Efforts to understand, improve, or do less harm to the world around me.


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Monday, July 09, 2012

Eye strain solutions

[Note: the following should not be construed as medical advice as I am not a doctor.  I only provide an example of something that worked for me.]

Reading from an LED screen a great deal lately, I ran into some problems with eye strain a while back.  Symptoms included:
  • Inability to focus on what I was reading
  • Constantly trying to refocus
  • Feeling dizzy and sometimes gross
Fortunately rather than blowing a wad of cash with some eye doctor to tell me the same thing, a good friend had the same issue and correctly (it seems) diagnosed it as eye strain.

Here are the fruits of my research:
  • EyeLeo freeware - really helps by just interrupting your work every so often to encourage you to take breaks, do some eye exercises.  They're annoying but they definitely work.
  • F.lux (freeware) - lowers the blue color that your brain associates with morning.  Over the course of a day, it gradually lowers the color temperature so that you can sleep better at night.  This also reduces eye strain.  Needs to be disabled for any kind of color-sensitive work.  Alternately, you can buy some clip-ons that do basically the same thing:
  • I bought some goofy big eye strain-prevention clip-ons.  They work well so far and help out with night driving as well (I often get blinded by headlights).  I say goofy as they're not very small, but they are dramatically cheaper than other versions I found (most were upwards of $50).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This has nothing to do with eye strain, but there was a moment - an important moment - when Fluffy decided to take action:

http://i.imgur.com/v6M24.jpg?1

Put some pants on that horse!

http://i.imgur.com/u3owN.jpg?1