Nick_Tarleton comments on Anti-akrasia remote monitoring experiment - Less Wrong

45 Post author: cousin_it 27 September 2010 11:34PM

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Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 28 September 2010 02:49:55PM *  0 points [-]

I could use your help even if only for a few hours a week. I am very bad at resisting the temptation of going to Hulu Dot Com and mindlessly watching TV shows.

How many hours per week will you be working?

I am on a Mac right now, too.

Nerdy details follow. I can certainly guide you in setting up a view onto my screen or "desktop", but do not yet know how to make that connection "view-only": the app that I suggest you use (which comes with your Mac and is called "Screen Sharing") is intended to be used to operate a computer remotely, so when your "Screen Sharing" app is in the foreground, not only can you see my screen, but also the keystrokes or mouse clicks you make are transmitted to my computer rather than applied to your computer. What that means in practice is that you will occasionally forget that your clicks and keystrokes are being transmitted to my computer, and fleeting harmless hilarious chaos will sometimes ensue at my end.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 28 September 2010 08:55:14PM *  1 point [-]

Mac OS screen sharing is compatible with VNC, so the viewer can use any VNC client with a view-only mode (e.g. Chicken of the VNC (I think) or TightVNC from MacPorts). (Screen Sharing's superior proprietary compression will be lost, though.)

Comment author: cousin_it 29 September 2010 10:40:24PM 1 point [-]

FWIW, we couldn't get OS X screen sharing to work with RealVNC on Windows, but installing Vine Server on OS X fixed all our problems.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 18 March 2013 02:41:11PM *  0 points [-]

Sadly, that is no longer true of the version of OS X released after that was written. Specifically, neither Lion's built-in "screen sharing" server nor Vine Server on Lion works with any of the Windows VNC clients we tried.

When someone used Windows remotely to monitor my OS X Lion desktop in 2012, it was through "captures" (still images) of my screen saved to a shared folder of Dropbox. Specifically, I wrote some code to fork and exec "/usr/sbin/screencapture -C" every 3 minutes.