Speaking of cool toys...

How do you get ride of those extra keyboards and mice?  With Synergy, of course!

In the Office org, it's pretty standard for most devs to have at least two machines.  You've got your somewhat beefy dev box for coding, an older machine to dogfood builds of Office and check mail, and then, depending on your feature area, you might have the miscellaneous Vista machine for testing, tablet for inking work, etc.  I'll admit, it can sometimes be kind of hard to keep track of them all, and harder yet to fit all the keyboards and mice on a single desk. 

Plus, I'm pretty fond of my Kinesis keyboard and Trackball Explorer, so it's a real pain to type on something else for long periods of time.  And it might be that I'm a bit lazy -- and hate having to lean over to reach a different keyboard.  And I can never keep track of what machine that KVM box is hooked up to.  :)

With Synergy, I have my two monitors and tablet sitting next to each other, and just move the mouse between them as if they were a single virtual desktop.  In fact, there's only one mouse cursor ever showing, so it feel exactly as if I'm working on a single machine.  In addition, I can copy content from one machine and paste it on another with nifty clipboard sharing.  Plus, it'll install as a system service, so it starts up automatically at boot and is available from the very login prompt.  Best of all, it's not just a Windows app -- if you've got a MacMini at home or Linux box, you can connect them all! 

(BTW, if Chris, or any of the other Synergy team members are reading this, my one feature request is automatic synchronization of my "locked" status amongst my machines...)

If you're like me, you'll find Synergy is one program you'll end up relying on, day in and day out, before you even realize it.