Protecting Your Outdoor Space in the Offseason. Regardless of the climate, you live in, protecting your patio furnishings and accessories during the colder months is crucial to maintaining a beautiful and functional outdoor living space. Protective outdoor covers can help defend against snow, sleet, wind, sun, and rain, which can damage your outdoor essentials and cause them to deteriorate over time.
Consider these five ways to help ensure your outdoor space is protected from whatever weather may come your way:
Protect patio pieces – Investing in high-quality covers can help keep your outdoor furniture pieces functional for years. Look for covers that feature durable fabrics and details like adjustable straps and cord-lock closures for a quick, custom-like fit. To keep water from pooling and seeping into cushions and furnishings, use inflatable airbags to elevate covers and help repel rain, snow, and debris.
Keep debris out of your AC – Air conditioning units are built to withstand rain and snow, but not to keep out debris or pests. Select a full cover with air vents to reduce inside condensation, as moisture buildup can freeze the condenser coils or create mold, causing damage over time. If you live in a milder climate and your unit is beneath trees, consider a mesh-top cover to protect your air conditioner from falling sticks and leaves.
Safeguard the grill – Whether you’re putting the grill away for the season or gearing up for winter cookouts, be sure to cover your grill when it’s not in use to help prevent rust and damage. Eliminate the hassles commonly associated with grill covers with an option like the Storigami Easy Fold BBQ Grill Cover, which folds twice as fast as standard covers and takes up one-quarter of the space when stored. Featuring looped, easy-to-grip handles and directional guide arrows to simplify the folding process, the collection allows you to continuously cover and uncover your grill whenever you want to fire it up.
Shield firewood from wind and water – If you use wood to heat your home, keep your logs burn-ready by storing them properly. Take time to stack logs neatly for proper airflow at least 20 feet from your house to prevent bugs from getting inside. Use a rack to keep the stack a few inches off the ground to protect the wood from moisture and insects. Then shield logs with a water-resistant cover with air vents that help reduce wind lofting and condensation.
Simplify storage – Streamline seasonal transitions with functional and flexible storage containers. For example, the Classic Accessories Ravenna Deck Box is a weatherproof storage solution for pool toys, gardening tools, cushions, and other outdoor items. Available in three sizes, the series combines capacity with durable construction and fade-resistant materials designed to stand up to the great outdoors. These lightweight units can be easily repositioned or taken apart for convenient offseason storage.
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What are dark patterns? An online media expert explains
It’s not you; many e-commerce websites are difficult to use by design.
fizkes/iStock via Getty Images
Jasmine McNealy, University of Florida
Dark patterns are design elements that deliberately obscure, mislead, coerce and/or deceive website visitors into making unintended and possibly harmful choices.
Dark patterns can be found in many kinds of sites and are used by several kinds of organizations. They take the form of deceptively labeled buttons, choices that are difficult to undo and graphical elements like color and shading that direct users’ attention to or away from certain options.
Dark patterns in subscriptions are a common example of these kinds of design choices, given the ubiquity of online subscriptions and free trials for all kinds of products and services. This kind of dark pattern might make it difficult for a user to unsubscribe, or it might automatically convert a free trial into a paid subscription.
To demonstrate how common these kinds of design practices are, and to illustrate the various harms they can cause, designer and public interest technologist Stephanie Nguyen and I launched the zine I, Obscura. The zine publishes case studies of different dark patterns and what can and should be done to protect users from these practices. I, Obscura was launched with help from student authors Ryan Tan, Kaylee Doty and Kally Zheng, and in collaboration with the Stanford University Digital Civil Society Lab and the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.
Examples of dark patterns on well-known websites.
Why dark patterns matter
The inability to unsubscribe from a service results in a specific monetary harm: It makes people spend money they didn’t intend to. But dark patterns can cause other kinds of harms, as well.
These can take the form of emotional manipulation, like when a site places a countdown clock on an offer to accelerate a customer’s decision-making, even though time has no bearing on the sale or the use of the product or service. Or the harm could be the loss of privacy, as when an app forces users to turn off data collection in two different settings instead of making privacy settings easy to find.
A power imbalance exists between users and organizations, which makes it nearly impossible for individuals to always protect themselves from deceptive design practices. We created I, Obscura to help educate web users about the possibilities.
Consumer protection is important, as well. The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general have enforced consumer protection regulations against organizations that use deceptive design practices, especially those with apps that target children. It is important for policymakers to prohibit the use of dark patterns and to require organizations to make interactions as transparent and simple as possible.
The Conversation U.S. publishes short, accessible explanations of newsworthy subjects by academics in their areas of expertise.
[Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]
Jasmine McNealy, Assistant Professor of Telecommunication, University of Florida
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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