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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

#121

Post by alin23 »

spockz wrote: post #118
httgp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing the exact model number of your LG monitor? And is text as sharp as the Retina display?

Sure: LG 27UL850-W. I can’t say whether it is exactly as sharp but to me it looks similarly sharp. Both scaled and on native resolution. The colours of the M1 screen are better however.

I’m using the exact same screen and it is what led me to write Lunar actually.

The screen is great, text is perfectly sharp in 4k on both M1 and Intel Macs. I don’t have the HDR function because I bought it 4-5 years ago but the colours look very good too, no washing out problem.

But the damn joystick man, I just couldn’t get past it and had to spend 4 years writing an app to work around it.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#122

Post by Dah00n »

alin23 wrote: post #105
megablast wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

Tips just need to die (as being counted a part of a salary). It's only a thing in countries with poor worker protection so here's hoping they get more of that. The only country I have seen it used in was the US. My wife worked as a waiter in Copenhagen and they got a good pay and few tips. They tips they did get all got put in a glass and shared between every single employee equally, the only way tips should be used IMO.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#123

Post by alin23 »

kalleboo wrote: post #113
alin23 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately no, Gamma doesnt reduce the power consumption of the LED backlight of the monitor. It may in fact increase power use a bit because rendering black pixels needs more energy to excite the crystals. I haven't contacted Apple because I don't think they are interested in implementing such a thing really. I've written more about why I think that here: https://lobste.rs/s/2zajeu/journey_controlling_external_mo…

One bit of speculation I've read before is that the display brightness on some displays is stored in a cheap EEPROM chip without wear leveling, and constantly writing new brightness values throughout the day will wear it out in a short time span (years)

I’ve read that in a lot of places over the years and even got afraid of it when my LG 4k flickered a bit one day.

But I’m sure I’ve went way past the 100k writes speculated limit with Lunar’s Smooth Transition and by testing Lunar 6 hours a day almost every day for the past 4 years.

It’s possible that this EEPROM issue might not be an issue anymore. Lunar has thousands of active users and there are zero claims of a monitor failing because of it.

It’s also possible that it’s just a problem waiting to happen and I’ll get sued to death in a few years, who knows.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#124

Post by spockz »

alin23 wrote: post #121
spockz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: LG 27UL850-W. I can’t say whether it is exactly as sharp but to me it looks similarly sharp. Both scaled and on native resolution. The colours of the M1 screen are better however.

I’m using the exact same screen and it is what led me to write Lunar actually. The screen is great, text is perfectly sharp in 4k on both M1 and Intel Macs. I don’t have the HDR function because I bought it 4-5 years ago but the colours look very good too, no washing out problem. But the damn joystick man, I just couldn’t get past it and had to spend 4 years writing an app to work around it.

Are you sure that you have the UL and not the UK? The UL is HDR400 so actually not really hdr. The only thing is that macOS doesn’t seem to realise this and with all the toggling there are four states that occur:

MacOS and monitor no HDR: “correct” colours and brightness MacOS HDR and monitor HDR: washed out colours / very low contrast macOS HDR and monitor No HDR: very strange picture macOS no hdr and monitor hdr: also washed out image

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#125

Post by fighterpilot »

alin23 wrote: post #109
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 o…

If it's easy, do you mind sharing the hex for some of the colors, such as the background? You've picked a really nice combo of colors that I'd like to bookmark

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#126

Post by rudian »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #96
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').…

Why not roll back to Catalina? Mac recovery menu has the option to reinstall the OS that shipped with the machine. What I don’t know is if you’re allowed to selectively upgrade to, say, the latest version of Catalina. But you can pick and choose updates, so maybe?

Maybe they already do. The problem is by September they’ll be 2 versions behind, with no fix in sight.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#127

Post by zimpenfish »

alin23 wrote: post #107
GekkePrutser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dunno if you'd be able to find one these days but

https://thedigitallifestyle.com/w/index.php/2017/06/23/micro...

"The Surface Dial is a [battery powered] Bluetooth rotary controller for controlling Windows"

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#128

Post by dividedbyzero »

CodeIsTheEnd wrote: post #17

I haven't used Lunar ( https://lunar.fyi/ ), the app the author built, but it looks fantastic! Clearly great effort has been put into it! I really appreciate this class of application that exposes more hardware functionality to the end user. Flux (which may or may not be a direct competitor) is another great example, as is Halide, the pro camera app for iPhones. They're certainly not flashy, but they can be great qua…

You probably could script that in Hammerspoon. I have a small script that resets the balance to center every few seconds (it sometimes wanders off-center for some weird readon), setting the volume should be possible too.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#129

Post by klodolph »

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.

Seems less like it’s funny, and more like it’s aimed at a niche market.

Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs

#130

Post by klodolph »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #102
justin66 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the Pro Display XDR & stand were less “outrageous” and more “aimed at a niche market most of us don’t know much about.” People were expecting something consumer / prosumer and Apple made something aimed at the professional market.
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