From time to time I spend a few weeks abroad. From time to time I’d like to watch swiss tv while I’m there. There are services like Zattoo or Wilmaa out there, that allow you to watch tv via internet, but they only allow IPs from within your home country, in my case Switzerland.

So we want them to believe that we’re home, not 4000 miles away on some sunny island (dream on). The solution is kind of simple actually, once you know how to do it, but it took me far too long to find it out anyway – so I thought it might be worth sharing (which also prevents me forgetting it).

We just need to route all relevant internet traffice through a home computer. You need to have SSH access to this computer, and you need to have a decent internet upload speed for video stuff. Lucky me I have a loyal and faithful Mac Mini at home, acting as Media Center, SVN server and .. well, as a decent TV proxy :-) Here’s how you do:

1. Open Terminal, enter:
   ssh -2 -C -D 2001 username@yourserver.com
   (username is your account on the remote machine – and yourserver.com could be an ip or whatever address your server has. I use Dynamic DNS for mine.)
2. Enter the password for username
3. Open «System Preferences» and go to «Network» (You can close the Terminal). Click the Button «Advanced…»
   
4. Go to «Proxies» and activate SOCKS Proxy and enter
   Socks Proxy Server: 127.0.0.1 : 2001 (see picture)
5. Go to What Is My IP Address? or this IP Tracer to check if everything works. If the map shows you’re at home, you’re good to go!

Now for TV I recommand Wilmaa: worked perfectly for me. Surprisingly good quality, and it’s for free! Great for football matches or Heidi in swiss german ;-)

If you ever have accessed your Mac with Remote Desktop, your Mac probably got a sickness out of it. A process named build_hd_index will be running on a regular basis. Very regular. Much too often! And if you have, like me, a lot of hard drive space, build_hd_index will have to do a lot, because it’s aim is to index each and every file on each and every hard drive. So I read, at least.

Whatsoever, this process made me sick. My once silent Mac was like on Kokain: hard drive noise accompanied by a respectable cpu usage (about 40%, and hey, I have eight horses drawing my carriage after all). Addicted to indexing! It made me crazy! Now I got rid of it (again actually, System updates can bring the devil back – that’s why I need to write that down if it’s just for myself).

How to stop it

Here’s a simple terminal todo – open up your terminal and enter line after line:

sudo chmod a-x /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/build_hd_index
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent
sudo rm /var/db/RemoteManagement/caches/filesystem.cache

For newbies: After the first sudo, enter your admin password (usually your password you use for installation etc.). If you’re asked wether you want to overwrite/overrule something, type «yes» and press Enter.

So what is this doing? Line by line:

1. sudo chmod a-x /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/build_hd_index
   Changes the right of devil script named build_hd_index so it can’t be executed anymore
2. sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent
   Gets rid of the Apple Remote Desktop preferences file which should have stored wether your system should run build_hd_index
3. sudo rm /var/db/RemoteManagement/caches/filesystem.cache
   Removes the cache file produced by build_hd_index (mine was over 6 GB!)

There are other things you could do, like unchecking some option in the accessing Remote Desktop. This might work for you, it didn’t for me. And I don’t want to care anymore about it. After all, what’s its use?! To be able to search for files via Remote Desktop the old Tiger way?! I don’t know.. but I know that I never ever need this. It has nothing to do with Spotlight, and it has nothing to do with locate (Terminal command). And my Mac’s so very much calmer now. It went to rehab.