Rubénerd!

It is with a solemn heart but with loving memories that I bid farewell to an old friend of mine, my Samsung SyncMaster 2232GW 22" display.

Images were taken yesterday, 2010 and early 2008 respectfully.

Purchased in Singapore's Funan Centre during a sale in November 2007, she was manufactured in Malaysia during the same month. Clad in a glossy black plastic case with a elliptical base and generous vent, she matched my later 24" SyncMaster 2433BW perfectly on my desk.

Equipped with both DVI and VGA ports, she displayed images at a 1680x1050 resolution, a generous horizontal upgrade from my previous 1280x1024 display without sacrificing vertical resolution. The biggest difference was her 2ms refresh rate, a vast improvement over the 12ms and subsequent ghosting of my previous display.

She displayed imagery from numerous computers, including my short lived Nintendo PC (so named because the case looked like a Wii), my venerable MacBook Pro, as a second monitor for my Mac Pro and as the primary display for my Antec A300 Sim Lim Square tower. In those capacities, she's shown me Mac, KDE, Gnome, Xfce and Windows 2000 desktops.

This monitor was the first I ever owned with a glossy panel. To this day I probably still prefer matte displays, but I will admit she did render beautifully deep blacks provided I didn't point her at a window.

Earlier this month, without provocation, the display started flickring upon being turned on. At first the flickering only lasted a few seconds, slowing down gradually until it returned to normal operation. Today, it takes many minutes, during which time I get a headache even having her in my periphery.

Goodbye old friend, you served me well.

Observe the above image by D宅 on Pixiv if you will. The stunning landscape. The ridiculously gorgeous and vivid colours. Hatsune Miku!

Full size, the image is 2500x1154. My primary monitor is 1920x1200. To be pixel perfect (as I insist with my desktop backgrounds) it's too short by 46 pixels.

1920x1080 images are perverse enough, but this is just out and out cruel!

Quote from a 3/5 star PC Magazine review of the Samsung display I picked up back in 2007:

While I'm pleased that the digital port is HDCP compliant, I think a monitor in this price range should offer something more in the way of multimedia connectivity, such as an HDMI port or a card reader.

A monitor losing points because it doesn't have a card reader? No wonder my toaster only got 3/5 stars.

Sorry I couldn't resist, I've always wanted one of these.

With their launch of new iMacs and Mac Pros yesterday, Apple are perhaps copping the most flack for discontinuing the 24 and 30 inch Cinema Displays. Presented for your consideration are my thoughts, interspersed with plenty of pointless nostalgia. Is that how you spell "interspersed"? Doesn't look right.

Anecdotal nostalgia

For several years my primary machine was a PowerMac G5. It was an amazing machine for compiling huge projects, compressing archives and video, and when it got hot it sounded as if a fighter jet was landing on my desk. It was huge, it was beautiful, it looked like a machine someone would use to get things done. But I digress.

Along with the Mac mini, the PowerMac (and now the Mac Pro) are the only Apple computers that didn't/don't come with displays, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who baulked at the price when I saw the Cinema Displays displayed (heh) as an optional extra for use with my new PowerMac. Next thing I did was go down to Funan Centre and pick up a Samsung display for 1/10th the price.

Now it might seem silly that a person buying a professional computer would go out and buy a consumer display to use with it, but the great thing about the PowerMac line was you could bring your own third party stuff to the party. Its why people went with them instead of getting an iMac. Even most professional AV users I read on newsgroups opted for third party displays, though they no doubt splurged a bit more on them than I did to buy mine.

As a pointless aside, that Samsung display still works. We have it attached to our media server and scanner machine. Last Windows box in the house, go figure.

Don't attempt jokes before breakfast

The problem for Apple is displays are now so cheap and the profits so razor thin people are more likely to cut themselves on that than any of the styling of the display itself (that was supposed to be a joke, but it went off the rails). Apple uses IPS panels in their displays, but people don't see that when they're comparing prices, they just see inches and price. There's another joke there, but I'll leave that for you to imagine.

Still, I can see why some people would be disappointed. My aging MacBook Pro still has a great screen built in, and because it's the older generation it has a florescent tube as the backlight instead of LEDs which their new display and current MacBooks use. It sucks (relatively speaking) for battery life, but I find I can use it for much longer periods without getting eyestrain. The same goes for the 30 inch Cinema Display, probably, if I could have afforded one.

The other issue is that Apple's lone display -- the 27 inch -- is just as wide in resolution, but you lose 200 pixels down. For an OS that keeps the menubar permanently locked to the top of the display, plus with all the toolbars in pro apps, that's not an insignificant loss of screen real estate.

I suppose this is another of those decisions that makes bidness sense for Apple, but will ruffle plenty of people's feathers. I wish I could have afforded a cool Apple 30 inch display that they used all over Law and Order, but I suppose my current super cheap but decent 1920x1080 22" ViewSonic will have to do. The ratio is a bit irritating, but the colours are great and lines are ultra sharp. Oh yeah, and it's matte!

As a final aside…

It looks as though Apple Australia still has stock of the 30 inch Cinema Display, as of the 29th of July. If I had two and a half grand I'd get one in a heartbeat if only so I could revel in further digital nostalgia. It's got DVI instead of a MiniDisplay Port too. I could even pretend it's an iMac by drawing a black optical drive slot on the side.

Grabbing a quick coffee at our local deli this morning I happened upon an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by David Flynn talking about the utopian idea of all day battery power. Where do I sign up? :)

Quoting Mooly Eden of Intel, in the article he discusses the counter intuitive idea of having more powerful processors to save battery life given they can finish a task quickly and go back to idling which uses less power. I hadn't thought of it that way before! He also touches on SSDs which draw less power and turning off services such as Bluetooth and WiFi which make sense.

Non backlit displays?

Two small observations though; one was his description of more energy efficient displays in column three:

That said, notebook screens with LED backlighting draw less juice than the non-backlit models, while also providing a brighter picture.

Granted I'm a computer science student not a computer engineer, but AFAIK the benefit of LED displays isn't that they're brighter than regular backlights, but that they draw less power for the same luminescence. Well okay I suppose that's just a subtle distinction :).

He also mentions "non-backlit models" which technically isn't true; while contemporary laptops lack LEDs they do have florescent tube backlights. High resolution colour LCDs would be impossible to read without any backlight at all, you can try this out by turning the brightness on a notebook display to 0%.

Last year the inverter for my MacBook Pro's backlight failed which made the screen virtually impossible to use. Good thing I was able to fix it!

Notebook batteries

Finally, in the last column where he discusses old laptops and battery life he makes a good point:

After a few years your laptop's battery will be wearing down and running at much less than its original capacity. You can buy a new battery but you'd be better off buying a new notebook.

We could make our houses more energy efficient, but we'd be better buying a new house ;). I kid in jest, it is a good point but for some of us we don't have the luxury of buying new machines every few years just because the battery is dying!

While it is true newer computers are more energy efficient and come with more sophisticated batteries, that isn't to say people with older machines can't also benefit. As a out-of-left-field example, my ancient Toshiba Libretto 70CT notebook originally came with a nickel cadmium battery which was almost as heavy as the rest of the machine, had the dreaded memory effect and simply didn't provide many hours of use. Replacing the innards with lithium polymer cells reduced the weight of the whole notebook and gave it more battery life than when it shipped new!

Is the notion outdated anyway?

My last thought is: could the idea of a full day's battery charge be achieved not by carrying around heavier computers, but by using lighter devices like iPads (or equivalent knockoffs that will no doubt be sprouting up everywhere) for some of the time? I wrote this entire post on my iTelephone for example, and the battery is still going great. If we had reliable phone infrastructure, could it be conceivable that some of our data be in the cloud so we're not tied to just one machine [and it's battery] during the course of a day? Just food for thought.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could recharge our own energy as easily as we could recharge a computer? Eh, on second thought maybe not, we'd have lots of energy when we were born, but by age three we'd barely be able to leave the house for a few hours before dropping our heads into bowls of soup and making royal arses of ourselves. I already embarrass myself with terrible jokes and a poor fashion sense in public as it is.

Related posts

Curated by hand! I really should install a plugin to do this for me one day.

• 2010.03.30: Batteries own me
• 2010.01.24: OS X telling me to Service Battery? Uh oh

Hot off the heels (relatively speaking) of their ribbon interface-clad Office 2007 Microsoft's Mac division has announced their next version of Office for Mac that will also include the ribbon interface. Problem is, both Microsoft and Apple already solved the problem of feature accessibility years ago with the tall toolbox and the ribbon is a giant step backwards, especially now with widescreens so prevalent.

Some personal history nobody cares about

Its hard for me to admit this, but when I first moved over to the Mac from Windows in high school I loaded up Office for Mac on it to take to classes because at the time NeoOfficeJ was still rough around the edges and I already had lots of Office documents. I was surprised that their Mac version was in many ways better than the PC suite: the interface was much cleaner and it seemed more responsive. I wans't alone in thinking Microsoft's best product wasn't even on Windows.

Time went by and gradually Microsoft released Office 2004 then 2008. It was as if Microsoft management had cottoned on to the fact their flagship software suite was running better and was more elegant on a competing platform, because each subsequent version got progressively slower (the understatement of the century) and the interface more cluttered.

By the time I left high school I started using OpenOffice and with the 3.x series I feel as though I have a solid replacement that supported open standards (sorry folks, I don't consider OOXML such a standard). I also started using Gnumeric which was one of the best free/open source applications I've ever used before and since.

The ribbon was outdated before it even existed

The first exposure I got to the Office 2007 ribbon was at university when the computers started being upgraded. I kept hearing the arguments that the ribbon would make it easier to discover features than menus, and that if I didn't like the fact it took up half my screen I could simply collapse it, but I was unconvinced.

The concept of a ribbon interface seems like an idea for computers built ten years ago. Virtually all new machines use widescreen displays now, which means this huge thick slab takes up even more space. The elegant Office for Mac and iWork solution that Paul Thurott so despises of having a collapsible, free floating window pallet is far more practical for widescreens because it scarifies no precious vertical screen real estate.

Fortunately, as with Chrome/Chromium's Mac versions, being a Mac application it means it will retain a menubar for the sake of our collective sanity. I also hope they'll have the option of deleting the silly ribbon entirely and using a floating pallet again.

My number one feature request

As I said I've since moved to iWork, OpenOffice and Gnumeric, but I would hope for the sake of people who do have to use this latest version of Office they work really, really hard at improving performance. The fact a PowerPC version of their suite running in Rosetta on an Intel platform runs faster than a later Intel native version speaks volumes.

When I turned on my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro I got in early 2006 this evening the backlight refuses to turn on using the function keys on the keyboard. All other keyboard functions are fine.

If I shine a torch at the screen I can just barely make out the windows and can adjust the brightness slider in the Display prefpanel, but nothing happens. Using an external monitor I can use the machine, but the internal display is still black.

Not sure whether this is a problem with Snow Leopard, I sure as heck hope so but it's looking increasingly unlikely. I didn't have the backlight Snow Leopard installation problem, but could this be related?

Things I've tried so far and have failed:

1. Resetting the PRAM (three times)
2. Resetting the PMU

This is really serious. I need to take this machine to classes. If it's a hardware failure and I can only use an external display, I'm in big trouble.

With the introduction of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing. Fortunately, there is a workaround!

Previously on Leopard

In Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X, if you opened System Preferences and chose Appearance, you could choose the level of font smoothing on your monitor with a handy drop down box.

On Snow Leopard...

For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing aside from a single checkbox, instead relying on LCDs to report what settings should be used. The problem is, support for this is spotty and sometimes the results look terrible.

The solution!

Fortunately you can still adjust this manually. Open the Terminal in your Utilities folder, then enter the following code on one line. Replace the "2" with a number between 1 and 4, depending on how much smoothing you want.

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

The changes will only take effect on newly opened applications. The easiest way I've found is just to log out and log in again.

Heaven knows why Apple user interface designers decided to remove access to this feature.