[planetafro]

Amazing write-up! Your efforts are much appreciated. I have an Intel Mac Air with an external monitor and strongly feel that usability items like these are sorely underrated. Kudos for the great work in a seemingly closed ecosystem.

[alin23]

Thanks! Yes, it can be hard to let people know that an app like this actually exists.

Some people don't even feel the need for such a thing and just stare hours at a time into a blinding 100% brightness panel when working at night time.

I think that can cause macular degeneration much faster than just "not filtering blue light", but this is not as talked about so people don't think about its effects that much.

[GekkePrutser]

I agree, and for me the problem is also that newer screens won't even go down far enough because they optimize for max brightness as that looks better on the spec sheet.

Most of my monitors are way too bright at 0% at night. On my 4K I even need to work at 0% during the day and reduce contrast at night (which messes up colour depth).

And yeah the OSD controls are horrible.

I still work on a real VT520 CRT terminal sometimes and it amazes me how it can go from super bright to hardly readable in pitch dark. And has amazingly handy analog brightness/contrast knobs. Not all innovation is progress.

[alin23]

I love knobs (rotary encoders mostly). I wish they were in everything where you need to adjust some range like brightness, contrast, volume, color warmth.

For some time I really wanted a battery powered wireless rotary encoder that I can listen to in Home Assistant and hook it to whatever I want but I couldn’t find anything like that.

[GekkePrutser]

Ikea made a rotary encoder (dimmer) like that with Zigbee. It works well with Home Assistant. It actually had an accelerometer to determine its position, so it could be rotated within a passive magnetic mount. Unfortunately they stopped making them. They replaced it with a square one that doubled as an on/off button. But perhaps you can still find some second-hand. It was in their Tradfri range.

[alin23]

I have about 5 or 6 of those square on/off ZigBee switches. They're perfect for automating through Home Assistant.

Now I just have to find those encoders you're talking about. It's exactly what I wanted to buy.

[GekkePrutser]

Yeah they were pretty great but DeCONZ didn't support them. Which just happened to be the stack I chose.

Apparently they were supported through the HA integration but not in the GUI. They also work with ZHA as far as I know.

I still see some on Ebay, not sure if they can be shipped to Europe though: https://www.ebay.com/itm/133779313546?hash=item1f25de538a:g:... . This tends to be an issue.

[zimpenfish]

Dunno if you'd be able to find one these days but

https://thedigitallifestyle.com/w/index.php/2017/06/23/micro...

"The Surface Dial is a [battery powered] Bluetooth rotary controller for controlling Windows"

[Joeri]

I had the same problem and used one of the dark overlay tools that the author of the article criticizes to bring it down further than 0% brightness. But that trick also messes up color depth. I've since switched to an iMac, and the nice thing is that while the display can go very bright, when you dial down the brightness to the lowest value it is very dim to the point of being hard to read in daylight.

[dividedbyzero]

I found putting one of those Philips Hue light strips behind the monitor helped tremendously. If I set its brightness and temperature to a dim warm setting, the dimly-lit wall right behind the monitor makes mid-range screen brightness work just fine (eyes accomodate to the higher overall brightness, so the monitor needs to be brighter to "fit in", but I still perceive the whole scene as dimly-lit) and the color temperature seems to work well for me, I still get tired and sleepy. I can even control the light using the Hue bridge's REST API, so it's easy to automate as well.

[GekkePrutser]

That would help indeed, and so does keeping the lights on at a high level. But my 4K is so bright at 0% that it feels too bright for me even with the brightest artificial light I have :) Only in daylight it's OK (and I still keep it at 0% then!).

But there is another reason I don't always have lights on. I live in Barcelona where it gets hot in summer and I don't have AC. So at night when the temperature outside is lower than inside I leave all the windows open to cool the house. If I have lights on it attracts bugs. So I stay mainly in the dark.

[brokenmachine]

>If I have lights on it attracts bugs. So I stay mainly in the dark.

Get flyscreens?