Comments on: Cthulhu Lives in The Blog Cave

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:43:30 +0000

Dan, Imma look into that. I’m a little reticent to use software solutions when hardware ones do as well for the simple reason that I can move my hands from one keyboard to another with zero system resource drain, and it looks cooler, but still, it could be good.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:05:38 +0000

Hey Greg, have you heard of Synergy (http://synergy-foss.org/). It is FOSS software to share one physical keyboard and mouse (not really one as it is two devices…) between multiple computers. So you can have multiple monitors on your desk, each connected to a different computer, and just move the mouse between them.

By: D. C. Sessions

D. C. Sessions — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 09:49:28 +0000

My solution to ‘puter proliferation is to use VMs. One physical computer, as many virtual ones as I want. I’ll send you a picture of my physical setup (yup, monitor arms and wireless keyboard and mouse) as soon as I’m back from the current road trip.

By: uncle Glenny

uncle Glenny — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 01:39:42 +0000

“dongle” was used 20 years ago at Apple to refer to things attached to the USB, I’m not aware that any such devices existed.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 23:36:18 +0000

Yes, I think the word Dongle has come to refer to the blue tooth or whatever technology device because a) it looks like a dongle and b) does not have a name.

I might have gotten that word from Linux in Exile now that I think of it.

By: gruebait

gruebait — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 21:53:53 +0000

O.T. and odd to mention perhaps, but I have never, ever heard “dongle” used like that. (I suppose because I spent so many years cursing them at work)

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:31:07 +0000

Benton:

I’ve looked at monitor arms and other devices of that sort and I can easily get into using such items. Right now I don’t think I need them .. my “desk” is custom built from dumpster parts and works fairly well.

On turning off peripherals and such: It depends, but that would have to be taken into account. The external disk drives may shut themselves down when they are not in use so turning them off with the power strip would probably be OK since that would only happen about once a week. But what I’m really thinking of is turning off all the transformers that are plugged in even to unused devices. I’m not certain, but I think a lot of things drain power when “off” or not in use, such as a powered USB hub. I’ve got at least one monitor that tells me it is “off” by shining a yellow light … obviously it is not really off.

So yes, everything has to be turned off properly, but a power swtich can then kill those other pesky leakers.

Regarding world domination …. we shall see … we shall see …

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:49:46 +0000

OK, installed, tested, works great! Thanks for the suggestion. I may well pay the 40 bucsk for this.

See how fast doing stuff in Linux is?

By: Benton Jackson

Benton Jackson — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:47:50 +0000

The more ambitious you make this reorganization project, the less likely you are to ever actually do it. You need to do it in small stages- take one cable, and untangle it from Cthulhu. Tomorrow, do something else. Eventually it will get done, and a lot faster than your current world domination plan.

One more thing- some peripherals don’t like being turned off from a power strip. For example, an ink jet printer needs to “park” the print head before turning off, or it’ll dry out. External hard drives probably need to flush buffers.

Here’s another organizing item you might like- monitor arms. Like this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TSAV3E/ref=wms_ohs_product_T2

It frees up the desk space under your monitors, leaving more room for crap. I love mine.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:38:44 +0000

Well, I want it to be open source. I’m not totally against non-open source software, so I may give it a try.

Scanning software, for the purposes of scanning, doen’t need to do too much. Other than controlling the hardware, everything you can do to an image can be done in other software. What I like about the Windows epson software is the way it handles file names, incrementing the numbers added to the name, etc. … remarkably, the Linux version does not do that VueScan probably does something along those lines.