Vimeo (great quality)

YouTube (not so nice quality)

QuickTime (great quality)

Sources of the files shown in the video.

load/createdb.sh

#!/bin/bash
STEP=300

rrdtool create load.rrd --step $STEP \
DS:load:GAUGE:600:0:U \
RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:2160 \
RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:5:2016 \
RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:15:2880 \
RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:60:8760

load/load.sh

#!/bin/bash
load=`cat /proc/loadavg | awk -F' '  '{print $1}'`
/usr/bin/rrdtool update /srv/www/statistik/load/load.rrd N:$load

create_load.sh

nice -n 19 /usr/bin/rrdtool graph /srv/www/statistik/load/loadg.png -a PNG -b 1024 --start -126900 \
-l 0 -u 10 -t "Load" --vertical-label "Current load" -w 600 -h 300 \
--color BACK#1e1816 --color FONT#ffffff --color CANVAS#1e1816 --color GRID#4E403C --color MGRID#4e403c --color FRAME#EEEEEE --color ARROW#4E403C \
--border 0  --grid-dash 1:0 --dynamic-labels --x-grid HOUR:8:DAY:1:DAY:1:43200:%A \
DEF:g1=/srv/www/statistik/load/load.rrd:load:AVERAGE \
LINE2:g1#ff3d00:"Load" \

/etc/crontab (last 2 lines)

*/2 * * * *	root	/srv/www/statistik/load/load.sh
*/2 * * * *	root	/srv/www/statistik/create_load.sh 1>/dev/null

If you are wondering why the load is that high; it’s a QuadCore Xeon processor with HyperThreading – 4 threads are 24/7 crunching SETI@home files

Graph after several hours

No problem here! I just had to move one APE from the kitchen into the dorm room, where we have a LAN socket and also a power socket next to it.

The simplicity behind the setup is to do something that sounds (at least in my ears) a bit “uncommon”. You have to create 3 separate WiFi networks, all with the same SSID, password (WPA2 recommended!) & channel. Then, connect each station to the LAN sockets and voilá – it works!

Here’s are some screenshots of my setup:

At the “wireless” tab, be sure to have the same settings on all your access points!

On the internet section – select “Bridge mode”…

I prefer static local IPs for this kind of device

That’s all! I tested it and got the max. speed out of the DSL connection throughout the whole house!

Many thanks to @sl1974 for pointing my nose onto page 40 of this document!

While Stefan takes it slowly with moving around stuff (well until this time), I have a fable for moving stuff around and also moving between rooms. You may wonder why I plan to move my office again. The answer is a bit delicate and I’ll try to explain it without sounding rude (what I am NOT).

It’s pretty easy: I work at home and our house was build in a new housing estate with the result that we have a lot gardens here. My office is (currently) facing our garden, and also the neighbors one. When it turns to spring and summer, neighbors put their kids (and friends of them) into their garden which increases the noise level dramatically. As mentioned before – this is not meant rude – I just prefer to sit in a silent room and rarely listen to music while working. As this is a housing estate that’s my own fault – I could rent a small office in a technology park, but that’s kinda expensive. So I spend some days on measuring the temperatures of the current office and the attic. The results are kinda funny: At 3pm, it’s around 24.7°C in my current office with the Mac Pro running + 2 HP screens creating heat. The attic is at 23.1°C – I was a bit surprised – sure, the Mac Pro will add some heat to the attic but I think it’s not as worse as I thought before, looking at the thermometers.

But back to the planning. I plan to use the following hardware in the attic office (8.0beta) (will not buy new stuff).

- Mac Pro Quad Core 2.8 2010 model / 16GB RAM / SSD
- ATI Radeon 5770 – 3x HP Z24r 24″ screens
- GeForce GT120 – 2x Samsung 22″ screens

† As long as she survives †
- MacBook Alu 2008 13″ / 4GB RAM / SSD

And my wifes stuff
- iMac 21.5″ i3 / 12GB RAM
- MacBook White

I went through the process of testing a lot different variations of desktops. Even buying new VIKA AMON or GALANT series was planned. The best option would be to get 2x GALANT with some additional stuff from this series, but that would be expensive – ~900€ + transportation home (too huge for our car ). So we planned again using the IKEA Home Planner tool (2010 version – not available from IKEA directly – but Google is your friend ) and this is the result:

Heat
In the past I had complained about the heat at the attic sometimes – that was the main reason I moved downstairs into the current home office 2 years ago, but because of already mentioned reasons, I will get used to it. In the end, it’s not much warmer there. If it get’s way too warm, I need to escape with a MacBook or finally get a cooling unit (which is more expensive in using (power costs) than buying it initially.

Lines
The good thing is, that I have a lot great connections upstairs. Ok – I don’t need ISDN anymore and Sat is meanwhile tunneled via the Network, too, but to be able to use 2-3 lines of GBit/s speed is always welcome

Storage
Of course – no overhauling talk without also highlighting this topic. Currently, and I say currently, because it’s a kinda imperfect situation, but it works, I’m running a Mac mini in the basement, pimped to 8GB of RAM and 80GB Intel SSD. I’ve installed OS X SL Server on this particular machine and connected 2x Onnto boxes (4x 1TB + 4x 1.5TB) to it. The speeds are “ok” – up to 60MB/s via the GBit network and I would not complain if playing a media file (even a simple MP3 files) would work without interrupting while I just browse on the same RAID device. That it kinda annoying. I’ve tried to sell the components of my Filer, but the truth is, that this stuff seems to be too special – not one single person is interested in my LSI/Intel SASUC8i, 24GB ECC RAM or my AMD 245e CPU. I will let it run for the next few days, but when I can’t sell it, the idea of a dedicated filer will come back into my mind – and believe me – I currently have WAY to much HDs laying around (somewhat of 25TB). So – let’s see what will happen here The pro with the lines is, that I could theoretically use up to 2Gbps between the basement and the Mac Pro if I connect it directly.

Otaku
Started this hobby in the mid of last year before I paused for several years. Meanwhile more than 20 figures made their way to our Home Office (it’s a mixed collection of my wifes figures & wall scrolls and mine). Also, a bunch of wall scrolls are hanging in the current office. OF COURSE, all this stuff will move to the new office

Screens / Cinewall
Looks like a lot people liked the “cinewall” I had installed, got some “shocked” feedback when I said “Hey, I can live fine with only one screen”. Oh me fool Luckily I haven’t sold any display – I love multiple screens – it’s somewhat handy when coding on complicated functions and modules for ctrltweet. So, yes – the cinewall will be back (and better) in the new office. I will upgrade my desk to 5 screens. Yes. 5 2x 22″ will make it to the left and right (onto the brown/black Expedits you can see on the graphic above).

That’s it for the plans – we already bought some nice stuff (like a 3rd 4×2 Expedit) today and the main movement day will be tomorrow. I will keep you updated!

Ciao
Dennis

nohup
What sounds a bit familiar dutch to me is a command that puts a process into the system background and not your users background. I think screen is based on it.

Example:

$ VirtualBox -s "Nyu" &

This would launch the VM “Nyu” and when you press Enter one time, you will be back in the terminal while it’s running. The “&” at the end of the line does this, it put’s the process into the background.

What I had not in mind was to put it into the session’s background. Once I close the terminal, the VM will be shut down (and maybe damaged).

The right way:

$ nohup VirtualBox -s "Nyu" &

This will put your VM process into the system’s background. There’s no need to run your session anymore, you can close it and the VM will continue running.

Another option is to use the tool “screen” which is available on a lot UNIX or Linux systems. Screen is fine for processes you want to watch. I personally use it for irssi (IRC chat client, based on the console). You can detach it and come back later, attach the console and you see all what happend when you were away.

HD serial numbers
ZFS is great. It’s very stable, fast and secure. But – what will happen is that HDs will fail. It’s not a question of “if”, but “when”. Yesterday, @gotteshand asked me how I know which HD is broken, especially when I run more than one of the same HDs. A very good question – but there’s a solution.

What you need:
1. smartctl must be installed

# apt-get install smartmontools

2. you need the information of the format command

root@karinka:/export/home/dieta# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c0t0d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@0,0
       1. c0t1d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@1,0
       2. c0t2d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@2,0
       3. c0t3d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@3,0
       4. c0t4d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@4,0
       5. c0t5d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@5,0
       6. c2d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci-ide@14,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
       7. c3t0d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1002,5978@2/pci1000,3140@0/sd@0,0
       8. c3t1d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1002,5978@2/pci1000,3140@0/sd@1,0
       9. c3t2d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1002,5978@2/pci1000,3140@0/sd@2,0
      10. c3t3d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1002,5978@2/pci1000,3140@0/sd@3,0
      11. c3t4d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1002,5978@2/pci1000,3140@0/sd@4,0
      12. c3t5d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1002,5978@2/pci1000,3140@0/sd@5,0
      13. c3t6d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1002,5978@2/pci1000,3140@0/sd@6,0
      14. c3t7d0 
          /pci@0,0/pci1002,5978@2/pci1000,3140@0/sd@7,0

(Press CTRL+C to leave the command)

3. This little script:

#!/bin/bash
smartctl -a -d sat,12 /dev/rdsk/$1

Save it as hddsn.sh and set it to a+x:

# chmod a+x hddsn.sh

4. Run it!

# ./hddsn.sh c0t0d0
smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [i386-pc-solaris2.11] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     Hitachi HDS721010CLA332
Serial Number:    JPxxxxHQxHDxxx
[...]

You will receive a real bunch with a lot information about your drive, but the serial number is the one you want to know. Do this for ALL you drives and note them like this:

c0t0d0 | RAIDz1 storage | Hitachi 1TB | JPxxxxHQxHDxxx

and maybe shut down the server, remove your HDs ONE BY ONE (remove, note the serial, print it with a dymo, tape it on the back that you see and put the HD back to the case, NOW, go on with the next!). Be careful NOT to mix the SATA cables. This will also help you identify a broken HD – it’s pretty easy to replace them knowing which one is the right one.

DMG to ISO
When you are a Mac user, you know DMG’s. Ripping a DVD or CD for installing a software on your VirtualBox using the harddisk utility creates a DMG by default – maybe you have older images in that format.

There’s a little command line that helps your to convert DMG’s to ISO’s.

$ hdiutil convert debian-netinstall.dmg -format UDTO -o debian-netinstall.iso
$ mv debian-netinstall.iso.cdr debian-netinstall.iso

I’ve no idea why it creates a .iso.cdr first, but the renaming works fine, and so you are able to push it to your server to install it virtually.

High Windows CPU load in VirtualBox
A few days ago, I’ve explained how to quickly migrate VMware Fusion VMs to VirtualBox. This works pretty fine for Linux/Debian, but not with Windows. I was sick of having a Windows XP on my Mac Pro and also one on my MacBook, so I decided to create a VM on the Nexenta server that I could also access from on the road.

I’ve followed my own steps to move the VMware Fusion installation to VirtualBox, but I noticed that the core it was running on (1) was creating full load. I thought: Ok – maybe Windows XP is not a good idea – will check it later – and stopped working on that issue.

A few days later, I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 in a VM, being surprised by the low load it creates. Running 3x Debian VMs + 1x Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 created a load of just 5-6%. That’s amazing for a small DualCore 2.9GHz 45W AMD X2 245e CPU.

I then started to install Windows XP SP3 today fresh – from the ISO I’ve ripped from my original CD. It works fine! Installation increased the load for a short time, but once it’s booted and has not much to do, it will drop down to 6-7% of CPU usage (the Nexenta, not the Windows XP itself ).

To be able to access it easily, I enabled Remote Access on this virtual machine which is a bit snappier than the VirtualBox (X-forwarded) interface.

Resumé: Install Windows VMs from scratch on VirtualBox. It’s nice fast here and welcome, even if I just need it for IE test & some rare Office stuff.

- Mac Pro “Kurumi” in the office
- iMac “Indy” in the office
- MacBook “Dawn” – everywhere
- MacBook “Hammy” – everywhere
- Mac mini “Belldandy” in the living room
- Mac mini “Saki” in the office

As both Mac minis are “just” used to playback videos (from the Nexenta server), TV (Sat) & Radio (Sat), I don’t think a backup makes any sense. So – still 4 Macs to backup left. On Debian it was a hassle to create new partitions now and oh – the backup pool (4x 1.5TB RAIDz1) was already created and data is stored onto.

Luckily, ZFS is a fantastic filesystem. I simply create new pools below the mainpool.

zfs create backup/tm-kurumi

Done! This took just a few seconds. Now I want that Time Machine does not fill up the complete space of the backup pool, so I set a quota. 500GB sounds reasonable, since I save most of my stuff directly to my server and my Mac Pro’s OS drive is a 240GB SSD.

zfs set quota=500G backup/tm-kurumi

Let’s see if it works:

root@karinka:/var/spool/cron/crontabs# zfs list
NAME                     USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
backup                  1.15T  2.85T   578G  /backup
backup/tm-kurumi         65K   500G   65K  /backup/tm-kurumi

Looks good! The next step is to assign the correct rights to this volume, so that the user can really use it when logging on to it via AFP and later using Time Machine.

chmod 770 -R /backup/tm-kurumi
chown -R dieta /backup/tm-kurumi

“dieta” is my username to access the AFP network.

Last step on the UNIX side is to make this volume “supported”. In the past a lot people were working with the following command on the CLIENT

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

but this is a bad idea – you need to redo this on every single client. There’s an easier option (especially from admins point of view) to make a volume supported from the server’s side.

touch /backup/tm-kurumi/.com.apple.timemachine.supported

That’s all you need to do (sure, per volume, but it saves you to touch others Macs from the terminal). Now this is a fully supported Time Machine volume Oh! It seems like this also works for Debian & other systems and not only Nexenta/OpenSolaris, so give it a try!

To share it, we need to add a single line (per Time Machine) to the /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default:

/backup/tm-kurumi       "Time Machine Kurumi"   allow:dieta cnidscheme:dbd options:tm

Maybe you want to restart netatalk now using

/etc/init.d/netatalk restart

But I found out, that’s it’s not needed. AFP loads the netatalk config files when you log on to the server via Finder.

At last, connect to your server via AFP and log in to the new volume and them tell Time Machine to use this volume. Here’s a screenshot how it looks when the backup is done

Hope you enjoyed this post and have learned some stuff!

By the way: did it for all 4 Macs and this looks like this on Nexenta:

Cat-scan

I was doing support for several years in the past, and so I know about the importance to especially let displays join the room temperature. This means: I will post “on desk” photos later into this post. So please stay tuned!

UPDATE

Unfortunately, the Radeon 5770 in my Mac Pro does not support more than 2x DVI the same time. I’m still waiting for the two Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cables that I’ve ordered on Friday. They were sent out today – with Hermes – urgs. So hopefully anytime tomorrow they will be here and then I’m ready to boost all 3 screens

Those screens are AWESOME – showing me a very homogeneous picture. Like the 30″ ACD they also have an anti-glare coating, but by far not that intensive, so you don’t really recognize it.

The brightness is very high, delivered with 90%, reduced to 40% and now to 20% they are showing more than enough brightness to work with them. Also contrast should be reduced as mentioned by @StefanDidak via Twitter. I will take a look at this later.

For 360€/display, it’s a fantastic deal that HP offers. They are capable to be put into Pivot mode (90° rotated) and OS X offers an option to rotate the screen content. In my mind that’s a bit too high. It feels like watching upwards on a skyscraper – nothing I want to use Nether the less I should mention that the S-IPS panel is great! Having one screen rotated you can clearly read and see the content on the screen from bottom to top. I tried that with my old Samsung 22″ (226BW) a year ago and this was just ugly – well, that’s one of the differences between a TN and a S-IPS panel.

1920×1200 is a good size. The pixels on this 24″ screen are of course bigger than on the 27″ Apple Cinema Display, but I think, for me – it’s the better deal!

I zapped into a bit 1080p material and it’s great to see. The screen is very responsive and watching a movie works fine. But this is in my mind a domain of a glossy screen – the HPs are non-glossy and so, of course the blacks are not as black as on glossy screens. That’s why we have a glossy 42″ Panasonic Plasma in the living room – this one is made for watching movies while this workstation here is made for work. Fine to watch an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” when having lunch, but nothing for a blockbuster movie. And that’s fine for me!

The feet of the displays are very sturdy and heavy. Shaking the desk a bit doesn’t make them shake and so you don’t feel sea-sick when writing a blog post

I’m using 8 of the 12 USB ports. Why? Because each display has 2 where the ports are and 2 on the left side. Having 3 stacked into a triple screen setup blocks 2x 2 USB ports on the sides. I’ve connected all 3 displays via USB to the Mac Pro and connected the keyboard, mouse, webcam and the UPS to the displays – and still have a lot free ports for my card reader, headset etc pp.

More tomorrow – when hopefully the cables were delivered.

On Thursday, I should have been able to grab my shiny new iMac “Mid 2010″ edition from the Apple Store CentrO. I’ve got the UPS tracking code from AppleCare in Cork, IE and saw that it arrived on time. But to be sure, I thought: better give them a call. They guy on the hotline was not really in the mood the check it for me. He said “If the UPS tracking says it’s here, you can pick it up – no worries!”. Ok.

So we went to the Store again, happy to close this chapter. Couldn’t be that hard to simply get a machine that you paid for a few months ago, right? Let me take a look on how the iMac should be configured… ah yes:

iMac “Mid 2010″ 27″
2.93GHz i7 CPU
4GB of RAM (upgraded to 8GB as promised)
256GB Apple SSD (maybe most important)
1TB HD

When we arrived and went to the Store, I directly asked for the Store Manager (name of course hidden here). Turns out that he was there and came to me, with the Genius/Technician who supports my case. Both were very friendly, but – the Manager told me that (again) something went wrong. Eeeeeek! Seriously!? It was not a bad joke as I thought in the very first moment. No – they really had forgotten to built in the SSD. The had already booked the 675€ upgrade price from my VISA. Uncool. Really. Was a bit upset and so we sat down and talked about options. He mentioned that I had asked to replace the iMac with a Mac Pro last week. That time he said that this is not possible, because everything was already in process. But now, and he also seemed a bit annoyed by AppleCare, he asked me if I want to get a Mac Pro and take it home directly. I answered that I need some time to think about it and so Soja and I went out of the Store, deeply disappointed and went to the “Coca-Cola Oase”, a huge round hall in the front of the CentrO. to get some food. (No – I’m still “dry” of Coke – and went with a Sprite – uargs :S).

After getting new jackets for the upcoming (or already arrived) pretty cold winter, we went back to the Store and the Genius said: “We will give you the Quad Core Mac Pro with a 27″ Cinema Display” – just as we had discussed before. Great. It was all on stock. Carrying this beast to the car was horrible. Uh.. very heavy and of course, there are no caddies in the CentrO.

The Mac Pro has the following configuration:

Mac Pro “2010″
Quad Core 2.8GHz Intel Xeon CPU (1)
3GB RAM
1TB HD
SuperDrive
ATI Radeon 5770

Nice base to start with. I was really hard thinking if I should get the 8 Core model instead, but those CPUs are just clocked to 2.4GHz, which makes it for my daily work slower than the Quad core. They don’t had the 3.2GHz Quad model on stock and I really wanted to complete this “task” that day.

Meanwhile I had already ordered some hardware to “max it out”.

240GB OCZ Agility2 E SSD (275MB/s read, 285MB/s write)
16GB of RAM from a contact on Twitter

Friday, I started using the Mac Pro by trying to get my iMac content to the Mac Pro. I thought: Well, I’ve a TimeMachine backup on the OS X Server, can’t be that hard to move it back to the Mac Pro. It was In the end I used the Migration-Assitant to copy over my stuff. Bad idea, because my account was already in use – so I decided to use my MacBook for the work and wait for today when the SSD should arrive for a fresh install.

But there’s one thing that didn’t fit into my plan – headache. Yes – again. I don’t know why, but using the Apple Cinema Display with 27″ makes my head feel bad. After 4h’s I was ready to switch the Mac Pro off and call the Store. They already had a complicated case with mine. The Store Manager asked my to wait until he would come back to me.

At 21:55 CET, a few minutes before the close, I received an eMail from the Genius. No problem! I can bring the display back. He also mentioned that my DDR3-1066 RAM from my old iMac is still in the Store and I can pick this up, too.

Speaking of RAM/memory, however you call it – I had ordered 4x4GB of RAM for the iMac so that it’s here when the iMac should arrive. Of course this will NOT fit into a Mac Pro, but I found a very useful job for those RAMs. I upgraded Soja’s “Indy” to 12GB of RAM and my MacBook to 8GB. Putting it into the MacBook was more like “let’s see if it boots”, because I had read that this MacBook “Late 2008″ does support up to 6GB of RAM (which is a strange number – there are no 3GB RAMs and it has just 2 slots – hmm). I can herewith say, that the 2x4GB DDR3-1333 MHz RAM works great in my MacBook! I’ve used a VM to see if it really uses more than 6GB – and it does.

Soja is now also really happy, because 4GB is around about nothing for an iMac, today. I also had set the bootdrive to the right one. A known “bug” in the current iMacs – if you are not sure it’s selected, your iMac will take some time to find the right drive which will push your boot back about 10-20 seconds. Simply go to:

System Preferences -> Startup Disk and make sure your volume is highlighted (regular settings: in blue)

When the display will be brought back today, you may wonder what I will use as a display for the Mac Pro. Good one! I will use 2 of my old Samsung 226BW screens for the next days (already set it up this morning). But for future expansion, I ordered 3x HP ZR24w displays.

Yeah – seriously! Those are extreme cheap if you see that they are S-IPS panels with DisplayPort, DVI-D & VGA. They also come with integrated USB Hubs (1x in = 4x out / 2 on the bottom, 2 on the side). DisplayPort is VERY good, because my ATI Radeon 5770 in the Mac Pro has 2x Mini DisplayPort and 1x DVI (DualLink), so I also bought 2x Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cables. This stuff should arrive around Tuesday/Wednesday. I will keep you updated on this

For the price of ONE 27″ Apple Cinema Display, I was able to buy all 3 of them + the cables – and still could spend 10€ on anything else That’s amazing.

Something that is still a bit annoying is the bluetooth. When using the (delivered) Magic Mouse with the Mac Pro 2010, it stucks. I now have replaced the large keyboard with the wired small one and attached an older Mighty Mouse to this. This works, but – the cable is a BIT annoying

While I wrote this post, DHL has delivered the SSD – photos:

Hmm – cool Mac compatibility logo on it. When we return from our “taking back” CentrO. visit today, I will put it into the Mac Pro and give it a fresh install. Very excited for the speed.

PS. You may ask “what happens to your iMac 27″ i3 you got last week?” – Answer is: it was a temp iMac – I will return it. i3 is nice for normal tasks, but VMs on it is a nightmare

That gives me the chance to directly blog what I’m downloading from the different developers websites. Here’s a list of the software I would go nuts without having them

Software

• MobileMe $/Y
• Growl & Growl Mail
• WideMail
• Transmit $
• TextMate $
• Adium
• Echofon /$
• QuickSilver
• ScreenFlow $
• TotalFinder $
• HyperDock D$
• Gruml
• Dropbox /$
• iStat Menu $
• 1Password $
• Knox $
• SwitchResX $
• LayersApp $
• Rucksack $
• Aperture $
• iWork ’09 $
• VLC
• VMWare Fusion $
• KeyRemap4MacBook

$ = Shareware
/$ = Costs or limited free Version
$/Y = Costs per year
D$ = Donationware

Safari Extensions

• Safari AdBlock
• Safari Restore
• Facebook Cleaner
• Reload Button

Dashboard Widgets

• Delivery Status
• UIN-Checker

I think I’ve forgot some Apps, but I will update the list as soon as I remember

And no, they don’t use the Matrox solution that centers your popup windows in the middle between 2 displays. That’s a bad one in my mind. No. This particular person is using an USB2DVI connector to drive the 2 additional displays (while one is connected via DVI).

Hmm… Until last week I was using a Mac Mini that was sitting on the little rack next to my desk to drive the 3rd display and TelePort does the rest of the trick to simulate 3 displays attached to my iMac. So – of course – I couldn’t resist and ordered a USB2DVI adapter via Amazon from Winstar. I maybe should mention that I need the Mac Mini in the basement, because I started to dig into Mac OS X Server carefully (thanks to a fantastic Lynda.com videotutorial). Anyway. Here comes the Quick Review.

It all arrived in this little box.

Inside the box – another box. Ok

Inside this box – you guess it – another box! Felt like a Matrushka game (you know these russian figurines you can stack together).

Finally – the adapter and a few adapters for HDMI & VGA from DVI, a USB cable and a driver CD.

The USB2DVI adapter itself is very small. Just a wide as a regular DVI-I port.

Luckily, there’s no power supply needed to drive the adapter. It’s bus-powered. That’s pretty good, I’ve connected already dozens of power supplies to my hardware in the house :S There should be a universal one you can use to connect MORE than just one device to.

The installation has a little trap: They deliver a SMALL CD (6 or 5cm, not sure) with the drivers. Uhm.. not a good idea to put this small CD into your slot-in drive I have an external LG USB2 DVD-Writer that helped me out. I guess there are drivers somewhere on the web, but I couldn’t find them fast enough, so I just got the external drive from the basement.

On the CD there are some folders and a bunch of files within the “MAC” (ah! Wrong spelled guys! A Mac != MAC) folder – I grabbed the one with the highest version number and installed it. Then – reboot. Of course, the display was already connected.

When booting into the system, the display was already recognized by OS X. Just had to move it around in the System Preferences.

The right display is connected to the Mini DisplayPort to DVI Apple adapter, while the left display is connected to the USB2DVI connector.

Using the adapter
Just connected you start moving windows to this new screen and you see the only issue that adapter has: It lags a bit. Of course it does, a DVI signal needs at least 400MBit/s to work good, USB2 has a “theroetical” bandwith of 480MBit/s, it seems like it’s not enough. I was aware of this before and so I knew it will lag a bit. It’s ok to use this display for more static stuff like surfing, your Twitter client, your iTunes player, Mailclient, messenger or whatever you want that does not have to respond superfast.

Resumé
This extension is great for attaching palettes onto it or “background task tools”. Don’t use it as a Photoshop editing screen or Final Cut Videoflow screen – you will be unhappy with the result. I think it’s made for those crazy brooker guys with a bunch of displays to watch the stock market in real-time.

Costs
It’s amazing unexpensive in my mind. This adapter here just costs 54€. Of course it depends (like all IT stuff) on the brand and version you choose.

Compatibility
Drivers are available (on the little CD) for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Max. screen resolution
This depends on the version you choose. Looking a bit into the future, I’ve selected a model that supports up to 1920×1200, even if my 22″ displays are just 1680×1050.

Be careful when buying such an adapter to select the one that fits to your screen resolution

Own usage
I will use (and keep) it as “left” screen. Connected is one of my old 22″ Samsung displays (that sadly has some cracks in the plastic panel).

I already moved stuff onto that makes sense in my mind on this kind of display/connection:
- Echofon (Twitter client)
- Adium (Messenger)
- iTunes
- Gruml (RSS Reader)
… and then the screen was full Oops!

My desk now looks like this:

You can mark areas, if you have any question about stuff you see on this photo, don’t hesitate to use this function (it works like the flickr stuff!)

I though it’s time for a new panorama shot

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