Hello Moon! + Bearing witness to innovation in food and beverage engineering at HK Starbucks

  • July 4, 2023
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The Moon peeking out between trees and streetlamps, as seen from the back of a speeding taxi. An unobstructed view of Luna. Daytime mobile phone camera shots of the Moon, at least the ones snapped by yours truly on the devices I’ve used in recent years, come out better than nighttime attempts. I took these […]

Another pickled pepper grabber [OR] Inexpertly deburring the holes and rounding the corners of a stamped-steel teabag-squeezer-squisher

  • June 21, 2023
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Forks, butter knives, spoons, and tea spoons. Those are the implements that populate the open-top compartments in the plastic cutlery tray in one of the topmost drawers in our kitchen. Unless you’ve inherited or splashed out on a complete set of sterling silver Edwardian-era cutlery that includes highly-specialized implements like horseradish spoons, grape shears, sugar […]

Out and about in Tsuen Wan last week

  • June 6, 2023
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The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Last week, running errands in Tsuen Wan, I took a few seconds of video and a still photo at a crosswalk aka pedestrian crossing. It’s interesting to observe the significant fraction of persons continuing to wear masks, even outdoors, months after the territory’s mask mandate was lifted (HK to drop mask mandate from tomorrow [2023-02-28]). […]

First taste of grapefruit + useful citrus peeler (akshully peel-starter) tool

  • June 1, 2023
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Until yesterday evening, I’d never consumed any fresh grapefruit. I had an inkling that it was less sweet than, say, an orange and recall reading or seeing or hearing that some people salted cut grapefruit to mask the bitterness (for a pop-sci explanation, check this October 2020 news article at science.org: Why adding salt makes […]

Taste of Latinum, Taste of GOLD [condensed soup edition]

  • May 22, 2023
Categories
Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The easiest (or laziest) way of advertising in this corner of the globe is to operate on the basis that local consumers are real-world equivalents of Ferengi route and strongly insinuate that the product being hawked, whatever it may be, is associated with the rapid accumulation of vast wealth. For the first time, I’m seeing […]

Mysterious caterpillar (?) spotted this afternoon

  • May 20, 2023
Categories
All My Friends Are Insects The Diary of Lupin Pooter
S. and I were on our way somewhere when the slow and gentle undulatory motion of a caterpillar caught my eye. We paused for a moment, I took a short bit of video of the thing zoomed-in as much as possible without reducing the bug to a blur, and then we continued on our way. […]

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

  • May 15, 2023
Categories
The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The maxim No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. is attributed to Aesop and the fable of The Lion and the Mouse. Today, I’m pleased to bear witness to a good deed done by an unknown stranger. The act of kindness in question strikes me as quite likely completely altruistic as […]

Some Photos (20230323): Non-Normal Human Research Center

  • March 23, 2023
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
I cribbed this entry’s title from the English text of a peculiar sticker that I saw on the rear hatch window of a minivan and used a cropped version of the least-blurry image I took through our taxi’s front windshield for the post thumbnail.

Fluoride testing tap water, retail-purchased bottled spring water, and distilled water

  • March 4, 2023
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Looks like 0.5 mg/L (equivalent to 0.5ppm) of fluoride in our tap water. According to the Use fluoride page at toothclub.gov.hk, the fluoride concentration of our tap water should be 0.5 mg/L (equivalent to 0.5ppm): Domestic water in Hong Kong has been fluoridated since 1961. This has led to a great decline in the incidence […]

Gold-leaf-bedecked, laser-cut cake + cakes with oxygen absorber and oxygen indicator sachets

  • February 7, 2023
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Some of S.’s colleagues recently gifted her a couple of attractive, packaged-for-gift-giving-purposes cakes they’d purchased while on holiday overseas. One of the cakes, cherry-blossom-themed, with the transparent plastic removed. One of the cakes featured a cherry blossom motif. It was made of yellow sponge cake to which red or pink food coloring had been added, […]

7030 cool/cold white SMD LEDs and paper circuitry (using copper tape + 3M 9703 anisotropically conductive tape)

  • January 25, 2023
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
I was looking for some large-ish SMD LEDs to incorporate in a paper circuit, using copper tape for the traces, on a note card, to try out 3M 9703 tape (3M Electrically Conductive Adhesive Transfer Tape 9703), sometimes referred to as z-axis conductive tape because it doesn’t conduct laterally (from side to side, i.e. along […]

De-annoyancing the YouTube subscriptions page (UPDATE: added visual video duration indicators)

  • January 8, 2023
Categories
Contrivances JavaScript Mucking About With Things
I wrote a userscript to get rid of YouTube’s notifications tally and irritating fly-out on-hover overlays and gray-out upcoming vids and shorts: YouTube-Subscriptions-Better-er.user.js […].