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Re:Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or li... by goodside on Saturday October 10, 2009 @03:42PM (#873728)
The brightness values are nowhere near extreme enough, and they're not adjustable beyond a few presets. The intent, which it does okay, is making your computer match the color tone of whatever your indoor lighting is, which makes the display more red than it makes it dark. But what you really want it to do is make the display dark enough that it won't keep you artificially awake late at night when the monitor is the only light source. On the Mac, the best tool I've found for that is Shades (http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/shades) which unfortunately doesn't have a timer. But binding to alt-space or whatever is pretty much just as good.

As a side note, the effect that monitors and other bright lights have on preventing sleep is the suppression of enzymes in the pineal gland that convert serotonin into melatonin about an hour before bedtime. There's a deletion mutation in the genes that code for one of these enzymes (ASMT) that's very common in autistics and relatives of autistics (which is a non-trivial subset of hackers/coders/geeks), so you might not be benefitting from the darkness anyway. You can solve the problem more directly and reliably by just taking melatonin supplements.

Re:Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or li... by ahlatimer on Saturday October 10, 2009 @09:54PM (#874183)
Not to discredit shades, but I just tried it and it was giving me this annoying brightness flicker. I'd imagine it has something to do with my extra display, but without that display, what's the point? It's trivial to adjust the brightness on my MBP with the F1 and F2 keys.

I do end up adjusting the brightness of my displays as the night goes on, but I do it using a couple presets on my display.

Re:Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or li... by goodside on Sunday October 11, 2009 @08:24AM (#874674)
I'm running Shades with two monitors without any problems. Did you have fl.ux running at the same time? If so, that'll mess it up.
Re:Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or li... by MikeCapone on Saturday October 10, 2009 @04:23PM (#873789)
Thank you. I've installed Shades and it seems good so far. I'll try it tonight to see if I find real-world benefits to it.