from Hacker News

Edison Bulb Night Mode

by dguo on 11/3/23, 10:29 PM with 32 comments

  • by _nalply on 11/4/23, 7:11 AM

    What if there was a real Edison bulb having a night mode?

    I imagined it having a circuit to dim it during the night, like a night light. For example having a few filaments inside a bulb and switching between parallel for more light and serial for less light.

    Our home was not well insulated and in a corner of our sleeping room we had condensing moisture (it was unavoidable because in the corner the temperature was way too low,the lowest I had was 9°C or 48°F). I thought about putting some nichrome wire (for example terrarium heating wires) in the corners and having a switch between parallel and serial as a means for two different power levels. The idea is a parallel switch. If you turn the switch, multiple contacts are connected and disconnected. If you connect the wires cleverly, you can switch between parallel and serial. Luckily our landlord found a permanent solution for this problem after I showed him the measurement I made, so I didn't need to build this.

    So that's why I started to get a picture of an Edison bulb that has such a switch inside its base.

  • by cfj on 11/4/23, 7:10 AM

    I like this a lot. I had a similar idea for my own site[0], but I leaned a bit more heavily into the actual cord behavior of the thing.

    [0] https://svarden.se/post/the-worlds-most-satisfying-toggle

  • by josephwegner on 11/4/23, 12:03 PM

    Really great article, and the site looks great! One small piece of feedback:

    > the server-rendered HTML will always default to light mode. This creates a flicker for night owls

    You might consider switching this - render the dark-mode version by default, and have the flicker be from dark-to-light. For users operating mostly in dark mode, a bright flash of white can be painful. The same is not true for users operating in light mode - they will barely notice a moment of dark.

  • by CGamesPlay on 11/4/23, 6:25 AM

    Two improvements that could be made:

    1. My dark mode preferences change throughout the day. Caching the value in localStorage means that it will require manual updates twice a day. Add a behavior that automatically unsets the localStorage key whenever it would set it to the currently system-preferred value.

    2. Apply the override using a CSS class on the body element calculated from a synchronous JavaScript block to avoid the flash.

  • by seanosaur on 11/4/23, 3:12 AM

    Very cool! Love the little cord pull.

    > ...the server-rendered HTML will always default to light mode. This creates a flicker for night owls...

    I played with this a bit and yes, that flicker is harsh. I appreciate the fade-in, but maybe have the initial color on load be somewhere between light and dark and then fade it to whichever is set by the client.

  • by adaml_623 on 11/4/23, 8:48 AM

    Regarding the local storage Vs server side defaults I don't understand why you wouldn't use a web cookie to store the on/off state? Am I missing something

  • by mindhunter on 11/4/23, 6:15 AM

    If he’d run the dark mode JavaScript in the head and control the style through a css class, it would not flash.

  • by dfee on 11/4/23, 4:28 AM

    Cute bulb and effect. I like that your dark mode isn’t so harsh, as well. I feel they’re often max contrast, which is the last thing my eyes want to see. This is more of a … solarized?

  • by p1mrx on 11/4/23, 4:52 AM

    Generally, pulling down on a light bulb only turns it off once.

  • by eternityforest on 11/5/23, 10:31 AM

    I love the landscape at the bottom of the page! It really gives a sense of the page being a place. I might have to steal that page bottom concept! I've never actually seen it before.

    The bulb is a really nice detail, and the color schemes are both really nice.

  • by CSSer on 11/4/23, 2:19 AM

    This looks nice and all, but this doesn’t work on mobile devices due to pull to refresh.

  • by runlevel1 on 11/4/23, 6:01 AM

    That's one classy looking personal page.

  • by lloydatkinson on 11/4/23, 5:54 PM

    Ironically dragging doesn’t work on mobile