At the number two spot is a great way to connect to your computer from home with out paying a dime. If you have leopard, then potentially you already have this feature, known as back to my mac. However, this requires a DotMac account. Which again is not free. There are applications like GoToMyPC which cost around $20 per month. However, all you need is Chicken of the VNC. This free application let’s you VNC (virtual network computing) from anywhere to your home computer, and it’s free. After installing you will need to find out the ip address of your home computer. You can do this by going to IP Chicken or whatismyip.

If you don’t have a router connecting all your home computers then that is all you will need to access your PC. However, if you do have a router then you must forward the VNC port 5900 to your local computer’s ip address. If you need help with forwarding that port check for your router here. Once you have all that setup you are good to go.

There is one more thing. You need to determine if you have a static or dynamic IP address from your ISP (internet service provider). If the address is static, doesn’t change, then you don’t need to worry about your computer at the other end not responding. However, if you have a dynamic IP address, then you have one last thing to do. That is setup a FREE account with DynDNS which will give you a domain name which you can connect to and which can be update to the correct IP address with their free software.

From the Developer’s Site:

A fast, lightweight VNC client for Mac OS X. A VNC client allows one to display and interact with a remote computer screen. In other words, you can use Chicken of the VNC to interact with a remote computer as though it’s right next to you.

Chicken features automatic server discovery via Rendezvous; listen mode for navigating through firewalls; an auto-scrolling full-screen mode; keychain integration; CPU performance throttling; remappable, smart unicode keybindings; mouse button emulation and native multibutton support; tons of supported transfer encodings including Tight and ZLib; and customizable connection profiles.

Screenshots:

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