5 ports, 4 devices? Am I reading that right? One for the connection back to the mothership? I need more ports than that--I have an 8 port one in my living room right now, and only one port free which I'm thinking of giving over to the other laptop.

It would be...

Bedroom - Router + switch = 6 ports. (2 from router, 4 from switch)

Living Room - switch = 7 ports.

Oh, I misread you entirely. Yeah, it does look like I need to do something like that. It's a shame, because I wanted to upgrade my router anyway, because it's a bit hinky, so it would have been nice to get increased functionality at the same time as upgrading reliability.

I also need to take another look at my power bars, and make sure those are sensible. I think I'm maxed out under the desk too, which was another reason I didn't want to add another electrical device there.

Oh, for fuck's sake I've fallen down the VNC rabbit hole again. I'm back to ground...well, one. Where VNCing in gives me the grey screen with one terminal window. I can't run Gnome on the box itself because it's sending some perverse frequency to the monitor no matter what I choose (the monitor error message keeps reporting the same thing, no matter what setting I pick). I'm up to my elbows in error messages and google and manuals, and I'm about to break it all down and find out exactly what video card is up in that beast.

This is what you get with a $200 PC and a ~10 year old flatscreen and an old install of a DIY OS. NO LOVE.

Well, didn't manage to get a resolution better than 800x600. I'm going to back up the data from that server, and at least upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu, and if that doesn't work, install from scratch.

Has anyone here used Fences ( [link] A chatty developer at a vendor of ours mentioned it, and it's really helping keep my work desktop under control, and I'm about to give it a shot on my much bigger home desktop. It allows you to bring back some old school Win 3.1 functionality, basically, and group icons on your desktop, "fence" them off in a movable container.

Hmm, that sounds interesting.

I'm cranky at Astrid right now because I suspect it has larger than appropriate data for its sync processes. Anyway, something does, cause I hit overages for both dongle and phone this month. Thank goodness its no longer punitive charges.

I've been fiddling with Fences, ita.

I installed it on my replacement computer at work, and so it's been organised from the get go. Putting it on the mess that is my home PC is enlightening, because it's always clarifying to see what has no home--boom! Out you go! I thought I was good about deleting and uninstalling, but shit, stuff had really piled up.

I don't really see any reason to get the paid version. I don't need to do anything fancy.

I didn't see any reason for more than the free version. I'm mainly using it to put applications into related groups and sticking things in one place.

Finally got around to trying Swype, and I'm impressed.