I incorrectly surmised the problem was the cable, as I was using a more-shielded cable before discovering I had enough video memory to use both screens at the same time.

In other words, if I turn off the ThinkPad’s 14″ LCD (in Fedora’s “Configure Display Preferences”) the Samsung external display is dramatically sharper, text is more legible. I assume it’s a power issue–because the SL400 seems to have enough video memory. Just not enough juice to sufficiently power both LCDs simultaneously. Is this a Lenovo-specific issue or specific to the Intel GMA 4500MHD? If you’re curious, here’s what I get with “/sbin/lspci” at the command prompt:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)

I bought a Samsung ML-1630 laser printer a few days ago from OfficeMax. The advertised price was $199. I was planning to spend around $100 for a laser printer. Why did I spend $200? OfficeMax had a deal, $100 off a Samsung display when you buy the ML-1630 too. Package deal.

I was planning to buy a 23″ Acer display in the near future, for around $170 with shipping, from Buy.com, which had the best deal I could find–cheaper than Amazon. I was set on the Acer–Fry’s had it on display for $200. I liked the size and the non-glossy minimal design. I would not have considered a Samsung display were it not for the OfficeMax package deal, although I know they make quality displays.

23″ seems like the largest you can go before the price jumps significantly. Maybe it’s the math behind the shipping or manufacturing? So from an economic standpoint, maybe there’s an ideal size, maybe not. 23″ of text at 1920×1080 is the max my video card can dish out. In Fedora that works out to where text on the big screen is a bit larger than the text on my 14″ 1280×800 ThinkPad.

Speaking of Fedora, it recognized both the printer and the display without a problem. The trick is learning how to activate and deactivate the external display. It’s not complicated but very intuitive. Plug in the display, click System, Preferences, Display, click on the “Unknown” display. Click the “On” radio button. Sounds self-explanatory in retrospect but I just assumed this would turn “On” by itself.

Another nuance: your panel bar doesn’t show up (by default) if you drag the “Laptop” box to the right of the “Unknown” display, if the external display isn’t plugged in. At least that’s how I think it works–whatever device you drag to the left in “Display Preferences” gets priority. Imagine you suspend your system, unplug the display, then bring your machine back out of sleep to find a blank screen–now your applications panel is off in Gnome limbo.

OfficeMax sold me a Samsung 23″ display for $279 minus $100–about the same price as the Acer 23″ I was thinking about. What was enticing, I could take it home immediately, no waiting for the postman. $200 seemed like too much for a laser printer, especially when I know I’m probably getting a “starter” toner cartridge. Chip-limited to 1000 pages? Even in economy mode? But I justified the cost. The printer is portable and flat on top, saving room on my desk. The 2333HD sits right on top of it.

Today at school I looked up reviews of the ML-1630. The reviews were not bad–no major complaints, mostly compliments on the quietness and size. To my surprise it was priced about $100 lower online. Did OfficeMax charge me too much? Was that a rebate price? Out of curiosity I wanted to see what I would have paid for the combo online. Actually, about the same. The SyncMaster 2333HD would have cost about $280 online with shipping, according to Buy.com, which means I would have paid about $380 total–the same deal I got at OfficeMax.

I do have one complaint. The printer doesn’t come with a USB cable. Does Samsung assume everyone has plenty of those by now? Fortunately my brother had an extra cable, thanks Tom!

The SyncMaster 2333HD is nice. It came with an HDMI cable and my laptop has HDMI output. For some reason the HDMI output was not crisp–blurry text. Yes, I played with the sharpness, contrast, font rendering, etc. On a hunch I borrowed a VGA cable from my dad. The VGA looks crisp at 1920×1080, text is not blurry. Text rendering is really my top concern. Of course, clarity depends on the VGA cable. Shorter, shielded, you can really tell the difference.

Why would VGA look better than HDMI? In my case, it does. Is it my laptop hardware or the Samsung display? It’s not a priority for me to find out. But if you’re some kind of HDMI expert, my laptop is a ThinkPad SL400. Like I said, I won’t blame Samsung because maybe the issue is with my video card. But I can’t rule out the possibility Samsung tuned the 2333HD’s VGA input more for PCs–where crisp text is a priority, optimizing HDMI more for video. Regardless, I can’t argue with sharp text. Now somebody sell me a VGA cable!

Show me only the best performing banners (ranked by avg. $ paid per impression) for all advertisers I’m approved for. Example: I have a 234×60 spot open. Show me only the top performing 234×60 banners. Don’t waste my valuable time, traffic and bandwidth. Why am I browsing amateurish ad campaigns, when I know you have banner-by-banner performance metrics!? In other words, I don’t want to see banners with just a company logo–I’m not increasing your brand’s awareness out of charity. I have bills to pay, too.

Upgrading the blogs. WordPress. So many options to configure for 2.8.5. Matt Mullenweg, the man with the plan. If you don’t know that name yet–look it up. Well maybe he has a plan. Hey Matt, next time you’re in Austin look me up. Maybe he’s too preoccupied with his gadgets.

I believe the future is LARGER. When I say LARGER, I’m talking about pixels. 1080p! This is how I surf now. 1920×1080. Focus Matt. Focus! No, not on your iPhone, on the BIG PICTURE. Really, it just seems Matt is focused now on the iPhone and Wordpress.com, by the way I’m reading the news. So many Wordpress.com announcements. And now Automattic is selling an iPhone theme?

Come on, iPhone doesn’t have THAT much penetration. What is your monthly bill for an iPhone? $100? Tack on some fees and that’s practically a car payment dude. The mobile phone is just a transition to something bigger. In the end, nobody wants to squint. Look, I don’t know if it’ll be a hologram, some kind of tessellated origami illumination, or how long it will take. But just because Africa has a million mobile users texting dialect translations in exchange for water allotments, that doesn’t mean the endgame is anything other than vector-based pixel infinity.

What else am I up to? Planning changes and features for my experimental Twitter client. Hush hush. I’m researching stocks for a class project. Investing in my own business–trying new hardware. Instruments. Whereby some act is accomplished. The “end” I aim to achieve.

1. Accept money to receive calls, from people you don’t like. Mr. Smith has many exciting business opportunities! He pays you $x to answer the phone. You need the money and answer the phone with a fake smile on your face.

2. Broadcast your location to marketers for a fee. Creepy, but self explanatory. Make extra money going on GPS scavenger hunts. Slow retail stores love it. Adds new meaning to, “Are you finding everything OK?”

3. Allow yourself to be recorded. You miss your privacy but the money is good. And talking is easier than blogging. Data hungry marketers, armed with voice recognition software, pay you by the word to talk in a loud voice, especially at the grocery store. Businesses complain about these new loud shoppers at first, but learn to tolerate the noise after suffering dreadful scavenger hunt exclusions. Lady Gaga’s marketing team pays five bucks to yack about her hypnotic new single at an eligible Starbucks, verified by GPS.

Before purchasing the domain (and the content) I studied the traffic keyword stats to see what I could do with it, if anything. Here’s my analysis of wp-fun’s traffic:

1. People come to wp-fun looking for WordPress plugins. But as we know, WordPress keeps evolving and it appears wp-fun’s plugins are not all up to date, tested, tweaked for WordPress 2.8.x. I may or may not support, update these plugins–I will need some time to study the traffic, popularity, potential of each of them. If you have requests, suggestions in this regard, please let me know, I will take your input into consideration.

2. At first glance, it looks like there are a fair number of searches for one particular plugin that interfaces the Google Chart API. Yes, charts are cool. We all love data and often need visualizations to make sense of it all. But WordPress charts? Even more cool. I’m familiar with the Google Chart API, but haven’t coded anything for it yet. Does the Google Chart API have a future? I’m not sure–that’s possibly a question worth exploring at wp-fun. In years past, PHP depended on “gd” for charts, which isn’t very fun–even if you get “gd” working, rendering graphics on the server is an unnecessary burden in most cases. How about Flash charts? Flash is a dead end. Where am I going with this? HTML 5 makes (SVG) vector graphics standard in major browsers. So if your PHP script generates SVG chart data, with the client’s browser doing half the hard math, you can throw together some “rectangle” tags and there you have a chart, with no third party in the picture. So I’m thinking, maybe I can transform Google Chart enthusiasm into SVG enthusiasm–in the form of a WordPress plugin. That’s doable.

3. Sidebar tabs. What is a sidebar tab? It seems bloggers want them, for whatever reason. And wp-fun has these searches. The best example I can think of: Business Insider uses sidebar tabs to show the most popular, most commented posts, as well as editor picks–within a small box. This allows you to cram lots of information, links, whatever, into a small visual area, eliminating clutter, managing visual attention. I believe wp-fun’s sidebar tab plugin is no longer supported. That’s something I can investigate, explore further.

So I can use wp-fun to discuss WordPress plugins and hacks using PHP, CSS, etc. WordPress is growing in popularity too–worldwide. Because it’s open source. That said, I have a couple of never-released WordPress plugins that I use here. Now with wp-fun.co.uk I have a good reason to release them. The domain is transferred, now I just need to switch the DNS, move some files around, etc. That should keep me busy this weekend!

I found the question provocative. I had just started to combine the two activities. I was hacking Wordpress into my own custom Twitter client. To control, correlate and classify my information consumption and production. In other words, it became clear each of my blogs needed a corresponding Twitter account, and each blog needed a custom interface to interact with each of these accounts.

Since I implemented this new system, the protracted blogging activity is less central to what I do here.

My interests don’t always overlap, which is why I created so many websites. When my interests do overlap, I can copy-paste an update. For example, I may post something about Red Hat here on Ferodynamics.com, my all-purpose “tech” site, and then tack the stock symbol ($RHT) onto a corresponding post released from StockmarketSoup.com, my new stock market site.

My software is coded to update Twitter and Identi.ca, and (for a limited duration) my site. But these micro-posts don’t show up in my RSS feed. They don’t reach Ping-o-matic. They aren’t archived locally either. So search engines will only find these updates on Identi.ca and Twitter.

This made me think: Could I better merge the two activities (microblogging and blogging) by restricting all of my blogging to 140 characters? Restrictive, but time-saving. I’d spend more time reading, researching, reducing information, and less time elaborating mind-numbing details. Conversely, I had no desire to auto-dump the first 140 characters of full-length posts on my followers…that always irritates me.

I did some research and it appears Wordpress has no function to publish a string of text. Is this functionality intentionally left out? It would take me a few days to write such a function myself. Further dissuading me: short status updates would water-down my oh-so-interesting RSS feed. As far as the SEO consequences of 140-character length posts, I won’t even go there.

Since attaching my microblog interface changes to Wordpress, I’m engaging Twitter more. And blogging less. What happened? Maybe this is entirely coincidental: traffic dropped significantly. Seasonal drop? Paradigm shift? Or are search engines still hung up on RSS update frequency, algorithmically condemning newly-devoted microbloggers that formerly blogged.

So here I am, fallen back on the microblog battlefront, safely nestled in RSS.

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This was a fun little Javascript project. The output works just about anywhere, on Facebook too. It doesn’t even matter if the website uses a fixed-width font. You might be thinking: I could use this to hide my email address from spam bots! Have fun with it. By the way, it won’t write numbers yet.

It’s not a plugin, but interacts with my many Wordpress installs. For example, the function get_bloginfo(’name’) tells home.php which tweets to fetch, by niche. I’m also using the get_currentuserinfo() function to hide/show controls.

Now updates (tweets) expand horizontally to 100% of the browser’s width, the idea is to not waste space. Fresher updates are brighter, in the first column. I left out time stamps to save space. And besides, freshness is relative and approaches zero/infinity. Additional columns (to the right) are progressively older and darker, relatively speaking. Also, number of followers affects color intensity–red means more followers, white means fewer followers. Actual number of followers labeled in (upper-right corner) gray text.

I also worked on some regular expressions to replace (neaten) shortened URLs with “(link)” text. This further confused my tweet-length sorting algorithm, which inspired the changes in the previous paragraph. Minus sorting (by length, to conserve space) the script is considerably faster, win-win all the way around. Also added regular expressions for stock symbols (auto-linked to Google Finance) and @name mentions, which is a wonderful way to discover new, interesting people.

And we are driven to revise our sources. Who’s lagging days/hours behind my other sources? How is the information packaged? Can I optimize my information gathering/consumption with software? This is where Twitter shines, and I believe the time invested pays off.

I’m starting to play with these ideas at StockmarketSoup.com, the ideas are coming faster than I can implement them.