Kinesis Keyboards Rock

I love my Kinesis keyboards, They're wicked expensive but just recently I've learned you get great service with the high price. Also let it be known I've never actually paid for a keyboard (about $300 now), I've always expensed them. The increase in productivity and comfort is well worth the cost (to my employer!). About a month ago my 'i' key got really flaky and one email and they sent me a whole new key-well (a whole half a keyboard) I had to move over the key caps but still I was very impressed. Well a fizzy water incident caused my 'f' key to stop working and they're sending me the other side now (all free of charge). They even made it sound like I was doing them a favor because I was willing to swap out the key wells myself. I guess when you charge that much for a keyboard you can afford to back it up with great service.

I tell you, not having an f key is ucking rustrating.

How to run synergy securely

I run Synergy to connect my linux desktop to my PowerBook. This allows you to share one keyboard/mouse with another machine. When your pointer moves to the edge of the screen its control moves over to the other machine, your keyboard gets sent to whatever machine the pointer is on. It's AWESOME.

Out the box your passwords if you type them are sent in plaintext, this is unacceptable.

My keyboard it connected to my linux machine which is where I run the synergy server.

on my Linux machine (the server) I start synergy with this (I have it mapped to a menu item in my window manager).

  killall synergys;
 synergys -a localhost:24777 --config $HOME/lib/X/synergy/synergy.conf &

synergy.conf looks like this

 section: screens
          ark.corp.com:
          laptop:
 end
 section: links
        ark.corp.com:
            left = laptop
        laptop:
            right = ark.corp.com
 end

Now on my mac I do this (I have it in a shell script called synergy)...

  killall synergyc
 ssh -x -q -N -L24777:localhost:24777 ark.corp.com &
 sleep 3;
 /usr/local/synergy/synergyc -n laptop localhost:24777 &

Now all synergy communication is on the linux server and the laptop just talks to a local port which is an SSH secure tunnel to the linux machine. Works great!

I haven't quite got this to work between two mac machines yet...

Increase font size in Google Reader

I find the font size for the articles in google reader too small. Increasing the font size using command+ in firefox works, but the lens on the right is all misaligned after I've done it and I never feel comfortable hitting reload to make it recalculate the lens size.

If you add this to your userContent.css in the chrome directory in your profile directory the font will be bigger and more readable.

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.google.com/reader/) {
.item-body-container {
  font-size: 130%!important;
}
.queue-buttons a {
  font-size: 80% !important;
}
}

If you don't have a userContent.css you might have a userContent-example.css just copy that over and add these lines.