• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • This is why I end up doing so much DIY.

    A job that takes a professional half a day could take me a whole weekend.
    But having to play “how likely are they to fuck it up, and how much of a pain will it be to fix” drives me up the wall so much, I often just buy the tool and do it myself.

    My time to do it: 15 hours, plus £200 in materials.
    Cheap tradesman: 8 hours, £450 total, non-zero chance I’ll have to rip it out and re-do it myself anyway.
    Specialist tradesman : 5 hours, £900-1200 total.

    So it either ends up being lots of work, a gamble, or lots of money. Quick, good, cheap, pick two!


  • Hosting NSFW content is an absolute ball-ache, so a lot of instances that are not NSFW focussed do not host it.
    In the early days of feddit.uk, we decided to go the path of SFW, to simplify things.
    I absolutely salute the lemmy-nsfw admins in taking that load on.
    And it makes a lot of sense: If you’re going to deal with the headaches, you might as well focus entirely on them!








  • This is roughly what we have in the UK.

    For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
    And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh. (The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).

    There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
    Whether it is fair for people using less energy…But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
    There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.

    Once I’m off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.

    On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it’s cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
    However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it’s been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!




  • Maybe the best way to think about it is not dark, but the absence of more light.
    On a DMD projector, we use tiny micromirrors for each pixel which flash thousands of times per frame of video.
    The flash/no-flash ratio decides how much light makes it out of the projector. This gives us over a thousand light levels per colour channel, from near dark, to full light.
    When the mirrors are not in position, the light output is very low. (1/1000th of the full output, on a projector with a static 1000:1 contrast ratio)

    The screen is designed to reflect light well, which means in a non-perfect room, it will have a light floor of the reflected ambient light, plus whatever still makes it through the projector (as Cygnus mentioned, room treatment).

    If you do treat a room well enough that the small amount of light that makes it through the projector at all-off is a problem, you can do things like fitting an ND filter to the lens (reducing the full light output, while also reducing the minimum).
    Or you can use the dynamic iris fitted to some projectors (which reduces the amount of light being put out based on the overall scene illumination, similar to the way LCD TVs lower the backlight level to “reach” contrast ratios of 100000:1).