Odd

I just got what I think is my very first link-spam here on LJ. To my entry from 2007-02-27, as though anybody is going to go back and read comments on that.

I was going to leave it up and point to it because there's something vaguely amusing about it, but then I remembered that their goal is probably not to get click-throughs but to boost their Google ranking. So away they go, and I somehow feel as though I've arrived.

[Computer] Widescreen Display

I just got a new display for my desktop, an Acer AL2216W widescreen LCD. It has a native display resolution of 1680x1050. It's quite adequate, especially since it finally has me off of CRT, giving me a ton more desk space.

The problem is that the video card in my computer (that onboard Intel 950 described in the spec) doesn't have an internal mode for 1680x1050. But it can actually supoprt that resolution, it just needs to be convinced. Fortunately, someone clever has written a program which pokes the appropriate values into the appropriate places to convince this kind of video card that it supports resolutions it doesn't know it supports.

Unfortunately, I've already misplaced the link for the very nice walkthrough I used. But the little program is called 915resolution. It's as simple as running that with one line to overwrite a resolution you're not going to use (that's anything, with an LCD you want to be in native resolution anyway) with one you want to. This only affects RAM, so it has to be rerun every time you boot. That's good news, as it means you can't break anything permanently unless you try really hard.

Gentoo makes it even easier for you. The 915resolution package comes with a nice init.d script. Just drop an appropriate line into /etc/conf.d/915resolution, add it to whatever runlevels you need to, and you're good to go.

As for me, I'm enjoying my increased desk space (nearly 4 sq. ft.), my increased screen real-estate (453280 px), and not having to shove my face up to the screen and/or squint to read text in an XTerm at default resolution (a significant gain in effective screen space).

[Computer] Synergy

Now that I have the nifty new monitor, I have enough space on my desk to have my laptop next to the monitor without it being all cramped. Which reminded me of an especially nifty bit of software my coworker mentioned a few weeks ago called Synergy.

It's a software KM (no V, but they're talking about maybe putting that into a future version). You have a keyboard and mouse hooked up to a "primary" computer. When you mouse off the edge of the screen, the mouse teleports to the monitor of another computer, and keyboard events are also forwarded to that computer. So if all your computers have independent displays, you can use your one good quality keyboard and mouse to work on all of them. It handles clients dropping connection smoothly (your mouse just skips them). It can do some nifty stuff with connection the edges in interesting ways which make sense (only part of an edge connects to another computer, say because you have two small monitors side-by-side beneath a widescreen?). And, for bonus niftiness, it shares clipboard contents (at least text) and is supposed to be able to synchronize screen savers so the clients are slaved to the server.

The setup guide is really good, so no comments here on how to get it working. I have two computers in loop, so it doesn't matter which side I stick the laptop on. When there's no laptop, I just end up with the right edge of my screen warping to the left, and vice versa. I suppose that could get annoying, I don't know. One caveat, it doesn't play nicely with window managers which use screen edges for virtual desktop switching; they recommend you turn that off and use keyboard for that. I already wasn't using those, so it wasn't an issue for me.