I use to get headaches every day (the kind that seem to originate behind the bridge of the nose). One day in effort to reduce the ache (a desperation move I didn't know would work out not) I reduced the brightness level in my monitor to the lowest possible setting. It slightly helped me cope with the rest of the day at work, but I forgot to reset the monitor. The next day I didn't get a headache. Turning down the brightness to the lowest level is now something I do with every monitor I use. Coworkers always comment the first time the see my screen "how do you see anything on that?" But the truth is you adjust really fast and don't even notice it's so dark. Best of all, I don't get headaches anymore.
This may not have been CVS, but I felt it was related to looking at screens all day so I wanted to share.
I frequently hear coworkers complaining about headaches and recommend they decrease their screen brightness. They always provide their own reasoning for the headache cause that makes it unavoidable. I shrug because I can't make them try my suggestion. But it would be interesting to have someone else try and get some feedback if the solution works for others (identifying my problem as a work hazard rather than a personnel condition).
This is very true. Flux helps with color, but it can still be a bright rectangle in a dark room and cause a lot of eye strain.
The best thing I can recommend is reducing your monitor's brightness to the same level as your periphery, including turning on a lamp to illuminate your surroundings (called bias lighting). Try something as simple as this: https://cdn.instructables.com/FUD/A1WU/GX3M1GEN/FUDA1WUGX3M1...
Turning down the brightness had the opposite effect for me. My monitor at the time "turned down the brightness" by reducing the duty cycle of the backlight. This caused flickering that was imperceptible yet caused much eyestrain. Actually turning up the brightness, moving the monitor as far back as possible, and using yellow-tinted Gunnar lenses have made a huge difference for me.
Basically every monitor with a LED backlight controls brightness by PWM. It only causes problems if the frequency is too low. (Contrast with fluorescent lights: every single fluorescent tube in existance flickers, but only some flicker slowly enough that people can notice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjyhFyUN_zQ Ditto CRT monitors, back when they were still used. Refresh rate of 60hz is flickery and annoying, refresh rate of 72hz is totally fine.)
Interesting observation!
I actually lower the brightness to about 10-20 % on each display I use (the default settings are ultra high for a sunny day in a fully lit store) and while I have two CCFL panels (a 1000 USD 24" from the past and a 1000 USD 30") blazing at me and both of them clearly use some sort of PWM - they start buzzing audibly below 80-90 % brightness (both in their audio outputs AND even with audio disabled it is heard from the monitor itself) - there never was any visible flicker. And in the CRT days, I saw flicker up to 85 Hz (including). Color wheel DLPs are also pure hell - the image breaks into three separate colors in each eye saccade. Yet, CCFL backlight, buzzing like crazy - and no visible flicker.
Enter my latest, fanciest, wide gamut screen with LED backlight - and on lower brightness, it flickers worse than a 60 Hz CRT...
However, luckily, it is not the case of each and every LED monitor - search for "flicker free" or "PWM free" - and it is not some fancy rare unicorn feature, a PWM free IPS display can cost the same or even less than flickering equivalents.
According to this recommendation page [0], there are quite a few monitors with "PWM-free (flicker-free) WLED backlight". The list includes many affordable mainstream choices.
I heard some monitors may revert to PWM below a certain brightness threshold, but assuming the information on that page is accurate, not getting PWM-free monitor is probably a sub-optimal purchase decision.
http://geizhals.eu/?cat=monlcd19wide&xf=103_flicker-free#xf_... lists a LOT of displays that are supposed to provide a flicker-free viewing experience, and you can also filter for other technical properties to your heart's content. (Caveat: parts of that site are machine-translated to English - but that doesn't affect the rigor that went into curating the original data).
Another thing to look into is FL-41 tinted glasses. I learned about them from a local vision therapist, and just ordered a prescription set about a week ago. There have been studies (e.g. [1]) indicating its usefulness for light sensitivity, migraines, and circadian disruption from using computers/TV at night. I don't have my glasses yet so I can't speak personally to their effectiveness.
I use flux already and love it. However, it itself is/was not enough to solve headaches--but I use it for more comfortable evening/morning viewing of the screen.
Definitely works for me. I keep my monitors and phone at the lowest brightness in all but full sunlight, and pretty much don't get headaches anymore. (Well, now just on the days I miss my coffee...)
The human body has a tendency to attempt to attenuate sensory input. The process you describe is similar to a practice in audio engineering where by an audio engineer will start with the lowest volume and gradually turn the volume up. If you start the volume high to begin with, your ear (and in your case your eyes) will attenuate the sensory input down which causes unnecessary strain.
There is a list of recommended monitors intended for people with migraine over at Reddit and as low brightness is the main criteria, this list can help everyone with CVS.
I've been doing this for years. It was especially a problem back in the CRT days you were basically staring at a light bulb all day.
With the never ending trend of websites and applications being white background black text aside from high contrast modes and/or plug-ins to change color schemes turning down your brightness works well.
My home computer is on night mode with brightness and contrast at the bottom. With the light off or could stand to be even darker!
Yep I used to get them too, sore eyes also and weird squinting. I run my screen at about 2/3 or 3/4 brightness, I use a dark theme in my IDE and I also always bump up the font size. Doing all this I don't get headaches or eye squinting anymore.
Also I use flux and try not to use the computer much at weekends.
Agreed. It's been 20 years that I use low brightness (and not too high contrast), plus I code on dark background.
Another thing I noticed helps is some other light source in the room, possibly a desktop lamp to light the wall behind the screen. It bothers me if the screen is the only light source in the room.
I actually alternate light-on-dark and dark-on-light color schemes for my editors because I like having visual context. Because I've reduced the brightness of the monitors light backgrounds aren't discomforting so I don't mind using either scheme.
Often, the minimum brightness is still too bright. An Android app called Screen Filter helps with this on phones - it turns down gamma or another setting - not sure about a PC equivalent.
I used Twilight for month, but I found the red tint made my phone hard to read, so I kept disabling it. I still get the same 6-8 hours of sleep as I usually did. I may not be susceptible to the blue light impact on melatonin as I've been using screens from wake to sleep for over a decade.
There's lots of numbers and statistics there, but none of it is actually scientific. The closest you get is that "VSP Optometrists report a 50% increase in digital eye strain and the effects of blue light exposure."
But I can promise you as someone on the receiving end of VSP's marketing to eye care professionals, that they're marketing the bejeezus out of their blue light blocking technology to their eye care professionals.
So, if you're an optometrist and you have a financial incentive to sell blue-light blocking coatings, and you're getting tons of marketing about the epidemic of digital eye strain in your inbox and mailbox and the publications you read, of course you're going to notice an increase of its incidents in your patients.
If you're experiencing discomfort from using your computer for hours every day, you should absolutely do things to alleviate that discomfort. But the thing that all this marketing and FUD leaves out, is that there's no evidence that blue light exposure (from digital devices) or CVS or digital eye strain or whatever they'll be calling it in a week causes any long-term damage to your eyes.
From the American Academy of Ophthalmology[1]: "Staring at your computer screen, smartphone or other digital devices for long periods won’t cause permanent eye damage, but your eyes may feel dry and tired."
"From the American Academy of Ophthalmology[1]: "Staring at your computer screen, smartphone or other digital devices for long periods won’t cause permanent eye damage, but your eyes may feel dry and tired.""
I always believed this myself but I wonder what kind of research has been done to back it up. Intuitively, staring at a computer screen for 8+ hours a day for year after year would not seem to be a good thing.
Indeed this article seems to claim different:
"As you sit in front of the screen, your eyes dry out, and you stop blinking. Over time this leads to damage of the eye muscle that is used to focus on far away objects and damage to the tear ducts."
I'm always suspicious of advice from organizations that would benefit from misinformation (e.g. "Cigarettes are good for you" - the Cigarette Industry or "Looking at screens isn't going to cause you to need more eye doctor services" - some eye doctors).
This is good advice in general, but seems a bit misapplied here- most eye doctors are likely to make more from selling you unnecessary services now then by subtly lying to you in order to damage your eyes :).
My retired optometrist friend recommended that I wear reading glasses with a very low power at all times while using the computer, and I do that now. They're .75x or 1x, I can't remember. I don't need them--nothing is blurry without them--but they help your lenses to relax by doing some of their work at close distances.
The condition he wants me to avoid is called nearpoint stress, but sounds very similar to me (a layperson). It culminates in your eyes lenses becoming "stuck," unable to fully relax to focus properly on things at a distance. I guess the reason is that your cilliary muscles (that alter the shape of the lens) become overworked to the point of a spasm.
One symptom of that is looking up from your computer and objects being blurry for a few seconds, but then coming into focus.
You have to be careful with OTC reading glasses. If your reading PD is much more narrow or wider than about 57mm, then you're introducing prism. At the powers you've mentioned, it _shouldn't_ be a problem, but higher powers can cause headaches and eye strain.
I just wish local drugstores sold sub +1.00 reading glasses. I've only been able to find them online, so it becomes a game of buy +0.25, +0.50, and +0.75, and then go through the hassle of returning two of them (likely at a loss). Optometrists may carry them, but they're so much more expensive than anywhere else. Anyone know of a better solution to find the strength that's right for me?
That said, I often find the same thing as you, that nobody sells them. It's very hit-and-miss, so I just check the racks frequently and see what turns up.
It's incredible how small is the Internet.
Just today I went to my optometrist because I have problems focusing objets at a certain distance. Turns out that I had exactly the same diagnosis, and I was recommended to buy a 0.5 glasses and use them when I'm staring at the computer or tablet.
You will notice a difference! If I am using the glasses for a while, then take them off and forget to put them back on, I can actually feel the difference.
Wearing them is really nice and when I do it all the time it prevents me from having any trouble focusing on objects at a distance, except for some specific things.
Looking through a scope on a rifle still causes the blurriness, perhaps because of its extreme closeness.
My optometrist prescribed exactly the same thing for the same reason. I sometimes have trouble seeing in the distance because of too much computer/phone use, and your explanation is spot on what he told me.
I'll vouch for this as well. A cool test: a few hours into the later parts of a long night when your working on something, try removing flux. I was blown away by how clearly this app should be a necessity for all devs and possibly techies
I have Flux on a 1 hour shift, so I don't notice the colors changing as it happens, but it absolutely makes a huge difference. Disabling it at 10pm after a few hours of 'flux-ed' viewing feels like staring directly into the sun.
I seem to be the only one that Flux drives crazy. I know it's just my perfectionism speaking, but ... I just want to know if I'm alone in the world in my criticisms. In the past I've been stuck with old broken monitors that made certain colors look wrong or blend with similar colors, and I remember the beauty of seeing the same applications and websites render correctly on a good monitor. When I see a friend's monitors with the colors off, I feel that same feeling I get when you go to a relative's house and find them sitting around the TV with both letterboxing on and an incorrect aspect ratio (apparently it's possible) like barbarians. In the past I've had friends work on some page CSS and come up with something where parts of the text had arbitrary colored off-white backgrounds in the middle of a white page. I ask how they missed such a mistake, and then when I look at their screen you can't even notice it behind the oppressive yellow tint.
I'm sure if I ever do somehow see the light and accept Flux into my heart some day, with my luck right afterward there's bound to be some hip new product that claims that looking at an over-abundance of parallel and perpendicular lines keeps you awake longer or is otherwise minisculely unhealthy, so the product applies small distortions to the locations of everything on your screen, and people designing while they have it on will inflict similarly-jumbled messes upon their own users...
flux&al adjust colour temp, but be very kind on the backlight any time of the day. Some screens are so stupidly bright it's like staring at a bright bulb all day long. If at all possible use a screen that adjusts backlight automatically according to ambient light. And no, you really don't need that much brightness, just don't turn it all the way down either!
Do you know any good automatic-adjustment add-ons? I'd like to use the OS X option, but it seems to automatically adjust to ~2 notches above what I want. So something to use the same relative changes, but a lower absolute brightness, would be perfect. Right now I just do it by hand.
I think OS X built-in setting work just like that. I.e. turn on automatic brightness, then move slider to make screen dimmer.
I've just tried making the screen really dim, then pointed flashlight onto light sensor. The screen went super bright, but after turning flashlight off it got back to my dim setting.
Flux has been awesome for me, I've been using it for a long time. Redshift more recently, but does a good job too. Twilight for Android is a very nice counterpart for my phone.
f.lux was pretty life changing for me when I first tried it, but I'm uncomfortable with the fact that it is free-with-no-ads-yet-closed-source. That's just ... odd. Eventually, I uninstalled it and instead just started going into System Preferences by hand when it gets late in the day and switching color profiles (which is all f.lux seems to do anyway) to something that is based on a lower white point. In my admittedly unscientific testing, it seems to have the same effect as f.lux, which is what I would expect.
I hope Apple releases Night Shift for macOS soon and then I can stop manually switching color profiles around, but for now it's not a big deal.
I have seen a few ophthalmologists seeking treatment for a condition resulting from computer use. I think CVS is a catch all that makes sense on the surface but doesn't really address the damage that has been done. There is some interesting research being done in this area, but it has taken a while for the eye health community to catch up.
My story goes back over 4 years ago, one day like the flick of a switch I could barely keep my eyes open. Now I live with it but it is extremely uncomfortable and distracting and I no longer hack on anything outside of work. My issue isn't so much dry eyes but strained and fatigued eyes. Imagine the most tired and strained eyes you've ever experienced. Multiply that by 10 and that is how my eyes feel starting from the moment I wake up. Luckily I still have 20/20.
Basically, let this be a warning not to take for granted your eye health.
I was in a similar situation for a couple of years. Recently I started doing warm compresses on my eyes and it has made a huge difference.
I also recommend changing one thing about your routine every week and keeping an eye pain diary. That will help you identify things that help. It takes some work, but as you said eye health is super important.
I looked into break timers a while back, but I wanted something really simple that I didn't need to install. I wrote a blog post about how to make a simple break timer with OS X notifications and AppleScript: https://reberhardt.com/blog/2016/02/09/a-dead-simple-break-t...
Anyone know of a break-taking app that watches your activity and can wait until you've lost focus on your work before reminding you to take a break?
Something like the alarms that wake you up at the right point in your sleep cycle.
It would probably need to have a cut-off eventually, but I'd hate to be interrupted in the middle of tracing some complex logic if there's a perfect stopping point 10 minutes later.
Joking aside, I view this as a necessary balance required in life. Even if my primary activity needs a lot of solo concentration, I must embrace the distactions as having value for reasons mentioned in the article. We are not ultra-specialized machines, even if we specialize in very narrow fields, we still live a life that comes with variety, diversity and in an environment filled with beneficial chaos.
Not quite what you're asking but it tracks how long you've been working (or using keyboard/mouse) and simply displays that without interrupting you at any point. If it's an hour or more for me, when I happen to glance at it, I get up and take a walk or stretch.
Get a G-Shock watch and set the countdown timer to whatever duration suits you. Given the 20:20:20:20 rule I saw above, I figure a 20 minute countdown probably isn't a bad countdown.
At school, I was taught that we have a short attention span of something like 10-15 minutes, so you could always do that. Every time the alarm goes off, go for a walk around the office.
"Reading in a sitting posture at myopia onset predicted the greatest myopic progression to adulthood and reading face up on one's back the lowest. Reading with eyes on turned more downwards was slightly connected with greater myopic progression."
I had some major vision problems a couple of years ago, to the point I didn't touch a computer for about 4 months. iPad and iPhone screens weren't bothering me so I got to keep working.
My suggestion to people having severe problems is to strip apart every variable and test. A few things I have suspicions about which I have rarely seen addressed:
- switching between low & high DPI screens
- lights/screens which are not on the same frequency
- viewing angle (referring back to the myopia study.) Prior to a standing desk I would always lean back in my chair - going back to when I was like 11 years old.
From my opinion, if you took best practices and worst practices, and then like did all the worst ones you would be fucked pretty quickly. You could take someone in great health and give them chronic pain in weeks or a few month. Doctor's advice shouldn't be ignored, especially when something fatal may be occurring, but in many cases they may have no helpful advice.
Ergonomic / RSI / Carpel tunnel issues apply here as well. I've mentioned before I had severe RSI with chronic, 24/7 pain for years, and exhaustive attempts to fix it eventually cured it. Unfortunately as I get older I've also had to acknowledge that our bodies get less and less capable of fixing themselves. At the least we can try really hard to do things which aren't aggravating the decline.
I realize you weren't asking me, but as I had it many, many years ago I'll describe it, before I go into what I did.
One day, I woke up and both hands felt a bit odd, painful and tingling all the time. The next day, I woke up and both hands were burning. I had no strength, and no fine control at all. When I did tense them, it felt like I was holding my hands under a running hot tap. I couldn't hold a fork to get food to my mouth, I couldn't even hold a key to get it into the lock to open the door.
I was studying at the time, and obviously couldn't continue that. No doctor was able to help me, I was put on anti-inflamatories that were completely ineffective. I started drinking to deal with the pain, and within a couple of months I was drinking 3.2 gallons (12 liters) of beer a day, just to dull the pain.
Once the pain died away, I was still left with some serious problems. Fortunately alcohol dependence was not one of them (I just stopped drinking). Any repetitive motion that lasted more than a few minutes would cause me a day or more of pain. I found I was unable to reliably hold things, and I could just lose my grip on whatever was in my hands. Many glasses and cups were smashed because I just couldn't hold them.
So here's when I figured out what was wrong: many of my problems were related to a significant loss of strength. Because I had been unable to do anything for more than three months, I had lost much of the strength in my hands and forearms. Stamina, too. This meant that when I did anything repetitive, I was straining the muscles beyond their ability to cope.
I sold my computers, and grabbed a pair of free weights I had lying around. The "free" part is important, because machines reduce the load on ancillary muscles. I started doing some very basic arm strength exercises (curls and reverse curls). However, training yourself is something I would recommend against - find a reputable physiotherapist and have them set you out a basic rehab program, and get a muscle balance assessment, too. You could find that you have other issues that are causing your problems - I still have serious muscle tension issues that I am working on, with the assistance of a physio.
I studied personal training some years after, and I've found that it's so very easy to screw it up when you do it all yourself. I met one guy who thought he was just a paragon of bodybuilding - he was bench pressing well over 200 pounds, but his lat pulldowns were limited to just 30 or 40 pounds. His shoulders were rounded so far forward that you couldn't see any definition in his pecs.
The main reason I recommend a physio rather than a Personal Trainer (PT) is that, as I said, you may have some biomechanical issues that need sorting out, and no matter how much a PT may claim they can do this kind of thing, they are not medical professionals. A PT would be helpful in making sure you you are biomechanically sound in implementing the physio's program, but there's no substitute for real medical help.
I'm a strong believer in bias lighting, and that it critically needs to be either incandescent or sunlight-based. Putting one flickering light source next to another (perceptible or not) causes more trouble, in my personal experience.
"He recommended I use a hot compress at least once a week for 10 minutes and to look away from the screen in a method called the 20-20-20-20 rule. Every 20 minutes take
20 seconds to look at an object at least 20 feet away and blink 20 times."
Is there any evidence that this treatment actually works?
I can give only anecdotal evidence. I do this reasonably regularly. It's mainly to combat meibomian gland dysfunction and works by heating up the oils in and around the glands so that the dry build-up clears, and the glands can function a bit more normally. They should be releasing oil throughout the day to keep the surface of your eye from drying out.
I think you need to be careful not to overdo compresses, and associated massage, as the glands are also delicate and you can damage them, but for me it results in much more comfortable eyes and better vision when I do it semi regularly.
I've been doing this on and off for decades now, thanks to blepharitis and the associated gland dysfunction you mention. The fact that I stare at a screen all day certainly doesn't help and I've had to stop wearing contact lenses even though my prescription is quite strong and any sort of glasses screw up my peripheral vision.
The downside to the compress (other than the one you mentioned) is the simple fact that I can't always just nuke my little eye-pad thing and lean back for 10 minutes several times per day at work. Even when I'm able to do it a few times per day as my eye doctors have suggested, any relief is relatively short-lived and doesn't treat anything long-term.
It sucks because my eyes almost always feel irritated or dry and no manner of lubricating drops, antibiotic drops, or hot compresses have helped. I've tried a few less tested but ultimately harmless things like fish oil supplements (since they're cheap and effects seem to range from unnoticeable to possible systemic benefits in the long term).
My takeaway has been that there's really no "cure" for blepharitis or chronic inflammation and meibomian gland dysfunction. All you can really do is minimize the things that exacerbate it and deal with it.
I was diagnosed with blepharitis two years ago. Amusing (not really...) little story:
Usually, for me, it occurs in just one eye. I haven't had it for months, but I do religiously clean my eyes every day now. The last time it happened in both eyes, and I ended up on the floor holding my eyes in the most intense pain I've experienced in a while.
My partner took it upon herself to fry up some onions. She hadn't friend them for more than a year before. A minor screaming fit at her for being so incredibly stupid and ignorant for doing that (I couldn't even take my hands away from my eyes for a day after she did that) and I thought she'd never do it again.
23 hours.
She did it again, and claimed that it never occurred to her that it would hurt me again.
I feel mine started through squinting. My layman's theory is that this introduced tension to the muscles in the area, and around the glands, which inhibited them over a long period of time. It is much better now for me, but like you I can't follow the care instructions to the degree I should. I find a very gentle massage of that area after heat really helps, and I also try to relax the muscles around my eyes and being aware of them becoming tense whenever possible.
Like you say though, it seems to be something you manage rather than cure.
This sets the backlight brightness. I'm not sure what the units are, but it can go all the way to 0. If I shine a very bright light at the screen (like sunlight), it is readable at 0.
Seems like there could be a Kickstarter. I'd want a high resolution external eink display as a secondary monitor. The refresh rate would be hell, but it'd be okay for text work.
This is still pretty appealing - I could stand to put static or near-static text there. I'd probably want to add it to my current pair of monitors, though, instead of subbing one out.
I've been wanting something like this for ages. Even as a small-scale secondary monitor, it'd be great to toss static text like tickets or APIs onto an eink display.
Oh yes! At least Kobo readers are Linux and you can SSH in. You could even install another distro I believe. Some ugly hack could be rendering the display content on your machine and just sent the image over.
Yeah, there's clinical backing for at least some of it.
The 20 seconds, 20 feet part is closely matched to eye exercises for people with certain types of nearsightedness or eyestrain. One example for nearsightedness is "close, middle, far" practice, where you cycle your focus across three visually-adjacent objects at different depths, which forces quick refocusing without saccades.
This has been pretty consistently shown to help strengthen muscles and improve refocusing speed. I haven't seen CVS-specific results, but for now I'll trust that treatment for older syndromes is a good start.
I find that soaking my face for 20-30 seconds in very cold water multiple times each day seems remarkably helpful. Plus it gets me away from my laptop for a few minutes. It's also the last thing I do before I go to bed and the first thing I do when I wake up.
The initial thinking was that I could do this to help reduce swelling (tired, puffy eyes). No idea if that works, but it sure is refreshing.
I can only provide anecdotal evidence, and I was not officially diagnosed with it, but I definitely have plenty of the issues listed. Since I adopted the Pomodoro Technique (25min work, 5min break), I have noticed that a lot of my symptoms have subsided. My biggest issues were headaches and blurry vision.
Doing things outside helps me. Which makes sense, the whole point is to ease work for the ciliary muscles and allow them to fully relax. That happens by de-flexing the lens...which happens at a focal distance of 'infinity.'
(I'm a layperson, hopefully all of my terms were correct.)
Time outdoors is my best cure for this. It seems to be some combination of doing less active, narrow-target focusing, and having the option to look longer distances. 20 feet is doable indoors, but focusing 500 feet away is often out of the question.
I am thinking my habit of drinking lots of water / tea / yerba mate helps. Means I get up and go for a piss every hour at least. Drinking lots of water is generally seen as a good thing.
My eyes twitched for a couple months and I talked to my optometrist about it. He recommended exactly this - drink lots of water while using computers so I'm forced to take pee breaks.
Also, quinine which is found in tonic water might help... with twitching and relaxing the eye muscles.
One thing I discovered through an ad hoc anecdotal experiment involving only myself, over a quarter century ago, was the effect of font size. As a CS undergrad I was working like crazy in the lab for many hours a day. The display-hardware was B&W X window terminals (cathode ray, of course) with 19" screens. I had this idea: if I make things easier to read even when my eyes are tired, I can boost my endurance, right? So I switched to using large fonts. This had exactly the opposite effect; my fatigue symptoms became worse, because I was able to ignore the status of my eyes and keep going (without even consciously realizing it). If the fonts are big enough, you don't even have to blink any more; you can still read if your eyes dry out, ha! A that point I experienced an "aha" moment, and tried it the opposite way: I used a smaller font than the default. Like magic, my fatigue symptoms soon went away. I hypothesized that this is because small fonts create a negative feedback. When your eyes start to lose focus, you cannot read the screen any more. Firstly, you are forced to blink more often to keep your eyes moist. Second, you have no choice but to relax and not squint or strain. When the feedback mechanism does break, you're forced to take a break simply because you cannot ignore the fact that you're having trouble reading what's on the screen.
Since that time, I have always used small fonts and haven't had any problems. Plus, when CRT's started to disappear around the turn of the century, that was a fantastic change. Solid-state screens are much easier on the eyes.
What about good old dark editor themes or, better: Inverting of screen colours? Staring at a bright computer screen for hours is a recipe for tired, red eyes. And all operating systems offer negative screen colours. On OS X it is an accessibility option and has the standard shortcut control+option+command + 8.
Android and iOS also can do this. On iOS it's again an accessibility option, press the home button three times after it is activated and you will be able to read HN much longer (also, a black+blue HN is nice).
I am using this option so much that I finally switched from Ubuntu to OS X on the desktop after an Ubuntu upgrade at that time eliminated negative screen colours (and hibernation, but this is a different story), and it was impossible to bring it back.
I also like Flux darkroom, but after some time it gives you the feeling of being in a horror movie.
After a particularly intense few weeks of work of computer-based work, I started getting double vision every time I tried to read or type at a computer screen. Initially it was rather disturbing.
Recovery was 3 days away from screen time and time outdoors (focusing eyes on far away things). I've definitely reformed my habits to spend time looking out the window more.
This is one of those cases where it's important to remember that not all equipment is born the same when it comes to ergonomics, even when it features similar specs.
I have a 2012 MBP Retina, in retina mode (scaled at half the native resolution).; I can look at it for hours and hours without any problem. I also have a larger 4K screen from Iiyama, also "in retina mode"; after about an hour staring at it, my eyes are so dry that they are forced to cry, and headaches are much more frequent when I stick to that.
Somebody should do for monitors what Hermann Miller did for chairs.
I haven't seen them myself, but the TrueTone displays in Apple's newest iPad pro seems to put a lot of work into this, particularly in automatically matching the color temperature of the surrounding light.
From what I understand VR goggles have collimator to focus eyes of the user at infinity. I was wondering: are there collimator spectacles? Would they help? Would they interfere with text reading?
I suffer of CVS big time, I had to apply tons of eye-drops every few hours due the dry and burning sensation on my eyes and some days I won't even catch much sleep because my eyes hurted so badly and keept me awake.
What helped me a lot was a pair of Gunnar glasses (cristaline version) plus taking short brakes every 25min (Podoro Technique helps with this). The Gunnar glasses alone took me to cut down my use of eye-drops to 1 or 2 times a day.
So I honestly recommend the glasses, but wait for the style you like to be on sale (I bought mines 30% off) and if you are not sure about the meassures of your head, go with the Sheadog ones, I have a big head, and those fit me perfectly and are very light weight.
It could be that the name I give to the symptoms is not appropiate (even when who diagnosed me with CVS was an optimetrician not me...) nevertheless the symptoms are quite real... And, fortunatelly, I have found a solution that works quite well on coping with it.
That's a pretty plausible explanation for why my eyesight has gone down the drain in the past couple years. And I'm young, I can't be losing my vision just yet.
I had 20/20 vision until I was 33, then over the next couple of years I noticed my site getting worse until I tried on a friends pair of glasses and everything went crisp.
I asked the optometrist what would cause my eyes to go bad and she just said "How many hours a day do you look at a computer screen?"
My advice is don't mancave or cubicle if you have an option. Fight for that window seat at work. I'd rather have a window cubicle than a windowless office. Enjoy the view every couple minutes.
I don't know if this is good or bad but wearing contact lens while on the computer does help me notice much faster when my eyes dry up. That prompts me to blink and look around.
I am not sure if this is the place to show code, but here's a small script which can help you remind about looking away from monitor and follow 20-20 rule (only for MAC-OS):
while :
do
for run in {1..5}
do
sleep 1
tput bel
echo "Eye Beep"
done
sleep 1200
One of the best things that's happened for my eyes in regards to looking at compute screens all day was getting upgraded from a 1366x768 laptop to a 13" Retina Macbook Pro. Even though the text is way smaller on my MBP, everything is so easy to read.
I occasionally see screens change shape from the typical rectangle to trapezoid. That's when I would just shut down and go outside or do something else.
This effect could last the rest of the day/evening for me.
I thought this would be about how computer vision is distracting AI researchers from other areas of AI. I guess computer vision has multiple definitions now.
over the last 10 years of being on a computer for at least 10 hours a day my distance vision has been obliterated. i used to have 20/15 vision and now i have 20/50 vision.
I'm positive the screens are the issue. My toddler nieces stand a foot away from tvs and every time i see it i beg their parents to not let them subject their developing eyes to that.
I feel incredibly lucky that I don't suffer from any of these symptoms, as I sit, and have sat, in front of my computer for ~14 of my available waking hours each day for the past... 10 years?
8 hours a day at work, and I then come home and game for 3 or 4 more, sometimes as much as 9 or10 additional hours, and have not yet felt anything as described here.
I may do these exercises naturally, as part of my existing habits, because I'm fairly easily distracted.
Against dry eyes,a micro controller and two airbrush pistols with natrium-destilled water solution. Its a shame there is no ready made solution built into or upon glasses...
PS: Huge glasses that cover the eyes also protect against moisture loss.
This is another pointless diagnosis of a cluster of issues centered on an activity. Instead of, you know, centered on the disease. Kind of like diagnosing bad software with "HeadUpButt Developer Syndrome". Cute, a cocktail party line, but not the same as medicine.
Lots of human activity boils down to finding patterns and labeling them. Don't you think there could be some benefit to having a label on this cluster of issues, such as making it more efficient to find useful remedies?
I do agree though that there's a danger with this kind of thing to think of it as some kind of single agent and oversimplify. I think we need to be careful to keep in mind the underlying nature of the meaning of these terms.
This may not have been CVS, but I felt it was related to looking at screens all day so I wanted to share.
I frequently hear coworkers complaining about headaches and recommend they decrease their screen brightness. They always provide their own reasoning for the headache cause that makes it unavoidable. I shrug because I can't make them try my suggestion. But it would be interesting to have someone else try and get some feedback if the solution works for others (identifying my problem as a work hazard rather than a personnel condition).