Category: HerpDerp

Another pickled pepper grabber [OR] Inexpertly deburring the holes and rounding the corners of a stamped-steel teabag-squeezer-squisher

  • June 21, 2023
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Forks, butter knives, spoons, and tea spoons. Those are the implements that populate the open-top compartments in the plastic cutlery tray in one of the topmost drawers in our kitchen. Unless you’ve inherited or splashed out on a complete set of sterling silver Edwardian-era cutlery that includes highly-specialized implements like horseradish spoons, grape shears, sugar […]

First taste of grapefruit + useful citrus peeler (akshully peel-starter) tool

  • June 1, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Until yesterday evening, I’d never consumed any fresh grapefruit. I had an inkling that it was less sweet than, say, an orange and recall reading or seeing or hearing that some people salted cut grapefruit to mask the bitterness (for a pop-sci explanation, check this October 2020 news article at science.org: Why adding salt makes […]

Fluoride testing tap water, retail-purchased bottled spring water, and distilled water

  • March 4, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Looks like 0.5 mg/L (equivalent to 0.5ppm) of fluoride in our tap water. According to the Use fluoride page at toothclub.gov.hk, the fluoride concentration of our tap water should be 0.5 mg/L (equivalent to 0.5ppm): Domestic water in Hong Kong has been fluoridated since 1961. This has led to a great decline in the incidence […]

Gold-leaf-bedecked, laser-cut cake + cakes with oxygen absorber and oxygen indicator sachets

  • February 7, 2023
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Some of S.’s colleagues recently gifted her a couple of attractive, packaged-for-gift-giving-purposes cakes they’d purchased while on holiday overseas. One of the cakes, cherry-blossom-themed, with the transparent plastic removed. One of the cakes featured a cherry blossom motif. It was made of yellow sponge cake to which red or pink food coloring had been added, […]

7030 cool/cold white SMD LEDs and paper circuitry (using copper tape + 3M 9703 anisotropically conductive tape)

  • January 25, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
I was looking for some large-ish SMD LEDs to incorporate in a paper circuit, using copper tape for the traces, on a note card, to try out 3M 9703 tape (3M Electrically Conductive Adhesive Transfer Tape 9703), sometimes referred to as z-axis conductive tape because it doesn’t conduct laterally (from side to side, i.e. along […]

Seeing things that go bump in the night

  • December 26, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A very basic, DIY-ish night-vision camera equipped with 2 beefy IR LEDs recently landed on our doorstep and S. and I took a nighttime stroll to try it out. The short video below was taken with a phone camera aimed at the night-vision camera’s screen while the LEDs were switched on. In low light, the […]

My master misses me!

  • December 24, 2022
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
I recently restocked my assortment of medium-to-large ziploc bags after finally using up the last of the previous batch, which were extra-heavy-thick but tended to crack (ah-yup, literally crack and split) over time when folded or bent slightly. This time, I went with a different Mainland manufacturer and just extra-thick rather than extra-hevy-super-duper-thick. They’re thinner […]

Labels for stored nuts and bolts as a simplest-possible, just-barely-useful task to furnish motivation needed to begin learning CAD software (FreeCAD)

  • December 7, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Three containers of M2 coupling nuts (304 stainless steel) bearing my taped-on homemade labels, along with the retailer’s packaging (clear plastic heat-sealed baggies). Motivation is critically important in task-based learning, but acquiring a new skill from scratch can be a hard slog even when you genuinely, even urgently, need to be able to do the […]

Fluid Film rattle cans

  • November 21, 2022
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Got new cans of Fluid Film after a long drought. On the left is one of my new cans. My last, empty can is on the right. Fluid Film is great, but it was difficult to obtain (for yours truly) for a long while. I’d gotten my last cans of the stuff courtesy of someone […]

Here’s the obligatory thermal camera hand selfie

  • October 11, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
A human hand as viewed by a FLIR ONE Pro infrared camera dongle for Android phones. Temperature measurements with K-type thermocouple probes (to which I alluded in a previous entry: Hardwired auto-off sucks. Don’t build it into tools/instruments you design.) are useful, but you’ll only get readings at the precise locations where you place the […]

They want cats to eat ze bugz too, it seems.

  • October 4, 2022
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All My Friends Are Insects HerpDerp Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter
S. and I stopped in a local pet supplies store this afternoon and some peculiar flavors of canned cat fodder caught my eye. Sandwiched in between some of the traditional fish-and-fowl-based products were rows of unusual combos, proudly labeled as having been made in Taiwan: CRICKET & CHICKEN, RAT MEAT & CHICKEN, MEALWORM & CHICKEN, […]

Hardwired auto-off sucks. Don’t build it into tools/instruments you design.

  • October 1, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Testing TØØLS
Hardwiring an auto-off feature into a measurement tool or instrument, like a digital thermometer, is dumb and bad. Don’t do it. Providing it as an option is probably useful in a lot of cases, but turning a tool off after an arbitrarily chosen length of time is dumb and bad. Five-minute-and-change-long clip of two DJI […]