Exploring a sunflower with a cheap 60x-100x clip-on microscope

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Mucking About With Things Spitting Images
An inexpensive 60x-100x-magnification clip-on microscope like the one shown above can be a shed load of a lot of fun. Last Friday, I spent one of the shortest hours of my life (because TFWYHV) exploring a sunflower, one which I’d just lopped off its stalk, from a bunch that had brightened our home for the […]

Brrrt… Bleep Bloop: Forrest Mims’s 3909-based toy organ

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Mucking About With Things Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
If you give the MP3 file embedded above a play, you’ll hear me noodling around with my slightly modified version of the “toy organ” DC circuit featured on page 105 of Forrest Mims Engineer’s Notebook [ISBN 9781878707031]. Using alligator clips, I attached each of the three different types of small 8Ω speaker (left to right: […]

Wanna hear about the time that I bought four LM3909Ns?

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Mucking About With Things Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
… and they came wrapped in sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers? Above: My four itty bitty LM3909Ns came sandwiched between two rectangular bits of pink (possibly anti-static) foam, wound inside a chrysalis of plastic wrap (UK: cling film) which was, in turn, lovingly cocooned within a mass of sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers. And they’re older than you, assuming […]

Some Taobao merchants sell PTFE-coated wire and others sell spools

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Mucking About With Things Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Some Taobao merchants sell PTFE-coated wire and other sell little spools, but I couldn’t find any offering spools of PTFE-coated wire, so I got some of each and did the spooling myself. I neglected to include any known-size objects for scale but I the center-hole of one of those spools is just large enough to […]

How come nobody knows? Introducing NighIsTheEnd.rb, a helper script for making signs

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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
First I acquired (read: bought cheap) some packs of velcro-backed felt letters. Then I got some large-ish scraps of thick black felt. On a completely unrelated project, I tried using a hot-glue glue gun for the first time in my life. It clogged. Boo hoo. I still needed a glue gun, so I ordered some […]

For my first blog-to-tweet, a gorgeous cloud!

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Mucking About With Things Spitting Images

It’s the only way to be sure

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Mucking About With Things
Recently, I bought a sound-playing children’s book and another with grating-based animations and dissected both of them to see precisely how they worked and what materials had been used.

First-ever soldering experience! Why did I wait so long?

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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts