Photos of and through an alley gate in Causeway Bay (April 2021).
The “before” view of my second experimental setup. Three types of PTFE tape, two PTFE-impregnated glass fiber tapes and one straight PTFE tape, all with silicone adhesive, under test. How do you hold components in place while soldering? Not the PCBs on which the components are mounted. PCB holders and PCB vises can be pricey […]
Animated GIF clip of me soldering one pin on a breakout board. This afternoon, I soldered some breakout boards and recorded the process using the camera on my recently-acquired microscope (a SHOCREX 3800W) and used my other recent purchase (a QUICK 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier) to deal with the flux smoke instead of […]
The plastic countertop soap dishes we’ve gotten have ridges intended to keep the soap bar a millimeter or so above the rest of the dish surface. Those ridges are a bit on the wide, long, and numerous side, however, and the result is that the parts of the bar that contact the ridges stay moist longer than the rest of the bar and those areas often feel mushy the next time one grabs the soap.
Top of my Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier, with the tethered remote control and not-yet consulted Chinese-language instruction manual resting next to the base of the flexible duct. There wasn’t much assembly involved. One end of the flexible duct slides onto the flange mounted atop the machine and attaching the flared rubber intake […]
Snapshot of the screen showing part of the calibration card included with the microscope’s camera. The magnification goes much higher but this is the highest at which a meaningful bit of the card is visible. I recently acquired a new workbench microscope (a SHOCREX 3800W) from the manufacturer’s (or rebadger and reseller’s) Tmall store. I […]
Caution: Avoid swallowed by children. Rinse immediately with water if contact with eyes. We’ve been checking out the labels on the cleaning products, soaps, shampoos, deodorants, etc. that we use, looking for quats or substances that release them. Here’s an article that’ll give you an idea of why: Questioning quats’ safety, published in Chemical & […]
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To satisfy my own curiosity, I recently tore down two old Canon multifunction printers, an inkjet and a laser. When I removed one of the motors, the relative positions of the hole into which the gear on the motor axle had gone and two rivets (which were actually the ends of metal axles for other […]
Concerned that you might be an empathy-less replicant whose belief in their own humanity is a delusion based on false, implanted memories? Worried that you may be losing your mind? Head to your nearest Hong Kong MTR station and have a gander at one of the posters shown above (scroll to see all three). If […]
We spotted this poster on the wall of the elevator that takes concertgoers from street level to the This Town Needs live music venue in Yau Tong when we were there for last night’s ALVVAYS show.
I bought the tickets months ago and promptly forgot about it until I flipped to this week’s page in my tried-and-true dead-tree calendar/planner. Thus it transpired that S. and I went to see ALVVAYS play at This Town Needs (the reincarnation of Hidden Agenda) out in Yau Tong (a gritty-by-HongKong-standards industrial area sort of but […]