A small tool to help look after your eyes

Both my parents have to wear glasses and a number of my friends do too and while it’s recommended that we all take a 5 minute break for every hour we work at a computer very few of us really do.

There are a bunch of mac apps out there that do the job, one that comes to mind is Time Out. While it does the job it did get a little annoying after a month or so. Instead I decided to use my screens brightness to dictate when I should take a break.

After some searching I found a great little terminal app which wraps OSX’s brightness settings into something I can work with.

First I created a bash script /rest/app.sh which will handle dimming the screen and restoring it.

#!/bin/sh

# Get the original brightness
BRIGHTNESS=`/rest/brightness -l`;

# Dim the screen to it's lowest setting
`/rest/brightness 0`

# Stop for 5 minutes
sleep 300

# Back to work!
`/rest/brightness ${BRIGHTNESS:60:8}`

Now we need to run the script every hour, we can do this by creating a cron job. Open terminal and type

crontab -e

This opens up the users crontab from where we can add our cron job. */60 basically means every 60th minute. So it should run on the hour every hour.

*/60 * * * * sh /rest/app.sh

Voila! The screen should dim on the hour and then return to normal brightness 5 minutes later.

Time will tell whether this is better but so far I’m liking it!

If you guys have any ideas on how to make it better you can contribute here