I remember doing something like that, but you can't actually observe or control your own machine through ARD. To get this desired effect, I believe you must share your screen with another Mac, then observe that Mac. Can't do it with only one Mac, but then I suppose you wouldn't have ARD if you only have one Mac.

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Noshtzy:
Yep, that's how you'd do it. I did something similar between an XP system and a Linux system once when I was messing with VNC. The most amusing part was watching the mouse run the same few pixels as I attempted to drag it across, then watching that duplicated to infinity.

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I have a screen saver that does this, its called SickSaver. The website isn't in Elglish, but has a nice picture: http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/sicksaver.php

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No, you can't observe your own CPU with ARD. No, you can't use ARD to observe another machine observing your own CPU. ARD refuses to connect to another machine that is running ARD. Yes, the screenshot is fake.

I remember a nice little desk accessory that must date back to the days of System 5, called "Fun House." It did this same sort of effect, but in a little tiny window, maybe about 30x30 pixels. It still ran in Classic on OS X a few years back when I last tried it, but I've misplaced it and can't test it on my current Quad G5 machine. Since it runs only in Classic, it will no longer work on Intel Macs.

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4: It's not fake. There is a preference in ARD to allow connections while ARD is running. It's default to off for security but this actually the recommended way to manage computers behind a NAT.

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>I have a screen saver that does this, its called SickSaver. The website isn't in English
http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/sicksaver.php
Ok, I have translated the page. But the interest of SickSaver remains limited :-)

Regards,
Pierre

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Pierre, please make it universal !

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No - it's not fake. I actually submitted a tip like this to TUAW about a month or so ago - I personally think the screenshot I took of my screen looks a bit cooler. Almost similar to Time Machine from Leopard:

http://www.andruedwards.com/index.php/blog/article/apple-remote-desktop-vicious-vortex-death-spiral-1207/

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I did something similar using the screenshot command several times, and opening the resulting image in Preview... http://kosmaczewski.net/2007/01/10/infinite-regression/ :)

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>Pierre, please make it universal !
Ok, I will do it by this evening. I hope that it will be as simple as recompiling, I do not remember if I use some special byte manipulations...

Oh, since I'm there : TUAW readers seems interested by Posterino (http://www.tuaw.com/2006/11/28/beta-beat-posterino/). They may be interested by MozoDojo (http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/mozodojo_en.php). I Won't post that myself since it seems like self-congratulations too much :-)

Regards,

Pierre

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As the author of this bit of fun I can assure you it's NOT fake.


If you want to try it, enable the ARD Service in Sharing of System Prefs and then run ARD. Then click File connect to specified address - for the address type localhost. Then open a remote desktop session and voila you've got a picutre like the one above.

-Chris-

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Isn't this Time Machine? Core Animation? :-)

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This must be the first real 3D-Desktop.

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It's kind of pathetic that the UI locks up when you do this, and a direct result of OS X having only one UI thread for every running application to share. I actually tried this a few weeks ago with Chicken of the VNC and had to ssh in from another machine to kill the process before I could use my computer again. Bad design from the hacks at Apple.

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I agree - I had to SSH in as well to kill off the ARD process.

-Chris-

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@Ted & ossiejnr, Apple doesn't expect dumba$$es to do this…

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Actually any VNC client will do the same thing. I did this on a windows machine several months ago.

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The reason this occured was because I was trying to connect from mac A to mac B over SSH - I'd just forgotten to setup the port forward and disable my local ARD service.

Therefore when I connected to localhost it connected to itself.

I was having a senior moment :-)

-Chris-

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"Mr. Sulu, all ahead warp factor 9."

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I got ARD to observe my computer using the built-in VNC client. It didn't lock up either. I was able to do everything at normal speed. The windowed machines just took a while to update.

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