So I Went And Got A New Monitor

Wow, it’s been 9 months since my last post!

Yeah well I’ve been busy doing other stuff… you know, mundane stuff like “work”. Oh yes, I got into Star Trek Online too, but that’s another story. The topic of this post very conveniently has references to the previous post made here, 9 months ago. Yeah, my HP monitor died. Truly dead. As in, “no sound no picture.”

As a quick recap, the monitor suffered a weird red-dot syndrome and I had to call in for servicing just a few days before the warranty ran out. Now, 9 months after the monitor was replaced, it truly died. I was just surfing the net, then I moved away from the PC and fiddled with something on my phone. Now, I had set my PC to blank the monitor after 10 minutes of inactivity, as a power-saving option. So, as I was fiddling with my phone, I saw the monitor blanking from the corner of my eyes. No big deal, it’s just going to sleep mode.

So, when I was done with my phone, I turned back to my PC. I shook the mouse as usual, and waited for the monitor to come back on. Nada. Hmmm, strange. Ok, so I pressed a couple of keys on the keyboard. That should wake it up nicely.

Nope, the monitor stayed blank.

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A Very Rare Hardware Failure – DVI Port faulty!

Lately my stuff has been failing. Luckily, ALL of them were still within warranty. Back at this post, I was lamenting that my stuff all seemed to start dying at the same time.

Last week, a new item joined this infamous list – my relatively new 21-inch LCD Monitor. Yeah the one I use to play games on. What happened was that it started showing red dots scattered all over the screen, and it doesn’t ALWAYS happen. It would happen when the screen went into high-resolution mode (ie anything more than 1600×1200) with pictures with dark grey bits. Incidentally the native resolution of the monitor is 1920×1080, and yes that means HEAPS of red dots all over the place! Continue reading A Very Rare Hardware Failure – DVI Port faulty!

See Singapore in 3D via Google Maps

I have only recently noticed something new with Google Maps – a 3D model view. Off in the upper right corner of a map view, there’s this tab called “Earth“.

When you click it, it runs the Google Earth engine, and shows you the map of the area in 3D! Yes, like in flight sims, where buildings are full 3D models, but the rest of the terrain is flat 2D representations. However if you rotate your POV, you can actually see the relief of the terrain – knolls, hills, mountains, and such.
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Rants and Ramblings of a Typical Kiasu Singaporean