Reach your Mac from anywhere

With Tailscale · free for personal use · set up in about five minutes

At home, Telkino finds your Mac on its own. Away from home, you need a safe way to reach it. The easiest one is Tailscale: a private network for your own devices only, with no router settings and no open ports. For personal use the free Personal plan is enough.

Three steps

1. Install Tailscale on the Mac and the iPhone. On the Mac from the App Store or from tailscale.com/download/mac, on the iPhone or iPad from the App Store. Sign in on both with the same account, for example with Apple, Google or Microsoft. Tailscale creates your private network at the first sign-in. On the iPhone, allow the VPN configuration when iOS asks.
2. Turn on Screen Sharing on the Mac. Under System Settings › General › Sharing. If you already use Telkino at home, it is on.
3. Add the Mac in Telkino with its Tailscale name. Enter the device name from the Tailscale app as the host, for example mac-mini, and port 5900. Then connect as usual.

That’s it. Away from home, Tailscale only has to be switched on at the iPhone. The connection runs directly between your devices, no Telkino server is involved. Apple High Performance with HEVC video works over Tailscale too.

Good to know

• Instead of the short name, the full name such as mac-mini.tailnet-1234.ts.net or the 100.x.y.z address from the Tailscale app works too.
• To reach the Mac from away, it should not go to sleep. Wake on LAN only works on the same network, not over Tailscale.
• Telkino finds computers via Bonjour only on the local network. Over Tailscale you enter the name once yourself, or use the Shortcut below.

Extra: import computers with a Shortcut

The Tailscale app 1.36 or later offers your devices to the Shortcuts app. A small shortcut lists them, you pick one, and Telkino opens the editor with name and address filled in. Nothing is saved or connected until you confirm.

1. Open the Shortcuts app and create a new shortcut, for example “Add Mac from Tailscale”.
2. Add the action Tailscale → Find Devices. Filter: “Is Online” is true.
3. Add Choose from List with the found devices as input.
4. Add Open URLs with this URL, inserting “Name” and “DNS Name” of the chosen device as variables:
   telkino://add?name=Name&host=DNS-Name&port=5900
5. Done. Put the shortcut on the Home Screen or run it with Siri.

What Telkino does with the link

The link telkino://add opens the Add Computer editor and fills in name, host, port and optionally the user name (username=). Everything else stays with you: password, image quality, saving. Invalid links are ignored.