Running Windows 10 with extended support patched for a few more years. I don't like Windows 11 and the direction that Microsoft is taking it. I considered Linux but a few of my important programs are Windows only. I built my computer fairly recently so older versions of Windows weren't fully compatible with it. 

Be careful here. The voltage rating is important. If you do what you are suggesting and wire the caps in parallel you will indeed double the capacitance but will half the maximum operating voltage. Far better to find two 8.8uf caps and wire them in series. That way you will get the 4.4uf and the voltage will be doubled. I had the same problem for a 131W sox e lamp. Two 6.8uf caps at 450vac gives 3.4uf at 900vac, more than the 650vac required and much safer to use.

rhombicuboctahedron

Had to look that up lol!

Interesting idea, that would definitely be easier to make yourself.

The container can be polygonal. Just make it of sheet metal

I have seen a rhombicuboctahedron shaped one in Righi Licht (a closed manufacturer of GLS lamps in Switzerland). It is fairly easy to make, and it can be bound in a rigid external cube "cage", which will prevent stress and flexing (which could chip the paint) on the sheet metal itself when it is handled (moved or door opened and closed)

You cannot make perfect use of the sphere shape being "ideal" anyway, because internally you have to "disturb" it at least with some sort of wall which would prevent direct line of sight between the lamp and detector

I would try SON ignitor to a wire wound externally around the lamp and not connected to anything

The wire can be in insulation

Superimposed ignitor can be wired from the same ballast which is powering the lamp, just connect the lamp before the ignitor so it does not get the pulse to the main terminals. This will still let the ignitor sense the lamp arc voltage, and stop igniting once the lamp fires

Ballast dependent ignitor (and possibly a small X capacitor) may be required if you figure you need a more powerful pulse. In this case use whatever ballast that provides the correct tap for the ignitor. I think you might still try to connect the entire 2nd ballast setup from the output of the 1st ballast (parallel to the lamp), to get the ignitor to see the lamp arc voltage, but there may be more things that might or might not work correctly

The lamp is internally coated with a conductive layer (ITO), which would act as a large capacitor plate, standing between the wire and the arctube. This is ok as long as you can couple enough pulse to this layer, so the entire layer gets to HV potential relative to the arctube

The environment (including metal luminaire parts, and in an open bench test - just the more distant general environment) is also a capacitor plate - a grounded one, which is undesirable, as it makes a 2nd capacitor from the lamp to ground, forming a divider with the capacitor made by the wire. You can increase the divider output by winding more wire

@Laurens
That is a very interesting possibility, there isn't a whole lot of telegraph line there but that could be the case.

It looks like he used MyPal, a Gecko-based browser. I usually use Supermium, which is chromium based and updated more frequently.

I'm currently browsing on a Windows 7 Ultimate computer. It was built in 2006 and has 12GB of DDR3 RAM, a 2TB mechanical and a 256 GB solid state drive, a blu-ray drive (which I added), an Nvidia Quadro K4200 GPU (a fairly powerful unit), and a 64-bit 4-core 8-thread Intel Xeon CPU. Yeah, quite the beast back in the day. And I bought it for $20 last year.

As for security risks, most antivirus programs still run on Windows 7, and there are even some that will still run on XP.

One potential reason is that if you own the telegraph line, you likely own the right to put other cables on it too. So this means that you can buy a dilapidated telegraph line for cheap in the late 90s, do just some cosmetic work to keep it in non-deserted state, and whenever your telecom company decides it's time, use that right of way to put fibre on those poles (which is of course much cheaper than digging, and you already have the permission to have those cables on that area of land).

Which browser and what version did you used?

I decided to load up my old Compaq nx9010 with it's single core Celeron CPU and DDR ram. It immediately connected to the internet on it's own. I must've been doing something on it a few years ago lol. I wont make a habit of this due to the obvious security risks. But it is a nice blast from the past. What OS do you currently use?