Different resolution when connecting to Mac remotely

There's a subtle difference in the 2 technologies-- and kind of a misnomer.

Apple's remote screen sharing technology is based on VNC -- Virtual Network Computing. You'd think this would be a virtualized technology that would provide you with whatever screen resolution you wanted, right?

And Windows RDP -- Remote Desktop Protocol -- it would only give you what appeared on a remote desktop, right?

Wrong and wrong.

Apple's VNC-based Screen Sharing will show you what the user's preferences are set to. This is great for supporting a remote user -- you see exactly what they see, even if they have multiple monitors, you can pick and choose which one (or both) that you want to see.

And if there's someone already logged on to the system and you're connecting from another Mac? You're given the choice of whether you want to connect to their account's display, or use your own account's preferences. Multiple users simultaneously on one Mac, even with different screen resolutions.

So the trick is, set your account's preferences to what you want to see remotely; by default, that's going to be the native screen resolution your MacBook Pro supports. I think that once you've set those on your desktop, you're only given the option of scaling it on the Screen Sharing session if you're logged in with a user account not associated with a physical display (the Display preferences shows your remote session as an Unknown Display.)

But changing the resolution to something that's not reflected on the remote display? That's virtualized technology only supported by Remote Desktop.

Yes, confusion, caused by poor choices in names. Apple's use of Screen Sharing is probably the most appropriate name of them all.


Shortcut for opening applications stack on dock bar

ctrl+fn+F3

..selects an item of the dock. You can navigate using the arrow keys. The selected item is the one that will be selected first the next time you use this shortcut.

Once you've selected the Applications folder, the shortcut becomes for the next time:

ctrl+fn+F3+↩

BTW:
You can also use ctrl+fn+F2 to access menubar items.


Is there any way to preserve recent keyboard activity in case something accidentally gets deleted?

If you'd still like a key logger here are some choices. There are many keyloggers that do much more than logging the keystrokes. Most have many more features but these can be turned off if you're only interested in keylogging. Some highly rated yet easy to use keyloggers are Aobo Mac Keylogger,  Perfect Keylogger for Mac, and  Refog Keylogger for Mac. Be careful with these because they will log your passwords unless properly set up. Aobo Key Logger is a Mac-only app. These were obtained from this site that rates 5 keyloggers.


Something like osascript -e 'quit app "Dock"' might work. If not, you could also quit and reopen Dock by logging out and back in.


How do I check how many RAM slots I have in use?

The System Information app has this information (and a lot of other info about your computer). Access it by going to the Apple menu (top left of your screen), selecting About This Mac, and clicking the More Info button.

Fire up the app and click on the Memory tab. You'll get a visual representation of how much memory you have and how it's installed. There is a rectangle for each memory slot, and each rectangle will be labeled "Empty", or with the capacity of the chip inserted.

For even more info, go to File-> System Report.
In the new window that appears, click Memory in the list on the left. It will show you the number of slots and what's in each one. In the below screenshot, there is one empty bank. It's the one with the Size, Type, Speed, and Status as Empty.
If none of yours say empty, you've got something in every slot.

Note that if you have an older version of OS X than Lion, you won't have the visual representation. You can open System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities) and follow the directions from the second half of this answer.


Retrieve formatted manual page from command line

You can use the following example command to get formatted plain text output for a manual page:

man grep | col -bx > ~/Desktop/grep.txt

Produces, e.g.:

GREP(1)                   BSD General Commands Manual                  GREP(1)

NAME
     grep, egrep, fgrep, zgrep, zegrep, zfgrep -- file pattern searcher

SYNOPSIS
     grep [-abcdDEFGHhIiJLlmnOopqRSsUVvwxZ] [-A num] [-B num] [-C[num]]
          [-e pattern] [-f file] [--binary-files=value] [--color[=when]]
          [--colour[=when]] [--context[=num]] [--label] [--line-buffered]
          [--null] [pattern] [file ...]

To automate the use of e.g. man grep | col -bx > ~/Desktop/grep.txt command in Terminal, so you can just type e.g. mant grep, or other command, it can be wrapped in a bash function placed in your .bash_profile file.

I normally prefer to have my manual pages in PDF format however I've modified the manp bash function I use in my .bash_profile file to work for plain text as, mant.

For plain text manual pages:

function mant ()
{
    mpdir="$HOME/Documents/Manual Pages"
    [[ ! -d $mpdir ]] && mkdir -p "$mpdir"
    if [[ ! -z $1 ]]; then
        if [[ ! -f $mpdir/$1.txt ]]; then
            man "$1" | col -bx > "$mpdir/$1.txt"
            open -e "$mpdir/$1.txt"
        else
            open -e "$mpdir/$1.txt"
        fi
    else
        printf '  Error: Missing argument!...\n  Syntax: mant command_name\n  Example: mant man\n'
    fi
}

For PDF manual pages:

function manp ()
{
    mpdir="$HOME/Documents/Manual Pages"
    [[ ! -d $mpdir ]] && mkdir -p "$mpdir"
    if [[ ! -z $1 ]]; then
        if [[ ! -f $mpdir/$1.pdf ]]; then
            man -t "$1" | pstopdf -i -o "$mpdir/$1.pdf"
            open "$mpdir/$1.pdf"
        else
            open "$mpdir/$1.pdf"
        fi
    else
        printf '  Error: Missing argument!...\n  Syntax: manp command_name\n  Example: manp man\n'
    fi
}

To add either or both bash functions shown above to your .bash_profile file, in Terminal use the following command:

nano "$HOME/.bash_profile"

Then copy and paste the function(s) into the .bash_profile file, then save the file and exit nano pressing the following keys:

Control+X
Y
Enter

Close and reopen the Terminal app, not just the window, and you are ready to go.

For the default manual page in Terminal, e.g.:

man grep

For a plain text file manual page, e.g.:

mant grep

For a PDF file manual page, e.g.:

manp grep

With the bash functions, if a file for the given command doesn't already exist, it's created and then opened. If the file of the command already exists, it's just opened. This way you can easily access the manual page in the form you'd like while in Terminal.

If you want to place the files in a different location, then change the path portion of the following line of code as appropriate:

mpdir="$HOME/Documents/Manual Pages"

The rest of the code within is tokenized to use $mpdir for the location of the files.

As a side note, if you just want the complete manual page for a given command, in a Terminal window, which is easily fully scrollable, you can do the following...

Just type the command name by itself, then right-click on it and select: Open man Page

This is better then typing e.g. man grep and pressing enter, because it's fully scrollable and you do not need to navigate using key sequences as defined in the less command utility used as the pager by man.


You need to boot the phone into DFU mode.

Plug the iPhone cable into the phone and the computer, with iTunes open.
Turn off the device.
Hold the Power button for 3 seconds.
Hold the Home and Power buttons for 10 seconds.
Release the Power button but keep holding the Home button until iTunes recognises the phone.

The screen will turn on, but it will be black. iTunes will recognise the phone in DFU mode and give you the option to restore.


What (hardware/software) projector setup is needed to project both displays?

You basically need to have your macbook output to two displays, which it won't do easily/willingly.

There are a couple hacks...either doing the display output over USB or using a matrox display. See more info: here

One really hacky solution might be to output via air display to and iPad (hooked up to a projector)for the 2nd monitor. I'll buy you a beer if you make that work. :-)


My battery died while El Capitan was installing

You can do Internet Recovery using a WiFi connection, if available.

If not, you have two other options:

1) Purchase an ethernet adapter and connect directly to your modem or router and perform the Internet Recovery.

2) If you have another Mac, you can download the OS and copy it onto a USB drive and install it on your MacBook Air.


Unable to SSH to OS X Server over alternate port

Here are steps to get SSH listening on port 443. Note that if you have SIP disabled, you can directly edit (as root) /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh.plist and therefore can skip steps 1 and 3, and use the above path in steps 2 and 5. Note in that case you will want to run the unload command before editing ssh.plist.

Copy the existing ssh.plist file into /Library:

sudo cp /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh2.plist

Edit the file as root:

sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh2.plist

There are two things that need to be changed. First is the <Label>. Change this:

<key>Label</key>
<string>com.openssh.sshd</string>

To something like this:

<key>Label</key>
<string>com.openssh.sshd443</string>

Next change this:

                <key>SockServiceName</key>
                <string>ssh</string>

To this:

                <key>SockServiceName</key>
                <string>443</string>

Save and then run this command to load the service:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh2.plist

If you ever need to unload it, you can do so with:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh2.plist


TouchID requires your Password after 48 hours

The first part of your question has to be a glitch. The iPhone 6S is still a little buggy; mine doesn't always play system sounds, like the Siri chime and the lock "click" sound. But I can explain the second part of your questing:

Apple thinks that a passcode is more secure than TouchID is due to the fact that the odds of TouchID giving a false-positive are 1 in 50,000 (stated by Apple). However, the article hasn't been updated after the 2nd-Generation TouchID in the iPhone 6S came out, and given its great speed improvements, I would assume that the 2nd-Gen has a lower chance of giving a false-positive than the 1st-Gen. The odds of guessing a 6-digit passcode, would be literally 1 in 1,000,000. Even the odds of guessing right with 5 guesses, 1 in approximately 200,000 is still higher than TouchID. I like the convenience of TouchID and will still use it everyday, but from a purely statistical standpoint, a passcode is much more secure.


Taking a close look at the adapter, you will notice there is evidence of melted metal on the second prong most likely caused by arcing.

What this tells me is that there was a short from the hot to neutral which (should have) tripped the breaker.  What caused it?  Any number of things from faulty wiring to a surge with enough voltage to cause the electricity to "jump" from one conductor to the next.

Is your adapter safe to use?

Yes, provided it works.  Adapters are designed to isolate the high(er) voltage mains AC from the lower, cleaner, usable DC voltage.  If anything was damaged due to a surge, the adapter simply won't work (most likely the internal fuse would be blown).

Bottom line... you can plug it in and it won't hurt your Mac.  You can even used the charred AC plug connector and it will still work.  Unless the prong is broken, or so physically deformed that it's causing a short, there's nothing to worry about.


Cusor won't react to hyperlinks when using Safari

There's nothing in the release notes that would indicate this has been fixed, so it's likely a new bug. I don't do Mac OS development, but for this to work, Safari has to tell the OS 'hey, change the mouse pointer when you're over this area.'

Some things you might try:

Reset NVRAM and/or PRAM
If you have multiple monitors, unplug all but the primary one, and restart the system.
Change the size of the mouse pointer; that might force the pointer system to reset.
Reinstall the OS (Bonus: this reinstalls Safari.)
Consider updating the firmware on the monitors you have. (Instructions and links will be manufacturer-specific.)

Update: Looks like it's settable via CSS, so you've probably got a mix of buggy javascript, CSS, and maybe a bug in Safari. Here's a JSFiddle that illustrates how it works.


Is it possible to have 2 different backup systems for different external hard drives?

Yes, Time Machine can do this. All you need to do is connect at least two hard drives to your Mac. One hard drive will be for you to download your raw photos on to manually as you wish. The other hard drive will be your TM hard drive. Because your first HD for your photos is connected to your Mac, it wil also be backed up whenever TM does a backup. Those TM backups will backup what's on your Mac and what's on your photos HD, but you also have the option to select anything you want to exclude from the backup by going into the Options on TM.


I wouldn't complicate things with a DVD. Just set up your new drive using an external USB adaptor (or a full drive enclosure / drive toaster) and install Lion cleanly there. You can boot to it, migrate over apps or users. It won't get the Recovery HD until you swap the drives, but you can re-run (or re-download) the Lion installer a second time to have it drop the Recovery HD on the now internal Lion drive.


How do I customize the alert sound for an iPhone timer?

If you're able to save the file you'd like to play as a ringtone, then the iPhone can play it once the timer hits zero. The big limitation here is that it'd need to be ~35 seconds in length, but depending on your specific need, that might be enough.

There are a few apps on the App Store that will allow you to create ringtones from music files, or you could do it yourself in Garageband. The linked instructions are for Garageband '11, but searching "garageband ringtone" at Apple support will yield links for various other versions of Garageband - the process is pretty much the same.


The default Virtual Box machine network settings are shown below.

Try changing the settings to what is shown below.

This should cause your virtual machine to use the same DHCP and DNS as your physical machines. Basically, your virtual machine will be on the same LAN as your physical machines.


personal folder in outlook stored on network share available on iphone?

It appears that this works while using a VPN. The iPhone talks to the Exchange group policies, and can use all the mail folders (although, IMAP may be necessary for this). For more info, see this Apple doc (page 9).


You can use a Merge field.

The first thing you need is a merge source.  This can either be your address book, or a numbers spreadsheet.  Ensure that the details you wish to include are available in the relevant source document.  Then enter Insert > Merge Field > Name/Email/Phone etc etc in the relevant places in your document.  This will create place markers for the relevant fields that you can populate later.

Once you have done this and created the fields, you can fill them in.  Click Edit > Mail Merge, check the settings and click merge, it should create a new document with the details all filled in.

I've not tried with the numbers file route, but I have found that the easiest way to produce a single document is:  Create a contact group within Address Book, call it Temporary, or anything you like.  Create the main document as above, and save it as your template, setting the group you just made above as your merge source.  Then each time you want to create a new one for a client/contact, just move them to be the only contact in the temporary group, do the mail merge, and hey presto, a new document tailored to a single contact/client.

From my limited testing just now I would expect a new document to be created for every contact in the group, but for some reason it's only doing the first contact for me, however this should still be fine for you, as you are not actually needing to do a real mail merge, just steal some of it's functionality.

EDIT: In addition to the above, I did some more testing, if you create a template document inserting the merge fields as previously described, then when you wish to populate the fields, just open address book up, and drag a contact onto any of the fields which will be highlighted as you drag.  When you let go, the contacts details will replace the place text for the field names and you will have your document.  The benefit of this method is that should a contact change their details you can just repeat the above.  The previous mail merge actively replaces the field markers with plain text than cannot be subsequently amended in this way.

Hope this helps!


bzip2 compression library not found error

By default header files aren't installed to /usr/include.

If you run xcode-select install in a Terminal window this will install the Xcode command line tools and also populate the /usr/include folder with a bunch of header files including bzlib.h.

This might be what you're looking for.


Earliest way to disable wifi at login or boot

You may be asking two different things, but in the last paragraph you said:

  The ultimate goal is to prevent the system from automatically logging into a network

Prevent System From Automatically Logging Into a Network:

I think the way to accomplish that is to un-check (disable) the Auto-Join feature for each WiFi network name/SSID that's stored. System Preferences, Network, Advanced.... Uncheck all checked boxes in the "Preferred Networks" list.

Also note that there are a couple of other options here that may be of interest:

You can uncheck the option to "Remember networks this computer has joined"
You can check the box to "Require administrator authorization to: Turn Wi-Fi on or off.

To Disconnect WiFi Power at Boot Time:

To disconnect wifi power at boot time, you can use cron. It's certainly simpler than building a .plist, and it's invoked at boot instead of login. In my testing, it survives a login, but of course it could be "overruled" by other system settings -- YMMV. It can be re-started from the WiFi icon in the menu bar after login when you wish. Here's how to do this from the CLI:

crontab -e

This will start your designated crontab editor, and open your current crontab. If you don't have a crontab (haven't used it previously), you'll be prompted to select from one of three choices for default editor. I'd suggest you choose pico or nano. That done, the default crontab will be opened in the editor of your choice.

Once the editor has started, make the following entry on the first empty line at the "bottom" the file:

@reboot /usr/sbin/networksetup -setairportpower en0 off

Save and exit the editor, and your new crontab becomes active. This command will now execute aach time your system boots, and (subject to the exception mentioned) your WiFi interface will be "OFF" until you turn it on.


How to send and receive iMessages from my phone number on my MacBook Air with Mountain Lion

This is simple to accomplish if you have an iPhone to associate your phone number with your Apple ID account. I'm not aware of any way to hack, trick or cajole Apple to add a cell phone number to an Apple ID other than it going through the normal activation process on iPhone only.

Activate your Apple ID - http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4268
Open iMessage on the Mac and in preferences, set the caller ID to initiate messages from your phone number instead of your AppleID email.

As you can see, it is allowed to add more emails to an Apple ID, but the adding of phone numbers happens when you activate things from a live phone account and SMS messaging verifies that the phone number matches the iPhone.

Once that's done, Apple is happy to let your Mac or iPad or phone "iMessage" from that telephone number.


iPhone 4s running iOS 7 displays pictures taken with filter as white

If you have tried all the above with resetting your camera settings and iPhone settings you might need to restore the whole iPhone. I used to see this a lot in iOS 3 and 4 where you could take pictures but they save as blank/white images. Fix was in those OSes and iDevices to DFU restore the sucker without restoring from a backup sorry to say.


Is it possible to set up rules in Mail that do not appear in the rules list?

Not that I know of. However, depending on your email provider, you may be able to set up server-side rules, which wouldn't appear in Mail.app and would be applied before your Mail.app rules.


How do I delete items in my itunes download queue?

While an item is in the download queue, the user can't remove it.

You could contact the iTunes Store Customer Support department, which, apparently, deals with this kind of stuff, or try this wibbly wobbly solution:

Go to the Download page and find the small down-pointing arrow icon next to the Download Error. Tap to Retry.
Put your finger on the arrow icon and do a quick swipe to the left.
The arrow will be replaced with a Delete button.
Tap and confirm.


stat is part of the coreutils package.

brew install coreutils

This installs stat with a g prefix: gstat.

You can avoid the g prefix by following the Caveats section:

  All commands have been installed with the prefix 'g'.

  If you really need to use these commands with their normal names, you
  can add a "gnubin" directory to your PATH from your bashrc like:

PATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"


Automator Service that does predefined simple calculations

n = STDIN.read.scan(/-?[0-9., ]+/)[0]
separator = "."
separator = "," if n =~ /.+[. ].+,.+/ || n =~ /,/ && n !~ /\./
separator == "." ? n.gsub!(/[, ]/, "") : n = n.gsub(/[. ]/, "").gsub(",", ".")
out = "%.02f" % ((n.to_f * 1.19 * 100).round.to_f / 100)
out.gsub!(".", ",") if separator == ","
print out

Understands both 10,000.50 and 10.000,50, but treats 10,000 and 10.000 as 10
Half decimals are rounded up, negative half decimals down


Is line level Bluetooth audio possible with iPhone?

You'll want something like the Griffin BlueTrip Aux as it gets powered from a DC car jack (a.k.a cigarette lighter recepticle) and receives bluetooth music and sends it out a stereo analog connector to your car's AUX in / line in headphone jack.

There are many similar products that are cheaper and larger and the audio quality on some is not as good as Griffin's product, but you can shop around since there are several similar product on the market.

The part you list needs a USB cable and getting that out of a lightning port phone would be far more product than a simple BT receiver.


How to display Lyrics for the song in Apple Music on iOS?

First you have to add the lyrics to your song in iTunes (tap on the song, then press cmd + I).

Go to your iOS device (since it is shared via iCloud), and then single tap on cover in following screen:

You see the lyrics, you can switch it back to cover by single tap on the lyrics.


I don't know much about Tor but I managed to get rid of the error by starting tor beforehand:

brew install tor torsocks
cp /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc.sample /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc
Uncomment ControlPort 9051 and CookieAuthentication 1 in /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc and change CookieAuthentication 1 to CookieAuthentication 0.
brew services start tor

I'm using it successfully as follows:

brew install openssl
torify /usr/local/opt/openssl/bin/openssl s_client -quiet -crlf -connect example.com:443


How reliable are the iOS data usage stats?

This is the extent of Apple's documentation on cellular data usage:

  Go to Settings > Cellular Data > Usage to view your usage. Contact
  your carrier directly if you have questions about your cellular data
  usage.

It doesn't sound like this is going to be very helpful. There are also threads online, such as this one, that seem to indicate that iOS6 may be using cellular data while connected to Wi-Fi and misreporting it.


Unable to install Windows via Bootcamp without superdrive (mountain lion)

It Doesnt work, I managed to do it with better CD and somehow it read it. Also when you do restart after bootcamp completes and ask to restart, don't hold option key, it will find it automatically where to boot from. Holding option and trying to boot from BOOTCAMP volume it doesn't work.


How to get to previous calandar entry's after the date has passed

Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar > Sync >

Choose a longer timescale


17" MacBook Pro (early 2011) 16GB RAM, 1600 MHz?

Your MacBook Pro has two memory slots designed to take 204-pin PC-10600 (1333 MHz) DDR3 SO-DIMM memory chips.

Apple's official position is that this model supports up to 8GB of memory, but real world tests have proven the machine to work fine with 16GB, so both Crucial and OWC are correct in what they say.

If both of them sell the 1333MHz chips, assuming they are 204-pin PC-10600 (1333 MHz) DDR3 SO-DIMM memory chips, then these will work as they are the correct specs for your machine. Xaxxon's comment about the likely speed of what your 1600MHz chip is running at is correct. Paying for 1600MHz chips are just a waste of money.

If it was me I would go ahead and purchase two of them and install them into your computer to get the 16GB you want.

You could try just purchasing one and adding it to your machine, but you may be risking inconsistent/random performance issues having one 1600MHz chip and one 1333MHz chip installed simultaneously.

Of course, it's up to you and you could just test this and see how you go. But, if it's cheaper to purchase the two at the same time as opposed to buying one and then another later, I'd just buy the two new 1333MHz chips. Having two identical chips is the safest option.


How Do I Recover Formatted Mac hfs+ Partition?

The easiest way (depending on your model) is to do an Internet Recovery. You can do this by holding Command+Option+R while your computer boots. You will get a globe and will either ask you to connect to Wifi or if you are connected to ethernet you will just see a progress bar. After it downloads it will bring you to the recovery partition and you can re-partition your HDD and such.


MacPorts not working after power outage during build (sqlite disk I/O error)

The fix for this is actually quite simple, and is mentioned in this MacPorts issue. From a comment on the issue by "pixilla@…":

$ cd /opt/local/var/macports/registry
$ ls registry.db-journal
$ sudo sqlite3 registry.db
sqlite> .tables
sqlite> SELECT id FROM ports;
sqlite> .quit

Based on another comment by "ecronin@…", I conclude that, had I run any port command as root, it would have been fixed automatically and saved me all this trouble. But I always forget to use sudo...

EDIT Wait, I did run a port command with sudo. Weird. Oh, well, at least it works now.


Logitech Options won't let me change the "Keystroke assignment" assigned to a mouse button anymore

I've discovered no answer to how to make Logi Options behave properly in this respect, but the commercial mouse driver "SteerMouse" works just fine for me. It's $20, but at least it lets me continue to use my Logitech mice the way that I've been using them for years.


Airplane Mode and Do Not Disturb on iPhone 4

Airplane Mode and Do Not Disturb perform different functions, neither of which are directly linked to push notifications, but can affect them.

Airplane Mode is a quick-fire way to turn off all the wireless radios (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS) on the iPhone. You can subsequently turn on the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios while still in Airplane mode by going to their respective settings toggles. If you have no data connectivity (i.e. cellular data or Wi-Fi), then you can’t receive any data, whether via push or pull. For more details, see Apple’s support article: iOS: Understanding airplane mode.

Do Not Disturb mode turns off the tones and vibrations from phone calls, SMS/iMessages, and any other push notifications that are set to alert you. However, depending on your settings, some calls may still get through. In the Do Not Disturb settings (Settings → Notifications → Do Not Disturb), you can configure some calls from a specific group of contacts (e.g. your favourites), and repeat calls (a second call within three minutes of the first) to bypass the block.

Do Not Disturb does not prevent your phone from receiving push notifications or pulling data, it merely silences any alarms about the data. It’s also worth noting that alarms set via the built-in Clock app bypass the DND setting.


Uncheck "Reopen windows when logging back in" by default

Edit: since 10.7.4, the "Reopen windows when logging back in" checkbox has stayed unchecked if you uncheck it once, so the hacks below are not needed anymore.

One option is to set the LoginwindowLaunchesRelaunchApps key to false in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist:

defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowLaunchesRelaunchApps -bool false

You could also save this property list as ~/Library/LaunchAgents/logout_saves_state.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN
http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd>
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>logout_saves_state</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>defaults</string>
        <string>write</string>
        <string>com.apple.loginwindow</string>
        <string>TALLogoutSavesState</string>
        <string>-bool</string>
        <string>false</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Then load the property list by running launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/logout_saves_state.plist or by logging out and back in once.

TALLogoutSavesState sometimes got reset to true when I logged out and back in, so just running defaults write com.apple.loginwindow TALLogoutSavesState -bool false once wouldn't have worked.

Neither of these options actually makes the checkbox appear unchecked, but they have the same effect.


How to prevent warnings like No xauth data when doing ssh from OS X to other machines?

Put XAuthLocation=/opt/X11/bin/xauth in /etc/ssh/ssh_config.


Clash of Clans Bases and Game Center Accounts

Use your old Game Center account for your new device too.
Or you can follow the guide here: http://clashofclans.wikia.com/wiki/Game_Center_User_Guide


Apple ID password not being requested before installing an app from the App Store

Go to Settings → General → Restrictions and set Require Password to Immediately to always be required to enter your password for purchases.


I think this is a CPU power transistor failure. After doing some research, I noticed that 2013-2015 Macbooks had a similar issue. The transistors that switch the CPU from high to low power are too slow in heat and don't switch fast enough, causing a crash. The solution that fixed it for me was to install Macs Fan Control and set this rule:
This seemed to fix the issue for me. As happened to you, random processes, such as Word and kernel_task were being named the culprit.


Apple Music / iTunes: Cannot add track to playlist when iPhone connected via wifi

This problem has been bugging me so much, it seemed so random but yes it definitely disappears the moment you plug in the iPhone, then appears again the moment you take it out.

I assume this is a bug and will be fixed soon, but here are a couple workarounds:

As you say, eject the iPhone either by physically disconnecting, or clicking the eject icon.
You can click "Add to My Music", then go to your library, find the relevant song, and drag/drop into a playlist. It works, but it's not much fun.


Slow loading/transparent menu bar during startup

This happens to me too sometimes. A guaranteed solution: Restart the menu bar. Here's how:

Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities). Type: killall SystemUIServer.killall restarts the following process, and SystemUIServer is the process in charge of the menu bar. Once you press enter, the menu bar will disappear and reappear. It should be working fine.


Why do many processes use the letter "d" at the end of the process name?

Since OS X is in part based on FreeBSD here is relevant documentation from the FreeBSD Handbook's 3.8. Processes and Daemons...

  "There is a convention to name programs that normally run as daemons
  with a trailing “d”. For example, BIND is the Berkeley Internet Name
  Domain, but the actual program that executes is named. The Apache web
  server program is httpd and the line printer spooling daemon is lpd.
  This is only a naming convention. For example, the main mail daemon
  for the Sendmail application is sendmail, and not maild."

Take note of the last two sentences from what I quoted, the trailing "d" is only a convention but as you can see with the example sendmail is the mail daemon and doesn't have the trailing "d".  There are also other daemons in Unix/Unix like OSes that do not use the trailing "d" for daemons however as a convention it is a good practice but not an absolute.


Nordic keyboard " < " key switched to " ' "

I found this article suggesting me to delete a file

running the following command, then doing a reboot followed by running the assistant again fixed the issue!

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

This was also mentioned in the article @Tom Gewecke commented above, but I overlooked it when I did not find the mentioned file in finder. I suppose it might be a hidden file or something.


How does macOS process protection work – Cliff Notes style?

Apple's Documentation Archive

See Apple's App Sandbox Design Guide for both an overview and in-depth discussion of how sandboxing works on their platforms.

  You secure your app against attack from malware by following the practices recommended in Secure Coding Guide. But despite your best efforts to build an invulnerable barrier—by avoiding buffer overflows and other memory corruptions, preventing exposure of user data, and eliminating other vulnerabilities—your app can be exploited by malicious code. An attacker needs only to find a single hole in your defenses, or in any of the frameworks and libraries that you link against, to gain control of your app’s interactions with the system.

  App Sandbox is designed to confront this scenario head on by letting you describe your app’s intended interactions with the system. The system then grants your app only the access your app needs to get its job done. If malicious code gains control of a properly sandboxed app, it is left with access to only the files and resources in the app’s sandbox.

While the document is marked as not being updated, it remains the best introduction to sandboxing on Apple's platforms.


"No connected camera" on MacBook Pro High Sierra

Sounds like a conflict with something that is running in your personal account.

Try logging into your account holding down the shift key. Hold it until everything has settled, it can take a minute or two. This will prevent login apps from running.

See if the problem remains.


Is a 2008/9 Mac Pro cluster a viable option to a 2018 iMac?

Since you won’t be running an abstract workload - making abstract generalizations won’t be super useful but my experience is you always want to get the most modern CPU and Mac to run your workload since the processors of the last 2-3 generations have the best compiler optimizations and the amount of work that can be done per CPU cycle increases far more than a back of the envelope calculation would show.

Let’s assume you already have both the iMac and the Mac Pro - your time will be better spent working to tune the workload for your iMac or have it run in the cloud rather than run on a bunch of old Mac that need management / orchestration / etc.

If you haven’t purchased hardware, I’d say neither your equiment is the best. If you have a workload you can run on GPU you would need something like bitcoin mining rigs or go to the cloud again and instead spend your money on a MacBook and displays and learning / consulting and not hardware.

To come back to your specifics:

RAM is never the real bottleneck - RAM makes up for a less optimized solution, but you need storage and a smart algorithm to get out of the way of CPU and storage bottlenecks.
if you have a massively parallel CPU load - get it on dozens to hundreds of CPU that you rent or are super low cost and run Linux or some OS you can orchestrate with chef or puppet or ansible or some of the newer cloud tools to let software define the OS configuration (google cloud / amazon cloud / https://bosh.io/docs/ / https://www.spinnaker.io/ )


De-Authorise iTunes account on my 3 stolen PC's

Follow these instructions from Apples Knowledge Base:

  Click iTunes Store on the left side of iTunes.
  If you're not signed in to the store, click the Account button, then
  enter your account name and password.
  Click the Account button again (your Apple ID appears on the
  button), enter your password, and then click View Account.
  In the Account Information window, click Deauthorize All. *

  Note: You may only use this feature once per year. The Deauthorize All
  button will not appear if you have fewer than two authorized
  computers. If you need assistance on using this feature, please
  contact iTunes Store support via email
  (http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/store/).


To delete CoreStorage volumes you have to use the CLI:

please backup your volume "mainHD"
boot to Internet Recovery Mode (hit altcmdR immediately after the start-up chime)
open Disk Utility and check/repair mainHD
quit Disk Utility , open in the menubar Utilities/Terminal.app and enter diskutil cs deleteVolume LVUUID to delete the Logical Volume
in your case: diskutil cs deleteVolume B3E1FCD6-ACAB-4152-AEB5-71F41C329C17
and then
diskutil cs delete LVGUUID to delete the Logical Volume Group
in your case: diskutil cs delete C2BDDBCA-73CF-473C-B9DA-E5682EF29610. Your LGV will be converted to a simple, empty volume with the name "Untitled".
enter diskutil list and sudo gpt -r -vvv show -l /dev/disk0
result of the latter (start blocks and block sizes differ because the example disk is half as big as yours & some parts of the output are omitted):

...
         40       409600      1  GPT part - "EFI System Partition"
     409640    244763224      2  GPT part - "mainHD"
  245172864      1269536      3  GPT part - "Recovery HD"
  246442400    242522776      4  GPT part - "Untitled"
  488965176      1269536      5  GPT part - "Recovery HD"
...

enter diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0
then remove any partition except those with index 1 and 2 (EFI and mainHD) with  sudo gpt remove -i IndexNumber disk0
enter diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 0b to expand it to the full size.
enter exit and quit Terminal
open Disk Utility, check/repair mainHD again and quit afterwards
reboot to main HD
rebuild Recovery HD with Recovery Partition Creator 3.8 or by just reinstalling Mavericks 10.9.5 (don't use 10.9.4 or earlier!). Your data and apps will be preserved.


Why does my Displayport monitor not turn on when selecting a boot drive?

I was not able to solve the problem with that connection. However, it works fine with an HDMI to HDMI cable.

Leaving the question unanswered, as I'd still like to know why the Thunderbolt to Displayport connection didn't work properly.


I tried several methods from the comments to solve this problem
As shown above, almost the entire hard disk is occupied by "Other". Since the operating system could sometimes get confused by the multitude of tasks, a restart could possibly solve the problem. (Enter in the terminal sudo reboot)
Since "other" can be anything, except
Books
Documents
Xcode Build caches of a project
iCloud Drive
iOS files
Mails
Programs
Other users
System

It is best to work at the root level to see what exactly is being used in conspicuous high disk space. We are examining the data partition.
$ sudo du -hxd1 /System/Volumes/Data
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/sw
1,0K    /System/Volumes/Data/home
979M    /System/Volumes/Data/usr
271M    /System/Volumes/Data/boot
 15G    /System/Volumes/Data/Library
3,1G    /System/Volumes/Data/System
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/mnt
 23M    /System/Volumes/Data/.fseventsd
400G    /System/Volumes/Data/private
 30G    /System/Volumes/Data/Users
 50G    /System/Volumes/Data/Applications
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/opt
5,3M    /System/Volumes/Data/.PreviousSystemInformation
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/Volumes
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/cores

In my case, the /private/var directory pulls a lot. Again, I can examine the output further.
$ sudo du -hxd1 /System/Volumes/Data
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/yp
8,0K    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/networkd
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/install
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/empty
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/ma
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/mail
 59M    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/spool
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/jabberd
 24K    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/MobileSoftwareUpdate
1,0M    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/vm
4,0K    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/msgs
4,0M    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/logs
 11M    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/audit
104M    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/root
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/lib
400G    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/db
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/at
 57M    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/log
1,8G    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/folders
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/containers
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/select
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/netboot
 36K    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/run
 36M    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/protected
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/rpc
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/tmp
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/backups
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/agentx
  0B    /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/rwho

Now in my case I know that /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/db is the problem.
Reapplying the same method on that directory and digging deeper finally led me to /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/db/powerlog/Library/BatteryLife/Quarantine which was using practically the whole disk space. Deleting it solved the problem (for now).
Note: These are invented memory sizes.


Keyboard shortcut: shift+tab in chrome does wrong thing

As a workaround, or just to check whether the problem is with Google Chrome or something else, install this extension.

To configure it to go to the last input, type in Shift + Tab in Shortcut Key and as the Action, click Browser Action > Inner Page Action > Focus on the previous input element.

You could also try Reset Browser Settings and then try going back in a form in Incognito Mode - ⌘+Shift+N


Nope. No fine-grained control of access in HomeKit at this point.


I've found, and am now loving, Royal TSX. Not only does it do exactly what I loved CoRD for - multiple RDP connections in a single window - it has a plugin system that'll connect to VNC, TeamViewer, web pages etc, and more in the future. The RDP plugin is based on FreeRDP, and seems to support the latest RDP protocol enhancements.

Some of the functionality requires the companion server product, and it'll only do 10 connections in "free" mode ($29 for unlimited connections). But given that it's a stable, feature-rich client that is being actively developed, I can recommend it highly.


A half answer:
I found the source code for dns-sd.c and dns_sd.h, dating back to 2004 and OS X "Lion", where "flags" is a value of type DNSServiceFlags, which seems to be one of these (deprecated) constants.  If that's so, then "1" means "kDNSServiceFlagsMoreComing": another entry should follow immediately. "2" means just "kDNSServiceFlagsAdd". "3" means "kDNSServiceFlagsAdd" together with "kDNSServiceFlagsMoreComing". Not very useful.
According to that same program, "if" is uint32_t ifIndex,  the "interface index", which is also mentioned on that Apple developer page.  I'm seeing values like "4" and "0", and I can't quite figure out the meaning.  It seems to be both a bitmask for requesting a class of interface (where 0 means "any", and -1/-2/-3 cast to an uint32_t are other classes), and an index into a list of network interfaces (where 0 means "error", and positive integers indicate a valid interface).  I only have one active network interface, and I can't tell that it's "#4" of anything, or why I'd see "0" for some dns-sd requests.
Apple's mDNSResponder code, in many revisions across many years, is at https://opensource.apple.com/source/mDNSResponder/.


iPhone not charging in Windows. Driver without iTunes?

Just download iTunes, open the .exe file with winrar or some other similar software and then run the AppleMobileDeviceSupport(64).msi executable from there.


Can a Mac's part number be determined with a Terminal Command?

Apple Order Numbers -- which also are referred to as Model Numbers, Part Numbers, or Marketing Numbers.

Unfortunately, Order Numbers cannot be found on the hardware itself nor can they be found in the "About This Mac" section of OS X, and this is the primary limitation of the identifier.

Nor can it be determined using Terminal.

Open About this Mac  and copy the serial number from there.

Paste that number in the search box on the Look up web page

It will show you the "Order Number"  as example  Order     MQXXXLL/A


It could possibly happen if you have your language set to English, but your region to China:

System Settings>General>Language and Region


Macbook Pro headphones port won't pick up my microphone

USB Audio Port Adapters usually work well, but I'd look for "compatible with Mac" in the description just to be sure. Why your TRRS adapters are not working is kinda weird, possibly dust?
After seeing the video - doing exactly what you are doing (but with a lavalier mic) does work for me.
I can only recommend to check for dust or try to use a different adapter.
There are also adapters that are not splitters (they only do mic to 4pin), try getting one of that kind.
(Don't have enough reputation to comment, which is why this is an answer)


You can disable it in System Preferences:


Quit iTunes.  Then you can go into your "~/Music/iTunes/Mobile\ Applications/" directory, and manually delete apps using the Terminal or Finder.  Before the next Sync, in iTunes control-click to hit the "Reset Warnings" menu item for your device.  During the next Sync, iTunes may ask if you want to (re)copy purchased files from the device.  Just say no.  iTunes will be confused, but the apps will remain on the device, and not on your HD.

It would be better to first make a backup copy of your Mobile Applications directory with Time Machine, or to another HD, before messing with iTunes internal data like this.


I answered a similar question here: OSX 10.8 - How to keep a custom dock for all users that login

This answer should still apply to macOS Sierra.

Dug up my notes from when I first modified the user template in our base images.  Ran back through the process, changing the default Dock to have about 15 items, on a fresh Mac and these steps worked.  I did a lot of this from the command line, so as to not fuss with changing/reverting permissions using Finder.

Arrange your Dock however you would like for it to appear on new user accounts, changing the orientation and adding/removing applications.
Browse to ~/Library/Preferences and copy the com.apple.Dock.plist file to your desktop.
Open Terminal and start a root session by typing: sudo -s
Enter your current account's password when prompted
Copy the copy of your modified dock preference file from your desktop to the User Template in your Mac's System folder.: cp ~/Desktop/com.apple.Dock.plist /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/Preferences

That should do the trick.  I tested this on a fresh Mac by logging into both a Guest account and a new (created after the above steps) standard user account, both accounts showed the proper Dock with 15~ items.

It shouldn't be necessary with these steps but if you run into trouble you should verify that the /System/Library/User Template folder has permissions set to: System - Read/Write & Everyone - No access.


I am almost positive there is no app that does this. Your best bet will likely be to develop a script that cross checks icon changes at some regular interval when both machines are on the same network with access to whatever drive in which you keep your icon library stored.


What happened to my macros after update to Word for Mac 14.5.7?

Turns up that the Office update changed my preferences in MS Word. Previously templates had been stored in

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/

When AutoUpdate ran, the location changed to

~"UserName"/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/


How to block from sideloading apps (ipa) in iOS devices.?

Without the device being jailbroken or having a development provisioning profile installed, there's absolutely no difference between an app installed via the App Store or via "sideloading", except that one might be able to install an old version of an App Store app. Or possibly an app which the developer removed from the app store by choice. It's simply not possible to install any app that's not originally from the app store via "sideloading" without it being configured for development as all applications must have a valid App Store code signature. If you want to block installation of all apps, you can create a MDM profile with Apple Configurator with this restriction.


Want to add keyboard shortcut to open selected file with specific mac app

I have seen similar mappings done in Karabiner - a more flexible system for mapping keys. It allows even funny mappings - like on the right shift key, or functions that happen if you hold a key.
But they require some scripting and while it's easy to get something that works on my machine only its hard to figure out something sharable. I will outline what I think needs to be done.

Karabiner a feature called "Complex modifications" that allows this. I find the documentation sparse but it's simple enough to figure out.

There is a number of pre-made mappings where the code can be inspected at comples_modifications (use the "show JSON" that reveals when you click the triangle next to "import").

Custom mappings can be just put under ~/.config/karabiner/assets/complex_modifications and can then be imported.

The launch app mappings all have a line like this:

"shell_command": "open '/Applications/TextEdit.app'"

All that's missing is the selected file.

oh-my-zsh has a function that does this.
It's rather short, here in full:

pfs () {
    osascript 2> /dev/null <<EOF
    set output to ""
    tell application "Finder" to set the_selection to selection
    set item_count to count the_selection
    repeat with item_index from 1 to count the_selection
      if item_index is less than item_count then set the_delimiter to "\n"
      if item_index is item_count then set the_delimiter to ""
      set output to output & ((item item_index of the_selection as alias)'s POSIX path) & the_delimiter
    end repeat
EOF

From the command line a command like this works:

open -a TextEdit $(pfs)

All that would be left is to figure out how to get the pfs definition into Karabiner...
I will leave that as exercise to the interested reader


The easiest way to add a photo as an attachment is to open you photo library while multi-tasking find the photo you want to attach.

Hold down on the image until the copy button appears, Hit copy.

Go back to Mail and hold down in the body of the message. Hit paste when the option shows up.

Repeat until you have all the attachments you wanted.


Adding bootable diagnostic partition(s) to 2010 iMac (sans ODD) (fancy Bootcamp question)

I used the AOMEI partition manager for the partitioning and cloning, but similar software will do probably just as fine.

In Windows, clone Disk 0 to Disk 1. This results in another bootable system on Disk 1. Disk 1 has three primary partitions (just like Disk 0).
Create a fourth ~10GB partition at the end of Disk 1. Assign it letter Z.
Mount the windows ISO (using Daemon Tools or similar), then copy the contents to Z:.
Open the command prompt, go to the mounted image, then:

cd \boot
bootsect.exe /nt60 z:

(if it throws any error, make sure Z: is not open or used anywhere)
Create directory _bootimages on Z:, and copy all ISO files you want to be able to boot from.
Download EasyBCD and start it.
Add all ISO's to the boot menu, giving them descriptive names.
Under the WinPE tab, add another entry. Call it "Windows 7 setup" and point it to Z:\sources\boot.wim.

Restart, hold down Alt and click the "Windows" option that corresponds to Disk 1. A boot manager will pop up. Done.


Subscribed calendars not shown on my device, but they can be opened manually [iOS 14.4.2]

Solved!
To make those events to show up, put a UID parameter inside every VEVENT. Example:
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:41e9d941b4ae063b9b6236fdc6f2479d-20210424T191741:username@example.com
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:English
TRIGGER:-PT2M
END:VALARM
URL:https://zoom.us/j/99999999999
LOCATION:209
DESCRIPTION:Read The Cather in the Rye
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210425T154000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Moscow:20210425T162000
SUMMARY:English language, ENG-9-1
END:VEVENT

Also UID can be absolutely random line, e. g. ae063b9b6236fd, but it must be unique for every event in your calendar and outside of your calendar. If the client meets two events with same UID's, the last one mentioned in iCal response will be shown. If there is no UID, the event will be ignored during parsing.
Client needs UID to prevent duplicating events and merging events with TODO lists (if supported), etc.


...Because the older the cheaper

This goes without saying!

  How long a 2012 iMac can be used for iOS development? Or in more general sense, how long an iMac can be used for iOS development?

Nobody can really answer this because nobody can know for sure when any particular model Mac will no longer be supported.  In fact, this article goes into detail, but their very first words are "Apple has no written policy"

IMO, the 2012 is probably not the best choice because it's at the "cutoff" for supported iMacs on the macOS Catalina release.

Will it...

be supported by the next version?  Nobody knows.
still receive updates?  Most likely.
run the version of XCode required to develop on the latest iDevices?  That's the kicker.  It may or may not.

Being that your at the very end of the line, I'd look for something about 3 years "younger."  This will buy you some time before you get a more modern, well supported machine.


External SSD or HD. Performance compare to internal SSD?

An external HDD is going to be ~100 MB/s, an external SSD closer to ~500MB/s, the SD card expanders (such as tardisk or transcend jetdrive) have read/write speeds only slightly slower than that of the HDD (~75MB/s). However, the SD expander has the advantage of not actually being external (it sits flush to the edge of the MBP and occupies the SD card spot). Your internal SSD likely has speeds close to ~700MB/s. Network attached storage will only be as fast as your connection. If you have an "N" network, your speed will max out at ~35MB/s, with an "AC" connection or gigabit Ethernet you should have no problem getting full ~100MB/s speeds.


is it possible to automate device enrollment process using Intune MDM?

Apple can compel device enrollment automation that triggers no touch download and forced enrollment.

http://deploy.apple.com/

iOS devices require user approved enrollment unless the hardware was purchased under a business account. This subset of hardware can be automatically managed devices as part of an enterprise or business account. Your three steps would work for these iOS devices.
Since your three steps are three different processes, focus on them sequentially.
Figure how to update settings once a device is managed (by Intune in your case) as you likely have the most control over that initially.
Then you will have two paths for the other two steps. User assisted enrollment of a device and Apple DEP process that points to your specific MDM.

https://www.apple.com/business/docs/site/DEP_Guide.pdf
https://support.apple.com/guide/mdm/welcome/web

Read this PDF and site for some great tips, like manual supervision via Apple Configurator.


Number 3.6.1: Cell value needs to be invisible, if the adjacent checkbox is checked

If I understand your question:

Instead of referencing itself, reference the formula that created the amount.

So, E8 appears to be B8-F8, correct?  Then the formula for E8 can be:

  =HVIS ( D8;"";B8-F8 )

This will return Null or empty string without the self-reference error.

Screenshot is using Numbers 3.6.1 US edition but the formulas should work if adjusted for your localized version:


Use icloud for contacts, not photos. Photos take up a lot of room on icloud. Do you have itunes? Assuming so - create a backup on your PC-- you will be given an option upon plug in to backup "now" ? If you aren't you can go into your settings and do a complete backup now - make sure you have ticks next to each item you want backed up. i.e. photos, apps etc.


Where did this new WiFi network with SSID 'SETUP' come from?

This could be the network for a wireless printer. Its possible that someone nearby has bought a new printer with wireless functions.


How do I create user accounts from the Terminal in Mac OS X 10.11?

If you are here and your system is running anything from 10.10 and newer, the sysadminctl command is your best friend. It does a lot of magic that DSCL can't do.

Here's the output for sysadminctl:

sysadminctl[21233:29122637] Usage: sysadminctl
    -deleteUser <user name> [-secure || -keepHome]
    -newPassword <new password> -oldPassword <old password> [-passwordHint <password hint>]
    -resetPasswordFor <local user name> -newPassword <new password> [-passwordHint <password hint>]
    -addUser <user name> [-fullName <full name>] [-UID <user ID>] [-password <user password>] [-hint <user hint>] [-home <full path to home>] [-admin] [-picture <full path to user image>]

Pass '-' instead of password in commands above to request prompt.

Then you'll want to do:

sudo createhomedir -c 2>&1 | grep -v "shell-init"

To add/remove users use dseditgroup:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a usernametoadd -t user admin
sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a usernametoadd -t user wheel


I'd start with the actual uninstaller rather than the cleaner.

http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/uninstall-creative-suite-cs5-cs5.html

Adobe does do deep integration, and I've been known to just walk away from machines with too much adobe on them. If you feel the uninstaller isn't getting things clean enough, you can take it a step further as follows:

Perform a clean install of the OS
use Migration Assistant to bring in the user account rather than setting up a new user on the "clean" Mac
download the uninstaller onto the new admin account

At that point, you can run the uninstaller to clean out any ~/Library plugins that might be installed. It's overkill, but sometimes a clean start is better than trying to let uninstallers find every copy of files that have been zipped, moved, linked, etc...


Yellow mexican singer in system 7 / mac os 8?

Jared: the Butcher of Song

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Smith


How to fix OS X Finder window with file/folders panel that doesn't draw itself?

The problem is solved by changing the preferences of Google Drive:

Click the Google Drive menu and choose Preferences.

Uncheck the option to “Show file sync status icons and right click menu” in the Preferences/Advanced window.

More info following links from ConvexMartian above.


Delete file in PKInstallSandboxManager folder

The answer to this is both NO and YES, NO you should never clear those temporary cache items yourself, but YES you can have Mac OS clear out the temporary files itself.

You should not modify or delete any of these folders:

.Spotlight-V100: Spotlight metadata for each mounted volume. The mdworker processes use this metadata to update Spotlight search.

.fseventsd: A log file of FSEvents logged by the fseventsd launchdaemon process. It monitors file system events, such as file creation, modification, deletion, and more. Time Machine uses this data to process backup in the background.

.DocumentRevisions-V100: macOS versioning database used by apps to save and retrieve different versions of a document.

.PKInstallSandboxManager: Used for software updates and sandboxing.

.PKInstallSandboxManager-SystemSoftware: Used for system software updates.

.Trashes: Trash folder in each mounted volume.

If for some reason you reboot the Mac and the temporary files and temp folders are still bloated with who knows what, you can reboot into Safe Mode by rebooting the Mac and holding down the Shift key, this performs additional measurements to get rid of temporary files and caches, when the Mac has finished booting into Safe Mode, rebooting back, as usual, should get things in check as expected.

And if you came across these folders because you’re running out of storage, check out some tips to free up disk space on the Mac, or do a file size based search, you’ll likely find something appropriate for recovering some space for your situation.


Oops -- deleted swap files (Mac OS, 10.6) -- will they come back?

To re-create swap files, you should restart the Mac (a normal shutdown is all that's needed). Swap files get cleaned up each and every reboot whether you attempted to mess with them or not.

I used the word attempted since you can't really delete a swap file from under the system due to how unix (the underpinnings of Mac OS X) works. The best you can do is remove the entry in the filesystem that points to the swap file, but any file doesn't get deleted until all files that were using the file are done with it.

Since swap files contain the state of the machine while running, they are marked to not be backed up since they change from second to second and get recreated each boot. To back them up would simply waste space on the backup and time of the system.

You picked a good system file to delete - next time be sure to ask first before deleting other files since many system files are not as forgiving when you delete them from a system and then reboot things.


Apple Mail - block incoming mail at certain hours

Just put your machine in do not disturb mode when you want to get some work done: http://osxdaily.com/2012/08/10/turn-off-notification-center-in-os-x-temporarily/


Using iTunes navigation with lists. Is it gone now?

Posted as answer just to provide image…

As douggro says, the caret at top right of the window, when in Music view, gives you the old view back.

Pro Tip: if you also want the old view back when editing track info, opt/right click & Get Info.


How can ZFS be used with encryption on OS X?

OS X 10.7.4 Core Storage for encryption, ZEVO for ZFS

Example

Objective: one physical disk, five volumes. One of five non-encrypted, one encrypted with a passphrase, three encrypted with a different passphrase.

Starting point:

/dev/disk2 – a physical disk
/dev/disk2s2 – a JHFS+ volume to be kept, unprotected
/dev/disk2s3 – a slice to be destroyed, to be reused with encryption and ZFS.

Hints

Since HFS+ has a single global lock for all metadata updates (held across the I/O) it is highly sensitive to disk latencies. So whilst the mixture of ZFS with JHFS+ on a single disk is possible, for most use cases the file system mixture is not recommended.

This example also makes some use of compression, and of child file systems.

Summary of commands

diskutil coreStorage create pusscats /dev/disk2s3
diskutil coreStorage createVolume 370260EF-D772-4739-BAF6-F4CD6F49A60D jhfs+ Billski 50% -passphrase
diskutil coreStorage createVolume 370260EF-D772-4739-BAF6-F4CD6F49A60D jhfs+ Pickle 100% -passphrase
diskutil unmount disk3 && diskutil unmount disk4
sudo zpool create -O casesensitivity=insensitive -O normalization=formD Billski /dev/disk3
sudo zpool create -O casesensitivity=insensitive -O normalization=formD -O compression=on Pickle /dev/disk4
zfs create Pickle/button
zfs create Pickle/button/nose
sudo chown gjp22 /Volumes/Billski
sudo chown gjp22 /Volumes/Pickle
zpool export Billski && zpool export Pickle
diskutil unmount /Volumes/slice\ two

The output, in Terminal

sh-3.2$ diskutil list disk2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *8.0 GB     disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS slice two               1.5 GB     disk2s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS slice three             6.0 GB     disk2s3
sh-3.2$ diskutil coreStorage create pusscats /dev/disk2s3
Started CoreStorage operation
Unmounting disk2s3
Touching partition type on disk2s3
Adding disk2s3 to Logical Volume Group
Creating Core Storage Logical Volume Group
Switching disk2s3 to Core Storage
Waiting for Logical Volume Group to appear
Discovered new Logical Volume Group "370260EF-D772-4739-BAF6-F4CD6F49A60D"
Core Storage LVG UUID: 370260EF-D772-4739-BAF6-F4CD6F49A60D
Finished CoreStorage operation
sh-3.2$ diskutil coreStorage createVolume 370260EF-D772-4739-BAF6-F4CD6F49A60D jhfs+ Billski 50% -passphrase
Passphrase for new volume:
Confirm new passphrase:
Started CoreStorage operation
Waiting for Logical Volume to appear
Formatting file system for Logical Volume
Initialized /dev/rdisk3 as a 3 GB HFS Plus volume with a 8192k journal
Mounting disk
Core Storage LV UUID: 22CF33F0-9EB1-424C-AFFA-FFA45A75A828
Core Storage disk: disk3
Finished CoreStorage operation
sh-3.2$ diskutil coreStorage createVolume 370260EF-D772-4739-BAF6-F4CD6F49A60D jhfs+ Pickle 100% -passphrase
Passphrase for new volume:
Confirm new passphrase:
Started CoreStorage operation
Waiting for Logical Volume to appear
Formatting file system for Logical Volume
Initialized /dev/rdisk4 as a 3 GB HFS Plus volume with a 8192k journal
Mounting disk
Core Storage LV UUID: 500E7D8F-27A3-4704-BF9F-5AE5D6BB6982
Core Storage disk: disk4
Finished CoreStorage operation
sh-3.2$ diskutil unmount disk3 && diskutil unmount disk4
Volume Billski on disk3 unmounted
Volume Pickle on disk4 unmounted
sh-3.2$ sudo zpool create -O casesensitivity=insensitive -O normalization=formD Billski /dev/disk3
Password:
sh-3.2$ sudo zpool create -O casesensitivity=insensitive -O normalization=formD -O compression=on Pickle /dev/disk4
sh-3.2$ zfs create Pickle/button
cannot mount '/Volumes/Pickle/button': failed to create mountpoint
filesystem successfully created, but not mounted
sh-3.2$ zfs create Pickle/button/nose
cannot mount '/Volumes/Pickle/button/nose': failed to create mountpoint
filesystem successfully created, but not mounted
sh-3.2$ sudo chown gjp22 /Volumes/Billski
sh-3.2$ sudo chown gjp22 /Volumes/Pickle
sh-3.2$ zpool export Billski && zpool export Pickle
sh-3.2$ diskutil unmount /Volumes/slice\ two
Volume slice two on disk2s2 unmounted
sh-3.2$ clear

At this point, with all volumes of the physical disk unmounted, you can disconnect the disk. Reconnection should allow use of the child file systems:

sh-3.2$ zfs list
NAME                  USED   AVAIL   REFER  MOUNTPOINT
Billski             1.04Mi  2.37Gi   684Ki  /Volumes/Billski
Pickle              1.87Mi  2.37Gi   472Ki  /Volumes/Pickle
Pickle/button        808Ki  2.37Gi   412Ki  /Volumes/Pickle/button
Pickle/button/nose   396Ki  2.37Gi   396Ki  /Volumes/Pickle/button/nose
sh-3.2$ clear

sh-3.2$ mount | grep /dev/
/dev/disk1 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk0s2 on /Volumes/11E53 (hfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/slice two (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled, noowners)
/dev/disk4 on /Volumes/Billski (zfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk6 on /Volumes/Pickle (zfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk6s1 on /Volumes/Pickle/button (zfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk6s1s1 on /Volumes/Pickle/button/nose (zfs, local, journaled)
sh-3.2$ clear

sh-3.2$ ls -l /Volumes
total 40
drwxr-xr-x@ 32 root   wheel  1156  3 Jun 09:08 11E53
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   admin     1  4 Jun 15:17 11E53-2012-06-03 -> /
drwxr-xr-x   5 root   wheel     5  4 Jun 22:27 Billski
drwxr-xr-x   6 root   wheel     6  4 Jun 22:33 Pickle
drwxrwxr-x   7 gjp22  staff   306  4 Jun 21:41 slice two
sh-3.2$ clear

sh-3.2$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS 11E53                   25.0 GB    disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:          Apple_CoreStorage                         25.0 GB    disk0s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s5
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS 11E53-2012-06-03       *24.7 GB    disk1
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *8.0 GB     disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS slice two               1.5 GB     disk2s2
   3:          Apple_CoreStorage                         6.0 GB     disk2s3
   4:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk2s4
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.9 GB     disk3
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:                        ZFS                         2.6 GB     disk3s2
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:             zfs_pool_proxy Billski                *2.6 GB     disk4
/dev/disk5
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.9 GB     disk5
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk5s1
   2:                        ZFS                         2.6 GB     disk5s2
/dev/disk6
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:             zfs_pool_proxy Pickle                 *2.6 GB     disk6
   1:       zfs_filesystem_proxy button                  2.5 GB     disk6s1
   2:       zfs_filesystem_proxy nose                    2.5 GB     disk6s1s1
sh-3.2$ clear

sh-3.2$ diskutil coreStorage list
CoreStorage logical volume groups (2 found)
|
+-- Logical Volume Group ED97CA61-2077-45CE-9CBB-8AA0A7600CB5
|   =========================================================
|   Name:         b
|   Sequence:     1
|   Free Space:   0 B (0 B)
|   |
|   +-< Physical Volume 5C79B2B6-CE01-4F02-9222-2AD898791AC5
|   |   ----------------------------------------------------
|   |   Index:    0
|   |   Disk:     disk0s4
|   |   Status:   Online
|   |   Size:     24999997440 B (25.0 GB)
|   |
|   +-> Logical Volume Family 7A9C5B98-287F-4F6B-9F9C-9641EFBC16E1
|       ----------------------------------------------------------
|       Sequence:               11
|       Encryption Status:      Unlocked
|       Encryption Type:        AES-XTS
|       Encryption Context:     Present
|       Conversion Status:      Complete
|       Has Encrypted Extents:  Yes
|       Conversion Direction:   -none-
|       |
|       +-> Logical Volume 3A130C9E-63AE-4F00-A1C3-E750B1570381
|           ---------------------------------------------------
|           Disk:               disk1
|           Status:             Online
|           Sequence:           5
|           Size (Total):       24681226240 B (24.7 GB)
|           Size (Converted):   -none-
|           Revertible:         Yes (unlock and decryption required)
|           LV Name:            11E53-2012-06-03
|           Volume Name:        11E53-2012-06-03
|           Content Hint:       Apple_HFS
|
+-- Logical Volume Group 370260EF-D772-4739-BAF6-F4CD6F49A60D
    =========================================================
    Name:         pusscats
    Sequence:     1
    Free Space:   0 B (0 B)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume F64F6909-25BF-4638-8647-CD058D60968B
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    0
    |   Disk:     disk2s3
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     6020829184 B (6.0 GB)
    |
    +-> Logical Volume Family 4D42970B-FAB7-4EFE-B120-2057A9A7A7E5
    |   ----------------------------------------------------------
    |   Sequence:               2
    |   Encryption Status:      Unlocked
    |   Encryption Type:        AES-XTS
    |   Encryption Context:     Present
    |   Conversion Status:      NoConversion
    |   Has Encrypted Extents:  Yes
    |   Conversion Direction:   -none-
    |   |
    |   +-> Logical Volume 22CF33F0-9EB1-424C-AFFA-FFA45A75A828
    |       ---------------------------------------------------
    |       Disk:               disk3
    |       Status:             Online
    |       Sequence:           2
    |       Size (Total):       2934915072 B (2.9 GB)
    |       Size (Converted):   -none-
    |       Revertible:         No
    |       LV Name:            Billski
    |       Content Hint:       Apple_HFS
    |
    +-> Logical Volume Family 3A009EF4-4B3D-4BC8-8B47-EFE88B2BA12A
        ----------------------------------------------------------
        Sequence:               2
        Encryption Status:      Unlocked
        Encryption Type:        AES-XTS
        Encryption Context:     Present
        Conversion Status:      NoConversion
        Has Encrypted Extents:  Yes
        Conversion Direction:   -none-
        |
        +-> Logical Volume 500E7D8F-27A3-4704-BF9F-5AE5D6BB6982
            ---------------------------------------------------
            Disk:               disk5
            Status:             Online
            Sequence:           2
            Size (Total):       2934910976 B (2.9 GB)
            Size (Converted):   -none-
            Revertible:         No
            LV Name:            Pickle
            Content Hint:       Apple_HFS
sh-3.2$ clear

sh-3.2$ zpool status
  pool: Billski
 state: ONLINE
 scan: none requested
config:

    NAME                                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    Billski                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
      GPTE_7CBD336C-568A-41AE-8E61-291CBD8EF783  ONLINE       0     0     0  at disk3s2

errors: No known data errors

  pool: Pickle
 state: ONLINE
 scan: none requested
config:

    NAME                                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    Pickle                                       ONLINE       0     0     0
      GPTE_25BF8159-FB8D-4589-B52A-184F6675176E  ONLINE       0     0     0  at disk5s2

errors: No known data errors
sh-3.2$

The end result, in Finder

Known issues

In CoreStorage world the content hint Apple_HFS will be not true for the ZFS end result. I have asked Apple to allow a more suitable hint.

At unlock time, the system may appear to reject the passphrase (maybe because of the content hint mismatch). When rejection appears:

wait
the unlocked volume (and any child file systems) should mount
escape from the password dialogue.

If you wish, use Keychain Access to add to a keychain the passphrase for the UUID of a Core Storage logical volume.

Mountain Lion no longer supports diskutil eraseDisk placement of partition maps on Core Storage logical volumes –

gpes3e-gjp4:~ gjp22$ diskutil list /dev/disk4 && diskutil list /dev/disk5
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *8.0 GB     disk4
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk4s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage test                    7.7 GB     disk4s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk4s3
/dev/disk5
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS test                   *7.3 GB     disk5
gpes3e-gjp4:~ gjp22$ diskutil unmount /dev/disk5
Volume test on disk5 unmounted
gpes3e-gjp4:~ gjp22$ sudo zpool create -O casesensitivity=insensitive -O normalization=formD Billski /dev/disk5

Unable to begin erase operation: Placing a partition map on a Core Storage logical volume is not supported (-69671)
diskutil eraseDisk failed, exit status 1
gpes3e-gjp4:~ gjp22$ sw_vers
ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.8.5
BuildVersion:   12F37
gpes3e-gjp4:~ gjp22$

– thanks to mgrosman for the alert.

Repairs

Considering Apple's design of Core Storage to work primarily with content hint Apple_HFS, and the bugs in fsck_cs:

I don't know whether 'forcing' alternative types (ZFS, zfs_pool_proxy, zfs_filesystem_proxy and so on) might impair the ability of fsck_cs to effect repairs in case of difficulty.

Proceed with caution.


As you can see here that version of iOS ins't signed anymore by Apple. It means that you can't install that version unless you have saved the SHSH blob with softwares like TinyUmbrella. You can save SHSH blobs for certain firmware until it is signed.


how do i erase all info on macbook air while still keeping microsoft word

Your best bet for a clean slate would be to wipe the drive and reinstall OS X. However, if you really need to keep Microsoft Word you might want to try other options.

For data that the old owner did not delete, you can create yourself an account on the machine (Administrator) and delete their account.

Then, using Disk Utility, you can "erase free space" to actually delete the data.

As for the rest of the stuff on the drive, such as installed applications that you don't want, you will need to manually remove these from /Applications. I suggest that you don't simply delete the .app files from that directory, but run them through a 3rd party uninstaller such as AppCleaner.

This is a lot less "clean" than reinstalling OS X, but it does what you want.


You can install the command line tools separately from here. You want the 10.6 download listed under "Option 1: Downloading Pre-Built Binaries".


How to prevent iTerm2 from creating overlaps and broken lines after pasting multiline chunks of text?

From docs:

Pastes (both regular and slow) are done by splitting the text to paste into chunks. There is a delay between the transmission of each chunk. To change the speed that "paste" pastes at:

defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 QuickPasteBytesPerCall -int 1024
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 QuickPasteDelayBetweenCalls -float 0.01

To change the speed that "paste slowly" pastes at:

defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 SlowPasteBytesPerCall -int 16
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 SlowPasteDelayBetweenCalls -float 0.125


Quitting and reopening Mail loses all accounts

Chase reports and asks:

Also, the folder ~/Library/Mail only has two folders
Mail Lost+Found
V2
All of my mailboxes are contained within V2... is that normal?

Those folders should exist, but at least based on the contents of my own ~/Library/Mail folder, it's incomplete. I also have individual folders for each of my email accounts and those folders contain mbox files which I assume are the local copies of the IMAP mailstore.

By way of troubleshooting, it might be interesting to know what the file permissions are for the Mail directory.
Open the terminal, and type (or cut and paste) the following command:
ls -l ~/Library/Mail

The results (edited here to show only the relevant line) for my own functional Mail folder are:
drwx------    13 jaberg  staff    442 Oct 13 00:25 Mail

The permissions basically tell us that this a directory and that the owner, jaberg (me) is able to read, write and execute. (The execute permission of a directory is sometimes thought of as the search permission. You need the x in order to be allowed access to the information about the contents of the directory.)
You can also view permissions from Finder by selecting the folder and performing Get Info… from the file menu (or ⌘+i), but you won't get as much information.

You'll find more information about accessing and interpreting file permissions in the Apple Knowledgebase: Troubleshooting permissions issues in Mac OS X
If you're permissions differ from those shown here, you can try to Repair Permissions using Disk Utility (this doesn't require a restart or booting from a different volume) or, if you're comfortable, change the permissions of the Mail folder to match those shown using the chmod command. You can learn about chmod from its man(ual) pages, accessed from the terminal by typing:
man chmod


Is there a way to receive a warning if memory is running low?

You can acheive this with a combination of Growl and some shell scripting.

Growlnotify is a command line tool that can send a message to growl:

grownnotify -t "Title" -m "Message"

Wrapping some logic around this to check for CPU use or Memory use should be straightforward enough.  I'm not at a Mac right now so can't test with commands but something like the following should be possible

while true
do
sleep 60
memuse=`vmstat -some -options -to -show -current -memory -use | awk '{ print $column_that you_are_interested_in_eg_5 }'`
if [[ $memuse -gt 80 ]]
then
growlnotify -t "Memory Low" -m "Memory use is at $memuse %"
fi
done

Thew above isn't going to work, please don't copy and paste it, but it's something to go on.  You can expand the logic further easily by checking every 2 minutes, and if it's over 80% then check every 30 seconds to see if it's persistantly high and not just a spike, and if its still high after 3 checks then alert, otherwise don't etc.


" No such file or directory" when copying from local harddisk to icloud drive

The root cause of the issue is the lack of the disk space.

During my copy operation, my local HD has run out of spare space:

 df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  iused      ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1     233Gi  233Gi    0Bi   100%  5751980 4289215299    0%   /
devfs          191Ki  191Ki    0Bi   100%      661          0  100%   /dev
map -hosts       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%        0          0  100%   /net
map auto_home    0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%        0          0  100%   /home
/dev/disk2s2   466Gi  420Gi   46Gi    91% 10491127 4284476152    0%   /Volumes/Time Machine

After I removed some apps from /Application and rerun the cp command, it works as expected.


How does Time Machine treat changes to the Photos Library?

SHORT ANSWER

Time Machine only backs up new or modified data, and keeps a record of any deleted data. This includes what's in your Photos Library. It does not do a fresh backup of the entire Photos Library each time you make changes to it.

LONG ANSWER

The way Time Machine works is that it backs up anything that has changed since the last backup. For example, a file that is:

Edited since the last backup is backed up again in the next backup
Created since the last backup is backed up in the next backup
Deleted since the last backup is not included in the next backup (i.e. there is no record of it in that backup, but the file itself is still stored for any older backups it was a part of)

Now, the confusion usually comes from the way Time Machine actually does a backup. I'll try and explain this below.

The initial backup TM does on a new backup drive is a full backup of
your Mac. So, if your Mac has used 80GB of a 1TB drive, then the
first backup will take up 80GB of space on the new backup drive.
All remaining incremental backups do not do a full backup. Instead TM backs up any new data (i.e. newly added data and any edited data) and keeps a record of any deleted data.
In the case of files such as Packages (including the Photos Library package), TM will identify any:

new data (e.g. new photos in the Masters folder within your Photos Library package) and back this up
modified data within your Photos Library package (e.g. edited photos) and back this up
deleted data within your Photos Library package (e.g. photos you've deleted) and keep a record of the change

When the backup drive runs out of space, TM will delete as many of the oldest backups it needs to in order to be able to do the next backup (and this is where users can lose data that was not part of more recent backups)
Regardless of whether it is the initial full backup or an incremental backup, TM will display this to the user as if they're all separate full backups. This is designed on the basis of User Experience (UX) design so that it's easier for users to browse and find data, and acts to reassure users that it's all there. According to Apple:

  ...what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is
  that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how
  your system looked on any given day—so you can revisit your Mac as it
  appeared in the past.

Source: Mac Basics: Time Machine (web archive of Apple knowledge base doc)

Finally, as added reassurance that TM does not do a full backup of your Photos Library each time, I can share a personal example. My family Photos Library is 341GB in size and if this was fully backed up each time then the 2TB external drive that it's backed up to would be full after only 4 or 5 backups (allowing for other data), but that particular TM backup drive has backups going back to late 2015.


I've moved most of my password storage to 1Password app so that I don't need to mind the keychain when it makes more than one copy of a password. the benefit of that is I can have my passwords synced to iOS (and other OS) as well as save them periodically to a USB drive for disaster recovery.

Keychain doesn't do any of these as well as a tool made for managing passwords. As a bonus, I end up making much more secure passwords programmatically rather than typing them by hand.


How to prevent full-screen exit on second monitor, when I close macbook lid?

Disable extended desktop

By default the system will attempt to use both the external monitor and internal display in a dual-display setup; however, you can force the system to only use one display with a custom boot argument PRAM setting . To do this, open the Terminal utility and run the following command:

sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0"

Following this command, restart the system and your system will now either use the internal display, or only use an attached external display. To revert this setting, you can either reset the PRAM or run the following command to clear this value from the boot arguments (reboot for the change to take effect):

sudo nvram boot-args=""

Source:


SSD in a MacBook Pro (mid 2012, 13"), Finder symbol with question mark

I'm guessing the problem is the cable that connects your hard drive to the logic board.  You can order a new one from eBay, Amazon, or other Apple suppliers, or set up a Genius Bar appointment to have them diagnose and see if it is the issue.
A family member and I both had similar issues with our MacBooks.


How do I get the multimedia keys on my keyboard to do anything?

Got it!  USB overdrive heard the keys and let me map them to arbitrary osascript.  http://www.usboverdrive.com/USBOverdrive/News.html


Web Visit Generator - Similar to JingLing

A quick Google Search shows that a lot of others have asked this question before, but with no real answers. Instead people are suggesting using Bootcamp.


Tracking down the correct forks of this semi-dead project was indeed tricky.

I installed the Kernel Extension from here:
https://github.com/mattingalls/Soundflower/releases

I installed SoundFlowerBed from this fork:
https://github.com/mLupine/SoundflowerBed/releases

That puts an item in the menu that allows you to set SoundFlower (2ch) --> Built-In Output, which then makes "SoundFlower" available in QuickTime Player etc.


Whoops, didn't know that such a simple interface was able to show notifications

ANSWER: iCal is able to display invitations out of the box


I just bought the wrong album on iTunes. How do I give it back?

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/

Contact customer support via e-mail and hopefully you can get a refund.


How can I sort notes in the built-in notes app by date created rather than date last saved?

Hmmm, it's not possible. The built-in Notes app is quite straightforward. You should look for another app which will allow you do to this. There are tons of Notes app (free or not) on the AppStore.

edit: As Dori said, Evernote is really good and allows you to sort like this.


Can Notification Center be made black/dark in macOS Sierra beta?

Since the macOS Sierra update (Including Betas) the Notification Panel no longer uses the Dark Mode option, therefore it is permanently in light mode. This is an intended feature.

When Dark Mode is enabled on macOS Mojave or later, it will appear dark:


Karabiner-Elements cannot open new Terminal window unless Terminal already in focus

I played with your key def for Karabiner. (Note that I'm on Big Sur, Karabiner 13.3). Here's what worked for me:
After the first time that I installed and activated your shortcut and tried to use it a dialog came up asking to allow some accessibility or privacy permission. I accepted it without noting exactly what it said but looking through the Privacy permissions in System Preferences I saw that a permission for Automation to allow "karabiner_console_user_server" to control "Terminal" had been added and its checkbox was checked. At first I didn't think the shortcut had done anything but then I found that Terminal had been opened and the tmux script had been run. (I don't have the tmux script so it failed for me but was displayed in Terminal as a command.) Terminal was the bottom most application (shown last in the application chooser). So when testing the shortcut be sure that Terminal isn't hiding behind everything.
At one point I found that if Terminal was running but hidden behind other apps, using the shortcut did work but left it hidden. When it was visible the shortcut did appear to work as desired.
In continued testing I checked and unchecked the Automation preference checkbox at various times and when it was checked the shortcut did attempt to run the tmux script. When it was not checked Terminal did open (behind other apps) but the script appeared not to run. I was not asked to accept any privacy permissions after the first time it had asked after installation (probably because Apple prefers confusing someone by not displaying repeated permission requests rather than annoying someone with multiple requests and confusion tends to result in fewer complaints than annoyances).
So be sure that the Automation privacy permission in System Preferences that I mentioned above exists and that it is checked. It's probably a good idea to quit and restart Karabiner-Elements as well; I did that at various times just in case. If the permission isn't shown (checked or unchecked) then something else isn't working. Adding permissions for an application to automate another something that, for some reason, can't be added manually and is only asked for when one actually does something that requires the permission (and possibly only once), don't ask me why. (Note that I didn't ever shut down and restart to see if I'd be asked to allow the permission again though I think it wouldn't. I'm not sure.)
I hope getting the shortcut to work is as simple as this but I imagine there are plenty of other possibilities that might be the issue.


Looking for Mac Typing software that supports Spanish keyboard layouts - Recommendations?


Well-built applications (hopefully including most of Apple's own apps) should be self-documenting -- Apple recommends that developers include a preference manifest inside each application that describes the preference keys they use (including their names, data types, descriptions, reasonable default values, etc).

To view an app's manifest, right-click (or control-click) on the app, and select Show Package Contents; then open Contents/Resources, and look for a file or folder named after the app's bundle id with a ".manifest" suffix (e.g. Safari's is in a sub-bundle, so it's actually in Safari.app/Contents/Resources/com.apple.safari.manifest/Contents/Resources/com.apple.safari.manifest).

The manifest file is itself in .plist format, and may be a little hard to ready by hand, but if you look for the name values listed under <key>pfm_name</key>, you should find what you're looking for.


Time Machine wants to backup all files after permission change — how to avoid?

In the end I just had to erase my time machine disks and start from scratch.
It seems to work fine now, but this is not how it should have worked.

So I would be looking into moving from Time Machine in favor of something more reliable and avoiding TM further at all costs.


How can I turn off responses to Calendar invites?

This is not possible using Calendar.app, including both macOS (OS X) and iOS.

Your best bet is to submit feedback on Apple's website: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

If enough of us do it hopefully they'll add the functionality.


Why can't I format my blank SSD from OSX Recovery?

Use Disk Utility from a working machine

I don't know why this didn't work in recovery mode, but a friend suggested I plug the SSD into a working Mac with a USB adapter and try using the working Mac's Disk Utility to format the drive.

I did, and that worked. Now I'm installing OS X on it using recovery mode.

Maybe (I'm speculating) the version of Disk Utility that I have recovery mode (my computer came with Mountain Lion) doesn't know how to work with SSDs?

In any case, Disk Utility on a machine running El Capitan was able to format the drive via my USB adapter.


I removed some songs from my directory, how do I tell iTunes to remove them from my library?

iTunes has no functionality to actually scan for missing songs from it's library. If you want to delete Music, you need to do it from within iTunes, and not the other way around. It can however identify missing files which normally appear with an ! mark next to their names. These can simply just be deleted out of the library manually.

There are some 3rd Party options to try and do this automatically:

AppleScript Scan Missing is an AppleScript solution if your using a Mac or this AppleScript from MacOSXHints.
For Windows you can use the iTunes Library Scanner mentioned in this iLife article.

Once you have removed the songs from the iTunes library, they will be removed of your iPod the next time it synchronizes.


Can I save an HTML file to my iPhone and open in Safari?

Once the page is opened on your iPhone all you have to do is tap the Sharing icon, middle icon on bottom, and select 'Add to Home Screen'

If you want to load an html file that you've created on you Mac to your iPhone you'll need to do the following. From System Prefs > Sharing > Enable Web Sharing. Place the html file in your ~/Sites folder. Go the the URL listed in the Web Sharing panel from your iPhone, while on the home network, and open the html file. It will load in Mobile Safari.

If you want this to stay on your iPhone you'll need to have the page written in html5 and have a properly setup CACHE MANIFEST. This includes the appropriate tag in the html file and have the proper manifest file. Then you can follow the first step and add it to your home screen and always have it on your iPhone.


How can I make a keyboard configuration become default when I hook it up?

I'm not sure if it'll support the switching case you describe 100%, but KeyRemap4Macbook will probably get you most of the way there. You can set different options for the internal and external keyboards, for example.


Where does File Sharing store SMB passwords

If you enable Windows File Sharing for a user in System Preferences > File Sharing > Options > Windows File Sharing the method to encrypt and hash the password is modified in the local node of the sharing host's directory service.

The file affected is /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/$user.plist. $user is the name of the user account you enabled in Windows File Sharing. If you enable several users all respective plists are modified.

Technical background: in addition to the existing authentication authorities another one (SMB-NT) is added. SMB-NT is considered weak.

You can get the current authentication authorities of a user by entering:

dscl . -read /users/$user authentication_authority #replace $user with a valid short user name

Usually you have to enable this for older Windows clients (Windows XP etc) only!