monitors
Fix
Reduce Monitor Scratches With Toothpaste
8:30AM Azadeh Ensha | We already knew that toothpaste boasts all kinds of magical scratch-removal powers , so it’s no surprise that the handy paste can also be put to work improving scratched computer monitors. More »
Fix
DIY Dual Monitor Stand
2:00AM Adam Pash | Reader Elemental Member wanted the functionality of this vertical dual-monitor stand but didn’t want to cough up $US200 to get it, so, naturally, he built one from scratch. More »
Work
MonitorES Updates, Pauses Any Media Player When You Lock Your PC
2:00AM The How-To Geek | Windows only: Tiny, portable utility MonitorES not only turns off the monitor when you lock your PC, it also pauses almost any media player and even sets your Google and Yahoo IM status to away. More »
Work
MonitorES Pauses Media, Turns Off Monitor When You Lock Your PC
2:00AM The How-To Geek | Windows only: Tiny utility MonitorES pauses your media player, turns off your monitor and sets Google Talk to away whenever you lock your PC. More »
Work
Edgeless Enables Mouse Cursor Wrap Around
11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If you’re sporting a wide screen monitor or dual monitors, Edgeless wraps your mouse cursor around one far edge to the other saving you the long haul through the middle. More »
Work
PushMonitOff Links Hot Key Combo To Monitor Power Switch
11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: PushMonitOff is a nifty little stand-alone executable that instantly turns your monitors off with a hot key combination, allowing you to flip them back on when needed. Why would you want to turn off your monitor by keyboard instead of using the the physical monitor button? If you manually turn off the monitor, you can’t awaken the monitors with input from the computer. Once you activate the hot key combo and shut down your monitors with PushMonitorOff, any input from the keyboard or mouse will turn them back on. If you’re sporting multiple monitors, clicking two keys on your keyboard also saves you the reach of flipping two, three, or more buttons to power down without feeling like you’re shutting down a power station. Don’t laugh—when clicking my bank of monitors off, I feel like I should be hearing turbines winding down. The default combination is SHIFT+F1, but can be modified to any combination you like by accessing PushMonitOff settings via the system tray icon. PushMonitOff is a portable and stand-alone freeware application, Windows only. Photo by Lemsipmatt. PushMonitOff [via EliteFreeware] More »
Fix
F.lux Changes Your Screen Brightness By Time Of Day
7:00AM Adam Pash | Windows/Mac/Linux: If you spend your entire day staring into the pit of an eye-burning LCD, free application F.lux may be right up your alley. This free utility adjusts the glow of your monitor—both the brightness and tint—based on the time of day, dimming your monitor later into the evening and tinting the screen colour based on the kind of lighting you employ. To get a better idea of what those changes will look like over the course of the day, F.lux has a preview option that runs through the dimming in a few seconds. The dimming and tinting seems drastic in the preview, but I’m giving this one a test run in real time to see how it really feels. Obviously this app wouldn’t work well for a designer or someone who relies on accurate screen colour (though you could use the Disable for one hour option), but as someone whose lost more than a few battles with insomnia, I do appreciate the idea that coming to the computer at 3am won’t burn my retinas. If you give it a try or have used it in the past, let’s hear how it works for you in the comments. Flux [via Download Squad] More »
Work
Do Widescreen Monitors Hamper Producitivity?
1:40PM Jason Fitzpatrick | The bigger-is-better attitude is rarely debated when discussing monitor sizes, but not everyone is in love with the trend towards widescreen monitors. What if all that width is largely wasted? Rafe Needleman, a contributor at the gadget blog Crave, has this to say about wide-screen monitors: Like reading a page of text or a book, most Web sites are set up with strong vertical orientation. That works for text-based material, since wide lines of text, longer than about 60 characters, become hard to read (the reader has a hard time finding the beginning of the next line). What happens with modern “stretchy” sites or apps that let the user read text in a widescreen format where line lengths get long? Pages get tiring or hard to read. He goes on to note that many arguments supporting widescreen monitors are based on the benefit of putting two applications side by side on the same monitor, but that most monitors have a fairly small number of vertical pixels and that it’s a poor compromise. Certainly the number of tips we’ve shared on how to make your widescreen more functional—making Google reader widescreen and how to micromanage your widescreen, to name a few—shows that widescreen monitors definitely require a little tweaking and adaptation to hit their productivity stride. But are widescreen monitors really as unproductive as Needleman suggests? Sound off in the comments below about your unholy love for or deep frustration with your widescreen monitor. Photo by Timothy J. The Myth of Width: When Wide Screens Don’t Work [Crave] More »
Work
Use Your Playstation Portable As An Additional Windows Monitor
10:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If you’re on the look out for a new trick to teach your PSP, using it as supplemental monitor for your Windows rig is pretty sweet trick indeed. Like many of the other awesome PSP based projects we have suggested here at Lifehacker, this requires a little bit of homebrew magic. The results are quite impressive however. Once you install PSPDisp and tether your PSP to your computer with a USB cable, you can use it as an independent display. Update: several readers have reported that they can tether over WiFi. Thanks guys! Check out the video: More »
Design
