Several years ago I took it upon myself to bring my mother at least into the 90s. And now it's coming back to bite me. The current challenge is to find a laptop. A laptop for the sole purpose of Powerpoint. And we wander into the idiocy of consumer hardware and the complete failure of countless software engineers to adapt.

I'll start from the top, it seems that widescreen has finally taken over and 4:3 and 5:4 displays have died a death. It seems all one can buy expecially at the cheaper end of the market is widescreen. Right now I'm sat at a 1280*768 widescreen. It's plenty wide enough, but aside from being a overpriced portable DVD player, It's a bit of a pain in the arse.

Issue 1, the KDE control centre is a perfect example of this broken. It just won't fit within 768 pixels and this has annoyed me somewhat. Ok we can get around that with some careful use of alt+drag, but then we run into issue two, adding a display of different dimentions is a pain. A really huge pain. And then OpenOffice Impress seems to have problems coping with a screen that changes in width. Yes, Xorg 7.3 is a huge step forward but there's still work to be done. It's not easy to keep preaching the open source way when there's something out there that does it better.

Yep I mean Vista. One of the Dave's was running a Cthulu session with some variety of newish widescreen Toshiba serving as a dice tray and tome of all knowledge, and from time to time appropriate information was flashed up on a 1280*1024 TFT facing the players. Effortless and easylike. So now as we speak I'm taking a look to see whether Vista with both OpenOffice and Office 2k3 (and 2k7 if I get my hands on a copy. Mmmm Achademic Aliance. This time it's free, next time will cost). I also like the outsider's vew I get on Vista, it's exciting, like turning on an old C64. You just can't help notice what's missing.

Well first things first, the fonts look horrible. I need to go find the ClearType addon. And I need to restart in order to use 120 DPI fonts. Grr. Then I might be able to read this rant. I should pologie to anyone who finds the text on my websites a bit small. I need to keep a box set up with a monitor the size of a shoe and all the annoying defaults left alone. But hang on. Everyone else's sites are too small as well. Something's wrong, but it might just be my eyes. Or my arms. I have a tendency to sit wth wahtever display I'm using at about arms length, rather than being in danger of bashing my nose on it. I need smaller arms and a smaller nose to do this right.

Part 2 [img_assist|nid=209|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=640|height=367]of horrible was this nice little gem when I decided that I needed some moral support, or at least Tudrunktu Dave to mock me in a less vindictive way than Microsoft. No, you can't take over my searches, google owns my soul, no I don't want MSN to be my homepage. I tried it once because it was new and shiny and didn't like it. Strangely enough that was some time after trying Suse 6 for the same reasons. And no, you don't need to collect all te data you can about me. I already told IE that I did't need Microsoft to check every site I visit in case it's a Phishing scam. And (wait for te steam from my ears to subside) no, I don't want my alredy diminished widescreen to be eaten by anther toolbar. You can keep it.

Right, reboot time, I've been nagged into it. I'll be back.

And back I am with shiny Windows Live Messenger, it just gave me a little lecture on privacy, wanna see?

[img_assist|nid=212|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=640|height=470]

And to top it all off, it went and installed the toolbar anyway, after I had explicitly told it not to. Bug anyone?