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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

#191

Post by germinalphrase »

goldenkey wrote: post #180
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…

As an optometrist with a deep knowledge on this subject, let me first say, the established edifice of eye care and laser eye surgery is an abomination that ruins lives. The advice your optometrist gave you is the information they were indoctrinated with and sadly, it's erroneous. What follows is my best synopsis on what is wrong with the industry, what causes worsening vision, and what you can do to resolve your visi…

The premise of this post is that (most?) optometrists are ‘doing it wrong’ - so is there any way for a layperson to vet the quality of an optometrist beyond their basic credentials?

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

#192

Post by MrAwesome »

abletonlive wrote: post #32
MrAwesome wrote: post #6

It 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.

Yeah, as other commenters have said - the curtains are for bright city lights I can't turn off.

Personally, I have a simple electrical timer set to turn on a bright sunlight bulb at 6:30am, and I open the curtains during the day.

You're right on the money about camping and how it affects the body, in my experience. Light obviously isn't the only factor in camping feeling good - but I've also been reading lately that light exposure (and possibly direct sun exposure?) during the day is quite good for you.

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

#193

Post by bob_theslob646 »

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?

Yeah, agreed. Is their any science behind this?

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

#194

Post by eropple »

knolan wrote: post #152
elabajaba wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience this is more reliable, but there's something off about the color temperature selections available within the Home app. LIFX bulbs have less than great color to begin with (their warm whites feel sickly and sallow), but it has the same problem with Hue. I end up setting colors within the Hue or LIFX app and then going "the color that is currently set" in Home. So not using their app has drawbacks too.

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

#195

Post by eropple »

crispyambulance wrote: post #183
lynndotpy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want some lights that expose a simple API and are easy to talk to. I want smart lights that will work when the internet is down and doesn't need an app to connect to.

There's another problem with many these smart lights, IMHO. A lightbulb should be a long-lasting, easily replaceable thing. Putting in all sorts of doodads into the base of lightbulb just strikes me as wasteful and a recipe for a brittle configuration. It's bad enough putting in a power converter, now we're talking about RF transceivers, computers, webservers, and REST API's. All this packed into a tiny very hot spac…

> You can then put all the internet-of-things jazz into THAT BOX and not in each light.

How do you propose to do this in a lamp or a can light with a standard light socket? Should I rip open my ceiling and add control wires to every can that's in there?

These bulbs don't have the smarts in them just because nobody thought of doing otherwise. The world is mostly made of legacy infrastructure. Hue will sell you lamps that don't use E26 bulbs, but you're not going to be changing the lights out later if you want to use something else.

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

#197

Post by benreesman »

goldenkey wrote: post #180
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…

As an optometrist with a deep knowledge on this subject, let me first say, the established edifice of eye care and laser eye surgery is an abomination that ruins lives. The advice your optometrist gave you is the information they were indoctrinated with and sadly, it's erroneous. What follows is my best synopsis on what is wrong with the industry, what causes worsening vision, and what you can do to resolve your visi…

I’ll agree with the siblings that you’ve made more claims than provided footnotes, but I will also clarify that I left something out (I figured it was assumed) in the dialog I described.

My optometrist did in fact put having a current prescription as the #1 thing. I’m a lazy guy in some ways but I value what eyesight I’ve got so I go every year on the dot to get my prescription measured by competent professionals.

I asked: “(Given that we have the correct prescription and that my screen usage is unfortunately not likely to go down) what can I do now?”

Cranking up the font size and paying for a solid monitor is obviously mitigation at best: the healthy thing for a guy like me would be to run around and throw spears at moving animals, not live in a glass box staring at a glass panel.

But circumstances being what they are? I can pull a longer stretch more often on the better display without getting a headache than I could before. It’s anecdotal, N=1, but the only subject is me and I’m not selling anything.

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

#198

Post by layer8 »

abletonlive wrote: post #32
MrAwesome wrote: post #6

It 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.

I use a Philips wake-up light for that.

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

#199

Post by layer8 »

hnick wrote: post #176
bozhark wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me feel less crazy for the black electrical tape on all the LEDs.

There are little semi-translucent black stickers you can get called lightdims or something, I use those. Doesn't fully block the light but makes it very faint but still visible which I like. Sometimes you need a couple. Does not help for things like routers which have a glaring sun inside them that reflects off the white plastic and blasts out of every single ventilation hole.

https://www.lightdims.com/

I use them as well.

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

#200

Post by layer8 »

was_a_dev wrote: post #178
pflanze wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreeing on the flicker. I don't think it's surprising that it's so common, though--undimmed lights are cheapest to power by not making proper DC out of the AC coming from the socket, and dimmed lights are cheapest to dim by slow PWM (pulsing ~100 times per second) without including inductors to flatten the pulses.

Is there a way to tell if an LED bulb doesn't flicker

Slow-motion video recording.
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