Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

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

  • May 18, 2022
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

Won’t fly far, fethers [sic] snipped

  • August 8, 2021
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Spotted this lost-pet poster for a parrot near a bus shelter early last month and, just now, stumbled across the photo I snapped of it at the time. Hope they found the bird!

Dusty, grimy, sometimes packed in trash, and occasionally short

  • July 2, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A pair of NOS gloves that I donned to protect my hands while snipping off lengths of 304 stainless steel mesh. Handling a couple of small rolls of clean-looking SS for a few minutes left them visibly filthy. Buying stuff from merchants in China directly, rather than from a retailer whose stock comes from a […]

Soldering fixture test: stainless steel mesh + silicone foam

  • June 21, 2021
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Contrivances Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Here’s the setup I tried: a cut-off length of white silicone foam (with a 15mm x 20mm rectangular cross-section), a roughly square piece of stainless steel mesh, and binder clips securing the mesh against the foam. On occasion, one needs or wants to solder wires to a small and irregularly-shaped component. Last month, I tried […]