5 Things I Learned When I Quit Facebook

I have a Facebook problem.

The problem is, I love Facebook. I love posting about my day, connecting with friends near and far, and seeing the funny/crazy/sweet things people share. But I also hate Facebook, for being such a time suck, for making me feel bad about myself when other people’s lives seem so much more exciting than mine, and for leading me to spend more time interacting with a screen than with the real world. And when I log off Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are there clamoring for my attention, a never-ending scroll of links and tweets and photos and conversations that feels impossible to keep up with.

A few weeks ago, I’d had it. It seemed like social media was bringing me more guilt and frustration than happiness. So I decided to go on a fast, starting immediately. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Cold turkey was the way to go

I’ve made attempts to cut down before, setting rules like “Only check Facebook first thing in the morning” or “Only check Twitter during lunch” or, when I came back to work after maternity leave, “Only use social media while pumping breast milk.” But one quick check in the morning always turned into needing to get back on at 11am to see if anyone commented on that one post, which turned into composing witty replies to those comments, which turned into OMG I’m late for that meeting! I had no self-control. Cutting myself off from social media completely was the only way to ensure I’d stay honest. I even deleted the Facebook app from my phone.

The FOMO wasn’t as bad as I’d feared

Yes, I missed a bunch of birthdays, and yes, I would have missed the news of a former coworker’s engagement if another friend hadn’t seen the post and clued me in (thanks, Camille!). But to my surprise, even from day 1 of my fast, I didn’t feel like I was truly missing out on anything. My best friend from high school texted me cute pictures of her 2-year-old. I caught up with people over email or even on the phone (remember that?). I checked my favorite news sites for the day’s headlines. I was good.

What I wasn’t getting: constant updates about the awesome vacations people were taking (making me feel like a boring homebody), or the amazing educational activities they’d planned for their kids (making me feel like a slacker mom), or the IMPORTANT POLITICAL THING WE SHOULD ALL TAKE ACTION ON NOW that inevitably devolved into a nasty name-calling flame war (making me feel tired). I didn’t miss any of that at all.

Facebook, on the other hand, seemed to think I was missing out big-time. Since day 3 of no Facebook, I’ve been getting increasingly desperate daily emails like this one:

I was way more productive

I had never realized how often during the workday I clicked on Facebook out of sheer habit—I caught myself typing in the URL on autopilot way too many times that first Facebook-free day. But the real shocker was how much more I got done at home, when my evenings no longer disappeared into a black hole of sitting on the couch scrolling through my feeds. I read actual books! I made a quilt! I worked out! It was almost embarrassing how much time I suddenly had on my hands.

I was more present

When I wasn’t constantly thinking about how to describe every moment in a perfect tweet or status update, I got to actually live the moment. I took pictures of my kids just for me, rather than for a filtered-and-framed Instagram shot. When we went to the beach or had dinner with friends, I savored the experience for itself, not for how good it would make me look when I posted about it.

I might be cured of my Facebook addiction

I stayed on total social media blackout for two full weeks. Then I decided to let myself hop back on Instagram once, to post a photo of the Lightning McQueen cake I made for my son’s birthday. A few days later, I started sending out a few tweets. But Facebook…oh, Facebook, you ultimate time-suck. I was really worried that I would get back on Facebook and immediately fall back into my old ways. Was it even possible for me to use Facebook in a healthy way?

Last night I got on Facebook, for the first time in more than three weeks. I scrolled through my feed for about five minutes. And then…I closed my browser. I put away my laptop. And I went to bed. And I don’t really feel like going back.

It turns out my Facebook addiction was just a (really) bad habit. By interrupting the habit, I might have broken the cycle. I won’t quit Facebook completely—all those things I love about it haven’t changed. But now that I know I can go without it entirely, it seems easy to limit myself to just checking in, say, twice a week. Wish me luck!

Source: http://news.health.com/2014/08/01/5-things-i-learned-when-i-quit-facebook/?xid=socialflow_facebook_health

As Tesla Grows Up, It Gives Up on Free Charging

TESLA OFFERS A good sales pitch: Gorgeous cars, ludicrous acceleration, features like Autopilot that arrive via over the air updates. And to sweeten the deal for those who can afford the luxury electric, free charging at the young automaker’s international network of Supercharger stations.

Since 2012, Tesla has invited its customers to plug in to chargers that add 200 to 300 miles of range per hour. Good enough to top up a depleted battery in about 30 minutes, while a driver has a bathroom break and a bite to eat. They approach the convenience of pumping gas into a conventional car, and they’re free for life.

Not any more: Starting next year, new Tesla buyers hoping to plug in will have to pony up. But this isn’t Tesla giving up on its promises or Elon turning Ebenezer. This is Tesla growing up—along with the American electric vehicle industry.

Supercharging Comes at a Price

As of January 1, 2017, anyone who orders a Tesla will get just 400 kWh of free Supercharging credits per year, good for about 1,000 miles of driving. Tesla has not revealed how much it will cost after that limit, but says in a blog post the “small fee” will be cheaper than buying gas. Folks who ordered their car before then still get to charge for free, for life. (That doesn’t count the 373,000 people who have put down $1,000 to reserve a Model 3—that’s a deposit, not an order.)

Tesla plans to use the new income to build new Superchargers (it’s running 734 worldwide, with 4605 charging points), but the simple fact of demanding money for their use could do more than expand the network.

You see, some Tesla owners have treated the free lunch more like an all you can eat buffet. It’s not unusual to see a queue of Model S and X cars waiting to get their electron fix at busy locations. In an August 2015 letter, Tesla chided owners for over-using Superchargers instead of doing their day-to-day charging at home.

“Anytime you give something away for free, it’s harder to manage,” says Art Wheaton, who studies the auto industry at Cornell University’s Worker Institute. Asking for even a small dollar amount per fill should encourage people to only take what they need. “It will help manage the lines,” says Wheaton. As Tesla keeps selling cars, that’s crucial to maintaining a positive user experience.

Plus, these things are expensive. “Having a supercharger turn on is like putting five to 10 US homes on the grid,” says Paul Mutolo, an energy storage chemist at Cornell University. Having a bunch of cars charging at once leads to a big spike in power demand, and that leads to big bills from utility companies. “Their demand charges have got to be quite hefty,” says Mutolo.

Making money could allow Tesla to build Superchargers more in line with CEO Elon Musk’s vision for sustainable transport, with solar panels and batteries to store energy and buffer demand, cutting costs at the same time.

More Chargers Are Coming

Today’s problems with offering free charging stand to get far worse as Tesla morphs from a niche luxury car maker to a mass manufacturer. Elon Musk will sell about 100,00 cars this year; he wants to produce half a million cars a year by 2020.

In any case, Tesla has outgrown the need to offer Supercharger use gratis. The automaker first made the deal when at a time when range anxiety limited EV sales. Most Americans wouldn’t buy a car that couldn’t handle a road trip, even if they drove fewer than 40 miles a day. Telling them they could charge quickly, right off the highway, and at no cost was a clever way to soothe concerns and drive sales.

Now, that’s less of an issue. The Model S goes farther than ever on a charge and is no longer the only electric car you’d even think of taking out of the city and onto on the highway. Musk faces competition from the likes of the the more affordable Chevrolet Bolt, with over 200 miles of range.

Meanwhile, non-Tesla infrastructure is catching up. BMW and VW are building a network of fast chargers. The Obama Administration is funding a network of “electric vehicle charging corridors.” Tesla and the EV market are mature enough to shed the need for free charging.

Tesla has long believed you should charge your car the way you power your phone: Plug it in at work, at home, anytime you’re not using it. But if you’re anything like me, your phone still runs out of juice at inopportune moments. The Supercharger network is a terrific failsafe, but it does little good if Tesla can’t keep it useful and practical as it slowly grows up.

Are You Ready to Swallow a Pill Full of Poop?

FOR A WHILE there, Seres Thera­peutics was the most promising name in poop. Located in Cambridge, Massa­chusetts—in the same building as Crispr Therapeutics, one of the key players in gene editing today—the biotech company has been trying to transform medicine by harnessing the billions of bacteria in people’s intestines.

Those bacteria, plus others that live in and on the body, make up the human microbiome, an invisible world that is only recently coming into focus. Scientists now know that the wrong balance of bugs in your gut—a delicate ecosystem that can collapse as you age, travel, or even take new medi­cation—can lead to all sorts of distress. Seres is one of the first startups aiming to design treatments that would manipulate the microbiome to repair bad guts and cure diseases. When it went public last year, the company was valued at $133.7 million, a vote of confidence for its first drug candidate: a set of microbes distilled from human feces, washed with ethanol, and condensed into a pill.

The technical term for transferring poop from one person to another is fecal microbiota transplant, and Seres’ oral version appeared to work wonders. One of the deadliest antibiotic-resistant health threats in the country is Clostridium difficile, a nasty gut infection that can strike patients after a course of antibiotics wipes out their existing bacterial residents. Early trials suggested Seres’ treatment cured recurring C. diff infections 97 percent of the time, the kind of result pharma companies only dream of. The startup was primed to nab the Food and Drug Administration’s first drug approval in microbiome-based therapeutics, pioneering the way in targeted treatments for a whole range of gastrointestinal disorders, from C. diff to Crohn’s disease. So nobody expected what happened next. In July, Seres reported the results of its more rigorous, second-phase trial: Nearly half the patients had their C. diff infections return—statistically indistinguishable from those who received no treatment at all.

The lab-built poop pill had failed.

JUST A 20-MINUTE drive from Seres is OpenBiome, the country’s largest stool bank. Its scientists are trying to cure C. diff too. The difference is, OpenBiome’s product has worked for years.

OpenBiome believes in the power of pure, barely processed poop. Every month, a hundred or so donors drop off anonymized bags of their stool at the bank, where a lab tech in a poop-emoji-emblazoned hair net weighs and scores every sample (on the Bristol stool scale: Google it). Another tech adds a simple saline solution, shakes it up in a Whirl-Pak bag, and freezes the liquid—ready to send to doctors and researchers across the country. Since OpenBiome opened in 2012, these simple preparations have successfully treated more than 15,000 cases of C. diff. The form of delivery to the body doesn’t even seem to matter. Enema, colonoscopy, oral capsule full of freeze-dried stool: It all works. “With C. diff,” says Mark Smith, OpenBiome’s cofounder and research director, “you can deliver it however you want.” And that’s the problem. Raw poop, diversely delivered, makes OpenBiome’s approach a regulation nightmare.

Introduce the good microcritters in large enough numbers and they can gobble up C. diff ’s food supply, starving the infection out.

Nobody, least of all the safety sticklers at the FDA, sees Open­Biome as a long-term solution. While stool banks screen donors for harmful pathogens, no amount of testing can turn up everything. And even if it could, it’s not just bacterial threats like E. coli that patients have to worry about. There’s no telling how someone else’s microbiome will affect your health down the line: The bugs in two people’s guts can differ by as much as 90 percent. So it wasn’t surprising when, in 2013, the FDA announced that it would regulate fecal transplants as drugs—a major blow to OpenBiome. Though stool banks can still operate, the development of safer alternatives will likely phase them out.

Seres felt pretty good about its chances to unseat OpenBiome—it had a theory about exactly which intestinal microbes combatted C. diff. Whereas OpenBiome went with the whole shebang, confident that something in there would do the trick, Seres thought it could design a more tailored, and therefore more regulation-friendly, fecal experience. (Seres declined to participate in this story, but it has reported some details about its process.) C. diff thrives, the idea went, on certain bile acids in your intestines. The more it eats, the worse the infection gets. But there are good critters in your gut—so-called spore-forming bac­teria—that have an appetite for those bile acids too. Introduce these guys in large enough numbers and they can gobble up C. diff’s food supply, starving the infection out. So Seres took batches of poop from healthy donors and reduced it to just 50 specific species of the spore-formers, adding ethanol to kill pathogens. Et voilà, the company thought—a poop pill even the FDA could love.

“It was very encouraging at first that just spore-forming bacteria worked,” says Dale Gerding, an epidemiologist who’s been studying C. diff since 1980 and is now the chief medical officer for Rebiotix, another company developing a poop pill. “But now that’s in question.” When Seres’ drug trial failed, the neat hypothesis fell apart. The fact is, Gerding says, the whole field of microbiome-based medicine was due for a reckoning. Doctors were so thrilled with the power of poop that they got overconfident in their ability to control it. Even Open­Biome’s Mark Smith agrees. “From a scientific perspective, the Seres result is actually a pretty important contribution to the field,” he says. “I’m sure it’s not what they intended, but previously people thought anything would work. Here we found something that didn’t.”

COLLEEN KELLY STARTED using fecal microbiota transplants in 2008—one of the first gastroenterologists in the US to do so. Over the years, she has noticed some strange side effects. One of her C. diff patients, for instance, also suffered from alopecia universalis. He hadn’t been able to grow any hair since he was 16: not on his head, not in his armpits, not even on his eyebrows. But when he got a stool transplant from his sister, he started sprouting fresh patches.

When Kelly told a colleague about the result, she got a second shock: He had seen a fecal transplant recipient regrow hair too. The two doctors were stuck. They didn’t have the resources to analyze their patients’ microbiomes to see what bugs might have been responsible for the change. “You don’t know how bad I wish I had that,” she says.

Tabletop robots sort through fecal samples from around the world, identify species of bacteria, and use those to grow more.

She’s not alone. It’s becoming more and more clear that the microbiome has therapeutic potential beyond the gut. Some patients undergo signi­ficant weight changes after a transplant; others say their depression goes away. Yet doctors still can’t figure out how it works.

Which is why, in early August, the National Institutes of Health announced that it would fund a fecal transplant registry, maintained by the American Gastroenterological Association. For the first time, thousands of transplant patients will have their microbiomes sequenced before and after treatment so doctors can have a better shot at identifying not only the bugs that fight C. diff but also what’s causing all those side effects. If Kelly had access to that kind of analysis with her alopecia patient, she might have stumbled onto a new, targeted microbiome therapy—delivering just the right bacteria to trigger hair growth.

WALK 15 MINUTES down Allston Street from Seres’ headquarters and you arrive at yet another microbiome-based start­up, Vedanta Biosciences. (One wonders if these 25 square miles contain the highest concentration of human feces of any major American city.) To Vedanta, fecal transplants have always been hopelessly irregular. Though it still handles real poop, the company is looking toward cleaner pastures.

At its lab, tabletop robots sort through fecal samples from around the world, identify individual species of bacteria, and use those to grow more of the same. Then algorithms look for bacteria and diseases that go together to determine how the former can be used to treat the latter. Vedanta already has its first drug candidate, a combination of microbes to treat inflammatory bowel disease (better known by its two main types, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease).

It is this kind of research-based approach that will move microbiome therapies forward. And it’s what the rest of the field is finally undertaking—tearing apart Seres’ trial data, following up with OpenBiome’s patients, and diving into the NIH’s new database.

In the sterile, glassed-in spaces at Vedanta, you can glimpse a future free of the concerns that real, raw poop brings. There, robots are busy growing microbes themselves, no human donors necessary. Imagine: All the magic of poop—with none of the mess.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/microbiome-therapy-making-fecal-transplants-better/

How Algorithms Could Help Keep People Out of Jail

STEVE LEIFMAN KNEW Miami-Dade’s courts had a problem. Ten years ago the longtime jurist realized that his county was putting too many ­people with mental health problems in jail. So he set up a psychiatric training program for 4,700 police officers and a new system to send people to counseling. The incarcerated population plummeted; the county shut down an entire jail.

But Leifman thought they still weren’t doing enough. So he asked the Florida Mental Health Institute to look at intake data for the county’s jails, mental health facilities, and hospitals and figure out who was using the system. It turned out that over five years, just 97 people with serious mental illnesses—5 percent of the jail population—accounted for 39,000 days in jails and hospitals. By themselves they had cost Miami-Dade $13 million. “This population was really hitting the system hard, without any good outcomes for them, society, or anybody,” Leifman says.

Across the country, jails and prisons have become repositories for people living with mental health issues. More than half of all prisoners nationwide face some degree1 of mental illness; in 20 percent of people in jails and 15 percent in state prisons, that illness is serious. Local criminal justice systems have to figure out how to care for these potentially complex patients—and how to pay for it.

Leifman’s team set up a more intensive system of care. Today, 36 health care providers in South Florida have access to a database of people in clinics or shelters to determine who they are and what help they need. Privacy laws keep its use limited, but the idea is to eventually widen the database’s scope and availability to other providers.

Cities across the country are starting to follow Miami-Dade’s example, trying to use data to keep low-level offenders out of jail, figure out who needs psychiatric help, and even set bail and parole. In the same way that law enforcement uses data to deploy resources—so-called predictive policing—cities are using techniques borrowed from public health and machine learning to figure out what to do with people after they get arrested. The White House’s Data-Driven Justice initiative is working with seven states and 60 localities, including Miami-Dade, to spread the ideas even further.

Eventually anyone moving through the justice system in Miami-Dade will enter medical and family history, past arrests, and more into the database, built in partnership with the Japanese pharmaceutical company Otsuka—which, according to Leifman, has spent $70 million on the project. An algorithm will help predict what kind of help a person needs before they actually need it. Let’s say you have a 30-day prescription for bipolar medication but never get it refilled. This new system would flag it and notify your case manager. (All this will have to comply with federal privacy regulations; the county is now figuring out who will have access—a public defender, a representative from the county mental health project, etc.) “If we can treat mental illness using more of a population model or disease model, not a criminal justice model, we’re going to get much better outcomes,” Leifman says.

This algorithmic approach is going way beyond mental health care. It all depends on what you put into the database. Some places use predictive software to help determine how likely people are to ­reoffend—which in turn influences their jail sentences and parole determinations. This is controversial, because the risk factors some algorithms take into consideration, like lack of education or unemployment, often disproportionately tag poor people and minorities. A ProPublica investigation found that Compas, an assessment tool used in Broward County, Florida, was 77 percent more likely to rate African American defendants as high risk. “Algorithms and predictive tools are only as good as the data that’s fed into them,” says Ezekiel Edwards, director of the ACLU’s criminal law reform project. “Much of that data is created by man, and that data is infused with bias.”

That’s why these predictive systems need oversight and transparency if they’re going to work. Leifman won’t use them in sentencing considerations, for example. “I want to make the decision, not leave it to a machine,” he says. “You don’t want a technology that takes away from using our own brains.” Still, even with more work to be done on training the algorithms, no one can argue with the potential to improve lives, save money, and create a more compassionate and just justice system.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/law-enforcement-mental-health-algorithms/

Social media is a gold mine for detectives busting scams

An equestrian suing for worker's compensation in Baltimore thought she had everyone fooled. The woman said in her claim she was injured and couldn't ride horses anymore, and in the courtroom, she had a convincing act.

But online, it was a different story. This was in 2002, when community boards served as social networks. There, private investigator Scott Catron found she had been spilling critical details about her life -- including when and where she would be riding next.

The woman's case quickly fell apart. She got nothing, and the insurance company saved more than $200,000.

Fast-forward to today, and even more of our lives are plastered over social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. That online explosion in personal information spurred Catron and fellow private investigator Michael Petrie to create Social Detection, a search engine that runs deeper searches on social networks and sites like Craigslist for their cases.

"We didn't have that before the internet came about, but once that it was here, we ran with it," Petrie said. "We knew that this was an emerging trend."

Our increasingly public lives have left a trail of evidence for investigators. Cops and private eyes don't have to follow people around in real life as much as they used to. They just need to open up Facebook. In October, police departments in Oakland, California, and in Baltimore were reported using data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to track protesters via third-party monitoring program.

Social Detection is one of those tools. Catron and Petrie built the program after spending more than 20 years investigating insurance fraud with long stakeouts and complicated disguises.

They had done web sweeps before, but that had required meticulous organization, scanning endless pages of posts to find digital needles in haystacks.

The pair needed social media searches that could go deeper than just typing a name in on Facebook.

The average investigator conducts 10 to 15 searches on a person, across several social networks and Google to get any worthwhile results, Catron and Petrie said. They're hoping to narrow it down to just one.

Too much information

People are still busting their own million-dollar fabrications by sharing too much on social media. The investigators estimated that Social Detection has saved insurance companies nearly $7 million in fraud cases since its beta launch in April 2015.

"Everybody wants to be seen or heard online," Petrie said. "They don't think they're gonna get caught."

Social Detection has been able to dig up people trying to hide behind disguise accounts that sport aliases or pseudonyms like their names spelled backwards.

It works by connecting the "digital dots," Catron said, using information available from the claimant's lawsuit. The data set typically includes a name, phone number and address. From there, investigators have access to names of relatives and possible friends, thanks to public records.

Even if there's a fake name, if the profile is linked to the claimant's family members and if photos match, investigators using Social Detection can put two and two together, Catron said.

It's often family and friends who help, inadvertently, to expose the lies, Catron said. The tool helps investigators comb through posts from friends and family members as well.

In one worker's compensation case, a man claimed he could barely walk 20 feet because of an injury -- and yet he was running half-marathons in Chicago.

He kept a low profile on social media, using his middle name to sign up, and didn't include photos. But a stranger's video of a marathon his spouse commented on showed him running in the background.

"They don't know it's out there. I mean, you can't control it," Petrie said. "If you comment or like or do anything on a public page, it will essentially be discoverable."

The team hopes to make Social Detection available on a subscription model, priced from $200 to $1,000 a month, but exclusively for insurance fraud cases. Catron and Petrie hope it could soon be used to help recent college graduates and job applicants clean up their own social media messes before someone else finds them.

Some soul-cial searching

Ghosts of social media's past can often come back to haunt people when they least expect it. Just ask Miss Teen USA, who faced a nightmare just minutes after winning the crown in July thanks to the Twitterverse finding her racist tweets from 2013 and 2014.

Using Social Detection, I looked into whether there were any skeletons showing in my closet. I've kept my social media presence pretty clean, but I was also a part of the unfortunate generation of people who created a Facebook profile as a teen. So yes, there's a lot of cringe-worthy material if you look back back enough.

I went back and deleted most of the high school hijinks on my Facebook when I was headed for college and again when I graduated, but Social Detection brought up some funny stuff I had forgotten about.

Like this Instagram account I made in 2012 to test out the app on Android -- the day after it had become available on Google's mobile operating system. The only photo was a test shot of my freshman year textbooks. It received zero likes. The discovery won't exactly cost me my job, but it did revive a ghost I'd forgotten about.

The account has since been edited to reflect that I use a different Instagram account. Hopefully the two followers on that account will transfer over.

The tool isn't perfect -- I had a hard time digging up dirt on the social media accounts I had vetted, like my Facebook profile, and it would take experienced web sleuths like Catron and Petrie to find obscure links to me, like a random YouTube video I might not even know I'm in.

"There's so much data out there that is missed," Petrie said. "So, do you want to find all of it, or do you want to find just some of it?"

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/social-media-is-a-gold-mine-for-detectives-busting-scams/

How much longer your SSD will last! Find out

If you read Dong Ngo's excellent primer on solid-state drives(SSDs) and how to extend their lifespan, then you might be wondering where you and your SSD stand. As Dong explained, SSDs have a finite number of program/erase cycles. That is, you can write data to and erase data from an SSD only so many times before it begins to wear out.

That's the bad news. The good news is the amount of data you need to write to an SSD before it begins to wear out is enormous. In its months-long SSD endurance test, TechReport tested six SSDs and they all made it past the 700TB mark, three topped the 1PB mark and two topped the 2PB mark -- that's PB as in petabytes!

To write that much data to a disk takes a long time -- it took more than 18 months of constant, tortuous writing before TechReport killed all six drives. If you wrote 100GB of data a day, which I doubt you do, it would take you 10,000 days or 27.4 years to write 1PB of data to your SSD.

All of this is to say you probably don't need to worry about the lifespan of your SSD. Your laptop's CPU or its battery will die long before its SSD does. If you are curious to see how much data you've written to your laptop's SSD, however, there is a way to do so on both Windows and MacOS machines.

MacOS

On your Mac, you can use Terminal to see the amount of data you've written to your drive.

1. Open Terminal and enter the "diskutil list" command.
2. Find your physical drive on the list, which includes partitions and virtual disks. In my case, my physical is disk0.
3. Enter this command: "iostat -Id disk0" or similar (depending on the number for your drive).

ou will see three values listed:

• KB/t = kilobytes per transfer
• xfrs = number of transfers
• MB = number of megabytes transferred

The value listed under MB is the total number of megabytes that you have written to your drive from when it was first installed to now. I have written 1,076,395.35MB of data to the SSD I installed in the spring of 2015 on my MacBook Pro. That's just over 1TB of data in about a year and a half.

Sadly, my early-2011 era MacBook Pro will soon be retired because the battery can't hold a charge for much longer than an hour, the spinning beach ball makes frequent appearances and the loud cooling fans spin more often than they rest idle.

Windows

Windows doesn't have a built-in way to check the amount of data you've written to disk, so you must instead turn to a third-party application. I use CrystalDiskInfo, a free program that's easy to use.

Launch CystalDiskInfo and it'll display a host of information. For our purposes here, look for two things.

1. Check your Health Status. It should say "Good" if all is well with your SSD.
2. The value for Total Host Writes is the amount of data you've written to your drive over its lifetime. For my new Windows 10 laptop, I've written 283GB of data thus far. It's got miles to go before it's put to sleep.

You can also check the status of your Windows laptop's disk by opening the Command Prompt and entering two commands. First, type "wmic" and hit the enter key. Next, type "diskdrive get status" and hit enter again. If everything is good with your system's hard drive, you'll see the Status listed as "OK".

Source: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/find-how-how-much-longer-your-ssd-will-last/

Five things to consider before buying LED bulbs

Know what you're getting into before investing in LED light bulbs.

As your incandescents burn out, it's a good time to consider switching to LED bulbs.

LEDs have an impressive lifespan (20-something years!) and are very cost-effective.

Now's the right time to switch to LEDs. These bulbs have made significant advances over the last few years, finally delivering the warm light incandescents have comforted us with for decades.

Because there are so many LED varieties, choosing an LED is entirely different from picking up an incandescent. Before you head to the store, find out what you need to know about choosing the right LED bulbs.

Lumens, not watts

Forget what you know about incandescents -- your watts are no good here.

When shopping for bulbs, you're probably accustomed to looking for watts, an indication of how bright the bulb will be. The brightness of LEDs, however, is determined a little differently.

Contrary to common belief, wattage isn't an indication of brightness, but a measurement of how much energy the bulb draws. For incandescents, there is an accepted correlation between the watts drawn and the brightness, but for LEDs, watts aren't a great predictor of how bright the bulb will be. (The point, after all, is that they draw less energy.)

For example, an LED bulb with comparable brightness to a 60W incandescent is only 8 to 12 watts.

But don't bother doing the math -- there isn't a uniform way to covert incandescent watts to LED watts. Instead, a different form of measurement should be used: lumens.

The lumen (lm) is the real measurement of brightness provided by a light bulb, and is the number you should look for when shopping for LEDs. For reference, here's a chart that shows the watt-lumen conversion for incandescents and LEDs.

As you can see in the chart above, an incandescent can draw up to five times as many watts for the same number of lumens. Get a sense of the brightness (in lumens) you need before heading to the store, and throw away your affinity for watts.

Choosing the right color LED

You can always count on incandescents providing a warm, yellowish hue. But LEDs come in a wide range of colors.

As shown off by the Philips Hue, LED bulbs are capable of displaying an impressive color range, from purple to red, to a spectrum of whites and yellows. For the home, however, you're likely looking for something similar to the light that incandescents produce.

The popular colors available for LEDs are "warm white" or "soft white," and "bright white."

Warm white and soft white will produce a yellow hue, close to incandescents, while bulbs labeled as bright white will produce a whiter light, closer to daylight and similar to what you see in retail stores.

If you want to get technical, light color (color temperature) is measured in kelvins. The lower the number, the warmer (yellower) the light. So, your typical incandescent is somewhere between 2,700 and 3,500K. If that's the color you're going for, look for this range while shopping for LED bulbs.

You'll pay more for an LED bulb

LED bulbs are like hybrid cars: cheaper to operate but pricey upfront.

When switching to LED bulbs, don't expect to save buckets of cash. Instead, think of it as an investment. Luckily, competition has increased and LED bulbs have come down in price (like this $5 LED from Philips), but you should still expect to pay much more than an incandescent.

Eventually, the LED bulbs will pay off, and in the meantime, you'll enjoy less heat production, longer bulb life, and even the option of controlling them with your smartphone.

Bottom line: unless you're replacing many incandescent bulbs in a large house, you won't see significant savings in your electricity bill.

For a detailed breakdown of the cost-effectiveness of LED bulbs, check out this useful post.

Watch out for non-dimmable LEDs

Because of their circuitry, LEDs are not always compatible with traditional dimming switches. In some cases, the switch must be replaced. Other times, you'll pay a little more for a compatible LED.

Most dimmers, which were likely designed to work with incandescents, work by cutting off the amount of electricity sent to the bulb. The less electricity drawn, the dimmer the light. But with your newly acquired knowledge of LED lingo, you know that there is no direct correlation between LED brightness and energy drawn.

This guide explains why some LEDs will hum, flickr, or buzz when tied to a dimmer.

If you'd like your LED to be dimmable, you need to do one of two things: find LED bulbs compatible with traditional dimmers, or replace your current dimming switch with a leading-edge (LED-compatible) dimmer.

When shopping for LEDs, it helps to know what kind of dimming switch you have, but if you don't know (or would rather not go through the trouble), simply search for LED bulbs compatible with standard incandescent dimmers. To make things easier for you, we tested a slew of them to find out which LED bulbs work best with dimmers.

Not all light fixtures should use LEDs

Knowing where it's OK to place an LED will ensure that the bulb won't fizzle ahead of its time.

You probably know that LED bulbs run dramatically cooler than their incandescent cousins, but that doesn't mean they don't produce heat. LED bulbs do get hot, but the heat is pulled away by a heat sink in the base of the bulb. From there, the heat dissipates into the air and the LED bulb stays cool, helping to keep its promise of a very long life.

And therein lies the problem: the bulb needs a way to dissipate the heat. If an LED bulb is placed in an enclosed housing, the heat won't have anywhere to go, sending it right back to the bulb, and sentencing it to a slow and painful death.

Consider where you'd like to place your LED bulbs. If you have fully or semi-enclosed fixtures you need to light up, look for LEDs that are approved for recessed or enclosed spaces.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/five-things-to-consider-before-buying-led-bulbs/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0h&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5818528b04d3012b8b022086&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook