Why do LEDs generate heat? (2025 Update)

These are mostly neighbors. I seem to have been put in charge of a lot of stuff around here and people call me a lot.

Yes. The SMD resistor was very obvious/

My cable modem has some blue LEDs and some green LEDs. The blue ones are much brighter, which doesn't look right.

For some reason last time I bought a wrench set, it was very difficult to find metric only. They all seem to have both over here, although I can't remember the last time I ever found anything which had imperial bolts on it. Weird.

You have a 9mm which isn't 9mm? WTF?

So you have to be an expert just to get the right bullet for your gun?

So how often do things f*ck up because the parts were made in different states and aren't quite the same measurements?

But you're older than me and in a backwards country, so you tend to know about things before they were made more sensible.

The blue lights on my modem look to be very bright.

I often wonder if it is just because thay are blue or if they use more power or if they are just more efficent in converting electricity to light or possiably just take more power before they put out any light.

Maybe it is people's eyeballs. I understand that many amimals do not seem to see a red light very well if at all.

Apparently in the UK, 80% of calls are still over 2G as the reception of higher versions of G is s*it. Presumably you need more masts for 3G or above, as the range is lower or something, and the USA must have a lot more masts, or less mountains. Turn 2G off here, and most of us couldn't make a call.

For some reason, most of the spam calls here are to landlines (cost presumably). So I just unplugged my landphone and use mobile only. No more annoyances. I have a couple of friends and relatives that moan that it costs more money to phone me on my mobile. So they text me and ask me to call them. I have many hours of free calls per month by just paying £6 a month to my mobile company.

calls per month by just paying £6 a month to my mobile company.

Phone number portability made that advantage go away. The spammer doesn't really know what number is a land line and what is a mobile. Probably more than half of the old land line numbers have been ported over to mobile phones. A spammer really doesn't care tho. They just set the robo dialer to hit all 10,000 numbers in each LATA. These days area codes don't mean much either. The northerners who move here usually keep their old phone number if it was ported over to mobile. I call the guy across the street and it is a Maryland area code. He lives here year round now. Fortunately there really isn't anything called long distance in most phone contracts. Alaska is a local call for me.

You've got to dig into history for some of the weirdness. At various times bores have been measured groove to groove (groove diameter) or land to land (bore diameter). For example the British .303 us bore diameter although the bullets are usually .311 - .312. The NATO 7.62x51 round refers to the .300 bore although the bullets are .308. The commercial .308 Winchester is interchangeable for all practical purposes although it may be a little hot for M1s or M14s. Many Mosin Nagants are happier with the .312 bullets intended for the .303 SMLE, although the cartridge is nominally 7.62×54mmR.

The .380 ACP in James Bond's Walther PPK is also known as the 9mm Kurz or Short, not to be confused with the 9x19 Parabellum or Luger. They don't interchange unlike the .38 Special which is .100 inches shorted than a .357 Magnum cartridge but can be fired in a .357 revolver. The inverse is not true, which is what the .100 longer case is all about.

Not really. For something like the .38 Special there are a lot of choices in commercial cartridges, including the +P and +P+ versions. While you need to know what your intended use is you can ignore a lot of the technicalities and buy a box of Golden Sabers or whatever.

Hand loading is another story. You'd better know what you're doing and be slightly OCD. Particularly with cartridges that started out in the black powder days, there is plenty of room to fit twice your intended amount of smokeless powder.

Those little quibbles are mostly of interest to surveyors. You need a $5000 GPS and post processing to really pick up the differences. The difference comes out to 2 ppm, so even local surveys are hardly affected. I assume manufacturers use the international foot but I wouldn't swear to it.

Britain redid everything in meters in '59. However you could drop the whole UK out in the eastern part of this state with room to spare. Standardizing 50 states, each with their embedded bureaucracies is something else.

NENA, the National Emergency Number Association, has come out with a GIS standard so everyone will use the same database schemas and the same WGS84 projection. All the counties in all the states are going to jump right on this. After 9/11, all the agencies were going to share information and procedures. When pigs fly...

Unless you are Sheila Jackson Lee. Then you buy a box of .50 BMG and wonder why you can't get it to chamber in your M4gery.

If you think 17 genders, 8 year old drag queens, and autistic teenagers addressing the UN are sensible, I guess that's your option.

Read Thomas Kuhn's book. As a synopsis, every generation insures job security by swapping around whatever the last group did. It all started with those enlightened assholes in the French Revolution. How much more screwed up than this can you get?

When Corbyn and Johnson finish their pissing contest you'll be lucky to be using tin cans and string.

Isn't there a wrench or bolt in England that is referred to besides the common Imperial (inch or fraction of) that is measured or called by the head size insted of the diameter of the threads ? I am thinking it starts with either a W or M.

You do not really have to be an expert to get the correct bullet unless reloading your own. Most guns have it printed on the barrel what kind of ammo to use. However you may find one that has been modified to take a different kind of ammo.

The engineering company surveyors actually told my wife they only got within a foot but she was bitching because they staked out a house that was in the road. (not built but platted). She figured it out by looking at where the utilities were. They were trying to figure out why a sewer main was running under this guy's house. I know the house lot to me was surveyed 3 times and there are 3 different corner pins in a 10" triangle out there. Each guy swore the ones before him were wrong.

I know about Whitworth and BA, not sure about an M. A buddy used to race old MGs and Triumphs.

That would be Whitworth. They made working on elderly British sport cars interesting. Even better there was the pre-war and post-war sizing.

It's only going to get better.

That would be exchange (line 214-814-xxxx). LATAs can involve multiple area codes.

I don't remember exactly, but it's been at least a decade since I had to pay for long distance (other than international) calls.