Yes, these devices exist. But, IR is significantly, even several orders of magnitude, less powerful from the sun than visible and UV light. The only applications derive from receiving power from human sources that are bright enough, some examples are here in the other comments.

Even then, I have doubts that human IR emitters produce enough power for anything but the most highly efficiently engineered device, outside of a microwave.

+1 on wildcard addresses. Any 10 min mail site is also great for anything unimportant.

7-8% is the standard value used after taking inflation into account. It’s really 10%, but inflation eats 3% yearly, on average. Using the metric this way also conveniently means that the value you calculate for the end of compounding (in 35 years) is interpretable in todays dollars.

So 7% interest on 50$ monthly for 35 years means total principal of 21k$ and total of 83k$ (todays value).

See https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator

Firefox WAS Netscape. Netscape was open sourced, rewritten, and released as Firebird (in reference to a phoenix’s rise from Netscape’s ashes). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application_Suite

Second this. Vanlife stuff is focused on size, mass, durability, efficiency, replaceability, repairability, modularity, price. There is nothing better than vanlife videos for learning how to live minimally within an apartment.

Some additional tips,

• folding furniture.
• Human baseline happiness returns to set points. Remove something non-essential and you may be sad at first, but will eventually stop caring.
• No couch or TV: if it cant fit on/in my car or is fragile, I’m not buying it.
• if you don’t mind appearing “poor”, you may realize that the products that best fit all the above criteria are just basic things from walmart, target, etc. Those folding plastic tables and metal bed frames, plastic tubs and drawers, actually solve their problems 90% as well as traditional products at 10% the price, while being readily available everywhere. You don’t worry about damaging them either.
• take or leave advice. Maybe you want a nice desk. I have a nice office chair. It will be hard to move, but it’s worth it. The point is you can be minimal in unimportant areas.

Yes! It’s not so much the work itself, but the mental effort tied to it. After a couple weeks of repetition something becomes habit, that mental effort is diminished.

For most people, big breaks in habits fall apart fast, while more gradual changes stick.

For example, many make resolutions to get fit, and start a bunch of related things. But since none of it is habitual, it requires mental effort to do consistently. Soon, something else important requires that mental attention, and the plan falls apart.

The successful ones aren’t special, but they created one, little, achievable metric to hit:

1. “Subscribe to 2 science-based fitness influencers and watch their content regularly”.

Because it was easy, it became habit. Then, they chose another simple thing to build on:

2. “Change evening commute to pass by gym”
3. “On Tuesdays, go into gym”
4. “Learn proper form for one excercise”
5. “Bring a protein shake”
6. etc.

Each of these is so small they don’t really feel significant at all. And they’re not. The important thing to understand is we’re all lazy. The real challenge isn’t getting yourself onto a diet or into the gym, it’s designing your habits so that the diet isn’t “a diet”, it’s just what you eat. It’s designing your life so that going to the gym requires less mental effort than not going.

I could write a lot more about this but it’s already getting long. Atomic Habits is a good book on how to design your habits and habit chains, if you have the time.

There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread, one thing to note is that too much change too fast is a recipe for failure. Whatever you do, make sure it’s manageable. For each change, ask yourself whether it can become a permanent habit for you. This is the only way to sustain it enough to achieve your goals. It could help to write down good ideas, and try them one week or month at a time.

Ok, that’s what I’ll do. Thanks so much for the info! 😁

It is not propaganda if it is true.

Something can be true and propaganda. If reporting is misrepresenting a situation using purely true information and events, then it’s propaganda. It’s misrepresentation that makes something propaganda, not truthfulness.

Note: This is not a comment on whether I think Lemmy/Al Jazeera is doing propaganda.