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Screen Cleaner Brightens Fading Displays
Dirty Screen Boy writes "Over time, your LCD or CRT monitor will gradually fade in brightness and contrast. This fading is inevitable, because the backlights for LCD screens eventually fade, and the photo-reactive substrate on CRT monitors eventually degrades.
ScreenCleaner Pro rectifies this situation by altering the gamma of your monitor to compensate for monitor degradation, so it will look as good as new. Don't toss out that old monitor, just run ScreenCleaner Pro on it, and watch your old monitor gain a new life.
Simply let ScreenCleaner Pro run in the background, and it will automatically analyze your monitor's gamma curve and relative luminescence. After enough calibration data has been collected, ScreenCleaner Pro will adjust your monitor to like-new condition.
The analyzation/calibration process can take up to 10 minutes, but you can work normally while ScreenCleaner Pro is analyzing your monitor; simply let it run in the background."
get a "cloth" and "wipe" the display.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
i was commenting on one post and 3 more show up. This is crap how about real news.
Nice ad.
Wow, it's never been this easy to get first post. Too bad it will be off the front page in about 13 minutes. My this is getting WAY too looney.
No really, there's nothing.
At all.
Zip.
Nada.
I mean c'mon, its already April 2nd in Europe...
I think we should all give cmdrtaco a round of applause.
Nothing for you to see here, please move along.
I want to know how this was able to anylyse anything in my monitor? I ran it for awhile and it didn't do anything, then suddenly 10 minutes later it's like its wiping large amounts of dust off the screen. It's made a really good difference to the screen.
Is this permanent or something I will have to run often? its not going to shorten the monitor life is it? I have a CRT.
Come on CmdrTaco, Take a break and get a beer or something.
Dear Editors:
One can have too much of a bad thing.
I thought anything that refined gamma emitters would get Homeland Gestap^M^M^M^M^M^MSecurity after you, right quick.
I have a stupid 19" trinitron and it's just getting brighter. All too common a problem with the 19s and 21s.
It will instantly adjust your gamma to zero. It will fill your house wiht toxic smoke, too, so you if you gets all humans and pets out the house first, you can use it to fumigate for pests.
Guess all you non-'merkins are out of luck!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
In not too long your Karma will be nothing to see, too!
It's for Mac OS X...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Remarkably, this doesn't appear to be an april fools joke. The comments in the discussion seem to date from quite a few days ago. This is probably just a bit of code that is inserted in the GDI and has a guess at a reasonable adjustment for pixel intensity. Hopefully it doesn't adjust gamma, because that would look dumb, a faded monitor needs the darker intensities to be raised, while mid intensities stay roughly where they were. Raising gamma increases the middle intensities too much. I also doubt this would work for games using DirectX or OpenGL (too much effort, and unrobust).
I recall a time in the 90s when April Fools news did a great job of walking the thin line of perfectly plausible. Great effort was put into crafting stories that took days and even years to refute. Sheng Long from early 90s April EGM comes to mind. Of course, I understand that the wealth of information available on the 'net these days has changed things signifigantly. However, most of these articles really didn't even try. Lets have less Photoshop and more though next year.
I recall playing so much SFII to see if it was real; I think I ended up convincing myself that you had to perfect everyone in 1P mode to get it. Needless to say, I wasn't successful (my best effort was about ~15 of 24 rounds perfect.)
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
Mah monitah haz bin gettin' all grey and dim-lack. Kin yoah product fix mah prablem? Some folk has sed thet all ah need tah fix mah prahblem is tah wahp it with ah cloth and sahm cleanah. Ah sed "don't gas laght be boah. I knowz when mah screan needs ah cleanin'!" Ah am pahticulahly inte-ested in yoah praduct! Send me ah sample soaz ah kin trah it!
Sinceahly,
Rufus!
kerosene soot, you know. gets all over the insides. say, who's the new gatekeepers at slashdot, they have a fine sense of news and are adept at sorting out all the political lies. these guys should take over for good. anybody hear any good rumors about the new apple device for bathrooms called the iPeed?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Well duh. And if you quit the program your screen will instantly brighten back up.
you know, I realize that this was just an april fools joke, but really, it goes to show something. One of the biggest drain on laptop batteries is the screen, and I know a lot of people keep the brightness on their monitor up pretty high. Yet people ran this program, and didn't notice any difference in the screen gradually darkening. This might be a good way to save battery power on laptops. Start the screen at "normal" brightness, and then have it slowly start to darken, letting your eyes adjust slowly, in order to save battery life.
(do I get extra karma for posting an insightful comment on slashdot on april 1?)
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Grab.app wasn't able to properly capture the dustcloth while it was moving, but this should give you some idea of what Screen Cleaner Pro looks like.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Every CRT monitor actually ships with a built-in dustcloth (or, in some higher-end models, a tiny man with a squeegee), but it's rendered unusable through trickery. Most monitor companies disable it by cutting a trace, while others disable it using firmware.
Firmware's trivial to bypass, but the cut traces... now that's tricky. What this software does is actually increase the speed of the electrons inside your monitor so they can jump the gap -- much like an Olympic long jumper -- and activate the cleaning circuitry.
If you take your monitor housing apart and turn out the lights in the room while running the software, you can actually watch this occur several times per second. It's fascinating to see.
The Taco poissons d'avril have been a bit overboard this year.
Doesn't MonsterCable sell a "screen cleaner" product that costs about fifty bucks for 100mL? It's supposed to be "clumpy" so that it doesn't drain down into the CRT housing where the bunny feathers and dead caterpillars live.
No, it's iPoo.
"A UK company started up by a distant relative of the inventor of the toilet, has created a new handheld GPS device that allows you to locate and then get directions to the nearest toilet in the UK."
Actually, I have here (somewhere) a rather tattered copy of the obscure book, "Where to Go in London". It's circa 1969(?) reviews about free toilet facilities in the city, and not about possible gay sex-friendly places as some might think. It's actually some guy's published opinions on the best and worst places in London to do a number 1 or 2.
And Google Cache finds something similar. I'm not sure if this type of research is anal-retentive or what.
... where it alters the gamma of the user.
... RRRRAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHH .... HULK SMASH!!!!!!!"
One user, now being transported to an undisclosed military base in Nevada, said, "I tried this screen cleaner program, and all of a sudden, I felt
Type in "hector" or "andrew" while SCP is cleaning your screen.
Aww, it's too bad that this program isn't available for Windows 95 or 3.1. :( I could use that program. I'll try to find a Mac G5 to connect my monitor to.
That's the spirit. We don't need no stinking energystar, just crank up that electron gun and aim it at my face, baby. Yeah, that's the tan I needed, with a free skin peel, too. Better than botox!
I did think there was something wrong with my LCD monitor until I cleaned the crap off the screen!
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
"the analyzation"?? Is that the same as the analysis? Sounds like Dubya is making these April Fool's stories up now.
My PowerBook actually has light sensors in it, just under the speakers on the right and left and side. I think it's an option in certain models, the ones that have backlight keyboard support (though it might also be in the ones that don't have backlit keyboards, I'm not sure).
It automatically dims the display, and adjusts the brightness of the backlit keyboard depending on the ambiant light level. Quite handy to have the screen dimmed automatically when I'm in a low light situation.
Although, I have this disabled at the moment (it can be turned off via the control panel) as I found it was a little distratcing in 'twilight' to have the screen frequantly bounce between brighter and darker. Ideally, I'd like it to prevent the brightness levels yo-yo'ing so much in twilight conditions (e.g. by more gradually changing the brightness if it finds it's changing frequently).
I'm serious. You really should install this software (assuming you're on OS X). It's actually quite amusing.
;)
As for the Easter Eggs, Hector is actually quite cute. The rest of them, well...
They could totally sell a windows version of this in a big yellow box in PC world, for £30 a copy.