Benz Blog

KVMs: just say no. I’ve already stated how unhappy I was with the IOGear KVM switch (which only supported VGA), but I’m equally unhappy with the new one I bought: the Linkskey LDV-202AUSK. The DVI connection resulted in a much brighter picture, but there were so many “display artifacts” that it’s just unusable. By “display artifacts”, I mean streaks of blue or green dots that appear in various places. It’s most noticeable on the desktop and when viewing photos. So both products are going back and I’ve got the monitor hooked directly to the Mac now. I can use either Remote Desktop to access the Dell, or use VNC. (Note: rebooting the Dell via Remote Desktop results in weird stuff happening on startup. For example, the Cisco VPN service fails to start properly. Rebooting via VNC works just fine, although using the Dell with VNC produces a weird high pitched frequency which I think is coming from the Dell but I’m not sure. It gets really annoying after a few hours).

As expected, I modified the key bindings as stated here to enable the home/end keys to work as they do on Windows. Too bad this doesn’t seem to work everywhere (like in the text box I’m typing in right now in Firefox), but it works in every text editor I’ve tried so I’m content. IMHO, the key commands for cursor movement make much more sense on Windows than they do on the Mac. (This doesn’t apply to window management, though: Command+W and Command+M is much better than CTRL+F4 or ALT+F4 and ALT+SPACE, N, respectively).

Also as expected, I’m back to the 2-button mouse with a scroll wheel. Rumor has it that Apple is working on a 2-button mouse of their own. Good. Although I honestly could have done without the 2 buttons, I really missed the scroll wheel.