During the day we setup our monitor to be bright, so that it show up with the stronger daylight. However, few of us will remember to turn it down at night.

That is how you get eye strain. What you really should do it turn down the brightness when you turn on the lights in the evening. Of course that is trouble and few of us will ever remember. I could also add the point that the light from our standard house lights is not the same as daylight, but you really should checkout my opinions on the different types of white light at CameraSecrets.co.uk.

However, you need not worry about this problems any more as there is a free piece of software to turn up and down the colour of your computer screen for you.

You will find it at http://stereopsis.com/flux/ . After installation, you simple let the software know where you are on the earth (my PC does not have GPS), and it will change the brightness and soften the light for you. If you need a 'true' colour for some work then there is an override from the controls that sit on the toolbar.

Available for PC, Mac and Linux!

One of the most frequent comments i hear when people return from a break is. 'My Computer seems so slow!'

The Internet is full of suggestions and software which promises to speed up your PC, so i thought I better share the tool that I use.

AVG PC Tune-up is a simple tool from AVG. AVG is a good antivirus company, and is most known for its simple AVG Free application.  AVG PC Tune-up is really quite simple is what it offers.

• System Scan
  I run this every few days. This operation cleans up all the temporary and junk files that windows like to leave around. it also cleans up fragmented files.
• Disk Maintenance
  This allows you to specifically defragment your drives
• Free Up Space
  This tool is great for removing duplicate files. It is amazing how much space you can waste, and confusion you can cause, when you leave multiple copies of the same file on your disk. This tool is just the job to bring everything into line.
• Software Control
  Many software programs can be run on startup, and many are really not needed if they are used infrequently. You can remove software from the list.
• System Tweaks
  AVG suggest small change to your system that will speed up operation.
• Disaster Recovery
  Don't rely on this tool, but if you do loose a file by mistake and can not find it in the recycle bin, this tool may help you recover it.
• Registry Maintenance
  The Registry keeps information about the launching and settings of software on your PC. It can get fragmented, and derangement will speed up it loading in a similar way to DeFragmentation of a disk.
• System Status
  This is useful for knowing the settings of the machine, especially when you need technical support
• Privacy
  If you are concerned about leaving 'traces' of files behind after you wanted them deleted then this tool will help you. You can 'shred' an individual file, or the whole of a drive. The latter removes all traces of any deleted files but dos not touch those being used. The erase history option will remove your tracks for web surfing etc
• Speed up Internet
  This tool provides settings to speed up internet connection, al though faster broadband makes little change to this.

Glossary of some Terms.

Fragmented files – Fragmented files is caused when the computer tries to save a file on the disk and finds the space for it is not big enough, it will therefore save part of the file in one part of the drive, and the rest somewhere else.  As a disk becomes more fragmented, more files are spread around all over the drive. This causes performance issues because the disk head takes more time when it needs to jump around the disk drive to read a file.  De-fragmenting the drive will bring files back into one place on the disk.

So much of web design is creating sub-concious messages. If you don't follow the rules, you can loose a visitor because your site just 'does not feel right' One of the biggest mistakes for self made or updated web sites is bad use of colour. I am not saying that people should not update their own sites. I encourage that they do, and regularly. Whenever you add content to a site you need to check that it will Look good.  you may find this colour wheel a useful way of checking the colours on your site, or for choosing a new colour mix. Of course the colour rules work for all type of medium, web and print. The Colour Wheel