Encrypt Time Machine Backups with OS X

Time Machine backups can be encrypted right from your Mac. This means the data is extremely safe from prying eyes and the very unlikely event of a cracking attempt, and it also means you’ll need a password to access the encrypted backups yourself. Enabling this feature can be done in two ways:

Enable Encryption on New Time Machine Drives

If you’re setting up a new Time Machine backup drive, enabling encryption is extremely easy:

• Connect the drive to the Mac, when asked to use the drive for Time Machine, check the box for “Encrypt Backups”

Encrypt Existing Time Machine Backups

Already using Time Machine? Enabling encryption is just as simple. With the Time Machine drive connected to the Mac:

• Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and choose “Time Machine”
• Choose “Options”, select the drive to protect, and choose “Encrypt backup disk” or “Encrypt Backups”

The wording varies slightly depending on which version of OS X you’re using.

You will need OS X Lion 10.7.4 or OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 or newer to have the backup encryption option available, though the ability to encrypt existing drives only comes with Mountain Lion onward.

Certain folders can be excluded from backups if they don’t need to be encrypted, but because they won’t be backed up you’ll need to handle backups of those files manually.

For those who don’t need to encrypt all backed up data, another excellent option is to encrypt folders with password-protected Disk Images. That disk image file can then be backed up as usual to a Time Machine drive, but only the data stored inside of it will be protected instead.

Use Gestures To Go Back & Forward in Many OS X Apps

OS X has a myriad of multi-touch gestures that have been expanded upon from OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion onward, and one of the better gestures is the two-fingered swipe left or right to go either back or forward in a wide variety of apps.

You’ll obviously need a trackpad or Magic Mouse to be able to use these, and they’re supported in a fair amount of Apple apps like Safari, Dictionary, iTunes, App Store, Launchpad, and just about any other app where there’s a forward or back button. For browsing, the gesture can be much faster than navigating to a back or forward button since all it takes is a quick flick to activate.

Unfortunately not all apps support the back/forward gesture yet, but with heavy iOS influences coming to the Mac you can bet more and more apps will support this and others soon.

On a side note, if you’re used to hitting the Delete key to go back a page in Safari and don’t want to use a gesture, that behavior can be restored to the Delete key with a defaults command.

Finding Files from the Command Line

Searching the file system for a specific document or file is easy and very fast. Though most users are best served using Spotlight from the menubar, there are times when either Spotlight isn’t working, you need more paramaters, you’re working in the Terminal, or

Searching For Files with find

The find command is very fast and easy to use, it’s straight from the unix world and as such works in Linux as well as OS X. If you’re looking to learn things that are consistent across platforms, find is a good choice.

At it’s most basic, find can be used like so:

find path parameters

For example, you can locate anything within the user home directory containing “screen” in it’s name with the following:

find ~ -iname "screen*"

You may want to pipe the results to more if you’re expecting a large return, like so:

find ~ -iname "screen*" | more

Of course you can also find specific files that are buried somewhere in a directory. For example, looking in the user library folder for a specific plist file:

find ~/Library/ -iname "com.apple.syncedpreferences.plist"

You will need to prefix find with ‘sudo’ to search root directories and outside of the current user privileges. find also supports expressions, allowing you to search for very specific matches, wildcards, sequences, and other advanced options.

find is very powerful but it’s power quickly brings with it some complexity, as a result the classic mdfind command is probably better for more novice command line users.

Searching the Command Line with mdfind

mdfind is Spotlight’s terminal interface, meaning it won’t work if Spotlight itself is disabled, not functioning for another reason, or rebuilding it’s index. Assuming Spotlight is working as intended though, mdfind is very fast, efficient, and a bit more user friendly.

At it’s most basic level, mdfind is used as follows:

mdfind -name FileName

For example, to find all appearances of “Photo 1.PNG” the command would be:

mdfind -name "Photo 1.PNG"

Because mdfind is like Spotlight, it can also be used to search the content of files and folders for a specific file. To find all documents containing someones name could be done as follows:

mdfind "Will Pearson"

Much like the find command, sending results to more may be useful when sorting through a lot of files, like so:

mdfind "Sent from my" | more

mdfind can also be limited to specific directories with the -onlyin flag:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Library plist

Finally, there is also the ‘locate’ command, which is also very powerful and can be tied to find, but it has to be enabled separately.

Start a Time Machine Backup on a Remote Mac with SSH

Time Machine backups can be triggered remotely thanks to SSH (Remote Login) and the command line. This is an excellent solution to use if you left the home or office without making an important backup, though the SSH requirement does add a potential layer of complexity that may make it more appropriate for advanced users. Those who prefer the GUI might be better served starting a Time Machine backup remotely by using Remote Access from an iPhone or iPad.

Assuming you’re familiar with SSH, have Remote Login’s SSH server enabled on the target Mac, here’s all you need to do:

• Launch Terminal or open an SSH client on an iPhone or iPad, and connect to the remote Mac with SSH
• Once logged into the remote Mac, type the following command to start a Time Machine backup:
tmutil startbackup
• Add an ampersand to the end if you want to be able to log out immediately, which sends the process into the background, otherwise wait until the backup is complete and log out as usual

If for some reason you want to stop a backup currently in progress instead, the following tmutil command will do that:

tmutil stopbackup

If you are concerned about a particular file or folder being backed up, using a past tip to compare backups can also be used to verify that a recent backup is even necessary.

List Your 15 Most Used Terminal Commands

The history command is a useful way to find specific commands that have been used in the past, and it can also be used to discover what your personal most used commands are with the following command string:

history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head -15

The output strips any flags or parameters, providing only the root commands shown by the most commonly used. Example output may look like the following:

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn |head -n 15
56 traceroute
35 nslookup
35 ssh
31 ls
28 curl
25 sftp
23 gcc
23 make
18 cd
18 cat
17 round
15 python
13 kill
13 clear
10 defaults

The number to the left indicates how many times the command has been used, per what is listed in bash history. Clearing bash history will obviously change those numbers, as will any adjustments to the length of commands stored in bash_history, and having it disabled completely will obviously cause the entire command to report back nothing.

If you’d rather see the most used complete commands, perhaps to make aliases or for another purpose, simplifying the command string by removing awk will accomplish that;

history | sort -rn | head

Leaving the -n flag off of ‘head’ will default to list 10 items, but any number can be applied by specifying it with -n.

These commands will work in OS X and Linux, and should work in other unix variations as well.

Australia hits Apple with $28.5 million bill for back taxes

Apple is getting slapped with the bill after the country has taken aim at complex tax structures meant to shelter revenue from tax liability.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Apple has been told to pay an additional $28.5 million in back taxes to the Australian government, a report out of the country says.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting today that the Australia Tax Office actually hit Apple with the charge in April. According to the news outlet, Apple's Australian division generated $4.9 billion in revenue last year but paid only $94.7 million in taxes.
Apple's tax strategy has come under intense scrutiny over the last year as news of the company's shockingly low tax liability has been made public. During its last fiscal year, Apple paid $713 million in taxes on $36.87 billion in foreign profits -- less than 2 percent of its international profit. Not surprisingly, foreign governments are displeased by that and have been trying to find ways to increase the amount of tax Apple pays.
However, Apple is by no means unique. Just about every major company has established complex structures that allow it to transfer profits across the world and shelter tax liability.
Just last week, the French government announced that Amazon owes it $252 million in back taxes, including interest and penalties.
CNET has contacted Apple for comment on the report. We will update this story when we have more information

Samsung wants details of Apple's settlement with HTC

In a court filing this afternoon, Samsung requests that Apple provide a copy of its patent license agreement with HTC.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Samsung is showing its first public interest in the settlement that ended the legal fight between rival Apple and HTC this past week.
Samsung this afternoon filed a request with the court for Apple to provide a copy of its patent license agreement with HTC.
That deal, announced on Saturday, put an end to the bitter battle between the two companies, a conflict that's similar, but smaller in scale to the one between Apple and Samsung.
In its filing, Samsung says it wants to see what patents were covered as part of the agreement since there may be some overlap with the ones used in the case between it and Apple, including the '381 and '915 patents, which cover "bounce back" and scrolling and zooming, respectively.
"As you know, the issue of Apple's willingness to license its patents was briefed in Samsung's opposition to Apple's motion for permanent injunction," wrote Quinn Emanuel's Robert Becher, who is representing Samsung in the case. "This license has direct bearing on the question of irreparable harm and whether monetary remedies are adequate."
Becher added that the license could also shed light on whether Apple included some of its "unique" user experience patents, which it doesn't share with other companies. In a testimony about that collection, Apple patent licensing director Boris Teksler referred to that collection as "untouchables," that it only shared with a very small handful of other companies.
Samsung declined to comment on the filing.
Samsung says it wants the court to weigh in on the matter no later than November 27.
Following last week's deal with HTC, curiosity has heightened over the possibility of a settlement between Apple and Samsung, which legal experts believe to be inevitable. With that said, one of Samsung's top mobile executives earlier this week said the company had no plans to negotiate with Apple.
Both companies are due back in court on December 6 for a hearing that is expected to iron out some of the aftermath of the August jury verdict that landed squarely in Apple's favor. Some of that includes a motion by Apple to permanently ban at least eight of Samsung's devices in the U.S., as well as one by Samsung that seeks to get the entire trial thrown out.
Updated at 2:47 p.m. PT to reflect that the motion requesting the agreement was filed.