{tech}.Ben Buckman.net

I bought a new MacBook Pro recently as I transition into full-time freelance work, but I still need to work with my employer-provided (older) MacBook for the next few weeks. There's a great tool for helping with that scenario called Synergy, which is a [GUI-less] tool for sharing a keyboard, mouse, and clipboard across multiple computers (running multiple OS's), letting the mouse move seamlessly from one computer to the other as if it were another monitor.

There are a number of UI's to simplify Synergy's setup. For the Mac I found QuickSynergy (also works with Linux). But I couldn't get QuickSynergy to work. So I tried SynergyKM instead, and that works like a charm. (Set the computer with the mouse/keyboard you want to use as the "server" and the other(s) as clients.) I did have to turn off "Enable Bonjour" in the config panel (it's in System Preferances, not Applications) to get it to work, however - but oddly, "Enable Bonjour" needs to be on in the Tray's SynergyKM icon. (I'm not sure why they're separate, but with one off and the other on, same on each computer, they connected instantly.) SynergyKM is only for Mac, though, but there are other Linux GUIs for Synergy (I tried one once on Ubuntu with mixed results).