VBOK #8 - Graphics/Cool Sites
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TOC
1. Graphics resolution
2. Cool sites
Software downloads
Humor
Webpage Resources
Miscellaneous
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1. Graphics Resolution
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It never ceases to amaze me when I go over to someone's house to
troubleshoot their computer, that many are still viewing their screen
at 640x480x256. In case your unsure of what that is, it is called
resolution (For the purposes of this article, I'm defining resolution
as the number of pixels displayed on-screen) and it describes the
dimensions (in pixels) and the number of colors included in the
palette that your computer will be able to choose from. In this
particular case 640 pixels horizontally, 480 pixels vertically, and
256 colors.
Why am I picking on this?? Well for one, your icons are bigger than
your head... Ok, maybe not that big, but they do eat up a lot of
screen real-estate. Also any applications you run take up quite a bit
of screen. There are advantages and disadvantages of increasing your
resolution.
Advantages: More room to run applications in, less scrolling side to
side and up and down in your windows, more colors (This isn't
necessarily true, but it is a closely related topic, and I'll address
this issue below), more colors means nicer looking pictures (ever
notice that annoying color banding (called dithering) in most of the
pictures you look at), A much less cluttered appearance (unless you're
one of those people who upon getting more space, feels the need to
fill it up).
Disadvantages: With higher resolutions and colors, there is a
performance hit (speed), which could be big or small depending on your
hardware and the resolution you set up (generally it's a very small
performance hit). This is due to the fact that there is *much* more
information to deal with as well as more pixels to update on-screen
(I'll get to this below), The higher you set your resolution, the
smaller your icons and text, and your refresh rate drops (I'll get to
this too).
Ok, let me get to the issues that were mentioned above, but not
explained:
Where I stated in the advantages that you get more colors, it is that
your resolution is actually separate from the bits per pixel (bpp),
but when someone is speaking about resolution, they're usually
including bpp. bpp refers to the number of bits used to describe the
color of a *single* pixel on-screen. Usually I'm bad at analogies, but
I think I made this one fairly clear.
Let's say I wanted to describe my appearance to you.
Let's assume I'm running 1 bpp. That means I am limited to one word to
describe myself. MALE
Instead of 1 word, a computer would have one bit, either on or off.
That means that it can display a black pixel (off/0) or a white pixel
(on/1).
Now let's move to 2 bpp.
Me: MALE, CAUCASIAN
Computer: four colors to choose from 00, 01, 10, 11.
In case this doesn't make sense, computers are binary (base 2). They
deal with 1's and 0's, where humans normally deal with a deci system
(base 10). In base 10, your placeholders are 1's, 10's, 100's, 1000's,
10,000's etc.. In base 2, they are 1's, 2's, 4's, 8's, 16's, 32's,
64's, 128's, 256's, 512's, 1024's etc.
Because computers are base 2, the next step in my analogy is 4 bpp.
Me: MALE, CAUCASIAN, BLONDE, BLUE-EYED
Computer: 16 choices, 0000, 0001, 0010, 0100, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1100,
1101, 1110, 0110, 1111, 0011, 0111, 0101, 1011
Do you see the pattern yet?
1 bpp 2 to the 1st 2 colors
2 bpp 2 to the 2nd 4 colors
4 bpp 2 to the 4th 16 colors
8 bpp 2 to the 8th 256 colors
16 bpp 2 to the 16th 65,536 colors
24 bpp 2 to the 24th 16,777,216 colors
So you can see that the higher your bpp, generally the better pictures
will look. The computer can more accurately represent the true color
in the picture because it has more colors to choose from, hence less
dithering.
Now, this is where the performance hit comes in. Let's say you bumped
your resolution up to 800x600x24bpp. Now instead of your computer only
having to keep track of 307,200 pixels (640 X 480) with 256 colors for
each pixel, it now has to keep track of 480,000 pixels (800 X 600)
with 16.7 million colors available to each pixel.
Another performance hit you will take is the vertical refresh rate.
This is mainly dependent upon the graphics card manufacturer and
varies among models. The inside of your computer monitor is coated
with a material called phosphor. When light hits it, it makes the
phosphor glow. Well, it only glows for a little while, so it must be
hit with light again to keep it glowing. The refresh rate (in Hz) is
how many times the whole screen is updated per second (light hits the
phosphor on the screen). Some common ones are 60Hz, 72Hz, 75Hz, 100Hz.
The faster (higher) the refresh rate, the less noticeable the screen
flicker is. Screen flicker is very apparent to some people, and not to
others. For example, I cannot set my refresh rate below 70Hz, because
I can see the flicker staring directly at the screen. I've heard of
some people who can see 75Hz refresh rates. Here's a test for you.
Look at something close to your monitor, but only so that you can see
your monitor screen in your peripheral vision. See the flickering?
This is extremely apparent when you are watching TV, and you can see a
computer screen in the shot. See that massive flicker? That is because
television is recorded at 30fps (frames per second), and the monitor
is refreshing at some rate, let's say 65Hz. You're going to see
flicker. If the rates were reversed (i.e. the tape runs at 65fps, and
the monitor has a refresh rate of 30Hz, you would be able to watch
*each* line being refreshed instead of flicker).
Now you know a lot more about resolution and refresh rates, so let's
put it to use. For Win95 users, right click on a blank area of your
desktop, select "Properties", select the "Settings" tab. Before you
make the below changes, write down what your settings are before you
change them just in case it doesn't work.
First move the slider under "Display Area" to the right one notch.
Look at the numbers that come up, you should see one of these
800x600
1024x768
1152x864
1280x1024
1600x1200
Now, click on the down arrow below "Color palette", and pick the
highest bpp you can. If you can't get at least 24bpp, then go back to
the "Display area", and drop it back one. Try to see if you can get
24bpp. All of this depends upon your type of graphics card, how much
video memory you have installed on your *graphics card* (This is
different from your system memory), and your monitor
Click "OK".
The newer versions of Win95 will automatically revert back to the
original video setting (before you changed them), after 15 seconds
(unless you click the "OK" button after it changes the resolution). So
if your screen looks garbled, don't worry, it'll fix itself. The older
versions of Win95, you may have to restart your system for the new
settings to take effect. If everything looks garbled when it finishes
rebooting, reboot again, but this time press F8 when your screen
displays "Starting Windows 95", select Windows SAFE mode, when it
loads windows all the way up, undo the changes you made, then reboot.
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2. Cool Sites
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Software Downloads:
ZDNet's 1001 best downloads
Dave Central
MS-DOS Archive
One Stop Windows
Shareware Shop
The Ultimate Directory Of Gratis Software (TUDOGS)
The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software (TUCOWS)
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Humor:
Distortions - See famous people morph into weirdos
Rainfall Joke Repository
ComicZone - If you just can't wait for the newspaper.
The Onion - This is more for the mature audience. Hilarious
The Virtual Voodoo Doll - Email it to someone.
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Webpage Resources:
The Java Place - Tons of Java with examples
HTML Goodies
CGI Scripts... To go..
CGI Scripts
Mega Web Tools - A lot of everything
All of it - Lot's of good stuff for beginners
CGI World
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Miscellaneous:
Throbbers - Tired of the animation in top right corner of your
browser. Get a new one. (IE and NN)
Free Homepage Guide - If anyone remembers newsletters 4 and 7, that
was my very pathetic, very meager offering for info on FREE e-mail
and homepages. Go here to get ALL the info.
Well, that concludes this issue. Have fun.
Leif Gregory
Copyright (c) 1998 by Leif Gregory. All rights reserved.
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