Terminals are weird: quirks of the ways control and alt keys are represented in a standard unix style terminal.

I bought a used Thinkpad to replace my long-lived but now-dead netbook, and while it’s a much better machine in relative terms, it’s still kind of a weenie compared to the Mac on my desk. It’ll be a fine coding/email/browsing device, but I have this fantasy of remoting in to the Mac, using the Thinkpad as a dumb terminal, so I can also drive Xcode from afar. I’ve set my desk up to be as comfortable a coding station as I can manage, but there are many other places I’d like to be as well…

My question for the interwebs: is it possible to set up a VNC server on a Mac such that there is no way to log in with a password, that authentication is only possible through some pre-set key pair? I know that one can do this sort of thing with Git but I am hazy on the details. I imagine that I would generate a file, copy it onto the laptop via USB stick, set some configuration somewhere, open the relevant port on my home router, and then control my desktop machine without worrying that it is protected by something so flimsy as a password.

Now that its metacarpal bone contains a couple of screws, my thumb appears to have developed the ability to detect changes in barometric pressure. Cool! I am a human weather station!

Okay, to be honest it’s annoying and it kind of hurts, but if it’s the worst I have to deal with as a long-term consequence of last year’s motorcycle crash then I think I am OK with that.