Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[StrawBarrel]

Pretty sure you could actually request one, if for some reason you wanted a ban without, y'know, actually violating the forum guidelines. Iirc the boss toad's given out self-requested ones before. Sometimes someone'll ask for something like that basically as a self-help thing... it can be a kindness for folks with particularly poor self-control, tbh.

Self imposed banning does seem like a good tactic for focusing. I think sometimes it’s good to remove distractions so more time and energy can be devoted to other tasks. I remember recently unsubscribing to a youtube channel. While the videos were entertaining, upon reflection they were using too much of my time.

[nenjin]

I always figured it was the computer lagging because it was downloading all the update stuff, even if you hadn't told it to do the updates.

Windows is ok about slipstreaming that stuff. At least if you're on an SSD Hard drive. If you're still dealing with a standard HDD.....oof.

[Kagus]

Apparently I can't use the "Show new replies to your posts" button; it has consistently and immediately 404'd ever since I had a network outage a while back.

Rest of the forum works just dandy though. Ah well, cache-clearing time then!

[pisskop]

Oh man, that's my landing page for this site!  One Day I'll jump back into Dwarf, but until then...

[StrawBarrel]

I was there during the last days of the Cataclysm thread and from what I remember most of the fighting was about shit what was happening in the main branch of the game and only the last little bit of it was about the two main forks.

Ah gotcha. Well that does sound rather unfortunate.

Hey don't kinkshame

Forkshame.

Lol

[Mathel]

I've slept in a hotel last night, and they had a strange bedside lamp.

It did not have a power switch or a power button. Instead, tapping once anywhere on it's metallic shell would turn it on, and tapping thrice would turn it off.

Being curious, I did some experimentation and discovered thus:

It has to be direct skin-lamp contact, or skin-water-lamp. Any material other than water would block it. I tested keratin (fingernail), thin plastic cloth (t-shirt), slightly thicker cotton (bedsheet), and steel (keyring).
It would also not trigger if it was carefully touched, rather than tapped. It would not register a tap if I was already touching it, and two taps right after each other would register as only one tap.

The lamp did not utilize the plug's grounding peg. So I am guessing that it used it's lack of grounding for trigger. It would run minimal DC voltage (perhaps 1V) to it's shell at miniscule current, and measures rapid changes in this voltage.
If a human (it should work with any creature above certain mass with somewhat conductive skin) touches it, this immediately discharges into them, which triggers the lamp. This would also explain why a tap would not be registered if you are already touching it, and why two taps right after each other would not register separately (no time to charge). But it would not explain why it did not work through metal.

It's really a WTF just because it is a lamp that requires skin contact to function.

[Lord Shonus]

Those have been around for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch-sensitive_lamp

It doesn't have anything to do with the lamp not being grounded - virtually all lamps are two-prong ungrounded systems. There's an IC in the system that measures the electrical properties of the metal shell, and contact with your body changes said properties - a cruder version of the exact same system used for touch screens.

[Mathel]

The difference is, I am able to operate the touchscreen on my phone through the same T-shirt, with my fingernails, or with a steel rod. I can even get it to react through thin leather gloves half the time. All of which implies it is operated by my EM field, rather than directly discharging into me.

This lamp required actual skin contact.

As for being grounded, I agree that most lamps are ungrounded. However, this should not work with a grounded one. The Earth's capacitance is (close enough to) infinite, so one more human would not meaningfully add to it.

[StrawBarrel]

Wow. I didn't know these existed. I have never seen one before.
The wikipedia link has an nice video of such a lamp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Touch_Lamp_Demonstration.ogv
I find this to be very impressive stuff.

[anewaname]

It might be that the lamp would respond through the steel keyring for a different person or with a slightly different environmental situation. The lamp is likely to have been built with components that would not or did not meet a quality threshold for other devices, and it is an ungrounded lamp designed with some observance of UL regulations...

Was the metallic shell a limited region of the lamp's base, something that would be easy for the cleaners to wipe with a wipe pad? Maybe the lamp is a post-covid design.

[nenjin]

I've got a plastic lamp here in my office with a touch button. It doesn't react to anything touching it but skin. (It doesn't depress.) So there's some kind of sensor on it.

[Grim Portent]

Yeah, my mother has a bright white lamp she uses when scrapbooking and making cards. Head of the lamp is a flat disc with the light on one side and a touch sensor on the other. One tap for on, one for off. My understanding is the 'sensor' is just a patch of material that links to a capacitor in the lamp, when you touch the connected area the capacitor's capacity changes, electricity stored in the lamp starts to move and triggers the mechanism that turns the lamp on/off.

It's getting old, but still shines super bright. It's a good lamp.

[Mathel]

It might be that the lamp would respond through the steel keyring for a different person or with a slightly different environmental situation. The lamp is likely to have been built with components that would not or did not meet a quality threshold for other devices, and it is an ungrounded lamp designed with some observance of UL regulations...

Was the metallic shell a limited region of the lamp's base, something that would be easy for the cleaners to wipe with a wipe pad? Maybe the lamp is a post-covid design.

It was the whole stand, plus the rods holding the lampshade. The stand was a rotary version of this shape (along vertical axis)
     ||
     ||
     ||
  _/  \_
/         \
with the three rods having been welded to it horizontally at the top. All of it functioned as trigger, including the rods.
The glass lampshade did not, of course.

[King Zultan]

Closest I've ever come to a lamp like that is one of the ones you have to clap at.

Also witnessed the aftermath of a gelding blow, at some point while I was dealing with the fencing stuff from when the horse from one group got in with some others, the asshole that got into the wrong field decided to ether kick or bite the other stallion's balls for some reason, and today I noticed that the testicles no longer seem to be there. You'd think the horse would react to this but so far he isn't acting any different.

[EuchreJack]

I wanted to post a funky bug I found in Cataclysm Dark Days ahead. But when I looked at the threads in Other Games subforum for some reason they were all locked. Then I finally found the reason why:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=177449.msg8464333#msg8464333

I had no idea before that they became a battleground for forks to fight each other. I find that both funny and sad at the same time.

I created a topic on a different forum, but it is fairly inactive.
The discords for the respective forks are fairly active, I would suggest posting it there.