Regarding the teacher who wanted to easily control internet access on student Macs, assuming that he is running Leopard, I think that this is something that could be controlled with Parental Controls. You can set up permission on each student PC so that the teacher PC could set up Parental Controls on each Mac from his Mac, and then the teacher could allow or disallow Safari (or Firefox or whichever) whenever necessary, using the GUI.

Another, more geeky way would be set up a proxy server daemon (such as Squid) on the teacher PC, set up web proxy to point at that PC on all student PCs, and just keep the proxy daemon shut down until he wants to allow students to access the web, and when they are done he can shut down the proxy. That would be a bit of a pain to set up, but easy to start and shut down internet access.

Second point: I know that you guys know the details of remote control pairing, but I think that your description made it sound like you paired a remote to a single Mac or AppleTV. Technically, that is not how it works, of course - you pair a unique remote to a machine, so that machine responds only to that remote control, but the actual remote control could still control multiple machines that have not set up pairing. In other words, in the particular case talked about in #173, if the MacBook Pro was paired with one remote but the Apple TV was not paired, then the MBP would ignore the second remote control, but if the first remote was used with he MBP and the Apple TV had not been paired, it would still respond to both remotes.

I guess to put it simpler, the Apple Remote does not store pairing - the actual device stores the pairing.

I don't know if I was any more clear than you guys were, but it sounded to me as if you were describing a situation where pairing would cause that remote only to work with the MBP, but it's actually the MBP that will only respond to the paired remote.

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doogald wrote:
RI guess to put it simpler, the Apple Remote does not store pairing - the actual device stores the pairing.

I don't know if I was any more clear than you guys were

Actually, that's an excellent point, doogald, and your "put it simpler" explanation is something we'll share with the listeners on next show.

Thanks!