Filed under: Hardware, Tips and tricks, TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: Turn off your remote control infrared receiver
The Apple Remote is a slick little gadget, but Apple made a particular design choice that annoys the bejebus out of me: out of the box, every Mac is set up to work with any Apple Remote. If you have a couple of sleeping MacBooks in your living room like we do when you pick up a remote to watch something on the Apple TV, you could very well wake all three devices with the press of a button or two. To make matters worse, Apple isn't very forthcoming about solving this problem or giving you an easy way to bind an Apple Remote with one device or another. Fortunately, there are a few options that aren't hard to pull off.
Your first choice is to completely disable the infrared receiver on your Mac. If you rarely or never use your Apple Remote, you can disable the infrared port on your Mac so it simply no longer accepts signals, intentional or otherwise. This is done with the setting you see above, accessible at the bottom of the Security Preferences Pane.
Your next option is to pair your remote(s) with their respective devices, a step that I wish Apple could somehow implement from the get-go so you don't have to. Here is an Apple support doc detailing the one simple step to pair an Apple Remote with a Mac, and another on pairing and unpairing a remote with an Apple TV. In case you ever have to unpair a remote from your Mac, you can simply open the Security Preferences Pane and click the Unpair button at the bottom right (note that this button is only illuminated when an Apple Remote is actually paired with your Mac; otherwise it's faded out).
For your sake, I hope you don't have too many Apple Remotes to pair, but this should solve those sudden waking moments for your Macs.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Paul Menzies said 1:50PM on 8-19-2007
Great it paired. Thanks for the Tip!
Reply
matthew Sacrey said 2:00PM on 8-19-2007
this is also a good idea for the multi mac dorm room, I used to hate it when my roommate would accidentally open front row on my when I was writing a paper.
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blinkcowz182 said 2:22PM on 8-19-2007
The best thing to do is sit in the back of a big lecture hall and hit menu. There's nothing like seeing all the screens go to FrontRow and hearing the chorus of all the MacBooks while the professor is talking :)
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Michael Hodges said 2:50PM on 8-19-2007
yeah I used to hate when front row came up on my laptop while i was watching tv (from the apple tv), on the plus side though - since they're the same remote I had a spare after my dog ate the first one.
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DK said 3:10PM on 8-19-2007
Woe - never knew anyone with a remote could launch front row on my machine - the thing that scares me is anyone could be forwarding through my presentations without my clicks - eeks!
Thanks for the tip :-)
DK
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webmacster87 said 3:33PM on 8-19-2007
Incidentally, if you still want to use Front Row but don't want to use your remote, you can do Command-Esc to open Front Row on your computer, then use the arrow keys, return key, and escape key to navigate around the Front Row interface. Since I'm rarely a few feet away from my MacBook, I prefer to do this to use Front Row instead of an Apple Remote--plus turning off the infrared receiver helps your battery life too.
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ernise said 3:41PM on 8-19-2007
but where is that option in system preferences?
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tim said 5:14PM on 8-19-2007
does anyone know a solution to my problem? -
i have 3 macs, imac, mac mini (tivo) and macbook pro. i paired the imac remote to the imac, the mini remote to the mini, but the mbp is not paired, however, when i use the mini remote it would access the mbp even though it was paired to the mini.
i ended up disabling the remote all together on the mbp since i never use it anyway, but i dont want to have to do that forever.
any ideas?
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Adrian said 5:24PM on 8-19-2007
The remotes don't do anything being paired. It's only the computer that stops listening to any remote except the paired one.
So if you pair a remote with a mac, that remote still works with all macs that aren't paired (still listen to all remotes).
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Fritz Laurel said 5:32PM on 8-19-2007
If there's one thing that annoys the bajeesis out of me, it's double-negatives in a UI.
Why, why, why can't you people learn that you should never turn on a check box to turn off a feature????????
Cheers,
FL
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mayo said 5:34PM on 8-19-2007
Chris, please RTFM before you claim something is impossible to do. It's in the manual of every device (from what I've seen and own) that comes with a remote or 30 second google search.
Head over to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302545 and follow the instructions to get your remote paired with your machine. The machine will then only work with the paired remote.
If you really want to disable the remote, the setting is in the Security preference pane.
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Greg G said 7:31PM on 8-19-2007
Are you able to pair the same remote with multiple Macs? I only have one Mac, so I can't test it.
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Milind said 6:58PM on 8-19-2007
I've forever paired my remote with a press of "Menu" and "Play"....
And as much as I would love to try the "press the menu button at a conference", I'm the only one with a mac :)
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Lou said 12:00PM on 8-20-2007
It should be noted, for those security conscious folks that never use an admin account for every day work, that this requires admin privileges to work. You need to log in as an admin, not just unlock the security pref pane.
The Apple support doc fails to mention this little nugget.
Cheers
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Loonesta said 11:06AM on 8-21-2007
Since I've only the one iMac to wake, I haven't encountered this situation, but -you can "pair" your specific remote to your devices - it's a button located right under the check box for disabling the remote entirely in the Security section of System Preferences. Clicking this button is supposed to link the Apple remote that came w/ the Apple computer to that computer & block any other I-R signals.
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Keith said 2:12PM on 8-20-2007
Yeah, Any one have a fix so that I can use my apple remote without it turning up the tempeture on my window a/c??
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Allan Marcus said 3:06PM on 8-20-2007
here's and AppleScript to toggle the remote on/off. Use Script Editor and save as an application.
set currentValue to do shell script "defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.driver.AppleIRController DeviceEnabled"
if currentValue is "0" then
set status to "disabled"
else
set status to "enabled"
end if
display dialog "Set remote control infrared. Right now it is " & status & "." buttons {"Enable", "Disable", "Cancel"} default button "Disable"
copy button returned of the result to button
if button = "Cancel" then
return
end if
-- only change it if it needs to be changed
-- currently disabled and button is enable
if currentValue is "0" and button is "Enable" then
do shell script "defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.driver.AppleIRController DeviceEnabled -bool yes" with administrator privileges
return
end if
-- currently enabled and button is disable
if currentValue is "1" and button is "Disable" then
do shell script "defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.driver.AppleIRController DeviceEnabled -bool no" with administrator privileges
return
end if
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