Widescreen

No, that's not my Linux box, though for about a day I did have Gentoo installed, and I'll probably make another go at it at some point in the future. I've been pretty busy lately. I'll try not to keep posting just Windows things on a blog that's supposedly about my Linux box. If you'll notice though, the windows_installs directory is hosted on a Samba share on Athena. See, they can play nice together.

I also have Vista beta on another partition on this computer, but there aren't Vista drivers for most of the hardware, most notably it doesn't recognize the screen as a wide screen, so Vista is pretty much a no-go until Dell, nVidia, and/or Microsoft gets their act together on that.

Here's a snapshot of my desktop. The screen is much brighter and crisper than my old laptop. It's actually only 80 pixels wider than my old laptop screen (and 150 pixels shorter), so in some ways it can feel a bit cramped vertically. I think the pixels are about the same size physically. I'm adjusting and experimenting with different ways to arrange things, for example, the icons across the top and bottom are a holdover from my 1600x1200 days. I used to put the web browser just below the top row of icons, but now I tend to put it over them slightly. I'm thinking of moving them more toward the side of the screen.

Gaim 1.5 had a bug that made it crash when signing on to the MSN Messenger service (apparently MSN changed the way they did logins, and it exposed the bug) so I installed the beta 2.0 version of Gaim, and I like what they're doing with it. The new sounds are a big improvement: much less abrasive. They also have a "Psychic mode" plugin that looks like it'll be fun to play around with.... (Note: I have obscured some screennames in case there's a stalker or an IM spammer with an OCR-bot.)

The new computer is quite snappy; it starts up fast, and goes in and out of sleep without problems. The speakers are awesome: in fact, this is the perfect laptop for watching widescreen video on, which I have done. Another nice feature is the built-in card reader. A single slot takes SD/MMC/MS/Pro/xD cards.