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Dell 2405 First Impressions

It’s here, a day early even. Here are some random thoughts & first impressions of the Dell 2405 24″ LCD Widescreen Monitor:

  • It’s bright. Much brighter than the Sony 21″ CRTs I’ve been used to.
  • It was a snap to set up physically. (Hmm, bad pun). Snap the base into the screen, and voila.
  • The base is quite sturdy. I don’t think the cats jumping off the window ledge will knock it over.
  • Thanks to Bernd Paysan’s Dell 2405 web page for the correct scanlines to use in Linux. (Courtesy of Google).
  • 1920×1200 resolution rocks.
  • I need to get a DVD playing ASAP. Just for kicks.
  • I’m not used to feeling like I’m sitting so far back, even though it’s just the monitor pushed back farther on the desk.
  • I’ll have to keep my desk clean now that I have all this extra space. (No, really).
  • I’ll be able to hear my speakers again as my monitor isn’t blocking them.
  • Coding web pages and stuff will be fun with multiple windows.
  • I can’t believe I bought something from Dell.
  • I can’t believe none of Dell’s competitors can compete. The nearest monitor even close to this was a Sony 24″ at $1800. Buying a Dell became a no brainer.
  • The 9 in one flash card reader is a very cool feature on the side of the monitor. And the 4 USB ports.
  • Even better, Ubuntu recognized them without any prompts.
  • Need to post the pictures. (And done)
  • No burned out / dead pixels
  • When scrolling this blog really fast, I get some motion blur on background on the far left, but you really have to look for it
  • UT2k4 in 1920×1200 is jaw droppingly gorgeous.
  • No noticeable motion blur in UT2k4. Get sucked right in and you dont’ even notice it’s an LCD anymore.
  • I should probably go boot into Windows and check performance. But I’m lazy.
  • Dell’s customer service still sucks. After the hard drive return process I went through last year, it’s not any better. The hoops I had to go through over the weekend, after I made the purchase, just to find out if it shipped with a DVI cable, were ludicrous.
  • It ships with a DVI cable, FYI

Learning curve

Tonight, I learned all about LVM (Logical Volume Manager) on Linux. How to take 2 hard drives, and tell Linux to look at them as one drive / directory.

Nailed it on the second attempt. Might try it on the server later in the week.

For Wed: Learning rsync. Then I can do incremental backups from the server to my dedicated backup box via cron and never worry about my data again.

  • in Humor
  • 1 min read

Small things annoy me…

Small things annoy me… like links that spawn new browser windows.

If I’m clicking the link, I obviously want to go there. Don’t leave the current screen up.

All I do then, is shut the one that just popped up and open it in a new tab. But still, annoying.

Great music lives here

Re-ripping my CD collection for the 4th time in as many years, I’m reminded of all the great music I own, that I rarely listen to.

Having everything located on a central server you can stream from, either by artist or just random, let’s you hear things you haven’t heard in years.

I need to get the server back up. Soon.

Time Warner vs. Comcast

From all appearances, it’s anything but Time Warner vs. Comcast. From a business point of view, Comcast owns 22% of Time Warner. They’re jointly buying Adelphia together and splitting it up.

And that’s where it get’s ugly.

In doing the joint venture to buy the US’s 5th largest cable company (Adelphia), and divest Comcast of it’s 22% share of Time Warner, what they don’t tell you is they’re going to swap some markets around. The Star Tribune has the story.

And one of those is here, the Twin Cities. Today, TW owns the South and West suburbs, as well as parts of Minneapolis. Comcast, through it’s purchase of AT&T, owns St. Paul and the northern suburbs.

And a year from now, they’re gonig to trade a market. And Comcast gets the Twin Cities.

Which just plain sucks.

Financially, Comcast is going to raise my rates over 25%. But what chaps me is the level of service. Since Comcast bought AT&T, who bought TCI, they’ve been upgrading those cable lines for years, and are almost done. Time Warner on the other hand, has had wonderful service for the last 5 years.

Comcast blocks ports, such as 80, so users can’t host different kinds of servers.

Time Warner not only doesn’t block them, but once every few months I get an email saying “Hey, we see you running an email server, so we scanned it, and it’s not a relay”. Even though it’s against the TOS for me to do so, they give me a heads up that they know, and continue to let me.

I’ll be honest – I’m not a big fan of Big Media companies, and Time Warner is one of the biggest. But their cable broadband service has been phenomenal. Few service outages, ok customer service, and the quality, including boosting from 3 to 5 megs down earlier this year, has kicked ass.

I am not looking forward to being a Comcast customer. They’re going to raise my price substantially, because I choose not to subscribe to TV service from them, they have antiquated cable systems, and are now going to try and merge someone else’s cable system in to theirs.

Great.

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Happy Earth Day!

It’s the 35th anniversary of Earth Day.

But every day is Earth Day. Do your part.

I especially liked Google’s logo today:

Google Earthday Logo '05

Flickr continues to amaze

Flickr continues to amaze me. What did they do this time? If you had previously bought a Pro account, they have announced Pro users have been given a another year for free, and 2 Pro accounts to give away to friends. In addition, normal Flickr users have had their bandwidth and photo’s doubled, and Pro users have had their bandwidth doubled, and the price of a Pro account is now almost half of what it was last year.

I guess being bought by Yahoo was a good thing. God knows I’ve been very, very happy with Flickr, and this made my day.

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Home Sweet Home

It’s nice to be home. Even if the weather is cold, rainy and windy.

Jinzora & Netjuke to merge

So I leave for a business trip for a week, and halfway through I finally check the ‘net for news, and what do I see?

Jinzora and Netjuke are merging efforts to create an even better music management web tool.

While kind of cool, I’m glad to see the Jinzora team in firm control – their release cycle and active development is why so many Netjuke users have jumped ship from Netjuke to Jinzora. Blake Waters, the lead developer of Netjuke, has been busy for the last 2 years on other projects, leading to Netjuke development stalling.

I’m glad Jinzora 2 has been released, and under the GPL. I have concerns about Netjuke’s future, as they wanted to get away from the GPL, and possibly even charge for the software. I’m hoping Jinzora stays on the path they have so far, and away from where Netjuke had thought about going. And Netjuke’s requirement for 2.0 for PHP5 was disconcerting – I understand wanting to use latest and greatest versions of software, but even Ubuntu doesn’t support PHP5 yet.

I look forward to the teams working together.

Thanks to Jamie for the heads up on my forums.

Welcome to Sunny Florida

I’m in sunny Florida this week. 80 and sunny every day, upper 50s, low 60s at night.

I could get use to this. Except for the hurricanes.

Time to go ride the Hulk a dozen times.