Better lighting for your computer | Hacker News Reader

Better lighting for your computer

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107 pointsnreece42 comments

It is a interesting idea which other people had before him in my opinion. I think its a bit useless though. Let me tell you why.

Rather soon after the TV was introduced people started to sleep less. This is actually so evident that there is extensive research about this. (here is a common article for instance: http://www.journal-news.net/page/content.detail/id/505495.ht... )

So TV causes already people to sleep less and some experience sleep disorders, ok what about the internet/computer thing?

Well, as it turns out that isn't good for us either. I myself (lets be subjective for a moment) find it hard to "turn off" my head if I go directly to bed after sitting infront of the PC. This has probably many reasons some are,

- our brain is not made for multitasking (what we constantly do, surfing, mailing, videos, whatever ... It has shown to reduce brain's ability to concentrate, because our brain can do these tasks at the cost of our ability to concentrate. (This actually lowers your IQ)

- Constant sitting infront of the PC and TV has caused the society do less active things, which leads to insufficient excercise, again leading to reduced sleep.

- This effect is especially noticable on kids and young adults. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/5/13.html

- Even cellphone usage is disturbing your sleep. https://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/460368?articleid...

So it is interesting to have such an application but having something rather that turns off your emails at 11 and turns off internet at 12, and forces you to sleep at 1 would be more interesting.

I think if you really want to enjoy a good sleep you should give yourself 1 hour without any new media (TV, Mobile, PC,..) before you actually try to sleep.

Neat app idea, however two nitpicks:

1.) Screenshots? This one seems obvious.

2.) Patent Pending? Seriously? The developer certainly is not the first to come up with this idea. The idea that this "technology" needs to be licensed from them is just silly.

I had to agree with you on the patent pending statement and made a comment to that effect.

I hate seeing things like this when it comes to software. Give it another ten years and I'm not going to be able to code a damn thing without violating a stack of patents.

Give it another ten years [...]

Uhm, try, "for at least ten years already".

Screenshots of this are tricky unless you literally mean "photographs of the monitor", as I suspect the way this is done is by modifying the gamma tables in the graphics card. This gets applied post-framebuffer in the RAMDAC (for VGA) or in the TMDS frame assembly stage (for DVI/HDMI/laptop panels). In other words, the framebuffer, which is what you're normally reading for a screenshot, always contains the same data, it just gets tinted as it is sent to the screen. Graphics card drivers often come with UI to modify this rendering stage, and the windowing systems all come with APIs for manipulating it from user space.

Of course, you could always take the framebuffer and aproximate the transformation in software and dump the result to file.

During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.

Say what? Look like the sun? CFL or LEDs are just white light sources. Most of them are not even full spectrum and they're not mean to 'look like the sun' at all.

All this program did was cast a yellow/pink overcast over my screen. If you're doing some graphics work, this is useless.

If you're on a Mac and your eyes feel tired from a lot of light late in the evening, give this a try: http://docs.blacktree.com/nocturne/nocturne

does an app of this sort exist for windows? I have done this to my computer manually but a simple theme would be cool.

Nocturne uses a feature of Mac OSX to help with the screen inversion. It might be possible on windows but I've not seen it.

You can actually screen invert on Macs without Nocturne using the universal access (accessibility ) preferences, but Nocturne smooths out the rough edges. Accessibility preferences on windows might also have this feature.

I hate to nitpick, but they are in fact meant to "look like the sun" due to the fact that most monitors generally run at a color temperature of 5500K which is (approximately) the same color temperature of sunlight. When set to a "night" setting it isn't creating an "overcast", it is merely changing the color temperature of the monitor to something more in line with moonlight (4100K) or lamp (3400K) light sources, something you could do manually by adjusting your monitor settings.

.. or, if you are going to stare at the monitor 24x7, get one with a ambient light sensor and brightness auto-adjust :-)

This sounds like more than just brightness: think colour temperature.

i tried this, since so many of you reported interesting results. it didn't do much for me.

a common theme seems to be: "it looked weird at first, but then i went back to my default settings, which looks blinding." might i suggest that the real problem is you've simply got the brightness on your monitor turned up too high?

yeah, it looks cool at first. you get a new monitor, play with the settings, and you decide it looks most striking on full blast. i've long thought that's a recipe for eyestrain.

i've got an apple 23-inch cinema display. i keep its brightness set on the lowest possible setting. if there were two or three lower settings, i'd try those.

It's not just the brightness though. (I'm using a Powerbook G4.)

F.Lux appears to change the tint and other color factors depending on lighting and the brightness outside. Yes, I probably could get the same effect from diddling with the display settings, but this way I click a single button and it sets everything up for me.

And, to my eyes at least, it did make a remarkable difference. I went from the constantly nagging-at-me desire to rub my eyes to an instant feeling of, "Hey, that looks nice. Ahhhhh."

The one catch is, I wonder how this is going to affect graphics work. Does it mean that I'm gonna get colors all wrong when working on graphics at night?

'Course ... I'm all kinds of color-blind anyway, so maybe this'll actually help!

It will definitely get your colors weird, but it has a one hour disable button for when you need calibrated color.

How well is your monitor actually calibrated in the first place? ;)

It isn't in the least! There'd be no point to it.

I am one of the people for whom most of the pictures at http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness look identical. In addition to red/green colorblindness, I have similar problems with purple/violet/blue/etc. See also "Deuteranopia".

For this reason, when tasked with doing an actual website design, I tend to make heavy use of pastels and "muted" colors. I'm looking forward to finding a graphics person I can trust to do layouts.

I'm trying this now and really liking it. Simple idea, and my eyes don't feel as fatigued as they normally would now.

The odd thing about the Windows implementation (Vista at least) is that the mouse cursor isn't affect by whatever filter's being applied. So as the screen gets dimmer the little white arrow becomes a progressively brighter beacon contrasted against the rest of the screen. It makes it hard to lose.

I went to school with the author - he's sharp as hell. He also founded Picasa.

Don't all laptops have ambient light sensors and adjust their displays & keyboard lighting accordingly?

This app isnt meant to dim the screen. It changes the color temperature of the monitor to a warmer setting. Its like the difference between a fluorescent and a regular incandescent light.

Actually it's a colder setting.

Nope. Mine (a rather expensive one) doesn't have that. An old Pocket PC of mine did though.

How can there not be screenshots?

I don't think luminosity can be demonstrated with screenshots. Those are better suited to demonstrate other functionality like layout, workflow etc. I have been using this for a couple hours and it seems to be a good thing so far.

Because it takes about 30 seconds to download and try, and the visual effect is not well demonstrated by a screenshot.

How do I do this for Linux?

i don't know what it really does, but if it's just dimming the screen at certain times, call xbacklight from cron.

It's actually changing the color temperature, not the gamma.

Use xbacklight to change brightness, and xgamma to change color. For instance, if you wanted a more "cool night" glow, you might run this:

xbacklight -set 60 ; xgamma -ggamma 0.8 -rgamma 0.8 &> /dev/null

And then for daylight, you might run this:

xbacklight -set 100 ; xgamma -gamma 1.0 &> /dev/null

Anyone use this yet? Does it work well?

At first it seems annoying and really dims the monitor (10PM here). After about 15 minutes I turned it off and was blinded by the brightness. Its now running again. Wonder if this will make me tired earlier, need to stop this 2am nights.

It seems really strange at first, but after giving it a few minutes, it's much easier to look at the screen now. I hadn't realized how blinding the "daylight" setting was at night.

I like it a lot. I had to adjust the night setting, since all the way to "Halogen" was making everything look orange. I now have it a few steps up and it looks great. Installed it on my desktop and laptop.

I too just tried it. The default night setting is way too orange, but I adjusted it a bit and then got interrupted by an instant message. About 5 minutes later I went to play with the settings again, the daytime setting (my monitor's default) was blinding! I've been running it for 15 minutes now, the orange tint is barely noticeable. I think I really like this, will try it for a few days.

While we are on the topic of light... What is the ideal lighting for a home office? I find my eyes start to hurt when I'm on my home PC but they never bother me at work.

Check that you have sufficient ambient light in the room. A bright screen against a darker backdrop can cause eye strain. White walls and a small, low-wattage light can fix this.

I don't remember where I read it, but diffuse light from the back of the screen is the way to go. Kind of like the Phillips TV "Ambilight" that was advertised on TV a few years ago.

I do this and IMHO it works well. It takes a while to get the right amount of light for your room size/configuration but I feel my eyestrain has gone down significantly.

Now if I can only get them to turn off half the lights at work...

This sounds nice. I like to dim the lights a bit before I go to sleep so that I fall asleep faster. When I do that, I manually dim my laptop too.

This might 1) Remind me that it's getting late and that I should go to sleep soon, and 2) Help me fall asleep without the manual brightness-setting.

But alas, I'm an Ubuntu man.

You can do similar things in Ubuntu, see my post above about using xbacklight and xgamma

I'm an Ubuntu man myself :)

I gave this a try and the change in color temperature gave me a splitting headache in approximately 3.2 seconds... until I finally managed to stare at the monitor long enough to kill the app.... a splitting headache that has remained with me all night long. And sadly, no, that's not an exaggeration in the least. :(

my mac does this automatically? and since its color calibrated for photo editing I don't want the monitor to change color on me.

Your (presumably) laptop adjusts light level only, not color "warmth". As for photo-editing, you probably don't want a service playing with your colors.

But you can run it and click the disable for one hour button if you're popping into photoshop for a little while.

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