I recently bought a new LCD monitor, and when I plugged it in, it was terribly fuzzy, so I returned it, and got a new one...which was also fuzzy (though less so). This made me wonder if I could perhaps fix the problem, so I began playing with all those buttons on my monitor.

I managed to improve things, but until I discovered the images on this page, I couldn't get it quite dialed in.

It was actually a pretty surprising experience adjusting the monitor at that website. You essentially are shown an image, and asked to adjust one of your settings until the image looks right. It works like a charm, and if your LCD is at all fuzzy, I highly recommend it.

For the last couple of years I've kinda, sorta been hunting on and off for a place where I could volunteer some of my free time. I started at the nearby university, thinking that I might be able to convince some kind professor to teach me some things. When that failed, I tried searching google for nonprofits that looked interesting. Failing that, I went on a limb, and asked a professor of mine if he had any ideas (he did, but they fell through).

Finally, after all this time, one fell in my lap. Last week, I was looking for a place where I could donate my old computer hardware, and I discovered the Alameda County Computer Recycling Center. It looks pretty darned cool. I will spend my time putting together old computers into useful devices, and then installing Ubuntu or Suse. In exchange, they will give computers (for free) to needy parties.

It's not helping the homeless, but it should be educational for me and, ultimately for them. Plus, it will help to keep e-waste out of landfills.

For some reason, this bit of knowledge just hasn't gotten out there to the masses. I guess it's a bit nerdy, but here goes. When computers are not in use, they can do two very different things. They can either suspend, or they can hibernate (or you can turn them off of course). When they suspend, they go into a power saving mode that stores the state of your computer in RAM. When they are hibernating, the state of your computer is stored on the hard drive.

This is an important distinction because RAM requires energy to store information (making it volatile memory), and your hard drive does not (making it non-volatile memory). Hence, any time your computer is in suspend mode, it is incurring a negative environmental impact, and any time it is hibernating, it is incurring no more impact than a lump of silicon.

So. I won't get into how to deal with these in GNU+Linux, (because I can't get my laptop to do either), but this article has some good information on how to do it in XP. If you are a Mac owner, this decision has been made for you. Your computer will suspend and hibernate at the same time, and there is no easy way I know of to hibernate only. (They call this SafeSleep, and the idea is that if the RAM hasn't been reset by a loss of power, it will boot from RAM. Otherwise, it will boot from the hard drive.)

I should also mention that hibernation is a great alternative to leaving your computer on when you go home at the end of the day. It saves the state exactly how you left the computer, and saves the environment by not using energy through the night.

A few weeks back, I mentioned that I was having some trouble setting up the Zimbra Suite on my server. I finally got it to work, but it wasn't as reliable as I needed it to be. When I looked into the problem, it seemed I just needed a newer computer to run it. Apparently they were serious when they talked about the minimum hardware requirements (who knew?).

I thought about just running a lighter-weight piece of software, but after I priced it out, I learned that I could get a new computer (sans monitor, keyboard, speakers, mouse and hard drives) for only $350. So I did. I just finished putting it together* and getting Zimbra working again (which was easy since I used the old hard drives), and now I've got a give away pile.

Here's the list:
• One computer, sans hard drive. It's a P3, it's got about a gig of RAM, graphics card, integrated ethernet. The case is a beaut, but it weighs in at about 20 lbs. If you get it a set of matched processors, it's actually kind of fast
• A P3 processor and heat sink
• Four SDRAM spacers
• Working keyboard
• Two DSL Modems

And that's it. That computer could work well for somebody that does light computing. The rest is probably garbage, but you never know. Any takers?

*The specs, in case somebody is interested, are meager, but still infinitely faster than the predecessor. The new computer is a Intel Duo, 2.13Ghz ($150), 2GB of RAM ($70) and cheap motherboard with integrated video, sound and ethernet ($40).