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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

#151

Post by Jaruzel »

dbttdft wrote: post #104

"Edison bulb" refers to a style and not anything to do with the quality of light. And you will probably get LED and a buggy one at that. Get incandescents, never ever use CFL because they look terrible and will make you want to kill yourself. Only get LED if you need cold color temperature, and know what you're doing enough to avoid flicker and other LED problems like bad color rendering. Half of LEDs will flicker ev…

> Get incandescents

In the UK, and in the EU, standard bulb incandescents are no longer being imported and the current stock is all there is, and as you say CFLs are horrible.

So the options left are halogen (just as bad as CFL imho) or LED. I've resisted LED for ages, but now it seems they are finally good enough to replace incandescents.

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

#152

Post by knolan »

elabajaba wrote: post #103
sampo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone who had Lifx due to them not needing a controller, don't buy them their software sucks. It worked fine for months at a time, but would then decide it no longer wanted to obey commands and you'd have to re-pair it, which usually took 30 minutes and 5 failed attempts where it would fail during the setup process after resetting the bulb. Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you'd have to just…

I’ve a couple of LIFX bulbs in my home. I paired them directly to the Apple HomeKit Home app and never bothered with LIFX‘a app. They’ve been 99% reliable for me for about three years now. I don’t know if I’m lucky or that avoiding their app was worth it.

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

#153

Post by GuB-42 »

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.

In my local hardware store, they sell remote controlled light bulbs where you can change color temperature, RGB too. Of course you can find similar products online, including Amazon, AliExpress... Look for RGBWW. These exist as LED strips too.

No apps, networking, or anything, nothing to configure, just IR remote control.

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

#154

Post by lozenge »

Claude_Shannon wrote: post #149
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.

Not just expensive, but way overpriced, dim and anti-interoperable.

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

#155

Post by iamacyborg »

biztos wrote: post #127
sampo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I have the nanoleaf bulbs too and they’re very responsive via Homekit/Thread.

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

#156

Post by mrob »

benreesman wrote: post #150
mrob wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

I simply change the font settings in LXQt Appearance Configuration. This generates a Fontconfig file in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf, which most applications respect. One exception is my favorite terminal emulator Kitty, which can be easily patched. In freetype.c, change the last line of get_load_flags() to "return base | FT_LOAD_MONOCHROME | FT_LOAD_TARGET_MONO;"

I assume other desktop environments support something similar.

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

#157

Post by aaron695 »

tgv wrote: post #121

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?

No post body was provided.

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

#158

Post by yurishimo »

twicetwice wrote: post #44
bubblethink wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Thanks for linking this! I've wondered if someone would start selling pre-flashed devices. Good for them.

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

#159

Post by sofixa »

lozenge wrote: post #154
Claude_Shannon wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but they are really expensive.

Not just expensive, but way overpriced, dim and anti-interoperable.

There are more luminous models now, and i wonder why you say anti-interoperable? Their protocol is widely understood and spoken by a ton of alternatives to their Hub, so you can use them with whatever you want.

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

#160

Post by marvin »

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.

I’ve tried out LIFX, and they’re pretty decent. But I’m unhappy with the spectrum of their deep, low-intensity reds. They don’t go far enough into the long-wavelength. I use this at night, before sleep.

Ditto with their pure whites; haven’t measured the spectrum but feels like they don’t manage to approximate sunlight in color rendering. Granted, the bulb I have only goes between blue-white and red.

Anyone been thinking similar thoughts and know of any options?

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