Took me a while, but after more careful digging, I've figured out what is happening. Last.fm is indeed lying. They are not listening to your media players. They are listening to your sound card output. Disabling sounds in Skype will disable every Skype event log except for two - updates to mood/music playing, and any time you make a skype call. Those to events trigger Last.fm logging. In the log, there's no real identifying information. What can be gleaned, though, is how long you made that call.

"If you choose to download the Last.fm software, it will monitor all the music you listen to on your computer (even if you are not online). It will then send this information to Last.fm via Audioscrobbler. This information will then be integrated into Last.fm to enhance the depth of your record collection and the accuracy of your profile.

The Last.fm software cannot and will not collect and transfer any other information from your computer other than as described above."

That is a flat-out LIE. And you're not even told about the integration with Skype when you install Last.fm's Audioscrobbler. You have to find out yourself by looking through log files, or go back to an obscure 2006 Skype Blog post.

This was most fun!

That'll teach me to cut my nails too short!

After a little tiff with some angry man over on Reddit, I had to go conduct a few experiments of my own regarding the effectiveness of green light on photosynthesis.

To get to the meat of it all, between ~450 - 1800 umol, green light tends to drive photosynthesis more efficiently than red and blue light, especially in plants with much thicker leaves, like actual trees, succulents, cacti, etc. A tiny bit higher than 1800 umol, and your ROI drops rapidly as you've pretty much hit saturation of the chloroplasts, for all ranges of light. The law of Diminishing Returns comes to bite us in the butt, and no wavelength is ultimately more efficient than any other, and in fact, you begin reaching damaging levels of photon saturation which can burn a plant.

Now, there are multiple food crops that have an optimal light requirement below 500 umol. Multiple types of lettuce grow very well with ~200 umol, for an example. For that purpose, LED lights using red and blue light do well more than simply suffice. For rooting cuttings, red and blue light works very well. Fruiting plants typically require much more light, Jalapenos like it around 1500 umol. I've grown nice-sized jalapenos, bigger than what I'll find in most supermarkets, under a red and blue only panel, but I suspect I might be able to do a bit better with some focused green light. I'll do that when I get one made with equivalent specs.

Of course, getting to that intensity for larger plants will likely require me going solid white with a carefully-tuned color temperature. I have seen units now that on equal power draw with their HID counterparts are beating them by roughly 20%. However, these still require either EXTREMELY LARGE or very exotic cooling systems for anything over 300w and in a reasonably small package, and are not totally feasible for either green house or consumer gardening, this will likely be stuck in the parking light/street light arena for a while.

I have seen the benefits of green light, but there isn't MUCH additional benefit versus splitting up into different LED modules so you can get the light deeper into the canopy with the red/blue units. Perhaps for those doing bonsai, or growing cacti, and possibly underwater corals/plants, there is a good use, I can see it. Well, at least I'm sure of why an HPS works rather well despite having a very 'poor' spectral output. It's more than just the 660-680nm + IR that it dumps in massive quantities, it is also the green light having its own effective role.

Kinda goes totally against the conventional knowledge that red and blue are the most efficient, eh?

So Jorge Cervantes did a Reddit AMA. And he went on to say LED is not as good as CFL or HID.

As you see in the response to that post, I didn't let that slide, at all.

Don't dare talk shit about my profession when you're totally uninformed about the subject.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZTikdxj8AI&feature=youtu.be

Finally, I have a copy of the video from the filming session done at the end of last year. Sorry that took so long to acquire!

It was great getting to watch (albeit remotely) the filming session.
Got any questions?

Trying to figure out a way to go modular. I think the company I'm working with has a piece that I could modify into a modular plug and play system for my horticultural panels, so I can simply warranty repair with a swap out. It is going to take a fair amount of modification, however.

http://i.imgur.com/kGmNh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/tY6C5.jpg

Can't show much more than that, unfortunately.

Looks like my tech is gaining some attention - the BBC's program "CountryFile" will be at the UK facilities for filming Monday.

This should be rather interesting. Shame I'm here in the USA - I guess I'll have to settle for a mere mention on the program instead of being physically present to explain things.

So my side porn shop job has these LED-lit display cases for Lelo vibrators. Of course, being an LED nut, I pay more attention to those cases than I really should.

That paid off. A couple of weeks ago, I had noticed issues with the display cases flickering on occasion. Yesterday, I could smell electronics burning, and my first instinct was to go check the Lelo Displays and their wall-wart power supplies.

At first touch, I got burned. So I kicked the warts out of the wall plug, waited a few minutes, and opened up the transformer housing.

This is what I saw.

The entire output side of the boards (bottom of the picture) are totally fucked. Resistors burned to a white ash, diodes burned black, capacitors bulged, transformer wrapping coming unglued from the heat.

Now, the design of the circuit is just fine, and the components appear to be quality. The major flaw I see is that this is 12V 1A being pushed down 20 feet of thin thin copper wire (WITH insulation, the wires are about 1mm thick.) DC hates being pushed any considerable distance (exception being HVDC) and this leads me to believe these power supplies were inadequately tested. We tried powering 6 meters of LED strips on DC back at the research facility in the UK, we measured 23.6V input at the beginning of the chain and 10V at the end, causing huge resistive losses and making heat sinks almost intolerably hot to touch. Lesson learned, don't drive DC power down any long length of wire, especially low voltage DC. I believe this is what caused the failure in these power supplies, and the fact that the failures are in the same area (on the DC output side of the board, essentially) would give extra strength to my theory.

That porn store should be happy they have me. I just saved them from a potentially expensive fire.

Where other major companies have failed, I have succeeded. I have pumped 300w of LED power into a package that is 30mm x 30mm before actual packaging material/power leads are concerned, and kept it cool with a copper-cored carbon-coated heat sink. I am about to push the current envelope 5x past what China thinks is possible according to my inquiries to major manufacturing companies.

Here's a photo of the original 100w prototype, modified from an RGB module.

Everything is about to experience a severe system shock, from HID to plasma to fluorescent. This much power, in such a small space, and cooled easily via air cooling with an advanced heat sink not using phase changing tech or peltier cooling, is a game changer.

Questions? Criticisms? Comments?