Regular Tools to Make Your Security Life Easier

Today, I ran into a couple of problems switching back and forth between computers. Changing back and forth between keyboards and mice was getting to be a pain.

A coworker pointed me to the following tools:

Synergy was the answer to my problems. Synergy allows you to use two separate monitors attached to two separate machines and share a keyboard, mouse, and clipboard between the two.

In my case, I was switching back and forth between my Windows XP desktop and my PowerBook G4 laptop. Synergy installs on both machines (including Linux).

I chose to run the server on my Windows machine and the client on my OS X laptop. Configuration is self explanatory and can be easily adjusted from the sample .conf file.

Obviously, this would work best if you could actually see both monitors at the same time like a traditional dual monitor setup.

The second application was GeekTool.

GeekTool is a PrefPane (System Preferences module) for Panther or Jaguar to show system logs, unix commands output, or images (i.e. from the internet) on your desktop (or even in front of all windows).

A screenshot of GeekTool in action can be seen here.