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Protecting and Preserving Your Vision?
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?\"
I read Slashdot on a line printer, you insensitive clod!
But it looks like everyone is taking their 5-10 minute break.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
My brain implant lets me see my computer screen without using my eyes at all.
My vision varies widely over the day, especially after staring at a CRT for 12 hours. But then, I have diabetes... have you had your blood sugar checked?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
you may infact need glasses. Stimatism(sp) initially presents itself as eye-tiredness then little "grey" patches in you vision (like a spot of dust on a camera lense) when you are very tired. So do yourself a favor and have your eyes tested, I did and can once again sit at the box for long periods.
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
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.
There's a law in Brazil which allows a five minute pause every one hour so the person can leave the PC.
It's not "bad". It happens. To a lot of people.
At Ac Lensthey are selling Computer Vision Glasses.
Quote: "These glasses have a special tint that helps to reduce glare and the intensity of the light produced by the average computer monitor, and a special UV coating that blocks UV rays produced by monitors and flourescent lighting." Sounds like Just what you're looking for to me.
Also, You might want to look into getting a Glare Screen, there's a good one at
FutureShop.
Quote Again: "VisionGuard XL, Glare Filter with Radiation Barrier. Relieves eye strain for healthy vision. Reduces glare up to 99%. Fits regular and Flat screen monitors 14 " to 17"." Looks again like it will solve your problem. AndrewM
6. You need to take these 5 minutes breaks before your eyes get tired. You don't have to leave your desk, just look around, close your eyes for a while, etc.
Cant read print for very long with muchless without my glasses but I can stare into the green glow for days.
CONFIG_FONT_6x11=y
First, you need to go 100% digital. By this I
mean an LCD with a DVI or ADC plug. Forget about
anything with a traditional VGA connector.
It should go without saying that you MUST run
at the native resolution.
Pick an LCD with wide-angle viewing, such as the
excellent 20" Apple Cinema Display at 1600x1024 or
the 23" Apple Cinema Display HD at 1920x1200.
Don't cut corners on this -- I know you're tempted!
Now get rid of cheap flourescent lights. I suppose
you can keep the fancy 15 kHz ones. Avoid the
regular 60 Hz flourescents.
Adjust monitor brightness to match room lighting,
but wait... room lighting needs to be somewhat
low. At low light levels, your eye is less
sensitive to flicker. The eye does a kind of
time integration over a pulse stream to work;
the time constant varies with overall brightness.
What I do to relieve eye strain is to look away from the monitor every few minutes. Whether it's looking at the keyboard while I type (which I don't have to do, I can touchtype with the best of them), or look at your cubicle wall, your feet, anything that will have your eyes change focus. Doing this for even just a few seconds is a tremendous help (and I too suffer from diabetes, and if I stare at a monitor for too long my vision just goes blurry).
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Don't do that "one thing" that makes you go blind. And while we're on the subject, stop looking at pron on the computer all day. That'll cut your screen-staring time down at least by 75%
I've got an astigmatism in both eyes and have problems with declining vision (just as a result of aging unfortunately) and eye fatigue from looking at monitors. Other than the obvious - wear my glasses when using the computer, take breaks away from the computer etc - I set up my sight lines to have various things at different focal depths.
;) - this is just off the top of my head.
I put up a number of pictures on the walls near the monitor and I make a point to look at them every few minutes (a Kandinski, a Renior and a picture of Liv Tylor in a school girl outfit... sigh... a couple of minutes pass...). Anyway, by looking up every few minutes it allows my eyes to focus on things at different depths. I also look out the window as often as possible. When I use my laptop, I arrange it so I have a view.
Its simple but I find it helps. The anthropologist in me can't help but point out that from an evolutionary standpoint, the muscles in the eye were not designed to focus on one plane of depth all the time. Complex environments (forest, savanna etc), constantly moving around and generally not looking at something three feet in front of you for 6 to 16 hours a day probably created a eye muscle that can adapt quickly, but probably didn't create one that is designed for endurance - holding a single plane of focus for hours and hours. Not that I'm siting a reference here - pun
But the differing focal depths thing works. I do it when I read too.
Debunking Full Spectrum Lighting Claims
Full Spectrum Lighting - Is it any better?
etc.
Previous posts have made suggestions to get your vision checked to see if you either need glasses or you need your prescription changed. I'd definitely opt for that with the suggestion that, in the meanwhile, you bump down your screen resolution and sit further away from the monitor if possible.
The reason I suggest this is that your eyes require no effort in order to focus on objects in the distance, but require the contraction of the ciliary muscles in order to focus on objects that are close up. This response, like any other muscle response, can fatigue if it's held for a long time.
A lot of Visine may help as well -- if you are spending a lot of time in front of a monitor you are probably blinking a lot less, too.
Good luck!
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
I went from 20/20L 20/15R to 20/25L 20/20R because of monitor glare. And that was a year or two ago.
Back when I used glasses. Just shy of needing them. I came across a need to walk about a mile or so between two places and back each day. With geography and parking being what it was, I'd probably have spent more time driving than walking. It turned out that just being outside and having the ability to look at things at close intermediate and far distances improved my vision over a couple of months. I was due for an eye checkup during this time, and the optimologist confirmed that this sometimes happens, and my theory that the lens stiffens and the muscles weaken through disuse might have some basis in fact.
In any case, you'll get some good advice. Mine told me a bunch of stuff to try. The most suprising was the suggestion that I lower my monitor so that it was about 25 degrees below eye level. This sounded odd to me, because computer furniture mostly seems designed to raise the monitor.
Glasses might also be an option. I have a friend who wears them only when she's online. (And on certain, uhm, other occasions, because her husband thinks they're sexy.) Or if you already wear glasses, you might find it worthwhile to have a separate set of "task" glasses just for working with the computer.
I use to have a guy that would describe everything on the screen for me so I wouldn't strain my eyes but the costs became prohibitive so I had to let him go. Now I have a guy in India doing it for a 1/10th the cost. It would be the perfect solution but the phone bills are killing me. Also, porn is not as stimulating.
I got my eyes checked a few months ago, the first time in ages, and computer use has absolutely speeded up the deterioration to my vision.
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.
--- Kicking the Cheat since late 2002
My experience with people who complain about eye strain with computer monitors is that they almost always have their brightness and contrast set way too high.
A display is an emissive device, not reflective like a piece of paper. Have you ever held a sheet of paper next to your computer monitor? notice the difference. Now try to adjust your monitor so that it looks more like the piece of paper as far as brightness and contrast go.
Personally, I use dark green text on a black background (Mozilla) or light amber text on a black background (all my xterms) and have the brightness and contrast turned down very low. I don't suffer from eye strain with these settings.
Of course, my eyes are probably a but more sensitive than most since most other people can't see anything on my computer monitor they way I set it up. But for me it's as clear as day.
With laptop displays I find that is is even more important to use a dark background since the backlight is the cause of most of the eye strain.
Ten years ago or so, GE came out with some pastel tinted bulbs, pink, yellow, blue pastel tints to the powercoating inside the bulb. I found the blue tint gave a much "whiter" light than regular incandescent bulbs, and I like a nice white light source. When they were discontinued, I went back to shitty bulbs. Now they market almost the exact same product as the blue pastel ights as the new Reveal bulb. Speaking from experience, I love them. They're worth the extra buck. Whites are whiter, colors are brighter, and things DO Seem a bit crisper and clearer. So while I do agree with SOME parts of this study, I disagree with the weight they give to the psychological aspects.
- Improves color perception
- Improves visual clarity
They acknowledge that these lamps can help in these areas.- Improves mood
- Improves productivity
- Improves mental awareness
They dither about this, but I can say the GE bulbs do help my mood, and through that my productivity and awareness. Try to do ten dimentional math when you're in a bad mood and foggy. It's hard. But in a good mood, you can do it more easily (although it's still hard- Improves results of light therapy in treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD)
I anecdotally disagree. However on the other factors, I can agree that these bulbs do nothing to further retail sales, vitamin D production or tooth health (chewing light bulbs is NOT good for the teeth). For plant growth, I can't speak because I'm not a plant.jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I've seen a number of solutions posited. But the simple one is this: Occasionally leave the room with the computer, and just sit down and relax- for around five to ten minutes or so. Perhaps in conjunction with these other fine ideas. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
90 degree is 45 to each side, which is not enough
:-)
for a decently wide monitor. With that Dell, there
will be subtle disturbing color and brightness
variations, especially near the edges of the screen.
That is, unless you sit back very far and line
your head up perfectly.
Also, is it free of dead pixels? (both kinds?)
I got my Apple Cinema Display shipped by mail,
and it arrived with 100% perfect pixels. There
wasn't a single stuck-on or stuck-off pixel,
and not even a bad sub-pixel.
If it is resolution you want, get 1920x1200
with the 23" Apple Cinema Display HD. ("HD"!)
Damn, I sound like an Apple ad... except my
Mac is running Debian of course.
You can use a PC with an Apple Display if you
like; it requires an ADC-to-DVI adaptor that
takes away the coolness of running power and
USB down the monitor cable. (ADC is DVI plus
25-volt power and USB pass-through)
I am rather nearsighted, but I wear corrective contact lenses all the time, and I used to work at the computer just with those. One day I visited my optometrist and he told me I would feel more comfortable working at the computer wearing reading glasses. I scoffed, I told myself I felt fine, and anyway I was too proud to adopt the trappings of old fogeyhood just yet. Until one day at the drug store I tried on a pair and was amazed at how much more comfortable it made it to see at close distances. Apparently my contact lenses refocus the light so much so I can see far distances, but it creates more strain when looking at near distances. The reading glasses counteract that. So for working at the computer and for reading, I wear my contacts *and* my reading glasses. It makes it so much more comfortable. I just got a cheap +1.25 power pair at Target, and they're not unfashionable, either.
I'm dealing with more vision problems right now, but I've found that viewing a monitor is MUCH more comfortable if you change the colors of your main tools to use black backgrounds with light text, usually green or yellow.
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.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Viewing angle matters a lot if you want to avoid
eye strain, which was the whole point of this
ask-slashdot. It especially matters on a screen
that is nearly 2 feet wide. Apple gives you a
whopping 170 degrees, and it shows.
Contrast may matter a bit, but 350:1 is enough.
Remember that 8-bit per channel video limits
the output anyway. I smell marketing.
Brightness is useless unless your room lights
are too bright. Any monitor you can buy is
brighter than you should need. If your room
light is way too bright and you are stuck with
it, then yeah, maybe brightness could matter.
Fix your room lights.
Correction on the sizes:
1680x1050 $1299 20" Apple Cinema
1920x1200 $1999 23" Apple Cinema HD
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.
Periodically looking at 3D stereograms has helped me relax my eyes quite a bit. The regular exercise has even corrected an astigmatism, according to my eye doctor.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
A better solution than turning your resolution down, is to turn your resolution up, and increase the default sizes of all your gui stuff (display fonts, text zooming, icon sizes, menu width, etc, etc), turn on AA, and increase your refresh rate, as has already been said.
... she edits medical texts), and for years she suffered from the eye strain bit, with the whole 800x600 resolution crap, cause that made everything bigger. I helped her upgrade last year to an LCD with a proper refresh, 1280x1024, and fixed all the font sizes and layouts, etc etc. She saw immediate improvement in ease of use.
My mother is a text editor (no, really
Low resolution introducies jaggies, which just worsens the eye-strain. (in my experience)
I don't need glasses away from my machine. So, I went to the Optomitrist and told him that I was interested in preserving my vision. I told him that I wanted to spend money buying glasses, even though I didn't really need them.
He gave me a quite weak prescription. My ability to discern small details is already very good, but these glasses enhance my close vision even more. I put on my glasses, and things are just a bit bigger. As well, the lenses come with an anti-glare coating.
I've found that my eyes ARE a bit less tired after the end of the day. I switch between wearing them and not wearing them pretty smoothly, and I never wear them unless I'm looking right at the monitor.
Even if you have glasses, you can probably benefit by having a slightly different prescription for working at the computer. No reason to let your normal prescription get any worse.
Unusual symptoms include:
- A feeling that one of your eyes shuts off or fades into a haze;
- A feeling that your eyes are under a different kind of strain - left is not the same as right (this often gets mistaken for different prescription for left and right eye);
- Changing prescription doesn't help, and the optometrists swear that "it is as good as it gets".
The cause of it is that you're staring at the monitor at a fixed distance for extended periods of time, without invoking your accomodation muscles.It is fixable, though. It'll cost ya (and usually it is not covered by insurance), and you'll have to go through quite painful physical excercises, but they do indeed help, so don't lose the hope if you get diagnosed with it. And keep in mind that surgical measures are pretty much useless when dealing with it, it's your willpower that is getting you back in shape.
The specific fix will depend upon the specific cause. Try each suggestion here and elsewhere and see what works for you.
Switching to LCD if you haven't should be first. CRTs have more variance in output because LCDs are slower to darken. They flash.
Room lighting should be incandescent, rather than fluourescent, for the same reason: flash. Spectrum is, IMO, far less important than constancy.* If one thing flashing is bad, two things flashing at different rates is probably worse.
Work with room lighting and screen brightness to get it as comfortable as possible. You can't get around the problem of transmitted rather than reflected light, but you can minimize it.
The average optimal working attention time is around 25 minutes. Taking 5 minutes of every half hour off will keep you at a higher performance level as well as rest your eyes before you're forced to. Better to quit when you can find a good stopping point than when you can't see to read whether you've made mistakes.
Eye exercise to try while working: focus briefly on something far away. Outside if possible. Look at it for 30 second to stretch the muscles that had been set for close looking. Then look back and forth between something near and far, to "warm down" the eye muscles and keep them flexing. Then rest them by looking at something far again, for a few minutes.
Use paper when you can, especially for something you need to concentrate hard on. You'll lean forward and squint at the screen when trying to find a bug in code or something similar. That makes the transmitted light + flash (if applicable) problem all the worse, For reviewing something closely, print it. This especially for PDFs and such that are presented too small. If you'd have to have it wider than the screen (ie. use your bottom scroll bar to read across the page) in order to see it comfortably, print it.
Don't use WYSIWYG black-on-white skinny little letters for lots and lots of reading. I can read 4 or 5 pages of that stuff on my 15" LCD before my eyes get tired. I can read 10 times as much using light grey text on dark blue background in plain old DOS style monospace font.
I'm firmly convinced about the constancy thing. I've done experiments with incandescent vs. fluourescent lighting and found fluourescent to be worse (though I can only hypothesize why that is). About the only prior work I could find to reference was by a guy that also showed fluourescent light caused cavities, so it was kind of an iffy proposition. But my data replicated some of his other claims, so it's not completely bogus.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Have you tried the various compact florescent bulbs? I recently went through a few, looking for one that was the "right" color. Incandescents are about 2750K, a good approximation of sunrise/sunset lighting. Some of the compact florescents are about 6000K, a reasonable approximation of high-noon sunlight. Those were too white for me -- seemed odd to have that color light inside the house, and made the whites on my LCD screen look a bit yellow by comparison -- but might be good if you like things more towards the blue. I ended up with a Philips bulb listed at 3000K.
The Straight Dope covered this subject in an interesting (but not completely conclusive) article.
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...)
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Use computers 10-24 hours per day, 7 days a week, for your entire youth, while your eyes are growing. Anything less than two feet in front of me I can see with frightening clarity at times, but anything further than two feet in front of me is a total blur without glasses. My eyes don't get tired until about 10-15 hours of hard core usage, which is usually about when my brain has turned to tapioca and it's time to stop anyway.
Let's hear it for mutations.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
I wear my sunglasses indoors, espically when i have to be looking at the screen for long periods of time. It seems to help my eyes from straining and reacting to all the light around me
life sucks, then you die
OK, I had laser surgery and it's the best thing I've ever done for myself. But, one thing I thought it would do was reduce my eye strain.
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.
I enjoy spending long periods in total darkness. It's relaxing. Is it good for the eyes? I dont have a fucking clue, but uh.. maybe it rests them? I dont know :)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I don't have the reference pages right now, but....Most people's monitors are way too bright and have the contrast cranked up way too high. How do you know?
I've been having problems w/ eye fatige since the beginning of this year, and am getting to know my opthamologist fairly well. These are just notes I'm passing along from him as we try to get my workspace corrected.
some weeks/months ago we had a discussion about programmers having desks on an open floor vs. having private offices or semi-private cubes. I was one of the few voices in support of open floors, at the time, for the reasons of fasciliating team communication.
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.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
The reason I hate the bluish headlights, is when they're not uniformly colored... so when they're behind you on a not terribly smooth road, they do all sorts of cool color changing effects as your viewing angle changes... which is distracting.
Need a Catering Connection
-----------
Does your hosting company offer WAP hosting?
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I have extremely good eyes (not color, though). I sit in front of computers a good 8 hours a day, at least, and it has been going on for at least 8 years. I don't feel that my eyes are getting worse (and I am already 37). I almost never have eye strain. At home, I have a 21 inch monitor, and the resolution is 1024x768, and thus I can sit almost a three feet away from the monitor. At work, the monitor is smaller, but the resolution is the same. I also can sit fairly far from the monitor.
I recommend to use a big monitor, low resolution, and high refresh rate. I am extremely sensitive to flickering, so much, that I refuse to stare at such a monitor for an extended time.
Advice. The last thing you should save money is on a good monitor. Yes, you can save a couple of hundred dollars over a few years, but the price will be your eyesigt. Is it worth? You can eat with an artificial tooth, you can dance with a wooden leg, but you cannot see with a glass eye. Take care of it. Allocate more money for your monitor.
Vilmos
So, you're saying I should switch back to the old monochrome monitor that came with my XT? All yellow-on-black, all the time!
"Each time you smile, it'll only last awhile. Life may be scary, but it's only temporary."
Score:5 Funny Hey! I haven't said anything yet.
I learn new things the hard way.
This is why you have scheduled 5 minutes breaks every hour during the work day when you have sitting down terminal work (like computer work).
If there isn't a law that allows you this already (worker's protection), then make sure your employer understands how much more efficient you will work with these breaks, even though he/she is paying for them. In the end, your boss will benefit from you having 5 minutes break every hour.
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.
Then you, my friend, are obviously not running on your optimum caffeine rating (ocr). Might I suggest some Bawls? Or maybe some Penguin mints?
I was thinking of converting to paganism, but where the hell can you find sacrificial virgins these days?
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.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
This program monitors your use andd force breaks and stretching:
http://www.workrave.org/welcome/
It is oriented for Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), but helps eye strain too.
Has Linux and Winddows version.
You're pretty weird to display near-black on black,
:-)
or were you forgetting that nobody does that anyway?
I think 10:1 would do.
When you go really wide, like with those monster 23" wide-aspect things from Apple, you tend to display your windows side-by-side. You stop trying to spread one window across the whole thing, unless you're doing something non-text that calls for that. If you go dual-display, you can only evenly divide your workspace by 2 or 4. On a wide display, you can divide by 3. Also you don't have to deal with software behaving badly, putting dialog boxes spread across the two displays.
LCD screens help a lot for me. I have a window at work, though, so "full spectrum" lighting is free.
Also, go get your vision checked, I was surprised how much getting glasses helped, even though I am nearsighted---it makes it more comfortable to look at far-away things, which means that when I take a break, I'm not constantly looking downward or at walls in order to keep things in focus, and I'm giving my eyes a little rest.
I guess it has to happen to everyone spending lots of time starring at the same distance. Ie, looking at a monitor for a few hours a day. ;-))
I started with computers at 9, now 24 and it's my job. I usually spend 8-12 hours a day in front of my computer. I can see the square of the pixel on my LCD, but can't read the licence plate of the car 30 meters in front of me.
Just got some glasses and I now see the outer world differently. (no glasses vision still good to avoid seeing ugly people in town
blah
Hear hear! Far easier on the eyes. I use a green-on-black KDE theme all the time, and KDE 3 is now much better and more consistent about its handling of non-standard foreground/background combinations than KDE 2 was.
They certainly should. Unfortunately Eclipse, which I use all the time, does not - but I've logged a feature request and it's being worked on. And a lot of applications which should know better (e.g. Mozilla) don't pick up their theme colours from KDE.
My personal pet peeve is websites which set foreground colours but not background colours or vice versa. Even the specification document for CSS2 fails on this one - it doesn't specify a foreground colour for links, so on my screen the pale green links on the pale blue background are virtually unreadable.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Green on black is _okay_ (unlike black on blinding white, which will make you
snowblind if you set the contrast high enough to show detail properly), but
there are better color schemes. Amber on black looks uglier for the first five
minutes, but after your eyes get used to it you can stare at it for much longer
periods of time with zero eyestrain.
Even better, I've found, is a tertiary color scheme. Set your system foreground
color to #FFE6BC and your background to #294D4A. Set this system-wide. If you
use Gnome, there's a theme available called themacs (GTK1) or eMaCs (GTK2).
On Windows you can just go into the Display properties under the Appearances
tab (clicking on Advanced if you're using WinXP) and set it up manually easily
enough. It's possible in KDE/Qt also, though I forget the exact steps. Anyway,
Also set your web browser to use these colors exclusively (ignoring the colors
the web page author specifies). (You'll need to change your link colors also;
blue on slate green isn't the best combination.)
Your first reaction will be, "boring", but use it for a week and then ask
yourself when was the last time your eyes got worn out looking at your
display; it'll be a week ago, right before you switched to this scheme.
Oh, and do make sure your refresh rate is set as high as it will go.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
6a. Drink lots of fluids. This forces you to make bathroom breaks, which causes you to not look at your computer screen for a few minutes, and to focus on things that are further away. Caffeine or alcohol can help speed up the urgency for bathroom breaks, but I find I'm more productive with caffeine in me, as opposed to alcohol.
And of course, sugared sodas and alcohol also include extra calories, so you'll have to adjust your diet to compensate for the extra intake. Yes, water works, but I'm not just all that big on drinking water. And there have been studies that show links from nutrasweet and short term memory loss.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Ironically smoking helps with this; forces you to get away from the computer for 5-10 mins once in a while, so I go outside, walk around a bit and have a smoke.
I'm actually a heavy Eclipse user myself, and I depend on the color support.
What version are you using? If you're still on 2.x you're right -- but the version 3 milestone builds are quite stable (the current one, M7, is what I'm using now and I haven't had any problems yet... though M6 and M5 had some noticeable bugs). They have a new and vastly improved code formatter, too -- you should try it out.
Now that I think about it, I think I started trying out the version 3 builds *because* I needed more control over the colors....
Anyway, in any of the recent builds:
In the preferences window, drill down to Java --> Editor, and flip through the tabs. Set the colors here, mostly on the Syntax tab. It'll take you a few minutes to get them tweaked right (there aren't preset color schemes, like "Twilight" in JBuilder), but it's worth the time.
I also noticed that in Windows at least (and I'm guessing other platforms as well) Eclipse 3.0 does pick up the systems colors for shading buttons, menus, etc..
You can also change font sizes, in Preferences under Workbench --> Fonts.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I can't imagine that lowering the refresh rate to 60 Hz would be a good thing in any situation.
I *did* look at the example page, and the first one especially clearly showed me that the vertical bars were darker (I have a 19" CRT).
But when I look at a flat black field (i.e, background to text on my system), it just looks black. How is this hurting my eyes?
I know when I look at black text on a white field I feel like I'm going to go snowblind until I lower the contrast/ brightness to a point where details are clearly lost from graphics. And when I look at pale text on a black field, I can sit farther back and read without straining at all.
If you're making a point about how these monitors may not accurately represent an image, fine -- but we're talking about ease of reading text here, so who cares?
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
And of course, sugared sodas and alcohol also include extra calories, so you'll have to adjust your diet to compensate for the extra intake. Yes, water works, but I'm not just all that big on drinking water. And there have been studies that show links from nutrasweet and short term memory loss.
I drink a lot of water and do the bathroom break thing, but my five-minute vacations are cigarette breaks. Almost one every 90 minutes.
... that really have a strong effect on my enjoyment and use of a monitor.
Here are my two cents:
1. Keep at least an arms length away from the monitor. Keeps you from staring at the damn thing up close.
2. Keep some light around the room going. If its nice and dark then you kill your eyes and they tired much faster. I know it makes it harder to see but you'll see longer.
3. Get a plant. You need something oddly shaped in three demensions near the monitor. Gives you something to refocus your eyes and keep from getting eye muscle strains.
I hope this is of some use.
- Position your desk and monitor so windows are outside your field of view. If you can't do that, shade the windows to drop full daylight down to a little less than your monitor's brightness (see below).
- Room lighting should be halogen or the newer residential-use fluorescent lamps, which with warm color and electronic ballasts are no less eye-friendly than incandescents. Install about twice the lighting typical for the room's size, and a dimmer to adjust downward according to your needs/mood/whatever of the moment. Which will vary, and you'll appreciate the reserve lumens when working on hardware & such. Make sure lamps and dimmers are compatable. Direct or indirect, lamps should be placed outside your field of view when looking at your monitor, to avoid even a hint of glare. Avoid overhead lighting of any type. Note that the common el-cheapo office fluorescents are bad, bad news on all counts.
- Desk lamps should be halogen, or full-spectrum fluorescent if you can afford it, shaded and positioned to direct all of the light down to the desk surface. Regular table lamps with translucent shades don't cut it. You shouldn't be able to see even a hint of dazzle, either from the lamp or reflected from the desk.
- As many others have said, LCDs are easier on the eyes than CRTs, but make sure your Lin/Win/Mac display is set to the recommended resolution for the monitor. Otherwise, the monitor has to map the display pixels to its discrete LCD pixels, and the result is usually pretty bad.
- Regarding the black-on-white vs. white/yellow/green-on-black debate: I've found that the key comfort-wise is to minimize the differential between the brightness of the display and that of the rest of your field of view, with the display just slightly brighter. If the room is dimly lit, or typical room lighting with a dark or shaded surface behind the monitor, use green/yellow-on-black. In typical room lighting with a light surface behind the monitor, black-on-white with the brightness about half the monitor's maximum. In daylight with a light surface backdrop, black-on-white with brightness and contrast cranked up to max. In intermediate conditions, interpolate.
:)
HTH.Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
Ha ha ha, you dumb bastard, its a schooner...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I have been hooked for about five years on GE Grow-n-Show bulbs. They're available as a standard light bulb form factor and as a flood-light. They're very purple when not lit, but the light they put out is a beautifully pure white approximating sunlight. Everything viewed under them just looks unnaturally crisp, and of course the plants love 'em. Also, you can stare right into the bulb and read the wattage rating printed on it without feeling like you're staring at the sun.
I think they may have dropped the Grow-n-Show name recently (probably felt that it was attracting narco-terrorists or some such) but the packaging is the same. They cost almost twice what normal 'soft white' bulbs do, and I think they only last half as long, but they're still an incredible bargain in my book.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Chromium is key to the body's ability to regulate blood sugar, and is disappearing from the normal diet due to modern intensive farming techniques. A supplement of chromium will tend to stabilise your blood sugar variations, and over time tends to reduce the symptoms of diabetes. Try 200mg/day of chromium picolinate to start, vary the dose up or down depending on how well you respond to it. It IS a metal though, not a water-soluble vitamin, so don't take silly doses -- you don't need that much.
Incidentally, it will also have the side effect of reducing fat and increasing lean muscle mass...
cheers Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
1. Eye Fatigue: assuming you've done sensible things like vary the screen contrast and whitepoint to match your surroundings, the most common problem is slow screen refresh. And different people eyes "refresh" at different rates. A good quick test: when you're at the movies and watching a panning shot move across scenery, do your eyes swim in almost-pain from the inability to focus? You have fast-refreshing eyes. Set your screen to refresh to a minimum of 85Hz, 100 or 120 if it can. The difference can be felt immediately in a reduced level of tension around the eyes and neck.
2. Brain Fatigue: if you're coding creatively, such as doing new work, you are stressing your brain. The brain chews a surprising amount of energy and also particular nutrients, especially fats (essential fatty acids & oils). Fish oils (superior to flax/linseed substitutes) will tend to improve clarity of thinking (and also reduce dyslexia and antisocial behaviour, interestingly). But to improve mental stamina, take L-Glutamine combined with L-Tyrosine and L-Phenylalinine. These are the primary amino acids used by the brain when thinking, and supplementing your intake will sharply lift your mental stamina and reduce your stress/fatigue levels associated with mental work.
cheers, Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
if you're coding creatively, such as doing new work, you are stressing your brain.
From a neuroscience point of view, would you care to qualify that statement? I will give you a hint: This is utter bullshit.
The brain chews a surprising amount of energy
This is true. In fact, ounce for ounce the brain consumes more energy than any other part of your body.
especially fats (essential fatty acids & oils).
This is bullshit. The common unit of energy is ATP which is derived primarily from sugars and other carbon skeletons, but not "oils" and "fatty acids".
Fish oils (superior to flax/linseed substitutes) will tend to improve clarity of thinking
Point me to a study please. Again, a pure fallacy.
(and also reduce dyslexia and antisocial behaviour, interestingly).
What??!? Dyslexia?!? In a pigs eye. Again: Study please? Paper? Journal reference?
But to improve mental stamina, take L-Glutamine combined with L-Tyrosine and L-Phenylalinine.
Says who? You? Based upon your previous statements, I don't think I would trust anything you say. Furthermore, the CNS can produce any amount of these amino acids it needs even in complete starvation mode. Hint: Neurons work with these amino acids in the millimolar range and no supplements of these amino acids will do anything.
These are the primary amino acids used by the brain when thinking, and supplementing your intake will sharply lift your mental stamina and reduce your stress/fatigue levels associated with mental work.
You talk out of your ass as a matter of daily life, right? Guess what? These referenced amino acids are NOT the primary amino acids used by the brain when "thinking". Go do some basic reading of biochemistry textbooks on Glutamate and GABA to find out what I mean.
I've been wearing a pair of Oakley Steel framed
sunglasses anytime I'm outside for over 3 years now.
And I mean religiously. Never leave the house without
them, type fanaticism.
Yes, they cost me 130$ and the neck strap for them
was around 9$ or somesuch, but the lenses were worth it.
My headaches from exposure to outside sun dropped to nil.
I have very-light-blue, very light-sensitive, eyes
and would recommend this fix for everyone.
Important to note is that I have subtly bent the
frames so that they actually almost touch the skin
all around my eyes to
prevent the sun from impinging on the edges of my
vision as well.
You won't believe the difference until you try
it yourself.
YES, THAT MEANS CLOUDY DAYS ALSO.
After all these years, only the heaviest cloud
covers will allow me to walk outside without my shades.
My sensitivity to sunlight has increased dramatically almost to the point of pain without
my shades. I will gladly keep my shades around
to preserve my eyesight for that cost.
The tube responds too slowly to changes in
intensity, so a vertical line doesn't turn out
the way it should.
Due to gamma, this has a stronger affect when
using light-on-dark text.
Suppose that for a 1-pixel-wide vertical line
your monitor is able to change the electron
intensity by 30%. Due to gamma, that could mean
going from white to dark grey or from black to
dark grey. You won't get from black to light grey.
None of this applies if you have a 100% digital
setup. (DVI or ADC connector to an LCD display
running in the native resolution)
Oh glorious. I haven't seen this sort of mindless flamebaiting for years.
I should let it lie, this and the other "expert" commenter are clearly flamebaiting like men possessed. But, this IS something that other people could read and be misled by. And it's something that CAN help people's quality-of-life.
So
Tell yer what, child. Do a spot of research, do a spot of reading... hell, live dangerously and try a spot of experimentation.
Then come back and read again what I've transcribed. Not fantasised- transcribed.
And no, sorry child, with that attitude, I don't feel like doing your work for you. Get off your lazy self-righteous arse and do something yourself for once.
Here's a hint. First-year biochem don't cut it. And things are a little more complex than one or two chemical paths.
> So do yourself a favor and have your eyes tested.
UK slashdoters may not know that by law they are entiteld to free eye tests (paid for by there employer) if they use a VDU regularly as part of there job. ( First google hit)
Employers wont go out of there way to give them for you, so you will need to ask. I work in a laser lab and get free eye tests for obvious reasons.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
1.)Turn your font size up really high so that you don't have to have your face a couple of inches from the screen.
2.) make sure your screen (or screens) are each directly facing your eyes.
At my job I'm blessed with a double monitor setup, but at first I found that I was getting major eye strain after a day of work, even though at home or school I would often spend a whole day in front of my (single) screen. After about a month I realized the problem: the two monitors had their screens parallel to each other, but I generally only looked at one of them at a time, which meant I was usually looking at them at a sideways angle, which meant that I had to constantly change my focus as I scrolled my eyes across the screen reading text. The solution was simple, to angle the monitors so that whichever one I'm looking at I'm looking straight at it.
get up, go outside, look up.... see the big orange thing? thats the "Sun"...