Running 30" and 20" monitors side-by-side using a Macbook Pro | Hacker News Reader

Running 30" and 20" monitors side-by-side using a Macbook Pro

andrewljohnson.com

I'm jealous of that awesome setup with a 30 inch monitor. I'm even more jealous that he has his girlfriend as his co-founder. Its extremely hard to meet pleasant, smart as well as entrepreneur-minded females in this line of work.

it's also very dangerous to mix up businesses with family. If one go wrong, chances are the other will burn too...

My favorite restaurant died as a result of this.

Incidentally, if anyone knows where to find good Shakshuka (like at Rachels, from Grove St in Jersey City), let me know.

Tell that to the husband/wife team behind Flickr (and now Hunch).

Cisco, IIRC

and Tipjoy

and Bebo

and LearnHub

Proof by example?

Are these companies started by couples where one part failed and the other succeeded?

Because if they're just companies started by couples where both relationship and business have been a success then the preceeding warning could still apply to them.

Except that Len and Sandi did get divorced...

But they divorced after they left the company. And the company survived.

Their relationship was sunk, but the company survived - that's the important things taken care of at least!

I've got one and find it only slightly faster than a close vnc session. A better option for me was to dig up and old computer and use osx2vnc to send just key and mouse to the other screen. This way, you get the power of a whole computer behind your second screen.

I used to do the same thing with an old mac mini and synergy. But I couldn't quite get the synergy auto restart working consistently after the mini slept. Plus I missed not being able to move windows between the screens.

If you do use this approach of having a second computer running, then on Windows you can use MaxiVista and it will use the second computer as a real second monitor in a similar way this USB adapter does.

i.e. MaxiVista installs a virtual video card and monitor, take whatever is supposed to be displayed on it, ships over the network and displays it on the other computer. You can drag windows over to it as you'd expect and generally use it as any other extra monitor, but it is more sluggish than a real video card.

There was a MaxiVista Mac beta around at one point, I don't know if it turned into a real product, but http://www.screenrecycler.com/home.html seems to do the same thing.

Do people really want to be distracted by a constantly-visible browser window? I find virtual desktops to be much easier than managing multiple monitors. It also gives me more real desk space for notes and coffee cups :)

When cross-referencing e.g. with reference materials, yes.

No, but I'd like to not be distracted by switching back and forth between virtual desktops if I can instead see at the same time all 6 Emacs windows & 10 terminals holding various aspects of my debugging state.

(and I only need one coffee cup at a time. Keep your refills within arms length!)

The need for 10 terminals means you are probably not using emacs to its fullest. ;)

Zonks! virtual desktops are better, but don't look nearly as cool.

I'm not familiar with the display adapters on a Macbook, but my 2008-gen 13" Macbook connects to an external monitor fine. Could I use a splitter, like he states, and connect it to two 24"? That would be pretty awesome.

anyone have particular splitter recs?

"it is possible to achieve graphics acceleration using an ExpressCard slot. Using a PCI Express expansion chassis, a standard PCI Express graphics accelerator card can be utilized to allow game-level 3D graphics (to an external monitor). [..] Graphics upgrade/expansion (to an external monitor) is also available through the ExpressCard slot via Docking Stations."

- http://www.expresscard.org/web/site/qa.jsp#19

Which would probably provide much better performance, although at a higher cost.

I've been doing the same thing for a while, but with dual 23's. My adapter is an IOGear USB 2.0 DVI adapter. I seem to recall I had to download the OSX drivers from their website, but other than that it works very well.

Note the iMovie will not run if it detects one of these adapters though.

Wow, at $99, this is something I'll have to consider. The options I looked at last year when I bought my MBP were considerably more expensive.

I got the gefen, which is slightly cheaper from amazon. All of the converters seem to use the same displaylink technology, so reviews say they work the same, but price varies from about 80-160. There are some crazy ones for the MBP that can drive a 30 inch monitor and have an external gpu, but it was 500 and reportedly quite loud.

Thanks again Smokey ;)

I see this for $69 in amazon.

I have a software-based solution for this, but I think I'll definitely look into a USB to DVI adapter now...

http://blog.carlmercier.com/2009/02/16/a-dream-setup-three-m...

I ended up replicating your setup after reading your blog post. I am still impressed with the performance of the 'extra' monitor even when using it over ssh.

I emailed the developer of ScreenRecycler with praise after I bought it and he sadly replied that not enough people buy the product and that he wishes he could spend more dev time on it.

I thought "people buying it" and "spending time improving it" happened the other way round...

I run three monitors at home and work.

At some point (in the future!) I will have to face the fact that many people accomplished much more with fewer screens, less processing power, more basic software...

Hrm. I don't like that idea much.

Too bad the guy can't properly scale his photos.

The image isn't screwed up, just the in page scaling: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33766454@N02/3638277193/sizes/l...

It's nice how the 20" width lines up with the 30" height.

That is very nice, and I think two modest (17' or 19') widecreen monitors, rotated to portrait, would be good for coding. But it's my understanding that sub-pixel smoothing only works when the monitors are landscape. Is there a fix for that? Or is the best way just to switch it off?

it looks particularly horrible if you are using a portrait-mode display like he does (or at least I think it's a portrait mode, as the whole thing is stretched to the full height of my sideways 24" widescreen (tallscreen?) display)

Now he should invest in some screen cleaner. My God.

After I posted the link, I noticed how dirty my screens were and cleaned them :)

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