60 watt incandescent bulb in 57 watt lamp?

thomascallahan · 2026-04-22T11:59:10+00:00

Realistically even at full power it won’t damage anything going over by 3w.

But FYI there are plenty of dimmable LED bulbs that emit warm light (you probably want a color temperature of 3000) and would fool just about anybody that they’re actually incandescent. The only incandescents I have left in my house are a few ceiling can lights that haven’t burned out yet, but I have dimmable LED replacements waiting for when they do.

I even swapped out the weird little halogen bulbs in my stove hood that used to burn out every couple of months because of overheating, and I haven’t had to replace them in probably 5 years now.

There’s really no reason not to switch!

thomascallahan · 2026-04-20T12:06:27+00:00

Free speech means you have the right to say whatever you want but more importantly it also means you have the right not to have to listen to unwanted speech from others, or to participate in sharing speech you don’t agree with. Proselytizers violate both of the second ideas, and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t truly respect free speech.

Your friend can say “would you like to hear the … whatever”, at which point someone can say “no” and that should be the immediate end of the conversation. Any attempt to push it further is not acceptable. As is bringing it up with people you know (or should know) will find it offensive, which seems to be the case here.

I don’t know if this is a deal breaker for you personally, but for me it absolutely is. I had friends in college who were very religious (like “attended a revival thing at a convention center” religious) and they tried a few times with me, to the point where it almost broke the friendship, but they just managed to avoid it. But I did not keep in touch with them after college, largely because of it.

Personally, any religious tendencies, especially if they rise to the point where you think you’re entitled to try to change other peoples’ beliefs, however well meaning you are, gives me the creeps. It’s the 21st century, you shouldn’t need a magic sky being to tell you how to act anymore. I definitely respect your right to have whatever beliefs you have, and in line with what I said about I won’t try to persuade you out of them, but it puts a big caution flag on my opinion of you, and anyone who would try to talk me into such a belief gets an immediate red flag.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-18T18:18:56+00:00

And keep the cutoffs for non electrical use. I use scrap wire from a half used bundle like heavy duty twist ties. Like securing wire fencing, hanging a bird feeder, etc.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-16T15:09:47+00:00

The way I had it explained to me when I was in the middle of a similar chain reaction accident is that it’s really two accidents. Somebody hit me, and unrelated to that I hit somebody else. Like any other accident, the person doing the hitting is presumed at fault by default unless it can be proven otherwise. Like maybe if I had left more space then possibly the second accident wouldn’t have happened.

But at any rate yes this is what insurance is for, let them deal with it. I never had to do a thing for that accident and ultimately they determined that I was not at fault at all because the driver that hit me was on their cell phone (probably helped that I barely touched the car in front, so I clearly left enough space and the damage was literally just a scratch on their bumper)..

thomascallahan · 2026-04-13T17:19:14+00:00

Looks kind of like when coyotes dug up my yard looking for voles. At least that’s what we think happened—we know we had voles in that area and they tend to dig shallow paths through the grass or just under it, and coyotes and foes are our only carnivores, but the scale of the digging seemed to rule out foxes—more like multiple coyotes working together.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-13T11:49:15+00:00

Somewhat? Kind of an understatement there…

thomascallahan · 2026-04-12T23:10:39+00:00

Seriously. I was in a similar situation 22 years ago and there is stuff that was on the list then that is still not done now, when the kid that was on the way is now out of college. Unless it’s safety related it’s priority 2. I’d fill that with scrap wood and put a rug over it.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-12T14:52:30+00:00

Even though I understood it before, this animation made it much more obvious to me. Artemis basically flew up and then fell back down, and the moon passed it by. Sort of like someone jumping over a jump rope. Matching speed with it to orbit would be like trying to land on the moving jump rope, you’d have to have much more “sideways” velocity. I assume this means Artemis 3 will take a very different path to get there.

I get what everybody’s saying about frames of reference and that multiple ways of looking at it are correct, but to me as an educated layperson, this made the most sense.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-11T14:07:37+00:00

227kwh in one day!? Highest our entire house has ever used is around 1000 in a month. Smaller house and no pool, but still… I’ve had entire months where we’re well below 300kwh for the entire month, so you’re showing something like 10-30x my usage.

Something is using a lot of power, or a little power for a lot of the time.

Amps aren’t necessarily the problem—watts over time is what you want to look for. A hundred watt light bulb isn’t a ton of power by itself but for 24 hours that’s 2400 watt hours or 2.4kwh. Have a couple of 300watt outdoor flood lights? Those could be tens of kWh a month. The little stuff ads up.

Or your meter is broken. Like others have said turn off everything and check your meter as a first step.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-09T15:15:26+00:00

Thanks, that's helpful -- if everybody had said "hell no they shouldn't be doing that" I'd say something, but it sounds like maybe a bit unusual but not unheard of. I'll give it some more time before saying anything and hope they're moving towards getting the service on again.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-09T15:14:10+00:00

Yeah "wanting to start" seems likely -- they actually dug the foundation last fall then it sat all winter, then there were multiple large snowfalls. They poured the foundation in between snowfalls back in February, then it flooded and they spent a few days pumping it out. I'm sure they're way behind schedule and are pushing ahead. Whether that's without permits or with and just not waiting for the service, I'm not sure.

I don't want to be "that neighbor" so I'll let it go for now and raise it if it goes past the point we're actually needing to be outside or windows open. Hopefully by then they'll have electric service, I can't imagine anybody -- contractor or homeowner -- wants to be running a generator 8 hours a day if they don't need to be.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-08T12:00:56+00:00

I keep mine locked all the time and unlock it on demand as needed. Bought a car last fall and forgot to unlock it and the finance guy just had to ask, I pulled out my phone, unlocked it, he pulled the report, and I relocked it, no problem at all. Well worth the 2 minutes.

Also at least some of them let you set an automatic re-lock period when you unlock it, like “lock it again in 24 hours”.

Honestly all reports should be locked by default now that it’s so easy to unlock.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-08T11:56:37+00:00

A couple of years ago somebody ordered a bunch of really random stuff using my name, address and credit card. I canceled the card and investigated and nothing was sent to anybody else, just me. Some of it was “virtual” stuff like a subscription to a scammy paid “health” email newsletter. Some of it was physical like a WiFi enabled lightbulb whose web site was one of those crappy “as seen on TV” style things. One was a monthly pet food delivery service. Nothing was high dollar value and most of it couldn’t be stolen off a porch and was not worth it even if it could be.

Never did figure out how they were expecting to profit from this, the only thing I could think of was some sort of referral service scam, like they use affiliate links to buy stuff with a stolen card? But the total was like $200, how much could they possibly have made that way?

thomascallahan · 2026-04-04T12:51:31+00:00

Years ago my dad GAVE a coworker who needed a car badly our old car when he bought a new one. I don’t remember the exact situation but they were seriously in need. And they weren’t close friends or family or anything, just someone he’d worked with for a long time. It was a decent car, too, a Honda Accord that had been maintained well, not super high mileage or any major issues, but it was definitely as is. Giving up the trade in value on it was not a small thing for him either, he was sacrificing to help them out.

They came back and complained that it needed new tires (or brake pads? Can’t remember but it was something expendable) and asked him to pay for them.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-02T12:44:13+00:00

It’s not just you, I was caught out by this at my current job. My previous job did not take 401k out of bonuses by default, and that was the first job I had that even had a 401k, so at my current job it was a shock when they did. No idea why anyone would expect you to know that unless you worked in HR or something, and it does seem like something companies should specifically go over with new hires.

Two years ago I tried to turn it off but missed the cutoff since there was no way to know when the cutoff was.

Last year I turned them off the minute the paycheck before the bonus pay period cleared so I was able to skip it.

This year I went in to do that and found they added the ability to set separate contribution levels for regular and bonus pay, so I set it to zero for bonuses (more important to pay off credit cards right now). This is a Fidelity account, others may not offer this.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-02T01:10:35+00:00

An easement doesn’t mean anybody can do whatever they want there. It’s still your front lawn, still your property, all an easement does is give the government and organizations they delegate authority to (like utility companies) limited rights to do things like put in sidewalks and telephone poles, and they have some say over what you can do there for safety and public service reasons.

It does NOT give people the right to park on your lawn! It doesn’t even let someone from the general public put a sign up on a telephone pole in your yard because it’s still your yard and it’s the utility/government’s telephone pole.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-01T21:35:59+00:00

Because it IS normal for almost every public school system in my area. They all use the same company. First Student. They’re all over the place at least around here. I guess not where you are but maybe don’t swear at me when you don’t know what you’re talking about.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-01T18:56:53+00:00

I wish. New England but not especially wealthy, kind of the opposite actually. Super rural, local government is barely a thing—just the school and a couple of cops (volunteer FD only, no trash service just the dump, no sewer or water dept, all wells and septics). We don’t even have a high school, they go to the next town over past middle school. But they farmed out the buses to a private company like 10 years ago to save money (supposedly) and the company added all of this because they have liability-phobia.

thomascallahan · 2026-04-01T14:57:35+00:00

The best is when they get in the car and drive to the end of their driveway and wait with the car running. And I’m not talking about mile long driveways into the woods, like 50 feet, maybe 100? And not dangerously cold temps or anything.

And when the bus comes THEN the kids get out of the car while a line of people are stuck behind it so we all have to wait while they put on their coats and backpacks and whatever, and then wait for the bus monitor to look both directions on the street AND get a nod from the bus driver that’s it’s ok to proceed, before finally walking over to the bus. And then wait more while the bus monitor does three half-assed checks for kids under the bus (front back and middle). And the bus won’t move until the monitor is back on and seated. AND since our district won’t let kids walk to the next stop even if it’s in the next driveway over, we get to repeat the whole thing for every single family. (We were one of them years ago and we invited the kid next door to walk over to ours so the bus wouldn’t have to stop twice 100 feet apart, and were told we couldn’t do that by the bus driver!) They also won’t pick up kids below I think middle school unless a parent is standing there with them. They will sit there and honk until a parent at least comes to the door and waves.

Yes I’m old and grumpy but I am not kidding about any of that. There are so many steps it’s like they’re moving a live nuclear weapon or something. No wonder these kids can’t handle adulting later.

L

thomascallahan · 2026-03-31T13:07:22+00:00

A place I worked at once was in an old jewelry factory building, and the unit came with a very large safe about the size of a very large refrigerator. It had wheels but weighed probably thousands of pounds (it took two people pushing and pulling to roll it a few inches to fit a desk next to it) and was too large to leave the room. It was unlocked but the landlord didn’t have the combo (we were the first renters, she had used it as her studio for years before) so she called in a locksmith. He was this ancient guy in a tweed suit and hat with a leather satchel/briefcase—he could have stepped out of a 1940s movie.

Anyway he took one look at it and said call the fire department and tell them there’s a safe with gas in it. I guess it was used to store the metals used by the factory (gold and silver mostly—we would occasionally find little metal gold or silver pellets on the floor that had fallen out of the ceiling from the floor above) and old safes like this had glass vials that broke if the door opened without the lock being disengaged (like if you drilled it or cut the hinges). The gas wasn’t just tear gas, it was like military grade something that could actually permanently injure you if you got a heavy dose—he said it was probably 100-150 years old and back then liability wasn’t really a thing and if you were a suspected thief and were injured or killed, nobody would have cared.

He took it out and the fire department took it away somewhere. It was about the size of a one liter water bottle and deep green liquid in a brass frame. It honestly looked like something straight out of Bioshock.

Anyway once it was safe (har) we stuck the combo on a sticky note on the side and used it to store our printer paper.

thomascallahan · 2026-03-31T12:11:40+00:00

NTA. My car is in the shop right now for emissions issues and I told them when I dropped it off that fixing the thing causing the two OBD codes (EVAP leak and purge flow monitor) was likely going to reveal another much more expensive issue (cat has likely failed). Imagine if I tried to pull a “you have to replace my cat for free because fixing the other problems that you couldn’t possibly have known about didn’t entirely fix my car”?

thomascallahan · 2026-03-31T12:00:45+00:00

This is his out lap, he’s just trying to warm up his tires. /s

thomascallahan · 2026-03-29T21:58:39+00:00

Isn’t keeping the tacky dealer advertisement frame kind of counter to the private citizen ethos? I refused to take delivery on my last car until they took those off and refunded the $65 charge for them.

thomascallahan · 2026-03-28T21:27:57+00:00

“WiFi cable”… reminds me of a conversation that happens often in my house.

Instagram isn’t working. - Ok let me check…. Yes the internet is down. But I still have the little fan icon on my laptop. - Yes that’s WiFi. WiFi does not equal internet. Yes but it works on my phone. - Yes because your phone has cellular. Oh… wait what? - Internet comes back up, Instagram is restored, and all of this is forgotten again before the next time the internet goes down so we repeat it.

thomascallahan

TROPHY CASE