Night vision on a Mac!

It’s cold in New Delhi, especially at night. Without central heating, sitting on a chair and working on a desktop at night is agonizing so for the past few days, I’ve been working in bed using the MacBook pro at night. This has created a new problem. The brightness of the 13″ LED, which attracted me to the MacBook Pro, is now a distraction for my sweet wife who prefers to sleep while I work. In fact, the bright glow is enough to light up the entire room. I could even see our dog making faces at me, he couldn’t sleep so I kept bribing him biscuits to keep quiet.

Some Google searches later, I ended up with the simplest of solutions. Just press Command + Option + Control + 8 on your mac and you’re done. The screen inverts colors to a negative format, so the white and light gray background of most windows become black and light gray.

The control of contrast in this negative display format is within System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Display. I’ve really never had to change any settings there.  Pressing the combination of four keys works both ways to revert back to original display.

It takes some time getting used to this new screen format but it’s definitely soothing and less disturbing. I’ve lately been using this negative format during daytime.

Now if I could figure out a way of getting a biscuit back from the dog…