[eimrine]

Button phones + laptop instead of sensor phone for everything.

Cash instead of banks (cryptocurrency is an exception).

Email + forums + IRC (sometimes) instead of Telegram or similar.

Arc lamps instead of LED if it is possible.

Singlespeed bicycle instead of ones with gears.

3-way stereo with paper diffusors and class-A amplifier instead of wide-band 1-way with plastic diffusor and class-D amplifier. And listening to as old records as possible to find on torrents, not on streaming services.

Hardly to say why I chose all of this instead of all of that, I just like it and do not care about someone's laughers.

[becquerel]

Surely banks are pretty boring. They've been around for quite a while.

[Aardwolf]

> Arc lamps instead of LED if it is possible.

What's the advantage of Arc lamps over LED?

[eimrine]

Metal-Halide lamps give the best colors, next after the Sun, which is needed for one of my hobbies.

Sodium lamps gives superior amount of lumens per watts, they are perfect for lighting up my backyard especially if using at least 600W of singular lamp. I miss the times when cities were lighted by sodium, a blue-light pollution is one of the main reason of why I use to hate cities nowadays.

Also I use a cold-cathode fluorescent lamps in some places, they are almost as good as MHL and if used correctly (no often switch on/switch off) I need to replace them maybe once per 10 years. They are hardly to get nowadays, but I have enough of spare ones for all of my expected lifetime.

[wruza]

Not a gp, but my eyes can’t stand some LEDs. I don’t know the exact physics of it, but sometimes even a reflected/diffused LED light feels like I’m looking into a laser beam. Colors are also very off, like in a ~chroma fog that isn’t there. Other people don’t notice anything strange. I’d appreciate if someone explained why, because I’m a regular trichromat with no obvious vision deviations otherwise.

[uKVZe85V]

> I’m a regular trichromat

Do you mean you have tested for usual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichromacy and showed that you see all shades people usually see, or have you definitely tested for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy ?

[wruza]

You made me think about it twice, tbh. I have passed regular vision tests, but never tested for tetrachromacy specifically. I can distinguish 22-35 lines here, depending on how far I sit to ignore jpeg line separating artifacts and how much I unfocus my eyes. https://kfor.com/news/test-how-many-colors-you-see-can-deter... (so silly to choose jpeg for a color test, oh internet). I don’t think I am a tetrochromat.

I failed another one which asks have you seen this color “before”, but honestly I’ll fail it even on 20 different-hue color palette because I have no color memory and my color vocabulary is on a “3-bit male” side.

Also failed “choose 2 identical out of 4” type. They are all 3+1 unless I peer very hard.

Does it say something?

[2rsf]

> Singlespeed bicycle as in fixed-gear, a drivetrain with no freewheel mechanism?

[eimrine]

I really want to get into fixed-gear culture, but in places I consider as home there are a lot of mountains, so I use a coaster hub (with breaks!) a-la Torpedo. Having a 2.0 ratio on 622 rim (this is 27" or 28" depends on tires) gives me an ability to ride all those mountains but when I go for long trips on flat road without ups and downs I use a significantly higher gear.

[the_third_wave]

Arc lamps...

Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries THE GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S. Navy flashlight. In the sotto voce tones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanick lucipher is of such a superior design as to make any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone concerned. He leads Waterhouse back to a special room behind the room behind the room behind the room behind the pantry, a room that exists solely for maintenance of the galvanick lucipher and the storage of its parts and supplies. The heart of the device is a hand-blown spherical glass jar comparable in volume to a gallon jug. Ghnxh, who suffers from a pretty advanced case of either hypothermia or Parkinson's, maneuvers a glass funnel into the neck of the jar. Then he wrestles a glass carboy from a shelf. The carboy, labeled AQUA REGIA, is filled with a fulminant orange liquid. He removes its glass stopper, hugs it, and heaves it over so that the orange fluid begins to glug out into the funnel and thence into the jar. Where it splashes out onto the tabletop, something very much like smoke curls up as it eats holes just like the thousands of other holes already there. The fumes get into Waterhouse's lungs; they are astoundingly corrosive. He staggers out of the room for a while.

When he ventures back, he finds Ghnxh whittling an electrode from an ingot of pure carbon. The jar of aqua regia has been capped off now, and a variety of anodes, cathodes, and other working substances are suspended in it, held in place by clamps of hammered gold. Thick wires, in insulating sheathes of hand-knit asbestos, twist out of the jar and into the business end of the galvanick lucipher: a copper salad bowl whose mouth is closed off by a Fresnel lens like the ones on a lighthouse. When Ghnxh gets his carbon whittled to just the right size and shape, he fits it into a little hatch in the side of this bowl, and casually throws a Frankensteinian blade switch. A spark pops across the contacts like a firecracker.

For a moment, Waterhouse thinks that one wall of the building has collapsed, exposing them to the direct light of the sun. But Ghnxh has simply turned on the galvanick lucipher, which soon becomes about ten times brighter, as Ghnxh adjusts a bronze thumbscrew. Crushed with shame, Waterhouse puts his Navy flashlight back into its prissy little belt holster, and precedes Ghnxh out of the room, the galvanick lucipher casting palpable warmth on the back of his neck. "We've got about two hours before she goes dead on us," Ghnxh says significantly.

   The Cryptonomicon
   Neal Stephenson
   pp 289-290

Oh, and fixies are silly city-dweller contraptions, the grown-up version of the BMX they rode as kids. Here's a nickel, son, get yourself a derailleur. I've been cycling from more or less when I could walk - being born in the Netherlands - and never stopped. The human machine works best at a cadence of around 80-100 rpm but the landscape does not take this into account by putting hills in the way. The same goes for the weather which sometimes giveth, sometimes taketh away.

[eimrine]

Cudos to Netherlands riders! I've heard of insanely good design of your bicycles, compared to rest of the world. Don't you have a coaster brake hubs? What wheels/tires are the most common in your country?

And do not confuse an arc lamp with fictional light sources, despite of the starting arc light is really doing that kind of impression you have described.

[the_third_wave]

Yes, coaster brake hubs - "terugtraprem" in Dutch - are standard on the more traditional bikes. Those tend to run on 28"x1½" (40-635) tyres. The most common size is 28x1⅝x1⅜ (37-622).

As to arc lights that quote is somewhat - but not entirely - tongue in cheek. There is a metal-halide lamp in most video projectors (except for the more modern LED-equipped versions) and they're there for a reason, this being their wide colour spectrum. They do have quite a few disadvantages though ranging from their often relatively short life (in projector applications around 1500 hours) through the potential for self-destruction - older lamps run at higher currents and temperatures which eventually can lead to explosions - to the copious amount of heat they produce and the long startup time. Do you have a reef aquarium or do you use them as grow lights?

[eimrine]

Thank you for the answer with numbers, as another lifetime rider I consider wheels as the most important part of the bicycle and Youtube bloggers I have seen do not tell much information about wheel sizes.

I use MHL at kitchen because it makes food to look delicious and also at my workshop because sometimes I do some paint work. But a friend of mine uses MHL on growing phase and Sodium lamps while flowering because a proper use of LED requires a lens and sometimes even an active cooling.