Mac Geekery

Getting back to our roots for a moment, here’s a nice little bit of geekery. You can use the built-in audio units AUNetSend and AUNetReceive to generate audio on one computer and have it play back on another computer. Moreover, these computers do not need to be on the same local network, and the created audio can be though any program from GarageBand to VLC to iTunes.

The short of it is that you need to capture the audio from the computer playing it and pipe that in to the AUNetSend audio unit. On the other end, you’ll need to tell AUNetReceive to use the audio from that other computer. That’s how this works. Now, getting these two audio units going is a whole other problem.There's more »

I kind of accidentally stumbled across this one and the sheer usefulness of it really set me back.

I’ve been playing with teleport a bit as I again have multiple machines at my desk and no KM switch to go between them. Being an iMac, an external display, and a MacBook Pro, I have three screens to use for a lot of things and teleport is phenomenally useful and suited for this task. I just really wasn’t prepared for the unexpected benefits it can have in this case.

Before I go there, and for those unfamiliar with teleport, let me explain what’s happening with teleport first. teleport is a program (teleportd actually) that waits for the mouse to touch a side of the screen and, when it does, connects to another teleport-enabled Mac and sends all mouse input (including 2-axis scroll-wheel input) and all keyboard input (with the exception of media keys) to that machine instead of the parent. Then you touch the opposite side of the remote Mac’s screen as if you are moving from one monitor back to the main one and the connection drops, putting you back on your home machine. It’s great for having multiple Macs at the same desk as the newer versions include private-key encryption of your input as well as file drags and clipboard sync. It’s just great, and since it’s donation-ware, give something to the guy.There's more »

I have talked up my Mac mini running OS X Server quite a bit in regards to how I use it as the center of my home entertainment center, but I never really touched on why I use OS X Server. The mini is a great little beast, and I use it heavily. Aside from running Front Row on it via a neat little hack, it also acts as my sandbox webserver, my torrent box, and my backup server.

Mobile Homes

Tiger Server reintroduced the most beloved and missed feature of ASIP – portable checkout – and updated it to modern times. Mobile Homes, as it is now called, uses SyncServices to keep a copy of your home directory synchronized between your computer and the server, and it actually works as advertised. Mostly.There's more »