You could also buy a pair of $8 orange safety goggles and a piece of orange cellophane to cover your phone. The frequencies that disrupt circadian rhythm are 500nm to 450nm or so with the strongest response at 470nm. Response is also dependent on duration and ambient light levels, so if you are in the dark, as much as 0.5 lux of blue light over an hour can halt your pineal gland from producing melatonin.
F.lux also shouldn't be relied upon by itself. How well it works is dependent on the particular frequencies emitted by the RGB components of your screen. I have a 470nm band pass filter that I look at light emitters through, and f.lux reduces such emitters, but doesn't stop them completely. I have constructed a removable orange filter as a supplement.
I actually have those goggles, but find they don't fit well over my glasses. Know of any pair designed to work with glasses?
I know flux isn't perfect. But as I don't really use my phone much before bed, it seems to work well enough. The glasses could be useful for late night computer work though.
There is a website that sells over the glasses shades for this purpose, but those are way over priced. Most anything orange stands a good chance of working. You can park an incandescent bulb behind one and look at its spectrum reflected off of a CD or DVD. Look for the blue that looks like the sky on a cloudless day. I'd buy over-glasses safety goggles from a store, then test them at home and return them until you found a pair that works.
For $24, you can get enough orange filter gel to make a filter for your 27" screen, then have enough left over for a couple of iPads and several iPhones.
Does being snarky make you feel better about yourself?
I find it hilarious that someone who knows that staring at a bright blue-white screen is going to impact their sleep, continues to do so. It is even more amusing to think that they'd rather drop $400+ on a new Android phone that can run lux/redshift instead of modifying their own behavoir in a trivial way.
You should not alter your lifestyle to fit the limitations of your possessions. Rather, your possessions should help you to live the way you want to. If you enjoy staring at screens at night (e.g. for reading), you should buy gadgets that enable you to do so.
This reminds me of threads on MacRumors and Apple Discussions. Someone asks how to do X with [gadget]. Someone replies that you can't do X with [gadget]. Then someone asks why you would want to X with [gadget], you're obviously using [gadget] wrong and you should buy Y to do X instead.
The rest of the thread is an argument over whether people should want to do X with [gadget]. Maybe a post explaining how to more or less do X with some hacks thrown in the middle.
You forgot the last and most important step: [gadget] version (n+1) comes out with a new feature: "Do X with [gadget]!" And suddenly everyone is so excited that they can now do that thing that was so clearly wrong to want to do before.
It sure did make me feel better about myself. Did telling that person he was using his phone wrong make you feel better about yourself?
There wasn't even a problem. "I like f.lux." "Or you could not stare at your phone." What were that poster or third party readers supposed to have gleaned from your comment, pray tell?
When someone discusses a problem that has a trivial and obvious solution that they're not using, you should consider that they may have already thought of it and found it wanting.
>You could just stop staring at your iPhone before you fall asleep?
There's this big problem with technology - particularly common with people that is not familiar with it (looking at you @aroch) - where people think that you should adapt yourself to the technology around you where it should always be technology the one that should adapt to your lifestyle.
If you cook something and it tastes like shit, do you eventually become used to the taste of shit? or do you find out what happened and cook in a way that relates more to the kind of flavors that you want?
