Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Mind the Swarf and Deburr the World

  • November 25, 2023
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Nearly all of my fasteners (nuts, bolts, washers, et al.) come direct from the ol’ Big Rock Candy Mountain [#], usually in heat-sealed clear plastic bags bearing adhesive-backed labels that have been run through thermal printers and have the same hand feel as thermal-printed receipts. The crisp black text on some, though not all, of […]

A busted espresso machine leaves town. A new espresso machine comes to town.

  • November 6, 2023
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Recently, after a long and gradual decline that culminated in a series of acute failures of escalating severity until finally no espresso was bring produced at all, our superannuated De’Longhi bean-to-cup espresso machine (a Magnifica ECAM 23.120 B [B for black]) gave up the ghost. Bands of condensation droplets in the new machine’s water reservoir. […]

Rebarrr and… Giant Centipedes

  • October 13, 2023
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand We'll go much more a roving
Below is a photo of some corroded rebar, exposed through spalling, on the floor of a multi-level underground car park in a residential complex here in Hong Kong. Snapshot of a section of floor in a multi-level underground parking lot. Today’s other photo is of a rusty cover for some sort of plumbing/electrical infrastructure access […]

Double-volute-spring-havin’ wire rope cutters

  • August 18, 2023
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HerpDerp Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Until I got some of the Knipex wire rope cutters shown below, I’d never seen a volute spring and didn’t know they existed. Guess I’ve led a somewhat sheltered life. The uncharacteristically brief Wikipedia article says they can frequently be found as a component of garden pruning shears and, though I have used pairs of […]

A product review TPTB never wanted to see the light of day

  • August 16, 2023
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
My 3-star review of a set of nut drivers was unacceptable to Amazon.com. A little over a week ago, I submitted an Amazon.com review for the first time in, unless my memory fails me, years and years. The post-form-submission Review submitted – Thank you!” message advised me that processing the review could take several days […]

Cleaning and picking nits on (cheap-o, carbon-steel) Forstner bit assortment packaging

  • August 15, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
I picked up a 2nd assortment of cheap-o carbon-steel Forstner drill bits a while ago. The bits in the new set have thinner shanks, so they’ll fit in my beater cordless drill’s smallish keyless chuck, which is just barely too small for the girthier Irwin-brand Forstner bits. Their shanks are also hexagonal and less slippy […]

Wiha SAE nut driver set handle color, size markings (Wiha 34390 7-Piece)

  • August 8, 2023
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Wiha’s 34390 7 PIECE SOFTFINISH HOLLOW SHAFT NUT DRIVER SET, as received by yours truly, as shown on Amazon.com, and as shown on Wihatools.com. Yesterday, a set of Wiha inch-size nut drivers (34390 7 PIECE SOFTFINISH HOLLOW SHAFT NUT DRIVERS) that I’d bought on Amazon.com arrived . They didn’t match the product photo (red-and-black instead […]

They’re fine, but why are there just four of them? + Holes through silicone rubber

  • August 3, 2023
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Contrivances Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Phillips head when they were introduced and began to see widespread adoption, not only because but certainly in part because they reduce the chances of your tool slip-sliding off the fastener head. Inner-hex aka hex socket drive or Torx-Plus ) is mostly what I have and use. More on the smaller tools advantage of smaller […]

Checking relative write and read speeds on some 32GB μSD cards

  • July 16, 2023
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HerpDerp Testing The Diary of Lupin Pooter
One of our felines, having a drink. Video resolution is extra-poor due to cropping of the video. One of our felines, having a drink. Cropped video. The video above is cropped from a 1080p (i.e. 1920×1080-pixel) AVI video recorded by a cheapo trail cam I purchased recently out of curiosity. These things have myriad potential […]

Improving my Powershell prompt with Reddit copypasta

  • July 13, 2023
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Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Powershell The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Date (as YYYYMMDD), time, and the preceding command’s run time. This is an animated GIF so that you can see how the time in the prompt updates when a command is run. Often, when I’ve been noodling around, or installing or updating software, or trying this or that at the command line, I select all […]

Hello Moon! + Bearing witness to innovation in food and beverage engineering at HK Starbucks

  • July 4, 2023
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Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The Moon peeking out between trees and streetlamps, as seen from the back of a speeding taxi. An unobstructed view of Luna. Daytime mobile phone camera shots of the Moon, at least the ones snapped by yours truly on the devices I’ve used in recent years, come out better than nighttime attempts. I took these […]

Another pickled pepper grabber [OR] Inexpertly deburring the holes and rounding the corners of a stamped-steel teabag-squeezer-squisher

  • June 21, 2023
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Forks, butter knives, spoons, and tea spoons. Those are the implements that populate the open-top compartments in the plastic cutlery tray in one of the topmost drawers in our kitchen. Unless you’ve inherited or splashed out on a complete set of sterling silver Edwardian-era cutlery that includes highly-specialized implements like horseradish spoons, grape shears, sugar […]