Yesterday was a fantastic day and not because of any significant amount of gaming that went on (though I did manage to find myself some time to play W101 and make my way through most of level 11). Two points of interest. First of all, Tipa brought up this amazing little application she had found called ‘write or die‘ if you’ve ever had issues feeling motivated to write, or if you’re doing NaNoWriMo (which I am, 24,244 words in) then this may just very well save your writing career.
Aside from that, you may remember a comment a while back from Lars talking about a simple program called Synergy. This program lets you move to the left side of one monitor, and your mouse will ‘jump’ to the other pc (in my case the laptop) allowing you to control both computers with one mouse and keyboard. So I have the laptop set up to the left hand side of my pc when I’m at my desk working, and I control both of them with the mouse / keyboard from my pc simply by moving it over.
It’s by far one of the most amazing things I’ve played with in a while and I completely geeked out over it. Since I was so used to boxing by alt tabing to the other screen and using one pc for two accounts, I was finding it difficult to box with two computers. After giving it some time I decided to try synergy out and now I know there’s no way I could ever go back. I realize the program is quite old, it says it hasn’t been updated since 2006, but it works with vista just fine. It can also work across multiple OS and linux, mac, as well as pc. So now I can have my laptop running with whatever I’d like while I keep my pc running and not have to be reaching over to any other keyboards or mice.
The only downside to this is that if you are playing games you need to be playing windowed. If you’re playing in full screen it will force you to desktop when you jump to the other monitor. I did experience a very small amount of lag at one point but it was barely enough to be concerned with. I know this program has been out for a while and I’m probably well behind the times and everyone already uses it, but for me it was a huge find, and I couldn’t have been happier.
Anyhow, I did get a chance to play Wizard101 last night. I defeated some fire elves and took all their stuff. I have a few quests that send me all over Wizard city looking for particular objects. One of them is to locate these little men who hide out in each zone. I’ve been unsuccessful at finding the current one I need, I think it’s in triton avenue. Tipa informed me that the Halloween quests were on their last night, and she would be freed from doing the Master Tower battles, I hope she got her spider!
Today is FRIDAY *cheers* I hope everyone has an amazing day and an incredible weekend.
Yeah, it makes life a lot easier! I use a different program called Multiplicity, which is a commercial product. It works in fullscreen mode too; I have no problems with it playing EverQuest II. However, it does seem to have issues with some games (such as Vanguard, Warhammer Online, and City of Heroes) where (fullscreen or not) after a while, the game would stop responding to any mouse clicks (which makes it hard to play :) ). I’ve been meaning to try Synergy, and a few other software KM switches out there that I’ve heard of, to see how they compare.
I can’t wait to give it a try :)