Home office monitor update: that's much better now

"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein) 12/14/2018 at 17:42 • Filed to: None

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I brought that !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! back to Micro Center today, and replaced it with a Dell, but not the cheap Dell that I had originally thought about getting. I spent a whole $245 plus tax. Fauwncy. But it’s much nicer.

To refresh: I bought an HP EliteDisplay S240uj for $145 at Micro Center after a sale and a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . It’s a 23.8" 25 60 x 1440 monitor with USB-C video and a wireless charging pad in the stand. But in terms of being a decent monitor, there was nothing elite about it . Its speakers made that damn noise, and the panel was kinda garbage. It had a fixed- height stand that was too high for my chair.

I thought I would get a Dell UltraSharp U2412M to replace it, which is a 24" 1920 x 1200 monitor with old school chunky-ass bezels !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! with that same coupon . While it’s lower resolution, and doesn’t have HDMI let alone USB-C (only DVI and DisplayPort), on the plus side, it has a taller 16:10 aspect ratio, an adjustable height stand, and a higher quality panel.

After I returned the HP at the customer service counter, which was decorated with these hilariously outdated Titans of Computing Innovation posters...  

I headed toward the back of the store to find the mini DisplayPort cable I had intended to get to go with whatever monitor I ended up with. It took me forever to find among all the different DisplayPort and HDMI cables. I’ll give Micro Center credit, while they have hilariously outdated retail sales operations, complete with commissioned sales people wearing blazers, they have a good prices and s election.

Then I headed towards the monitors and checked out the Dell U2412M. It was...fine. But the bezels looked like something I would’ve used at a computer lab when I was in college in 2003. I had also scouted a couple other Dell monitors, the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! which is the same 24" 1920 x 1200 but in a new bezel-less style, and the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , which is the same style but a 25" 2560 x 1440.

I would’ve probably been fine with either of the 1920 x 1200 monitors, but I was drawn to the nice slim bezels of the new version. Then I figured, hey it’s only 30 bucks more to get the 1440p, and that one included a mini DisplayPort cable in the box,   so that was a savings.

So, $245 after the coupon for a nice 1440p 25" slim bezel Dell monitor. I fucked around searching on my phone trying to find better deals, and B&H had been selling this !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (with no adjustable stand and maybe a just-ok panel) for $200 for the past couple weeks, but they have since run out of them, apparently.

I brought it home, set it up, and while it’s not the most mind-blowingly perfect monitor ever, it’s wayyyy nicer than the shitty HP that I tried on the first go round, and the adjustable stand is worth it to me over that Acer that I would’ve had to buy before B&H ran out of them.

Chariotoflove > Textured Soy Protein 12/14/2018 at 17:54

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Good call.  Something that you will be staring at for so much of your time should make you happy.

facw > Textured Soy Protein 12/14/2018 at 17:58

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Ha, those posters!

How many people today could even tell you what Visicalc was? Groundbreaking sure, but also crushed by Lotus 1-2-3 35 years ago (I’d imagine many Oppos haven’t heard of Lotus either, the Thinkpad I bought in 2000 came with the Lotus suite, and even then it was comically outdated).  

3Com really should have tried harder to push into Cisco’s space, losing the business/consumer NIC market wouldn’t have been bad if they were selling enough enterprise switches routers.  

benjrblant > Textured Soy Protein 12/14/2018 at 18:09

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you should get f.lux! can’t stand those bright cool white colors on my monitors.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > facw 12/14/2018 at 18:12

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Hey now, we’ve got more old Lotus 1-2-3 files than I care to think about in one particular congressional collection.  Someday we’ll have to get around to dealing with them and figure out what they might be able to be migrated to en masse .

lone_liberal > Textured Soy Protein 12/14/2018 at 18:19

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Nolan Bushnell and Robert Metcalf I knew. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston are a new ones . I know of VisiCalc but I’ve never heard those names , or if I did I haven’t heard them  in 30 years. And congrats on the monitor. Monitors, keyboards, and mice are important when you spend hours on a computer.

Tareim - V8 powered > benjrblant 12/14/2018 at 18:22

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I had forgotten about that program since upgrading to win 10, thanks for the reminder, downloading it now

My X-type is too a real Jaguar > Textured Soy Protein 12/14/2018 at 18:24

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Fun story,   Dan Bricklin was buddies with a boss I had in the late 90s and would drop by for lunch whenever he was in Atlanta. His stories of Comdex in the 80s were legendary. 

xc90v8/I4 :( > Textured Soy Protein 12/14/2018 at 18:25

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I’m happy for you one the choice of monitor I think it’s a good decision and will keep you happier for longer. But how you can use a keyboard tray is beyond me. Both my forearms are resting on the table the entire time when I’m at my computer so that seem’s quite uncomfortable to me..  

Textured Soy Protein > xc90v8/I4 :( 12/14/2018 at 18:28

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The armrests on my chair are adjusted such that I can rest my elbows on them while I type on the keyboard tray. 

Textured Soy Protein > benjrblant 12/14/2018 at 18:34

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The monitor isn’t nearly as blue as it looks in that pic. The desk lamp has a “warm” CFL bulb in it. I know the similar LED bulbs are 2700k so I’m assuming it’s something in that range. But with the white balance of the camera it makes the screen look more blue.

There are a bunch of adjustments for the color balance and whatnot but Dell actually calibrates their monitors at the factory, and even provides a calibration sheet. It looked pretty dang good right out of the box so I haven’t messed with any of them.

Mac OS has an automatic night mode kinda like that f.lux appears to be. Maybe not quite as granular. But I just need to maybe turn the brightness down once the sun goes down. 

xc90v8/I4 :( > Textured Soy Protein 12/14/2018 at 18:36

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Ah okay, I don’t have armrests...

Well I guess everone feels comfortable in different ways..

Which is why some think BMW seats are more comfortable than Volvo seats..

And some people feel more comfortable in the back of an A8 than in the back of an S-Class..

And some people feel more comfortable in missionary..okay enough with the beer

rustneversleeps > Textured Soy Protein 12/14/2018 at 18:46

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That cat.

Textured Soy Protein > rustneversleeps 12/14/2018 at 18:52

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Yup.

facw > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com 12/14/2018 at 18:56

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Honestly, your best bet is probably a virtual machine with 1-2-3 installed. Better than having to worry about whether migrating to another format/program is destroying/damaging things. The key thing is getting the files themselves onto some durable and redundant media. I did a research project back in the early 2000s investigating the state of digital data at an Ivy League research library, and the results were not terribly encouraging. Numerous floppies that weren’t readable, though frankly, it was not as bad as I feared given my personal experience with floppies. Apparently they work better if you keep them stored away in box instead bouncing around in your backpack.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > facw 12/14/2018 at 19:20

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I know all about it. There still aren’t a lot of great answers for born digital archival materials.

For now, the data virtually exists on a rather secure server that fewer than a handful of people at the university have access to, the original drives have been physically copied in triplicate, with the various hard drives being kept in a vault and a couple of other secure locations. Overall, there is 2TB of data for this particular collection. We’ve got a lot of work to do with it at some point in the future.

Some of it may be migrated into useful formats (like the old word perfect documents that have an easy migration path), but the bulk of it may well end up being accessible to researchers on a by specific request basis in a virtual machine or emulator type environment.