Hello! Hopefully this is the right place to ask this, but I was wondering if anyone here was using a SAD lamp, and if you have any recommendations.

Tangent:
I currently live in a fairly dark apartment, and have a cheapish SAD lamp that is pulling double duty to not only brighten the room, but also keep me from going crazy in the darker winter months. It seems in an age of smart-everything, I've struggled to find something to replace mine with.

I currently have a Verilux HappyLight, but it kind of sucks ass. The power cord always falls out, pressing the power button might be enough to loosen the power cord. The settings have to be set every time you turn it on. It's just total garbo in my opinion. I looked at smart bulbs, but they don't seem to hit the lumens I'm looking for.

I think part of the issue with my current setup is that I have to actually turn the light on, which you would think would be fairly easy, but with the issues above, and my sheer laziness it's basically an impossible task.

What I'm looking for is something that can be automated, I think one of my major issues I've had in the last year is that I haven't been able to wake up to the morning sun as I had previously. It takes hours before I actually feel awake. I've gone from a morning person to some sort of bizarre afternoon person.

Anyway, I'm looking for others experiences and recommendations.

See device recommendation thread from 2019.

It's been a few years: tech has further matured, and we've gotten more things enshittified. With that in mind, I am asking these questions :

Edit: new comments very welcome as well! I wasn't on this site yet in 2019

(0) Did you find the device worth the money, what was surprisingly helpful or unhelpful? What was the tipping point into getting one and did it fulfil its promise?

(1) If your existing one broke today, would you still buy a new fitness tracker today?

(2) If yes, which one?

(3) Else no, why not, or what lessons have you learned since owning one, or what technological considerations do you have today that you didn't before?

Bonus: for folks who never had one, did you ever wanted one and if so what stopped you?

So for the past several weeks, I have been running my phone almost exclusively in greyscale. This is a tactic that is normally recommended for reducing phone usage, and can be easily done in iOS and Android through accessibility settings. The primary argument is without the colours to grab your attention, the phone looks less enticing.

My experience has been mostly positive, with a few drawbacks. Overall, it has made me use my phone less, although it is not the only change I have done.

Benefits:

• I do find my phone less distracting. It is less appealing.
• Text based content still works great.
• Images are normally readable, although sometimes I miss subtlety in images.
• If needed I can toggle it off, but I rarely do so.

Drawbacks:

• It took me several days to adjust, and it was a hard adjustment period.
• Some apps use colour for organization. The biggest offender in my use case for this is Three Cheers for Tildes. Overall the app is great, but new comments being denoted by an orange line is not readable for me. However, this just at times leads me to wait until I am at a desktop to look at the thread. I do think both on website and in apps Tildes should look at putting new comments with a dotted line, to not rely only on colour for accessibility reasons.

Surprises:

• The biggest surprise for me is how unappealing my phone is in colour, since the use of colour everywhere is jarring. Most people do not realize how bright and colourful even phone menus are, until they run greyscale for an extended period of time. It has become more obvious to me how much app developers (and even OS developers) are using colour to grab our attention and suck us in.

I used to use the Waking Up app for daily 20 minute guided meditations, and I want to get back into it, but these days I don't use a smartphone most of the time so I'm looking for something similar that I could load up onto the (offline) hardware music player that I use for music and audiobooks. Ideally a number of different similar-length guided meditations (where I could either loop through them in order, or pick one at random for each session). I'm still fairly new to meditation, so I'm probably not aware of all the forms/formats that this kind of thing can take, but the ones I'd been using are 20-30 minutes of mostly silence (but I'm not opposed to the idea of some kind of background white noise) with a guide providing verbal instructions around breathing and relaxation at the beginning, then providing occasional visualization exersizes or affirmations to focus on at occasional intervals.

A few searches shows no shortage of options for this kind of thing (both free and paid), but I'm wondering if anyone has any specific recommendations of something like this that they use or have used and would vouch for the quality. It seems like the kind of category where it would be easy to churn out a bunch of low-effort AI generated slop and disguise it as something else, which I would like to avoid.

I work in IT, and was the caregiver for both my parents as they aged. You'd think I would be the one that people turn to to ask this question, and yet I have been utterly frustrated by my attempts to find such.

I have a few folks who are extended family and friends that are now in the early/mid stages of different forms of dementia, and a real pain point is that they no longer have the capacity to recognize ads, and will unfailingly click and install scam apps via the Apple store. Think things like 'cleaner' apps that have a $50/week subscription fee, and other abusive tactics. The #1 subject I get called about is some ad popping up after they've finished a puzzle, and now they think they're out of space, and in a panic.

This is not a small problem. The coloring and puzzles they can still do bring them happiness and stability through their day; removal of the ipads entirely causes them a lot of stress. (TV is nothing but ragebait, and a non-starter. They do have books on tape, but get tired of listening rather quickly.)

I have been completely unable to locate ad-free, paid versions of these types of apps. I'm not looking for free. I don't care about the cost. I just need apps that only do what they say they do, and don't have unexpected pop-ups, ads, or anything else, and I thought perhaps the folks here might know of some.

Any ideas?

[edit] Only five hours in, and I've already gotten more insightful, helpful responses than anywhere else I've asked. You all are the best.

On another platform a female journalist warned other women not to use menstrual tracking apps.

I worked in a co-op during college that sold very nice paper journals for tracking menstrual cycles. I replied to that thread mentioning that very nice specialized paper journals still exist.

Someone ( a man ) replied back to tell me that ADHD women have enough to deal with these days and proceeded to list all the ways something like that could fail.

I suggested sending emails to one's self along the lines of "update your diary" which someone could then read at home and take care of things.

Since I don't have ADHD my question is if people who do have ADHD really do find it to be that incapacitating?

I know it is an Internet thing to keep replying without a reason, even if it is only out of momentum. I'm wondering if that was the deal in that thread.