Friday, June 29, 2007

Personal Workspace

A control room may be as humble and spare as one laptop and one child (the controller), which is close to where I am, except I'm a grownup. My one laptop (the other one's in the closet) is now the wildly popular Dell Inspiron E1505, a duo-core jobber, running Ubuntu, in my case with Beryl 0.4.2 (a release candidate).

CubeSpace, which hosted the wildly successful Portland BarCamp a few weeks ago, is premised on this model: find your cube and fit in. Doesn't have to be the same cube every time. Join a counter- part cube farm in Tokyo. Flit about, a wandering cube farmer. Except I've always envisioned my PWS as a tetrahedron in GST, but that's just my Fuller Schooler aesthetics shining through the covers.

So O'Reilly's Safari Unleashed or whatever they're calling it, proved its weight in gold just now. After fighting the problem for hours, as to how to get my 1280 x 800 desktop to share out to my 1024 x 768 Optoma or some like-minded projector, preferably on both screens simultaneously.

Answer (as I found by browsing Safari): use the Ctrl-Alt-Fn-minus to lower the resolution, which'll make that 1280 x 800 surface (one side of a cube of two caps and four desktops) into a virtual desktop not quite fitting in its little brother window. I can live with this outcome.

What's amazing about this nVidia card is it'll then play a DVD movie through both displays simultaneously, though I don't ask for "full screen" as that'd mean "partly off screen" in my space. My Toshiba, the one in the closet, hasn't mastered that trick yet.