Calibrating one screen is fairly straight forward with the right tools. Just follow the software wizard and you’re done in about 10 minutes. Calibrating two screens can be a little bit more tricky—especially if one of those screens is a laptop display.

I use the latest version of Eye-One Match (v3.6.3 as of this writing). Once figured out how to make the magic happen, it’s really a breeze. Follow these steps and you should be fine…

My Set Up

• 15” MacBook Pro (late 2010) runs OS X (Snow Leopard, v10.6.6)
• 20” XL20 Samsung SyncMaster external display
• laptop screen has been arranged to be the secondary display whenever the XL20 is plugged in
• XL20 contains my menu bar

Let’s Calibrate!

These steps work for me. I’m not saying it’s the only way to accomplish this, but it sure works for me.

Calibrate the laptop display first

• ensure you DO NOT have your external display plugged into your laptop
• start Eye-One Match and follow the steps to calibrate your screen
• save your profile with a meaningful name (such as “MPB-24-03-2011”)

Calibrate the external display next

• plug the secondary display into your laptop
• you may need to ensure that it is set as your main display (not sure about this step)
• start Eye-One Match and follow the steps to calibrate your screen
• save your profile with a meaningful name (such as “XL20-24-03-2011”)

Ensure that you now have two displays with their own ICC profile

• go into “System Preferences” > “Displays”
• click on “Color” tab
• ensure the “Show profiles for this display only” option is checked
• click on “Gather Windows”
• compare the settings

If all is well, you should now have two displays with their own profiles, and your profile settings should look similar to this:

Note the two different profiles.

And no, I am not being “unfairly discriminatory” here: anybody who knows how to read a log file and do a little digging can find out where script kiddie attacks are coming from (I’m not talking about “real” hackers here—the kind that know how to conceal their activity by rerouting their page requests).

So from now on, anyone in China or the Russian Federation trying to directly access this site is now being blocked. Sorry folks, but enough is enough.

I got my IP range for China at www.okean.com and for the Russian Federation at www.countryipblocks.net. The downside is that it increases my .htaccess file to a whopping 150kb—which is a shame as this file is read by Apache with every request to the server.

Be Clear

Please don’t put us into a position where we have to decipher your intentions. When we have to do that, it takes up more of our time and the extra work involved will end up costing you more of your hard earned cash. Heck, it may even annoy us (and annoyed designers are far less productive than designers who are in good spirits).

Quality Content

As a site proprietor it is up to you to ensure that content is up to scratch. Well written content will please your visitors and generate more revenue for you as the owner of the site. On top of that, good designers put a lot of effort into properly crafted designs and prefer to see their hard work being matched by equally well crafted copy. At the very least, and at all times, run a spell checker on your copy before sending it out for publication.

Be Clear, Again

Actually write some copy. Don’t just give us vague hints: “uhm, this needs to say something down the lines of…” Consider us dumb machines: we need specific instructions (unless we actually have been contracted to be copy editors). If you don’t know how to write content, consider hiring someone who does.

Deliver Content In An Appropriate Format

Deliver content in an appropriate format: for instance, RTF (Rich Text File) or Microsoft Word. It is much harder for us to strip content from a PDF than convert a properly marked up RTF for example. You can also help us by highlighting the changed content.

Don’t Change Your Mind (Unless You Have To)

If updates have been scheduled to take place at a particular time don’t send us anything until then (unless our opinion is called for). We really don’t need the content until the actual updates are about to take place. Chances are you will change your mind in the meantime. Sending us multiple emails with conflicting requests for content updates will simply confuse us, and there is a chance we’ll miss some of your instructions. Of course you’ll want to send us revised copy when situations change, making clear that previous content has been scrapped.

Observe Email Etiquette

When you are sending us content via email, give emails a clear subject heading. That way, if we need to refer to your emails at a later stage we can easily find them again.

Also, refrain from giving updates about your sister’s friend’s cat. Business emails are for business, and generally should be limited to just that: business. It makes our job so much easier. While we may want to hear about the cat, we prefer you to give us an update in another email.

In Conclusion

While I’m sure I’ve left out some useful aspects of effective content delivery, these pointers will go a long way to helping us being more efficient and allow us to do what we do best: craft beautiful and useful sites.

Please remember that the more work you create for us, the more we have to bill you for.

Ma.gnolia is kicking off development of Ma.gnolia 2, or M2 for short. What does that mean? Well, for one, M2 is a ground-up rewrite of Ma.gnolia, re-creating features we love today, taking a second run at what didn’t worked as well as planned, on a distributed, service-based architecture designed to handle the large volumes of data we’ve seen. But even more significant, M2 will be an open source project that can be downloaded to remix and run as your own.
Yep. That’s right. In a few months, you will be able to download and install your very own Ma.gnolia!

For more info, check out their blog.

This could have been such a simple issue to resolve were it not for the odd combination of symptoms.

In any case, I am glad to be able to run my desktop as trusty old workhorse again.

Symptoms of a flawed system

My desktop still doesn’t want to boot half of the time: it has a hard time getting past the XP progress bar on a regular boot, or “mup.sys” during a safe mode boot. So I reinstalled Windows on a new hard drive. Cool that works. For the first 5 days or so. Then it’s back to same same: Windows won’t boot, and if it does, it freezes after a few hours. Turn off all power to the system for 10-60 minutes, and it might reboot some of the time.

Looking for a solution

Alright, maybe it’s not getting enough power. Take out the 3rd SATA disk. Now it’s using the same amount of power as it did prior to instability issues. No luck—same trouble. Unless the PSU is issuing dirty power must be something else instead.

Hmmm… better check RAM. Different combinations. No luck.

Upgrade BIOS. No luck.

Just to make sure: re-install Windows, again. No joy past the first few days.

Take out all power cords & re-insert them. No luck.

Set my DRAM timings manually. No luck.

Oh bother. Those shiny new Macs start to look more appealing by the minute…

And while squatters may often sell these domains at much inflated prices, it’s likely to be the cheaper option compared to acquiring an existing business name (the business would have to completely rebrand afterwards). Needless to say, this mainly benefits larger organisations (those with enough funds to acquire the squatted names).

Where things start to get somewhat nasty is when squatters hold on to .org names (reserved for not-for-profit-organisations). One of my clients made inquiries into purchasing one such squatted domain only to be told it was available for a considerable sum indeed—no exceptions.

All in all I’m no fan of this practice and certainly will not endorse it, but it just goes to show: there’s always two sides to a coin.

I quite like one prediction about the impact the phone might have. It just might help end the walled garden concept that mobile carriers are so keen to impose on us: restricting internet access to predefined content and premium charges for services such as getting a conventional ringtone on your phone (heck, I nearly got suckered into buying one myself when a newly purchased device included only teeny bopper polyphonic tomfoolery).

Perhaps it is just part of an evolutionary process, and comparable to the development and adoption of the web:

• 1st stage: a new useful technology is adopted by few (think early internet days).
• 2nd stage: more people adopt the technology (hail the dancing baby animations, fishtank webcams, pop-up ads, and x-rated sites). At this stage (think internet boom), the marketing pirahna’s have jumped on the bandwagon (show me the money!).
• 3rd stage: the novelty has worn off, and the technology actually has to deliver the goods, and prove itself useful to the masses (like the internet after the bubble burst).

That time was used to catch up on some of the things neglected by me: movies, books, photography and spend a bit more time with friends… I also managed to make inroads re the vast backlog of file processing (RAW images, cleaning up newsfeeds and emails). It was like a spring clean in autumn: quelle horreur!

Over the last couple of years I was never disconnected for more than a few days at a time (although some may argue that I have given the impression of being “disconnected” for much longer).

For somebody who spends many hours a day with head buried in virtual worlds it was a nice bit of time off but it was quite a relief to get plugged in again just the same… Wow! I can breathe again…

Not long ago, we were pushing our computers to the max running photoshop: it just couldn’t handle the complex mix of styled vector data and bitmap imagery. Much to my delight these latest computers are just ripping through the stuff, while at the same time running Dreamweaver, Illustrator, VOIP software and various other applications.

It got me thinking about why these prices had fallen so much. I entertained the notion that this was partly due to millions of gaming enthousiasts pushing the envelope by continously demanding more of their systems–up to a level that surpasses the requirements of most graphics industry professionals.

Similarly P2P folk would have contributed to better network infrastructure and cheaper prices by making file swapping a routine affair. Perhaps we can even go as far as thanking spammers for taking up so much of the internet’s bandwidth with their enormous volume of useless messages. But no, that would be taking this train of thought too far.