Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Bigfoot in Hong Kong

  • July 19, 2019
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Nike doesn’t sell very many non-hideous sneakers in [CURRENT YEAR], so I caved and got a “recrafted” version of a 1992 sneaker (the Air Skylon) and a reissued 1997 model. Having larger-than-the-median feet in the Big Lychee poses some challenges. On Hong Kong stairs, for example, the steps are narrow enough that my toes or […]

A quarter as much at just shy of double the price: Hong Kong retail in a nutshell

  • July 10, 2019
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Purchasing anything aside from the lowest-quality, subsistence-level, Hong-Kong-Chinese-cultural-normative goods in a brick-and-mortar shop in Hong Kong is a fool’s game. Unless you absolutely must have the thing immediately — and in that case good luck figuring out where to get it if it’s not something you’re already regularly buying — you’re much better getting it online.

Chrome Vanadium Chinesium: Finest quality. Superior workmanship.

  • May 1, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
A recent haphazard domestic DIY escapade furnished me with the above photo: replacing the shredded sisal twine and fabric on our cats’ scratching posts. The sisal materials were fixed in place using beefy little round-crown staples, so I ordered some staple removers (the ones with a screwdriver form factor, ending in what looks like chisel-edged, […]

The scourge of planned obsolescence, in Magic 8-Balls

  • March 26, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
There are innumerable how-to videos and static, step-by-step online guides to replenishing the water inside the fluid reservoir of a Magic 8-Ball, but a cursory Google search didn’t turn up any explanation of the process by which the water manages to evaporate out of its little plastic prison. My first guess would be that there’s […]

And idle sat the cordless rotary multitool in its case a few feet away

  • March 21, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
I would have saved some time and gotten a much cleaner result if, to begin with, I had used my Bocsh Dremel-alike, but the result was acceptable. Tonight, I added a 2-part plastic miniature latch to a generic plastic drawer. The latch has two components, one terminating in spring-driven jaws and the other being, basically, […]

How heat-shrink tubing reacts when exposed to the arc of an electric-arc lighter

  • March 19, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
LEFT: tubing shrunk by exposure to a flame. RIGHT: tubing shrunk via placement very near the arc of an electric-arc lighter. If you’ve ever wondered what the arc of a flame-less lighter would do to heat-shrink tubing, the above photo may be of interest. In addition to having a rough texture (a consequence of the […]

Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits

  • February 1, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits as a means of trying out a couple of different soldering iron tips, whilst listening to some recent podcast interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. The surface of the yellow silicone mat on which I worked is speckled with tiny dried droplets of rosin and will […]

恭喜發財! And the cargo tricycles sit idle.

  • January 31, 2019
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Is that the way it is? Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter
恭喜發財! That phrase has a literal meaning but, in practice, it’s used as a verbal cue to either fork over one or more envelopes of banknotes or to pause for a moment to receive some envelopes of cash or to do both. There’s traditional visiting and eating involved too, mostly to ensure that family members […]

When batteries splooge, electronics are the first to suffer

  • January 30, 2019
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
You go a week or so without looking at your TV, only to pick up the remote control and find it stone dead. Then, when you pry off the battery cover to swap in some new AAs, bits of the old batteries fall out, along with a shower of greenish-whitish powder. After you pick up […]

Another chakra unblocked: first use of J-B Weld

  • January 29, 2019
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A new bit of hardware needs to be bolted down to the benchtop during use but I’d like to be able to stow it away the rest of the time. The base of the item in question features four M8-diameter holes, so I hunted around for stainless steel threaded inserts. I could only find stainless […]

Seems Legit: Mitutoyo 500-196-30 AOS Digimatic Calipers

  • January 22, 2019
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A skim of various Google results (e.g. How to tell if my mitutoyo calipers are fake? and Is it an original mitutoyo vernier caliper?) followed by a quick visual inspection of my purchase leads me to believe that I’m the proud new owner of a pair of authentic Mitutoyo 500-196-30 AOS Digimatic Calipers. They were […]

赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift + GOOP really has CHAINGED!

  • December 12, 2018
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift. In Traditional Chinese, it’s 贈品. The same reasoning that comes into play in trying to reason out the sorts of merchandise that might hypothetically be traded over interstellar distances (assuming that the buyers don’t already have Star-Trek-style replicators) applies when choosing whether to order something from Taobao or […]