You Need Cry, Dear

  • April 27, 2018
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
You Need Cry, Dear sort of, very loosely, sounds like the characters printed in Chinese beneath the nonsensical English. The Chinese translates to something close to “Have your express delivery.” Once you start down this path, making the mascot a bowtie-sporting cartoon deer is the obvious next step.

Back in the cut: WEAR HELMET

  • March 30, 2018
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter We'll go much more a roving
It was a public holiday and so we spent the afternoon back in the cut, crawling through promising-looking industrial buildings in a corner of the New Territories. As connoisseurs of light-industrial decay, we savored the innumerable signs of shoddy construction enhanced by decades of deferred or improperly executed maintenance and the exquisite stratigraphic layering of […]

Best fuel I know!

  • March 29, 2018
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter We'll go much more a roving
Rad sign, eh? Workspace Search 2018 seemed to be inching towards a satisfactory dénouement, but it was just one of those pesky false endings. The adventure continues. “It’s freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?” “Indignation,” said Michelangelo. “Best fuel I know. Never burns out.” Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy […]

Notice: Please beware of the undulating pavement

  • March 22, 2018
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter We'll go much more a roving
Why go to all of the fuss of repairing “undulating” pavement if you can simply tape up warning notices about the issue and call it a day? In one industrial neighborhood we visited today, identical copies of the helpful sign shown above were taped to the I-beams sunken into the cement ridges bifurcating the sidewalk.

Looks like a worthwhile use of GPUs to me!

  • March 21, 2018
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HerpDerp Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Count the ZOTAC GPU boxes. Don’t forget to smile and wave at the surveillance camera pointed at the open door. It and the street-facing windows are open to facilitate a cross-breeze for free, or at least cheap, cooling. I’m looking for workshop space. It’s Hong Kong and we’re dealing with Hong Kong real estate agents […]

Bodge of the week: replacing a naked piezo buzzer

  • March 20, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Two specimens of the same model of timer. Top: an as-yet-unused timer, opened up to show its innards. Bottom: my good-enough-for-now five-minute fix: soldering an SMD pieze buzzer to two of the leads on a transistor inductor. A few days ago, a dual-clock kitchen timer we’ve had for years stopped making much noise when its […]

Lead-free solder recommendation: Kester K100LD for shiny lead-free solder joins

  • March 6, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Sodding soldering
Can you tell the difference between the joins made with a type of SAC305 solder (top) and the K100LD solder (bottom), both from Kester? It occurred to me recently that I had no idea how much solder remained on the spool I’d been using, of the SAC305 alloy (Indium Corporation’s CW-807, a SAC305 (96.6% Sn, […]

Proof of life: Have 2.0mm-pitch pin headers, 2.0mm-to-2.54mm adapter plates, and LoRa transceivers—Will solder

  • March 2, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering
My soldering is still, gradually, improving. All four of the LoRa transceivers above have had 2.0mm-pitch pin headers attached. Two of the transceivers above are slotted into female headers on pre-made adapter plates which I purchased from an online vendor. THe other two have been soldered permanently onto bare adapter plates to which I fitted […]

Dupont crimp-on connectors marathon!

  • January 22, 2018
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things
Can you spot the little faces in this discarded, mangled length of Dupont connector reel-end? Tonight, I’m helping my better half with a work-related project. Nearly a hundred and fifty 4-AA battery holders and the same number of mini speakers need to have breadboard-friendly connectors affixed to the ends of their leads and I have […]

2018 is Coming! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

  • December 24, 2017
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things
All of the little odds and ends that I kept after disassembling a laser printer toner cartridge. S. and I have returned home after having possibly our finest Christmas Eve lunch yet (chicken biryani and a mango lassi for her; palak paneer, creamy red lentil dal, and beef curry with a banana lassi for me) […]

Nightingale/Songbird: Moving your media without losing your metadata |OR| A Python script for updating content_url values in main@library.songbirdnest.com.db

  • November 21, 2017
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Mucking About With Things Progging Python
If there’s a one-step means of notifying Nightingale or Songbird that all of your media files have moved to a different location via the music players’ UIs, I didn’t see it, so I solved my problem with a short (~150-line) Python script [Python 3.6 (Windows, 64-bit)] that, with input via a few prompts, connects to […]

A buck-fifty soldering iron tip-cleaning sponge versus one that cost thirty cents

  • October 4, 2017
Categories
Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The two sponges, side by side: cheap third-party sponge on the left and official Hakko-supplied sponge on the right. I’m still using the same cellulose tip-cleaning sponge included as an accessory with my Hakko FX-888D but I’ve been soldering more frequently in recent months and anticipate doing even more in the near future. When is […]