The Hopp Stop

• Cut the Rope, a very fun iPhone/iPad game, has a free holiday version out. Recommended.
• Marco the Tumblr gets to use an enduring rotary phone with his Verizon FiOS connection.
• Spencer Hall with another hilarious column at Every Day Should Be Saturday, this time centering on the West Virginia hiring of a football coach-in-waiting.
• The Times has been running a series over the last week on the 1960 plane collision over NYC that resulted in a plane crashing in Park Slope. This article on the state of the neighborhood in 1960 is a great read if you’ve seen the vitality of the neighborhood today, or are interested in urban planning and post-war urban decay in US cities. It’s remarkable how much of urban decay was caused by a combination of lending practices (encouraging a move to suburbs by middle-class whites) and racism.
• This post, another in the Park Slope crash series, has a great 1960/2010 matched photo of the wreckage.
• I love the National, so I really enjoyed this Pitchfork interview with Aaron Dressner, one of the musical forces behind the band.

• Earlier this year GQ magazine ran a great oral history of the making of GoodFellas. Lots of fun tidbits therein. I find these oral histories to almost always be total winners. E.g., previously GQ had an oral history of the making of Dazed and Confused (my Googling is coming up empty on that, sorry).
• Fluxblog, a great music blog, has its year-end “survey mix” of material from 2010. Eight discs worth of MP3s to download and check out.
• Very fun new tower defense game for iPhone/iPad (universal app): iBomber Defense. I’ve been enjoying it over the last couple days. Here’s the Touch Arcade review.

If you’d like to add an extra display to your laptop while you’re on the road, there haven’t been any options available other than carrying an actual monitor around with you. Not too practical, of course.

But if you’re an Apple laptop user and have an iPad, you’re now in luck. A company called Avatron has released Air Display, a $10 iPad app that, combined with a utility and driver for the Mac’s OS X, lets you use your iPad as an external display.

My iPad/MacBook Pro setup in Carmel

The screen is refreshing over WiFi, so it cannot handle video or other fast-moving windows (too slow a refresh rate), but it works great for an occasional second screen to hold your calendar, task manager, IM window, etc.

Note that the Avatron web page says that a Windows version of the accompanying utility software is on the way.

Hat tip to Wired’s Gadget Lab blog for alerting me to this app.