Dell Support

Last week, on Friday, my dell xps m1330 broke (again...I had problems with the graphics chip some months ago). Luckily I purchased a support upgrade (2 more years of next business day support), so the technician came today to repair my notebook (well, not really next business day but it was my fault, I was busy on Monday and Tuesday).


Picture from http://www.codinghorror.com/

I've got a new power supply and motherboard, now everything works fine again! No data loss at all.

Thx dell, even if your products may not be the best (2 support issues in 1 year), your support is really great!

Powerful synaptics

I just discovered how easy it is to set up some simple multitouch gestures with synaptics. I heard some rumors that you can have multitouch gestures with (nearly) every notebook touchpad you want, but I never tried until now.


(Images from http://www.hy-tech.de/)

I followed this tutorial, it's german but I think everyone will be able to find a tutorial in english. If not, just read the "man synaptics", you'll find the synaptics options for xorg.conf with good explanations.

What I don't like is: why hiding these things in xorg.conf? Its powerful but only for power-users. I think we should have this in mouse preferences to! (probably the feature does already exist, I don't have the latest version of gnome yet)

Fancy fancy :) Try it out...


UPDATE: With the new Xorg coming with Ubuntu 8.10 and others, the settings I talked of are banned from xorg.conf. Now hal is the part that controls these things. If you want to set up synaptics via hal, you have to put a *.fdi file under "/etc/hal/fdi/policy".

Touchless SDK

Some days ago, Microsoft released a SDK called Touchless to develop multitouch-alike applications but instead of using a touch-screen you can use your webcam and colored markers!

They made a nice demo video showing the new technology! (The two guys are talking crap for the first minute, but then they show whats possible with the sdk...great!)

Watch the video here!

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Last Saturday I wiped out one of my cult / classic film deficits! I've seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show (the film, not the musical). They show the film every Saturday for more than 30 years now in a small cinema in Munich. They hold the record for the longest permanent movie shown in a cinema (the premiere in Munich was 1977).



To everyone who hasn't seen the Rocky Horror P. S.: watch it! And take some gadgets with you ;) e.g. some rice, a news paper, toilet paper and water pistols :D it will be great fun....