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?
People upvote headlines these days (as a form of agreement) rather than articles. But you're right. This is on the extreme low end in terms of details.
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 features (timed schedules, scenes) live in the Hue brigde, so everything works also without outside internet.
LIFX: No Zigbee, no bridge. These bulbs connect to your 2.4GHz home wifi. More advanced features (schedules, scenes) live in the LIFX company server, so won't work without internet connection. But without outside internet connection, you can still use the phone app via your wifi router to control the color and brightness of individual bulbs. If you're a home automation hobbyist, you can give color and brightness commands to LIFX bulbs over your 2.4Ghz wifi, so you can program your own timed schedules that would work without outside internet connection.
Other smart bulbs: Cheaper. Philips Hue and LIFX are the two most expensive.
I understand LIFX is best for bright colors. But Philips Hue bulbs don't contain just RGB leds, but also leds for white and warn white, so the bulb may have 5 different types of leds. So Philips might produce better near-white "natural" light than same colors produced by combining only red,green,blue leds. Not sure if this matters to everyone or only to some lighting connoisseurs.
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 spam power off or the color you were trying to choose until it finally worked (this was in a room with the bulb and a hard wired wifi AP). The app was also slow and took awhile to start (on flagship Android phone at the time).
Eventually my bulbs died and I haven't gone back to smart lighting yet (though I'm considering ordering some hue or Ikea bulbs).
If you check /r/lifx on Reddit it's basically filled with people complaining about lifx's awful software.
In my experience the ikea bulbs are also awful, constant unpairing requiring multiple attempts to re-pair with the remote, especially if you have multiple bulbs in close proximity. In the end I gave up and just use them as normal bulbs. It would be a nice setup if it worked though, having a dedicated remote control is much more convenient than using a phone imo.
Damn, I was hoping they'd be a good hue alternative because I don't want to pay hue prices. I was looking at nanoleaf as they're using Thread, but they don't have any basic bridges (only homekit, eero, or one of their rgb wall panel things, none of which are things I want) and won't speak Matter.
At this point I feel like I might as well wait for Matter bridges to come out this fall, as hopefully companies will refresh their product lines then and we'll get some better quality lights.
The ikea setup might be worth a shot with the networking bridge they have to control multiple bulbs at once, but my experience with individual bulbs was bad.
> Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you'd have to just spam power off or the color you were trying to choose until it finally worked (this was in a room with the bulb and a hard wired wifi AP). The app was also slow and took awhile to start (on flagship Android phone at the time).
Interesting. I have lifx bulbs going back to the first generation Kickstarter products and I've never had one die yet. I use them daily.
From what I understand the number one cause of led bulb failures is heat, which causes things like capacitors to fail prematurely or poor connections to break from the repeated expansion.
All my bulbs are used in lamps or fixtures which are not enclosed which means they have plenty of ventilation.
You'd think being in the same room as a Unifi UAP AC Pro in a non crowded area with a dedicated 2.4ghz ssid would fix those wifi issues, but it didn't.
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.
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.
I used Google Home for a while, but honestly it was a pretty bad experience as time went on.
I've used Home Assistant[0] for the last 8-9 months. It works great and has support for every device I used with Google Home. It also has bridges so that you can still use Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant for voice commands if you want that. The mobile app is good enough. It isn't as user friendly as Google Home, but it's not terrible and way more powerful.
You can run it on your own hardware, e.g. a NAS or Raspberry Pi, and they also sell purpose made hardware[1]
Using a zig-a-zig-ah stick in combination with a raspberry pi 3/4 running zigbee2mqtt is surprisingly stable, compared to the slightly cheaper alternatives [0] and works quite okay in combination with home assistant.
But to be honest I'll be looking into getting a Home Assistant Yellow as well as this seems to be easier.
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.
It is the bridge that provides the REST API, not the bulbs.
Having a REST API means the complete setup is easier to tinker with through a defined protocol and not having to resort to hack with the bulbs or any zigbee/low-level things.
I used this to play a bed time indication sequence on multiple bulbs in the living room from MIDI notes.
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 space packed in with silicone goop and made, often times, by disinterested bottom-of-the-barrel manufacturers.
It's much better, I think, to have the light bulbs be just that, LIGHTBULBS. Of course, they can be LED's, DC powered and have multiple colors but the control and power source should be in a box away from the lights, somewhere convenient. You can then put all the internet-of-things jazz into THAT BOX and not in each light.
This would ultimately give interior designers a better palette of light sources to work with and give consumers a less annoying churn of bad choices for technology.
> 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.
So now there are two standards that are mutually exclusive--"works in every light made in the last hundred years" and "the other one".
I sense great commercial success here, telling people to run LV to every HV can light. And how about--you know--a lamp? Like the one standing on my floor right now, with nowhere to place an external box? Should we redesign them all for this new standard that doesn't address actual pain points? How do we power the control boxed? Does every lamp now have a chaining 120V and you need to hang an AC adapter off it, then weasel control wires into the lamp shade? Or do we expect them to output 12V in case you want to run them with automated controls? Or do we expect them to just pick a vendor, build in their control box and you throw out the lamp if the software sucks? In a lamp?
This solves a problem people don't have through the time-tested strategy of making people think more, do more work, and be more annoyed. I think I'm seeing why it doesn't exist.
I am talking about permanent fixtures here. And anyway, there ARE 12VDC lights without a bunch of electronics junk inside them. They're readily available for folks and designers who want _really_ _nice_ lighting.
The MagicLight app works pretty well, doesn't require cloud (though they will try and get you to sign up) and you can automate through home assistant or look at the API yourself.
Home Assistant, but you'll spend more than a weekend getting things settled. Still, I love how open and free the platform is for most of its users. It really is an incredible example of open source software.
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 duper bright. Other than that, I'm a big fan! Big fan of products from that site generally, and the guy behind it seems solid.
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)
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.
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.
Completely agree, fantastic lights and worth every penny, their CRI is high enough to fill out the visible light spectrum nicely - you don't get any "indoor greys" and they seem to last forever, several of my bulbs are over 10 years old and still working perfectly.
Absolutely. I have a bunch of waveform light strips (the highest CRI) which I use for specific lighting conditions (e.g. taking photos) and it's the difference between literally night and day. I'm also using them for plants and they love it!
The only downside is their rather expensive cost so I'm yet to replace all my lighting with it, but it's a great investment given that it'll probably outlast me and so won't need to change them.
I put one up in my photo studio because I wanted some 6500k lights, and there’s no way it was actually white at 6500k. I forget what color it was tinged with but it was super obvious.
I suspect they’re only high CRI at certain color temperatures?
They offer a high current adapter for the Phillips Hue Light Strip so you can have large and bright light strip installations. Their LEDs are also top notch. I installed some as my pandemic lighting and it's been great.
So, I'm a low light kinda person anyway. The best light are light turned off. I can't stand the amount of light some (many?) switch on at the earliest sign of evening, and I guard my stash of low power bulbs (finding ones under 3W is hard!) like it's my first born. Apart from the kitchen, my house has no bright white lights anywhere.
What would the utility of smart bulbs for someone like me be?
My last apartment had really inconveniently placed light switches. I bought some smart bulbs and found it really nice to control from my phone. For example I could turn on or off all the lights in my home without getting out of bed at night or in the morning. I also had wireless light switches that I could place on any part of the wall or just keep at my bedside.
I bought Phillips Wix bulbs during Black Friday for much less than Hue bulbs. The Wix orange/yellow is underpowered but it works fine for us since we are using that at night anyways.
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?
I've replaced almost all the bulbs in my house with the 800 lumen white & color hue bulbs and find them plenty bright. However, they recently came out with 1600 lumen (16W/100W equiv.) bulbs which doubles the lumens of the standard ones. I haven't tried them but I'm hoping to soon.
The 1600 lumen ones are a game changer if your light fixture only has 2 sockets. I used to have 2 800s and swapped them for 2x1600s, significantly better, and if they ever came out with a 2000+ lumen bulb I would pick it up.
Have LifX come back from the dead yet? They've been struggling super hard to get products back on the shelf and their support has been like, comatose, according to Reddit etc
I really wanted to try their products because I hear the color bulbs are INSANE, but they were always out of stock, never on sale, and I heard so many horror stories...
Had both LIFX and am now on Hue. The diffusion in the Hue stuff is on a whole other level, very easy on the eyes and aesthetically pleasing light produced. I don't think I'd go back.
Automating with the brilliant open source Home Assistant.
Not sure what horror stories you have heard but supply is not too bad in Australia, I see them in stock in retail stores, I have had Lifx for a long time, still going strong.
I kick started lifx. Received 4 but had so many problems. They were crazy slow and didn’t change colour properly. I’m sure they have improved since then tho but I don’t have any use since I’m not in my own home.
This is the kind of thing I was talking about, exactly. I am not saying it's everyone's experience, but when you pay big coins for a fancy tech product these days like... support... please...
And at this very moment the dang color bulb is sold out on their website.
I am not quick to give any credence to companies when I hear of poor support from the company. Perhaps I was a victim of the classic supply chain issues in this case, or I am gullible to angry Reddit reviewers. I'd really love to be wrong! I have heard the colors on those bulbs are out of control amazing.
I will keep an eye out for a bargain or better bulb if I can find one. I am definitely hoping to be impressed now that I am a lifelong consumer of these things.
The 1600 white bulbs are real slappers. If you can snag a costco deal or something.. do it.
The 1600 color bulbs are just the old color bulbs with an upgraded white LED, which is still really nice but not like... a huge upgrade if you're trying to blast really huge color. They are overpriced as heck right now. Really a bummer move.
... my money says they are coming out with a new color bulb in the next year
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.
No internet connection required to use the bulbs. The bulbs connect to a hub over Zigbee, the hub connects to your LAN. Making that connection requires the Hue app, as far as I know.
Once the bulbs are set up with the hub, you can control it on your network using HomeKit or open source equivalents, and don't need the Hue app for anything but firmware updates.
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.
I have worked at home my whole career. It was life changing when I discovered I could aim several LED shop lights at my ceilings (90,000 lumens total, in a vaulted living room) to create a summer day indoors, even on the dimmest cloudiest winter day.
When I remodeled my new home, I put 3 dimmable LED light strips around each ceiling, hidden above molding, so every ceiling is effectively a diffuse but high lumen light.
Then I use smart bulbs in accent lamps and other lighting, to add color for variety and mood.
This is called Cove Lighting for anyone wanting to research this.
I'm remodeling a 12'x12' bedroom to be my office and lighting is a huge part of my plan. I'll do cove lighting like this using CRI 95+ LED strips dimmable ~500lumen/ft either 4000K or 5000K. Haven't decided on the color temp. You lose a lot of CRI going to a temp adjustable strip.
The effects, with a 60000 lumen setup, were remarkable. Winter depression, which affected me on 2 out of 7 days before enrolling in the study, dropped to zero for the next two months.
The study showed that this lighting setup works as well as those light therapy boxes you sit in front of, and perhaps even better.
This is my dream when I own my own home. I want high CRI LEDs with tunable colour temperature. Automated to track roughly the colour temperature of the outside environement. It would be great for those dark British winters
If suffer from seasonal depression, I’d suggest that a couple lightbulbs (household size dependent) and some electrical work are well worth your time, even as a renter. Do it now, while you’re able to take on projects.
I love the idea of indoor summer days, but my wife thinks it's cozy when it's dim inside (never mind that I think she'd enjoy winter more if she could get more daylight than what's available far north where we live). The dimmable strips sound like an amazing compromise. Are those available at sufficient wattage?
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.
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 have been messing with VR lately and that is a new dimension as well, similar in change to the jump to high DPI. Ignoring the stereoscopic part, you also don't realise the scale of things until they are in the correct FOV in front of you. I see now why simracing boffins faff about with FOV so much on their screens! I took the effort to calculate FOV for my desktop monitor and where I sit, and in FPS games and it made a huge difference to immersion.
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 :)
I do hear that actually, my little brother plays and there is a pretty big age gap there, so he has unlimited energy and time and I do not. He plays so much better than I can manage, and I just don't have the time to commit to it anymore. I still play for fun though.
I've actually got a fair number of recordings of his old matches against the heavy pros of the time. I've ground it through some software and I've caught him getting a shot off in as little as 80ms. That's not even possible I don't think, but I quintuple-checked it.
Even if I'm off by a factor of two he was faster than an F22 pilot, by a lot.
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!
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.
I've recently been looking at collimated displays, they're used by flight sim users to improve immersion in game. They use a large fresnel lens in front of their monitor in order to collimate the light. For their purpose it adds a perception of depth to the viewed image.
However, they also claim there is a natural relaxing of the eyes, which adds to the immersion.
I wonder if such a display would work in an office environement. A quick look for any literature came up blank.
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 vision issues in a matter of months and never have to worry about it again. You'll still need some form of corrective lenses though - I'm not selling bullshit.
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Most cases of myopia (nearsightness), involving progressively worsening vision, are largely due to inaccurate lens prescriptions.
An optometrist or optician will have you sit with your head in the phoropter asking "better/worse" while flipping lenses - pretty much a binary search type of approach. But this is often done hastily and results in inaccurate prescriptions.
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Unfortunately, inaccurate scripts are often inflicted upon children which as I will describe later, compounds into worsening vision over time, with the opticians/optometrists prescribing higher and higher power lenses that are only solving an issue that is created by the previous history of inaccuracy! Telltale signs of inaccurate scripts include:
- minor corrections
Eyes are not static objects and vision actually does vary from month to month, day to day, lighting conditions, blood pressure, etc. If a correction is minor, it's almost always unecessary and harmful.
- slightly different prescriptions for left (OS) and right (OR) eyes.
99.9% of folks have equivalent vision in both eyes. Like I said above, if a difference is minor, a correction would almost always be harmful.
- minor cylinder corrections (astigmatism.)
Astigmatism is extremely rare and when it does occur it's almost never minor. These corrections are especially egregious as they cause distortion compensation.
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So why do eye professionals commit these cardinal acts of eye destruction upon their patients? Well we already discussed hastyness but that is clearly a vice that is going to result in bad outcomes in any profession.
What else? Well, eye professionals are taught to seek out as perfectly sharp an image as possible, and then back off the power a bit to reduce the possibility of eyestrain, headache, and dizziness. Some professionals don't even back off the power though..
In order to accomplish this task of perfect sharp vision, they add all of these minor corrections. When these ill-fitting lenses are worn for months on end, the body has a somatic response. The eyeballs elongate, which pushes the focal plane back, causing further myopia. [1]
The patient goes back to the eye doctor and now receives an even more incorrect script based on the transient state their eyes are in, induced by a cascading patterned history of harmful scripts.
In the worst case, the eye doctor recommends laser eye surgery which shaves the corneal lens of your eye into an artificial lens. Essentially, they carve your current harmful prescription straight into your eyeball. And then guess what happens? The eyeball shortens and often, the patients vision becomes progressively worse again. It can take months, but it does happen. [2] And now the fix that they recommend? More laser eye surgery. It's barbaric.
So please, do not get eye surgery before trying what I recommend below. Surgery on the cornea is advertised as non invasive but it can cause life long issues such as chronic dry eye. Please try to assess whether your vision is actually bad, or just a transient state due to a long history of bad prescriptions and poor habits.
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How do you break the cycle and restore your vision?
1) First, look at your current script. How asymmetric is it? How small are the cylinder values, if any?
Lower the scripts power and make the prescription symmetric. Remove the minor cylinder values. So for example, if you had -3.6 and -3.4 with some small astigmatism corrections, just ask for a script for -3.4 SPH in both eyes.
2) Make sure the pupillary distance is correct - eye professionals are notorious for fucking this up because the PD needs be to custom set for the frame the lenses will be going in, otherwise you'll have lenses with a focal center that is not aligned with the center of your eyeball. This causes distortion and uneven focus, causing eye strain and worsening vision.
3) Aspheric lenses - buy good lenses like Seiko double aspherics - just like cinema or photo lenses cost a lot of money because they reduce abberation and edge distortion, your eyes benefit from the same technology. Bottom dollar spherical lenses are okay, but strain is not healthy for eyes, and a good $300 set of Seiko transition lenses with coatings can last 10+ years. It's worth your eye health.
4) Have multiple pairs of spectacles. Use the weakest usable one (or no specs) depending on the task you are doing. For instance, I'm on my phone in bed, so I am not using any glasses. This will improve your vision over time. You can slowly reduce the power of your scripts if you care about it. I went from -4.75 to -3.5 and I'm happy with what I'm at, so I don't spend any effort trying to lower any further. But if you have the money, the time, and the will, you can get to -1.X territory through judicious use of a set of activity appropriate lenses.
Lastly, buy your own frame, buy your own pupilary distance tools, buy your own trial lens kit and trial frame like the Oculus UB6. Take time and figure out the right prescription for yourself without it being rushed. Test it and have it remade if the center of focus of the lenses is not at the center of your eyes. PD is integral!
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An eye professional who cares and understands these things CAN help and even properly measure these values but they are rare. Sometimes if you want something done right, you kind of have to do it yourself. Or at the very least, guide or give your demands. After all, you are the paying customer.
Hope this helps others break the cycle of worsening vision. If anyone has any question, feel free to reach out.
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.
It's not bad advice to make font sizes larger. You should also be using something like F.lux or night mode all the time. Yellow light is much less straining on the eyes than white or blue light.
Resolution really doesn't matter much when it comes to strain. I have a 2011 2560x1440 27" monitor that I've always used large font on. What's important is being able to see without straining and a larger UI helps. Having higher resolutions is nice but largely unecessary. Blur is not going to happen from making things larger if you do it right. Doing it right means that you shouldn't be changing the actual output resolution of your OS, but rather the interface size itself. On OSX you'll want to use the HiDPI (Retina) resolution options. Enabled through this script: https://github.com/xzhih/one-key-hidpi
On Windows you can just set the magnification/font size through the settings panel.
This applies to any resolution display -- use the full physical resolution!!
Frame rates are actually more of a factor. 120hz+ is going to cut down on strain. Avoiding PWM [1] on phones, tablets, laptops, and monitors will also help.
But really, the gold standard is for you to wear a different set of spectacles when you do your computer work. You shouldn't need the power of your full prescription to do close up work. It's destroying your eyes.
Wow, it's the first time ever I see a confirmation that the weird approach I followed (mostly due to mistrust and weird teen ideas that the body might adapt) and worked on me has scientific bases and could work for others too and from an optometrist!
SEIKO Vision by their website does not appear to be available in the United States (no providers are listed in their directory)-- do you happen to know anything equivalent available there?
Seiko's US website has some PDFs if you do some searching but the JP website is a far better resource, and the products are international for the most part. [1]
I don't have a list of references ready for these kinds of debates but the information is out there if you even do a cursory glance. The Japanese have been the most vigilant in doing research on myopia. [1]
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?
Most optometrists are fine when it comes to diagnosing eye health. They have equipment that largely aids them in those diagnostics.
For myopia, there's really not much you can do other than ask them their approach to vision correction. For example, do they recommend multiple pairs of glasses for different activities? If they don't, you can immediately cull them or you can use them as a service and give them instructions. Doctors ultimately serve you, and if you want a couple scripts, minor corrections removed, etc. these aren't groundbreaking demands they'll reject.
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 fingertips is such a huge part of our livelihood. I’ve been trying to treat all of it with more care.
> 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.
As someone who also mostly works in the terminal and who has stopped wearing glasses thanks to a weird approach, try a pure white or slightly yellowish background with a black font in the daytime.
Most terminal users will find that weird, but among other weird things I tried it worked wonders for me!
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.
I tend to offset expensive purchases with cheap ones. Expensive chair, cheap as hell desk. Expensive monitor, cheap computer. Expensive keyboard, cheap mouse. You can get a really nice workstation if you choose the expensive parts deliberately for the ergonomics.
I don’t want to speak for you but you said one or two things that echo with me: by hyper-optimizing my workstation to be the most comfortable place in my house I think I sort of feed a tendency to hide from difficult parts of life by just working too much.
I also think you’re onto something about activity, particularly outdoor activity being the best counterweight to that tendency, I just struggle to get an active routine going from a cold start.
Usually if I’m active I can keep it that way, but whether it’s C19 lockdown or a death in the family, it’s very easy to get knocked back into that sedentary state.
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.
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.
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.
Your far ancestors didn't have to deal with light pollution and all sorts of city lights. I don't know where you live, but a lot of people live in cities, where this is a problem. If you live in the countryside or in very small cities, you may not have the same problem.
Our ancestors used to go to bed earlier and wake up in the middle of the night for a while before going back to sleep. Our schedules and concept of 'normal' (versus 'natural') has changed drastically.
Street lights are too bright for sleep where I live, and I need to wake up with an alarm anyway so no waking up with the sun for me. It's a no brainer!
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.
I've done the same thing and it has significantly made me feel comfier at night.
There are other ways to improve your sleep quality as well! Don't use any electronic devices 30 minutes before bed or while in bed. Meditation before bed with deep slow breathing. A nice warm bath or shower. Sleeping on your side if you can.
For me, none of these things helped when I was really struggling with sleep several years ago. It turns out I had severe sleep apnea! If you aren't sleeping well, talk to your doctor and see a sleep specialist. I swear by my CPAP. Both my waking and sleeping life is infinitely better with it treating my severe sleep apnea.
Don't suffer in silence. If you're feeling unwell physically or mentally, talk to a medical professional. So much harm can be minimized and sometimes your ailment can be totally cured!
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.
At least in my case I have to go to quite some lengths so that a sleeping mask doesn't slip off during the night; I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing while asleep to constantly work them off my head, but unless I really tighten them down, they don't help me much. Blackout curtains are much simpler.
Dark 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.
Yes, although there is a trade-off with respect to the fact that the more vibrant you want your colors to be, the more brightness they generally require (starting from dark colors), which may result in less contrast on a white vs. a black background. On a white background you therefore want to stay with muted/dark text colors.
Another consideration is that screen brightness should roughly correspond to the ambient brightness of the environment. Unless you work in the dark, that basically requires a light background.
Vibrant text colors on a dark background look attractive (like neon signs), but aren’t very ergonomic in the long run.
Agreed on all points, Japanese ceiling lights are wonderful. For context, the great majority of Japanese homes and apartments come with standardised, non-screw, ceiling light fixtures for which you purchase your own lights when you move in.
In fact, I had never even seen a building without these fixtures until I moved into my current apartment (built by Sekisui House in 2019) that for some reason has these horrible in-ceiling, spotlight-esque lights that are common at least in Europe. Whilet they have a somewhat yellow tint, they can not be dimmed. My solution was to grab a standard desk lamp and LED bulbs that came with a simple IR remote, so as not to torture my poor eyes at night.
I have seen downlights which have a switch to toggle between warm and cool but the switch is not accessible after installation. I imagine the hardest part is just the controls. You’d have to run some data line along with the electrical and then have a special switch which contains the controls. Unless you are willing to go with a wireless remote in which case just get the ikea bulbs for cheap.
The simpler version of this is Philips Warm Glow in the US, generically known as 'warm dim', where the lamp has two LED engines - one bright and cold, one dimmer and warm, and it crossfades between them when the lamp is dimmed. Works great. I use it for every lamp in my house.
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.
It's also easy to see when you move your hands quickly back and forth in front of a dark background with fingers spread apart, instead of the fingers being blurred you'll see their image repeated distinctly many times (like a fan).
One 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 CFLs and LEDs, so now we need a bunch of measures to quantify our light.
> 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.
> Good quality LEDs are >90 CRI, and the higher end ones are 95+.
High CRI is fine, but it's not something we should be completely satisfied with:
> R_a is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of R_a, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (R_a) calculation R9 is not included.
> The most commonly used value of CRI is called Ra, which is the average value of the first eight indices (R1-R8). Lesser-known but more accurate is the extended CRI (Re), which uses the average value of R1-R15 and thus serves as a more accurate measure of color fidelity given that it takes the rendering of more colors into account.
High CRI / Ra scores are fine for what they are, but they do not measure the entire 'colour reality', so when the GP says that CRI scores are 'lacking'—even ones in the 90s—they're not wrong. Current LEDs may match the CRI scores of incandescents, but incandescents may still produce results that are better outside of what CRI measures.
Of course this may only matter to those of us who remember incandescents: the younger you are the more likely you lived your life never experiencing incandescent, and so LED is "normal" and "fine".
Regardless: CRI was a decent place to start, but it'd be nice if we could collectively raise the bar.
Yep. Take a look at the datasheet for the Bridgelux Thrive chips - they have a plot of intensity/wavelength of the LEDs compared to a black body radiator, it's pretty much identical even deep into the reds. Of course, that means it is also very close to 100 on all the R numbers.
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.
I'm lucky enough to live and to work from a well-lit apartment (mostly by natural light). I was made aware of that when I recently visited the newly purchased apartment of one of my close friends who has the building close to his building only, I don't know, I'd say 10-15 meters away, anyway, close enough that the natural light very rarely gets to his living room. I realised then that I would have been very unhappy to live there (even though, in all other respects, my friend's apartment is "better" compared to mine, as in it is situated in a better location and is bigger and more spacious).
Light and noise (as in, its absence) make a hell of a difference in our well-being.
I didn't love the author's suggestion of Edison bulbs, but maybe I am missing something amazing about them that makes up for the fact that they use ~10x the energy of low color temperature (e.g. 2500K) LEDs? I guess it seems online that "Edison bulb" can refer to form factor rather than incandescent?
Hue Ambiance, night shift and light/dark according to time of day on both phone and laptop really seem to help me feel awake and also get right to sleep
Some of the best lighting around are the specialized fluorescent tubes used to promote coral growth in tropical aquariums. It's very close to full-spectrum sunlight and can be simply set up over a desk. Also great for small plants.
Each 2 ft tube is 25 W. It's basically a simple fluorescent tube, but the inner surface is coated with a special collection of phosphors that absorbs the incident radiation and re-radiates in a sun-like spectrum. They're a bit pricey relative to ordinary fluorescents, but the effect is really nice.
Focusing 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.
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
Lights 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.
Sleep as android's automation feature coupled with home assistant allows me to do things like turn on the lights when my alarm turns on (or offset by some time).
I agree with this 100%. When we bought our house 5 years ago I bought some hue bulbs as a luxury purchase along with one Sonos speaker. Figured I was spending 200 grand on a house so may as well pay a few hundred dollars worth of toys.
Fast forward 5 years and the whole house is automated (and not through the cloud) but the ability to change moods with lights (and lights with moods) and especially have non-white light throughout the house has been amazing.
I can't even remember the last time light was truly bright white except for occasionally in the morning when needing to wake up or when needing to really read and concentrate. Other than that it seems vaguely inhuman to go into a house and be lit up in cold white lights like an interrogation
I would say that once you get over some initial shock about colored lights, sometimes it makes sense to have lights in room half brightness orange-yellows and sometimes it even is nice to have them deep blues and purples and some accent lights are always nice to have somewhat colorful because they are mostly providing ambience and decoration rather than light to do something with
Also moving away from overhead lighting and towards more lamps and wall lighting in rooms has also done wonders. Something about overhead bright lights feels unnatural once you don't have them
Which makes sense being that the only time that sort of light happens outside is at midday in the summer
Absolutely, absolutely agree. Out of all of the things I own, the little monitor-top lightbar I have is at the top of my list for cost-to-life-benefit ratio.
If I forget to turn it on I always why I feel so gloomy.
Seriously get one, even if your lighting is otherwise nice.
I don't understand what this accomplishes? Monitors produce their own light, with the brightness being adjustable. Including local dimming zones or per-pixel zones in OLEDs.
The only benefit I can see is if you cannot touch type and need to see your hands, but isn't key lighting the normal solution to that problem?
PS - I used to work with someone that needed the overhead light on to see their LCD monitor better. I'm still confused by that to this day.
This directs light down on the desk, so the light is perpendicular to the light coming from the monitor. It's not illuminating the monitor at all really. It's basically a desk lamp that doesn't take up any space on the desk. And in my case, it's powered by one of the USB ports that the monitor (43" TV) already had.
Not OP, but I got this one and really like it. There are plenty of cheap ones, but this one is really nice. I will say that I don’t use the puck much except to turn it on and off. I don’t really change the color temperature or brightness. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DP7RYXV/
My 34" ultrawide sits on the bridge of my desk above 4U height of 19" rackspace, is there much scope for angling the light about? Concerned that it might reflect on gear knobs. I otherwise really like what this does, quite a high price for some LEDs, but I have no doubt it's great...
It's not super adjustable, it's really designed to illuminate the area just below the monitor (mine is actually a 43" 4K TV). It defaults to sitting at 90 degrees - straight down. It can be adjusted a little bit, but ONLY towards the monitor. This isn't terribly useful - I don't know why you'd want to do that.
As for cost, yeah it's a bit much for what it is, but the build quality reflects that. The counterweight on the back is quite nice and solid feeling.
Yes. These all work roughly the same - the light bar rests on top of the monitor and has a counterweight in the back to keep it there. So no adhesives or clips.
Also don’t just drench the space in light. Small accent lights (like a desk lamp) make a space so much cosier. I have small lamps in every corner and they’re great. They all have warm light.
In the bedroom I have a dimmable lamp that can be scarcely brighter than candle. It’s great for reading, and for not blinding myself when I need to find something on the bedside table.
Like others, I recommend a big monitor. I use MonitorControl on Mac to adjust it automatically and manually. Night Shift and other orange light filters are a godsend.
Because blackout curtrains are more accessible. I live in an apartment and probably couldn't install a rolladen even if I could afford it. You can get good blackout curtains for less than 20 dollars.
I personally never considered them as a solution. It's less preference and more not knowing they existed. I could put them in my current place (and it's tempting to!) but I'm moving again in six to nine months to a place I won't be able to.
I recommend Chinese Milight led panels, there's a 2000 LM variant, very bright, cheap but high quality.
They have full RGB + white temperature + dimming, I found the RGB part a pointless gimmick but dimming is invaluable.
"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 even in normal non-dimming fixtures fast enough that you dont see it looking dead on, but slow enough that when you move your hand you will see multiple copies of your hand. Some LEDs look terrible like fluorescent lights.
>Dark mode
Is crap in practice. 1/10 of your programs needed for a task will not have dark mode. Also most dark modes are high contrast instead of just low brightness. Most programs will suddenly show something bright because they are not cohesively developed (some stupid library will show an unthemed window), and most LCDs cannot be dimmed enough to be used in the dark without straining your eyes (also it will need to be PWM-free which is common now but it is still another constraint). Another fun fact is that if you use a program like redshift to set the color temperature low, the overshoot on a typical LCD will make flashes of white light every time you scroll. The pragmatic solution is to go to bed early, or just do what I do which is to use CRT/OLED and forget about dark modes but set the brightness and color temperature low.
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.
I don't think they are as bad as CFL. CFL have really cold dim light with some other phenomena going on. I have seen LEDs that are, though.
> but now it seems they are finally good enough to replace incandescents.
Certainly not on average. Half the time I encounter an LED I notice that it flickers, even without a dimmer. I just bought 4 for $50 thinking I paid enough to get a non-bullshit product, and they flicker and I will have to go try the $60 one next.
