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 […]
Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter
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 […]
Tonight, on my way to the supermarket to replenish our household’s egg and milk stores, I noticed a large praying mantis on the sidewalk. Fortunately, I was en route to rather than returning home from the grocery store, so I could pause and observe this individual of what I believe to be the species Hierodula […]
If you give the MP3 file embedded above a play, you’ll hear me noodling around with my slightly modified version of the “toy organ” DC circuit featured on page 105 of Forrest Mims Engineer’s Notebook [ISBN 9781878707031]. Using alligator clips, I attached each of the three different types of small 8Ω speaker (left to right: […]
… and they came wrapped in sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers? Above: My four itty bitty LM3909Ns came sandwiched between two rectangular bits of pink (possibly anti-static) foam, wound inside a chrysalis of plastic wrap (UK: cling film) which was, in turn, lovingly cocooned within a mass of sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers. And they’re older than you, assuming […]
Some Taobao merchants sell PTFE-coated wire and other sell little spools, but I couldn’t find any offering spools of PTFE-coated wire, so I got some of each and did the spooling myself. I neglected to include any known-size objects for scale but I the center-hole of one of those spools is just large enough to […]
Another neat little magnet bites the dust and the failure mode, as usual, is the separation of the shiny chrome-like coating from the working surface of the magnet. So long, seal with stripey beach ball, I hardly knew ye.