Mountie and Duet

Mountie and Duet

Here is a pretty neat and portable solution to get a dual monitor setup for your macbook.

Mountie is a $25 clip that allows you to attach your ios device to the side of your macbook.  It consists of spongy grippy clips that hold on to each device with a stabilizing bar running in between them.  It comes with a few different sets of pads of different thicknesses to accommodate different mac/ipad/iphone models.  I'm using a macbook pro 15 mid 2014 along with an iPad air 2.  The clip is really easy to attach and remove.  So that's kind of cool on it's own.  But it gets really neat when you pair it with Duet.

Duet is a $16 universal app.  I know it's pretty pricey but worth every penny.  I picked it up when it was on sale though.  So this lets you use your iOS device as a second monitor for you macbook.  There have been several similar apps that use wifi but this one has one big difference.  It's connection is done over the lightening cable.  This gives you incredible performance, reliability, and visual quality.  Your iPad will look and respond just as if you had a small secondary monitor attached by hdmi or thunderbolt.  This is a great portable/space saving dual monitor solution that's great for travel, on the couch, or if you just have limited desk space.

Highly Recommended.  On a table the iPad works well in both portrait and landscape orientation.  On your lap I find landscape to throw the balance too far off to feel all that comfortable or stable.

Best way to mount an external hard drive on a laptop

Spider Mount

So with pretty much every laptop coming with a SSD these days (or you are upgrading to one) the lack of large of amounts of storage is pretty apparent.  The good news is most modern laptops have usb 3.0 ports which gives you the full throughput that portable 2.5" external hard drives can deliver.  The biggest issue if you use your laptop on well your lap is it's pretty inconvenient to have this hard drive tethered to your laptop which doesn't easily move around with you.

So I started looking into different ways to attach the hard drive to the back of the lid of the laptop.  I've tried suction cup hooks like you can find in craft stores.  There are some Christmas wreath hangers that kind of work but are rather large and the hook is the wrong shape.  The idea is to suction cup the hook to the hard drive and then hook it over the top of the laptop screen.  Plastic hooks are obviously preferred to prevent scratching.  Also, it has to be small enough not to obscure the screen.  Then if the angle/curve of the hook isn't right the hard drive won't hang right.  Also, it's pretty easy to knock the hook off the laptop or the suction cup could release.  Overall, it was a pretty horrible solution.

Next I tried those thin rubbery sticky pads used to hold cell phones to car dashes.  Those kind of work but were hard to remove and as the stickiness wore off the hard drive would fall off.  This was an even worse solution with strong possibility of damaging your hard drive from a fall.

Finally, I found a solid solution I REALLY like.  Those little rubber coated flexible spider mounts are perfect for the job.  They are really inexpensive like these for $2.55.  Those ship from china so it takes a few weeks.  Search around amazon and you can find some prime ones for a bit more.  Look at my photos to see how you should bend them to wrap around the hard drive and create 2 hooks on the opposite end of the usb port.  When bending sharper angles like for the hooks you might want to use some pliers.  Just be careful with these cheaper mounts because you can actually have the metal underneath poke through the rubber outer coating.  The rubber coating makes it safe to use and grips so it doesn't slide around.  You can bend all the little legs to fit almost any hard drive and any laptop.  Now, when you get up or move around with your laptop your external hard drive moves with you.  For hard drives I really like the Seagate Backup Plus slim 2TB for around $89.

5 minutes with the Macbook 12 inch (2015)

So I happen to be in the apple store replacing my old iPhone 5.  The screen was starting to separate from the body due to battery swelling.  It's apparently a thing with the early made iPhone 5. Anyways, they replaced it in all of 10 min.  Gotta love apple support.

Anyways, I went to check out the macbook 12 inch.
- Amazingly light.  Weighs the same as my old ipad 3 and almost as thin
- The 12" form factor is smaller than my 11.6" cheapy acer windows laptop.
- Butterfly switches on the keyboard DO make a different. It feels really good for such a low profile keyboard. I did several rounds of typeracer.  I was at an awkward angle but still managed 75 wpm.
- The new touchpad really is amazing.  It feels like it's clicking but nothing moves.  I did it over and over again for my brain to try and process what is really happening. So weird but it totally works.  3 different levels of force adjustable in settings or you can go back to touch to tap if you want.
- Fired up quicktime.  Played a hobbit trailer.  Tried out the force touch thing to increase ff or rewind speed.  Works well.  Feels great
- Messed with the usb type c connector.  it's a nice reversable connector BUT not magnetic so with something this light if you catch the cable you'll yank the laptop right off.

Overall I was more impressed than expected.  It feels pretty responsive in my limited testing but that octane score isn't great.  My work laptop gets 29,142.  My acer c720 chromebook from last year is around 10-11K.  So 2 things I would want: Faster cpu option and at least 2 usb type c ports.  If it had those then this would be my favorite laptop by far.  For smaller projects it's probably fine but I could see it being frustrating for compiling larger projects.

Raspberry Pi 2

Local microcenter had the 2's in stock so yeah I picked one up with a case. I haven't looked at my old pi in years so it was a pleasant surprise to see how much has changed. I love this new noobs installer (except it could use some partitioning options). It makes installing multiple OS's with multiboot so easy.

It's almost a usable desktop os. Video is playing during this pic:

Openelec kodi is running really well. Tested 1080p mkv and Dts and dd5.1 pass through. All is working well. Fire tv is still probably the better couch experience for kodi but this is a pretty nice do everything Linux pc.

Here is how the case from Microcenter looks like:

Pebble Watch (original) and initial impressions on Apple watch.

- So I recently picked up an original black Pebble watch to see if I would like wearing a watch again.  I haven't worn a watch for several years now.
- I got it for an amazing $60 new from best buy.  For that price I was willing to take a chance.  It's a lot easier to swallow than $350 :-)
- It's a bit clunky looking bit fits on my wrist fine.  My wife wouldn't be caught dead with the thing on her though.
- I love the week long battery life and the e-ink.  This thing is great for notifications.  I had no idea it didn't even have a speaker.  But it's nice to get that buzz when a notification comes in during a meeting and all I have to do is take a quick glance at my wrist.  This is actually useful IMO.
- There are a ton of apps and watch faces on the pebble store; a lot more than I expected.
- Waterproof.  You can swim with it if you want.
- Fitness tracker apps are only OK and not the most accurate.  I've never been a big believer in fitness trackers anyways.  When I workout I use a fitness specific watch like my tom tom multisport cardio which has a built in optical heart rate sensor, gps, etc.

Wonky bluetooth issues:
- Apparently it interferes with my miccus mini-jack rx a2dp bluetooth audio receiver I use in my car and keeps cutting out my audio every minute or so. It could also be a combination of the hands free in my car (acrua 2007 which seems honda has issues with pebble) and my miccus + pebble. It's really annoying. Lots of other posts with pebble interfering with car hands free and a2dp. The solutions are either to turn off your pebble or the bluetooth on the pebble while in the car. Not using the product is not really a solution IMO. I did test turning off my pebble and everything goes back to normal.
- So I tested my original pebble in my wife's 2013 pilot and the bluetooth works just fine there. No audio drop outs or any quality issues. So apparently it's just my car/bluetooth a2dp receiver :-(.
- UPDATE 5/7/2015:  So I decided to upgrade my miccus to a new iClever Himbox bluetooth 4.0 and I'm happy to say it plays nice with the pebble.  No more audio drop outs.

Still, for $60 I'm still pretty happy with it. I find it more useful on the weekends when going out vs day to day use at the office. I don't like having a watch on my wrist while at the computer. It might be useful on heavy meeting days though.

Apple Watch
Walked into an apple store and gave the watch a try. I went through all the apps and settings and messed with it quite a bit. FYI, you only need an appointment to try one on but they had several that were bolted down to a table you can play with. I had my pebble on while I was doing this. :-)

The demo mode was a bit more limited but at least I got a feel for the basic UI. The controls are a bit confusing at firs since I kept wanting to hit the communications button as home. Force push didn't really blow me away as much as I expected from all that I read. I pushed harder and it vibrated. There was no tricking of the brain or anything (I think I might be confusing this with the new macbook 12" touchpad). The sizes seemed fine to me. No idea about weight since I couldn't pick one up. Wife looked over the big display case with all the models and bands for all of 30 sec and then left the store. She has no interest in this.

I think the most useful thing about a smart watch is the notifications and maybe some of the custom faces. I already have that with my $60 pebble. I think I'll wait for v2. The way I seem to use a smart watch beyond notifications is the info has to be on the watch face. If it's buried in some app that takes more than 1 - 2 interactions then it becomes a job for the phone. That's why I like my weather watch face or like the bitcoin price watch face. I can glance down and get some useful bit of information in addition to the time in < 1 sec.

The apple watch sure is pretty though.

I'm pretty satisfied with my pebble and should hold me over until version 2 of the apple watch is released.