Synergy

Synergy is really cool. If you don't know what it is, and you have at least two computers, it's a way that you can share one of the computer's mouse and keyboard with the other computer(s), and also it combines your monitors onto a shared desktop so you can scroll off the edge of one computer's screens onto the other. If you don't have at least two computers, you should really get another so you can use Synergy with them. Oh, Synergy is cross platform, too, so you can use your new and cool Mac with your old windoze box. And it's cool.

Anyway, the Windows interface is a little clunky, but head over to http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ and grab the windoze installer (SynergyInstaller-1.3.1.exe) for your windoze box, and for Mac you would get synergy-1.3.1-1.OSX.tar.gz version.

On a sidenote, if the mac version didn't just come with a couple files and "synergyc" and "synergys" (one for client, one for server), you downloaded the wrong file. I can say this because I did it, and was having a heck of a time figuring out what I did wrong.

For my setup, since my windoze machine is the desktop with a keyboard and mouse attached, I made it the server. The windoze version seems to have an interface that is at least semi-usable, where I couldn't find an interface for the mac version. This is OK because after telling the windoze machine what computer name to expect (It ended up being nickwhipple.mac_123 or something really dumb and long like that), all I had to do on the Mac was run "synergyc -f windozecomp", with windozecomp being the name of my windoze computer. Mine is named beast.

Actually, if you open synergy from the windoze computer I think you can simply put it in test mode, and then run synergyc -f windozecomp from the mac, and the windoze machine should find the name of the mac computer. Then you can add that to your windows machine, along with settings on what side of what screen should go to what.

That's all for now. But if anyone reads this blog and finds this a big confusing, let me know, and I'll put up some screenshots.

Update:
Yeah, SynergyKM for mac is way better than plain synergy, because it has a graphical user interface. So if you are using a mac definitely go for that. Its naming scheme is a little bit different from the other synergy so if you have already been messing around with one you may have to re-do some of your settings.