We recently ventured out and acquired a Canon SELPHY CP1200 printer and the specialized paper and paper cartridge necessary for printing pages of photo stickers, eight identical stickers to a page, similar to the photo stickers produced by Japanese photo-sticker (purikura) booths. No small amount of fiddling with camera settings and a few sticker sheets […]
Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Lately, I’ve been spending chunks of my free time futzing with cheap microwave doppler radar sensors and soda-can antennas. Last night, it was all about hooking up teensy all-in-one MP3-players and itsy bitsy little OLED screens to Arduino boards. I’ll write more on that soon. Right now, let’s talk about money. Or, rather, the latest […]
A new (minor) personal first: connecting and driving a display, from Arduino. Thanks to Adafruit for the tutorial (Monochrome OLED Breakouts) and open-source libraries I’m using to drive this little 128×64 OLED display. Note: I am a repeat Adafruit customer but purchased these particular displays from a Taobao merchant for a fraction of the Adafruit […]
It’s getting to be that time of year again. Hong Kongers and others in this part of the world must buy cheap (but not too cheap!) premium foreign chocolate products to give as gifts. S. and I recently bought a box of Cadbury Glow chocolates, for our own consumption. Verdict: perfectly alright, but neither of […]
Recently, the onset of Hong Kong’s version of winter presented us with another chance to savor the intersection of the city’s near-total lack of residential climate control and its hilariously dysfunctional retail culture. Weather forecasts are calling for lows in the mid-to-low 50s℉ (10-13 or so ℃) in Hong Kong within the next ten days […]
Late last month, after needing to re-do a substandard bit of my own soldering work and finding it quite a challenge to get the solder to melt and flow, I did a of reading and concluded that I ought to try another solder alloy from a different manufacturer and that de-soldering might be a heck […]
One recent weekday night, I sat down assembled the miniature Strandbeest shown above from a kit which I’d purchased a week or two earlier. Here’s a YouTube video about the same (or a very similar) kit. From what I can gather by browsing the official Strandbeest site and webstore, this beest appears to be an […]
Last week, I wanted to test-drive one of the 24-LED WS2812 5050 RGB LED rings I’d bought a ways back. Getting it working, controlled by an Arduino board running the Adafruit NeoPixel library, was easy peasy. Except for the soldering step. For reasons that weren’t apparent to me while I was wielding my soldering iron, […]
Someone replaced the ghost in the Ghostbusters logo with a depiction of Lilith from Evangelion — the original 7-eyed-mask version from Neon Genesis Evangelion as opposed to the redesigned, two-eyed-bone-mask version — and printed it on a t-shirt.
On Monday night, we made eggplant parmesan, according to a recipe variant in which the eggplant slices got coated in finely-grated parmesan cheese instead of breadcrumbs. Viewed from the side, it looks a bit like a cross-section of some unknown animal:
Above: what 6500 1/4-Watt, 1%-tolerance metal film resistors (50 each of 150 different resistance values, ranging from 1 Ω to 10 MΩ) look like if you buy them from Taobao. That cling-film/plastic-wrap-wound bundle was roughly the size of an adult’s forearm, from elbow to wrist. Total cost: $USD 10. For reference, Sparkfun’s Resistor Kit (COM-10969, […]
The title of this post is taken from a statement made by Dr. Richard Miller, professor of pathology in the Geriatrics Center of the Medical School, as quoted in an April 2004 U. Mich. press release (World’s oldest mouse reaches milestone birthday, via this Reddit thread). One of the Reddit posters found Yoda the mouse’s […]