[Pan-users] Re: Re: Fit image to Window

[Duncan]

James Sumners posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Tue, 19 Oct 2004 09:07:56 -0400:

> On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 23:57:28 -0700, Duncan
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> IOW.. You need a bigger machine with more big hi-rez monitors, and a
>> fast internet and news server connection, and PAN won't seem so limited
>> any more! =:^)

> Would you care to pay for it?

<g>

> Sorry, but I can't afford all of the hardware you have and must spend
> my money on other, more pertinent, things.

Well, truth be told, it's not the cost it would seem and I saved up well
over a year for the dual Opteron setup.  The 19" monitor (and most of the
previous 17" and 15" monitors I've had) have been second-hand scavenged,
most of them $20-50 from a homeless dud that dumpster dives and sells what
he finds.  He's found only the single 19", but regularly finds 15 and 17"
monitors that work perfectly, thrown away when someone upgrades.

The 22" I did pay significant $$ for.  They have no-name brands available
on pricewatch.com from about $360-ish (shipping included), but this one is
a Viewsonic, refurbished, that I purchased for $400 from Fry's
Electronics.  Eventually, I'd like to have four 22" monitors in a 2x2
arrangement, for a 4096x3072 desktop, but obviously, that'll be awhile,
probably another year or two, more if I upgrade memory again in the mean
time.

The dual Opteron and memory I paid about $1600 for off pricewatch,
mobo/CPUs/heatsinks/fans as a unit, because that was about the same price
as buying them separately, the memory from a different company (again off
pricewatch) as the price for it from the same source as the mobo combo was
way high.  A decent power supply set me back another $200 or so (Fry's),
but everything else, case, hard drives, etc, I reused what I had
previously.  (The case is a cheap steel full tower case I bought a couple
upgrades ago, about 4-5 years, drilled out for additional ventilation and
etc as appropriate.)  That $1800 (plus another couple hundred for misc
like changing out the video card, case fans, and the like, so $2K all
told) was about two years worth of budget, tho somewhat more than that due
to interim purchases.  It was about a year ago, and I put some of it on
credit card.  I haven't done anything significant since except buy that
$400 22" Viewsonic, which was a deal I couldn't pass up, and I'm only now
getting back down to a zero balance on the card, so all told, it was more
like three years worth of tech budget, taking me four years to collect,
given interim purchases.

> I use Pan in tabbed mode because it works best on my 1024x768 monitor.

If possible, you might try 1280x960 (or 1280x1024, but that skews the
perspective slightly), and up your font sizes a bit.  That way you can
still read your fonts, but you get more picture on the monitor.  Play with
the X modelines a bit if necessary, and/or set it to ignore the DCC clock
rate limits and fudge them a bit too.  That's what I've done on many of my
monitors.  The 19" in particular is overclocked to get to 2048x1532, and
I'm actually surprised it handles it.  It's a Dell that as I mentioned I
got second hand from the dumpster diver dude, and I didn't expect Dell to
take to overclocking that well, but it works fine.  My Viewsonic 22"
is actually overclocked a bit to do 2048x1536 as well, according to the
DCC data, but Viewsonic now has revised the specs on the newer versions of
the same model, and claims it'll do it, which it does.  It just doesn't do
much /above/ that.

Here's a modeline generator if you need to set up some custom modelines. 
Note that in addition to the positive tolerance percentages he says you
might have to allow, you can input -10% and similar to tighten the
tolerances even further, if your monitor is good enough quality.  With
tweaking and using non-standard mode-lines, I can get my 22" up to just
over 2100, so about 64 px more display, before it starts discoloring to
badly.  However, I can't get it up to the next standard resolution very
well, nor can I match pixel sizes as compared to the 19".  I've tried. 
The 19" actually has more ceiling left at 2048x1532 than the 22" does,
even when the 19" is more overclocked to get to 2048x1532 in the first
place.

http://koala.ilog.fr/cgi-bin/nph-colas-modelines

In addition, if you set your windows and desktop to dark backgrounds,
light text, you can lower your refresh rate quite a bit and still find it
tolerable.  Lower refresh rates of course mean potentially higher screen
resolutions without overclocking your monitor as far.  As long as I stay
light text on dark, I can tolerate 60Hz and lower refresh. 
Experimentally, using the modeline generator above, I can do down to
~54-ish Hz b4 the flicker gets intolerable, on these monitors, here.  With
a light/white background 65 Hz is about the lowest I can tolerate.  Both
screens now run 60Hz @ 2048x1536, dark backgrounds.  (I use privoxy set up
with a bunch of customized filters of my own devising, to enforce light
text on dark background, while still giving me colors, and "fixing" pages
that would be either white on white or black on black, "invisible text",
without privoxy, because the stupid page author sets either text or
background color without setting the other, simply making assumptions that
one cannot make.  Note that an enforced CSS scheme would allow forcing
light on dark, but forcing that would kill variant colors as well, while
my filters just tone them down or reverse them to fit a light on dark
color scheme.)

BTW, the 19" says it's recommended resolution is 1024x768.  The 2048x1536
I run is exactly DOUBLE that (so 4X the screen real estate in pixels, thus
4X the stress on the monitor, save for the lower refresh rate)!

As for tabbed mode... consider setting up the various panes with hotkey
access, and using that instead.  That way, you save the screen space the
tabs take, but can still switch between panes by hitting two key-combos,
one to bring in the new pane, the other to disappear the old one.  Even
with the screen real estate I have, I do that on occasion, in particular,
disappearing the group pane to allow me to see a full width overview (aka
header) pane, when subject lines get to long and I still want to see
author and date and lines (and score).  I'd certainly be doing that on a
small screen.  That tab-space gets /expensive/!  I have mine set to
Ctrl-Shift-Key, where Key=O for overviews, G for group, and B for body.  I
no longer remember what the default settings are, as I've changed mine
around to my liking, but it's possible you'll have to delete key combos
elsewhere to set it up as you like there.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin