Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter

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 […]

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 ZAMAON.C0M
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 […]