Bill’s Mind

April 29th, 2007

I’ve been using a neat little utility for the past week called Synergy. It allows one keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers over the network, in an extremely intuitive way. You still need a monitor on the extra computers… Synergy kind of merges all your machines into one huge desktop. Check out this video and hopefully you’ll understand.

There are other programs like it, such as Multiplicity and MaxiVista, but the beauty of Synergy is 1. it’s free software (open-source) and 2. it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac. I run Windows 2003 on my main PC, and Gentoo Linux on the other. It also synchronizes your clipboard so you can copy and paste between your different machines as if they were all just one big family.

Now if anyone could be so kind as to donate a Mac Pro to my cause, I could run all three platforms on my desk :)

April 28th, 2007

On the web, the PDF format is pretty much the de-facto standard for distributing printable media. For years, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader has been getting fatter, slower, and buggier with each new release. So bad in fact, that a lot of people switched to Foxit Reader, which is fast and lean but kind of feels like a Windows 3.1 app :P… Read the rest of this entry »