Every year I forget to put something in the boxes of decorations before they go to the dungeon, it had to be this stupid cord that I forgot this year. At least the amp is fine and I can continue my square wave tuning tomorrow. ARG!
I just checked it and it's still good, although it may be a 1N5408 from the size of the bulge under the heatshrink. I made a few of them.
BTW, that trick was shared with me back in the 70's by my electronics mentor. He was an older gentleman with a limited use arm and he had a big triple light fixture over the split level entry and it was a PITA to get the ladder into the landing to change the bulbs so he put a diode in the switch box and upped the wattage of the bulbs. All they saw was half wave rectified voltage and bulbs lasted forever, cool.
Cheers
amusing, indeed ... put a label on both ends of these cords before you put them away ...
just to get the math straight:
its 1/2 power rather than 1/4 power with a diode in series with a resistor;
RMS current thru a resistive load behind a diode is 1/sqrt(2) down or 0.707 and so is RMS voltage at the load;
so average power I(rms)*V(rms) is 1/2;
with a string of light bulbs it is actually even higher than 1/2 because the filaments run at lower temperature, thus lower resistance ...
it may look like 1/4 brightness though because of the lower efficiency.
(if you don't believe, either dig out your collage books and solve the integral of a half sine wave over time or quicker - nowadays - put it into a sim and let Spice do the work)
The diode trick was actually used in some early color TVs in Europe when most of the small signal stuff was already SS except for the horizontal and vertical outputs which still used vacuum tubes because HV power transistors were not available, yet; but now the 300mA heater string was too short for 220V mains; a diode in series was the cheapest solution. Needless to say that the B+ was also half wave rectified.