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What's a setting that you'd recommend?
Kind of an awkward title, but I'm talking about settings for your phone, your OS, your coffee maker, etc.
With all the tech in our lives, and with so many devices and software having quite a robust set of options for how they work, it's easy for us to not even know that something is available. How many cool things are we missing out on if we're just accepting the defaults?
So, what's a setting, on anything you have or use regularly, that you recommend to others?
What makes it so worthwhile?
Another useful setting for MacOS users is enabling the file path bar in Finder. Enable it with option+command+P or going to View > Show Path Bar in the Finder top bar.
MacOS does a lot of nonsense to obscure where a folder is in the file system so it can feel disorienting to know where your folders and files are in relation to each other. Enabling the path bar shows you the absolute file path of any folder you open in Finder. This makes using a Mac feel less disorienting than it does by default.
Movie Mode on your TV Heres Tom Cruise explaining it
More than just motion smoothing, I'd recommend searching "rtings calibration settings <tv model>" and using whatever settings they suggest. OLED TVs ship with settings that blow out / saturate colors to make it "HDR-ish" and it looks atrocious on animated content in particular.
I remember when my parents bought an expensive TV years ago. One of those curved ones. So I came over to check it out. I was like "WTF is wrong this TV? Why does it look this way? Like a soap opera? How much did you pay for this thing??" And they didn't have a soap opera on. They didn't notice it or at least didn't care, but I saw it right away. I remembered my mom watching soap operas as a kid and I really disliked how "smooth" they looked compared to other shows that looked "rougher."
So I spent at least half an hour just fiddling with all the settings, until I came across a setting that said "240hz." Turned it off, or rather turned it down to like 75hz or 60hz and and bam, everything looked nice and "rough" again. Always thought that was a terrible setting. Especially one to have on by default.
That setting, whatever name it goes by, drives me nuts. First time I noticed it was on a vacation when I was watching an animated show on Netflix, because it screwed up with the motion.
When I looked it up, apparently it's made with sports in mind...? No clue if it helps with that, but I hate that so many TVs use it as a default.
Some tvs call it motion blur. Motion blur is good, I don't want to have to process that many frames that quickly.
Reduce Interruptions focus mode on iOS and MacOS devices.
It eliminates most notifications from alerting you unless it’s a phone call or the Apple AI decides it’s a time sensitive message. Plus you still can check the notifications pulldown menu to see what notifications you missed. You still have notifications, but you get to see them on your terms instead of having an app decide it gets to distract you.
It’s less isolating than Do Not Disturb, but still ends up with you not being disturbed or distracted regularly.
I just disable almost all apps notifications. I leave text messages, calls, and work emails/messages on, the rest I have to go into the app to see anything. I started doing this when some apps decided to abuse notifications to get me into the app, and I liked it so much I started doing it for almost everything.
This is the way. I honestly don't know why anyone allows notifications from anything that isn't a messaging app, or maybe scheduling / reminder type deals.
There once was a time when I decided to allow notifications from other apps, opting to shut them off only after getting advertisements / engagement farming / other bullshit. But after a while I realized that they almost universally abuse the privilege, and now they only get turned on if I am absolutely sure that I actually need them. And let me tell you, the odds are stacked against them.
I like this! For Android friends, we can set this up too. Go to Settings > Modes and create a new mode called "Reduce Interruptions" (or whatever you want). In the settings for the new mode, turn off "Allow all notifications" - this will add notification visibility controls to the "Display settings" menu at the bottom. From there you can customize it as you wish with these options:
I think you need to tweak some things under each notification filter category too, otherwise I believe it will just block all notifications by default. But most categories have an "allow all/everyone" option so it shouldn't be too cumbersome.
This is on Android 16 (specifically GrapheneOS, but they're basically identical in cases like this), so it may look a little different if you're on an older version or a different skin (e.g. Samsung's One UI).
I set every app on my phone to a different notification sound. I also assigned a unique sound to close family members' texts. There's no rhyme or reason to it, but the upshot is that for the notifications I get all the time, I have learned what the sounds are. That means I know without picking up the phone whether it's important. If my wife or daughter texts, I can check it right away, but I can ignore task reminders or pings from email/slack if I'm in a meeting. In general, it helps me from not be distracted by my phone when I'm doing something else.
Refrigerator: 3c
Freezer: -20c
POSIX-compliant mode on everything else
Having an "Extra Dim" shortcut in the Android top bar is handy. Along with Flashlight and Rotate Screen
with iOS we’d do Accessibility / Display / Reduce White Point.
i also mapped a triple tap on the back to turn on the flashlight at 1% instead of the normal lowest setting. way better for night when you’re not ready to use the face of God to find your water.
How do you adjust the default brightness for the flashlight? This is in iOS?
iOS -- and yes and no. Its triggered with an action (Accessibility > Touch > Tap Back) -- the shortcut is literally
Toggle Flashlightwith the brightness set really low but not all the way down.Its a shame --- in the jailbreaking days we had 'Amber', which turned on only one of the lights, giving a perfect warm light. I don't know why they don't let us have that.
1 - If you have a smartwatch, turn off all notifications - or at least, leave only for the most important apps.
This sounds obvious now that I'm writing it, but my apple watch became a source of stress which I didn't notice until I was groaning every time I felt my pulse vibrate. I felt that this was more distrating and disruptive than my own phone
2 - Not really a setting, but clean up your phone homescreen and only show the most important apps. Hide everything else. Use search whenever you need to access those hidden apps.
This helps in two ways:
The notifications were the main reason I got rid of my Apple Watch. My watch would vibrate to alert me to text messages when I was currently texting that person on my phone. It felt like having a toddler pull at my shirt when I was having a conversation.
Not just your watch, your phone as well. At least, that is my experience. The majority of notifications on my phone are silent without vibration. If something is urgent people will call me anyway.
For a lot of applications I have actively turned off notifications. For example, I have discord on my phone but will only know if I got pinged when I open the app.
Night Light in Windows. There is an option in MacOS too but I forget the name. While the option is meant to reduce the blue light at night, I think it's just good to have this on all the time if you work on the computer all day (and if you don't require super accurate colors). The display will be a lot more yellow, but it the payoff is huge in terms of reducing eye strain. Night mode (dark mode) is also good for this, but not an option on every single application. To me dark mode makes things harder to read too, especially in spreadsheets.
Not so much one option, but in general micro-managing your notification settings. Too many distractions these days! Ask yourself if you really need each app to pop up and interrupt you. Kill notifications per-app, and decide if each app needs to show: badges? play sounds? show up on the lock screen? show banners? Your attention is precious currency for apps, so guard it well.
Do Not Disturb: similar to the last point. It's a good idea to limit screen time before bed. Maybe set Do not disturb to start as early as 8:00 PM and end as late as whenever you are done breakfast, for example. Can always set specific contacts or apps as exceptions to this in the settings.
Access to photos, camera, microphone: guard this well. Apps love nothing more but to get their hands on all your data. Does an app really need your full photo library? Maybe you only give it access to the photos you need it to access.
It's called "Night Shift" on iOS and macOS. Here are the relevant support pages to enable the feature:
Android has a similar feature.
On Linux, GNOME and Plasma have their own implementations of the feature. For other desktop environments or window managers, one could use:
I use Gammastep. I shared my config in a previous comment:
https://tildes.net/~tech/1pbq/i_am_new_to_mac_os_give_me_your_favorite_or_preferred_settings_tools#comment-g3m5
With Gammastep, I have set up automatic light/dark theme switching when the sun sets or rises, for all the programs that I use. I also have a block on my status bar that I can click to force-switch light or dark mode across the system, regardless of time of day.
This one is kind of obtuse to explain, and I definitely can’t help folks find it on a case-by-case basis, but both my wife’s and my car have door unlock default settings wherein, when your car is locked and you have the keyless remote in your pocket, touching the driver door handle unlocked only the driver’s door, but touching the passenger side door handle unlocked every car door. This is nice in theory for individuals who want to only unlock their door when getting in to drive, but in a couples / family context, it’s super annoying. The driver gets to the car first, unlocks the door, gets in, then manually has to unlock the rest of the doors for their passengers.
So, my setting tip is that if you find yourself in a similar situation, look into your car’s system settings (usually buried several screens deep in whatever UI it has) and see if you can toggle your car to unlock every door no matter where the touch comes from. We were able to do this on my wife’s 2014 Toyota, and haven’t tried with my car yet but I intend to look for it this week. Game-changer!
I got a 2020 Ridgeline earlier this year, and it has the touch to unlock, touch to start, and auto-lock when you walk away. Between that and the wireless Android Auto connection (adapter), I don't have to ever take anything out of my pockets. It's very civilized.
I will say there are times when I want to leave the truck unlocked, and I basically can't. It really aggressively keeps locking itself. That can be a little annoying.
I don't think that this is an option on my car, but it's OK because that setting you like is just how it is. But I actually kind of wish it weren't. I kind of liked how my old Nissan leaf was; press the button on the handle once and it unlocked the driver's door, press it twice to unlock all of them.
Turn off mouse acceleration. It inhibits your ability to develop the muscle memory to quickly move the mouse cursor precisely.
Make sure you have the Do Not Track signal being sent out by your browser. Especially if you live somewhere with laws requiring honoring of it.
Dark mode. All the time, every thing with a backlight. Because the less you stare at bright lights the better.
Semi-related: Disable any notification for all apps that aren't used for urgent communication. Push notifications are the popup of the 21st century. I have a related blog post percolating: Make things harder to use.
If your hybrid or electric car has a "comfort" mode, make sure it's set to that. The efficiency differences between that and Eco are minimal, and your passengers will thank you by not having your car lurch to a stop.
Unless you're printing out for something life-changing or a photograph, use draft mode.
Actually, you probaly shouldn't enable Do Not Track. The services which you would like to obey it, use it as a way to fingerprint your browser, and since barely anybody enables the setting, it ironically makes your fingerprint a lot more unique. It also turns out most browsers are phasing it out.
And I'm sure that has nothing to do with most browsers being owned by massive tech giants that lose more money now that more laws are passing that require honoring it.
There is no legitimate reason to remove support other than 'it puts advertisers at legal risk for not respecting it. The fingerprinting problem would be solved by having it in a proper settings wizard.
Of course, telemetry and tracking will always be opt-out until we put the axe in the back of online advertising.
I adore dark mode but I know at least one person who gets eye pain from it. My suggestion would be to spend a week with it and see if you experience more or less eye strain.
I can't stand dark mode in the most apps on a desktop. My current solution is to use not-so bright lamp behind monitor to smooth light contrast in the night/evening. It can be related to astigmatism, I read at least few comments from some people with astigmatism that they also prefer light mode.
I seem to drift in and out of dark / light mode on desktop. I find myself being jaded with dark mode from time to time so I re-theme everything to light, and go 'wow, this is great', and keep it for a bit before going back to dark modes.
The dark mode periods seem to last a little longer than light ones maybe, but it's fairly even.
It's better on KDE as I have more theming options, light mode is less used on my Mac as it's not so controllable.
Reminds me of how on my Mac, I just invert the colors a lot to the point I remapped that to be Command+, for convenience. Sometimes to make a "dark mode", sometimes to make a "light mode".
I absolutely abhor dark mode. I prefer to actually see what's on my screen. I especially hate it when my students are using their computers in dark mode and I need to see the code they're writing but they're all using dark mode with their especially low contrast syntax highlighting color schemes. And if you're not running on an OLED display, the backlight has to be run extra hard since the vast majority of the pixels are obscuring said light.
Not sure if this counts as a setting but site search shortcuts in browsers (I mostly use chrome so this works, but IIRC firefox and others support it as well).
I have shortcuts set up for any sites I regularly search (Wikipedia, Youtube, etc.) and the skipped steps of navigating to a site is remarkably handy. Type
Ctrl-t w bananaand I have the wikipedia page open.Auto-brightness - on your TV, on your phone, on your monitor, on your Steam Deck, everywhere where it's available. There is zero reason to burn out your eyes.
If you are lucky and have notification RGB LED on your phone, set different colors for missed call, SMS/IM and e-mail. That way just one quick glance tells you how needed your attention is. Don't have RGB notification LED? Unbelievable that we don't have it today as we had it already in 2009. Every phone should have at least normal notification LED if you ask me.
Not really setting, but more of an advice - tidy up your passwords! From people around me I know how messy password management gets without password manager. Especially when people save their passwords into browser that isn't synced up and they find out the don't have them after reinstall... Or if they don't even know their Google account name after buying new phone, let alone password... Tidy it up, you are doing this for you!
Auto-brightness is one of the first things I turn off on a new tv/monitor. I find it very distracting having the brightness noticeably jump around as the displayed content's brightness changes, even at the lowest/mildest setting. I do spend time "calibrating" baseline brightness and other settings (just by eye and RTings guide, no calibration equipment)
Phone auto-brightness seems to just be based on ambient lighting (or it's much better / more subtle than TVs if it's signal based), so I usually leave that one on. It occasionally settles on an absolutely stupid brightness occasionally for no clear reason and I have to adjust manually, but overall its worth it there.
I have Panasonic plasma TV from 2011 and it works like a charm with auto-brightness. It is also placed on really bad spot where it gets shade and also sunlight throughout the day and it handles it pretty well. If I set it manually it wouldn't work for my usecase. That said I knew this will be controversial take and there will be people who does exactly the opposite thing. And it is fine if it works for you!
I don't have monitor with auto brightness and I hate not having it. Menu isn't that bad but I hate fiddling with it. It doesn't have a dedicated button for say "profile switching" either to quickly set different value. And having it basically in the same situation as the TV I can really see how useful it would be to have auto-brightness. The thing is I have really bad positioning of my workspace where lighting conditions vary wildly throughout the day.
Phones (and Steam Deck) does pretty good job with that with occasional hiccup as you said.
The whole thing is that I know people who sets their brightness manually to stupid values (like 100%) and the TV or phone is unwatchable, not even mentioning how stupid it is in the evening when there is no other light in the room (or just very light ambient lighting).