First steps with the lab TV

Last week saw the installation of a large LCD monitor in my teaching lab, and now that finals and grading are winding down and research is gearing up, it’s time to start tinkering with how best to use this beast. In the interest of sharing and recording the various approaches I try, I’ll be blogging it all right here using the “LCDelight” tag. Below is a recap of my first week with the setup, including a description of what has worked well and what has not.

The first issue came up while the guys were mounting the panel to the wall bracket. They had the bracket centered on the monitor such that it would hang at a good height, but this would not allow the VGA cable to fit because of a cross-support on the bracket. The guys made an adjustment and all was well – the monitor hangs just a bit lower, but still fine.

Once they hung it on the wall, I plugged in the AppleTV and… no joy, or at least no networking. It said something to the effect that the AppleTV does not support “enterprise security”, meaning it could not log on to our fancy campus wi-fi network. Big problem. So the short-term solution I’ve come up with is to plug in an old AirPort Express and create a rogue wireless network for the AppleTV and my iPad when I’m in the lab (shh, don’t tell Information Services). This works perfectly, but means I need to manually change wireless networks when I want to AirPlay to the TV – not a big deal, but not 100% ideal.

As far as AirPlay goes, it is all that and a bag of chips. Really. A simple flick in multi-tasking mode on the iPad and a tap to switch it on, and you’re suddenly sharing any app on your iPad to the big screen. This is one of those features that seems so natural and obvious once you use it, you wonder how you could have gone without it, or how you could go back to being tethered with a cable.

Even though I don’t imagine myself presenting a lot of slides in the lab, I wanted to try Keynote with the iPad and TV to see how it looks and works. There is a choice of presentation modes in a Keynote slide show, including a presenter mode that displays notes and the next slide on the iPad while keeping the output on the TV clean. I was surprised and disappointed that I can’t present a slide show with a resolution native to the TV (1920 x 1080). I tried to create one on my Mac and open it on the iPad, but Keynote on the iPad complains and resamples it to fit its own screen.