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Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

lunar.fyi

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Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#71
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to know how my monitor does this?

I've been reading that NAND flash doesn't support erasing individual bytes, while EEPROM does. If there's some way to attempt this and know the outcome, maybe that's a way to figure it out.

NAND Flash is just a type of EEPROM.

Early EEPROM could only be wiped entirely (but as this was done electrically, it was still an improvement over UV-erased EPROM), while EEPROM at the time of Flash's creation could often be byte-erased (as is the case now).

Nowadays "EEPROM" mostly refers to small, slow, rarely written config storage for microcontrollers. As thus, they are also usually accompanied by low write/erase endurance despite their byte-erase granularity.

Flash was meant as a higher capacity/performance version indeed sporting full block erasure as a downside, but nowadays it has supplanted EEPROM in all categories but small micro-controller usages. Plus, as capacity is now cheap, high write loads can easily be supported with write levelling (that is, writing to new locations instead of erasing/writing the same block over an over.)

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#72
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, after 100.000th write your monitor is toast because the EEPROM died. Also note that most people change brightness in increments, with each step causing a write.

Is there a way to know how my monitor does this?

Either disassemble your monitor and lookup the ICs, find someone who already did it, or try to write about 100 000 times and see what happens... :)

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#73
post #17

There is a problem with "cheap" monitors and DDC/CI: some of them use EEPROMs to store brightness settings, and this limits you to about 100,000 writes. Worrying about this is the main reason we don't ship DDC/CI with f.lux. (I know that some more modern monitors use NAND and don't have limitations like this.) Anyone know if these fears are overblown?

How long would it take to test 100k writes to the monitor? If you changed it once a second, that'd be like, a day?

Seems like the kind of thing you could easily test if so inclined and properly insured?

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#74
post #14

This is a great example of why I like the Touch Bar on my Macbook Pro. When it is connected to an external monitor, I tap the brightness icon in the Touch Bar and get two sliders: one to control brightness on my laptop, and one to control brightness on my external monitor. This seems to be a native feature; I did not install anything to do it.

But why can't they expose these controls independent of the Touch Bar? I actually find it ridiculous as a 2015 MBP owner that there is no easy native way to do this basic thing unless, apparently, you have a Macbook with a Touch Bar

They are independent of the touch bar. It simply presents a UI for any external monitors for which macOS already knows to control the brightness. You can change the brightness of supported monitors from System Preferences or using the keys on compatible keyboards.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#75
Cool idea, but I'm a software developer and I cannot figure out how to use this app. Something as simple as monitor brightness doesn't need so many controls, toggles, and things popping up and telling me things. It doesn't follow a single MacOS design convention.

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#77
post #66
post #31

Creator of Lunar here. Thank you all for the kind comments and generous donations and many thanks to the OP for posting this! Let me know if you have any questions or quick feedback about Lunar.

Hi there, I couldn't find a way to disable built-in logging & analytics to log.lunar.fyi. Is there a setting to disable any network requests other than for software updates? Thanks!

Hi! The route for log.lunar.fyi just returns 200 now and doesn't do anything. I was just logging the request before but I disabled that in the meantime since I didn't find it useful.

I will disable the request completely in the next update, but if you want to know what's sent or even disable it completely you can take a look at the source code of the sendAnalytics function in AppDelegate.swift: https://github.com/alin23/Lunar

Re: Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors

#80

Cool idea, but I'm a software developer and I cannot figure out how to use this app. Something as simple as monitor brightness doesn't need so many controls, toggles, and things popping up and telling me things. It doesn't follow a single MacOS design convention.

Different users have different needs. The app was extremely simple when I first launched it because I only needed an UI for ddcctl.

But as I was gathering feedback from users, I wanted to make Lunar usable in as many monitor setups as possible. And very good ideas came out of that (Sync mode being one of them) but it also cluttered the UI with a bit too many configurable values. Those are still needed by some users even though they might not seem useful for you, so I don't want to remove configurability.

I think by adding all these knobs, Lunar achieved the goal of being flexible enough to conform to most types of monitor usage. Now I just have to figure out how to simplify all this without losing flexibility.

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