SideWindow + Konfabulator + iPaq = t3h s3xy…
Sometimes, it’s good to be a geek. Why, because stuff like this is enough to make you happy:
Cute, neh? it’s a combination of some nice technologies: first off, my handy, dandy, trusty iPaq 2215, Glitch. Second, the absolutely fantabulous Konfabulator software, which allows you to set up handy, dandy, and sexy widgets anywhere on your screen, to do all sorts of things, from monitoring hard drive and processor usage, to keeping an eye on traffic in your area, checking your email, or making random annoying noises. Fun stuff. The last ingredient in this geek cocktail is SideWindow, a new bit of software that actually extends your main Windows desktop onto the screen of your PDA, turning it into an auxiliary display where you can drag anything from your main computer screen. So, I plugged Glitch in, turned SideWindow on, brought up Konfabulator and a few widgets, dragged them over to Glitch’s new display, and voila: an amazing-looking auxiliary display that provides me with remote control of my music, a running tally of my RAM, HDD, and CPU usage, weather and time/date info, email status, and even RSS feeds. And all this is always visible, no matter what I’m doing n my main screen, be it programming, working in Photoshop, or playing WoW. Tre sexy.
I also set it up at work:
Mostly the same widgets, although I switched out the Winamp remote control and a couple of the HDD monitoring widgets and substituted one that automatically pings whatever sites I tell it to and lets me know if any of them are unreachable (great for keeping track of client’s websites and making sure you know if they’re down), and another one that can keep multiple bits of text from the clipboad handy, which is a great tool when programming. Here’s some phonecam pics of what the setup looks like over at work. Nice and hackerly. 
August 4th, 2005 at 9:21 am
Howdy Folks!
I currently run a similar setup (just exchange the iPaq with a Viewsonic :-).
The only things I am currently missing are:
* distinct background bitmap for my “auxilary display”
* After reboot, all the widgets forget their place and pop up on the main display.
Any ideas?
Best
J
August 4th, 2005 at 10:20 am
Hey there!
I’ve had similar issues, but I’ve sort of learned to live with them. If there’s a way to set up a separate background, I don’t know it. Since SideWindow ‘extends’ your current desktop, rather than creating a separate monitor, I don’t think that it is possible ot have a separate background. One thing you could try is creating a new background image that’s twice as wide as the one you’re using, and in the first half of this extra long image, put your current background, and in the top left corner of the second half of the image, put the background you want to appear on your PDA. Set that image as your background in ‘Tile’ mode and it *should* show up correctly in both places.
As for the widgets forgetting their place, that happened to me too. In my case, I don’t use Konfabulator at all on my main desktop, so what I did was that I turned off the option in Konfabulator so it won’t turn on automatically when I reboot. Then, when I connect the PDA, I turn on Sidewindow, and *after* sideWindow is on, I turn on Konfabulator and the widgets appear on the PDA screen. The trick is to remember to, when you’re going to remove the PDA, to turn off Konfabulator *first*, while the widgets are still on the PDA, that way it remembers their locations on the PDA, and afterwards turn off SideWindow, before unplugging the PDA.
If you use widgets on your main desktop as well, however, then I don’t know how to fix it, since it always moves the widgets back to the main screen when you unplug the pda and doesn’t move them back automatically. The only way I’ve gotten it to work is to make sure that all my widgets are only on the PDA, and to make sure that I turn Konfabulaor off first before unplugging the PDA.
Hope that helps!