Ramblings 5: Big Screens, DVDs, and More March 11, 2002 Paul Sullivan

It Begins

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Let Us Visualize For A Moment...

For those who don’t know, I really like that Geforce 3 Titanium 500 that I purchased from Leadtek. It drives my 21” Viewsonic P225 monitor at 1920x1440x32 all day long, and having that much real-estate is extremely productive for me. As the image below-left shows (in 800x600 for space savings), I have a MS word window open on the left, and the web on the right so I can create my articles while I do research at the same time. Having that much space available makes everything easy. I can create large spreadsheets, complex graphics, manage screen shots, handle ICQ chats and listen to my tunes in Music Match without losing a step. Dual monitors may be a wonderful thing for many, but if you want to minimize desk space requirements, a single huge monitor is a great way to do it.

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LCD Redux

To clarify my feelings on LCD displays, it is not that I don’t like them. It is just that I think they are not ready for prime time yet. Geometry may be perfect, but this “native resolution” issue can be a problem. I would normally run at the maximum, let’s say 1600x1200 on an 18” Viewsonic LCD. However, for some applications, let’s say close-in editing of bitmap or vector graphics, I may want to change to 1024x768 or even 800x600. When I do this, things can start looking a bit ugly depending on the model of LCD I have. Fonts can look very jagged, the desktop may be stretched out and unclear, etc. There are LCD’s (like those on some Dell Laptops) that let you center your lower-resolution image on the screen so that it takes up only 800x600 actual pixels, for instance. The rest of the screen defaults to a black border on all 4 sides. This method actually works very well, especially for gaming. The only thing left is to make sure the “refresh rate” of the LCD is very fast, because ghosting is something we should just not have to put up with. It makes your eyes tired when you are scrolling in your browser or office programs and makes fast, first person gaming much harder. Maybe in a year or two things will be a lot better and prices will go down, but until then, I’m glad we have the CRT to fall back on.

SIDEBAR: I hear tell they are working on a Compact CRT, which is supposed to give you all the benefits of a standard CRT monitor at less than half, possibly even as low as 1/3rd the current depth. If they can pull this off, I’ll be able to avoid LCD’s altogether while they work out the bugs.

Leftovers

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Bits & Bytes...

Last Ramblings I started this little “Pre-FM CD” Track of the Week thing to commemorate all of those wonderful CD’s that existed before the age of the RIAA Copy Protection fiasco, where damaged music is being pushed upon the unwashed masses, such as myself. It is not technically a “Track of the Week”, more like “Track of the Article”, but it did not come out sounding as good, so Track of the Week it is. In the sprit of a 28 day month, I figured I would put out three of them to make up for the missing days. It is so nice not having drop-outs in my legally purchased music! So, without further delay:

Pre-FM CD Tracks Of The Week

• “Cancer” from Filter
  
• “Zombie from The Cranberries
  
• “Vanishing Cream” from The Hunger
  

DVD Happenings

A kind and thoughtful person who read the Fair Use article sent me a link to an amazing little piece of software called SmartRipper that lets you easily rip your DVD’s to a space on your hard drive so that you can make legal backups of your movies. While I don’t yet have a DVD burner, I was able to successfully rip DVD’s to the hard drive for playback. There were some issues with the proper soundtrack and screen ratio’s being selected, but beyond that it worked quite well. So, if you have a DVD burner, you can now make backups of your movies, which comes in handy if your kids like to use your disks for Frisbees as they play in the sand box.

Also on the DVD front, I was asked in another email about taking screen shots from your DVD’s. It turns out that the emailer was able to make screen captures, but they all ended up in the standard 720x480 format and looked squished from side to side. One way to correct this is to use an image editing program, such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to expand them horizontally to match their proper ratio. In Paint Shop Pro 7, I open up the saved bitmap and choose Resize from the Image menu. In the dialog box that pops up, I specify the aspect ratio in the “Maintain Aspect Ratio” area, which in the case of starship troopers is 1.85 to 1. Then at the top I enter the known height of 480 and it calculates the width automatically, which for the 1.85 ratio is 888 pixels. Then I just save the modified image to disk and make it my wallpaper. It may not work precisely for each DVD out there (like the Matrix for instance) but the process is essentially the same. The values just need to be tweaked.

SIDEBAR: The more the record companies push consumers, the more likely they are to alienate them. If they don’t wise up soon, they may find that buyers are so angry that it will drive their profits into the ground.

Splitsville

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Oh, Oh, It’s Magic...

A little bit ago, someone I knew bought a new machine and had an extra Pentium 233 with 64 meg and a 6 gig hard drive to spare. They decided to donate it to someone who was an intern at their company, as they had no computer of their own to use for term papers, etc. After I had formatted the machine into a single FAT-32 partition and spent some 8 hours loading up all of the software, I was finished and happy with the performance of the installation. However, when it became clear that the person would need a recovery image because they did not have familiarity with reloading an operating system and software should something go wrong, I smirked a bit because I could not image the machine with Norton Ghost because the system had no second drive and no CD burner. After the painful image of reloading flashed in my mind, I got smart and turned quickly to Partition Magic.

While it can resize partitions in Windows, I did not want to go to all the trouble of messing up my nice clean install with a program I would be removing anyway. Luckily, Partition Magic allows you to create a Boot Disk set that contains the DOS version of the software. Though the DOS version is not as fully functional as its Windows cousin, it can certainly handle a simple resize. So, I just booted up on the first floppy, ran Partition Magic for DOS from the second disk and resized the 6 gig partition to a 5 gig partition. I then took the remaining 1 gig and made an extended partition out of it. When I booted back into Windows, it saw the second partition as Drive D:, and I was able to copy the small GHOSTPE.EXE file over to the new D: drive, drop back to DOS and create a quick image of the C: partition to a ghost file. I made the image file Read-Only just to be safe, and I was done.

The DOS version included with Partition Magic 7 makes it simple to resize partitions and create new ones without a trace of interference in the Windows registry. If you work on systems that have no secondary disks but need to be ghosted, and you don’t have a compatible network card or CD burner you can lay your hands on, try using the DOS version of Partition Magic 7 to make some room for that image.

I Have The Power!

There are very few killer utilities out there, but when you get your hands on one, you just have to share it with the crowd. There is this awesome program out there called PowerDesk, and it puts Windows file management to shame. The best part is, it is 100% free for the basic version.
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Endgame

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Privacy In IE 6

One of the features that IE 6 touts is the management of cookies. However, the feature applies only to the Internet Zone and is not uniformly implemented. For instance, even if you specifically tell IE to block cookies from certain sites, if you put them in the Trusted Sites Zone, they can save cookies to your drive anyway. Conversely, if you put a site in the Restricted Sites Zone, all cookies will be blocked regardless of your privacy settings. It would have been nice if you could set cookies on a case by case basis for each zone, but even when taken in context of a single zone, the cookie management is pretty decent.

The Internet Zone, the only one affected by the privacy settings, contains the default configuration for the sites that you visit on the web. Every time you visit a new site, the settings in the Internet Zone will determine what features are enabled or disabled, unless that site is listed explicitly in another zone. The question for many is how to put these zones to work for them instead of being limited by them. Using myself as an example, I’ve been burned enough times by bad scripting to know that by default, I do not want any scripting on at all, whether it is ActiveX, Java or anything else. So, in the Internet Zone, I default to a medium level of security, then go through and turn off all things Java and ActiveX, including the ability to cut and paste via script, and installation of desktop items. Under the Privacy settings, I go to the Advanced dialog and specify that I want to override automatic cookie handling and force a block on all first and third party cookies. Under the Web Sites dialog, I can specify individual web sites I want to accept cookies from, which ensures I don’t get any cookies from sites I don’t want.

More Zoning

There are some sites that I place in the Trusted Sites Zone, such as WindowsUpdate. Microsoft.Com, and regardless of the settings I put in the Privacy dialog, cookies will show up. That leaves me with the Restricted Sites Zone. This is a zone that I’m getting fond of. By default, I set everything to a High security level, and then make a single change to enable Active Scripting. It is in this zone that I put sites that I frequent but can’t access without scripting. In Restricted, cookies are blocked by default, so all I have to worry about is the scripting. If the site does not let me access it without cookies, I may end up putting it in the Trusted Zone, at least for the duration of the visit, but I usually bypass sites with such limits whenever I can. If I can get the same files somewhere else, I’ll go that extra mile to visit another site. Ideally, Internet Explorer would allow you to set scripting and cookie preferences for each and every site you visit, but given the realities involved, I guess we are stuck with what they are offering, at least for now. Still, it is not a bad setup really.

Remainder

Another place to look for key IE 6 settings is the Advanced tab under Tools / Internet Options. It is here that I turn off Smooth Scrolling, tell the program not to search from the address bar, turn off auto image resizing, turn on inline auto complete for web addresses and enable the printing of background images and coloring.

Not to be forgotten is Outlook Express 6. Since it is not all that new, I won’t go into too many details, but will just cover some of the highlights that I ended up focusing on. First, I always hated where it put the default folders because it made it inconvenient to back up. Thankfully, under the Tools / Options / Maintenance menus is the Store Folder button, where you can specify your own path. I put mine under My Documents / Outlook so that I could do that simple drag and drop to a network drive when I need to do a quick backup.

I also configure OE6 to send news and mail in strict Plain Text format. I hate, just hate, HTML email. Blech! To speed things up, under the General tab, I set it to automatically go to the Inbox folder first and under the Read tab, I set it to mark the message read after 0 seconds. Under the Security tab, I can set it to the Internet Zone or the Restricted Zone. In my case, since I have scripting on in the Restricted Zone, I have it set to the Internet Zone, where I have scripting turned off. Most people who enable scripting by default in the Internet Zone and have it turned off in the Restricted Zone do just the opposite. Finally, just in case you were not aware, OE 5 and 6 can both retrieve your Hotmail accounts. Just go through the new mail wizard and specify a hotmail address and it will walk you through the rest. Just to be sure, you may want to adjust your Internet Zone settings so that your Userdata Persistance is on and your User Authentication Logon is set to Automatic Logon Only In Internet Zone.

SIDEBAR: Would you rather have an LCD or compact CRT? Would you be bold enough to take the Nokia Monitor Test into a store and use it the next time you are in the market for a new monitor? Do you like IE6 and OE 6, or are they not so good to you? Let us know your opinions in our Comments Section.