Dang's Weblog

Well, the self-destructing DVDs seem to be a flop. It’s been a month since they’ve been in test markets, and the majority of stores seem to not be selling them.

I can’t say I’m surprised. Afterall, I wouldn’t buy one. Pay $7 for a DVD that will die 48 hours after opening it? No way, I can rent for much cheaper than that, and I can buy many DVD’s for $10-$12, and watch them as many times as I want. Maybe if I had a DVD burner, and could copy them, it might be worth it, but probably not. If they were priced competitively with rentals, then I’d consider it.

Remind anyone of DivX?

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Janette got this huge new keyboard for her birthday. It’s quite impressive, and has a lot of random sounds built in. It also has support for midi, and for adding new sounds. On the whole, quite neat.

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Well, I managed to get my laptop all running. I backed up my Linux install, blew the whole thing away, installed Windows fresh, and then restored my Linux. All is working now.

On a side note, I managed to find the option in Windows that turns on antialiasing in the fonts. Windows fonts now look much better, although still not at good as linux. You see, linux (well, Gnome) has a special mode for LCDs that takes advantage of the physical layout of an LCD. Windows doesn’t appear to have any such beast, at least not in XP Home, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with slightly ugly fonts in Windows, the infrequent times I use it. At least it does antialiasing, as I couldn’t get Win2k to do it at all.

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Okay, so I went and tried to install Windows XP today, and failed abysmally. The Windows install disk claimed that the partition table was full (it wasn’t, there were only three partitions and Linux could create a new one fine). So, I created the partition in Linux, and told Windows to install on it. This failed. for some unknown reason, but managed to bork my MBR, meaning I had to boot from a Linux CD to fix it. It looks like I’m going to have to wipe the drive and install Windows first, then re-install Linux. That really really blows. I guess I’ll just wait and not install Windows for now. I really don’t need it, for the most part.

Have I mentioned that Windows sucks?

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Well, Gentoo Linux is fully up and running on my new latop, and it’s sweet. It’s noticably faster than the old one (duh, it has 80% higher clock rate), and has a nicer screen. It also run much hotter. Whereas the old one maxed out at arount 60 degC, the new one maxes out at 77 degC.

The tap feature of the touch pad works fine in linux. Actually, with the new touchpad driver, all the nifty features (like scrolling and corner taps) work too, so that’s a huge improvement. However, the placement of the touchpad is not good on this laptop. On the Sony, the touchpad was centered under the space bar. On the HP, it’s centered on the body of the laptop, which makes it slightly to the right with respect to the space bar. Since the hands are placed based on the home keys, which line up with the space bar, this places the right edge of the touch pad under the palm of my right hand, and I keep brushing the touchpad when typing a lot. That never happened with the Sony, due (I believe) to the placement of the touchpad. It’s annoying, but not really a problem, since there’s a button at the top of the touchpad that disables it. I can just hit that whenever I’m going to be typing a lot.

The keyboard is somewhat different in feel. The keys have more travel than on the Sony. I’m not sure yet if I like it better or worse. The layout is mostly the same, tho, except for the insert/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdown keys being in the top right rather than along the right side. I don’t use them much, so that doesn’t really matter. Also, the HP has a set of multimedia keys along the top. Maybe I can get those working, although I’m not really sure what I would do with them. I already have keyboard shortcuts for the apps I use most, and I don’t close my browser or mail reader, so opening them easily is not an issue.

All in all, I’m pleased with the new laptop, although I’d really rather the Sony still worked. I have yet to re-install windows, so we’ll see how that goes, and I’ve yet to determine battery life, so there’s some work still left to do. The ACPI support on this laptop is better than on the Sony, so maybe the battery life will be better.

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Well, my laptop arrived today. The estimated ship date was the 22nd, and the actual ship date (from China no less) was monday, and it arrived this morning. Fed Ex is amazing. Thank gods I had free shipping, I’d hate to think what 3 day from China costs.

At any rate, it’s here, and I’ve already blown away Windows and am installing Gentoo. It’s very pretty, and the screen works, and all the pixels work, and it’s fast. So, I’m happy. More later, when I actually have Linux up on it.

Oh, one wierd note. When I first booted it up, it booted into Windows, of course, and started the First Time Boot Setup Your Computer screen. In that screen, tapping the touchpad clicked. However, when it was all done and had rebooted (why did it need to reboot? It’s just accepting a license…), tapping on the touchpad stopped working. I looked briefly in the driver, and didn’t see a setting for fixing it. I admit, I didn’t try hard, but I’ll be extremely pissed if they don’t give a way to turn it back on. I very much prefer tapping to using the buttons. At any rate, tapping does work (the hardware is not broken), so it’ll work fine in Linux. Plus, I get to try the fancy new touchpad driver for Linux that gets the multi-tap, scrolling, and so on working.

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Okay, this is annoying. In Gnome 2.4, they removed the standalone freecell game, and instead link to the freecell built into the monster solitaire game. Now, in and of itself, this is not a problem. It certainly looks better. However, the monster solitaire game, like all such I’ve ever seen, uses the click-and-drag format for moving cards. As everyone in the world knows, freecell uses the click-click format for moving cards, and that is much superior for the game. The old, standalone freecell got this right, and the new one does not.

At least, through the wonders of open source, I can manage to get and compile the old version, so I’ll still have it as long as it works. Maybe by then they’ll have fixed the new version…

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Michigan just had a very strange but very cool comback. After being dominated by Minnisota for three quarters, they scored 31 points in the fourth quarter to come back and win. Navarre was almost perfect under pressure, and didn’t piss the game away, and Perry’s fumble at the end during the last drive was recovered by Michigan, and they won on a fieldgoal! Bravo, Navarre.

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Well, I broke 200 spams today. I won’t know exactly now many I got, because I have to go to bed early because I have to go to work early tomorrow, However, my current number is 206.

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Since 1:30 this morning, I’ve gotten 132 pieces of spam. I think that’s a record for me. We’ll see how many I get in the 24 hour period today…

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