I was trying to get into my personal Macbook a couple minutes ago but the screen was black and I had a spinning beach ball. I couldn’t remember if I had anything important open so I didn’t want to force a reboot. I hadn’t used the computer for a couple hours so I guessed that the screen saver had hung or VLC froze in full screen. I logged into my Macbook through ssh and ran ps -e. VLC wasn’t there, so I looked for screen-saver-y things and found 5827 ?? 0:00.22 /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine. I ended up killing it with sudo killall ScreenSaverEngine which immediately brought me back to my desktop. I am guessing I won’t have a screensaver back until I reboot. Hope this helps! Oh, and make sure that you already have SSH enabled (Remote Login in the Sharing preference pane) and know the IP/Domain of your laptop. I used johns-macbook.local which the OS set up for me automatically. My guess is that it is some sort of bonjour/zeroconf to dns bridge.
