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HiDPI screens and apps 2

This entry was posted in Tech and tagged Dell Fedora HiDPI Linux M3800 on by

HiDPiAs said in the post about Fedora 20 and the Dell M3800, I would come back to elaborate on using a HiDPI screen with certain applications. As said in that post, things have improved generally since I have switched to Gnome 3.12. So, all the default applications scale well, and do their work correctly.

Now, just to set the perspective: the resolution on my laptop is 3200×1800 on a 15 inch screen. Most laptop displays currently available run 1366×768 on 15 inch (which is really bad) or 1920×1080. So, in essence, whenever I do a remote desktop from my laptop to my pc at home, which runs at 1600×1050, well, you can probably guess what happens: the Remote Desktop takes up about a quarter of my display, with all text scaled to this proportion. This can be solved by using programs such as Remmina, which is capable of doing scaling.

However, there are also programs which are not able, yet (I hope), to scale properly on a HiDPI screen… And the programs I am referring to are not obscure programs that hardly anyone uses… The most annoying one is Chrome, Google Chrome. Why it cannot handle a HiDPI screen I cannot, for the life of me, understand.

If you look at the screenshot, which will be scaled to your display, probably, you can see the difference between Firefox (upper-left) and Chrome (lower-left). See the difference between the tabs and the address bar? Also, have a look at Spotify (lower-right), Steam (Middle-right), and DropBox (upper-right). Compare those to the Calculator (to the left of DropBox), the Terminal (upper-middle) and the file-browser (lower-middle).

This should all get better eventually, I hope, but for now, I guess I’ll just have to live with squinting every now and then…

Dell Precision M3800 and Fedora 20 1

This entry was posted in Tech and tagged Dell Fedora Linux M3800 on by

M3800 - fullI am the proud owner of a Dell Precision M3800 laptop, and when I say owner, I naturally mean user, as the laptop is officially owned by the company I work for. It is a very nice machine with very good specs, which is useful when you need to run a lot of VM’s on your machine.

The laptop has Windows 8 pre-installed, however, for my work I like to use Linux, more specifically Fedora, as it gives a bit more options here and there, and it’s less hungry on the resources. So, this post is basically about the things I encountered while installing and using Fedora 20 (the latest version), and I’ll make a new post when Fedora 21 has been released and I installed it on the laptop.

The first thing of note, is to disable UEFI boot in the BIOS and set it to Legacy BIOS boot mode. Fedora 20 should be able to work with UEFI, but I could not figure out how it worked, and after 4 tries I gave up and moved on.

When I was still working at my previous employer, I made a number of scripts to be able to reinstall my laptop quickly, so that I would be able to be up and running again pretty fast after a new version of Fedora had been released. Naturally, things break when using these kinds of scripts, even between version, so I usually test them on a VM (and sometimes I get other people to test-drive them, right, Maarten? 😉 )

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Finally… Something appears!

This entry was posted in Site and tagged BenWeb Update on by

updateAnd it’s an awesome post! Or maybe not…

Anyhow… I finally got around to actually doing something on the site. Over the past weeks, I have been adding galleries and an article or two, one of which is basically the combined blogs of when we were doing work in our apartment, and the other is the blog that I did from our holiday in Canada in 2012.

About the article on Canada: it’s been sitting in my Evernote since, well, basically since we came back from Canada. All the time, I had the intention of posting it to my site, but never really did it. Mostly because of a lack of time, but also every time I saw it, I saw how quickly jotted down some days were, and I realized that I would have to change that a bit. And finally I did, however, I do realize that some parts of it are not really proper sentences, but hey, it gets the message across.

I hope to get some more blogs out on a kind of more regular interval, but we’ll see how it goes.

Welcome to BenWeb

This entry was posted in Site and tagged Background BenWeb History on by

MasswelcomematHello and welcome to BenWeb!

I started my first site back in 2001, when I spent a year in Canada on an exchange. That site slowly evolved from a “monthly diary” to something more akin of a blog. After a while, it became clear to me that manually editing HTML files was a bit tedious. So I started looking for a CMS and found one in the shape of e107. This was in 2004, or something.

e107 really is nice, and it served me well for nearly a decade, but, unfortunately, development has slowed quite a bit, and the new version (v2) has been in development for nearly 6 years now, with not a clear date of release in sight. So, the time came for me to switch to something new.

Having helped a friend in setting up her own blog (LIMWZ Beauty Blog), as she is not that technical, I started to work with WordPress and was quite impressed. It does have a lot of options and plugins, that seem to be able to mimic what I want/need in my site.

Having found a theme, Customizr, I started fiddling around with plugins, testing, and trying. I am used to being able to customize who gets to see what in e107, but WordPress does not seem to offer that kind of functionality out of the box, so the search was on for more plugins.

To make a long story short: you are looking at the current end-result. There will definitely be some more tweaking, and updating, and posting, and trying, but you, as the reader, should not notice that.

Now I just need to start looking into my old sites and find out if there is stuff that I want to “migrate” to this site… Oh well… Gives me something to do after work…