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Spooky fun with ssh on OS X

Want to freak out your wife/husband/kids?

On a mac that you have access to:

Go to ‘System Preferences’. Under ‘Internet & Networking’ there is a ‘Sharing’ icon. Run that. In the list that appears, check the ‘Remote Login’ option.

Then ssh into your mac remotely by downloading putty if you’re on a pc or launch a terminal on another mac and run “ssh username@ip.address” without quotes to ssh to the mac while someone is working on it.

Once you’re logged in:

Crank up the volume by running:
sudo osascript -e "set volume 10"

Then run:

sudo osascript -e 'say "I am watching you." using "Zarvox"

Or if that doesn’t work, try:

sudo osascript -e 'say "I am watching you." using "Cellos"'

Make sure you have an automatic emergency defibrillator handy.

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My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.