So I finally got Outlook for Mac at work this week, and I really like it so far. One thing I immediately noticed was missing, however, was the ability to setup signatures to not show on any replies and forwards. This is pretty important to me, since I’m frequently getting myself into pretty deep email chains, and I don’t want my email and phone number on all 75 emails in them.

This was definitely a problem that needed a fix. A quick google search, and I found a solution: Application Shortcuts. This is a pretty awesome tool on the mac, that seems glaringly absent from windows. What it does is basically give you the ability to set keyboard shortcuts for any application, and manage them all via system preferences:

1. After setting up my signature in Outlook, I went to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.
2. In the list on the left, I went down to Application Shortcuts.
3. I hit the plus sign to add a new shortcut.
4. In the applications dropdown, I found Outlook.
5. The next step was extremely important to get this to work. In the Menu Title box, you need to add the menu name exactly as it appears in the app. This does not include the path to this menu item. For example my menu item was to insert my signature called Standard (Draft > Signatures > Standard), so I put just the word “Standard” in this box.
6. Then assign the keyboard command, save, and viola! You now have a keyboard command to add a signature whenever you like in Outlook.

Got this guy on Etsy. There are a million different kinds on there. Good stuff.

Ok, so i’m kind of a noob at this Linux madness, but here goes: This week, I set up Synergy between my Macbook (running Leopard) and my home brew Linux machine (running Ubuntu 8.10 – Intrepid Ibex).

For those of you who have no idea what I just spewed out with my keyboard, Synergy lets you share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems. Its actually ridiculously seemless, just like running dual monitors on one machine.

So, lets get down to the How-to. FIrst, we’ll configure the Mac, as that will act as my server. This means we will be using the mouse/keyboard connected to this machine. For this, I downloaded a nifty tool called SynergyKM, which adds the Synergy setup to your system preferences, as well as displays the connection status in the menu bar.

Once you’ve installed it, run SynergyKM through the System Preferences window. Under the General tab, hit the “share my keyboard and mouse” radio button.

Next you’ll then need to add the screen names of the computers you will be using. These names will be the host names of the said machines.

To find the host name of a Mac, open the sharing preference pane in System Prefs. Whatever you see in the Computer Name section is what you’ll name that computer in Synergy. For the Linux machine, just run the command hostname. This can be run on the Mac as well, but may be appended with the line .local.

Finally, make sure the screens are in the order you want them to be. I have my Mac on the right, but its your preference. Just drag the screens and pick your poison.

Its basically the same deal on the linux box, only instead of synergyKM, I used a program called QuickSynergy.

To install it, just follow the usual command line procedure:

./configure
make
make install

You will need the GTK 2.0 and libglade-2.0 development packges installed on your computer in order to achieve a successful compilation.

Next, slect the Client tab on the QuickSynergy main window. Fill in the field with the server’s (in this case the mac) IP address/hostname and the click Start. It may take a couple seconds to kick off, but you should be able to rock the mac mouse and keyboard on both computers now!

Finally, synergy by default will not run on startup on the Linux machine. In order to do so, go to system/preferences/sessions. Add a new startup program. Call it whatever you want, and make it call the following command, just replace the x’s with the server ip:

synergyc -f xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

In case that was all total freaking gibberish to you try the video or links below, or just comment on this post. I’ll be happy to help you if I can:

http://quicksynergy.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm

Special thanks to my boy Tomas for showing me the ways of the Synergy Ninja.
_Rob