LevelsOfDetail

Yes, I know it's totally cliche already, but I'm going to comment on Chrome anyways.

I think Google has a hit with this one. It's not even done yet, and I can already consider using it as my primary browser. It's a great example of putting a lot of thought into a relatively small number of UI elements. It manages to kill many UI feature birds with relatively few widget stones.

There's a few missing pieces that I hope will come soon enough. Bookmark syncing, color management, a little bit more configurability. But for a beta, it's a great start.

Actually this was just my excuse to try posting using Chrome. They appear to have built in Safari's text field resizing feature, but it looks like it doesn't work with Movable Type's already resizable text field.

edit: Oh, and by the way, it looks to me like Gecko is dying a slow death. It's Apple, Adobe, Google, and Nokia all against Mozilla.

As if it wasn't obnoxious enough already, I've decided to convert to saying "... said the nun to the sailor" instead of "that's what she said." Sounds more evolved and whatnot.It's the Raichu version of the phrase.

In a another bout of self-abuse (I should really see someone about this tendency...), I installed OpenSUSE 11 on my desktop at Work.

It's actually pretty slick. The installer looks really nice, and appears to work well. I think all my hardware was actually detected. Actually, the auto-detection worked too well. My mouse ended up getting detected twice, causing all kinds of weird problems when I installed x2vnc later (The solution was to just disable one of them using sax2).

I still don't really like the SUSE config tools, but I must say I arbitrarily find the GTK versions less offensive than the QT ones (maybe it's just the gtk style). There remains a seemingly arbitrary division of tasks between the yast control panel and the gnome control panel (even with some overlap in functionality), and the fact that they kinda look the same doesn't help with the confusion.

Also no patented subpixel rendering by default. I think it's a few SRPM rebuilds away, but I just haven't looked into it. It's silly that this is extra work though. I'm pretty sure all the various patches will be upstream in the next version. Hopefully that means it will work out of the box on many more distros.

The new package manager seems pretty good. zypper commands from the command line are reasonably fast. The only oddity so far for me is that by default, the "repository" on your install media is listed as the primary source of packages (aside from updates), which means that every time you do a big install operation you have to go find the disc. I'm pretty sure there's on online equivalent somewhere, but it's not entirely clear to me how to find it.

Anyways, I'm trying not to get too bogged down the details. The more I use different distros, the more I think it's what's on the inside of your home directory that counts, i.e. all the little scripts that you could have written to make yourself work more efficiently. Not the hours you spent finding the perfect dark theme, that's just going to get broken next time you upgrade.

Update: Here's how to enable subpixel.

After dilly-dallying for 9 months or so, I finally pulled the trigger on a new monitor, the HP LP2475w, and it arrived today.

Initial impressions are pretty good. It's definitely not as sparkly as the 3007WFP-HC was. That's good. It's still wide gamut, so now I have to go find a calibrator to buy. Joy. I'm starting to hate shopping. Thankfully, it seems like there are fewer choices in the color calibration world, so this shouldn't take another 9 months.

1900x1200 feels wider than it should. My initial theory is that 1600x1200 actually made me maximize windows when I didn't really need to. There's sort of a zone between 1200-1600 pixels wide for a window that the size doesn't really make a difference, and so even if I make a window 1200 pixels wide, I can't fit anything useful in the remaining 400 on the screen, so I end up just maximizing. When I get that extra 300 pixels to work with, suddenly it makes sense to keep my big windows 1200 pixels wide and have a new 600 pixel column to put other stuff. Besides, maximizing to a browser to be 1900 wide seems silly.

Also on the "bright" side, the big red number on my TD ameritrade account page looks nice and saturated today. :-P

More in-depth review I'll write after I get a calibrator and a some more time with the screen itself.

OK, I've had the monitor for about a week now, and I also got it calibrated with the Eye-one display 2 calibrator that I got from newegg. Here are the full notes:

• Wide Gamut: It's still there. It's still kind of annoying. Firefox 3 makes the experience quite a bit more bearable, but Flash doesn't support it yet so video's often look like candy colors still. I also get the feeling that cleartype might not be tuned for wide-gamut monitors.. but I don't understand the theory enough here to really say. Even with the calibration-corrected gamma, text looks every so slightly more fringy. It could also just be the bigger pixels when compared to my NEC 2070NX.
• Color uniformity: A few readers on the HardForum thread for this monitor have reported a green-to-pink color uniformity problem. I think I see it too, though it is very faint. Here's a picture that I took that exaggerates it:
  
• Ghosting: I don't see too much motion blur, but there is some inverse ghosting. Doesn't really bother me that much though.

I'm new to calibration, but my with my first profile, the monitor validator that comes with Eye-one Match tells me I have an average deltaE of 0.69, which I understand is pretty good. There definitely seems to a bit of technique to this, so I'll have to update this post if I manage to coax better numbers out of the screen.

At this point, I'm seriously debating returning this monitor and just getting an NEC 2490 instead. Everyone likes the 2490, and after I've spent 600+ on this one, spending 300 more the best thing out there doesn't really seem like a big deal. If I use the monitor for the next 4-5 years, it seems totally justifiable. I still don't really buy the whole wide-gamut thing, and it seems like it's going to take a while for people to sort out more-than-8-bit displays anyways.