2025-01-10 - Using Power Toys (sharing a mouse on 2 machines with Mouse without Boarders and the included sharing clipboard feature)

    I have been aware of Power Toys from Microsoft for about a year now. In class, students in my class including my friend, Jack, were trying to verify that APIPA works so two machines on the same LAN can communicate with each other when DHCP is down. After watching them work for a while, Doug suggested that my fellow classmates use Power Toys' Mouse without Boarders , that way one mouse can work on both machines and its not as tedious to coordinate actions between multiple people. One person can just do something on a machine and make sure what  needs to be done on the other is also done as they know best what needs to happen and that they have in fact already done what the know they did. You involve other people and you tell them make sure to do ipconfig /release that they heard you and did it. But in the mess of trying to figure out why APIPA wasn't working, and this problem took like an hour and a half to figure out partially because they were being slowed down by people telling each other to do something on each others computers and the other person being so busy trying to solve it on their end that they stopped collaborating and weren't paying attention to each other and times happened where they thought they heard each other and when they asked if X or Y was done--not knowing that the other person meant this and not that, they would respond saying yes, and so they tried again to get APIPA to work and it never worked. Things got much simpler when Doug got involved and he downloaded Power Toys on both machines and activated Mouse Without Boarders and connected both machines to each other so one mouse could do the work of both machines. 

    I don't remember exactly what it was that went wrong when they were trying to get APIPA to work and finally with Doug's help, it was able to work properly. 

    I wanted to be apart of this but I had so many projects of my own which I wanted to do the entire time I was there. But I did come help for a few minutes. I was not apart of it when Doug came along and got it working though. 

   Oh, I remember, there is a setting in network settings that on one computer it appeared to be working but on the other, when you navigated to network settings and turned of DHCP, for some reason it was still receiving an IP address. I don't remember the reason for that but Doug solved it. 

    Anyway, I had been keeping Power Toys in the back of my mind for a time I would eventually like to set it up. I have been plagued for years with needing two mice to control both my laptop and desktop when at home. I had a wireless mouse dongle connected to my laptop for the longest time where two different mouses would be connected to it, one for on-the-go and one for at home and when my desk got too cluttered I would move the two home mice to a box on a side table so it was out of the way and then I would get the two mixed up all the time to great frustration. And then I lost one of my mice and had to buy a new one and had to go through all sorts of trouble to get new mice connected to the same dongle. Doug suggested that my laptop has Bluetooth, why don't I just buy a Bluetooth mouse. I had never thought of this. It would also resolve this one issue I was having where my mouse would stop responding and the dongle was already as close as I could get it to the mouse itself. And it would also resolve the problem I had where when gaming on the rare occasion, the mouse would stop responding for a number of crucial seconds at the worst possible times. I went all in on Bluetooth mice. I was able to eliminate the dongle from my laptop so there wasn't this thing connected to the motherboard that kept getting yanked on by everything around the laptop and weakening the USB module soldering job. 

    I did like my old mouses feel in the hand much better, but the scroll wheel is a little more convenient. I got this one mouse to use at home with a metal scroll wheel so I can scroll much farther, much faster, but I did like my old mouse. My pinky keeps getting rolled under the mouse and pinched uncomfortably as I use the mouse. But it has the option to connect with Bluetooth to two different computer, and also to use a dongle. I left the dongle inside the mouse and proceeded to use Bluetooth. Then I bought a smaller Bluetooth mouse that fits in y pocket for on-the-go. But a few days ago I had this idea as I was going through Power Toys and looking at everything it offers. And I knew about Mouse without Boarders but never set it up. It would be convenient to have one mouse for both my desktop and my laptop. 

    So I set it up. At first, I set up the mouse connected at home through Bluetooth to work on y desktop and I thought this was so cool. But then I realized, wait, I will only be able to use this mouse when the laptop is here, powered up and running Power Toys, otherwise it won't work. Most of the time when I use my desktop, the laptop is not running. It's asleep in my backpack or something. What do I do about that. And I thought, well the desktop is always running. I just turn off the keyboard with the trackpad so nothing happens when my cat walks over the keyboard. But I don't have Bluetooth on the desktop. It has an older motherboard and I have a Bluetooth dongle which I used to use. But I started having problems where it kept trying to connect my computer to my TV and the TV would display Bluetooth pairing boxes over what I was watching or doing on my desktop at the time. It covered a huge portion of the screen and it would do it every thirty seconds and never stopped. It only went away when after dealing with this for a long time I realized that I had unplugged the dongle for whatever reason. So I discovered that I cannot just turn Bluetooth on my TV off and this dongle was going to prompt my TV every 30 seconds. So I stopped using Bluetooth on my desktop. So how do I use a Bluetooth mouse on a none Bluetooth TV so I can use it through Power Toys n both my desktop and laptop? If I connect it so it is set up on the desktop, it needs to work with the laptop by far the most. Using it with the laptop is top priority. My desktop has a way for me to control the mouse already, the laptop doesn't and I don't want to use the touchscreen or trackpad on the laptop all the time. 

    I realized my mouse uses both Bluetooth and a dongle so I connected the dongle to the desktop and set up Muse without Boarders to work the other way, from my desktop to my laptop, and now it works! And if I have those RF problems I was having before with my older mice, I can simply switch to Bluetooth while playing games. Apparently, I think it is the USB port that times out when I am gaming and I don't want to change the settings of a USB port just to suit something I will only use it for briefly like a few times every six months.  

    My only problem with Mouse without Boarders is that now whenever the mouse goes off frame for just a second when moving a file or I am trying to clear the desktop on my laptop using that far right button on the taskbar to clear the desktop of any open windows, it is much harder to select now without going off screen to the other desktop. Oh yeah, and by the way, this is effectively keyboard without boarders too. Although, the wireless keyboard on my desktop controls my laptop too, but the keyboard built into my laptop does not control my desktop. Whatever. Just make sure the mouse is always on the computer you want to use at the time. Man, in gaming this could be a nightmare!

    After using this for a few days I had quickly concluded that I hated that it was so hard to minimize all icons using the right-most edge of the taskbar button because every time I plug in or unplug my laptop or wake from hibernate, it restores all windows. And I like to keep everything open so they're ready to go and I can pick up from where I left off. And I think the multiple desktops solution windows has implemented is brilliant and useful, but I know that if I used it, I would forget I was on a different desktop and say the machine slows down and I want to close a few things, well, the solution would then become the problem. 

    It seems that this is the case with every solution so it's up to the user to decide what they're willing to put up with. I felt this way when I first started using my Pi Hole and Pi VPN, I didn't like the way it affected my email viewing on my phone so I had to turn it off and never remembered to turn it on and I didn't want to disable the adlists that were affecting my email. So the solution became kind of tedious. I realized that adblocking is great but doesn't block YouTube or Spotify ads and messes with my email and it often has problems that need to be fixed. It's not quite like inventing the lightbulb and you just don't ever need to worry about changing the lightbulb every few weeks or days and so the innovation looks great on paper but gets tedious real quick and you're not eliminating work, you're creating more of it with the appearance of convenience rather than plugging, playing and forgetting. At least when you knew in the old days that if you wanted light, you were forced to accept the extra efforts needed to get it, you knew you were going to have to light a match for the gaslight or something. But if you just installed electric light bulbs and they die all the time and the power keeps going out, it stops being this thing that you get to forget and enjoy the convenience of and instead of the necessary work for the convenience of light, you traded extra work for convenience with random frustrating problems that take time to fix and a regular budget to make up for in new lightbulbs. You might conclude that matches are cheaper and less frustrating. 

    That being said, I left the Power Toys windows open on both machines and happened to see a couple of toggle switches I found useful. There is a feature that switches the mouse from just moving off the edge and disappearing from one machine and onto the other, basically disabling the mouse on one machine or the other and deselects everything so if you want to just stop a song in iTunes from playing, the spacebar stops working and you have to take extra steps to get basic functionality that you had before. So this feature makes it so the mouse doesn't just disappear, or you can use a keyboard combination to switch, you can make it so the mouse doesn't disappear to on the other machine from the corners so that taskbar button still works, you can make it so everything doesn't just get deselected, so the spacebar in iTunes still works without extra steps to make sure iTunes is selected and the mouse isn't disappeared, they did actually take the time to make sure this solution is a quality product that doesn't just trade one inconvenience for another. I will have to see for a few more days how I feel about this before I just go to using the dongle for the desktop and Bluetooth for the laptop and just pressing the button on my mouse to switch back and forth. 

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