Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Life Goes On, Save Me, Good Day, Save Me, Good Day

  • September 20, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Snickers in purple wrappers emblazoned with odd phrases on a 7-11 shelf. I found myself in a 7-11 a few days ago, needing to make a purchase, any purchase, and scanned the shelves for something small to buy. I’m not bigly into candy and rarely buy any, but the purple-wrapper-ed Snickers bars printed with odd […]

Some smaller HOPs

  • August 23, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
I like my Wera 42-piece 8100 SA 2 Zyklop Speed Ratchet Set [1/4″ drive, metric] and it sees a fair bit of professional-amateur tinkerer usage, particularly the included 8784 A1 Zyklop bit adaptor, 1/4″ (05003529001), with hex-inner or Torx drive bits. Often, though, I’ve had to dig out a separate bit assortment to get a […]

Having a gander inside a SMART SENSOR AS808 (an inexpensive, standalone 1xAAA-powered temperature and humidity sensor)

  • June 21, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The screen of the (reassembled) SMART SENSOR AS808, displaying the ambient temperature and humidity as well as the date. We have some small and accurate-enough temperature and humidity sensors (“SMART SENSOR AS808”). They run on single AAA batteries and the batteries last for months and months. Their biggest flaw is the lack of any way […]

A mildly satisfying micro project: increasing the run time of a pull-string cat toy by making the string longer

  • May 18, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The pull-string cat toy, disemboweled. Some recently-bought cat toys came with spring-powered vibration motors. The springs (likely spiral torsion springs, i.e. watch springs) are loaded by drawing back a length of string attached to the motor’s axle. When you draw back the pullstring and release it, the eccentric mass on the motor’s axle causes the […]

Shrinky-dink sneaker insoles

  • May 14, 2022
Categories
The Diary of Lupin Pooter
One of life’s little vicissitudes: shrinky-dink sneaker insoles. We send laundry out and get it back washed, dried, and bagged. I’ve washed sneaker insoles many, many times. In a first for our household, a pair of insoles came back heat-shrunk to about two-thirds of its original size. The image above shows an identical pair of […]

Ugly, but it works: DIY Lightbulb-grabber because we couldn’t find one locally or get one shipped from the Mainland

  • March 10, 2022
Categories
Contrivances The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Once upon a time, this was a water bottle. The light bulb in our storeroom blew back in February. The ceiling in that room is high enough that replacing the bulb from a stool isn’t do-able and the layout of our place (little doorways, narrow hall, and tight corners) makes maneuvering the fiberglass stepladder ladder […]

Got some stubby bits ([JTC-7801] 78 PCS DOUBLE END MINI RATCHET BIT SET)

  • March 9, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Side-by-side comparison of the H4 bit that came with the low-profile, offset, ratcheting screwdriver (below) and the one from the JTC-7801 set (above). I bid you welcome to an exciting follow-up to a late-January post: Stubby bits for low-profile offset ratcheting screwdrivers. A few months back, I got a couple of low-profile, offset, ratcheting screwdrivers […]

Purring is reportedly very complex and often misconstrued

  • February 3, 2022
Categories
The Diary of Lupin Pooter Tygers, Tygers!
Marceline grooming Bubblegum. Marceline grooming Bubblegum. Both cats seemed content, but neither was purring. I’ve only ever heard a cat purr when being brushed or stroked (aka petted) by a human being. Certainly that’s the only circumstance under which any cat I’ve owned or cared for has purred, but the BBC says that a cat […]

Deep sockets and feeler, radius, and pin gauges

  • February 1, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS Tygers, Tygers!
Wera 05004525001 Belt A Deep 1 Socket Spanner Set (1/4 Inch). Plus a 4mm deep socket purchased separately. Deep sockets are one of those tools that, every so often, I could’ve really used but managed to get along without. So I got a , Wera’s 05004525001 deep socket set (1/4-inch drive). It’s got 9 pieces, […]

Stubby bits for low-profile offset ratcheting screwdrivers

  • January 28, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
This is the bent-up-end offset ratcheting screwdriver. The Japanese company‘s name, Rubicon, is translated into Chinese as Robinhood. With a specific task in mind, I recently got a couple of low-profile, offset, ratcheting screwdrivers. The kind that accept hex-shank bits. Specifically, two Japanese Rubicon brand jobbies: RGH-9A (straight and flat) and RGH-9B (bent-up at the […]

Do Not Soak

  • November 12, 2021
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Huh. Didn’t read this label on the bottom of the mug until I’d turned it upside-down to hand-wash the base. This Fallout-themed mug had been sitting in our kitchen sink for a day or so, exposed to water to the extent that, when the tap was used, some water splashed into the basin where the […]

Don’t you wanna watch me spill? Alerting when a container is nearly full of liquid.

  • August 19, 2021
Categories
Arduino C++ Contrivances The Diary of Lupin Pooter
There may come a time when you need to know if a container being filled with liquid that flows at a slow, variable rate is nearly full so that you can empty the contents or do something else with the stuff inside. Such a need recently arose here and I put something together using an Arduino (Cloneduino) Nano, a couple of non-contact capacitive water level sensors, a WS2812 LED breakout board, and a piezo buzzer.