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 🙂