Laziness is the mother of all inventions (VNC Windows to Mac OS X)

Today has been an eventful day in front of the computer. I need to finish up a lot of stuff before going UX-LX since I'll be gone for a week (if the Icelanders permit).

However at home I use my girlfriends iMac as a stereo. Back when I had a MacBook as a work laptop I would just have a Apple Remote Desktop session running and change the music remotely. Now I have a standard issue Dell Latitude and Apple Remote Desktop is a thing of the past.

I started out using TightVNC but it was not a pleasant experience since the connection kept dropping and there was no support for scaling which is a necessity when you are trying to view the contents of a 24-inch monitor on a 15-incher. So I moved to RealVNC and now I had scaling but the connection kept dropping just the same. After some googling I found out that a lot of people have problems with the built in VNC server that comes with Apple Remote Desktop.

So my new solution is to use Putty to restart the damn thing whenever it goes down with:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -agent -restart -console

It's a workaround but at least it works and I don't have to move.