My dual monitor desktop
Today I bought a new (old) 17″ LCD monitor and decided that I too will have a dual display on my desktop. At first I wanted to buy another graphic card, but I figured out that my on-board GeForce Nvidia 7050 PV works like two independent graphic cards and has two outputs, one VGA and one DVI. So all I needed was a DVI cable for my new (old) monitor and some free space on my desk.
I plugged in the monitor and tried to play with the settings. I knew that I wanted one monitor as it was (landscape) and the new one in horizontal position (also called pivot or rotated). At first this didn’t work – the graphic card driver insisted that the desktop should be twice as wide and both monitors would display the same desktop, just split between the both screens. All other options were useless – clone, which displays the same desktop on both screens or single view which made turn one screen off. I also tried rotating one desktop, but all I could do was rotate both or none, which was useless for me.
I decided to see if someone had the same problems and read a half of hour of forums. I even installed some software (Ultramon and Pivot Pro), but I didn’t believe they could solve the problem – they both work on top of Windows, so the graphic card should tell Windows there’s two screens and not just one. I was right, they didn’t help at all.
On one of the forums I read about the problem and a ‘miraculous’ solution: there was a problem and some time later it was gone, but the user didn’t know what solved it. I thought of the most typical of the solutions: restart my machine! After restart, the Nvidia driver offered a new option, Dualview (independent monitors). I selected it, rotated the desktop (only one) and it works like a charm now.
I can proudly tell you that I am officially in the dual monitor club now 
Above all, the free space on my desk was the hardest thing to get.
My dual monitor system
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Importing Thunderbird contacts to Gmail – without Thunderbird
Today I had an interesting task to complete. My father, who used to use Thunderbird for his mail client, has switched to Gmail. The reason was, well, that his computer got crowded with trojans and viruses so he re-installed his Windows OS. The swich to Gmail was a success, except for the contacts. They have stayed in the old Thunderbird account that was deleted during re-installation of Windows.
His new installation didn’t include Thunderbird and I didn’t plan installing it. I had to find another solution for the import.
I used VNC to connect to his computer, and tried to find a address book file in his backups. He makes a backup when I come visit and make it, so the backups weren’t really fresh. The other problem was that they’re very selective – one day we backup pictures, the next day (read: the next year) we backup documents, the next mail and so on. I was lucky to find a backup of a whole Thunderbird account made by MozBackup – a pcv file. It’s basically a zip file, so I opened it with Total Commander (CTRL + Page Down opens archives with different file extensions), navigated to abook.mab and extracted it.
I was a step closer to getting the contacts I wanted, but Gmail doesn’t support importing mab files to contacts. I surfed the web and found a useful program for converting all kinds of contact and address book files: Dawn. Pretty useful software and designed just for my needs. I opened the mab file (note that you have to select Pine Address Book as an input format) and exported it as ordinary CSV. This step was successful for the first time. All I had to do was change special Slovenian characters, because they were somehow lost, probably in the conversion which may not be UTF-8 compliant.
All I had to do next was send the file to my fathers computer and import it into his Gmail contacts. another task that I finished with great success.
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Mozilla Firefox 3.6 available (new version)
I’m a little surprised that a new version of Mozilla Firefox (yes, version 3.6) is already in its final stage and available for download as I write this. I was waiting for it the whole day since the news was published.
There were two release candidates before the final version (RC1 and RC2) and it seems that Mozilla decided to publish the final version pretty soon. Usually it takes several months before the final version is released, but maybe the news from China and Germany about the security threats in Internet Explorer made people at Mozilla release fast.
Anyway, I am happy to see a new version and can’t wait to see what’s new and useful. It’s supposed to be faster, but as with every new version, I seriously doubt that.
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