I now have a MacBook and have been getting all my software installed. One thing that I need to do is keep my machines synchronized, but I don't really want to go out of my way to figure out Rsync or pay the $100 for .Mac. I mainly need to keep my address book and calendar in sync.

I figured it would be ok to just manage the calendar on either my iMate Pocket PC phone and my desktop's iCal, which are kept synchronized with Missing Sync. But then I'd have the MacBook to worry about. I settled for the time being with continuing to use my published calendar on ical exchange. That works for now, but if the owner of that site ever decides to take it off line, I'm screwed and will have to find another service or run one on my own.

For the address book synchronization, I found Slamdash's Address-O-Sync, which uses Rendezvous to sync up address books on a network. When both machines have Address-O-Sync running, you select Sync on one of the machines and all is done.

I also may need to figure out how to keep documents in sync. At the moment, I'm using the desktop as a file server and editing files remotely via the MacBook. I need to do this because I'm doing work for someone and running a CVS development environment on the desktop. But I may eventually either need to set up Subversion on these machines as well to keep other documents synchronized. I'm going to try to avoid that for now, but we'll see how long that lasts.

UPDATE: Someone commented to me that Unison would do the trick. I had a hard time getting fink to find Unison, though. I'm now using psyncx, the GUI front end to the Unix psync command to keep my Sites and Documents directories mirrored on the desktop and MacBook. Works well for the time being. The Quicksilver dual G4 desktop is also cloned on an external drive, which gives me some added redundancy.

UPDATE 2: Psyncx wasn't doing it for me, so I bought Synchronize X Plus, which has been working like a champ for synchronizing my files.

UPDATE 3: I've been using FoxMarks to keep my Safari Bookmarks in sync with great success. I also tried Google's BrowserSynch tool which was absolutely unusable compared with FoxMarks because of the significant delays in synching when Firefox starts up.

MySync has also surfaced as a solution for synching address books, Safari Bookmarks, and Calendars. The software was recently purchased by Mark/Space, makers of the synchronization utilities for handhelds including Windows Mobile (Pocket PC), Palm, HipTop and Sony PSP. I use the Pocket PC synchronizing tool presently and it works very well.