Joy of Tech

I feel like a proper grown up computer user now that I have a 17" LCD monitor (it was worried it would be just a bit too big -- I think ideally I would have a 16" monitor, but funnily enough, no one makes these). And I have it set up in portrait mode. Yes, portrait. Eat that, all you landscape viewing fools. I have seen the future, and it has an aspect ratio less than 1. Or more than one. I suppose it depends what you divide by what.

Anyway, I thought that portrait would be a gimmick, but the majority of things I do work much better in this orientation. The only exception is watching videos, but most of that gets sent out to a CRT TV (19", anything bigger is just silly, and gloriously standard-def). So I'd recomment everyone give it a try. I'm very happy with the HP L1740, which pivots and swivels like a break dancer (note: check cultural currency of break dancing. Replace with body popping? Or doing the robot?).

I also seem to have fixed the problems I was having with my laptop overheating. Partly this is because autumn has come and the ambient temperature is lower (the problems began during the heatwave, and I think it may have been connected).

The answer is the underrated art of underclocking. That's right. Instead of these speed demons who increase the speed of their processors to get every last ounce of high speed power from their machine, I've been reducing the speed of the processor in the laptop. I mean, all I ever use it for is for checking email, surfing the web when I should be writing high powered academic treatises on the fundamental computational complexity of computing various classes of functions, and writing high powered academica treatises on the blah blah blah. Anyway, since then I haven't had any problems. Maybe this is just superstitious voodoo. But, I feel almost environmentally friendly because of the reduced depletion of my processor's natural resources. Plus, I've always thought that it must be really boring to be a CPU: I mean, you spend most of your time idle, waiting for data to be fetched from disk at a rate which seems beyond glacial. Hopefully, this underclocking makes the time seem to pass a little faster for the little Athlete...