TOPIC: LEGACY HARDWARE
From convex to concave: reflections on decades of computer monitor usage
10th March 2025Within the last week, I changed my monitor and am without an Iiyama in my possession for the first time since 1997. The first one was a 17" CRT screen that accompanied my transition from education into work. Those old screens were not long-lasting, though, especially since it replaced a 15" Dell screen that had started to work less well than I needed; the larger size was an added attraction after I saw someone with a 21" Iiyama at the university where I was pursuing a research degree.
Work saw me using a 21" Philips screen myself for a time before Eizo flat screen displays were given to us as part of a migration to Windows 2000. That inspired me to get a 17" Iiyama counterpart to what I had at work. Collecting that sent me on an errand to a courier's depot on the outskirts of Macclesfield. The same effort may have been accompanied by my dropping my passport, which I was using for identification. That thankfully was handed into the police, so I could get it back from them, even if I was resigned to needing a new one. More care has been taken since then to avoid a repeat.
The screen worked well, though I kept the old one as a backup for perhaps far too long. It took some years to pass before I eventually hauled it to the recycling centre; these days, I might try a nearby charity shop before setting off on such a schlep. In those times, LCD screens lasted so well that they could accumulate if you were not careful. The 17" Iiyama accompanied my migration from Windows to Linux and a period of successful and ill-fated PC upgrades, especially a run of poor luck in 2009.
2010 saw me change my place of work, and a 24" Iiyama was acquired just before then. Again, its predecessor was retained in case anything went awry and eventually went to a charity shop from where I could go into a new life. There was no issue with the new acquisition, and it went on to do nearly twelve years of work for me. A 34" Iiyama replaced it a few years ago, yet I wonder if that decision was the best. Apart from more than a decade of muck on the screen, nothing else was amiss. Even a major workstation upgrade in 2021 did little to challenge it. Even so, it too went to a charity shop searching for a new home.
This year's workstation overhaul did few favours to that 34" successor. While it was always sluggish to wake, it did nothing like going into a cycle of non-responsiveness that it had on numerous occasions in the last few months. Compatibility with a Mac Mini could be better, too. The result is that I am writing these words using a Philips B346C1 instead, and it has few of the issues that beset the Iiyama, save for needing to remove and insert an HDMI cable for a Mac Mini at times.
Screen responsiveness is a big improvement, especially when switching between machines using a KVMP switch. Wake up times are noticeably shorter, and there is much better reliability. However, it did take a deal of time to optimise its settings to my liking. The OSD may be more convenient than the Iiyama, yet having Windows software that did the same thing made configuration at lot easier. While getting acceptable output across Windows, Linux and macOS has been a challenge, there is a feeling that things are nearly there.
Another matter is the fact that this is a curved screen. In some ways, that is akin to the move from a 24" screen to a 34" one when fonts and other items needing enlarging for the bigger screen. After a burst of upheaval, eventually things do settle down and acclimatisation ensues. Even though further tinkering cannot be ruled out, there is a sounder base for computing after the changeover.
Wiping of hard drives with Linux
2nd December 2013More than a decade of computer upgrades can leave obsolete kit in your hands, while legislation on electronic waste disposal might leave you wondering how to get rid of it. Thankfully, I discovered that my local council refuse site, only a few miles away, accepts such items for recycling. It saw me several times last summer disposing of obsolete and non-working gadgets that had stayed with me too long. Some were as bulky as computer monitors and printers, while others were relatively small.
Disposing of non-working, obsolete equipment is an easy choice, but it's harder when a device still works and might be useful. Computer motherboards still include PS/2, floppy and IDE ports, making decisions trickier. My Gigabyte Z87-HD3 mainboard has one PS/2 port (compared to two on older boards), limited IDE sockets and surprisingly, a floppy drive socket, unexpected for anyone who considers these technologies outdated. PC technology isn't abandoning backwards compatibility yet, as this mainboard supports an Intel Core i5-4670K CPU and 24 GB of RAM.
Despite the IDE port, I wasn't tempted to use my leftover 10 GB and 20 GB hard drives that I've had for over a decade. Ten years ago, that capacity would have been respectable if not for our growing need for data storage due to photography, video and music. Beyond size limitations, these drives' speed can't compare with today's standards, which became obvious when I replaced a similarly aged Samsung 160 HD with a Samsung SSD.
This line of thought led me to recycle the drives, so I considered wiping them. Linux offers a good tool for this: the dd command. It can overwrite disk data to make information virtually irretrievable. Linux also has several dummy devices that supply junk data for overwriting. These work like /dev/null, which suppresses command output. The first is /dev/zero, which supplies octal zeros, which I used. For those wanting more randomness in overwriting, there's also /dev/random and /dev/urandom.
To overwrite data on a disk with zeroes while having feedback on progress, the following command achieves the required result:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/sdd bs=16M
The operation needs root privileges. The if parameter of dd specifies the input data, which is sent to pv that displays a progress bar not provided by dd alone. The output then goes to another dd command with the target disk specified by the of parameter. The bs parameter in the second dd command sets the block size for writing. Note that pv isn't installed by default. On Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint systems, install it with this command:
sudo apt-get install pv
The pv sandwich is also invaluable when using dd to copy partitions between different physical or virtual disks. Without it, you might wonder what's happening during silent operations, which is particularly concerning when retrying failed operations that take a long time to complete.