Does your monitor hurt your eyes at night? Auto-adjust your color temperature. | Hacker News Reader

Does your monitor hurt your eyes at night? Auto-adjust your color temperature.

stereopsis.com

40 pointschaosmachine21 comments

Previous discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=488211

It will be even cooler if it adjusts according to how much light your web cam detects.

I imagine this isn't too hard. You probably need to design a clever light-intensity-test to determine the range your cam can detect.

My 2 cents: The eye's perception of color "white" is _very_ dependent to context. That's why whatever change this does to the monitor at first, it will not be visible in a few minutes. Also why I check the "slow transition" checkbox. The least you notice about it the more useful it is. Or so I'm guessing.

I'm using xflux for about 3 months now and wouldn't want to miss it anymore.

My first reaction was the obvious "Urgh, I'll never get used to this red tint". Only 30 minutes later I was barely noticing it anymore. And on second day, after an allnighter, I realized that it really does reduce my eyestrain significantly.

That said, the tool itself is not without flaws, at least not the linux version.

I'd much prefer if I could just manually set the color temp without their latitude magic which is always off by an hour or two in my area. Also I'd want it to fade gradually instead of switching over in one fellow swoop.

Maybe a fellow hacker can point me to a command line util that lets me manually set the color temperature in X11?

My MacBook changes the screen brightness and that's all I needed.

If I wake up at 4am (having gone to sleep mere minutes before :P), my MacBook dutifully shows me a screen with a brightness of 1 - given, of course, that the lights are still off as they usually are.

I tried this and found it highly annoying. It didn't seem to use any kind of gradation. Just "hey, it's supposed to be dark where you are" and everything turns red. It's really irritating.

Does this actually do anything to help your eyes?

I just got the Linux version running. It definitely changed the screen color a lot. I guess we'll see whether it helps my eyes.

I've been using the Mac version for a month or so now. My experience has been pretty pleasant: the slight hue shift serves both to decrease eye strain and to suggest that it's getting late (an unintended but useful consequence).

I personally am not sure that the ease on my eyes really comes from the hue shifting or simply from the reduced contrast, but either way I enjoy the effects of the program.

Easily the biggest problem I have is that the Mac version doesn't actually gradually shift hues and so when it makes its sudden change at around 7pm it literally hurts my eyes as they attempt to adjust.

I'm not sure if it alleviates eye strain, but using less blue light at night has a definite effect on your ability to get to sleep. (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08065/862394-51.stm)

It turns out that blue light even affects the circadian rhythms of blind people (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ask-the-bra...).

Tried to use this for a while, but in Vista some system pop-ups and whatnot made the screen flash back to normal. This hurt my eyes quite a few times when in happened after the screen had been a lot darker for a long time.

Terrible idea if you're like me and have calibrated your monitor and now can detect minute changes in the color temperature. :-)

Turn down brightness and/or contrast if you like, but don't mess with the color.

I saw this a while ago and my question is the same as before - anyone know a Linux equivalent?

There's a link to the Linux version right under the main download buttons.

Indeed, though at first I missed it too.

As I cannot try it (I'm using 64-bit Linux), I peeked into the executable and found out that it is using XF86VidModeSetGammaRamp and XF86VidModeGetGammaRamp functions internally and it takes latitude and zip code (not longitude, so it is US-only).

Armed with location and time, program already knows how much sunlight there should be (plus-minus some error) and then the daemon slowly changes the color temperature of the monitor...

> As I cannot try it (I'm using 64-bit Linux)

There's a Linux link on the page. It works on 64-bit too.

Yes, I found it, downloaded it and disassembled it...

Of course it would work on amd64 if you have also 32-bit userspace (ie multilib support) installed and 32-bit emulation enabled... but I don't.

the red tint is irritating (though its only been half an hour for me), and not only to eyes. Human eye is most sensitive to green wavelengths, dont know why they chose red.

Anyone know why it makes an outbound tcp connection?

If your eyes are sensitive, as mine are, the first thing you should do is reduce contrast. Brightness is less straining, and colors are just colors.

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