You must be familiar with modern LCD screens, right? If you look carefully, most of them have a button to automatically change the attributes of the screen to adjust for the types of media which is being viewed: one specially tweaked for movies, another for photos, a separate one for text and there’s one we’re particularly interested about — night.

You see, working in front of a computer screen at night raises a particular concern. The fact that you’re staring at a bright screen late at night when your body is supposed to be turning in, disrupts your circadian rhythm. A bit of medical jargon coming your way — during nighttime, darkness permits the production of melatonin by the pineal gland. Melatonin causes drowsiness and in tandem with the central nervous system, controls the circadian rhythm. In layman’s term, all this means is the bright light from the LCD screen screws up your sleep-wake cycle.

That’s why there’s a customized “Night” setting on your LCD. Furthermore, there are several apps that will reduce the brightness of your screen while working at night; Shades is one example of a Mac app that will do just that. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the LCD’s reflection off a person’s face at night — it’s mostly bluish white. Technically, the specific colour temperature is 6500K; also known as daylight. That’s right. If you find it hard to fall asleep after using your computer, this is why.

F.lux addresses this issue but it does it slightly differently. Instead of reducing brightness per se, it actually warms the colours you see on your screen and imitates the lighting in the room during nighttime. It’s quite hard to wrap your head around until you actually use it but I’ll do my best to try and explain it.

After downloading and launching the app, it will ask you for your location and the type of lighting that’s in the room — tungsten, halogen, fluorescent or daylight. Based on the information, it calculates exactly when the sun sets in your area and adjusts the colour temperature of your screen to mimic the lighting in the room. Note that the Mac version’s interface isn’t as refined as its Windows counterpart — but it doesn’t matter very much because all of the time, the app is absolutely unobtrusive. There are no pop-ups and you won’t notice it running.

Here’s a short clip to show you how seamless the colour change is. I have to apologize for the video’s quality. The warming effect isn’t visualized in screencasts and I had to resort to using a digicam. The focus is invariably off. The point here is to show you that F.lux can actually warm the screen up quite a bit to compensate for the lighting conditions, especially if the room is lit with halogen or tungsten lamps. I can assure you that the colour changes evenly across the screen, even though it looks “top heavy” in the video.

I’ve been using F.lux for a while and I cannot instinctively tell when the warming appears. It’s a natural transition, which I appreciate. It can also be temporarily disabled in the menu bar to work on colour-sensitive projects. One more thing I have to stress: using F.lux doesn’t mean that you will fall straight to sleep once you’re off the computer and in the bed. No, there are other factors governing sleepiness. F.lux will only help reduce stimulated wakefulness and assist you in adjusting to lighting conditions.

If you find yourself skeptical, give it a try. F.lux is cross-platform and will work on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you think it works, share your experiences in the comments.

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I used to resort to a couple of Mac apps to help put me to sleep. Recently, I found something another tool to help me achieve blissful slumber — my iPhone.

I was looking for an iPhone app that would play soothing sounds (something akin to a Sound Machine) like pouring rain or blowing wind (yeah, I’m kinda digging that) to help put my mind at ease. Coincidently, I found that listening to these sounds while falling asleep, I dream less and tend to get a better night’s rest. Although, your personal results may differ.

In my quest to find these apps (the App Store is so cluttered these days), I tested several and found that most of them have slightly different sounds to offer. Each one has its own distinctive motif. So, instead of choosing the best one for me (which may not be the one for you), I decided to list them all down so that you can try for yourselves. So here they are, 9 iPhone apps to help soothe you to sleep.

Custom Sounds of Nature Lite

CSON Lite provides 2 very realistic sounds of nature — Calm Ocean and Mountain Stream. Within Calm Ocean, there is a selection of sounds and the option to configure their presence and volume: Ocean, Seagulls, Wind Chimes and Foghorn. Mountain Stream has a several sounds to choose from as well: Stream, Bull Frogs, Birds and Day Crickets.

Each of the selected sounds loop so they can be played endlessly. CSON Lite also has a built-in timer so that you can listen to the sounds for as long as you wish before the sounds slowly fade away.

iRelax Melodies

iRelax Melodies is free for a limited time and has a collection of 16 very relaxing (indeed!) sounds to put you to sleep –River, Ocean, Flute, Rain, Winds, Music Box, Lounge, Birds, Piano, Orchestral, Waterfall, Thunder, Zen, Fire Camp, Melody and Night — all arranged as post-it notes spanning two pages. The sounds are selected by tapping on their corresponding notes and here’s the cool thing: you can select as many sounds as you want and mix your own customized track!

iRelax also offers a built-in timer albeit only as predefined time intervals of 5, 10, 15, 30, 45 minutes; 1 hour and 2 hours.

eSleep Lite

eSleep Lite is slightly different from your regular sound machine in the sense that it allows you to select 1 background “music” track and up to 3 “noise” tracks. Besides that, it also has a little party piece: it will let you record your own soothing sound to be played as a “noise” track.

eSleep Lite comes with built-in alarm and timer that starts to fade out in the final minute.

Ambiance Lite

Ambiance Lite is not your ordinary sound machine. It is a full-fledge jukebox of awesome sounds. The free app comes pre-installed with three: Large Wind Chimes, Loons and Rain and Thunder II. However, you can download as many sounds as you want for free from their online repository!

To imagine how Ambiance Lite works, think of it as an iPod. You can rate, favourite, loop and shuffle different sounds from the main playlist. It also features the usual timer and alarm functions so that you can set the app to play and drift off to sleep without a worry in your mind! Not bad for a free app!

Naturespace

Boasting holographic audio, Naturespace features five stock environments with 3D sound that are accurately recorded in high definition and seamlessly reproduced to provide you with a realistic experience.

If you’re not the kind to fiddle with settings or customize sounds to perfection but rather, just want a simple app that can help calm you down instantly (and effectively), this is the one you need.

Sleepmaker Storm, Stream and Rain

Sleepmaker’s series of apps are for the serious insomniacs who know what they need to put them to sleep. These 3 apps dish out specific collections of sounds, all targeted at tranquility. Unfortunately, this is also the apps’ weakness. Because they are separated into three distinct applications, there’s no mixing and matching. You are able to only play one sound at a time.

However, the sounds that they offer are pretty realistic. Take a look at their descriptive titles.

In Storm;

• Gentle long rolls with lite rain
• Medium thunder with heavy splatter
• Heavy constant wind storm

In Stream;

• Gentle mouth of brook
• Medium fast flowing stream
• Heavy bottom of waterfall

In Rain;

• Gentle onto forest foliage
• Medium and steady with puddles
• Medium rain against windows
• Heavy torrential downpour

Sleepmaker also produces Wildlife and Waves sound packs but I have yet to review them. Personally, I think it would be easier for end-users if they made one free app with all the sounds packaged together.

White Noise Lite

Don’t be fooled by the name, White Noise Lite has a larger selection of sounds than just pure white noise. Actually, it has several sounds that are pretty odd like Grandfather Clock, Oscillating Fan, Train Ride and Airplane Travel. Although, I must admit, they’re surprisingly relaxing and I grew to like them, especially Train Ride — it is hypnotic!

It also has the usual calming ocean and rain sounds. My suggestion is to try out the other sounds because they may seem weird but they’re actually quite good.

So which is my favourite? I can’t really say. They all have something different to offer. But I don’t see why we have to choose — they all free! Try them out and let me know how they work for you. Are you an insomniac? Do you find it hard to fall asleep? What do you usually do to get yourself some kip?

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Well, I’m no doctor but what I do know is that there are tonnes of web apps and tools that you can use to find ways to stay healthy and physically fit. We’ll look at the three main areas of health that affect us in our day to day lives which can be made easier by our web apps; sleep, nutrition and medication for when all else fails!

iSleepDiary

Any doctor will tell you that a good night’s sleep is extremely important. Sleep allows your body to perform at its optimum level whether you’re running a marathon or fighting off a nasty infection.

Basically, in iSleepDiary, you answer ten questions every day about how you slept the previous night. You can see an example in the screenshot where I was asked about how long and how well I slept and about my routines before I went to bed.

All of this is recorded over time and in a few weeks results start to appear as to whether or not you are getting enough sleep and whether you have a sleeping deficiency. This can all be printed out or simply viewed as an easy to read chart in your account.

TwoFoods

Many of us eat food that we think are healthy but in actual fact, they aren’t. This web app will show you the nutritional value in food that we eat every day and it will also compare them to one another. What’s more, it tells you the nutritional value of items without a label such as apples and fresh bread.

In the example above, we compared apple pie and spaghetti. You can see their calorie and other nutritional information displayed below the item. I found this app useful as it raised quite a few warning flags for me. It turns out that spaghetti isn’t healthy if you laze around afterwards! Who knew?

iPills

Everyone, at some point in their lives will be put on medication. It could be antibiotics, anti-depressants, birth control pills (can’t forget that one!) or something more specific to treating an illness. Normally, you’re given strict orders from your doctor to take them at a certain time each day – obviously one of the most important ways to stay healthy is to take your medicine.

iPills is an iPhone app that acts as your virtual pillbox. Instead of simply setting an alarm, your ‘pillbox’ contains all of the pills that need to be taken that day. When you take it, you simply tap the pill (which can be customized to look different to the others) and it goes into the ‘Taken’ box.

Your pills can be set up to re-occur daily, hourly etc. And because it involves almost no interaction other than tapping the pill you just, it’s easy to use and it eliminates the painstaking procedure of organizing it on your iPhone’s generic calendar.

I have selected the three apps above because they all have one thing in common; simplicity. Health issues target everyone, not just web savvy folks like ourselves. Using these apps will get you on your way to being a lean, mean fighting machine. Just remember to eat your apple-a-day!

Which apps do you use to keep yourself healthy and stay in shape?

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Many people perceive dreams to be important because:

• Dreams are important for our overall well-being and health. Dream deprivation leads to irritability, disorientation, and depression.
• Dreams are our connection with our subconscious mind. They reveal suppressed emotions, as well as our innermost desires and fears.
• Recurring dreams may point to an unresolved issue in our lives. This helps us understand how to reduce stress and where we may need help.
• Dreams can provide guidance and inspiration for ideas and creativity.

A lot of information about understanding why people dream, and analyzing your own dreams, is now easily available on the web. A simple search reveals dozens of sites that claim to help you interpret your dreams. Unfortunately, many of them are outdated or are marketing gimmicks for selling books or premium services. Let us see some of the best free sites and how you can make use of them.

Remember Your Dreams

The first step is to sleep well. Perhaps these sounds to help you relax and sleep can help? Typically, five minutes after we wake up, half the content of dreams is forgotten. After ten minutes, 90% is lost. Here are some guides to help you remember dreams:

• WikiHow provides a 10-Step guide and some tips to remembering dreams
• Reader’s Digest offers 7 ways for better dream recall
• Tips and resources from an expert to increase dream awareness and recall

This should get you started, but remember to be patient and persistent. Find out what works best for you.

Search Online Dream Dictionaries

If you don’t want to sign-up anywhere but simply want some quick clues to interpret a dream, use online dream dictionaries.

No single dictionary or site can provide a completely correct interpretation of your dream. This is because every dream symbol, object, and theme can mean different things to different people, depending upon our culture, personality, upbringing, and experiences. These dream dictionaries are still useful however, because many symbols do have universal meanings, and some dictionaries offer multiple interpretation of symbols. Remember to apply the meaning in the context of your life and the recent past.

• Dreams Dictionary aggregates multiple dream dictionaries and provides a search front-end to various domains of dream interpretation like psychology, theology, etc.
• FateDreams gives you a searchable Dream Interpretation Dictionary with over 10,000 keywords you can search.
• Spirit Community has a unique Biblical and spiritual dream dictionary.
• DreamVisions has a ‘Dream Analyzer’, where you describe your dream in a form, and get back your dream’s symbols and their meanings.
• Free Dream Interpretation has a searchable Dream Dictionary of over 3000 dream meanings.

Ultimately, only you can interpret your dreams, using these different resources, and tailoring them to your unique situation. Some people think that the dictionary approach is outdated and irrelevant. DreamWiki is an interesting site for learning the art and technique of dream interpretation, but is relatively new with minimal content. It deviates from the dictionary-based approach and focuses on interpreting dream behaviors in the context of the dreamer’s life.

Best All Round Dream Sites

The following sites provide several resources related to dreams. They are useful for those who are really interested in learning more about their dreams.

Dreammoods

• Background information on dreams including research, dream types, recall tips and dream theory
• Searchable Dream Dictionary covering over 4000 keywords and symbols with 12000 different meanings.
• Quick guides for universally common dreams like flying, chasing, etc. and dream themes like food, birds, and characters.
• Discussion forum section with thousands of members in different forums for different types of dreams.
• Dream Bank with a hundred-odd real user dreams interpreted by experts.

Dream Central

• Dream Dictionary – limited, not searchable.
• Basics of Dream Analysis, covering themes and common symbols
• Discussion Forums for interpretation, nightmares, prophetic dreams, and discussing dream symbols

Dreamsleep.net

• Lots of articles about common types of dreams, universal dream symbols and experiences
• Easily accessible Dream Dictionary with alphabetical drop downs and quick links
• Free Online Dream Interpretation Forum where you can discuss dream interpretations with other members

Join Online Dream Communities

You can use an Online Sleep Tracker to keep track of your sleeping patterns, but it doesn’t help with dreams. The best way to keep in touch with the world of your dreams is to record them in a journal and join a community. While you can indeed record your dreams in a blogging platform like LiveJournal and join the Community of Dreams’, there are unique advantages to joining focused sites that have built a community to share, rate, and interpret each others dreams. They offer automated keyword tagging to dream symbols, classification of dreams, detection of trends, and so on.

Dream Journal lets you record your dreams privately or publicly. The site has over 9000 active users with over 120,000 dreams.

Dream Crowd has built an active social community where you can keep a dream log, share your dreams with others, and comment on other’s dreams. The site automatically tags keywords and phrases in your dreams that are hooked up to its dream dictionary for quick interpretation.

Unleash the Power of Lucid Dreams

Lucid dreams are dreams where you know that you are dreaming and can control your dream. This lets you dream your fantasies, have superhero powers, psychic powers, travel in space, or whatever you wish. There are a few sites devoted to the unique world of lucid dreams:

Lucid Dreaming is a popular social-networking community exploring and documenting lucid dreams.

Lucipedia is another good site for learning, recording, sharing, and discussing lucid dreams.

Dream Views has a good guide to developing the art of lucid dreaming, and also an active lucid dreamers forum.

So these are some of the sites to help you understand and enjoy your dreams meaningfully. Was your favorite dream site missed? Do let us know in the comments! And oh yes, sweet dreams!

Image credit: Chris Gin

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If my Mac isn’t performing any tasks and if I won’t be using it, I’ll set it to sleep. How to put mac to sleep? That’s equivalent to Standby mode on Windows computers. Since the PowerBook G4, all portable Macs including the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro have a separate sleep mode known as Safe Sleep.

Set as the default sleep mode for portable Macs in 2005, Safe Sleep is a combination of sleep and hibernation modes. At the initiation of sleep, the contents on your main memory will be stored as a sleep image on the RAM and written on the hard disk. The memory is kept powered but if the battery is depleted, the Mac will shut down. After an adapter is plugged in and the Mac is switch on, it will load the sleep image which was saved to the hard disk and restore your workspace.

While this approach is, as they call it — safe; the whole process of initiating sleep is slower because the sleep image has to be written to the hard disk. There are 2 other sleep modes you should know about.

Sleep Only

Also known as mode 0, this is the old-school sleep mode. Only the RAM is powered during sleep, nothing is written to the hard disk so the process of sleep initiation is much quicker and so is waking it up. The downside is the lack of a backup if the battery runs out of juice while sleeping. The advantage: sleep is almost instantaneous.

Hibernation Only

Also know as mode 1 (or 5, for secure virtual memory), the contents of the memory are written to the hard disk, the entire Mac powers down. In this mode, sleep initiation takes the same amount of time Safe Sleep. Waking up also takes slightly longer than the normal sleep mode since it has to read the sleep image from the hard disk. This mode is equivalent to Hibernate on Windows computers.

I use this mode when I have to leave my Mac idle for longer durations but don’t really want to shut it down and also to save power. The duration to start up from this mode is somewhere in between a normal boot and waking from sleep — around 10 seconds.

On waking, a progress bar will be displayed as the sleep image is read from the hard disk to restore your workspace.

Image from Apple KB

And now, SmartSleep

Brought to you by the same guy who developed JollysFastVNC, SmartSleep combines the best of both worlds. It even defeats Safe Sleep at its own game.

SmartSleep is a preference pane which will allow you to set the sleep mode you desire (described above).

In addition to that, it introduces a new sleep mode: um, SmartSleep. Using SmartSleep, the ‘Sleep Only’ mode is used to put your Mac to sleep. In the case that the battery level drops below 20%, it will switch to Safe Sleep and write the sleep image to the hard disk. SmartSleep makes your Mac sleep quicker without jeopardizing the safety of your data.

What you should know

While Safe Sleep is slow, it is very useful. For instance, during sleep, the battery can be safely removed/changed without worrying about losing data since it has already been written to the hard disk. SmartSleep does not replace this feature because hibernation only kicks in at 20% battery level.

How long has your Mac gone without restarting? Which sleep mode do you use? Let us know in the comments.

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I’ve been looking into some relaxing sounds which apparently allows us to relax and slip into a more relaxed state of mind by influencing brain waves. Basically when our brain works, there’s an electrical impulse generated which runs a specific frequency. This frequency changes according to our state of mind: alertness (alpha), relax (beta), drowsiness (theta) and deep sleep (delta).

With an external stimulus (in this case we’re using sound/music) we can shift our state of mind from alpha to beta or hopefully theta if you’re trying to fall asleep; or to alpha if you’re trying to wake yourself up.

I’ve found several ways to achieve this and I’m going to list them out here:

Sounds to relax or fall asleep

Pzizz

Many Mac and Windows users should be familiar with this application. It’s well known for helping insomniacs fall asleep and also to get the best out of power napping. Pzizz may not be free but they do offer two sample 15-minute MP3’s to get a short preview of how their application is like. One of the two MP3’s is to help you fall asleep and the other is the energizer module.

Hopefully, listening to 15 minutes of the sleep module will get you relaxed enough to fall asleep. If not, there’s always the “Repeat” button. If you’re a serious insomniac who is looking for a way to help you get some kip, this should be it.

iSerenity

iSerenity is a website which has pre-recorded ambient soundscapes like falling rain, ocean waves, thunder and the sound of a crackling fire among many others. Think of it as something like an online sound machine.

There’s no need to download anything, just click on each sound to listen to it. And it loops indefinitely.

SonicMood

Another online sound machine is SonicMood. It’s a little different from iSerenity in the sense that the sounds they offer aren’t exactly “ambient”. It’s more like a blend of MIDI instruments to form a relaxing sound piece.

Similarly to iSerenity, you can listen to SonicMood through your web browser. They package their sounds in different “moods”, most of which are to help you relax. My favourites are Japanese Wind Chimes and Lighthouse.

dlooch Dashboard widget [Mac Only]

If you’re not big on ambient sounds, you may find dlooch an interesting approach to relaxing. All it does is loop soothing sounds by fading them in and out. At first, they sound rather mechanical but slowly the relaxation kicks in if you allow it to play for a while.

Podcasts

One shouldn’t overlook the beauty of podcasts when searching for ambient sounds. There are quite a few like Dark Ambient [iTunes link] and White Noise Lounge [iTunes link] that provides soothing soundscapes. Just do a simple search in iTunes store for “ambient” and scroll through the results. You’ll be amazed at what you might find.

To wake up!

Back in 2006, an interesting MP3 arose on the internet which supposedly replaces your morning cuppa joe and its aptly called – Coffee Replacement. To some people, it sounds like a washing machine winding up in frequency with some birds chirping in the background. It may or may not work for you – and in my book, there’s never a good replacement for that steaming cup of coffee in the morning.

However, this is definitely worth a try if you’re cutting down on coffee or need something to pick you up if whenever you’re feeling sleepy.

The 20 minute MP3 was lost in the sea of all the file sharing sites, most of the links appeared to be dead. By chance, I managed to find a live link and decided to share it here with our MakeUseOf readers.

Coffee Replacement – 20 min MP3, 27MB

WARNING: Coffee Replacement should NOT be used by people who have any forms of seizures or epilepsy; suffering from cardiac disorders or use pacemakers; or take psychoactive drugs or stimulants.

Sounds to concentrate

If you’re easily distracted by the noises in your environment and you aren’t rich enough to get one of these bad boys, then you may want to take a look at white noise. Or rather, listen.

White noise is a signal which contains equal power of a set of frequencies within the audible bandwidth of human beings. In a nutshell, it’s a collection of all the frequencies of sounds we can hear. It is more commonly used for masking sound, i.e. blocking out unwanted surrounding sounds like chatter or street noise. Some even use it to mask tinnitus, a ear condition where a person will constantly hear ringing or buzzing and often causes headaches. White noise is best appreciated when using stereo headphones.

For Mac users, there’s Noisy – a simple white and pink noise generator. Windows users may want to take a look at a free application called White Noise Sleep System. For everyone else, there’s Simplynoise – an online white, pink and red noise generator.

So there, all the sounds you’ll need to help you feel relaxed, fall asleep, concentrate or to wake up without that morning coffee. Let me know how it works for you. And like always, if there are any other applications you use which are not listed here, please share them with us in the comments.

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So I’ve found 3 little gems which does around the same thing. They might not be as fully-loaded as Awaken, but they still do the job and they are free!

1. iTunes Alarm

iTunes Alarm is one of the most recommended applications for those who can’t afford Awaken. The concept is the same. If you want to play some music before you go off to bed, click on “Sleep” and it will ask for the amount of time before it puts your Mac into sleep mode. That’s the quick method. If you’d rather just pause iTunes, a new ‘Stop’ alarm has to be created.

You may create an unlimited number of alarms, of which they may be set to repeat on any day of the week. With each alarm that starts to play iTunes, you can set a ‘Snooze’ period of your liking, the volume level that the music plays at; and the playlist from which to play the music (or you may set it to play songs at random).

iTunes Alarm has to be open in order to be able to play/pause your music. So if you accidentally quit the application, you might miss your alarm (and be late for work – yikes!). Plus if you set your Mac to sleep after the timer has run out, iTunes Alarm has the ability to wake it to play your next alarm. Pretty cool stuff.

2. iTaf

Another alternative is iTaf. The application is only slightly different from iTunes Alarm. Every alarm event which you create starts playing from iTunes and can be set to stop playing after a certain period of time. So, instead of hitting the ‘Snooze’ or ‘Stop’ button to turn your music off, you can enjoy it while getting dressed in the morning and leave for work without bothering about it. iTaf will then automatically pause iTunes and sleep itself (or shut down) after the time frame has elapsed.

One thing that puts iTaf above iTunes Alarm is the ability to shut down your Mac. It also has more superior scheduling options like setting a single day off from a weekly alarm (comes in handy when it’s your birthday and you don’t want to be woken up!)

3. iTunesTimer Widget

Lastly, iTunesTimer is a bare-bone, simple Dashboard widget which can only start playing your iTunes, pause it or sleep your Mac. It is a one off timer which doesn’t have any scheduling function and it doesn’t repeat or snooze. You control how long you want to play your music with the slider, which is not very accurate (I couldn’t get the timer to set at 10 minutes) but I guess that’s not very important. The catch with this little gem is its simplicity.

I also wrote about Snooze in my article “Dashboard Widgets You Can’t Live Without“. All it does is basically sleeps my Mac when the time is up. Actually, it’s got no music function, but I just wanted to add it in as an option.

If you’re a Windows user, Aibek wrote an article about addons for your iTunes, although sadly, alarms are not one of them. If you’re looking for an alternative to iTunes, here’s Mark’s article about Songbird.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

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