Posts Tagged ‘remote control’

Stupid Computer Trick — VNC Echo

Friday, May 16th, 2008

At work I’m messing around with setting up a new machine running Leopard… I was having trouble figuring out how best to access network shares and a helpful guy on the Apple Support Discussions Board pointed me to the Columns View in a Finder Window. When you click on the icon for a machine on the network that has file and Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) screen sharing enabled, you get two buttons; Connect As… and Share Screen…

Now while I was setting up the Leopard machine, I had it sitting in the opposite corner of my cubicle with a standard mouse & keyboard attached, and was getting some wrist pain from that, so I set up ARD screen sharing through VNC on the Leopard machine so I could control it from my PowerBook or the PC. I also have ARD screen sharing through VNC set up on my PowerBook, so…

When I finally figured out to look for the Connect As… button in the the Columns View, of course my first thought when I saw that Share Screen… button was, “Hmmm. What does that do?” So being the geek that I am I clicked it, it asked for my password, and up popped a view of my PowerBook screen. Inside that was a view of the Leopard screen, and inside that was a view of my PowerBook screen, and inside that… You get the idea. Very cool indeed!

Oh, and I almost forgot… I’m controlling my PowerBook through my Lenovo PC via Synergy and QuickSynergy (my post on that here). So it’s Lenovo — PowerBook — Leopard on Intel — PowerBook — Leopard on Intel — PowerBook — Leopard on Intel — ad infinitum…

vnc_ard_echo_sm.jpg
(click on the image for a full-size screenshot)

Vine Viewer is able to record movies of what’s going on, and once I figure out how to get the file size down a ways (right now it’s full-resolution, and 240MB) I’ll post it, just for fun.

Update: Here it is. Enjoy!