Easy recipes for a (bit) better world

The planet is in an emergency, and we all should be doing something for it. The main problems on planet sustainability are:

• Burning coal, oil, and gas
• Deforestation –> see Ecosia recommendation next
• Increasing livestock farming –> this is one of the reasons why I follow a vegan lifestyle

Changing the way we treat the planet is not on individuals' hands. It's something that governments should work together. Unfortunately, political programs barely talk about this. Apart from following a vegan lifestyle since 2014, I have recently adopted three pretty easy practices I wanted to share today. I'm conscious that all these are not game changers, but I do believe that the sum of many small contributions can generate a real change. That's why the title of the post was about easy recipes :)

Turning to the dark side

Dark mode is a new setting for apps and opearting systems (Windows, Linux, Mac) where colours are inverted, also known as light-on-dark color scheme. According to Wikipedia:

A recent article by Popular Science suggests that “Dark mode is easier on the eyes and battery” and displaying white on full brightness uses roughly six times as much power as pure black on a Google Pixel, which has an OLED display.

While dark mode is clearly better in terms of energy saving, it is not always the best option for every individual. For example, people with astigmatism struggle more reading black-on-white than viceversa. Besides, the dark mode is better in low-light ambients. If you are close to a window, your eyes will have a high contrast between bright and low lights, so in such situations is probably better to use the light mode. Overall, I recommend you just to try it, and see what works better for you.

How to enable dark mode in Mac and Windows?

Here

TLDR:

• Mac: Go to System Preferences > General > Appearance, and click on Dark
• Windows: Go to Windows settings > Personalization > Colors, and scroll down to Dark

How to enable dark mode in Google Chrome?

At the time of writing this (Nov 2019), there is no native config for Dark mode on Chrome. The closest thing is a flag in `chrome://flags`, but trust me, I've tried it and doesn't work very well. For example, when using Jupyter notebooks it will make your cursor invisible! After trying different extensions my recommendation is to use Dark Reader. There are two features I like here:

• You can switch from dark to light mode easily just with two clicks
• You can select which sites you don’t want the dark mode to be applied on. For example, I disabled local Jupyter notebooks by going to Site list and typing localhost:8888 in the filter. As Jupyter lab has its own Dark Mode, I can rely on it better than using this extension.

Every search counts

There are many posts out there talking about Ecosia, e.g. this, so I'm not going to repeat them. While the user experience with Ecosia is not as good as with Google, my recommendation is to use it by default and just go to Google if you don't find what you need. I would say 90% of the time I'm just going to a previously visited site or searching for something easy where the search engine is not really impacting my user experience.

And every order counts

My last recommendation towards a bit better world, is Amazon Smile. While there are some concerns by nonprofits and charities, I think it's a great idea and encourage everyone to use it. Of course Amazon is not losing a lot of money with this, it's almost negligible to them. But the impact on the customer is 0, and

Constant dropping wears away the stone