I’m looking for advice about what sort of portable room cooling devices to look at and what pitfalls to avoid. Some context:

Over the past few years I’ve noticed that I do pretty badly in the heat, especially at night. I live in Zürich, the concept of air conditioning has not yet arrived in this place. The prevailing wisdom for how to survive summer is to just make sure your house doesn’t get too warm in the first place, but my apartment is pretty badly insulated and during the worst weeks it doesn’t cool down that much at night either, so it’s been pretty bad the last few years. I’ve mostly just avoided being in my room whenever possible, but I do have to sleep somehow.

The obvious solution to me is to buy some sort of air conditioning device, a topic I know basically nothing about. My flatmate has one for his room, of the “dangle a tube out of the window” kind, which seems to do an okay job, but it is extremely loud and quite bulky - neither of those are dealbreakers per se, but I’d happily pay a bit more money if that gets me something quieter. In addition, our windows are not sliding windows but ones that open like a door, so any device that requires me to poke something out of the window would probably need a solution for this as well. Any sort of permanent modification to the house such as putting a hole through the wall or the window glass are not allowed.

So my questions are: What types of coolers should I look into, what types are best avoided? Any specific brand or model recommendations would also be appreciated. I looked at one electronics vendor’s website and found a huge range in prices from below 100 to over 1000; I don’t have a specific budget in mind per se, but unless it makes a big difference (e.g. in noise levels) I would rather stay below 500 dollars.

Recently my daughter (third grade) has started learning to type at school. It's a Montessori program, so it's a pretty low tech environment overall, which I mention because I don't necessarily expect them to have a nuanced view of technology issues.

One of the typing programs they use is nitrotype.com, which adds a competitive gameplay element. However, it also has mechanism to friend another player. Friends can only communicate with stock phrases, so there's not too much "Internet leakage" beyond being able to choose a username.

I set it up for my daughter on her Linux Chromebook (I whitelist things I want her to have and everything else is blocked at DNS). Seeing her interact with it the first time, I realized that she spends as much time "adding friends" as doing the typing.

On its face, this activity is pretty harmless. But I am worried about the patterns it might be creating for her. I'm worried about her uncritically engaging with the dopamine hit of getting a new friend. Or how it shapes her idea of how many friends she has or where idea of her self worth comes from. Or what she thinks friends are.

So after that long preamble, here are some questions:

• How would you explain "friends" in this context?
• Would you distinguish them from other kinds of friends, either real or virtual?
• Would you attach a moral component to the activity? E.g. that it is good/bad or helpful/harmful
• How would you frame it to the teacher? Not so much in terms of whether or not they should do it in the classroom, but what kinds of conversations should they be having about the friends experience?
• If I'm asking the wrong questions, what questions should I be asking instead?

I'm really interested in seeing the perspectives people have on this. My own ideas are a bit murky, but I will put them down as a comment.

Next week, I will be closing on my first ever home (hello Michigan tilderinos!). One of the projects I want to tackle and work on after I move in is setting up a smart home ecosystem that is sustainable long-term. I saw the open-source Home Assistant but I think I need to do more research on it and find compatible products. For now, my wishlist of projects are:

• Controllable lighting from my phone or computer
• Carbon Monoxide/Natural Gas detection
• Water leak and usage monitoring
• Thermostat

Are there any other use cases that you use home automation for? If you use Home Assistant (or used it in the past), what are some things I should consider? Any products that you bought in the past and regret now?

I've been doing a postdoc in molecular biology in academia for a little while now, and getting ready to take next step. I'm looking into industry careers, but it's difficult to know what they entail since we don't often get exposed to them.

If you or someone you know works in biotech, I'd love to hear about it.

How did you get into it? What do you enjoy or not enjoy? Where do you see the industry heading? What are some of the positions like?

I'm a few years out of college and just landed my first "career" job last fall as an operations manager at a non-tech company. I enjoy the work and am learning a lot, but the work/life balance leaves a bit to be desired with very limited PTO days. My girlfriend and I want to move to the Denver area about a year from now and I want to try to get a job in the tech industry doing operations or project management.

Have any of you been in my position before? What kind of jobs can someone with about 2 years of operations management experience find to get them on the project manager track at a tech company?

Where do you go for decent reviews? Context-i was looking for a site to find good popcorn, and all the results on google for as far as i cared to scroll were fluff (pun intended).

Here’s what i use:

Rtings for stereo.

Wirecutter for appliances.

Reddit for everything else.

And my results are quite mixed, and involve a lot of scrolling.

Where do yall go?