I am fussy about the brightness/contrast of my monitor. I dunno, maybe I have sensitive eyes, or whatever.. Anyways, at night, I turn the contrast of my monitor waaaay down, and then during the daytime when I can barely see it with my nighttime setting, I turn it back up again. I use the OSD on the monitor to do this, which means I have to move, and press buttons hehehe.. Seriously though:

I had a cool little thing for Windoze called 'Volumouse' which was chock full of semi-useless mouse/hotkey desktop abilities, but the ONE thing I configured it for, was when my mouse pointer was hovering over the taskbar, I could scroll the screen brightness/contrast up and down instantly using the mouse wheel. Very handy!

Has anyone seen a gadget for Linux that can do the same thing for me, or have an idea how I might implement this functionality myself?

Thanks

nvidia or ati graphic ? afaik both have sliders for brightness/contrast in their setting tool, which you can call via k-menu/system for example. You needn't get up or do any hard work for that.

If this is still not convienient enough, the command for nvidia to adjust the brightness is for example

nvidia-settings --assign brightness=X

wheras X is to replace by a number, the default is 0. Same for contrast. You could easily make your own-style frontend for this using any of the easy script languages, like python (with pykde/pyqt) or Kommander.

Hmm.. OK, It is indeed an Nvidia card, so I do have the nvidia settings tool. Thanks for the suggestion on using it as a backend for what I'd like to do.
The CONTRAST control on my monitor acts quite differently than the Contrast control on the nvidia-settings thing, but I CAN get satisfactory results using nvidia's BRIGHTNESS control instead.
I'd really like to have a taskbar item, or 'area', where I can scroll the mouse wheel, but if I can't have that, I think I would be happy with a simple toggle-button that when clicked, would toggle the brightness from 0 to 1.

First problem: The 'Brightness' attribute can't be queried using nvidia --query[]
...possible solutions: two click methods (maybe left click for dim, right click for bright) OR use the scroll wheel, where each notch of the wheel would increment/decrement Brightness by .01

Second problem: I have ZERO experience with any forms of python/pykde/pyqt and very minimal Bash experience.
...possible solution: I'm not afraid to learn, so I am going to read some stuff about these languages and see if anything looks like something I can make use of.

Suggestions/tips are very appreciated

NOTE TO MODS: This is looking like a programming thread now; please feel free to move it if you agree.

How about this

http://freenet-homepage.de/dateigarage/fruit.jpg

You can hover your mouse over the sliders and then change settings with your mousewheel.

Jaaa! Das ist guten
I think that gizmo would be precisely the thing but I don't read much German, so.. Is that webpage just a picture, or does that site tell me somewhere how to download it?
What is it, btw? Like a floating dock-window, or is it integrated onto the desktop?
Cool @ the page has 'fruit' in the name just like me!

uhm, yeah, that webpage is a picture of my desktop, I have named the little script after you because I'm pretty sure that no-one else will ever need it

I have created it with kommander, you can download it here:

http://freenet-homepage.de/dateigarage/gftool.tar.gz

Make sure you have kommander installed in order to run it. For some distributions, kommander is part of the package 'kdewebdev'. You can start it in the system tray with

ksystraycmd --hidden --startonshow --keeprunning kmdr-executor /path/to/gftool.kmdr

LMAO! You are awesome thank you so much
I believe I do have Kommander, and I will check out the code to see just how the heck you whipped that up so fast!!
I'll letcha know how it goes Thanks again.

OK, it is indeed cool and will do the job just fine I think so now.. Rather than submit a bug report I would like to figure out how to edit the gizmo myself. Kommander-Editor looks WYSIWYG-easy enough, but:

1 - How do I make it affect (interface with) the nvidia-settings tool? Like, where to I put in what command(s) get executed when I use it?
2 - I've set the range from -1 to +1 (this is the range of Brightness allowed) but can't seem to make it step by 0.1 per increment. Is it able to?
2.5 - The cute little icon doesn't appear until I click the tool in the taskbar. Before I click it, it's just a blank white square.
3 - The bug: seems that if I mis-click a slider it goes by itself, up and down, which is cool in itself.. But if I then click the other slider, it all locks up solid, and I hafta kill it with Ksysguard. Suggestions?

1. right click on one of the widgets and choose 'show kommander text'. That shows you the code.
2. The sliders use integers, you can't use floats with them. You maybe know that bash variables are typeless, so you basically have to treat them as strings. Floats wouldn't help you anyway, cause nvidia-settings uses ,(comma) instead of .(decimal point).
2.5 yes, don't use the close button to minimize. Click on the tray icon instead, then the grapefruit will stay. However, there is of course some limitation to the tray icon, since there is no way in kommander for that.
3. Can't say anything to that, as I cannot reproduce the bug. Does the mousewheel not work on the sliders ?

Hmm, ok first, thanks again for those tips..
1 - Will do.
2 - I now know that bash var's are typeless - I didn't before. You're right, floats using commas doesn't sound fun to implement.
2.5 - OK
3 - Yep, the scroll-wheel does work, perfectly; but if I try to 'drag' a slider for example, and I miss the button, the slider starts to go by itself. If I then go and use the other slider at the same time, it hangs up - lights still on, but no one home

Ok, I will fiddle with it more.. Looks like I might need to keep the values -10 / +10, and write 1 or 2 little bash scripts to maybe grab the values and convert them to something nvidia will like.