It's kind of dark times right now. And I'm definitely only talking about the days being short. It's pretty dark out right now, since it's the winter in the northern hemisphere. Every year, I start to realize somewhere around January that I'm tired, really tired, and don't want to do anything. I'm not sure that this is seasonal affective disorder, but I did start to explore it and found that bright light makes me feel a lot better in the winter. The problem is, I go through this discovery every year, it seems. My earlier attempts After I first learned that bright light can actually help you feel better in the winter, I got a Happy Light. That's the actual branding on it, and it might have helped, maybe? But it was really inconvenient to use. I got one of the more affordable ones, which meant a small panel I had to sit uncomfortably close to. And I was supposed to use it almost first thing in the morning for 30 minutes. That's... really not going to fit in my routine, especially now that I have two young kids who are raring to go right at 7am, and they do not want to deal with mom sitting in front of a lamp that early. So I just kind of stopped using it, and would poke at it in the drawer occasionally but not really do anything with it. Instead, I got a few more lamps in my office. These seemed to help, a little, but that might just be that I like my spaces well lit1. Going as bright as possible Somewhere along the line I saw a post talking about winter energy and light. And the author suggested that indoor lights just have to be bright. They recommended some high-watt LED bulbs. I went ahead and ordered some and... these are very bright. They're 100 watts of LEDs each, and I have two of them. I plugged them in to these plug-in fixtures that have inline switches. These seemed to really help me out a lot. On days I used them, I was more energetic and felt better. But I had a lot of days when I didn't use them, because using them was inconvenient. The main problems were that I had to turn on two switches manually, and they were too bright to look at. Turning them on doesn't sound like a lot, but doing it every day when you're already struggling can be just enough friction to avoid doing it! The brightness was the biggest issue, because they were blinding to look at and cast this reverse shadow out of my office. The brightness was the point, so now do I deal with that? Shading it Turning on the switches was easy. I put them on some smart outlets, set a schedule, and now they turn on and off at my predetermined times! Then I had to make a shade for the lamps. My main goal here is to diffuse the light a bit, so I was thinking of a small wooden frame wrapped in a light white fabric. That would spread the light out and avoid having any spots that are too bright to look at. I took measurements for where it was going to fit, then headed out to my workshop. Then I ripped a scrap board into 0.75"x0.75" stock. I ended up with just enough for the design. This is what I ended up with, after it was glued up. Here's a bonus detail shot of the extremely unnecessary joinery here. But hey, this joinery was incredibly satisfying, and the whole thing went together without any nails or screws. Joy makes it worthwhile. And then with the fabric attached2, it ended looking pretty nice. In its intended home, you can see that it does its job! It's now not painful to look straight at the lamp. You wouldn't want to do it, but it won't hurt you at least! Waiting for summer Of course, we need these bright lights during the winter, during the dark days. But summer will come again. Not all of us will see the long days. We'll lose some to the winter. But summer will come again, and we'll be able to go outside freely. Soak in the sun. Be ourselves. Dance in sunshowers. It's hard to see that in the darkest of times. I'm writing this for myself as much as I'm writing it for you. But believe me: you are strong, and I am strong, and together, we will survive. It seems like this winter is going to last a long time. And it probably will. But I'm not just talking about the winter, and the dark times are going to end, eventually. 1 Most places are very poorly lit and don't have enough lamps. You should have a lot of lamps in every room to make it as bright and cheery as possible! I refuse to believe otherwise, but my wife, a gremlin of the darkness3, does like rooms quite dim. 2 My wife helped with this step. She works with fabric a lot, and this was our first project combining our respective crafts. Certainly not our last! 3 She approved this phrasing.

Container queries expand the universe of designs that can be implemented, giving us whole new superpowers. Now that container queries are broadly available, I think it’s time we start exploring this potential! In this post, I’ll share the “killer pattern” I can’t stop using in my work, and explore what’s possible with this new capability.

If you're not distressingly embedded in the torrent of AI news on Twixxer like I reluctantly am, you might not know what DeepSeek is yet. Bless you.

You redesign your entire website, customers and employees say it's better, but none of the metrics change… Does design even matter?

I used to use yt5s all the time to rip and remix videos: