Wake-on-LAN isn’t a new technology, but with the increasing number of smartphones making their way to the market, it’s high time we looked at how you can make a home theater PC, or any hard-wired system in your house, wake up from anywhere with free tools and bit of tinkering. Here’s how to get started. More »
Mac only: Inspired by our previous post on remote Mac muting, Brett Terpstra created a remote server package and iOS-friendly webapp that allows for remotely controlling your Mac’s volume, iTunes functions, and even launch applications from anywhere. More »
Windows/Mac: Join.Me is a free tool from the creators of LogMeIn. Download the app, run it, share the URL with a friend, and you’ve got nearly instant screen sharing with text chat, voice conferencing, mouse sharing, and more. More »
It’s arguably Apple’s greatest skill: Making your previous gear look obsolete next to their new releases. So what do you do with your devices after they’ve been made redundant? Here’s a handful of ways to reuse that spare, older-gen iPhone. More »
iPhone – Handhelds – Smartphone – Apple – Wallpapers and Themes
I love messing with settings and geeky file-sharing programs. My spouse doesn’t, but digs Hulu and appreciates free. So I set up a media center that satisfies my geek cravings but is actually easy-to-use for non-nerds. Here’s what I pieced together. More »
iPhone/iPod touch: TouchMouse is a free application for the iPhone/iPod touch that, when paired with its accompanying control software on your Mac or Windows computer, turns your touchscreen into a mouse and keyboard.
Once you download the software to your iPhone or iPod touch and pair it with the server software—Logitech has versions of the TouchMouse Server software available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7 as well as Mac OS X—you'll be able to use your device as a mouse for controlling your computer. The interface allows you to click the mouse buttons, move the cursor via the touch screen, and pull up a small keyboard to enter text on the computer.
While such an arrangement isn’t a practical replacement for a full-out wireless keyboard, it is a great tool for presentations or for pairing with one of the awesome media centers we’ve highlighted. If you have another app for turning your iPod touch or iPhone into a remote or clever things to do with them once you have them set up as remotes, let’s hear about it in the comments.
Blogger Guillermo Esteves loves his BitTorrent, so when he’s away from his home computer, he still wants to start up any download at a moment’s notice. His solution: Use file-syncing application Dropbox to sync torrents between computers.
Assuming you’ve got Dropbox installed on your home computer and work computer, for example, you can download a torrent, save it to your Dropbox folder, and let Dropbox sync that new torrent to your home computer.
Using the folder monitoring feature available in most popular BitTorrent applications (including uTorrent for Windows/Mac and Transmission for Mac/Linux), your BitTorrent app of choice can monitor your Dropbox folder for new torrent files and automatically open them when they appear. In practice, that translates to dead simple, instant remote BitTorrent downloads, which we like very much.
You can also upload torrent files to Dropbox from the Dropbox web interface, so you could even do this from a computer where you can’t install Dropbox. This isn’t the only remote BitTorrent method out there, but it’s certainly a good (and easy to implement) one.
