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The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

alinpanaitiu.com

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Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#101

Post by alin23 »

birdyrooster wrote: post #90
alin23 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got my first job as a Junior Malware Researcher, I was earning $422 per month. That times 7 is exactly the cost of the MacBook Pro I got (1TB SSD, 16GB RAM) Yes, I live in Romania, and salaries have been increasing a bit but they're still a joke for junior devs.

Can you rent an apartment for like $100/mo or less there?

Not really, rent has skyrocketed in major cities, especially around Computer Science universities.

I had to split a 2 bedroom apartment far away from the city center with 2 other friends to get to $120/month.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#102

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

justin66 wrote: post #92
Teknoman117 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your livelihood isn't dependent on that kind of a display, personally, I would try to avoid falling into their trap. I'd call it anti-competitive to have previously supported an industry standard, only to then remove that support and push their product as the only way to achieve an equivalent to that standard. I'm not saying the ProDisplay XDR isn't a good screen, or even overpriced in the class of displays it liv…

> Telling all the people who want HDR to go buy a $5,000 display they don't need is a bit of a mean spirited move. Plus an extra $1,000 for the stand to mount it. That never stops being funny.

I wonder whether we might get to witness audience booing again for another outrageous Apple product as pre-recorded Apple events works great for their goals.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#103

Post by Joeri »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #54
alin23 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Yes, it can be hard to let people know that an app like this actually exists. Some people don't even feel the need for such a thing and just stare hours at a time into a blinding 100% brightness panel when working at night time. I think that can cause macular degeneration much faster than just "not filtering blue light", but this is not as talked about so people don't think about its effects that much.

I agree, and for me the problem is also that newer screens won't even go down far enough because they optimize for max brightness as that looks better on the spec sheet. Most of my monitors are way too bright at 0% at night. On my 4K I even need to work at 0% during the day and reduce contrast at night (which messes up colour depth). And yeah the OSD controls are horrible. I still work on a real VT520 CRT terminal so…

I had the same problem and used one of the dark overlay tools that the author of the article criticizes to bring it down further than 0% brightness. But that trick also messes up color depth. I've since switched to an iMac, and the nice thing is that while the display can go very bright, when you dial down the brightness to the lowest value it is very dim to the point of being hard to read in daylight.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#104

Post by vladvasiliu »

FireBeyond wrote: post #30

Apple seems to be making a lot of display related things difficult lately. This, and Display Stream Compression are two. Just as high refresh and HDR were becoming really mainstream, Big Sur completely broke what was working flawlessly in Catalina (and it has not been fixed as of either 11.5, or the Monterey betas so far - and by completely broke, I mean does not work, at all, for anybody, not just 'some edge case').…

> my Mac Pro happily drove 2 27" 4K monitors in 10 bit color at 144Hz.

It's a bit tangential, but I keep seeing people mentioning 4K monitors with high refresh rates on HN, but I've never seen any. Would you care mentioning what make / model those are?

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#105

Post by alin23 »

megablast wrote: post #91
alin23 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got my first job as a Junior Malware Researcher, I was earning $422 per month. That times 7 is exactly the cost of the MacBook Pro I got (1TB SSD, 16GB RAM) Yes, I live in Romania, and salaries have been increasing a bit but they're still a joke for junior devs.

Are they a joke compared to a waiter??

Obviously not. I have close friends who worked as waiters (and even worse, in the kitchen), and they were getting $300/month on 12h of work with the promise of tips.

That practice really needs to stop.

Recently I went to a restaurant in Cluj that had an app from which you could do everything: see menu, order, send notes to the chef, pay

The experience needs to be polished a bit (low 4G signal and no wifi made this quite hard to use for me), but I feel that could empower waiters more. Maybe by getting paid the same for a lot less work, or by creating a completely different type of job.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#106

Post by alin23 »

ammar_x wrote: post #63

Although I'm not interested at all in brightness control and the different technologies you described, I really enjoyed reading your post. Your way of combining talking about technical issues with your personal life and challenges (your company job, having a side project along your day job, the winter cold near your house, etc.) made it possible for me to enjoy reading a post about something completely unrelated to m…

Thanks a lot! I guess that validates a bit my choice of style. I was afraid it might sound too story-like for such a technical subject.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#107

Post by alin23 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #54
alin23 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Yes, it can be hard to let people know that an app like this actually exists. Some people don't even feel the need for such a thing and just stare hours at a time into a blinding 100% brightness panel when working at night time. I think that can cause macular degeneration much faster than just "not filtering blue light", but this is not as talked about so people don't think about its effects that much.

I agree, and for me the problem is also that newer screens won't even go down far enough because they optimize for max brightness as that looks better on the spec sheet. Most of my monitors are way too bright at 0% at night. On my 4K I even need to work at 0% during the day and reduce contrast at night (which messes up colour depth). And yeah the OSD controls are horrible. I still work on a real VT520 CRT terminal so…

I love knobs (rotary encoders mostly). I wish they were in everything where you need to adjust some range like brightness, contrast, volume, color warmth.

For some time I really wanted a battery powered wireless rotary encoder that I can listen to in Home Assistant and hook it to whatever I want but I couldn’t find anything like that.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#108

Post by alin23 »

almostdigital wrote: post #40

This seemed neat so I installed Lunar to try out on my M1 MacBook Air with a LG HDR display connected over HDMI. After launching the app my system started freezing so bad I had a hard time closing the app, inputs unresponsive for 30 sec then active for 1 sec to become unresponsive again. I figured I'd try to launch it with my monitor unplugged and worked fine, but after plugging in my monitor again it doesn't connect…

I can’t say for sure what the problem is in your case, but it’s definitely not a problem in Lunar.

All the app does is call a macOS function called IOAVServiceWriteI2C to send a standard DDC message to the monitor (something like “set brightness to 30”)

In your case, either the dongle or the monitor reacts unexpectedly to that message. What should happen is that the dongle should simply forward that message as it is to the monitor and the monitor should have firmware logic to interpret it correctly and either set the brightness to the sent value, or not do anything.

That’s why Apple will never implement native brightness changing using DDC.

They can’t risk having users come with problems like this one in the press, because the monitor or hub/dock does something funny with the DDC message and crashes.

Lunar can also function in software mode using gamma by following the instructions here: https://lunar.fyi/faq#bad-ddc

That mode will never crash a monitor because it doesn’t send any data to it.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#109

Post by alin23 »

polishdude20 wrote: post #55

Are you using some sort of website builder / pre-made styles for your writeups? I really like the layout and color/ stlye.

I’m using Hugo as the static site generator (it really helps with blogs but I wouldn’t use it for simple presentation webpages).

I started with the Blogophonic theme but I have heavily edited it since then: https://github.com/formspree/blogophonic-hugo

Unfortunately I don’t have some pre-made theme that I can share, I mostly improvised with colours and styles that I noticed look good on other websites, then settled on some colour scheme and style using Sass variables that I use all over the place.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#110

Post by Toutouxc »

Great work, Alin. I will continue with the trial version for a while, but ten minutes in, it looks like everything is working.

Brightness actually wasn't my biggest gripe, it was my monitor's stupid volume controls (three menu levels deep). And Lunar takes care of both!

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