the World is a Game

Graphics card problems

Yesterday I had a problem with my computer. I noticed that some games that used OpenGL was very slow and some programs didn't work at all. I had to restart the computer to make it work again. When I left my computer for some time and came back later it was all black and I couldn't do anything but pressing the power button (The screensavers use OpenGL).

Then it got worse. During bootup the graphics was messed up, with vertical lines and characters that was not correct, but it was still easy to see what was going on. After the Ubuntu loading screen it all went black and I couldn't do anything. This made me worried.

I have had problems with the graphics card before. The problem that time was that there were too much dust in the fan, but the symptoms was not as serious as they were this time.

Today I cleaned the inside of my computer and now it appears to work again. I guess I should clean the graphics card fan more often. I don't do it very often because I'm lazy and I have to disconnect it to clean it properly.

Post statistics for Peterssidan

The stats was last updated: 1 January 2013
Here is some stats that shows how my post activity has varied over the years.

Total post count

2012: 390
2011: 336
2010: 160
2009: 199
2008: 316
2007: 322
2006: 71

Avarage posts per day

2012: 1.07
2011: 0.92
2010: 0.44
2009: 0.55
2008: 0.86
2007: 0.88
2006: 0.75

I would also like to have daily and monthly stats but that is too much work because the stats are collected manually.

Firefox 4 not for me

Today I tried out firefox 4. I was not impressed. Like always when upgrading you will have to restore some of the settings because things jumps to new positions and the like but this time it seem to be impossible to fix everything.

The tabs had rounded corners and didn't look the same as the theme of my desktop environment. I didn't find any way to fix this.

The status bar was gone so I had to put my add-on buttons elsewhere. Normally the url of a link is shown in the status bar when hovering the link. Now the url just shows up on top of the page at the bottom. The url is faded in so you don't see it instantaneously. If you have the search bar visible it will for some reason be shown to the right instead of to the left. I find it inconvenient that it changes position because you don't know exactly where to locate your eyes to see the url.

Zoom used anti-aliasing for images which makes pixels blurred. I guess there is a way to disable this but I don't find it.

Firefox is a great browser and I can't live without the NoScript plugin but for me firefox is going in the wrong direction. Because there was so many things I didn't like with the new version I decided to downgrade to version 3.6 again. It's not perfect but it is better and it's what I'm used to.

Thick layer of dust

Lately something has been wrong with my graphics card/driver. Everything was fine when I started the computer but after some time all graphical stuff just got terrible slow and all OpenGL applications just crashed.

In the Xorg log I found the following:

xjump · xjump in Games with 0 comments on Fri May 07, 2010 9:35 pm

I use have one game that I can turn on quickly and play whenever I feel to. At the moment xjump is that game. It doesn't look like it has an offical homepage but at least it's an Ubuntu package.

The game is quite simple. You jump from platforms to higher platforms and avoid falling. Get as high as possible. It's quite fun, and quick game.

Have you played xjump? What is your highscore? Very Happy