Five Best Tools for Managing Your Multi-Monitor Setup [Hive Five]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5519833/five-best-tools-for-managing-your-multi+monitor-setup

Multiple monitors expand your screen real estate, boost your productivity, and give you tons of extra room to spread out your work. Boost the benefit of your multiple monitors with these great tools.

Photo by jonnypage, from featured workspace Office Makeover: Multiple Monitors and Middle Earth.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite tool for getting the most out of your multi-monitor environment. You responded, and we tallied up the nominations. Now we're back with the top five tools Lifehacker readers use to maximize their multi-monitor enjoyment.

DisplayFusion (Windows, Basic: Free/Pro: $25)

DisplayFusion is a multi-monitor management suite. It adds a taskbar—complete with Aero peek—to every monitor, supports spanned or monitor-dependent wallpaper with position fine-tuning and integration with Flickr and Vladstudios, and customizable titlebar buttons for window management. In addition, you can configure hot keys for everything from randomizing wallpaper to moving, spanning, and tiling windows. The free version covers almost all the major features sans the multi-monitor taskbar—which is polished enough for a lot of folks to completely merit the $25 upgrade to Pro. Click on the image above to take a closer look at a multi-monitor setup running DisplayFusion Pro.

Synergy (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

Synergy takes a different tact than the other entrants in today's Hive Five. While all the other entries are concerned with making the multi-monitor experience awesome on one operating system, Synergy focuses on bridging your multi-monitor experience across systems. If you routinely use your multi-monitor setup to display output from different computers—one for your Windows machine, one for your Linux machine, and one for your Mac, for example—installing Synergy on all three systems will allow you to use the same keyboard and mouse to control all three systems seamlessly. Pushing the mouse against the edge of the Windows monitor towards the Mac monitor will slide it right across to the other OS as though they were all running in parallel virtual machines on the same operating system. Check out our guide to setting up Synergy for an in depth look at configuring Synergy on your systems, or take a look at recently mentioned QSynergy for a nice new interface.

Windows 7 (Operating System, Starting at $70)

Earlier versions of Windows practically acted like multi-monitor setups were so fringe as to not be worth considering. With Windows 7, the support for multiple monitors has grown to the point that many people find they no longer need to use 3rd-party software to power up their multi-monitor setup. If you just need simple, multi-monitor support without any bells and whistles, you'll find Windows 7, right out of the box, gets the job done. Little things—like extending the taskbar across multiple monitors—are still overlooked in Win7, so if you want a unified look and the convenience of a taskbar on each monitor, you'll probably want to check out other tools in this top five, like DisplayFusion Pro, UltraMon, or MultiMon.

UltraMon (Windows, $39.95)

UltraMon, like DisplayFusion, is more of a suite of tools and modifications than a simple fix. Ultramon extends your taskbar across all your monitors—click on the screenshot above for a closer look—adds extra windows management buttons to application title bars for easy screen-to-screen movement, and even handles multi-monitor wallpaper and screensaver management. In addition to the tweaking the primary interface, UltraMon also has a powerful mirroring tool to mirror all or part of a screen to another monitor—great for giving a presentation where you want to control the output going to the projector or what a client will see on the other side of the desk. You can try UltraMon out for free, but after the trial a license is $39.95.

MultiMon (Windows, Basic: Free/Pro: $28)

MulitMon is a multi-monitor tool focused on spanning the taskbar across multiple monitors. It supports up to 3 monitors with the primary monitor in the center. The freeware version doesn't support system themes—the screenshot above is of the free version, note the very generic looking left-hand taskbar. The Pro version supports themes and will mirror the appearance of your main taskbar. In addition to the taskbar functionality, MultiMon has a clipboard extender built into the secondary taskbar and better integration with the Windows shell.

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Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for the best multi-monitor tool, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:

Which Multi-Monitor Tool Is Best?online surveys

Have a favorite tool, trick, or tip to share? Let's hear about it in the comments. As always, if you have a great idea for the next Hive Five we want to hear about it. Send an email to tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line and we'll see what we can do to get your idea some screen time.

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Stop Picasa from Filling Your Hard Disk with Unwanted Screenshots [Picasa]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5520271/stop-picasa-from-filling-your-hard-disk-with-unwanted-screenshots

Picasa is a great photo manager with loads of features and a very high ease-of-use factor. If you regularly take screenshots however, you've likely noticed an annoying "feature"—a disk-gobbling screenshot function you can't turn off. Let's fix that.

Whenever Picasa is open if you press the "print screen" button to snap a screenshot with another screenshot application, Picasa will double up on the effort and save a roughly 2MB BMP file in the folder /My Documents/Picasa/Screen Captures/. There is no toggle in the Picasa options menu to turn this feature off—or make any adjustments to it for that matter—when Picasa is running it will always snap screenshots. Sure you could "solve" this problem by always turning Picasa off when you want to snap screenshots or map your favorite screenshot application's hot key to another key besides "print screen" but both of those solutions are hardly ideal.

I initially sought to remedy this problem simply because it annoyed me. I hated the little Picasa screenshot notification popping up in the lower right side of the screen every time I used my other screenshot app. It wasn't until I actually found a solution and went to delete the screenshots that Picasa had been taking all this time that I found Picasa had chewed up nearly 7GB of disk space with useless screenshots. The following hack will disable the screenshot function in Picasa and halt the build up of disk-hogging BMP files.

A bit more detail for XP Pro/Vista Pro [Ed. Note: Works fine in Windows 7]
1. Locate the screen shot folder that Picasa creates. Something like My Docs\Pictures\Picasa\Screen Captures
2. Right Click on it > Properties >Security Tab
3. Goto Advanced > Then in the permissions tab click Edit.
4. Un-check the "Include inheritable permissions from this objects parent"
5. A pop up will ask you if you want to do this and if you want to copy or remove the permissions. In this case you want to "remove" them.
6. Apply everything and check that you no longer have access to the folder.

Some info for Xp Home/Vista Home
1. Goto this link on information about how to get a security tab, so you can edit these settings. The easiest is to boot into safemode.
2. Follow the directions for XP Pro.

When you're done the permissions menu should look like this:

Once you remove Picasa's ability to use the "Screen Capture" folder it simply gives up on taking screenshots—problem solved! If you ever want to use the screenshot feature in the future just reverse the steps, adding permission to access the folder instead of taking it away. Thanks Jeffery Klassen!

Remove Screen Capture Feature from Picasa [Google Support Forums]

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Winscape Turns Your HDTV into a Window [Downloads]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5520386/winscape-turns-your-hdtv-into-a-window

Mac: You know the movie version of the future where instead of real windows, we've got virtual ones that offer beautiful views of anything we want? Application Winscape pairs your Wiimote with a flat panel TV (or two) to do just that.

It's a seriously geeky project, and it's one that would require a pretty big commitment, but the results, which you can see in the video above, are actually incredibly impressive. The app is free to try, and costs $10 if you want to stick with it after 30 runs.

Hit up the Winscape homepage for more details on this crazy but cool project (including how they built it). You'd be crazy to replace an actual view with a virtual one, but this seems like the perfect (if impractical) project for a window-less room—if you're sitting on a pile of cash, that is.

Winscape [via Gizmodo]

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Universities Banning iPads Left, Right and Center Due to Bandwidth Overload [Ipad]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5520120/universities-banning-ipads-left-right-and-center-due-to-bandwidth-overload

You'd think iPads might be banned by schools because they distract students, but George Washington University and Princeton University have both put the kibosh on them because their Wi-Fi networks are way overloaded since the launch.

Bandwidth overload is a problem we've all encountered, but you've got to really feel sorry for those students trying to access internet—for proper school reasons—from their laptops, but are booted off because all their peers have now got 'Pads.

Princeton University has blocked around 20 per cent of iPads from being able to access the network, and George Washington doesn't support any Apple products, apparently. Cornell University's information-technology director Steve Schuster said they had similar problems when the iPhone launched, but is "working to ensure the iPad does not have devastating consequences to our network."

This comes after an entire country banned the iPad: Israel has found that the iPad's Wi-Fi broadcasting works at higher levels than is normally accepted in Israel. [Fudzilla via TechRadar]

Image Credit: Jesman

UPDATE: Commenter Cintax has pointed us towards this Princeton report, which explains the problem they have with iPads on campus (22 of the 41 iPads, to be precise) are related to DHCP client malfunctions, which causes interference with other devices.

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The Page: An E-Ink Newspaper That Won't Smudge Your Fingers [Eink]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5520154/the-page-an-e+ink-newspaper-that-wont-smudge-your-fingers

For some reason I'm skeptical that the one thing keeping newspaper readers from switching to E-Ink readers is the form factor, but that doesn't make this semi-transparent E-Ink newspaper display concept any less cool.

The key word, of course, is concept, but flexible/foldable displays aren't anything new. Nor are interactive content or E-Ink. It's bringing these concepts together in a workable package that might take some time. Meanwhile, though, here's how it would ideally work (without all the wobbly images):

I like it! Except what's with all this New York Times business? Show me what Garden and Gun looks like on this bad boy. Then we'll talk. [Cargo Collective via Design Boom]

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