I just spent too much time looking at colour bars on a webpage we were building. The top flash menu versus the bottom div looked different. But the colour codes were the same. I’d been caught out by the viewing-angle dependence of LCD screens.
“Eh?”, you say. Well, it turns out the colour or hue changes significantly on LCD screens as your angle of viewing changes. So colours at the top of the screen look different to colours at the bottom. This is true even over the tiny 9″ of real estate as on my eee pc. To doubly confound my cones the effect gets worse the closer you get to the screen. So by pressing my nose against the screen and squinting at the menu versus the div it looked worse.
So I had to F9 my eeepc (press f9 on reboot to restore factory defaults) in an attempt to make wifi work properly. It seems good now but I’m keeping an eye on it. Anyway, I had to reinstall FF3 and found some deb packages to make life far easier.
Initial install instructions [eeeuser.com wiki] included this link to 3eportal where the deb packages and instructions reside. I had to run the dpkg command twice to make it work without errors. This method does not touch your FF2 install.
I’ve been upgrading and installing on my eee pc 901 ready for travelling. Getting FF 3 on this was a fight. Top hints:
add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list (although I’ve read that adding debian repos to this xandros install might be dodgy). The first is to get out of that stupid simple UI and have a real desktop again:
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701/ p701 main
deb http://ftp.ie.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free
install http://www.gtk.org/ and associated libs (pango, glib…) as per the docs in the tar.bz download. Then add the library path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /usr/profile (I’ve also read LD_LIBRARY_PATH is now considered harmful so I should read up on pkg-config command)
I’ve found the rest of the default install to be pretty good. Amarok works great with podcasts and my ipod (much better control over the ipod contents than itunes), the default movie player is great and twitterfox is keeping my tweets up-to-date.
If only I could get FF weave to behave. It seems overloaded since google sync became obsolete.
My list of buddies on Pidgin IM was getting out of hand. Too many friends with multiple accounts — Jabber, MSN, AIM… Tim pointed out a couple of space saving tips.
First, you can drag a buddy icon and hover over another to nest them as a single entry. I’ve now amalgamated those with Jabber, MSN and AIM accounts into a single buddy on the list. Whichever account is top-most gets IM messages when you send them. You can expand a buddy with a right-click and change this ordering if you like.
The second tip is: buddies menu -> show -> buddy details. Uncheck this option to remove the icons and make the font nice and small. Now I’ve got space for more buddies. If only I could find some…
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