techiehenry

Last night while checking my emails I noticed something strange with my LCD display. A faint line was drawn from where my desktop icons are, extending to somewhere in the middle of the screen. I tried to move the icon out of place, but the faint line remained in its place. Okay, so it wasn’t the icon. However, when I tried to move a window over it, I was in for a shock: the LCD had an image burned in it!

Thinking that I had to live the rest of my life with that burned-in image, I just shrugged and continued what I’m doing. Of course I was a bit sad that my LCD of just over 8 months had an impression of my browser toolbar imprinted on it. This morning, I tried to turn on the display again. The supposedly burned-in image was nowhere to be found! Curiosity got the better of me, and I tried to do a bit of research as to what actually happened.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one experiencing this characteristic of LCD displays. LCDs, for that matter, when turned on to a particular state for an extended period of time, tend to have some difficulty switching to another state. Thus the effect of some pixels being slightly off-color from some of its neighbors.

From what I’ve experienced it is not permanent, though my research tells me it’s not always the case. Left on long enough, image persistence can be permanent on LCD displays — though this should most likely happen to those used for advertisements.

So how do we prevent this? One site recommends the following (some functions are applicable in Windows, but these have equivalent functions on other OSes as well):

1. Set the screen to turn off after a few minutes of screen idle time under the Power functions in Windows. Turning the monitor display off will prevent an image from being displayed on the screen for extended periods of time. Of course, this could be annoying to some people as the screen may go off more than they wish.
2. Use a screen saver that either rotates, has moving graphic images or is blank. This also prevents an image for being displayed in screen for too long.
3. Rotate any background images on the desktop. Background images are one of the most common causes for image persistence. By switching backgrounds every day or few days, it should reduce the change of persistence.
4. Turn off the monitor when the system is not in use. This will prevent any problems where the screen saver or power function fails to turn off the screen and result in an image sitting on the screen for long times.

Sources:

1. http://compreviews.about.com/od/monitors/a/LCDBurnIn.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_persistence
3. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88343
4. http://www.lifehacker.com/software/lcds/remove-lcd-image-burnin-146469.php

For the longest time I was curious as to how some people with Friendster profiles create radically different layouts from the default, plain one. Don’t get me wrong, I know they use CSS to do it. What caught my curiosity was that most of these people I know who have personalized layouts were ordinary, non-geek types! How in the world were they able to learn how to do it (considering that when I ask some of them about the details of CSS, they don’t even know anything about it)?

Well it seems that some sites provide custom-made layouts (stupid me). I’ve tried browsing through some of them, and I haven’t seen anything that suits me (most were juvenile and hard to read).  Looks like I need to roll up my sleeves and learn a few CSS tricks on my own.

This one’s a really wicked version of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers (for the NES) theme song. It’s complete with sound effects for power-up, coins, entering and leaving the tunnels, and even the tune at the end of each level (and yes, the sound effect when reaching the flag is included)!

Other versions have cropped up, but this one IMO has that “WOW” effect.

Watch it here.

While listening to a TWiT podcast, I overheard Leo Laporte talking about an open source, disk encryption software that is available for Windows and Linux.

This is good news! Since it is open source, you can look at the code and see for yourself that no malicious software (or trojan), or even a backdoor is placed in it. This is in contrast to some commercial security software that were known to have backdoors built in them to serve some unknown purpose by the developers themselves.

This is how it works. Remember how a file archiving program (like tar) groups a set of files and stores them in a single compressed file of a given format? Or even yet, remember those disk compression programs (like Doublespace) that came around as Windows95 was being introduced in the market that claims to double your hard disk’s capacity? It’s just like that.

A disk encryption program prepares a file of a defined size and mounts it so that it appears to its owner as a filesystem (or a disk drive) on the computer. However, instead of making the size of the files smaller, the contents of the files are jumbled (encrypted) in such a way that they are unrecognizable from their original form. The files are encrypted as they are stored on the filesystem, and decrypted as they are read. On the fly.

This adds a level of security in such a way that the files stored in the encrpted volume is inaccessible in their raw form without the encryption program loaded. If someone breaks into your system, let’s say online, what the intruder would see is a very large file. Any way it may be read, the contents of the file cannot be identified.

Did I get your attention? By all means, visit their website!

Yesterday afternoon I found out that my DSL connection wasn’t working. After checking and making sure that my physical connection is okay, it seems that my machine cannot get an IP address from the PLDT servers. I immediately informed PLDT DSL support about it. Later on I found out that the DSL service in my parents’ place were out as well. Sensing that this maybe a bigger problem that I thought, I called PLDT DSL support again and informed them of the situation.

I wasn’t able to follow-up on the situation until about midnight. When I called PLDT DSL support again, I was informed that it was indeed a bigger problem. The agent on the line told me that their tech personnel are fixing something with the DSLAM taking care of some connections in our area.

Which takes us to what I really wanted to share. What is a DSLAM?

It’s the device responsible for connecting the network of DSL connections in a particular area to the outside network.

For a detailed explanation, here’s something from Wikipedia.