Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits

  • February 1, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits as a means of trying out a couple of different soldering iron tips, whilst listening to some recent podcast interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. The surface of the yellow silicone mat on which I worked is speckled with tiny dried droplets of rosin and will […]

恭喜發財! And the cargo tricycles sit idle.

  • January 31, 2019
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Is that the way it is? Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter
恭喜發財! That phrase has a literal meaning but, in practice, it’s used as a verbal cue to either fork over one or more envelopes of banknotes or to pause for a moment to receive some envelopes of cash or to do both. There’s traditional visiting and eating involved too, mostly to ensure that family members […]

When batteries splooge, electronics are the first to suffer

  • January 30, 2019
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
You go a week or so without looking at your TV, only to pick up the remote control and find it stone dead. Then, when you pry off the battery cover to swap in some new AAs, bits of the old batteries fall out, along with a shower of greenish-whitish powder. After you pick up […]

Another chakra unblocked: first use of J-B Weld

  • January 29, 2019
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A new bit of hardware needs to be bolted down to the benchtop during use but I’d like to be able to stow it away the rest of the time. The base of the item in question features four M8-diameter holes, so I hunted around for stainless steel threaded inserts. I could only find stainless […]

Seems Legit: Mitutoyo 500-196-30 AOS Digimatic Calipers

  • January 22, 2019
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A skim of various Google results (e.g. How to tell if my mitutoyo calipers are fake? and Is it an original mitutoyo vernier caliper?) followed by a quick visual inspection of my purchase leads me to believe that I’m the proud new owner of a pair of authentic Mitutoyo 500-196-30 AOS Digimatic Calipers. They were […]

赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift + GOOP really has CHAINGED!

  • December 12, 2018
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift. In Traditional Chinese, it’s 贈品. The same reasoning that comes into play in trying to reason out the sorts of merchandise that might hypothetically be traded over interstellar distances (assuming that the buyers don’t already have Star-Trek-style replicators) applies when choosing whether to order something from Taobao or […]

Butchering an LED bulb

  • December 6, 2018
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
This light bulb (Philips 18W 6500K 2000lm 150mA 220-240V ac 50/60Hz 9290011650A) had the temerity to flicker, so it got to taste the cold HSS of my hacksaw blade. When one of the bulbs in our kitchen began to flicker, I saw a chance to sate my curiosity as to what was inside. The meanings […]

Butchering a BMO

  • November 29, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Forgive me, BMO! Tonight, I extracted an MTR Octopus card NFC thingamajig and implanted it in a purchased-for-this-purpose hollow BMO figure from, apparently, a 2014 series of McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. This particular BMO toy was dubbed Channel Changin’ BMO because its screen consists of a lenticular-printed sticker that allows it to display multiple facial […]

Better late than never: carbide-tipped hole saws, M35 HSS-Co step drills, and deburrer

  • November 18, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
My second batch of Bosch TM5 carbide-tipped hole saws, with a rubber band holding the packaging on the largest one closed after I opened it, three no-brand-but-putatively-M35-grade HSS-Co step drills, a deburring tool and (not really visible) a plastic box containing ten carbide tips for same. It sure would’ve been swell if the items pictured […]

Today’s pre-soldering photo

  • October 11, 2018
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HerpDerp Sodding soldering Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The seller included the pin headers but yours truly had to stump up the 2P screw terminals. Today’s recreational soldering: some breakouts for Si4599 MOSFETs and a couple more for LTC2944 battery-monitoring ICs. The photo was taken through the lens of a flex-arm-mounted magnifier removed from a set of “helping hands” and remounted in a […]

And just a few decades later…

  • October 5, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Two lemon batteries, connected in series, can (just barely) power a red LED. Making a lemon battery was one of the sciencey activities I encountered frequently while leafing through children’s science-experiments-you-can-do-at-home and “rainy day” activity books when I was a young’un and wanted to try but couldn’t. As this article explains, a single lemon isn’t […]

All of the really intriguing events occur unobserved

  • September 25, 2018
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter
This rubber band failed in such an interesting way that I wish I’d caught it in the act.