Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Apple, Microsoft, Social Software
Control your Mac or PC using Twitter
by Jason Clarke Sep 9th 2009 at 3:00PM
Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. It seems like it's everywhere, and people are trying to use it for everything. And I mean everything. For example, have you ever wished that you could remotely control your computer using Twitter? I have to admit that I have not, but I suppose I can see the convenience of using such a ubiquitous tool to send quick commands to a computer.
The services TweetMyMac and TweetMyPC allow you to do exactly that - send specific commands to your remote computer to have it perform specific tasks. Here's a sampling of the sorts of commands it can understand: shutdown, restart, logout, sleep, ip, screenshot, screensaver, open (apps), quit (apps), lock, etc.
While it would be extremely convenient to control a computer via tweets, personally I'm a little wary; the possibility of making mistakes would concern me, as would security concerns. You have to create a dedicated account that your machine uses to listen for commands, and it will accept commands from any Twitter accounts it is following.
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Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Prof. Michael Stoll said 3:33AM on 9-10-2009
this seems to be for those who are total twitter-nerds. all others may consider VNC. btw: will the computer direct message me after having performed the task? i.e. as follows: "i shut down a second ago". ...
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Ryan said 11:09PM on 9-11-2009
Maybe, not sure. One thing I would like to point out is that a computer would not be able to tell you it had shut down "1 second ago" as it would be turned off.
Money Mike said 3:42PM on 9-09-2009
I'm definitely one of those people who are tired of hearing about Twitter and have no interest in using it.
I am interested in the idea of controlling my computer remotely, though. I know there are alternatives, but I've actually never used any. Any chance you'd like to do a writeup on what options there are out there?
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axl456 said 4:04PM on 9-09-2009
ssh + sftp + No-ip + WakeOnLan
Matt Cullen said 3:26AM on 9-18-2009
I didn't look to see how those programs work, but there's no reason that they couldn't be set up to confirm that they have carried out your task. In the case of shutting down, a message could be sent saying shutdown commencing. Restart could be accomplished by having the program start automatically at boot and having it remember that it needs to send a confirmation tweet when it's back up.
I'll stick with logmein. When I need to access a computer remotely, it's to do something more involved.
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