The Greater Seattle Area IT Experts

Before we delve into the details of how this is possible, let’s first take a look at a TechInsider report highlighting just how much time people spend in front of screens.

• 10 percent of users spend three-quarters of their waking hours looking at screens.
• 40 percent of users spending more than five hours a day looking at screens.
• 95 percent of users spend more than two hours a day looking at screens.

What makes digital eye strain difficult for the modern office worker is the fact that avoiding the screen can be virtually impossible. Plus, it doesn’t help that so much of our entertainment involves a television or computing device.

In regards to the risk of temporary blindness, two recent cases link the condition to looking at a smartphone screen, in a dark room, and with one eye covered. This happened to two women, aged 22 and 40, while they were using their smartphones in a dark room. In each case, the two women were lying on their side with a pillow covering the eye not looking at the screen. When their temporary blindness condition was brought to the attention of an optometrist, it was determined that misuse of the mobile devices was to blame.

In these two situations, temporary blindness occurred because the women had one eye covered while using their device. This causes one eye to try and adapt to the darkness by catching up to the other that isn’t being used, which couldn’t happen because a pillow was in the way. Subsequently, when the screen turns off, the open eye tries to adapt again, but experiences darkness until the other eye catches up.

Fortunately, these two cases have been diagnosed as circumstantial, and therefore, shouldn’t be a cause for concern from the smartphone-using public. However, the fact that these temporary blindness incidents resulted from looking at a screen incorrectly should be reason enough to warn about the dangers of digital eye strain--especially since so many office workers are required to spend so much of their time staring at a screen.

Here are four best practices for looking at screens that can potentially save your eyesight.

Remember to Blink
Not blinking often enough can dry out your eyes and cause pain. Blinking more often than you already are can go a long way in preventing eye strain.

Increase the Size of the Text
The smaller the text means the more you’ll have to squint in order to read it. In most apps, increasing the text size is as easy as using Ctrl + (+). Larger text may help alleviate headaches caused by eye strain.

The 20-20-20 Rule
Every 20 minutes, take 20 seconds to look away from the screen and instead look at an object that’s 20 feet away. Doing so will prevent your eye muscles from focusing on a screen too much throughout the workday and going sedentary.

Reduce Blue-Light Exposure
Continuous absorption of blue light emitted from screens can cause damage to your eyes and produce cataracts, among many other problems. Minimizing screen time and using a pair of “computer glasses” to block some of the blue light are two ways to reduce this light.

Do you suffer from digital eye strain? What are some ways that you’ve found helpful to alleviate this strain? Share them with us in the comments.

InfoWorld discusses this scenario in length: “For example, a large enterprise that migrates 100 applications to an IaaS cloud might discover during testing that the latency is too high for 25 of the applications. The board of directors and leadership were given a plan showing 100 applications migrating to the cloud, and no one wants to communicate a change, so they power through. The result is that those 25 applications don't function well enough to support the business, and that adds up to a big, costly failure.”

The idea is to acknowledge that your plans may need to be altered, and to change them as such before it becomes a major loss for your business. The appropriate response, as indicated by InfoWorld, is to not move those 25 applications to the cloud. Instead, it’s best to not rush this matter and instead focus on moving them so that they can function properly upon virtualization. The only problem is that there’s more to take into account, like your IT budget. This makes implementing new solutions slightly inflexible--just enough that even the slightest mistake can derail implementation.

Provide a Sense of Autonomy
While you may feel the desire to oversee a project one step at a time, it’s best that you don’t. You should entrust the project to whoever’s sole responsibility is to manage your technology solutions. The more hands that are on a project, the more hurdles that the administrator has to go through in order to get the cloud migration finished without incident. You should be able to get IT projects done without having to run every little decision by the chain of command.

Evaluate and Test Accordingly
It’s important to realize that your organization will probably experience problems, and that you need to handle them as they occur. Examine how progress is being made and alter your business’s approach to cloud migration based on how well it’s doing. The idea is to address potential problems before they happen, so that you can avoid expensive downtime and delays in the project’s completion.

Make Adaptation an Accepted Practice
Your business needs to see the ability to adapt as an asset. It’s one thing to discover a flaw in a plan, but another entirely to find resolutions and swiftly work toward resolving it. This means that you need to do your part to foster this type of acceptance in the workplace. When something goes wrong, don’t point fingers and try to find the one responsible for it; encourage your team to discover the resolution.

If you need assistance with a cloud migration, Digital Seattle can help. Our skilled technicians can work alongside your IT staff to guarantee that your cloud project goes off without a hitch. To learn more, reach out to us at (206) 709-9556.

The main problem with the device is the battery itself. An anonymous source states that Samsung outsourced the batteries from manufacturing plants in China and Korea, though batteries received from Korea seem to be the only ones affected by the issue. These batteries explode when the device charges, and so far there have been at least 35 reports of such an incident. Samsung estimates that 1 in 42,000 devices sold will experience the problem, but the company has chosen to recall every single device… you know, just in case.

You can be sure that Samsung will be reeling from the consequences of this decision for quite some time. Not only does the company have to replace over a million devices, but it also has to deal with the publicity fallout of this recall. There has already been quite a lot of public outcry over the faulty devices--take, for example, this article about a six-year-old whose phone exploded in his hands. Yikes.

Samsung will likely be in damage control mode for the next few months as they move toward resolving the problem and reassuring their consumer base that the problem won’t happen again.

Until Samsung gets its act together, customers are likely to turn their attention toward other smartphone options, like the iPhone 7 (though this model still has to worry about ongoing complaints citing its lack of a headphone jack).

Either way, if you own a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and haven’t adhered to the recall, be sure to do so as soon as possible. Samsung has released a page which details the return process, as well as your options based on your mobile carrier.

http://www.samsung.com/us/note7exchange/

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