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.

Control Netflix from your phone

UPDATE: Teclado Flix has been discontinued.

Check out my new Android application Teclado Flix.

It's a remote control for people watching Netflix on their PC.
TVs from 2005 to 2014 feature HDMI inputs but cannot be connected to the Internet or run apps like Smart TVs can.
So what can Netflix fans with "old" TVs do? Just plug your laptop on the TV and watch Netflix.
But it would be silly to get up to pause and resume a video, so I made a remote control app to do that.

A computer program is required. I made a very tiny one that runs on any operating system.

Netflix on Arch Linux (or Linux in general)

UPDATE: 
You don't need an unstable version of Chrome to play Netflix streamed media anymore. Simply download the latest stable version of Chrome.
Note that Chromium (it is exactly the same as Chrome, minus features such as syncing using a Google account and proprietary plugins) does not support the widevine and thus cannot play Netflix content.

Original article:

Netflix has thrown away its Microsoft Silverlight interface and is now using HTML5 to stream its content.

Well, almost. Not surprisingly, the videos are still encrypted and DRM'd. It is done using a plugin developed by Widevine Technologies (a Google company).
Chromium is the open-source part of the Google Chrome browser (everything but the Google branding, the syncing mechanism with the Google account and a few plugins, is open source). So nowadays you'll often find the Chromium browser on Linux distributions.

The Widevine plugin is not included in Chromium for licensing reasons, yet you would expect to be able to install it anyway. There seems to be people working on that but I couldn't make it work.

What worked for me is this:

1) Install google-chrome-dev from AUR. The reason you need the unstable version is that you need a very recent version (42+) and that you need a Google-branded browser including the Widevine plugin.
yaourt google-chrome-dev
2) Launch it with the google-chrome-unstable command.
3) Open Netflix and check if it works.
4) If it doesn't work, make sure the Widevine plugin is installed and working. Type chrome://plugins and possibly chrome://components in the address bar and check it is enabled.


Also, check out this cool browser extension Flix Plus from Lifehacker. I find it very useful!

I have to say I am impressed by this company from a business and technological point of view. Did you know they release a lot of their code with an open source license? Did you know they don't manage any hardware but rely heavily on Amazon for their computing and storage needs?
There is a trend nowadays, except for a few giants like Facebook, for most companies to transition from managing their own hardware and storage to have it them hosted by platforms such as Amazon AWS, Heroku, GitHub, Bitbucket, Microsoft Azure and other online services.
In many IT companies, there's no server room anymore, except for switches and routers, as file servers and other tools are physically located outside the company in data centers.