And if I drink alcohol then my world also becomes kind of blurry.. then reality also becomes less defined? It sure feels that way. But not to my friend sitting next to me who chose not to drink. We live in separate realities at least as far as our individual experiences are concerned.
By using an android tablet they leverage the existing OS/UI/Java ecosystem to write a (fairly simple) app. Recreating that from scratch would require a lot more development.
Sure, it saves development time & money. But if they anyway need some kind of custom interface... problem is, the lifetime of the tablet is way lower than a corresponding "dumb" system. I'd see the advantage of using a tablet if you have lots of controls (let's say you control the temperature for 6 rooms, you can see more info, etc.). By the way not everybody wants to have yet another touch screen in their home, but that's another story.
Before: Every time a message arrives the phone makes that noise, and a little lamp is lit in my brain which stays lit until I pick up and unlock the phone and look at the message, answer, etc.
After: The phone is in silent mode all the time. When a message arrives I get a little tickle on my wrist - I just glance down and see who it's from and the lamp in my brain has nothing to do anymore. I even sometimes forget to pull out the phone and answer the message later.
It's easier to leave the phone out of reach, I feel less need to have it on me.
It's great having a phone which never makes a sound. If a call comes in I see it on the watch and can reject the call from my wrist and optionally send an SMS instead. And podcasts are not interrupted by annoying pings.
It's a Garmin, so only have to charge it once every 10 days or so, and there's not much to do on it.
Changing desk height to standing height and buying a saddle stool.
I used to bike to work but as soon as I sat down at my desk I felt like I was cutting my body at the waist. My lower body/legs were some kind of passive appendage stuck to my chair.
The first week of working while standing I kept looking for a chair to sit on, it was really distracting and I felt tired.
I bought a saddle stool with enough height so that I can transfer back and forth between standing and sitting. The stool has no back support and my legs are still fairly straight (like sitting on a bar stool) so my body is still much more active than just sitting in a chair.
Definitely life-changing. I have suffered from lower back pain all my life. If I have to go back to sitting in a chair for more than a few days I feel my back starting to lock up. In the standing/saddle configuration this doesn't happen.
git subrepo is what I chose to include a "core" library of functionality in a number of repositories.
Works fairly well, the main thing is that git treats all the files in the subrepo the same as any other files, so no surprises.
