“It’s a plastic bag,” she said. “No,” I said, “it was a big white bird.”

  • April 17, 2017
Categories
Spitting Images
Returning to the bedroom and looking out towards the sea settled the matter, at least to our satisfaction. The white, bird-shaped splotch was no longer perched near the crown of that tree. Almost surely a bird. The odd cast to the photo above can probably be attributed to my having taken it at maximum-zoom with […]

“Infinite LIGO Dreams”

  • February 23, 2017
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Yesterday, we finally got our print of Penelope Rose Crowley’s phenomenal Infinite LIGO Dreams (Artwork inspired by gravitational wave discovery) back from the framing shop. This work and many others (including many original works in addition to prints) are available at Crowley’s site.

Purikura with props; Or, getting the hang of using a Canon SELPHY printer.

  • February 3, 2017
Categories
Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
We recently ventured out and acquired a Canon SELPHY CP1200 printer and the specialized paper and paper cartridge necessary for printing pages of photo stickers, eight identical stickers to a page, similar to the photo stickers produced by Japanese photo-sticker (purikura) booths. No small amount of fiddling with camera settings and a few sticker sheets […]

Let’s Talk About Money!

  • February 2, 2017
Categories
Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Lately, I’ve been spending chunks of my free time futzing with cheap microwave doppler radar sensors and soda-can antennas. Last night, it was all about hooking up teensy all-in-one MP3-players and itsy bitsy little OLED screens to Arduino boards. I’ll write more on that soon. Right now, let’s talk about money. Or, rather, the latest […]

My soldering skillz still leave much to be desired

  • February 2, 2017
Categories
Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A new (minor) personal first: connecting and driving a display, from Arduino. Thanks to Adafruit for the tutorial (Monochrome OLED Breakouts) and open-source libraries I’m using to drive this little 128×64 OLED display. Note: I am a repeat Adafruit customer but purchased these particular displays from a Taobao merchant for a fraction of the Adafruit […]

It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it?

  • January 23, 2017
Categories
Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks!
What do you see when you look at the photo above? If we wanted or needed to take a simply descriptive route, we could say it’s an image of an accumulation of shells in the wrack line at a beach near my home, taken with the camera lens aimed straight out at the sea, with […]

A golden treasure box that glows from the inside out!

  • December 30, 2016
Categories
Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter
It’s getting to be that time of year again. Hong Kongers and others in this part of the world must buy cheap (but not too cheap!) premium foreign chocolate products to give as gifts. S. and I recently bought a box of Cadbury Glow chocolates, for our own consumption. Verdict: perfectly alright, but neither of […]

I don’t even know what’s in here

  • December 21, 2016
Categories
The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Recently, the onset of Hong Kong’s version of winter presented us with another chance to savor the intersection of the city’s near-total lack of residential climate control and its hilariously dysfunctional retail culture. Weather forecasts are calling for lows in the mid-to-low 50s℉ (10-13 or so ℃) in Hong Kong within the next ten days […]

Kester flux pens are fluxing fantastic!

  • December 13, 2016
Categories
Personal Firsts Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Late last month, after needing to re-do a substandard bit of my own soldering work and finding it quite a challenge to get the solder to melt and flow, I did a of reading and concluded that I ought to try another solder alloy from a different manufacturer and that de-soldering might be a heck […]

Say, that’s a nice mask.

  • December 9, 2016
Categories
Spitting Images
This post was precipitated by the necessity of testing a twitter cards WordPress plugin and my desire to share a photo of an exceptionally charming fox half-face mask.

Wind Power Beast-mode and this week’s new word: sprue

  • December 8, 2016
Categories
Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
One recent weekday night, I sat down assembled the miniature Strandbeest shown above from a kit which I’d purchased a week or two earlier. Here’s a YouTube video about the same (or a very similar) kit. From what I can gather by browsing the official Strandbeest site and webstore, this beest appears to be an […]

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning.

  • December 2, 2016
Categories
Spitting Images
The ruddy orange hue of the bellies of the clouds visible over the sea one recent evening was so striking that I had to snap a few photos. Then, I turned one of those images upside down and thought it looked even nicer. And now here it is on this site. In retrospect, I might’ve […]