Your lamps aren't LED but CFL (think old neon signs), and the small black box is not a transformer but an inductor.
In short, your lamps produce light by an electrical current flowing through a gas in a glass tube. To make the gas conductive to electricity, a very high voltage is applied for a short amount of time. That's what the thing in the plug does.
I don't know that particular model of lamp, but my suggestion is to use intact lamps and bin the broken ones. There's a considerable risk of electric shock, fire or (in extreme cases) high-velocity glass shards if you try replacement parts at random and don't know exactly what you're doing.
As the lamps haven't been working beforehand anyway, I suspect they're generally beyond repair.
I don't know about other countries - in Switzerland there's something called 'tactile sign language'. It's a variation of sign language where the 'listener' is holding your hands to track your movements, and it's commonly used by/with people with impaired hearing and eyesight.
A more universal (and much easier to learn but much slower) variant is the Lorm alphabet where you use your right hand to draw letters on the 'listening' person's left hand. E.g. the word 'hello' would be: run finger down top half of pinkie, tap tip of index finger, run finger down middle finger to wrist (twice), tap tip of ring finger.
The closest one to true FOSS that I'm aware of is Apertus. Not sure whether it's feasible to build anything meaningful from scratch without your own GPU farm though.
Trade-in deals mostly suck around here. I hand my 'old' phones down to friends and family, who hand theirs down to their kids. Their kids usually get a 'new' phone when their old one has stopped working or is really, really showing its age. I assume this system is representative of a quite sizeable part of society, so I'm not sure how much to read into those trade-in statistics.
+1 for Jitsi. Works well, user-friendly, lots of features without looking complicated, not too resource-hungry, lots of ways to extend it. All the other person needs it to click a link, enter a name and allow microphone/camera usage one time. There's also an app for Android and iOS, though you can just as well use a mobile browser.
Well the half-good news is, judging by Palantir's track record of managing large public projects elsewhere, that project is bound to bankrupt the US once and for all so people can build something new. The bad news is, it's probably only going to happen late within the first fifteen years of the 'two-year' contract.
The knowledge is still there, it's just that the LLM has been instructed not to divulge it, and these instructions are often imperfect and can sometimes be circumvented accidentally or on purpose.
Going great so far - as the work week has started a day late, today's practically already Wednesday!
It's finally warm enough to work outside most of the day, so that's what I'm doing. Loving it. Behind the PC monitor I see mountains, a small forest and the dogs wandering around in the garden, trying to secretly dig holes where they think I can't see them.
On a personal level, I find myself (finally) growing increasingly indifferent to various things that I can't influence. If the world stays its current course, there's a good chance I'll lose some of the luxuries in my life, but in the grand scheme of things we'll likely still be okay. Let the world burn if it wants to - I'll save the rest of my sanity for the problems that affect me personally if and when they arise.This mindset brings an immense sense of freedom. I'm much happier already.
Besides that it's a pretty normal week, just busier than usual as there's a lot to do in the garden and around the house. I still need to fix the holes in the lawn, get rid of a metric ton of weeds and paint some walls. It's a lot of work but totally worth it.
FWIW - as a person guilty of sometimes not texting back: most of the time it's not because I don't want to talk to that person, it's because I don't have the time and/or energy to write something worthwhile, make a mental note to text back something witty 'later', and you can probably guess where this is going.
Apologies for butting in here, but this brings up an IMHO very important point:
The general public HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that the Fediverse exists.
If I may be so bold as to add: ...and they like it that way.
When it comes to online stuff, most people are lazy, very very ignorant and anywhere inbetween politely indifferent and openly hostile towards any attempt to educate them. They want to look at cat videos and pr0n, collect likes for their food pics and chat with their grandkids. The technology behind all that is a nuisance, not a tool.By and large, I think those people can't be helped, because they're happy with the status quo. If anything, you're the enemy for wanting to take away their beloved Tiktok and WhatsApp.
That means our largest efforts - self-hosting, the Fediverse, ... will probably always be a bit of a parallel universe to the Internet at large.This is sad for humanity in general, but it makes enshittification of those services both technically more difficult and (due to its small size and enshittification-resistant populace) less commercially viable.And small doesn't equal insignificant.
So what I'm saying is, we shouldn't see the Fediverse etc. as a replacement for everything, but as a safe space for refugees. And that's what it excels at.
I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it's gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what's making it nearly impossible is the big players' anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that's been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, ... yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it's a residential IP (actually it's not), the PTR record doesn't match the A/AAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names - not that unusual), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), ... if I didn't know better, I'd suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that's probably just beause I'm a cynic.
I’ve tried meeting new people but it’s not the same.
Give it time. New friends are made by spending time with strangers until they're not strangers anymore. If the new people are nice enough, and you get to hang out with them for a while, some of them will probably turn into friends. You're already on the right track by getting to know new people.
Welcome! And I hope you did take that nap. It sounds like it's been well-deserved. Always remember, the most important person in your life is you, so take good care of yourself. You're the only you there is.
Your lamps aren't LED but CFL (think old neon signs), and the small black box is not a transformer but an inductor.
In short, your lamps produce light by an electrical current flowing through a gas in a glass tube. To make the gas conductive to electricity, a very high voltage is applied for a short amount of time. That's what the thing in the plug does.
I don't know that particular model of lamp, but my suggestion is to use intact lamps and bin the broken ones. There's a considerable risk of electric shock, fire or (in extreme cases) high-velocity glass shards if you try replacement parts at random and don't know exactly what you're doing. As the lamps haven't been working beforehand anyway, I suspect they're generally beyond repair.