Burning Man, Dell 2405 LCD, and Photos

Burning Man Prep

Last year we used a shade structure from form and reform. It held up well, and it was nice to use extra tarps off the main structure. The disadvantage is that you have 4 supports around 5 foot, and 2 around 7 foot. That makes it a real pain in the ass to get in most cars. We are toying with the idea of flying to Reno this year, so this would definitely be out of the question.

Enter the next option. The noah tarp and a couple of extended poles look like they will perform fairly well in the wind, pack down to 2 foot, and will cover around the same area. The disadvantages are cost and flexibility. While you can put it up a number of different ways, the catenary shape would not fare well if you tried to use multiple tarps of the end points. Some loose burlap hanging off the sides might work though…

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1 month update on my Dell 2405FPW

– I notice less eye strain. I didn’t expect that I would, since my old monitor had a high refresh and a very good DPI.
– I have yet to notice LCD ghosting – the screen refresh is more than enough for games/dvds/vidfiles.
– I love the widescreen aspect. Perfect for dvds of course, but more and more TV shows are moving towards the format (I just hope that people continue to encode them in WS). It is also much more immersive for gaming. Of course, even some modern games do not support widescreen resolutions, but that is changing. I bought this monitor expecting that and accepted the fact that I had to be forward looking. Playing games or vid files with the black bars isn’t horrible, I just miss the widescreen glory.
– A DVI connection to the monitor is a must. When I used the monitor with analog, it looked like crap. Banding, cross hatching and color bleeding. DVI made everything crystal clear. I couldn’t believe the difference.
– Blacks are not true black, they are more like a very dark indigo. This is just something you have to deal with until LCDs do not need a backlight (OLEDs?). On that note, there is a slight backlight problem with the lower right corner of the screen – blacks are slightly more indigo than the rest of the screen. I’m just being picky though, you have to look really hard to notice it.
– 24 bit color range (a limitation of current LCD technology as I understand it) has shown slight banding in rare cases (color gradients that go across the screen in web pages). It does very well on everything else though.
– After setting my gamma to 1.8, I found the monitor was just as respectable as my old sun monitor for doing photo work.
– The USB2 hub and card reader built into the monitor work great. Coping files off my camera and hard drive enclosure (both USB2) is just as fast as using the primary USB2 ports on the motherboard. It is very nice to deal with cables going just to the monitor, instead of all the way down to the tower.

In short, no buyers regret.

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Photo roundup

rion has some good shots of the famous Tsukiji fish market in Japan. Interestingly it was the geoquiz question yesterday on theworld. Sadly, it seems there are plans to close the historic market and move it to the suburbs – it rests on some of the most expensive real-estate in the world. I am certainly no expert, but for some reason this seems to indicate that there might be some changes happening in Japanese food culture. I mean, Japan is the land of $82 square watermelons. To hear of them cutting costs with food (especially something related to the culture of premium sushi) seems very strange. Or, maybe they just really like malls.

thenarrative has some good shots, but I like this one a lot. I miss the clouds and the big sky living here.

daily dose of imagery has this great shot. At first glance it looks like someone has removed the upper structure from the picture with photoshop.