First, for the sake of comparison, here’s what the edge of one of the green bracts ringing the back of the sunflower’s head looked like through my 60x-100x-magnification clip-on microscope: Now here are two bract-edge photos taken with my 200x-500x USB scope (it’s a Measurement eScope DP-M07) at 500x magnification: I didn’t get around to […]
An inexpensive 60x-100x-magnification clip-on microscope like the one shown above can be a shed load of a lot of fun. Last Friday, I spent one of the shortest hours of my life (because TFWYHV) exploring a sunflower, one which I’d just lopped off its stalk, from a bunch that had brightened our home for the […]
There’s tons of Pepe the Frog merchandise on Taobao. I stumbled across a listing for a Pepe-themed tissue dispenser, showed it to my wife, and she lobbed back a link to search results for products making use of his likeness. Below are a couple of rows from the first page of results for “Sad Frog” […]
Tab sweep numero uno
Categories
FRICTION A blog post about how Harry Potter sustained the author during America’s immediate post-911 mass-psychological dark mood titled The Importance of Fiction. A good read. My mind initially saw, instead, the title The Importance of Friction. On Hackaday, Jenny List asks Whatever Happened To The Paper Mobile Phone? A Lemelson-MIT Program profile of Randice-Lisa […]
If you give the MP3 file embedded above a play, you’ll hear me noodling around with my slightly modified version of the “toy organ” DC circuit featured on page 105 of Forrest Mims Engineer’s Notebook [ISBN 9781878707031]. Using alligator clips, I attached each of the three different types of small 8Ω speaker (left to right: […]
… and they came wrapped in sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers? Above: My four itty bitty LM3909Ns came sandwiched between two rectangular bits of pink (possibly anti-static) foam, wound inside a chrysalis of plastic wrap (UK: cling film) which was, in turn, lovingly cocooned within a mass of sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers. And they’re older than you, assuming […]
Some Taobao merchants sell PTFE-coated wire and other sell little spools, but I couldn’t find any offering spools of PTFE-coated wire, so I got some of each and did the spooling myself. I neglected to include any known-size objects for scale but I the center-hole of one of those spools is just large enough to […]
Another neat little magnet bites the dust and the failure mode, as usual, is the separation of the shiny chrome-like coating from the working surface of the magnet. So long, seal with stripey beach ball, I hardly knew ye.
First I acquired (read: bought cheap) some packs of velcro-backed felt letters. Then I got some large-ish scraps of thick black felt. On a completely unrelated project, I tried using a hot-glue glue gun for the first time in my life. It clogged. Boo hoo. I still needed a glue gun, so I ordered some […]
Lots of portable electronic gadgets use Li-ion batteries, so I can understand why an Li-ion battery warning sticker would arouse the interest of thieves somewhere in the logistics chain between Amazon.co.uk and me. Fortunately, they weren’t interested in hot-glue guns and the holes which they poked in the box, including one through the Li-ion battery […]
Why is the tissue-dispensing version of Genki Sushi’s new(ish) hip-hop/gangsta-themed bear mascot sweating? Does it want customers to use more tissues, faster? Or is it worried that restaurant patrons will exhaust its supply of tissues quickly and a staff member will thrust more into its maw? Other depictions of the bear bro are just as, […]
Better late than never is the principle at work here. I processed these images weeks ago but didn’t get around to posting them. Though I haven’t actually nailed down the identity of any of them, in some cases, I have a guess or two. There’s a lot going on here on this rock. The finger-shaped […]