f.lux - Mac, Windows and Linux

f.lux is a small utility program that changes the colour temperature of your monitor to suit the lighting conditions in your room. You will notice less eye-strain when using your monitor at night as the screen is tinted a light orange. This helps your body keep it's natural rhythm by not exposing your eyes to bright white/blue light in the evening.


What is colour temperature?
Colour temperature is expressed in Kelvin and if something is orangey red looking than it has a lower value and if it's broad daylight, with a bright white light, it has a higher value (approx 6500K). 


So how does flux work?
Fluorescent lighting is around 4100K so it has a slight orangey look, this was often highlighted on early digital cameras. Your eye does a great job of compensating for colours and you barely notice it after a while. Until, that is, you put your computer on with it's bright screen. This is why people using a PC at night often have a blueish glow on them, because these colours are not provided by the surrounding lights. With f.lux installed you can compensate for these lighting environments and the program is customisable to your lighting colour temperature. And to make life easier, f.lux knows when sunrise and sunset occur and automatically adjust the screen colours for you.


This is a really small app and it does exactly what it says on the tin, check it out today!

Rating 4/5
Price - Free
Developer - http://stereopsis.com/flux

Excess Instructions

Now most people tend not to read the instructions that accompany their new technology purchase, be it a clock radio, HD TV or a new Windows 7 Laptop, so why do (some) companies insist on supplying paper instructions in every language in the world! This is quite an exaggeration but my point is that a wireless headset for an xbox 360 doesn't really require an entire forest worth of paper for instructions!

Environmental Packaging Future

Image: NASA

In a future where we drive around in alternative fuel cars and generate all our electricity from renewable sources we need to make everything in our lives more energy efficient. So making, transporting, and disposing of unnecessary packaging needs to be reconsidered. Many products now come to the UK from abroad and so this packaging travels even further across the world.

There is an industry which has been minimising packaging for years, the space industry. NASA have been sending astronauts into space using the minimum weight possible. At lot of their food comes in very little packaging. Liquids come in pouches as shown in this NASA picture.
This pouch takes up very little space and weight compared to the normal packaging that we're used to, and it allows astronauts to drink in space through the in built straw.

Original Source create shower gels from natural ingredients. As an environmentally conscious company they have created packaging, similar to the liquid pouch above, for their shower gel. They claim it's made with 75% less plastic. It's an innovation that paves to way forward and will make a huge difference to the environmental cost of transportation. It also takes less natural resources to make and with oil prices increasing and oil potentially running out, minimising this has to be a good thing.

There are many companies trying to reduce their carbon footprint in this way, from beer bottles made with less glass to supermarket lorries with a more aerodynamic shape. It will be very in common in the next few years to see companies move away from spending money on token windmills and move to spending money on alternative fuel lorries, more efficient packaging and of course advertising their green image! Most supermarkets already offer degradable carrier bags and a range of renewable bags. It's a future where maybe a simple jar of Marmite doesn't have to be presented in a box, just because it's extra old!

Mac Mini gets miniaturised

Apple have done it again and made another product unbelievably small. The iPod/iPhone charger has got smaller and smaller from hand size to just a plug head for the iPhone 3GS charger. The Apple Mac Mini has had the same treatment.

The new Mac Mini is a single unibody construction. It looks about 50% smaller than the outgoing model. It is 2x faster so that makes it 4x more powerful per tonne to use some TopGear logic. It also features an HDMI socket so you can set up your Mac Mini on your HD TV. This save you having to buy an Apple TV (perhaps?). It's also the most energy efficient Mac to date.

Apple are selling the Mac Mini in two variants. One is a standard computer and the other is a Mac Mini with Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server installed. This server version doesn't have an optical drive. It would make an ideal home server or small business server.

Apple Mac Mini starts at £649 with a 320GB hard drive from www.apple.com/uk.

Image: Apple Inc.

Should I refrigerate my PC?

As temperatures in the UK begin to rise for summer (BBC Weather), the silly question is: Should I refrigerate my PC?

Your PC contains several components that get hot when used, particularly the processor (CPU) and the graphics card/chip set (GPU). Anyone who uses a laptop for more than half an hour will begin to see the effects of modern design. That is to say that more powerful chip sets = more heat, and that, modern design = minimal provision for cooling. So laptops without a hard surface to sit their 2mm feet on soon overheat. It does make you consider chucking it in the fridge to cool it down! Unfortunately this is not a solution. If you put your laptop in the fridge you are likely to get condensation forming INSIDE your laptop. This would not be very helpful as electricity and water really don't mix. You could in fact wreck your laptop.

To prevent your laptop from overheating you should properly ventilate the area around it. Always use it on a hard surface. If it runs really hot (like when playing games/DVD's) you can cool it with a fan. Overheating components are more likely to fail or even catch light. So happy hot weather weather computing from www.webwarpblog.co.uk just in time for the British summer.