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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 think we should all give cmdrtaco a round of applause.
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.
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.
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?
And its actually a problem that can be remedied with some simple soldering in of a new resistor. Our ACM at Hopkins has taken to relieving people of monitors with this affliction and fixing them for ourselves resulting in a dramatic increase in 19" & 21" monitors in our office.
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.