Splashtop Remote Desktop brings Windows PC access to your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

By Darren Murph

From http://www.engadget.com/

Oh, sure -- you've got a smorgasbord of virtual machine clients out there for the iDevice in your life, but you haven't had this one. Until today, of course. Splashtop (the former DeviceVM) has just unleashed its Remote Desktop app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, enabling users to funnel Windows PC content onto their handheld. The catch is an obvious one -- you'll need a WiFi connection to make the magic happen, though we're assuming you wouldn't even want to imagine how sluggish the process would be over 3G. The company claims that this app will let users "watch movies, listen to music, or access any other Windows files and programs, including full web browsers with Flash," and you'll need a WiFi-connected Win7, Vista or WinXP machine nearby to take advantage. We've got a feeling this won't work nearly as well as advertised (sorry, it's just the nature of tunneling / emulation), but those willing to take the plunge can tap into the App Store as we speak.

Remote Desktop Software Comparison Chart

From: http://www.remotedesktopmac.com/

iPhone House Controlling: Controlling Household Electronics With Your iPhone

From: http://www.ismashphone.com/

Integration and consolidation is the name of the game for all technology. It used to be the smaller the gadget the more chic, but now it is how many functions you can limit to just a few areas. It began with the monolithic home computer that began to allow you to watch movies and listen to music. As we began to port those functions to our portable devices and iPhones people saw the possibility for integrating functions only packed to the recesses of our imagination, or at least late night cable channels.

The iPhone has proven its ability to also act as a remote for limited features on your iTunes', but now outside developers are trying to break it out of the shell of tradition it has conventionally been trapped by. Home Automation, which is the integration of many electrical features in the home, may be the next step for bringing the iPhone into absolutely every area of daily life.

Home Automation can mean a number of different things, such as bringing together all the heating and cooling controls of your house or all the entertainment centers. Lighting is an area that is often difficult to conceive of for Home Automation as switches are found standard in most homes. X10 Home Automation has been developing technology for decades that can be used to basically control these power center in your home.

What the X10 Home Automation technology does is ask you to set a base controller, which as they state "can be any number of things including a simple plug-in device, a wireless remote or motion sensor and transceiver or even your PC." From there the information it sent to power lines to instruct the different functions on your electrical grid to do what your wish.

This sounds like a much more complicated process than it ends up being as you basically use different integrated product from X10 to create a network that is the size that you actually want. First you can purchase a device from X10 to connect directly to a light source, such as free standing lamp. There are a variety of these under the industry standard of X10 that transfer the information with radio frequency bursts.

From there you get an X10 controller to connect to your computer, from which you use associated server piece on your computer so as to actually control the device attached to the light from your computer.

The final stage of the X10 Home Automation process is really to download and install their iPhone application that will connect to this software and then follow its controls down the line to the object you want to control. This iPhone application states you that you can control up to sixty items in your home right from your iPhone, but you have to have the proper X10 equipment for each device to make this work. What this iPhone application actually does is allows you to control all of these X10 devices through the central hub of the server piece, which then in turn control the home features they are attached to.

This is not cheap or incredibly easy, and once you actually purchase all of the X10 equipment you will have to go in and spend $9.99 on the iPhone application (X Commander). The price is not, however, the main thing that should be considered here (try MobiLinc Lite for free). If you will be able to make this work then you really have integrated the iPhone into your home operations in a way that is beyond what even the more high end users are doing. You may want to keep this limited to things like main lights, televisions, and garage doors at first, but after a while you may be able to even get kitchen appliances on board!

Care to see advanced lighting control with iPhone? Check out Luminair app (DMX lighting control). You never know what kind of ambient light you will need in your dorm room or apartment. Keep in mind this app requires different set-up compare what we described above, not X10 but DMX.

Resources to get your iPhone home automation project started:

1. List of requirements for X Commander control software. Before you buy anything just make sure that you have everything organized and you understand requirements.

2. You can order components (controlers, X10 plugs, server) at x10.com. Word of caution they sell their stuff like late night infomertials with Crazy Eddie's flare

3. Learn more about DMX light control here. This is more expensive option for iPhone light control compare to X10, but you can see from the video above that results are amazing.

4. Read our article on How To Turn Your iPhone Into The Ultimate Remote

Kill Your Phone Remotely

Many of today's most popular smartphones can be erased remotely if they are lost or stolen. Here's how to do it.

by Jamie Lendino

A handset may be valuable, but it's easily replaced. The data on it, however, is often much more important. Cell phones carry all kinds of personal and business information these days, and preventing it from getting into the wrong hands is key.

While a stray personal address book won't matter much to an unsavory type who finds a lost iPhone—they'd much rather just sell the phone—cached online banking passwords, corporate documents and VPN access are better off kept secure. That's why many of today's smartphones support a mobile kill switch, also called "remote wipe" capability. Remote wipe lets a device owner or IT support engineer remotely erase the handheld's data in case it's lost or stolen.

All of the major smartphone platforms have some kind of remote erase capability. There are several ways of doing it, such as installing apps on the handset, using a management console on the IT side, or signing up for a cloud-based service. Here's a rundown of what's out there for each platform. No matter which smartphone OS you or your employees use, you're bound to find something that can help put your mind at rest.

Though it varies by kill switch and platform, remote wipes aren't fail safe. If someone finds the phone before the remote wipe occurs—which could happen if the battery dies, or there's no signal to receive the command—a thief or corporate spy could disable the network connections and then hack into the device (the procedures would depend on the particular phone). Your best insurance is to flip the kill switch quickly, the same way you would call your credit card company the moment you noticed the card was missing.

Note: By "kill switch" we mean remote wipe capability; this is not to be confused with the "kill switch" found in iPhone OS and Android 1.5 that lets Apple and Google delete mobile apps they no longer approve of on existing handsets.

Apple iPhone
Apple's $99-per-year MobileMe service offers Mac users the ability to push e-mail, contacts, and calendar entries to the iPhone (among other things). But one key feature, first announced in March and later introduced with iPhone OS 3.0, lets MobileMe users perform a remote wipe on a lost or stolen iPhone. It's found under Account -> Find My iPhone -> Remote Wipe. It can also display a message on the phone's screen, like "please call Jamie at 718-555-1212 if found."

Palm Pre
All Palm Pre owners set up a Palm Profile when first activating their new devices. The Palm Profile lets users back up settings, receive over-the-air updates, or—ta da—remotely erase a lost or stolen handset. To begin, head to palm.com/palmprofile, enter your profile e-mail address and password, and click Erase Device (for more information on this, read Palm's detailed instructions). In addition, Palm's Exchange ActiveSync implementation in webOS 1.1 now supports Remote Wipe, which lets IT administrations do the same thing for centrally managed Pres.

BlackBerry OS
Any BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) handset can be erased remotely via the Erase Data and Disable Handheld IT administration command over the wireless network. IT admins can also specify if the handset should revert to factory default settings or retain the IT policy it had before. Individual users with BIS can install Roblock for BlackBerry 2.0, a $9.95 app that remote locks or wipes devices, offers GPS tracking, and recovers lost contacts.

Android OS
SMobile Anti-Theft for Android is a $19.95 app that features GPS locate and remote wipe functions for the T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile myTouch 3G, or any other Android-powered smartphone. The app can erase both the handset and any SD card data. The $29.95 Security Shield for Android also protects against viruses and other malware, but that's not much of a concern in the U.S. (at least at the time of this writing).

Windows Mobile
Microsoft's new My Phone Windows Mobile service, currently in beta, lets users locate lost handhelds via GPS and erase their data remotely. It also backs up contacts, photos, text messages, and calendar entries to Microsoft's storage cloud. My Phone (Beta) works with any Windows Mobile 6.0 handheld.

Microsoft Exchange Server can handle the same task for enterprise devices, along with Absolute Software's Computrace Mobile, which can manage enterprise devices running Windows Mobile or BlackBerry and issue remote wipe commands.

3 Easy Ways To Restart Your Computer Over The Internet

By Ryan Dube

I am very obsessed with technology, and I like to push the limits of whatever technology currently exists. Personally, I think it’s very cool that there are lots of remote access tools out there, like the 7 free ones listed in Aibek’s article on Screen-Sharing and Remote Access applications or the remote mobile VNC app I wrote about recently that lets you access your computer with your mobile phone.

However, there are circumstances when connecting to a PC isn’t easy or even possible, yet you still need the ability to reboot your web server or file-sharing server at home because an application is locked up or the server isn’t responding. These days, doing a remote computer restart is fast and easy - and it’s now even possible to do so from any web browser or by using the popular micro-blogging tool known as Twitter.

1. How To Perform a Basic Remote Computer Restart - Shutdown.exe

For those of you who don’t already know how to remotely reboot a computer, the simplest approach if you’re sitting on the same network as the target PC is to make use of the Windows shutdown.exe tool. The Microsoft support page makes the command a bit more complicated than it really needs to be, because there are a number of “switches” available so that you can tailor the shutdown command.

Essentially, from a command prompt or an application, you can issue the shutdown command using the syntax: shutdown -r -f -m \remotecomputerIP -t 00

• -m \remotecomputerIP - substitute remotecomputerIP with either the network name or IP address of the computer
• -r forces a restart
• -f forces all running applications to close
• -t 00 tells the command to restart without any time delay (zero seconds)

Depending on your reason for remotely restarting, you’ll want to use these commands carefully. For example, if you just want to set up an application that does a regular reboot every two or three days, you may want to consider allowing a user who’s currently on the computer to cancel the reboot, or at least allow them the option to save whatever they’re currently working on.

However, for the purpose of this article, all we really want to do is remotely force a reboot if you’re away from home and you’re in a situation where your web server isn’t responding. To do this, the command above will work. The one drawback with the “shutdown.exe” approach is that you need to be sure you are connected to your remote computer as a user that has administrator privileges. When you prefer to keep tight security on your PC or server, this isn’t always easy to accomplish.

2. Remotely Reboot Your Computer Through a Web Browser with Shutter

One of the easiest ways to get around this security quagmire is by installing a free application created by Denis Kozlov called Shutter. The cool thing about Shutter is that once you’ve got it set up on your target PC, you can perform various functions on your computer through any web browser on the Internet. First, install Shutter to your target PC or server and the initial screen that comes up will look like this.

First of all, don’t worry about the settings on this screen because these are for when you use the application locally. However, your interest is in using the application as a sort of “web server” that gives you access to your PC from any browser. To set it up, click on the Options button and choose the “Web Interface” tab.

On this screen, select “Enable,” choose a “Listen IP” from the list and enter whatever port you’d like to use. Most folks just use port 80 since it’s default, however if you want added security you can use some obscure port. Finally, choose your Username and Password (required), click save and the application is set up - it’s as easy as that! The only last step is to make sure that if you’re using a router, you open up a “hole” so that you can connect to your Shutter server through the router.

To do this, just go to your router administration control panel (usually 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1, depending on your router’s brand) and configure port forwarding as shown here.

Just make sure the IP and port you defined in Shutter is defined here and that it’s enabled. Once you save, setup is complete. Now you can go to any web browser and send not only a “restart” command to your computer, but also a whole list of other commands.

To access the Shutter service, you can just type in the IP on your local network. In my case, I’d open a browser and type “192.168.1.103:1087″ to access the web interface. From an external Internet location, like a library or from work, I simply type in my external IP assigned by the ISP followed by the port, such as “65.xxx.xxx.122:1087″ and the web interface will come up after you log in with the ID and password you defined.

Editor’s note: If you don’t know what your external IP is, just visit whatismyip.com

As you can see, the Shutter web interface lets you perform a whole list of tasks on your remote computer, including muting the volume, turning off the monitor or running a specific program. The great thing about this approach is that all of these commands are issued from the application running on your target computer, so you don’t need to perform any special security configurations to remotely trigger these commands.

3. Remotely Reboot Your Computer Through Twitter With TweetMyPC

Easily one of the coolest applications I’ve seen in a very long time, TweetMyPC is an application you can install on your target PC, just like Shutter. The difference is that in this case, the application “listens” intently to all of the “tweet” messages that you send out from your Twitter account. Whenever you issue a command such as Shutdown, Restart, or Logoff - the computer does exactly as it’s told.

Just install the application, go into settings and enter your Twitter credentials.

Click “Save and Close,” and you’re done! No complicated security configuration, no tweaking your router’s internet settings - just install the app, insert your Twitter credentials and you’re golden. Finally, go into your Twitter account and just issue your command.

The convenience of this restart technique are the awesome possibilities. Just imagine, now you can pull out your cellphone and text a Twitter “Restart” update to reboot your computer. Any place where you can access your Twitter account, you can issue one of these three commands to your remote computer. The good news is that the author of this application is in the process of developing a Mac version.

Do you know of any other cool ways to remotely reboot your PC? Share your own tips in the comments section below.