Synergy, dual display desktop.

Well for years not I’ve been wanting to try out Synergy, I just never got around to it for many reasons such for lack of a personal network and not many computers to try it out on.

But after working with computers for a few years not I’ve built up a few scrap computers, and some old laptops on the edge of breaking down.

So my current synergy setup is a old 1.8 ghz single core desktop, and a 800mhz laptop (which I’m grown quite fond of) but the mouse is broken on the laptops keyboard which pushed me to try out synergy as the small screen is perfect for writing blogs, checking forums and the whole social side of things!

My Desktop I use for designing/developing websites, so it has to run quite resource hungry apps (which is a struggle for it) so this also brought me to using two computers at once, so on my laptop I can just run my browsers to see how the website is coming along and on my desktop I can just have open Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

A Quick Look at Opera 10

So I noticed Opera 10 alpha release, I have become more of a Opera fan over the past releases… maybe your asking why know what I’ll tell you why but you have to try it out as well.

Opera is not only a web browser its a complete Internet suite, you have a nice download manager, email client, RSS reader and you can even take notes. What more can you ask for really, you actually do get the whole package without having to mess around with installing add-ons for the browser.

But you cannot forget the security side of using Opera, at the moment Opera is a rather secure browser especially when comparing it to Internet Explorer and Firefox, this may change when it become more popular but thats the way things work unfortunately… just means its time to stop using Windows - easier said than done really.

So why the fuss over Opera 10.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Upgrade

I updated Adobe Photoshop CS 2 to CS 3 finally I have been waiting for this for a long time and it was a brilliant upgrade.

Finally they make it easy to see your design, this is my favorite feature in Photoshop, and basically as you have your panels open you can fix them down so your picture will not be able to go under the panels. This is brilliant in CS2 I was always moving the tools and layer panels.

For the money it costs to upgrade I can’t say it was worth it, in GBP its around £100 USD you can find it at $200 considering I brought the original for whopping $600 that is a lot and it doesn’t really earn me much back, brilliant for a hobby though.

Overall if you have CS 2 I say buy Adobe Photoshop CS3, I’ve always preached adobe software due to the fact they are brilliant!

I believe you can also use Adobe Photoshop on a USB flash drive using something like thinstall, I’ve also seen it on many torrent sites. Which I believe is illegal.

BitLet - A bittorrent applet

The other day I came across BitLet, now I’m a big fan of bittorrent I believe it is one of the best ways to share your podcasts as once you’ve downloaded it you can then share it to the other people downloading it.

A lot of people think that P2P is a bad thing because it allows you to download music or movies but it really isn’t its a lot more something like Utorrent is a amazing client it has all these tools on it such as the encryption some ISP’s do not like clients like utorrent so it includes encryption so that the ISP’s don’t slow your downloads down.

But now if your at work or school and they don’t have a BitTorrent client visit BitLet and start the Java Applet and your ready to download.

Bittorrent Server.

Well the other day I came across a couple of bittorrent routers so it got me thinking about making one on the cheap which is just as efficient if not more, so I set out to do so.

So i figured a computer to run around the clock shouldn’t be very powerful strip it down to the minimal 128mb RAM and at the most 500mhz processor, so I asked around and luckely someone was throwing a old computer out which was around 500mhz.

So I considered a lot of operating systems but came to the conculsion of using Windows, it is very user friendly compared to Linux allowing to easily configure and run so i am running Windows 2000 Server Edition, I would prefer to run something like Damn Small Linux because it uses up very little resources which will also cut the electricity bill down but for now I will play with Windows.

Next I needed to find a bittorrent client, one of my favorite clients is Utorrent it has encryption and most of all a web user interface, so we can connect remotly to utorrent.