How to frighten your friend on a boring weekend

So, you wanna scare your friend this weekend? And you are wondering how to do that. Well, here is an idea. During my summer internship, I was trying out VNC on various machines including my android phone and an android tablet. That is when I found this out -



What you need is a VNC server and a client. On my ubuntu machine I had installed tightvncserver and xtightvncviewer. What we could do is use the vnc server to start a new X session. For those of you totally new to many such things, 


1) To install tightvncserver do a

Code:

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

Similarly install xtightvncviewer.


2) Set up your vnc password by doing a

Code:

tightvncpasswd

Set your password and then

3) Start the new X session in a different display by doing

Code:

tightvncserver :1

4) Next, in order to view the session you created you need to use vnc viewer. For this do

Code:

xtightvncviewer :1

Type in your password and then you should have a window which shows your desktop.
Find below a screen shot I took of my office screen with two viewers open side by side for the same new session ( I soo miss the huge monitor :| )

So now, all you need to do to scare your friend, is some how sneak up one day, download a scary mp3 on his computer and may be setup a cronjob to start the vncserver, and then run the mp3 in the :1 display. Do tell me if you try this out or you have a better way to spook your friend ;)

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A very handy wireless mouse using your android phone

PRemoteDroid is an awesome app which you must have on your android phone and your laptop. Suppose you are giving a talk somewhere or just giving your course presentation, you don't have to stand right next to your laptop without going forward and interacting with the audience. All you need is this app installed on your phone and your laptop with bluetooth enabled.

You need the server app on your laptop and the client on your android phone(which you can get it on the market). You can get the server app here . If you are using an ubuntu machine then you also need libbluetooth-dev installed. After this all you need to do is start the server on your laptop as

Code:

java -classpath bluecove-2.1.jar -classpath blucove-gpl-2.1.0.jar -jar PRemoteDroid-Server.jar

Then set the password up, and start the bluetooth server by right clicking the tray icon. Also open up the android application and pair up your laptop with your phone. Now you have your handy wireless mouse whereever you carry your phone. :)

<Fart> As I had said many times, there is a reason for almost everything. So the reason for this post is a talk I attended during Shaastra 2011. For those of you who haven't heard of Shaastra, it is supposedly the biggest Tech-fest in the southern states and is hosted by IITM, a 'premier' technical institute of India. So you would generally expect a lot of high tech stuff here. But alas.

So, I was sitting for this talk where the speaker was all geared up to give the talk. Even the event co-ordinators had set up the computer attached to the projector with the necessary presentation. And as the speaker was about to start, he asked them a remote to the computer so that he can switch between slides. But this 'technical' institute had no such thing at all. 

So ,what followed was a series of embarrassing and awkward situations where the person in front of the computer had to be constantly woken up from his slumber to move to the next slide.We can't blame the poor sleeping guy if the talk were that boring. But still the point is, being in one of the (supposed) most elite institutes in the country, we couldn't do anything to help the speaker. </Fart>.

So, that was when I started thinking how smartphones can be used is such cases or may be a wii remote and a led. Ofcourse a wireless mouse would do as well, but what is the fun if you do things straight ;).

P.S. : The author is also from IITM in case some one was wondering 

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