f.lux is saving my eyes

Like many technology workers, I suffer from overuse injuries of the fingers and wrists, as well as constant eyestrain. I do much of my programming at night with the lights off, and while OSX has good built in functionality for dimming a monitor (or using the Shades app for secondary monitors), it didn't seem like enough.

I could either have the brightness turned up so I can see, but have my retinas blasted with excess photons, or have the brightness turned down, and then squint as I try to read.

Enter f.lux.

Instead of messing with the brightness of your monitor, f.lux changes the colors of your monitor to be easier on the eyes. At first, it was kind of an uneasy yellow color, but my eyes adapted quickly.

Everything felt normal, until I turned f.lux off. My monitors colors returned to normal, and I instantly felt like icepicks were being driven into my eyes. Needless to say, f.lux was turned back on, and I use it every night. I heart f.lux.

Keynote 2008

So I've just done my first presentation with Keynote 2008, and color me impressed. When you compare iWork vs MS Office, I consider Excel better than Numbers, and Word better than Pages. Keynote however, is far better than Powerpoint. Both programs have a practically identical purpose and workflow, but where Keynote excels is in the quality of the default templates, animations, and graphics. Basically those things that taken separately, don't matter much, but taken as a whole, it makes Keynote the superior presentation building application.

I wonder if OSX 10.5.7 will be included in Mac Box Set Family Pack. If so, I may have to pick that up so that I can iWork 2009, iLife 2009, and OSX 10.5.7

Evernote

Evernote is one of a long line of notetaking applications, from Microsoft OneNote (which is supposedly pretty good) to Zoho. In my search for a notetaking application to supplement my brain (which has horrible short term memory), I settled on Evernote as the most full featured of the bunch:

• Has a desktop AND web AND iPhone client
• For notebooks that are synced to Evernote's servers, free OCR
• The ability to have synced notebooks (to take advantage of web/iPhone clients and free OCR), or desktop only notebooks (for sensitive info)
• The ability to add pics, pdf, word, excel, numbers, pages, webpages, or free text to a note
• quick searchability

The only thing remaining for me is to put my local Evernote notebooks into my truecrypt partition, then I'd be all set