300 dpi TFT screen at your desktop now

If the monitor you’re using right now is LCD display, chances are it’s got 300 dpi of resolution, potentially exploitable.

Yes, typography quality for on-screen reading can be available for no additional cost. Sounds bold? Take a look:


LCD owners can see live demo of tripling their screen's horizontal resolution

(Effective on certain (well, most) LCD display types only)
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Moore’s law and PC upgrade

Five years ago, I paid $25 for my first (ever!) memory module for my own workstation. It was a 256 MB unit. A week ago a 1 GB module cost me virtually the same: $26.50 (count the inflation?)

A good approximation of the Moore’s Law, isn’t it? According to a variation (slackened one) of the law, the number of electronic device’s microelements per dollar doubles every two years. Therefore, I should be getting (2 power (5/2)) times more memory, or 1513 MB, while I got (2 power (4/2)). However, for the inflation accounted more accurately, the equation would probably match perfectly.

Apparently, same goes with hard disk drives.

My first HDD was the slowest (read “economic”, but also the most cold & quiet available in the market) 40 GB in 2002, having been accompanied by a quicker & bigger 120 GB in 2004 and being substituted by 200 GB in 2005 and 500 GB in 2007. The last three being of basically the same price.

Here’s the summarizing graph:
Application of Moore's Law to PC upgrade

For the sake of cleanness CPU transistor counts were omitted from the graph, yet they’d be right in the middle between RAM and Disk curves with 37.5 million transistors in the processor purchased in October’02 vs. 221 million 5 years later. Again, all that for essentially the same money. The criterion for processor selection was “the cheapest in the top-line”.

Another coincidence not reflected in the chart: after my first 256 MB module I bought the second one in just a month. This time I am also planning to purchase an additional 1 GB as soon as in coming January…

Real benefits of disk partitioning in PC?

What’s all the excitement about dividing a hard disk drive into several smaller virtual “disks”?
Nobody seems to be able to provide an intelligible explanation why they went to partition their nice big drives.

A quick web search on a topic makes up for some good laugh. One adviser e.g. went as far as this:

If you purchase a computer with a partitioned hard drive, you should send a letter of thanks to the manufacturer. The manufacturer was aware of the many benefits of partitioning, including organizational flexibility and storage efficiency, and divided the drive into partitions before loading it with an OS and all of the other free software that comes bundled with a typical PC. This presents a huge advantage for you, as anyone who has ever had to partition a drive can attest.

(emphasis mine)
(BTW notice the original article has become paid content – what an illustration to the idea of decline of paid content!)
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GnuCash for Windows available after 10 years in UNIX

The GNU way to manage your money!GnuCash team has been famous in the past for their harshness towards anything “Windows”. No wonder – the 1st version of GC was written in 1997 in Motif for X Window System which was (and still is?) light years ahead of substandard Microsoft Windows GUI in terms of professional usability.

It seemed nobody expected them (GnuCash) to release a Windows port. Me wasn’t exception either. So when I had to move from X to MS Windows I also had to keep a subsidiary UNIX machine (thank God, virtual computer was OK) special for UNIX applications, most notably for GnuCash.
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How to eliminate spam bots from AWStats for good

The two most common approaches in Web analytics are:

  1. Web server logfile analysis
  2. Page tagging

Page tagging is the method of choice from the commercial standpoint. However, it’s got its characteristic drawbacks:

  • changes to the web application are needed
  • vendor lock-in of some sort takes place (regardless whether you use a subscription-based solution or acquire a hosted one).

On the other hand there is one nice web stats tool operating in the old good logfile analysis realm, which is AWStats. Until recently it was a reliable work horse for many webmasters delivering quite useful reports about origin breakdown, sessions (visits duration), lists of landing pages (“entry”) & exit pages – categories commonly associated with the more complex page tagging statistics systems.

What happened to it?
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Weekly Top Posts automated email digest for WordPress

Ever wanted to set up a weekly or monthly mailing list for your blog?

FeedBurner is good for a daily email dispatch which is attainable by just “burning” your feed and activating mail service for it.

But how about less frequent mailings?
And how about selecting only the best articles to include in those rare mails?

It’s easy. Better yet, it can be automated with standard components for your WordPress installation.

To set up a Weekly (or Monthly) Top Posts mailing list just follow these 5 simple steps:
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Migration from Joomla to WordPress + merger of two WP blogs Completed

So this is the first post in the new migrated and merged weblog. At last.
It has proved one more time that a web site start up should be planned carefully lest you’d have couple of busy evenings correcting your strategy in the future.

Problems one should be prepared to when venturing such moves:

  • Permalink re-design. Page addressing approaches are very different in Joomla and WordPress.
  • Permalink forward setup for each page moved.
  • Loss of your design. Joomla look&feel and its themes may be appealing to many (like it was with me couple years ago, when it was “Mambo” yet) and it’s got nice built-in features (some of which may be available as WP plugins, but some may not)

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