Always a good thing 😀

I treated myself. I’ve been after a TFT monitor for ages as I have to keep my curtains closed due to the sun hitting my monitor and it’s quite large and so has to sit in the corner of the desk causing me to crane my neck at a slightly uncomfortable angle. I remember a friend telling me that the prices were due to fall in early 2005, so I checked and checked and saw no sign of this until Monday night, when I saw a 17″ LG L1715S on www.ebuyer.com for £150.01 inc VAT so I pounced on a whim. It’s a little extravagant for someone with no money and a credit card but I spend about 10 hours a day staring at my monitor so it’s worth the difference it will make.

I also treated myself to a 24 port US Robotics 10/100 ethernet switch as my old 8 port switch is pretty much full and I anticipate needing something with more ports for taking to events like What the Hack and LUG Radio Live 2005.

Both of these arrived today and I dropped the switch in for the old 8 port switch within about 15 seconds. The VGA cable for the TFT monitor wasn’t long enough to stretch around my desk, luckily it’s detatchable and I have a longer one spare. So far the monitor seems great, I have set it up with the proper horizontal and vertical refresh rates in xorg.conf and added 2 extra resolutions of 1280×1024 and 1152×864 alongside the usual 1024×768 et al. 1024 made my GUI seem too large and 1280 makes the web look too small, I haven’t tried 1152 yet, maybe that will be more comfortable.

The only real criticism I have of this monitor so far if that there is a small amount of faint left to right ghosting, about 1cm wide. It’s predominantly along the left-hand screen edge, apparently to do with the backlighting, but other than that it’s great. Played Wolf ET with no problems at all.

The other day, after being refused the free mobile phone upgrade in the O2 store that I was entitled to as part of my contract, I received a letter from them offering me a free upgrade. Pricks. So I took it and I now have a nice shiny Sony Ericsson K700i as recommended by Aq.

As my old phone was a Nokia 8310, I had to work out how to transfer my contacts from it to the K700i. The K700i imported all of my contacts from the SIM card but a while back my Nokia went weird and started saving everything to the phone memory rather than the SIM. I don’t have any bluetooth devices, a cable, or mobile internet connectivity in my contract and the only IrDA devices are my laptop (Ubuntu), my sisters old WinME PC and the two phones themselves. I couldn’t work out how to do it by direct phone to phone IrDA though I didn’t try very hard. I looked at MultiSync but it doesn’t seem to do Nokia, I tried to find Gnokii in my Ubuntu repositories but I must have spelt it wrongly because I couldn’t find it last night, though I could today when it was too late.

So anyway, I had to use my sister’s Windows box and the Nokia Phone Suite (I used an old version apparently) to get my contacts etc off the phone and onto a PC, then to my Ubuntu laptop. I couldn’t get MultiSync to talk to my K700i via IrDA so I ended up typing the missing numbers in by hand. Meh. I should have used the Windows only CD that came with the K700i but I couldn’t be arsed. I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly.

Recommendations for a Linux compatible bluetooth dongle are welcome. It’s not something I know about.

While we’re on the subject, I also found this link for all things Nokia under Linux. And this one for using the K700i with Linux.

Also the weird hangs and power-offs haven’t occured since I took the side panel off my PC so it looks like it was a cooling issue, I’ll have to get some more fans.

Well anyway, I have a new phone, a new 17″ TFT monitor and a new 24 port network switch so I’m quite happy. Just don’t tell my credit card company 😀

Oh and volunteers to do my uni assignments, a free holiday in Barbados, a guaranteed £50k a year job messing with Linux and being sexually abused by Michelle Trachtenberg (aka Buffy’s sister, Celeste from 6 Feet Under and the chick from Euro Trip, who I happen to think looks like my girlfriend at times ;)) are the only things that could make me happier at the moment.