Remote luxury.

[reddragdiva]

x11vnc is just the thing. If you have X running, you run x11vnc on that machine and it makes the current X session available via VNC. So I can have my environment and programs and the forty or fifty tabs I've just opened in Netscape available at the merest "vncviewer 10.0.0.4:0" on the underpowered laptop, and it's safe and well if the laptop falls over.

There areeeeee practiccccal      problems.. It's insaaanely laggy... And keypressessss and mouse events are alternatelybouncy and lost. You can    tell I'm typing this paragraph on the laptop . Not to mention shoowinng a 1024x768 dessktop on an 800x600 screen. But I can get around these, I'm sure.

A couple of the other laptop batteries may be working. One just lasted 70 minutes and charged back up from 1% to 99% in 40 minutes — I'll see how it is after a few more cycles. (Not as good as the 150 to 180 minutes a new one lasts, but much better than 0.)

Today I got to fix a monitoring script written by my predecessor that's been broken for six months. WHEN WRITING SCRIPTS ANY OTHER PERSON MIGHT EVER HAVE TO MAINTAIN, PLEASE USE THE LONG FORM OPTIONS, NOT THE SHORT FORM ONES. Thanks.

(The specific case being a mess of fancy options to curl to achieve the best possible imitation of a particular version of IE for monitoring a page written by the sort of web designer who thinks you shouldn't be allowed to look at his page unless your monitor colour temperature is the same as his.)

Update: FAQ 44 is about the bouncy keys problem. I'll test this evening.

Update 2: x11vnc -onetile -norepeat -scale 3/4 is a bit faster, can keep up with my typing (mostly) and scales the screen to fit the laptop. Now to sort out wireless. And sound.