Search results

That was my initial thought but then I'm thinking LED drivers often end up horribly inefficient at very low drive currents. And the LED themselves lose efficiency below a certain drive current, typically around 5% of rated current. Because of these factors, if you try to extend battery life 60...

I'm fine when the movies stick to facts, not hysteria. The China Syndrome was mostly hysteria. Gasland was a somewhat better mix of facts, albeit with some over the top stuff as well. Remember most of the people making these types of movies have an agenda. As such, they'll play fast and loose...

As much as I hate say it, in a race between him and Hitlery he's the better choice. I actually can get behind some of his ideas on dealing with terrorists as well. What we've done hasn't been all that effective.

Not sure what this has to do with I wrote. Cars are tools. In some places, mostly rural areas, they're the right tool for the job. In others like cities they're not. The fact they're used to the extent they are, even in places where they're a horrible fit, like NYC, is precisely because we...

Emphasis mine. Yes, we're giving electric car subsidies but this is mainly to level the playing field between electric cars and gas cars. Gas cars have massive direct and indirect subsidies. Some figures I've heard thrown around are up to $5 per gallon to account for externalities and costs...

Because maybe it's 2016 and time to dump the idea of throw-away rockets which has existed since the beginning of space travel over 50 years ago? If computers followed the same model, we would still be using vacuum tubes. Actually, scratch that. We would still be using mechanical relays. While...

Well, the fact there's a bunch of orders at least proves there's a huge latent demand for mid-priced electric cars, even with gas at $2 per gallon. Can't say if they'll be able to scale up production in time. If they can, then they'll make a killing until the big three decide to get into the EV...

A tool like this is a much better way to reflow the card. I've been happily using one for the last year to both repair boards and build new ones. It looks like he killed the SSD with excessive heat. Then again, there may have been a component failure which caused it to stop working in the first...

Doesn't Tesla sell direct to customers? Since you said you were interested in a Tesla anyway for your next car, that seems to be yet another compelling reason to buy one. I hate haggling myself. When I quote people prices, I almost always quote exactly the price I want. At times I've had people...

Kind of resembles my thoughts on the subject. I haven't been more than 400 miles from where I was born. I'm not that keen on ever breaking that record. I might like to eventually do a bit of train travel but that precludes having the time, money, and someone I enjoy traveling with. Right now I...

I'm just mildly interested but it's totally irrelevant to me as well. I'm not planning on taking out loans any time now or in the foreseeable future.

831 for me last few months. I have four credit cards but never run a balance from month to month. I also tend to only use a small portion of my credit. I still have an outstanding student loan but as far as I know they ceased collection efforts after I sent them a few nasty letters. Apparently...

Either that or someone forget to put a 1 in the price per GB: $0.125. This may actually be the case because ~$500 for a 2TB SSD isn't a great price breakthrough. The Samsung 2TB, which is arguably a MUCH better drive, can now be had for around $650. It'll likely drop to close to $500 by the time...

This is starting to get really interesting. SSDs are headed towards a factor of four of HDDs in terms of price, and are way ahead in terms of capacity per unit volume. How much longer will spinning disks be around at this rate?

This is exactly why I hate homeowners associations. I'm glad they largely don't exist in NYC. I've heard in some places you actually have to get permission from the homeowner's association to do something like paint your home anything but the original color scheme, or to maybe have shrubs where...

That doesn't seem low enough to cause flickering. My guess is there are occasional brief sags well below that which might be causing the flickering you're seeing. Unfortunately, as Dave and Lunar already said, you would need a data logger to catch those.

Sometimes it is because the undervoltage may cause parts to operate outside their specs. More often than not though it's more annoying than damaging. Try to look for LED bulbs which are speced for 85 VAC minimum. If they still flicker, then it's time to get your landlord or electrical company to...

Actually, I do know why. Part of it was riding 225 miles in December. Another part was just being busy. When I'm not busy, I sometimes tend to eat more out of boredom. But mainly I find if I ride 3000 to 4000 miles a year my weight will eventually stabilize at 165 or 170 after a few years and I...

Mind you that's just for January. Based on my earnings since I've started this consulting gig I earn roughly about the same as David. For as long as it lasts, anyway. Same here. I'm at least 20 pounds more than Merc, although I lost some weight over the last two months.

The cooling requirements for that are going to be a pain. Of course, if you have a water-cooled setup then no problem.

Probably about 5 weeks of my after tax earnings based on the really busy January I've had. Of course, chances of these hours keeping up all year are close to nil.

My guess is this chip wouldn't be of much value for anything but servers. My understanding is most desktop applications don't benefit much from more than 4 cores. 4 faster cores would do better than 16 slower ones. And it's hideously expensive besides.

Some bulbs have lower minimum voltage specifications than others. And there's manufacturing variation even among the same bulb type. That said, it seems there are LED driver ICs which deal with 85 VAC to 265 VAC ( https://www.spansion.com/downloads/AD405-00011-E.pdf ). That would give LED bulbs...

I definitely sounds like an undervoltage issue. Some LED bulbs work fine down to 75 or 80 VAC, others might start to flicker at 100 VAC. Unless you can get your landlord to fix the mains power issue, which should be done anyway for a whole host of reasons having nothing to do with LED bulbs, I...

Actually the ground pins aren't redundant. They have all those ground pins because these CPUs at full throttle suck a few tens of amps from the CPU power supply. If you have a few less paths to ground, ripple increases, and the CPU might either be unstable, or fail to work at all. That said...

Meanwhile I'm sure the average line workers at IBM were told they had to share the pain. Of course, if the company does well again they won't be sharing in the gain. I'd love to know how anybody on a board of directors could do such a boneheaded move like rewarding for failure. If a CEO receives...

I do the same thing with LED bulbs. I aim them towards the ceiling to effectively diffuse them. LED fluorescent tube replacements give a nice, diffuse light but of course you need 4 foot T8 or T12 fixtures to mount them in (and the fixtures usually need to be rewired to feed 120VAC directly to...

No, I'm talking about the point of entry here. I've already tested this somewhat feeding high-voltage DC to LED tubes which supposedly need AC. As I said, in most cases the only place you have 120VAC in the circuit is before it's fed into a rectifier and filtered to DC. A full-wave rectifier...

I can't answer specifically about the hardware in question but the way integrated graphics are trending the population for whom a discrete graphics card makes sense gets smaller every year. My guess is those who need one already know it. Those who have to ask probably don't. I'm personally...

Other than being in a place where you're car dependent, what you're aiming for isn't that far from what I'm aiming for. Probably no sense digging a well here or using a septic tank given that the city water and sewer system is still reasonably cost effective but I'd like to be independent of the...

That would be more a case where they would rigorously enforce existing laws rather than pass new ones. Plenty of people do their own wiring or plumbing, even in places which tell you this work must be done by a licensed person. If you're competent it's generally not a problem. I suspect most...

This is based on my knowledge of electronics but I googled it, and it turns out I'm not the first one to think of this. Basically, if it doesn't have an induction motor or a 60Hz transformer it'll probably work just as well on 120VDC as on 120VAC. I was concerned about my fluorescent lights, but...

It sounds like you have more restrictions than we do. For what it's worth, NYC is also a free-for-all. I have little doubt as the economics make it viable we'll have all sorts of DIY systems here which they'll be powerless to do anything about. It's worth noting the grid here is actually...

It seems the regulations in NYC aren't that onerous. For example, here's the part on selling power back to the power company. Power generated directly offsets the power you're billed for on a 1 to 1 ratio. Yes, you'll still have administrative charges on your bill if you generate more than you...

My opinion as well, which is one of the reasons I'm planning on installing solar power. With a system roughly the size you plan to install, I could run heating or cooling while the sun is out, and have enough battery capacity to at least run lights and some electronics at night. The problem is...

Actually we still have oil heat but the same idea would apply. We would need to run the blower and the water pumps for the hot water heating. Probably a few hundred watts give or take. I'm thinking of that if it turns out power outages become a lot more frequent. I did the math for running a...

At least they seem to have some decent skills. Still a stupid thing to do, but it would be even more stupid if a novice did it.

Actually since we already have a gas line going into the kitchen for the gas stove I would imagine that heater could run on natural gas. Thankfully we don't lose power often enough for it to be a huge deal. Last time we had an extended power outage was when Sandy hit. Last year one of the power...

A few more pictures after shoveling: I measured the accumulation at 13" to 14" before shoveling. About an inch came down while I was shoveling. I was overly optimistic sanitation would pick up the garbage. I put the pails out at 7 last night, long before any snow came. Sometimes they pick...

At least this is the first accumulation this year. Last year we were having snow like this seemingly every few days. I snuck the camera out the front door to take a few pictures: I'm more concerned about the 50 mph wind gusts than the snow. It's going into the teens tonight. If we lose power...

Yep. And my father was just as excessive with his other hobbies. We estimate he spent about $200K altogether. And that would have been fine if he made good money but he worked for the city his entire life. The sad part is very little of anything he bought is now worth anything. We realized after...

It's still the case if I have time to go through my father's stamp collection instead of paying at the Post Office. He left us upwards of $50K in stamps, most of them sadly worth no more than postage. Basically, that's just about anything from the 1950s on, which is most of what he had.

I'd probably say somewhere in the ball park of $125 to $150 per emitter for parts and labor. Shipping to AZ shouldn't be more than $20 or $25 going UPS ground or USPS Priority.

Even worse, my first attempt at pointing out the errors in the efficiency numbers was removed from the comments. I tried again, this time with a link to a source. Hopefully that will remain. Misinformation is bad enough, but failing to correct it when someone points out the mistakes is...

I have all the parts on hand, other than the heat sinks for Dave's light. I just haven't had time to do anything with them yet. I'm going to cobble together a three emitter light for myself using one of my heat sinks and post pictures. Hopefully that'll happen in the next few days. A car...

They're using incorrect figures in that article: Compact LEDs' energy efficiency ranges between 5 to 15 percent. Fluorescent lights range between 7 to 15 percent while the top-notch incandescent bulbs vary between 2 to 3 percent. CFLs are about 20% efficient, linear fluorescents up to 30%. The...

By most metrics 2015 was better for me than 2014, which in turn was better than 2013. That kind of reverses the long-standing trend where each year was worse than the last. Hopefully 2016 will be looking up for all of us.

Merry Christmas to all! :reindeer:

Same here, the reason being I don't have the room for a large monitor, nor the eyesight to sit far enough away from it so it doesn't exceed my field of view. At the distances I view my monitors, which is about 16", 24" to 27" is just about perfect. 4K or 5K resolution means I probably won't see...

I did about 9 years ago with a friend of mine. He was the one who talked directly to the lawyer although since it was primarily my idea I wrote some of the preliminary paperwork. I could email you the documents if you want to get an idea of what the patent filing should look like.