So roane72 and a couple of other people have recently mentioned things about a study that says that staring at computer screens late into the night is messing up our sleep cycles and giving people depression. This is apparently because screens are made to mimic the color spectrum (‘color temperature’) of the sun, and as animals living on Earth, we’re used to the sun being up in the daytime and not being up at night, and when we trick our eyes (and therefore brains) into thinking the sun is up at night, it screws us up in all sorts of ways.
So F.Lux is a teeeeeeensy little app (seriously, I just downloaded it, it’s tiny) that adjusts the spectrum of your monitor based on what time it is. Since it’s now about 11 pm for me, f’r ex, it has dropped the color temperature of my screen from around 6500k (whites are blue-white) to 3400k (whites are orange-white, which actually is startlingly soothing). It’s barely noticeable to you on a conscious basis, because the thing about color is that we tend to adjust to perceive the whitest thing in the picture as ‘white’ and the darkest thing as ‘black,’ even if they aren’t really. Also, you can easily toggle it off if you want to do art or other color-sensitive things.
Roane says it’s helping her get sleepy and go to bed at more reasonable hours, and apparently some people say it’s improving their moods, so we shall see.
App to decrease eyestrain and other stuff that happens when you stare at a monitor too much