Charly's Column – f.lux

If you ask me, it has to be possible to adjust lighting to suit your needs in an unobtrusive and fully automated way. I enabled night mode on my Android smartphone. In the evening, the display shows an ever-decreasing amount of blue light as time progresses. At first, this seems a bit strange and takes getting used to, but it is very friendly on the eyes. Without night mode, I get dazzled when I unlock the phone. This is because its display – like most monitors – is adjusted to a color temperature of 6500 Kelvin.

Cirque du Soleil

Light with a temperature of 6500 Kelvin has a higher blue component than sunlight, which does not exceed 5800 Kelvin even on a clear day. For work during the day in a bright room, 6500 Kelvin is completely OK. In the evening with dim light, I feel as if my PC displays are so bright that work becomes tiring. Of course, I could manually adjust the brightness and color temperature using the buttons on my displays – but that is something that I want to be done automatically. My choice of dimmer goes by the name of f.lux.

Installing f.lux

F.lux is simply pronounced "flux". It is available as a command-line tool [1] or with a GUI [2]. I decided to go for the graphical variant. F.lux is written in Python 3, which means quickly installing some packages on my Ubuntu test system for it to run:

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