This is a followup to my recent post on concrete fasteners. A large-scale furniture assembly project has been polished off and it’s about time to give anchoring our bookshelves to the walls a go.
Category: To see a world in a grain of sand
At approximately 5:38AM, dawn had taken the form of three wide pinkish beams of light. A photograph is worth a thousand words, but I’m not an especially skilled photographer and my attempts at capturing a sunrise or sunset, as it appears to my eyes, always seem to go awry and end up inadequate at best […]
Phone-camera-microscope’s-eye view of the surface of the wrist wrest pad glued onto a computer keyboard. Phone-camera-microscope’s-eye view of the surface of the wrist wrest pad glued onto a computer keyboard. A 2023 Kickstarter project for a high-magnification mobile-phone-camera microscope that closed to new backers last December (iMicro Q3 – A Fingertip Microscope toward the Optical […]
Clip-on phone camera microscope view of a section of orange-skin-pattern from the design printed on the bag of Cara Cara oranges Last month, we tried a type of orange that was new to us: Cara Cara. The origin of this orange cultivar is a fascinating story and the way that citrus farming works in general […]
Last time, I mentioned that our older ceramic knives’ plastic handles had developed cracks and propounded my hypothesis that the cracking was a consequence of the blade material and the handle material having different coefficients of linear thermal expansion and my having, in the past, run them through our dishwasher periodically.
Today’s post: two short clips of the changing condensation patterns on the inner surface of the glass lid of a stockpot, filmed consecutively while I was hard-boiling a couple of dozen eggs at some point in the past few days. The videos are set to loop and are muted by default but the audio is […]
Not very long ago, I mounted some metal fixtures, made of 304 stainless steel. The fixtures were intended to be affixed to their substrate using adhesive and each one came with a tube of glue. How robust an attachment the stuff would create, I cannot venture to guess, and I opted to use screws. An […]
S. and I recently visited a local landmark-slash-mini-park: Blackhead Point, the site of Signal Hill Tower, a brick structure erected in 1907, subsequently enlarged, and shortly thereafter abandoned. Photo of Signal Hill Tower (in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong), taken by yours truly in December 2023. Each day at 1pm, a large copper sphere […]
Cross-threading is a bummer. Through a momentary lapse in punctiliousness, I apparently managed to get a male-threaded pipe plug started into the female-threaded end of a piece of pipe at a tiny angle. Or, given that the plug didn’t seem to be canted at all, perhaps I failed to remove a particularly pernicious bit of […]
Below is a photo of some corroded rebar, exposed through spalling, on the floor of a multi-level underground car park in a residential complex here in Hong Kong. Snapshot of a section of floor in a multi-level underground parking lot. Today’s other photo is of a rusty cover for some sort of plumbing/electrical infrastructure access […]
I was looking for some large-ish SMD LEDs to incorporate in a paper circuit, using copper tape for the traces, on a note card, to try out 3M 9703 tape (3M Electrically Conductive Adhesive Transfer Tape 9703), sometimes referred to as z-axis conductive tape because it doesn’t conduct laterally (from side to side, i.e. along […]
Animated GIF clip of me soldering one pin on a breakout board. This afternoon, I soldered some breakout boards and recorded the process using the camera on my recently-acquired microscope (a SHOCREX 3800W) and used my other recent purchase (a QUICK 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier) to deal with the flux smoke instead of […]