This is what a Sprint tech found when he went to a cell site to check why there was no power.

This is pretty freakin insane. That must have been one painful way to go. So remember people, the next time you have a craving to chew on an electrical wire, DON’T do it. Stay safe!

Find out what’s on Clearance at ThinkGeek!

Technorati Tags: power outage, sprint, bear, electricity, electrical, safe, unsafe

I’ll start off with a bit of history before I dive into my review of synergy. Last summer I bought a PowerBook G4, while I like my Mac I can’t stand using the touchpad and it wasn’t practical to hook up a mouse to it. What I wanted was to place the Mac on my desk and use my PCs keyboard, mouse and monitor. Well of course the easy answer was to get a KVM switch, well thats where the easy part stopped. I was searching online for a good 4-port USB KVM that was not too expensive, this is harder then you think. Most of the KVMs I found were well over $300 (Canadian) and didn’t have many reviews or much information about them. I came close to buying one off of tigerdirect until I read a review about it and found out it had trouble when pressing more then one keyboard button at a time, well needless to say I was not impressed I like my video games too much. So I put the KVM on hold but that meant the Mac started to be neglected, it wasn’t collection dust or anything but it wasn’t being used as much as it should.

One boring Saturday evening I flipped by G4/TechTV (in Canada) and saw Call For Help TV was on, so I started watching the episode. Darren Kitchen was on from hak5, he was giving a demonstration on an open source program called Synergy. Well it got my attention right away when I saw a Mac, Windows PC and linux laptop all sitting on the counter. I wondered what the program did… Was it a IM client for all systems? Was it a new email client? What was it??? Well I won’t make you wait any longer, synergy was a program to share your keyboard & mouse of one computer with up to 4 more systems over your network, so no extra wires. Best part its Free!

First thing I thought of was using my Mac with my windows PCs keyboard and mouse, so I listened to Darren explain to Leo what the program was all about, I have to say I was impressed. This software has been around for a while now, 2003 I believe, this was the first I heard of it and I am glad I did. I ended up waking up early Sunday morning like a kid on christmas that just HAD to play with his new toy. That’s just what I did I fired up the powerbook and downloaded the program onto both machines.

The windows install is super easy just run the installer. Once you launch the server you need to tell it where the other computers are in relation to the server (windows PC). You just need to do this on the server side.

The mac was a bit different its a command line (terminal) utility, but wait someone else made a graphical interface, OS X Synergy GUI. All you need to do is unpack the synergy files & the GUI files, then launch the GUI and enter the path to your synergy client, specify the IP address of the synergy server (my windows PC) and hit “Start”.

I got the 2 computers up and running fairly easy, then I decided well maybe its time to put my old IBM thinkpad, from my college days, to good use instead of sitting on the shelf. So I downloaded centos and installed it on the laptop. No small feat with the old age of this laptop, its a 1.3 GHZ celeron with 256MB of ram and it showed its age. The install was slow but installed perfectly no need to tweak or find any drivers. Synergy was easy on centos, untarred the files and installed it. You do have to run it through the teminal, use [linux]$ synergyc -f 192.168.0.100 (of course sub in your servers IP) and thats it.

Synergy allows you to copy and paste between all the system so this is great for testing a web site in multiple OS and browsers, this is what I use the setup the most for. If you move the mouse into one of the systems and hit “Scroll Lock” it locks the keyboard and mouse into that system so if you are playing a game you can turn and not end up on another system.

The only problem I have come across is that since installing this on the mac it seems the wireless connection drops out and I have to “turn Airport off” and back on. It doesn’t happen often and its a quick fix.

There you have it, synergy is one of the most useful open source programs I have come across. Hopefully, you will find it as useful as I do.

My current “Super Geek” setup.

Technorati Tags: synergy, KVM, open sourse, microsoft windows, linux, apple, mac, centos, powerbook, IBM thinkpad, call for help, hak5, leo leporte, darren kitchen, share keyboard and mouse, geek

I was looking at it again and well the colours were scaring me so I decided I would spend a few more minutes on the design. So I give you the 15 minute design part 2 at 25 minutes total.

First Design

Second Design

If you would like to use this design just save the html page when you view it.

I stumbled upon some great resources this week. I have installed the first one on this blog you will see it when you go over a link. Nice preview eh! It uses the great service of websnapr, which generates a thumbnail preview of a site. Its pretty fast and reliable so far. The wordpress plugin was created by the fine folks at XSblog.

Firefox just keeps getting better and better. I can add to my list of great extensions with the fireftp. This little baby adds a ftp program functionality right into your web browser. Goodbye filezilla, hello fireftp!!

markupmaker this lets you instantly create the basic markup for a layout, it could be very useful for some of the repetitive code.

Using the above markupmaker I created this oh so lovely page in 15 minutes flat. The colours aren’t the best but hey it was 15 minutes and I put no thought into the site before I started coding it. I grabbed a colour combo and when to town. Enjoy.

3 great little resource that make things easier and more fun. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: web design, html markup, ftp program, files, firefox, color combos, wordpress, plugin, stumble upon, websnapr

This was the week from hell, every day was busy from 8am until about 10pm when I had to stop to relax a bit. But the weekend is finally here and I get to see some daylight. YAY

Lets have a look back at some of the things I did this week:

- purchased a website with domain name
- purchased two domain names
- did some web design (which will be released for free this weekend)
- send out a press release for one of my businesses
- played around with some wordpress plugins
- did some more wedding planning, not much though most of the big stuff is done
- played with the dog hahah
- played with the women
- watched the Sens lose to Boston
- looked for a house

Thats enough crap to do, nevermind the day-to-day work. So you know what I am going to do, I’m gonna kick back have a beer maybe go to a pub with some friend and do nothing at all.

later sk8ter hahah

wordpress, beer, weekend, web design, pug, diets

Technorati Tags: wordpress, beer, weekend, web design, pug, diets