Category: HerpDerp

Canon laser printer teardown pareidolia

  • August 14, 2019
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HerpDerp Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
To satisfy my own curiosity, I recently tore down two old Canon multifunction printers, an inkjet and a laser. When I removed one of the motors, the relative positions of the hole into which the gear on the motor axle had gone and two rivets (which were actually the ends of metal axles for other […]

ALVVAYS in Hong Kong (at This Town Needs in Yau Tong)

  • July 24, 2019
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
I bought the tickets months ago and promptly forgot about it until I flipped to this week’s page in my tried-and-true dead-tree calendar/planner. Thus it transpired that S. and I went to see ALVVAYS play at This Town Needs (the reincarnation of Hidden Agenda) out in Yau Tong (a gritty-by-HongKong-standards industrial area sort of but […]

Bigfoot in Hong Kong

  • July 19, 2019
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Nike doesn’t sell very many non-hideous sneakers in [CURRENT YEAR], so I caved and got a “recrafted” version of a 1992 sneaker (the Air Skylon) and a reissued 1997 model. Having larger-than-the-median feet in the Big Lychee poses some challenges. On Hong Kong stairs, for example, the steps are narrow enough that my toes or […]

A quarter as much at just shy of double the price: Hong Kong retail in a nutshell

  • July 10, 2019
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Purchasing anything aside from the lowest-quality, subsistence-level, Hong-Kong-Chinese-cultural-normative goods in a brick-and-mortar shop in Hong Kong is a fool’s game. Unless you absolutely must have the thing immediately — and in that case good luck figuring out where to get it if it’s not something you’re already regularly buying — you’re much better getting it online.

Chrome Vanadium Chinesium: Finest quality. Superior workmanship.

  • May 1, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
A recent haphazard domestic DIY escapade furnished me with the above photo: replacing the shredded sisal twine and fabric on our cats’ scratching posts. The sisal materials were fixed in place using beefy little round-crown staples, so I ordered some staple removers (the ones with a screwdriver form factor, ending in what looks like chisel-edged, […]

The scourge of planned obsolescence, in Magic 8-Balls

  • March 26, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
There are innumerable how-to videos and static, step-by-step online guides to replenishing the water inside the fluid reservoir of a Magic 8-Ball, but a cursory Google search didn’t turn up any explanation of the process by which the water manages to evaporate out of its little plastic prison. My first guess would be that there’s […]

And idle sat the cordless rotary multitool in its case a few feet away

  • March 21, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
I would have saved some time and gotten a much cleaner result if, to begin with, I had used my Bocsh Dremel-alike, but the result was acceptable. Tonight, I added a 2-part plastic miniature latch to a generic plastic drawer. The latch has two components, one terminating in spring-driven jaws and the other being, basically, […]

How heat-shrink tubing reacts when exposed to the arc of an electric-arc lighter

  • March 19, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
LEFT: tubing shrunk by exposure to a flame. RIGHT: tubing shrunk via placement very near the arc of an electric-arc lighter. If you’ve ever wondered what the arc of a flame-less lighter would do to heat-shrink tubing, the above photo may be of interest. In addition to having a rough texture (a consequence of the […]

Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits

  • February 1, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits as a means of trying out a couple of different soldering iron tips, whilst listening to some recent podcast interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. The surface of the yellow silicone mat on which I worked is speckled with tiny dried droplets of rosin and will […]

赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift + GOOP really has CHAINGED!

  • December 12, 2018
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift. In Traditional Chinese, it’s 贈品. The same reasoning that comes into play in trying to reason out the sorts of merchandise that might hypothetically be traded over interstellar distances (assuming that the buyers don’t already have Star-Trek-style replicators) applies when choosing whether to order something from Taobao or […]

Butchering a BMO

  • November 29, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Forgive me, BMO! Tonight, I extracted an MTR Octopus card NFC thingamajig and implanted it in a purchased-for-this-purpose hollow BMO figure from, apparently, a 2014 series of McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. This particular BMO toy was dubbed Channel Changin’ BMO because its screen consists of a lenticular-printed sticker that allows it to display multiple facial […]

Better late than never: carbide-tipped hole saws, M35 HSS-Co step drills, and deburrer

  • November 18, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
My second batch of Bosch TM5 carbide-tipped hole saws, with a rubber band holding the packaging on the largest one closed after I opened it, three no-brand-but-putatively-M35-grade HSS-Co step drills, a deburring tool and (not really visible) a plastic box containing ten carbide tips for same. It sure would’ve been swell if the items pictured […]