Geoverse

I was getting tired of crouching behind my laptop screen at home with a view angle of nothing. So I did what any workplace assessment would recommend: get a proper lcd screen. Of course I took the liberty of filling in the technical details myself so I went and got a 24″ monitor and hooked it up to my laptop. It works like a treat! The widescreen is amazing too! Fast, huge, clear, and can be rotated. I now work at a desktop resolution of 1920*1200. Unfortunately my games have a hard time at that resolution but luckily this monitor also supports lower resolutions with the small disappointment that the screen quality is lower but this is normal for lcd screens. Here is a small pic of what it looks like:

It’s the BenQ FP241W with a sweet 3 year warranty. Bring on the home theatre experience! 😛

*I also got a cordless keyboard of course so I can close the lid of my laptop.

LyX, see here, is something I have been looking for a long time as a tool which uses LaTeX. It’s a ‘What You See Is What You Mean’ word processor. Unlike other LaTeX applications, this one gives you feedback what your document will look like as you type without bothering about the aestetics too much as in MS Word. Equations are inserted as you see them instead of code on one line. Tables and figures are also easily added as floaters which means after the document is processed in LaTeX, it they will be intelligently positioned. LyX also supports BibTex. It’s easy as without having to learn any code. Why would I bother spending and wasting time learning code and typing it when visually it goes so much faster and easier? LyX just got updated to version 1.5 beta 3 so have a go at it. You’ll love it! The only downside is that despite it can import and export your docs as TeX files, it doesnt port well to MS Word. So file sharing is a bit more cumbersome. But since artices can be submitted to journals as LaTeX files, this is a minor problem. I’m still in the stage of getting familiar with it but I can see already that it will save me lots of time later on when I just cant be bothered with the hassles you get in MS Word with inserting figures, captioning and formatting.

EDIT: I found a decent programme that will convert *.tex files to rich text formatting (*.rtf) for MS Word. Go here to download it (open sourceware).

Tis was another ordinary day using windows vista when suddenly vista
decides I should reactivate it. Fine i thought it’s a genuine copy
anyway. I restart the pc and whadda ya know? Windows is no longer
genuine. It still shows up as activated but I cant get past any
validation and online vista appears as unvalidated. WTF!?! I spend the
better part of my evening talking to HP in finding a way to sort out
this mess. No luck! They little know what has caused it. That extra
module of RAM? New drivers? Incompatible software? After trying a few
things I am still left with an apparently illegal version of windows
Vista with windows genuine advantage notifications all over the screen.
I finally decide to reinstall Vista. When that was finally done, there
is a problem with activation. The product has already been activated on
another computer?? There is no such thing! This is a special upgrade
for my HP dv9055ea notebook only! So I use the option to activate
windows by phone and I call Microsoft, Australia. After working through
the bots, I finally get a person on the phone. Thankfully not too many
questions asked and I get my new activation ID and I finally
successfully reactivated Windows Vista. Sheeesh! If this happens one
more time I’m going to ditch Windows forever. The world of linux
suddenly seems much more attractive now…

My website has a new guestbook with some anti-spam protection. Hope ya like it like i do! 😛