Spamming anime pictures to prevent OLED monitor burn-in

Last month my monitor broke so I upgraded to a new one with an OLED screen. It was quite expensive so I want it to last a long time. After doing some research I had some interesting experiences related to preventing burn-in and other considerations.

Slowing panel degredation by reducing brightness

Since OLED screens have higher contrast, the screen does not have to be as bright to see text clearly. I once set my brightness to 20%, forgot to change it back, and didn’t notice for several days. When viewing movies or games you can toggle HDR and get the full brightness. Since all pixels have lower brightness, the difference between bright and dark spots is reduced, resulting in reduced burn-in.

Note: many of these programs are for windows os

Spamming custom themes and wallpapers

I like having colorful themes that are constantly changing on everything, but now I have the excuse of preventing panel burn-in.

Desktop Background:

• I use john’s background switcher for choosing a new wallpaper out of my collection every hour. I also like using wallpaper engine or lively wallpaper for animated backgrounds, when I feel like it. But these wallpapers only ever get shown on my second monitor or in between the gaps if I have several programs tiling on screen at once. Also, I don’t have any files on the desktop because the program launcher/start menu is more convenient and looks better.

taskbar:

• Another idea is to set the taskbar accent color to be chosen from the desktop wallpaper. Or you can use the program Translucenttb to make the taskbar translucent. Since the desktop is frequently changing, the taskbar will also be changing color, hopefully averaging out to the same as the rest of the screen.

Vscode/Vscodium

• There are so many pretty color themes on vscode. Every time I install a new theme, it looks nice and fresh for a while, but then I get busy coding or dealing with whatever dumb issue made me open my editor so I never bother to change it for months. So I set up an extension to automatically pick a theme for me every time I open the program. I also make sure it chooses a from a list of light themes during the day and dark themes during the night.

Browser:

• There are many pretty themes for Firefox and other browsers in the extension store, so the tabs and navigation bar are not just one big white rectangle getting burned in. You can also use an extension such as Firemonkey and install custom CSS themes for website you frequently visit. I also made a few for websites I host here.

By regularly switching between many themes, the UI elements for many programs will be randomly chainging colors instead of constantly white. On average, these static elements will be worn down a similar amount to the rest of the screen.

Enforcing light and dark theme

I like using light themes when there is sunlight in my room, and dark themes are much more comfortable to look at at night. Luckily, switching between light and dark themes is also useful for preventing panel burn in. Many programs and websites do not have colorful themes, and even if they do, the text is usually either white or black. By using light theme during the day and dark theme during the night, the wear on areas with static text elements will be much more even.

System:

• I use the app Auto Dark Mode to change the system theme at sunrise and sunset. This changes the color of text on the taskbar. Many programs also automatically choose a light or dark theme based on the system theme.
• If a program has a light or dark theme but does not follow the system theme, you can write a script to change the program’s theme, and set Auto Dark Mode to run this script whenever it changes the system theme.

Vscode:

• see previous section

browser:

• I use the Dark Reader extension to apply a dark theme to websites that don’t have one at night. It works well on almost all websites. However, make sure to disable it for website that already have a dark theme, otherwise it will put its own dark theme on top which looks bad.
• Sometimes, a website you frequently visit has a dark and light theme but does not automatically follow the system theme. That theme setting is almost always stored as a cookie, so you can create a simple userscript using Firemonkey to modify it. For example, for fandom.com:

// ==UserScript==
// @name fandom dark theme
// @match            *://*.fandom.com/*
// @version          1.0
// ==/UserScript==

let theme=window.matchMedia && window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: light)').matches;
theme='theme='+(theme? 'light':'dark');
if(!document.cookie.includes(theme)){
  document.cookie=theme;
  location.reload();
}

Command line HDR toggle

High dynamic range is good for movies and games, but messes up colors for other programs. I found this program to let me enable or disable HDR from the command line. It is useful to put in a script alongside commands for overclocking, enabling game-specific hotkeys, and more.

Conclusion

I don’t know if any of this actually makes a difference lol. It’s probably not a big deal. My previous monitor broke after four years anyway.