Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Mushy bars of soap: testing a countermeasure

  • April 4, 2021
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Contrivances Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
The plastic countertop soap dishes we’ve gotten have ridges intended to keep the soap bar a millimeter or so above the rest of the dish surface. Those ridges are a bit on the wide, long, and numerous side, however, and the result is that the parts of the bar that contact the ridges stay moist longer than the rest of the bar and those areas often feel mushy the next time one grabs the soap.

Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier

  • April 3, 2021
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Top of my Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier, with the tethered remote control and not-yet consulted Chinese-language instruction manual resting next to the base of the flexible duct. There wasn’t much assembly involved. One end of the flexible duct slides onto the flange mounted atop the machine and attaching the flared rubber intake […]

New microscope for the workbench

  • April 2, 2021
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
Snapshot of the screen showing part of the calibration card included with the microscope’s camera. The magnification goes much higher but this is the highest at which a meaningful bit of the card is visible. I recently acquired a new workbench microscope (a SHOCREX 3800W) from the manufacturer’s (or rebadger and reseller’s) Tmall store. I […]

Avoid swallowed by children

  • March 29, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Caution: Avoid swallowed by children. Rinse immediately with water if contact with eyes. We’ve been checking out the labels on the cleaning products, soaps, shampoos, deodorants, etc. that we use, looking for quats or substances that release them. Here’s an article that’ll give you an idea of why: Questioning quats’ safety, published in Chemical & […]

And we’re back.

  • March 29, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Canon laser printer teardown pareidolia

  • August 14, 2019
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HerpDerp Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
To satisfy my own curiosity, I recently tore down two old Canon multifunction printers, an inkjet and a laser. When I removed one of the motors, the relative positions of the hole into which the gear on the motor axle had gone and two rivets (which were actually the ends of metal axles for other […]

Voight-Kampff and general sanity self-evaluation visual aids now available in select MTR stations

  • July 30, 2019
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Concerned that you might be an empathy-less replicant whose belief in their own humanity is a delusion based on false, implanted memories? Worried that you may be losing your mind? Head to your nearest Hong Kong MTR station and have a gander at one of the posters shown above (scroll to see all three). If […]

Poster seen in an elevator (“No excuse, Carrie Lam”)

  • July 25, 2019
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Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
We spotted this poster on the wall of the elevator that takes concertgoers from street level to the This Town Needs live music venue in Yau Tong when we were there for last night’s ALVVAYS show.

ALVVAYS in Hong Kong (at This Town Needs in Yau Tong)

  • July 24, 2019
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
I bought the tickets months ago and promptly forgot about it until I flipped to this week’s page in my tried-and-true dead-tree calendar/planner. Thus it transpired that S. and I went to see ALVVAYS play at This Town Needs (the reincarnation of Hidden Agenda) out in Yau Tong (a gritty-by-HongKong-standards industrial area sort of but […]

Bigfoot in Hong Kong

  • July 19, 2019
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Nike doesn’t sell very many non-hideous sneakers in [CURRENT YEAR], so I caved and got a “recrafted” version of a 1992 sneaker (the Air Skylon) and a reissued 1997 model. Having larger-than-the-median feet in the Big Lychee poses some challenges. On Hong Kong stairs, for example, the steps are narrow enough that my toes or […]

A quarter as much at just shy of double the price: Hong Kong retail in a nutshell

  • July 10, 2019
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Purchasing anything aside from the lowest-quality, subsistence-level, Hong-Kong-Chinese-cultural-normative goods in a brick-and-mortar shop in Hong Kong is a fool’s game. Unless you absolutely must have the thing immediately — and in that case good luck figuring out where to get it if it’s not something you’re already regularly buying — you’re much better getting it online.

Chrome Vanadium Chinesium: Finest quality. Superior workmanship.

  • May 1, 2019
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
A recent haphazard domestic DIY escapade furnished me with the above photo: replacing the shredded sisal twine and fabric on our cats’ scratching posts. The sisal materials were fixed in place using beefy little round-crown staples, so I ordered some staple removers (the ones with a screwdriver form factor, ending in what looks like chisel-edged, […]