f.lux beta (another thread)
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@herf With the new release I just had installed, I very clearly see the future for this program and your other projects: You and Lorna (and probably other people working with color controlled lights) want to make it abundantly clear to avoid or reduce light after / near sunset as much as possible. The "vignette" mode really makes this obvious!
I do appreciate your specific example, and I'm still in school, but I don't have to get up early for that, it's for other reasons and it's not mandatory. I remember you talked about a phase shift versus a stronger light / dark cycle and I'd a bit of education about what you're describing. My understanding of this topic only involves regulating light / dark timing, so bright light during the day, etc. So, what is a phase shift?
Thank you, it's great to see you both on the forums, it does seem you've got a bit more free time not working as much on the beta now that you've got it working. You and Lorna are very helpful and it's just incredible how much you all can help explain some of information about light and sleep, and we keep learning more (and I'm sure your research is non-stop so far). I am just in awe of how much there is to learn about all this, I never thought I'd learn so much about what seemed a very simple topic.
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I did a Performance Test (just noticed the button there) and I got 64 - 70% dropped frames at 60FPS. Is that normal? Feels like a lot. Would you recommend disabling f.lux during gaming then?
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How are you guys getting 4.25? It's not automatically updating for me.
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@Tungsten_smooth said in f.lux beta (another thread for 4.21):
@herf With the new release I just had installed, I very clearly see the future for this program and your other projects: You and Lorna (and probably other people working with color controlled lights) want to make it abundantly clear to avoid or reduce light after / near sunset as much as possible. The "vignette" mode really makes this obvious!
I do appreciate your specific example, and I'm still in school, but I don't have to get up early for that, it's for other reasons and it's not mandatory. I remember you talked about a phase shift versus a stronger light / dark cycle and I'd a bit of education about what you're describing. My understanding of this topic only involves regulating light / dark timing, so bright light during the day, etc. So, what is a phase shift?
Thank you, it's great to see you both on the forums, it does seem you've got a bit more free time not working as much on the beta now that you've got it working. You and Lorna are very helpful and it's just incredible how much you all can help explain some of information about light and sleep, and we keep learning more (and I'm sure your research is non-stop so far). I am just in awe of how much there is to learn about all this, I never thought I'd learn so much about what seemed a very simple topic.
Same here. This beta has opened my eyes to one simple fact: this is an extremely deep rabbit hole.
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@TwoCables said in f.lux beta (another thread for 4.21):
How are you guys getting 4.25? It's not automatically updating for me.
It auto updated here without any problem. I just quitted f.lux and launched it again.
Btw, one bug, that was already present in build 4.24 at least, can't tell about the previous ones. When the screen goes to "sleep mode" aka AFK, when i return to PC and the monitor powers back on, f.lux has daytime temperature. I am forced to click on f.lux icon in the taskbar to bring it to foreground in order to get back the right temperature.
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@caydenly this is a common result now, since GPUs are synchronizing with the backlight. In this version, we have done a lot of optimization to send as few commands as possible, because dropped frames at 60hz are hard to avoid now. (Before the power saving efforts of the past couple years, this stuff was totally free and never dropped frames ever.)
Also, for gaming, you can use our "very fast" transition setting, so the number of times we will touch the GPU is low.
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@disqQ said in f.lux beta (another thread for 4.21):
@TwoCables said in f.lux beta (another thread for 4.21):
How are you guys getting 4.25? It's not automatically updating for me.
It auto updated here without any problem. I just quitted f.lux and launched it again.
Btw, one bug, that was already present in build 4.24 at least, can't tell about the previous ones. When the screen goes to "sleep mode" aka AFK, when i return to PC and the monitor powers back on, f.lux has daytime temperature. I am forced to click on f.lux icon in the taskbar to bring it to foreground in order to get back the right temperature.
Yeah, I exited f.lux 4.24 several times. I right-click the icon and choose "Exit f.lux".
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@Tungsten_smooth Well, we don't know the answers yet -- in particular a lot of people need better ("more") light exposure during the day (which involves screens too, because we work in offices that are too dark to accommodate them). The first part of our job with f.lux is to think up hypotheses and motivate people to test them. The vignette feature is based on some recent research, and I'll write down the idea sometime soon.
But the main work we're doing is to make models and test them in the real world (not just have people believe they're all true).
Regarding your question about phase vs amplitude:
Phase
Most people think of the circadian system ONLY in terms of phase - e.g., we would call a night owl "phase delayed" and an early bird "phase advanced". This means that their internal clock is offset from the solar time by a certain amount.
So when you are a night owl who wants to wake up earlier, you want to "advance" your system by seeing more light in the morning and less at night. And the reverse for an early bird who wants to sleep in. As such, a lot of our users tend to be night owls. But you might think this is the end of the road for circadian topics - is your phase aligned with how you want it to be?
Amplitude
What is clear from experiments on shift workers and the elderly (and many rodent models) is that the overall circadian rhythm in the body can be suppressed. In some cases, it's operating at a lower "amplitude" because light and dark are not clearly defined or not happening at the right times. For instance, people who spend time in natural lighting during the winter have an enormous melatonin amplitude thorughout the night (you can see melatonin in the blood lasting 14 hours), whereas most of us in the modern world are living in a "perpetual summer" and we have a relatively small melatonin duration in comparison to natural conditions.
We think some sleep problems (and some immunity and seasonal effects) depend to some degree on the "strength" of the circadian rhythm, not just whether it's phase aligned. (Of course, a misaligned rhythm, e.g., in shift work, will almost always have a reduced amplitude, so they are somewhat related.)
Also, not all sleep trouble is circadian, so when we can, we look for ways to help people get to bed on time. It is probably true that we could do a lot of good here that's completely unrelated to magic science and more to human behavior.
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@TwoCables You can also get it via link, as usual, at: https://justgetflux.com/flux-setup4-25.exe
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@disqQ said in f.lux beta (another thread for 4.21):
@TwoCables You can also get it via link, as usual, at: https://justgetflux.com/flux-setup4-25.exe
It was still just v4 before.
Mike got the automatic update working for me just now though!
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@TwoCables Rabbit hole is exactly the way we talk about this - once you fall in, you realize there isn't a bottom. But first you have to fall in....
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@herf
Hi ,
just installed the new "beta" version ..initially it's a bit confusing.. but I think I have my "old" settings back. My Anti-virus did not like the installer ? I agreed /approved that the file was legit but that is something you might need to work on, overall I tend not use the settings at all once the program is installed .. "set and forget " is my motto.suggestions ,
- see if you can get back to the old UI .. the waves on the screen make it very confusing , something compact and neat ?
- I dunno what they are , the line " light is making your body earlier. means a big huh to me ?
- change waking time to working time .. ( unless we have people that roll out of bed while working)
- no help ? not even a link or a help file ? ( maybe could explain how it works and the settings )
aside from that its good, I have pointed several people to this who work late in the night and most of them give raving reviews ..
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Wow. Great job with the new software mouse cursor! No reboot required! Now we no longer need to use any tricks.
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I don't know if this was just a one-off glitch, but I was taking the color temperature down and up with the hotkeys and somehow got it into a situation where it just wouldn't stop going up. It was at somewhere like 70,000K before I ended the f.lux process and restarted it (when I restarted, it was at something like 18,000, which was more manageable to get back down to where it was, especially since it wasn't going up anymore). I've noticed there's an 800 lower bound, but is there an upper bound when using the hotkeys?
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@citrusella It goes up to 100,000K, which isn't so enormous - a blue sky can be 50,000K. What we mainly need is a more non-linear adjustment up there, because nobody needs tiny increments all the way up to 100,000K.
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4.21 worked flawlessly (notebook, external monitor via vga, win10, integrated graphics).
4.25 now has the following bugs:
-Checked “Use Monitor Data for Calibration” makes external monitor greenish. Unchecked returns colors to normal.
-f.lux colors don't appear after the monitor comes back from power saving standby. Have to click the f.lux icon in order that they come back. -
@AlbertBaer Thanks for the note on the monitor...will think about how to make it so we can debug the settings.
Regarding standby: which OS version and GPU are you using? And 4.21 did not have the trouble?
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@herf Yes. I'm back to 4.21 now and f.lux colors are right there when monitor comes back from power saving standby. It's latest Win10 creators update 64bit Pro. And GPU is ancient GM45 ;-).
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Yea, i'm having the same problem, as i reported here yesterday: https://forum.justgetflux.com/post/13522
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What exactly Software mouse cursor (fixes "white cursor") does in this new build? I see it's not using MouseTrails in the Registry.
