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Comment by bretthopper | Hacker News Reader

f.lux was basically unusable in its previous version that was tied to sunset. In Toronto, for example, f.lux would start kicking in at 5pm in the winter which is no where near most people's bedtimes.

My solution was to continually disable it for an hour at a time until I had enough and uninstalled it. Happy to be able to try it out again.

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It's funny how we see things differently.

It is my understanding that this was "by design". I.e. that if you work after the sun is set, it's bad for your natural sleep cycle for you to stare at a monitor screen which emits light that looks like the light coming from the sun.

By tying the emitted color from the screen to the rising and setting of the sun, your brain isn't affect by this any more. This doesn't mean that you have to go to bed when the sun sets and your monitor turns yellow - it just means that you increased your chances of feeling tired at a more natural point during the evening.

I'm a long time f.lux user and have happily accepted the yellow sun set on my monitor when the sun outside set. I've even worked long hours with this setting since it's a great ease on the eyes. If you ever worked at night with this setting for a couple of hours and then tried to switch of f.lux, you will feel your eye becoming VERY sore. Only then do you realize how uncomfortable the normal light from your monitor is.

When I had a problem with flux dimming my monitor too early, I just changed the intensity so it didn't get too orange. Just taking a little of the blue off still helps.

"Basically unusable?" That's a bit dramatic. I never minded the warm screen kicking in before the end of my workday.

It might be placebo, but I've noticed a pretty dramatic drowsiness set in immediately following the f.lux "sunset." A lot of the time I will turn it off so I can stay up and get things done. If that's what one experiences at 5pm, I'd call that unusable.

New version has "working late" mode. http://puu.sh/7lImw.png

Likewise. As with a pomodoro ending and the bell rining, the sun setting on PyCharm stops me working. All sorts of chemistry going on.

It was absolutely unusable. Here in the north you would get two hours of sunlight during the winter, and f.lux would work accordingly.

Similarly in the summer, you would get only a few hours of darkness, making f.lux almost completely useless except for a few months of the year.

Not dramatic - having your screen turn orange at 6pm is unusable. I'm going to work until 11 or 12pm. Let met set it so I start winding down an hour or two before I go to sleep. It does decrease the contrast of text, making it harder to read.

To be fair, I think the flux developers would tell you to stop working a lot earlier than 11pm.

You know what, they're right, I'll stop doing side projects, my day job is all I'll ever need.

No, you just don't work until 11pm on them. You go to bed earlier, wake earlier, work on them at a different time, and have a more natural (i.e. solar-based) sleep cycle.

Having side projects and staying up too late do not need to be synonymous.

When sunrise is 8:30 and sunset is 16:45 it's rather hard to work a full time job and a side project simultaneously in daylight hours.

I too found flux unusable.

The new stepped changes and options including "Working Late" should help a lot.

It's supposed to be tied to the time you turn your lights on (with their different color temp), not when you go to bed. But maybe some people use it differently?

It's not brightness, it is blue light. You are not suppose to turn blue off when it is time to go to bed. Blue light suppresses melatonin and it is important to start this early and not when your headed to bed.

Personally I hate artifical light and except for my kitchen my house is fairly dim. Work I just keep the lights off and have flu.x installed and dim my screen.

> It's supposed to be tied to the time you turn your lights on (with their different color temp), not when you go to bed.

This assumes you work in a room exposed to sunlight during the day.

It also assumes you don't work in a well-light environment during the 3rd shift.

Regardless though, I think these shortcomings should be resolvable by simply setting your location in flux/redshift "incorrectly". So if you work the 3rd shift and use artificial lighting to give yourself an 'artificial day', then you'd just set flux/redshift to think that you are a continent or so over.

Not sure if you use flux, but you can set the colour temp for your daytime and your night time to match the kind of lights you are working under. They even mark certain temps like tungsten, fluoro, halogen etc ... So you don't have to assume anything.

I also use flux to match colour temperatures. It's pretty great!

I use f.lux when I want to avoid bright light. I don't use it to try to match the color temperature of the room.

As such, I turn f.lux on around the point I start turning lights off, long after winter sunset. And I have it set to a rather dramatic setting.

Couldn't you just change the location to some place where the sun actually set at around the time you wanted to stop working?

My solution was to set the location to south of Hawaii. That gave me the best combination of bright during the day and not dark until 8pm or so. Setting my actual location was making it darken before 4pm.

The old flux was basically a sunset simulator. Complaints about it really have more to do with the solar system and your lat/long.

You could set it to an appropriate lat/long to produce desired behaviour... Then you could move there since the day cycle would be more to your tastes :)

I had the same issue, but I disagree with the "unusable" part - it definitely was very usable and I felt serious improvement in my sleep schedules. Yes, I had to postpone it regularly and I'm glad to try new version, but the old one was very useful too.

Huh, I had a different reaction - it was kicking in much too late, an hour after the light outside started to get dim in Victoria, so I changed the timezone to Calgary so it would start an hour earlier.

There's a disable until sunrise option, I kept using that (and don't set the location).

No reason at all to tie this to actual local sunlight/sunset.

I got a bit more creative, and now f.lux thinks I live near the equator, a few time zones west of where I actually do.

... which means that your screen stays orange for hours in the morning when the sun is already out.

That's ok - I usually get up around 10 or 11. By then, it's all peachy

Simply use a different timezone. That's what I do during the winter.

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