When the screen on my PC died horribly (see recent post) I looked up what to replace it with and came up with the Benq G2220HD: 22" 1920×1024 that doesn't do HDMI (but then neither does anything here), doesn't have speakers (so what), but the actual display is very very good for the price. But can I get one?

Mint, being based on Ubuntu, has a remote desktop program that lets you view and control one PC from another.

But unless told otherwise, it asks for permission for this on the 'viewed' PC's screen.

Clearly, at the moment that's not very useful. So where is the file to edit to tell it not to ask permission? (The PC is behind two firewalls, so I'm not worried about anyone on the net being able to get in, not least as you can also get the remote end to give a password.)

Edit: Ah ha, ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/remote_access/%gconf.xml – where else? 🙂 Fortunately there's an example with the desired settings on L's PC.

Yes, the monitor (a 15" lcd from Sharp) died last night. The backlight still works, unlike a friend's laptop, but there's nothing on the screen: no picture, no info text, no menu. Poo.

And unless I can turn it off, Spotify is going to play all of the good Human League – thank you v-Karen – then all the nowhere near as good Human League, then every compilation album they have ever been on.

Ok, ssh in and kill the Spotify task. Find the ip address.. connection refused. Ah, when I added the new hard drive last week, I did a fresh installation of Mint, and its 'what have you installed' backup program obviously didn't pick up the ssh server.

Fortunately, I can do alt-ctrl-F2 on the PC keyboard to get a terminal I can't see, login, sudo apt-get it, and get it running. Now, I can say kill Spotify. Silence, but still no screen and I was in the middle of something I want to save.

Fortunately, when a friend's laptop has its backlight die recently, I used freecycle and found someone who was giving away two crt monitors, one 17" and one 14". Took the former over, it works, leave happy friend. A couple of days later, she calls. It's not working. Go over, yes it is, make a slight change, no it's not. I suspect it's the laptop detecting the monitor in a dubious way (it has a pirate copy of Vista and I refuse to do anything with the software..)

Ok, take over the other one. Obviously, I leave the big one, because we don't need it and 17" monitors are big..

Fortunately, it's still there and not been given away last night 🙂 Unfortunately, it turns out that the PC doesn't have a vga socket, just a dvi one. Somewhere, there must be an adapter (the PC was always sold without a monitor for one thing) but I can't find it in any sensible place.

Oh well, it's too big for the space underneath the stairs anyway. So I used the netbook to check what replacement to get and ordered it.

But reading might be patchy over the next few days. Who knows, I might even get some work done 🙂

Phil Woolas' lies lose election court case. He was the president of NUS in my time as a student and I'm pretty sure his election manifesto included a promise never to be an MP. (At the time, being chair of the Labour Students was seen as merely a step on the road to being one…)

Narrow election losers who win court battles to get a rerun have a habit of being humiliated due to a 'you lost, get over it' attitude of many voters. See the Winchester general/by-election results for the classic example, where a two vote majority was increased more than ten thousand times. What's going to happen this time? Will voters see the LibDem as cheated out of a win or express an opinion on the LibDems now?

OK, inserting song titles into evidence at an inquest for a bet is dubious behaviour.

But some of the alleged examples are somewhat thin ('self preservation' isn't obviously any reference to the Italian Job theme, for example, especially in context) and it's not as if he was referring to titles with the irreverence of Mike Batt's greatest hit.

Plus if he's to be punished, why not the judge in the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case who included an acrostic in his judgement a while back?