I have one of those old-school desktop computers without a built-in light sensor, and the monitor controls aren’t very accessible. During the day it’s too dark and at night it’s too bright.
Is there a simple utility that would automatically change the brightness based on time of day (or better yet, sunrise/sunset times)?
There’s a similar tool called F.lux, but it only changes color temperature and not brightness.
I don’t know what it was called, but just last week one of my coworkers had an app installed on his MacBook that would actually change the color temperature and brightness of the display depending on the hour.
So it was not only bright, but cool blue during the day; and dimmer but a warm amber during the night.
If you can wait until tomorrow I’ll find out what it was called.
Is there a command in the video signal to change backlight brightness? I thought that’s only controllable on the monitor itself (unless you have a laptop)
Yes, through DDC. I’m not sure how many monitors support it, but mine does. On my own monitor I’ve seen software change the brightness and it shows up on the firmware brightness slider too. Here’s a program to demonstrate it: ScreenBright. And just to verify it, I have my monitor connected to a watt-meter that shows power usage going up and down with the backlight brightness.