Leftovers (2)*
*aka little bits that don't need their own posts
Dual Monitors Are Wonderful
For a while I've been hearing about how great it is has to have multiple monitors. From friends and bloggers (particularly at Coding Horror) alike, the reviews are uniformly positive and I was convinced of the logic that having more screen real estate would increase productivity. However, I had never worked for an extended duration with multiple monitors. I just upgraded my home office and now have a dual monitor setup at home. This is probably not surprising news to anyone, but it is great. The pay off is instantaneous and I can easily see how this setup increases my productivity. The only downside now is that I really know what I am missing when I go back to a single monitor setup.
Remote Desktop Across Multiple Monitors
I've had to use Remote Desktop a lot recently to work from home via VPN. A neat trick I discovered this weekend was that Remote Desktop can treat multiple monitors as one monitor, so you can take advantage of multiple monitors. For whatever reason, Microsoft made this a command line switch, and not an option through the UI, but it still works. So, from a command prompt: "Mstsc /span" and you're good to go.
Another Plug for Monoprice.com
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned them before, but I wanted to again point out MonoPrice.com as a great place to by any sort of computer or A/V cabling that you need. I got cables for my HDTV and sound system from them; the quality is good and the price is amazing; literally orders of magnitude cheaper than Best Buy. If you are a real audio/videophile you might found something you don't like about the cables (which are non-name brand), but I compared the HDMI cable I got from them versus a couple of other ones I had and noticed no difference. MonoPrice.com also has nice deals on Ethernet cable, including a 100 ft cable for around $10. Just as a side note, if you don't think cables are overpriced in general, just think of San Francisco's Candlestick park, now called Monster Park after a certain cable company which apparently has some pretty high margins.