f.lux
Posted: April 16th, 2014, 8:28 pmFigured I'd share this for the benefit of everyone: https://justgetflux.com/
It's a program, for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even iPhone/iPad, that adjusts your monitor's colour temperature to match the lighting of the room you're in and the time of day. f.lux is designed to minimize the harsh blue light we're used to staring at while on the computer - light that's brighter than normal daylight. Receptors in our eyes respond to this blue light, assuming it's from the Sun, by keeping us awake. Different settings allow you to tone down the temperature of your monitor's brightness and essentially allow you to sleep better at night. There's research to support this, and testimony from plenty of our own users, I'm sure.
After installing, make sure you set your location so it can calibrate your day/night cycles correctly. (I've had it for years, and trust me, no one has come to my house to kill me yet.) Then, adjust the settings to however you want. My personal recommendation is 3500K for day (just above Halogen) and 1900K for night (Candle), but it takes time to ease into as these settings already change the colours a lot. The one issue I've encountered is that it doesn't change the mouse colour, resulting in one glaring bright spot in the middle of my cozy warm screen, but this can be fixed (at least on Windows) by enabling Mouse Trails in the control panel. Sure, they aren't exactly pretty, but they're not very noticeable imo. If you can find your way into the registry files and change the mouse trails setting to "-1", that should disable the trails themselves but enable the adaptive colour scheme.
It's an absolutely amazing program that I recommend to everyone. However, if you're using a shared computer/account, I would probably check with the other users before dropping the temperature from 5000K to 1200K or someone might think something's horribly wrong with the monitor. It definitely takes some adjusting to, but it's worth it.
<3 you all
It's a program, for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even iPhone/iPad, that adjusts your monitor's colour temperature to match the lighting of the room you're in and the time of day. f.lux is designed to minimize the harsh blue light we're used to staring at while on the computer - light that's brighter than normal daylight. Receptors in our eyes respond to this blue light, assuming it's from the Sun, by keeping us awake. Different settings allow you to tone down the temperature of your monitor's brightness and essentially allow you to sleep better at night. There's research to support this, and testimony from plenty of our own users, I'm sure.
After installing, make sure you set your location so it can calibrate your day/night cycles correctly. (I've had it for years, and trust me, no one has come to my house to kill me yet.) Then, adjust the settings to however you want. My personal recommendation is 3500K for day (just above Halogen) and 1900K for night (Candle), but it takes time to ease into as these settings already change the colours a lot. The one issue I've encountered is that it doesn't change the mouse colour, resulting in one glaring bright spot in the middle of my cozy warm screen, but this can be fixed (at least on Windows) by enabling Mouse Trails in the control panel. Sure, they aren't exactly pretty, but they're not very noticeable imo. If you can find your way into the registry files and change the mouse trails setting to "-1", that should disable the trails themselves but enable the adaptive colour scheme.
It's an absolutely amazing program that I recommend to everyone. However, if you're using a shared computer/account, I would probably check with the other users before dropping the temperature from 5000K to 1200K or someone might think something's horribly wrong with the monitor. It definitely takes some adjusting to, but it's worth it.
<3 you all