Get Your Funk On

My Kogi L4AX-NA 14-inch LCD monitor (which is actually my wife's, bought from Best Buy in USA) pretty much gave up on me. No dead pixels, but the entire screen is white and washed out, can hardly see a thing. It actually started off by flickering quite badly, and in its final stage it was washed out and flickering. What I don't understand is that when i shut down my computer, the screen says NO INPUT SIGNAL in perfectly formed red capital letters, as if to mock me.

Had to use my laptop for a few days, my Toshiba Satellite 2800-S201 that just celebrated its 6th birthday several months ago. It received a new 20GB hard disk about 3 years ago, after the 6GB drive that it came with started crashing a little too often, and was running out of space. Couldn't afford for hard disk problems to plague my senior thesis!

Especially in comparison to my desktop, my laptop was horrendously slow at times, so 'twas a good thing that the monitor didn't die out on me much earlier, while I was desperately battling assignment after assignment. But generally it was quite ok, just that one time it was really crawling. Not sure why that happened.

I got a nice screenshot out of my laptop running Debian, though, which I themed to look like a Mac. Played around a little in both GNOME and KDE, but I prefer GNOME anyways, so the screenshot was taken in GNOME. Even got the "docker" on the bottom that zooms in under the cursor, and the icons bounce after being clicked.
I got a Dell E177FP from Sim Lim, S$255 is not bad for a 17-inch LCD monitor. Pretty much the cheapest reputable deal I could get. The 3 year warranty is not from Dell, though, but from the distributor. By the way, the response time of 8ms, quite typical of LCD monitors these days, is a full 42ms less than that of the kaput Kogi monitor!

I spent some time fiddling around with my system after the addition of the new monitor, and realized that the driver I was using for the integrated graphics card was sub-optimal (to put it mildly). Changing some options was as good as buying a new graphics card because the integrated card is actually quite powerful with a proper driver!

Basically what I did was change the graphics driver, set the desired resolution to 1280x1024@60Hz, and finally got power saving working (monitor switches off after 10 minutes of inactivity), which had me stumped for a long time, since I bought my desktop actually. It seems the generic 'vesa' driver I had been using was incapable of triggering DPMS to the monitor through the graphics card.

Spent some time playing LinCity-NG and TuxKart after that. It was also very fun to play Cannon Smash, a table tennis simulation. Still can't quite get used to Free Tennis, a tennis simulation.