VNC for Android phone

With the advent of computer file storage and automation came unmanned operation.  Unfortunately, what often happens with unmanned operations is somehow the engineer becomes responsible for station operation and ends up getting all the phone calls when anything goes wrong:

  • Traffic forgot to transfer the Sunday log and the station is off the air at 12 am Sunday morning.  Call the engineer.
  • Part-time DJ didn’t read the directions on merging logs, call the engineer.
  • Windows has encountered a problem and needs to reboot, call the engineer.
  • The server has locked up, call the engineer.
  • Silence sensor, engineer’s phone number

I got sick of driving to the radio station when things got out of whack with the AudioVault, so I installed VNC on all the machines.  From that point, I could log on from home and see what the problem was.  It was great, when traffic goobers up the log transfer, I called the traffic director at home and had her go in a fix it.  Untrained operators, called the program director.  Unfortunately, I don’t have Bill Gate’s phone number, so the Windows issues are still on me.

All of this was great as long as my laptop was around.  Being married, however, I had to occasionally listen to my wife, who insisted that we not take the laptop to dinner or the movies with us.  There were those occasional times when it would have been nice.

With the purchase of the Android phone, however, I no longer have to worry about that.  Android VNC is a free app that allows an Android phone to connect to any VNC server application.  The user can save all the VNC connection information on the phone.  It has several mouse options including a touch pad, touchpad mouse, mouse trackball, etc.  It connects to most VNC servers: incl TightVNC, RealVNC on Win and Linux, x11vnc, and Apple Remote Desktop on OS/X. 0.4.3.  Special commands such as ctl-alt-del are available through the menu.  It is also fully zoomable.  All in all, I can do almost anything with the Android phone that I can do on the laptop.  My wife is thrilled.

It is a time saver.