Overkill: Aramid thread to mend a woven-PP bag.

  • October 26, 2022
Categories
Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Fixed the zipper on a woven-polypropylene (PP) bag aka 蛇皮袋 (Snakeskin Bag in Simplified Chinese). Recently, I stuffed a woven-polypropylene bag a mite too full of stuff and managed to pop the its zipper slider (the thing with two nostril-like orifices which one pulls back and forth) off one side of the zipper’s “chain” (the […]

Here’s the obligatory thermal camera hand selfie

  • October 11, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
A human hand as viewed by a FLIR ONE Pro infrared camera dongle for Android phones. Temperature measurements with K-type thermocouple probes (to which I alluded in a previous entry: Hardwired auto-off sucks. Don’t build it into tools/instruments you design.) are useful, but you’ll only get readings at the precise locations where you place the […]

They want cats to eat ze bugz too, it seems.

  • October 4, 2022
Categories
All My Friends Are Insects HerpDerp Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter
S. and I stopped in a local pet supplies store this afternoon and some peculiar flavors of canned cat fodder caught my eye. Sandwiched in between some of the traditional fish-and-fowl-based products were rows of unusual combos, proudly labeled as having been made in Taiwan: CRICKET & CHICKEN, RAT MEAT & CHICKEN, MEALWORM & CHICKEN, […]

Hardwired auto-off sucks. Don’t build it into tools/instruments you design.

  • October 1, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Testing TØØLS
Hardwiring an auto-off feature into a measurement tool or instrument, like a digital thermometer, is dumb and bad. Don’t do it. Providing it as an option is probably useful in a lot of cases, but turning a tool off after an arbitrarily chosen length of time is dumb and bad. Five-minute-and-change-long clip of two DJI […]

Decadal review of the Belkin Verve Tab Folio for Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Touch, Black

  • September 23, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Nearly a decade ago, S. and I bought Belkin ‘Verve Tab Folio’ cases for our then-new Kindle Paperwhites (1st-gen EY21 Wifi-only units). Neither of our Kindles, which we got out of an abundance of optimism, has been used terribly often. Mine was almost always kept in airplane mode and employed as a portable PDF reader, […]

Life Goes On, Save Me, Good Day, Save Me, Good Day

  • September 20, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Snickers in purple wrappers emblazoned with odd phrases on a 7-11 shelf. I found myself in a 7-11 a few days ago, needing to make a purchase, any purchase, and scanned the shelves for something small to buy. I’m not bigly into candy and rarely buy any, but the purple-wrapper-ed Snickers bars printed with odd […]

Some smaller HOPs

  • August 23, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
I like my Wera 42-piece 8100 SA 2 Zyklop Speed Ratchet Set [1/4″ drive, metric] and it sees a fair bit of professional-amateur tinkerer usage, particularly the included 8784 A1 Zyklop bit adaptor, 1/4″ (05003529001), with hex-inner or Torx drive bits. Often, though, I’ve had to dig out a separate bit assortment to get a […]

Hello from Judson’s Garage: Fiddling around with upscaling and enhancing low-res, low-quality video

  • August 16, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts
Concluding frames of the commercial for MEGO’s ‘Forbidden Zone Trap’ Planet of the Apes playset. Vault of Vintage Toys recently posted an image of the box for a 1970s-era MEGO Planet of the Apes (check out All PLANET OF THE APES Original Franchise Trailers (1968 – 1973) if you’re only familiar with the remakes) playset: […]

Having a gander inside a SMART SENSOR AS808 (an inexpensive, standalone 1xAAA-powered temperature and humidity sensor)

  • June 21, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The screen of the (reassembled) SMART SENSOR AS808, displaying the ambient temperature and humidity as well as the date. We have some small and accurate-enough temperature and humidity sensors (“SMART SENSOR AS808”). They run on single AAA batteries and the batteries last for months and months. Their biggest flaw is the lack of any way […]

A mildly satisfying micro project: increasing the run time of a pull-string cat toy by making the string longer

  • May 18, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The pull-string cat toy, disemboweled. Some recently-bought cat toys came with spring-powered vibration motors. The springs (likely spiral torsion springs, i.e. watch springs) are loaded by drawing back a length of string attached to the motor’s axle. When you draw back the pullstring and release it, the eccentric mass on the motor’s axle causes the […]

Shrinky-dink sneaker insoles

  • May 14, 2022
Categories
The Diary of Lupin Pooter
One of life’s little vicissitudes: shrinky-dink sneaker insoles. We send laundry out and get it back washed, dried, and bagged. I’ve washed sneaker insoles many, many times. In a first for our household, a pair of insoles came back heat-shrunk to about two-thirds of its original size. The image above shows an identical pair of […]

Get Set. Go Shopping! Some MTR posters from January

  • March 17, 2022
Categories
HerpDerp Spitting Images
Get Set. Go Shopping! poster for some place called Paradise Mall. A warning not to feed wild pigs. Hong Kong Disneyland advert featuring kids with a park cast member in a Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl costume. Call me Bitcoin Queen poster featuring the founder of some local cryptocurrency enterprise.