Contrivances – Eat Dirt, Shit Rocks

Crumpling cabinet feet/wheel mounts: jerry-riggin’ a solution

February 27, 2025

Back in September, I mentioned modding some vintage metal filing cabinets by replacing #3/8-16 screw-on foot pads with M10-bolt stainless steel wheels. That project entailed re-doing the threads in the holes on the footpad mounts by tapping the screw holes. It seemed to work perfectly and, at the time, I was quite pleased with myself.

Twitter (aka “X” aka “Xitter”) individual tweet (aka “xeet”) page re-title-er (userscript workaround for Twitter broken-ness)

November 1, 2024

Contrivances HerpDerp JavaScript

To those amongst you who are active on Twitter (now known as X and colloquially to some as Xitter), even if you’re simply browsing and not actively posting/tweeting/xeeting, and who use browser bookmarks: today’s post ought to be right up your alley! First, some background. Note: I don’t use smartphone social media apps, so we’re […]

Adding duration info to video filenames using Mediainfo and Powershell

June 28, 2024

Contrivances Mucking About With Things Powershell The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Animated GIF showing Windows Explorer and a terminal window and the command being used and a video filename being updated with its duration. First, here’s a one-liner you can employ on Windows to add duration information to video filenames. It uses Powershell and assumes you’ve installed the command line version of MediaInfo for Windows. The […]

They’re fine, but why are there just four of them? + Holes through silicone rubber

August 3, 2023

Contrivances Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS

Phillips head when they were introduced and began to see widespread adoption, not only because but certainly in part because they reduce the chances of your tool slip-sliding off the fastener head. Inner-hex aka hex socket drive or Torx-Plus ) is mostly what I have and use. More on the smaller tools advantage of smaller […]

Improving my Powershell prompt with Reddit copypasta

July 13, 2023

Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Powershell The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Date (as YYYYMMDD), time, and the preceding command’s run time. This is an animated GIF so that you can see how the time in the prompt updates when a command is run. Often, when I’ve been noodling around, or installing or updating software, or trying this or that at the command line, I select all […]

De-annoyancing the YouTube subscriptions page (UPDATE: added visual video duration indicators)

January 8, 2023

Contrivances JavaScript Mucking About With Things

I wrote a userscript to get rid of YouTube’s notifications tally and irritating fly-out on-hover overlays and gray-out upcoming vids and shorts: YouTube-Subscriptions-Better-er.user.js […].

Ugly, but it works: DIY Lightbulb-grabber because we couldn’t find one locally or get one shipped from the Mainland

March 10, 2022

Contrivances The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS

Once upon a time, this was a water bottle. The light bulb in our storeroom blew back in February. The ceiling in that room is high enough that replacing the bulb from a stool isn’t do-able and the layout of our place (little doorways, narrow hall, and tight corners) makes maneuvering the fiberglass stepladder ladder […]

Don’t you wanna watch me spill? Alerting when a container is nearly full of liquid.

August 19, 2021

Arduino C++ Contrivances The Diary of Lupin Pooter

There may come a time when you need to know if a container being filled with liquid that flows at a slow, variable rate is nearly full so that you can empty the contents or do something else with the stuff inside. Such a need recently arose here and I put something together using an Arduino (Cloneduino) Nano, a couple of non-contact capacitive water level sensors, a WS2812 LED breakout board, and a piezo buzzer.

Soldering fixture test: stainless steel mesh + silicone foam

June 21, 2021

Contrivances Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Here’s the setup I tried: a cut-off length of white silicone foam (with a 15mm x 20mm rectangular cross-section), a roughly square piece of stainless steel mesh, and binder clips securing the mesh against the foam. On occasion, one needs or wants to solder wires to a small and irregularly-shaped component. Last month, I tried […]

This may not have worked (reliably) even if I’d had the pin ordering correct

June 11, 2021

Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Here’s a zoomed-in image of my attempt to connect to an SCD41 sensor without soldering wires onto it or cobbling together some sort of jig with pogo pins. I recently got some SCD41 sensors. They report CO2 level in PPM as well as temperature and humidity. They’re also surface-mount, of the LGA variety and small […]

Calibration slides: a boon for measuring small things like the dimensions of solder pads on surface mount components

May 28, 2021

Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering TØØLS

One of the calibration slides, with the 1-mm-per-division scale above a new surface-mount CO2 sensor from Sensirion. I hadn’t aligned the start of the scale with the left side of the sensor yet, but it’s 1 centimeter (10mm) square. The trend seems to be that the share of interesting new thingamajigs and doodads available only […]

Trying to heat-test some Nitto and Chukoh PTFE adhesive tapes

April 7, 2021

Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering TØØLS

The “before” view of my second experimental setup. Three types of PTFE tape, two PTFE-impregnated glass fiber tapes and one straight PTFE tape, all with silicone adhesive, under test. How do you hold components in place while soldering? Not the PCBs on which the components are mounted. PCB holders and PCB vises can be pricey […]