Free Quality Mouse and Keyboard Sharing

Do you have multiple computers at your desk? Are you looking for a way to share one monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard with all of them? Try Synergy - it works (fantastic!) and it's FREE! [Win, OSX, Unix]

I use Synergy at the office to share one monitor, a mouse, and my keyboard with a MAC Mini, an XP machine, and a Vista powered tablet - it works great. It's fast, robust, and customizable. Until recently I was using Kavoom Software Switch to go between my two PCs (Synergy between my PC and MAC Mini) but it didn't like Vista so I went 100% Synergy and it's working great with my Vista powered tablet. So give it a shot - synergize. [Download]

My Tech and Spring-cleaning - Part 2 "Dust Balls"

My Tech recently made my spring-cleaning checklist. In Part 1 of this infinite series I blogged about the zen of clean desktops. Part 2, a short post, is but a simple reminder.

Most of today's computers (not all) are cooled by fans and heat sinks. The fans, many fans sometimes, blow air across the parts of our computers that get hot. Unfortunately, most of us don't live in Intel clean rooms so our systems are actually cooled by air and other particulates like dust, small bugs, boogers, pet hair, and other nasty things. The picture to the left of this post illustrates my point - that's a nasty hair ball in front of my primary fan intake.

So the reminder. Open up your computer once a year and vacuum out the really nasty stuff. Use the molding tool to ramp up the sucking power and do your best (without bumping into anything important) to get the big wads out. If you're really smart you can pull your fans and blow them out with compressed air. WARNING: Only recommend for smart people. Don't sneeze into your machine. Don't let your toddler play with the moving parts. Don't lick the power supply. Don't use the "hairy" cleaning tool on anything.



Related: Lifehacker: Geek to Live: Evacuate PC dust bunnies Step-by-step instructions for the not so smart people - might even be helpful for a few of the ones that think they're smart.

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Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 Bits Installed

I installed the Vista Ultimate Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 bits on my Motion Computing M1400 tablet PC last week. I installed the bits in a computing fit after I managed to trash my user profiles on the M1400. Frankly, I didn’t expect Vista to install properly – I thought I’d waste and hour or two and end up with a fresh copy of XP on the machine. To my surprise I was wrong.

NOTE: I don’t like the way Windows manages user profiles – I’ll spare you the rant.

Vista Beta 2 installed on the M1400 flawlessly and I was installing it over a networked DVD drive. The installer even re-started the system once or twice during the process and it just kept going. I performed a “clean upgrade” which is different than a typical upgrade – it dumps the old Windows XP installation into a windows.old folder which you can delete after you’ve transferred any files or folders you might want off the old system. The installation process took between an hour and two and to my surprise I was sitting in the seat of a brand new working Vista installation when it was over – cool.

Vista isn’t a Windows XP update – the U.I. is radically different. I’m not going to get into the details – there are a lot of other places to go for that kind of thing. I can tell you that it’s going to take some getting used to. At this point I’m using the integrated Help features (which are in pretty good shape considering it’s Beta software) to bounce around the OS. 1^st impressions are good. I’m looking forward to the fresh perspective. In my opinion this upgrade is long over due – the OS needs to keep up with innovations in the areas of tagging and RSS.

Office 2007 Beta 2 (I installed it for OneNote 2007) also installed flawlessly and installed these bits over a wireless network just for kicks. Again, 1^st impressions are good and it’s refreshing to see something new. The ribbon (widely employed throughout the system) will take some getting used to but I can see the logic behind a task oriented U.I. – we’ll see how it does long-term. OneNote 2007 is great (I’m a big OneNote fan) – the OneNote 2007 team spent a lot of time listening to their customers and making improvements that makes sense – improvements that will really improve the usability of the application. More and more my work day is spent in Outlook and OneNote. Thanks OneNote team.

More to come as I bounce off of new things in the software so many of us use. 

Comments Disabled

I temporarily disabled the commenting system. Why? Comment spam fatigue. My blog is attracting hundreds, no thousands, of spam comments a week and I’m sick of cleaning up after the buggers. I’ll bring comments back on-line after I have some time to make it a little more difficult for spammers to take advantage of this system. I’ve been considering SCODE1 – a CAPTCHA security code plugin for the Movable Type platform.

Transferring Personal Video from PC to TiVo DVR

You can transfer video (MPEG-2) from your PC to your Tivo, assuming it's connected to your home network. Cool - did it just the other night for an episode of Lost I recorded on my cable-enabled Sony Vaio.

Vista Upgrade Advisor

Want to see how your machine (PC) will "make friends" with Windows Vista? Download and run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. One of my work machines is Aero capable, I'm hoping at least one of my home machines is.

Windows Code Names

Now I know where Microsoft comes up with Windows code names. I didn't know the Canadians had this kind of influence over Windows development.

Ever wonder where Microsoft got the code name for its upcoming Windows Vista release? According to Lily Delos Rios, VP of Product Delivery at Symantec, the code name Longhorn grew out of two then-current project code names: Whistler and Blackcomb. Whistler and Blackcomb are two mountains near the popular Whistler, British Columbia, ski community. The project named Whistler became Windows XP, and Blackcomb was to be an even more ambitious new operating system. When it seemed that Blackcomb was too ambitious, Microsoft decided it needed something in the middle, something between Whistler and Blackcomb. In the real world, there's a saloon located between the two mountains, and that saloon's name is Longhorn.

Source: Security Watch: Forget Google, it's Symantec vs. Microsoft - CNET reviews

Micrsoft vs. Google - A Question of Relevance

Will the Fed help tech companies sort out China?

Reading: Yahoo turns to Washington for help on China | Tech News on ZDNet

The Fed needs to step up to the plate and level the playing field (or at least set some guidelines) for tech companies trying to do business in China. China represents a huge market for these companies so they can't just not do business with the Chinese; unfortunately the U.S. stock market won't reward them for being good citizens. The Fed needs to step in and set some game playing rules - the industry can't be expected to create the rules, the game is already in motion. I think the Yahoo! chief has it right.

Governments change governments. Governments who are in trade together can certainly change governments," he said. "We tried and we are going to continue to try as an industry to have our government help us.

- Terry Semel, Yahoo! Chief

Yahoo! iPod Directions

iPod Directions - easy access to Yahoo! Maps on your iPod. I like it.

Yahoo Maps and the popular iPod portable MP3 player are used together to bring you an exciting online service called iPod-Directions. What is it? iPod-Directions is a powerful step-by-step directions saving tool that will export online driving directions from results by Yahoo Maps and import them into your iPod. It’s an easy solution for getting Yahoo Map directions saved and displayed onto any iPod Video, Nano or Photo, and without the need of additional software!

Simple Sneakers

I ordered a pair of Simple Sneakers today from Sierra Trading Post - they were on sale for $23.95. I saved over 60% ; ) STP is a great place for deals on shoes and clothes for that matter.

Simple - a nice little shoe company (their slogan) - is cool and I felt like taking a pair of their kicks for a spin. It's my 1st pair of Simple shoes - we'll see what happens.

Simple Home | History | Blog

Albumart.org - Easy Album Art

I'm a freak about keeing my iTunes library organized and part of that includes making sure all of my music is properly cloaked in the right album artwork. Albumart.org = easy album artwork. Type the name of an artist or a song and they'll almost always have the album art available.

iTunes album artwork tip: You can drag images from a webpage (off of Albumart.com search results for example) to the artwork window in iTunes to add or update the artwork associatd with any song.

Pandora

I started using Pandora, a streaming music player that builds play lists for you to match your taste, a couple of weeks ago and I'm still using it. I built a few stations based on artists that I like and Pandora streams similar music to my headset. It's pretty cool and I've discovered some new artists using the service. It gets smarter too as you use the simple thumbs up and thumbs down system to tell it what you like and don't like. Over in the right-side column of this blog's home page you can see a list of the stations I've built so far - click on any of them to start your Pandora experience.

Pandora | About | Blog | TechCrunch related to Pandora