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Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
Pixelcide
16:00:00 on 2005-01-07

I'm having mixed success with my resolutions for the new year. I mean, here it is, the end of my first week, and this is only my third entry, when I set a goal for four per week.

How can I have fallen off the wagon already? On the up side, the three entries before that happened since mid July, so I think I may be doing quite a bit better than I had been.


We finally got Marilynn's last Giftmas present Wednesday — a Dell 1704FPV flat panel monitor. I have two of their twenty-inch models in this range at work, and absolutely love them, so I wanted Marilynn to have what I consider the best. (Well, I did go get her a monitor at Best Buy, but it had two dead pixels. I beat their return policy on the dead pixels, but that's another story.)

Of course, I'm deathly afraid of dead pixels. What are dead pixels? Well, in LCD monitors each spot on the monitor is a distinct trio of red, green and blue picture elements that are turned on and off individually. One, two or all three may be broken and not illuminate, or more maddening, always be turned on, causing white, black or discolored pixels to always be visible when certain colors are available.

Companies say you'll never notice them. Trust me, I notice them right away, and they make me mad.

Anyway, these conditions need to be checked for, so I decided to write a quick utility to check the screen with all the elements lit (white), all of them off (black), and each individual color on to check individual subpixels. I've called it Pixelcide, in "honor" of dead pixels.

Pixelcide help screen

Anyway, on the upside, I intend to release it unto the world once I get it a little more polished and add a little more functionality:

  • Change the LCD monitor to the highest resolution it supports to check each pixel individually, and change it back afterwards
  • Support multiple monitors
  • I need to put horizontal and vertical lines in to test for lazy pixels (adjacent pixels that are stuck together in display intensity)
  • I am considering have a feature where the system will take a monitor's EDID and then you tell how many dead pixels you had; with that in the tool, we can build a web-accessible database of what monitors have the worst records of manufacturing defects

Once I release it, I'll be adding details here; of course, given my record of finishing projects...

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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