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Belated Merry Christmas! 


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Quote: "Definitely cooking, considering the context."
Potentiometer lol
Quote: "A friend and I were talking and we realized that nine times out of ten, whenever we see someone smoking it's an older person, not a young person."
Yeah, definitely. Frankly it always amazes me when I see people my age smoking. Although, having said that, there's one girl who smokes I worked with at PhotoCreate... she moved a stubby cooler off the heat-press too fast and got a face-full of strongly toxic-smelling gases and said, "Whoa *cough* I wanna die from my ciggaretes, not stubby coolers!", so I wonder whether some people simply don't care whether they live a long life or not. Even so, when they started smoking they clearly weren't considering the agony and horror of coughing up their own lungs and then breathing through a tube later on.
Quote: "Just wish they banned the crap..."
I kind of wish they would too, but in the long run it would do more harm then good. If you suddenly cut the supply of something people want, they'll do anything to get it back even if it means black market supplies, and since it becomes a rebellious thing to do, the number of smokers will climb again (as is human nature). If, however, you successfully educate people about the dangers of smoking in such a way that no one actually
wants to smoke, then it doesn't just become frowned upon, it's not even considered. That is, no one even really thinks about smoking as good or bad, it's just not something that's done for obvious health reasons.
Quote: "Get someone to make a connection with it to High Co2 emissions officially and boom, should be gone in 5 years..."
lol I don't know about you, but personally I think global warming (or climate change, whatever they call it now) is utter rubbish

[Note: Feel absolutely 100% free to state whether you agree or not about climate change, but let's not get into a debate about why this may be true or not, k?

]
Quote: "So uh... Since it is Christmas can we get Word Association unlocked?"
That thread was funny to read for the first 10 or so posts, but people very quickly started posting full sentences and ruined it. Also it was 6 years ago. And I'd not seen that thread until today. And it didn't appear to end well. And, while it would be nice to have a thread with very strict rules, we can after all play the game in this thread. So no, I don't really see any reason to unlock the thread
Quote: "TheComet has switched entirely to C for his current project."
Forgot about that. Apologies.
Quote: "C feels like DBC felt all those years ago, it's beautiful."
"Beautiful" is SO not the word I would have used...
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Ok, so my Arduino STILL hasn't arrived (stupid Christmas postal rush), so I started looking for simulators. Turns out there's quite a few Arduino simulators.
http://123d.circuits.io/ is the best Arduino-specific simulator (that I know of), and definitely very easy to use and highly convenient, but lacks more advanced functionality (and aside from that, I wanted something that was offline and not a slow, browser-based sim). Then I discovered Proteus. AMAZING tool! It's helping me test out electronics concepts that are super confusing
without breaking stuff!
Even so, some things are still confusing me. First of all, I'm finding it annoying and disappointing that it's so difficult to do digital circuits. I always thought digital circuits would either be completely switched on (5V) or completely switched off (0V), and that transistors were completely digital. Some questions for those with the time and patience to help me out:
Question: In the following diagram (of a NOT gate), what is R5 there for? Is it there to limit how much current is running through the transistor? Doesn't that also limit how much current can flow out the output of the gate?
Question: In the following diagram, would there be any current flowing through the top wire (and by extension the resistor)? If the resistor was changed to, say, a 100 ohm resistor, would current still only flow in the bottom wire?
Question: In the following diagram, would the top LED light up at all? If the resistor were to be changed to 100 ohms, would it light up then?
Question: In the following diagram, would both LEDs light? [For the record, I'm assuming both would light up if 0.5mA is enough to power an LED (it was just a random resistor value), but the bottom one would be very bright or simply blow - this particular question is to make sure my current understanding (no pun intended) is actually correct]
Question: Aside from cost (as I assume MOSFETs are more expensive), is there any reason to still use standard transistors? Specifically, do MOSFETs do everything normal transistors do? In what are they better than normal transistors (i.e. why use them)?