The McKenzie’s Blog…

Ok, let me explain first what it is.. Synerygy2 is a way to share multiple computers with one keyboard and mouse.  No, it’s not a KVM replacement.. Synergy2 replaces only the keyboard and mouse, you’ll need to have a monitor attached to each machine on your desk.  This is actually a plus.  In the photo below you’ll see my working area at the office… I’ve labelled which each runs for an OS and below that the names of the computers (click to see the full size image)

The keyboard and mouse is actually attached to the Ubuntu machine, in other words that’s the “server”.  The XP and Windows 7 machines are “clients”.  One thing to consider with Synergy is that it’s not secure.  It does send everything you type in plain text over the network.  This can be avoided by tunnelling the connection over something like SSH.  Perhaps I’ll cover that later.  Synergy2 isn’t new, it’s been around a very long time.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel or try to take any limelight from those that have already posted great articles on how to set it up, the best information can be found from the Synergy2 website itself.

What I’m posting about is really how to fix a problem that I’m sure others might have encountered.  Right.. so the problem is this.  As I’ve said, the server is on Ubuntu.  Naturally the “Windows key” on Ubuntu has no natural meaning to the OS, it’s just another key and not mapped to anything out of the box.  The problem I’ve had is that while using Synergy the “Windows Key” didn’t work on the Ubuntu machine even though I’d remapped it to do things, such as Win + T to open a new xterm, Win + R to open the Run Command Dialog (basically making it operate a bit like Windows).   the fix for this was a change in the $HOME/.synergy.ini file on the Ubuntu machine.  The weird thing was that when move the mouse to the XP machine the Windows key did what it should, however on the Windows 7 it wouldn’t work.

Right, so what was the fix?  Here is my .synergy.ini file

section: screens
burma:
scotland:
  meta = super
rambler:
  meta = super
end

section: links
burma:
left = scotland
right = rambler
scotland:
right = burma
left = rambler
rambler:
left = burma
right = scotland
end

section: options
screenSaverSync = true
end

The important lines above are the “meta = super”.  Under Ubuntu the Windows Key is called “meta”.  This tells Synergy when the focus is on the windows machines to map the “meta” key to the “super” key, or in other words the Windows key.  Once that was changed and synergys was restarted all was good again.

I’m posting this for anyone else that might have a problem with the windows key not working under synergy with Linux/Ubuntu/Unix machines and windows machines, but also as a reminder to myself should I forget how I fixed it   I’d been through this exercise about 4 years ago but having rebuilt that machine I couldn’t for the life of me recall how I fixed it .. well, now that I’ve blogged about it I’ll at least have one good place to go and find the answer again  

Wow, I’ve just looked at my blog and haven’t posted anything since Nov 2009?! ? WTF is that all about anyhow?  Lets see, what’s happened since my last posting?  Well, I’ve returned from South Africa   It was a great trip, ran longer then originally planned but it was good.

We’ve all suffered through Christmas and of course New Years, so Happy New Year eh?

Well, that brings us to today now.  I’ve converted back to Windows (it was a sad day yesterday).  I’d finally had enough of Ubuntu.  It was a series of issues that forced me back to Windows … apps that stopped working, funny things happening since upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, that was a mistake for sure and generally speaking I just grew tired of missing functionality in Ubuntu when everyone you deal with uses Windows.  Oh well.  I’m not running Windows 7, 64-Bit, finally making full use of the hardware in my laptop.  The only “issue” I have right now is Win 7 doesn’t seem to support the ACPI power management stuff.. so, as a result when I pull the power and run on battery the only performance tuning that happens is the screen dims but the CPU’s run full out and thus drain the battery at an alarming rate.  I’m sure I’ll find the correct drivers for that issue at some point. 

Oh yeah, I bought a new car as well .. pics of the new motor here ..

There’s not really much else to report I suppose.  As usual, check out the photos on our flickr account for new photos and videos. Such as this one, Lisa playing her piano..

I hope I’ll have some more interesting things to blog about in the future.. just sort of lost the desire to blog.. hoping it comes back.

Yes, I’m still here and still alive The week has gone very well with the work related stuff, but there’s still work to be done this coming week (and maybe more depending on quickly things can be organized). It seems that SA isn’t a stranger to slow services like other countries.

The weather this past week has been brutal here with highs not much higher then 14C in the day time and loads of rain. I’ve been told this is not normal weather for this time of the year, especially since this is the summer time down here.

This weekends plans were a bit scuppered due to the weather but what can you do. I just hope we have better weather this coming week. I’d hate to think I brought shorts and didn’t have a chance to wear them, save for the first day I arrived.

I’ll try to get some pics and post them later, unfortunately the broadband speeds down here are less then desirable so uploading photos would be very tedious and time consuming.

I’ll post more later when I have something more interesting.

The trip to Johannesburg started with a taxi ride to Heathrow Airport in London. The trip was uneventful and actually quite educational. The driver gave me some great tips on alternate ways to the airport that avoided nearly all f the dreaded M25. As I will be going to Heathrow in Dec to collect my mum when she comes over it will give me a chance to test the routes.

Getting through security was about the easiest I’ve seen in years, well for me anyhow. Unlike most others around me (men and women) i didn’t need to take off my belt or shoes. A short wait on the secure side for the gate to assigned and opened, then about 90 mins ish in the boarding area. The flight was late owing to “catering and security checks”… Hmm security checks on the catering. On the flight I have seat 51J on a 747-400, flight VS601 with Virgin Atlantic.

The take-off was quite late. However it was announced the expected flight time was reduced from the original 11h5m to 10h15m or something, so this will make up for the later departure.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m off to South Africa for a couple of weeks with work. This won’t be a holiday by any means but I sure hope to have some time to sight see around the area while I’m there.

Expect some blog postings from me while I’m there, certainly not a day by day posting like previous trips haha there’ll be way too much boring work stuff I’m sure. I will however post when I’ve done something fun and have some pics to show as well.

Follow me on twitter and on facebook.

I should finish that statement by saying it’s my last Nokia phone, EVER!

I bought my NokiaN97 back in June.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I, like everyone else that ever ordered one of these devices, was excited like I’d never been about a phone.  The prospect of what was promised by Vodafone and Nokia was overwhelming the senses.  However, I very quickly found myself, like pretty much everyone else that has ever ordered this device, sad and disappointed to entirely new levels.

Where do I start .. well the device came shipped with the then current firmware level of 10.x .. right out of the box it was acting odd.. dropped calls, low phone signals levels where there should full signals, etc, etc.  The worst at the time was making and taking calls… you might be lucky and get a call in and you might be lucky to not have the device crash and reboot during or immediately after a call.  This was frustrating to say the least.

While the start of my relationship with my new N97 was rocky it was manageable .  Plus the promise of the much talked about V11 firmware and how it would fix a lot of problems, that and that alone kept me hopeful that we could make things work (me and the N97).  Firmware V11 came and went, sure, some problems were resolved, but entirely new problems were introduced.  Once again, we were on the rocks with our relationship.  I managed, somehow, to tolerate the device.  It wasn’t crashing randomly any more, which I suppose is a positive thing.  However, one of the new problems that came with V11 was a memory leak that slowly filled up my C:.  The first time it happened I received an “out of memory” error and the phone crashed and rebooted.  Upon reboot I was confused at first since the C: had about 18meg free.  I then noticed it would slowly fill as days went on and crash again.

Until now, I’ve not even touched on the other long laundry list of known issues with this device, including the much loathed Nokia N97 Self Harming issue where it scratches and destroys it’s own camera lense.  Mine has been no exception to this issue, the lense is nicely scratched and gashed, thankfully not directly over the camera’s optics so the camera is still very usable.  Others, however, have not been so lucky.

So, back to the story.. we last off with the tails of whoa over V11 firmware.  Well, it was many months before Nokia finally released the even more anticipated V12 firmware. It was even longer for UK contract phone owners since the UK carriers either refused to push it out to us or they blamed Nokia for the delay.  I don’t know where the problem really was or who was really to blame, suffice to say it sucked big time.   Finally, V12 was released and the world cheered, until they installed it and noticed yet more problems were introduced, for some it was more problems then fixes.  Some of my issues were fixed but my memory leak got worse.  I could now only run my phone for 2 days before the C: would fill and the phone would crash or I had to reboot it.

Well, here I am now in Nov.  After waiting for V20 to come out and then deciding not to wait until sometime next year I changed the product code on my phone by following the instructions on THIS PAGE.  That worked a treat I was then able to upgrade to V20.  That did not go well at all I have to say.  The process of loading the firmware was fine, however after the initial reboot there were loads of performance issues and lots of crashes.  After much Googling I’d come to conclusion that I needed to do a hard reset and rebuild my phone from scratch   That was the first time I had to a full rebuild.  Somewhat painful .. loads of apps to find and install, activation codes to find etc.  More annoyingly was I had to rebuild all my menus again for all the apps.  Very time consuming.  Fine, I accepted that, the phone is crap, the OS is crap and Nokia is crap, just one of the little joys of having bleeding edge hardware and Beta software.

Well, last night the phone acted up and needed a reboot.  This wasn’t the memory leak, that seemed to be mostly cured going to V20, I forgot to mention that above.  I pushed the power button, turned off the phone.  It did as it was suppose to.  Power it back on.. it sits at the white Nokia screen for about 2-3 mins.  This is NOT normal.  60-90 seconds boot time is normal for my phone.  I pull the battery, try again.  Leave it for 10 mins or so this time.  Still, no boot.  Bugger me.  I pull the battery, sim card and microSD card out.  Wait a few mins, replace the sim and battery and power on.  Nothing, just the White Screen of Death.  I tried all the “fixes” that others posted about, nothing at all.  I was again forced to hard reset and rebuild my phone.

This was the last time I ever hard reset my phone for no valid reason.  The next time the phone does this, I will hard reset it clear and format the internal mass storage and sell it on EBay for whatever I’m lucky enough to get for it.  That will be it.  I will also not be organizing my icons again or doing much else in the way of customizing my phone because of the hassles and time it takes, all to have it destroyed because Nokia can’t get it’s act together.

I would love to return the phone to Nokia for a full refund not to mention refunds for the software I’ve purchased for the device that will, on the next total lock up will become of no use to me since I won’t be using the device.

I am one very unhappy customer of Nokia at this point, the only good thing is knowing I’m no the only one.  There are 1000’s and 1000’s of people that have bought this phone and posted about their deep disappointment with the device and Nokia in general.  I hope, like me, they will all vote with their feet and refuse to by any more Nokia and Symbian based phones!  I think my next phone will be an Android of some sort.  It can’t be any worse.  No, don’t even think of trying to talk into an Apple i-CAN’T DO WHAT I LIKE ON MY PHONE-Phone.

If you are thinking of buying a Nokia N97 I would strongly encourage you to spend 2 hours at least Googling about the device and issues people are having.  Don’t take my rantings on here for it, see what everyone else is saying about the device.  If you have any sense you’ll see it’s not a good investment, and a very costly one at that.

Days 4 and 5.  We started the day much as other days, breakfast in the hotel, Lisa loves the waffles the most.  They are quite good that’s for sure.  On Thursday they had Chocolate ones, so that was a nice treat from the normal ones with chocolate spread on it.

Wednesday, it was back to the Albert Cuypstraat Market again for a couple of things that we didn’t get the day before.  We’d only walked a small part of that market.  Then it decided we’d take in the Tropenmuseum.  This is quite the place.  Four floors of Dutch history centred around the Caribbean and tropical areas.  They also had a great “Getting to know China” tour in a special area of the museum, the only problem was it was given entirely in Dutch by a Chinese guy.  It would have been nice for a just a little bit of English to be given, but oh well.  They covered the Chinese art of Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chinese cuisine, Chinese writing with hair and feather pens.  They also spoke about Chinese traditions for celebrating and honouring the dead and Chinese tea ceremony’s and different famous Chinese teas.

I have heaps of photos from the museum which I’ll get up shortly.  After the museum we headed for the “China District”, which is just on the edge of the Red Light district.  Bloody shame too, we had to walk through the RLD twice again that day   We had lunch at a Chinese Dim Sum restraunt.  The sign outside (I have a photo somewhere) that read “All you can eat for 8.95, in 1 hour” haha

After stuffing ourselves with Chinese food and leaving the owner suffering from a minor stroke having witnessed the awesome eating power of Yuki (I’m certain he’ll change his sign either increasing the price the cutting the 1 hour to 30 mins), we headed back to Nieuwendijk and Kalverstraat shopping areas and Dam square.  One of the tram drivers from a previous day liked his job a lot, when we approached Dam square his announcement over the tannoy was something like “Now stopping at the Dam square, all those going to the Dam square get off here at the Dam square”.  We wandered around the square and got a photo with all the girls and Batman, which nearly made Emma cry, what a scary cat.  Yuki then went to the Amsterdam Diamond Centre.  I stayed around the square with the kids.

After that it was back to the hotel, rather early then previously, but we were all completely knackered.  Poor Yuki, when we got back to the hotel we’d found out the Internet had been shutdown due to some technical problem (apparently their open wifi was used by spammers or something so the ISP killed their connection for 24 hours).  It was a long and boring night with no Internet haha

We all just chilled out for a while then about 1830 Lisa and I walked down the street to the Domino’s Pizza and picked up a medium pizza and some chicken wings for dinner and took it back to the hotel room.

Thursday morning we got all packed up and had breakfast and got a taxi back to the Olympic Stadium Park and Ride.  We had too much stuff to carry on the Trams there, it was just easier.  The Park and Ride was by far the best bargain of the trip, 6 Euro per day, so 24 Euro and the car was kept safe in a well lit, underground 24hr guarded parking facility.  I was well impressed.  Anyone planning to drive to Amsterdam should seriously consider using the P-n-R facilities they have, it’s cheap and easy for sure!  Wish more cities has those sorts of secure short/longish term parking facilities.

We then made our way back towards the Hook of Holland port, taking our time and exploring some of the county lanes along the way.  There weren’t many windmills to be seen really, to really experience those you need to get on a bus tour from Amsterdam .. we didn’t bother as they were quite expensive and very long.. they were 32 Euro for each adult and 16 for each of the kids plus they were 5 ½ hours out on the go.  There’s no way the kids would have survived that trip

We took a bunch of photos of the countryside and settled in the Hook of Holland to explore the small town here and have lunch before getting on the ship.  We found a nice little clothing shop and managed to find Yuki a cute PJ set with Snoopy on it (that’s her fav), plus we picked up a bunch of things for the kids and I got a fleece jacket I’ll keep at the office (since our AC is mental and seems to be set on “Fend off Global Warming” mode all the time), that was a bargain as well, a huge bag of clothes for 40 something Euro.  Much better then shopping in Amsterdam haha

That brings me to the current time, 1426hrs.  Currently sitting on deck seven of our ship just waiting for them to cast off and hoist the mainsails, heave the anchors and get the cat-o-nine-tails out to encourage the rowing team to crack on with the crossing.

Yuki has given up on getting online for now and decided to sack out over 3 chairs and try and sleep.  It’s highly unlikely that will happen, now with our kids.

Speaking of the kids, they’ve been in the kids play area for about the last hour or so since we boarded the ship.  We’re sat right next to the kids area, I’m not sure if that was a good or bad idea.. haha we can see the kids but we can also HEAR them too.. do they sell mufflers for children?  If not they should, there’s a fortune waiting for the smart bugger that brings that to market!!

Right, enough for now.. we have about 7 hours until we land I think.. then it’s straight home with the kids and get them to bed.  We’ll deal with the aftermath of the clothing and bags tomorrow or something.  I’ll be ready for bed myself as son as I walk in the door I think.

Good bye Amsterdam and Holland, it’s been mostly good but had it’s moments as well.  Can’t say we’d hurry back again, but mostly that’s just because of the cost of visiting verses a couple of bad experiences.