Home neck exercises

NECK - HOME EXERCISES

A large number of people suffer from neck pain. Young people having neck pain has increased since many of them do a desk job now-a-days. More prevalent in persons using laptops.

These exercises are good for them as a preventive measure for 

cervical spondylosis, 

RSI of the neck, 

repeated neck strains etc. 

They are also beneficial in people already suffering from the above to prevent the severity of the condition.

Sit Straight, look straight, slowly bend backwards to look up as much as you can, maintain for 10 sec and come back to neutral. Repeat it a few times. 

To begin with you can start from a count of two or three, gradually increase the count day by day. You can do up to ten counts over a period of time. Same applies to all the exercises described here.

Now slowly bend forwards to look down as much as you can , maintain for 10 sec and come back to neutral.

Sit straight, look straight, slowly bend sideways to make your ear touch the shoulder, as much as you can maintain for 10 seconds and come back to neutral, repeat the same for the other side.

Sit Straight, look straight, slowly turn to sides to make your chin turn towards the shoulder, maintain 10 seconds. Come to neutral and repeat the same for the other side.

Sit Straight, look straight, tuck in chin, as like looking into your pocket without bending your neck. Maintain it for 10 sec and return back to neutral. Do not bring your chin more forwards.

Clasp your hands, put thumbs together, place thumbs under your chin, tuck your chin and gently press your thumbs with your chin, do not let go. Hold it for 10 seconds and gently relax. Avoid jerky movements.

Sit straight, look straight, place your palm on forehead, gently press your palm with forehead, hold for 10 sec and gently relax.

Sit straight, look straight, place clasped hands behind your head, gently press the hands with head, hold for 10 sec and gently relax.

Sit straight, look straight, place your hand on right side of the head, gently press, hold for 10 sec and gently relax, repeat the same for left side.

To stretch the muscle on the right side: Take the right hand back of your body; turn the head towards the left side, look down as much as you can, now place your left hand over the head, gently pull the head down. Stretch has to be felt at the sides of neck. Maintain it for 30 sec and gently relax.  Make sure you don’t shrug the shoulder while stretching the muscle.

         

To strengthen the right side muscle: Take one arm length of the thera band.

Hold one end of the band in left hand. Fix it with the arm straight and close to the body. Hold the other end of the band in right hand. Pull the band outside and away from the body upwards with right hand, as shown in the figure. Maintain for 2 sec and bring it back to neutral.

Take one arm length of the thera band. Hold one ends of the band with both the hands. Place your legs wide apart. Pull the band in such a way, that the elbows move backwards and squeeze your upper back, as shown in the figure. Maintain for 2 sec and bring it back to neutral.

• Always consult your doctor before starting the exercises.
• Don't do the exercises when you have acute pain.
• Stop exercises if it increase your pain and consult your doctor.
• Be gentle in the beginning and always build-up slowly.

Full screen zooper widget with note 3 style air command.

This is a full screen zooper widget, i have put together. 
It is a simplistic, functional and single full screen widget.
This widget has all the info: like time, date, battery, wifi/network, weather. It has calendar events, system information, missed calls and messages. I have incorporated a galaxy note 3 style air command dial in to the widget.

There is room on the top left for a simple rss reader widget.

Top right are two folders for google and favorite apps.

Settings: This is on note 2 at 240 dpi.

Nova launcher: grid 10*7, no status bar, no dock bar, no shadows, allow overlap widget.

Zooper widget. Single : re size as required.

Simple rss widget, re size as required.

Works well with darker shaded wallpapers.

Download zooper templet here.
wallpaper here.

Allin1 zooper widget small

This is a 4*1 version of allin1 zooper widget.

Here is the zw file.

Allin1

Allin1 Conky

Allin1 Zooper widget

My New Zooper widget : Allin1

Hi i made a zooper pro widget to include most of the essential data all in one. Here it is, a simple widget.
It shows the time, date, place, sunrise, sunset timings, present network, wifi: connected to & strengh, battery: remaining & temp, weather: condition & temperature, RAM: bar & left, uptime and next alarm.
Download the template from here.

New conky config showing date, data, weather, calendar and Email : Allin1

Hi all,

This is a allin1, new big conky on my desktop which displays useful data at a glance.

Because the conky weather no longer works, i have used yahoo weather to get the same results.

Here is a screenshot.

You will need a lot of fonts and few scripts to run this successfully. 

Fonts used: 

1. Radio Space
2. hooge font
3. Poky font
4. Weather font
5. OPenLogos font
6. PizzaDude Bullets font
7. VariShapes Solid font
8. StyleBats font
9. DejaVu Sans
10. Liberation Serif

Google for them and download free from the sites.

Scripts used:

1. conkyrcallin1
2. gmail.pl
3. logo
4. weather PNGs.

Download the scripts from here.

Logo used:

Download and save the fonts, scripts and logo.

You will need to edit the scripts and change the paths, to make it work.

If you need more info...... for 

Google calendar (gcalcli) go to http://www.webupd8.org/2010/08/display-google-calendar-on-your-desktop.html to know how to make it work.

Yahoo weather : go to http://www.weather.yahoo.com. Enter your city name or zip in the search weather box. Your weather info page will open. Note down the 7 digit number displayed in the address bar after the city name. You will have to add it to this part of the script, replacing the number with the one for your city.

${goto 920}${execi 300 curl -s "http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?w=1940345&u=c"

Have fun......

Back Care Exercises

These exercises should only be done on recommendation of a medical practitioner. Not all exercises are suitable for all persons.  What exercises are suitable for you, among the below explained ones, will depend on the condition causing the back pain, consult your doctor.

Williams' Flexion Exercises

These exercises were deviced by Dr. Paul Williams in 1937 for patients with chronic low back pain after finding that majority of these patients had degenerative disk disease.

Williams' Flexion Exercises

1. Pelvic tilt.

• Lie on your back with knees bent, feet flat on floor.
• Flatten the small of your back against the floor, without pushing down with the legs.
• Hold for 5 to 10 seconds.

2. Single Knee to chest.

• Lie on your back with knees bent and feet flat on the floor.
• Slowly pull your right knee toward your shoulder and hold 5 to 10 seconds.
• Lower the knee and repeat with the other knee.

3. Double knee to chest.

• Lie on your back with knees bent, feet flat on floor.
• After pulling right knee to chest, pull left knee to chest and hold both knees for 5 to 10 seconds.
• Slowly lower one leg at a time.

4. Partial sit-up.

• Lie on your back with knees bent, feet flat on floor.
• Flatten the small of your back against the floor, without pushing down with the legs.
• Hold for 5 to 10 seconds.
• while holding this position, slowly curl your head and shoulders off the floor.
• Hold briefly.
• Return slowly to the starting position.

5. Hamstring stretch.

• Start in long sitting with toes directed toward the ceiling and knees fully streched.
• Slowly lower the trunk forward over the legs, keeping knees streched, arms outstretched over the legs, and eyes focus ahead.

6. Hip Flexor stretch.

• Place one foot in front of the other with the left (front) knee bent and the right (back) knee held rigidly straight.
• Flex forward through the trunk until the left knee contacts the axillary fold (arm pit region).
• Repeat with right leg forward and left leg back.

7. Squat.

• Stand with both feet parallel, about shoulder’s width apart.
• Attempting to maintain the trunk as perpendicular as possible to the floor, eyes focused ahead, and feet flat on the floor, slowly lower your body by bending your knees.

Devised by Robin McKenzie in 1981, after noting that some of his patients reported lower back pain relief while in an extended position. This went against the predominant thinking of Williams Flexion biased exercises at this period of time.

McKenzie Back Extension Exercises

1. Prone lying.
   

• Lie on your stomach with arms along your sides and head turned to one side.
  
• Maintain this position for 5 to 10 minutes.
  

2. Prone lying on elbows.

• Lie on your stomach with your weight on your elbows and forearms and your hips touching the floor or mat.
• Relax your lower back. Remain in this position 5 to 10 minutes.

3. Prone press-ups.

• Lie on your stomach with palms near your shoulders, as if to do a standard push-up.
• Slowly push your shoulders up, keeping your hips on the surface and letting your back and stomach sag.
• Slowly lower your shoulders. Repeat 10 times.

4. Progressive extension with pillows.

• Lie on your stomach and place a pillow under your chest.
• After several minutes, add a second pillow.
• If this does not hurt, add a third pillow after a few more minutes.
• Stay in this position up to 10 minutes. Remove pillows one at a time over several minutes.

5. Standing extension.

• While standing, place your hands in the small of your back and lean backward.
• Hold for 20 seconds and repeat.
• Use this exercise after normal activities during the day that place your back in a flexed position: lifting, forward bending, sitting, etc.

Extension exercises may cause further damage in people with spondylolysis, spondylolisthesis and facet joint dysfunction. Flexion exercises should be avoided in persons with acute disc herniation.

Printable PDF format download.

Get the beautiful ubuntu natty running on your Vaio CS laptops

Its been a week since Ubuntu natty got officially released. I was running natty since when it was alpha. Since i had issues like the touch-pad freezes, and also since i wanted try the gnome-shell and screwed the install, i decided to do a fresh install.

These are the steps i went through to get a beautiful natty 32bit running on my sony vaio CS17G.

1. Installation: Download Ubuntu natty free from the Ubuntu site, here.
                         Burn the ISO file with a ISO burning software to a CD.
                         Boot with the CD into a live session, to test it, for me i was booted to a Ubuntu classic desktop, without unity. everything worked fine.
                     
                        Go ahead and press on install Ubuntu, If you have partitioned hard disk with gparted, you may run into the issue of installation getting stuck at copying files stage, for ever.

                        So while installing to partitions done with gparted, selecting formatting option, overcomes this problem and installation proceeds without a hitch.

2. Reboot:       After the successful installation, you will be prompted to reboot. I landed in trouble again when natty refused to boot and it stops permanently with a black screen and a cursor on the top left corner. I had to boot with kernel options noacpi nolapic. This resulted in a successful boot into a natty ubuntu classic desktop with a message that unity is not possible because of driver issues.
                     
                        The fresh install without the nvidia proprietary drivers results only in Ubuntu classic Desktop without unity. But the Fn keys work very well, both for volume and brightness, and the AV Mode key brings up Banshee media player.

3. Nvidia:       If you want unity desktop you have to install nvidia drivers. Go to additional drivers option, which will search for the available nvidia drivers, install nvidia current form the available drivers, reboot.

4. Unity:       I was rebooted to a beautiful natty desktop with unity running. But i lost the Fn key for brightness after installing the nvidia drivers. Volume keys worked fine. Av key stopped working. To make brightness keys work again, i had to install nvclock.  Look here for the instructions on how to make this work.

5. Updates:  Install all the available updates. Also install some of the essentials, like ubuntu-restricted-extras from the ubuntu software center. Also install most useful apps like vlc, conky, chromium, gimp, cheese etc. Look here.

6. Conky:   To get a beautiful conky, shown in the screenshot above, look here for instructions.

7. Suspend: Suspend works well, haven't tested hibernate yet. But the problem is that when you wake from suspend you will loose the keyboard. For this i had to use atkbd.reset option to the kernel while booting. This mitigates the problem of loosing your keyboard after suspend.
                    So my kernel options while booting are i8042.nopnp noacpi nolapic atkbd.reset.
                    I found that these options make my vaio cs work reasonably well.

8. Kernel:   Without noacpi nolapic kernel options it will not boot many a times, though it boots without these options, randomly one in 5 to 6 tries.
                   i8042 option seems to help with the touchpad craziness. It seems have stopped the freezes and make touchpad more usable.
                   atkbd.reset is required for the no keyboard after suspend issues.

You might not have the touchpad at the login screen with atkbd.reset option, use keyboad to login. On reaching the desktop press alt+F2, select terminal, and from the terminal do
                  sudo modprobe psmouse.


Randomly touchpad might act weird especially after waking up from suspend, for that do
                 sudo rmmod psmouse

                 sudo modprobe psmouse

9. Camera: Webcam works only with the cheese webcam booth.

10. So now you have a beautiful, stable, working Ubuntu natty running on your Sony Vaio CS laptop.
cheers!!

Finally, got back the brightness control in windows 7 on my Vaio CS17

Had a tough time trying to get the brightness control to work after installing windows 7 on my Vaio CS17G, which came with vista originally installed.Every time i pressed the Fn+F5 or Fn+F6 the display bar moved by one block, but there was no change in the brightness. Windows mobility centre didn’t have the brightness option.

Finally got hold of the correct driver upgrade version from the Sony Australia, which did the job. 
Windows 7 Upgrade NVIDIA Graphics Driver Upgrade Version 8.15.11.8640
This program will upgrade NVIDIA Graphics Driver to version 8.15.11.8640.
Although it says that this is applicable only to VGN-CS36GJ, VGN-CS38GD, VGN-CS36TJ, VGN-CS36MJ, VGN-CS37GH, VGN-CS28GD, VGN-CS36SJ, VGN-CS27GJ: it worked without a hitch for me on my Vaio CS17G.

Now i have brightness changing with Fn keys and also on power on/off and i have brightness control from windows mobility centre as well.

Download the driver from here.

Ubuntu Natty Beta on Sony Vaio CS17

I am posting some screenshots of natty beta running on my sony vaio CS 17.

What works: Unity looks great, works after installing nvidia additional drivers.
                       Fn keys for volume work out of the box.

 Hiccups:     Brightness keys do not work, will try to tweak with nvclock.
                    Media keys do not work, pressing media keys brings up right
                    click menu.
                    Touchpad randomly stops responding and makes the box
                    unusable needing reboot.

will post in detail after i use it for a while...
                    

Fibromyalgia

Information to patients.

Up to 5% of the population suffers from fibromyalgia, which is a syndrome characterised by chronic body pain, fatigue, anxiety or depression, sleep disturbances.
Commonly seen in patients between 20 to 50, more in females than males at 9:1 ratio.
primary : not associated with other conditions.
secondary: associated with rheumatoid arthritis or SLE
Common symptoms associated with fibromyalgia with decreasing frequency are:

Condition                                % of FMS Symptoms

Muscular Pain                                         100
Fatigue                                                     96
Insomnia                                                   86
Joint Pains                                                72
Headaches                                               60
Restless Legs                                           56
Numbness and Tingling                            52
Impaired Memory                                    46
Leg Cramps                                             42
Impaired Concentration                            41
Nervousness                                            32
Depression (Major Depression)               20
can also be associated with irritable bowel syndrome, paraesthesia, genitourinary symptoms.

Diagnosis : There is no single test which can establish the diagnosis. It is more a diagnosis by exclusion. Do investigations to rule out all other rheumatological conditions.
Criteria used for diagnosis according to ACR are:

1. Wide spread presence of pain throughout the body present for more than 3 months.
2. Presence of tender spots throughout the body. At least 11 out of 18.

                           
Treatment: Mostly symptomatic treatment, options available are:

1. Medications: Tramadol, pregabalin, ketamine, gabapentin and others.
2. Exercises: Most important part of treatment. Aerobics, stretching and strengthening exercises, etc
3. Relaxation techniques to reduce the effects of stress: meditation, pranayama etc.
4. Antidepressants and muscle relaxants can also used.
5. Psychotherapy.

Another conky config showing date, time, stats, calendar, gmail and weather

Update: Conky weather no longer works, so i have used yahoo weather to get the same effect in my new config. Look here for details.

These are a couple of conkys showing you the date, time, stats, calendar, gmail and weather forecast.

You will need a lot of fonts and few scripts to run this successfully. 

Fonts used: 

1. Radio Space
2. hooge font
3. Poky font
4. Weather font
5. OPenLogos font
6. PizzaDude Bullets font
7. VariShapes Solid font
8. StyleBats font
9. DejaVu Sans
10. Liberation Serif

Google for them and download free from the sites.

Scripts used:

1. conkyForecast.py
2. conky3Days.templet
3. gmail.pl

Download the scripts from here.

Logo used:

.conkyrc for the first conky in the above pics is here.

And the .conkyrc for the second pic is here.

Download and save the fonts, scripts and logo.

You will need to edit the scripts and change the paths, to make it work.

If you need more info...... for 

Google calendar (gcalcli) go to http://www.webupd8.org/2010/08/display-google-calendar-on-your-desktop.html

Conky weather go to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869328

Have fun......

Ubuntu dark charcoal theme for chrome

Hi install Ubuntu darkly charcoal theme for chrome web browser. You can install it from the chrome web store for free. Go to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jjekofhljmbijhelagbihakhbnognjfj to install. I liked the theme a lot, it looks great with a dark Ubuntu theme, take a look at the screenshot below.

Natty Narwhal boots only with acpi=off kernel option

The Natty Narwhal alpha 64 bit edition with latest updates, on my Vaio CS can boot only with the kernel option acpi=off. Other kernel option like, pci=noacpi, acpi=force are not working as of now.

AV Mode multimedia key works with natty narwhal on Vaio CS

Hi with the latest upgrades available for natty narwhal, i found to my surprise that the AV Mode multimedia key now works and brings up the rhythmbox music player on press. This is the first time in 2 yrs, since installing ubuntu on this machine, that i have any of the multimedia keys working.

Mind you this is the only key which works at the moment, volume change keys, forward and backward keys and capture button for webcam do not work.
I believe this is the first step in the right direction.

Although the rhythmbox starts with the AV Button, it leaves the machines unresponsive for a minute or so. But the machine recovers on its own....Natty is still alpha1,so hopefully as it matures, will fix the issue of media keys on Vaios....

Natty Narwhal running unity on my Vaio CS

Natty Narwhal alpha1, ubuntu 11.04 was out last week. I took the plunge and installed it as a dual boot alon side with my maverick. I am posting screenshots of my natty narwhal i,e ubuntu 11.04 desktop running unity interface under compiz. Will add a video shortly. Thank you.

Back pain and posture.

Nobody is immune to Back pain. It is the most common musculoskeletal condition, like tooth decay and the common cold, this is an affliction that affects a substantial proportion of population, at some point in their lives. This condition does not discriminate by gender, age, race or culture.

There are a number of surveys in many countries that reveal a point-prevalence of 17–30%, a 1-month prevalence of 19–43% and a life-time prevalence of 60–80%.

It has been said that backahe is the price the human race is paying for adopting a erect posture.
There are a number of factors which contribute towards developing backache like: Work environment and ergonomics, posture, psychosocial factors and spine/extraspinal pathologies. Sometimes these factors overlap towards causing this condition.

Common conditions that cause the back ache are: Disc pathologies, Injuries, degenerative changes in the spine, infections etc.

If your have chronic backpain, pain radiating along the thighs or legs, recurrent backpains, tingling or altered sensation in the limbs; please see the orthopaedician as it needs to be investigated.

In this article i will concentrate on backpain related to work and posture.

 Back pain is often a consequence of poor posture and stress on spine. This causes overtaxing of various tissues of the spine.

Stooping either in sitting or standing posture increases the strain on the spine leading to damage to intervetebral disks.








                                                                              

Knee pain in young IT Professionals

One of the common complaints, I encounter in my clinic is the knee joint pain in young individuals. Mind you most of my patients are IT Professionals, who sit in front of the computer and work, on an average of up to 10hrs a day.

Knee pain in young individuals is a common condition, esp in individuals involved in sports, prolonged sitting or standing jobs, industrial jobs and even office jobs.

Most of these patients have

• anterior knee pain, which is a dull aching pain: 
• aggravated by activities like prolonged standing or sitting, going up and down the stairs, jogging or doing sports. 
• Some of them can get grating sensation on moving the knee. 
• There is no swelling or redness of the joint
• and there is no history of any previous knee injury.

So if you are having these symptoms, you could be suffering from one of these conditions:

Blog renamed

This blog has moved from www.dksdk.blogspot.com. I have renamed my blog to www.techiesurgeon.blogspot.com. Thank you.

Conky config for my conky showing date, time, stats, calendar, mail and weather

Update: Conky weather no longer works, so i have used yahoo weather to get the same effect in my new config. Look here for details.

Since some of you are asking for the conky config for the conky i posted in my previous post, here you go. This is a single instance of conky on my ubuntu maverick, displaying stats, date, time, calendar, gmail and weather.

You will need a lot of fonts and few scripts to run this successfully. 

Fonts used: 

1. Radio Space