Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   monitor swapping hell
Wednesday, February 10 2021
I hadn't been paying much attention to the ongoing Donald Trump impeachment trial (number two!) until today, but after all the buzz about a video edit made of the Janurary 6th Capitol putsch, I was curious. Today we were teased a video that hadn't previously been made public from the Capitol's surveillance cameras, so I wanted to see that. But it was entered into evidence until fairly late in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, I'd took delivery of an 15 inch 4K Azmior monitor I'd bought for only $140, and the original plan was to use it to replace the 1920 by 1080 monitor I have on the upper-right of my monitor array. But on consideration, it seemed like it was too physically small. A 15 inch 4K monitor has extremely small pixels (it comes to a DPI of 274), so the best use of those tiny pixels is not to be in a place that induces neck strain to read (as the upper right monitor does). I eventually decided the best place for the new 15 inch monitor was to attach it to an arm anchored to the east oak column (which is there to support the solar deck overhead).
But I still wanted to do something about the top right monitor. The existing monitor is a 24 inch I-Inc that I'd bought in July of 2010. That's a bit big for its resolution of 1920 X 1080, and windows overlapping the line between my 40 inch Vizio teevee and the I-inc are considerably wider on the latter than on the former. Since the hardware attaching the upper-right monitor to the sloping east wall-ceiling needed to be raised anyway (to better accommodate the large size of the Vizio teevee beneath it), I thought it would be a good idea to replace the I-Inc with a smaller 1920 X 1080 monitor. So I removed the I-Inc, raised the mounting bracket by two inches, and then attached a 20 inch Apple Cinema display. The Apple is a good monitor, but it turned out that I was wrong about its pixel count; it was only 1680 X 1050, and I still had the mismatch of pixel sizes, only with fewer pixels in the replacement. That was no good. So then I tried swapping in another monitor that I assumed was 1920 X 1080, 21 inch Acer x203w, a monitor I'd taken several times to the Adirondacks. The Acer is a pretty bad monitor, with a visible wavy unevenness to the backlighting. And then it turned out that it was 1680 X 1050 just like my Apple Cinema display. No way was I going to live with that! I would've gladly hung my 24 inch Asus 1920 X 1200 monitor (which is currently mothballed), but it didn't have any VESA mounting holes on the back. So after all that fucking around, all I ended up doing was raising the I-Inc monitor two inches. Mind you, removing and installing monitors on that particular hardware is not easy. It's not an arm; it's just a bracket holding another bracket in a way that allows you to tilt the monitor about ten degrees up and ten degrees down. To loosen or tighten screws in the four inche space available, I either used a ratchet mechanism attached to a phillips point, or I just twirled the phillips point between my fingers.
Once the I-Inc was raised up that little amount, I had space to push the 40 inch Vizio teevee back until it was stopped by the sloping wall-ceiling behind it. This opened up a large swath of desk space in front of it, the perfect place to work on microcontroller projects, paint pictures, or disassemble things. My hope is to keep it empty, being sure to put away one project before starting on the next (though that doesn't really sound like my style).
This afternoon Powerful got some Chinese food, but I knew Gretchen wasn't going to consider that a proper dinner (it had lots of green peppers in it for one thing), so this evening I made spaghetti with a chonky fried mix of onions, mushrooms, and tempeh intended to be combined with red sauce. Gretchen and I ate it while watching news about today's impeachment hearings in the teevee room. Later I found the built-in web browser app in our big teevee room's smart teevee, and using that I was able to make it so Gretchen and I could watch the live feed of the evening's impeachment hearings from the New York Times website.


The way the new computer screen setup looks like.


How it's represented in the Windows 7 Screen Resolution control panel.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210210

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