Itunes has a shared library feature but does not show you who and what is it sharing to.So lets start terminal and type :
lsof |grep iTunes |grep TCP
You can also find out what they are listening to by doing
lsof | grep mp3
Now how about for a little fun , say your colleague is listening from a windows machine
nmblookup -A 192.168.0.23
gives you their netbios name , next on use that name with :
echo “Ejoying songname John ?” | smbclient -M THENAMEHERE
shows a dialog like this smack middle in their windows screen
Note that you can send messages like this to any computer you see in finder’s SHARED sidebar , just don’t abuse it , it will stop being funny.
Posted: April 9th, 2009
Categories:
osx
Tags:
itunes,
macosx,
netbios,
network,
terminal,
tips,
tricks
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For every folder you open in Finder it saves a .DS_Store file in that folder with the window settings , here is a easy way to get rid of them (texts in bold are shell commands to be put into Terminal ) the command recursively traverses all the directories , you can replace all the path with / for a system wide cleanup
find /Volumes/myvolume/mydir -name “.DS_Store” -print0 | xargs -0 rm -v
Like all operating systems there are some caches on osx that you might sometimes want to get rid off , to do so :
rm -rfv ~/Library/Caches/
removes all caches for the logged in user
sudo rm -rfv /System/Library/Caches/ /Library/Caches/
removes some system wide caches
sudo rm -rfv /private/var/folders/
removes Leopard specific cache folders
The osx kernel is a modular one meaning extensions are loaded into it as needed , to speed things up especially at boot caches are made that from time to time you might want to clear
sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache /System/Library/Extensions.mkext /System/Library/Extensions/Caches/com.apple.kext.info
Posted: November 1st, 2008
Categories:
osx
Tags:
macosx,
terminal,
tips,
tricks
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Since i started dual booting either Tiger or Leopard one thing that really annoyed me was that i had to deal with 2 itunes libraries , not being able to have the same thing in itunes no matter what i boot into.
Well there is a very elegant and easy fix for that that i am going to detail in this post and it only requires you to have a extra partition besides the ones that you are booting from.
So let’s get to it (texts in bold are shell commands and should be entered via Terminal):
1 – move your itunes library to a partition you do not boot from (i put mine on the Storage partition)
mv ~/music/iTunes /Volumes/IStorage/
2 – boot into each of the os’es and delete ~/music/iTunes if existing and make a symbolic link to the new location in its place
ln -s /Volumes/IStorage/Itunes/ ~/music/iTunes
This works beautifully and it works at some extent for things like Photo Booth too , also tho it might work i do not advise to make the links with Finder , just stick to console.
Posted: July 13th, 2008
Categories:
osx
Tags:
dualboot,
itunes,
macosx,
terminal,
tips,
tricks
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Everyone has those divx movies , you can play them in quicktime given you have the proper codecs like Perian , but the pesky itunes will not add the files to its library.
What we need to do is basically change metadata of files by adding type “MooV” to them , the simplest way to do it is download this

applescript droplet i wrote and just drag the files you want fixed on its icon.
A more involved way to do it that needs devtools (found on the install dvd) installed is by entering the bold text below in Terminal , after you modified the path and extension to suit your needs.
find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”
Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote ??!! , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.
Posted: May 8th, 2008
Categories:
osx
Tags:
itunes,
macosx,
terminal,
tips,
tricks
Comments:
2 Comments.
OSX is nice , and not because it has no shortcomings , but because you can fix them as opposed to windows.This has a lot to do with the power of osx that stems from it having applescript and a posix compliant shell.
Here is how to change metadata of files so you can play divx movies with itunes for example , with terminal and devtools
find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”
, with applescript http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=214705
Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.
If yo do not know by now you can download movies from youtube just by selecting the file in Safari > Activity > Copy > Paste into downloads window.
How about playing every movie format there is including the flash movies you just downloaded from youtube in anything you like , quicktime , itunes , frontrow etc , well then just download http://perian.org/ and never care about formats of movies ever again.
To top it off i have a script for those times when you do want to know what are your movie files encoded with , this is a extremely fast shell script , with basic info , you can get it packaged as a osx app to drag folders to or directly as a cross-platform script.

Posted: May 8th, 2008
Categories:
osx,
software
Tags:
hacks,
macosx,
movies,
terminal,
tips,
tricks
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There are some things the interface will just not tell you , or you just need a textual representation for , so here we go (texts in bold are shell commands to be put into Terminal)
open
Apple command , opens a file , just as if you had double-clicked the file’s icon , a wrapper to the os extensions useful in terminal to open a file with the app associated with it.
uptime
17:35 up 31 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.03 0.10 0.07
Standard unix command showing load and time since boot.
uname -a
Darwin leopard 9.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.5.0: Wed Sep 3 11:29:43 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.7.58~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Apple only command showing kernel and os info.
sw_vers
ProductName: Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.5.5
BuildVersion: 9F33
Apple only command showing os name version and build number.
lsof
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
SystemUIS 119 valexa 9u IPv4 0×2e700f8 0t0 UDP *:*
Dock 107 valexa cwd DIR 14,3 1326 2 /
……………………………………………………………………
Unix command showing list of open files/sockets/connections by running processes
EX lsof -c Dock shows all files open by Dock and sudo lsof -i | grep LISTEN shows all listening server applications running
vmmap
Virtual Memory Map of process 107 (Dock)
Output report format: 2.2 — 32-bit process
==== Non-writable regions for process 107
__PAGEZERO 00000000-00001000 [ 4K] —/— SM=NUL /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock
…………………………………………………………………………………
Apple command showing virtual memory of processes , used vmmap Dock for the example
fs_usage
18:05:55.034 lstat /Users/valexa/Library/Preferences 0.000053 fseventsd
18:05:55.036 pwrite F=23 B=0×4000 O=0×00659000 0.000024 mds
18:05:55.434 lstat /valexa/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist 0.000069 mdworker
Apple command showing real time information about all file/network accesses going on (needs to be ran as root)
Posted: January 1st, 2008
Categories:
osx
Tags:
macosx,
terminal,
tips
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