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Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

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Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#141

Post by throwaway290 »

lawkwok wrote: post #7

Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them. The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming. Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room. The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.

Try incandescent bulbs. They're hard to come by these days but they give the coziest vibe, couldn't be further from a hospital. As a bonus, full-spectrum blackbody radiation (unlike patchy spectrums of all LEDs) and no PWM.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#142

Post by benreesman »

goodguyamercunt wrote: post #138
benreesman wrote: post #59

At 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…

I don't want to sound stupid but just because a single doctor said it doesn't make it true.

Oh sure, I don’t think I would have gotten surgery without multiple opinions!

But while there are no guarantees it sounded plausible and a few Google searches found other people saying it had helped, the downside is a quite high but not utterly ruinous expense on the thing I look at more than anything else, and even a pretty expensive retail computer monitor would only have to extend my useful eyesight by a comparatively modest period of time to pay for itself.

And while it very well may be placebo, it certainly feels less physically stressful on my eyes and facial muscles, so I don’t regret it even though I’ll have to cut the budget somewhere else.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#143

Post by InCityDreams »

bubblethink wrote: post #25
lawkwok wrote: post #7

Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them. The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming. Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room. The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.

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 find wiz lights to work well for me. No faff setup, and then...so much better at home.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#144

Post by pharmakom »

bubblethink wrote: post #25
lawkwok wrote: post #7

Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them. The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming. Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room. The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.

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 has a pretty well understood protocol that you can run entirely locally. There are Linux CLI controllers, for example. The official app works well enough but it’s reassuring to not be locked in.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#145

Post by benreesman »

ehnto wrote: post #120
benreesman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 4k is a huge step up from what I had been using which was just whatever. Getting up to a modern DPI is a game changer right?

Not to assume you play games or watch YouTube, but on low DPI you also don't realise what you are missing in detail. Entire objects reveal themselves in this new space between the pixels. Where once was a splodge is now a person far off into the distance. You could almost liken low DPI to being near sighted, which I also am. Once you hit higher DPI suddenly you can see the view far off into the distance clearly. I ha…

Oh man, I never got into gaming because two of my brothers were so off-the-charts that I was like “why bother”.

When I was like maybe 19 there was this Quake3 player who went by Zero4 who was in the top few on Earth at that time, and my 16 year old brother slapped him around so effortlessly during their biweekly workouts I knew that it was going to be more fun to watch than to be 1-px railed before I figured out which gun I was holding :)

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#146

Post by aitchnyu »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #123
nostromo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eith…

I'm Indian and I've been trying to import warm white, high CRI lights but I can't figure out which ones are warm white and support 230V and B22 Bayonet holders.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#147

Post by mrob »

d3nj4l wrote: post #64
benreesman wrote: post #59

At 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…

A hard amen to this. I can't afford the 6K display, but getting a decent 4k one for $400 has more than paid for itself in reducing stress. I never noticed it, but my eyes were working overtime reading blurry text.

Blurry text can be fixed at zero cost by disabling font antialiasing and enabling full hinting.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#148

Post by alin23 »

I always felt overhead lights are tiring, and I almost never turned them on since I left for college and had my own place.

In the last 7 years I experimented with everything: ambiental LED strips/string, IKEA Tradfri bulbs, 150W LED COBs, desk lamps, hidden source of light, TV/monitor ambilight.

In the end I settled for very little lighting, created with ESPHome [1], and controlled through my Volum app [2], part of which can be seen in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzz-xrEon7g

  1. An RGBW monitor ambient light (bright enough to light up the entire room when I need it)
  2. A battery powered string light which I take everywhere with me so I don't have to use overhead lights in Airbnb's/hotels etc.
  3. Long, warm and dim string lights for hallway, bedroom and balcony
[1] https://esphome.io/#light-components

[2] https://lowtechguys.com/volum

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#149

Post by Claude_Shannon »

lawkwok wrote: post #7

Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them. The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming. Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room. The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.

Yeah, but they are really expensive.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#150

Post by benreesman »

mrob wrote: post #147
d3nj4l wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hard amen to this. I can't afford the 6K display, but getting a decent 4k one for $400 has more than paid for itself in reducing stress. I never noticed it, but my eyes were working overtime reading blurry text.

Blurry text can be fixed at zero cost by disabling font antialiasing and enabling full hinting.

It’s hard to know what’s real vs. subjective on this for a layperson like myself, but I’ve found it tough to get a font solution for the terminal that I really like.

I’m currently using WezTerm on Mac OS because it renders very crisp fonts and has GPU-accelerated ligatures, it’s pretty slick and I’d recommend trying it out.

I’ve messed around a bunch with my Ubuntu machine with the same terminal/font/etc. and never got a result I liked.

If you have a really good config that you like I bet I wouldn’t be the only one who gave it a spin!

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