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

[Scott Castaline]

On 09/08/2011 05:47 PM, Ron Frazier wrote:
> 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.
Weather Underground
wunderground.com
> * 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.
conky
http://conky.sourceforge.net/
http://www.howtoforge.com/conky_system_monitor_on_ubuntu704
>
> 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
>