Sense Insensitivity

Freeing your inbox of unfortunate truths and inopportune diversions

Most email filters only protect you from one thing- spam. But how dangerous is spam? Have you lost sleep over Replica R0lex Watches? Did Cia1is ever make you cry?

Sense Insensitivity (SI), the latest experiment from LolaLabs, protects your inbox from two seriously terrible things- unfortunate truths and inopportune diversions.

Messages will always be held until the time is right. Isolated insensitive sentences will be corrected or removed. In some extremely insensitive circumstances, SI can even quarantine the message indefinitely after writing a scolding email to the sender.

When your boyfriend breaks up with you, over email, on your birthday, SI keeps the message in quarantine until the day is over. When your ex-girlfriend subtly mentions her fiancé, SI replaces all occurrences of “fiancé” with “friend.”

When your boss contacts you at 10 PM, SI sits on the message until business hours. When a friend sends you a link to an addictive flash game, SI hides it until after you finish your paper.

Sense Insensitivity. Coming soon, from LolaLabs.

2009 06 27

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Not So Bright

Hello, throng. I thought I’d kick off this journal with a few older, tiny projects that I never properly released. This includes today’s entry: “Not So Bright.”

A college roommate had the terrible habit of sleeping at night. Many Apple LCDs – mine included – cannot dim lower than 30% brightness. My roommate’s addiction demanded that I either a) reduce the glow of my screen below 30% at night or b) inconvenience myself by removing/disabling the machine while he slept. Obviously, I chose the technical solution.

Not So Bright cuts your screen’s overall glow by darkening every pixel. This behaves much like having a dimmer backlight. To use it, fully dim your screen’s backlight the normal way (F1 or a monitor button), open Not So Bright, and use its slider control to set the level of additional dimming. 

Download Not So Bright (36KB, Mac OS X Universal Binary)

Notes:

  • Even at 100% brightness, your color calibration may slightly change while Not So Bright is running. All changes will be reverted when it quits.
  • If you have multiple monitors, Not So Bright will only dim your primary monitor.
  • To the technical among you- all real magic is handled by the CoreGraphics method “CGSetDisplayTransferByFormula”.
Update: I found a few similar apps by other people: Brightness Control, DarkAdapted, ScreenShade, Shades. Brightness Control is the most similar. Every one of these apps is far more complex than Not So Bright - the smallest among them is several times larger on disk - but they do have features that some people need (multiple monitor support, background processes, manipulating color channels independently). So here’s Not So Bright’s niche: tiny, elegant, 0% CPU usage, sexy icon.

2008 12 01

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