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Ask TUAW: Silencing iPhone notifications, remote control a PC, printing over the internet, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about controlling a PC over the internet, silencing iPhone email notifications at night, replacing a MacBook Pro SuperDrive with a hard drive, printing over the internet, setting iCal as the default calendar, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.
Yazsoft updates ShareTool, launches Monster Holiday Giveaway
Fearless TUAW blogger and all-around nice guy Brett Terpstra wrote about Yazsoft's ShareTool in a Friday Favorite post a couple of weeks ago. Just to review, ShareTool allows you to easily access your Bonjour services on a remote machine as if you were still on your home network -- iPhoto and iTunes sharing, printer access, just about everything you could do if you were sitting at your kitchen table with your laptop.Version 1.2.5, announced yesterday, has some key new features: ShareTool automatically configures routers supporting NAT-PMP or UPnP Remote services automatically appear in Finder, iTunes, and other applications ShareTool enables remote access for any application or service that advertises itself using Bonjour and runs over TCP/IP All network traffic is strongly encrypted. Access to your services requires your Mac OS X username and password Dynamic domain name support On the fly compression: Transfer large files quickly Between December 1st and December 31st, 2008, you can buy ShareTool licenses for 20% off. Yazsoft is also inviting TUAW readers to enter their Monster Holiday Giveaway -- they're giving away 4 packages each containing a new MacBook, a 24" LED Cinema Display, and an 8GB iPhone. No purchase is required to enter the giveaway -- just click on the graphic at the top of the entry page.
Friday Favorite: ShareTool
Another Friday Favorite, our weekly opportunity to get all sloppy over our most-loved applications. If you have an always-on Mac at home, a decent upstream connection and another Mac anywhere outside of your home network, you might find ShareTool to be as useful as I do. It allows you -- with an amazing degree of simplicity -- to access your Bonjour services on a remote machine as if you were still within your home network. It does this over an SSH encrypted connection (and also automatically sets up a proxy for secure web-browsing over the tunnel). Yes, you can get some of these benefits with a simple SSH tunnel, or you could set up a VPN using HamachiX, but the simple fact that ShareTool "Just Works" makes it my favorite choice for everything from screen sharing to iTunes streaming. I use ShareTool on a Mac Mini, with an Airport Extreme Base Station on a connection that gets about 800k average upload speed. iTunes streaming is flawless, and remote drive access is as good or better than just using SFTP. Setup is as simple as choosing a port (defaults to 22, the standard SSH port) to share on and hitting "Share" on your home Mac. After that, you can set it to start at login, and begin sharing on launch. Then, on your remote machine, you just need to enter an IP or domain and the port, and the rest is automatic. You can select which Bonjour services to enable or just go for broke and enable everything. I've got a static IP these days, but services like No-IP and DynDNS work great if you have a dynamic IP address. ShareTool can even handle updating the dynamic IP service for you, so you don't have to run any daemons. ShareTool is provided by YazSoft, and a free trial is available for download on the main page. The pricing structure requires a license for every computer, and a pair of licenses costs $30USD (5 for $75USD). YazSoft provides free updates within a major version number (1.x customers get all 1.x updates for free). If you're looking for an easy way to keep your entire home network handy anywhere you go, it might be worth a try.
ShareTool offers a Back to my Mac alternative
Back to my Mac is one of the much-touted features that .Mac subscribers gained with Leopard. Basically, it lets you enjoy screen sharing between two appropriately configured Macs. The main drawback for many is the required .Mac subscription.If that's you, check out ShareTool. This $20US utility lets users access all of the Bonjour services on their home network, like iTunes music sharing, screen sharing and file sharing from anywhere.It requires routers that support NAT-PMP or UPnP and Mac OS 10.3.9 (that's right, Leopard is not required). The folks at Bains Software claim that everything is properly encrypted, but we haven't tested this. You can try it out for 15 minutes for free.
