Lighting system as a wake up tool.
Have now been using a light or lighting system as a morning wake up for over 15 years. It’s life changing.
Lights start off dim and red/orange, and brighten very slowly to warm white. Works every time.
I wake up without the jolt of an alarm at home.
In fact - automated lighting in general - just so good.
What one do you use? I tried this but the one I bought even the dimmest setting wakes me up when it comes on.
Phillips Hue, 800 lumen colour bulbs. We have three in our bedroom.
It also depends on how they’re controlled. We do most of our control through HomeBridge/HomeKit but for wake-ups we’ve continued to use the Hue app-configured automations as the soft-on and ramp up are the most gentle.
We were using a dedicated Phillips light alarm clock before the automated lights.
Similar, but lighting system as a sleep tool. Lights start off warm white and slowly dim to amber / red, then off at the push of a button every night.
Same here - it just started as wake up. :)
Linux?
The question is about purchases.
Wait it’s suppose to be free? I still pay the 50$/m fee to guy who sold it to me.
Lots of us used to purchase Linux via floppies or CDs attached to a giant user manual that might hopefully help you get it working. I know we were purchasing the physical media itself, but I think people should remember how in those days you mostly couldn’t just easily download any distro and it would just work.
Winrar
Bicycle technology. Suddenly I could travel three times the speed of walking for the same effort.
Semi professional wifi(networking) at home (TP link omada or ubiquiti) and just buying excessive amounts of access points in my home.
Fuck you, low wifi signal. Fuck you, crashed router.
Internal SSD with the operating system on it. No other upgrade I’ve made to my PC has ever been so substantial.
I have my OS on an NVMe drive and it’s one of the best decisions I made when building.
But the jump from SATA SSD to nvme is much less noticeable than the one from HDD to SATA SSD
HDD, SSD and NVMe all have different versions. Later generations are normally 2x faster than previous version. Comparable generations are normally an 8x speedup. (Later generations are in parentheses).
HDD to SSD is like 80(160)->300(600).
SSD to NVMe is 300(600)->2400(4800, 14000).So, it’s likely a similar upgrade, unless you did HDD-g1 to SSD-g2 to NVMe-g1 (using G1/G2 to simplify).
It’s also likely possible that your computer is running so fast that a doubling or quadrupling in speed is a diminishing return as you don’t notice the difference.
My first very small mp3 player, something from sony. It was amazing.
My first digital camera, just being able to see your picture after shooting them. being able to delete photos was revolutionary.
My first wifi access point, having Internet at home without cable.
My first phone that could load msn messager. Also pretty cool.
When I got my first HD tv. I had previously been playing oblivion on Xbox 360 on an crt tv and when I setup the HD I was absolutely blown away by the clarity. I remember my stupid fucking ex-wife trying to tell me there was no difference between the two.
A temperature controlled pod for my bed. I used to sleep so hot all night long, constantly moving to find the cool part of the bed.
Now I keep it like as cold as can be all night, and my sleep has improved 10x. Plus my partner likes it warm so her side is nice and cozy. Both of us are happier for it.
Switched my polyester comforter for a wool blanket. It’s so much better for temperature regulation.
Last January I got a new laptop that blows my desktop out of the water in terms of specs. I was dumb and decided to get a budget desktop because of all the USB ports and the disk drive it has. It was something like $300-400USD. My current laptop was roughly $1000USD before tax.
Had to remove the complete spyware win11, but otherwise it’s been a great laptop (minus the few times I’ve either somehow broken MXLinux or broke KDE Plasma). Totally better than my old laptop as well considering I don’t need to constantly charge my new one to keep the battery from dying and it doesn’t have a lot of damage.
Affordable solar panels and batteries. With this we were able to life off-grid surrounded by nature.
Setting up my own NAS and offside backup.
Big project for sure, but being in control of my vital backups was important for me. Additionally the up front costs is lower than the subscriptions I would have needed.
Which build you got? What technology for the backup?
offside
Bone apple tea!
Off-site *
Beetlecrab Audio Tempera is the most inspiring electronic musical instrument I own. I got it in April, and I’m still finding new ways to use it. It does so much.
Oxi One really is the hardware sequencer to rule them all. Though I’m sure you could get by with a Hapax or Deluge if you don’t mind spending twice as much.
Not a purchase, but Csound has always been an invaluable companion to my music making process. It’s also entirely free and open-source.
Google Home did when it first came out. Unfortunately, the quality has been consistently tanking since inception
I dont get why google home is getting worse. I would have expected it to get better end better
The problem with a product from any large corporation is you want it to get better, but they want it to generate more money.
It’s not an enshittification process where it’s becoming more expensive or features are going behind a subscription. It just understands less and less and can do fewer things apparently. Plus it’s quite inconsistent.
It still is enshittification as they run it on fewer and fewer servers as the investor money dries up. It’s revenue was supposed to be from finding out what people wanted to buy, subscriptions, or purchases of other iot devices, but it never worked out.
I very much doubt Google home is running on “investor” money
A while ago Amazon introduced plans for an AI powered Alexa.
Sure enough, the original one has got worse since. I can now ask the one upstairs to turn off the office light and be told there are no devices with that name. Yet if I go to the kitchen to ask the same thing, I’ll be told there are multiple devices with that name, and it doesn’t know which one.
So now I use a switch.
Is Nintendo any better?!
/s
Haven’t seen this in this thread yet, but I’m going to say an improved sound system. For me, it was just a soundbar and rear speakers. I live in a tiny apartment so couldn’t fit a full sound system with front speakers, but just that was a huge improvement over just the TV speakers before.
64gb of ram. 32 cores.
if you keep many chonky applications open it’s lovely.