set_trace # timfreund's blog on dev, ops, and other work stuff

Seiki SE39UY04 for Development on Linux

Posted: Wed, 15 Jan 2014

I’m not a gamer or an artist. I’m a software developer and system administrator. I use linux on the desktop, and below you’ll read how I decided to gamble on the Seiki SE39UY04

I was just about to pull the trigger on two new 1080p monitors when the SE39UY04 dropped in price to $499. That would give me 2x the resolution I would get out of the 2 1080p monitors at a price I couldn’t ignore.

Gamer friends cringed at the 30hz refresh rate. I swore of games years ago because of the terrible things that Unreal Tournament and StarCraft did to my bed time. My cursor blinks about once per second, and i3 doesn’t offer much in the way of fancy desktop window animations. Seeing the desktop animation in the following video made me feel like it’d be entirely comfortable for the type of work that I do:

Garrett does a great video review as well:

He talks a bit about the monitor powering off. There’s a setting in the service menu that disables the four hour power off function. The sparkle that he talks about around 3:15 is definitely an issue with some gradients.

Here are two other reasonable reviews on the web that I considered:

Photographer friends cringed at the color fidelity prospects. I understand. I would rather enjoy silence than listen to poorly reproduced music, but I am not a visual artist and I don’t do any work that demands accurate color reproduction. /u/trackpete’s Editing Large at 4k was a fantastic resource for seeing first hand exactly how the color fidelity played out in real life. He includes side by side photos that will show the difference in color reproduction assuming that you’re viewing the images on something other than the subpar Seiki.

My emacs theme doesn’t look much like a sunset, so I felt like I could live with the situation. I’m not dead yet, so I guess I was right.

Getting the monitor running with linux was my only remaining concern, and fortunately there’s a guy named houkouonchi that made me confident enough to make the purchase. He wrote a detailed review of the device and its bigger sibling on Amazon, and he provided detailed information about configuring the Nvidia driver and X to send a 4k signal to the Seiki.

It’s not a perfect monitor, but it’s the most value for my hardware dollar since building the Q6600 workstation that served me for years and upgrading to an SSD in my subsequent workstation. I’ll happy when 4K displays with wide color gamut and fast refresh rates are both common and affordable, but I’ll enjoy this bargain basement display until then.

Redshift Delayed Dimming Hack

Posted: Wed, 21 Aug 2013

Redshift automatically winds down the color of my display as day turns to night. I don’t know if it helps me sleep as the experts say it will, but it cuts down on eye strain significantly. I only have one gripe: my display gets really red really early in the evening. That’s not even a fault of the application. My schedule and the sun share equal blame in the premature dimming of my screen.

I choose to toggle Redshift off if I’m editing images or styles since colors matter for those tasks, but I often forget to toggle it on once I’m done. I wanted a way to make sure that Redshift was enabled an hour before I go to bed on most nights so that I’d know to wind down.

D-Bus provides a great conduit for that sort of runtime inter-process communication and configuration, but Redshift doesn’t yet come with a D-Bus interface.

Three factors join forces that allow me to schedule Redshift display dimming in a less ideal way:

Redshift listens for USR1 signals and toggles dimming on receipt.
xrandr displays current gamma information (and Redshift dims the display by altering the gamma)
Cron scripts run by my user account have access to my XAuthority credentials.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
 
export DISPLAY=:0
current_gamma=`xrandr --current --verbose | grep -i gamma | awk '{print $2}' | head -1`
 
if [ $current_gamma != '1.0:1.0:1.0' ]
then
    echo "Redshift is enabled"
else
    if [ `ps -ef | grep /usr/bin/redshift | grep -v grep | wc -l` -eq 0 ]
    then
        echo "Redshift isn't running"
        nohup gtk-redshift 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null &
    else
        echo "Redshift is running but toggled off"
        killall -s USR1 /usr/bin/redshift
    fi
fi

Bash

In an ideal world I’d add D-Bus support to Redshift for a more elegant solution and a fun bit of C programming. It’s on my “someday maybe” list for a time when I can afford to fumble with a language I last used around 2004. In the meantime, this inelegant shell script does the job and gets me back to work on more pressing projects. Maybe it’ll work for you, too.