Well I went ahead and bought a MAC aluminum keyboard. And I must admit, it’s a beauty. It also types really nice once you are used to it. However, Apple in it’s infinite wisdom has not released a seperate driver for Windows machines. The only way you can get it is via Torrents or via Google (applekeyboardinstaller.exe - and be sure to get it from a Bootcamp 2.0 version)

I think that it’s kind of ridiculous for a hardware vendor to do this. Oh well.

Other then that everything is going OK at the moment. I am still in the middle of a ‘Getting Things Organized (again)’ mood so I remodelled the room a bit as well as the desk. Nothing too major. I think the biggest change is starting to use Synergy (http://synergy2.sf.net) for my 2 PC’s. I can now literally move my mouse around 3 monitors (2x 19″ widescreens and 1x 17″) It’s amazing and very convenient.

Additionally I hope to be able to start looking for a new living space soon… If I can get that sorted out I’m a happy camper

I just had to sharea this one very cool thing:

“Drop Down”, Quake-style command prompt for Windows - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech.

It’s a Quake-style console for use in Windows. Now you might think why would you want that? Well it autohides as soon as you click anywhere or ALT+TAB to another program, but keeps running in the background. It also gives you the console the moment you press WIN+~ (tilde)

I personally grabbed the file from: http://www.mediafire.com/?0e3kxld19qd

Works great, and I highly recommend it to people who, such as myself, frequently use the DOS-prompt… err I mean the Quake-console

Pff… if you ever want to give yourself a headache - try setting up your own network monitoring/reporting/charting stuff. First off, finding anything that runs on Win32 is a challenge - and if you can find a freeware version, you almost found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow so to speak.

Now sure you can use for example PRTG Network Monitor (freeware version is limited to 10 sensors, available at: http://www.paessler.com/prtg) or The Dude (available at http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude.php) but well… you still miss out a bit.

So far I haven’t really found my end-all solution that does everything that I want, which is SNMP monitoring, Syslog, and PING-ing. Now keep in mind that I have a fairly simple network. (2 routers set up as access points, 3 wifi-networks, 2 Ethernet over Power Adapters, 1 security device, 2 PC’s, 1 server, 2 notebooks, and 1 network-disk) so it shouldn’t be too hard.

For the time being I am using Kiwi Syslog Daemon (available at http://www.kiwisyslog.com/kiwi-syslog-daemon-overview/) for Syslog functionality - and PRTG Network Monitor for monitoring / PING.

Let’s hope I find something a bit more workable in the future. Untill then, if you are looking for a simple and free solution, you got 2 that you can use

Both are a breeze to setup and configure and well, they do work. Tips, comments and/or suggestions? Let me know!

I just had to post and share this one:

1. The liberal use of the “VERY HIGH PRIORITY!!!” flag
2. The 18-line sig about all the Bad Things that will happen to me if I ever reveal the contents of your privileged, confidential (and unencrypted) message
3. The unrequested press release (and the serial ignoring of the “Unsubscribe” I sent you for the previous seven press releases)
4. The graphical background, font and table tags, and remaining 14k of HTML cruft associated with every. single. message. you’ve ever sent
5. The including of my — plus 98 other strangers’ — personal email addresses in the “To:” line of your friendly reminder about Tyler’s birthday party

Source:
http://www.43folders.com/2005/11/07/five-email-tics-id-love-for-you-to-lose?page=3

Well, lately I have been playing around with VMWare Workstation 6.5, and I must admit that it looks and runs really nicely. The performance seems to exceed that of Virtual PC on some points IMHO. But Virtual PC is completely free.

I have also installed Virtual Server 2005 R2 EE (Enterprise Edition) again for testing purposes. I have created these virtual machines so that I can test products, programs and a few other things. I also intend to learn a few SQL 2005 things in the near future so I needed a system that I could ruin completely without getting worried.

I’ll try to post my findings on which program I liked the most later on. I also know that I can play around with VMWare server, but I am giving Virtual Server 2005 a head-start.

The server-editions have the advantage of being able to install it on one machine and then running the client on another. This way my main machine won’t get too tainted or bogged down.

Apart from the above geeky stuff I am doing quite fine myself. The company-trip (for work yes) to Baveno, Italy was great and an amazing experience. It did however mean that I have been working for 12 days or so in a row (with a gap here and there of a few hours) Today I also worked so yeah, no rest for the restless I guess

So all is fine and dandy here. I already look forward to the next weekend since I’ll be going to a birthday-party at that time so… woohooo!