Skip to Content

Get your holiday on with Holidash!
AOL Tech

Posts with tag lcd

Filed under: Utilities, Browsers

Find and Fix Dead Pixels With Your Browser!

You've probably heard of Dead Pixel Buddy, a free app that helps you locate dead or stuck pixels on your LCD monitor. One of our devoted readers has sent us an interesting alternative that runs in your browser.

Willy Ci
has coded it as part of his portfolio, and it's elegantly simple. Pick a color with the palette tool, click go full screen, and your monitor is instantly awash in glorious pixel-hunting color.

Since it's browser-based, it'll run on any platform (as long as Adobe Flash is supported).

Both machines I used for testing had a slight issue escaping from full screen - the chooser didn't reappear, and my mouse pointer vanished. Simply mousing up to the tab bar and right-click reloading the tab solved the problem.

Once you've pinpointed the trouble spots, head over to killdeadpixel.com and see if you can't revive them with their trippy animated gif. Switching to one of the fullscreen modes makes stuck pixels easy to spot by giving you a black background to work with. No guarantees it'll wake them up, but it's worth a shot since most manufacturers won't warranty a screen with fewer than three problematic pixels.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Video, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Palm, Web services, Freeware, How-Tos

How to fix stuck pixels on LCDs

JScreenFixDo you have a pixel that is stuck on a certain color (other than black) on your LCD monitor or laptop? Luckily it's only ever happened to me once, and thankfully it eventually started working again. Stuck pixels are ones where they continuously show one non-black color; dead pixels are the black ones, and there's usually not much that can be done about those.

So if you have a stuck pixel, how can you fix it? This is Download Squad, so with software, of course! Online software, no less. JScreenFix is a little utility that will display a set of dizzying patterns to exercise each color cell of each pixel on your monitor. I don't pretend to understand how this works, but apparently displaying this random set of colors can repair most stuck pixels in about 20 minutes, and can also help to mitigate burn-in damage to plasma screens - although this takes much longer.

Simply visit the site, and click the link provided to open a popup window containing the Java applet. There are also standalone versions available, including a PDA version.

[Via lifehack.org]

Filed under: Business, Kids, Linux

$100 laptop shipping Q2 of 2007

one laptop per childThe One Laptop Per Child initiative is getting ready to roll out their line of $100 laptops for school children in developing countries in Q2 of 2007. Quanta Computer in Taiwan is the manufacturer that was brought into the project to create the low cost devices, expects that they will produce close to 10 million units in the first year of development. OLPC figured out a way to improve inexpensive black and white DVD player LCD displays, in order to keep the normally few hundred dollar feature, at a price of only $35. Software was cut out of the machines, since two thirds of software in laptops manages the other third, and supposedly they mostly do the same functions in nine different ways. The OLPC laptops will be running Linux OS, 500MHz microprocessor, and 128MB of DRAM with 500MB of flash memory usage. Unfortunately the laptops will not have a hard disk, so no downloading, but they will have four USB ports if that makes it better? So if anyone has some good deals on flash memory keys that the kids can use, I'm sure OLPC would be interested. Other than the no hard drive feature, and black and white display, sounds like this laptop initiative is really going to help these kids out with their studies, and look into what the rest of the world is like.

More pictures of the laptop after the jump...

Read more →

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
SXSWi 2008 Schwag Unboxing
SXSWi 2008 Day 1
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

BloggingStocks Tech Coverage

More Tech Coverage