A mid-night thought...

In the middle of the night, I had a fragmented dream in which I replayed my travails with the Ubuntu laptop as I tried to get it to play nicely with the house's router, and at some point, it became apparent to me that I had done pretty much everything but reboot the machine.

So when I got up this morning, I turned the computer on (which sort of defines "cold boot") and... Shazam!... the problem has gone away.

My hypothesis as to what the cause of the problem might have been is now moot, but I suspect that the Firefox proxy settings did something to the system setup that didn't get undone when I reconfigured Firefox to not use a proxy to access the Internet.

Restoration of connectivity enabled me to install and run something called Synergy, which is a utility that lets you control several computers using a single mouse and keyboard. It's like a KVM switch, except it's implemented in software, utilizing a network connection between machines and allowing focus to be shifted from one computer to another simply by moving the mouse from one screen to another. An added benefit is that whatever's on your clipboard makes the move, as well. And the icing on the cake is that the software lets you do this with any combination of machines running Windows, Mac OS X, and/or several flavors of Linux.

So using Synergy is not at all like my netbook's capability to extend a desktop across two monitors. That means I can't drag a Windows window across screen boundaries and deposit it on the Ubuntu laptop (and there is no reason to think you drag a window across a screen boundary from one Windows machine to another). Still, if you have to divide your attention among several machines...

That said, I cannot spend any more time today exploring what I can and cannot do with the software. Work came in last night, and I still have to finish despeckling the item that must be delivered before I hit the rack tonight.

So, I better get to it...

Observations and other miscellany...

It took 11 hours, but the despeckle of the psychology piece is pretty much finished. The first half of the review went pretty slowly, which is typical for long jobs like this, because my work tends to be more polished as I proceed through the text and gain some familiarity with the "flow" of what's being said.

The fitbit tells me I have yet to break 3,000 steps for the day, which means I better get my carcass up out of my chair and do something other than stare at computer screens.

So, I better get to it... :^)

Feeling positively technical...

Years of experience with cable and dish television suppliers has convinced me that I have no interest in about 95% of what's offered. I don't watch sports, have no use for infomercials, can't imagine using pay-per-view, and am not impressed by premium services that recycle the same old stuff (or worse, try to get you to watch their new content).

So I decided to see what we could do with a D-Link Boxee Box, which I bought (refurbished) through Amazon.

The setup went very smoothly, except for having to pause and reconfigure a wireless router to act as a bridged client (the television and the incoming data connection are at opposite ends of the house).

I didn't have all that much time to explore the capabilities of the box before Galina and I decided to watch something on Netflix, after which I'm back here in the office about to send off the item I finished despeckling at a little after 6 pm.

But it does look like an interesting device, that's for sure.