Month: October 2013

Be brighter than your screen at night. Get f.lux.

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Back when I was in college, I was infamous amongst my friends for being the nocturnal one…Seriously, who am I kidding? That hasn’t changed a bit.  My “sleep schedule” is still a constant mystery to anyone that knows me.

So here I was, browsing the interwebs late at night and what is this I see?? Well, honestly—the only thing I could see then was the glare of my super-bright laptop that clearly had some sort of personal vengeance against my vision with the way it was trying to blind me.

That’s where f.lux comes in play.  It’s a quickly downloadable software (eh, I wouldn’t really even call it a software since it’s so lite. Maybe a plugin. For your computer.) Anyways! It literally took me about 30 seconds to download and as soon as it opened itself up and placed itself in my taskbar, the soothing process began.

Essentially f.lux warms the coloring of your laptop or monitor screen to “match the sunlight.”  Depending on your location and the time of when the sun sets and rises and the type of lighting you tell it you have, the glare of the monitor will adapt to put less strain on your eyes.

I tried to take screenshots, but since it’s only the coloring of your screen changing, I couldn’t quite capture it 😦

Looks like the only solution is for you to try it!  Have fun, night owls!

Oh. Bonus: it’s available for Mac, PC, Linux, and iPhones and iPads at www.justgetflux.com.

Rain or Shine, Lookin’ Fine

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Sorry for the massive delay, guys.  Unfortunately, I’ve been feeling under-the-weather lately and that led to a couple days (more like a week or so) of sniffling, constantly checking my temperature, hydrating, and resting.  Speaking of under-the-weather though, who’s heard of an app called Swackett. Known as a “different kind of weather app,” Swackett not only tells you the temperature, but also attempts to give you fashion advice.

Essentially their main goal is to tell you what it’s going to feel like.  Some people are good with numbers; others? Not so much.  I’m one of those people that if you tell me a temperature, I’ll be like cool! Now what.  So this type of app was a pretty good find for me.  (Also, it’s not that I’m incompetent with numbers—actually, I’m pretty good when it comes to numbers in math—but the whole idea of 68 degrees somehow feeling freezing for the summer versus 68 degrees being awesomely warm in the winter just bothers my mind.)

This app has multiple views: it’ll show you outfit options (for male or for female), has three “fun games” it rotates through, and shows weather data from AccuWeather.

Yeah, after I saw the app, I wondered what the camera icon was for, and apparently, you can change the sky background and move the little peep around (that’s what the little guy/girl is called, btw).  So, I guess alternatively…you could probably take a pic of yourself and move the peep to stand next to you and do like a side-by-side comparison of how much better you look than a 2-D model!  I bet that’d be a great ego boost!

There’s also a general plain-old-weather view that gives you a boring temperature and some details about precipitation percentages and what not, along with a detailed time view.

Something else I found cool is that it has an Insight view.  This is where it judges weather or not (Typo intended.) outside is good for different activities or different health conditions and stuff.

It’s a pretty good app, but it’s available just on iPhone for now. They have a couple things they could work on, maybe just a few bugs. But, the idea isn’t too shabby, and I could totally see it catching on!

P.S. – While it works well for a general idea of what to wear, I wouldn’t follow their fashion advice to a tee. (LOL GET IT, like to the tee-shirt. Oh, I’m so funny sometimes.)