Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Butchering an LED bulb

  • December 6, 2018
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
This light bulb (Philips 18W 6500K 2000lm 150mA 220-240V ac 50/60Hz 9290011650A) had the temerity to flicker, so it got to taste the cold HSS of my hacksaw blade. When one of the bulbs in our kitchen began to flicker, I saw a chance to sate my curiosity as to what was inside. The meanings […]

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 […]

Today’s pre-soldering photo

  • October 11, 2018
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HerpDerp Sodding soldering Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The seller included the pin headers but yours truly had to stump up the 2P screw terminals. Today’s recreational soldering: some breakouts for Si4599 MOSFETs and a couple more for LTC2944 battery-monitoring ICs. The photo was taken through the lens of a flex-arm-mounted magnifier removed from a set of “helping hands” and remounted in a […]

And just a few decades later…

  • October 5, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Two lemon batteries, connected in series, can (just barely) power a red LED. Making a lemon battery was one of the sciencey activities I encountered frequently while leafing through children’s science-experiments-you-can-do-at-home and “rainy day” activity books when I was a young’un and wanted to try but couldn’t. As this article explains, a single lemon isn’t […]

All of the really intriguing events occur unobserved

  • September 25, 2018
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter
This rubber band failed in such an interesting way that I wish I’d caught it in the act.

Flaky T-slot extruded aluminum struts

  • September 19, 2018
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Congratulate me on removing these aluminum chips without sending any of them airborne. The lengths of 30cm x 30cm T-slot extruded aluminum (aka 80/20) and assorted T-slot-compatible hardware (e.g. T-slot nuts) I ordered weeks ago showed up yesterday. Last night, after stripping away the layers of packaging (dust-impregnated, faded greenish woven polyethylene textile over bubble-wrap […]

“They Live”, but WeLend

  • August 22, 2018
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Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A Hong Kong company is running a an ad campaign in which a loan is anthropomorphized as a cute woman in shiny knee-high boots and a really short cheerleader skirt, who hugs borrowers. The fact that an advertisement like this passes raises no eyebrows in Hong Kong tells you quite a bit, and none of […]

That Beckett quote is defeatist.

  • August 16, 2018
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Mucking About With Things Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Yes, it pleases me to believe that these four 2N3638A transistors are NOS. This evening’s tinkering session is going to involve yours truly double-checking a breadboarded circuit I assembled last week, to assure myself that it correctly replicates a circuit included in a datasheet for an EOLed Hall effect sensor and then, if no boneheaded […]

But imagine it actually worked — wouldn’t that be swell?

  • August 14, 2018
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Racked up along a checkout line at a Hong Kong CitySuper with all of the other impulse-buy junk: “Keep Memory Gum”: a Japanese chewing gum (from Lotte, a Korean company) that claims to somehow boost one’s memory. A geek.com article about this gum describes it as minty and says that it contains ginkgo biloba. An […]

OK, WD-40 probably isn’t the best spray paint remover. But it works in a pinch!

  • July 27, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
M12 screw-on foot pads for pegboard/storage wall units that I’m adding to my workshop I would’ve left the the durned things silverish—if they’d shown any inclination to stop shedding paint. The inside of the box in which the M12-bolt “shelf feet” had been shipped to me was speckled with the stuff and it rubbed off […]

Bedhead systems

  • June 1, 2018
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
From left: call button receptacle, call button plugged in (button itself dangling) with red reset button overhead, and a red triangular emergency-pull knob with its own reset button above it. I’ve spent a couple of days in and out of Hong Kong’s Prince of Wales Hospital, not ill myself, but advocating for and looking after […]