The Case of the Slumping Polystyrene Foam (Question for the Experts)

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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Makin' stuff and breakin' stuff Mucking About With Things Questions for the Experts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Recently, I mounted a few pairs of metal chests of drawers piggyback-style, which entailed drilling some holes. To keep the point of my drill from skittering away, I used a center punch to create a tiny dimple at each of the intended hole locations. Intending to clean the drill and the deburring tool that I’d used on the holes (a hex-shank deburring blade in a hex-shank handle as you can see in the photos below) once I had unpacked the tool-cleaning stuff (WD-40, Fluid Film, etc.), I laid them both — along with the center punch — on a fragment of one of the polystyrene foam sheets in which the metal drawers had been packed for shipment.

Adding duration info to video filenames using Mediainfo and Powershell

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Contrivances Mucking About With Things Powershell The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Animated GIF showing Windows Explorer and a terminal window and the command being used and a video filename being updated with its duration. First, here’s a one-liner you can employ on Windows to add duration information to video filenames. It uses Powershell and assumes you’ve installed the command line version of MediaInfo for Windows. The […]

Tin-can time capsule

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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Lid of the can of 2008-Olympics-themed band-aids. In the course of some tidying up, I happened upon this can of 2008-Olympics-themed Johnson & Johnson band-aids. They were manufactured in China but the labeling on the tin is Japanese. Front of the can of 2008-Olympics-themed band-aids. The can and all of the band-aids are adorned with […]

New vs. used T130-2.0SK ATTEN soldering iron tip

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Bizznezz HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
New-in-tube ATTEN T130-2.0SK soldering iron tip. This is a mostly-photos followup to , which concluded with some photos taken of a lightly used T130-2.0SK ATTEN soldering iron tip, described online as a knife tip. It gets inserted into a corded handle that, in turn, plugs into an ATTEN GT-series soldering station (such as the ATTEN […]

Fingertip Microscope iMicro Q3 (late-2023 Kickstarter project from Shanghai)

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Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
Phone-camera-microscope’s-eye view of the surface of the wrist wrest pad glued onto a computer keyboard. Phone-camera-microscope’s-eye view of the surface of the wrist wrest pad glued onto a computer keyboard. A 2023 Kickstarter project for a high-magnification mobile-phone-camera microscope that closed to new backers last December (iMicro Q3 – A Fingertip Microscope toward the Optical […]

More conical? Or more trumpet-shaped? Result inconclusive.

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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Post-soldering, post-cleaning pic of the protoboard and rows of pin headers used in this little test, labeled with the solder wire used for two pairs of 2×4 pin header blocks: 8 pins soldered with no added flux and then 8 pins soldered with Chip Quick CQ4LF liquid flux, done for each alloy. I’m saddled with […]

Never forget that rubber bands eventually go bad.
AND, if you need less-ephemeral, non-messy rubber bands, use silicone rubber bands (FREE ADVICE #002).

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Free Advice HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things RECCIES The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Fragments of deteriorated rubber bands. At upper left: bits from rubber bands that were, IIRC, bluish-green originally. Or were they purple? They’re bluish-green now. At lower-right: parts of what were once white rubber bands. Rubber bands (here taken to mean solid, non-woven elastic rings) degrade. Whether they’re made from natural rubber or synthetic rubber (e.g. […]

Testing fresh solder wire: various flavors of flux-cored K100LD and Innolot

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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Post-soldering, pre-cleaning photo of the protoboard and rows of pin headers used in this little test. Numerous punishing soldering sessions have left this solderless breadboard stained, scorched, and cracked and it is not long for this world. Recently, I posted about picking up soldering again after a hiatus () and I’ve gotten some fresh spools […]

Odd (and oddly transient) software (mis)behavior:
Could not find file 'gifski.dll'.
ScreenToGif seemingly losing or forgetting gifski.dll

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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Yesterday, I encountered an odd issue where ScreenToGif seemed unable to use its own bundled or downloaded-at-install-time version of gifski (gifski.dll).

Getting back into the soldering saddle (Indium SAC305 vs. Kester K100LD with and without extra flux)

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Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering Testing The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
One of a few snapshots I took of the same soldered pins, in between twiddling the focus height adjustment on a microscope. In this first of three images, the uppermost bits of the pins are the most in-focus features. This and the next two photos are taken of a small region on the prototype board […]

The mystery of the rusty ceramic knife (SOLVED), or destructive partial disassembly of a Kyocera ceramic santoku knife

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Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
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.

A’sittin’ on a rainbow: Using Buzz to transcribe speech from audio files

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HerpDerp Metagrobolized Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
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 […]