Sharing a Keyboard and Mouse Without a KVM
I like to keep a distinction between my personal computing and the office computing. As a result, I tend to bring my Mac with me when I work. It's convenient to have all my music, personal email and RSS news feed subscriptions at hand. I even keep an iCurve stand at work so I can bring it up to eye level. Of course, that makes the trackpad and keyboard harder to reach. So I also kept a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to compensate. The problem is that my current office setup doesn't work very well. I can certainly feel the strain in my wrists and arms.
At home, I have a KVM switch that I use to share my monitor, mouse and keyboard between my PowerBook and an even older PC. This works pretty good for me. I didn't want to invest in a KVM for work though. There's no point for me to share the display. I just wanted to share the mouse and keyboard.
That's where Synergy comes in play. Synergy runs on Windows PCs, Unix, Linux and, yep, even Macs. I just installed the software on my work PC, which is acting as the server. I then installed SynergyKM on the PowerBook and configured it as a client. I can now move the mouse back and forth between the PC and the Mac without having to reach over the desk to reach either mouse or keyboard. Best of all, it's all free since both tools are released as open source software.
The LifeHacker blog has pretty good guide to configuring Synergy on both PC and Macs. It was a very helpful starting point to get this working. I'll have to see how things go and whether this helps relieve the strain on my wrists.
Frederic Jean