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I've been using Thwirl for a long time as my Twitter client, and I was very happy with it. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed like the rest of the world had gone mad and started talking about TweetDeck.

I guess everyone knows about TweetDeck by now, but in short it's an enhanced Twitter client that allows split your data stream into smaller pieces. Groups, searches and other goodies are a part of the main interface, making it easy to administer larger amounts of twitter data. While this is the strength of TweetDeck, it's in some ways also it's weakness. Compared to other clients it takes up a lot more screen estate, but the thing that bugged me most was that currently there is no real easy way to keep your groups and other settings synchronized between different installs on different computers. Maintaining your user groups etc. on a computer by computer basis just isn't fun.

Thanks to @gabvirtualworld and @TweetDeck I found out that the configuration and settings TweetDeck uses is located in c:\users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\TweetDeckFast.[random string]\Local Store\ (In Vista/Server 2008. XP and others hav a slightly different path). In that directory there are two files that are of interest:

• preferences_[twitter_username].xml
• td_26_[twitter_username].db

If you set up TweetDeck on one computer, then copy those files with you to a new computer your get to transfer your current settings. You still end up with two separate installations to maintain though, but you do get to transfer your setup from one to another.

I wasn't happy with that either, hard to please I know, so I set out to find a way to have those files located at one place and have several TweetDeck installs point to the same ones.

Enter DropBox. DropBox lets you have a central storage for files and have that area syncronized to your local computer(s). I run several applications from my DropBox space already, like Putty and KeePass, so I figured there had to be a way that I could utilize DropBox for my TweetDeck configuration synchronization needs. Long story short; Yes. You can use DropBox for this, and still keep TweetDeck happy.

This is where the magic happens:

Sorry, but there is no magic, but it does work. The steps required are the following:

1. 1. Stop TweetDeck
3. 2. Move your preferences_[twitter_username].xml and td_26_[twitter_username].db from your initial "master" TweetDeck install, to a new folder on DropBox. I chose apps/TweetDeck
4. 3. Start a command prompt, and navigate to the c:\users\\AppData\Roaming\TweetDeckFast.[random string]\Local Store folder and run the following commands:

   mklink td_26_[twitter_username].db "[your path]\My Dropbox\Apps\TweetDeck\td_26_[twitter_username.db"
   mklink preferences_[twitter_username].xml "[your path]\My Dropbox\Apps\TweetDeck\preferences_[twitter_username].xml"
   

5. Repeat step 3 on any other machines you want to keep syncronized

The trick here is the mklink command. This creates a NTFS based symlink on your filesystem, that pretty much works the same way as a Linux symlink. In essence what you end up doing here is making symbolic links for the files that TweetDesk stores it's configuration in, thus making the different installs use the same set of files. Stroring it on your DropBox install makes it available for all the computers.

Of course, there is a downside to doing this and that is if you keep TweetDeck running on several computers at the same time. If you do that, you will end up with save conflicts in your DropBox, but you should avoid running Twitter clients on several computers at the same time anyway to avoid going over the rate limits in the Twitter API.

One of the things that my laptop was unable to do after installing Windows Server 2008 on it, was being able to get Bluetooth working. Several people have, in comments on my previous post, asked for a solution. Thankfully Gil Kirkpatrick has published a great howto explaining how to hack the Bluetooth stack drivers to get them installed and running on Windows Server 2008.

In his Installing the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack on Windows Server 2008 post, he gives a detailed explanation on how you should be able to make certain changes to several .inf files to enable their installation in a Windows Server 2008 environment. The trick is to to go through the various files, and basically replace the amd64...1 string in them with amd64...3 this making them installable on a server operating system.

I can vouch for the accuracy of his post, and method. I just spent 10 minutes going through the experience, and yes, I do now have a working Bluetooth stack on my ThinkPad T60 running Windows Server 2008.

Thanks a lot Gil, you made my day!