Is there any possibility to find my father's lost iPhone?

Using a Apple ID along with Find my iPhone it could have been located if it set up with a iCloud account.

If the device was not set up with an iCloud account, the only recourse is to keep calling it in the hopes some honest person will answer.

However, there is no way to track it without the Apple ID.

  Requirements

  As of January 2013, the service is supported on
  iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Mac computers running OS X 10.7.5 "Lion"
  or later. In addition to a compatible device, a free iCloud
  account is required to use Find My iPhone. Users can also track
  their Find My iPhone enabled devices through iCloud.com on Windows,
  but cannot use it the other way around to track their PC.


This can be done by installing the rEFInd boot manager. This is a free product. In order to bypass the increased security of the newer macOS operating systems, you have to implement a rather complex installation procedure. The steps are outlined below. These steps are just a outline and are not indented to be a detailed installation procedure.

Download rEFInd.
Use the Disk Utility, diskutil command or other method to create a new small (~200 MB) "MS-DOS (FAT)" formatted partition.
Install rEFInd in to this partition.
Configure rEFInd to it will appear in the Mac Startup Manager.
Configure rEFInd to be silent when it boots.
Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the option key until the Mac Startup Manager icons appear. Select rEFInd as the default operating system to boot to.
Install the Startup application which can select which operating system rEFInd should silently select for the firmware to boot.

I have found most users will read the above steps and decide to pass on using this method to boot the installed operating systems.

On my Mac, the Startup application appears on the dock as shown below.

When open, the Startup application appears as shown below.

The current version of the Startup application still requires you to manually restart to boot to the selected operating system.

The Startup application is written in Apple Script so you can view the source and easily make any desired modifications.

I suppose the Script Editor preferences could be set to allow opening the Startup application from the menu bar, as shown below.

Or, the Automator application could be used to create a service to open the Startup application. In this case, the Startup application would appear under Services in the menu bar, as shown below.


Prevent automatically appending file extension when renaming file

Go to Finder
open Finder Preferences
Uncheck "Show warning before changing an extension"

Optionally, check "Show all filename extensions" to verify that Mac did not automatically append extensions when you add your own.


Disabling the ability for my iPhone to use my iPad as a Speaker for the Phone app

On your phone go to:
Settings > Phone > Calls on other devices.

Turn it off altogether, or just for your iPad.


How to play internet radio stations in the Music app on iOS 13?

My guess is that it has something to do with your location. I'm in the USA and when I searched for "hr3" in the Music app it immediately showed that station you are looking for as a result. Maybe TuneIn only works with the Apple Music app in some countries?


Mojave: possible to disable menubar transparency?

On my MacBook Air (Early 2014) checking the box "Reduce Transparency" does the trick:

System Preferences > Accessibility > Display

It being an older Mac (non-retina) I'm wondering if it works the same on newer Macs with/without retina display.


Applescript - Getting Property of an Object Not Working

This does not work because the AppleScript support in Messages.app is broken.


The Download Preview window in the Dock - how to change sequence

Yup! Control+click on the folder on the dock, and select Sort by Date Added.


I do not believe the built-in Apple VPN client supports IKEv2 on either the Mac or iOS devices. This is because certainly on the Mac - including Mavericks 10.9.1, and I believe also iOS the VPN client is based on the open-source Racoon software which does not support IKEv2.

There is a Racoon2 see http://www.racoon2.wide.ad.jp/w/ which does support IKEv2 but that is not what Apple include.

Cisco AnyConnect client for iOS and Mac does support IKEv2.


If you are editing the file with an application like TextEdit or Xcode, you also need write permission to the folder the file is in (or en.lproj).

You can also use another editor like nano:

sudo nano /Applications/Notes.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/DefaultFonts.plist


How to reformat a time machine drive to use on a PC

Ages ago it was just 'fdisk', but now Microsoft suggests this: Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Mangement/Storage/Disk Management/Format

Ref: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-format-hard-disk-partition#create-format-hard-disk-partition=windows-7


Can I make the mouse hairpin in the terminal more visible?

There's an app available to download called Mouse Locator which will put green markers around your cursor if you press a hotkey.  That might help you but I don't know if it's still a working program under current OS X releases.


My iPhone can't text friend's Android, but my wife's iPhone can

This occurs because Apple still believes the phone number is using iPhone, but it can vary from device to device whether this impacts sending and receiving messages to that number (and how long it takes for that to resolve).

The quickest way to resolve it is for your friend to read the Apple support article Deregister iMessage. The deregister process can be done from the old iPhone (if it's still available) or online. It still may take a few hours for all Apple devices to recognize the number no longer uses iMessage, but it could take much longer without completing the deregister process.


MacBook Air and external USB 3.0 hard drive

If two Air don't power the same drive and you've tried several cables, you might need to talk to the drive manufacturer. MacBook Air can power a SuperDrive that triggers a high power mode on the USB ports, and I have seen reports that they can push well over 950 mA to burn a DVD.

Basically, it's unlikely two MAcBook are are both under-powering one hard drive and more likely the drive only asks for 500 mA and that's not enough to power the drive's controller or perhaps that drive/controller is simply out of spec.

You can refer to Apple's KB article that covers USB 3 devices getting 900 mA at 5V as a feature of the MacBook Air, so that should be plenty of power for a drive to operate.

You might need to seek service for either the Air or the drive if you can't fix things with trying other cables. The operation with other devices is nice, but in the end, if you need it to work with the Air, you'll need to work through that by repair/replacement of something.

Using the System Information tool on OS X, you should be able to determine if the USB chipset is sending any data over to the Air - whether or not it is getting enough power or even getting to the point where it can signal how much power it would like as part of the USB enumeration process.


What tool can I use to manage notes and/or bookmarks for a collection of PDF files?

You should try Mendelely, a Reference Manager with Dropbox-like sharing/syncing. It reads Comments from PDFs, but sometimes mixes them up. In my example i had saved an Article as a PDF with the Headline as the Filename, but Mendeley indexed my Comment as the Filename.

You should also take a look at Eaglefiler, as the name says more Archiv-oriented.


Why can't I see the weather information in Notification Center?

I realize that this thread is old, but there are so many issues with iOS7, that there are probably many who still haven't found a solution to this.  What worked for me: Settings > Privacy > Location Services -  Turn on Location Services (if it's not already), and also, scroll down to Weather and make sure that specific app is turned on.  After that, the text weather showed up under the date on Notification Center.  And I have my Weather app in a folder.

iPhone 4S
iOS7


Fast way to download a video from an URL

In addition to fiddling around in Mercury Browser:

I found a collection of ugly-looking spammy apps: Video Downloader. I tried the purple one by Appsneon, it seems to work fine.

It shows a download button on iOS video player overlay, when browsing through the app. This is more convenient than Mercury Browser's approach. I wish mainstream browsers would offer this option as well.


Mac mini loses wifi when an ubuntu computer is on the same network

Try locking down the MAC address into the router to a specific IP address.
MAC address is media access controller not the mac mini.
The router will dhcp the same IP each time you connect.


Resizing preview pane in Finder column view

Finder's column view can be a painful experience, which is why I seldom use it. I find if I resize the window by the bottom right corner (like all us old-timers grew up doing), the preview is on a one-way trip to thumbnail land. If you increase the window size, you get extra columns while the preview stays the same size. But if you then decrease the window size, it's the poor old preview that bears the brunt and shrinks in size. What a crazy state of affairs.

A far easier way of previewing files is to just use Quick Look… Select one of the files and press spacebar. You can reposition and resize the preview to your heart's content, and the preview window updates as you navigate through your files.

If you really want to use column view to preview files in the same window, here's how you can resize the preview:

Resize the window down until you can only see the desired number of columns (minus the width of the preview column).
Scroll to the far right so you can see the preview again.
Hover the cursor over the right edge of the window until you see the column resizing icon. It has a vertical line in the middle and two arrows either side…

You need to approach the edge of the window from the left. If you approach from the right, you'll get the window resizing icon instead (two arrows with no dividing line).
Once you see the correct cursor, click and drag to the right to resize the preview column, thus enlarging the preview image.

It's not pretty but it works. (Hint: Use Quick Look instead!)

Oh and by the way, we'll be getting another option to preview files in macOS Mojave called Gallery View. It looks like it replaces Cover Flow. While it takes away the list of file names, it does add a metadata panel for the selected file which could be quite a useful little feature.


Restoring Preferences after downgrade from El Capitan to Yosemite

OS X stores application preferences in a few locations

Restore the files and folders from these locations in your backup:
    /Users/username/Library/Preferences
    /Users/username/Library/Application Support
    /Users/username/Library/Containers

To the corresponding locations for your new user account.
No guarantee though that the plist files from the newer OS X system version will work in the older one though. Try it.


Is there a way to hide malicious google results in Mac?

The Safari web browser has extensions you can load that will warn you about dangerous websites. The one I use is called URL Advisor. Another one is SafeSurf. If you go to "Safari Extensions" under the Safari menu item you can get a list of available extensions.

I don't know for sure about Google Chrome or Firefox but if extensions exist for Safari I feel confident they exist for other browsers as well.


You shouldn't need System Events just to display a dialog, nor can you strictly speaking 'activate' it...
try just

#!/bin/bash
osascript <<EOD
  tell me to display dialog "Unauthorized Login" buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with icon caution with title "WARNING!"
EOD

echo "$(date) LogIn Alert" >> ~/Develop/login.log

I can't really test it as I'm totally clueless on cron/bash/osascript itself, but that would be all you'd need for a regular Applescript to display a dialog.

If that doesn't work, then the next step would be to set it up in Automator, as an Application, then set to launch at login.


This is to mirror a window to an IOS device, perhaps this may help you?

http://xscopeapp.com/guide


Can I avoid adding "security" questions?

Should you want to continue to use Apple services such as the App Store and iTunes then the questions will need to be answered, this prompt will appear periodically until you do so for information this prompt is usually triggered by an OS upgrade or on occasion when Apple changes the terms and conditions in the App, iTunes or iBooks stores.


Is there a way to upload a video from my iPhone to Google+?

No, there's no way to do that yet. Using external apps won't help either since Google has not released a full API yet with those functions so far.


How to keep music in iCloud but not downloaded?

On your iPad, go to Settings → General → Storage & iCloud Usage → Manage Storage → Music.

From there, you can either Edit or directly swipe left on any artist to delete all their songs. If you just want to delete individual albums or songs, you can drill down by tapping an artist or album, respectively, then swipe left to delete each item one by one.

If you want to go thermonuclear, you can simply swipe left on All Songs. Do note that this operation takes some time to complete, up to several minutes. So just let iOS do its work, and soon enough you should have your storage back.

Once you’re done, in order to keep songs from being downloaded in the future, go back to Settings → iTunes & App Store, then toggle Music Off under AUTOMATIC DOWNLOADS.


How to proper setting root mysql password

I got the problem, basically almost all the solution you can find around are outdated.
With mysql 8.0.15 you have to follow this guide
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/resetting-permissions.html

I recommend to read the whole page, but basically you have to use

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'MyNewPass';

NOTE Using the method UPDATE mysql.user SET authentication_string.. will lock you out from your own mysql server (you won't solve even with mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables).
If you end up locked out, I guess the only hope (I didn't test it) is to stop mysqld and relaunch mysqld manually using --init-file="myinitfile" where myinitfile is a plain text file containing the ALTER USER instruction I mentioned before (I'm not sure it is even doable if you have installed mysql using brew, but note I'm new to macOS). Mine was a fresh installation, so I've just deleted the whole /usr/local/var/mysql directory and reinstalled mysql.


Auto-mount of the contained disk-image, when the external disk is mounted

You can create a launchd LaunchDaemon definition with the key “StartOnMount” set to true. This will allow you to have your own script run whenever something is mounted.

Your own script should then just check if “Backup” is mounted without “TimeMachine” being mounted - and if so, mount “TimeMachine”.

You can use the “mount” command to get information on the currently mounted file systems.


I am only guessing here, as my G4 quicksilver can't run OS X 10.8, but the confil file may require SMB signing and NTLM v2, try lowering the authentication level, and turning off SMB signing and let me know if that resolves your issue. In previous versions it was smb.conf

You may want to also try:
http://eduo.info/apps/smbup

http://jsddevelopment.blogspot.com.es/2012/06/wdtv-live-and-samba.html


How to selectively sync playlists from iCloud to iPhone

You cannot disable a playlist from showing up while still using iCloud Music Library.

You can, however, control which playlists are downloaded by clicking the (•••) and changing wether it keeps songs offline.


Getting the First Cell NOT Containing Certain Text in Numbers

As it turns out, I've figured it out. It did require Applescript. What I did was loop through the rows and selected the values in the row where "not" was not present in column B. Here's the Applescript I used via Automator:

on run {input, parameters}

    tell application "Numbers"
        tell table "Calculator 1" of sheet 2 of document of front window
            set aRange to "A2:A22"
            set bRange to "B2:B22"
            set aRows to the rows of range aRange
            set bRows to the rows of range bRange

            set correctRow to -1
            set correctCol to -1

            repeat with i from 1 to count of bRows
                set aCell to "A" & (i + 1)
                set bCell to "B" & (i + 1)

                if value of (cell bCell) is not "not" then
                    set correctRow to value of (cell aCell)
                    set correctCol to value of (cell bCell)
                end if
            end repeat

            set the value of (cell "C2") to correctRow
            set the value of (cell "C4") to correctCol
        end tell

        display dialog "Updated!"
    end tell

    return input
end run

Keep in mind that the cells I used are specific to my spreadsheet, but generally this method could be applied for any 2D MATCH() function.

Create a table has the name of the each row in each row of the header column, and use the desired MATCH() function per row in this way (see the picture of the table in my question).
Use this Applescript to loop through the MATCH() functions and find the correct row and column. Change "C2" to whichever cell will be your Correct Row and "C4" to whichever cell will be your Correct Column.
Use the INDEX() function to get the value of the cell and put it into another cell, using the coordinates the Applescript calculated for you.


2015 Macbook Pro display goes blank but machine continues to run and fans continue to go even if I close lid

You've already reset the System Management Controller and NVRAM (both logical first steps), but there's no mention of you testing the MBP in Safe Mode or of testing your hardware.

Next I would probably start with testing to see if this behaviour is replicated when booted into Safe Mode and if the issue persists then running Apple Diagnostics.

Boot into Safe Mode

Follow these steps to boot your Mac into Safe Mode:

Fully shut down your MBP
Restart your MBP
Immediately press the Shift key and keep it down
Let go of the Shift key when you see the login window (NOTE: If you have FileVault enabled you may need to log in twice).
Take a note of what happens (i.e. does your MBP still behave the same way, etc)
Exit Safe Mode by restarting your MBP as normal
Test again when booted normally

If the problem doesn't occur while booted into Safe Mode, let me know and we'll go from there.

If the problem persists, proceed with running Apple Diagnostics.

Run Apple Diagnostics

Follow the steps below to run Apple Diagnostics:

Fully shut down your MBP
Restart your MBP
Immediately press the D key and keep it down until you see the Diagnostics screen appear
Wait for Diagnostics to finish (this typically only takes a few minutes)
Once complete, one of two things will appear on the screen:

a No issues found message
a brief description of any errors found plus further instructions

If the diagnostics test does find errors, take a note of what they are

Note: If pressing and holding the D key at Step 3 doesn't work, start again at Step 1 and, at Step 3 press and hold both the OptionD keys instead. This will try and run diagnostics from the internet instead, so you will need to allow more time for it to complete.

Regardless, take a note of what happens and let me know how you went.


How to delete one specific file permanently in OS X Yosemite?

From what you said in your question, I'm assuming the file you want to delete is already in the Trash.

In Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/) type the rm command followed by a space.
Click the Trash Dock Tile to open a Finder window to the Trash. (Note that if the target file is not in the Trash just bring up the target file in Finder.)
Drag and drop the target file from the Trash (or whatever Finder window it's in) onto the Terminal window. This will add the fully qualified pathname of the file to be deleted to the rm command.
Example: rm /Users/me/.Trash/googlechrome.dmg
Press enter and the file should now deleted.

For additional options to the rm command have a look at: OS X Man Pages for rm

If the target is a folder use rm -dr ... where ... is the pathname of the folder to be deleted.


Your default shell is the brew-installed zsh. You probably removed the folder containing zsh and some other important files/folders/libraries.

In the preferences of Terminal (or System Preferences > Users & Groups > ctrl-click user_name > Advanced Options... > login shell | as far as I remember you have to reboot to make this work) set the default shell back to /bin/bash. Then relaunch Terminal and uninstall brew and reinstall it afterwards. You may have to uninstall brew manually by deleting some folders in /usr/local/ if you deleted too many files and folders previously ("I accidentally deleted some files from my Applications directory. I don't recall exactly what but some of them included the Cellar directory.").

In a second step reinstall brew and brew installed execs.


Create a new iTunes column for "Play count/skip count ratio"?

The columns and metadata that iTunes supports is hard coded unfortunately. There's no way to add a custom field or column to the browser.

You might be able to get a similar effect with some combination of smart playlists and/or some external scripting, but there's nothing built in that will do what you need.


The only free (albeit not open source) Mac OS GUI compression utility I'm aware of is B1. It does support password protecting archives, although not encrypting them.

Two commercial applications that do support encrypted archives are:

Winzip
StuffIt

That said, if you're happy using the command line, the zip utility provided with Mac OS can do password-based encryption (look at the -P option).


What's a more graceful way to hide private information during a live demo

You could hit Command + F1 which toggles display mirroring. Then use the laptop screen  to do the copy and paste. That way the users still see your main desktop, while you work on your laptop screen.


A fast way to get back to the top from anywhere in the list is to tap the status bar above the list. This works in many places throughout iOS, like Safari, Notes, etc.

The only fast way to the bottom, though, is to swipe as fast as you can!


Moving the selection to the beginning of the line

Once you grasp the pattern, it's quite easy...

To move to the next/last letter -  →  or  ←
To move to the next/last word -  Opt ⌥   →  or  Opt ⌥   ←
To move to the beginning/end of a line -  Cmd ⌘   ←  or  Cmd ⌘   →

Hold  Shift ⇧  whilst doing any of these & it will add to your current selection if you are moving away from your original insertion point, otherwise it will remove...
...with the exception of  Cmd ⌘ , which will always add.

As you've discovered, all these functions use your original cursor point, not the beginning/end of your current selection. That would perhaps require a little mind-reading, to know which end you wanted to work from ;-)

For your specific situation, if you start with  Shift ⇧  held, then  Cmd ⌘   → , then just  →  - 'to end of line plus one character'
Alternatively, holding  Shift ⇧ , then  ↓  followed by a number of  Opt ⌥   ←  would be quicker than just  ←  - 'to middle of line below minus several words, one at a time'


How do I play a YouTube video in the background on my iPad?

Try the following steps :

1: Start the video from YouTube whilst in Safari.

2: Hit Home key once. You'll exit Safari and playback will stop.

3: Double-tap Home key to bring up the app-switcher. Slide to the right to bring up background audio controls. The icon on the right side will show whichever program you last used with background audio: Safari.

4: Press Play. Youtube audio will resume playback.


How to tell Siri > when I am done talking, eg, over steady background noise?

If you press and hold the Home button down and keep it down the whole time you are asking Siri the question, letting go of the Home button will signify "end of question." It takes a little getting used to but it works great. This is not exactly what you asked for but it solves your problem.


Mysteriously, a rectangle has appeared in the middle of the screen. How to get rid of it?

A floating black rectangle appeared on my Mac screen after upgrade to High Sierra operating system. It is due to an Accessibility option and can be removed as follows:

System Preferences > Accessibility > Zoom > Options > Show preview rectangle when zoomed out

I do not know how it appeared, but I am glad that it is gone.


Whilst at the top of your feed, pull down so you see the News Feed button. Tap that and you can select from All Friends, Most Recent. Lots of other choices are available if you expand the list by tapping the downward facing arrow.


It depends:

TimeMachine on WiFi

TimeMachine does not backup if heavy traffic is going over the Network, there is something like Quality of Service running in the Background which throttles the upload speed to you TimeCapsule.
Also your WiFi Connection could be bad, as it was in my case. I did not recognise the bad connection with surfing (less upload and general only 8Mbit/s Speed) but 1,5GB to upload over a bad connection >1Mbit/s would take about 3 hours.

TimeMachine on USB

Is your drive full? Disks can operate in a performant way up to 80% of capacity, the they get significant slower.

Is you drive old or defect? Sometimes drives are doing a lot of seeking and old drive have a high seek error rate, this will slowdown writing (especially at a >85% full disk an small files)

Are the files small? Many small Files takes longer to get sorted and processed my the Time Machine.

Are you using USB3? Make sure the drive is away from you Macbook, this helps sometimes with old USB3 Chipsets on external HDD enclosures.

General Suggestions:

Turn on an Off you Mac
Make sure Hardware is okay (HDD test)
Make sure connection to TimeMachine is good
Type in Terminal: killall mdworker
Try Again ;)

Apples Suggestions:

Slow Time Machine

Try these suggestions if Time Machine is slow.
The first time you use Time Machine, set it up in the evening so that the initial backup can be done overnight.

If your backup disk is a Time Capsule, leave your Mac in the same room as the Time Capsule for the initial backup, or use an Ethernet cable to connect your Mac to one of the Ethernet ports on the Time Capsule.

Virus scanning software can make Time Machine backups very slow. If you use Norton AntiVirus or a similar product, try to exclude your backup disk from automatic scanning. Also make sure you are running the latest version of the virus scanning software.
 Exported from Apple Support Site

OS X Yosemite: If Time Machine remains in the “preparing” stage

After the initial backup, Time Machine backs up only files and folders that have changed since your last backup. Time Machine displays a “Preparing...” message while it compares your current files and folders to those in the most recent backup.
The length of preparation time Time Machine requires depends on the amount of information on your Mac, the size of the backup, and the speed of the connection between your Mac and the backup disk.

The preparation stage can also take longer if:
The previous Time Machine backup was interrupted.
The Mac wasn’t shut down properly.
A disk was disconnected from your computer before being ejected.
A software update was recently installed.

You used your Mac for several days without performing a backup. This can happen if the backup disk was disconnected.

Antivirus software can also cause backups to require more time. Make sure your Time Machine backup folder, located on the backup disk and named “Backups.backupdb,” is excluded from virus scanning. Exported from this Apple Support Page

Last but brutal tip:

Reformat the TimeCapsule or the TimeMachine drive and make a new initial Backup over Ethernet or USB. And restart you Macbook, sometimes the mdworker is slowing down.


relocating documents folder of ios applications

You can't access other folders beyond the sandbox from App Store applications.

There is a library in Cydia called Unbox that allows you to access the filesystem from a sandboxed application but you will need to create your own app to achieve this as it is NOT A TWEAK.

For Information, Sandboxing is Apple's security feature preventing App Store applications from accessing the whole filesystem and also limiting what API's can be used. Some private API's can, others will simply crash if run in the Sandbox.


Edit Font Metadata so FontBook will put it in English smart collection?

With the help of Rob from Fontstruct.com, I figured it out.

The English smart collection depends on having a certain set of characters.

There are various "official" standards that tell people what characters have to be included in a font for what kind of language support, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1, but there's no single standard that absolutely every font foundry and font-vending website uses. I read a complaint that two foundries producing two fonts with the same set of glyphs can claim wildly different language support.

But there didn't seem to be an easy way (like a spreadsheet) of finding out the minimum number of characters needed for English support.

There are websites like FontDrop! https://fontdrop.info/  and tools built into font-designing software into which you can drop a font file and see what languages are supported, but you have to drill down to find out how those tools are determining language support. FontBook is more lax than FontDrop! about when it thinks there's English support, i.e., some fonts that don't show English support at Fontdrop! are listed by FontBook as having English language support.

Anyway, what I did is find one of my 3rd party fonts that FontBook included in its English smart collection that also had relatively few glyphs. This font has all the characters in Unicode's "Basic Latin" set plus Ä, Å, ä, å, Ö, ö and ¨ (that's A/a with a diaresis and circle, O/o with a diaresis, plus the diaresis itself). On fontdrop.info, this font shows as having only Zulu language support, but in FontBook it has more, including Cornish, English, Indonesian, Malay, Somali, Swahili and a bunch of others I've never heard of (Asu, Bemba, Bena, Chiga, Congo Swahili, Gusii, Kalenjin, Kinyarwanda, Luo, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Nyankole, Oromo, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sangu, Shambala, Shona, Soga,Taita, Teso, Vunjo).

I took one of my own custom fonts, which is meant to have only a few glyphs, and added dummy glyphs as needed for everything in Basic Latin + the diaresis (figuring that the other characters might not be needed if I had the diaresis) and voilà - the font appears in FontBook's English smart collection and can be used to annotate things in Preview.

To make life complicated, I've got another 3rd party font that FontBook put into the English smart collection that has only the 26 letters (caps and lowercase), numbers and an asterisk, but if you make a custom font that has everything in Basic Latin and nothing else (so the letters, numbers and an asterisk plus a bunch of other stuff), FontBook says the only language supported is Zulu - go figure.

I made a test font that had just upper and lower case letters, numbers and an asterisk and FontBook put my test font into the English smart collection - but as I said, a test font with everything in Basic Latin, which actually has more characters, didn't go into the smart collection.

Of course, Apple could make life simpler and make Preview able to "show all fonts" the way every other Mac app can, but...

BTW, if anyone knows of a site that shows what characters are needed for what language support, I'd love to know about it.


This is a tough question even for law enforcement. There's some software out there that claims to do this, try Google. You can also jailbreak older devices but you don't say what kind of iPad you have.

http://www.redsn0w.us/2010/03/download-direct-links-jailbreak-guides.html

Try recovery mode if you don't have iTunes, at least you can use the iPad after.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1212


If the user chooses to include your app in their iCloud backup, then all the files which the app makes available for backup are backed up, such as files in the app container's Documents folder. Store your database here for it to be backed up.


Often "hiding a partition" is simply setting them to not mount at boot. Have you looked in /etc/fstab for a noauto line that prevents one of the Volume UUID from mounting in the default manner?

You should be able to read all the partition, volume and filesystem information in terminal or Disk Utility (both of which are in the Utility menu of the install app)

diskutil list, diskutil info disk0, and diskutil info disk0s2 should get you started.  diskutil will list all the commands if you just run it without any commands listed.

Of course, if the utility is using non-standard drivers or encrypting/obfuscating things you will have a harder time getting into the drive without more detailed information on how that specific utility did it's work. If diskutil can't see the partition then it's not actually hidden but gone. Tools like that run the risk of you using the space that is marked as free unless they do a good job of modifying the size of the device and hacking the partition table data.

In response to your edit - if the partition tables are changed to be non-standard you can undo the damage by being very good with writing hex values using dd  - if you get the it right, you can reverse the changes that were made to alter the file system definition data. Using gparted or another tool that is built for the task would sure be safer and probably easier.


Grey screen when booting from original disk, doing Internet recovery or booting from High Sierra boot disk

The flashing question mark means that it could not find a volume to boot from. This indicates either that the volume is corrupt, disk not working or an error in the SATA controller that talks to the disk (or all of the above). The grey screen I believe comes from the stuck storage device enumeration right before the OS X Utilities window should show.

I've encountered the exact same behaviour on a MacBook Pro of similar age and it in my case it turned out to be a failure on the internal hard drive controller. I'd suggest you open it up and disconnect the hard drive, then try starting from Internet Recovery, the diagnostics and running from an external storage (such as live CD or USB stick). It may be that only your hard drive failed so a drive replacement could be a complete fix.

It is quite easy to open the computer and temporarily disconnect the drive, see the detailed procedure at iFixit


How do I get "get-iplayer" to use an already installed ffmpeg?

I would reccomend installing Homebrew and running brew install ffmpeg. That way you can delete the other one, because Homebrew installs it in /usr/local/bin so you won't have to worry about path issues.

To install from the source you've already got:
From this page:

cd ~/Downloads/ffmpeg to go to the FFMPEG directory

./configure along with your needed flags. You probably won't need anything additionally for what you're doing.

make and then sudo make install. Be sure to type your admin password.


This is very tricky. From 10.6.6 (when Apple released the Mac App Store), the App Store has been pretty deeply built in to the system. You can see this by the fact that if you click on the  in your Menu Bar, there is an option to launch the App Store from there.

In later versions of OS X it is even more deeply embedded as software updates for the OS are downloaded through the App Store. In order to completely remove all trace of the App Store and still have a stable system that won't crash or kernel panic, you would have to dig in to some of the Apple Frameworks and binaries to remove references for the App Store.


Try this...

tell application "iTunes"
    set iSel to selection

    set n to 1

    repeat with trk in iSel
        set track number of trk to n
        set n to n + 1
    end repeat
end tell


How do I find out which app uses which distribution certificate?

I had to work this exact same thing out today. I had multiple distribution certificates that had the same name and needed to figure out which apps were using which certificates. Apple really should make it more obvious, but once you know where to look, it's pretty easy to work it out. A bit convoluted, admittedly...

The following instructions require you to use your browser's inspection tool. I've written them for Chrome but the instructions are nearly identical for IE/Firefox/etc.

Sign in to Apple Developer
Click Certificates, IDs & Profiles in the menu
Make sure that you are viewing "Certificates"
Click a distribution certificate and take note of the URL. The last part of the URL is the certificate's ID. Make note of it.

https://developer.apple.com/account/resources/certificates/download/12345ABCDE
Certificate ID = 12345ABCDE

Click "< All Certificates" to return to the main list
Click "Profiles" to view your app profiles
Click an app to load it's profile info and then click the "Edit" button
Right-click the name of the certificate that is selected (the one the profile is set to use) and click "Inspect"
You will see the certificate ID for that app in the source code:

    <input type="radio" name="certificateIds" id="12345ABCDE" value="12345ABCDE" checked="">

            Certificate Name Here
            Jul 15, 2020

If you have a large number of apps then this is going to be a lot of work. Given that Expo can pull your app list and show the certificates they're using, there's clearly some type of API that can retrieve the information. More than likely it's a component of fastlane, but I haven't dug too deep into which tool it could be.


What is the purpose of the process RelayUploader in macOS?

This isn't a proper answer, just some things you may want to try:

RelayUploader (aka Relay.Uploader) seems to be associated with a company called TechSmith... do you have any of their apps?
If you have a malware of virus scanner, you should run a scan on it.
Have you looked at the info available in Activity Monitor? (If not, open Activity Monitor, select the process from the list, then click the i icon in the Activity Monitor dialog). What does it say in the Open Files and Ports tab? Do you recognize any of these files?


Can OS X be configured to avoid seeing a WiFi log in window when joining some networks?

According to this thread, you just need to rename the following file:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Captive Network Assistant.app

to something else and it will not show up anymore.


kernel_task uses up over 50% cpu usage until I open Activity Monitor

Maybe you could get a CPU monitor to check the status beside the Activity Monitor. This way you could tell if its really tied to activity monitor. I have an app called  CPU LED which shows a string of colors indicating CPU usage but there are several in addition to this. Doing an app store search on CPU Monitor brings up about 50 hits. You can scan through these to find one that suits your needs. Then if it is tied to Activity Monitor you could download a mac virus checker with a free trial period and run it on your machine.


Is there a way to add all of the recipients of an email to a group/folder in contacts from Mail?

Perhaps an AppleScript like this one can help. Note that I'm not really proficient in AppleScript, so I'm sure this can be improved, but no one has answered so far.

  tell application "Mail"
    set theSelection to selection
    set theMessage to item 1 of theSelection
    set theSubject to subject of theMessage
    tell application "Address Book"
        set theGroup to make new group with properties {name:theSubject}
    end tell
    set theRecipients to to recipients of item 1 of theMessage
    repeat with a from 1 to count theRecipients
        set theRecipient to item a of theRecipients
        tell application "Address Book"
            set theName to name of theRecipient
            tell application "Mail" to set theAddress to address of theRecipient
            set thePerson to make new person with properties {first name:name of theRecipient}
            make new email at end of emails of thePerson with properties {value:theAddress}
            add thePerson to theGroup
        end tell
    end repeat
    set theRecipients to cc recipients of item 1 of theMessage
    repeat with a from 1 to count theRecipients
        set theRecipient to item a of theRecipients
        tell application "Address Book"
            set theName to name of theRecipient
            tell application "Mail" to set theAddress to address of theRecipient
            set thePerson to make new person with properties {first name:name of theRecipient}
            make new email at end of emails of thePerson with properties {value:theAddress}
            add thePerson to theGroup
        end tell
    end repeat
    tell application "Address Book" to save
  end tell


The OS X disk utility checks the HFS+ volume header, and its backup header (located in the last block of the disk). If both match, then the rest of the disk is assumed to be consistent. That's along the lines of quick fsck(8) check. Another quick check for journal consistency is performed if you've set up journaling, and if that also checks ok, then the rest is skipped.

You can always run fsck manually, or - http://www.newosxbook.com/ has a tool called HFSleuth which - while directed at programmer/hacker types - can allow you to do a more thorough check.


sold an iphone 5s, buyer is saying I didn't wipe and needs my 4 digit passcode

He can wipe it without your passcode, provided it is not locked to your iCloud account, which by the sounds of it, it's not.

This can be done by connecting the phone to iTunes and then putting it in recovery mode. Quoting from Apple website page here.

Connect device to iTunes.
Put in recovery mode: Press and hold the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons at the same time. Don't release when you see the Apple logo. Keep holding both buttons until you see the recovery mode screen.
When you see the option to Restore or Update, choose Restore.

iTunes will download software for the device. If it takes more than 15 minutes, your device will exit recovery mode and you'll need to repeat steps 2 and 3.

Once done, the device can be set up and used as normal.


What is the case screw length and thread pitch for the 2010 MacBook 13" Model 7,1?

You didn't mention which screw you lost.  It's important to know because there are a number of different screws specific to that model:

3 mm Phillips #0. (Head: 2.75 mm. dia.)
4 mm Phillips #0.  (Head: 2.75mm dia.)
6.25 mm Phillips #000. (Head: 4 mm. dia. x .5mm thick)
3.25 mm Phillips #000. (Head: 4 mm. dia. x 4mm thick)
11 mm Phillips #00, with Shank (2.2mm dia. x 2 mm len.) (Head: 3.2 mm. dia. x .5mm thick)
.25 mm Phillips #00, with Shank (2mm dia. x 3.75 mm len.) (Head: 3.2 mm. dia. x .5mm thick)
5.2 mm Phillips #00, with Shank (2.3mm dia. x 3.5 mm len.) (Head: 3.2 mm. dia. x .5mm thick)
11 mm Phillips#00 in the middle of the case. (Head: 5mm dia. x .75mm thick)
14.5 mm Phillips #00 (Head: 5mm dia. x .75mm thick)

Source:  ifixit.com

Your best bet is to browse through the repair guides on iFixit, identify the screw that you are missing then search for it online.  However, if it's just one screw, you will probably be just fine.


Retrieving opened PDF file(s) from Safari's temporary files

Preview stores the temporary files (the ones which are directly opened from within Safari without downloading) within sub-directories in /private/var/folders directory.

To find the one you are after, run the following command in Terminal:

sudo find /private/var/folders -type f -name *.pdf -print 2>/dev/null

The path for all the temporarily cached PDF file(s) is displayed. If you see the file you are after, you can simply open it from the displayed path or copy it to a suitable location.


What text editor under OS X can close current window when you press ESC key?

Emacs allows you to override shortcuts keys.

Add this line to your .emacs file (located in your home directory) :

(global-set-key (kbd "<escape>") 'save-buffers-kill-emacs)


I have this problem happen occasionally with many of my audio "gadgets".  I generally follow troubleshooting steps in this order and have always gotten it working again.

Step one is plugging/un-plugging headphones.  This almost always corrects it (but apparently it has not in your case).

Step two is power-cycling the device.  For an iPhone, I would recommend resetting it by holding down both the sleep/wake and home buttons until you see the Apple logo.

Step three is carefully checking the port for damage, or an object that might have become lodged in there.  And if it's not fixed by this point...

Step four is getting it serviced by the manufacturer.  Sometimes problems are simply beyond our ability to fix them ourselves.


OSX and DHCP, forcing the local system to release a DHCP address

I find that changing the value of DHCP Client ID will sometimes generate a new DHCP address when rebooting the Mac and/or router will not.


How can I find out which Automator folder actions are attached to a folder?

As an alternative, this one-line snippet of AppleScript will return all folders with folder actions applied them:

tell application "System Events" to get the path of every folder action
    --> {"/Users/CK/Scripts/AppleScript/scripts", "/Users/CK/Downloads", ...}

This one might be handy too, because it lists the actual path to the scripts or Automator workflows monitoring each of your folders...

tell application "System Events" to get the POSIX path of every script of ¬
        (every folder action where class of its scripts contains script)

...or a specific folder:

tell application "System Events" to return the POSIX path of every script of ¬
        (every folder action where its path contains "/Users/CK/Desktop" and ¬
        enabled of scripts contains true)


Not sure whether Snow Leopard Quick Time will work if you restore it on Lion, since I don't have that version to restore.

However, there are a few freeware utilities that can clip videos:

According to this Super User thread, VLC can both cut clips of video without transcoding and also transcode entire streams/files into different formats (see the VLC wiki).
How-to Geek has a guide that shows how to quickly cut clips from videos with Avidemux.
SimpleMovieX has a free (unlimited) trial that can also do the trick. The main downside is that the trial version is slower than the paid version.
MPEG Streamclip is another freeware tool that provides similar functionality.

One of these utilities may provide the functionality that you're looking for.


What user info does Apple disclose to third party app developers, once a user purchases an app?

The short answer is it depends.
It depends on what the App developer claims it needs to collect.  Apple doesn't sell your data nor will it give out data "willy nilly."  But if a product/service that you want requires the sharing of data, Apple will share it.
From Apple's Legal page concerning Privacy:

Disclosure to Third Parties
At times Apple may provide third parties with certain personal information to provide or improve our products and services, including to deliver products at your request, or to help Apple market to consumers. When we do, we require those third parties to handle it in accordance with relevant laws. Apple does not sell personal information, and personal information will never be shared with third parties for their marketing purposes. For example, when you purchase and activate your iPhone, you authorize Apple and your carrier to exchange the information you provide during the activation process to carry out service, including information about your device. If you are approved for service, your account will be governed by Apple and your carrier’s respective privacy policies.

To put this another way - Apple will share what is necessary to provide you with the product/service you're requesting.  If there is a 3rd party, your private info they have will be governed by their privacy policy.
As for your data with respect to individual apps, what gets shared depends on what the App itself is requesting.  However, it's Apple's policy that you be made aware of what personal info the app  requires

App guidelines
On the App Store, Apple requires app developers to adhere by specific guidelines designed to protect user privacy and security. Apple also requires them to provide a privacy policy that you can review. When Apple becomes aware of an app that violates our guidelines, the developer must address the issue or the app will be removed from the App Store. Apps go through a review process before becoming available on the App Store.

(Emphasis mine)
In short, the App you purchase can obtain/use any/all the information you described in your question. However, they must make you aware of it.  They may not need nor do you want an App to have have access to PayPal addresses, however, if the App says they collect it, they can.  If they do collect it and don't tell you that would be a violation of Apple's Privacy Policy.
On the other side of that coin, your data that they collected (in accordance with Apple's policies) are now governed by their privacy policy.  So, if on the App store, they say that they collect your personal information like a Social Security number, and then turn around and sell it, they may be well within their rights to do so if that's what it says in their policy.
Bottom Line
Before purchasing/installing an app, check to see what info the app collects.  Many people marvel at how many free apps there are on the App store not realizing the hidden cost - their privacy.  App developers want to get paid for their work and if they're not charging you anything up front or have in-app purchases, the app isn't the product they're selling - you are.


Can I pay for my Netflix subscription using iTunes credit?

According to this Bloomberg article:

  Netflix Inc. (NFLX) is deepening its ties with Apple Inc. (AAPL) by
  allowing owners of Apple TV set-top boxes to sign up for the
  video-streaming service directly and pay through their iTunes
  accounts.

More details and support links can be found on Netflix's iTunes billing page.

Finally, according to the current US iTunes terms and conditions:

  When making purchases, content credits are used first, followed by
  Gift Certificate, iTunes Card, or Allowance Account credits; your
  credit card or PayPal account is then charged for any remaining
  balance.

While the current T&C doesn't directly mention the Netflix subscription situation., the iTunes Card ("credit") comes before the credit card or PayPal account. However, since Apple also has your credit card information, as this Fast Company article notes, your credit card might actually be used to pay for your Netflix subscription instead of the iTunes credits.


Mac silencing consuming / stealing notifications from my iPhone / Apple Watch

This might blow a lot of people's minds. After spending hours trying to figure this out with no answers online, here's the answer I figured out.

The problem is that Calendar notifications are by default configured to be "Alerts" rather than banners. When you have a notification set to an "Alert" the device you currently have open (in the order of Mac > Watch > Phone) will steal the Alert from your other devices and you will never be notified because it showed up on your Mac. Thus, the trick is to set the Calendar notifications to be Banners rather than Alerts. In fact, you should set all of your notifications for all apps to be Banners because the Alert style breaks the whole purpose of your Apple Watch. The whole point of the Apple Watch is that it's on your body and lets you know when you need to notified. But if you have any notifications set to Alert rather than Banner style, your notifications will be stolen away from your Watch by your Mac.

I'm puzzled by the lack of documentation and information on this subject from Apple.


Installing a Lion Vm within Mountain Lion

OK, having had a good play the following options are possible with Parallels:

From the Recovery Partition on your machine, however this only works from the current one, not any other attached ones, so if you are booted into ML, you can only use the ML recovery partition - so no go for Lion
From original Media, in this case an official USB stick as it was not available on DVD, I didn't have one, so no good for me (note that hand made ones will not work, neither will if you created a bootable partition
From a Disk Image file.  As with option 2. above, creating a bootable DVD/USB Stick/partition on an drive etc will not work if you have extracted the image file to create one.  You need the actual DMG file.  If you have the original App Store download, the easiest way to get this is is to rick click and Show Package Contents, then find the InstallESD.dmg file and make a copy of it.

Using the file from method 3. will allow you to use the new VM Wizard to create the Lion VM


Junk mail disabled but still filtering on Maverick

One at the time.
Your web mail (the Google web site)

Use settings there to show or not the Spam folder in Google mail.
Google (gmail) said: messages that have been in Spam more than 30 days will be automatically deleted!!

Now you can show or not on your Computer (by selecting or not the SHOW in IMAP)

On your computer:
After you have disabled the show in IMAP in gmail settings, restart your computer's email (Mail.app) program, and the Spam/Junk Folder will be gone.

The next is in Disable the Junk mail filtering on your computer that is done here.

Remember the Gmail (web) will be still filtering according to your junk mail settings there.


This is just a precautionary measure, for the case if something goes wrong. If the update runs w/o any troubles (which should be the case) you don't need to reinstall all your files.

I've just configured time machine before updating my mac, and in that way you are on the safe side.


How to wipe an iMac that can't be turned on?

Well, if you've totally written off the Mac, including the hard drive, why not just destroy it?

Hammer etc

I mean, literally destroy it such as taking a hammer to it in the back yard. Then you can just remove the hard drive and destroy that as well. You may want to lay down a sheet or something first, and be sure to wear safety glasses, but this will do the trick.

External enclosure

Another advantage of the 'hammer' approach is the option of destroying the outer shell and removing the hard drive and continuing to use it by inserting it inside an appropriate external enclosure.

Bath

If you're not keen on the above approach, another option is to fill a bath tub with enough hot water to submerge your iMac. Be sure to mix two (or more) cups of salt in it and place the iMac in it overnight. Then you can just throw it away the next day.

Magnet

In terms of whether using a magnet in real life to scramble your data is doable, you would need a sufficiently strong magnet to achieve the result you want. Ideally you would have to get a hold of a Neodymium magnet, as this will have the strong magnetic fields necessary to erase or scramble the data.


Boot from Recovery (hold Command ⌘+R on startup), open Disk Utility and retry your partition deletion operation.

Side note, for partitions on the boot drive, it's usually best (if not required) to use Recovery.

EDIT:

To remove the 24.22 GB Ubuntu partition, try the following command after unlocking the CoreStorage group with diskutil cs unlockVolume (backups are always recommended):

diskutil cs revert 32D2E33F-8D67-4B7F-8CF5-ADFCB1C01C74

In theory, the above command should revert the partition "Macintosh HD" to a regular partition (sans CoreStorage and encryption). Then:

diskutil eraseVolume /dev/disk0s4

should remove the Ubuntu partition.

To merge the partitions, open Disk Utility from Recovery, select the ex-Ubuntu partition and click - underneath the pie chart. This should remove the ex-Ubuntu partition and merge it with your Macintosh HD primary partition.


Is there a Google Calendar Mac Desktop App?

Yes, the built-in Calendar app lets you add them.

For your Mac:

On your computer, open Calendar
In the top left corner of your screen, click Calendar > Preferences.
Click the Accounts tab. On the left side of the Accounts tab, click +.
Select Google > Continue.
Enter your Gmail address, password, and verification code (if you have one).
Click Accept.
On the Accounts tab, choose how often you want Apple Calendar and Google Calendar to sync.

For more information, see https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/99358


RW mounted NTFS drive not shown in finder

You should remove the nobrowse parameter because it tells the system that the mount point should not be visible via the GUI (i.e. on the Desktop).

Also, check your Finder preferences. In the "General" tab are options to show "Hard disks" and "External disks" on the desktop. In the "Sidebar" tab are similar options to show "Devices".

If this is an internal drive, the Finder will not show an "Eject" button, but you should be able to use Disk Utility to unmount.


Disk unmount failing ; Unable to install Lion OSX. Ends with a kernel panic

This could simply be a failed hard drive. Have you tried repartitioning the drive rather than erasing it?


Is it possible to use 6GB of memory in my MacBook Pro 3,1?

Yes. I own a MacBook Pro 3,1. I installed 6GB memory and have been using it like that for more than two years. Note the specifications below. You can call the tech support people at Other World Computing if you have any questions.

The RAM in my system is as follows:

Bank 0: 2GB DDR2 SDRAM 667 MHz
Bank 1: 4GB DDR2 SDRAM 667 MHz


Automator "New File" workflow in Mojave returning “Not authorised to send Apple events to System Events.”

In System Preference/Security/Privacy/Automation after unlock you have to select Finder/System Events.
Then may be in Accessibility you can select Finder if you got an error.
There are some explanations : https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-privacy-preferences-on-mac-mh32356/10.14/mac/10.14


Yes, macOS includes the Preview app which can open large TIFF images.

By default, the Preview app is located within your Applications folder.

The Preview app actually offers a lot of functionality, including:

opening images and PDFs
editing images and PDFs
signing documents
sharing files
annotation

For more details, see this page.

If I've misunderstood your question, please feel free to clarify it.


About photos going onto other Apple products

In the iCloud settings of the Mac minis turn on photos. They will both sync photos.

To not have the photos synced to the phone simply don’t have the photos option enabled in the iCloud settings.


Various random website cannot be reached (cannot allocate memory)

What fixes it for me for wireless connection is this:

Go to network preferences
Open the connection data
Open "Advanced..." properties
Go to "TCP/IP" tab
Set "Configure IPv4" to off (remember the previous setting)
Click "OK" and then Apply
Wait for the connection to be reset
Go back to TCP/IP and re-enable IPv4 to the previous setting
Click "OK" and then "Apply" again

After the connection restores, the memory errors are gone. Still no idea why it happens or why this fixes it, but seems to work for me and is much faster than rebooting.


How to backup email database of Apple Mail?

Why not let the export take three days or whatever is needed? That's the safe bet if you can't afford to lose mails. Also, the longer it takes to export, the more likely you have database issues or a volume of mail that demands a redundant backup in an industry standard format.

Just like exercise, there may not be a quick and handy remedy to months of inaction. If you have years of mail, it might also be necessary to test restoring your normal backup before trusting the export. No one actually wants a backup, they ultimately hope to know they have a good restore chance.


How do I show all calendar events in "Today view" in iOS 9?

I don't know if by "Today's View" you actually mean the iOS 9 "Todays View" or the Calendar Widget. To activate the Calendar Widget scroll to the end of your Notification Center and touch "Edit" and add the Calendar Widget.

Now, regarding how the info of your next appointments on the Calendar Widget will look like, it depends on how you present them on the actual Calendar App.

As you can see in the pictures bellow, on the left you have a relative presentation of the events and on the right an absolute presentation.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.


It really depends on exactly when your Mac was made. Right down to the week. If the hardware contains things that Mavericks doesn't know about, then it won't run Mavericks, period.

Your model may have been available before Yosemite, but that doesn't mean it's got the same components - just the same specifications. Foxconn might, for example, have run out of Mavericks-compatible USB bus chips but Apple said go ahead with the new chips and a driver will be included in Yosemite.

If you are sure you created your bootable USB correctly (it boots other computers into Mavericks) then you are stuck.


Download RealVNC Viewer for Windows and move it to the applications folder.

In the macOS open System Preferences > Sharing and enable "Screen Sharing" for either All users or restrict it to your user.

Open RealVNC Viewer and enter the IP or the host name of the Mac and hit the enter key.


Missing Hardrive icon in Finder, OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 MacBook Air

Go to Finder -> Preferences -> Sidebar and make sure "Hard disks" is selected.


How to highlight text by changing background colour in Mail

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this.  Here's how I do it.

⌘ + T: to open up Fonts window
click on the document background color icon and Colors window will open
choose the highlight background color you desire note:

Note: this will change the background color of your entire email

Select the text that you want highlighted and cut (⌘ + X)
Go back to Colors window and change background color of entire email back to original color (usually white).
Paste (⌘ + V) the text back into email, and you will see the text with your desired background color


OS X Yosemite attempts to eject external drives after sleep

I used to have the same problem, but since installed an app called "Mountain". It allows me to customize which volumes to eject and also re-connect for me on wake. It is not a free app, but it's worth the $5.99 (as of the time I write this).

http://appgineers.de/mountain/

Note, I don't work for them nor am I connected to them in any way. I just like the app and have had great results with it doing exactly what you're doing and more. (I move my macbookpro from 3 locations, where I have different external volume configurations.)


Reinstalling clean system on faulty hardware? Suggestions

If overheating is the problem I would try doing the clean install while having a fan blow cool air directly onto the computer into the vent openings. I may even remove the bottom covers to increase airflow.

If you are selling for parts, why not remove the hard drive and sell it drive-less, then take a hammer to the drive itself to protect your data.


How to delete all the recordings from the Voice Memos app on iOS?

Open the app and you'll find a little symbol with 3 horizontal stripes in the right bottom corner.
You'll get a list and you can tap the memo and click "delete" right afterwards.

Or in iTunes you can select all voice memo's after you've synced them to your PC and delete them from there.


Is there a DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) in the iPhone Lightning Dock?

Yes, because the Lightning port is digital-only. The Apple Lightning to 30-Pin Adapter also contains a DAC, according to MacRumors.

I don't know about the quality, but there is much more space for a good DAC in the dock then there is in the phone, so I wouldn't say it has to be worse.


How do I take a Screenshot of the new "Touch Bar" on the newer Macs?

Apple has released an update to the Grab application that allows you to capture the Touch Bar.

The Touch Bar is constantly dynamic in nature, so Apple added a "timed" capture for the Touch Bar so you can navigate to the App with the Touch Bar layout before the "grab" executes.

You can find the Grab application under Utilities.  ⇧ Shift⌘ CommandU and select Grab or use Spotlight (⌘ CommandSpace) and just start typing "grab..."


Is it possible to upgrade Mac Pro 2.1 to 5.1 firmware?

No, it is not possible, so it doesn't make sense and hasn't been done before.

Yes, the hardware is different (considerably). It's a completely different board and layout where the CPU and RAM are. The difference on the cases is around the FireWire 400 ports.

The 1,1 could be flashed to 2,1, and the 4,1 to 5,1; that mainly buys you newer CPU support (well, newer compared to the original firmware's capabilities).

The 1,1 and 2,1 have 32-bit EFI firmware; many have searched for ways to change that without much success (see MacRumors' forums).  One answer I read suggested swapping out the motherboard.

All three (1,1-3,1) use older DDR2 frame-buffered DIMM's, whereas the 4,1/5,1 use DDR3 DIMMs.  The supported CPU's are also different.


Why can't I upload ALL my live Apple photos to my windows PC

I would suggest that they are in iCloud. Can you tap Settings > [your name] > iCloud and check if Download and Keep Originals is checked? Here is Apple article just in case:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264

If not, check it and leave the device for 3-4 hours with a robust Wi-Fi connection while photos will be loaded from the cloud (there is no progress bar). After this, check if you will see the photos.

If you still can't see them, do you use any cloud or streaming service for photos? Also, you just connect the phone to PC and open the DCIM folder, right? No iTunes or 3dparty software?


Error code -36 - cp: Input/output error - mac

In a Terminal:

grep "I/O error" /var/log/system.log

This will output to the Terminal all lines in the system.log file that has I/O error in it. Output such as kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O errors are indicative of a falling and or damaged HDD. Note disk0s2 is an example and depending on which disk and partition has bad sectors the disk number and slice number will be different then the example. If you have output such as this and aren't backed up then do it before doing anything else!

Note; Depending on when the last time you had an error copying something it may not be in the current system.log file and you'll ether need to check the archived system logs or grep directly after the copy error.

If the copy is failing just on a particular file, you can attempt a recovery using ddrescue on the target file to try and copy it. ddrescue is a third-party utility that will need to be installed however dd is a part of OS X and it too can be used, although ddrescue offers more control and options then dd does.


How can I recalibrate the touchscreen on my iPhone?

The iPhone's capacitive touch screen doesn't have the concept of calibration.

To fix the problem you're experiencing, I suggest trying each of the following options:

Hard reset of the phone by holding the Home and Sleep buttons for 10 seconds.
"Reset All Settings" from Settings → General → Reset.
"Erase All Content and Settings" from Settings → General → Reset.
If your phone is still under warranty or covered by AppleCare, bring it to Apple and they will repair or replace it for you.
If not covered, then there are guides for replacing the front panel (first-gen iPhone), which contains the digitizer.


OSX: Spotlight shows the content of locked notes

You need to close your notes

I justed tested this in OS 10.11.5 and the contents of the note don't show, just the title.

I created a note and titled it for which it would be easy for Spotlight to find:  "Smattering test note"  (I have no other instance of "Smattering" on my system).  Here is what it looks like after I have locked and closed the note.

Doing a Spotlight search for "Smattering" yields this result:

It autocompletes the note title (ligher grey text) and clicking on it opens the Notes App.  Until I unlock the note with my password, the contents are not visible.

If I don't lock and close my notes, if I do a Spotlight search, the contents will be visible


Find My iPhone shows device as 'Offline'

Wow, Big Brother is watching! Contrary to popular belief, the iPhone's cell reception is not perfect, and from time to time you can and will "lose cell," and it will appear offline. This can happen when it enters its energy saving mode when asleep, though you should still receive calls. This can really happen any time you're not within a reasonable line of site to a cell tower, or even when switching between towers, and cell frequencies really don't go through wooded areas or mountains or hills all that well, and by that I mean "not at all." It is completely normal for iPhones and cell phones in general to lose cell connectivity when behind a hill from the nearest cell tower. Also, holding the phone wrong can cause it to lose cell, because just holding it will de-attenuate the antenna. And all cell phones have this feature.

Also, the A-GPS system iPhone uses is also not perfect. GPS itself is far from perfect, and really doesn't work all that well (read "not at all") unless you have a line of sight to 3 or more satellites. The 'A' part of A-GPS means "assisted" and you can read about what that means in the link above, and it mitigates some of the issues with GPS.

Using "Find My iPhone" to track family members is a little extreme. I think a more friendly way to have the same functionality is to use Apple's Find My Friends app. Try to talk Mom into using that instead, and then you can track her at the same time, too, quid pro quo.


Is there a way to turn on indicator that a directory item is a shell script in Terminal?

Try typing ls -G in terminal, you should see colored listings by file type.  If the scripts aren't being shown in a different color, this means that they are not marked as executable, so you will need to type sudo chmod +x <filename> to make them so.  Then they should appear in a different color as opposed to directorys etc.

If you prefer not to always type ls -G then you can put the following command in your .bashrc file in your home directory  alias "ls"="ls -G"  Then restart terminal and you should see colored output whenever you just type ls


How can I upgrade an old iMac from 10.6.8?

You have a couple of options you can try:

Download  El Capitan from the App Store
Take your Mac into an Apple Store where they can download and install El Capitan for you.


After installing software, I need to allow it to load in Security & Privacy. How do I do it with a script?

That's the whole point of Gatekeeper.  The user needs to manually allow for an application to run or have access to control your computer.  Otherwise any malicious application could just grant itself access and permissions to run and control your computer.

Your best option would be creating a Readme.txt file with explicit step-by-step instructions on how to grant access and permissions for that application, to control your computer, in System Preferences.app

This following AppleScript code, In MacOS Mojave, will bring you to the System Preferences window where you can address the "If I click the Allow button to the right" issue that you have mentioned.

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    tell its pane id "com.apple.preference.security"
        reveal anchor "General"
    end tell
end tell

And this AppleScript code will bring you to where you need to set Accessibility, Full Disk Access, and Automation privileges for the application.

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    tell its pane id "com.apple.preference.security"
        reveal anchor "Privacy_Accessibility"
    end tell
end tell


You can disable automiatic login by going into System Preferences, Accounts, then selecting "Login Options" and changing "Automatic login" to "Off":


Missing purchased tab in App Store and Family Sharing in iOS 11

In the Today tab, tap the account icon in the top right, then choose Purchased.


RAID 1 with a Mac - how to avoid formatting one of the drives

That's basically the only way unless you have one of the older mac pro's with the raid card. if I was you over usb id leave them as stand alone drives.


How do I stop Big Sur from installing on my computer?

Disable the Automatically keep my Mac up to date check box.

Use the second “more info ...” blue link to get security updates until you are ready to take the invitation to upgrade. It’s listed below the Other Updates text in the middle of the window.  If you like the command line you can pick and choose from any or all available update(s) and also suppress them by name.
sudo /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Big Sur"

Please read this entire article before trying sudo for the first time, you could delete all your documents and photos with a syntax error or bad copy/paste of a good command. If you use Time Machine, one sudo alone won’t delete your backups.

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/preventing-the-macos-big-sur-upgrade-advertisement-from-appearing-in-the-software-update-preference-pane-on-macos-catalina/

The article above explains the down side of trying to block Big Sur before it's advertised and the error message you will see in that case. A more invasive solution would be to use an MDM product to block the actual installer. Or compile an app like the following open-source tool which anyone can compile with a free AppleID and free version of Xcode.

https://github.com/hjuutilainen/bigsurblocker


iOS9 photos - remove image from screenshots folder that isn't a screenshot

The screenshot folder is a folder automatically. The user can not handle this file. Only screenshots will appear in this folder.
If you want to import a picture of the web (Google picture for example) in your film, you can hold down over the image and select "save image".
Good luck !


Move Certificates from Server to Remote Computer (MACS)

scp provides a handy way to do this. It also happens to be nearly platform-independent (Windows requires Cygwin or similar).

Ex: from the Mac you want the certs on:

scp -r user@server:/path/to/cert/directory /where/you/want/the/certs

Note that the '-r' option works on entire directories, if you only want to work on the certs, not the directory containing them, you may ignore it.


How can I fix Safari iCloud Tabs failing to display in Big Sur?

This problem may have fixed itself, or been fixed by Apple. It might be due to using a flaky internet connection (ours typically goes down for a few minutes every 50 minutes or so). I'll do some further tests over the Christmas period to see if the problem recurs.


It seems as though Apple predicted this situation and made provision for it.
I found the answer at http://pondini.org/TM/17.html
David


Mid-2015 MacBook Pro shuts off without warning when an Ethernet adapter is *not* plugged into a Thunderbolt port. Why?

There is a nice thread about it here: https://de.ifixit.com/Antworten/Ansehen/320496/Randomly+shuts+down+when+not+connected+to+an+external+display.

Turns out there maybe a few reasons why this happens:

Thermal paste
Thunderbolt-Ethernet-Driver
Magnetic sensor that indicates when lid is closed is damaged.

This is definitely a thread you want to read, several very useful info there.

I've been having this problem my self, right now testing your fix, having just an ethernet dongle connected.

Good luck


I got my answer from the CommanderOne support:

To clear the history of the list, use the following command in Terminal (Ctrl+O):
defaults delete com.eltima.cmd1 TCXWindow.connect2addresses
Please, note that settings ID (com.eltima.cmd1) varies based on Commander One version, that you have installed:
Website: com.eltima.cmd1
AppStore free: com.eltima.cmd1.mas
AppStore PRO: com.eltima.cmd1.pro.mas
SetApp: com.eltima.cmd1-setapp


How to Steam Video from iPhone to WiFi-Enabled HDTV

If your tv can act as a DLNA client (specifically it should be a DMR - Digital Media Renderer) you should be able to do it with [ArkMC] app for iPhone1. Haven't tried it though.


Where to target when doing a Brute Force attack on an extended mac OS drive?

John the Ripper is for finding the logon password for user accounts, it doesn't decrypt encrypted drives.

There ae tools to decrypt the encrypted drive but they requie the password to be in memory on the host mac system. They are also very expensive.Passware http://www.lostpassword.com apparently have products that can do this.

http://www.esecurityplanet.com/mac-os-security/passware-cracks-apples-filevault-encryption.html


How can I deploy an ad-hoc iOS app to a user without a Mac?

Today the most common way is to use TestFlight. This does not require a computer at all for the end-user installing the app. They will simply need to download the TestFlight app from the App Store, and use that to download and install your app.

The other options you have for deploying ad-hoc iOS apps are:

1) Using Apple Configurator (Mac-only)

2) Using Xcode (Mac-only)

3) Using iTunes (requires specific version of iTunes)

4) Using OTA installation

Options 1) and 2) are Mac-only, and thus cannot be used from Windows.

Option 3) requires you to have the 12.6.4 (or older) version of iTunes that includes the App Store. You can download it here for Mac and Windows:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208079

Option 4) requires you to have a SSL-enabled web server that you can distribute your app from. You'll need to create a special plist-file for you app and link to it using the itms-services protocol. You can read about it here:

https://community.scripture.software.sil.org/t/distributing-ios-ipa-apps-with-ota-over-the-air-instead-of-apple-app-store/728

NOTE: If you haven't got very specific reasons for not wanting to do so, your best option is to use TestFlight.


How to restrict the domain of a function in Grapher?

Grapher does it the other way around:  y = x > 0 ? x^2

See

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2786498


As you can see from Apple's product page for the 12W USB Power Adapter, it's compatible with iPhone 5S. The output voltage is the same in both, except the 12W adapter gives a higher amperage (2.4A instead of 1A), but your phone can regulate it's intake.

I use my iPad Air's charger occasionally with my iPhone 5S with no problems.


I removed the HomeBrew files by running the following command. After that, I ran the installation as mentioned in the above post. It all worked fine. I was able to install all the packages I need.
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/HomeBrew


Some iTunes URL generate 404 response from python but still work when you browse them from a web browser

I found a way to bypass it.
It seems that itunes is sending back a 404 response for some applications, especially (from what i've seen) if they have restricted content such as gambling.

the way get around it is instead of sending a request to the main apple store like here

  https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1029783189?mt=8

one should send the request to the local appstore.
In this example case, the Australian one:

  https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/id1029783189

Thanks for everyone who tried to help.


All files disappeared on local drive, folder are still here

Time Machine is the only built in recovery solution, so the file changes are not logged in a way you could guarantee a trace of what happened if you didn't configure Time Machine to make external and/or local backups.

If you shut down the computer soon after you discover missing files, sometimes you can use software to look at free space and reconstruct missing files. That tends to work better on HDD as opposed to SSD, but some recovery is often possible. Not having the machine on actually increases the odds of recovery since you are counting on no other program over-writing the free space where those files used to be stored.

I'd start with something like Data Rescue if you want to try to recover any files.

Once you've decided to not seek recovery or you've done the recovery, you might check the storage in Disk Utility to see if the catalog needs repair.


The permissions of some folders did change to more restrictive on Lion. I don't know about 10.6, but /Library/WebServer/Documents/ is owned by root and has 751 permissions on 10.8 as well.

I don't have any postrgesql folder by default on 10.8, but 10.7 might have had one.

Files are normally meant to put be to ~/Sites/ and accessed from http://localhost/~username/. The URLs can be made shorter by adding virtual hosts.

You could change the owner back to yourself with sudo chown -R $USER /Library/WebServer/Documents/.


Cannot connect to Apple and iTunes Store

Sounds like it may be Restrictions which is in:

  Settings -> General -> Restrictions

if this is off, check if everything is turned ON for cellular:

  Settings -> Cellular -> Use cellular data for

If everything is ON, then it could be a type of profile installed for blocking these apps at:

  Settings -> General -> Profiles

Remove what you don't know, let us know if you fixed it.


Can I browse all the words in single list view in the Mavericks dictionary?

I think the best you can do in the built-in Dictionary.app is type a single letter in the search box, like "a" and get a list of up to a 1000 words that begin with it.

You could also write a simple app of your own and use Apple's API for accessing the system dictionaries: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/DictionaryServicesProgGuide/access/access.html


Maintain business contacts database on Mac and iPhone?

Using Numbers would work as you say it syncs when ever a change is made. The benefit of this is that it is customised to your wifes needs, i.e the filed Name, Instrument, etc, ect are what she needs.

Using Office to go adds a few unnecessary steps to the procedure, with iCloud everything just syncs.

If she were to buy a database package it is not likely to contain all the correct fields she requires and would contain a lot more that would be useless, so a bit overkill really.

However the benefit of having a database app like Bentois that all your contacts details are clickable on the app, so if she is looking for a bass player she will be able to search and then click the contact number to call them. However this has a much larger cost than just buying Numbers for iOS.


Battery replacement on MacBook Pro 13" Early 2011 considerations

No. This A1322 model battery fits many MBP 13's, all the way back to 2009 version. Given the number of iterations and countries MBP have been sold, it's due to have different part numbers.

I also have a MBP 13' Early 2011 version. Two months ago I replaced the battery with a A1322 battery I bought online and I haven't had a problem.

Beware that:

If you are going to ifixit yourself, taking out the battery requires a special screwdriver. I got mine as a free addon from the vender.
Download CoconutBattery. It's a free app that gives you information like manufacture date (which I cannot find under System Information) and charge cycles.


I'd start with Telephone from the App Store and then once you have some more detailed requirements, you could refine what you're looking for.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/telephone/id406825478?mt=12


OS X 10.8.5: Can I move icons around in the dock and not have them stay there when the apps are closed?

You can remove all closed apps from the Dock (even if they are set to 'Keep in Dock') with the following command:

defaults delete com.apple.dock static-only

You can assign a hotkey to run this, or set up a launch agent to run this regularly.


As an iOS Developer, how can I avoid upgrading to Lion?

You really can't. Unless you skip to Mountain Lion. It's one of the blessings and curses of being an Apple Developer and that is that you must stay current, or you're out of the game for both iOS and Mac Development.

To use the latest bells and whistles for the next OS releases, you are really going to be bound to Apple's software and hardware requirements for those tools, otherwise you will find yourself spending too much time hacking together your build tools, instead of making forward progress.


Does downloading big files reduce my SSD lifetime significantly?

No, not at all. People underestimate the lifetime of SSDs. They can write a lot (usually around 700+ TB before clunking out).

This is a good place to find out more about how long SSDs actually last..

In fact, if you'd like to see more stats on your SSD, this tells you how to install smartmontools to get an idea of your drive's status.

As for your second question, I would say that's entirely up to you. If you'd like to avoid having large files cluttering your limited SSD space then go ahead with the HDD purchase.


How to raise verbosity of Installer.app?

You can use the command line installer (in /usr/sbin/installer).

From the man page:

  The installer command is used to install Mac OS X installer packages to a specified domain or volume.

and use the -verbose or -verboseR options.

By example :

installer -verbose -pkg DeveloperTools.mpkg -target /


Installing GNU compilers on PureDarwin/Darwin?

Your link is broken to the instructions.

FYI, the point of macOS is, to a large degree, the fact that it IS a walled garden. Having control over the entire hardware and software stack lets Apple provide a seamless, polished service and products at a premium cost.

As far as Homebrew goes, as a maintainer, I have zero optimism that it will work at all, unless the Linux version can be coerced to get installed and/or run, then maybe it could work (no promises) but will likely require a lot of time compiling things. Normal Homebrew (on macOS) checks for Xcode CLT and other very macOS specific stuff that won't be present in Pure Darwin. I think Homebrew on Linux will also fail because it looks for Linux headers, etc.

No matter what, this is an unsupported configuration for Homebrew and I'm 99% sure it won't work, but would be curious to learn where it fails.

I would assume/guess PureDarwin has some sort of package manager, or a package manager planned? Maybe?


Why "sudo nano" can bypass csrutil / SIP when enabled and other apps can't?

SIP doesn’t matter so much on Catalina. The system volume is read only / protected.
When you say crsutil was enabled, that is meaningless. That tool is always enabled and can run. You would need to report the full status it reports and then reboot the Mac and then specify the full path to a specific file you attempted to modify for someone to be able to check your work.
I would just set aside all the history and ask a follow on question showing your precise vim failure. That’s quick for people to answer whereas trying to teach anyone how SIP works takes about 2 hours and constant feedback to cover all the nuances. Far too broad for a question here other than the idea to ask a follow up question that documents the specifics.


Yes it is. I use it for my firewall needs. A great way to test if it still exists, is to just run it. Open Terminal.app and enter the following command:

sudo ipfw list

It should report the following (rules may vary):

65535 allow ip from any to any

Additionally, Apple will not remove it as it is actually the backend for the default Application Firewall found in System Preferences, at least not for some time.

You can read up more on ipfw in OS X using Apple's Manual Page (or simply type man ipfw in Terminal.app).

As for pf (the actual implementation of OS X is pfctl), it is a much more object orientated program that can control network access translation and packet filter (while ipfw requires external components to handle them). It is born from OpenBSD (as opposed to FreeBSD) and has been around for quite a while as well. It's power comes from being able to accomplish more internally, but also optimize long rulesets (that sometimes bogs ipfw down). They are both, however, excellent firewalls and can coexist quite happily. You can read more about the differences between pf and ipfw, here.


Plug the USB drive into any Windows computer.

Navigate to "My Computer" in Windows Explorer (click Start->My Computer[near the top right of the window]).

Right-click on the USB drive:

Windows 7:

Should be listed under "Devices with Removable Storage"

Windows XP and older:

Should just be listed in a list of all drives installed on the computer

Click "Format".

Choose options you want to format as, make sure the "Read Only" button is deselected, and make sure the "Hidden" button is also deselected, and click "OK".

Congratulations! Your USB drive has now been re-formatted. You (should) now be able to format it using Mac OSX.


How to fix the error: "This disk doesn’t contain an EFI system partition"?

You can recreate the EFI System Partition (ESP) using the command-line tool gpt.
Since you have to modify your current start device you need to boot to Internet Recovery Mode or an external (thumb) drive.

Additionally you need a valid EFI-partition or an image file of it.

Here is a similar question: How to fix broken EFI partition?. I have copied some of the steps of the accepted answer. Check all the warnings there before proceeding. So please credit the OP.

Preparation:

Backup your data.
Detach any external drive (especially your external Time Machine backup drive).
Restart to Internet Recovery Mode by pressing alt cmd R at startup.
The prerequisites are the latest firmware update installed, either ethernet or WLAN (WPA/WPA2) and a router with DHCP activated.
On a 50 Mbps-line it takes about 4 min (presenting a small animated globe) to boot to a recovery netboot image which usually is loaded from an apple/akamai server.

I recommend ethernet because it's more reliable. If you are restricted to WIFI and the boot process fails, just restart your Mac until you succeed booting.

Alternatively you may start from a bootable installer thumb drive (Mavericks or Yosemite) or a thumb drive containing a full system (Mavericks or Yosemite). The disk identifiers may be different then.

Rebuild the EFI-partition:

First you should get an overview of your disks and the partition layout:

Enter diskutil list
Example listing:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                  Apple_HFS                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         499.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                         *1.3 GB    disk1
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         30.7 KB    disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS OS X Base System        *1.3 GB    disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Macbook Pro            *498.9 GB   disk2
                             Logical Volume on disk0s2
                             A6AC962B-74A5-42E8-B84D-B5A7A6325432
                             Unlocked Encrypted
/dev/disk3-disk12 ...belong to the OS X Base System (your recovery system you booted to previously)

Disk0 is your main internal disk device containing the EFI-partition (dis0s1), the CoreStorage partition (disk0s2) and the Recovery HD (disk0s3).

Disk1 is a logical disk created by booting to the netboot image which contains a recovery system (OS X Base System = disk1s2) similar to the Recovery HD.

Disk2 is also a logical disk residing in disk0s2 and it contains the CoreStorage stack.
Enter sudo gpt -r show disk0
Example listing:

    start       size  index  contents
        0          1         PMBR
        1          1         Pri GPT header
        2         32         Pri GPT table
       34          6
       40     409600      1  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
   409640  975093952      2  GPT part - 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
975503592    1269536      3  GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
976773128          7
976773135         32         Sec GPT table
976773167          1         Sec GPT header

The partition with the index number 1 is the wrong formatted EFI-partition, the partition with index number 2 is your CoreStorage partition and the partition with index number 3 is your Recovery HD.
The correct GUID for the EFI-partition is C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B.
To manipulate the GPT you have to unmount all mounted volumes on disk0 (first the CoreStorage volume, which has its own disk identifier disk2 but resides on disk0, then disk0):

diskutil unmountDisk disk2
diskutil unmountDisk disk0

To delete your wrong EFI-partition enter:

gpt remove -i 1 disk0

Now re-add the EFI-partition with the correct layout and type

gpt add -b 40 -i 1 -s 409600 -t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B disk0

Enter exit and quit Terminal.
Reboot to your main volume

This should sort out the partition itself, but as you've created an HFS partition in its place, you need to fix its format as well.
The format of the EFI System Partition is documented by Apple here. As you can see, they recommend you clone an existing ESP rather than recreating the file system with newfs_msdos. If you have an external drive with a GPT partition table (OSX install stick should have it), you can clone that.

Make sure you have your disk and partition numbers the right way around or you may overwrite data:

If disk1 is your external drive, and it contains an ESP as the first partition (disk1s1) and disk0 is the drive whose ESP (disk0s1) you want to fix, run this command:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk1s1 of=/dev/disk0s1

you have to enter an admin password.

This will copy every single block of disk1's ESP and overwrite the corresponding block in disk0's ESP with it.

Alternatively, take a gamble with newfs_msdos.


iPad won't accept WiFi captive portal logon

alright I may have some light to shed on this:

I just got off the phone with an Apple Engineer and he said a few things to me that make sense.
He has stated that the "crippled browser" should never be displaying any other page than
our captive portal page. He stated that if after logging into captive portal I am redirected
to www.apple.com/library/test/success.html the iPad's "crippled browser" will close.
If I see another page (like I saw apple.com and not http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html which would have closed the browser.) it is likely that the system hosting captive portal is not directing me to the exact original page requested. Which was http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html
It could in fact be truncating or altering the original URL, which is possibly why I see apple.com's main page in the "crippled browser"

No resolution yet, as I still need to confrim that the wireless controller is indeed doing this, but it makes sense, and might help.


Automated LDAP and Search setup on Catalina

The easy way is to make a configuration profile and push it via MDM once you reach the break even point where you’re spending more time touching machines vs scripting solutions.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mdm/directory-mdm23422775/web

You don’t need an MDM to make these or could use server app as your MDM if you just want to manage a couple items past this, but most teams that have staff to run LDAP would want MDM as well.

You could script downloading your profile from any file share using curl but it’s also possible to just script your MDM enrollment and push the profile to the Macs that need it using APNS.


What is a typical Notability's file size?

I can't say for sure but my whole Notability folder is less than 300Mb and it includes over 300 notes including pictures, pdfs, text books, etc.


Is it possible to be notified when a prerelease album is available on Apple Music?

Not sure if you’d get notified if the pre-release turns into a proper release, but you can get notified when artists you usually listen to release new stuff. Chances are that the upgrade from pre-release to actual release generates a notification as well.

You can configure the notifications by following the Apple Support Document, Get Apple Music notifications.


Path to my background images on IOS8 iphone or How to recover my background's images from my iphone

Assuming that you don't want to jailbreak your phone there are a number of utilities that let you browse through the backup of your iPhone and locate files, messages, voicemail and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Though I have not used it one of the top search results is iExplorer. And it is cross platform.

There may be better ones but this says it works on Macs and PCs and you didn't say what you had.


Macbook Pro Dock appearing randomly during movies and applications running

One thing you could try is a full reset and restart of the Dock. Note you will need to re-add any non-default icons (i.e. apps) that you've added to the Dock - so you may want to take a screenshot of your Dock as a reminder of what you had there. (Or start afresh and only add things as you actually use them).

To reset and restart the Dock, follow these steps:

Go to Finder
Press and hold the option key down
Now go to the Go menu
Select the Library option to open the User's Library folder. You can let go of the option key now.
Go to the Preferences folder (i.e. within the Library folder)
Find and move the com.apple.dock.plist file to the Trash
Now open Terminal (usually located in Applications > Utilities)
Enter this command killall -KILL Dock
Press enter

This should resolve the issue. As mentioned previously, you will need to re-add non-default apps back to the Dock.


Possible to sort iTunes Artists View not by Album? (iTunes 12/macOS Sierra)

To add the proper ID3 meta-data, you can simply select the tracks you want to put in same album, then cmd+i and change the artist or album artist to make them fall into the same album. Example: name both the artist and album artist of all the selected tracks, "Soundcloud".

Or you can select Songs on the left pane, then click on Name, Artist, Album, etc. column headers to sort them according to your choice. :)