VFDs appear to be more resistant to "overuse" damage than some screen technologies like cathode ray tubes. Still, I worry a little about my Squeezeboxes showing the time round the clock, making a handful of pixels in the normal ":" areas work hard and not using the edge pixels at all.
Today I made some changes to my FuzzyTime plugin to combat that. FuzzyTime has always provide a drop-in replacement for the built-in DateTime screensaver. Now there's another configurable option for FuzzyTime's screensaver -- how many "spaces" to push the text left and/or right (to spread out the VFD pixel use/wear), and how quickly to move the date/time text. The default, as before, is to behave exactly like the built-in DateTime screensaver, so you'll have to go to the FuzzyTime settings page for each player to make the text start moving. I'd suggest starting with the default "rate" value (1 space per minute if using a time format that only shows hours & minutes) and a maximum offset around 10. FuzzyTime now also provides APIs for other plugins to use, so they, too, can make their text move around, too. I've been working on some changes to SuperDateTime (my favorite When Off screensaver), but don't have anything nice enough to send to Greg yet. :-) I'd love to hear from anyone else who tries this out. http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/slim7/FuzzyTime/ -Peter -- peterw http://www.tux.org/~peterw/ free plugins: http://www.tux.org/~peterw/#slim AllQuiet BlankSaver ContextMenu FuzzyTime PlayLog PowerCenter/BottleRocket SaverSwitcher SettingsManager SleepFade StatusFirst SyncOptions VolumeLock ------------------------------------------------------------------------ peterw's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2107 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=51418 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
