I’ve been consulting for some of the world’s largest companies for the last three years and have observed three themes that worry me: Agile is a really controversial word, despite the manifesto being quite clear on the matter, Somewhere within every company, there are many, many engineers that have been waiting weeks for test environments, and Engineers have the heaviest, plasticky-iest, and most unpleasant machines in the entire organization This (hopefully) brief post is about that third point. … »

TL;DR:

Control + ⌘ + Shift + G Home button triple-click.

Why?

Exposing ourselves to bright screens at night while checking our Facebook feed or reddit posts might not be as harmless as it seems. Tons of research, like this and this suggest that viewing things on bright screens right before bed makes our brains think that we’re in daylight longer than we actually are and, consequently, prevent us from falling asleep sooner than we should be. This combined with our early-start culture has been shown to lead to fatigue, decreased concentration and, in some folks, depression.

Additionally, other research has shown that prolonged exposure to artificial light (like those in most offices or our phones) can, over time, damage our eyes’ ability to adjust to incoming light and weaken their sensitivity to it.

I didn’t notice any of this until a Slashdot post introduced me to Flux several years ago. Before using this application, I was usually tired and sore (I rode my bike much more often back then) most of the time, but didn’t think much of it. I went out often back then, and most of the people I came across were just as or more tired than I was, so I thought I was fine.

I was trying to put a bunch of slides together today but had a lot of trouble doing it because my Mac would freeze up every minute or so for about 10-15 seconds. If you’ve ever tried mowing a lawn with no gas, you kind of know how this feels. It was infuriating.

In search of anything that might improve the state of things, I stumbled upon this interesting solution that seems to have made the slowness go away!

If your Mac is freezing up or acting slow in general, give this a try: