Anyone able to connect gioteck VX-1 (PS3 controller) via Bluetooth?

Ok, I got it to work.  I would not recommend using this technique, but it works, I hope someone posts a better solution.

Set up gioteck VX-1:

Get a Sony controller and set it up (See Next Section, if you don't have a Sony controller, you can copy my values, which may work, just remember that the steps below will be slightly different since you will be copying details from this thread instead of from your Sony controller)
Follow same instructions as in Step 1, but using your gioteck VX-1 instead of your Sony controller, write down the gioteck's address as soon as it is displayed.
Bring up terminal and type:

cp /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist ~/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist
cp /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist ~/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist.backup

Open your ~/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist in Xcode
Expand HIDDevices
Click on HIDDevices
Click on the (+) to the right of HIDDevices
In Item 0's Value column type the Address you wrote down in step 2
Save and close the file
Turn Bluetooth off
Type the following in Terminal:

sudo cp ~/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist
cd /Library/Preferences
sudo chown root:wheel com.apple.Bluetooth.plist

Turn Bluetooth back on.
Press the big round middle button on the VX-1 (where the Playstation logo would be on a Sony control)
Your controller should connect now automatically without asking you to enter a passcode to pair, but it won't work as a game controller at this point and after less than a minute, it will disconnect, but at least you know that you have done all the steps correctly so far if it doesn't prompt you for a passcode and it is listed even when the status is "Not Connected".
Bring up System Preferences->Bluetooth.  You should now have PLAYSTATION(R)3 Controller listed (the Sony controller), and PLAYSTATION(R)3Conteroller-ghic list (the VX-1)
Click on the Sony controller in the list (if you don't have a Sony controller, as stated in step 1, just know you will use details from this thread instead of from your Sony controller)
Write down your Sony's Address
Open ~/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist in Xcode again
Expand DeviceCache
Now, expand your VX-1's address (mine was 00-0e-3d-de-c9-19)
Expand your Sony's address (mine was 34-c7-31-1b-2b-e7)
Now drag the nodes of you VX-1 one by one to match the order of your Sony nodes (just to make them easier to compare) as you compare their values, when you encounter that your VX-1 is missing a node, right click the node within Sony, click copy, then right click your VX-1 and click paste. Then drag your newly pasted node within your VX-1 so that the order of your VX-1 nodes match the order of your Sony nodes (again, this is just to help you not miss anything).  While you compare and note the differences mentally, don't change any VX-1 values yet, your just copying missing nodes from Sony at this point.
Now that the address nodes for your Sony and VX-1 contain the same number of nodes in the same order as each other, note that the following in your VX-1 should match your Sony exactly:

PageScanMode           Number  0
InquiryRSSI            Number  0
PageScanPeriod         Number  0
SupportedFeatures      Data    <80001808 7a8207fc>
ProductID              Number  616
PageScanRepetitionMode Number  1
Services               Data    <040b7374 7265616d 74797065 6481e803 84014084 8484074e 53417272 61790084 84084e53 4f626a65 63740085 84016902 92848484 1b494f42 6c756574 6f6f7468 53445053 65727669 63655265 636f7264 00949284 84841149 4f426c75 65746f6f 74684465 76696365 00848411 494f426c 7565746f 6f74684f 626a6563 74009492 84848406 4e534461 74610094 95068404 5b36635d 34c7311b 2be78686 92848484 0c4e5344 69637469 6f6e6172 79009495 18928484 84084e53 4e756d62 65720084 84074e53 56616c75 65009484 012a8495 95008692 84848419 494f426c 7565746f 6f746853 44504461 7461456c 656d656e 74009484 014301a0 0284014c 0492849f 9e848401 71a28200 00010086 8692849f 9ea19581 0a028692 84a3a005 a000a101 92849f9e 84840173 a3018686 92849f9e a1958107 02869284 a3a006a0 05a10892 8484840e 4e534d75 7461626c 65417272 61790093 95019284 a3a006a0 05a10692 84ad9502 9284a3a0 01a001a1 0292849f 9ea19581 09048686 9284a3a0 01a001a1 0292849f 9ea19581 00018686 86868686 92849f9e a1958104 02869284 a3a005a0 00a10192 a8869284 9f9ea195 0d869284 a3a006a0 05a10f92 84ad9501 9284a3a0 06a005a1 0d9284ad 95029284 a3a006a0 05a10692 84ad9502 9284a3a0 03a001a1 02928484 8412494f 426c7565 746f6f74 68534450 55554944 009b9284 9b950284 045b3263 5d010086 86869284 a3a001a0 01a10292 849f9ea1 95138686 86869284 a3a006a0 05a10392 84ad9501 9284a3a0 03a001a1 029284bf 92849b95 02a60011 86868686 86868686 8692849f 9ea19581 0c028692 84a3a001 a001a102 92849f9e a1958180 3e868692 849f9ea1 95810102 869284a3 a001a001 a10292b3 8692b392 84a3a004 a005a113 92849b95 1384055b 3139635d 57697265 6c657373 20436f6e 74726f6c 6c657286 8692849f 9ea19581 09028692 84a3a005 a000a101 92a88692 849f9ea1 95810602 869284a3 a006a005 a1819a00 9284ad95 019284a3 a006a005 a1819800 9284ad95 029284a3 a001a000 a1019284 9f9ea9a3 22868692 84a3a004 a005a181 94009284 9b958194 0084065b 31343863 5d050109 04a101a1 02850175 08950115 0026ff00 81037501 95131500 25013500 45010509 19012913 81027501 950d0600 ff810315 0026ff00 05010901 a1007508 95043500 46ff0009 30093109 32093581 02c00501 75089527 09018102 75089530 09019102 75089530 0901b102 c0a10285 02750895 300901b1 02c0a102 85ee7508 95300901 b102c0a1 0285ef75 08953009 01b102c0 c0868686 86868692 849f9ea1 95048692 84a3a006 a005a10d 9284ad95 029284a3 a006a005 a1069284 ad950292 84a3a003 a001a102 9284bf92 849b9502 a6010086 86869284 a3a001a0 01a10292 849f9ea1 95118686 86869284 a3a006a0 05a10392 84ad9501 9284a3a0 03a001a1 029284bf 92849b95 02a60011 86868686 86868692 849f9ea1 95810e02 869284a3 a005a000 a1019284 9f9ea9a3 00868692 849f9ea1 95810302 869284a3 a001a000 a1019284 9f9ea9a3 21868692 849f9ea1 95810201 869284a3 a004a005 a11b9284 9b951b84 055b3237 635d536f 6e792043 6f6d7075 74657220 456e7465 72746169 6e6d656e 74868692 849f9ea1 95018692 84a3a006 a005a103 9284ad95 019284a3 a003a001 a1029284 bf92849b 9502a611 24868686 86869284 9f9ea195 810b0286 9284a3a0 01a001a1 0292b386 92849f9e a1958100 02869284 a3a001a0 01a10292 b3869284 9f9ea195 09869284 a3a006a0 05a10892 84ad9501 9284a3a0 06a005a1 069284ad 95029284 a3a003a0 01a10292 84bf9284 9b9502a6 11248686 869284a3 a001a001 a10292b3 86868686 8692849f 9ea19581 08028692 84a3a005 a000a101 92eb8692 849f9ea1 95068692 84a3a006 a005a109 9284ad95 039284a3 a001a001 a1029284 9f9ea195 816e6586 869284a3 a001a001 a1029284 9f9ea195 6a868692 84a3a001 a001a102 92b38686 8692849f 9ea19581 05028692 84a3a005 a000a101 92a88692 849f9ea1 95810d02 869284a3 a005a000 a10192eb 8692849f 9ea19581 02028692 84a3a001 a000a101 92eb8692 849f9ea1 95810101 869284a3 a004a005 a1139284 9b9513a7 57697265 6c657373 20436f6e 74726f6c 6c657286 86868692 84969297 92849d95 0c929e92 84a3a001 a002a104 92849f9e a5a28201 00010086 86921592 84a3a004 a005a11a 92849b95 1a84055b 3236635d 504c4159 53544154 494f4e28 52293320 436f6e74 726f6c6c 65728686 920f9284 a3a001a0 01a10292 849f9ea1 95028686 92fc9284 a3a006a0 05a10892 84ad9501 9284a3a0 06a005a1 069284ad 95029284 a3a003a0 01a10292 84bf9284 9b9502a6 12008686 869284a3 a001a001 a10292b3 86868686 8692cb92 84a3a001 a001a102 92849f9e a195814c 05868692 ec9284a3 a001a001 a10292b3 8692f292 84a3a006 a005a103 9284ad95 019284a3 a003a001 a1029284 bf92849b 9502a612 00868686 868692b4 9284a3a0 05a000a1 0192a886 92139284 a3a001a0 01a10292 849f9ea1 95816802 868692fa 9284a3a0 01a001a1 0292b386 92079284 a3a006a0 05a10992 84ad9503 9284a3a0 01a001a1 02920b86 9284a3a0 01a001a1 02920d86 9284a3a0 01a001a1 0292b386 868692da 9284a3a0 06a005a1 0d9284ad 95029284 a3a006a0 05a10692 84ad9502 9284a3a0 03a001a1 029284bf 92849b95 02a60100 86868692 84a3a001 a001a102 92f28686 869284a3 a006a005 a1039284 ad950192 84a3a003 a001a102 9284bf92 849b9502 a6000186 86868686 86868686 86>
ClassOfDevice          Number  1,288
ClockOffset            Number  0
LastServiceUpdate      Date    Dec 24, 2012 11:00:29 PM

Verify that you changed ClassOfDevice's VX-1 value to the value that the Sony had: 1288, I can't remember but I think VX-1 had 7997.  I think that the most important things are the ClassOfDevice, LastServiceUpdate, and Services (but not in that order).  Any node that I did not list in Step 23 should be present in VX-1, but have values that do not match the Sony.  If you ever go to System Preferences->Bluetooth, click on PLAYSTATION(R)3Conteroller-ghic, then click on the little gear icon/down triangle, and click Update Services, it will probably wipe out all these changes, so don't do that.
Save and close ~/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist
Repeat Steps 10-13
Now when you click the big round circle button in the middle of your VX-1, it should connect instantly via Bluetooth and work in all your Sony SIXAXIS compatible OS X games.

THE SECTION REFERENCED IN STEP 1 ABOVE:

Plug in controller using USB cable
Unplug controller (You have 15 seconds to complete the next steps through 6)
Ignore pairing request
Open System Preferences->Bluetooth
Click on the PLAYSTATION(R)3 with status of Connected (there will be more to the name after the (R)3)
Click on the gear down triangle icon at bottom of list and then click Add to Favorites
Go back to the same menu from Step 6 and pick Update Services
Some people say that at this point you need to turn off Bluetooth (uncheck On) and wait for the lights on the controller to stop flashing) and then turn Bluetooth back on, then connect the controller via USB.
Click on the gear menu and pick Disconnect.
Now, with your controller listed in the Bluetooth list with a status of Not Connected and with your USB cable disconnected, press the Playstation logo button.  Your controller's status should change to Connected, stay connected for more than a minute (for as long as you are still using it) and work in the games and apps that support the PS3 controller.  If not, I don't know WTF, and no, I do not know how to make the lights stop flashing.

Any time you stop using the controller, disconnect it via System Preferences->Bluetooth or hold the Playstation logo button for 10 seconds to power it off.


This is an issue if you have two versions of Excel installed at once (like 2011 and 2016) in Mac OS. There is a way to sort this out.

Click on the file in question and drag it into the icon for the Excel you want to associate it with (like the 2016 icon in your dock). It will now associate all CSV files with excel 2016.

Caveat: if you have only Excel 2011 open and not 2016 and you click to open that file it will open in 2011. If you have 2011 and 2016 open at the same time it will open in 2016. If you have neither excel open it will open in 2016.

Note: the Get info will now read the association correctly but do not hit the Open With button as that will re-associate it with 2011.


my icloud is saying that it is not verified. What do I do?

You should start with logging into iCloud at https://appleid.apple.com from a computer. Once you're sure your Apple ID is OK, then log in to https://icloud.com to check that iCloud is fine.

Lastly, you can go to settings in the iPhone and make sure the time zone and clock are set to within 4 minutes of the real time. Then try signing into iCloud on the device.


Can I see all locations that a DMG file install files to?

A DMG (Disk Image) file is like a zip file.
It's compressed and has a check built-in to check if the integrity of the app is intact.
Once you open a DMG file, in most cases, you just have to drag/drop the application into you Applications folder and that's it.
If you want to see the full content of that application, go to
Applications folder
Right click on an app
Select 'Show the ... content'
In the 'Contents' directory, you'll see all dirs and files that came with your app.
I don't know if that's the answer your are looking for?


As of iOS 11 there's still no ability to disable the on/off switch for VPN Connect on Demand, even in Supervised mode. The built-in IKEv2 VPN has an Always On setting, but that's not going to apply the Cisco or other 3rd-party VPNs.


How do I dismiss many multiples of the "Disk Not Ejected Properly" notification in macOS?

I started killing processes with "Notification" in their name, and when I hit the one called "NotificationCenter" the smoke finally cleared:

killall NotificationCenter


Use Siri to play all songs (shuffled) in iOS 9

"Siri, shuffle all my music" - that worked for me!


There are quite a few smart card readers (e.g. this one on the Apple Store) that work with OS X.

For support of Smart Cards you may also want to check out Smart Card Services on MacOsForge.org, as highlighted by this Apple Support document regarding smart cards on OS X Mavericks.


Make a custom keyboard layout the system default — even for the login screen

This works on OSX 10.9 Mavericks, with a keyboard layout that I created with Ukulele. Assuming that you have the layout already installed in your system, log into your account and make your custom keyboard layout active.

Open a terminal and run the following command:

cp /Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist /tmp/

If you intend to use a text editor (e.g., TextWrangler) to make this change instead of XCode (which has a specialized graphical plist editor), also run:

plutil -convert xml1 /tmp/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist

Now, open /tmp/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist in the text editor or in XCode.

Throughout the file you will find several mentions of a KeyboardLayout ID key followed by an integer and KeyboardLayout Name followed by a string. Change these strings to the name of your custom keyboard layout and the id integers to the ID of your layout (the easiest way to find the right values is to compare with your user settings found in the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist.

Also the value of the key AppleCurrentKeyboardLayoutInputSourceID must be changed accordingly (probably to something like org.unknown.keylayout.NameOfYourLayout). Again you can find this value in your local preference file.

Once these changes are done, save the file and go back to the terminal. To play it safe, you can create a copy of the original com.apple.HIToolbox.plist file, just in case you made an error and need to roll back. For instance, to save a copy in your Documents folder:

sudo cp /Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist ~/Documents

Then install your change with the following:

sudo sh -c 'cat /tmp/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist > /Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist'

(It isn't necessary to convert your file back out of text form with plutil if you did so earlier.)

Exit the terminal, and restart the computer (logout is not sufficient: the file will not be reread). After restart, you should have your keyboard layout in the login screen.

NOTE: it's possible that it would have been enough to copy the file com.apple.HIToolbox.plist from ~/Library/Preferences/ to /Library/Preferences/, however in my case it has more entries, so I decided to play it safe and just modify the existing file.


Select your project in the right sidebar, then select the project in the main area above your targets. You'll find the configurations under the tab 'info'.


Airpods connect to iPhone perfectly but disconnect from MacBook after a few seconds

The fact that the Airpods connect to Bluetooth but never show up in Sound output/input devices indicate an issue with macOS system audio. Open a terminal and run:

sudo killall coreaudiod

Now try to connect the Airpods via Bluetooth. That should work. If not, try restarting the MacBook and connecting again.


It will likely depend on the pins you are using on the iPhone end. A modified cable should be able to cut the charge sense portion of the signal (or otherwise manipulate the call for charge signal) while allowing the sync portion of the USB signal to pass.


How can I inspect the environment variables of a running process?

You can inspect environmental variables of running process with

ps eww <PID>


Stop unknown devices trying to connect to Apple TV

You can give AirPlay a password in the settings on your Apple TV. Only with this password you can connect.

Open Settings
AirPlay
Change 'Security' to Password
Turn off 'Require Device Verification'


MenuBar doesn't show up in full screen mode

This was a known issue.
Please download the 10.7.2 OS X Lion update (Apple Menu > Software Update).
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4767

The OS X Lion v10.7.2 Update includes Safari 5.1.1 as well as fixes that:
...
Address an issue that may cause the menu bar to not appear in full screen apps.
...


Set default priority of mdworker processes

See https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/265751/263848.

Spotlight indexes in the background and should not impact performance significantly. If you are experiencing serious issues, you may have a bigger issue at hand.

Are you sure it doesn't occur when spotlight indexing is off?

I would suggest trying basic troubleshooting steps. Maybe a reinstall.


I have no idea why the Mac can't see the 2 partitions.

Try using Disk Utility on the Mac to format the drive with FAT 32, then give it 2 partitions, and see if the Windows likes it.

That's the best I can come up with.  It works with thumb drives.


USB hub that charges and allows normal data connectivity at the same time on same port

It sounds like you need a Thunderbolt dock, not a USB hub.  Maybe one like this:  https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3PRODCK/
The reason I suggest a Thunderbolt dock is because I have yet to see a USB hub or dock that provides more than 15 watts to a downstream data port.  I assume you are using a Lightning to USB-A cable to plug in the iPad, that's going to limit power to the iPad to 12 watts, maybe 15 watts.  Even if you are using a USB-C cable I have yet to see a USB hub with a charge and data port that provides more than 15 watts.  I suspect that the iPad is charging fine, it's just that by streaming music constantly it is consuming more than the 12 watts provided.
You'll need a quality Lightning to USB-C cable to get more than 12 watts into the  iPad.  I emphasize "quality cable" because I bought a non-Apple brand Lightning to USB-C cable only to find that it did not support USB-PD and therefore was limited to 12 watts to my iPhone.  Apple's USB-C cables will pass more power, as I assume would a better built cable from someone else.  I suspect your iPad came with a Lightning to USB-C cable, use that.  I will assume and suspect a lot here, you didn't specify everything I need to know in your question.
Even if your MacBook Pro doesn't have Thunderbolt/USB-C ports you can still use a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) dock on a Thunderbolt 1 or 2 (mini-DP) port.  A Thunderbolt/Mini-DP to Thunderbolt/USB-C adapter will allow you to plug in the dock and still get the full Thunderbolt and USB 3.x bandwidth.  The reason you want the Thunderbolt dock is to get a more powerful USB-C port (as in more than 15 watts), and is still full bandwidth, for your iPad and all other devices.
Assuming you get a Thunderbolt dock like that I linked to above you will find two Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, one of which will be labeled for connecting to the laptop.  Don't connect the MacBook Pro to the laptop port, that's for the iPad.  The goal is to get most power to the iPad, and that will be on the port labeled to the computer.  Connect the MacBook Pro to the low power Thunderbolt/USB-C port, leaving the laptop to run from it's bigger battery or from a power brick plugged in directly.  Thunderbolt is not like USB, Thunderbolt is peer to peer and so "upstream" and "downstream" lose some of it's meaning, connecting the Macbook to either Thunderbolt port will give full function and bandwidth.
Now my disclaimer.  I have not tried this myself.  I'm taking educated guesses based on my experience with Apple hardware.  There may be a cheaper non-Thunderbolt hub or dock that can provide both power and data, I simply have not seen one in my own searching for my own needs.


/Library/Java - deleted it, how to restore?

On Mavericks

pse@Fourecks:~$ ll /Library/Java/
total 8
drwxrwxr-x  2 root  admin   68 Oct 23  2013 Extensions/
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   48 Oct 23  2013 Home@ -> /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  102 Oct 23  2013 JavaVirtualMachines/
pse@Fourecks:~$ ll /Library/Java/Extensions/
pse@Fourecks:~$ ll /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/
total 0
drwxrwxr-x  3 root  wheel  102 Jun 27  2012 1.7.0.jdk/
pse@Fourecks:~$ ll /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/
total 8
drwxrwxr-x  15 root  wheel   510 Jun 27  2012 Home/
-rw-rw-r--   1 root  wheel  1577 Jun 27  2012 Info.plist
drwxrwxr-x   3 root  wheel   102 Aug  3  2012 MacOS/

So (as long as you don't need the JDK) you might fix this be redoing the symlink:

cd /Library/Java
sudo ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home .


On my MacBook Pro I sometimes had similar difficulties. It always turned out that the cause were weak signals or interferences. Please try the following measures:

Move your Mac closer to the WiFi Router / Airport. Alternatively place your router in a better spot (e.g. elevated).
Change our Wifi from the 2.4 GHz to the 5 GHz band (If you provide more info on your router, I might be able to give more info on how to do that)
Try to look for other devices that could cause interferences like TVs, bluetooth devices, microwaves.
If you have to use the 2.4 GHz band, try switching to a different channel. See what channel the WiFis around are using and choose a channel number that is farthest away from the others. Ideally select channel 1, 6, or 11.

You can analyse your WiFi environment pressing alt and your WiFi icon in the MenuBar. You will get some info like this. If you hover the mouse over other network names you also get information about those.

This article, for example, has more info on the issue.


Problem while trying to export iTunes library to an xml file (on OS X 10.8, iTunes 11.1.3)

I've managed to solve the main reason I was asking this question... (Although I couldn't make Export Library work from iTunes on my Mountain Lion partition)

I booted into Mavericks and then I copied the iTunes folder from Mountain Lion partition to the Mavericks one and it worked as expected... :-)

My library is migrated, including play counts, playlists, album arts, ratings... Well, it's all there.

Note: The iTunes is up to date on both partitions (version 11.1.3).

Note 2: In order to migrate my iOS devices' backups, I also copied from Mountain Lion to Mavericks the folder ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync.

I'm still curious why export library was not working, but my problem is gone.


I wrote a script to do this.

To show it in the menubar, use BitBar. A small app which creates menubar items from shell script output.

Once you download BitBar, save the following code into a file called lingualtime.1s.php then point BitBar to where you saved it.

#!/usr/bin/env php

<?php

# <bitbar.title>Lingual Clock</bitbar.title>
# <bitbar.version>v1.0</bitbar.version>
# <bitbar.author>Stan Hutcheon</bitbar.author>
# <bitbar.author.github>stnvh</bitbar.author.github>
# <bitbar.desc>displays the current time in a sentence</bitbar.desc>
# <bitbar.dependencies>php</bitbar.dependencies>

$time = array_map(function($time) {
    return intval($time);
}, explode(' ', date('g i')));

$st = array('hour' => '', 'minute' => '');

$past = '%s past %s'; $to = '%s to %s';

$pastHalf = false;

function get($int) {
    $numbers = array(
        1 => 'one', 2 => 'two', 3 => 'three', 4 => 'four', 5 => 'five', 6 => 'six', 7 => 'seven', 8 => 'eight', 9 => 'nine',
        11 => 'eleven', 12 => 'twelve', 13 => 'thirteen', 14 => 'fourteen', 15 => 'fifteen', 16 => 'sixteen', 17 => 'seventeen', 18 => 'eighteen', 19 => 'nineteen',
        10 => 'ten', 20 => 'twenty', 30 => 'thirty', 40 => 'fourty', 50 => 'fifty'
    );

    return isset($numbers[$int]) ? $numbers[$int] : '';
}

if($time[1] >= 35) {
    $pastHalf = true;

    $time[0] = $time[0] === 12 ? 1 : ++$time[0];
    $time[1] = 60 - $time[1];
}

# get lingual values
foreach(array('hour', 'minute') as $key => $part) {
    if($time[$key] < 20) {
        $st[$part] = get($time[$key]);
    } else {
        $currTenth = floor($time[$key] / 10) * 10;
        $currRem = $time[$key] - $currTenth;

        $ling = get($currTenth);
        if($ext = get($currRem)) {
            $ling .= '-' . $ext;
        }

        $st[$part] = $ling;
    }
}

printf(($pastHalf ? $to : $past) . PHP_EOL, $st['minute'], $st['hour']);


unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"' and unexpected end of file errror

The first quote on CFLAGS_FORGA is curly. The second is straight.

Replace the curvy one with a straight one.

There are various places you've used curly quotes. Replace them all with straight ones.


Can Late 2012 Mac Mini support two QHD Monitors?

Am I right to read this that my Mac will support two QHD monitors but
only by splitting from the DP/thunderbolt port leaving HDMI-out
unused? In which case can I get a Thunderbolt->dual DP or DP->Dual DP
adapter or do I have to get a DVI splitter and two DVI->DP adapters?!

There's no such thing as a Thunderbolt "splitter."
You are confusing the term dual-link DVI with dual DVI.  Dual-link DVI refers to the number of data channels (double) that is available for more bandwidth meaning higher resolution.  It's not a "second connection" and you cannot "split" the signals.  Dual DVI is two DVI ports for multiple monitors.  The Mac mini does not nor support dual DVI
Multiple Monitors on a Mac mini
The Mac mini will natively support two monitors:

Thunderbolt/DisplayPort - Quad HD (2560x1600)
HDMI Port - Full HD (1080p)

To get another display or dual QHD displays, you need an additional adapter and for the Mac mini, that means USB:

USB 3.0 to DisplayPort -  Ultra HD
USB 3.0 to HDMI  - Ultra HD

This will give you another USB adapter, but be aware that you are now offloading all of the graphics processing onto the USB bus and ultimately on the CPU.  In other words, this is not something for performance, but rather convenience.  The Mac mini wasn't designed for this type of setup.


Is it possible to remove an account from Mail, Contacts or Calendars of the iOS Settings app whilst keeping data synced within other categories?

In a word, yes.
Navigate to
Settings > Mail > Accounts
Select the account you want to edit/change
There will be on/off buttons allowing you to selectively sync only those parts of the account you want.
In the screen capture below I have only Mail turned on. I could just as easily turn Mail off and have any combination of contacts, calendars, reminders or notes on.


Is it actually rebooting, or failing to shutdown?

You can try a hard reset. Hold both the power button (that you've been using) and the home button in until the device reboots.


To pick a random 13" MBP, such as this one from mid 2012:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook-pro-core-i5-2.5-13-mid-2012-unibody-usb3-specs.html
The 8Gb limit seems to be an Apple supported limit, but many people happily report getting 16Gb working fine - see the memory section in the link as well as this page for details.

The "Mid-2009" and "Mid-2010" MacBook Pro models support 1066 MHz PC3-8500 DDR3 SO-DIMMs and officially and unofficially support a maximum of 8 GB of RAM with one odd exception.
Specifically, as discovered by OWC, the 13-Inch "Mid-2010" MacBook Pro models (and only the 13-Inch models) -- the MacBook Pro "Core 2 Duo" 2.4 13" Mid-2010 and "Core 2 Duo" 2.66 13" Mid-2010 identified by MacBookPro7,1 -- can support up to 16 GB of RAM with dual 8 GB memory modules if they are running OS X 10.7.5 or higher, have been updated to use the latest EFI, and are equipped with proper specification memory modules. If running a version of Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard," these models only can use 8 GB of RAM.
The "Early 2011" and "Late 2011" MacBook Pro models use faster 1333 MHz PC3-10600 DDR3 SO-DIMMs. They officially support 8 GB of RAM, but OWC has determined that they actually support 16 GB of RAM regardless of the operating system installed, although only the "Early 2011" MacBook Pro models are capable of running a version of Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard."
Finally, the "Mid-2012" non-Retina Display MacBook Pro models use faster still 1600 MHz PC3-12800 DDR3 SO-DIMMs and likewise officially support 8 GB of RAM, but actually can support as much as 16 GB of RAM. These models do not run versions of OS X prior to OS X 10.7 "Lion."


Power settings, including sleep and wake:

man pmset

What settings are active?

pmset -g

What is keeping your mac awake?

pmset -g assertions

To find out what woke up your mac, run this before sleep:

pmset -g assertionslog

While this is running, you can find out the state of your assertions with CTRL-T

Assertion status system-wide:
   BackgroundTask                 0
   ApplePushServiceTask           0
   UserIsActive                   1
   PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep    0
   PreventSystemSleep             0
   ExternalMedia                  0
   InternalPreventDisplaySleep    1
   PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     0
   NetworkClientActive            0
Listed by owning process:
   pid 97(hidd): [0x0000c79b00099bde] 00:00:00 UserIsActive named: "com.apple.iohideventsystem.queue.tickle.4294971710.3"
    Timeout will fire in 600 secs Action=TimeoutActionRelease
   pid 56(powerd): [0x0000e37c00108184] 00:01:04 InternalPreventDisplaySleep named: "com.apple.powermanagement.delayDisplayOff"
    Timeout will fire in 235 secs Action=TimeoutActionTurnOff
No kernel assertions.
Idle sleep preventers: IODisplayWrangler

You'll need to take a look at the internal state of mDNS. To enable debug logging:

sudo killall -USR1 mDNSResponder # so much data.

Trim the logorrhoea to what you came for:

sudo syslog -c mDNSResponder en

Dump the state of mDNS to the syslog:

sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder; tail -1000f /var/log/system.log

The section “Network Interfaces” in the syslog output lists the network interfaces on your machine that Bonjour knows about. For any interface which (a) Bonjour believes to be capable of Wake On LAN and (b) Bonjour has discovered a Bonjour Sleep Proxy, you should see a black sun (“☀”) immediately preceding the address at the end of the line, like this:

------ Network Interfaces ------
v4 en0(4) 00:17:F2:CD:7E:0A 00:00:00:00:00:00 v4 0.0.0.0 ⊙ ⇆ ☀ 192.168.1.50

For any interface which (a) Bonjour believes to be capable of Wake On LAN but (b) no Sleep Proxy has been discovered yet, you should see a white sun (“☼”). This means that Bonjour is willing to use a Sleep Proxy on this interface, but hasn’t found one yet.

------ Network Interfaces ------
v4 en0(4) 00:17:F2:CD:7E:0A 00:00:00:00:00:00 v4 0.0.0.0 ⊙ ⇆ ☼ 192.168.1.50

Review the canon here.


How can I respond in a definitive fashion to an app pestering me about a permission?

Enable & Control Access for Assistive Devices & Apps in OS X Mavericks

  For example, many popular games will require access to the Assistive
  Devices abilities so that an online game can properly use voice chat
  or screen broadcasting. This is true with nearly all Steam games,
  ranging from Team Fortress 2 to Civilization V, and Blizzard / Battle
  Net games like StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft. Note these games
  will continue to function without Assistive Access, but their feature
  set for online communication and sharing may be limited, and thus if
  you’re playing games and find the voice chat features aren’t working,
  this setting or app-specific access could very well be the reason why.

You can not send a replay to it, but you can disable it in your sys pref security and privacy, and/or in the game set up.


Login screen stuck after entering password after BigSur update

Bummer. Before you try and reset the password, have you tried a safe mode start? (Power down, hold shift as the Mac starts)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201255

Here is the script to reset the password when it’s not working anymore.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202860


Struggling to remove Contacts from Messages

Yes it is possible.

Select the "Preferences..." item in the Messages menu. Select the accounts tab. There you should see which accounts that are connected to the Messages app. Remove the existing account(s) and the add your own account.


How do I back system and application settings up on my Mac?

Use Time Machine. I know it sounds a little snarky, but this is really exactly what it's for. With a current Time Machine Backup, you can install OS X and then restore from your backup... et voila!

Time Machine has crafted exclusions to not backup files that are either counterproductive or unnecessary when restoring a backup onto a clean installation.


How to resolve messed up GPT (FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF) from Ubuntu without data loss

Enter the following command. This will change the MacOS Catalina partition back to an APFS container.

sudo sgdisk -t 2:7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/sda

Next, you will need to reboot. Immediately after rebooting, hold down the option key until the Startup Manager appears. Hold down the control key before selecting macOS from the Startup Manager choices.


You can list all the metadata attached to a file with the mdls command

See this answer for a sample https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/165098/19086

ls -l@ will show which extended attributes are attached to a file


My 2016 13" MacBook Pro's screen goes black when it is opened vertically beyond 90 degree

Welcome to Ask Different. This sounds a lot like a hardware issue unfortunately - specifically a loose display cable. For MacBook models 2016 - present, the display cable is integrated into the display itself, so you will need to get the whole display replaced. Please see the attached article for further information regarding the issue. Sorry and best of luck.


What is happening, is the calculator splits the numbers and dots into the following:

5..6=3 turns into 5 * .6 = 3

As we know that . is another way of saying 'multiply' its simply, 5 multiplied by .6

As for 523..6.1=31.38, it turns into 523 * (.6 * .1) = 31.38


Using launchd to monitor a running program or process

I'm posting this as an answer because it's to much for a comment and I believe I know what the issue may be, even without seeing the contents of the proc_check.sh shell script.

I realized after reading again your question and ensuing comments, after deleting my first answer, the hint was the script worked from the command line but not when called by launchd.

When your User Agent .plist file is triggered, the $PATH it receives may not contain the paths to some commands/utilities that are being called within the script.  The $PATH passed to the proc_check.sh shell script is only:

/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

So, any program that is called in the script that is not in the above $PATH or includes it's fully qualified pathname is not running when called by launchd.

To fix this, either use the fully qualified pathname for all executables called within the script, that are not in the above $PATH, or add a PATH=... statement after the shebang, where ... is the actual output of, echo $PATH in Terminal, e.g.:

#!/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11/bin

Note: The $PATH above is what's outputted by echo $PATH on my system and may well be different on yours.


Based on the error message, I tried the following command and solved the problem:

chown -R username: ~/Library/Safari

So I guess there are some files or directories which does not belong to me. It's weird how could this happen because I never touched that directory manually before.


How to share internet with WPA/WPA2 security?

Mac OS X Mountain Lion supports Internet Sharing using WPA/WPA2.  You will need to upgrade to get this functionality.  This article has a little more info.  And here is a screenshot of the new option for WPA2 in Mountain Lion (10.8):


Why does Google Chrome mount and unmount a volume every few hours?

Apparently there is a Google Software Update process that is queued to run periodically, which is why it's not always there. (I couldn't grab a screenshot of it, it was too sneaky). It's not just for Chrome, but for Google Earth and Picasa too. It was a bit of a breadcrumb hunt finding info about it.

I think the Google updater isn't a proces that runs all the time, but a launchd job that runs when you boot and every so often after that. Google com.google.keystone.user.agent and you'll find a number of explanations of what they've done (and how to get rid of it if you want).
charlie  (Apple Discussions)

From Google's Help Page:

Google Software Update is a background application for the Mac OS that helps ensure that you always have the most up-to-date, stable, and secure versions of the Google software you have installed. Google Software Update may run two services: GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent and GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon. These services allow Google applications to be safely and securely updated.

I couldn't find, and I'm not aware of any reason it mounts a partition, but it's probably either:

A bunch of information about which updates are available and for what apps
Updates for products, Google Chrome updates are quite regular
An Update for the Updater

Ah the endless mysteries of HardwareGrowler. Entertainment for the whole family!


Can't change OS X Maps to use km instead of miles

If you want to change the system to use metric units, you have to select a region (locale), which uses only metric units.
Apple is not very good when it comes to internationalization. Especially the many small nationalities suffer from this attitude. It feels like American culture is walking all over you.

Go to System Preferences / Language & Region / Select a region which definitely uses the metric system. Maps should finally work.


Yes. It's now quite easy to do so using Quicktime.

Connect both phones to the computer using a USB -> Lightning cable.

Open QuickTime Player.

Choose File -> New Movie Recording twice.

Choose a given phone to mirror for each of the windows.

Move the windows around as you see fit!


Windows 10 via Bootcamp: "Setup was unable to use the existing system partition..."

It turns out the error is misleading. I was able to resolve the issue and successfully complete installation by clearing space on the "EFI Partition" by following this guide: Unable to install Windows 8.1 using Bootcamp, system volume doesn't contain required free space?


Is it possible to connect an external CD/DVD drive to an iOS device?

No. There is no way to interface a CD drive with an iOS device. The best way to do this is to have your iOS device registered to a copy of iTunes running on a Mac or PC, and to connect the iOS device to the Mac or PC via WiFi or a USB cable. This would presuppose that you have a suitable CD drive connected to the Mac or PC for ripping audio.

However, it occurs to me that you could probably rip music to AAC or MP3 format on a Mac or PC and then email those files to yourself, check the email on your iOS device, and then open the email attachments on the iOS device. That would get the music files in there.


Panning with two fingers in Preview (OS X Mavericks)

Yes! I am having this problem. It appears to be a known problem with both Chrome and Firefox. So far, I've only seen this behavior in these two browsers. It does not appear to affect Safari.

There are posts from as early as August indicating that this was an issue.

Several posts have suggested clearing your Mac's PRAM as a temporary fix, as well as turning off the "two finger swipe to switch pages" gesture for both Mouse and Trackpad.


sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=1

(or net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf)


go to System Preferences > Sharing and check "Internet Sharing" and choose WiFi in the first drop down and Thunderbolt in the second.


Minecraft not opening in portable drive, only opening in Applications

I believe Minecraft was created so that it can only work when i's in applications folder because they don't want people to be able to play it on other peoples hard drives, they want them to pay money to buy it for themselves. This is just another trick they use to make themselves more money.


Can Coda 2 be made to uploads to locations other than the root of a website?

Publishing is different than uploading in Coda.
Uploading will just upload to whatever folder you are in in the web view (bottom of the file list pane, 2 icons, local and remote).

So if you are in the root on the web view pane, anything you 'upload' will go there. If you want to upload by manually 'uploading', navigate to the folder you want in the web view, then whatever you upload will go there.

If you want to upload files retaining their structure, you want to 'publish'. So you can either 'mark for publish' or when you save a file, it gets marked for publish, then you can publish the lot, which will upload everything in its right place.

Of course, this all depends on your folder settings. Make sure you have the right info in your settings pane, for local folder root and remote folder root etc.


Eclipse quit unexpectedly (Mac OS X 10.7.4 and Eclipse 3.8)

This is probably because eclipse shutdown abnormally.
Open the Terminal and go to the location where eclipse is installed.
Then run eclipse from the terminal like...
$./eclipse -clean

It should start, once it does go to the Eclipse menu and Quit eclipse.
If you have any shortcuts on the desktop you'll have to remove them and make new shortcuts with the executable.


Is there a difference between HDMI or Thunderbolt for monitor?

Answering straight yes. You loose quality when connecting monitor with VGA.

You see VGA is analog standard and digital signal being first time converted into analog in a computer to be transmitted through VGA cable and then converted back into digital to be used by the digital TFT panel. Since there are few steps of converting signal and analog interference while in a cable you have few chances to loose on quality.

Then it depends on particular setup, cables and quality of convertor when answering how much of quality being lost. So if you don't see that quality is degraded on you VGA connected MacMini compared to MacBook on DVI that it is safe it definitely more convenient to leave them as they are.


Remotely connecting to Apple Mac mini from MacBook

Can I connect to Mac Mini Remotely from Mac book?

Yes. You can use OS X's built-in screen sharing. It's a VNC-based application that ships with OS X. You'll need to enable it on your systems in order to use it. Open System Preferences -> Sharing. And make sure 'Screen Sharing' is checked. I recommend the excellent ScreenSharingMenulet -- sits in your menu bar and lists any Bonjour-enabled screen sharing hosts in a drop down when you click on it for automatic discovery and easy connection to shared screens in your network.

  Do I need to buy any other hardware for the remote connection or I can do thru Wi-FI available in both Mac MINI and Mac book?

No additional hardware or software is required. You don't even need ScreenSharingMenulet -- you can find and connect to shared screens via Finder if you like.

You do say something confusing your question though:

  My aim to have a logical system with 12 GB (8GB with Mac MINI + 4 GB in laptop)for running Virtual Machines on both Mac MINI and Mac Book and be able talk to each other.

You cannot tie the machines together using screen sharing. They won't present themselves as one logical, virtual device to any virtualization software with shared memory or CPUs or any such thing. They will act as completely separate machines, but they can be accessed, graphically, from one another.

If you're trying to tie the machines together to act as a single, unified "super computer" you need to look at much more complicated technologies than anything OS X ships with. Beowulf for clustering and something better than ethernet for inter-machine communication will be necessary like a fiber channel connection (and that will require more hardware).

  What about the performance compared to direct and remote connections as it is vital for Virtual Machine communication.

It is difficult to give an answer to this question as it all depends on what you're trying to do when it comes to communication between the machines. On the remote access side of things: over my local wireless network the performance is decent if you use adaptive mode on the screen sharing application but it can get glitchy if you disable adaptive quality scaling. If my macs are all on wires on Gbit ethernet then non-adaptive scaling is quite good. Processes running within VMs on my Macs have good sustained throughput to the Mac's built-in ethernet and wireless network interfaces. Inter-process communication between VMs running on separate Macs is going to be completely dependent on your network and your processes -- impossible to give an answer that'll cover all cases I'm afraid. If you get more specific with what you're trying to do I could possibly answer this more succinctly.


homebrew gcc-5 fails to find any standard library

Something is wrong with installation. Try updating Homebrew and reinstalling gcc-5. On El Capitan

Target: x86_64-apple-darwin14.4.0

should be

Target: x86_64-apple-darwin15.0.0

Works fine for me.


Any service (Find my Friends, Find my iPhone etc) that requests the location will show the little compass icon in the status bar as the location is requested.

You can also see apps that have recently accessed your location within the last 24 hours in Settings > Privacy > Location Services

For more information, see iOS 6: Understanding Location Services


Mac Mini Keeps freezing and have to manually power down and restart

I had a similar problem with my Mac mini. I tried different RAM, re-installed the OS, looked at system logs to try to figure out what was causing the problem. I got nowhere. Eventually I took it into the Apple Store to have a genius take a look, and at first it checked out fine. They kept it overnight and determined the logic board was bad. After a warranty replacement, it's working fine.


How to access user installed menubar icons with the keyboard?

Install Bartender. I'm a huge fan for many reasons; but amongst those, it allows Spotlight-like quick-filtering of menubar items:

⇧⌘␣ …

… drop …

↩!

Look, ma! No mouse.


Dead battery is replaced and recognized on MacBook Pro – processor speed is still cut


I tried everything, but I ended erasing my hard drive. I think is a bug of the version of macOS. So I suggest if Siri is not an important feature for you, just ignore this bug. On the other hand, the solution I find so far is back up your important stuff and reinstall the operating system.


If you never intend on .avi or .mkv files to be synced you may want to try the following.

Mobile Pane
Skip items that match any of the following
Choose Name Contains and type ".avi" (without quotes).

Do the same for ".mkv" (without quotes).

If you do intend on syncing both file types and would like only to stop them from syncing when they are found within the Desktop folder you may want to try the following.

Mobile Pane
Skip items that match any of the following
Choose Full Path and type "~/Desktop/*.avi" (without quotes)

Do the same for "~/Desktop/*.mkv" (without quotes)


Your iPhone could not be activated because the activation server cannot be reached

Since you have an iPhone 7/Plus i immidiately suspect one of the many chip problems plauging those two models (actually the problem is with the motherboard substrate itself, I think).

If it is this one problem, you can find out by jumping to the initial "Hello" screen after the update, if you have that, and selecting the info i in a small circle in the bottom right corner. It will show you various hardware parameters of your phone, such as the serial number. It should also show the IMEI and a few others it gets from the mobile network chip (as far as I understand).

If it is unable to retrieve one or more of these parameters from the hardware, which is a common affliction of the iPhone 7 series, you will not see them in that info screen and it will not be able to activate, and you might get the error you are reporting, despite it managing to reach the activation server. The problem is rather that it doesn't manage to give the activation server the info it is requesting.

If you find that this is indeed the case, nobody is able to fix your phone but Apple, but you might be able to get a free service if you can convince them that it is the same problem essentially (which it is), as the one they have a free program for: https://support.apple.com/iphone-7-no-service


Reboots hang. Cold Starts Boot on iMac 27" i7 (Mid 2010)

To further diagnose the problem I would try creating a 2nd user account to log in with, while also disabling any kind of automatic log in if that is enabled for your normal account. This could be used to see if it is something specific to your user account.

Test to see if the machine can restart from the login window or the other user account.

If it does then there is a User account problem occurring, and you can try to manually locate what the problem is by doing manual house cleaning tasks.

If the problem still persists I would try seeing if when you boot your mac into Safe Mode and see if the problem still exists.

  To start up into Safe Mode (to Safe Boot), do this:

  Be sure your Mac is shut down.
  Press the power button.
  Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
  Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).

If it goes away then there is some kind of third party driver, etc that may be causing the issue. See more information on what Safe Mode does to find out where to look to troubleshoot next.

If all else fails a very good solution in this case is to backup everything to an external drive, and then do a clean install of OS X. Then you can import just the files you need using Migration Assistant or manually.


Installed Safari Extensions disappear after restarting Safari

Is the login keychain locked or otherwise inaccessible? Apple now stores the list of installed Safari extensions in that keychain. See the link below for more details:

Deploying & Installing Safari Extensions on Safari 6.1+ & 7.2+


External monitor cuts out on MacBook with Multiport Adapter

I tried a new cable and it worked.

Apparently HDMI is very touchy. Try different cables from different vendors until the display is stable.


Mac-compatible Logitech mouses come with a preference pane to program their features.  Or (even if not Mac-compatible) try a third-party mouse-button utility, like SteerMouse, $20.

edit
Here is the post about using the Logitech M325 on Mac.  Maybe that will work in other cases, too.


g5 ppc osx 10.5.8 i can't change administrator password

From the screenshot, I see that you've already gotten to "Single User Mode". (Command-S at power on should get you there unless there is an Open Firmware password - in which case you'd need to clear that by changing the installed RAM).

After mounting the filesystem:

mount -uw

You can change the password of a user:

passwd username

If you don't know the username, list the user home folders:

ls -l /Users/


How can I rename the columns in Numbers?

As often happens, a couple of minutes after posting the question, I found a way to do this.

In the Inspector, (opt-cmd-i), in the Table Inspector tab click on the middle button of Headers and Footers. Select the option Freeze Header Rows and the first row will stick to the top.


Where to install Kibana (and tools like it)

On macOS the canonical place to install Unix software is /usr/local/, with the usual set of bin, lib, etc etc. beneath it. Going with this your installation of elasticsearch would seem to be bit odd but that is probably easy to fix.

You could also go with Homebrew which allows an easy installation of a lot of Unix software (and which uses /usr/local as a base as well). Both Kibana (4.4) and Elasticsearch (2.4) are available through Homebrew.


That is a tough one and some of the symptoms seem to indicate hardware issues but the fact that it came back to life may put the lie to that conjecture. Since you already reset the SMC that is also out. More troubleshooting steps around power issues (including resetting the SMC) in the Apple KB here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

Some of (all?) of these steps may be redundant depending on what all you have done.

It sounds like there may be a software issue as well. I use Onyx for general system maintenance and have found it works well and causes no problems. That may be worth a shot.

However once you have gone through that and the issue still remains you may have an intermittent hardware issue.

If you have upgraded the RAM yourself, you can try removing the DIMM you installed. Same for any HD/SSD upgrades you may have done yourself.

Failing that it may be time for a visit to your local Genius bar...


Any way to sync only music with ipod classic 160gb

I found it by accident.

If you click on your iPod in iTunes, and then you select movies at the top, you can uncheck "sync movies".


What causes 5 pink bars on 27" iMac (2011)?

I have had this problem.  It coincided with the iMac running very hot. It crashed and the pink stripes appeared. Every time I tried to start it, it stopped loading and rebooted. I thought it might be the video chip (I'm no Mac expert).  I gave up and left it for months then tried again, rebooting holding down the shift key and various other combinations of keys that I'd read about. This went on for hours but somehow the pink bars disappeared eventually, returned then went again. Eventually and to me, miraculously, the Mac started! I read somewhere that out of date software can make the Mac run too hot so I checked via the disk utility and found disused printer and scanner drivers using a lot of power so uninstalled them. Eventually after another crash or two and the stripes reappearing, I found that turning on holding down the shift key until the screen cleared, shutting down and starting again the OS loaded. It started running cooler and after shutting down correctly and restarting a few times all seems well (so far!). It has been like monkeys typing Shakespeare but I'm glad I didn't take the advice of a computer repairer I'd phoned who told me I should scrap the iMac (a near top of range 2011 model costing me £1600), take out the hard drive and put it in another Mac!  I hope this garbled account might give a little hope!


My OS X Mac Mini server crashed - How can I restore it?

I am unfamiliar with the two disk Mac Mini Server.  I have, however, had a Time Capsule for several years.

First of all:

Your file system is damaged beyond what Apple themselves can fix.  Take the warnings very serious - you may loose data.  I do not think that the hard disk is physically damaged, though.
You may risk accidentially loosing your internal Time Machine backups by accident.

At this point in time, I would suggest that you first create an extra backup of your Time Machine data (this most likely require an extra external drive the size of your Time Machine harddisk) which for the Time Capsule can be triggered from inside Airport Tool - I do not know how to do it for your hardware.

That done, get a copy of your installation media as suggested by soxman.  After ordering with AppleCare - due to the severeness of this problem - you may want to consider downloading a torrent with the dvd images so you can get started before you loose data.

When you have it fixed, consider upgrading to Mountain Lion Server (if possible on your machine).    I do not know if the installer can reformat the file system and restore the time machine backup, but it might be a shortcut to the 10.6 start.

A final note:  I would recommend against using third party file system tools for anything else than salvaging files before reformatting the partition.  File systems are so important that I would only trust Apple itself for OS X file systems.


How can I buy Yosemite apps from a Mavericks installation?

I know this is a fringe case. I can report that as of Summer of 2015, buying an app for a newer OS version from an older version is not possible. I solved the issue by installing 10.10 on a different partition, and bought the app from there.


Can't delete Exchange account from Mail or Internet Accounts preferences

The thing is since MountainLion with cached preferences. You could try the following really hard solution (last line of defense), which trashes all you Apple Mail settings and all of your Internet accounts including twitter accounts etc. et al:

backup your Library folder to somewhere else like your Desktop or another HD
from Terminal, delete the folder "~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail" and "~/Library/Containers/com.apple.internetaccounts"
from Terminal, delete Apple Mail Preferences with "defaults delete -app Mail" (this resets your apple mail plist to default values)
logout and login again.

If this doesn't work, copy your Library folder back and we have to find another way.


Transfer student Apple Care to another user

Yes, you can transfer AppleCare to another person subject the terms and conditions in the location you live.  Whether this is a student-purchase or not doesn't make a difference.

You didn't mention the country you live so I'll assume you're in the US for this info.  (you'll need to look-up the T&C's for your own country if not in the US).

Here's a snippet from Apple's AppleCare T&C for a Mac.  It tells you how to transfer the AppleCare to someone else.:

  10. Transfer of Plan.

  Subject to the restrictions set forth below, you may make a one-time
  permanent transfer of all of your rights under the Plan to another
  party, provided that: (a) you transfer to the other party the original
  proof of purchase, the Plan's Confirmation, the Plan’s printed
  materials and this service contract; (b) you notify Apple of the
  transfer by sending, faxing or e-mailing notice of transfer to Apple
  Inc., ATTN: Agreement Administration, MS: 217-AC, 2511 Laguna Blvd,
  Elk Grove, CA 95758, U.S., fax number 916-405-4175 or
  agmts_transfer@apple.com, respectively, and (c) the other party
  accepts the terms of this service contract. When notifying Apple of
  the transfer, you must provide the Plan Agreement Number, the serial
  number of the Covered Equipment, and the name, address, telephone
  number and email address of the new owner.

Make sure you follow a, b, and c to correctly perform the transfer.  Keep a record of what you send to Apple and how they respond back to you.


OpenSSL 0.9.8zg 14 July 2015 is the version installed by OS X 10.9(.5) (Mavericks) and resides in /usr/bin/.

MacPorts neither installs nor updates/upgrades genuine Apple (OK, OpenSSL is not Apple but it's part of their basic BSD package) system software. MacPorts' standard realm is /opt/...

You would have to install a newer OpenSSL version with MacPorts - if available.


This is an Xcode Playground.  That's important because it's the only place (with the default settings) that you can display these colors.

EDIT (June 23, 2016): After reviewing the WWDC material on new features in Xcode, images are also supported.  This is done via image literals.

This is taken from Apple's Playground Help:

  Open the source editor for the playground page that will contain the literal.
  Place the insertion point at the location in the code for the UIColor or NSColor.
  Choose Editor > Insert Color Literal.
  A color literal is added at the insertion point, and the color picker opens.  The screenshot shows the color literal just inserted for the tintColor property of imageView.

  Use the color picker to choose a different color for the inserted literal. In the figure below, imageView.tintColor has been changed to Aqua, which updates the color of the resulting image.


How can I disable Skitch's "Discard Skitch Note" dialog when quitting?

This prompt has to do with Skitch's ability to upload/sync screenshots to Evernote. Because you don't have this configured, it's asking if you're sure you want to quit without having done this synchronization.

To disable this behavior you can go under Skitch → Preferences and select the Sync tab and change the preferences so that Skitch will only do manual syncing to Evernote.

Before

After


I cannot get out of recovery mode (OS X Utilities) by resetting or reinstalling the OS

On an 08 iMac, your options will be limited if the previous owner didn't correctly run through the reset procedure, leaving you with a nice, simple sign-in to take over the Mac as your own.

Part of the procedure is for them to sign in on their own existing App Store account & reinstall a clean OS that they are already associated with, as 'purchaser'. if they exit the process after install but before sign-in, then it's ready to transfer ownership.
Without that, you're left with trying to sign in as a new user with no previous purchase history & no access to anything other than the very latest macOS - not good if your machine can't run that.

Additionally, an 08 is not capable of running Internet Recovery, so automatic access to the correct installer is not possible.

Theoretically, you could boot an 08 from USB, but in practise I've never managed to achieve that, earliest I've managed to do that on was an 09.
This may leave you with only an install CD as your working method, although it's always worth trying to get a USB key to work first.

You are going to have to access the installer from another computer & burn/flash your startup medium from there.


If you get the Mac Mini with the AMD graphics it can support three monitors.

From MacRumors

  Mac mini (Mid 2011): Two Thunderbolt displays. Mac mini with AMD graphics can support a HDMI compatible device on its HDMI port when using two Thunderbolt displays.


Why does the iPad use nearest-neighbour scaling rather than Retina scaling for iPhone apps

There are two strong reasons, one of which I got from an Apple engineer and the other of which has been implied by a few Apple employees but not stated outright.

The first reason is that the iPad 1 simply doesn't have enough RAM to do the emulation while rendering the Retina graphics, particularly while animating them. This come directly from someone who was involved, so I'm as certain as I can be that it's true. Of course this is a deal-killer, making the next reason unnecessary except for the fact that the iPad 2, which has double the RAM, still doesn't use the Retina graphics.

The second reason is that the poor quality of iPhone app graphics on the iPad encourages developers to build universal apps or to additionally build an iPad version of the iPhone app. These universal/iPad apps make the iPad much more appealing to consumers and sells more iPads. It's particularly important for apps that use standard Cocoa Touch controls where the double-sized text, double-sized picker controls (the spinners), etc. actually look pretty bad and aren't terribly usable (in the UI/UX sense), and the 1X/2X button is kind of a hack. If iPhone graphics looked nearly as good on the iPad there'd be much less incentive to build the other apps, especially if there was little competition for yours.

I suspect that if Apple/Steve Jobs felt the iPad would have sold well if it only ran new apps built especially for it then there wouldn't be a compatibility mode at all. Instead they were able to launch the iPad saying that there are a couple of hundred thousand iPhone apps that would run on it in addition to the few thousand iPad/universal apps available.

It is possible to build an iPhone-specific app that substitutes Retina graphics if you do it "by hand," overriding the OS's default rendering. Matt Rix's excellent non-universal iPhone puzzle games Trainyard and Trainyard Express look and play great on the iPad for this reason. It just takes a bit of extra work.


/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/CloudDocs

It is part of Apples iCloud service and will synchronize your Desktop and Documents folder with iCloud Drive. If you do want to store your Documents to iCloud this folder is required and iCloud Drive needs to be enabled.


If Growl is installed and you want to turn off just the notifications for volume mounts and dismounts (as opposed to getting rid of Growl altogether):

System Preferences, Growl panel
Applications tab
Select HardwareGrowler from the list
Configure
Notifications tab
In the dropdown, for each notification (e.g. Volume Mounted) you want to disable:
Select it and untick the 'Enabled' box.

(Edit:) Or, as fnurl points out, remove HG entirely.
I find it useful enough to keep, but tweaked to my liking.  It alerts me if my WiFi starts bouncing, f/ex.  YMMV, as always.


macOS has always been "iffy" when it came to spoofing MAC addresses unlike other OSes so it's not a (faulty) hardware issue.  It's more of a "how Apple likes to do things" issue.
My advice is the following (in order):

Get that MAC address registered with the university.
Use SpoofMAC to, well, spoof your MAC address.

Yes, I think you should just bite the bullet and register your MAC with the university.  Yes, it's a PITA, but the downside is simply too costly for the time you're attempting to save.  If they happen to catch you (and they can), you're going to face disciplinary action because in the end, you agreed to their terms of service whether you remember agreeing to them or not.
That said, there are genuine uses for spoofing your MAC address and to do so on a Mac, you can use SpoofMAC.  It's available via GitHub (see link above) or via Homebrew.
Once you have it installed, you simiply execute the following command with the actual MAC address and your network device as needed:
% spoof-mac.py set 00:00:00:00:00:00 en0

They also conveniently provide instructions for launching this at startup.


What would happen if a Time Machine backup over Wi-Fi is in progress and I remove my laptop?

Time Machine should handle this gracefully, with the in-progress backup continuing the next time you connect.

I have many many Time Machine backups that have all been done over wifi, and I have honestly paid no attention to whether or not backups are in progress or complete while taking my laptop in and out of the house.


Can I have iOS Automation shortcuts run automatically?

EDIT: This has improved with iOS 14:
In iOS 14, Turn off "Ask Before Running" to avoid getting a notification and have automations run automatically in the background. See full list at See https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/enable-or-disable-a-personal-automation-apd602971e63/ios

Not all triggers can make an automation run in the background.

When you Arrive, Leave, connect to CarPlay, or use the Before I Leave or Time of Day triggers, or try to automate connecting to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, your shortcuts will only show up as notifications and won't run in the background. These are the only triggers where a user may not be in control of their device or it's state, and thus seem to be limited for security reasons – all other triggers can run in the background.

https://imore.com/whats-new-siri-shortcuts-betas.  See under "Personal automation". It's a long page, so cmd + F.
https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/enable-or-disable-a-personal-automation-apd602971e63/ios


Problem when booting OS X from an external USB drive

You do not need Unibeast (a tool for hackintoshes) to create an external installer. Can you confirm you're only using it to run the createinstallmedia command provided by apple as per this page?

Apart from that it seems you are confusing an external Mavericks installation with an external Mavericks installer. All you should have to do is double click the installer, straight from the App Store still laying in /Applications on your internal drive, then pick the external volume as a target (wipe the current ones and make a new one for the entire stick). Using all-apple tools should make that go smooth.

Then just boot from the external stick by holding down opt at boot, and complete the guide.

When in doubt or in need in help, always boot in verbose mode to get more information, and above all, do not over complicate things.


How do I get Siri to call Amy instead of Aimee?

If both people are in your Contacts, you can give one, or both, a nickname.  When using Siri, you can refer to the person by nickname and Siri will know who you're talking about.

To add a nickname to a person:

Open the Contacts app
Tap the contact you want to view, then tap Edit
Scroll down and tap add field -> Nickname
Add a nickname and tap Done

To remove a nickname, just reverse the steps.  You can change the nickname at any time.

Source


Create an image file from install DVD using Disk Utility. Restore this image to a USB flash drive. Then start the Macbook, press and hold "option" button. you will see the start up options. Select USB drive and complete installation.


Sounds to me like you need to identify your Mac model more than anything else. Give a try How to identify which model is my Mac?

Once you know your precise model, you may want to go to ifixit.com to identify the precise piece number you’re looking for.


How to extract MS Office for Mac keys from my Mac OS X 10.6.8?

I dont know if this one works for all applications, mainly because there is no set standard to store product keys, but Mac Product Key Finder should work for you. Its how I got Photoshop and others off my school mac onto my personal.


Open new Chrome window with different profile from command line

Pass the arguments to the  Google Chrome's executable directly, instead of routing them via open --args.
Set an alias to the executable inside Chrome app. (right click > show package contents)
alias chrome_cli="/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome"
chrome_cli --profile-directory="Profile 1" --new-window
chrome_cli --profile-directory="Profile 2" --new-window

Even append --new-window to the alias if that's used a lot.
For more help, run
chrome_cli --help

To remove alias,
unalias chrome_cli

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3773/how-to-pass-parameters-to-an-alias


Why can you not set a Siri button for an external remote on Apple TV?

The remote does not have a microphone to detect voice, like the Siri Remote does. It is currently unknown if you can make the Siri button programmable on a remote with a microphone.


How can I format a time to HHMM with AppleScript?

Here's a script that takes the current time and makes it HHMM as you asked.

-- preserve the current text item delimiters so we can put them back
set oldDelims to AppleScript's text item delimiters

set right_now to current date
set the_time to time string of right_now -- something like "4:20:56 PM"
set am_pm to characters -2 thru -1 of the_time as string -- is it AM or PM

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ":"
set the_hour to text item 1 of the_time as string -- in this example, "4"
set the_minute to text item 2 of the_time as string -- in this example, "20"

if (am_pm is "PM") then
    set the_hour to the_hour + 12
end if

if the_hour is "24" then
    set the_hour to "12"
end if
-- that could have been more graceful but it's nice and obvious this way

if (count of the_hour) is 1 then -- padding with a zero if necessary
    set the_hour to "0" & the_hour
end if

if (count of the_minute) is 1 then -- padding with a zero if necessary
    set the_minute to "0" & the_minute
end if

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
set steves_string to the_hour & the_minute as string -- putting the pieces together

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oldDelims -- cleaning up

return steves_string -- you would not need this line, but for testing it's nice

I am sure that this could be tightened up but I thought it was educational to see it step by step.

You could certainly pass in any time you wanted-- does not have to be "current date." (Note that current date includes the time too. You peel off the "time" part of a date by asking for "the time string" of it.


How can I change my desktop background every time I log in?

First you select the folder where your custom background images are in the left section, then you just select Change picture: and choose When logging in in the dropdown.


You can get the last time a password was changed by using dscl:

$ dscl . read /Users/<username> | grep passwordLastSetTime -A1

You will then get a result similar to the result below; the time will be in epoch (Unix) time.

<key>passwordLastSetTime</key>
<real>1489446910.113889</real>

Then, to convert epoch to something useful, you need to drop the mantissa (fractional part) since epoch is measured in nano seconds (useless for our purposes here)

$ date -r 1545267484
Wed Dec 19 19:58:04 EST 2018


Where can I find raw data for Apple photo's face recognition

In Mojave and earlier: Photos library (right click) > Show package contents > Resources > Media > Face. The sub-folders within the Face folder contains thumbnails of all faces. Additional data about them can be found in Database > photos.db but you'll need DB Browser for sqlite or similar program. Face related data is in a table named RKFace, several other tables named RKFace..., and elsewhere.
In Catalina and later, use the same approach as above but the folder names are different. You'll be querying Database > photos.sqlite, and looking at tables such as ZDETECTEDFACE, ZFACECROP, and basically any other with "face" in it.
Be very careful not to modify, delete or move anything when you open Photos library.photoslibrary.


What does “Cache location entry for Photos.app in cache file” error signify in Automator app?

I'm not sure what causes the modification/corruption, but my solution has been to delete the specified files, in your case:

/Users/barbooths/Library/Caches/com.apple.automator.actionCache-bundleLocations.plist

Doing this eliminates the warnings for me (I was getting automator, photos, system image utility and a few others.

My automator scripts still run correctly from the terminal, they just do without the extra warning output.


AirPods: listen to audio + record video + use microphones?

I believe as long as your AirPods are connected they will be used as the default microphone input, so any video recording software will work fine.

For example, in QuickTime Player, go to File > New Movie Recording. Then click on the arrow next to the record button and you can select exactly which microphone and video inputs to use if it's not already default.


There is pandoc --help as well as the online documentation/user guide. I have pandoc installed via Homebrew and I also have no man pages.

erik@Eriks-MBP:~$ man pandoc
No manual entry for pandoc


The problem here is that the handling of ~ differs between the shell and the macOS kernel. If you run your command directly from the prompt, PATH expansion is handled by the shell which knows how to expand ~. If you run your command through nice, the command is passed to the macOS kernel for path expansion:

pse@Mithos:~$ mkdir foo
pse@Mithos:~$ cat >foo/foo.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo foo here
pse@Mithos:~$ chmod +x foo/foo.sh
pse@Mithos:~$ foo/foo.sh
foo here
pse@Mithos:~$ PATH='~/foo':$PATH
pse@Mithos:~$ echo $PATH
~/foo:/Users/pse/.bin/script:/Users/pse/.bin/i386:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/TeX/texbin
pse@Mithos:~$ foo.sh
foo here
pse@Mithos:~$ time foo.sh
foo here

real    0m0.007s
user    0m0.002s
sys 0m0.002s
pse@Mithos:~$ nice time foo.sh
foo.sh: No such file or directory
        0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
pse@Mithos:~$ nice foo.sh
nice: foo.sh: No such file or directory
pse@Mithos:~$

To avoid this, always make sure that your assigned PATH contains neither ~ nor any nonexpanded variables.

PS: Additionally there are different time commands called for time foo and nice time foo.  To get the same output format in both cases, use /usr/bin/time foo instead.


What would the downside be of excluding "Saved Application State" from Time Machine?

There's no reason to backup this directory.

The contents changes so frequently that any backup is outdated by the time the backup's finished. This is no exaggeration; simply the act of making a backup will change the contents of this folder.
If you're relying on an unsaved document being there next time you open an app based on Restore, you're doing something wrong. Providing you save documents, the data in that folder will be saved to the appropriate location in the file anyway.
The saved application state stores a bunch of useless information anyway. When you're restoring a full Time Machine backup, the lack of cached data makes any app restore a strenuous task and the saved application state won't help.

Also, for what it's worth, this directory used to be (and still is on most installations) part of the standard exclusions list for Time Machine backups.


App or script to monitor/log processes starting and stopping?

The following script builds an array of Applications/Processes dynamically. This is an advantage in the sense that you do not need to "know" every process prior to its launch. However, it is important to note that due to this design as the number of processes grow the longer it will take to add a new process to the array. To compensate for this the script keeps the contents of the array cached so as to use them later preventing the need to re-add them to the array.

ALSO: If the Application/Process has not been dynamically loaded into the array prior to the process stopping the logger will leave the "Command" column empty. This will become less and less likely as your dynamically built array builds upon its cached information. Adding to the previous point. At times a "Command" may not be shown in the column yet it has already been added to the array. This is likely caused by the fact that certain process's like "sort" have been removed as they are used in the script and would be constantly starting and stopping (adding false positives to the logger). Currently the data will be put into the file /command_logger. This of course can be changed as you see fit. The config file /tmp/command_logger.plist can also be renamed/moved but remember that it holds the data to the growing App/Process array.

Please feel free to use and modify the following script as you see fit. Please remember to utilize a testing environment prior to running on your primary environment. Enjoy.

Tested on:

•   10.5.x
•   10.6.x
•   10.7.4

The output will include the following:

STARTED/STOPPED
Epoch (timestamp)
Date/Time
PID
Application/Process

NOTE: The following script includes an internal loop.

DYNAMIC APP/PROCESS LOGGER

#!/bin/bash

On="true"

TMP="/tmp/command_logger"
LOG_CONFIG="/command_logger.plist"
LOG="/command_logger"

if [[ ! -e ${TMP} ]]; then

    mkdir ${TMP}

    if [[ ! -e ${TMP}${LOG_CONFIG} ]]; then
        /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Add:Commands Dict" ${TMP}${LOG_CONFIG} > /dev/null 2>&1
    fi

elif [[ -e ${TMP} ]]; then

    if [[ ! -e ${TMP}${LOG_CONFIG} ]]; then
        /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Add:Commands Dict" ${TMP}${LOG_CONFIG} > /dev/null 2>&1
        find ${TMP} -type f ! -name '*.plist' -exec rm -f {} \;
    elif [[ -e ${TMP}${LOG_CONFIG} ]]; then
        find ${TMP} -type f ! -name '*.plist' -exec rm -f {} \;
    fi

fi

if [[ ! -e ${LOG} ]]; then
    echo -e "Status\tTimestamp\tDate/Time\t\tPID\tCommand\n" > ${LOG}
elif [[ -e ${LOG} ]]; then

    TITLE=$(head -1 ${LOG} | awk '{print $1}')

    if [[ ${TITLE} != "Status" ]]; then
        echo -e "Status\tTimestamp\tDate/Time\t\tPID\tCommand\n" > ${LOG}
    fi

fi

while [[ ${On} == "true" ]]; do
    IFS=""

    Live_Array=$(ps -Ac | sed 's/  /|/g' | sed 's/ /_/g' | sed 's/[[:digit:]]_.*[[:digit:]]_/ /g' | sed 's/:/!/' | sed 's/$/.comm/' | sed 's/^_//g' | sed 's/^|//g' | sed 's/^_//g' | sed 's/^|.*//g' | sed 's/ $//g' | sed 's/_$//g' | sed 's/|$//g' | sed 's/PID_TTY||.*//g' | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's/.*-sh.*//' | sed 's/.*CMD.*//' | sed 's/.*PID.*//' | sort -u | grep "[[:graph:]]" | tr -s "[\n]" "[,]")
    Live_Array=$(echo ${Live_Array%\,})
    IFS=","
    Live_Array_2=( $Live_Array )
    livarray=${#Live_Array_2[@]}
    for (( liv=0; liv<${livarray}; liv++ ));
    do

        /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Add:Commands:${Live_Array_2[$liv]} bool true" ${TMP}${LOG_CONFIG} 2> /dev/null

        Config_Array=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print:Commands" ${TMP}${LOG_CONFIG} | grep "=" | sed 's/=.*//' | sed 's/  //g' | sed 's/^.comm//' | sed 's/ $//g' | grep "[[:graph:]]" | tr -s "[\n]" "[,]")
        Config_Array_2=( $Config_Array )
        conarray=${#Config_Array_2[@]}

        for (( con=0; con<${conarray}; con++ ));
        do

            STRING=$(ps -Ac | sed 's/  /|/g' | sed 's/ /_/g' | sed 's/[[:digit:]]_.*[[:digit:]]_/ /g' | sed 's/:/!/'  | sed 's/$/.comm/' | sed 's/^_//g' | sed 's/^|//g' | sed 's/^_//g' | sed 's/^|.*//g' | sed 's/|_.comm/.comm/g' | sed 's/PID_TTY||.*//g' | awk '{print $2,$1}' | sed 's/.*-sh.*//' | sed 's/.*CMD.*//' | sed 's/.*PID.*//' | sort -u)
            Launched_Command=$(echo ${STRING} | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u | awk "/${Config_Array_2[$con]}/")
            PID=$(echo ${STRING} | sort -u | awk '{print $2,$1}' | awk "/${Config_Array_2[$con]}/" | sed 's/ .*//')

            if [[ ${Launched_Command} != "" ]] && [[ ${PID} != "" ]]; then

                DATE=$(date "+%m-%d-%Y %T")
                EPOCH=$(date "+%s")

                if [[ ${Launched_Command} == ${Config_Array_2[$con]} ]] && [[ ! -e ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-RUNNING ]]; then
                    echo -e "STARTED\t${EPOCH}\t${DATE}\t${PID}\t${Config_Array_2[$con]}" | sed 's/.comm$//g' | sed 's/_/ /g' | sed 's/.*sort.*//g' | sed 's/.*sed.*//g' | sed 's/awk//g'| awk '/STARTED/' >> ${LOG}
                    rm -f ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-STOPPED
                    touch ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-RUNNING
                elif [[ ${Launched_Command} == ${Config_Array_2[$con]} ]] && [[ -e ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-RUNNING ]]; then
                    :
                elif [[ ${Launched_Command} == ${Config_Array_2[$con]} ]] && [[ -e ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-RUNNING ]]; then

                    if [[ -e ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-STOPPED ]]; then
                        :
                    elif [[ ! -e ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-STOPPED ]]; then
                        echo -e "STOPPED\t${EPOCH}\t${DATE}\t${PID}\t${Config_Array_2[$con]}" | sed 's/.comm$//g' | sed 's/_/ /g' | sed 's/.*sort.*//g' | sed 's/.*sed.*//g' | sed 's/awk//g' | awk '/STOPPED/' >> ${LOG}
                        rm -f ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-RUNNING
                        touch ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-STOPPED
                    fi

                fi

            elif [[ ${Launched_Command} == "" ]] && [[ -e ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-RUNNING ]]; then

                if [[ -e ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-STOPPED ]]; then
                    :
                elif [[ ! -e ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-STOPPED ]]; then
                    echo -e "STOPPED\t${EPOCH}\t${DATE}\t${PID}\t${Config_Array_2[$con]}" | sed 's/.comm$//g' | sed 's/_/ /g' | sed 's/.*sort.*//g' | sed 's/.*sed.*//g' | sed 's/awk//g' | awk '/STOPPED/' >> ${LOG}
                    rm -f ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-RUNNING
                    touch ${TMP}/${Config_Array_2[$con]}-STOPPED
                fi
            fi
        done
    done
done


Can a late 2013 Mac Pro (cylinder) support dual 5K displays?

Yes - three 5K displays are supported on even the least GPU endowed Mac Pro Late 2013.

While I do not have the luxury of owning this kind of a setup, the following coming directly from Apple should answer this:

Mac Pro (Late 2013) - Technical Specifications


Is it possible to use 2 iPads simultaneously with Sidecar?

The current implementation of Sidecar in macOS Catalina and iPadOS 13 doesn't allow using two iPads simultaneously as Sidecar target. While this is not explicitly mentioned by Apple, all the support documents hint towards the conclusion that only a single iPad can be used as a Sidecar target.

Use your iPad as a second display for your Mac with Sidecar
Sidecar - Sidecar lets you expand your Mac
 workspace—and your creativity—with
 iPad and Apple Pencil

The primary intent of using Sidecar is not to let you use your iPad as an external display, rather to aid to your productivity.


I'm not sure about OpenFirmware commands, but your PowerMac G5 only has 1 processor since it's a 9,1. I'll edit this later if I can find any. It looks like it's possible in Single User Mode, but I'm not sure about via OpenFirmware.


The tracking speed is stored in the  ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist file.

defaults read -g | grep mouse
"com.apple.mouse.doubleClickThreshold" = "1.1";
"com.apple.mouse.scaling" = "2.5";

The slowest speed shown in System Preferences is 0.0 and the highest is 3.0

You can change the speed by editing the plist directly or with defaults, but you have to log out and back in.

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -float 2.1

This AppleScript code would change the speed immediately:

tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal pane "com.apple.preference.mouse"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences"
    set value of slider 3 of window 1 to 9.0 -- maximum, minimum is 0.0
end tell
quit application "System Preferences"

EDIT:
    defaults find mouse
will search your default domains, keys, and values for the word mouse, without the need to pipe to grep.


OSX and Windows Bootcamp give different system information

That is a dual core processor (Ivybridge Core i5 2.5GHz 3210M). I am guessing that Apple's system information is telling you about the physical cores and Windows is including hyper-threading which lets you run two tasks per core.


How Do I associate all files with Emacs?

It appears that this apple.stackexchange topic covers how to add items to the "Open With" menu.


Apple external Keyboard A1243 does not work properly

At minimum, your keyboard needs to be cleaned.  More than likely, it needs to be replaced.

Just doing a quick search for your symptoms brings up tons of relevant results in which a majority of the keyboards needed to be replaced.  Some were fixed by a cleaning, but that requires taking the keyboard apart.

But to be certain it is your keyboard and not you computer, just plug the keyboard into another computer; if the problem persists then it's time for a new one.


how to make each display a separate space, yet have a keyboard shortcut to move both screens at the same time?

I wanted to do something similar. While I'm not sure it's possible to make the "Move left" and "Move right" shortcuts behave like you want (at least not without a third-party tool), you can get pretty close with the "Switch to Desktop [n]" shortcuts. Here's what I did:

In Mission Control, add or remove desktops from both displays so you have the same number on both. I was using 5 in Mountain Lion, so when I first booted into Mavericks, I had 5 on my primary display and only one ("Desktop 6") on my secondary display. I simply added 4 new desktops to my secondary display, so now I have 10 in total. The result looks something like this:

Primary display with Desktops 1-5

Secondary display with Desktops 6-10

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts and select the Mission Control category.
Set one shortcut for each "pair" of desktops, like so:

(Of course, this will result in some conflicting shortcuts, but it doesn't seem to be a problem. One shortcut still fires both actions.)

Use ctrl-1 through ctrl-5 (or whatever set of shortcuts you chose) to switch between each pair: ctrl+1 for Desktop 1 on the primary display and Desktop 6 on the secondary, ctrl+2 for Desktop 2 and Desktop 7, and so on.

Seems like a bit of a hack I know, but at least it matches the behavior that I was used to in Mountain Lion while maintaining the benefits of the improved multiple monitor support in Mavericks.

EDIT: I just noticed that this can cause some odd behavior when switching desktop pairs. For one, after you land on a desktop, the menu bar flashes erratically and eventually focuses on one display or another, seemingly randomly. It also seems to mess with the application-switching, in that it doesn't always focus on the application or window that you would expect it to. (Perhaps there's a conflict there between the most recently used application globally and the most recently used on that particular desktop? I'm not sure.) I'll keep playing around with it, but that could be a dealbreaker for me. Luckily, I still have the option of switching back to pre-Mavericks behavior if necessary.


Pages document saved in MS Word format is not well-formatted?

It's difficult to answer your question without more concrete examples of "all garbled." But the answer is probably "no, there's no one setting to make everything work out the way you want."

Since the two programs are very different, it's challenging to get a one-to-one correspondence of document formats when you export out of Pages to .doc format.

In general, my advice is that your exported .doc files will look closer to your Pages documents if you use Pages' Word Processing mode, rather than its Page Layout mode.

Mixing images with text, especially in a page layout fashion (with text wrapped around images and the like), is especially problematic, since the .doc format isn't as well suited as Pages for that sort of thing.

If you want your associates to see just what you are creating, you are probably better off to send them a PDF from Pages than to try to use .doc format. If they need to make changes/edits/comments to your work, I would suggest that you send them the initial text (without inline images) in RTF, then incorporate their changes into your Pages document by hand, then produce your final document in Pages and end up as PDF.


Problems with OS X update and 'enable journaling'

OK, so this problem had me tearing my hair out and cursing the big one upstairs for picking on me, but the solution I found to work is shown below:

Firstly, and this might not be necessary, but I used my Apple Application Installation DVD and held down the D key on boot, which tests the hardware to see if there are any errors. I tried both the quick test and the long test, together taking around an hour.

Secondly I reset the PRAM. I'm fairly sure this did nothing to help my cause, but I put it here for a more complete answer. Hold down Command / Control / P and R, all at the same time as the computer is booting. It will reboot, at which point you can pull your fingers out of that weird position.

Next, and I believe this to be the most important step, load Single-User mode on boot (Command + S). Once the command prompt is ready you should see somewhere in the verbose type above it a drive (something like /dev/disk0s2). What I did now was to use

/sbin/fsck_hfs -f -d /dev/disk0s2

This debugged and fixed the drive in question, and upon using the 'reboot' command in single-user mode, the computer started up fine, and has been as good as gold since!

Regardless, this has taught me to back up my drives and also reinstall my OS on a new HD.

Hope this helps anyone in the same leaky boat!
Ste


How can I effectively analyse my macbook's performance issues?

In my experience Apple stores won't really do that kind of work, you may be better off taking it to an authorised service centre for that kind of thing.

You can use Activity Monitor (found in Utilities folder) to monitor disk activity. This will give you an idea of how quickly the drive is shifting data to and from its platters. You'd then need to research to see if the throughput you're getting is below par or normal.

Another thing to check would be CPU and RAM usage, checking these when the system is performing badly can give you an idea of what's slowing you down (assuming that it's software hogging your CPU/RAM).

It may also be worth checking the Console (also found in Utils folder) to see if any applications or services are spamming any (error) messages, these apps/services may be causing slowdowns by hogging system resources.

Another (far less innocuous) troubleshooting step could be to do an archive and install of your system (which basically keeps all your files and settings but installs a fresh copy of the system) and see if performance improves.


Right click on title of document no longer opens finder

If I'm understanding your question correctly, I think this relates to a bug in 10.8.2. I don't know the full extent of the bug, but it seems to break the ability to reveal a file/document in Finder from other programs, including via the title bar.

I've seen a few bug reports around relating to the 'Show in Finder' not working, or only sometimes working, due to issues with the appleeventsd process. For more info see this TotalFinder Feedback issue, a blog entry from Macromates and an issue on Open Radar.


How to transfer files from CD/DVD onto iPad Pro?

There’s no native way read a digital disc on an iPad, and I don’t think a 3rd party manufacturer makes such a solution.
You will need to extract these files from the discs on a computer, macOS or Windows, then upload them to whatever cloud service you’re using to make them available on the Internet to your iPad. If you don’t have a cloud service, iCloud is one option, as nohillside mentions above, but there are others such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Dropbox and Drive have iOS apps to handle file transfers. I use all three cloud services on my iOS and macOS devices.
Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Apple, Dropbox nor Google.


Could iCloud be replaced by a personal WebDAV server?

Simple answer: No

More exact answer: Maybe.
You would need to have a inside knowledge of the internal processes of the iCloud. The iCloud is not just one server, but many of them with different parts (Key Value Storage, Document storage, ....)
I don't think it's possible to replace them without extreme inside knowledge.

For more info about what exactly the iCloud is (much more than just a file server) you could read this Mountain Lion Review from John Siracusa

Of course there are other services which provide the same tools for managing reminders, todos, ... But there isn't a direct replacement for the iCloud and I can't imagine that there will ever be one. That would fundamentally contradict with apples philosophy of a closed and controlled environment.


Could trying to disable WindowsServer.plist break my iMac it will no longer start?

This is a bit of a mess - but you could do one test to isolate the hardware from the software (and some of the hardware).

Power off the Mac and pull the power cord. Disconnect everything you can - keyboard, mouse, etc... Take out all RAM - the manuals are at http://support.apple.com/manuals if you are not familiar with the safety precautions and tools needed.

Then plug in only the power cord and wait a few seconds. If the Mac doesn't start up, press the power button once.

You should get three beeps if the machine is healthy.
Power it off and put the RAM back in - be sure it's seated well / pushed in completely.
Connect only the mouse and power it on holding the mouse button down (button one if there are several).
The CD should come out if the hardware is healthy.
Shut it down (you can use the mouse or connect a keyboard if needed).
Now power on with the shift key held.

At this point, if your Mac booted, it's likely everything is fine and you can use Apple's support to troubleshoot the startup issue. If anything doesn't go like I mentioned - you should take a printout of this and what your results were and post here, or seek hardware help.


Recovering lost photos on iPhone 5s after restoring from iTunes backup

In my opinion, it is something that's really hard to do (or that might even be impossible), that's why, sadly, I think that you are not likely to get your data back.

Most of the time, when you erase some data on a storing device, actually, you don't really erase it but just hide it and give to the devices using it the authorization of writing on it, that's why, in some cases, you can get your data back.

Unfortunately, in your case, that's something much more complex for several reasons.
The first one is that getting back the data in the way I mentioned above needs to have an access to the storage at a pretty low level. Apple putted some restrictions on the iOS devices and for this reason I don't see any way to gain such a low level access without doing something dangerous and not allowed by Apple such as jaillbreaking your device (and even with this I'm not even sure you could gain this access).
The second one is that since you transferred some content from your iPhone 4s to your iPhone 5s, it might be possible that the photos have been replaced by some new content (so some or even all of your photos might be missing/corrupted).
The last one — which might be the biggest one — is that the storage is managed in a pretty special way in iOS for some security reasons and although I don't know what happens exactly when you restore you device, it might be possible that iOS protects the previous content by removing some keys that were encrypting your data, making it nearly (not to say completely) impossible to get it back.


TextEdit app is displaying wide borders at bottom and right corners

The bars shown are scroll bars. Go to System Preferences app → General and under Show scroll bars: select When scrolling.

It's likely that either Always or Automatically based on mouse or trackpad option is selected, which is causing the scroll bars to appear.

With When scrolling option selected, the wide borders will no longer be shown. The scroll bars, when displayed will be narrow, translucent and will disappear moments after the scrolling is complete.