Protecting and Preserving Your Vision? 123
Poligraf asks: "All of slashdotters spend a lot of time in front of monitors. What are you doing to preserve your eyes? My issue seems to be not a declining vision, but fatigue after certain amount of time in front of the computer. It becomes so bad that I need occasionally to leave the room with computer and sit or lie down to relax for 5 to 10 minutes. What do you think of a full spectrum lights? Certain scientists swear that it is the best thing since sliced bread, others viciously rip their claims apart. Has anyone used these? What is your experience? What other methods can you come up with?\"
Re:Bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
Alex.
What I do (Score:3, Interesting)
On glasses. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:from experience (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. I went for years with headaches and having trouble reading things at a distance refusing to believe I still didn't have the 20/20 vision of my teenage years. I went and finally got a checkup, go my glasses and the headaches are all gone. Also ironically I went back to taking classes to finish a degree and find I can actually SEE the chalkboard now and copy down notes. It makes a hell of a lot of difference to my grades too.. went from C's to A's. Before I had trouble even reading my textbooks. ;-)
Re:easy but not cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
Another cheaper and excellent LCD is Dell's 20" UXGA LCD.
Around $1000 (it's on sale for as little as $750 sometimes) and gives you 1600x1200 resolution. Note that the more expensive Apple 20" is only 1600x1024 but it does have a wider angle view (why you need more than 90deg I don't know; can you see the monitor from behind?).
I'm not big on Apple stuff. You're paying extra for the Apple logo. Plus their Cinema display needs way too much desk space with its tricycle landing gear feet.
Re:one more suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
Better yet, just go to sleep.
Re:easy but not cheap (Score:2, Interesting)
My Optometrist called it "Artificial Astigmatism" (Score:2, Interesting)
Not only has be myopia speed along as its typical pace, she also said I have developed astigmatism from my (apparently) near-constant computer use over the years. and i'm only 19..
They prescribed me some long distance (which i only use rarely, since I refuse to give in..) and some close-distance glasses that should the progression of the computer damage. I used them for a while, though they seemed not to do much in the way of helping.
The only way really to prevent this is to take breaks. up to 15 minutes, at least once a hour. Taking breaks can even help other aspects of your health, maybe if you combine them with some walking or other exercise.
I should listen to my old advice.
6. green on black (Score:3, Interesting)
All good text editors and IDE's let you change the background/text colors. Same with telnet apps, etc.. I spend most of my time on win2K, and use a slightly tweaked version of the "High-Contrast Black" scheme. There are always a few apps that don't conform, but it's easy to switch back and forth, or if you have switchable desktops you can switch over for those few apps that are hard-coded to use black text.
warning (Score:2, Interesting)
It's terrible advice for a Windows-optimized CRT. These days, black-on-white is the standard. If you use white-on-black, the vertical lines will be a bit darker than the horizontal ones. The effect is especially bad with high resolution, high refresh rates, cheap analog cables, and any video card not made by Matrox.
Test your monitor now. [uml.edu]
3D stereograms (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Some suggestions. (Score:2, Interesting)
Going to 85 Hz or higher will cause horizontal
smearing due to bandwidth limits. You may be
better off at 72 or even lower. You can increase
your tolerance for low refresh rate by decreasing
the overall brightness -- that is, including the
overhead light, window, desk lamp, etc.
Any one monitor height is bad. Unfortunately,
it isn't easy to drasticly change monitor position
every few minutes. Maybe you could get one of
those movable arms, allowing you to sit, stand,
lie down, etc. This is more of a back, wrist,
and elbow issue though.
Great article on this subject (Score:4, Interesting)
One interesting tidbit -- he mentions a study that found that while monkeys with their eyes sewn shut and untouched monkeys (oh, to be in the control group!) did NOT develop any vision problems, monkeys with their eyes sewn partly shut -- so they could only see dimly -- became myopic.
That seems like a pretty good hint that you might want to take breaks from the monitor. As other posters have noted -- it's a good idea to refocus your eyes on objects at other distances frequently during the day, and this should help avoid the eyestrain (and the other problems you might not notice for a while...)
Don't get laser surgery! (Score:3, Interesting)
Bear with me.
I have a bad asygmatism (sp?). For going on a few months, my eyes started hurting pretty bad whenever I put on the glasses. I tried different glasses and still had the problem.
I figured it was time to fix my vision so I got the surgery. Good news: 20/15 vision (wuhoo!) Bad news: Now I had the 'I'm wearing glasses' hurt ALL THE TIME. It drove me freaking mad. I asked the doctor and he said "Maybe you should get glasses". That's where he lost me.
Anyhoo, my eyes are great now, here's why:
[drum roll]
I stared running. Outdoors. In the sunlight. With nothing but far away things to look at like mountains, sky, clouds, trees, OTHER PEOPLE, all illuminated by constant unflickering sunlight along with it's magnificent ultraviolet rays.
So, I say, to fix your eyes, buy some running shoes.
desk vs office (Score:3, Interesting)
Well here's another argument for open floor plans. Yes, you get distracted more, when someone comes over and asks you something. This also makes you look away from the PC, look at a person, roll your eyes as a joke, look down in thought, et cetera.
I noticed this because a few times I had spent the whole day at work listening to music through headphones and noticed my eyes were getting tired. Why? I think it's because the headphones shielded me from the little distractions (like when someone walked near me or my manager wondered aloud about something.) Usually these events warrant a little turn of the head, which breaks up your tunnel vision.
Re:Eye Strain (Score:3, Interesting)
I try to let natural light into the room when I'm looking at the monitor, but I'm careful to balance the contrast and avoid glare. If it's nighttime and I need light other than the monitor, I use an incandescent on a resistive dimmer (never a triac dimmer, they flicker too).
The most important thing has got to be focus though. A friend of mine has a degenerative disease where her eyes can only change focus slowly, over the span of several seconds or minutes. Looking from the road to the instrument panel and back to the road is impossible for her, so she has to read the gauges with her peripheral vision. (Analog gauges are easy, because you can tell the positions of the needles. Digital readouts are next to impossible.) When she uses a computer, she has to turn away and focus on the room for a moment before standing up to go get something.
I'm determined not to let this happen to me. I use my music collection to help -- at the beginning of each track, I close my eyes for a few seconds, take a deep breath, open my eyes, and look at something across the room. It's relaxing in terms of general stress, and it gives my eyes a chance to change focus distance.
Think about it -- our eyes weren't designed to stand still for long periods. In a survival situation, you're focusing near and far constantly, and your eyes are all over the place. Try to give them a little workout now and then.
Monitor Settings and color schemes (Score:4, Interesting)
This is really targetted at Computer Users who complain about how their eyes hurt, especially after a long day of staring at the computer monitor.
I have had 15/20 vision all my life, and I've also been a heavy user of computers since 1979. People ask how the heck I have maintained my eyesight. It is really simple: turn the brightness down!
Here are my tips for adjusting your computer monitor:
That's it. Note that if you are working on computer graphics, this will NOT make the colors bright and pretty, so you'll probably have to go back to the eye-killing settings. But if you're a coder who is just doing text and web browsing all day, USE THIS. Your eyes will thank you for it.
Even better: do the same thing I mentioned above, but with an LCD screen. CRT monitors are worse for your eyes than LCD.
If you're playing first person shooters like Quake, you will probably have to crank up the brightness dial. Just remember to turn it back down later!
A Quick Bit on Color Schemes
When I originally wrote this node, I was focusing only on monitor settings. The above works fine for any monitor going back to monochrome CRTs from the 1970s, but with the advent of configurable color window managers like Windows where you have a choice of color settings, I have one more piece of advice. Get off that default scheme!
Ever since Windows 1.0, there has been a default color scheme. Somewhere around Windows 2.0 you were able to change it, but most people never do it and they leave it with the default settings. These default settings are BRIGHT white backgrounds with the blue title bars. In my opinion, this color setting isn't optimial for your eyes. Of course, we're not just limited to Windows, but since the majority of people use it, I'll at least start with it for my point.
Without going into technical and difficult to apply color preferences, I suggest trying one scheme that has been in Windows since Windows 95: the 'Plum (high color)' scheme. The point of using this scheme is that the window decorations are not the typical bright grey, and the window backgrounds are off-white. You may not care for the purple accenting, but that's not the point of this scheme, in my mind. Give it a shot for an hour and see if it works for you.
What I've strived for is the perfect balance of colors on my desktop. A lot of people don't know how, and don't bother with adjusting their appearance settings. Granted after you've been using one scheme for a while, it might feel too foreign to have a different scheme. But try it, it might help even more.
Re:Sorry, (Score:1, Interesting)
I probably wouldn't have needed glasses if I didn't read so much. My two younger brothers don't have glasses, and they played just as many video games as I did; they just didn't read as much as I did or read it all in one sitting. We kept the monitors/TV's quite far from where we sat.
Nowadays, I just remove my glasses when I'm at a computer. My vision hasn't changed too much since high school. I only put on my glasses when I'm walking from place to place. I have noticed that there are many more people with glasses and they usually have prescriptions worse (-3.0 to -6.0) than mine (-2.0 or about a little worse than 20/200). By not wearing my glasses in front of my 21 inch monitor, I've prevented my vision from getting worse. My vision has actually improved slightly.
If you must work all the way through, I find that it helps if you close one eye for a few seconds and then close the other eye for a few seconds at a time to let each eye rest.
Re:Chromium helps normalise blood sugar (Score:1, Interesting)
You certainly do appear to dispense quite a bit of "medical" advice. However, it all appears to be utter nonsense. Your advice of chromium supplementation goes against everything that the American Diabetic Association and the FDA appear to say. Namely: "There is no evidence that chromium supplementation helps diabetics or normal individuals".
Incidentally, it will also have the side effect of reducing fat and increasing lean muscle mass...
Bullshit. Study please?