Everything Else

I have a Blue '99. Nice ND.

I need A/C here in VA. Its too humid to not have A/C. If it were AZ or CO or MT, maybe, but not here

guardian452 wrote: Sounds like you tried some cheap bulbs and got burned by faulty power supplies. I've had good luck with Hyperikon (IMO they are the best), CREE, Samsung, and Luxeon/Lumileds (for automotive). I would avoid Philips, TCP, Feit, or anything with the word "smart" in the product name. [...]

Sort of. Admittedly a lot of the dead ones were Feit, but I've had Cree bulbs go just as well. Actually didn't have too many failures with the Philips ones.

guardian452 wrote: The lighting needs for Photography/Studio use are quite a bit different from parking lot (or indeed, our workshop/office space like I am retrofitting in my spare time at work).

I didn't think about it at the time when you said highbay lights, but certainly for factory floor or parking lot use, LED is a pretty good candidate. It is also interesting to see the LED streetlights coming out. As far as replacing any of that high voltage ballasted stuff I can see why you'd want to go that way.

However for regular indoor lighting (office or home), I am quite picky about light quality. I guess it comes from doing a lot of photography and a bit of cinema, but color temperature and, to some extent gaps in the spectrum have always been very apparent to me, as well as the multiple shadows from the many point sources etc. For me, a lot of tungsten-like LED spectrum sort of falls in an "uncanny valley." It looks like tungsten at first glance, but something is a bit off, and I find it annoying. It's especially apparent when viewing photo prints or other art, but I notice it just looking at white or beige surfaces as well.

In any case I found that there are a lot of good T8 tubes that are cheap to run and have good spectrum, and using fluorescent also has the nice benefit of being a good soft light source without having to bother to bounce it off the walls.

guardian452 wrote: The sickly green 90's bulbs may be appropriate here if you can find some...

Always reminds me of the Matrix. But if you can't find any, just wrap some daylight ones in some plus green gel

guardian452 wrote: He lost me at the fresnel lenses... He claims that a 650W tungesten bulb outputs 9750lm. Sure! But then putting bulb in a reflector doubles the luminous flux of the bulb to 19500 lm... I don't think that's how luminous flux works

He also confuses power factor with efficiency on multiple occasions.

I mostly just linked the article because I found it interesting how they were cheating on the CRI measurements, but I think those mistakes, as they are, are a confusion of theory and practice. The fresnel certainly doesn't double the flux, but you'd need a bulb with twice as much output without the reflector, if the bulb is an isotropic radiator. Likewise, especially when running on generator (as most sets do), low PF loads are effectively inefficient, as well as being electrically troublesome for many other reasons. I find that practicing electricians make many similar misstatements even if they do properly understand electrical theory.

Pointless and Right Now? Well, I'm having a break and I'm looking at the Dropbox API and the docs for the FAM.

The old HP RP5700 that ran my chipping station died. Had to rummage around for another box that had a physical parallel and serial port.
While I was reinstalling I also added support for reading and writing to RFID.

josehill wrote: Anticipating root canal.

Ugh. And how did that go?

ClassicHasClass wrote:

josehill wrote: Anticipating root canal.

Ugh. And how did that go?

In the end, not too badly, but a few minutes into it, we discovered that the novocaine hadn't fully taken effect. It was my fault, really, since I had forgotten exactly how numb you have to be to be truly numb, so I gave my dentist the green light to begin a little prematurely. Once we got that sorted out, it went smoothly.

The most interesting thing for me was the hydrocodone-ibuprofen I took after the procedure. I only took two pills over the next 24 hours, and then I stopped the course, since the pain had dissipated. I was fascinated by the realization of just how much I had gotten used to all the minor aches, pains, and general creakiness that I've accumulated over the years in the rest of my body. The hydrocodone masked all of them, and honestly, I felt like a kid again.

It's in such moments that one begins to understand the temptation to abuse pain medications.

josehill wrote: It's in such moments that one begins to understand the temptation to abuse pain medications.

Have you ever had morphine?
Your heart beats twice, the pain is completely gone and it feels like magic.

Your heart beats twice, the pain is completely gone and it feels like magic.

Or, you itch like hell.
Opioids never did much for me. When I had the repair of my pediatric hernia repair (which is a thing), they gave me Tylenol #3 which did exactly zilch. I just sweated it out until the pain receded.

On the subject of opiods they make me too nauseous so I can't take them. I used Kratom after slicing my hand open bad, that helped with far less nausea.

I fortunately have never needed to take painkillers. I get a lot of scrapes and cuts, but the pain hasn't bothered me much.
How did you find the kratom? I guess it's used like coca leaf, hold it in your cheek with a pinch of lime?

Kratom I order from Coastal Kratom. White Vein maeng da.

I take a spoonful, stick it in my mouth (its gross) and drink some water, swish around and swallow, repeat until its all swallowed. It works for about 4-6 hours.

Now my main Windows machine is downloading the Creators Update. As far as I can tell, there aren't any new features in it that I particularly care about, aside from the miscellaneous security updates.

Pass the morphine.

I just photographed the total bajeesus out of a UCC model 1035 terminal that uses a Selectric II with a fair number of hacks.







There's like 47 photos total that took me all morning to shoot.

pentium wrote: I just photographed the total bajeesus out of a UCC model 1035 terminal that uses a Selectric II with a fair number of hacks.

There's like 47 photos total that took me all morning to shoot.[/url]

Awesome!

Who's your housekeeper? If I ever uploaded a photo of my computer room somebody'd call the county on me and they'd send over their emergency response team in their radiation suits...

I have a housekeeper?

pentium wrote: I have a housekeeper?

No? How very Felix Unger-ish of you...

Keeping the creativity ball rolling.

So today while working on the backlights of a 32" LCD panel I looked at one of the broken tubes and wondered if I could melt the jagged end with my butane torch. I could. I made a straw once I fed a pipe cleaner through it.
Then I wondered if I could shape tubes that were not already broken. The big issue I assumed was that the vacuum would try and collapse the tube if I got it too hot. I took a bundle of bad tubes home and tried over a propane plumbing torch, then gave it 12000 volts.



Cool, I could make little neon signs.

I work with high voltage for a living, and I've seen a lot of funky HV power supplies, but what the H E double toothpicks is that and wherever did you get it?

Looks like part of an old neon sign...

I'm scared for the cancer growing in your hand now.