That's an article? A rehash of a handful of common ideas with no relation to the title and no further exposition, let alone some support for the ideas? How does something so empty get upvoted so quickly? Did brightness and dark mode become some kind of belief system?
Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
121–130 of 232 posts
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also do eye exercises, like going between focusing on something close, eg a finger, and focusing on something far away.
I try to walk around every 15 30 minutes and stuff. My workflow is especially dangerous in this regard because I do almost everything in the terminal so it’s especially easy to get sucked in. I’ve known sightless hackers who were awesome, it’s definitely not game over, but it also definitely slows you down. For most hackers our eyes and the musculature starting all the way back in your lower spine through to your fin…
It is a bummer that we can often see neglect in that area even amongst people really passionate about computing.
Apologies for the anecdote. I know for myself, I sometimes felt a stigma to investing in "nerdy" equipment designed to make computing more sustainable. Almost like if I don't commit to the furniture maybe I will become that out and about person I think I should be. Funnily enough, it was only after I had gotten into a bunch of outdoor hobbies that I decided to really splurge on quality of life equipment at the computer.
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#123One of the things I love about the shift to LED lights has been the focus on quantifying the different characteristics of light they emit, in terms of brightness, color, and spectrum, etc. It affords customizing light in ways that were swept under the rug a bit with bulbs in the past.
The reason those didn’t matter so much in the past is because traditional light bulbs are so damn good. Even today, as good as LEDs have gotten, their color rendering is still noticeably worse than incandescents. (The highest scores are around 80-90 CRI, an old-fashioned bulb is the standard at 100.) Trouble dimming smoothly, harsh blues, flickering, strobing, excessive glare… all of these weren’t a problem until CFL…
> Even today, as good as LEDs have gotten, their color rendering is still noticeably worse than incandescents. (The highest scores are around 80-90 CRI, an old-fashioned bulb is the standard at 100.)
This is false.
Good quality LEDs are >90 CRI, and the higher end ones are 95+. These are not common because everyone is busy selling/buying the cheapest crap they can make/get, but they're definitely not hard to get either
Ikea Ledare is a widely available >90 CRI bulb. The Ledare is also flicker free and has a metal heatsink base and good reputation for longevity/reliability (on the standard 800lm ones, the higher power ones seem to be more hit-or-miss depending on the exact model). However 99% of people aren't willing to spend $4-5 per bulb.
High end COBs, like the Bridgelux Thrive, are pretty much perfect. Close enough to 100 that the difference doesn't matter. The Thrives have been out for a number of years now. They're not much more expensive than normal LED COBs. These sort of emitters just haven't made their way over to consumer products yet, because (sadly) nobody cares about light quality so there isn't much of a market.
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#124Focusing on my light exposure has helped my delayed sleep phase disorder immensely. I used to sleep from noon to 6pm. I now sleep consistently between 4 am and 11 am, a huge improvement.
I make sure I get plenty of natural light immediately when I wake up and continuously throughout the day.
I set my bulbs to 5000K on full-brightness during the day, then dim and change them to 2200K in the evening. After 10pm I do not use ceiling lights, only lamps with hue bulbs. After midnight I change the lamp bulbs to red and set them to 10% (I use HomeAssistant to make automate all this).
An hour before I go to bed, I use no lights other than a small flashlight with a red LED on the nightlight setting.
I avoid all electronics after midnight other than my kindle on it's lowest light setting.
After making all these changes and sticking to them for 5 months I no longer need to take any sleeping aids which didn't work well anyway. The hardest part was changing when I workout, eat, work, etc. as I was so used to doing all those things overnight for the past 10+ years.
This conversation was very insightful to me: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=oUu3f0ETMJQ I understand some may not like the interviewer, but here is the wiki on Dr. Samer Hattar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samer_Hattar
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any friendly alternative to these home automation things ? I would like to try some stuff but I don't want to spend a weekend creating vlans or fighting google play services, alexa etc.
I won't link them because I don't want to get flagged for spam, but I really like the bulbs from cloudfree[dot]shop. They come pre-flashed with Tasmota and take <5 minutes to set up, then they can be controlled directly over wifi, or can easily be connected with HomeAssistant, etc. (Tasmota is open source local-only firmware, so there's no cloud or anything to worry about.) My only complaint is that they're not super…
I bought some plugs from them so I didn't have to go flash something myself with tasmota. Good customer service, but these days I'm mostly buying Z-Wave stuff from the smartest house (zooz)
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#126It seems like there has been a lot of buzz lately about the importance of reducing light exposure at night and the impact it has on your health. I can certainly speak to it anecdotally - getting a nice pair of blackout curtains and putting electrical tape over the electronics LEDs in my bedroom seemed to do wonders for my sleep. A quick search for sources led me to this article, which has a nice collection of links t…
I'm not convinced about blackout curtains being healthy. Why is it that when you go camping you feel so refreshed and good when the sun comes up and wakes you up? Did our far ancestors use blackout curtains? How did they deal with the sun waking them up everyday? My guess is that it's the optimal way to wake up actually.
Probably the fact that you’re breathing more oxygen when asleep while camping, vs a high CO2 level in your home bedroom.
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any friendly alternative to these home automation things ? I would like to try some stuff but I don't want to spend a weekend creating vlans or fighting google play services, alexa etc.
Philips Hue: You can use the phone app to control individual bulbs directly with bluetooth, but for more control you need also the Hue brigde, which talks to the bulbs over Zigbee (a wireless protocol), and to your phone app over your wifi. For initial setup, the bridge needs an internet connection, but otherwise it will work as long as your home wifi is up, even if there is no connection to outside internet. The fea…
I have Nanoleaf bulbs that connect to my phone via Bluetooth. It’s kinda fun, these are my first ever RGB bulbs, but it’s super slow and finicky. I will probably upgrade to the Philips next year.
They were cheap though!
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#128Dark mode is actually bad for your eyes as it causes more strain. Reading white letters on a black back ground is harder than reading black letters on a white background.
F.lux and similar software are a better alternative as they just increase the warmth of the screen, which, at least for me, eliminates that feeling of eye pain when computing at night.
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#129At the risk of sparking some kind of Apple flame war: I went to the optometrist recently and my vision had abruptly tanked, I have a much stronger prescription than a year ago. “Have you been pulling long screen hours?” “Yeah. Very long.” “Well that’s why.” “Outside of cutting screen hours, is there anything else I can do?” “Get the highest DPI display you can afford and crank up the font size. Won’t help much, but i…
How did you avoid your prescription increasing a lot for so many years? Did long screen hours also correlate with not going outside? It's known that having less light exposure (e.g. going outside) correlates heavily with decreased eyesight.
I’m not sure obviously but I think it’s just a really sharp increase in screen time.
Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
#130Lights are extremely powerful but people always seem to focus on only half the equation. Waking up to light is a million times better than waking up to sound. My lights dim and turn off around 9:30pm and turn on at 5:30 am and brighten until 6:00 am. I wake up without any grogginess at all. It's amazing.
Some of the best sleep I've ever had was while camping, where tent is pitch black at night and a soft diffuse glow in the morning.
I go camping and everything is noisy or hot as soon as the sun comes up. Worst sleep I could ever get.