Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Dishwasher-safeness claims are often fibs: Free Advice #001

  • March 11, 2024
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Free Advice Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Remember… free advice is worth every cent you’ve paid for it. Rule of thumb: If it’s not all-metal (e.g. a plain stainless steel saucepan) or all-ceramic (e.g. an unadorned coffee mug) or a solid lump of plastic like a one-piece, you perhaps ought to hand-wash it. Dishwasher detergents are less sudsy but significantly more chemically […]

JUST BARLING EGGZ

  • March 5, 2024
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Grubbin' HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
Today’s post: two short clips of the changing condensation patterns on the inner surface of the glass lid of a stockpot, filmed consecutively while I was hard-boiling a couple of dozen eggs at some point in the past few days. The videos are set to loop and are muted by default but the audio is […]

Just use a different-country ZAMAON (if feasible)

  • February 22, 2024
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS ZAMAON.C0M
We’re living through interesting times. A relatively minor subplot of the whole shebang is the sclerotization and crumbling-at-the-margins of Web 2.0 behemoths like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple (as well as their co-dependent, co-evolved big-tech-company symbiotes). At this point, the deterioration is undeniable and slightly painful to those who interacted much with the same […]

MDF and rubber; spiral swarf from Forstner drill bits + LDF/MDF/HDF

  • February 19, 2024
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HerpDerp Swarf + Copeaux + Scobs The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Old-ish photo today, from a small project that entailed countersinking thin, flat fastener heads in fiberboard and in thick, fabric-reinforced synthetic rubber. A couple of Forstner bits, below samples of their respective target materials, with (middle) spiral bits of swarf produced during drilling. Before drilling the through-holes for the fasteners’ shafts, I used Forstner bits […]

Heap of diminutive screwdrivers and nutdrivers [Vessel, PB Swiss, Athlet, Wera, and Wiha]

  • February 6, 2024
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Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS ZAMAON.C0M
You can’t really have too many of certain basic tools or or too much of certain consumables. In our household, it’s stuff like scissors and box cutters, tape (e.g. masking tape, strapping/packaging tape, and regular transparent Scotch Tape [UK equivalent: Sellotape]), rulers and measuring tapes, mechanical pencils and pens and markers, rubber bands, and zip […]

Metal confetti

  • January 25, 2024
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Swarf + Copeaux + Scobs The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
Not very long ago, I mounted some metal fixtures, made of 304 stainless steel. The fixtures were intended to be affixed to their substrate using adhesive and each one came with a tube of glue. How robust an attachment the stuff would create, I cannot venture to guess, and I opted to use screws. An […]

New (to me) Amazon shenanigans: Requiring a business account AND a “healthcare license” to buy a screwdriver bit holder

  • January 18, 2024
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Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS ZAMAON.C0M
A few days back, I looked up the Amazon listing for a low-ESD precision screwdriver bit holder, the 1013 Kraftform Micro ESD Bitholding screwdriver and was nonplussed to see that Amazon was requiring a prospective purchaser to be both an Amazon business account holder and to have submitted healthcare industry credentials to one of Earth’s […]

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

  • January 12, 2024
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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 […]

Viennetta, but made of minerals instead of vanilla ice cream (efflorescence?)

  • January 2, 2024
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand We'll go much more a roving
S. and I recently visited a local landmark-slash-mini-park: Blackhead Point, the site of Signal Hill Tower, a brick structure erected in 1907, subsequently enlarged, and shortly thereafter abandoned. Photo of Signal Hill Tower (in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong), taken by yours truly in December 2023. Each day at 1pm, a large copper sphere […]

Ratcheting wrenches for small fasteners (≤M4)

  • December 15, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Today’s story begins a few weeks back. While tightening up some loose kitchen cabinet and drawer handles and the screws that attach drawer sides to drawer slides, I replaced several of the handles’ countersunk Phillips-head screws with hex-head bolts and washers. Phillips-head screws that were easy to reach straight-on with a screwdriver were snugged-up and […]

Micro-landscapes in cardboard after some pliers-cranking

  • December 13, 2023
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
Cross-threading is a bummer. Through a momentary lapse in punctiliousness, I apparently managed to get a male-threaded pipe plug started into the female-threaded end of a piece of pipe at a tiny angle. Or, given that the plug didn’t seem to be canted at all, perhaps I failed to remove a particularly pernicious bit of […]

Mind the Swarf and Deburr the World

  • November 25, 2023
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HerpDerp Swarf + Copeaux + Scobs 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 […]