Episode: 4655
Title: Tips for Glasses
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4655/hpr4655.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:16:04 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4655, for 2026-06-05
Today's show is entitled, "Tips for Glasses"
The host is norrist and the duration is 00:09:50
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Cleaning Glasses and Mid Range Progressive Lenses"
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Queue.
This show was submitted in November 2025 to cover occasions like this
where there are gaps in the schedule.
I have a quick episode about wearing glasses of worn glasses for a long time and I've
made a lot of mistakes with my glasses, but I've got two things I didn't know it took
me a while to learn, I'll talk about it real quick, so was this important, well I'll
postulate something here, one is that beauty, HDR community members are nerds, two,
you know from the movies and TV shows that if you're a nerd, you definitely wear glasses,
so I think it's safe to conclude that HDR community members wear glasses, so one of the things
I was always doing wrong is one, my glasses would get very dirty all the time and I would
try to clean them using lens wipes or cloth or something and I'll always end up leaving smudges
on my glasses from the oil that's on my fingers, all these lens wipes and all the
little claws you get when you get a new pair of glasses, these are all really small,
so when I try to clean my glasses with them I would always end up accidentally touching
my glasses and doing the opposite of cleaning them, so I'll be trying to clean them and
end up getting streaks on there from the oil on my skin, so I had heard an odd doctor say
that the best way to clean glasses was just using regular dish soap, so I thought I would
give that a shot, so I tried just using dish soap and ended up cleaning the glasses with my fingers
and it worked really good because not only did it clean the glasses but in the process it got all
the oil off my fingers, so when I went to try the glasses later even if I accidentally touched
my glasses my fingers were clean so I didn't leave any streaks, so just to kind of
spell out the method and you can use dish soap like you've used the wash dishes with in the sink,
hands-op works too, just like any soap that you would normally wash your hands with,
all that stuff works just fine, so the way the clean to clean the glasses you just get some soap
a pretty good bit of soap, put it on your fingers, kind of use your thumb to smear it
across your fingertips, then grab the lenses of your glasses or one lens at a time,
just kind of like pick up your glasses by the lens and you'll end up, once out of your glasses
will have your fingertips and the other side or the one side of the lens will have your fingertips
and the other side will have your the tip of your thumb and then just clean the glasses,
both sides at the same time, both sides of the lens at the same time, you know with your
fingers on one side of the lens and your thumb on the other and just kind of rub the glasses
with your soapy fingers and it gets them really, really clean and then you can move over to the other
side of the glasses to the other lens, do the same thing and usually too whenever I do this I will
clean a couple of pair glasses at a time, so I'll have a, you know, the pair that I'm wearing
and maybe another pair, because there's enough, when you get the soap on your fingers you're going
to enough to do a couple of different pair glasses, so clean one, clean two, and then the good part
about this, like I said, is that now your fingers are really clean and there's no oil on your
fingers, so it's, it's really easy to dry your glasses with the microfiber claws and not even
if you do, actually it only touches the lenses while you're cleaning your glasses or drying your
glasses, it doesn't matter, because your fingers are just as clean as the glasses are here,
now I'm going to leave any streaks on the glasses. Those tip number one, cleaning glasses,
tip number two is about mid-range progressives, so what you get old enough
to need by-focals, so we know you're already wearing glasses to see far away, so at some point,
usually around the time you turn 40, you're going to need some reading glasses, and so typically
you combine those into a single set of glasses called by-focals, the newer by-focals are called
progressive, because you have good distance vision out of the top of the glasses, and you have
good up close vision out of the bottom of the glasses, and they're just kind of this range in the
middle where you can kind of see these medium distances, so the problem I was having is that
probably, like most HPR listeners, I spend a lot of time on computer including my job, and that's
a real narrow band in the progressive area, you know, it's not far away, and it's not close up,
you know, it's maybe for me it's a few feet, it might be, you know, for our listeners on the
metric system, it might be one or two meters away, but that's typically, you know, a good
distance to be away from your monitor is a, you know, three or four feet or, you know,
whatever that is in the metric system, but these don't, you can't really see,
except out of a real narrow range of your glasses, where you can really focus on one,
just a few feet away, and you know, I have two monitors, they're pretty big,
so I end up, if I'm trying to look at one monitor or another monitor or the bottom or the top,
the only way I could see, when I was looking at, I'd have to constantly move my head to have this
little narrow focus, little narrow window that I could see clearly, you know, at the distance
of my monitors are, I was constantly having to move that little window around if I move in my head,
so anyway, very annoying, lots of eye strain next strain, so I don't remember where I heard about
them, but there are a type of progressive lens that are made for doing computer work,
and what they do is they expand the middle area, so instead of having a narrow band that's kind of
this in between, good for this in between distance, they widen that band, so they have just a
little bit at the top, for seeing far away and just a little bit at the bottom for seeing
up close, and the majority of the middle is for seeing this kind of mid range, perfect for
using a computer, so the kind of definition of these lenses, I'll have the link to where I found
this definition, but it refers to them as computer progressive lenses, because they're also known
as occupational designs or enhanced readers, so they're optimized for intermediate and near vision
making them ideal for tasks like pro-long computer work or activities at mid range distance,
and I ordered me a pair of these, I got them from the online retailer, Zini, Zee and in I,
and they are on the Zini's website, they're called the mid range workspace progressives,
but you can probably order them from any online retailer for glasses, I've not had good luck
getting these glasses from my regular eye doctor, so I've basically given up by, I don't buy glasses
from my eye doctor anymore, I go to my eye doctor, give my exam, and then I take that prescription
and then I order glasses online, even for my regular glasses, my regular biofocals,
their cheaper, and probably just it's good, then the ones I can get there, plus I can get the mid range
progressives, so the reason I usually clean two pair of glasses at a time is I'll have my
mid range progressives and my regular biofocals, I usually have both of those and I'll kind of switch
them out throughout the day, so they're probably both 30, so that's the reason I'm too clean
and too pair of glasses at a time, because I'm cleaning my regular glasses and my mid range
progressives, but to kind of sum it up, if you work on a computer and you need
biofocals and you're having trouble with focusing on the monitor or seeing all of your
monitor at once, look for some mid range progressives, it's been a big improvement for me for
headneck comfort while working, that's it, that's all I got.
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