Spare Pencil » Miscellaneous

It’s timing time

Bas — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:44:00 +0000

Have you ever been doing something without realising how much time it required, even though it would be quite useful to know? I have. Actually, it is something you must keep track of when doing some freelance work (unless you and your client really don’t care).

Anyway, I have been looking for some cool free tool to do this for me and I have found SlimTimer. This tool is fairly simple, you basically make a todo-list and whenever you start working on something of the list, you click the item and the timer starts running. This all happens in a ‘client’ page, which you can simply bookmark (as a sidebar in Firefox).

On the SlimTimer website, you can view all your tasks and see the total amount of time spent per task (which may have been spread over any amount of time).

My only problem so far was that I had to keep my browser open while timing. Even the sidebar in Firefox is not perfect, because it gets in the way and if I accidentally close the browser it’s gone and the timing is stopped. Luckily, this issue is solved by viewing the page in Bubbles. (I guess there must be a Linux equivalent to Bubbles out there somewhere.)

Welcome back

Bas — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:24:52 +0000

SparePencil has been unavailable for the last few days. This was because of some cleanup I was working on. Most of it is finished right now, but I might change some minor things of the next few days.

The website was closed down, which allowed me to do some testing and restructuring without worrying about meantime visitors. I removed a bunch of posts, rewrote some pages and created a new theme (the one you are looking at right now). What I also did was upgrading Wordpress as well as adding, removing and upgrading my list of plugins.
You won’t notice much about the plugins, but I hope you like the new theme I am using. Replies to that would be cool!

Another thing you will probably not notice is that the RSS feed is now redirected through FeedBurner. Don’t worry if you already had a feed subscription; the old links should now point to the burned version.

That’s all for now. I’ll be in Dublin (Ireland) next week, so this will probably be the last post for a while. After that, I hope to publish one or more short articles about interesting things.

PS: I am proud to hereby present my first implemented Wordpress theme that validates XHTML 1.0 Strict on all seemingly all pages

Beryl users: keep your monitor away from open windows

Bas — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 14:25:01 +0000

… for your desktop will be blown away.

Check this cool video, made by a friend of mine, to see why:

The joys of 830.720 extra pixels

Bas — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 11:05:58 +0000

The good days of my (15″) CRT monitor were over, when it became suicidal. A couple of days ago, it decided to horizontally compress my very (800*600) desktop (well, actually the whole screen).
To be honest, this kind of worried me. I guess it didn’t worry me enough to prevent me from hitting the monitor on all sides. Despite the fact that it didn’t help, it did give some (nice) on-screen fireworks.
Anyway, I guess when a monitor (or electrical appliances in general) start making crackling noise, it is its way of saying ‘I am too old for this’. Something which is then interpreted by me as ‘time for a replacement’.

I was pretty fortunate that my parents thought the same way about this and that they were willing to pay for a new screen. So, yesterday we went to ‘the shop’ to buy it.
We were looking for a flatscreen, because my dad says they consume less electricity: I didn’t mind, because I don’t play any 3D games on this PC.
We found a pretty good one, an LG Flatron L1717S (for the people who care about technical details), it wasn’t too expensive either. In comparison to my old monitor, there could only be improvement.

You need to know that on this PC, I always used 800*600 resolution. The reason for this: 15″ monitors aren’t really suited for anything higher. Also, I didn’t think the Intel videochip (don’t bug me about it, it’s Dell) could go much higher.
Well, obviously I was wrong. Flatscreens have, unlike CRT monitors, an ideal resolution (basic knowledge, you should know).
If you are not on the ideal resolution, your screen can be a bit blurry. I just happen to hate blurry screens, so I increased the resolution. I could max the resolution to 1280*1024 without even decreasing the colordepth, I was completely amazed.

Now, I have 830.720 pixels more than I used to have, so I am wondering what I could do with them. I don’t have to scroll that much anymore. I can enable many (or all) docking panels in my favourite code editor and still have enough space left to write the code. I can put many more windows on screen without having them overlap too much. And, and… much more!