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Shift display dimming settings with time of day System
I have a Mac mini in the bedroom which we use for watching movies and controlling the music throughout the apartment. During the day, I want it to show a screensaver (a Flickr slideshow using ShuffleSaver) for a while before blanking the screen. But at night, I want it to go dark quickly so it doesn't keep us up. I put this in root's crontab to do it automatically:
0 6 * * * /usr/bin/pmset displaysleep 20 
0 20 * * * /usr/bin/pmset displaysleep 1
[robg adds: The easiest way to set root's crontab, if you're not an experienced command line user, is to use Cronnix. We have two other hints dealing with changing the display sleep times.]
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Shift display dimming settings with time of day | 6 comments | Create New Account
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Shift display dimming settings with time of day
Authored by: mankoff on Apr 12, '07 07:38:43AM
Good hint. I ran this for a while on my laptop, but sometimes it didn't work. I realized it is because it was sometimes asleep when the cron job should have run, and then was taking too long to go to sleep at night, or dimming too quickly during the day. My solution is to run the cron scripts every hour, like so:

0 7-21 * * * /usr/bin/pmset -c displaysleep 30
0 0-6,22,23 * * * /usr/bin/pmset -c displaysleep 3

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[ Reply to This | # ]

I've had bad luck with this, I think...
Authored by: lullabud on Apr 12, '07 09:33:26AM

I was doing this for a month or two on my G5, but decided to disable it because I'd often come home and find my display awake with no screensaver. I couldn't find the root cause, but I suspected that it was caused by changing the dimming prefs while the screen was already asleep. I didn't test it out though, and it could've been something else causing it, like Vine Server.app, which is something I frequently run.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Actually, I was doing it differently
Authored by: lullabud on Apr 12, '07 09:38:01AM
Looks like I replied too quickly without fully opening my eyes this morning, I had done it a slightly different way, via the user crontab with:
## Display dimming experiment
30 7 * * *      /usr/bin/pmset force dim 60
0 9 * * *       /usr/bin/pmset force dim 1
30 17 * * *     /usr/bin/pmset force dim 60
0 0 * * *       /usr/bin/pmset force dim 1
I had done it this way so as to not override the system defaults that I set up in the Energy Saver pref pane.

[ Reply to This | # ]
Not a very green tip :-(
Authored by: palahala on Apr 12, '07 11:21:40AM

Technically, the tip might be OK.

But unless you're unfortunate to have to be in the bedroom all day and are actually watching the slideshow: why not simply shut off the computer during the day instead? Help save some energy!



[ Reply to This | # ]
Brilliant!
Authored by: Kalessin on Apr 13, '07 02:29:36AM

You know when you don't know you need something because never occurred to you that it could be done? My display is set to blank after one minute. That's it. Thanks for this!



[ Reply to This | # ]
Question
Authored by: Brad Puett on Jul 24, '07 01:58:14AM

Anyone know what the setting would be for "Never" ? My guess was "0", but it doesn't seem to work consistantly :^(



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