Since then, Workrave has issued a series of updates that make the program even more useful at combating RSI. Anyone who spends more than an hour or two on their computer each day should take a careful look at what the program now has to offer to prevent headaches and hand injury further down the line.

To get started, follow this link to the program’s download page and start the 11 MB transfer. The installation is simple and fast, and you should be able to have the program on your computer in no time at all. Once installed the program puts an icon of a jumping sheep on your taskbar which you can right click to make changes. To get everything fine-tuned just the way you would like, begin by right clicking on the icon and selecting Preferences.

The default screen provides an interface through which you can program what kinds of breaks you would like and how often you wish for them to appear. For example, by clicking on the micro-break tab you can choose an amount of time between breaks, how long those breaks should be, and how long the default postpone time, or “snooze,” should be. You can do the same for different longer rest breaks that are just long enough to encourage you to get up and get a new mug of coffee or walk around the room. Finally, you can set a daily limit for computer usage, although you will likely find this setting to be more harm than help.

Next, fine tune your settings through the User interface button on the left of the preferences tab. Here you can change things like the volume of break notices, whether the program starts automatically with Windows or even whether or not you want to be able to see the remaining duration of the break once it has begun.

Best of all, if you have to transfer into crisis mode and begin working without breaks for a bit, you can suspend the programs features and continue with your work unhindered by the occasional break interruptions. If you find yourself using this feature too often you may not want to bother with the program at all, but most people will find it handy to silence the notices only occasionally.

Products that are aimed at stopping RSI have come a long way since symptoms of the malady became noticeable with daily computer use. While simple, the latest version of Workrave helps people stay safe from the most common health problems created by contemporary work environments. It can be very easy to ignore the headaches and hurts that we experience on a daily basis. By moving around once every so often, however, we can greatly reduce RSI’s effects.

A myriad of programs tries to aid the user in preventing strain caused by long hours of work on computer systems. I have reviewed half a dozen in the past years. Among them Eyes Relax and Eye Guardian which combat eye strain and Off 4 Fit which adds physical exercise to the breaks.

I just stumbled upon TimeClue at the Donation Coder website. The basic idea behind TimeClue is to give visual break reminders to the user sitting in front of the PC. This is done in form of a fading desktop that displays the current time in big bold letters.

You can still work on the computer even in its faded stage as everything is still fully operational. The reminder should however be enough for most users to stop work at this point to prevent eye strain. Breaks seem to last between 15 to 30 seconds, enough for eye exercises or getting a new cup of coffee or tea.

The program places an icon in the Windows system tray. You can use it to open the options of the program

Here it is possible to configure the auto fade interval. It is set to 15 minutes by default, meaning that the screen will face every 15 minutes. You can change that to an interval between 1 and 60 minutes.

Options are also provided to change the overlay color and the maximum opacity which define the fade effect on the monitor.

The color and text size of the clock are configured here as well. The program is blocked from fading the screen if a full-screen application is running.

The options are missing a fade duration setting, everything else appears to be there.

One problem that I ran into was that the program fades the screen even if you run multimedia contents on the screen. Lets say you are watching a video or playing a flash game. You need to stop the activity if the screen fades. Your best option in this case is to disable the program before you start that activity.

TimeClue aids users in taking regular computer breaks. The software is only as effective if the user in front of the computer adheres to the suggestions to take a break.

Windows users can download a portable or installer version of TimeClue from the developer website at Musetips.

Eye strain is a temporary condition that goes away after resting the eyes for some time. Resting the eyes regularly can prevent eye strain.

Eye Guardian is a small program for Windows that reminds a computer user to take a break. It is in this regard similar to programs like Eyes Relax, Eye Defender, Eyecare or Off 4 Fit which we have reviewed in the past.

The software program places an icon into the Windows system tray upon startup that offers options to configure the application. The language was set to Chinese on first start on our test system. To switch the interface to the English language users need to right-click the system tray icon and select the fourth option from the top. This opens the config menu. The pulldown menu lists English as an alternative language for the program interface. The setting needs to be saved by clicking on the leftmost button in the settings.

eye guardian

Five minute breaks are suggested after 50 minutes of work with the possibility to change both intervals in the program’s settings.

prevent eye strain

A dimmed full screen window is displayed on top of the computer desktop at break times. A message, configured in the program’s settings, can be displayed on the screen as well. A right-click opens the menu with options to return to work early. The window can be closed by clicking on the X window control at the top right as well.

Eye Guardian reminds users to take regular breaks. The default language on the other hand could turn non-Chinese speaking users away. Those users can take a look at the program alternatives that were linked to above.

Exercises are divided into the three categories Eyes, Hands and Body each containing several exercises that do not take up lots of space, if any, which is ideal for work environments. Each exercise is explained visually by an avatar that is performing it over and over again as well as text that is displayed below the performance.

The first exercise for the hands for example asks the user to stretch his finger joints while the first body exercise is all about stretching the body for a few times.

Each exercise is repeated several times. Basic controls allow to pause, rewind or forward exercises at any time. The exercises are easy to learn which means that the animations are no longer needed eventually which should definitely be the first goal of a new user. It does not make much sense to exercise the eyes when you have to keep them glued to the computer monitor to understand the exercises correctly.

The other criticism that I have is the advertisement popup that appeared once talking about another tool of the developer that would scan my Registry. I have no idea on the frequency of those popups, it happened once during my tests.

The time before the program reminds the user that he should take a break can be set between 10 and 180 minutes.

The website viddownloader converts the videos to avi before it displays a download link. This is probably not the most elegant solution if you want to download hundreds of videos but it works fine if you only want to download a few videos. You supply the url of the video that you want to download and viddownloader does the rest automatically and displays a download link afterwards. It supports the following sites at the moment: Youtube, Break, Dailymotion, Myspace and Pornotube.

The conversion took just a few minutes and depends on the length of the video mainly. Not sure if video conversions are queued or how viddownloader handles several requests at the same time. Download speeds were fine as well. I was able to download with about 100K which is ok for videos of that size. The flv video was about 7 megabytes in size while the converted avi was almost triple that size with 19 megabytes.