Some of you may already know that I’ve been laptop less in the past three months. Since about mid September display started to behave odd: it randomly turns off the lamps until I close and reopen the lid, then after about half a minute it turns off again, then again on, and so on. Sometimes it even starts blinking like a crazy stroboscope .
Long story short, here is a little video of the crazy display. Awesome, isn’it?

Unfortunately this little issue is a bit difficult to reproduce, sometimes it does it the whole day, and believe me, it’s quite irritating, sometimes it doesn’t for several days… Sometimes it does it only early in the morning (cold lamps?).

I contacted HP Support and they argued it could be a motherboard issue.
A motherboard issue, at least in Italy is under a 2-year pick-up-and-return warranty.
So they sent it to their repair center (actually an external one: A-NOVO Italia, Saronno) and sent it back after about two of weeks with a nice HP headed sheet stating they didn’t find any issue at all and just restored the operative system (a laptop coming with a motherboard issue and they did just that?). They also installed and ran a couple of benchmarks and other test software that said everything was ok, and I guess nothing more.

Guess what… display started blinking again 2 days after.
I contacted again HP, already a bit upset, I talked with another technician and he said his colleague was surely wrong. I had no motherboard issue but just some lamp or hinge one. It was covered by one year warranty with the producer and one with the seller.

Ok, I then went to the seller and told them about the previous story.
They sent the laptop to the very same repair center with a long description saying that it was a bit an unpredictable issue, that it was just been there some week before and suggesting to test it carefully this time. It was the December 1st.

Three days ago I was called to take back the laptop. Same HP headed sheet, all tests were successful, no issue found. Oh, they did a BIOS update, damn you receive a laptop for repair twice with the very same issue and you just run some test and do a BIOS update? Seriously, a BIOS update?!

Needless to say screen started blinking again soon. You can see it in that video taken a couple of hours ago and I can see it in front of me right now.

I don’t know if I feel more upset or frustrated… still I cannot believe how a repair center can suck this way… they didn’t even try to replace the lamps! they didn’t even unmount the display to check the cables!

Yay! that’s me!

It’s pretty much self-explanatory, just look at it and have fun!

I’m quite satisfied with the face distortion effects, aren’t they awesome (as Daniel would say )?
I still have some doubt, though, about the sepia effect. It can be obtained just with the gimp curve tool, so if you have a better one feel free to send me the curve file (or any other nice curve file that you have)!

I’m really looking forward to hear your comments and suggestions!

GUADEC Rants..
It seems that I won’t be able to be at GUADEC with all of us, it’s such a pain to read your posts and cannot be there..
I obtained the travel sponsorship but I really needed an answer for a couple of questions before being able to buy tickets. I asked Baris but he someway disappeared since last wednesday, I never seen him again on irc and he stopped replying my mails (and someone else’s too as far as I know).
So time passed, and I’m still here waiting for his reply… I can understand he should surely have been over busy within past week, but it was too bad that he was the only one to contact for sponsorship questions.
There is still a (very) little chance to take a last minute flight so Baris, if you’re reading this, just mail me, comment, ping me on irc!