Intro

I get headaches, BAD headaches, directly linked to my eyesight. Directly linked to staring at a screen, specifically to text, for too long. I've had my eyes go bloodshot, I've had my vision go blurry.

You may have heard of the stories of grizzled old hackers never sleeping, never stopping, never flinching for many hours on end while they hack away at code.. their whole body of attention is completely focused on their task. While I'm certainly not a hacker (as properly defined), I do have that focus when it comes to information and documentation.

The consequence of that focus is that I am going to go blind.

No, not in some official medical sense (I hope), it's more that I can feel it in me. Ever since going to this odd GUI environment, because of pornthe internet everything has had its brightness turned WAY up.

I used to really love tinkering away within DOS, with its nice black screen and dim gray text. But now everything has high contrast and brightness. It's taking its toll and I know it.

I have to come to terms with this issue, and so I'm beginning to collect knowledge about turning the brightness down on everything.

So far, I know about:

Changing the desktop background

xsetroot -sold black

Firefox

Firefox > Firefox dark

Changing GTK themes

http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXAppearance

lxappearance

If viewing the different themes does nothing, rename ~/.gtkrc-2.0.mine

For Unity Linux, do:

smart install gtk-engines2 lxappearance

I'll be keeping track of all this knowledge and once I'm somewhat satisfied I'll write up a guide to help others. Like many, I've bitched for a long time about how ugly and lacking in contrast all the dark themes are, but I've had to come to terms with the need and so will everyone else in due time. I may as well see what I can do to help when you turn to the dark side.

Oh, and this isn't about saving power. Power consumption is tied to money, and unless money becomes more of a significant incentive there will be no significant change to everyone's power consumption, particularly with something like display power consumption. This is the case with everything. Some sort of personal annoyance, threat, or cost has to be attached to something or there won't be much of a global change.