Martin Geisler Online

Last week gimpster.com had a kind of anniversary. I’ve now had my domain six months! That meant that I’ve just paid almost 100 dollars to NETsite :-) But that’s okay — they have been quick and helpful when answering my questions. It only took them a few days to transfer me to this new server.

Today I started in school again, after a summer-holiday that lasted about two months. It’s going to be a bit hard to get used to be in a classroom for perhaps eight hours a day. But this year I wont have to have anymore German, and instead I’ve got Computer Science. I really don’t know what to expect of it. Perhaps we’ll learn a lot of exciting things (I hope that), or perhaps we’ll just be bored. But then at least we’ll have four easy lessons a week. So basically its a win-win situation :-)

My 21″ Philips monitor, a 201P10 Brilliance, has just arrived. Wow — I expected it to be big, but not this big! It comes in a box, which measures roughly 1 meter (3 feet) at all sides. My dad and I could barely get it through the door into my room :-)

First thing to do after placing it onto my desk was to see how everything looked at a resolution of 1600×1200. It simply looks perfect. It can be used at resolutions as high as 2048×1536. I tried this under Windows, thanks to my Matrox G400. I could run it as high as 67 Hz, but at this extreme resolution everything is kind of small. Now I run it at 1600×1200, which is the ideal resolution for this monitor. It has a horizontal aperture-grill width of 0.24 mm (0.00945″) and display-area is 16″ wide, which means that is can resolve up to 16″/(0.00945″/pixel) = 1693 pixels. And it can handle a vertical refresh-rate of up to 97Hz in this resolution.

The on-screen-display is functional and contains many settings. You can adjust the purity in the corners individually. If the top left corner has a slight red tint, you can adjust it so it is pure white. You can also adjust both the vertical and horizontal convergence. The convergence is the alignment of the three electron-beams (one for each of the three primary colors: red, green and blue), so if you have a checkerboard-pattern, and all the black tiles is a little blue on side, it means that the three beams isn’t aligned probably. Finally you can adjust for moiré.

All in all, I would say that I’m very impressed by this monitor. After trying a 21″ monitor, you’ll never want to go back to a 17″.

I’m upgrading my computer to a 800 MHz AMD Athlon. This fine processor will run on an Asus A7V motherboard equipped with 256 MB PC133 RAM.

I know… it’s going to be a monster machine :-) And it gets even better when my new 21″ monitor arrives… It will be perfect for Photo-Paint 9, which takes up a lot of system resources. But it will also give GIMPS an extra boost.

I’ve just got home after 13 hours at work… This means that I’m rather tired and should be sleeping in my bed instead of posting news on my homepage.