The coarse carbon mats don't even filter half of the fumes.

These super basic fan+mat fume extractors do get the fumes out of your face, which is the most important part, but the particulate and VOC levels in the room will quickly exceed acceptable levels.

But even with a proper filter stack which filters over 99.9%, you can only filter what's actually captured. You still need some ventilation and it's also a good idea to run an air purifier in automatic mode to filter what wasn't captured at the source. What isn't filtered by filters is filtered by your lungs.

I prefer light mode + f.lux or Redshift.

There's no need to stare at cold blue light all day long.

Fun fact, there is actually a CSS media query for selecting dark/light themes:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

You need to spin up a server if you want to use modules anyways.

Well, it's not a big deal. Just run `python3 -m http.server` or install "http-server" via npm.

This is not something a kid learning basic html/js can do easily, since he probably uses windows, and doesn't even know how to navigate in the command prompt.

The "click on the html file on the desktop" just works(TM)

I wonder if you can still cut and engrave it with a CO2 laser (10.6 µm). It might be a very interesting material to work with.

There are ventilation systems with heat recovery.

They are usually triggered by a timer or humidity, but it would be also possible to trigger them based on VOC or CO2 levels.

Single-room heat recovery ventilation units are relatively affordable (about $400). There are also some which can be integrated into the window frame if drilling a 6" hole into a wall isn't an option.

I have read about such systems. I have not seen any in Florida. Do they work for keeping heat out while exchanging air? Where I live, we are trying to get rid of heat, not recover it.

> The gases currently used in the vast majority of refrigerators and air conditioners —hydrofluorocarbons and hydrocarbons (HFCs and HCs) — are toxic and flammable. When they leak into the air, they also contribute to global warming.

R-600a (isobutane) only has 3.3 times the GWP (global warming potential) of CO2 and for a fridge you only need about 80g. For safety reasons, the limit is 150g.

For comparison, the GWP of R-132a is 1,430 and R-12's is 10,900.

R-600a has mostly replaced R-132a in Europe.

Isobutane is of course flammable, but the operational pressure is very low. Aerosol cans also use isobutane. It's comparable to those.

Sigh, so much of this discussion is political.

The "problem" with R12 was that it breaks down in the atmosphere in short order (less than 10 years by some calculations). Most of the replacement refrigerants are basically inert. The estimated lifetime of r134a is 50,000 years. So even tiny leaks over a long period are going to do incredible damage to the climate. This was known from the beginning and is by design (the stable molecule bit).

But even now decades later the political ideology that AC units were the "problem" persists, despite the fact that its well documented that CFC's were used for everything from propellants in consumer products like silly string and hairspray, to large scale industrial uses like popcorn production (again recently in china).

Yet in all this time, we haven't really found a better set of refrigerants.

In the end, we would be better off bringing R12/22/etc back with the stringent controls for licensing/recovery/recycling/leak detection/etc that was put in place when they were banned. Combined with proper systems engineering to avoid leaks that are now required due to the refrigerants being extremely flammable or generally dangerous to human life we would both solve the problems of them being in the atmosphere, while avoiding the engineering problems of designing AC units that have to compress azeotropic compounds to extreme pressures, or function close to their critical points in tropical climates or any number of other problems with lubrication/etc.

I think butane or propane is the standard refrigerant for household refrigerators all over the world nowadays; the US is the odd man out.

R134a is still unfortunately widely used in cars. Newer cars are moving to R1234yf, which is expensive, maybe CO2 in the future.

Mercedes is already doing CO2, and the next-gen EV platforms are going that route as well, from what I hear. The high pressure of CO2 systems mean that they're very compact, and thus much easier to integrate with battery pack temperature regulation, AFAICT.

That's good to hear.

I think the interest for EVs might be due to CO2 systems being capable of working as heat pumps as well, producing hot air. Otherwise you'd waste a lot of electricity in cold climates.

Exactly this, both that they're able to heat the interior of the car, but also that they can play the role of battery cooling system (just heat a small radiator instead of inside of car).

Part of this is the regulation in the US around refrigerant reclamation. Once a gas is used as a refrigerant, it has be reclaimed/recycled or large fines can be assessed, even though the rules do not apply when the same gas is used in any other context.

This makes switching to a new gas much harder as the infrastructure for reclaim/recycle does not exist for the new gas, no mater how safe or better it is.

I wonder if the use of these same gases for canned air is at all significant compared to its use as a refrigerant. Regulators seem not to care if people squirt off KGs of the gas to dust off keyboards!

One very interesting refrigeration cycle I heard about recently is using a proton exchange fuel cell in reverse as a compressor for hydrocarbons or ammonia in a closed loop.

Protons jump across the membrane, creating a small pressure differential that is allegedly big enough to do heat pumping.

Ammonia refrigerators were ones of the first types. And they get very cold, quick.

Of course, when ammonia leaks, it does some nasty damage.

Markdown themes are also a great starting point.

You only have to set the margins/width of your document and maybe some sort of header & footer and you're done with the CSS your very basic but also very readable website.

I still think that vertical rhythm is snake oil.

Yes, it does look neater if you have a striped background and the lines of text align with that. However, you won't use a striped background. There is nothing else those lines of text align with unless you stick the text into multiple columns, which you probably won't do since it's annoying (zigzag scrolling) and pointless (there is no height limit on websites).

I think it's more important to pick distinct headline sizes which still look good when they wrap around. If they don't perfectly align with some imaginary stripe pattern which no one is imaging, then so be it.

I agree. I bought the "Bible" Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style and while I found it very interesting, I wasn't that convinced it applied to the web.

Vertical rhythm, which is mentioned in the book, is mentioned because when you print on paper pages you want the lines to overlap on the front and back of the page (so they don't bleed through making it harder to read), and so when the one page right next to the other one aren't misaligned.

I don't really think those apply to the web so much.

That said, it's all too easy in CSS to end up with wonky padding/margin if you don't have a consistent rule about whether to apply it to the top or bottom and by how much. So it's possible to end up with headlines up against body text or big gaps before the first paragraph, etc. I think that's worth fixing.

> if you don't have a consistent rule about whether to apply it to the top or bottom and by how much.

I recommend to use only top margins and to apply them to every element which isn't the first child (`whatever:not(:first-child)`).

This way there is no extraneous spacing at the very top or very bottom, which means the only spacing around the content is the padding of the container.

It's the same idea as the "lobotomized owl" selector (`* + *`). It's just more explicit.

Eh, I've seen a few examples of pages with good vertical rhythm and it's pretty incredible. I think the key is (1) it obviously works with certain types of content better than others (articles, etc), and (2) rigidly adhering to the rhythm is literally impossible merely due to flexible images, so vertical rhythm is best applied as a guideline rather than a rule.

It would be great if you could share some examples!

> The practical effect of GDPR seems to me that I have to click away about half a dozen consent popups every day. Sometimes a cookie warning in addition to that.

At this point I just want those consent forms to be standardized via ARIA tags or whatever so that some extension can click the "yea, sure, whatever" button for me.

That would be fine. But honestly I do the opposite. If I start seeing popups and prompts I just close the tab and move on. The internet is too big and your content just isn't that special.

Me too. So that I could click the "reject all" button, having also marked the "save as default preference" checkbox, and be done with it forever.

Integration of legalese into browsers should have been done a long time ago (another useful thing would be a "ToS" button in the address bar, so you don't have to go hunting for ToS and privacy statements, and read them in whatever painful CSS flavouring the site uses).