Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

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 […]

Wiha SAE nut driver set handle color, size markings (Wiha 34390 7-Piece)

  • August 8, 2023
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Wiha’s 34390 7 PIECE SOFTFINISH HOLLOW SHAFT NUT DRIVER SET, as received by yours truly, as shown on Amazon.com, and as shown on Wihatools.com. Yesterday, a set of Wiha inch-size nut drivers (34390 7 PIECE SOFTFINISH HOLLOW SHAFT NUT DRIVERS) that I’d bought on Amazon.com arrived . They didn’t match the product photo (red-and-black instead […]

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 […]

Checking relative write and read speeds on some 32GB μSD cards

  • July 16, 2023
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HerpDerp Testing The Diary of Lupin Pooter
One of our felines, having a drink. Video resolution is extra-poor due to cropping of the video. One of our felines, having a drink. Cropped video. The video above is cropped from a 1080p (i.e. 1920×1080-pixel) AVI video recorded by a cheapo trail cam I purchased recently out of curiosity. These things have myriad potential […]

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 […]

Hello Moon! + Bearing witness to innovation in food and beverage engineering at HK Starbucks

  • July 4, 2023
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Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The Moon peeking out between trees and streetlamps, as seen from the back of a speeding taxi. An unobstructed view of Luna. Daytime mobile phone camera shots of the Moon, at least the ones snapped by yours truly on the devices I’ve used in recent years, come out better than nighttime attempts. I took these […]

Another pickled pepper grabber [OR] Inexpertly deburring the holes and rounding the corners of a stamped-steel teabag-squeezer-squisher

  • June 21, 2023
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Forks, butter knives, spoons, and tea spoons. Those are the implements that populate the open-top compartments in the plastic cutlery tray in one of the topmost drawers in our kitchen. Unless you’ve inherited or splashed out on a complete set of sterling silver Edwardian-era cutlery that includes highly-specialized implements like horseradish spoons, grape shears, sugar […]

Out and about in Tsuen Wan last week

  • June 6, 2023
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Last week, running errands in Tsuen Wan, I took a few seconds of video and a still photo at a crosswalk aka pedestrian crossing. It’s interesting to observe the significant fraction of persons continuing to wear masks, even outdoors, months after the territory’s mask mandate was lifted (HK to drop mask mandate from tomorrow [2023-02-28]). […]

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 […]

Taste of Latinum, Taste of GOLD [condensed soup edition]

  • May 22, 2023
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Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The easiest (or laziest) way of advertising in this corner of the globe is to operate on the basis that local consumers are real-world equivalents of Ferengi route and strongly insinuate that the product being hawked, whatever it may be, is associated with the rapid accumulation of vast wealth. For the first time, I’m seeing […]

Mysterious caterpillar (?) spotted this afternoon

  • May 20, 2023
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All My Friends Are Insects The Diary of Lupin Pooter
S. and I were on our way somewhere when the slow and gentle undulatory motion of a caterpillar caught my eye. We paused for a moment, I took a short bit of video of the thing zoomed-in as much as possible without reducing the bug to a blur, and then we continued on our way. […]

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

  • May 15, 2023
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The maxim No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. is attributed to Aesop and the fable of The Lion and the Mouse. Today, I’m pleased to bear witness to a good deed done by an unknown stranger. The act of kindness in question strikes me as quite likely completely altruistic as […]