Bookmarks for September 1st through October 25th

These are my links for September 1st through October 25th:

Synergy Rocks!

If you’ve never heard of Synergy its a pretty awesome application. Basically it allows multiple computers to share one set of Keyboard, Mouse and Clipboard. It’s cross platform so it works very nicely if you’re running a mixed environment.

I set it up today at home (had to work from home as our office ADSL went down.) between my desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux and my laptop running Windows Vista. You install the Synergy app on the various PC’s that you want to be clients, in my case thats my laptop, you then setup a machine as your “server” and point the clients to the server. On the Server machine you decide in which direction the various clients are and then hook everything up.

At the moment I have it if I move my mouse of the left hand side of my linux machine the cursor continues moving across onto my laptop screen and now my laptop has focus, so I can type and work on it using my desktop keyboard and mouse. I? can even copy something and then move right again onto my linux machine and paste it.

The laptops keyboard and touchpad continues working, but its much better than having another keyboard and mouse cluttering up the desk.

If you do plan on trying it out I would suggest you get QuickSynergy for your Linux/MacOSX machines as it makes configuring things much easier.

Apple’s ad for the Red Ipod

I’m not sure if you got an email too from Apple about the Red iPod and how its the perfect gift for Valentines day, I’ve included the letter that they sent with the add in this post below. (If I’m not allowed to post it please let me know.) It’s an awesome piece of writing, had me laughing every second.

Although I do think I would have to give my girlfriend alot more than a red iPod to get her to allow me to replace the sofa and sell her car…

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Apple Macintosh – Folklore

mac_design_teamI missed this one, but for those of you who don’t know it was the Apple Macintosh’s 25th Birthday on January 24th. I love reading about the history of computing and in particular about the early days at places like Apple, much of what they were doing back then was new and uncharted and no one knew if it was going to work or how to do things.

I love reading Folklore.org which is written mostly by Andy Hertzfeld and tells the stories of things that happened at Apple while they were designing the Macintosh.

Steve Jobs on managing through the Economic Downturn.

I found this quote on Fortune’s Magazine’s website through a mention on this blog.

“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”

What’s interesting is that this may actually be what put Apple so far ahead of there competition after the .com bomb. Obviously not all companies have the huge cash reserves Apple does, but it does show that they’re looking towards the future and have a plan, a rather good plan. It means that as the economy picks up, we’ll probably see plenty of new exciting products from Apple.

Although of course the big question on all the Apple rumour sites is, will Steve still be with us? I really do hope so.

Invalid Last Name

After Tuesday’s new MacBook announcement, I desperately wanted to find out when the new MacBook’s would be available in South Africa. I went to the official SA distributors website (http://www.core.co.za) and rummaged around trying to some kind of “contact us” email address. I finally decided, after not finding any other electronic contact method to use the feedback form. I filled in my details, wrote up a nice little message asking when the new MacBooks would be available and then clicked the “Submit” button and thats when the error message pop’d up. “Please Enter a valid lastname. A minimum of 6 characters are required” obviously this shook my world as I was suddenly being told that my lastname which I’ve had for 20something years is invalid… after some deep soul searching I decided I would change it to “Nunns.” and the feedback page accepted it. I do feel sorry for those people who’s names won’t be made valid by simply adding a character