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What Sleep Docs Want You to Know About Turning the Clocks Back and Shorter Winter Days
  • Try these tips to help your body adjust quickly to the new schedule.

    View Morning Sunlight

    Circadian rhythms are the 24-hour cycles that regulate sleep, wakefulness, eating, and other activities. To adjust your circadian rhythms to the end of daylight saving time,** get plenty of natural morning sunlight in your eyes.** This light acts as an anchor for your internal clock,** **helping ensure the body's cells and organs function optimally and at the right times.

    • Get outside within 30-60 minutes of waking up to expose your eyes to sunlight.

      • If you wake before sunrise, turn on bright artificial lights until the sun rises. Once it rises, get outside if possible.
    • Try to get morning sunlight before the "circadian dead zone," which occurs between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. for most people but depends on your typical wake-up time.

      • While sunlight exposure during this period has many benefits (e.g., mood, vitamin D and hormone levels), it won't effectively shift your internal clock.
    • This typically requires** about 10-15 minutes** of sunlight on a sunny day, while cloudy days may require 20 minutes or more.

      • Even on overcast days, natural sunlight is usually brighter than artificial lighting.
      • If natural sunlight isn't an option for any reason, consider using very bright artificial lights or a light therapy lamp (ideally 10,000 lux or brighter).
    • Avoid wearing sunglasses for your morning sunlight viewing, but glasses and contact lenses are fine.

      • Always avoid staring directly at the sun or any intensely bright light sources at any time of day, as this can be painful and damage your eyes.

    View Afternoon Sunlight

    Make an effort to get outside again in the late afternoon when the sun is low in the sky or when it's setting. Exposure to the late-afternoon sun helps adjust your eyes' sensitivity and can buffer against the disruptive effects of artificial lights from screens and TVs in the evening.

    • While morning sunlight is critical for setting your circadian clock, afternoon sunlight serves as a secondary cue, signaling the body to prepare for night.

    Limit Nighttime Light

    Dim or turn off artificial lights in your environment after the sun goes down. Remember, the sunset will now happen an hour earlier, given the time change.

    • In the morning, we require a lot of bright light to set our circadian clock. Unfortunately, exposure to low levels of light (just 1,000–1,500 lux!) can disrupt circadian rhythms at night, especially short-wavelength light, such as blue light.
    • After sunset and in the hours before bedtime, opt for dim, low-positioned lights, such as table lamps, instead of overhead lights. This low ambient light supports natural melatonin production and makes it easier to fall asleep.
    • To help avoid short-wavelength light (blue and green light) after sunset, consider shifting screen settings to a red tint, using red "party" lights instead of LED or fluorescent lights, or wearing red-lens glasses.

    To maintain healthy sleep patterns, keep your bedroom dark and minimize light exposure during sleep hours.

    Strive for Consistent Sleep/Wake Times

    Aim to go to sleep and wake up at roughly the same time each day, ideally within a 45-minute to one-hour window, even on weekends. This consistency reinforces your circadian rhythm and makes it easier to fall asleep and wake up feeling refreshed.

    • Check out our Improve Your Sleep and Toolkit for Sleep newsletters for more on enhancing sleep.

    Leverage Temperature, Meals & Exercise

    While light is the primary method for adjusting our circadian clock, temperature, exercise, and meal timing also play important roles.

    • If you're struggling to adjust to daylight saving time, temperature can be a powerful tool to shift your circadian clock.

      • Taking a warm bath or shower before bedtime is a science-supported method to improve your ability to fall asleep and sleep deeply. Initially, the warm water raises core body temperature, but the subsequent cooling that occurs afterward helps facilitate falling asleep.
      • Keep your bedroom cool (about 67°F or 19.4°C), or consider using a temperature-controlled mattress cover.
    • To adapt quickly to the end of daylight saving time, wait to eat until your usual mealtime at the new time, even if you feel hungry beforehand.

    • Exercise significantly enhances sleep quality and duration. Sticking to your regular exercise schedule will also help your body adjust effectively.

    The above text is from the Huberman Lab newsletter.

  • Looking for zigbee smart plugs with monitoring
  • To clarify for others, that's just for motor and AC loads. Rated capacity for resistive loads is 1800 W (15 A). Aside from a portable induction stovetop and possibly portable AC units, this is likely fine for most things people will connect to it. Its probably not a good fit for OP though.

  • What are we doing for TVs these days software wise?
  • How "big" are your movies and tv shows? If they are 4k UHD remuxes then Nvidia Shield Pro or Apple TV 4k behind a firewall to block external internet is your best option for performance, usability, and privacy. You will want to ocassionally allow it internet for software updates. Kodi, a mini pc, raspberry pi, etc. would be more private but you trade off a seamless remote, easy interface, and streaming codecs (e.g., dolby vision).

  • ZeroTrust Your Home
    github.com GitHub - lucadibello/zerotrust-your-home: 🔐 Securing Your Digital Sanctuary, Trust None, Protect Everything.

    🔐 Securing Your Digital Sanctuary, Trust None, Protect Everything. - lucadibello/zerotrust-your-home

    GitHub - lucadibello/zerotrust-your-home: 🔐 Securing Your Digital Sanctuary, Trust None, Protect Everything.

    This is a decent writeup on applying "Zero Tust" principles to a home lab using mostly open source tools. I'm not the author, but thought it was worth sharing.

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    Server Monitoring software recommendations
  • You've already received some great suggestions. Another one is Netdata. Personally, I use glances to collect the data and Home Assistant to display the dashboard. But I only do this because I already had Home Assistant running.

  • Dell Optiplex XE3 for Home Server

    I recently got a Dell Optiplex XE3 second hand and set it up as a home server. It's working great and I wanted to share some info on it in case it's a helpful reference for other people's home labs.

    The Dell Optiplex XE3 tower is configured with a i7-8700 (6c, 12t), 32 GiB DDR4 RAM (2 sticks), 2 2.5" SSDs, and 1 M.2 NVMe SSD. I installed Debian 12 minimal and services are deployed via Docker. I'm currently running 20+ containers, with some of the heavier containers being Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Paperless NGX, Home Assistant, and Immich. I haven't performed any software power optimization; it's just a standard Debian install. When idle with no significant load on the containers, power consumption is 14-15W measured with a Shelly Plug. While not fantastic (my previous server had 6W with similar loads), it is lower than I expected and is quite reasonable.

    Overall, I'm impressed with this system. It currently has 4 unused PCIe slots, 2 unused SATA connectors, and 2 unused DIMM slots so it has solid future expansion. I have it laying on its side on a rack shelf and it takes up about 3.5U of space in my rack. While I wish it was smaller, fanless, had lower idle power, and had 2.5G Ethernet it has better idle power than I expected for its configuration and options for future expansion.

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    nixos @lemmy.ml agile_squirrel @lemmy.ml
    Who makes Nix packages?

    I'm new to Nix and wanted to get my feet wet by using the Nix package manager. However, I wasn't sure how these packages were made. Are these packaged by the community? Who do I need to "trust" when installing these packages? In general, I was looking for info on how nix packages are made and maintained.

    3
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AG
    agile_squirrel @lemmy.ml
    Posts 5
    Comments 8