OS X Daily reader Dan Luna sent in the following tip on accessing Windows shares on the Mac from the command line: “My Mac is nestled into a sea of Windows PC’s at the office, and so I am frequently accessing SMB shares to share data and files. Accessing SMB/Windows shares on the Mac is really easy from the GUI but I spend a lot of time in the command line and I always like to find a way to do things using the underpinnings of Mac OS X. With this in mind, here’s how to access SMB shares via the command line in OS X:”

This first command lists the available shares at the destination IP:
$ smbclient -U user -I 192.168.0.105 -L //smbshare/

Now you’ll want to pass set your SMB shares mount point:
$ mount -t smbfs -o username=winusername //smbserver/myshare /mnt/smbshare

and finally you’ll want to gain access to the SMB share by specifying your Windows login and the machines IP address:
$ mount -t cifs -o username=winusername,password=winpassword //192.168.0.105/myshare /mnt/share

Thanks for the tip Dan! I haven’t been able to check if this works because I’m on an all Mac network, but the commands seem valid so I see no reason it wouldn’t. Obviously you’ll need to fill in your own unique usernames, sharenames, IP addresses, mount points, etc.

I really appreciate Dan’s tip but I think I’ll just stick to the GUI myself…

Desktop icon clutter really gets to me, but it’s hard to avoid since a lot of apps download things to the Desktop by default. It’s easy to hide the Mac hard drive icons, but what about all the other stuff that gets dumped to your desktop? Well that’s easy to hide too actually, following these instructions:

Clean up the Desktop by Hiding Desktop Icons

Launch Terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false

After hitting enter, you’ll want to kill the Finder so that it relaunches and the changes take effect:
killall Finder

All of the files will still exist, but they’re now discretely hidden in your home folder’s “Desktop” directory rather than cluttering up your actual desktop.

To show the Desktop icons again, open the Mac Terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true

Again, kill the Finder and your icons will show on the desktop as usual.

While geeking around I discovered another way to check if your Mac is 64 bit compatible by using the command line. Launch terminal and type “sysctl hw |grep 64bit”

Here’s me using the command on my MacBook which does not have a 64 bit processor:
$ sysctl hw |grep 64bit
hw.cpu64bit_capable: 0


on my friends newer MacBook Pro his results were:
$ sysctl hw |grep 64bit
hw.cpu64bit_capable: 1


meaning it is a 64 bit processor.

I have a million different genres in iTunes and not nearly enough album art, which is fine and dandy until you put iTunes 9 into genre ‘grid’ view and then suddenly you have a bunch of boring looking music note icons. Apparently how iTunes sets genre art is by looking for album art set in that genre, and if it can’t find any album art it will resort to the boring grey box. But not anymore! Thanks to a crafty Mac user, you can now change those dull music note icons into virtually any image you want, which dramatically spruces up your iTunes grid view appearance. Highly recommended iTunes tweaking! Check out the how-to guide here:

DaveMBlog: How to use Custom Genre Art in iTunes 9

Want Gmail Push Notifications on your iPhone? In a crafty workaround, you can get Gmail to push notifications to your iPhone by setting up Gmail as a Microsoft Exchange account. The downside to this method is that you can only have one Microsoft Exchange account setup on your iPhone at a time, so if you already have an Exchange account configured you would have to replace it with the Gmail one. In any case, you can follow the instructions directly from Google on setting up the account so that you can get push notifications: Google Sync: Set Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch

[ via TechCrunch ]

Not to brag or anything, but I love the fact that that unless I’ve run Software Update I rarely have to reboot my Mac, this might not be that exciting to most Mac users but as a relatively recent Windows convert, I find this particularly nice. So naturally with my Mac geekiness I find it fun to check the uptime and reboot history of my Mac and others, it’s easy to do and it’s actually functionally useful too for troubleshooting certain Mac problems. Here’s how to do both via the Command Line:

How to Check your Macs uptime

To check your Macs uptime, simply type ‘uptime’ in the Terminal. In the below example, we have a Mac that has been up for 21 hours and 40 minutes.
YourMac:~ user$ uptime
10:33 up 21:40, 4 users, load averages: 0.09 0.19 0.21

How to Check your Macs reboot history

To check the reboot history of your Mac, type ‘last reboot’ in the Terminal. This will provide you with the dates and times of the last few reboots the machine has gone through.
YourMac:~user$ last reboot
reboot ~ Tue Sep 22 12:52
reboot ~ Sun Aug 30 23:17
reboot ~ Sat Aug 29 01:12
reboot ~ Fri Aug 28 22:07

wtmp begins Fri Aug 28 22:07


Nice huh?

Just a quick security tip based on some recent news, a couple Japanese computer scientists have figured out a way to crack WPA TKIP encryption in under a minute. This news came out a few weeks ago but after updating my wireless routers firmware I realized I hadn’t made the encryption type change yet myself, so I imagine many other people haven’t as well. WPA is still more secure than WEP, but now that TKIP has been hacked, it’s best to change your Wireless Router’s encryption method to AES to continue to be secure. Making the change is quick and easy, just login to your router’s administrative panel and you should find an option to switch the encryption from TKIP to AES. Obviously this isn’t strictly Mac news, but since it’s a security issue that effects everyone equally, it’s worth posting here.

Yahoo News: New Attack Cracks Common WiFi Encryption in a Minute

Here’s something you don’t see everyday, Safari in an epic freakout and taxing 7,909.9% CPU usage. WTF?

Disabling Spotlight in Snow Leopard is pretty easy, launch the Terminal and type the following command:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

This tells the Spotlight manager to disable all indexing on all volumes, the command will require your administrative password to execute.

Re-enabling Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is just as easy, just reverse the command to:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Now Spotlight indexing will be back on and work as usual.

MouseOver popups, self-starting blasting audio, auto-refreshing webpages, random sound effects, obnoxious flash ads, resizing of your browser window… oh the web is filled with all sorts of things that are sure to annoy web browsers a world over. Lifehacker came up witha great list of fixes that you can implement in Firefox to reduce the most obnoxious encounters on the web (some work in Safari too). If your pop-up blocker isn’t doing enough for you, try these tricks out too:

Lifehacker: Use FireFox to Fix the Webs Biggest Annoyances