We are getting there - the Windows one was fading too early at night, so we had to get the schedule right first. The new schedule is a big deal, and we can build a lot from it.
I've been enjoying spotting the sunset. Can't actually see the sun setting where I live, but the sudden change in hue (blueish to reddish - I've set it quite red) is quite noticeable (pleasing to my eyes).
Just found this today. I love how I can set the brightness during the day as well. 5500K feels much better on my eyes than the default 6500K I was using before.
Lux works really great if you have a Nexus 4. Instead of just overlaying a partially transparent block of color, it actually adjusts the screen temperature at a much lower level in the OS.
There is a Nexus 4 plugin on the Play Store to intsall if you want to try it out, made by the same developer.
After using Lux for a long time I've recently migrated to Velis autobrightness [1] and have, anecdotally, found it to work better. Less stochastic brightness changes, better bright and lowlight sensor attenuation and less batter drain.
In darkroom mode, 0x80ffff and 0x800000 are the exact same color. I don't mean that just tint disappears, I mean that vast luminosity differences disappear.
Does flux "broadcast" it's color changes anywhere that would be scriptable? For example, using a dark terminal theme gives the wrong effect in darkroom mode. (90% of the screen is red). So I'd love to be able to script the changes and adjust that (and potentially other) settings. Or maybe a plugin architecture? :D
It might be less than ideal, but I cloned my profile in iTerm and set it to use lighter colors (Solarized Light) and just switch to it when I kick on darkroom. You should be able to map this profile change to a keyboard shortcut, depending on what you're using, to make the switch a little easier.
If you use terminal full-screen (like myself), you can also invert screen colors[0] whenever you switch to it in Darkroom mode.
This makes your dark terminal background, that became light thanks to Darkroom mode, dark again.
It's a little bothersome to invert colors every time, but I guess I'm settling on this for now. I use powerline in tmux and vim, and there doesn't seem to be a quick way to configure it with light-background colors (and changing terminal color scheme doesn't affect its looks).
[0] Inverting colors is toggled with ^⎇⌘+8 by default. You may need to enable this shortcut in keyboard preferences.
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.
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 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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
"A healthy circadian rhythm depends on seeing bright light while you’re awake, not just avoiding bright light before bed"
This statement cannot be emphasized enough. Especially for Hackers and other indoor/Desk bound folks, the amount of bright sunlight exposure is critically important for two reasons:
1) Sunlight is the "moderator" of our circadian Rhythm via Melatonin and other Neuro-chemicals
2) A large percentage of people are Vitamin-D deficient, more Sunlight (on skin) = greater chance of Combating this issue
Taken together, fixing these will resolve many issues..
I moved from a dark to a very bright apartment, and it fixed my sleep problems, except during winter (where there is little sun, as I’m from Scandinavia), to fix that, I try to spend the darker months on the southern hemisphere.
Could this explain how moving from my less thick curtains has made me very tired? I used to just wake up at the rise of the sun and felt refreshed no matter what, but now it seems like I never get any good sleep.
It's probably seasonal affective disorder, but I feel my mood is heavily predicated on my own perception of how much sunlight is streaming through my window right when I wake up. It sets the tone for the rest of the day.
Yes. When the sun doesn't hit the room your circadian cycle is affected.
I used to close down the blinds and some times I'd wake up at 11 or 13 AM thinking that it's 9 AM.
Now, out of pure lack I live in a house which has no blinds. So I wake up alone no matter what, at 8:00 AM. If I need more sleep, due to late night activity, I get another one-two hours in the evening.
My parents were telling me and they were right. We need to make sure the sun can enter the bedroom in the morning.
To enhance sleep are necessary a couple of other things:
* Clean oxygen in the room (usually opening the windows 5 minutes before waiting for sleep will do)
* Proper room temperature (you need to feel warm UNDER the blankets, but not sweat)
* Less possible rumors in the room
* Avoid any CNS stimulant (coffee, black tea, coca-cola, etc.). A glass of red wine (just one) is very good. It's the recommended daily dosage (tannins) and although contains sugars, can act as a natural CNS inhibitor.
* light dinner, possibly 4 hours before (say you go to 00:15 AM to bed, it's good to have a light, rich in fibers dinner at 8-9 AM: Yogurt, Vegetables etc. Avoid fruits, after 6 AM, only black bread and vegetables should be taken).
* Close the screens and get a book if you don't feel really sleepy. This habit helps the circadian cycle in my personal experience. Watching movies/tv-series while waiting for sleep is an oxymoron: Your adrenaline levels, instead of getting lowered they get get higher, enhancing the opposite effect (alertness).
Of course, the BEST sleep, comes after a physically intense day and if you don't have physically intense days it's good to do some exercise in order to make your body feel tired at the time you need it to be tired.
PS. Wish you (and me) all the best, because it's one thing knowing (I study pharmacy, so I get a lot of this stuff) and a different thing doing... So this comment was a form of self-advice basically :-)
Sorry, poor English here. Some times, we tend to have devices inside the room which make subtle noises. Like a digital media player, for example, which tries to keep the HD spinning. It's a noise that you won't listen or pay attention to during the day, but at 2 A.M. your brain listens and process the noise.
The brain is an incredible machine. It tries to isolate all the known noises. So you have a phenomenon where people fall asleep while the usual noises can be captured by the ear, but when a new noise - as in unidentified - jumps in, you suddenly wake up.
If you can keep all these noises to a minimum, by switching off (not off mode, really off) such devices, will enhance your sleep quality. Keeps the brain less busy.
Also note that digital devices (especially routers and digital players) raise the room temperature by at least a couple of Celsius degrees, sometimes more[1]. Ideally, no working device should be on the bedroom while you're sleeping.
[1] I had a Dreambox-500 PVR in my bedroom. Apart from the incredible noise, when it was running during the day, the temperature was at least 6 Celsius higher, with no windows/doors open.
Oxygen reduces sympathetic activity, so for example in patients with heart failure or sleep disorders it is actually helpful.
I've heard that enhances cognitive awareness too, but from a quick look I didn't find any studies online to support the theory. Generally speaking, makes sense: we breath O2 and release CO2. When preparing to sleep the O2 quantity will be diminished considerably in the room. So it's better to allow as much, as possibly bigger % of O2 in the room.
But other than that, I know just know that patients with COPD and sleep deprivation disorders use oxygen therapy to get better. How exactly it works, I don't know though nor I can be 100% that enhances cognitive awareness.
ps. Air quality is usually associated with room temperature. Room temperature IMHO can have an even bigger negative effect on sleep quality. Another important thing not mentioned is bed/pillow quality.
EDIT: Changed H2O to O2 after being pointed out my stupid error.
How do you balance this need with getting higher quality sleep by totally blacking out your room before bed?
We live in a loft with angled ceiling windows/blinds* - if I don't close them then it's difficult to sleep with the general ambient city light. I was thinking of making an Arduino IR thingy to open them every morning at sunrise automatically, but tbh the noise of the blinds opening would probably wake us up anyway.
I could wear a sleep mask too, but that would obviously prevent me from waking up to the sun too.
On vacation in California this year I noticed myself waking up every morning with the sun and feeling amazing - wish it was as easy to replicate year-round in London :(
> (say you go to 00:15 AM to bed, it's good to have a light, rich in fibers dinner at 8-9 AM: Yogurt, Vegetables etc. Avoid fruits, after 6 AM, only black bread and vegetables should be taken).
I'd just like a clarification on this. Why rich in fiber? Doesn't fiber require more energy for digestion, which shouldn't be spent while sleeping?
Fibers are carbohydrates that are not decomposed thus lowering the secretion of insulin from pancreas (insulin spike). So the actual spike instead of having high peaks it is moderated now, making:
1) Your cells more sensitive to insulin (avoiding diabetes)
2) Your contains a more rational amount of energy so your body won't to have to store fat.
I don't quite understand how do you define energy since fibers are not technically digested. Well not the insoluble ones. The soluble are digested but, because of their slow digestion they regulate the insulin spike in a positive way: takes longer but spike (imagine this is a graph with peaks) is way lower (a graph with lower insulin peaks is easier for your pancreas to excrete and your body to handle).
Soluble fibers (e.g. oatmeal) helps with cholesterol, which performs a variety of functions in the human body (it's involved in cell wall functions, permeability, bile acids and so on).
> Doesn't fiber require more energy for digestion, which shouldn't be spent while sleeping?
Digestion requires energy and when you sleep there's much energy to be used elsewhere, so actually when you sleep the digestive process is working at full throttle... so I'm not sure what do you mean by shouldn't be spent while sleeping.
When you sleep having an empty stomach is bad, when you sleep having a load of food sitting in your stomach is equally bad, for the sleep quality but your digestion will work better than say if you were awake.
I like rising with the Sun, but at 58.9 degrees North there is only a few weeks a year where this is possible without radically changing my daily schedule with the seasons (about now happily being in one of those periods).
Yeah, I'm in Iceland. There would be four months a year where I got 90 minutes of sleep a night, and another four where I'd have to convince my boss that a three hour workday was fine.
Nordic Countries have this problem which affects melatonin levels and human psychology. It's not a very good place. I think the best conditions are met in the Mediterranean.
It affects each person differently though. Personally, I don't notice it at all. It is a bit harder to get up in the morning if it's still pitch-dark outside, but otherwise, I have no SAD-type effects.
Others can barely function without those lamps that are white-balanced to match sunlight and programmed to gradually brighten up in the morning.
I'm inclined to think that the longer hours in summer more than make up for the shorter hours in winter. Doesn't help with sleep but for any kind of outdoor activity it can be glorious.
To further this point, ironically in the Middle East (like the Persian Gulf specifically) the sun is so strong even locals do not spend so much time outside with direct contact with sunlight. Everyone, and I mean everyone here, is told by medical professionals Vitamin D deficiency is so widespread causes weird problems. We have to give our child Vitamin D supplements daily, and doctors tell me we could give him horse-pill like supplement regiments; the only place in the world where this is so strongly encouraged.
I know of three different people (late 20s to early 30s) who had pains in their joints and were all diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency. All three live in Southern Arizona where most people prefer not to stay out too long in the sun.
It's not that simple. Some of us (I'm a redhead) sunburn so easily, getting enough sunlight to avoid vitamin D deficiency means either near-constant sunscreen application or else a long-term risk of skin cancer.
My doctor emphatically told me to take supplements rather than to spend more time in the sun.
All sources I've read seemed to indicate that white people only need a few minutes a day of direct sun exposure to the entire body to get sufficient vitamin D. How long does it take you to burn?
I was under the impression that you can build up your tolerance to the sun by slowly increasing your exposure to it each day. Does this not apply for certain skin types?
For some skin types the effect is so small that you can just not take it into account.
Especially people with red hair are known to have these skin types (hair and skin color are both dependent on malanin)
If you have an infrared light in your bathroom, using it before/after shower while undressing/dressing can help your body make a little more Vitamin D.
Also, a recent discovery suggests sunlight lowers blood pressure via blood vessel dilation. Its not quite known how sunlight does this - one possibility is that it mobilizes nitric oxide in the skin.
This is an important problem to fix, because the eyes adjust to the dark screen (your pupil opens up), and in fact switching quickly to a bright screen is extremely alerting.
I used to use black terminals, then went to white due to most webpages being white. Switch from black terminal/emacs to a white webpage was just too irritating. (sometimes painful)
My fix is to not use dark themes anywhere. When I'm on a website with a dark background I click my "zap colors" bookmarklet which reverses the colors: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
I was just turned on to f.lux recently and I can't recommend it enough. I find the affects to be really noticeable and positive; working during the night is much less abrasive and I find the transition from screen to bed to be really smooth.
I love that something so simple can have such direct, physical ramifications.
I had the previous version installed on my mac, and kept seeing sporadic issues with my mouse cursor jumping a couple hundred pixels at once when moving it side to side. Finally disabled F.lux and the problem went away. Anyone know if the new release fixes that issue?
I've had the exact same issue. I just updated to the new beta and my mouse cursor is still jumping. It only happens during the transitioning phase (for me at least), so it's only 20 seconds that my mouse is barely usable. The new features are worth the minor annoyance in my opinion.
Mavericks (or the drivers it ships with) is locking the window server for 50-100ms every time we touch the color table (10.8 was awesome and didn't do this). We've reduced our frame rate to compensate (it's better in this version), but it is noticeable when we do fast animations.
Is this also why when I hover over the menubar icon I get a beachball until it's done animating? I didn't see in this in the old version, but with today's I couldn't access the menu bar at all until it was finished fading.
I've been tracking this but haven't found a fix yet. There is sometimes a beachball if you interact with the menu item immediately after launch. I'll keep looking.
FWIW, Mac dev. here too, seeing the same issue in 10.9 with my app (beachball when interacting immediately after launch.) Haven't been able to track this down yet.
Nope. I just installed the windows version myself, the new features sounded cool. Looks like the ability to even set "this is when I wake up" is still missing from Windows F.lux
can we please, PLEASE have an android port of F.lux. All the other apps make my phone erratic and lag, or flash the unfiltered screen at random intervals which is binding at night.
If that's the same one I tried, it doesn't actually work the same. It works by overlaying a transparent reddish color over everything, effectively "redshifting" whites but also (and unlike flux/redshift) messing up black (black goes from black to red-tinged black).
This was very noticeable for me because I have an AMOLED screen, so going from black to red-tinged-black actually made my phone brighter.
Hmm, you're right about the blacks, but it does the trick for me. Definitely doesn't seem brighter to me, the blue-white brightness is far more wakeful.
Once you have tried it for a week or so, try using a different computer until the same time at night. Your eyes will be significantly more tired / drained.
You may want our "sunset" setting at a higher color temp (maybe I should add a preset called "f.lux lite" for this...) The "working late" preset is another good one to try.
herf, i've been trying to find some info on this, but can you tell us why the default color settings changed so much? (recommended colors, vs. classic flux)
One answer is: because we could! Previously the setting you'd want right before bed looked totally silly at sunset.
But the more interesting answer is: we made a model after measuring dozens of panels with a spectrometer. The science isn't totally clear on this (it's clearer with super-bright lights), but it's our best read of what you actually need to wind down on a cross-section of current devices. Some of the new LED panels are pretty effective at stimulating melanopsin.
Overall, you can reduce a lot of circadian stimulus by dimming really far, but assuming you're working at a moderate level, you need pretty warm colors.
Really though, we can only do so much with displays, because if your lights are pretty bright in your bedroom, it doesn't matter what we do. So we'll probably have a large number of users choosing some less intense settings just because the room they're in doesn't match.
254 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadWhat a shame.
[1] http://jonls.dk/redshift/
It's called redshift-gtk on Red Hat based distros.
There is a Nexus 4 plugin on the Play Store to intsall if you want to try it out, made by the same developer.
1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.velis.auto...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vito.lux
Edit: Unfortunately, it seems to completely break when my screensaver kicks in.
*3.10, and I don't see a non-mac beta link
This makes your dark terminal background, that became light thanks to Darkroom mode, dark again.
It's a little bothersome to invert colors every time, but I guess I'm settling on this for now. I use powerline in tmux and vim, and there doesn't seem to be a quick way to configure it with light-background colors (and changing terminal color scheme doesn't affect its looks).
[0] Inverting colors is toggled with ^⎇⌘+8 by default. You may need to enable this shortcut in keyboard preferences.
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.
This assumes you work in a room exposed to sunlight during the day.
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.
I also use flux to match colour temperatures. It's pretty great!
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.
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.
Having side projects and staying up too late do not need to be synonymous.
I too found flux unusable.
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.
No reason at all to tie this to actual local sunlight/sunset.
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.
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 :)
This statement cannot be emphasized enough. Especially for Hackers and other indoor/Desk bound folks, the amount of bright sunlight exposure is critically important for two reasons:
1) Sunlight is the "moderator" of our circadian Rhythm via Melatonin and other Neuro-chemicals
2) A large percentage of people are Vitamin-D deficient, more Sunlight (on skin) = greater chance of Combating this issue
Taken together, fixing these will resolve many issues..
"The sun is up—go outside!" is the message I'm seeing right now in the Preferences. :-)
http://www.amazon.com/NatureBright-SunTouch-Plus-Light-Thera...
In my opinion however, lack of sunlight when waking weighs heavily on ones ability to rise in the mornings.
I used to close down the blinds and some times I'd wake up at 11 or 13 AM thinking that it's 9 AM.
Now, out of pure lack I live in a house which has no blinds. So I wake up alone no matter what, at 8:00 AM. If I need more sleep, due to late night activity, I get another one-two hours in the evening.
My parents were telling me and they were right. We need to make sure the sun can enter the bedroom in the morning.
To enhance sleep are necessary a couple of other things:
* Clean oxygen in the room (usually opening the windows 5 minutes before waiting for sleep will do)
* Proper room temperature (you need to feel warm UNDER the blankets, but not sweat)
* Less possible rumors in the room
* Avoid any CNS stimulant (coffee, black tea, coca-cola, etc.). A glass of red wine (just one) is very good. It's the recommended daily dosage (tannins) and although contains sugars, can act as a natural CNS inhibitor.
* light dinner, possibly 4 hours before (say you go to 00:15 AM to bed, it's good to have a light, rich in fibers dinner at 8-9 AM: Yogurt, Vegetables etc. Avoid fruits, after 6 AM, only black bread and vegetables should be taken).
* Close the screens and get a book if you don't feel really sleepy. This habit helps the circadian cycle in my personal experience. Watching movies/tv-series while waiting for sleep is an oxymoron: Your adrenaline levels, instead of getting lowered they get get higher, enhancing the opposite effect (alertness).
Of course, the BEST sleep, comes after a physically intense day and if you don't have physically intense days it's good to do some exercise in order to make your body feel tired at the time you need it to be tired.
PS. Wish you (and me) all the best, because it's one thing knowing (I study pharmacy, so I get a lot of this stuff) and a different thing doing... So this comment was a form of self-advice basically :-)
I think you meant something different, but I'm not sure what. murmurs? noise?
The brain is an incredible machine. It tries to isolate all the known noises. So you have a phenomenon where people fall asleep while the usual noises can be captured by the ear, but when a new noise - as in unidentified - jumps in, you suddenly wake up.
If you can keep all these noises to a minimum, by switching off (not off mode, really off) such devices, will enhance your sleep quality. Keeps the brain less busy.
Also note that digital devices (especially routers and digital players) raise the room temperature by at least a couple of Celsius degrees, sometimes more[1]. Ideally, no working device should be on the bedroom while you're sleeping.
[1] I had a Dreambox-500 PVR in my bedroom. Apart from the incredible noise, when it was running during the day, the temperature was at least 6 Celsius higher, with no windows/doors open.
I've heard that enhances cognitive awareness too, but from a quick look I didn't find any studies online to support the theory. Generally speaking, makes sense: we breath O2 and release CO2. When preparing to sleep the O2 quantity will be diminished considerably in the room. So it's better to allow as much, as possibly bigger % of O2 in the room.
But other than that, I know just know that patients with COPD and sleep deprivation disorders use oxygen therapy to get better. How exactly it works, I don't know though nor I can be 100% that enhances cognitive awareness.
ps. Air quality is usually associated with room temperature. Room temperature IMHO can have an even bigger negative effect on sleep quality. Another important thing not mentioned is bed/pillow quality.
EDIT: Changed H2O to O2 after being pointed out my stupid error.
We live in a loft with angled ceiling windows/blinds* - if I don't close them then it's difficult to sleep with the general ambient city light. I was thinking of making an Arduino IR thingy to open them every morning at sunrise automatically, but tbh the noise of the blinds opening would probably wake us up anyway.
I could wear a sleep mask too, but that would obviously prevent me from waking up to the sun too.
On vacation in California this year I noticed myself waking up every morning with the sun and feeling amazing - wish it was as easy to replicate year-round in London :(
http://instagram.com/p/O1K5oYPEV1/
They let in a bit of light during the day, but far from the full sun, and I can sleep in very easily.
I had a wakeup alarm clock that bathed the room in light, but the screen emits light at night. (It was a phillips alarm)
I'd just like a clarification on this. Why rich in fiber? Doesn't fiber require more energy for digestion, which shouldn't be spent while sleeping?
1) Your cells more sensitive to insulin (avoiding diabetes)
2) Your contains a more rational amount of energy so your body won't to have to store fat.
I don't quite understand how do you define energy since fibers are not technically digested. Well not the insoluble ones. The soluble are digested but, because of their slow digestion they regulate the insulin spike in a positive way: takes longer but spike (imagine this is a graph with peaks) is way lower (a graph with lower insulin peaks is easier for your pancreas to excrete and your body to handle).
Soluble fibers (e.g. oatmeal) helps with cholesterol, which performs a variety of functions in the human body (it's involved in cell wall functions, permeability, bile acids and so on).
> Doesn't fiber require more energy for digestion, which shouldn't be spent while sleeping?
Digestion requires energy and when you sleep there's much energy to be used elsewhere, so actually when you sleep the digestive process is working at full throttle... so I'm not sure what do you mean by shouldn't be spent while sleeping.
When you sleep having an empty stomach is bad, when you sleep having a load of food sitting in your stomach is equally bad, for the sleep quality but your digestion will work better than say if you were awake.
What's the difference between clean oxygen and dirty oxygen?
On a more serious note, it's probably an awkward way of saying "fresh air", i.e. not smelly.
I like rising with the Sun, but at 58.9 degrees North there is only a few weeks a year where this is possible without radically changing my daily schedule with the seasons (about now happily being in one of those periods).
Others can barely function without those lamps that are white-balanced to match sunlight and programmed to gradually brighten up in the morning.
I'm inclined to think that the longer hours in summer more than make up for the shorter hours in winter. Doesn't help with sleep but for any kind of outdoor activity it can be glorious.
So, the rest of you, just go outside.
My doctor emphatically told me to take supplements rather than to spend more time in the sun.
To solve your problem: Put sunscreen, sunglasses, and a hat on. Go outside.
[1] http://userstyles.org/styles/71155/georgify-dark-hacker-news
[0]: http://bobulate.com/
We need to get out more...
On Android it's called "easyeyez".
I have not tried it yet, but I hear good things.
I love that something so simple can have such direct, physical ramifications.
I would gladly pay for this!
This was very noticeable for me because I have an AMOLED screen, so going from black to red-tinged-black actually made my phone brighter.
how is twilight?
Now I want a Smart Things[1] integration with this.
[1]: http://www.smartthings.com
Thank you F.lux! The one feature I really hoped you'd add.
But the more interesting answer is: we made a model after measuring dozens of panels with a spectrometer. The science isn't totally clear on this (it's clearer with super-bright lights), but it's our best read of what you actually need to wind down on a cross-section of current devices. Some of the new LED panels are pretty effective at stimulating melanopsin.
Overall, you can reduce a lot of circadian stimulus by dimming really far, but assuming you're working at a moderate level, you need pretty warm colors.
Really though, we can only do so much with displays, because if your lights are pretty bright in your bedroom, it doesn't matter what we do. So we'll probably have a large number of users choosing some less intense settings just because the room they're in doesn't match.