It’s been said alluded to before that I am, occasionally, an obsessive, with a tendency to think about totally unimportant rubbish and that I should get out more. Clearly, a post on video connectors is necessary here, for me to clear the air.

See, I just got myself a big new monitor at work; no doubt some people will impune that this is a method for making up in my lack of prowess in other areas; probably they are right. But it’s left me wondering.

For years, monitors all had that strange 15 pin thing, always blue. Everything plugged into everything. Then, a short while back came out the DVI connectors; these are slight offwhite, with a novel combination of flat and round pins. My new monitor has an HMDI connector. But the other end of the cable is a DVI; my old monitor used DVI plugs, has no been downgraded to a second screen. Fortunately, it also had a VGA, which is lucky because the video card has one DVI and one VGA.

What’s going on here? It’s totally confusing. If I want to swap computers and monitors around, I have to sit and add up, do they have the same interface, do I have the right converter cables if they don’t (or if I only have convertor cables, do they have different sockets).

It feels like the bad old days before some bright genius of usability invented USB; a flawed genius because they were stupid enough to make them rectangular, but a genius non the less.

It all goes back to what I was droning on about in the pub, on friday; it ended up like a comparison between different operating systems, cause I was a bit too drunk to make myself clear; I move between linux and windows freely, and given the choice, I decide on relatively trivial grounds; it makes no difference to me, really, because I can make them largely look the same anyway. And this is the point: what do people want from a computer these days? My answer is this: forget the features give me familiarity; stability not excitement. Just don’t change a damn thing. And that includes the background wall paper.

Likewise, video plugs. We have three different sorts now. Stop it guys, just stop it.

You think this is bad, don’t even begin to get me started on low voltage power supplies…

Originally published on my old blog site.