Month: October 2012

Fixing screen resolution on Linux with xrandr

Not the best start of the week today.  For some weird reason my desktop’s screen resolution crashed into a safe 1024×768 mode today.  No updates, no changes in configuration, not even a reboot – just in the middle of the working morning.  I’ve tried to fix it to no avail, installed updates, and even rebooted.  Nothing seemed to help.  Google to the rescue, and I find this handy page that shows step by step how to use xrandr to fix things.  I knew about xrandr for a few years now, but it’sbeen decades since I had to use it, so I’m rusty.  15 seconds later I have the following script ready:

#!/bin/bash

#gtf 1280 1024 60
xrandr --newmode "1280x1024_60.00"  108.88  1280 1360 1496 1712  1024 1025 1028 1060  -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA1 1280x1024_60.00
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1280x1024_60.00

Run it once and all is back to normal. In fact, after a few minutes in 1024×768 mode, it feels like I have a better monitor now than I used to. They say, you need to lose something to really appreciate what you have. Until today I thought I had a crappy old monitor. But just a few minutes in a lower resolution make me appreciate it a lot now.

Game of thrones life-size throne

While doing a bit of shopping over at ThinkGeek.com (yeah, my t-shirts keep shrinking), I noticed something totally awesome – a full-size throne from the “Game of thrones” TV series.  Here is one of the pictures they have for the product.

As it is obvious from the other picture, the throne is not actually made of real swords, but it does look pretty impressive.  The price, however, makes it rather inaffordable for most people – $30,000.  There is an interesting bit of discussions in the comments to the product, where someone suggests that it might be cheaper to have one custom-made from real swords, and someone else doing a rough estimate, pointing to the cost of a real thing easily exceeding $300,000.

Even though I won’t be buying of these any time soon, I have to say I pretty impressed with the whole thing.

Work permits moratorium

In the last couple of years, the situation with work permits has been degrading rapidly.  Now, Cyprus News reports, it might get even worse:

LABOUR Minister Sotiroulla Charalambous yesterday proposed a moratorium on work permits for third country nationals employed in certain sectors in a bid to tackle unemployment among Cypriots and other EU citizens.

“It is a decision, which we view necessary under the current circumstances, with unemployment increasing and the availability of a satisfactory number of jobless capable local and community personnel to cover these needs,” Charalambous said after a meeting of the national employment committee.

The moratorium concerns bread production, confectioners, wholesale trade, printers, cheese makers, the dairy industry and other – unspecified — sectors of the economy.

I do understand and fully support the necessity to protect Cyprus citizens from unemployment.  However, what usually happens in practice is not the same thing.  In practice, those businesses that rely on foreign workers (native speakers, etc) or on workers with specific expertise, find themselves in the position of not being able to hire foreigners.  That, in turn, can’t be too good for the economy either.