Category: HerpDerp

And just a few decades later…

  • October 5, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Two lemon batteries, connected in series, can (just barely) power a red LED. Making a lemon battery was one of the sciencey activities I encountered frequently while leafing through children’s science-experiments-you-can-do-at-home and “rainy day” activity books when I was a young’un and wanted to try but couldn’t. As this article explains, a single lemon isn’t […]

But imagine it actually worked — wouldn’t that be swell?

  • August 14, 2018
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Racked up along a checkout line at a Hong Kong CitySuper with all of the other impulse-buy junk: “Keep Memory Gum”: a Japanese chewing gum (from Lotte, a Korean company) that claims to somehow boost one’s memory. A geek.com article about this gum describes it as minty and says that it contains ginkgo biloba. An […]

OK, WD-40 probably isn’t the best spray paint remover. But it works in a pinch!

  • July 27, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
M12 screw-on foot pads for pegboard/storage wall units that I’m adding to my workshop I would’ve left the the durned things silverish—if they’d shown any inclination to stop shedding paint. The inside of the box in which the M12-bolt “shelf feet” had been shipped to me was speckled with the stuff and it rubbed off […]

Bedhead systems

  • June 1, 2018
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
From left: call button receptacle, call button plugged in (button itself dangling) with red reset button overhead, and a red triangular emergency-pull knob with its own reset button above it. I’ve spent a couple of days in and out of Hong Kong’s Prince of Wales Hospital, not ill myself, but advocating for and looking after […]

When Goop goes bad

  • May 11, 2018
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
It had been a year or more since I’d needed the cleaning power of Goop, but need it I recently did, so I dug out my mostly-full 14-ounce container of orange-scented Goop-with-pumice. To my surprise, I found that the lid had cracked and its top had separated from its rim. Of course, it would’ve been […]

You Need Cry, Dear

  • April 27, 2018
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
You Need Cry, Dear sort of, very loosely, sounds like the characters printed in Chinese beneath the nonsensical English. The Chinese translates to something close to “Have your express delivery.” Once you start down this path, making the mascot a bowtie-sporting cartoon deer is the obvious next step.

Back in the cut: WEAR HELMET

  • March 30, 2018
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter We'll go much more a roving
It was a public holiday and so we spent the afternoon back in the cut, crawling through promising-looking industrial buildings in a corner of the New Territories. As connoisseurs of light-industrial decay, we savored the innumerable signs of shoddy construction enhanced by decades of deferred or improperly executed maintenance and the exquisite stratigraphic layering of […]

Best fuel I know!

  • March 29, 2018
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter We'll go much more a roving
Rad sign, eh? Workspace Search 2018 seemed to be inching towards a satisfactory dénouement, but it was just one of those pesky false endings. The adventure continues. “It’s freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?” “Indignation,” said Michelangelo. “Best fuel I know. Never burns out.” Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy […]

Notice: Please beware of the undulating pavement

  • March 22, 2018
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter We'll go much more a roving
Why go to all of the fuss of repairing “undulating” pavement if you can simply tape up warning notices about the issue and call it a day? In one industrial neighborhood we visited today, identical copies of the helpful sign shown above were taped to the I-beams sunken into the cement ridges bifurcating the sidewalk.

Looks like a worthwhile use of GPUs to me!

  • March 21, 2018
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HerpDerp Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Count the ZOTAC GPU boxes. Don’t forget to smile and wave at the surveillance camera pointed at the open door. It and the street-facing windows are open to facilitate a cross-breeze for free, or at least cheap, cooling. I’m looking for workshop space. It’s Hong Kong and we’re dealing with Hong Kong real estate agents […]

Bodge of the week: replacing a naked piezo buzzer

  • March 20, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Two specimens of the same model of timer. Top: an as-yet-unused timer, opened up to show its innards. Bottom: my good-enough-for-now five-minute fix: soldering an SMD pieze buzzer to two of the leads on a transistor inductor. A few days ago, a dual-clock kitchen timer we’ve had for years stopped making much noise when its […]

Lead-free solder recommendation: Kester K100LD for shiny lead-free solder joins

  • March 6, 2018
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts
Can you tell the difference between the contrast between the joins made with a type of SAC305 solder (top) and the K100LD solder (bottom), both from Kester? It occurred to me recently that I had no idea how much solder remained on the spool I’d been using, of the SAC305 alloy (Indium Corporation’s CW-807, a […]