My corner of the internet
Mostly electronics and software, but occasionally chemistry and photography.
For browsing, I have an organized list of writings For a something more casual, check out my fun section or my photos of space,
Because search engines are increasingly terrible, here’s a list of blogs I have found useful or interesting, and can verify are not LLM generated.
Scroll down for a reverse chronological feed. To save time, you can use RSS.
Recent Posts
You have been mislead about lightbulbs
—There's a story that goes something like this:
In 1925, lightbulb manufactures secretly colluded to standardized lifespans at 1,000 hours. They would test each other's products to ensure compliance.
This is true.
At the time, many bulbs lasted longer than one thousand hours.
This is true.
Therefore, this must have been done so that people would always need to buy more light bulbs.
This isn't quite right, but it's the type of wrong that cites its sources and hides in the part you'd never think to fact check:
The assumption that a longer lasting lightbulb is a good product.
In truth, increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way... but people think they want a long lasting lightbulb: the purpose of standardizing was (primarily) to avoid a race to the bottom.
Read more...
Regressive JPEGs:
One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there's the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.
In the file, this works by breaking up the compressed data into multiple "scans", each prefixed with a header. Here's the first scan of a representive image:
Read more...NGC 7497, etc.
[Photo]
A relatively unremarkable spiral galaxy... but hey, what's that in the background?
Read more...Making cooled clothing:
—Summer gets really hot, and it's not going to get better anytime soon. At my place, it isn't actively dangerous yet, but it's still unpleasant.
A normal air conditioner uses a low boiling-point liquid: something like liquid propane can boil down to -42 C. Just like water, it's evaporation absorbs a lot of heat and the remaining liquid will become very cold.
Read more...The Tadpole galaxy:
