Farfinder experience

I installed this yesterday or the day before, and almost removed it at once, but tried again, set up gmail smtp for outgoing email, and away it went on the iMac. Over to the Macbook Air where one should just enter one's special URL and log in. At first it had some hassle with certificates, but accepted eventually both on Safari and Firefox, NOT Opera..

The tool bar had no tool tips, so it was a bit hit and miss, particularly as things are a bit odd ref icon images. Apps show their icons ok, jpgs and tiffs don't, and Preview pdfs show a default icon, whereas Adobe shows ok.

The important thing is that one can while travelling, get access to one's home (or office) machine, and either download or open an item. One can also send an item by email. Thats about it, but it runs on a browser, works on Tiger and Leopard from whereever with no installation on the browser machine... I emailed Susan about it, after a few emails back and forth with Adrian, who is support-cum-developer.

Use of afp:// and vnc:// to dvrdns

Now that things are woking pretty well between Leopard machines, I just checked use of the above for file-sharing and screen-sharing access. The former works perfectly on Safari, but not Firefox - a security issue? The latter works fine both on Firefox and Safari.. one is presented with a screen-sharing window showing the Bonjour machines available, and the Finder window for afp:// - great!

Finally got remote control of Tiger from Air

I spent a lot of time trying to get Vine and later Leopard screen sharing working towards Tiger, but no, I couldn't even ping Tiger or reverse..? I looked also for 802.11n activator software, but didn't feel like downgrading Extreme in order to get it from the extreme package, however, I'm pretty sure its working on N because my 'final solution' - using Vine Viewer on Air and Apple Remote Desktop on Tiger - worked both on AE 24 and TC 5G (only) wireless networks!

Clipboard sharing IS possible after all..

I don't give up.. came across ClipboardSharing an old app but it works! And on the same page I heard of DropCopy, an updated app which puts a dropzone on desktop for file/object transfers and a circle in the menu bar where you can grab the remote's clipboard! So, two working solutions, no doubt put together by developers for their own benefit!

Copy & Paste solution

OK, I found a reasonable solution to this between AIR and iMac, which could be used by anyone wishing to copy an item and pick it up on the other machine.. use drop box! Everyone should have one set up with an alias on their desktop.

Cutting and pasting text can be done either through Google Notebook or Evernotes simply enough, though style might be a problem.

Thats it I've spent enough time on remote control, and am left with the local solution iChat as the easiest bet after all :)

Remote control and screen sharing

Can't remember what started me off yesterday, but I came across Vine in /applications and decided to check it out. It worked fine with iMac able to control AIR very nicely. I got hold of a temporary key to enable the reverse, and that too worked fine, so I decided to transfer my single machine licence to the AIR, thinking that would be the logical place to do most remote work from.

The only thing I couldn't get to work was transfer of Cut & Paste between machines.. this set me off on a search which resulted in a trove of wealth! First from Lifehacker's Gina Trampani (a very bright lady) showed how a couple of lines in Terminal could turn the Leopard's screen sharing app into something a bit better. This worked very well, BUT although there were Toobar icons for getting and sending clipboards, it didn't work :(  see http://tinyurl.com/28jdu5


So I continued searching and came across a MacFixit http://tinyurl.com/2jk4yr tutorial with three or four methods of controlling a remote machine.

The one which did most was iChat! That allowed transfer between machines by drag & drop. Another was like Trampani's, and yet another was the one called 'Back to My Mac' this can be started/stopped in the .Mac prefs. It was already on, so I'm not sure whether it might have been in use in the above methods..

Quite a day... I missed dinner and shovelled a handful of nuts in my mouth for sustenance ;) Off to bed and 9:30 pm feeling happy, having learnt so much, even if Cut & Paste didn't work.

Evernote, a Google Notebook alternative

I noticed a Tweet or a blog entry about this app a few days back, but today I received a beta invite, signed up and was off to a flying start on the iMacs and my E61, the latter first. One can run desktop versions on Mac and Windows (haven't installed on XP yet), but the idea is to sync with an online version, like GN. It looks smooth and it works slickly. So I added a thread on GN site, telling them to take a look ;)

And in its current form its free!