Fird's Domain

There are two ways to resize the desktop icon in Windows Vista. One of the ways is to use one of the three defined sizes:

Right-click on any blank space in your Desktop, and choose “View“, then pick one of the three “Large“, “Medium” or “Classic” size (they correspond to 80px, 48px and 32px respectively). However, these pre-defined sizes might not suit what you need. There is another way to resize the icons.

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If you open up any Windows Explorer instances in Vista, you’ll notice that Microsoft have make the Favorites more visible:

Windows Vista has made the Favorites folder more visible by default

You can actually add links to your own frequently used folders to speed up access.

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Windows Vista comes with a new way of organizing your personal files. Instead of mere “My Documents”, now there is a lot more - it is called the “Home Folder”. If you noticed, in the Start Menu, there is one entry that is labeled as your name (or your username):

There is more that we can do with this seemingly “nothing much” folder.

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Introduction

Thanks to the technology advancement and the always-going-down price of personal computers, most of us ended up with 2 or more computers at home (like me, for instance, I have a desktop running on Linux - which is pretty much my download slave and a business notebook running Windows which I use in the office and at home).

Sometimes you might need to use these computers simultaneously, and trust me - using more than one set of keyboard and mouse not only troublesome, but at some point you will get frustrated, not to mention that it can get confusing when you’re trying to do too many things at once. Initially, i used VNC to remote into my second PC, but soon I find the speed of which it updates the screen starting to nibble on my short temper. I don’t want to talk about KVM, because firstly, my primary machine is a notebook, and it won’t accept any means of display input - plus always flipping through the switch can be troublesome too.

At last! Found the ultimate solution! - Synergy

After snooping around in various forums and blogs, I found a neat piece of software called “Synergy”. There’s a plenty that I liked about this software:

• It’s FREE (open source, actually)
• It’s lightweight. Only 0.88kB in download footprint
• It’s non-intrusive and not troublesome (can be run as windows/gnome services)
• And the best part - it is cross-platform. So you can technically have a Mac, PC and Linux all together sharing the keyboard and mouse

There are a few more neat things about Synergy:

• Switching between computers is as easy as moving your mouse to the direction of the monitor (Think multiple-display-like experience)
• It doesn’t lag at all
• It also copies your clipboard (yes, copy text from Windows and paste in Ubuntu FTW!

Let’s see how to set it up!

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