Software – Auto adjust your screen brightness
F.lux – Changes Your Screen Brightness by Time of Day
This utility changes your monitor’s color temperature at night–and may help you help avoid insomnia.
- Free License Type
- Free Price
- Windows 7 / Vista / XP Operating Systems
- 547 KBFile Size
flux
F.lux takes your location and the current date into account, and can tell when the sun is going to set every day. Right around that time, with F.lux running in the background, you will notice a “virtual sunset” happening on your monitor. Everything seems to mellow down a little bit, every shade of color growing slightly warmer and cozier than it was during the day.
You can set the adjustment to happen very gradually over the course of a full hour, or quickly (in twenty seconds). When using the fast adjustment option, things visually slow down while the adjustment is being done, but it only takes a moment. Adjusted, the monitor looks completely natural, and after a while you may even forget the color temperature was ever changed.
If you’re doing color-sensitive work, you may want to disable f.lux temporarily. Unfortunately, you can disable it for only one hour–no more, no less. If you need to disable it for more than an hour, you simply have to quit the app (and then may forget to switch it back on–that’s what often happens to me, at least).
According to research papers cited on the Flux website, insomnia may be linked to blue light. There is no conclusive evidence on this, but many practitioners recommend avoiding blue light within two hours of sleep.
After working with f.lux for over a year, I can say that it makes it easier for me to go to sleep at night after spending some time in front of the screen. If I could just disable it for more than an hour at a time, it would be just about perfect.
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