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"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point. The concept of "white point" is often spok
by o11c 3y ago
"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point.
The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white".
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That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivially be done directly in RGB, just check the min and max color channel of the pixel, then adjust all channels to flip them), rather than requiring ad-hoc color schemes all over the place.
- callalex 3y agoThis is one thing Apple got right a veeeery long time ago. Every screen they have sold since like the mid 2000s, both integrated and standalone, has had auto brightness. I don’t understand why other manufacturers still can’t that right, to this day, no matter the price category. Even most non-Apple smartphones these days still suck at this.
- bee_rider 3y agoI’m surprised Linux doesn’t have some ubiquitous “use the camera to do auto-brightness” option (pinging the camera on a proprietary OS would be creepy, but if it is open source…).
- callalex 3y agoThat wouldn’t work very well because pretty much every webcam has auto exposure adjustment. Also a camera is good at determining how much light is in the room behind you, not how much light is hitting the screen. There really is no substitute for a photodiode and a halfway decent control algorithm. It only costs a penny so there really is no excuse not to include one.
- bluGill 3y agoI know a lot of people who have covered their camera with tape. Some laptops even come with a physical shutter. This is something company policy often recommends - if the camera is physically covered an attacker can't see the next product we are working on.
- JohnFen 3y agoWhen I buy a laptop, one of the things I'm looking for is that it doesn't have an integrated camera at all. It's happened sometimes that I can't find one, then I cover the camera with tape.
- theodric 3y agoThe Lunar dev has a variety of recipes for a hardware widget you can build which allows their macOS-only brightness-control app to implement adaptive brightness on any monitor that permits backlight control over DDC/CI. I'm sure a more-motivated and clever person than me could tap into that hardware and use it to drive ddcutil/ddccontrol outputs on Linux. https://lunar.fyi/sensor https://lunar.fyi/sensor
- layer8 3y ago> screens don't autoadjust their backlight CRT monitors had easy dials to quickly adjust brightness and contrast. You almost did it automatically without thinking when you had developed the motor memory. Nowadays monitor controls are often fiddly and awkward. But I still use them to adjust brightness to the environment.
- theodric 3y agoThere are some tools out there that will allow you to bind hotkeys (or at least provide a widget) to send brightness-adjustment commands via DDC/CI over the HDMI/DP cable to your desktop monitor. This may improve your UX. My 2015 and 2021 Dell monitors both support the functionality, with differing degrees of finesse. Non-exhaustive list: Linux: https://github.com/ddccontrol/ddccontrol https://github.com/ddccontrol/ddccontrol || https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil macOS: https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl Windows: https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian
- biocross 3y agoIf you’re looking for something that allows media keys and custom keyboard shortcuts: https://displaybuddy.app/ https://displaybuddy.app/ Works on both Windows and Mac
- layer8 3y agoMonitorian requires a subscription for hotkeys and CLI, unfortunately. Twinkle Tray is an alternative: https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray