Remote Desktop Madness
What happens when you make your Remote Desktop point to your own machine? Something like this, apparently. TUAW reader Chris Mills, who decided to give into his curiosity and give this a try, snapped this screenshot after opening a remote desktop connection to the same machine he was working on. This caused his system to more or less lock up but it made a nifty picture and offered a tesseract-ish view of his desktop. We at TUAW appreciate this kind of reader-generated ingenuity particularly because it allows us to enjoy the results without all the bother of messing with our own Macs.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Noshtzy said 11:41PM on 2-01-2007
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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Mark D. said 11:47PM on 2-01-2007
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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Emory Dunn said 12:00AM on 2-02-2007
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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Charles said 12:00AM on 2-02-2007
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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Joe said 12:38AM on 2-02-2007
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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Pierre Chatelier said 1:30AM on 2-02-2007
>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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yuji said 1:43AM on 2-02-2007
Pierre, please make it universal !
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Andru Edwards said 1:48AM on 2-02-2007
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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Adrian said 3:02AM on 2-02-2007
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 said 3:13AM on 2-02-2007
>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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ossiejnr said 4:13AM on 2-02-2007
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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Robert said 6:08AM on 2-02-2007
Isn't this Time Machine? Core Animation? :-)
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Lace said 6:09AM on 2-02-2007
This must be the first real 3D-Desktop.
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Ted said 7:47AM on 2-02-2007
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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ossiejnr said 8:11AM on 2-02-2007
I agree - I had to SSH in as well to kill off the ARD process.
-Chris-
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Karl Childers said 9:15AM on 2-02-2007
Actually any VNC client will do the same thing. I did this on a windows machine several months ago.
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Dimebag said 9:10AM on 2-02-2007
@Ted & ossiejnr, Apple doesn't expect dumba$$es to do this…
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ossiejnr said 9:17AM on 2-02-2007
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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Edsel said 9:25AM on 2-02-2007
"Mr. Sulu, all ahead warp factor 9."
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Anthony Scott said 9:33AM on 2-02-2007
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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