I remember my eyesight was 20/20 all my life until I started playing more and more with phones and tablets, now I can barely see any font in a regular browser tab at 100% zoom so I set it to 150% by default.

One thing that changed for good is using a 50" TV as monitor connected to my mac mini at 4' distance from my chair. Now my eyes don't cross anymore and my sight has improved a lot.

So yes, I concur that looking at clouds and the horizon everyday may be a good way to recalibrate our eyes. Spend more time outdoors.

[edit] Oh, and whenever I can, I cast my phone to my tv in the bedroom so I don't spend countless hours on tiktok forcing my eyes. I wish tiktok and instagram were available in landscape mode.

One time during a long screen time session I happened to notice by accident that looking at the reflection of the screen in the office window produced almost no eye strain even though I could comfortably make out all the text off the screens reflection. Made a mental note to research into this for a potential solution but never got around to it. Find myself imagining if some setup based around a semi-transparent screen which absorbs/reflects away just the right amount, combined with a mirror to simulate long distance could be worth experimenting with for someone sufficiently motivated. Think of the setup in the opticians office where you read letters off a mirror, but semi transparent. Has anyone seen anything akin to this?

If you have an iPhone, it can warn you if you’re holding it too close if you enable the warning. Turns out I do that a lot, without realizing

A macbook air at $999 is always more attractive than one at 1000, 1015 or 1021. After taxes sure it will go over 1000 but usually when we're browsing for prices first impression always matter

I live in a tropical zone over 100F year round and use shade cloth to keep grass and plants green. Wonder if that could be used to cover big areas in the desert?

There are places where tropical jungle forms a thick canopy that shelters plants growing in lower part of the canopy. The layers of canopy helps keep the humidity, thus forming a microclimate.

A good example is the moringa forest someone grew in their Phoenix, AZ front yard -- a city built in the lower Sonoran desert. Moringas are heat-seeking, drought-tolerant, fast-growing, and that guy's front-yard developed a canopy under which he grew more sun-sensitive plants. (Stuff labeled "full sun" does not mean "full Arizona sun).

The _simplest_ method for reversing desertification is to work with the natural tendencies so it does most of the work for you. That is, you jump start ecological succession away from desertification. You don't start with trees. You start by changing how rainwater is captured. In arid and semi-arid wastelands, although there isn't much rainwater, when it does come, it sheets off the ground. Rainwater harvesting structures as simple as swales (on-contour trenches), or even wide, shallow circles, capture just enough water for ecological succession to kick off. Planting things comes after, and helps accelerate ecological succession.

I lived here. Old man made this place long ago, never really raising rates like everyone else as things exploded. Reasonably priced, utilities included, well maintained. It’s a forest in Phoenix with many secret gardens , water fountains, items of interest. Yes a forest in Phoenix. It was a great place. https://www.rent.com/arizona/phoenix-apartments/forest-park-...

I use Brave, never seen an ad in ages

Ten years

Water wheels for a start, then dams, hydroelectric power and industrial revolution around the corner in just a year. Then ethanol/corn fueled engines and we'll be sailing/flying in no time. Trains will go electric right away instead of steam/diesel/gas. A small country with smart people and good leadership would easily build the first computer and nuclear bomb in less than a decade. From there, world domination.

To expand a bit more, energy is the fuel of civilization, since we won't have oil at surface level and solar won't be possible without panels, we should concentrate in generating hydroelectric power from rivers that will still be there. With unlimited power everything else is just as easy to rebuild.

It was never a nice idea, but there is nothing better for the moment

On the Android side of the fence, Xiaomi car looks nice:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/26/this-is-xiaomis-first-elec...

Things fly because of thrust, not wings. Rockets, missiles, don't have wings and yet they still fly even longer distances. Shut the engines of a 747 and it will fall like a rock, no matter how perfect the airfoils.

Bernoulli and Coanda are important but without thrust/velocity there is no lift

A 747 won’t fall like a rock. It will glide.

You can't say that without mentioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009

Where the pilot said what is probably the most British thing ever said in history:

> Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem.

> All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going

> again. I trust you are not in too much distress.

Just in case folks don't click on the link, it was a safe landing and everyone survived. It turns out modern planes can glide quite well.

This is a very important point.

The key difference is that a rock (like any ballistic projectile) accelerates until terminal velocity. In contrast, a 747 (like any airplane) descends with a constant vertical velocity when they lose power.

The engineers at Boeing are going to be really embarrassed once someone tells them they don't actually need to put wings on their aircraft...

not to mention authors of rfc-1925 as well :o)

I do the same grouped by week with some personal markup like:

  FEB 18
  - todo
  x done
  ! important
  ? optional
  
  FEB 11
  - todo
  x done
  ! important
  ? optional

Curiosity, we waste time learning a thousand useless 'shiny' things at the same time, then we apply all we learnt solving problems easily