Sans LCD

Makes you wonder how I ever managed to fit a conventional screen on there, doesn’t it?

LCD warranty followup

They said it was faulty. A new one arrives tomorrow. I’m expecting similar problems in about six months time based on Michael’s advice this malady afflicts many 8ms monitors, but hey, I’m happy with the fast turnaround right now. And six months time might be excuse occasion enough for a new screen, anyway. (Notably, I’ve never had any residual image/burn-in/”image persistance” problems with our slightly-older 19″ Benq. As a byproduct of its vintage, it’s a 25ms display and is hence less susceptible to such problems.)

Now I need to find room on my desk to put the monitor back again!

Strange Liferea bug

Liferea, my feedreader of choice, has a rather odd bug invoked by the scroll wheel. If I hover over the pane resizing widget between the list of items and current item display and scroll down, the entire right pane disappears. Scrolling back up returns it to normal view, but it seems a little odd.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m scrolling to, either… I’m half expecting the next feed item to appear, or something, but it just goes to blank UI chrome. Most odd.

Update: Turns out it’s been fixed already, I’m just having the problem because my version is oldish (as a result of me using Ubuntu’s package repository/apt system).

Rose Fu and Unsent Letters

Stumbled across someone called Rose Fu’s portfolio site today, and was suitably impressed by the design. Markup isn’t quite perfect, but it’s just good to see people achieving this kind of thing with CSS-based design. (Read “this kind of thing”: conventionally very sliced-and-diced table-design).

Also of interest was her very Post Secret-esque project, Unsent Letters. Sure, a lot of it is as bad as angsty Fan Fiction, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless. I’ve only looked at it for a few moments, but it seems to be generally much worse than Post Secret is (in terms of the angsty teenager thing). The submission instructions say you don’t have to be concise, and I think that might have been its demise — part of Post Secret’s beauty is it’s such a concise medium (sure, it’s visual), and allows some degree of obfuscation whilst still sharing experience or thought. But hey, it’s a different tool, and it’s possibly helpful for people to write to… I just think the fact that it’s published is somewhat self-defeating, because the whole thing really doesn’t seem as though it’s meant to be read. Which I suppose fits with the whole Unsent Letter thing, but it’s not really as though it need be published, either. Shrug. Reach Out! has a similar facility, that simply destroys what you submit. Conversly, I think that seems very futile…

I think Post Secret hits a nice middle ground, that’s concise (hence accessible) and creative (hence cathartic). Anyway… a post about a nice website transformed itself, weird.

My pre-HSC seminar timetable