2009-09-03

TweetMyMac

While surfing around the other day I ran into a really cool tool called TweetMyMac. The tool enables you to send commands to the computer through Twitter to make it take a picture with iSight, say something funny or send a screen shot of whats going on at the moment. Really fun to play around with, but when I stretch my mind to find something useful to do with this I come up blank. But never the less, it's really fun.

It's quite easy to set up. You'll need to set up a new Twitter account only used for this task (prefereably one with a hidden timeline) and then see to it that you follow your main account from the new one. Then download TweetMyMac from the website and install. Now you're ready to go. Follow the instructions on TweetMyMac to be sure to get it all right. A misstake could actually let others send commands to your computer. I would not recommend anyone to allow custom shell commands though (optional) since this seems a bit unsecure.

A full list of commands can be found on the website (although some from the latest update are not inluded, but just look at the changelog).

Some commands can be quite useful, like "battery" which returns the current battery status or "shutdown" which powers down the computer. But for me, these are still just fun to play around with since I carry my MacBook with me almost all the time and it's my main computer at home. But for a desktop computer I guess it could be great to see if the task is finished (by screenshot) and then power it down. But even there a RDC is far better.

Anyway, I now keep a list of all commands with me in my mobile so I can have fun when I leave the room and then have my computer say something like "Hello, I am a computer and I can talk". It suprises people quite a lot.

Try it out and have fun and please comment this post if you find some cool way to use this.