Screen Sharing at Hackibous
Feeling a Little Cramped?
One of the issues I've encountered while pairing at Hackibous is the awkwardness of squeezing multiple people around a small laptop screen & keyboard. At home it's easy to just use Apple's build-in VNC client to view each other's screen on separate laptops. At a coffee shop though you may not be able to see each other over the network or the shop's internet connection might not be fast enough for a screen sharing tool like Mikogo.
A Solution
My favored solution is to string a crossover cable (actually, any ethernet cable will do these days) between computers and use VNC over that ad-hoc gigabit network. Here's how to do it on your Mac:
1. From the computer you want to share, open Network Preferences panel
2. Get your self-assigned IP address for Ethernet (this could take a minute for your computer to generate)
3. Go into your Sharing Preferences panel, turn on Screen Sharing and enable "Anyone may request permission to control screen"
4. From the viewing computer, within the Finder select to Go > Connect to Server
* Enter the IP address of the shared computer using: vnc://nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn
* Connect "By asking for permission"
5. From the shared computer, accept the Control Request by clicking Share Screen
That's it! From the viewing computer, you should now be able to see the shared screen as well as control it using the keyboard and mouse!
Feel free to recommend any other viewers in the comments, especially tools that let the sharer do things like hide their screen temporarily or lock-out control of the keyboard and mouse so the viewer can only, well, view.
