Blurry colors and/or bleeding colors with hard to read text on Samsung SynchMaster P2370HD when hooked to HDMI on PC

Published
by
Eric Greer
on January 7, 2011
in Fixes, Guides and newbie.blog
. 0 Comments

So I just picked up a new GTX465 and was pleased as punch. The back of the new card has two DVI outs and a wonderful new little HDMI out in place of what used to be S-Video or whatever.

I am the proud owner of a nice Samsung 22in SynchMaster P2370HD tv which just so happens to work best with HDMI cables (or so I thought).

I plugged it in and colors were blurry, text was hard to read, the desk top was cut off and the screen was just plain horrible quality. I googled around for a long time and tried many options and fixed out. I installed the proper drives (which are a bitch to get from Samsung) and updated my video card drivers… no change! I messed with resolution, even though it should be the obvious default 1080p tv resolution – nothing helped!

People said the black level. People said the sharpness… yadda’ yadda’.

The real solution was thrice as obscure as any of that. The real solution involved renaming the Input! I know right? I found a post on tons hardware that said this:

Edem C 09-16-2010 at 01:40:07 PM
Hi all,

I also now a proud owner of the same model Samsung Syncmaster P2370HD and I finally figured how to get around this blurry text problem:

Under Menu is the suboption Input with 2 other subordinate options. Navigate to Edit Name and choose the HDMI option.there you can state what device you are using,and the resolution problem would be settled as soon as you choose PC. and there you have your native resolution. hope i could help Have fun!

Greets
Edem C

Crazy enough… it friggin’ works!! There is some automatic settings change that happens in the monitor as soon as you scroll the input name down to PC and it just starts working magically. So to recap, Go to Input (2 little cables) choose HDMI then move down to PC in the list.

Don’t thank me, thank Edem C!

Bash connection monitoring with ping and tracert

Published
by
Eric Greer
on November 12, 2010
in Linux and newbie.blog
. 0 Comments

My mom was complaining of her internet going out tonight, so I wrote a quick bash script to monitor her pings.

The script infinitely pings the target and logs the successes (or failures) into mom.log. No, you CAN’T change that log name. Okay, okay.. just kidding you can.

When the script detects a failure, it starts a tracert which it dumps to the same file. The result should be a list of successes and failures with tracerts for each failure. Take note this won’t work at all if pings are suppressed on the host you’re trying to monitor.


#!/bin/sh
ip=4.2.2.1
while [ 1 ]; do
ping -c 1 $ip 1> /dev/null
result=$?
if [ $result == "1" ]; then
echo FAIL on `date` >> ~/mom.log
echo FAIL on `date`. Doing tracert!
tracert $ip >> ~/mom.log
fi
if [ $result == "0" ]; then
echo SUCCEED on `date` >> ~/mom.log
echo SUCCEED on `date`
fi
sleep .4
done

Save that code into something.sh and then chmod +x it.

You’ll want to run this in a screen so its not dependent on your keeping your shell window open at all times. You can do that by running this command before you start the script:

screen -S pingtest

Press control-a then the letter d to detach the screen so it resumes running in the background.

Later, when you want to stop the script, run this:

screen -r pingtest

Sometimes simple things work well enough to make a note of!

Google is brutal with sitemap errors. Be Warned!

Published
by
Eric Greer
on June 11, 2010
in Other Sites of Mine and Web Design
. 0 Comments

Google has de-listed my game servers startup from its indexes. I went from a steadily climbing position to being not listed instantly. Why you ask? What pisses off the Google gods? Not much, apparently.

You see, I use vim to write all my websites. I know its not the best way to do things but gosh darn-it for some reason I just always end up coming back to it. One of the shortcuts in vim is Shift-A. This starts editing at the end of a line.

I was happily updating my sitemap by hand when I ended up pressing Shift-A on extra time. Unknowingly, I committed that miss-placed capital “A” into my sitemap and published it. Google happily crawled my sitemap not too long later and found the typo. They could have looked the other direction and threw a warning on webmaster tools, but instead they entirely de-listed me. Sounds fair to me.

But, theres a ray of hope. Chrome has built-in XML error checking. If you simply open up your sitemap in Google Chrome before actually making it live, it will display any validation errors in big red letters at the top of the page.

I of course fixed problem as soon as I saw it i webmaster tools and resubmitted my sitemap. Google even shows my pages as indexed but just will not display them in searches. I’m assuming is a temporary thing and that they’ll re-list me, but I can only guess. They’ve crawled and accepted my new site map, but are apparently waiting over a week to re-list me!

I’m sorry Google! Stop the madness! Can’t we be friends?!

Game Servers… not ‘SEVERS’! A tale of Google SEO.

Published
by
Eric Greer
on June 2, 2010
in newbie.blog
. 0 Comments

If you’ve ever tried to get your website ranked in a high volume search with Google, it’s basically a life long quest. It’s so much of a quest that people who know very few facts about the topic are actually paid good consulting money in order to take their best guesses at how to get better rankings.

Then, of course, as soon as you do that, Google can just change a gear in its system and you’re dropped right out again. I’ve been going down this road with my game server hosting startup HostedGameServers.com. I have a great service on servers that perform great. I ping 16 to my server and I’m over 1,500 miles from it! We’ve got a few clients and its the best we can do with manual promotion while we work to get listed in Google. Right now we’re about position 408… except if you typo the search.

First, search ‘Game Servers’ in Google. Not listed. Well, we are, but we’re on page 48 or something stupid.

Next, search for ‘Game Severs’. Note the missing r. Yep, we’re first page.

Our keyword significance is perfect. It’s #1 Game #2 Server #3 Hosting and our backlinks aren’t bad (about 125). Our site does nothing against the Google laws of sneaky code, either. I feel like I also have plenty of content.

My best guess as to what is going on involves the proper term ‘Game Servers’ being too valuable to list me, even if I am perfectly relevant. This search term gets a lot of hits, so Google has some high requirements for who gets listed. I’m not sure what those are exactly.

Other searches, like the typo’d ‘game severs’ get much less volume. So much less volume that I show up right on the front page. Why? Because I’m relevant but just not trust worthy enough for some reason. I have never had ’severs’ anywhere in my code base. I grep’d it.

I have no idea what Google wants form me. We provide a good service and our site is relevant for the right terms. We’ve even spent hundreds of man hours trying to get out there and spread links. Man its a hard world with Google!

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