I was looking for some way to tell if a remote machine was idle from the commandline and I stumbled across this snippet on Mac OS X Hints.
ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | awk ‘/HIDIdleTime/ {print $NF/1000000000; exit}’
returns a time in seconds and fractions thereof, ie 4.00711
If you want to record sound that’s coming out your Mac’s speakers (audio channel), but are too cheap to shell out for a copy of Ambrosia’s Audio Hijack Pro or WireTap Studio, you can try installing the free SoundFlower, setting it as the audio destination in your Sound System Preferences pane, then recording from it using the free Audacity.
If you can’t get away from your databases, you can at least talk to them from your iPhone using the iPhone version of jHeidi (presumably not using Java on the iPhone…). Supports Oracle and MySQL, only $3.99.
If you’re interested in making sure Retrospect 8 works for you, check out the Retrospect 8 beta downloads and comments in the forum, and make your own if you find something is broken!
Having recently changed ISP, my command of the day is
dscacheutil -flushcache
which flushes your machine’s DNS cache to allow you to access your named sites via their new IP addresses once you’ve changed them in the DNS thus making the locally cached IP addresses stale.
The ultimate Mac OS X hacker, Amit Singh (last I heard, snapped up by Google) has released a new version of his HFSDebug tool (that’s a commandline tool folks 
.
The new version has more features to do with hard links and hard link chains, new filters, component-wise path lookup from scratch, and is now Snow Leopard compatible (even if it is still only a PPC binary running under Rosetta
via MWJ
If you need to connect to an airport wireless network from the commandline you could check out the little known airport command line utility.
It’s hidden at
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport
You can use –help for help and -I for signal strength and ID info
Mikey Sklar lists some software tools available via the fink packaging system for hardware developers using Macs .
Apple has released Common Criteria security tools for Mac OS X 10.5. There’s also an Apple Common Criteria support page with links to whitepapers and the not-yet-updated-for-Leopard Admin guide.
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