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I decided it was about time to upgrade my monitor situation. For the past few years I've used a 15-inch and a 14-inch at 1024x768 to give me two windows of usable text and been very happy, but when my father and I temporarily swapped monitors for troubleshooting I realized that I had been missing a lot. You can fit an awful lot of code on a large monitor.
I thought that having a widescreen monitor in portrait/pivot/tall mode would be the most useful option. Instead of having the monitor be extra wide, rotate it around and have it be extra tall. While this isn't terribly useful for web pages or video games, it seems like a fantastic idea for programming: you can still fit 80 characters across, but instead of 35 lines down, you suddenly get 70 or 80 - that's double the code!
Monitors with rotating stands are uncommon, but I found a 22-inch HP w2207 in town and set it up. It's a very nice monitor: glossy screen, heavy base, easy rotation, DVI and VGA inputs, plus two USB ports and speakers. It's native resolution is 1680x1050, which in portrait/pivot/tall mode is twice as many pixels high as a 15/14-inch monitor in 1024x768, and slightly wider. Great.
Problem 1: rotating the display to present correctly is hit-or-miss and
annoying at best. Make sure you video card driver supports the "Resize, Rotate
and Reflection" (RANDR) extension; an easy way to check is to look at the
output of xdpyinfo:
$ xdpyinfo | grep RANDR
RANDR
xorg's nv drivers do, its radeon drivers do not, and in any case, you may
not currently use RANDR with XINERAMA, the extension that allows you to
treat multiple monitors as one. If you don't use XINERAMA, you need to run
multiple window managers and can't share windows or the clipboard between them
- that's annoying.
Rotating with the command-line utility xrandr is easy, but I found when
rotating back that my xterm's fonts were screwy - sometimes way too big,
sometimes way too small. I bound a script to flip screen orientation to the
Windows key (most useful it's ever been), but I found that depending on what I
wanted to do, the widescreen might have been more convenient, and flipping the
display and the physical screen was just more effort than it was worth.
Problem 2: a 22-inch portrait/pivot/tall is just too big. My neck hurt from moving my head up and down to read, and the difference in color and picture quality on different parts of the monitor becomes very apparent when you switch back and forth between the top of the screen and the bottom.
However, when the screen was in pivot/portrait/tall mode, and I was hacking away in vim with the taglist and vimproject plugins providing sidebars, it worked great until my neck started hurting. Maybe if I had gone with a 19-inch widescreen it would have been better, but I ended up taking the HP w2207 back and getting the less expensive and less featureful 22-inch Acer AL2216W.
Besides not having a pivoting stand, the big difference between the two is that the AL2216W does not have a glossy screen. I've decided that I prefer the traditional matte screen instead of the glossy one; while movies certainly look better on a glossy screen, I found it harder to read text and it was very distracting to see my face in the mirror the entire time I used the monitor. The effect was annoying with background lighting, but when I opened the window it was just unbearable.
As for fitting 80 characters of text per line, I found that with a 12 point DejaVu Sans Mono I could fit two windows side-by-side perfectly. Even better, I could have vim open on one half of the screen and split the other half between two windows - maybe a window for compiling, an interactive REPL, quick documentation, revision control, whatever. It's great.
Without the need for RANDR, I can go back to using XINERAMA and use two
monitors conveniently. The second monitor is still invaluable for tasks like
web browsing, email, and especially for API documentation.
As Ferd said, "Alec, welcome to the 90s."
Posted Thursday night, July 5th, 2007I've got a presentation tomorrow, and I, like all good presenters, plan on boring my audience to tears by showing a computerized slide show and reading text off it word-from-word. In order to accomplish this noble goal, I needed to get video out working on my laptop.
The IBM folks seemed to have planned for everything, and if I press Fn+F7, the laptop switches on its external display settings and pipes the screen out to the projector. Great! Unfortunately, in so doing it turns off the laptop display, which clearly thwarts me from reading verbatim what is projected.
Soultion: use i810switch to manually turn the external display on without
turning the built-in display off. Handy utility script:
#!/bin/sh
if [ $1 -a $1 = "on" ]; then
sudo i810switch crt on
killall xscreensaver
elif [ $1 -a $1 = "off" ]; then
sudo i810switch crt off
xscreensaver -no-splash &
else
echo "choose off or on"
exit 1
fi
Luckily for me, my sister got a Macbook when she went to college, and I inherited her Thinkpad X40. It's a really nice laptop, and almost everything works out-out-the-box with the current Debian testing. Unfortunately, while the Linux kernel contains a free driver for the IPW2200 wireless card, that card requires non-free firmware. Better than a non-free driver, but still far from good.
In order to use the card, I needed to download binary firmware blobs from
Intel and install it in
/lib/firmware. I found out which version of the firmware I needed by looking
at the dmesg output for a failed modprobe ipw2200 - Debian's
linux-image-2.6.16-2-686 needs firmware version 2.4. I reloaded the module and
everything worked just fine.
OpenBSD's iwi man page says the following:
These firmware files are not free because Intel refuses to grant distribution rights without contractual obligations. As a result, even though OpenBSD includes the driver, the firmware files cannot be included and users have to download these files on their own. The official person to state your views to about this issue is peter.engelbrecht@intel.com at (858) 391 1857.
I have sent him an email; if you come across this page trying to get the ipw2200 working, please do the same.
UPDATE: That email address bounces. Arg.
Posted at lunch time on Sunday, September 10th, 2006I put together a new computer this week and am very excited about it. In one fell swoop I've made the jump to 64-bit, DDR RAM, SATA, USB2, and SMP all at once - sweet!
I've named it barry in line with my new computer naming scheme: there's also a bruce, hal, jonn, and ray. Bonus points for anyone who can tell me what those names have in common.
Debian GNU/Linux has had no problems recognizing any of the hardware. The motherboard is an Asus A8V with the VIA K8T800 chipset; I specifically stayed away from NVIDIA's because of their demonstrated resistance to free software and have not been disappointed with the VIA support in the Linux kernel. Working with the motherboard is cumbersome because it chooses to place important connectors in odd places - the sound pins sit between two PCI slots - but I've been happy so far.
The CPU itself is an X2 3800+ at 2GHz. There is no way I am ever getting the CPU fan back off - that was quite the tight fit. I finally took a screwdriver and pressed down with both hands to get it to snap into place and am surprised the thing didn't shatter. On the upside, kernel-package, running at a nice level of 10 and competing with emacs, music listening, web surfing, and ssh-ing, produces a full kernel with FUSE modules in 20 minutes (wall-clock time), hours less than it was taking me on the PIII laptop.
I was also amused to notice that the latest emacs CVS snapshot takes ten minutes longer to compile than the full Linux kernel.
The Coolermaster CAC-T05-UW case is fantastic. The packaging was hilarious; the product name is "Centurion" and the word-for-word official description of the case is:
Centurion, an honorable name, represents quality of Discipline, Integrity & Loyalty. With the Centurion besides you, now you can concord the world feeling safe and proud without having to be a Caesar.
Wow. It's just a case, guys. That being said, I only needed a screwdriver to attach the motherboard. The PCI/AGP slots have a sturdy snap-lock, as do the drive bays, and there's a big fan right in front of the hard drives to keep them cool. The whole rig is the quietest computer I've had, allowing me to concord the world using an inside voice.
Posted late Saturday evening, July 1st, 2006I don't mean to seem ungrateful for the food that members of my family bake and send to me - it's delicious - but I received the best care package I've ever gotten this week from my dad. It included a compact wireless router/switch (so small! and 802.11g, too!), an appropriately-sized patch cable (neatly twisty-tied), a power source for said router/switch (also neatly twisty-tied), a 2.5" portable USB hard drive enclosure with 40GB drive inside (the case is powered by the USB cable, no awkward external power required), an appropriately-sized USB cable (again neatly twisty-tied), a nice travel pouch for the hard drive enclosure, and a mini screwdriver to swap out the hard drives. Not that I particularly needed any of it, but wow, talk about knowing the way to my heart.
Posted Wednesday evening, February 22nd, 2006Got a new pair of headphones the other day - Koss "Plug" earphones. The dog ate through my other in-earphones back in July and the iPod has been lying mostly useless since then, so the purchase was long overdue. I like them a lot: they fit snugly in my ear, are comfortable, and sound good for the cheap ($12-ish) earphones they are both with classical and contemporary music.
The downside is that they are loud. I have the volume at the lowest setting on the iPod and it's not good for background music in an otherwise quiet environment. It's more than fine for walking around, though, and on a computer with better volume range they work nicely.
Posted at teatime on Friday, October 28th, 2005I have recently inherited a Toshiba Satellite from my sister. It's a great computer - PIII, built-in floppy, eraser-mouse instead of a touchpad, and keys that don't require much force to press down. Unfortunately there is no model number printed on it, so I have no idea what to search for when I run into trouble.
Unphased I set about installing OpenBSD 3.7-current on it, and the only hiccup
was that x.org didn't properly autodetect the screen resolution. I poked
around and discovered it has a "S3 Savage/IX-MV" video card to which x.org
gives the BoardName "86C270-294 Savage/IX-M". The proper
sync/refresh settings are:
HorizSync 31.5 - 57.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 90.0
I ordered a BenQ 1620 DVD writer and recieved it last week. I plan on doing backups with it, both of the video and the data kind. My first test was to copy the recording of the Meddiebempsters' final 2004-2005 concert.
First, make sure your kernel includes device
atapicam
ATAPI/CAM support is not in 6.0-BETA's GENERIC for some reason, unfortunately.
The way suggested by the FreeBSD
Handbook
with dvd+rw-tools and a
copy of the DVD on hard disk (presumably via something like
dvdbackup) did not work for
me. On running growisofs, the fixating disc step either never ended or hung
my computer.
I ended up using lxdvdrip.
That it worked where growisofs didn't surprised me, since it's just a control
script that happens to use growisofs; however, I'm happy with the result.
The exact command I used was "lxdvdrip -st=copy -dl=/dev/cd0 -db=/dev/cd1
-lang=en" (where cd0 is the reader and cd1 is the writer). Remember to run
lxdvdrip as root and not as a user with sudo, as growisofs will yell at
you if it sees sudo's environmental variables.
I got a Logitech Trackman trackball mouse today. I made the move from standard mouse to trackball for three reasons: I'm worried about RSI, would like my choice of input device to reflect my inner laziness, and am impressed by its cool looks.
The amount of arm-moving I now need to do is only picking up my hand and moving it between the keyboard and mouse - once it's on the mouse I just use my thumb to scroll along. It's taken a morning of getting used to - I'm still not dragging and dropping very well and I had to set the speed way down - but it's working wonderfully so far and is very comfortable.
Posted mid-morning Monday, July 18th, 2005We replaced the last of the Enterasys (formerly Cabletron) gear today when we deployed a Cisco WAP in place of an Enterasys one. Wow.
Posted at teatime on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005