Atomic Playboy

Synergy is a very useful little application. It allows you to share a mouse and keyboard between several computers over a network, and even share the clipboard between them. Works for Windows, OS X and Unix (X).

This is great when I play Eve Online — it works just fine for games that have a mouse pointer. Games without a mouse pointer (such as the typical first-person shooter) keep control of the mouse on the computer it’s played on.

This is a very nice setup. I usually have my laptop next to the desktop monitor when playing Eve, to keep an eye on IRC activity and post on the forums.

One computer is set up as a server — this is the one that has the mouse/keyboard to be shared with the other computers. The others then start Synergy in client mode and connect to the server. Very easy.

No hassle with ports and IP addresses either; the server selects a name for itself and the clients, and then you configure the layout of the screens to decide what display the mouse should move to when it reaches the edge of that screen.

The clients just need a client name and a server name to connect to. Then you’re up and running.

I bought myself a wireless Netgear PC Card the other day. I’ve barely used the stationary computer since then, except for playing some EVE.

Freedom! I can move my laptop wherever I want! No trailing network cable! At least for 90 minutes or so, then I need to recharge the battery. Not exactly a stellar battery time, but I’m not really intending to use the laptop “on the go” anyway.

I also spotted three other networks in the vicinity, all of them without protection, and one who has enough sense to both use WEP and not announce his network. (Not that this stops me from finding it.)

Right now I’m in bed, and the only wire connected to my laptop is the one from my headphones.

One slight problem, now solved, was how to organize my music on the laptop. When my stationary computer is running, I can play all my music via the shared playlists in iTunes.

Copying my music to the laptop to play when I’m not at home isn’t a problem, but keeping it organized was. So I had a look at rsync.

rsync isn’t new to people who have some Unix experience. It’s an application to copy stuff from location A to location B, where A or B doesn’t necessarily have to be the computer you’re running rsync on.

I’ve used it quite a lot in Linux environments, but now I had to run it in Windows. Cygwin to the rescue!

Cygwin is essentially a Unix environment in Windows, with all the familiar shells and command line applications ported to Windows.

I only need to sync from the file server, running Linux, to my laptop, so there’s no need for an rsync service on the laptop. If you’re interested in that, here’s a good guide.

I have a batch file with the following command in it:

rsync -rtv -e ssh –stats –modify-window=1 –delete –progress echo@192.168.0.3:/mnt/data/Music/Albums/ /cygdrive/d/Albums

This will recursively copy everything in /mnt/data/Music/Albums/ on the file server to D:Albums on the laptop. Cygwin uses a pseudo-directory for different drives in Windows: /cygdrive/d/ equals D:.

The --delete flag removes any file on the destination that doesn’t exist on the source; so if I remove something from the file server, it gets deleted on the laptop as well the next time I run rsync.

Update: I had some problems with rsync checking every single file, despite them matching on the file server and the laptop. After reading the rsync man page, I found that Windows doesn’t store file dates with the same precision as Linux, so rsync saw them as possibly different due to the time difference and had to check them. Adding --modify-window=1 as an option to the rsync command solved this.

The command above has been updated to reflect my new settings.

My site is in a severe state of disarray and neglect. Lots to do in school (ADO.NET and datagrids, oh my), not really much to do outside of school but time still disappears into a black hole.

That may have something to do with the fact that I started playing a MMORPG. EVE Online is a major timesink. It’s not an obsession (”I can quit anytime I want!”) yet, though. But it still manages to be quite the timesink. More on EVE in a later entry.

I haven’t made any announcement about it yet, but if you’ve visited the site outside of your news aggregator of choice, you have probably noticed the domain switch.

The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy. Vice Admiral William P. Blandy, Commander of Operation Crossroads

I’ve had “I am not an atomic playboy!” as my IRC name (not nickname) for years and years. I heard the quote as a sample in song by Purple Motion and Skaven, made for the now classic demo Second Reality.

I didn’t really think much about it, but I stumbled upon the quote again the other day. And then it clicked: that would be a perfect domain name! Lo and behold, it was available as well.

I will have an easier time establishing a visual identity for the phrase “atomic playboy” than for “frozen skies.” So effective some days ago, atomicplayboy.net is the new domain around here.

Thanks to some DNS magic, any request to the old domain will be transparently redirected to the new domain. I’d appreciate it if you changed any links here to the new domain, though.