If you didn’t know, Microsoft commissioned some amateur photographers to capture live-image backgrounds. I think that’s a fantastic idea, as there’s some real talent out there (in many disciplines, not just photography) that hasn’t made the decision or had the opportunity to go professional. Long Zheng of istartedsomething.com has more details on the process and the results.

If you enjoy the shipped Vista backgrounds, you’ll be glad to know that Hamad Darwish, one of the amateur photographers has released an additional pack of Vista backgrounds that didn’t make the Microsoft cut -and they’re fantastic. You can get the download links from his website.

The easiest way to view all the possible images without selecting each one individually via the “Browse…” button is to unzip the images to the public pictures folder, typically located here: C:\Users\Public\Pictures

They should show up under the “Public Pictures” option in the Location drop-list.

Enjoy! Unless you agree with Jeff Atwood, then you should never see your background image anyway.

And thanks, Hamad!

It claims to support practically any version of Windows (from 95 to XP, and I’m personally running it on Vista), as well as Mac OS X 10.2+ and *nix (primarily tested on Linux).

When I posted about my office setup, I included a picture of my 3 monitor setup, plus my MacBook Pro. Thanks to Synergy, I essentially have four monitors. Moving my mouse off the left edge of my Windows desktop instantly transfers it to the right edge of my Mac’s desktop, along with my keyboard focus and clipboard. It only supports plain-text clipboard contents for Windows <-> Mac, but 9 times out of 10 that’s sufficient. (Submit a patch with the fix, if you feel brave!)

One thing is that configuring Synergy sucks. On the Mac (and *nix) you have to know how to edit a .conf text file. In Windows, it’s hardly better. You have to reference your computers by hostname, which causes me grief when I connect my Mac via VPN and sometimes get an arbitrary hostname assigned to me. Also, in Vista, you must always run the application as an administrator, or else no dice.

Here’s a handy guide to configuring Synergy 1.3.1–focused on my particular setup, and assuming you keep most of the defaults. We won’t get too “fancy” here. If you want more advanced information, check out the links under the Documentation section on the SourceForge page.

Windows (Running Synergy as a server)

Start Synergy, and select “Share this computer’s keyboard and mouse (server)”, then click “Configure”

The first step is to define your “screens”. A screen is really just “a computer”. In my case, a single PC has 3 monitors – that’s one “screen”. Click the super-fancy-awesome plus sign button (“+”) under the “Screens:” list box to add a new screen. Synergy recommends you use the computer name as the screen name, unless you’ve got a good reason not to, I agree with them–but for the server setup it doesn’t really matter. As far as I can tell, though, it’s purely cosmetic since you can use the “aliases” to map hostnames to a friendly name. Enter the screen name (your computer’s hostname) and optionally any aliases. It’s important to reiterate that both “screen name” and “aliases” are used to identify remote computers via the incoming/outgoing network connection.

I left all the other options as default (just to get something going). But essentially you can control which modifier keys are also sent over the network (or not), as well as “dead zones” on the screen that shouldn’t swap the mouse out.

Each computer needs to know about every other computer, so you’ll have to add a new “screen” for every box you want to hook up. Go ahead and do that, I’ll wait. Ready? Wishing they had some sort of “auto-discovery”? Me too. The next step is to “link up” your screens. You basically have to tell Synergy how they are positioned/connected. In my case, my laptop is directly to the left (and a little below) my main PC “screen” (remember, all 3 count as one to Synergy–it’s about “desktops” really).

Click “[New Link]” in the “Links” listbox and enter your information (explained in a sec) — then click the “+” button (genius!) to add it. Wash, rinse, and repeat until you’ve got it all set up.

The reason this is so complex is that you can configure portions of screens that link to portions of other screens. In the above example, I’m configuring the entire left side of my work PC (0-100%) to map to the entire edge of my Mac (0-100%) — on the Mac I configure which edge (left/right/etc) lines up with my work PC. Why would I want anything different? Consider the following extreme configuration:

In this “screen” layout, I would map:

• 0-50% of the left of Screen 3 to 0-100% of Screen 1
• 50-100% of the left of Screen 3 to 0-100% of Screen 2
• 0-100% of the bottom of Screen 2 to 0-60% of Screen 4
• etc.

Make sense? I hope so, because it’s a real pain to configure. And each “screen” has to be configured to match — so on Screen 1′s configuration, 0-100% of the left side goes to 0-50% of Screen 3. So much can be done here in terms of auto-config, it’s not even funny.

The good news is that you’re basically done. You can test your configuration by clicking “Test” in the main dialog, which simply starts the server allowing you to cancel it. I recommend using the “Test” mode until you’ve got it all set up, because otherwise it runs in the background and there’s no way to change the configuration without restarting the application. (Fun.) You can also configure some advanced options (like network port numbers, and auto-start options).

Mac (Running Synergy as a client)

This is the fun part. The UI on Windows at least abstracts out the configuration file describing the screens–no such luck on a Mac. And on a Mac, of all places! Synergy on the Mac includes a sample .conf file, which really helps. Here’s an example .conf file – it gets more advanced than this, but for basic stuff you don’t need anything more. Notice that I’m not specifying any percentages because they’re all 0-100%. If you want to get more complicated, I recommend reading the documentation.

section: screens
LERCHWORKPC:
maclerch.local:
end

section: links
# lerchworkpc is to the right of maclerch.local
maclerch.local:
right = LERCHWORKPC
LERCHWORKPC:
left = maclerch.local
end

Basically I’m identifying all the screens involved: LERCHWORKPC and maclerch.local. Then I’m associating them: to the right of maclerch.local is LERCHWORKPC, and to the left of LERCHWORKPC is maclerch.local. Nuff said.

To run Synergy in client mode, bring up Terminal (the Mac’s saving grace: a command-prompt), and drag-and-drop “synergyc” from the install location (by install I mean “where you unpackaged the files”) onto Terminal. Add “-f” and the name of the computer running the Synergy server, and press Return.

Drag “synergyc” from here… (assuming you installed it here)

… to here. So your command looks something like this:

The -f option tells Synergy not to run as a daemon. I prefer it because I can minimize Terminal and forget about it – but bring it back up to view the output or kill the app with CTRL+C easily if I want to. You can leave off “-f” to run it as a daemon and stop the process later, if you like.

That’s it, run the synergy client app and you’re all set up. Well I should rephrase. I’m all set up. Everybody has different configurations, so hopefully this will be a good stepping stone for you to get yours working.

It’s simple: create a shortcut with the following target.
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE” /c “IPM.Note”
(if your path to OUTLOOK.EXE differs, use yours)

Thanks Chris!
* Win+1 is, and always will be, PowerShell.

But I digress. In Vista by default you can activate the Win+# hotkeys to activate the Quick Launch shortcut in the specified location (1-based, so 0 == 10). In my screenshot above, Win+1 opens PowerShell, and Win+8 opens Reflector. As you reorder the shortcuts (you can drag and drop them to reorder) the hotkeys open the new shortcuts.

Very cool!

Well, I finally did a little more googling and found the following well-described answer to my problems, which I’m sharing here because this was a real pain.

If you want to use Windows Vista and you want to be able to print to a network printer, you’re going to have to use UAC. You turned it off? Turn it back on. You’re using the in-built “Administrator” account? Log-out and log-in as a normal admin. Microsoft says you have to use UAC to get a printer installed.

P.S. Here’s a new (admittedly rather useless) feature for Google to implement: search for similar images based on visual differencing, perhaps using peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) comparisons. That way I can upload a screen capture of an error condition and look for similar images. Yes, you could just search for the (hopefully) descriptive error text, but first, there might not always be error text (it ain’t a perfect world) and second, somebody might have written about a screenshot without unnecessarily retyping the error text on the page. I could also search for the closest match to my own picture, and find out that it’s Brad Pitt. That would be nice…

Out of the box Vista’s power management is configured with what’s called a “Balanced” power plan. The Balanced power plan tries to do just that: balance low power usage (energy savings) with availability (performance). The biggest problem I’ve run into with Balanced (or “Power saver”, or any plan that puts your computer into sleep mode at all, for that matter) is that when I wake my computer back up, the network connection remains asleep, and it doesn’t come back again. I have to reboot to get it to reconnect (which defeats the purpose of sleep mode). As someone who works remotely on frequent occasions, the fact that I’m suddenly unable to connect to my computer after an hour or so is just ridiculous. When I am in my office, and I bring Vista out of sleep mode, I’ve instantly got 3-5 applications all frantically trying to reconnect to their servers, none of which are able.

Perhaps I’m missing a setting that will let my computer wake up via the network, but if I’m missing it so are a lot of other people out there. (If you know it, please leave a comment to give me a clue!) Given how frequently I connect to my machine from a remote location, forcing my computer into sleep mode won’t really save me a ton of energy so in my case, the solution was simply to change my power plan to “High performance” which essentially keeps it on all the time. You can find your Power plans via your Control Panel (the Power Options icon).

I still don’t know what I think (overall) about Vista’s sleep mode…

Here’s the scenario:

• Install one of our legacy Win32 applications
• Install IE7
• Open the help–we use HTML Help (.chm files)
• Everything’s working great!
• Accept updates from the server (we have a custom auto-updater)
• After the application restarts, open the help
• Bam! The app crashes with an exception triggered from somewhere deep inside the ::HtmlHelp Win32 API call. (Please, no comments about the lack of exception handling here )

None of that code had changed between the original install and the updated version! So what was the problem? It turns out that a component getting downloaded automatically as part of the update was including a Microsoft redistributable file to support Windows NT: PSAPI.dll (version 4.x) which IE7 is not compatible with.

After much googling (and yes, I mean using Google.com, Inc.) and other investigations (like one-by-one putting back DLLs to see if one of them was misbehaving for a reason I couldn’t comprehend), I came across this post in the newsgroups. Bingo! Because the help viewer was loading in our process (or at least from our process), IE’s working directory included the “bad” version of the dll. If I deleted the dll, things ran smoothly (including for our own application). In my case, that was my resolution–delete the file.

Fortunately that version of the file is pretty old so unless you’re explicitly supporting Windows NT, you should be safe relying on the version installed with the OS (found in %SYSTEMROOT%\system32).

MSDN Win32 to .NET Framework API Map

- and -

Excellent pointers for calling unmanaged API’s, and pointing out managed equivalents, if they exist:

pinvoke.net