Heap of diminutive screwdrivers and nutdrivers [Vessel, PB Swiss, Athlet, Wera, and Wiha]

  • February 6, 2024
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Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS ZAMAON.C0M
You can’t really have too many of certain basic tools or or too much of certain consumables. In our household, it’s stuff like scissors and box cutters, tape (e.g. masking tape, strapping/packaging tape, and regular transparent Scotch Tape [UK equivalent: Sellotape]), rulers and measuring tapes, mechanical pencils and pens and markers, rubber bands, and zip […]

Metal confetti

  • January 25, 2024
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Swarf + Copeaux + Scobs The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
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 […]

New (to me) Amazon shenanigans: Requiring a business account AND a “healthcare license” to buy a screwdriver bit holder

  • January 18, 2024
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Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS ZAMAON.C0M
A few days back, I looked up the Amazon listing for a low-ESD precision screwdriver bit holder, the 1013 Kraftform Micro ESD Bitholding screwdriver and was nonplussed to see that Amazon was requiring a prospective purchaser to be both an Amazon business account holder and to have submitted healthcare industry credentials to one of Earth’s […]

A’sittin’ on a rainbow: Using Buzz to transcribe speech from audio files

  • January 12, 2024
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HerpDerp Metagrobolized Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Have you ever listened to a long interview or podcast or a nice, long vlog and then, just a couple of days later, when you got the itch to look up something like a book or a song you heard them mention found that you just couldn’t quite remember the title or the name of […]

Viennetta, but made of minerals instead of vanilla ice cream (efflorescence?)

  • January 2, 2024
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand We'll go much more a roving
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 […]

Ratcheting wrenches for small fasteners (≤M4)

  • December 15, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Today’s story begins a few weeks back. While tightening up some loose kitchen cabinet and drawer handles and the screws that attach drawer sides to drawer slides, I replaced several of the handles’ countersunk Phillips-head screws with hex-head bolts and washers. Phillips-head screws that were easy to reach straight-on with a screwdriver were snugged-up and […]

Micro-landscapes in cardboard after some pliers-cranking

  • December 13, 2023
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
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 […]

Mind the Swarf and Deburr the World

  • November 25, 2023
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HerpDerp Swarf + Copeaux + Scobs The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Nearly all of my fasteners (nuts, bolts, washers, et al.) come direct from the ol’ Big Rock Candy Mountain [#], usually in heat-sealed clear plastic bags bearing adhesive-backed labels that have been run through thermal printers and have the same hand feel as thermal-printed receipts. The crisp black text on some, though not all, of […]

A busted espresso machine leaves town. A new espresso machine comes to town.

  • November 6, 2023
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Recently, after a long and gradual decline that culminated in a series of acute failures of escalating severity until finally no espresso was bring produced at all, our superannuated De’Longhi bean-to-cup espresso machine (a Magnifica ECAM 23.120 B [B for black]) gave up the ghost. Bands of condensation droplets in the new machine’s water reservoir. […]

Rebarrr and… Giant Centipedes

  • October 13, 2023
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand We'll go much more a roving
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 […]

Not *JUST* tableware… “Soft Silicone Baby Utensil Mass Production Process. Silicone Tableware Manufacturing Factory” [APoW]

  • August 27, 2023
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? RECCIES
Are you the sort of person who takes an interest in how some of the things you use are manufactured? If so, then permit me to recommend the All Process of World YouTube account. APoW gives viewers a peek into manufacturing processes of an eclectic variety of goods in Korean factories. Their choice of content […]

Double-volute-spring-havin’ wire rope cutters

  • August 18, 2023
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HerpDerp Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Until I got some of the Knipex wire rope cutters shown below, I’d never seen a volute spring and didn’t know they existed. Guess I’ve led a somewhat sheltered life. The uncharacteristically brief Wikipedia article says they can frequently be found as a component of garden pruning shears and, though I have used pairs of […]