Photos of and through an alley gate in Causeway Bay (April 2021).
Category: The Diary of Lupin Pooter
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 & […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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, […]
There are innumerable how-to videos and static, step-by-step online guides to replenishing the water inside the fluid reservoir of a Magic 8-Ball, but a cursory Google search didn’t turn up any explanation of the process by which the water manages to evaporate out of its little plastic prison. My first guess would be that there’s […]