Category: Mucking About With Things

Getting back into the soldering saddle (Indium SAC305 vs. Kester K100LD with and without extra flux)

  • April 22, 2024
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Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering Testing The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
One of a few snapshots I took of the same soldered pins, in between twiddling the focus height adjustment on a microscope. In this first of three images, the uppermost bits of the pins are the most in-focus features. This and the next two photos are taken of a small region on the prototype board […]

The mystery of the rusty ceramic knife (SOLVED), or destructive partial disassembly of a Kyocera ceramic santoku knife

  • March 12, 2024
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Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
Last time, I mentioned that our older ceramic knives’ plastic handles had developed cracks and propounded my hypothesis that the cracking was a consequence of the blade material and the handle material having different coefficients of linear thermal expansion and my having, in the past, run them through our dishwasher periodically.

A’sittin’ on a rainbow: Using Buzz to transcribe speech from audio files

  • January 12, 2024
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HerpDerp Metagrobolized Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Have you ever listened to a long interview or podcast or a nice, long vlog and then, just a couple of days later, when you got the itch to look up something like a book or a song you heard them mention found that you just couldn’t quite remember the title or the name of […]

Ratcheting wrenches for small fasteners (≤M4)

  • December 15, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Today’s story begins a few weeks back. While tightening up some loose kitchen cabinet and drawer handles and the screws that attach drawer sides to drawer slides, I replaced several of the handles’ countersunk Phillips-head screws with hex-head bolts and washers. Phillips-head screws that were easy to reach straight-on with a screwdriver were snugged-up and […]

Cleaning and picking nits on (cheap-o, carbon-steel) Forstner bit assortment packaging

  • August 15, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
I picked up a 2nd assortment of cheap-o carbon-steel Forstner drill bits a while ago. The bits in the new set have thinner shanks, so they’ll fit in my beater cordless drill’s smallish keyless chuck, which is just barely too small for the girthier Irwin-brand Forstner bits. Their shanks are also hexagonal and less slippy […]

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

  • August 3, 2023
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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
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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

  • January 8, 2023
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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 […].

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 […]