This morning I read about Synergy in Mordy Golding’s blog. It’s open source software that lets you move your mouse between computers, without having to use any kind of switch. All you do is plug in the hostnames and voila!

I installed it on my Mac and PC here at work, and it’s working very well. I didn’t expect it to be this easy. :) And I can even copy and paste between the two, which is quite nice.

The only slight disadvantage is that I’ve now kind of lost two of my hot corners on my Mac (but I can still get to them if I move the mouse slowly; I just can’t fling my mouse in the corner anymore, eliminating the usefulness). The mouse movement also feels kind of slow on my PC, but it may just be my innate expectation for it to be thus. :) And if I’m in screensaver mode on my Mac, I can move the mouse on the PC but if I click and hold, the mouse moves on the Mac instead. But that’s not really a big deal — I can’t think of any situations where I’d need to have the screensaver up on my Mac and work on my PC at the same time.

For the moment, anyway, the benefit of not having to have a second keyboard and mouse on my desk far outweighs any disadvantages.

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So I bit the (small) bullet and upgraded to the Basic plan on Backpack ($5/month). Hopefully 25 pages will be enough; we’ll see. The five that come with the free plan certainly weren’t, and things started getting crammed and I didn’t even use Backpack for several weeks because of it. But I think with more pages I’ll have enough room to stretch. We’ll see…

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I downloaded Quicksilver, “a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.” Merlin Mann’s talked about it on 43folders and it seems to be pretty cool, from what everyone is saying. I’ll give it a shot for a week and see how things go.

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In The Back-Logged Life, Greg Knauss writes about info-glut. It’s the mountain of stuff that keeps piling in, crashing into our lives (or seeping up from the sewers, in some cases) and always always always bogging us down. And yet some of it is important, which is why we do it. But drinking from a fire hydrant isn’t always effective, and reading Greg’s post made me imagine what it would be like if I didn’t have this huge pile of e-mails to respond to, feeds to read, and to-do items to check off. Ah, bliss. Will I ever get to that point? Nah.

But I’ll try. Even a short respite would be wonderful…

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