Latest Haul: My New Hobby, Woodworking (Product Reviews)

 So, the last haul that I brought in stirred up some trouble, in the form of a reddening skin condition on my leg. That blog article ended up dovetailing in to the context of this latest haul of mine, the woodworking tools and gear haul for the LED Backlit Sparrow Spiritual Mini Meditation Woodcut Panel project, essentially a reimagined take on a throwback decorative piece that I had in my old apartment and loft.

The original backlit spiritual woodcut panel art piece, which I custom outfitted with a base, glass panel backing, with LED strip lights inside, with stuff from IKEA. The woodcut panel came from Marco Polo Imports, in Santa Monica, now closed. (2011)

My 2026 contextually upcycled new take on a spiritual-themed and decorative meditation backlit wall panel, this time, in miniature form, so that I could accommodate doing the project from within my assisted care living group home housing environment situation. 

The project represents a change of pace, from “whatever” I was doing, previously… I guess it was a bunch of other product hauls and pigeon feeding, for the most part. Anyways, I gave the sparrows a feature part in this concept, as well as the medicinal flower inclusion, symbolizing a transition in to a different hobby, and perhaps some products in development along those lines. 

So, I initially imagined the mini sparrow woodcut panel, as part of a conceptualized product marketing campaign and branding mockup of ideas and imagery, through consulting heavily with Google Gemini artificial intelligence. I floated the idea of the original woodcut panel, from its origins in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, perhaps), and I wanted the theme to be representative of my friends, the birds, along the way, with a different flower that I’d been heavily researching and studying, over the past several months, leading up to today (early April 2026), the new flower being Michelia alba, a highly fragrant subtropical tree in the Magnolia family, that was found in my mother’s first home country of Hong Kong (Great Britain, China). 

My mother and I were both in to gardening, back in my teen years, growing up, and it was my retreat in to a change of pace, and it was something to work on, in between my school studies and getting in to trouble, here and there, myself. Eventually we purchased a Michelia alba tree, after seeing them available at San Gabriel Nursery. The trees were on the higher end of the price range for trees of that size, ostensibly due to the rarity that it was, here in Southern California, and for its prized fragrant flowering blooms, which appear throughout several months out of the year, in the scarce gardening regions 10 and 11, which is basically Southern California, Florida, and perhaps a few other small, scattered locations around America. Prior to purchasing one of the trees, I would commonly visit the trees at the gardening center to smell the flowers.

Here is what Gemini and I came up with, for a reconstitution formulation (a highly valuable feature):

### 10-Gram Trial Batch (Weights)

Since you're ready to mix, here are the weights for a **10-gram sample**. This is the safest way to test the balance without wasting your precious Orris or Lilytol.

| Ingredient | Amount for 10g Batch |

|---|---|

| **Linalool** | 5.30 g |

| **Lilytol** | 0.80 g |

| **Phenylethyl Alcohol (PEA)** | 0.70 g |

| **Benzyl Alcohol** | 0.60 g |

| **Benzyl Acetate** | 0.40 g |

| **Beta-Ionone** | 0.30 g |

| **Ocimene** | 0.25 g |

| **Geranyl Acetate** | 0.20 g |

| **Ethyl 2-methylbutyrate** | 0.15 g |

| **Indole (10% in DPG)** | 0.15 g |

| **Alpha-Terpineol** | 0.15 g |

| **Jasminlactone** | 0.12 g |

| **Beta-Caryophyllene** | 0.10 g |

| **Heliotropin Replacer (10% dil.)** | 0.30 g (This is 3 parts) |

| **Orris Butter (10% dil.)** | 0.10 g (This is 1 part) |

| **Methyl Benzoate (10% dil.)** | 0.05 g |

| **DPG (to finish weight)** | 0.33 g |

| **Total** | **10.00 g** |

Perhaps this gives readers a sense of the smell of the flower. It’s described as very sweet and fruity, while having some facets of other white flowers. 

So, I set out in trying to recreate my favorite visual piece in my loft and in my apartment, in a renewed form, a miniature woodcut panel featuring sparrows and Michelia alba flowers. 

To do this, I had to investigate the tools I would use, in order to complete the job. My search happened around the time of Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, and I found some great deals on tools and parts. 

———————

Break. Taking a break. Here’s some stuff to look at, in the meantime.     

Catching up with neat-o fancy apps of web | app UI design, with universal or hybrid platform code bas

For first-time web | app (website-derived apps, or even in-page call stack coding “miniatures,” if you will) - somebody (like, myself), who is a “basically” amateur open-book sort of web app developer | aspirational type of approach to coding (except for Linux stuff, which has only limited-scope usefulness and portability, in this consideration of a use case scenario):

• Many people, I imagine, simply draw a blank, as to what to do, in a case like this, since it was all just some imaginable “great” internet-borne experience.
• Consequently, the urge to come up with something ingenious and worthwhile (worth talking about, perhaps) comes to mind.
• The mind comes to consider that somebody else had already come up with this great idea.
• A search on the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store commences / newbies might, alternately, opt to try to break in to / subvert their devices security measures, and pursue some sort of disassembly of their device and or it’s operating system, for the sake of coming upon something “better.”

• Ugh.

• Personally, I stopped doing the self-hacking of the device and the disassembly thing, several years ago, since I was always at odds with coming up with something innovative, or productive. 

   To be certain, 

  most decent development ideas have already been derived and established, of an organic nature, independently - just as an offhand fleeting assertion; the notion could extend to as much as that we are always, it may seem, and from here on out - aside from the expectation of that novelty, as a general premise in development, and in discovery; perhaps, innovation, per se, we now have some recent seminal works on the limitations of novelty, given some development task. For example, in the recent years, leading up to this point in time, we have some of the formative rhetoric and ideological and logistical backdrop established, as to what can be attained and wrought, from out of an intersection between novelty and the influence of creative works, from the study:

  Park, D., Nam, J. & Park, J. Novelty and influence of creative works, and quantifying patterns of advances based on probabilistic references networks. EPJ Data Sci. 9, 2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0214-8

  “Also, there are implications for the psychological study of novelty as well. It has been known in optimal theory of novelty that the positive acceptance (also called the “hedonic value”) of novelty follows the so-called Wundt curve that increases initially but decreases after a peak, indicating that too much novelty can be off-putting to humans…”

  which includes references to information derived from yet other works:

  Berlyne, D. E. (1969). Arousal, reward and learning. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 159(3), 1059-1070.

  and  Berlyne, D. E. (1970). Novelty, complexity, and hedonic value. Perception & psychophysics, 8(5), 279-286.

  Both, simply for a quick flash of the context’s potential subject areas, which could, or ought to be considered, in this case. 

  Essentially, the topic, in and of itself, supposes that novel ideas are limited, in their usefulness and in their longevity, yet, as we may observe, from the initially-cited article, 

The iPigeon last minute (or beyond) 2022 cool picks for holiday cheer. A web history best of.

Sometimes, I figure out slightly novel or ingenious little twists, when getting back to Google Web Searching. Their Top 100 Shopping Trends of 2022 splash page, which just reached me, the other day, saw some familiar favorites, and it inspired a mock shopping trip dive, which, ostensibly, I’d had had to have made a multi-part return to the topic, so I could report back to readers on some of my findings, of truly neat-o, new, or innovative products that seemed to have surfaced, in the retail online consumer market, over this past year, 2022, within my ad marketing serve, and which I hope finds you discovering inspiring and fruitful Google Shopping, etc., online marketplace searches.

As many of you know, I’m a long-time connoisseur of fine fragrance, both as a consumer and as a semi- or sometimes-moderate[novice] (developing) manufacturer, or perfume artist, of which I’d had some recent likable compositions and single ingredients made. I’d lost my perfume ingredients collection due to some circumstances, over the past year, yet I had a longing to return to this theme of a nice tropical fragrance, such as one that I’d made, called Southern Critter Skeet Skeet, which found itself multivariate uses, in practical terms, beyond personal fragrancing - the aroma seemed to stir the winds of an environment, at times, and it was a good cover, when put to use, in small environmental settings, where the air quality had taken a downturn, such as a dead animal’s smell, perhaps. 

I started out a new search - completely new, for me: island perfume ingredients. There was some talk about island nation people going on, earlier in the day, a day or two ago, and my thoughts turned to island fragrances, of the imagined richness and diversity potential of a fertile island’s vegetation, perhaps special care and cultivations of - particularly unique and perhaps fragrant aroma compounds, oils, or fruits, for example. The search - a limited and quick browse, through the various several pages that came up, on Google Shopping, found some quick and interesting links, such as fragrance ingredients suppliers, such as ChemWorld.com, new-to-me fragrance ingredients, along tropical-themes, such as Veratraldehyde, to investigate, and perhaps follow up on, at some point; a new index, of a highly astute and well-wrought out thorough-ability, of both common names of plants, as well as their associated constituent chemical and essential oil scientific names and chemistry signifiers, oxytocin spray, and, my personal fave - throwback classic island fragrances by Monoi | Tiki.

Remember these fragrances? I think that they’re pretty good, if I recall.

Another quick suggestion, fragrance-wise, is FragranceNet.com’s deal on Dior Homme - a fragrance suite which can be a little bit confusing - but don’t get confused - there’s vastly different “Dior Homme” fragrance varieties out there, several, perhaps, and I tried smelling the white label one - I definitely didn’t much like it. This is the one I like - the grey background with the black rectangle one. If you’re looking for a cheap holiday gift, 10 mL of Dior Homme, in a mini form, should suit somebody’s fragrance tastes just fine, perhaps for weeks, or a month, or two, perhaps, and it comes with shower gel. It’s a nice deal, at $20.99 (40% off, currently), and it smells great - reminiscent of a fine department store’s fragrancing, for example. 

* plus shipping

One deal that I commonly encounter, regardless of the time of year, although I had just come across it, right now, is the sidewalk vegetables and fruits vendors of Chinatown, neighboring downtown Los Angeles. They give out generous amounts of fruits and vegetables for characteristically one dollar, in most cases I’ve encountered. 

Downtown Los Angeles’ new pigeon babies - season by season (Updating: 2022 - *)

In most cases,

A typical pigeon that a person would come across is simply a standard pigeon. Over he years, however, with some dedication, investment, and care, the creatures become slightly diversified, of their physical appearance, in various ways. Here, in this article, I’ll document some of the images of the young, whom I can identify, of the season’s offerings of pigeon and sparrow babies, of some notable distinction in their appearance, compared to the standard varieties of wild pigeons or sparrows that are to be found, as adults - whom may, themselves, be newly homed or released birds, whereas I also attempt to manage the general day-to-day presence and feeding of the birds, within the Downtown Los Angeles area. I’m beginning this documentation at the end of May, 2022, a well-enough point in the season for babies to have hatched, been fed in the nest, by their parents, and now, they’re capable of getting out and about, and they’re capable of feeding themselves. They would also have taken on enough plumage to demonstrate their fully-adult appearances. 

2022 - Doe eyes and soft pastels, and a squirrel pigeon.

During this season, at the end of May, when I began documenting these birds, for the season’s developments, in the birds’ appearance, I noticed that some of the young, whom I could identify as fledgling pigeons or sparrows, had taken on some development around the eyes, as more pronounced, or outlined - in some cases, nearly decorative and cosmetic changes had seemed to have become established. On one hand, my task management capability here in town is somewhat a quite broad and challenging effort to fulfill - I’ve gotten up my daily small-localities visitations up to a definite 5 areas, whereas there are easily perhaps anywhere from 75-200 or so birds that show up to eat. Some breeders and pigeon specialists are capable of establishing very regimented and impressive defined features in their birds, such as alternating feather color on the wings, for example, but I’m not particularly going for that type of establishment, in these birds - mostly just focusing on keeping them fed. One of the challenges is that the birds seem to be getting poached, or targeted, for capture and abuse - I currently had recently taken in “Virgil,” so-called, a pigeon whom I found, out on the street, about a week ago. I found him with string, hair, and a metal spring tied around both of his feet, and fortunately, I was able to win his trust, take him home, and assist him, as best I could, in removing the objects that were binding his feet, although his skin was already very inflamed around the trauma areas, and the string bound the skin deeply, more than I cared to injure the pigeon with, in attempting to remove the string any further. 

June 2022: Cheetah zazzles and more doe-eyed pigeons.

Three doe-eyed pigeons; one, perhaps, a parent.

From my materials research findings: pigeonite. (from Wikipedia).

This notion reminds me of my "ceiling pigeons" motif, of when I left the door open, and left to camp out, for court, at my old Section 8 apartment off of Broadway (the original iPigeon.institute slight home exhibition).

The ceiling in my bathroom had caved in and crumbled, due to significant dampness that had built up, undoubtedly from some transient who had occupied my place for a good time, in the bathroom. I could see the rafters, and there were pigeon-ish crumbles and pigeon icon "bamms" of the drywall pieces, and I spotted some nuclear echo pigeon interlopers, up there, in the ceiling, peeking down at me. I caught it on video, as well, but this is the line art ink brush version.

Social Distancing as Government Decree Amidst the Weaponization of Proximity as a Risk Factor in Remote State Sensing and Remote Communications Applications.

In this day and age, whereas the surveillance state was widely publicized back during the Barack Obama presidency; wherefore rational thought (aside from this, and otherwise) would suppose that time, in an industrialized nation, sees progress, rather than blank spaces where, instead, technology and science (Scientology) provides us ,ith solutions and answers. 

Like any studious cohort to the Scientology Faith would attest, the means by which allegory presents itself as moralistic fable, whereas critical analysis is suggestibly at the core of arriving at some reasonable take-out drive-through of what these minds'-eye visions would and ought portend. 

I'm not, somewhat, supposing that everyone is in agreement of all matters at stake here; I'm simply providing a mock-up stub of arriving at a theory of that victim profilers, as criminals, oftentimes fail at overcoming the fallacy of the proximally significant Target of their scheme(s), out in society. 

Several things come in to play here. (I'll try to keep things short, stub, and simple. 

There's nano-meta-material electromagnetically construed quantum-arrangements of what could be the natural aesthetic of what constitutes a parasitic organism. Such a thing, philosophically, would be wrought out of the disorder of a ramshackle and detrimented lifestyle. Given the modern day foray of industrialized society, electrical currents, wear and tear on the infrastructure, private and public Enterprise, variants takes on personal space, and of criminality, all contribute to circumstances in which the electrical grid might be compromised, of an organic nature - such that would construe, given the aesthetic developments of disarray, wear and tear, environmental stress, etc. upon a host organism, who consumes radioactive materials through smoking, through pollution, or through the use of medications - these aesthetic "accidents" of an organic nature could, conceivably: provide the physical and underlying nano-metamaterial to construe a classically formed parasitic organism or virus, through nano-wire Faradaic induction transmission, for example, as one step in the process of a mock-up host creation of a creature which has all of the elements of life, as necessary, given a lesser state of evolutionary development - we can all agree on that much - that various creatures are representative of different stages of evolution, as they present themselves. 

Tracing back, just a bit, take, for example, my laborer's hand, as an image of such a structural environment of circumstantial disarray. There are various opportunities for protein structures to intermingle, become loosened from my hand, and provide fodder for a nano-materials-age ad-hoc creature to become mocked-up, if I were to neglect my common hygeine. 

There's various structural damage here. A bee sting, some scrapes, fingernail dirt, age lines and wrinkles. 

Given that this could have been my foot, in my sock, developing in such a similar environment, the nurturing life-sustaining medium of various types of bacterial and nano-sized breeding and grooming grounds could consequentially (moreso) be established, of an increased risk of establishment. 

With ionic minerals and electrolytes taken in to the diet, as supplementation, or as detoxification, the playgrounds for Faradaic currents to thread and Lorentz-attractors of electromagnetic-metalloids, currents carried through these particle-periphery structures - these things seem to become inherent (or apparent) in the concepts of Weaponization of intent, or in the exploitation of Proximity in culling a victim, to lessen the parasitic form's in(dis-)ease in a warfaring engagement of immunological or of a socially-bound structure. 

For example, a gay guy came up to me the other day, and I took him as standard; rather, at first. However, as it would turn out, he started acting gay towards me, which I somewhat just don't quite believe, or accept, as truth. Despite all things, he had gained some initial acquaintanceship exploits of common decency and twinges of friendship out of me, and he had gained the exploit potential of Proximity. 

He gestured towards my groin area, he wanted to hug me; he was drinking wine, and he had urged me to, despite me telling him that I'm allergic to alcohol. The solvent, volatile nature of alcohol comes in to question, with a subject such as myself, in that I am also allergic (perhaps moreso) to some of the metabolites of alcohol in the body, such as aldehydes (which my body more strongly produces. I relented to sipping some alcohol with him, while he became homosexually-interested drunk. 

My (sub-)theory is that having a matching duality of quantum endpoints, in two separate structures - here, our bodies, our stomachs, our lungs, our ear, nose, and throat structures - all come in to play with what I perceive as a "dirty" weaponization trick of proximity in social distancing being offended, which should have been obvious to him; yet he demanded that he was homosexually interested in intimacy with me. 

My take out order of the bum-at-the-park option for patronization of an establishment ended soon, thereafter. I noticed that the young man had an orthopaedic surgery scar on his left ankle, as he walked with a cane. I hadn't been let in on the extent of his limping in being such a drastic injury. I feel that his ministrations towards me were a form of ritualistic lurking intent, in persisting in my physical form, after the fact (here, being our interaction, and potential friendship, which had lost it's appeal, during the course of a couple of hours in which we were around each other, and speaking, which I felt was the basis and extent of our interaction, whereas I could have offered him options for hanging out with me further, of helping with work, whereas I found his gestured towards me unthinkably unprofessional, so I abandoned that hope for him). 

The situation had turned to me suggesting that he might need to be hospitalized. The story that played out in my mind's eye about the park suggested that he was being accommodated at the park with a warm blanket, as a homeless and unfortunate person, yet I returned, for my own sake, and there was no repeat of him showing up again. 

After leaving the initial encounter and situation that had established itself, as a crisis, I felt that he was trying to intend that his pain, of his surgery, and inflammation of his healing bones and ligaments in his ankle were perhaps the underlying motive in his "acting out" of a homosexually-interested nature.

I took the Metro Gold Line back towards downtown Los Angeles, Union Station, to take care of my administrative tasks and workload of the day. On the train ride back, there was a guy who was purported to be a vehemently anti-homosexual violent and volatile sort, who had also been drinking alcohol. It was reported to my internalized conscious mind that he would have wanted to complain of that I was wearing green and gold shiny eye makeup, whereas he would have taken it as a gesture of pro-homosexuality, which just isn't the case, in my case. I felt a sickening and relevant (to the context being described in my mind) illness, much like a drunken alcoholic hangover, (I suppose), yet definitely circumstantially, it seemed to be as a result of the proximity of one of the train's riders to me, whereas I consume a large amount of internally and externally applied ionic minerals during the course of a month. The spinning of the train's wheels seemed to reputedly be "milling" ionic periphery structural proximity calculations, whereas there were definitely compute calculations playing out in my head -

I wasn't thinking of these things, originally. 

A cool Google Cloud Platform appspot app I've discovered.

I came across some cool stuff in the trash along the way of my route in recycling as I got out in to DTLA for feeding the pigeons and to get on the internet at the library (today I'm at the LA Law Library).

Including: a 44.4 WH myCharge RZ12BV-A portable USB mobile device battery backup charger.

All things interesting aside, I'm not all up on my voltages, watt hours to milli-amp hours, so I Google'd the conversion and I came up with this highly relevant search result, 

PEOPLE ALSO ASK

How many mAh is 22.2 Wh?

How do you convert Wh to mAh?

Convert Watt hours to mAh

Insert Watts-hour (Wh) and voltage (V) and click on Calculate to obtain milliamp-hours (mAh). Formula is (Wh)*1000/(V) =(mAh). For example, if you have a 1.5Whbattery rated at 5V, the power is 1.5Wh * 1000 / 5V = 300mAh.

https://milliamps-watts.appspot.com

Convert mAh to Watt hours

More results

connecting me to none other than a Google Cloud Platform webApp appliance as-a-page, much like would be expected in searching for a conversion hop-to, here: agreeably monetized in diminutive scale by serving ads, as an « appspot » page, which is Google Cloud Platform's App Engine's scalable solution for hosted cloud app delivery service as a page - 

Google › cloud › appengine

Web results

App Engine FAQ | App Engine Documentation | Google Cloud

Jul 15, 2019 · You can override this using the --host<hostname> flag when ... serve SSL ( HTTPS) traffic through your appspot.com domain

a .appspot App Engine page, which I feel, in this instance is ingeniously presented of what App Engine is capable of.