How to Control Your Computer With Twitter

A little bit more than a year ago I showed you how to shut down your computer using nothing more than your cell phone, Microsoft Outlook in a free program called Query. Now unfortunately Query is not accepting any new applications, so in this video I'm going to show you an alternate way to do this which is an easier way to do it by using your cell phone and Twitter.

For this project we’re going to be using a free a piece of software called TweetMyPC, so if you do a Google search for that it should bring up their main website at CodePlex.com and the homepage gives a description on the program and how to use it but if you click on the download tab this will allow you to download it to your computer and unfortunately when you look at and ask a lot of question about this, this does only work on Windows so far.

I'm not sure if they are developing versions for other operating systems but you'll have to talk to them about that. So once you have this downloaded go ahead and create a Twitter account. If you already have a Twitter account that’s fine but in order for this to work you have to send Twitter messages such as shutdown or log off and if you don’t want that shown on your regular account then you'll need to create another one.

And also under settings you want to go ahead and set it up so your mobile phone works with it so that you can send Twitter messages using your mobile phone. Now once you have all that set up and you have TweetMyPC installed, go into program files and find the TweetMyPC folder and create a shortcut for it to your desktop and the reason that we want to do this is because ways in Vista you have to run this as administrator so you want to right click on the program and select run as administrator. If you have XP you probably don’t have to do this but since I'm using Vista that’s how you do it.

And then just right click on it on the program and select that at settings and enter you username and password and you can check to add and start with Windows automatically as well and then once you have it save and close just send Twitter text message using your cell phone and the TweetMyPC program checks for updates every minute so it shouldn’t take any longer than a minute for it to receive your message. Whenever it does you should see a little dialog box pop up it says Windows will shutdown in one minute, so at the longest this should take about two to two and half minutes to actually respond.

And then once it does it should shutdown and you can also as I said log off or restart you computer as well but those are the only three options. All right, well that’s it for this tutorial. For more, go to Tinkernut.com.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services