Had a little problem when trying to use an external monitor. Somehow I got in to mirror mode, and when I did I lost picture on both the laptop and the external monitor. Found a great fix.

Mirror Displays

It’s a little app you drag onto your control bar. Basically it allows you to switch in and out of mirror mode, without hunting through menus. I use it by placing my mouse over the button, then plugging in the second monitor. If things go goofy, I just click the trackpad button and it tends to right itself. Nice.

As I mentioned before, one of the first things I did with my Hackbook was to downgrade the BIOS so I could use 3rd party batteries. Well, I’m happy to say the battery I ordered from MyDigitalDiscounts works great with my laptop. I haven’t tested the duration yet, but plan to on an upcoming 6 hour flight. Hopefully I’ll get to watch at least three films before the juice dies -supposedly the 8-cell battery can provide up to 10.5 hours (YMMV). I’ll report back in another week or so with some real world numbers and I can’t stand reading benchmarks…

One thing to note on this battery – it does give you laptop a high heel effect. The battery is so large that it rakes the entire unit. It actually makes it more comfortable to type on – and the battery has anti-skid pads on it so it should stay put on your desk or tray table. I am a little concerned because the screen won’t tilt as far back as it does with the stock battery. On a desk or lap, that’s no problem – I am a bit wary about the tray table though. We’ll see. I can always prop up the front on a book.

So I’ve been prepping my Hackbook for a long flight. I ripped some movies with Handbrake using the Apple TV settings (figured I might go media server in the future). When I played them back however, the video and audio stuttered. I thought it might have been because I was playing the files off of the SDHC card, but moving them to the SSD didn’t help. I didn’t really wanted to re-encode a bunch of movies so I hit the MyDellMini forums for some suggestions. The answer – Plex.

This is a great little piece of software whose primary goal is to turn your mac into a really nice media server you can operate with the little remote doohickey that comes with iMacs. But as a benefit for the Hackbook it makes video playback very smoothly. Plus it has some nice interface features. The setup can be a little quirky, but they have a nice forum you can get answers from.

Plex – works great.