Category: HerpDerp

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

  • February 1, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits as a means of trying out a couple of different soldering iron tips, whilst listening to some recent podcast interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. The surface of the yellow silicone mat on which I worked is speckled with tiny dried droplets of rosin and will […]

赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift + GOOP really has CHAINGED!

  • December 12, 2018
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift. In Traditional Chinese, it’s 贈品. The same reasoning that comes into play in trying to reason out the sorts of merchandise that might hypothetically be traded over interstellar distances (assuming that the buyers don’t already have Star-Trek-style replicators) applies when choosing whether to order something from Taobao or […]

Butchering a BMO

  • November 29, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Forgive me, BMO! Tonight, I extracted an MTR Octopus card NFC thingamajig and implanted it in a purchased-for-this-purpose hollow BMO figure from, apparently, a 2014 series of McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. This particular BMO toy was dubbed Channel Changin’ BMO because its screen consists of a lenticular-printed sticker that allows it to display multiple facial […]

Better late than never: carbide-tipped hole saws, M35 HSS-Co step drills, and deburrer

  • November 18, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
My second batch of Bosch TM5 carbide-tipped hole saws, with a rubber band holding the packaging on the largest one closed after I opened it, three no-brand-but-putatively-M35-grade HSS-Co step drills, a deburring tool and (not really visible) a plastic box containing ten carbide tips for same. It sure would’ve been swell if the items pictured […]

Today’s pre-soldering photo

  • October 11, 2018
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HerpDerp Sodding soldering Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The seller included the pin headers but yours truly had to stump up the 2P screw terminals. Today’s recreational soldering: some breakouts for Si4599 MOSFETs and a couple more for LTC2944 battery-monitoring ICs. The photo was taken through the lens of a flex-arm-mounted magnifier removed from a set of “helping hands” and remounted in a […]

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 […]