An addition to my morning cocoa makes it mmmm turn out better:
Start with an ounce of milk, dump in the rest of the ingredients, spin up the stirrer, and slowly add the 8 oz of milk that just reached the end of its 70 seconds in the microwave:
The green LED to the left of the speed knob runs from the PWM signal driving the motor, so it flickers visibly and interacts with the camera shutter.
Let it whir for a few minutes until all the cocoa bombs vanish and it’s ready for another 33 seconds in the microwave.
The most recent batch of cocoa arrived in an exceedingly vacuum-packed mylar bag, to the extent the bag resembled a brick and the solid cocoa within fractured into big chunks. Bashing the chunks with a fork got tedious enough to remind me of the stirrer I got to mix titanium dioxide for the yet-to-be-tried glass engraving.
Back in the day, the teflon shell molded on the magnet had a rib around its middle to make it pivot neatly on a point contact. This one is flat and dislikes spinning on the slightly concave cup bottom.
Protip: fish the stirrer out before sipping the cocoa, lest it become a tiny cow magnet.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Flashes on Horrible Warnings about letting little kids play with/ingesting the magnetic ball office toys from a few decades ago. Details redacted due to proximity to breakfast time…
Nice use for a magnetic stirrer. [grin]
Kids these days have all the good stuff: button cells and tiny neodymium magnets.
Back in the day, all I got was a plastic maze with a drop of mercury inside. [twitch]
I’m not sure what happened to the ounce or two of mercury that followed my oldest brother home one day.
Something about a flask of the stuff dropped and broken on the street. Yeah 1950’s hazmat procedures. [wince]
No real danger to letting them swallow exactly one supermagnet … but once you pop, you just can’t stop.
Then you can stick ’em to the refrigerator!
I’ve always wanted a combo magnetic stirrer & hot plate for the kitchen. They’re so damned handy. Impossible to justify the space on the boat, of course.
The cheap heater-stirrer reviews were sufficiently scathing I avoided them entirely, not needing a bonfire of the viscosities on my countertop.
Besides, I can probably fix whatever goes wrong inside this thing, unless a motor winding shorts out. [sigh]
From the dearly-departed tenderbutton blog – kind of like Things I Won’t Work With ™, but less explodey: https://web.archive.org/web/20060526061908/http://blog.tenderbutton.com/?p=106
And if you aren’t reading Things I Won’t Work With and Derek’s other blog postings as well, then you should. Just don’t drink coffee as you read the TIWWW.
Such nuggets as “preparing dioxygen difluoride, often referred to in the literature by its evocative formula of FOOF”
the source of one of my all-time favorite quotes: “Let’s put it this way: during World War II, the Germans were very interested in using it in self-igniting flamethrowers, but found it too nasty to work with. “