I'm loving Google Notebook right now. After many attempts at finding an information saving / web clipping tool - including OneNote, Enfish, Onfolio, and a number of others that I can't even remember, finally there's something very lightweight and reasonably functional. I've also installed Google Browser Sync - a Firefox extension that syncs up cookies, bookmarks, history, open pages between various instances of Firefox that you might have - ie work and home, or desktop and laptop. Pretty nice to fire up Firefox at home and continue where you left off, and no longer does reinstalling Firefox mean another session of getting my bookmarks and various web site authentications setup. Firefox does seem slower though - so not completely sold on it. Not liking Google Calendar much. It's not bad, but the lack of automatic sync is a fatal flaw for me, when compared to Airset, which syncs up from Outlook at work to the website to Outlook at home and vice versa. Sounds complicated but isn't - all it means is that I have an up to date calendar and contact list at home and work, and online when I need it (as well as on my Blackberry and mobile phone). Redundancy of access is a pretty powerful thing, and has saved me plenty many times. [tags] Google, software, tools, notebook, calendar, sync [/tags]

I recently discovered A Social Life, a most excellent blog that is focused, so far, on enterprise tagging (aka internal tagging / bookmarking...), a subject that is *very* close to my heart right now. Steve Eisner, the blog author is VP of Engineering at AskMe, and has posted a series of insightful thoughts about how tagging might actually work within an enterprise. One of the few times that I've printed out posts and written notes in the margins. Cleaning up the Tag Soup and Our Experiences with Enterprise Tagging Terminology are recommended, but there's good stuff in every post I've read so far. [tags]tags, tagging, enterprise, internal, folksonomy, social[/tags]

Ok - this is pretty cool. PandoraFM is a sanctioned mashup of last.fm and Pandora which uses your most listened to artists in last.fm to seed the creation of radio stations in Pandora, and then submits tracks that Pandora throws out back into your last.fm profile. Or at least it's supposed to - I'm not getting the tracks showing up in my last.fm profile. Could be last.fm, which has been known to have submission problems from time to time. Sweet idea - I guess I should do a listen-off between the last.fm player (aggregation) and Pandora (experts). (Via jason kottke, his last.fm profile, and thus blackbeltjones) [tags]aggregation, crowds, last.fm, lastfm, collaborative, pandora, music[/tags]

If you've got the right setup (multiple monitors, multiple computers) and want to give each a separate monitor but share a keyboard and mouse, then you need Synergy.

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).

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems.

Pretty amazing - I've got a Windows XP box and a Mac mini hooked up to their own monitors, and with Synergy running. I just need a single keybaord and mouse. Moving between screens is as simple as they say, and shared clipboards round it all off and makes it all feel like a single unified system that can run Windows and OS X software.

So - why not just use Remote Desktop or some flavour of VNC ?

• Remote Desktop is *much* better than VNC. VNC is pretty much the only way of doing remote control of a Mac, so I would be forced to use the Mac mini as the primary computer.  I don't particularly want to do this (Mac mini doesn't do dual monitors, slower, etc).
• It's fast ! No screen images to send across the wire (or ether) - just mouse and keyboard data.

Just waiting for my third monitor, and then I'll have a full-on technogeek setup !

[tags]synergy, software, utilities, OSX, remote control[/tags]