Category: Personal Firsts

First taste of grapefruit + useful citrus peeler (akshully peel-starter) tool

  • June 1, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Until yesterday evening, I’d never consumed any fresh grapefruit. I had an inkling that it was less sweet than, say, an orange and recall reading or seeing or hearing that some people salted cut grapefruit to mask the bitterness (for a pop-sci explanation, check this October 2020 news article at science.org: Why adding salt makes […]

Labels for stored nuts and bolts as a simplest-possible, just-barely-useful task to furnish motivation needed to begin learning CAD software (FreeCAD)

  • December 7, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Three containers of M2 coupling nuts (304 stainless steel) bearing my taped-on homemade labels, along with the retailer’s packaging (clear plastic heat-sealed baggies). Motivation is critically important in task-based learning, but acquiring a new skill from scratch can be a hard slog even when you genuinely, even urgently, need to be able to do the […]

Here’s the obligatory thermal camera hand selfie

  • October 11, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
A human hand as viewed by a FLIR ONE Pro infrared camera dongle for Android phones. Temperature measurements with K-type thermocouple probes (to which I alluded in a previous entry: Hardwired auto-off sucks. Don’t build it into tools/instruments you design.) are useful, but you’ll only get readings at the precise locations where you place the […]

Hello from Judson’s Garage: Fiddling around with upscaling and enhancing low-res, low-quality video

  • August 16, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts
Concluding frames of the commercial for MEGO’s ‘Forbidden Zone Trap’ Planet of the Apes playset. Vault of Vintage Toys recently posted an image of the box for a 1970s-era MEGO Planet of the Apes (check out All PLANET OF THE APES Original Franchise Trailers (1968 – 1973) if you’re only familiar with the remakes) playset: […]

My first taken-through-microscope soldering video

  • April 4, 2021
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
Animated GIF clip of me soldering one pin on a breakout board. This afternoon, I soldered some breakout boards and recorded the process using the camera on my recently-acquired microscope (a SHOCREX 3800W) and used my other recent purchase (a QUICK 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier) to deal with the flux smoke instead of […]

Another chakra unblocked: first use of J-B Weld

  • January 29, 2019
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A new bit of hardware needs to be bolted down to the benchtop during use but I’d like to be able to stow it away the rest of the time. The base of the item in question features four M8-diameter holes, so I hunted around for stainless steel threaded inserts. I could only find stainless […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

  • March 6, 2018
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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 […]

Double rainbow at dawn

  • June 10, 2017
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Is that the way it is? Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
How long did it take you to spot the rainbow? The rainbow faded from one second to the next and, even at the moment I took the above photo, S. had to point it out to me. The fainter second rainbow, above and to the left of the first, only became apparent when I opened […]

Purikura with props; Or, getting the hang of using a Canon SELPHY printer.

  • February 3, 2017
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
We recently ventured out and acquired a Canon SELPHY CP1200 printer and the specialized paper and paper cartridge necessary for printing pages of photo stickers, eight identical stickers to a page, similar to the photo stickers produced by Japanese photo-sticker (purikura) booths. No small amount of fiddling with camera settings and a few sticker sheets […]

My soldering skillz still leave much to be desired

  • February 2, 2017
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A new (minor) personal first: connecting and driving a display, from Arduino. Thanks to Adafruit for the tutorial (Monochrome OLED Breakouts) and open-source libraries I’m using to drive this little 128×64 OLED display. Note: I am a repeat Adafruit customer but purchased these particular displays from a Taobao merchant for a fraction of the Adafruit […]