Someone recently asked me to replace the battery in their old iPod, and I found myself wondering what I should do with the old battery. It still works, but has less capacity than when it was new. So I looked around my workshop and found some of these surface mount LEDs and decided to test the limits of my soldering skills and make a flashlight out of them.

These LEDs are very hard to solder, since they're surface-mount and the pads are on the bottom of the LED. They were never meant to be soldered by hand, but rather placed by machine onto a specific amount of solder paste, which is then baked in a fancy oven at very specific temperatures for very specific times. To solder these by hand, you need to create a liquid puddle of solder and sorta float the LED on top, while being careful to not short the pads which are very close together as well as not overheating the LED. The temperature the plastic melts at seems to be only a few degrees higher than the solder melts at.

I wired up 5 of the LEDs in parallel, each with its own 6.8ohm resistor wired in series with the LED. This should limit the current to 150mA per LED. I hot glued this in place, as well as a lithium battery charging circuit I got off ebay for a dollar. Here's one such listing.

I slapped on a pushbutton, and Bob's your uncle! It worked first try!

Here's a blurry picture of the finished product. I'm pretty proud of how it came out, considering how tiny and fiddly the soldering was. And, I think I'll actually get some use out of it too. The battery ought to last at least an hour of runtime, and the thing is seriously bright.

Anyone here into electronics as a hobby?

Edit: Better-ish pic: https://i.imgur.com/Kxqy1jg.jpg

^{No potatoes were harmed in the making of this photo.}

Which games had really well thought out and engaging leveling system?

Skyrim was a good baseline I believe, not perfect but engaging and not too punishing. Path of Exile seems convoluted to me, to many skills the dont make any real impact. Fable was effective but very simple. Oblivion tried hard for a deep leveling system but was basically broken. Witcher 3 was pretty run of the mill (I thought, despite the praise the game gets).

I'm trying to find something where there are several viable different playstyles. And it's always good when combat isn't the only way to proceed.

The calendarepoch for the gregorian calendar (that the western world has been used since the 16th century) is 400 years. After that, the whole calendar repeats itself. It is exactly 146097 days in these 400 years. (Including all 4/100/400-rules.)

Out of these, there are 28 that are slightly more common than all others. One of those, is Friday the 13th, occuring 688 out of the 146097 days.

The least common day is a Wednesday the 31st, which happens 398 out of 146097 days.

Source, and more info

This question stemmed from a friendly argument my S.O. and I had involving The Sims. She thought it was the weirdest thing ever to try and create myself within the game. I understand the idea of truly creating a new character, but my first impulse is always to create myself and then behave how I normally would in whatever game I'm playing. I don't know if this is laziness on my part, or some sort of subconscious effort to maximize immersion.

Disclaimer: I do often create characters that don't just emulate myself, but it's almost always after I've finished my first play-through. I'm not averse to role-play AT ALL.

I noticed it spans further than character creation too. Like, if there's a pool of characters to pick from, I almost always pick one that looks the most like me, or one that I relate the most with. My S.O. will pick whichever one she's feeling at that time (usually the cutest). I've also noticed that I'm more apt to consistently pick that same character, while she is more likely to switch it up every so often.

One last observation I made that I think ties closely to this topic: When I'm playing a game, my mentality is always "I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do this. Did you see what I just did?!" etc. I see it from a first-person perspective, even if I happened to create a character that does not emulate myself. When she plays, it's always "Look what he's doing, oh man my guy did this" and verbalizes the game from a third-person perspective.

What's your take on this? What's your mentality when you game? Do you think there is a fundamental mental split among players? Is it because I game drastically more than her or started gaming sooner in my life? I'd love to hear some other perspectives on this.