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).
  

Facebook "improvements"

About 6 months ago I stopped using Facebook on a regular basis and basically made it into what my MySpace page does: someone could potentially still get in touch with me.  When I made this decision, I was worried that they would hit sort of an idiot threshold and start backing down from a lot of bad anti-user behavior.  Then I would have felt stupid for basically quitting the service.  Fortunately, my decision to leave has been continuously and constantly reinforced, including by their latest move to edit all your contacts' email addresses.

Which is good because every time it gets worse, I feel better.

Nation of Meat Eaters

Fascinating breakdown about US meat consumption.  Oddly even as cattle production is down, somehow we are getting (and eating) more meat out of the animals that are produced.  (Thanks K)