Third monitor on your MacBook Pro? Sure!

This morning I had a sudden urge to find out about adding a third (or fourth) external monitor to my MacBook Pro. I’ve been a multiple monitor user off and on since the early 1990′s – I do find the extra screen real estate very useful.

I’ll assume you can add a second monitor – that just requires the appropriate dongle (cable) from Apple for your model.

All of this will be dramatically simpler once more Thunderbolt devices are around – the latest Macs now hav this super high speed port to connect multiple monitors, external drives and so on. For the rest of us slumming it with slightly older gear :

Here’s a few notes on what’s happening with multiple monitor setups these days:

• Got a spare HD TV you could use as a monitor? Try the Imation Link Wireless HD Audio/Video Extender – as pointed out on Rexblog this works quite well once the Mac software is installed. Cost? $99
• Did you know there are USB connectors? This Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter Danny Sullivan used two of these in his four monitor setup! Cost? $66
• There’s an app for that! Air Display is a ten buck app that turns your iPad, iPhone & even iPod touch into an external monitor for your Mac (and Windows too.) Requires both to be on the same wifi network. How good will this look on the new iPad? Cost? about $10

Now I just need a spare monitor or two and a long weekend to try some of these out!

Note: some of these links are affiliate links and could result in me being paid.

Vale Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)

A very sad day. Strangely personal.

Thanks for it all Steve.

Starting my musical mourning with ‘Leader of the Pack’ from the Top 5 Songs About Death.

Tonight there will be a wake :

6:30pm onwards, Beer Deluxe: Unofficial MTUB Wake for Jobs. See you there.—
MelbTwitUngrdBrigade (@MTUB) October 06, 2011

I’ll be there.

Dalek Cupcakes – You WILL BAKE!

To celebrate the return of Doctor Who to Australian TV tonight the geeky among us are considering hiding out:

@ABCTV_Australia a specific request to venture into a seperate room to view the ep. whilst attending a friends party has been issued.—
Ivan de Vulder (@iveedeevee) April 30, 2011

or making Dalek Cupcakes:

Bake Dalek cupcakes and DEC-OR-ATE. (and then post pics) #Things2Do4WhoInAu /cc @ABCTV_Australia—
James Caldwell (@Cluemark) April 30, 2011

Somehow I’d never seen a Dalek cupcake before – I love it! Naturally I go searching for recipes as find a couple of good leads :

Taste.com.au has a recipe based on chocolate muffins and topped with a chocolate biscuit, while cut out + keep double up on cupcakes to build a dalek army.

There’s plenty of styles, here is a Dalek built with swiss rolls!

How to group people on a web service without a login?

Thinking out loud here. A favourite boardgame in our family is “Stockmarket” – a classic from the 1960′s that is fun all (yadda yadda.) We have a game underway at the moment (well, on hold since last night anyway

Here’s my train of thought:

Wouldn’t it be great to have an iPhone app to keep track of your cash, stocks and give you a running total net wealth as you play? Of course it would.

Then the marketing brain comes on : but the market would likely be too small to justify the development. But if you made a web app, it could be usable no matter the client and upgrades for new games would be instant!

Then geek brain comes back in : how would you sync a web app’s users (i.e. people sitting at a table playing a board game) easily? Without a registation process?

To restate the problem: I’m wondering how to associate players in web browsers to the same game.

What is you were to create an alpha-numeric key out of the players first initials and their ages (or the hour the game started)? This would create a (most likely) low-collision key (along with the game chosen) so the web app could link the various users together in tracking the actual game that they have on the table in front of them.

That’s pretty much it. Imagine a key for the game stockmarket : m37m33j14a11 for example. Plenty of room there for multiple games running at once without many collisions on a lookup table, wouldn’t you say?

The Spice of Life

We are told often enough, usually by our mothers, that variety is the spice of life. It is also true online – without variety in your sources, all you have are people who agree with you. Fun for a while perhaps, but ultimately lacking in stimulation.

This struck me particulary when this morning I saw the following two tweets in my tweet-stream:

Went into the LEGO store and Nintendo World and it was like being a kid again! Couldn't stop grinning —
Jonathan Poh (@jpoh) November 20, 2010

It's a movie based on a fucking Kid's book … no one got this excited when the Very Hungry Caterpillar movie came out #HarryPotterXVIII—
Deano G (@deanog) November 19, 2010

It’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to (or why the end of the Harry Potter movies isn’t all that)

The Guardian newspaper has an article from the charmingly named Jemima Owen about how the last Harry Potter film coming out is like an end to childhood.

Break out the violins.

“When the film of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released on 4 November 2001, I was 11 and in my final year of primary school … Nine years later, I find myself again nervously glancing at my watch on Friday night as I make my way towards the Leicester Square Odeon in London”

It isn’t even ten years. Not a whole decade.

Try this :

1977 : I am in the middle of primary school, in the fourth class. We take a class (school?) excursion into the city of Sydney, to the Hoyts Entertainment Centre (majority owned at the time by 20th Century Fox) which had opened only one year earlier. This is truly one of the formative experiences of my childhood – we saw the movie “Star Wars” on the big screen. Really big. Really loud. I was nine years old.

The scale of the place amazed me. The glamour of the cinema itself, and the city it resided in fired my imagination for years to come. For some pictures of the cinema at that time, here’s what the National Library of Australia has : (I’d love to copy them in here but who has time to fill out the request forms?)

For many years afterwards my dreams were haunted by, as I discovered in my twenties, this image of the exterior of Hoyts from across the road. Really. I dreamt that picture, in colour, at night, lights blazing and the names of movies up on the boards out front for all to see. Is it any wonder I held a soft spot for another movie that I saw there over four hundred times through the nineties? But I digress …

All this was the setting for the mind blowing experience that was Star Wars.

Fast forward now to 2005. The release of the final installment in the Star Wars saga. The mouth of the snake chewing on its own tail that is Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. That, people, is a wait of [sound of gears grinding in brain...] TWENTY EIGHT YEARS.

So take your Generation Y (or whoever-the-marketing-department-thinks-you-are) whining about waiting nine whole years for a cycle to end and suck on it. I waited three times longer and was so completely devasted by the experience of it all coming to an end that, frankly, I’m not sure I have recovered from. Perhaps I shouldn’t have seen it. I certainly came home, lay on the couch and was, in all seriousness, depressed for some time that it had really ended.

For so much of my life there had been the promise of three more episodes. An ending and a beginning all tied up neatly. When it was done, so was I.

Take this as a warning. Prepare yourselves, come the ides of 2011 don’t come crawling back here saying that I didn’t warn you.

Robot cars are here – if they can be insured

Robot cars are here. The waiting is over. Get used to it – but only if the insurance companies let you!

The fact is that robot cars have in fact been with us for five years already, as noted by FuturePundit back in 2006:

Skepticism about the feasibility of computer-operated vehicles became harder to maintain when the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Grand Challenge periodic contest for autonomous driverless vehicles finally produced winners in October 2005.

So why aren’t the car showrooms full of self-driving robot cars? That’s a great question. One that was answered, for me, at the Singularity Summit Australia a few weeks ago here in Melbourne by James Newton-Thomas.

James spoke about his career with AI (artificial intelligence) – way back in the 1980s he had developed loan officer systems that the human loan officers came to rely upon! Through the 1990s he worked on autonomous vehicle AIs for Caterpillar (the big name in mining vehicles.) The comment that really piqued my interest was this : having developed a robot vehicle to replace human operators, the stumbling block to implementation around the year 2000 was that the insurance premium was so high that it wasn’t a financially viable option.

Now that is really interesting. This means that ten years ago JNT had developed a robot vehicle that was ready for work in the mining industry but was essentially blocked by the insurance industry!

Why was the premium so high? I am not an insurance industry expert, so I couldn’t tell you. James did mention that his impression at the time was that since there was no history, no set of facts upon which to calculate the risk, the insurers erred on the cautious side (as they should be wont to do) and went high. Really high.

So that’s where we were until this week. Robot cars are certainly possible, because they have been built. Sure, not in mass production. Sure there are still limitations, but those are being rapidly eroded.

Then everything changed – Google announced on October 9th, 2010 that they not only had built robot cars, but that they had driven them over 225,000km in San Francisco!

Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles.

Wow – that means there’s over five thousand driving hours (assuming 25mph average urban speed) of robot cars. In an urban environment.

Is that enough data for an insurer to make a better assessment? We can only hope so.