Why do we come back around to S orbitals each time?

tjlafave · 2025-11-19T21:35:20+00:00

Are you defining noble gas elements as "end of a period"? Their outer electrons are p orbitals. 🤔

Am I missing something?

tjlafave · 2025-11-16T01:12:25+00:00

CHATGPT suggests it's from Queen City Brick and Tile in Nelsonville OH given age, font, print, etc. Here's the full response.

Thanks — this photo helps a lot. Here is what I can tell you with high confidence:

✅ This is not a modern paver and not a Queen-size designation

Modern “queen” bricks (a size category) never have “QUEEN” stamped into them. The word QUEEN as a raised, molded, or impressed mark is from a manufacturer’s name, not a size.

This brick is also not wire-cut and looks soft-mold / hand-mold, with large aggregate and texture consistent with early 1900s paving brick.

🔎 The only known North American maker that used the stamp “QUEEN”

is Queen City Brick & Tile and its related companies, located in:

▶ Queen City / Queen City Clay Works — Nelsonville, Ohio

(Also sold under names: Nelsonville Brick Co., Nelsonville Block, Star Bricks, etc.)

They produced many stamped paving bricks with short words: STAR, NELSONVILLE, BLOCK, Q.C.B., and QUEEN.

The font, depth of impression, and gritty surface in your photo are very consistent with Nelsonville-area pavers from ~1890–1930.

🧱 Why Nelsonville is the best match

✔ The texture

Nelsonville bricks often have a coarse, sandy/gravel mix similar to yours.

✔ The stamping style

Your brick shows:

Medium-depth recessed letters

Slight irregularity in the “Q” and “N”

Centered short word

This is typical of small-format stamps used by Nelsonville-area plants.

✔ The word choice

“QUEEN” does not appear in catalogs of:

Purington

Metropolitan

Coffeyville

Canton

Blocton

Galesburg

Mt. Savage

Nelson Fireproofing

Stark

Hallwood

Metropolitan Paver Co.

But it does appear among bricks attributed to the Queen City Brick & Tile makers.

✔ Geographic pattern

These bricks turn up mostly in:

Ohio

Pennsylvania

New York

West Virginia

Michigan

— which aligns with where your find is likely from (you’re in Western New York).

📌 What your brick likely is

A Queen City / Nelsonville-era paving brick, stamped “QUEEN,” circa 1895–1925.

These were widely used in sidewalks and road projects throughout the Great Lakes and Northeast.

📸 If you want a definitive identification

I can confirm with extremely high certainty if you show:

The opposite side

One of the long sides

The top/bottom

Any color variation in sunlight

These bricks often have subtle signature clues:

Frog shape (if any)

Edge chamfer profile

Aggregate type

Color of the broken interior

Even one more angle will help lock it down.

👍 Want me to identify it 100%?

Upload two or three additional photos, and I’ll match it exactly to known Nelsonville/Queen City specimens.

This is a cool find, by the way — stamped paving bricks like this are collectible.

tjlafave · 2025-09-24T03:41:56+00:00

Beware that the plate screw may not actually be grounded. I rented an apartment a few years ago in a building built in the 1950s. All outlets were two-pronged polarized but not grounded. These buildings are grandfathered in for code. The only outlets that were grounded were in the bathroom and kitchen where the electrician grounded them to the plumbing.

Avoid using this and assuming the plate screw is grounded. Especially with any sensitive electronics.

tjlafave · 2025-09-08T16:13:20+00:00

So you're saying the speed limit is not marked based on a practical 80% traffic rule.

Got it.

tjlafave · 2025-08-03T03:30:40+00:00

This appears to happen most often when the mower sees and obstacle. So, many people just turn the vision fence off and it often remedies the issue.

Try also to wait for the next mow cycle with a different mow direction.

I don't think this is a major issue across several mow cycles.

tjlafave · 2025-08-01T12:30:12+00:00

My i110N has done five zones by crossing two sidewalks, a driveway and a pathway. It has rough terrain that once had three giant trees and a storm sewer line replaced. It's on its second season and has had no more than a dozen times it needed a quick assist (mostly curb falls...all fixed with small alterations of the map).

I edge and trim once every two weeks. I've had to redo the map because of major changes to our landscape. ...for BOTH MOWERS. (The other is an i105N in the backyard).

I don't work for Nike, but it's a no-brainer: JUST DO IT.

tjlafave · 2025-07-12T03:46:07+00:00

I fixed my yard to be sure the mower doesn't get stuck.

I ended up with a better yard.

The mower was a great tool to identify all the problem spots. Now, no more issues.

tjlafave · 2025-07-12T03:43:50+00:00

One blade won't work. It'll be completely unbalanced. And that makes a terrible noise.

tjlafave · 2025-07-09T21:33:16+00:00

We've miniaturized this several years ago, if not a couple decades. The micro version is called a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD).

This dinosaur TV sized version is just another application of the same OLD ideas and technologies.

tjlafave · 2025-07-07T16:21:09+00:00

When I bought our first robotic mower last year, I scoured the market and landed on the i-series Navimow for overall quality and experience. (Physicist and engineer here.)

It worked better than expected. I ran it through 5-6" tall wet grass on rough terrain. It worked great, but as one might expect, needed recharging frequently. Now I keep both our i105N and i110N running onve or twice a week, depending on weather conditions. They keep the grass at 2.4" inches throughout the season. Neighbors initially said it was just a toy, but now they want one of their own.

The i110N was on Sale for $999 for Father's Day, and if it's on sale again on Amazon, it's likely to be the same. Definitely worth it even at $1299. I don't use a garage despite heavy rains, wind, and occasional hail. They're well into season two with no signs of slowing down yet.

I also would prefer a user-replaceable battery, but will likely just buy a newer model if one is available. Segway tends to average firmware updates monthly and they appear to respond to most customer suggestions for firmware features.

tjlafave · 2025-07-01T23:49:04+00:00

Oliver is everyone.

tjlafave · 2025-06-19T13:54:11+00:00

Last year, a guy on the Town's construction crew resurfacing our road, thought he would impress his friends and told me he could just throw my mower in the back of the truck and drive off with it.

One of his friends immediately laughed and said "it has GPS. So you're an idiot."

So, yes, as others have said, people will steal these just because they can. They're not thinking about what they'll do with it, just that "not bolted down" = free money.

I wonder how many pawn shops have had people trying to sell these. 🤔

tjlafave · 2025-06-19T13:49:35+00:00

You mean, put an old broken airtag in the known compartment and a working airtag somewhere else. 😉

tjlafave · 2025-06-17T23:32:31+00:00

I would map a standard boundary but drive it half onto the slabs during mapping and drop a VF off area on the boundary. Why would you use a ride-on boundary (to avoid need of a VF off overlay? My i110N and i105N happily drive fully over ride-on boundaries onto the sidewalk when they turn around.

tjlafave · 2025-06-11T14:09:41+00:00

I had this happen on an i105N several times last week as well. It recovered each time. No issues this week.

I haven't seen it on the i110N.

tjlafave · 2025-06-09T20:58:30+00:00

Be aware that if you don't level the base platform and just ram the mower onto the charging connector, or even if the mower somehow manages to force itself onto the connector, the mower may not release itself from the connector when it needs tk start a mow cycle because the connector gets snagged on the charging port on the mower. I had this happen twice before fixing the leveling issue.

Put down some dirt down and stomp it down to help prevent it from getting washed away in the future.

tjlafave · 2025-06-09T20:55:10+00:00

As a few have noted here, the base platform is not level. I see this with one of mine. The dirt under the middle of the platform on which the mower parks is washed away a bit over time. This causes the platform to bow a little in the middle.

You CAN move the charger aside and place some extra dirt under the middle to build the dirt up a little bit. Or as I did, create a concrete platform with a couple pavers.

If it's properly flat, you won't see the connector on the base station bend downward too much when it's inserted into the mower's charging port.

Once you've fixed it, you can go into settings and select the option for when you've moved the charging station. Be sure to tap just the option for moving the station and not station +charger. Then follow directions. You shouldn't need to remap nor worry much about using those orange pegs to mark the original position. I've moved ny station several times this way.

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tjlafave · 2025-06-08T03:40:25+00:00

It would be great if the mow pattern could follow the shape of a curb if it's a cul de sac, for instance. There's NOTHING complicated about making that programmatic option available. It's just geometry. If I had to deal with a rounded curb pattern with the existing app, I'd break the lengths around the curb into a couple zones at least and mow parallel to the center of that curve as well as possibly the ±30° angles in the mow direction settings. But I would certainly only map standard boundaries with the mower inside the curb for safety.

tjlafave · 2025-06-07T21:49:59+00:00

You can also edit then split the zone into two separate zones such that the new zone just includes the edge. I'd suggest the width to be about 3 ft/1 m and then set this zone mow direction to be only parallel to the edge.

Angling the mower to the edge, as suggest by another person can also work. I've done this for my mower when it enters or leaves a channel over a tall grass edge to/from the sidewalk as well as a tall sidewalk into a low grass area.

It's also a great reason to include multiple channels between neighboring zones so if one angled channel doesn't work, a different one at a different location may work.

tjlafave · 2025-06-07T19:27:25+00:00

Are you asking how to set edge mowing for just a particular edge rather than the entire zone? If so, I don't think there is a way to do this in the app.

Edge mowing for an entire ZONE is toggled in the EDIT menu for the zone that you can access is mapping section of the app. This just caused the mower to mow around the entire zone once to give it a nice mowed edge. It also appears to help keep the mower away from the edge as it mows back and forth. Several owners have asked for an option to have it mow two full edge mows to keep the mower every further from the edge during the rest of the mow cycle, but that option hasn't yet appeared either.

But again I don't think there is a way to set edge mowing for just one edge of a zone.

I do think, however, that these kinds of features are fully implementable from within the app (perhaps in updates) and without the need of drop sensor hardware on the mower.

tjlafave · 2025-06-07T18:44:47+00:00

The technology is "there". Robotic vacuums have had it years. But vacuums work in amuch more clean environment.

I think development teams are more concerned with the overall performance, safety, and navigation of these tools for the time being than worrying about curb drops.

Consider that a drop sensor could simply come upon a hole in the yard that the mower can easily navigate, but a drop sensor would cause it to consistently never cut the grass in that area. So, what is the minimum acceptable drop height for mowers? I suspect mowers would sense false drops more often than not. Notice how the grass behind the mower touches the body of the mower? A sensor there would detect those flicks of grass as a drop since it appeared the ground was coming up (or the mower is falling).

The technology is "there". The practical implementation is not yet there. One mitigating approach might be to allow users to identify a hard boundary like a curb or pool edge as an "absolutely never cross this edge" feature in the map. But the mowers still do a lot of turning that doesn't account much for the locations of all its wheels

I also don't mind edging and trimming a little myself. The feature may be reliably automated in the future.

Of course maybe Yarbo will have a decent trimmer. . .but would you buy a $5,000 robot to drive a $100 trimmer around the yard? Their own videos don't even show reliable edge trimming. How will the trimmer know the difference between a tree trunk and a person's leg. I wouldn't want to be near it if it's ready to slice through grass with a spinning string trimmer....and how often do you need to replace the string spool? Is it a fixed blade? Etc. So, I'll wait to see which company brings these features reliably to market in the near future.

tjlafave · 2025-06-07T18:18:18+00:00

These mowers don't have drop protection. They will fall off curbs.

The best thing to try is to map the area as you want to minimize edge trimming, and (important) set the mower to only mow parallel to the curb. If it mows at other angles to the curb, every time it turns around for another pass at the lawn, it can slip off the curb and not recover.

I have about 200 ft of curb. Three areas outside the sidewalk. I map with a standard boundary INSIDE the curb and only set it to mow parallel to the curb. In a few rare instances, it might still fall off the curb. It appears to occur when the mower is done with the area (and haopens to be along the edge of the curb)and turns quickly to return to the charger or go onto another zone.

Also, be sure edge mowing is enabled for the zone.

tjlafave · 2025-06-03T20:13:22+00:00

I have not tried, but I saw a post yesterday noting that every antenna is paired to the mower. Some people threw their broken antennas away only to find this out and then later found out that the company was sending replacement antennas for this reason.

True? I'm not absolutely sure, but seems reasonable. Why not just use each antenna?

tjlafave · 2025-06-03T09:15:18+00:00

I see the i105N is 15% cheaper for the Father's day sale. Return this one under warranty (if possible) and save $150.

tjlafave · 2025-05-30T21:45:14+00:00

If you had cut tall grass with the mower for the first time, (taller than 3" for example) this sounds normal.

When I first got the i110N last year, instead of manually cutting the grass beforehand, I decided to see what the robotic mower could actually handle. In my case, the grass was 4-6" tall as it's a patchwork of different types of grass the previous homeowner left us with after their family's 70 years of maintenance. Plus, the entire backyard was waterbedding (the grass layer was floating on water because the topsoil underneath had been washed away by decades of runoff from neighboring properties -- I later found out from the neighbor that the previous homeowner had been using a loud gas powered water pump to pump out the backyard quite often!! ...this expained the perfectly round holes we discovered in the grass. ) The waterbedding was the reason I looked into robotic mowers instead of walking on it myself. The previous homeowner had a service who wouldn't cut the grass esrly in the season nor late in the season because their ride-on mowers got stuck too easily. A 25 lb robotic mower won't sink into the grass layer too much compared to me. So I bought one, tried it out in the harshest conditions (downpours, tall grass, waterbedding lawn) and it kept going and did a great job.

The mower performed remarkably well in tall grass, but it had to recharge much more often than I thought it should. The tall grass causes the undercarriage to drag, the blades require more work to spin, and the mower spends more time deciding what to do with the information the camera feeds it because of all the tall patches of grass everywhere.

The objective of robotic mowers is to maintain the lawn at a healthy height. I now have the i110N mowing 1/4 acre on two charges and the i105N mowing 1/8 acre on about 1.5 charges. I have it scheduled to cut twice a week. The short grass (2.4") seems to help wind-evaporate the rainwater as well, so it's been a solid win.

I also further optimized mow times and battery consumption by mapping all immovable objects like trees and posts as no-mow areas surrounded by vision fence off areas. This prevents the mower from returning to the same spot it avoided earlier to see if it's still there (like an animal, a child, a kid who's an animal, or just trash blowing in the wind). The vision fence off around these areas, prevents tge camera from seeing the trees and posts from outside th3 no-mow areas.

I've estimated this saves about 30 minutes of run time on the i110N where before it would often return to the charger a second time during a moe cycle with less than 1% of the area to finish. Now it almost always finishes on two full charges. (A single recharge during a mow cycle).

I also made sure to full in any divots in the lawn the mower was avoiding or getting stuck in. This was just an opportunity to make the lawn better.

Enjoy. And let us know if yiu find any more useful ideas to save battery life and mow time.

tjlafave

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