It’s been one of those weekends, thank God it’s a three-day weekend ’cause I’m gonna need the extra day. Actually my duties for the weekend we dictated to me when I came home one evening this past week, plugged in my MacBook Pro and my two attached LCDs gave off a distinctive green tint. As nostalgic as I can be about my long gone days with my Kaypro which had a green screen on purpose, I was not at all pleased that my two LCDs seemed to have lost their red signal altogether (thus, creating a decidedly green tint to the screen). I thought that I’d just ignore the problem until I had time to deal with it. That didn’t even last an hour. I disconnected the Matrox DualHead2Go and connected my LCDs directly to the laptop one at a time and the screens and cables worked properly. Damn. Thus, further testing was going to be required to get to the bottom of this.

So Saturday morning I pulled out my PC in the see-thru blue plastic case (with the noisy fan and cool blue LEDs everywhere) and tested it with the Matrox and my LCDs. Damn it all if they worked perfectly okay. I tried testing the Matrox unit with my MacMini, but the MacMini wasn’t having anything to do with it (seems that the Matrox overdrives the LCDs and without a third screen I can’t adjust the Matrox to work with my LCDs). Damn. And I had just replaced one of the LCDs that mysteriously went crazy the week before upgrading to Leopard.

So, there I was, having just bought a new replacement 19-inch “wide screen” LCD but without the Matrox DualHead2Go I could only attach one of the two LCDs to my MacBook Pro. Argh. After pondering for a few moments, irony of ironies, probably as a result of my upgrade to Leopard it only seemed to make sense to connect my noisy but pretty blue PC to the second LCD. But what I wasn’t going to do was have to continue to deal with three keyboards and three mice to run the three computers (plus a quiet G4 media server) sitting on my desk. I had to get Synergy, another Leopard casualty, up and running.

As noted in a previous blog post, Synergy is a cool program that makes it possible to control/interact all of ones computers with one keyboard and mouse. In my set-up, the keyboard and mouse are connected to the MacBook Pro that is physically in the center and when I scroll off to the left edge of the left LCD the mouse moves to the LCD connected to the PC like it is all one computer desktop. If I scroll off to the right on the PC the mouse moves to the LCD attached to the MacBook Pro and if I continue to the right across the two screens the mouse will then jump to the TV that is attached to the MacMini. So, using Synergy my set-up acts like on computer attached across 3 LCDs (two 19″ and the 15.4″ on the mbp) and my 36″ TV. And blessing of blessings, on Saturday I was able to get the program up and running, though it’s an ugly kludge solution. The PC is noisy and I have a bad habit of trying to push a window off the edge of the MacBook Pro to the left forgetting that it’s not directly connected. But other than that, not so bad ending that began with a growing list of casualties following the Leopard upgrade. BTW, I’m still waiting for Yahoo to fix their desktop widgets (formerly known as Konfabulator widgets). JBB