Anyone know if you can get large computer monitor sized screen protectors/blue light reducers? Preferably sold in the UK. I was struggling to find anything when I googled.
My brother isn’t able to install f.lux/similar but he works late at night on his computer and has trouble sleeping, so I thought it would be worth a try for him to see if cutting back on blue light might help. The orange-tinged clip-on glasses I’ve seen are pretty expensive.
f.lux is cute but it’s a partial fix – it changes the color temperature by increasing the warm end but it can’t remove the blue. Craig at LEDMuseum has spectra, look it up:
ledmuseum.candlepower.us/23/monitor.htm
THE LED MUSEUM GOT A NEW COMPUTER MONITOR! … Spectrographic analysis of this monitor (displaying white); the software program F.Lux was running.
LEDs that look white are fluorescent – they use a blue emitter under a phosphor layer; the blue comes through. Again look it up, search: ledmuseum spectra
For example: http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Light-Emitting-Diodes-dot-org/chap21/F21-08%20Spectrum%20white%20P%20LED.jpg
Craig at LEDmuseum has been a great resource since Usenet days before the web; contribute something to the guy, he’s done all you find there on his own. For those who like that sort of thing he’s a hero.
You can buy colored film a lot cheaper – go to any good photography or theatrical supply store and buy Rosco theatrical gel in an amber or yellow color, around $7 for a 2-foot-square piece. Look up the transmission spectrum, you want to block below around 500nm, and their website shows exactly what you get. Works fine on both conductive and pressure-type touchscreens – anything from the old Sony Clie to current i-things. Big enough to tape across the top of a big monitor; flip it back for daytime, flip it over after 8pm or so. There are several other brands.
I’ve put what I’ve found on this since around 2007 at http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2007/03/12/light-and-dark/ thanks to tolerant blog hosts there; some bit rot but much of interest.
Amber for your refrigerator lights and nightlights helps back to bed after being up, for example. No or low-blue at home after 8pm helps; get “turtle safe” lights (yes, the same photobiology has been conserved over a very long time across more species than you’d believe. You can spend a few dollars for low/no-blue filtered CFLs and LEDs, or $60/apiece for pretty white LED bulbs with less but not no blue (yes, the damn patent office allowed patenting this long established idea in several ways).
Those who don’t notice the need for this are likely 20-ish adults; it’s babies through teenagers and older people who have less consolidated/more disrupted sleep, and get the effect more.
PS: good current reference list here:
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~kyba/literature/human_effects.html
Other studies show this also it’s well covered elsewhere. Might want to follow your own advice.
In fact the flux website has many listed.
Yes the studies are small, but they are plentiful and unlike most woo actual plausible mechanisms that explain why blue light has this affect have been found and are being studied further.
Put simply, light from screens has been established to to totally mess with sleep cycles, and further study has shown that blue in in particular triggers these effects.
Well known and respected skeptic Richard Wiseman covers this in depth in his book Night School. My life long battle with insomnia has greatly diminished since reading his book.
Being skeptical is good. Blindly attacking people when you think something sounds like woo without actually looking into it yourself is just as bad as promoting woo.
I was thinking about how blue light is ‘marginally worse’ for melatonin production compared with other colors; I realized that sandpaper is marginally more abrasive than velcro, and gravel is marginally more abrasive than sandpaper, broken glass is marginally more abrasive than gravel, etc.
If the monitor is connected via RGB VGA connector, the blue-colored three-lines 15-pins Canon kind, you can disconnect the blue signal (I think the pin #3). Or attach a resistor divider (or just a load resistor, as there are 75 ohm resistors in series already on the driver side), to lower the amplitude of the blue signal if you want to keep some.
You can do it by cutting a VGA cable longitudally, getting access to the wires inside (there will be three thicker shielded ones and some thinner ones, one of the three is blue), and tapping the blue one.
Isn’t sandpaper just broken glass?
Baby steps, and all.
So it works by making using devices so unpleasant that you just want to go to bed? I suppose that’s one way f.lux would give you better sleep!
It actually makes looking at them a lot more pleasing to me; even when the Kindle app is set to its dimmest, along with my iPad’s screen, it’s still glaringly bright in a dark bedroom. F.lux dims it enough to make for comfortable reading.
Ever since moving to Seattle and having to get a full-spectrum lamp to keep myself sane in the winter, I’ve been pretty aware of how much light affects my mindset.
You have 12 anecdotes. That’s quite more than nothing. Not entirely reliable, though, but provides indications.
No.
We’ve seen this recently with the radical change in dietary recommendations and that N was very much larger. Epidemiological studies do not establish causality in any way. With such a small N, the standard deviation is almost as big as the number of trials.
Gaffer’s tape can take care of that for you and won’t leave a sticky residue. You can’t usually go wrong with either ProTape or Gaffer’s Choice, but some of the cheaper brands aren’t as great.
Um, so what color is the dress now?
There was a trend in the late nineties, when the iMac was introduced in its spiffy new transparent plastic case, to eliminate the diffusing action of the plastic overmold on LEDs. This also makes the brightness specs higher, since they don’t spread the light around, but instead focus it in one little spot.
It was stupid idea, and hasn’t yet faded away.
Isn’t that basically the same thing? If you’ve increased the other colors, and then dimmed the whole thing to compensate (which flux does), then you’ve reduced the blue. Not just relatively but absolutely as well.
It doesn’t need to remove the blue completely. It’s an intensity thing.
Mark is, of course, on the Orange Film Industry pay-check.
When I was in flight school VFR night flying required carrying a red flashlight for preserving night vision at dim ground features, something about only firing cones or something?
Later I was fooling around with the air ambulance NVG stuff and they were using green mil spec lighting later replaced with soft white secondary installed lighting, flashlights, and finger lights for looking below the goggles at aircraft instruments.
So the red sort of makes sense, only fire red cones and a few rods, what is the deal with NVG green though?
