If you’ve ever been to a Las Vegas casino, you may have noticed the rows of slot machines sporting 120hz displays and hyper-saturated colors. Looking at these things stimulates a part of my brain, it wakes me up, it’s like eating candy with my eyeballs. Las Vegas casinos have this down to a science, and some people just don’t want to be anywhere else.

Ad displays on NYC subways seem to be 60hz and hyper-saturated as well, but the advertizers making material for the NYC subways don’t get paid to optimize for attention as slot machine designers / consultants do, so some of the videos are 30 FPS anyway. Eventually, these spaces are going to optimize their game as well.

Phones follow suite. The saturation on an iphone and flagship android phones are /intense/. I think this has two effects over a long period of usage:

1. It makes users more prone to being addicted and habituated to phone use, on a sense level, no cognition required to pull the dopamine lever (have you seen toddlers in public play with these things?)
2. You biological neural network re-adjusts as it’s exposed to the hyper-saturation. In effect, everything outside the screen seems under-saturated. Colors and texture become un-noticed.

Many people see greyscale when they look at my phone display. It is in-fact 25% of the original saturation, but the colors are too subtle to notice for the over-exposed eye. It’s still enough for me to use apps that encode some information in color, like GPS.

Here’s how to reduce the color saturation on some devices:

IOS: “Settings” > “Accessibility” > “Display and text size” > “Color filters” > “Greyscale”
Then set the intensity that you want.

You can add a “Color Filters” shortcut to the control center when you need to toggle it:
Control center > “+” at the top right > “Add a control” at the bottom > “Color Filters”

You could experiment with leaning off the saturation over some period of time. Start with 50% saturation, then each week decrease it by 5% until you’re close to the threshold of noticing the colors for utility purposes.

Android: It might depend on the vendor. You might or might not have an option to decrease the saturation to a certain percentage, only to full greyscale.

On stock android:

First you need “Developer options” enabled. Setting > About phone Then rapidly tap on the “Build number” 7 times, and a pop-up will appear indicating that developer options is being enabled.

Then with “Developer options” enabled: Settings > Developer options > Simulate color space > Monochramacy

You can add a shortcut to toggle it: Pixel phones:

• Long press home screen
• Select settings
• Drag the settings shortcut to the home screen
• Select the settings section for “Simulate color space”

Email me for errata and other techniques specific to other vendors and devices.

When you need to reball a BGA chip in a pinch, sometimes you are left with the most ghetto of options. A soldering iron, flux, alcohol, tweezers and… a 25 USD heat gun. If you have lead solder balls, you can pull it off.

Applying flux to a BGA chip helps to stick the balls in-place on the pads. It is necessary to apply just the right amount of flux. Too little flux, and the balls don’t stick; too much flux, the balls start to attract each other and escape the BGA pads. It’s kind of a headache to deal with.

If you do add too much flux, then apply a few drops of alcohol or acetone to the BGA complex. This will dissolve some of the flux, and also distribute the rest of it over the surface of the chip. It shouldn’t disturb the balls because these solvents have weaker surface tension.

As for the rest of the reballing task, this video does a good job at showing it.