How to turn your smartphone into a remote mouse and keyboard

Picture: It's past midnight and your favorite TV show is running on your computer, doing its job of trying to tire you into sleep. But you had a double espresso shot just before your shift finished, and you're still wide-awake, ready for more. The episode ends, and now your video player is gloomily projecting its watermark and a black screen. You can't go to sleep, not just yet -- you need at least another episode or two for that. But you don't want to get up and go across the room to queue more episodes, either. What do you do? You grudgingly get up, put on your flippers that no outsider is supposed to see, and crawl towards the computer to do the job.

Of course, you don't really need to -- not as long as you have your smartphone handy and have setup a remote connection between it and your computer, allowing it to act as a remote mouse and keyboard. Doing so is plenty easy, and for some of us, a remote mouse/keyboard app is among the first things we download off the Play Store when we get a new device. Interested in learning how to force your smartphone into working in concert with your computer? Then take a look below.

1. Step #1

Before you can control your PC with your smartphone, you'll need to set them both up with an app like Remote Mouse (works for both iOS and Android).

Just head over to the Play Store and download it. On your PC you'll need to go to http://www.remotemouse.net/ and download the server client.

Download Remote Mouse

2. Step #2

Now that you've got the client app installed on your smartphone, and the server app on your PC (it's a completely no-brains installation), you're ready to bridge a connection.

Simply fire up Remote Mouse on your Android or iOS device and you should see the server computer on your screen. Do note that both devices need to be on the same network.

3. Step #3

Aaaand voilà! You're ready to go. Use the vast green space as you would a laptop trackpad, and the keyboard as you would normally. You now have control over your computer remotely, and can safely go to bed tonight without worrying about nasty stuff like having to get up from your bed/couch.