I hate technology

Spent two hours trying to persuade my laptop to talk to my monitor in its native resolution. As the only graphics connector on the laptop is VGA, and the laptop didn't seem to recognise that the monitor could even handle 1680x1050, let alone that it was the native resolution, this was less than useful. I eventually managed to talk it into it, with the help of Powerstrip, which has a godawful interface, but with a bit of tinkering was able to persuade Windows to work with it.

The next laptop is going to have either DVI or HDMI output.

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 6-20-2010

• The future of medicine
  (tags: medicine healthcare speech complexity organization science)
• How what we know and what we act on aren't always the same.
  (tags: belief knowledge psychology)

He made a fatal mistake. He brought pikemen to a cannon-fight

Fortunately, I had enough pike-men to keep him at range while my cannon utterly destroyed him.

Julie and I picked up Settlers 7 this week. She's been a massive fan of the Settlers series since Settlers 1, and we've played a few of them since we met. Settlers 7 is the latest, prettiest edition of it, and is great fun. Being able to win through a variety of condition is great, and we enjoy taking different routes to victory (I usually amass a large army, she goes the research and religion route).

The game is fantastic fun, and is on sale at half price on Amazon at the moment, because it's had appalling reviews, largely because of the utterly shit DRM that's on it. Basically, it needs an always-on internet connection to work. Which is absolutely fine for the pair of us, but makes playing it on the move impossible, and caused major problems in the first few days when the DRM servers went down under the load. Other than that, if you like resource management games then I highly recommend it. Julie and I have been playing cooperatively against AI opponents, and slowly ramping up their difficulty as we get better at the game. So far she's doing much better at it than I am, but then she usually is with strategy games (she also kicks my arse at Warcraft 3).