Yesterday, while picking up some necessities (coffee beans) in a local supermarket, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to pick up some overpriced ground beef and some other items to soup up the regular tomato-based sauce for the leftovers from the Italian sausage I’d cooked the night before. Delicious beef, sporadically available as an increasingly infrequent […]
Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Last time (), I mentioned that our older ceramic knives’ plastic handles had developed cracks and propounded my hypothesis that the cracking was a consequence of the blade material and the handle material having different coefficients of linear thermal expansion and my having, in the past, run them through our dishwasher periodically.
Remember… free advice is worth every cent you’ve paid for it. Rule of thumb: If it’s not all-metal (e.g. a plain stainless steel saucepan) or all-ceramic (e.g. an unadorned coffee mug) or a solid lump of plastic like a one-piece, you perhaps ought to hand-wash it. Dishwasher detergents are less sudsy but significantly more chemically […]
Today’s post: two short clips of the changing condensation patterns on the inner surface of the glass lid of a stockpot, filmed consecutively while I was hard-boiling a couple of dozen eggs at some point in the past few days. The videos are set to loop and are muted by default but the audio is […]
We’re living through interesting times. A relatively minor subplot of the whole shebang is the sclerotization and crumbling-at-the-margins of Web 2.0 behemoths like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple (as well as their co-dependent, co-evolved big-tech-company symbiotes). At this point, the deterioration is undeniable and slightly painful to those who interacted much with the same […]
Old-ish photo today, from a small project that entailed countersinking thin, flat fastener heads in fiberboard and in thick, fabric-reinforced synthetic rubber. A couple of Forstner bits, below samples of their respective target materials, with (middle) spiral bits of swarf produced during drilling. Before drilling the through-holes for the fasteners’ shafts, I used Forstner bits […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]