Downloaded Fedora 18 yesterday and installed it on my Acer desktop. Everything is pretty sweet.

And all that messing about with the video card that I couldn't get to fit in the case? Yesterday I was looking for a usb cable at home and found a video card in my desk that I had totally forgotten about. Looked at it and thought, "I bet this will fit in there if I put the low profile plate on the end and slide the VGA port down to the other slot opening. It did! So I bought a $40 video card for the little short metal plates that came with it. Well - my partner here in the office is building out a new system so I gave the card to him. He'll make good use of it.

So I'm up and running a new os - with both monitors -- which I have to say just worked. So sweet.

I've got more space on my desk now - which I like and I think this will actually help my work flow a bit by simplifying things. 1 machine to work on - 1 machine for email and junk.

I think I've figured it out mostly. I've got the mechanism down I believe and now it is just a matter of nailing down some specifics. I used a program called cvt to find the modeline for the resolution I wanted. Then I tried it out with xrandr and that worked pretty well. I did all this with the guidance from this Arch wiki article.

Then I used the layout they show for creating an entry in xorg.conf but I didn't do it in xorg.conf I created a new file in /etc/xorg.conf.d as per this post.

I logged out, logged back in and had the option to change the lcd to the desired resolution. The only remaining issue is that while everything I can find says this monitor is 1440x900 - when I maximize stuff it goes off the right edge. But I can figure that out.

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My original post is below:
I've got a cheap LCD monitor that I use at home. It's decent but it does have one real pain in the butt issue. It doesn't report itself properly to computers. I don't know the details - I just know that regardless of what I connect to it and regardless of the OS - I have to go in and straighten it out.

Today I started using it with my laptop running Fedora 17 and sure enough I don't get the correct resolution as an option. Fedora doesn't use xorg.conf any more and the tools I've found all just give me the same set of options that don't include the right resolution.

I'm open to suggestions on how to get it to handle this correctly.

So - I took the Desktop Acer home, opened it up to start planning surgery and realized even with the top open, the video card wont fit because of a big row of cables that plug in to some pins pretty close behind it, as well as another above it towards the front. I don't know if any video card would fit in that slot.

I know the one below it can be used because I have another Acer that uses a mobo with the same layout and it has a wireless adapter plugged into the lower one. Of course it's a tiny, tiny card.

So I wont be running two screens from that machine any time soon - probably not ever. Instead I'll just move the linux laptop home and use the second monitor from the little Acer laptop. I'm moving the Acer desktop at home to the entertainment center. It solves a few problems, like the really bad time we've had getting netflix to work consistantly from the wii. I can also get rid of the transformer that was letting us use our dvd player as I wont need the dvd player any more. That was my last piece of equipment in there that couldn't handle local power.

I hooked up the pc to the tv with hdmi and it looks and sounds great. I could do better I'm sure with more work and equipment but we aren't audo or video philes - we're pretty easy to please when it comes to that stuff. Now I just need to get a wireless keyboard and maybe a remote. The front of the acer is all black except for a silver acer badge. I can probably pry that off without too much trouble.

Well - I do dumb things a lot. I hope a byproduct is your entertainment.

So I have an Acer Aspire X3810 on my desk. I'm typing this post with it. It's my primary work machine and I like that little guy. Next to it (I just described this the other day - sorry) is a docked Latitude that's pretty old. It still works good though. BUT I started thinking that I'd like to free up some desk space and it really isn't necessary to have the laptop. I just need to put a video card in the desktop and then I can drive both my big monitors off that. I'm not losing much really - the laptop screen is not that bright and I never use it. Whatever I'm actually looking at gets shoved over to the big lcd.

The Acer case is small so I went on-line and looked at low profile cards. I ended up buying an ASUS GeForce 210 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Low Profile Ready Video Card, EN210 SILENT/DI/1GD3/V2(LP) from Amazon. That was the dumb part. I didn't even think to crack open my case and take a moment to look at the setup. I just read "Low Profile" clicked add to cart. I had it shipped to a buddy who went back to the states for Christmas and he brought it back to Hungary with him.

SO - I get it and I'm like a little kid on Christmas. I unplug everything from the back of the case, slide it open and realize immediately there is no way the card will fit. It's got this honking big heat sink on it. The slot it has to go in is millimeters from the top of the case. If the heat sink were on the downward side of the card, it might work, but it's on top. Well - I thought about it and I've decided I'm just going to cut a hole in the top of the case. It can't be removed. The case is one wrap around piece that provides top, bottom and one side - then the other side slides off. Tomorrow I'll bring my Dremel (and the big fat transformer I need to run it) and I'm gonna cut a big hole right in the top. I'll take pictures of course. I think it's actually gonna look cool in the end.

A guy I work with in the office said, "You'll have dust problems." I reject this view. The whole side of the case is pretty much full of all these round holes for air flow. If I keep things tight I don't think this will be that much worse.

Of course the kicker will be if I do all that and it doesn't work well. It's been a while since last time I tried running multi monitor with linux using a second video card so I'm hoping it will all be better than it was then.

We were driving home from a ski trip and stopped to get gas just outside Budapest. The entire front of the place we stopped at was covered in a big advertisement for Afro Coffee. I thought it was pretty crazy so I took a picture. Well - it's a whole company. They say, "It all began with a dream. The dream of presenting to the world a new image of Africa. The image of a self-aware up-and-coming continent." And I think I can get behind that dream. Though I'm not sure if selling the idea that Africa == 70's Black America is really the best vehicle to achieve that goal. Maybe I'm wrong.

OK - the video is 95 minutes long -- Qualcomm CES Keynote. And I just dare you to watch it all. I couldn't do it.

So here is a summary with photos and a distilled video of some better moments - Verge Qualcomm CES best of .

If you go straight to the summary it may motivate you to try getting through the full thing. Pretty crazy.

When I typed that title, I originally typed synergys - because that's what I type whenever I start the synergy server on this machine. Funny.

Anyway. I'm sitting here at my desk. I've got 3 machines. A desktop and 2 laptops. Almost all my work happens on the desktop and the laptop to it's immediate left. That laptop is docked and connected to a 19inch lcd. So basically most of what I do happens on 2 Fedora machines that sit side by side. The third machine is my little Acer running Windows and it's there to have Outlook up. (Well until March when our organization ditches Exchange for Google Apps.)

OK - here is the interesting part to me. (Just now anyway) Sitting just to the left of my keyboard is my phone. It vibrates in response to a few events, including arriving email. So when I'm in the office I don't look at the Acer much. When my phone vibrates I glance over at it, see if it is an email and if so if it is one I need to deal with. If not I just keep working. This is so nice. I don't want that machine to do notifications via the speaker - that would be annoying and I probably wouldn't hear it anyway. I'm wearing head phones plugged into the box furthest to the left. If my little laptop could vibrate that would be sweet.

I read Snowcrash again last week while I was on vacation. We've gotten a lot closer to it since I read it the first time - but there is still a way to go on some of that tech. I like this added feedback option my phone gives me. I live in the future.

I have written here before about the problem of connecting to android devices via usb on Linux since they moved to MTP. Well I have found some relief. This is a solution for KDE, which I happen to use. But if you don't use KDE then you may want to stop reading here. The help comes via Alex Fiestas, KDE developer and he has written up what has been done so far on his blog. You may have seen that blog recently in all the attention it got about some of the improvements to screen management that are coming to KDE (something else I'm excited about.)
 
What the blog post doesn't mention and I think this could be helpful is that to follow his instructions on compiling the MTP support stuff he's written you need libmtp and libmtp-devel. (I think so anyway. I just had libmtp and I got an error the first time I compiled. All went fine once I added the devel package.) There is a ppa for Ubuntu listed and I am sure my distro, Fedora, will have this in the repos before long. I installed it and hooked up my Nexus 7 and I could actually see files and do stuff to them. In the past this was not the case at all. I'm pretty stoked. I imagine this will just get better. There are other ways to get files on and off my android devices but I really like to be able to hook them up via usb and look at everything with dolphin.

So I've been playing On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 on my android tablet. It's pretty fun. As I was playing I started thinking to myself that it would be a fun project to make an RPG with my wife and kids. I would assume that at this point there ought to be some software out there that would make it a pretty simple undertaking. Nothing fancy, just a real simple game. I think the kids would like it just because they had a hand in making it.

I've been looking at the options. I'm going to start with something more fairly 'do it yourself' and if I can't get that working well enough then I'll fall back to a more packaged option. That more packaged option would probably be RPG Maker. The downsides to this are that it's windows only and closed. For something like this, that is not the end of the world. If I realize doing something more on my own means it's not ever going to get done, I'll happily fork over a little cash if it makes the difference in getting this thing going. But first I think I'm going to try and tackle this with PyGame. There are some decent supporting tools and sets of graphics that are all open. Stuff like Tiled and Open Pixels. If I can pull those together with something like libRPG then this could be a lot of fun. My son thinks our theme should be robots vs. aliens set on a different world than our own. We'll see.

Today is the day most Hungarian families have their big family celebration of Christmas. So we are heading out to go ice skating as there should be no crowds. Tomorrow is our big day.

I hope that you and yours have a great holiday.

Personally I enjoy Christmas for the break from work and the time with family. I also enjoy it as I believe the birth of Christ is one of the more significant events in world history. I know he wasn't born on December 25th but I do appreciate advent and the time that is set aside to think about what happened and the implications.

I am tossing around the idea of going to tonight's mass at St. Steven's basilica. Don't tell my folks, they are good baptists and would have a cow. They already feel bad enough about my other 'liberal' tendencies. :)

They suck.

Same software that looks atrocious on my 64 bit Fedora 16 box looks fine on my 32 bit Fedora 17 box. Is it Fedora? Will an upgrade help me? I hope so because I'll be moving from 16 to 18 next month. If it's not - if this is a 64 bit java issue I'm gonna feel unhappy. Because I'm not ripping out that processor and rolling back. And the 32 bit Fedora machine is over 6 years old. It's the last 32 bit machine pc I own.

Other than that - I got nothing. Hope you all have a good Christmas if you celebrate it now.

So I made a lot of progress this week. I'm pretty happy with it. (The progress. Proggy itself has a long way to go.)

I ran into a weird thing today that I'm sure is related to the Python system path but I for the life of me can't figure out how I ought to do this. When I get further down the road and closer to thinking about packaging then I'll figure it out.

I have a directory where my main file for the application sits. Then under that is a directory with other modules - called modules. So I have the main module importing stuff from the modules directory and this works fine. For example there is util.py in the modules directory. So in my main module I can just say "from modules.util import *" and everyone is happy. Now sometimes a module in module will import another module already in modules. I figured I wouldn't need the directory name there - but I do. I assumed it would always be able to successfully import from the directory the calling module is in. Now it is ultimately coming because of a call from the main module - so maybe that is it. But the Kodos application that I'm porting doesn't have to do this. So I'm not sure what the difference is. Though I have it installed and so I've got files for it all over the place.

I'm out of time to check for today but I'll look at it later.

If you want to check it out - https://github.com/bittercode/pyrrhic-ree

Lots of stuff doesn't work yet and it's gonna throw errors like no tomorrow while you type in your regular expression if it has say parentheses in it. Each time you make a change the program tries to execute what you've got and there is no error handling so it will all barf out. But if you click on Help -> About that will work. Oh vanity. Though even that wasn't easy. The way stuff works with PyQT has changed since Kodos was written and launching a new window is not the same. It took me a while to cypher it all out - though a stupid mistake did make it a lot longer than it should have been. And that's where I ran into the import issues too.

I have a goal of getting this sucker presentable and then having it replace Kodos in Fedora. I think that would be pretty awesome. Though the trick is not only do I have to get it to a somewhat finished state - but I'd have to maintain it. That's the part I'm not so sure about. We'll see. But Kodos hasn't been touched in forever and at some point supporting QT3 is going to become more of an issue. I've been thinking about that more as 5 was just release. Life keeps on moving.

So last night it worked perfectly on my wi-fi at home. Go figure.

Something I kept meaning to say but kept forgetting. It charges by using micro usb. This is nice because I have lots of these cords and power supplies as it is also what powers my phones, raspberry pi, other tablets, etc. The one drawback is it is on "upside down". Now - it really ticks me off that Apple always has to use their own connectors - but making one that is indifferent to orientation is pretty much genius. So - on pretty much everything I own the "up" on the port is the side with the screen. On the Nexus 7 it is the side away from the screen. Stupid.

And here's another bit of stupidity. It hit me yesterday - hey this thing has a 7 inch screen - it might be good for reading comic books. Well as I mentioned earlier - getting files on their from my linux machines is a total pain. I decided to try using google drive as a means of transfer. This has not worked well with some comic book files I have. Drive puts them in a strange location and either I've picked a reader that doesn't function correctly or something damaged the file in the process of moving it via drive. I'll try other methods when I get a chance.

But I thought hey - how about the amazon kindle app? So I went on there and grabbed a comic book. I can't zoom in enough to read the text. This is a huge amount of interface fail on the part of Amazon. I can double tap a panel and it sort of pops out but it doesn't zoom in enough to make a difference. The pictures look nice, but I can't read the text. I ought to be able to do the normal pinch to zoom stuff. The comic book I got was a free preview and I'm glad I didn't pay for one. On the Nexus 10 it would probably be perfect but they need to get it to work well on the 7 inch tablet. I wonder if they do something to make it better on a Kindle Fire. If not I'd be ticked off if I owned one.

I've had time to work on my port of Kodos. It's fun as I'm achieving my two primary goals. I'm learning more about Python and about Regular Expressions. More specifically I'm learning about the python re module. At some point, once I have enough of the old program working - I'll need to try and get some people to try it out because I don't know enough about regular expressions to test it all that well. Unfortunately it will probably have lots of bugs. (And I haven't even started dealing with error handling yet. I'm just talking about bugs that mean you don't get correct output.)

Moving to Python 3 has popped up in a couple places in interesting ways. I don't need to import types to check and see what something is. (The findall method of an re object returns a list or tuple and it matters which.)

The bigger adjustment I've had to make is that I want to display some data a little differently. So where Kodos handles things one at a time, I want to get them all. Unfortunately with re and groups this means doing some looping. And with named groups I'm a tad stuck as the information is all there but tying it together is eluding me. I'm getting there slowly. I think maybe this is why Kodos did it the way it did. It's a little easier just grabbing a certain set of groups rather than all of them.

This is vague and rambling and I'm sorry - I'm just poking around in the dark a lot - reading lots of documentation and trying stuff out. Which is good as that all comes back to the learning part. I did kill some precious time on a typo - I really hate that. I had a missing closing parens on one line which caused a syntax error to be thrown on the next line. Argh.

The Nexus 7 wifi problems are pretty wide spread. They've got to get that crap figured out. I have friends on Facebook who aren't technical at all who just consider their device broken. And I guess they are right.

Later I'm going to see if I can find a good app for reading comics on it. This brings up my second Android super annoyance. I think I'll end up using email to get the comic book files on the device since I can't access it via usb from my linux box. Totally ridiculous.

I went with my family to see the Hobbit this afternoon. We all liked it quite a bit.

There were some points where the film diverged from the book and I really didn't understand the choice. Why is it better that Frodo falls early on fighting an orc rather than being knocked off a dwarves shoulders? Although now that I think about it - maybe it was so that he wasn't in the rather spectacular escape scene from the mountain. Couldn't have had him on someone's shoulders through that. I would have enjoyed it if the dwarves had had hoods and all been properly introduced. Though the two reviews I read said the film starts too slowly so I guess they would have really hated that. My 9 year old said those reviewers were wrong. Apparently he has a longer attention span than they do.
 
The added depth to some of the characters is nice and I find myself really looking forward to the necromancer story line. I would have enjoyed Saruman having a more positive role though. Radagast was amazing though the bird poop on the face was rather disgusting.
 
I did not see it in 3d or with the high frame rate. As it was we couldn't find one in the original setup either. We watched it with the original soundtrack but Hungarian subtitles. This is fine, though anything said by elves or orcs that wasn't in English - we didn't get to see translated. My kids were a bit miffed about that. I told them to be happy they got to see it at all and that at least it was better than if it were only being shown dubbed. I like going to the theater here. When you buy a ticket you buy it for a specific seat. No sitting in a theater for 45 minutes watching commercials. It is fine to show up right before the film starts.
 
I'm looking forward to the next films. I'm really looking forward to Smaug. I like Dragons. I've been re-reading the Pern books in chronological order. I'm a sucker for big flying lizards whether they are good, evil or indifferent.
 
Well I thought I've had more to say - but I'm tired. It's late. I'm going to surf a bit more and then go to bed. Maybe I'll think of more and post it later or if you want to talk about the movie - comment below.