Reducing Eyestrain: A primer for programmers and superusers
Posted: July 9th, 2009 | Author: scott | Filed under: Health & Fitness | Tags: eye strain, glasses, programming, rsi | No Comments »It’s so frustrating to have something so important to you be taken way by a health issue.
I’ve met a few programmers that have had RSI issues.
- A programmer I used to work with, Ted, had some back issues, which vastly affected his ability to do what he loves.
- I listened to a touching presentation at Boston Ruby Group by Chris Maxwell about how he programs with no keyboard or mouse because he has such bad carpal tunnel syndrome.
So when I recently started getting serious eye strain headaches, I started to get worried. I only got headaches on days of heavy computing – 12 hours or more (which, but the way, is probably unhealthy on every level – physically, mentally, and spiritually).
Here’s a list of things you can do to start avoiding this now.
- Get new glassess with Anti Reflective (AR) coating. This has helped me emmensley.
- Use anti rsi software. Anti-rsi (mac) workrave (windows/linux)
- Drink lots of water. This will hydrate your eyes and cause you to use the bathroom multiple times a day.
- Do eye excercies.
- Take a lunch break. Especially if you are billing per hour sometimes you want to eat lunch at your desk. but I’ve gotten some of my worst headaches from it.
- Upgrade your monitor to something with better resolution.
- Don’t use dual monitors – (or at least only have one primary one) having two monitors means they have to be farther away for you to see both of them wihtout having eye strain. Use only one.
- Use a firefox extension – Blank your monitor + easy reading or the “Readable” bookmarklet.
- Increase the text size of everything in windows.
- Put your monitor on the lowest brightness and the best contrast you can.
- Use a dark background background in your IDE.
- Turn on Cleartype (it’s on by default in mac). This allows you to read text better.
