[ale] [OT] Wide Screen monitors / using screen real estate

[Ron Frazier]

Hi guys,

I thought I'd post something a bit light hearted, since I usually post 
serious stuff.

Every once in a while, I save up enough money to get some new tech 
toys.  I just got my hands on an LG 23" 1080p wide screen monitor, to 
replace a 19" "square" monitor that I had.  I TOTALLY love it.  It has 
almost as much vertical space as the old one, and having the extra side 
to side electronic real estate is great.  I've noticed that many web 
pages, particularly forums, are not set up to handle reduced width 
properly, and don't reflow text very well.  So, I read part of a line 
then scroll over to read the rest then scroll back.  I use treestyle tab 
in Firefox to make a vertical bar of all my tabs, which reduces the 
width a bit more.  That problem won't happen with the Firefox window 
almost 2 feet wide.  However, generally, I'll probably either tile two 
windows side by side on the monitor, or have one window take up 2/3 of 
the width and do something else with the rest of the space.

So, that's what I have the question about.  Note, that I routinely 
alternate between Windows and Ubuntu.  So, these questions apply equally 
to either.  I know some of you work with Windows too, so feel free to 
send me tips for that as well as Linux.  The apps involved don't have to 
be the same on both platforms, but that would be nice.  I routinely 
leave about 1" to 1.5" at the bottom of my screen to leave space for cpu 
monitors, background processes I'm monitoring, terminal windows, weather 
data, etc.  Now I am going to be leaving about 1/3 of the width of my 
screen open (unless I need it) for similar things.  This works out to be 
about 6" of width.

At the very least, I'd like to be able to place any or all of the 
following in this empty real estate:

* Video.  Like YouTube, etc.  Could also be a video file, like an MP4, etc.

I know I can play video files in Windows with Media Player and in Linux 
with Totem or whatever Ubuntu comes with.  These applications seem to 
scale to a reduced size pretty well.  I don't think I've tried to go 
really small with Totem.  However, I haven't found a good way to scale a 
flash streaming video like YouTube very well.  I know I can use the zoom 
out (ctrl and -) function in Firefox, then drag the window off the edge 
of the screen so only the video shows.  But that's really messy, and it 
makes it impossible to read the website again without zooming back in.  
I'd like a better solution to that.  So, I need a way to play video, 
resized to whatever space is available on the screen, even very tiny, 
whether from flash or a media file, in Linux or Windows.

* Weather Radar

I'd like a live weather radar showing the metro area, updated 
continuously or at 5-10 minute intervals, that never times out, and that 
never reverts to the local meteorologist moving the radar picture in and 
out and zooming around.  It needs to be sizable to any available screen 
space just as with the video.  Now, I know I can point my web browser to 
weather.com and get a flash based radar map.  The problem is that it 
times out fairly rapidly and is not easily scalable due to the flash 
issues discussed above.  I'd like to do the same thing on either Linux 
or Windows.

* CPU monitor.

Here's the deal.  In Ubuntu, in Gnome, I can use two panel applets to 
monitor the CPU.  One is the system monitor, which gives a basic graph 
of the CPU utilization.  The other is the CPU Frequency Scaling 
Monitor.  This allows me to monitor any CPU core and tell what frequency 
it's operating at, so I can see when the frequency is reduced during 
light demand or increased in heavy demand.  By loading multiples of the 
FSM, I can monitor the frequency of each core.  That's very handy to 
observe how heavily loaded each core is.  On the windows side of the 
fence, Task Manager is my go to tool.  It displays a graph of the 
utilization of each core.  The problem is that it doesn't display the 
frequency, and it cannot be scaled down less than about 1.5" x 4".  So, 
what I want is something which will display a utilization graph of every 
core, and display the real time frequency of every core (as a number, 
not a graph), and will be resizeable to any size, placeable to any 
location, on either operating system.

Suggestions for other cool small size apps are welcome.

I was going to talk about Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, 
but I'll do that in a separate message.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Ron

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.	
linuxdude AT c3energy.com