Tab sweep numero uno

  • October 21, 2016
Categories
Metagrobolized
FRICTION A blog post about how Harry Potter sustained the author during America’s immediate post-911 mass-psychological dark mood titled The Importance of Fiction. A good read. My mind initially saw, instead, the title The Importance of Friction. On Hackaday, Jenny List asks Whatever Happened To The Paper Mobile Phone? A Lemelson-MIT Program profile of Randice-Lisa […]

Brrrt… Bleep Bloop: Forrest Mims’s 3909-based toy organ

  • October 10, 2016
Categories
Mucking About With Things Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
If you give the MP3 file embedded above a play, you’ll hear me noodling around with my slightly modified version of the “toy organ” DC circuit featured on page 105 of Forrest Mims Engineer’s Notebook [ISBN 9781878707031]. Using alligator clips, I attached each of the three different types of small 8Ω speaker (left to right: […]

Wanna hear about the time that I bought four LM3909Ns?

  • October 9, 2016
Categories
Mucking About With Things Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
… and they came wrapped in sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers? Above: My four itty bitty LM3909Ns came sandwiched between two rectangular bits of pink (possibly anti-static) foam, wound inside a chrysalis of plastic wrap (UK: cling film) which was, in turn, lovingly cocooned within a mass of sock-foam-mesh fruit wrappers. And they’re older than you, assuming […]

Some Taobao merchants sell PTFE-coated wire and others sell spools

  • September 10, 2016
Categories
Mucking About With Things Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Some Taobao merchants sell PTFE-coated wire and other sell little spools, but I couldn’t find any offering spools of PTFE-coated wire, so I got some of each and did the spooling myself. I neglected to include any known-size objects for scale but I the center-hole of one of those spools is just large enough to […]

Failure mode for a cute lil’ magnet: separation of chrome-y paint from magnet’s working surface

  • September 10, 2016
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Another neat little magnet bites the dust and the failure mode, as usual, is the separation of the shiny chrome-like coating from the working surface of the magnet. So long, seal with stripey beach ball, I hardly knew ye.

How come nobody knows? Introducing NighIsTheEnd.rb, a helper script for making signs

  • September 7, 2016
Categories
Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
First I acquired (read: bought cheap) some packs of velcro-backed felt letters. Then I got some large-ish scraps of thick black felt. On a completely unrelated project, I tried using a hot-glue glue gun for the first time in my life. It clogged. Boo hoo. I still needed a glue gun, so I ordered some […]

Homework’s whack, and so are rules! Tucking in your shirt’s for fools!

  • September 5, 2016
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Lots of portable electronic gadgets use Li-ion batteries, so I can understand why an Li-ion battery warning sticker would arouse the interest of thieves somewhere in the logistics chain between Amazon.co.uk and me. Fortunately, they weren’t interested in hot-glue guns and the holes which they poked in the box, including one through the Li-ion battery […]

Why is Genki Sushi’s hip-hop bear mascot sweating? Why is it making a finger gun gesture?

  • August 18, 2016
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Why is the tissue-dispensing version of Genki Sushi’s new(ish) hip-hop/gangsta-themed bear mascot sweating? Does it want customers to use more tissues, faster? Or is it worried that restaurant patrons will exhaust its supply of tissues quickly and a staff member will thrust more into its maw? Other depictions of the bear bro are just as, […]

Interesting living (and formerly living) things … at the beach a couple of weeks ago

  • August 17, 2016
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Better late than never is the principle at work here. I processed these images weeks ago but didn’t get around to posting them. Though I haven’t actually nailed down the identity of any of them, in some cases, I have a guess or two. There’s a lot going on here on this rock. The finger-shaped […]

Found: one left-foot flip-flop (prestigious Chynel brand)

  • August 3, 2016
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A typhoon passed through Hong Kong recently. Afterwards, at low-tide time, I donned a pair of low-rise duck boots and headed down to the small beach nearby to see whether any interesting sea life had been washed closer to shore or, less-fortunately for the creatures concerned, ashore. I did see some interesting living and once-living […]

For my first blog-to-tweet, a gorgeous cloud!

  • July 31, 2016
Categories
Mucking About With Things Spitting Images

It’s the only way to be sure

  • June 23, 2016
Categories
Mucking About With Things
Recently, I bought a sound-playing children’s book and another with grating-based animations and dissected both of them to see precisely how they worked and what materials had been used.