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Easier reading via enlarged fonts

The described method should work on even simple desktop environments. If I don't already have an xorg.conf for editing, I first generate it by  Xorg -config xorg.conf.new . To make the screen easier to read, you need to  scale DPI by setting Displaysize in the respective "Monitor" section of xorg.conf proportionally larger than it physically is. A native driver outputs the original image size in Xorg.0.log. You need to type in the real size values times the magnification factor. So if the real active area of your display is 200mm wide and 100mm high and want 1.5x larger text, you insert  Option DisplaySize 300 150 . Unfortunately, not all applications honor this setting. You need to increase the default zoom by hand in  Chromium . You need to update the hexadecimal "LogPixels" dpi setting in ~/.wine/system.reg for  Wine . Otherwise if you are using Gnome, you could also try to increase the text scaling factor with the Gnome Tweak Tool, Universal...

Disable text drag and drop in browser

I have never in my life got any use out of moving text by drag and dropping of selection inside a textbox. However, it has messed up my texts on numerous occasions, of which I might not have noticed it on every instance. Do you know which wise guy's idea it was to standardize on this? Stack Overflow: disable text drag and drop

Crowdsourcing and processing articles

Crowd workers are not online Shakespeares, but Carnegie Mellon research shows they can write "(...) the research team led by Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), found that the crowdsourced articles compared favorably with articles written by a single author and with Simple English Wikipedia entries." Programming crowds "In the MIT researchers’ experiments, Soylent recruited turkers to perform two different tasks: one was to copyedit a document of roughly seven paragraphs; the other was to shorten a document. (...) the researchers found that $1.50 per paragraph would elicit good results within 20 minutes; the cost would go down to about 30 cents per paragraph if the user was willing to wait a couple hours." Mind you that the first research itself has a bit xkcd feel to it in the ingenious sense. These are milestones which are worth remembering, because it'll only get steeper in the coming years -...

BZFlag on GMA900 of Eee PC is playable with a trick

Runs very nice, at about 30-40 FPS on laser sniping, but only when the settings are adjusted correctly ! Out of box experience is garbage, performing something between 5 to 10 FPS on a random map, but of course a lot depends on the specific map. After going through hoops of tweaking, I went as far as uninstalling the game and completely giving up. That was until recently, as on second thought, I simply couldn't believe that such simple polygon graphics advertised to support legacy PC's chokes on a 3D accelerator. I gave it another try, and as how it generally goes, your calm mind works much better on the same problem after having left it get organized by your brain subconsciously over time. All in all, after literally toggling every option available from the GUI, I had to conclude that it wasn't the 3D effects which were holding back the computer or even the antialiased radar map in the corner - it was the overlayed bitmapped text ! At first I couldn't believe my ey...