• 30 June 2024
• posted on cohost

Microsoft added "Night light", an OS-level replacement for the popular f.lux software and an analog to macOS's "Night Shift", sometime during the Windows 10 era. It filters out blue light and tints your displays to make them easier to look at at in darker rooms. This makes me very happy, in theory. The only problem is that Night Shift just doesn't work on my computer a lot of the time.

There's some result of my monitors + video card + video card driver + Windows install + precise arrangement of system files on my SSD that results in a number of fail states. This computer can:

• refuse to switch on the night light at all, showing unfiltered blue light regardless of which state the switch is toggled in
• refuse to switch off the night light, a very rare occurrence but one that at least goes away with a simple reboot
• disengage the "schedule night light" feature, which was previously on, so that it's only manually invoked.
• disengage the feature if it's enabled, and make it so that the schedule no longer works even if you toggle it back on, but manually enabling it does work.
• do everything correctly except, despite choosing to let it fetch sunset and sunrise times, then follow those for its schedule functionality, it silently fails and choose its own default times, far later than a normal summer sunset time anywhere I've lived.

Most of these states don't fix themselves with a reboot, but some do. Many of these states fix themselves when you edit certain Windows Registry entries, which has led to a present where I now have a .reg file with the relevant changes sitting on my Desktop so I can invoke it whenever I want. All of this is completely absurd.

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