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Here’s a quick note to update my ongoing struggle to ensure that my Apple TV doesn’t fall out of usefulness before its time. As you may remember I posted several months ago a wishlist for Apple’s next Apple TV update. It included some of the obvious things like responsiveness, performance, and video playlists. Unfortunately, none of these luxuries were included in the last update.

Apple TV 2.3, however, does actually seem to address many of the issues I pointed out in my last Apple TV post. The remote actually elicits an almost immediate visual response from the unit. There aren’t quite so many moments where I’m asking myself, “did that button press register?” It still happens, but I would say it’s quite less frequent now.

Two great features have been added with this update: 3rd party remote control support and video playlists.

Video playlists: Now you can play uninterrupted video through all of your day’s video podcast subscriptions. You can also set a video playlist to last through your New Year’s Eve party. Just create a playlist of videos on either a shared library or on your Apple TV’s main linked and synced computer.

This feature is great because now you can play each of your 2 or 3 minute podcasts from your favorite sources back to back as you turn to jello on the couch after a long day of hard brain stuff. You can create channels based on content and sit, motionless until every last one of those suckers has played.

3rd Party Remotes: Let your inner couch potato rejoice. Finally you can assign 6 of those extra buttons on ANY remote control littering your coffee table to the 6 functions of that little white remote that came with your Apple TV. Just enter Settings, Remotes, and start pushing buttons. It doesn’t matter which button you push on whatever infrared remote you have, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the main function of the device the 3rd party remote came with, you can repurpose the button for your Apple TV.

One sad note, Boxee was wiped out. I no longer have access to Hulu, Comedy Central, MySpace TV, and Torrents. And from what I’ve read, it’s not re-installable at the moment. However, I’d venture that most Apple TV users will enjoy the new features enough to make the update worth it anyway. While the Boxee crew will likely be hard at work creating a new installer and have you back on the Internet TV IV before the DTs have a chance to give you dead ceiling baby nightmares.

Also, I’ve got a few Boxee invites, so let me know if you’re interested in the comments.

Have you ever been sitting at your desk with your laptop open, working away on your dual-monitor desktop setup and thoughtlessly tried to move your mouse from your desktop monitor straight over to your laptop? What about copying a URL to the clipboard of your laptop then jumped over to your desktop to try to paste it into an email? It doesn’t work, right?

Well now it can. Synergy is an open source project that allows you to do just that. Install it on your windows desktop and your MacBook, take a few minutes to configure it, and voila! You’ve just created the perfect dual monitor, multi-operating system desktop work environment. 

You can now seamlessly move your mouse monitor to monitor to laptop and copy from one operating system and paste into another.

In my own setup, I’ve connected the keyboard and mouse via bluetooth and the left-side monitor to the Windows XP box sitting under my desk, and the center monitor to the MacBook Pro. Running Synergy on the Windows box in server mode and client mode on the MacBook, I now have a fully integrated multi-monitor desktop and laptop combo.