover that many artists…
Unearthing a Time Capsule and Preserving a Fading Cathedral

My first creative endeavors (as an adult) were not drawings or paintings. It was the early web that made me pick colors by hand and stitch together HTML code snippets. The web of the early 2000s was a very different place from the modern social media era, built from many small independent sites and blogs,…
Rounded Brass Things

All the rounded things in our lives disappear. The red alarm alarm clock in your nightstand, waking you up with their jarring twin bells. The desk phone with its circular rotary dial and its harmonious ring tone. The elegant wall clock whose soothing ticking has been hypnotic. Merchant’s scales that seem to look at you,…
Circles to Circles #5. Following the Rules.

Engineering is the art of creating solutions under constraints. The more rigid the constraints, the more creative you need to get. Art benefits from constraints, too. A long time ago, I discovered the joy of following – my own – silly rules when creating Found Poetry: Creating the labyrinth from which you want to escape.…
Combining Everything

The site name of this blog once was: Theory and Practice of Trying to Combine Just Anything. Should I bring it back? This website has truly been all over the place. History of heat pumps. Found Poetry from spam comments. Mathematical proofs. Drawings. Thinking about life-changing decisions. The original tagline – created in 2012 –…
Those Mice Will Haunt Me Forever

Douglas Adams explained it well: These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front.’ — Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The…
Alien Patent Art

Alien is the seed word – feed into Google Patents search. I am searching for alien patents filed between 1900 and 1910. I pick an image from the first patent found, when listing by date ascending. I multiply the image, invert it, color it, and place the series on my favorite black ground. I pick…
The Origin of Darkness

Where does it come from? Why and when did my physics/math/engineering art decide to only dwell on black backgrounds? I am sure there are proper theories in the history of art. I can come up with some armchair psychologist’s explanations – blaming popular culture, clichés, a collage of archetypical memories. I am a hacker. We…
Plural Form

Take a figure of a historical patent, meticulously drawn before there was software. It’s a Plural Grating Spectrograph. Wonder about the appeal of antique technical drawings. So modest, so sublime. Copy it, multiply it. Slowly rotate the color wheel, until the purples meet the reds again. This is an impossible spectrum. There are no purples…
Tribute to a Pragmatic Swiss Solar Pioneer – Who Called to Action in 1989

He is called a pragmatic doer, knowing his physics and engineering, devoid of ideology. This is how Josef Jenni is introduced in the preface to his document called How can we achieve the energy transition (Wie erreichen wir die Energiewende). It’s a manifesto and a technical overview – by the pioneer whose company had built…
Innovation and Scarcity (and Panic)

I tried to avoid such words. They sounded like hollow buzzwords in times of abundance, used by advertizers playing on fears. But our complacent world is taught a lesson, right now, at furious speed. I am following news as everybody else, I am reading about gloomy forecasts. An Austria paper mill has announced today it…
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.

Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
Enthalpy

When you move from fundamental principles (in physics) to calculating something ‘useful’ (in engineering), you seem to move from energy to enthalpy. Enthalpy is measured in Joule, as well as energy. It is assigned to a ‘system’, a part of the physical world separated from other parts by interfaces. The canonical example is a vessel…
The Solar Self-Building Movement

Every year the International Energy Agency publishes a detailed report on worldwide usage of solar thermal energy. The last one from 2019 is based on data from 2017. Countries are ranked by their installed capacity: Collectors’ thermal heating power under standard operating conditions is linked to their area: 0.7 kWth (kilo Watt thermal) per square…
Cloudy Troubleshooting (2)

Unrelated to part 1 – but the same genre. Actors this time: There are no dialogues with human life-forms this time, only the elkement’s stream of consciousness, interacting with the others via looking at things at a screen. elkement: Time for a challenging Sunday hack! elkement connects to the The Dark Platform. Hardly notices anything in…
Infinite Loop: Theory and Practice Revisited.

I’ve unlocked a new achievement as a blogger, or a new milestone as a life-form. As a dinosaur telling the same old stories over and over again. I started drafting a blog post, as I always do since a while: I do it in my mind only, twist and turn in for days or weeks…
Where Are the Files? [Winsol – UVR16x2]

Recently somebody has asked me where the log files are stored. This question is more interesting then it seems. We are using the freely programmable controller UVR16x2 (and its predecessor) UVR1611) … .. and their Control and Monitoring Interface – CMI: The CMI is a data logger and runs a web server. It logs data…