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Comment by heydenberk | Hacker News Reader

f.lux is one of my favorite pieces of software. It just does what it's supposed to and I hardly even think about it. Being near the 40th parallel, it rarely activates from April to October. At some point in October, as it did a week ago, it naturally and unobtrusively becomes indispensable again.

Something that happens quite frequently is non-technical friends see my laptop at night and ask "why it is orange?". When I temporarily deactivate f.lux, they shrink from the intrusive blue light and need no further explanation.

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Agreed. I've noticed a pretty significant improvement in my sleep patterns since I started using it. I used to have trouble "tearing myself away" from the computer at night, and I'd often stay up way too late just staring at my screen and not really doing much of anything—just sort of spinning my wheels. That rarely seems to happen any more.

Now, where the heck is the "Donate" button?

> Now, where the heck is the "Donate" button?

There's no need to donate; they'll start extracting cash from customers pretty soon!

f.lux is patent pending. If you make a cell phone, display, or other cool device, and want to talk about licensing f.lux? Email us: justgetflux@gmail.com

curious-- I do this sometimes (often) too, but how does f.lux help you tear yourself away?

Without the bluish light keeping me stimulated and awake I get tired more quickly. Once I'm tired enough, I just go to sleep.

I've noticed that I can't make it to 4 AM anymore, but I'd just attributed it to getting older. Perhaps it is f.lux's doing after all.

f.lux is an awesome little thing I had installed for months. Then on the excitement of moving to a new place, I removed it. And I could stay awake thru the night again. So it wasn't old age after all. Now I will put it back again.

I use f.lux and think it's great. I recently started taking a small amount (~1.5mg) of melatonin after reading a post[0] by Gwern and the accompanying discussion on HN[1]. I find that taking it ~30 minutes before I want to go to bed makes it much, much easier to "tear myself away" from the computer, book, etc. and go to bed.

0. http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495358

Bright blue light disturbs your natural sleepishness feeling (melatonin/etc), so the need to sleep is felt as, say, exhaustion which is different and comes later.

> Something that happens quite frequently is non-technical friends see my laptop at night and ask "why it is orange?"

This, very much; if you just have it on for a while, you don't notice it yourself. There was a time years ago when it would transition rather quickly so you could see when it turned on, but that's a setting you can turn off so it goes reeeeally smoothly. I hardly notice it now. Maybe sometimes when I turn on a game it will flicker back to normal for a little bit. But yeah, I hardly notice it (which is good), but others do. Funny.

I have tried using f.lux several times as it is a recurring theme on HN, but it just does not work for me. All it does is give everything a red tinge, but the light intensity remains the same. I feel like it is cooking my eyeballs and blurring my vision.

I have working alternatives now neither of which work well with multi-screens and neither of which are sophisticated as f.lux, but they do reduce the intensity of my screens which is what I want.

One is "Dimmer" which I use on my left screen and the other is the built in Nvidia tool to reduce brightness, contrast/gamma etc, which I use on my right screen. Pretty primitive but works for me.

That is the point; it's all about color temperature, and not about brightness. If you feel like you're cooking your eyeballs, perhaps your screen brightness is just too high.

f.lux only changes the color temperature and that is what I use it for. Changing the display brightness is easy: just use the brightness adjustment keys on the keyboard. I set my display brightness as low as possible, while still keeping the screen easy to read.

It took me a while to get used to it - I found I had to start out with minimal settings and slowly turn them up. I find I can sleep much faster now with it.

Colorblindness perhaps?

I love f.lux! I actually use it on my work computer during the day to knock down a little bit of the light. (just 6500 -> 5900)

It anecdotally helps a lot with eye fatigue, even during the day.

I just installed it and tried your suggestion of dropping to 5900K. After about an hour I reverted to normal for a moment and was shocked by how harsh the light from screen was.

Thanks, my eyeballs salute you!

Sweet! Cheers to full-time computer use for the next 40 years.

The default setting for f.lux is 5900 during the day, no?

6500k, matching daylight.

Oh, huh, I must have arrived 5900k for daytime use too several years ago

I never thought of this! Thanks for the tip!

'Intrusive blue light' was enough to get me to download it. This is great. Feels so much easier on my eyes right now (6am).

>It just does what it's supposed to

It doesn't work for me on Ubuntu for some reason, anyone got a similar experience?

Try redshift instead, you can use it from the terminal. If you want it to change according to time of day use redshift -l lon:lat. i.e longitude and latitude of current position. But you can also use redshift -O to set a specific level. I often use redshift -O 3500

Use redshift, its available in Debian so you can just apt-get it. There is a gtk interface (gtk-redshift) to help with configuration.

Note that in the latest version (1.8), the gtk-redshift launcher has been renamed to redshift-gtk.

Have you tried the xflux daemon? It's a command line version for X. http://justgetflux.com/linux.html

I have to say that I prefer the warmer color tones regardless of daytime and lighting, which is why I have f.lux always set to 5000K - unless I need accurate colors - and even warmer during the dark hours.

Otherwise and without f.lux I tend to get occasional headaches and my eyes fatigue after long days spent at the computer.

If you always want it set, most monitors have these same controls and will save memory. Mine even has presets so I just hit the button a few times.

There's also the OS's color-calibration/color-profile generation utility, which will usually let you set both gamma and temperature however you like them.

Brilliant!

When my friends have asked "why is it orange?" I've launched into an explanation of how blue light at night is unnatural and causes insomnia. Somehow, I hadn't thought of just temporarily deactivating f.lux and letting them see for themselves!

Will do next time.

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