LookIt

Note to art museums: pixilation is bad

On recent trips to art museums, I have noticed a very disturbing trend. Most museums have video projectors that are clearly hooked up to computers. Some are projecting art, others are projecting descriptive videos (usually as a loop). In the case of the projectors with art, some are noticeably older and lower resolution than others, which usually results in more pixilation of the art.

Yes, budgets are tight: they always are. But using old, lower-resolution projectors for art is just plain lame. Buy new projectors. Also, if the art was converted from film to computer, re-convert it using the highest resolution possible. When it was converted the first time, the resolution might have been limited to match the projectors at the time. Re-convert. Don't force your patrons to view crummy reproductions.

Preventing Windows XP and Vista icon rearrangement

This article solved one of my greatest frustrations with updating XP or Vista or VMware. Some updates would cause the resolution of the screen to change and all the icons to be shuffled. Sometimes, just switching between two computers on a KVM would do this. Even after changing the resolution back to the original value, the icons stayed shuffled. Gee, Microsoft, do you really think that I wanted to lose the work I put into arranging my desktop?

Ignore the title of the article: it works just fine for XP as well.