I often find myself in a stealth-like combat zone (home) where secrecy and the element of surprise is priceless (blogging late at night). Darkness can often provide the best natural cover in a covert environment such as this. DarkAdapted will help take the bright edge off your computer screen by adjusting your gamma so you can continue to blog, work, or generally download stuff willy-nilly all night to your hearts content. If you're like me, you don't hit the fridge for a midnight snack, you're still up at midnight blogging, coding, designing, or snacking on downloads. If you must keep the monitor brightness on the down-low or the natives get restless, then DarkAdapted will be your friend. It comes with different colored presets and allows you to make your own with varying levels of brightness and color saturation for customizable gamma-based screen-darkening. It doesn't darken beyond what is readable, but helps to get the brightness down to a manageable level. Coupled with a darker Windows theme, DarkAdapted is perfect for the late night devious activities you have planned. All of you hacker-elite out there are asking why I don't just go and adjust my monitor for brightness and be done with it, right? The answer is that I don't like to mess with my monitor every dang time I want to darken it down a bit (which is daily). DarkAdapted also allows setting up a custom keystroke to bring your PC or Mac back to full brightness. You now effectively have an easy way to get the best of both worlds (light/darkness) with little to no futzing with your beloved behemoth display. It is easy to throw this app on your USB drive and take it with you since it doesn't install anything and lives in an executable. Trust me, the next time you're in a live-blogging in a foxhole and need it dark, you'll wish you had downloaded it.

Do Google's bright white background and big, colorful logo offend your more somber sensibilities? Google Dark might be the cure for what ails you. It's a Greasemonkey script that replaces the Google home page with a darker, and some might say a little more slick, version. In addition, it makes the logo a little smaller and gives it an updated look, and makes the fonts a big bigger. All very Web 2.0. Unfortunately, Google Dark only transforms the Google home page and not results pages or any other Google sites. I would love to see a more complete version of this script that does all of the above, but I realize that might be asking a bit much.