Want to listen to your iTunes music at home from work, a coffee shop, etc?

It takes two steps: setup an SSH tunnel and forward zeroconf (‘Bonjour‘) traffic.

If you do it my way everything is already installed on your Mac and, especially nice for you corporate folks, doesn’t require admin privileges.
Windows users, you’re not necessarily SOL but Windows doesn’t ship with what you’ll need.

I use this technique on Snow Leopard, but I think it will work on Tiger and higher.

• Enable SSH on your home computer.
  System Preferences->Sharing->Remote Logon
• Enable iTunes Sharing.
  Preferences->Sharing->Share my library on my local network
• Still from your home computer, browse to 192.168.1.1 (or whatever your router runs on) and enable SSH port forwarding if you haven’t already. This technique definitely won’t work without this step.
• Protip: Optionally, register your public IP with a free Dynamic DNS service so you only have to remember a single domain name.
• At your work machine, go to a terminal and use the following two commands:

  dns-sd -P "myTunes" _daap._tcp. local 3689 localhost 127.0.0.1 &
  ssh -N -f homeComputer -L 3689:localhost:3689

  The -N means non-interactive, the -f means go to the background.
  The -L xxx:hostname:xxx enables a tunnel on the iTunes sharing port (3689).
  homeComputer is your router’s public IP address, or the domain name you hopefully setup earlier.

• To clean up when you’re done, you can run a

  killall ssh dns-sd

Finally, if you’re cool enough to keep your music on a Linux machine, you can also use this technique with Firefly formerly (mt-daapd).

Posted originally for my personal reference, but since my Mac tips get lots of Google hits hope this is useful to you too.

Screen Sharing on Mac OS X Snow Leopard – very convenient to have built-in*, and I use it to logon to my Ubuntu server when the CLI doesn’t cut the mustard – infrequent, but it happens.

If you’re like me, you occasionally get an unexpected blank or white screen when you connect to your other computer. It turns out the mouse and keyboard pass through just fine but the display is all white. Fix it by getting info on Screen Sharing.app and ticking the ‘Open in 32-bit mode’ box.

* Technical addendum: I would be remiss to sing accolades of the VNC-based Screen Sharing without mentioning Microsoft’s [Citrix] Remote Desktop. It’s significantly faster than VNC due to some sweet implementation differences – to my knowledge when you connect to the Windows host it switches to a special display driver that sends small drawing instructions over the tubes that are subsequently recreated on your client. VNC, while open source and commensurately ubiquitous in Unix/Linux/Mac land, is not so smart and blindly sends a compressed image of the screen. Just sayin guys – Remote Desktop is awesome.

The user interface is the one thing you are going to see more of than anything else on your computer. Fortunately plenty of software titles allow you to switch between different themes.

Good news if you use XP. Microsoft’s theming engine is not limited to the lame “Luna” themes introduced with XP. You can get the benefit of using Windows’ internal theming engine without actually paying a dime.

NOTE: This hack has worked for me through many Windows installs, but if you screw up your computer, I claim no responsibility.

The theme format for Windows XP has been very successfully reverse engineered. The three versions of Luna are all this format, and the themes for StyleXP also are in this format. Microsoft tried to limit the engine to only Microsoft themes, but we can patch the file that checks that.

Here’s what we’re going to do:

Hooray, StyleXP for free. Just move additional themes into the Themes folder to make them accessible through the Display control panel.

P.S. Oh, and if you need to justify using themes to yourself beyond their cometic appeal, know that some themes like Cursive (below) can be functionally better. Thinner scrollbars, thinner titlebars, and a collapsed start menu translate to greater screen real-estate. As software gets more and more palette heavy, that can be quite handy.