Monday, March 16, 2015

One more hour of sleep every night

Cheerful Sunset
(no copyright information)


It's 7 pm and the sky has this nice orange - red color.
But my computer screen does not. It's "shouting" a blue-ish tone at me. But not for long!

Everybody knows that watching screens (TV, computer or handheld devices) before going to bed is bad for your sleep. What you might not know, is that if you do use screens at night, you'll sleep more and better if the screen is yellow - red instead of blue. Yes, blue! I won't start the blue/black gold/white dress war again, but it's true and you don't realize it: there is no such thing as white in nature and color analysis is one of these very complex tasks your brain "computes" yet is subjective at the end because your brain is not wired the same way than mine, so at some point you might see a gold dress when I see a blue dress. So believe me, if you are looking at your screen right now, it's blue. If you think car headlights are white, then put one car with regular headlights and one with Xenon lamps next to each other. You will probably say one is yellow-ish and the other is blue-ish.
But that's the beauty of it. If your screen goes very slowly and smoothly from blue to yellow - red, you won't notice it.

So, about that one hour of sleep. There was a study I cannot find anymore, where they had people lying in bed doing nothing, and they measured how fast these people would fell asleep. Then they would repeat the experiment with a more yellow / red light. They found people would fell asleep faster with the second setup.

Redshift on Windows

I haven't tried it, but there is an experimental version for Windows. It does seem like f.lux is older but maybe it works better, I don't know. Tell me if you find out.

Installing and configuring Redshift on Kubuntu (or any Linux distribution really)

In this tutorial I'll assume you live in western Switzerland, and that you use Kubuntu.
The procedure is similar on other systems. I am also assuming you are not changing timezones all the time. (But there is a solution for you if you find yourself in this situation, look at the documentation.)

  1. Install Redshift:
    sudo apt-get install redshift
  2. Create and open the configuration file with your favorite editor:
    nano ~/.config/redshift.conf
  3. Paste this (Ctrl + Shift + V in Konsole) :
    [redshift]
    transition=1
    location-provider=manual
    adjustment-method=randr
    [manual]
    lat=46.7
    lon=7.1

    Change the last two lines with your latitude and longitude (yes, go ahead, click on this link). You can keep all digits if you want to. If your latitude reads South (Australia, New Zealand) or your longitude reads West (North America), use negative values where appropriate.

    If you can see "GNU nano" at the top left of the console window, press Ctrl+O then Ctrl+X when you are done to close the editor and save the file (or the other way around).
  4. Start "redshift" from the Terminal to check if it works. Your screen should go a bit yellow in a matter of seconds if the sun is not up. Otherwise try to mess with the latitude and longitude or your computer clock. There should be no output on the console.
  5. All well? Time to start Redshift automatically. Open the KDE menu and type "autostart". Select the entry that appears. Click "Add Program..." then type "redshift" (without quotes). Don't select anything just type "redshift" and click OK. Click OK again to close the window.
  6. Log out and in again. Your screen should be slightly yellow. It does? Congratulations. You just bought yourself one hour of sleep each night.
Now I suggest you install a similar app like Twilight on your phone.

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