It’s important to remember that humidity plays a huge role when it comes to managing thermal comfort, and the desert is a very dry place. Advice that is applicable to the desert might not apply in other places with high temperature/high humidity.

I don’t know whether drinking hot tea actually helps to beat the heat, but speculating a bit on it, we might guess that hot tea would promote sweating, which is highly effective for reducing body temperature in dry contexts, but less so in humid ones. The tea is also warmer than your body temperature if it is to be considered warm, and as such you will get hotter without getting any relief from the sweating, making drinking hot tea in a hot/humid scenario counterproductive if these assumptions are correct.

Just something to keep in mind.

Biking.

Moving under your own power has so many benefits:

• It’s fun
• It’s cheap (or can be, to be fair)
• It’s good for your health
• It’s good for the planet

In order of significance:

• Way smaller scale

This is the most significant part, large scale means entirely different problems to tackle.

• Less functionality

Seen from the perspective of the codebase. Some of this functionality is not of interest to the users (tracking etc). All code executed takes time in some way, shape or form.

• Younger codebase

Lemmy has had less time to accumulate cruft compared to reddit.

• Written in Rust vs Written in Python

Not super-significant at the end of the day, but it does make a difference.

• Bicycling

It’s cheap (well, can be), healthy (the risk of murderous drivers notwithstanding), and extremely fun. I’ve moved from mostly moving around by public transportation to biking everywhere, and I’ve never gotten so much free exercise. As a bonus, I get so much time to listen to podcasts as well.

• Coffee

Brewing coffee can be very fun and rewarding.

• Podcasts

Not the bro-kind. Lots of great entertaining and educational material out there, I listen to north of 50 hours a month.

• Growing food

Growing your own food is a really rewarding activity, give it a try if you can.

• Calisthenics and flexibility

I don’t have good access to a gym where I live, so calisthenics has been the option for keeping my body relatively fit. Getting into flexibility more recently has been a really good addition.

I don’t live in a hot place, but I am learning to cope with higher temperatures, and these are a few tips:

• Wear garments in cool fabrics, like Linen

Linen is one of the better types of garment to keep cool during summer. For a sunny day, long linen pants and a long-sleeved linen shirt will help you beat the heat in the sun. I find that linen helps with the issue of perspiration, as it does not retain moisture in the same way that cotton and some synthetics do. It’s also a pretty decent choice from an environmental perspective.

• Use fans to reduce perceived temperature

Wind helps keep body temperature low by aiding in the effectiveness of perspiration, i.e. sweat evaporating and reducing body temperature. This will only be effective if your indoor humidity is not too high, see later tips on that topic.

• Keep the sun away from the building

If you can shade the building you are in, it will heat up less. Awnings can be useful in this regard.

• Create a draft when the outside temperature is lower than the inside

This relies on the layout of your building being appropriate, but try to keep windows open at times when it’s possible. Bug nets can be useful to keep things open without getting unwanted guests.

• Keep things closed when the outdoor temperature is higher than indoors

You’ll want to try to maintain the amount of cool air as much as possible. Manage the climate actively, best as you can.

• Turn off things that generate heat

This relies on things like you not working from home and having to keep a computer on, but even under those circumstances, you can still try to switch from high energy devices to lower energy devices (stationary computers vs laptops, TVs vs phones). Higher electricity consumption is generally going to mean higher heat generation.

• Drink lots of water

You’ll need it to maintain good hydration, which keeps perspiration working, which is fundamentally what’s going to keep you cool when temperatures are hotter than what keeps you optimally cool.

• Go for a swim

If you have access to even mildly cool water, this can help refresh you when you’re feeling the heat. It’s also fun.

• Buy an AC

At the end of the day, perceived temperature can be a pretty hard factor to manage. When you’ve exhausted the rest of the list, you may need to get an AC, which will both cool the air and reduce humidity, which in turn decreases perceived temperature and generally increases comfort. If you can get one installed, that’s ideal, but if your country is anything like mine, you might be stuck with a portable one, which is unfortunately pretty inefficient. Try to get a good seal on the outdoor-part of the AC unit to help it work as efficiently as possible.

On desktop: Firefox On Android: Firefox

The extension support is the killer feature, and the open source+supporting a diverse web ecosystem is a close second.

World of Warcraft (TBC, WotLK, Classic, Classic TBC) probably wins out by a large margin, followed by Dota 2.