A funny thing happened on the way to the Google search results for “solaris x86″.

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Stefanie Höfling passed along the news that Cocoa Bootcamp will take place August 6-10, 2007, at Big Nerd Ranch Europe:

Big Nerd Ranch Europe is pleased to announce the next opportunity of learning Mac OS X Programming in the most desired Cocoa training course available: Cocoa Bootcamp with instructor Aaron Hillegass. The intensive five-day training taught at the retreat environment of Kloster Eberbach near Frankfurt, Germany is scheduled for August 6-10, 2007.

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When Richard (the other FMB writer) and I were in college, we’d play some fun pranks with the Unix “say” command.

For those who don’t know, this command makes your Mac speak. It’s really quite simple to do.

Here are the steps:

1. Open up Terminal.app. This application is located in the your Utilities folder on your Mac.
2. It will start up and have a prompt ready for you. At this point just type “say (insert words or sentence here) and push return.

3. As soon as the sentence is done, another prompt will appear. You can type a new sentence or just hit the up arrow if you want to repeat the last one.

And now for the fun part.

Richard and I both had Macs. We would have my Mac in the living room and be sure that SSH was enabled. (video tutorial here) Richard would have his Mac in the next room within hearing distance of mine. From there, he would log into mine via SSH so he had the prompt on my computer. (This wasn’t visible on my computer.)

We’d then invite a friend (aka, a cute girl to impress) over and tell her how cool Macs are because they can hold conversations with you. We’d then encourage her to “ask the Mac a question.” Richard would than answer the question and keep the conversation going by typing the “say” command from his computer.

One tip to make it more smooth is to let the victim friend know that sometimes the microphone couldn’t pick up the question because it was too soft or slurred. Of course that isn’t the case, but this gave Richard extra time to type the responses.

This is a very fun prank to do. It’s especially interesting to hear what kind of questions the person will ask the computer. If it’s a fella, it’s a given that there will be a question about the “size of his hard disk.”

In this video tutorial, I was you thru how to enable and use ssh on your colocated mac server. It’s an easy process, and this is a short tutorial, but it really opens the door for controlling your Mac in a very powerful way.

If you are new to using Terminal, or Unix in general, you might consider keeping an eye on FreeMacUnix.com. Richard has started from the very beginning in his explanations on how to use Unix on your Mac.

Shownotes:

• Setting Up VNC On Your Server- an earlier tutorial that is referenced in this video.
• Chicken Of The VNC- VNC Client for controlling your Mac server
• Mac mini colocation

Video Link: Enable SSH On Your Mac Server