musings on software development, writing and life

Well I’ve finally gotten around to setting up dual head on my main desktop machine. I’ve been meaning to try it out for a while – having had two monitors at work for a few weeks now I’m addicted – it genuinely does make a difference. Oddly enough I’ve found it seems to help my typing as well I’m touch typing a great deal more now, as I’ve become used to looking at one screen while typing into a window on the other.

It took a little while – tried a video card I got in an old box from Scruff, but that one didn’t seem to like me. I dug through my bits boxes and found my old matrox mystique – the one John gave me the very first time he came out to australia. Well, I think it was the first time… At any rate it’s bloody old. It’s working nicely, with R’s old compaq monitor hooked up to it and I’ve setup multihead fine. The monitor however is only capable of a max resolution of 1280×1024, so my 22 inch is forced down to that level from 1600 as well. I’m a bit disappointed about that as I really like the amount of screen real estate 1600×1200 gives me, but to be honest this res is probably better for my eyes

The other issue is that the second monitor is a bit fuzzy – a combination both of the card and the monitor’s own degeneration I think. I’ll have to look at getting a 19 inch flatscreen, or a flatron crt like the one R has – and probably upgrade to an AGP based dual head nvidia card, as that should enable me to run 3d acceleration (oh yeah that’s another thing – because of the mismatched cards, I can’t use 3d acceleration ) but I can do that at a later stage. Perhaps I’ll make it down to the swap meet next weekend…

Hrm that’s weird, the date on my ‘puter is ahead one day. oops. Oh and for anyone who didn’t get it already, the title of this entry is a backhanded dig at tasmanians

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