Screen sharing – a quirk or just me being dumb?

I recently came across a behaviour of Leopard’s Screen Sharing feature that surprised me. Would someone with two Macs to hand please try this and let me know whether it’s just something to do with my setup. (I install a lot of shit.)

• On the first Mac, log in as an administrator and create a standard user account and set its password.
• Turn off fast user switching, not that it seems to make a difference either way.
• Ensure the administrator account has a password set as well.
• In the Sharing preferences pane, go to Screen Sharing and set the option to restrict it to specified accounts. Add only the new standard account.
• Log out of the administrator account and stay at the login window.
• On the second Mac, open a Finder window and find the first Mac in the sidebar’s Shared group.
• Share the first Mac’s screen and you’ll see the login window. Try entering the administrator’s account details and the attempt should be rejected. Break the connection.
• Physically go back to the first Mac and log into the administrator account.
• Go back to the second Mac and try to share the screen. Enter the administrator account’s credentials again. They should once more be rejected.
• Now for the curious part. Enter the standard account’s credentials. When I do this, the remote Mac allows me to log in, but I arrive at the account that’s already running: the administrator account.

This happens regardless of whether Fast User Switching is enabled. With that feature enabled, I expected to arrive at the standard account’s desktop. With it disabled, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Certainly not to arrive at the administrator’s desktop, but I’m unsure if this is expected behaviour for VNC. I can’t imagine why it would be, but I had only used third-party VNC clients (on Windows) prior to this.

Insatiable appetite

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve felt restless when listening to music. If CDs weren’t immediately ripped and archived these days, many of my longtime favourites would be scratched to death by now, and even more recent gems such as Fleet Foxes and Liam Finn are being stretched to the limit of repeated listening. I’m desperately in need of new music recommendations.

More stuff along the lines of Fleet Foxes would be welcome. I’ve already had two recommendations based on that connection this week: Bon Iver and Conor Oberst. I’ve been sampling the former this evening and though not all is to my taste, Creature Fear and Lump Sum stand out as memorable.

Should it help, here are a few other things that have left an impression over recent months and years.

• Finn Brothers’ Everyone Is Here
• Laura Veirs’ Year of Meteors
• Maria McKee’s Life is Sweet
• Hector Zazou’s Songs from the Cold Seas
• David Byrne’s Look Into The Eyeball

Help me, dear reader. I beg of you to leave suggestions and save me from trawling the tawdry disco and 80s soul regions of my iTunes library for respite.

Nintendo comes up smelling of roses… (finally)

After its yawnsome E3 line-up, Nintendo has taken a huge step towards redeeming the Wii’s line-up in 2008 by stepping back in time… all the way to 1996!

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is now available for 900 Wii points on the European Virtual Console. This is the first time this SNES game, a joint project with Square, has been made available in this market, previously only seeing the light of day in Japan and North America. I’ve played a very short part of the US version and was immediately charmed by the graphics, the strange Nintendo humour (which could just be down to translation, for all I know).

The interactive battle sequences are a joy too, making proceedings less tedious than traditional RPGs.

Thank goodness for the current relations between Square Enix and Nintendo. I hoped that this game would be released a few years ago as part of the Super Mario Advance series, but thanks to all involved in finally pushing this out in Europe.

Hmm, what to spend my remaining 1700 Wii points on… I bought many of the good VC titles on cartridge, and Chrono Trigger will finally reach these shores via the DS next year. I wouldn’t mind seeing the delicious Secret of Mana again.

Suzanne Vega to re-record back catalogue

Oh my, I feel weak at the knees at the prospect of news posted in Suzanne Vega’s blog. In the entry dated 14 August, she has announced plans to re-record some of her back catalogue with just an acoustic guitar for accompaniment.

This enticing collection will be released through her website as Suzanne Vega Acoustic Favorites. From what I’ve gleaned from interviews about her writing process, it sounds like the results could be akin to polished demos. I’m very excited at the prospect of stripped down versions of her songs, particularly ones from her 1990s albums.

I recently posted about her iTunes Live performance, which has since been released on the iTunes Store. Sadly it’s the usual iTunes Live six-track EP, not a video of the whole concert, as I presumed from the pre-show announcement. My mistake. Sorry to get anyone’s hopes up, and I still recommend catching a date next time she tours in your area. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a venue as top-notch as the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham, where I saw her in 2004.

Gaming’s new frontier

Right now, four words are swirling around my head. Victor Meldrew would be proud. Why? Because I never imagined for one fraction of a millisecond that that cult teen flick Pretty in Pink would become a videogame.

It’s years since I last saw the film and I’d forgotten quite how funny it is. Watch the trailer and wait for the second part of the car-side conversation between Molly Ringwald and James Spader. Amazing that they didn’t waste the entire budget on trying to nail that scene.

Anyway, forget Nintendo’s attempts to broaden gaming’s horizons. This is the future of PC gaming.