This rubber band failed in such an interesting way that I wish I’d caught it in the act.
Category: 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It had been a year or more since I’d needed the cleaning power of Goop, but need it I recently did, so I dug out my mostly-full 14-ounce container of orange-scented Goop-with-pumice. To my surprise, I found that the lid had cracked and its top had separated from its rim. Of course, it would’ve been […]
You Need Cry, Dear sort of, very loosely, sounds like the characters printed in Chinese beneath the nonsensical English. The Chinese translates to something close to “Have your express delivery.” Once you start down this path, making the mascot a bowtie-sporting cartoon deer is the obvious next step.
It was a public holiday and so we spent the afternoon back in the cut, crawling through promising-looking industrial buildings in a corner of the New Territories. As connoisseurs of light-industrial decay, we savored the innumerable signs of shoddy construction enhanced by decades of deferred or improperly executed maintenance and the exquisite stratigraphic layering of […]
Rad sign, eh? Workspace Search 2018 seemed to be inching towards a satisfactory dénouement, but it was just one of those pesky false endings. The adventure continues. “It’s freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?” “Indignation,” said Michelangelo. “Best fuel I know. Never burns out.” Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy […]
Why go to all of the fuss of repairing “undulating” pavement if you can simply tape up warning notices about the issue and call it a day? In one industrial neighborhood we visited today, identical copies of the helpful sign shown above were taped to the I-beams sunken into the cement ridges bifurcating the sidewalk.