Create a kick ass development and reading environment

Almost since a two years now. I have the luxury of having three monitors available to me at work. Being a graphics developer it was essential to have large and beautiful screens and screen space that I could use effectively.


At work I primarily develop web based applications.
This means I often have an application to run, a development environment and a browser or mail client running simultaneously.

I also sometimes was to debug an application or remote into production and watch server logs without interrupting my current development work flow.

I even watched the E3 press conference while developing at work.

I have often struggled to create a similar environment at home due to the following reasons.

• High cost involved in buying a monitor that Rotates to either portrait or landscape mode.
• These "pivot monitors" usually run at around 250$ for 20 inch.
  
• Not enough table space to keep my laptop and tow other monitors on the same desk

After my recent dissection of my Dell e1505, I decided to fix this problem at home. I initially wanted to buy another monitor to partner my existing one. I have an Acer2016W LCD monitor that works fine. After researching a bit I couldn't find any monitor that would pivot for <265$,>

I decided then that I need to use my current monitor and find a way to match it with either an available LCD mount or a compatible spare.


I found one at dell.com that was adequately priced just 45$, I applied a couple of coupons from dell and got another 10$ off. You can find the mount here


I could find similarly priced options at ebay as well.


After ripping the base off my old monitor, it wasnt as straigt forward as i thought, I mounted the NeoFlex mount onto the screen.

Remaining steps involved reconfiguring my desk space and ordering a KVM switch.
I now have two laptops and three desktops all in my room (yea one windows vista, one ubuntu and a power mac G4). I will write about my room in another blog article.


Finally after downloading older ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 Catalyst driver for my Dell e1505, I got the screen rotation or pivot to work.

An now behold I have visual studio configured exactly as per spec my requirements.





There are several advantages of having portrait mode screen.

• I can now see roughly 90 lines of code apart from a solution explorer contains 3 project fully expanded in visual studio
• Reading PDF files beacomes easy as it feels like a page.
• Browsing forums and reading blogs becomes much easier as i can quickly scan most of the page without having to scroll up and down multiple times.
  

Total Cost of the project 45$. Total satisfaction : priceless

How to get a new laptop ...... from the old one for 50$

Continuing on my last post on fixing my old laptop.

I was buying a laptop for a HP pavillion laptop for my friend. I was looking forward to buy myself a laptop once I ordered his.

I found that the industry is moving towards only a two screen resolutions 1366x768 and 1980x1080.
I started looking for a laptop that matched my needs.


To my surprise I found that a laptop that matched my current 3 year old laptop configuration was selling on dell for $600+ taxes + 50 dollars recycling fee in California. That was turning out to $720.

Click here to check it out.



Moreover I was surprised at the screen resolutions they offered, my old dell laptop has resolution of 1440x900 which seems almost perfect 1600xHHHH would be ideal for me. I could not find a laptop that would actually fit my needs


I was using the new hp laptop i just ordred for my friend and the resolution seemed too low at first. 1080p seemed to high on my external monitor, so no hope on a 15 inch laptop screen.

I decided then to see what I could do with my laptop.

If you have read my post many of you might know I have been doing.

Here are a lit of things I needed to make myself happy.

• New system fan
• New battery as my 3 year old battery couldn't keep my laptop running for more than 10 seconds
• A new keyboard as my keyboard was not really soft after 3 years.

I started a search on by ebay desktop application.
you can get it here and I recommend it for all frequent ebay users.

http://desktop.ebay.com/


Anyway here were the three things I found on ebay ....













Total cost of the operation 10 +38 + 5 = 53 dollars.

And also got a 9 cell battery instead of the current 6 cell.


I would encourage every one to look at fixing their old laptop before investing heavily into a new one.

Remember one important information... Almost anything on the laptop can be replaced and even upgraded.