THE END OF CAPS LOCK

I hate to tell you, but if you are stepping on your keyboards, you aren't sitting properly in your chair. Didn't your teacher show you how to sit with good posture? Your feet should always be below your keyboard...

My normal operating position is feet on the desk and keyboard in my lap. I would guess that my feet are a few cm above the keyboard. This position is quite appropriate to my relaxed style of writing and sleeping.

What happened was that I was trying to swat an irritating house fly with what is apparently the May 2013 edition of EDN. 96 pages just is barely sufficient for fly swatting. The fly landed on the wall, near the ceiling. I climbed up onto the desk, took a mighty swing, missed the fly, and lost my balance. In order to avoid trampling all the other electronics on my desk, I performed a simulated hat dance with the stomping on the keyboard as a finale. The keyboard was recycled yesterday with all due honors and ceremony befitting a keyboard that has survived its owners clumsiness for over a year. It will be missed. I am now breaking in its replacement... a Dell KS-8135, which seems adequate except that it doesn't spell words a well as the previous Sony keyboard.

The all caps bulletins make it really easy to cut and paste into the Chyron CODI crawl machines at TV stations. 480i demands big text. There are still a bunch of old TVs running "cable ready".

Did you never learn that a vacuum cleaner is a better fly swatter than a magazine? No spat and no mess. Also it can reach the fly from the floor without stepping on computer equipment. Stealth is your friend little grasshopper...

(...)

Nobody hunts big or small game with a vacuum cleaner. They use a projectile launcher. I've tried a few such devices, such as a 410 shotgun with just the primer and a shell full of sawdust, and have the dead bug photos and burn mark on the wall to prove it.

I've been looking at this product: which shoots table salt. Despite the obvious benefits and glowing reviews, I see some major problems. 1. The price $45. 2. It's not full auto. 3. It lacks range and possibly accuracy. 4. Iodinated salt leaves a purple stain. Maybe the Mark II version.

The hose on my canister type vacuum cleaner is too short to reach the ceiling. It's also too far away. The fly would be gone by the time I get it.

Repurposing in a manner intended to horrify a product liability attorney, is more my style. If it can't be abused or misused, it's worthless.

How about a double barrel slingshot and a Saltlick for the bigger bugs? ;-)

How loud was it? Also, pics or it didn't happen!

How about a sandblasting gun drawing from a big sack of salt? More range is a twist of the air regulator knob away...

Sea salt and kosher salt don't usually have iodine. The different shape of the kosher salt flakes (vs regular table salt) might also cause interesting effects.

Matt Roberds

I do! I lived in a barn once. It had horses in the other half which means flies in both halves. I would literally have hundreds of flies, mostly in my windows. Simple, I just took the vacuum to the problem and let them spend a little time in the can.

Yes, that's just how I want to decorate my home...

Those who can - do, those who can't - use high speed projectile launchers...

I thought you wanted to get rid of flies, not terrorize your home.

Not very noisy. Just a pop from the primer. I expected burning sawdust, but that didn't happen.

However, I did get a simulated grain silo dust explosion when I once did something similar with a flare gun:

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe and expect me to dig through 20,000 JPG's with Picassa 3.9 for a lousy picture of wood dust on top of a drywall powder burn, no proof is possible without a suitable bribe.

When I worked in a gas station, we had compressed air powered grease gun fights using similar equipment. Besides, I'm interested in killing a few flies, not resurfacing the drywall. Besides, a sandblaster has a rather wide pattern and therefore insufficient range.

Good point. I won't try rock salt. Incidentally, I once had the back of both arms and my neck peppered with rock salt from a shotgun while "borrowing" a motorcycle. I know how the fly feels.

In these latter days, paintball guns are available COTS. But I don't think you could repaint a big dog with just one shot. Maybe a big home-made paintball loaded into the flare gun...

The trick is probably getting the range exactly right. ObSED: Solenoid valve and PWM control of the air supply? Or, some kind of motor-driven valve for "linear" control?

Change the nozzle?

You live in interesting times.

Was the motorcycle OK?

Matt Roberds

I lived in a warehouse for a while where a friend's rock band's gear was being set-up and kept. They had mice. I got tired of emptying 6 mouse traps a day, especially when all that virus crap was going around. So I bought a pellet gun and a scope.

I placed a B size sheet of paper on the floor, and a little drop of peanut butter.

It was fun watching them come out to it, since the scent would carry across the wooden floor, and even down into the cracks.

The scope was so good that you could watch the pellets as they hit.

Cleaning them up was a lot easier, and pretty soon they were all but gone. AND it was far more humane in every instance.

Extra credit for shooting frozen paintballs. Note that you will need dry ice to convince the gelatin to freeze. The gelatin also shrinks when frozen, which adds non-aerodynamic dents to the surface. Accuracy suffers accordingly.

That was the problem. I didn't think. The weapon of choice was an Orion 12 gauge flare gun borrowed from the boat. Something like this: I had some spent shells which I reprimed, but did not fill with flare powder. My dog training recipe consisted of a "pinch" of smokeless powder, a thin paper disk, and the rest of the barrel filled with Gold Medal all purpose bleached flour. I covered the end of the barrel with 2 layers of tissue paper, and security it with a rubber band.

However, since I couldn't see anything after the subsequent explosion, I could not accurately determine the effectiveness of the dog training device. The neighborhood kids indicated that I had burned most of the hair off the dogs behind, which wasn't exactly my intent, but was probably effective.

Paintballs are roughly 0.690 inches OD. A 12 gauge bore is about 0.73 inches. That's a fairly small increase in diameter. Even with the mass increasing with the cube of the diameter, it's not going make much of an improvement.

Also, launching a paintball with higher velocity propellant (gunpowder versus compressed air) will tend to make the paintball burst in the barrel. However, some kind of discarding sabot should solve that problem.

The principle advantage of using an EDN magazine issue to swat at a fly was its immediate accessibility and deployment. Adjusting the various controls of a pneumatic or powder driven fly crusher would be far too time consuming to be useful.

Too narrow a pattern would make it a "sand drill". I'm also concerned that there are glass windows and glass covered pictures nearby, that would not survive a sand blasting.

Yep. The problem was an inadequate exit strategy. I hadn't counted on the motorcycle being difficult to start because the tank had collected some condensed moisture.

No. The owner shot both me and the motorcycle with rock salt. He also peppered almost everything in the garage with salt. I dropped the bike, causing it to fall over and sustain additional damage. However that wasn't a major concern since it looked like it had crashed a few times in the past. I later returned, apologized to the owner, and spent several weekends helping him clean up the mess. Digging the rock salt out of everything in the garage was painful. The bike looked quite nice after the cleanup, but for obvious reasons, he wouldn't let me ride it. So, I bought a junk bike, rode it around for a while, and ended my motorbike riding career by launching it off a cliff, and into a wall of trees, with me still on it.

fuel-air explosion. was that the intention?

Dust explosion:

No. It was intended to be a dog training aid. See my previous rant:

I wish that wasn't funny ...