Ofer's Blog

Firefox with an IE Twist

I've been using firefox for a while now, but some sites just work better in IE (read SharePoint and Outlook Web).

I've used extensions that let you open a link in IE from firefox, but thats still annoying so Ive just resorted to leaving an IE window open for the times I need it, until now.

There is a firefox extension that lets you open a page with IE as the renderer in a tab!!  Its called IE Tab and I'm converted.

AMD Mini-ITX Board

My latest of a line of unfinished projects is to install a computer in my car.  To this end, I was thinking of using an old laptop with a broken screen, but I found something better.  A cheap interesting Mini-ITX Motherboard.

Mini-ITX is the "in" thing for small PC's nowadays.  Everybody is in on the action including HP.
The most popular Mini-ITX board is built by VIA, but there are boards built by others as well.  Most of these boards run VIA's low power cpu, but some run intel P4's or Pentium M's.  I have never heard of any Mini-ITX boards that run AMD, until I found this gem:


I have not been able to find out much about this board, but i know this much:

It's made by Asus for HP. 
It takes socket 754 AMD cpu's (Turion 64, AMD 64, Sempron 64)
It has a smaller than standard power connector ala HP's slimline desktop pc's. motherboard

I suspect it's a prototype board that was built to be put in HP's Slimline desktop pc line.  HP's slimline is a Mini-ITX based Celeron-M Desktop pc.

Super Dual Screen

Many of us have multiple computers at our desks with either two sets of keyboard and mice or a kvm.  Both cases are kind of annoying.
Wouldn't it be cool if the systems could just act like a single dual screen computer?  Well, it can.

The magic program that lets you do it is called Synergy 

Synergy is a client / server program that lets you connect one keyboard / mouse pair to multiple (as many as you like) computers.  Back in school, we had a setup with 12 monitors and one keyboard / mouse controlling all of them by just scrolling from screen to screen.

An advantage to this over normal dual screen setups is that if one machine is under load, that doesn't keep the other machine from slowing down at all.  Since the software itself is very light, even a heavily loaded serving machine can still handle being the server for the keyboard / mouse.