• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle

  • Dimmers will typically use a triac which cuts up the sinusoidal waveform. It doesnt actually lower the amplitude per se, but it limits the fraction of the time the waveform is on. Kinda like this. This means that a lot of the time the led isnt gettingas much or any power. The average power will be lower, and if the LED driving circuitry isnt designed to compensate for this, the LED will flicker.

    Clarification on triacs: they get turned on a certain fraction of the way into the cycle. Triacs will stay on until the voltage across them is 0. Conveniently the zero-crossing of the AC wave (when the wall voltage crosses zero to start foing negative or from negative to positive) does just that.








  • Linux wont take off until the friction for new users is low enough that the layman can resolve issues without resorting to techniques outside of their understanding and patience. Even as someone who uses linux, there are a ton of things that should have a GUI / just be a context menu entry. If you can get the same amount of work done with a button click rather than typing out a complicated command line string, you might as well use the GUI, right click menu, etc. and make it easier for the typical person. People these days can barely use tablets, and those already dumb things down to icons you tap. Unfortunately, making it accessible to the lowest common denominator is what makes things popular a major factor in making things popular


  • Coal plant burns coal to heat water, makes steam, and the steam powers a turbine to produce electricity. A nuclear power plant uses nuclear fuel to heat water and produce steam similar to a coal plant. It may do this indirectly (e.g. second loop between the nuclear fuel and water loop to prevent the water becoming radioactive). This means that to build a nuclear plant you essentially need to build a coal plant, and then also the nuclear reactor and safety stuff, which makes them more expensive. Since coal plants are being turned off anyways, it might be more cost effective to just retrofit old coal plants so the only cost is the nuclear reactor side of things (plus any necessary maintenance and upgrades)