Products You Never Knew Existed

[Pamela]

They have those chain thingies for big rigs also. Some states do not accept them, like Colorado.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Attachment 57711

yours is analog

mine is digital

http://www.cnet.com/news/meet-zuse-t...atrix-toaster/

Meet Zuse, the dot matrix toaster
Austrian designers Inseq introduce resolution for toast. Literally burns an image onto toast at 12 x 12 pixel resolution.

and

http://geekologie.com/2016/08/dot-ma...hatever-yo.php

This is a Kickstarter for the $85 Toaseroid toaster, a smartphone app controlled toaster that uses a dot-matrix grid of microfilaments to let you toast whatever you want on your bread (within small dot-matrix grid reason). You can also fine-tune the level of brownness. Not feeling creative? No worries, the toaster can also automatically toast the weather forecast, or text messages from a friend or lover. Obviously, my toast is going to be nothing but penises and dirty words from here on out. *opens crumpled brown lunch bag at work, coworker sits beside me at break-room table* "Hey GW, what you got for lunch today?" *flashes 'F*CK OFF' tuna salad sandwich* Man, that's gonna be the highlight of my month.

[Gravdigr]

****NSFW****



The website

[xoxoxoBruce]

I wish I needed that.

[fargon]

I haven't used a condom in so long I have forgotten how to use them.

[Gravdigr]

[footfootfoot]

I doubt I've used 20 condoms in my life.

[classicman]

<10 here ...

[Gravdigr]

Do the ones ya buy out of a machine in a truck stop men's room count?

[Gravdigr]

Hey Limey, winter's coming, gonna have some time on yer hands...

[limey]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Hey Limey, winter's coming, gonna have some time on yer hands...



Attachment 57900

Haggis!


Sent by thought transference

[monster]

you'd have to start at the tail end and do the head last or it'd start to wriggle and meow and you'd never finish....

[Gravdigr]

This has just got to be teh bleurgh:

[footfootfoot]

Let's hope, and cross our fingers, that by milk they are referring to the addition of lactose, an unfermentable sugar used in so called 'milk stouts' to add a slight sweetness and richer mouthfeel, and by chocolate they are referring to a type of dark roasted malt that has slight chocolatey notes by virtue of the manner of roasting, and not, god forbid, and FSM preserve us, that they actually added chocolate milk to the stuff or made it as sweet as chocolate milk, since porter is already sweet to begin with.

The take-away:

1. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
2. Don't spend so much time in the sun, even though you live in Florida. (See 1. above)

[glatt]

Originally Posted by glatt

"Filament" LED light bulb are the future, but here today. The price just needs to come down a little bit. These things are freaking awesome!

I bought one of these LED filament bulbs to try it out. Not cheap. $15.50, but free shipping.

It came in a plain unmarked box in a padded envelope. The bulb was in a protective plastic clam shell. No brand name that I can see.

Attachment 50537

Comparing the LED filament bulb side by side with an incandescent bulb.
Attachment 50538


And here it is in the fixture, with the dimmer at 100%. On the left is a 40 watt incandescent. In the middle is a 4 watt Filament LED, and on the right is a 60 watt incandescent. To my eye, in person, it looks as bright as the 60 watt bulb.
Attachment 50539


Here's a very underexposed close up of the LED light. You can sort of see in individual LEDs under the filament's coating.
Attachment 50540


And I noticed with the lamp shades on that the LED's 4 filaments effectively eliminate the shadows caused by the lampshade wire clamps that grab the bulb. Those shadows are visible on the incandescent lamp shade.



And finally, I took a video of the dimming.



The LED bulb is listed as 2600K, but it seems just a little bit whiter than the incandescent bulbs at 100% power. And as you dim the lights, the incandescents go yellow, but the LED keeps its color.

I like this bulb. It's expensive, but I ordered 4 more. It will take the Dining Room light from 220 total watts (with a mixture of 40 and 60 watt bulbs) and reduce it to 20 total watts. I don't know how long it will take for these to pay for themselves. I suppose I should have calculated that before ordering 4 more, but that would have involved tracking down a power bill and doing the calculations.

Originally Posted by glatt

These bulbs flicker a little bit. Apparently the larger filament LED bulbs have capacitors on the tiny circuit board in the base to smooth out the flickering, but these candelabra bulbs are so small, there isn't room in the base for capacitors. It doesn't bother me, but Mrs. Glatt has commented on it a few times. So these LED bulbs may be short lived in this house. We'll see how it plays out. But I won't be buying a new dimmer until I know the LEDs are here to stay.

Originally Posted by glatt

It's not even a year later, and 2.5 of the 5 LED bulbs I bought have failed. The 0.5 failure is that 2 of the 4 filaments of one bulb have stopped lighting up. I think there is a poor electrical connection somewhere in the bulb and it gets strained somehow over time and breaks. The filaments flicker a bit and then stop working altogether.

I can't recommend these bulbs any longer. At $12 per bulb, the price is simply too high to be replacing them after 10 months. The claim was 15,000 hours of operation and the real world results are 500 hours or so. I'd be ok with them if they were $1.

I'm obsessed with getting LED bulbs for my candelabra style dining room light. It uses 5 x 60 watt incandescent bulbs and it kills me to be consuming that much power.

The old LEDs I had were problematic. They were too expensive, they flickered like a very fast strobe light, and they got too hot and burned out after less than a year. The flickering was a result of the base being too small to fit a capacitor.

I just found a new bulb that appears to fix all of those problems. These new bulbs ahve the same filament technology, except they have a large metal heat sink above the base. The heat sink disperses the heat, so they should last longer, and the large heat sink is big enough to contain a capacitor that will even out the current and stop the flickering. The price is also much more reasonable at $3.80 per bulb.