Unhandled Exceptions

I currently work from home 4 days a week, which means I spend a lot of time in my Under Armour sweat pants and a tee. It also means that I have to sit at my tiny desk with my work laptop and my two flat panel monitors just sitting there. In order to make room, the keyboard for my home machine usually ends up on the floor or on top of my tower.

I have been researching USB KVM’s that would allow me to use my home keyboard without unplugging it from my home machine (and to share one of my flat panels with my laptop so that I can dual screen both my home machine and my laptop). Little did I know that my flat panels have two inputs in the back: a DVI and a VGA. And there’s a button on the bottom that allows you to flip from the digital to analog inputs. That solves half of my problem.

It turns out there is a software solution to sharing the mouse/keyboard: Synergy. It’s a nifty little client server app that essentially ports mouse/keyboard information from one client to another. The “server” machine is the one with the laptop and keyboard you want to share (in this case, my home machine). The client is my laptop. You can configure the server to link the screens so that switching machines is as easy as moving off of one side of the screen. It seems pretty fast, although I’m sure time will tell. But I’ll take a free solution over a $60 solution any day.