August 14, 2019

Canon laser printer teardown pareidolia

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 →

July 30, 2019

Voight-Kampff and general sanity self-evaluation visual aids now available in select MTR stations

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 →

July 25, 2019

Poster seen in an elevator (“No excuse, Carrie Lam”)

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 →

July 24, 2019

ALVVAYS in Hong Kong (at This Town Needs in Yau Tong)

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. →

July 19, 2019

Bigfoot in Hong Kong

Nike doesn’t sell very many non-hideous sneakers in [CURRENT YEAR], so I caved and got a “recrafted” version of a 1992 sneaker (the Air →

July 10, 2019

A quarter as much at just shy of double the price: Hong Kong retail in a nutshell

  USA   HK 1000g 250g $32.99 $56.50 Purchasing anything aside from the lowest-quality, subsistence-level, Hong-Kong-Chinese-cultural-normative →

May 1, 2019

Chrome Vanadium Chinesium: Finest quality. Superior workmanship.

A recent haphazard domestic DIY escapade furnished me with the above photo: replacing the shredded sisal twine and fabric on our cats’ scratching →

March 26, 2019

The scourge of planned obsolescence, in Magic 8-Balls

There are innumerable how-to videos and static, step-by-step online guides to replenishing the water inside the fluid reservoir of a Magic 8-Ball, but →

March 21, 2019

And idle sat the cordless rotary multitool in its case a few feet away

I would have saved some time and gotten a much cleaner result if, to begin with, I had used my Bocsh Dremel-alike, but the result was acceptable. Tonight, →

March 19, 2019

How heat-shrink tubing reacts when exposed to the arc of an electric-arc lighter

LEFT: tubing shrunk by exposure to a flame. RIGHT: tubing shrunk via placement very near the arc of an electric-arc lighter. If you’ve ever wondered →

February 1, 2019

Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits

Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits as a means of trying out a couple of different soldering →

January 31, 2019

恭喜發財! And the cargo tricycles sit idle.

恭喜發財! That phrase has a literal meaning but, in practice, it’s used as a verbal cue to either fork over one or more envelopes of banknotes →