One of the tools I use all the time, and would find myself severly disabled if it wasn’t running, is synergy. There site describes what it is best:

synergy: [noun] a mutually advantageous conjunction of distinct elements

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Anywho, so after upgrading Leopard I about passed out when the mouse and keyboard did not work across systems!

NOOO!

After calming down and doing a quick search of the nets I found that the source is available.

A quick download, ./configure –prefix=/usr/local, make, sudo make install and i was all set!

Go Open Source!

I was doing the usual tinderbox/build debugging, working with dev’s with svn issues, answering questions, monitoring feeds, researching an item on Google and playing with the cat (grin) when I saw Cote post this twitter:

Are there ant scripts/etc. to grab my Google Reader shared stuff and post them to del.icio.us on a cron job, nightly, or whatever?

I didn’t immediately have an answer but it must have been have stuck, because later after dinner while Cosmo 0.8 RC5 was building I thought of a way to do a simple command line tool that would pull feeds, grab items and then build a del.icio.us post for each item.

So I created Spinta.

It basically takes the output of the Universal Feed Parser and shuffles each item around and then calls on pydelicious to post the item. About an hour but most of that was my usual futzing about with the code’s structure ;)

Hopefully this will help Cote.

While reading The Unofficial Apple Weblog I saw an article on what you should be doing to get ready for Leopard and saw in Step 5, the following:

The easiest way to make sure your applications are up to date is to use the clever AppFresh from metaquark. This application is still in beta, but it already works quite well. It will scan your machine for all the installed applications (including Preference Pane apps) and compare the version numbers to those listed on iusethis.com. It will then allow you to download and install any available updates.

After downloading and giving AppFresh a try, I have to say I really like this app. Not only is it showing me what applications need updating it also shows, and I think this is the real killer feature, it shows how long it’s been since I last used an app.

Now I can go thru and clear out my Applications/ folder with confidence.

very nice

With the name change from Democracy Player to Miro and some very good UI and Usability changes, I’ve been spending more of my video watching time using Miro on my Linux server. Previously I was using a mix of Quicktime and VLC on the MacBook Pro and before that I tried the early versions of Democracy Player.

Miro runs very well on Ubuntu and, if you have most of the available codecs installed, has been able to play everything I’ve thrown at it.

But the real reason for this post is the great series named Hubblecast that I found while browsing Miro’s High-Def Channel — a great review of the highlights of recent Hubble activity.