tasuki’s blog

I first read Desiderata in Polish, at Letnia Szkoła Go. There’s a path that leads through woods. As you walk down, every few dozen of meters you encounter a slab with one verse on it. I found it hard to understand as my Polish wasn’t as great back then, but from what I understood I knew this was something special.

I thought it was just local folklore and so was surprised to find out that Desiderata was originally written in English almost one hundred years ago by Max Ehrmann.

Desiderata is a short prose poem, possibly the most powerful text I’ve ever read. Everytime I’m feeling down, angry, hurt, upset or desperate it brings instant calmness. Here’s a quote, one of my favourites:

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
–Desiderata

I felt an urgent need to print out Desiderata and cover the walls with it. As I haven’t used TeX for quite a while (a year or more?), this was a good opportunity to recall it a bit. You can download Desiderata (pdf) for printing.

The first time I saw square thumbnails (ie. thumbnails which are downsized and cropped to square) I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread.

The advantages of square thumbnails are obvious:

• they are really easy to align and never mess up your layout
• the layout will look more uniform and better than with irregular thumbnails
• they do not show everything so they invite the visitor to view the full sized picture

But there is a downside. Square thumbnails alter the composition of the picture. In some cases, when the photographer hasn’t thought much about composition, it can often actually improve the picture. But in other cases, when the composition is deliberate and well thought out, the square thumbnail can destroy it completely.

I use square thumbnails in my photo gallery (have you seen the pictures from my recent cross-country skiing trip?). And I keep wondering whether I should change it to normal thumbnails (normal = scaled down so as to fit into a given rectangle while preserving the aspect ratio).

Do you personally prefer photo galleries with square thumbnails (cropped) or with normal ones?

I am very picky.

I need a laptop which I will carry with myself on my journey accross Poland and then to the Netherlands. It should have screen with a nice resolution, lots of memory, large enough hard drive, and several other things. So far I picked up three candidates, which are incidentally more or less the same price (19k czk):

HP 6830s
17″ 1680×1050, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3430, 4gb ram, 250gb hd, Intel Dual Core T1600, Intel 802.11abgn, keyboard with numpad

HP 6730s
15″ 1680×1050, Intel GMA 4500MHD, 4gb ram, 250gb hd, Intel Dual Core T1600, Intel 802.11abgn

Clevo M765TU (Verified By Intel)
15″ 1680×1050 glare display, nVidia 9300GS, 4gb ram, 320gb hd, Intel Core Duo T3200, Intel 802.11abgn

So, while I’d like the 17″ display, I’m scared of the ATI graphics. And I hate numpads.

And I’d like the faster processor and bigger hard disk offered by VBI, but I’m unsure whether nVidia or Intel is better. And I absolutely hate glare displays.

I tried finding more about ati, nvidia, and intel on linux laptops, and among other things I found a very interesting benchmark. Reading all the discussions, I can see that everyone complains about ATI, some people complain about nVidia’s 2d capabilities (I also had some problems with that), and some other people complain that Intel cards are “not nearly as good as nVidia and ATI”). Intel seems like the safe choice — maybe it’s slightly worse, but it should work, and could be more energy-efficient.

Please do tell me if you know anything about current graphic cards in linux. Even better if you know something about the particular ones mentioned above.