OPINION • SEPTEMBER 27 , 2000
Road Hog: Home Sweet Hog [Page 3 of 3]

The Display to Go adds true dual-monitor operation though, in resolutions up to 1,280 x 1,024 in millions of colors, including a number of resolutions for letterbox displays. The top letterbox resolution of 1,600 x 1,024 is only available in thousands of colors, but I have no doubt that the cries of Road Hogs everywhere will induce them to up their VRAM to 8 MB and beyond at some point. In the meantime, you're good to go for the Cinema Display on your Hog today, for only $299. And yes, you can get it on sale right now at MCE for only $279.

Road Hog Tip of the Week
I use my Road Hog to do presentations just about every week, and the odd desktop mirroring has occasionally gotten on my nerves. What gets shown on the projector is my desktop, but it's the part of my desktop that sits to the left of my laptop's display. I could move it to the right side, but if you've read many of these columns, you know I tend to have everything in my life leaning left. I don't have any particular beef with any Road Hog whose monitors dress right, although I'm reminded of my Aunt Fanny's reply to the observation that "it takes all kinds." "No, honey, it HAS all kinds. It don't TAKE all kinds, it just HAS all kinds."

There's no great crisis from having a monitor on one side or the other, really, but it can be annoying. Aside from the disorientation of looking at the laptop screen in front of me and seeing nothing useful, the fact is that some projection monitors just aren't all that sharp. And I'm not doing PowerPoint nonsense, either; I'm doing real work, so being able to read all the numbers would be very helpful.

But, in keeping with the true spirit of unity that I seek to engender here, I'll share a tip that I stumbled across this week in my quest to do something about that monitor hanging off to one side or the other. I opened up the monitors control panel to see what I could do. You know the one I'm talking about—the control panel that features two little icons of the monitors, so that you can drag them to configure their relationship to each other. (Don't bother looking for it if you don't have two monitors hooked up: Macintoshes are smart enough to only offer this choice if you actually have it.)

Well, klutz that I am, I accidentally dropped one monitor icon on top of the other. Lo and behold, it stuck there, and I was able to have the exact same display on my laptop screen and the projector screen! There really were two monitors, though, and some things that looked like they were right next to each other actually weren't, a problem easily remedied by restarting. Some of you Road Hogs may have known this all along, but it was news to me, and darn good news at that.

So the Tip of the Week is also the Lesson of the Week, that, in the end, there is no right; there is no left. There is only One, and its name is Road Hog. Go in peace to love and serve the Hog.

Tim Wilson, Man About Town™, is the Producer of Plug-in Central, one of the Core Connections here at Digital Media Net. Saddle up and write him at twilson@digitalmedianet.com.

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