Damn, this is cool! Where was this when I had four computers on my desk in my dorm room, with four monitors, four mice, and one keyboard hooked to a shitty, old school, mechanical switch box? Synergy would have been the shit in that situation.

Basically, synergy is a tcp/ip based keyboard/mouse server. A sort of software-KVM if you will (minus the V). It allows you to control multiple machines with one keyboard and mouse, over the network. This is perfect if you have multiple displays for different machines, but would rather not have multiple input devices covering your workspace. Multiple monitors with a single keyboard and mouse was always my favorite way to manage multiple machines from one spot. I find it much more useful to switch input control between displays so you can still see what the other machines are doing while you are controlling a different one.

Especially cool about synergy are the available methods of switching control to different boxes, and the shared clipboard. You can switch to the next machine simply by rolling the cursor past the screen edge towards the next display, and/or assign key shortcuts. Shared clipboard means you can copy text (and in some cases graphics and other data) on one machine and paste it on another.

Finally, this thing is cool as hell because it is cross-platform. I've setup my linux box as the server, and I'm using it to control the Vista RC1 box, and Mac OS X machines on my desk. As I move the mouse to the right, the cursor moves from my Linux monitor, to windows, to the iMac; and after traversing screens back to the left I end up where I started. Snout!

Posted by ra in tech at 22:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I've occasionally noticed that my "new" computer (now 1.5 yrs old) is somewhat quirky about playing sound. I use the onboard sound chip, which actually sounds fine. It is a Realtek ALC850 and it uses a connector module that is insulated from the motherboard which reduces interference.

The problem is that I could only play one sound at a time. This would get really frustrating because something would have the audio device locked and then I would try to play a song or a movie and I just wouldn't get any sound. I finally got sick of bumping into this problem so I did some research to figure out what the heck was going on.

The conclusion? Simple! This POS does not have a hardware sound mixer! In windows, I assume the mixing for this thing is done in software by default once you install the driver, so one might not ever realize there is no hw mixer. I could setup software mixing in linux, but why would I want to increase the load on my cpu for that? Especially when I have several old SoundBlaster Live!'s sitting around.

So I grabbed an SBLive and stuck it in, disabled the onboard sound and rebooted. Voila. I had had the foresight to include the emu10k1 modules when I setup my system-- just in case-- so once the system came back up I instantly had sound that worked with multiple streams playing at once.

I'm really happy to have easily solved that problem, but damn is this pathetic! I had avoided onboard sound modules for years, but I figured by now they would be pretty decent. Nope, even on a higher-end motherboard cost-cutting has taken precedence over performance and quality. The SBLive that I purchased EIGHT years ago handily outperforms the onboard sound of my still newish computer. I've read that the nvidia nforce 1 and 2 actually included a nice sound chip, with hw mixer, but it was axed starting with nforce 3 to cut costs.

No wonder new computers often don't feel as fast as they should. The manufacturers assume that because you have a faster cpu they can eliminate chips designed/optimized for a certain task and simply offload that work to the cpu in software.

Posted by ra in rants, tech at 00:26 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Cringley's latest article about some guy named Frankston and his ideas about last-mile ownership reminded me A LOT of something I wrote here last October.

I really do think this is worth exploring. Not that I think it's guaranteed to work, but I wish someone would at least try it. However, privatisation is the rule here in the U.S. and I could see Telco-backed legislation outlawing the public-owned network idea. Sigh. Maybe it would be easier for us all to move to Japan, South Korea and Scandinavia.

Posted by ra in tech at 22:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Another month, another verizon v710.

Sure enough my most recent replacement phone started acting up just like the two before it. Each one has gradually become resistant to charging until finally it refuses to charge at all. I get a new phone (using the same old battery) and the charging problems are gone... for a while... until they slowly return... and I won't be able to charge the phone anymore.

The other day I took possesion of v710 number four. This is insane. I love Motorola phones, but I have to say their CDMA phones are shit. I love my Motorola GSM, but I never want to own another CDMA phone again.

Verizon was as helpful as ever... they tried to charge me $75 for the replacement v710 or $150 for a different model. I ended up getting the new 710 at no charge; but seriously, what a bunch of wankers!

Posted by ra in rants, tech at 22:28 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

If you ever needed a macro to edit the page header of an excel spreadsheet using the currently selected criteria of an autofilter filter within the spreadsheet... then you are pretty lame.
But anyway, here it is:

Sub UpdateHeader()

    ActiveSheet.PageSetup.CenterHeader = "&B&11" &

   Mid(Range("J1").Parent.AutoFilter.Filters(1).Criteria1, 2)

    ActiveSheet.PrintPreview

End Sub

Posted by ra in tech at 22:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

If you are a Firefox user you should know what I'm talking about.

Although it always seemed like it should be useful, I've never been a fan of the search bar. I simply don't like the fact that it keeps your last search sitting up there. What if I searched for "anal invader" last night and this morning one of my coworkers or clients sees that?

More practically, I tend to do a lot of pasting text into the google search box, and I hate that you have to manually erase what is the search bar before you can paste your query. (I'm talking quick middle-button paste, not ctrl-v stuff)

No surprise that some up came up with an extension to change this. The Search Button extension gives you the option of having a Search Button (duh) next to the search bar, but also allows you to set the search bar to auto-clear when you submit your query.

Now that I've installed this extension and started using the search bar, I found two awesome keyboard shortcuts related to it:
CTRL-K gives the search bar focus (what CTRL-L is to the address bar)
ALT-ENTER in the search bar opens the results of the query in a new tab.

Rock on! Now I'm loving the search bar!

Posted by ra in tech at 22:59 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

For MONTHS I have been irritated that I have been unable to use knotes (a utility providing memo pad or "post-it note"-like functionality in KDE.) It kept duplicating my entries many times over, giving me an enornous sea of extra notes, and consequently making it impossible to find anything. I tried blowing away the notes files themselves and the knotes config file (knotesrc) but nothing helped. Any new notes I created were heavily duplicated as soon as I quit a restarted knotes. (to be clear, they weren't actually duplicated in the notes.ics file, only in the display of notes from the knotes panel applet or the knotes viewer in kontact). I finally got so frustrated that I backed up my .kde directory and just started blowing away files and directories inside until I found a cure to the problem. At last I have solved this annoying problem.

After removing the following file, my knotes behavoir returned to normal
~/.kde/share/config/kresources/notes/stdrc

I'm not sure of the exact cause of the problem, but after testing with a new user with no prior .kde dir, I could not reproduce the problem; so I think it probably had to do with the huge quantity of notes I had retained since I started using knotes, and the fact that I have upgraded to newer versions of kde and knotes several times since.

In any case, I'm very happy to be able to use knotes again!

Posted by ra in tech at 12:19 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)