Saturday 20 June 2015

Reduce screen blue light - f.lux and RedShift

Day by day, artificial lights with a huge blue spectrum are becoming more ubiquitous.
By mean of the melatonin mechanism it is said blue light can influence the ability to sleep.
In pre-fluorescent era, the standard was the incandescent bulb: this bulb is known to radiate similarly to a 3500K black body, thus with a low blue component and with a low effect on the melanopsin-containing cells in your retina which reacts to light.
The change to fluorescent and led [and...] lights has changed the paradigm.

The ubiquitous presence and usage of LCD screens used before going to sleep could have huge effects on sleep capabilities.
An important source of blue light is given by the computer or laptop screen; a sun-neutral rendering screen is wonderful, but the blue content of light simulates the day-light, especially with principally blank pages as is in the majority of situations, cheating the circadian rhythm.

Given the previous informations, I stumbled on this little software: f.lux.
Its purposes are simple: to reduce the blue components of the screen by imposing a lower white temperature.  BRILLIANT!
f.lux is said to work great on Windows, Mac and Linux, it is free but closed source.

Anyway, for the Linux world something opensource can be better. In this situation comes RedShift and it is the one I personally use.

UPDATE: I switched to the built in KDE Night Color (System Settings -> Display and Monitor -> Night Color). The rest is maintained in the post for posterity. 

The usage is simple, just add it to your startup list of software with the proper command:
redshift-gtk -l 44.5:11.3 -t 6500:4500

This will load the graphical icon in the system tray. To explain the given options:
* -l 44.5:11.3 tells the software the latitude and logitude (here of Bologna). Search google with "lat long your_city" to get the coordinates;
-t 6500:4500 tells the software the day (6500K) and night (4500K) screen light temperature.

A super cool tool to observe the effects of filters on different sources is shown here.

Enjoy your newly found sleep!
Comments are welcomed!

No comments:

Post a Comment