dinner’s ready

Not all improvements to our home-network need to be high tech. Here is a very simple measure which reduces the amount of in-house shouting drastically. Often all of us are online, either to work, surf the net, MSN-chat or listening to iTunes and clearly we can easily see which other computers are on at the time. Just click on the Network icon on the top left of the Finder-window. As our computer-names are quite descriptive (iMacLieven,iMacBente,eMacAnn,iBookGitte) it will give a good indication of who is online but as we can all login to all these computers one can never be too certain. An elegant way to find out who is on whose computer is to use the Rendezvous window in iChat. This lists all people on the network which have iChat running on their computers and then iChat can be used to send simple messages immediately to a given person (such as : turn that music down or telephone for you etc.). There is just one problem : as the kids use MSN to chat they never turn on iChat and as we are of a non-chatting generation neither do we. Fortunately, it is easy to force iChat to be running at login.

On each computer go to SystemPrefrences-Accounts and for each user go to the Startup Items pane. Click on the + button and browse to the Applications/iChat program and click Add. Be sure to check the Hide button and you are done. Next time that person logs in, iChat will start automatically in the background (the only slightly annoying thing is a small sound at the end of login) and the user will appear in any iChat-Rendezvous window.