Background and explanations
Please read all of this post at least once from start to finish before taking any action.
All MacBook Pros from 2011 have a serious design defect. The thermal management and the generated heat together with the robustness of the discrete AMD graphics chips do not match up very well. Apple knew this and acted like a typical  Soapy Smith, only reacting to this after an outrage. This scandal took on the name of RadeonGate. Only with a threatened class-action law suit Apple was finally pressured into offering a so called "Repair Extension Program".
The Apple Repair Extension program is not available anymore. The only real way to fix this problem is to replace the AMD chip alone. Not the logic board. Not "re-balling", not "reflowing", not "baking". Apple replaced a failed chip with a failing chip. Time and time again. Only replacing the graphics chip is still a costly hardware procedure for such a vintage laptop.
The only known way – that is: with software alone – to get a 2011 MacBook Pro (8,2) with 'only' a failed AMD graphics chip to almost reliably turn on again and boot into macOS and be quite useable with an accelerated GUI is this guide or a variation of it. Most previous tips just removed all AMD-kexts and this results in a horrible user experience with no GUI acceleration at all.
It is necessary to know your exact OS version. The following guide will be simpler for Yosemite but assumes El Capitan or newer. El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra need SIP (System Integrity Protection) disabled. On previous systems (10.6–10.10) these steps are unnecessary.
Important: This guide assumes further that all kexts are still in their default location /System/Library/Extensions. Having all AMD-kexts there except one is beneficial for 'proper' operation. Previous hacks in this direction might have instructed you to move, or worse: remove all AMD*/ATI* kernel extensions. If that is the case: either move the kexts back into their default location or reinstall a system of your choice. Having most of the AMD kexts in place and then having the X3000-kext loaded with a delay will enable power management of the GPU which will otherwise burn electricity for nothing (and might hasten the final heat death of the chip on top of that). To reiterate: Only the file AMDRadeonX3000.kext really has be absent on boot to enable a successful startup, but all other (needed) AMD drivers should be in their default location and the X3000-kext loaded afterwards/delayed to get back into a realm of almost sensible power and temperature management.
Bypassing the discrete graphics chip
To get some display acceleration back it will be necessary to force the machine to not boot in discrete graphics (dGPU) but directly into integrated graphics (iGPU) and stay in this mode.
Booting into dGPU mode is the default on Macs with two switchable graphics cards. The procedure below will set an NVRAM variable that disables the dGPU and forces the system to only use the integrated Intel graphics even when booting.
The NVRAM variable is undocumented but appears to be universally applicable to all Macs with two switchable graphics cards. That means it should work on iMacs and MacBook Pros. Whether they have AMD or NVIDIA chips. The specifics about the drivers that might be necessary to move only cover AMD in this guide. But the NVRAM variable will bypass the discrete graphics chip in any case.
This will give you back your machine – but you will lose some features: e.g. the ability to drive an external display from the DisplayPort, a bit of 3D performance. Thunderbolt data connections should work.
In case this guide fails or is not wanted anymore: this procedure is pure software configuration and therefore fully reversible at any time with simple NVRAM reset.
The initial procedure:
Part 1: Disable SIP, disable dGPU, move one kernel extension

To start from a clean slate: reset SMC and NVRAM:
shutdown, unplug everything except power, now hold
leftShift+Ctrl+Opt+Power
and release all at the same time;

Now power on again and
hold
Cmd+Opt+p+r
at the same time until you hear the startup chime two times.

Boot into Single User Recovery by holding
Cmd+r+s

Disable SIP:
enter:
csrutil disable

disable dGPU on boot with setting the following variable:
nvram fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00

enable verbose boot mode:
nvram boot-args="-v"

reboot into Single User-mode by holding
Cmd+s
on boot

mount root partition writeable
/sbin/mount -uw /

make a kext-backup directory
mkdir -p /System/Library/Extensions-off

only move ONE offending kext out of the way:
mv /System/Library/Extensions/AMDRadeonX3000.kext  /System/Library/Extensions-off/

inform the system to update its kextcache:
touch /System/Library/Extensions/

reboot normally:

You should now have an iGPU  accelerated display, but the system doesn't know how to power-management the failed AMD-chip. (In this state the GPU is always idling with relatively high power, consuming quite a bit of battery when unplugged and leading to GPU temperatures from 60°C upwards [on average 60-85°C], despite not being used for anything by system.)
Part 2: improve thermal and power management
For improved power management of the disabled GPU you have to either manually load the one crucial kext after boot by:
sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions-off/AMDRadeonX3000.kext

If you have a temperature sensor application you might want to have it open before issuing the above command and watch the temps drop…
Automate this with the following LoginHook that will get executed after the next reboot:
sudo mkdir -p /Library/LoginHook
sudo nano /Library/LoginHook/LoadX3000.sh

with the following content:
#!/bin/bash
kextload  /System/Library/Extensions-off/AMDRadeonX3000.kext
pmset -a force gpuswitch 0    # undocumented/experimental
exit 0

then make it*1 executable and active:
sudo chmod a+x /Library/LoginHook/LoadX3000.sh
sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /Library/LoginHook/LoadX3000.sh

*1: The undocumented use of this pmset command seems to improve sleep/wake/shutdown behaviour. If it doesn't, experiment with leaving it out.
See Disclaimer below. The following is just speculation: sleep/wake/shutdown may remain troublesome. The theory here is that "something slowly corrupts" what is saved in the SMC. Therefore, resetting the SMC and re-applying the variable hack seems to alleviate the situation for a time.  (Permanent solutions for this welcome!) As short time workarounds you might want to try to avoid "lid-closing sleep", that seems to give more trouble than other methods (Apple-Menu, Keyboard-Shorcut). Apparent hangs on shutdown are usually just very long delays that will shutdown, eventually, cleanly and successfully.
Unscientific sampling suggests that Yosemite is worst for this and El Capitan and Sierra much better behaved in this regard.
Manually or otherwise delayed loading of this crucial kernel extension allows the system to handle power management a bit better. The battery will be less used and the temperatures emanating from the unused GPU will drop to a range significantly below 50°C (on average between 15-50°C).
For proper power management the minimal set of loaded kexts are on boot (versions for 10.12.6, check with kextstat | grep AMD):
com.apple.kext.AMDLegacySupport (1.5.1)
com.apple.kext.AMD6000Controller (1.5.1)
com.apple.kext.AMDSupport (1.5.1)
com.apple.kext.AMDLegacyFramebuffer (1.5.1)

And if the above method of loading succeeded this should appear added to the list:
com.apple.AMDRadeonX3000 (1.5.1)

A final step is to reboot once again into SingleUserRecovery
Do this with Cmd+r+s
after the commandline becomes active, enter:
 nvram boot-args="-v agc=0"

and reboot normally.
This will cool down the dGPU a bit further.
It is imperative to issue this command from SingleUserRecovery since the system with SIP enabled will block your attempts to set this variable when booted from the normal boot volume, whether in normal full boot mode or regular SingleUser.
It is important to note that therefor this step cannot be easily integrated into the force-iGPU.sh script (that you will be creating in a minute) and has to be repeated on its own after a NVRAM reset.
This last step assumes that SystemIntegretyProtection has been reenabled. But if SIP is intentionally and permanently kept off, then this step can be integrated in the force-iGPU.sh script above.
But since somehow I intended to keep SIP off permanently and it was turned back on without me noticing it, reliance on SIP staying "off" might be not the best approach. Clearing NVRAM, where SIP settings are stored, might be one such unforeseen disturbance.
Preventive measures for future use
There are two further caveats to know:
This is reversible when the SMC/NVRAM is reset. If that happens the GPU-power-pref NVRAM-variable can or even has to be set again to force the use of the iGPU from boot-time.
Since this can happen quite easily (and is often erroneously recommended way too many times than it is actually useful), you should probably prepare for such a scenario and create a simple script to greatly speed up the process and also make entering the necessary variable much less error prone:
 sudo nano /force-iGPU-boot.sh

– Enter the following content to this file:
#/bin/sh
sudo nvram boot-args="-v"
sudo nvram fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00
exit 0

– Now make that executable:
sudo chmod a+x /force-iGPU-boot.sh

In the future, when the SMC/PRAM/NVRAM gets reset to default values it is now possible to boot into SingleUser with:
Cmd+s
– And after mounting your boot-volume read-write to execute just this single line:
sh /force-iGPU-boot.sh

Remember that the agc variable is now also cleared. (See above)
Also, make sure you set the default boot-volume again in System Preferences> Startup Disk.
Part 3: Handling Updates from Apple
This setup has now one kext in a place Apple's installers do not expect. That is why in this guide SIP has not been reenabled. If an update that contains changes to the AMD drivers is about to take place it is advisable to move back the AMDRadeonX3000.kext to its default location before the update process. Otherwise the updater writes at least another kext of a different version to its default location or at worst you end up with an undefined state of partially non-matching drivers.
After any system update the folder /System/Library/Extensions has to be checked for the offending kext. Its presence there will lead to e.g. a boot hang on Yosemite and Sierra, an overheating boot-loop in High Sierra.
Upgrading to High Sierra 10.13: with this hack in place is almost straightforward: Despite applying a  firmware update  the installation process should not touch the NVRAM variable. The installation process also does not use a fully accelerated AMD chip but basic acceleration that is not problematic regarding this hack. However, as noted in the paragraph above the first boot into a system that is finished installing but just about to start the setup process will produce a heat/crash induced boot loop. The offending kernel extension has to be moved again like described above. (Starting at Step 3) After moving the kext, all shall be well.
Recent updates from Apple: Do not update before you have read the following.
Recent updates break the machine again. It updates the firmware, RecoveryPartition, seems to disable the possibility to boot into SingleUserRecoveryMode
and to top it off it installs – even with the DeltaUpdate – a working AMDRadeonX3000.kext!
Without preparation and with just the machine at hand you will be stuck a bit.
In case SingleUserRecoveryMode is gone for good, use regular RecoveryMode. Results are the same, it is just a little bit slower to boot into: the above procedure is still valid, and faster for all previous versions of Mac OS X/macOS.
But if you update to 10.13.6, or later:
Then you have to replace the instructions for SingleUserRecoveryMode (Command+r+s) with regular RecoveryMode (Command+r) and disable SIP via Terminal (Example for this precise use case).
In case you do belong to those where even regular RecoveryMode doesn't work as expected:
Workarounds for the inability to disable SIP with SingleUserRecovery:

First, boot into single user recovery mode. csrutil edits are not allowed in this mode, but can set the gpu-power-prefs nvram property. This will help to reboot  the machine in recovery mode. Then you have to replace the instructions for SingleUserRecoveryMode (Command+r+s) with regular RecoveryMode (Command+r) and disable SIP via Terminal (Example for this precise use case).

Before you update, prepare a bootable volume. That can be an external disk or a stick. Any version that boots the machine will be fine. Such a drive can be created on another Mac.
Keep in mind that on the external drive the AMDRadeonX3000.kext has to be (re)moved as well. Try booting from that drive. Only if that works as expected and you can mount your internal drive with it: reboot from your internal drive and proceed with the update of your internal drive/system to 10.13.6.
After the update is nearly finished, one reboot will hang. Force a shutdown and reboot from your external drive. Mount the internal drive and move the Radeon.kext. SIP only protects the booted system.

Suggested somewhere online, but really a desperate guess and untested: Instead of SingleUserRecoveryMode with Cmdrs you might try InternetRecoverySingleUserMode CmdOptrs.
Alternatively, it might be worth a try to see whether SafeRecoveryMode works CmdShiftr.

Graphical recovery mode might not work too, as it did for me. However, in the last version of High Sierra, it is still possible to boot to single user recovery mode. It just needs good timing. The trick is to first enable recovery mode by pressing cmd+R and immediately after it is recognized the cmd+S command for the single user mode. The exact moment has to be figured out by the user. If cmd+R+S are pressed at the same time, only single user mode will be activated. If first cmd+R is pressed and cmd+S is pressed too late, graphical recovery mode is loaded. – TAKeanice ↵

Screen brightness keys not working in High Sierra?
Apple changed the way that keyboard events for changing screen brightness are handled in High Sierra. With this hack in place the keys will be functionless. One more reason to stay with Sierra. But with this hack you might also resort to using another software solution. Aside from hacking your own AppleScript solution you might want to try out ready made applications or apps.
For example Brightness Slider on the AppStore offers customizable keyboard shortcuts.

To avoid these crashes/hangs/boot-loops – which are never a good idea for your filesystem – on a fresh install or an upgrade: make sure to babysit the installation process and always boot into  SafeMode (keep Shift pressed during boot-ups until the kext is moved into a safe place –– the installation should proceed just fine in SafeMode.
Closing Remarks and Recommendations
Further: this laptop is overheating, no matter what you do. The cooling system is inadequate and the huge number of failing AMD chips are just proof of that.
To prolong the life of this now hacked machine it is advisable to abstain from really heavy lifting over prolonged stretches of time.
Strictly follow the usual recommendations for laptops: use on hard surfaces, keep the fans and fins inside it clean. Using any fancontrol software with relatively aggressive settings should also help: like smcFanControl, MacsFanControl, or TGPro (both commercial).
Disclaimer: This whole procedure is no magic bullet. The state of failure for these chips not 100% predictable. Very few users have issues even with this hack in place: there might be issues with rebooting, going to sleep or waking up properly, most of them coming from users with Yosemite, the least trouble seems to be on Sierra. In these cases it seems sometimes necessary to not use the AMDRadeonX3000.kext, and therefore also not the LoginHook from Part 3. (But see the additional note under *1 above.) High Sierra users report issues with their displays backlight adjustment. So currently, the sweet spot for choice of operating system is in my view 10.12 Sierra.
In some cases, even with all these measures in place it seems that the still functioning Thunderbolt port will cause some issues if any peripherals are attached and active when the machine goes to sleep. After this happens any subsequent sleep cycle might be affected and an NVRAM reset with subsequent variable setting dance outlined above will be necessary, again. It seems advisable in such cases to either prevent machine sleep or unplug any hardware on the Thunderbolt port before letting the machine sleep.
Within the restrictions outlined at the start of this answer: Most users report complete success.

Hardware mods/hacks
Several ways available now, some bad, some good.
Bad solution: A very cheap hardware modification is available at/from RealMacMods:
While they use a relatively complicated way of setting the necessary EFI variable with linux the following has the advantage of cutting the core voltage to the dGPU completely by removing just one tiny resistor! (Pictures at the link)

On this reboot it is essential that you boot once into safe mode (hold Shift throughout boot), and then choose shutdown(not restart) from the menu.
Do this safe boot with the R8911 resistor in place. Without this SAFE BOOT, the next steps may not work.
Do no more boots until you complete the next steps.
The safe boot clears OS level GPU preferences, that may interfere with the following process.
This will now cause your MacBook Pro to stop switching to the Radeon automatically, but it will still draw power, create heat, and be visible to the OS.
We discovered that simply removing 1 resistor will resolve this.
The resistor can also be replaced with a switch, in case you need to turn your radeon back on for any reason.
The placement of this resistor varies between logic board models.
The resistor in question is R8911 on the 17″ MBP and R8911 on the 15″ MBP
a 1 Ohm resistor that provides a current path to the ISL6263C DC to DC Converter.
This resistor controls power to the Voltage Regulator that provides the Core Voltage to the Radeon GPU. Simply put, no core voltage, no GPU.
You will find the resistor just to the right of a cooling fan (in the above orientation). It will be near the ISL Voltage converter chip. This is the chip we will be disabling.
Just remove it. The preferred method is a professional reflow station, but an iron and a steady hand will get you where you need to be.  If you used flux to remove it (not needed), make sure you clean up with a little Alcohol or other suitable solvent.
That is basically it. Next time you boot up you will notice your GPU defect issue is gone, and you will no longer see the AMD GPU as installed hardware.

I have not tested this but it should eliminate any need to care for the kexts and also solve any issues regarding sleep, wakeup, hibernation, reboot etc.
Caveat for considering this method: since it also seems to rely on having this NVRAM variable set it looks like it is likely absolutely essential to have a fully automated method in place to set this variable without any user intervention. (Like a linux stick that makes the necessary changes) Otherwise an NVRAM reset might practically brick the machine. The vendor suggests to protect from accidental NVRAM esets via password and if a reset was made to call them for a 'procedure'.
(If bitten by this method, ending up with just a black screen: it seems possible to remotely access the machine with VNC or ssh, so if these are setup beforehand, it may indeed a not so bad option after all, as the nvram variable can bet set in this way. Remember: Untested internet story.)
Permanent, reliable and cheap hardware solution!
Dosdude1 has found a solution that looks like the holy grail for this problem: Permanently Disable 2011 15"/17" MacBook Pro Dedicated GPU - gMux IC Bypass

Option A, which will be detailed below, is to hard-wire the LVDS output lines from the integrated graphics LVDS output lines straight to the lines connecting to the display.
Option B would be to re-program the gMux IC (which is simply a Lattice LFXP2 micro-controller), with a custom firmware to disable the GPU switching functionality. I may experiment with this in the future, but doing so requires special hardware that I don't have. This would, of course, be the optimal solution, though.

This is almost easy. All that's needed are various lengths of wire.
To get a glimpse:

Also on youtube!
The 'bad solution' from above is now made into an almost professional and pre-made hardware solution, eliminating the previous 'badness' of that approach:

Tiresias (the GPUkiller):
The Tiresias is a small board that can be soldered onto the motherboard of the MacBook Pro 15-inch or 17-inch 2011 (Early or Late) models.
These are all the models that have the 820-2914-A, 820-2914-B, 820-2915-A or 820-2915-B motherboard.
The 820-2914 and 820-2915 board has two GPUs. The internal (Intel) GPU that is part of the PCH, and an external (discrete) AMD GPU. It is the external GPU that fails  in 'a small percentage of MacBook Pro systems' (Apple-speak for: 'very many'). The Tiresias writes the 'gpu-power-prefs' nvram-variable to the ROM so that the Mac does not use the (dead) external (discrete) AMD GPU anymore. If the user clears the NVRAM (PRAM) there is no problem as the Tiresias will write the record again, and the Mac will work again.
This makes this the ideal solution to bring a 820-2914 or 820-2915 with dead GPU back to life. Installation is easy (no wires to solder). You will need to mount a very small board onto the motherboard. An experienced technician can do this in minutes. Other than that R8911 should be removed to turn off power to the dead GPU. This saves energy, generating less heat and conserving battery life. Removing R8911 also prevents the Mac from getting confused by the dead GPU because even with the GPU turned off it will still try to talk to the dead GPU. Depending on what internal contacts in the GPU are ruptured this might confuse or even crash the Mac.
Mac OS X 10.13 High Sierra is also supported. To solve the issue of the backlight not coming back on after sleep also remove R9704 and connect R9704 pin 2 to C9711 pin 1.
OS X 10.6 - 10.12 (Sierra)
The backlight slider (in System Preferences) and the backlight keys (F1 and F2) work. System sleep works. Video out on the Thunderbolt port does not work, but all other functions of the Thunderbolt port do work.
OS X 10.13 (High Sierra)
As far as we know 10.13 (High Sierra) offers no advantages over 10.12 (Sierra). Apple totally redid the video drivers in High Sierra, and seem to have made a mess of it. The backlight controls will not work. And worse, after the machine wakes up from sleep the backlight is not turned back on at all.
To solve the issue of the backlight not coming back on after sleep remove R9704 and connect R9704 pin 2 to C9711 pin 1. This sets the backlight to full brightness. The down-side is that with this modification the brightness will also be on full brightness with the oldes OS's.
Tiresias for 820-2915 (15-Inch) Quantity one (1) Including shipping (world wide) 60 EURO.

Update for a one-stop software solution
The procedure above seems to have been cast into an application related to the hardware hack!
Well, at least parts of it. But on the other hand this application is more universal than the soution above, as it seems to handle also NVidia cards, that is: it is for disabling all discrete CPUs in all Macs.
Alas, this app made by dosdude1 is not well documented.
The readme screen says that it would set the NVRAM variable, move all graphic acceleration drivers, and then install a launchdaemon to handle updates and ensure that the variable stays set.
Not tested by me and not endorsed by me if you already have followed the procedure outlined above!
But if the procedure didn't work at some point for you or seems just to daunting to begin with, then you might try this:
dosdude1: Other, undocumented software that I've written is stored here: MacBook Pro dGPU Disabler.zip
You might have to look into the procedure above again, as the application seems to miss out on improving the thermal management part (if you modify the hardware by removing the transistor this becomes mood: mix and match).
If someone tests this out, please give feedback here via comments or an edit.

Update 2019: 20$ solution that uses a 64bit Windows computer and a  Lattice HW-USBN-2A ICSP FPGA programmer to apply a custom firmware to the  gMux IC. Dosdude1 claims this to be 'perfect' solution, meaning that even under HighSierra and Mojave battery life, temperature, brightness control and wake/sleep work as expected. Using that solution is permanent and makes everything above obsolete.
But this new solution is not free and requires hardware in the form of a Windows PC and the programmer); as well as currently soldering a few wires temporarily to the logic board.)
[Update June 2020]: This gMUX Bypass with native brightness control is a cheaper (opensource) version of the Dosdude1 hardware hack. GitHub: gMUXBypass


Upgrade processor iMac (mid 2010 specifically)

Yes, it is possible. By that I mean it is not physically soldered onto the logic board. However, as you mentioned, it will void your warranty. More importantly, Apple has not divulged the inner hardware workings of their system. Since Apple makes the logic board, and does not simply order stock motherboards, we do not know the exact number of chipsets that each physical board is designed to support. I have also heard that Intel sometimes will make the number of pins on Apple processors just slightly different than the PC version of the same processor.

All of that said, while it may be possible, it is not advisable, because messing up during an undocumented, unsupported process is more expensive than buying the new system.


Cant access firewall in system preferences; firewall tab is greyed out

My first assumption is that you have a app like Anti Virus that took over the control of your Firewall.

Here is a article on using the Terminal commands with Firewall.

It is for Lion, but I assume they still work with Mavericks.

For example to start it:

/usr/libexec/ApplicationFirewall/socketfilterfw --setglobalstate on

Give it a try.


How to specify what dictionaries should be used by click and press on trackpad?

Open Dictionary.app from the Applications folder, choose Dictionary → Preferences and select and reorder the dictionaries as you desire.


No.

All you can have is to activate both the 2-finger and the 3-finger gestures. They work differently, though.

With two fingers you scroll the page to the sides revealing the page "below" it or the page "above" it according to the tag history.

With three fingers you just tell the browser to "go back" (swipe left) or "go forward" (swipe right) without any animation at all. At least this 3-finger gesture is consistent in many apps, including Finder.


To view all the available tags in Finder, follow these steps:

Enable display of tags by going to Finder → Preferences → Sidebar → Tags → Recent Tags.

In the Finder menu, enable show Sidebar and Status Bar if they are hidden.
Under Tags section in the Finder Sidebar, click on All Tags.... This will display a list of all the available tags (pre-created + custom) sorted alphabetically.
Click to select a tag from the list. The count of files/folders associated with the tag is shown in the Status Bar.

To delete a tag, right click on it and select Delete Tag "Tag_Name"... from the context menu.

For more information on tags in Finder, refer to the Apple support document, macOS Sierra: Use tags to organize files.


Is it possible to purchase Lion, without using the Mac App Store *on* a Mac (ie. the app)

This only answers on part of the question, you can buy a Lion USB install from the Apple Store although it is more expensive at £55.

Link to USA store (at $69)


Try to find your archive folder, the emails should be in there and once you find them they can be moved to your inbox.


Deleting a network user profile from computer

You do need to do some Directory Services magic because normally /etc/passwd doesn't really exist on a Mac and is being created each time you access it from the records in Open Directory.

To remove your users from the terminal, run:

dscl . -delete /Users/username

Where username is the user you want to remove.

Otherwise, you should be able to do this from the GUI by going to System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Select the user from the user column and remove it with the minus.  It will ask you about removing the user's home directory and you want to say yes.

---Edit---

Check if the users exist in the system with:

dscl . -list /Users

If they don't exist, then you are safe to remove the home directories located in the root of the filesystem at /Users/username.


How can I install Snow Leopard on my 2011 Mac Mini Server?

Short answer: no.

The i7 in the new 2011 Server model doesn't support anything less than pretty much the original OS.

Sorry dude. I wanted to do the exact same thing.


Can't I use different Wi-Fi networks for different Locations?

The Sidekick app (which used to be called NetworkLocation) is an ideal tool for automating changes based on the location of your Mac. It's a veritable swiss army knife of tools, works well in Lion and has plug ins and terminal support for extending it should the built in tools not cover your additional use cases. For simple network location changes, you are covered with this app.


This is from everythingicafe.com which is an unofficial source, but I have heard this same information about batteries many times:

  So, what else can you do to increase your battery life? Charge it
  often. I’m serious! Apple uses Lithium Polymer batteries (not a
  straight lithium ion!), which perform best when you keep them “topped
  off”, meaning if you have a chance to charge it, then do it. I
  generally never let myself get below 45% unless testing due to what
  seems like unusual battery drainage. Apple also recommends that once a
  month you drain the battery down below 10% and then fully
  (uninterrupted) charge back to 100%. This is more for the battery
  meter than anything. It helps the meter get a correct reading on the
  battery and not display inaccurate information.

  Source

Charging at least once a month keeps the electrons moving occasionally.

You can read what Apple officially says about batteries and how to maximize battery life.


Is it possible to have the dock in different positions in different desktop?

No that is not possible. The dock location is set on the System Preferences/Dock pane. I tried setting it different for different spaces but all spaces (desktops) used the same setting.


How to make Little Snitch only block the upload traffic, but not the download traffic？

Both uploads and downloads consists of data packets going both in and out of your computer. Therefore you cannot block only one direction and still have a working data transfer.

In rough terms a download works by your computer sending a data packet to the server letting it know you want to download such and such a file. The server will reply with a small part of the data, whereafter it expects your computer to acknowledge that it received that data. If it does not receive the acknowledgement, it assumes the data was lost and tries retransmitting, eventually considering the connection broken.

Little Snitch works (by default) by blocking new connections that are initiated by programs on your computer (i.e. a new connection is when the first data packet is sent from your computer to the remote server). You will be prompted the first time, so that you can allow similar connections in the future. Even though the connection is initiated locally, it can be be either an upload or a download or a mix of both - you cannot determine that by looking only at the first packet sent.

Newer versions of Little Snitch similarly control incoming connections to your computer. Here you'll get the advance prompt only for TCP connections, whereas UDP connections will just be blocked by default, allowing you to remove the block later (for future packets only). Incoming connection filtering like this is not that commonly used, compared to the traditional workings of Little Snitch described above, which is very popular amongst Mac users.


User rights of a super user and the administrator

This is by design. A non-admin user is defined by not being able to use sudo (and the graphical equivalent in the mac windowmanager). You can still enter the admin user and password using sudo -u or the graphical equivalent but short of compromising/modifying the built in controls, that's how the system is designed to work.

The su command doesn't work as you expect since the root user in Mac OS X is disabled by default for security reasons. Sudo has enhanced logging and sudo -s gets you the same shell as su - would when a root user is enabled.

So if you don't want to change to using sudo you can enable root on your mac.


You may be limited in your choice of carrier, but as you surmise, the thing to do is visit a store. If the phone was locked to a specific carrier, you may need to get your plan from the same carrier, particularly if your preferred carrier is a CDMA carrier like Verizon. If you prefer to use a GSM carrier, the carrier can provide a SIM card and should also be able to unlock the phone from the previous carrier. (Provided, of course, the phone in question has a SIM card slot. I believe the original iPhone 4 did not if it was on Verizon or Sprint.)

The other caveat is that if it was running the iOS 7 software and your relative turned on the activation lock feature, you will not be able to use the phone until you gain control of her Apple ID. Going to visit an Apple Store may be able to help with this.


Hard reset and restore of iPad from a 2nd desktop computer?

If you are resetting these things and then restoring then from a saved local backup that second part is tied to your Mac.

You can reset an iPad to its "factory fresh" state from any Mac/PC, but you might not be able to reset an iPad to your desired "factory fresh eco_bach kiosk" state from any but yours.


Apple Push Notification Service: misbehaviour

The service is used for delivering you push notifications. Push notifications usually appear in the Notification Center in the top right corner of your desktop. Read more about it here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5362

If you disable the service, you'll probably lose notifications for events such as received iMessage-messages, Facetime calls and notification from websites that you have requested notifications from.

From what you write, there does not seem to be a weighty reason for disabling it. It is a normal, system service that should not pose a problem to your system.

The connections in FIN_WAIT_1 state does not pose a problem to your system. You can safely ignore it (in those numbers).

You can also safely ignore the log message. The log message does not indicate that there has been a "data leak" as such.

The reason for the log message is that Apple uses a large number of servers for sending your push notifications. Your computer will connect to a (somewhat) random of those servers. The server will present a generic certificate for the service, and not one customized to the exact "sub-server" you have connected to. That is the cause of the log message. This is something Apple needs to fix on their servers, but it is a known bug and not something you yourself can do anything about.

This does not mean that you lose encryption or anything like that, but it might mean that your system could be vulnerable to a Man-In-The-Middle attack, where you could be sent falsified Push Notifications. Whether that is indeed the case would require further research. It is most likely that Apple employed some sort of certificate pinning or similar to avoid this type of exploit. The likelihood that you should be attacked this way is pretty low anyhow. I.e. don't worry about it.

I don't see why you say the daemon is "misbehaving". It is not misbehaving more on your computer than on any other computer. You could say that it is misbehaving, but it is doing so by Apple's design. So instead, create bug reports with Apple to let them know that you're seeing a problem.

Of course, if you do not actually use Push Notifications for anything, you can safely disable it.


It could be dead pixels or it could be the driver 'chips' or a dead 'mux'. The hardware that control what pixels are turned on. Note the color, It looks to me like a group of pixels are 'turned on' when they shouldn't be. It is hard to tell just by looking at a picture. It could be anything in the graphics display hardware. Just let Apple replace it, no one troubleshoots to component level these days.


Compare columns for highest value, and count result in another cell

Fill column D with the following formula:

IF(AND(A1=X,B1>C1),TRUE)

Replace X with the number you wish to check for. This formula checks each row, returning true if the row's A column contains X and if the number in B is larger than C.
Enter the following formula in the cell for the result:

COUNTIF(D,TRUE)

This counts how many rows returned true for the previous formula.


EFI Boot Windows 8.1 or 10 Install on MacPro4,1 / Mac Pro (Early 2009)

Got it working finally...

The first trick is to remove ALL disks from the MacPro when trying to load setup. You may leave clean HDDs or SSDs where the Mac EFI cannot find MBR or Protected MBR.

After you removed all other disks the MacPro4,1 will not directly freeze after choosing EFI Boot on the installer stick.
(You will have to create it like mentioned before here to force an EFI boot of the installer.)
There will then be a progress bar loading files but unfortunately you will get stuck on a black screen in a few seconds...

To be finally able to load setup you need to flash MacPro4,1 firmware to MacPro5,1 firmware.

The EFI version reported in rEFit shell will not change. But you will still have a different version after the upgrade flash. Apple does not seem to take great care about correct versioning with EFI standards as I understood from Rod Smith's comment here.
This more recent Apple internal version of the MacPro5,1's EFI will be providing us with the ability to boot EFI setup from the Windows 10 Installer on the MacPro4,1 machine.

Setup will load fine then and will give you a clean bootable EFI/GPT install of Windows 10 (W8 I did not try since I am happy with the more recent version). Install bootcamp drivers and enjoy AHCI without patches.

Be sure to strip the bootmgr files from the installer disc or stick. Even when choosing EFI boot, the Apple EFI will still boot the installer in BIOS/CSM Mode when those files are present.

I will probably post more detailed step by step instructions soon...

Here they are:

Make EFI bootable USB Installer

Download Win10 install ISO from Microsoft
Boot into Windows DVD Setup or existing BIOS/CMI installation to access a Windows command prompt
open command prompt (from windows run cmd, from setup press shift+F10)
load diskpart and make a clean installer stick
type in command prompt:

diskpart
list disk
select disk n #n=usb stick
clean #everything will get deleted!
convert gpt
create partition primary
format quick fs=fat32 label=Winstall
exit
exit

mount downloaded install ISO (I did it in Windows, should work in OSX too)
drag everything from the mounted ISO onto the USB stick
delete bootmgr and bootmgr.efi files from the stick to avoid BIOS/CMI boot and force EFI boot. See also here

Flash MacPro4,1 with MacPro5,1 firmware

Bootrom MP41.0081.B07 (EFI 1.4) to Bootrom MP51.007F.B03 (EFI 1.5)
(If your machine shows Bootrom version MP41.0081.B08 you could first try to continue without upgrading. I don’t know which Apple EFI version is contained in there. Downgrading should be possible as well, definitely possible to version MP41.0081.B07. Please research if you don’t want to lose the downgrade possibility to MP41.0081.B08)
The upgraded EFI finally enabled me to complete the boot process and you will have all other advantages of the 2010 and later models (hex-core CPU, faster RAM, Audio over DP) This upgrade is reversible.  (If using El Capitan you need to disable System Integrity Protection. Otherwise the flash will not perform. If patch is running successfully you can see a big grey loader bar and the apple logo. Optical drives will open. See here how to easily disable SIP)

Dowload MacPro5,1 Firmware here
-Mount dmg
(above steps will avoid error 5570)
Download Mac Pro Firmware Upgrade Utility here
Run Utility and follow instructions
check upgraded bootrom version and identifier in System Information

Setup Windows with EFI boot

remove ALL disks from the Mac Pro
Plugin USB Installer stick
Boot Mac holding option/alt key
Choose EFI Boot
Enter setup and select GPT installation target disk
Install

Install Bootcamp Drivers (optional of course.. You can also manually add what you want)

Boot into Windows
Download Boot Camp Support Software 5.1.5640 here
run setup
(the setup was hanging on my machine while installtion of the RealTek Audio drivers. To solve that follow instructions here)

Done.

Only issue I have is with my NVIDIA GTX 680 DVI-D port (and maybe others). After installing NVIDIA drivers screen will go black without signal. Booting then will show Windows logo but will go black w(o signal when login screen should appear. The system will boot to login properly after only 5-10 sec black screen without signal when using the DVI-I port instead. After successful login I could unplug and switch the port. Confirmed on EVGA and Gainward card. Did not have time to investigate further.


Since you are referencing having to use a recovery key to log in, it sounds like your Mac has FileVault 2 encryption turned on. Are you expecting to turn on your Mac and have it automatically log in as you?

If that's the case, the encryption does not have that as an option. You must provide your account password or the recovery key in order to unlock the encryption before the OS can boot.

If my understanding is incorrect, would you please provide more details about the problem you're seeing?


My iPhone's Album Art is Wrong. How can I fix it?

The "awesome" thing is, that if you want to have the right Coverart in your iPhone you are obligated to buy your music in the iTunes store, else it messes the Coverart up (even though it is the correct one in iTunes). Bottomline: neither Amazon mp3 nor imported CD (no matter if original or not) will have the right cover in your iPhone.
Thanks apple for this great new feature !


Why might some files not have resource forks? Does this affect the `tar` utility at all?

Resource Forks are a part of Mac OS files that were mostly used on Mac OS "Classic" (Pre Mac OS X, E.G. Mac OS 6 - Mac OS 9) In earlier Mac OS, and on the HFS File System (and HFS+) files had two "forks", the "data" fork and the "resource" fork. The data fork is what all files today have; the resource fork was a proprietary data structure from Apple designed for storing images, icons, dialog boxes, code and more in a structured file format.

They're not "metadata", they contained actual program code. Here's a screenshot from the old ResEdit program which was how resource forks were edited

Unix, Linux, and Windows lack a clear analogous data structure like the Mac Resource Fork. In part due to this compatibility issue, Resource Forks are not really used anymore (they're largely replaced with "Bundles")

Because of this, BSD/*nix tools like tar do not (by default) handle the resource fork. Therefore, when you run tar cf, you only archive the data fork

Note that in some versions of OS X, the built-in /usr/bin/tar utility will preserve resource forks, bu I can't confirm this for all versions of Mac OS X. If you want to preserve resource forks, look into ditto or make an HFS+ disk image (dmg) file

Helpful, but out-of-date information: http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/macosx.html


Could you explain what exactly you mean by "modprobe"?

The program usually referred to as "modprobe" is a Linux-specific program. It is not available for OS X, as it doesn't make any sense there.

If you want comparable functionality on OS X, you want to look at a program such as kextload instead.


How do I configure my browsers not to save passwords for specific websites?

Since you have multiple questions here, I would attempt to answer one of them:

In case of Firefox:

Open the permissions manager

in the address bar type following about:permissions and hit enter

In the new window select the web site to work on and choose the settings.

To further customize a specific web site (fine tune) click on the small Icon in front of that website address. In the new pop up window you can highly customize what that web site can and can not do.


What's the best memory upgrade option for a mid2007 macbook running 10.6?

You're not the first person to wonder about this. Yes, matched pairs are good for speed. More RAM is also good for speed. In my experience, and in what I've read, the speed boost from more RAM more than offset the penalty for mismatched pairs.


Go to Settings > General > Useage at the Top you should get a list of all the Apps (may take a few to a few more Minutes)

Now Locate GarageBand and delete what you don't need anymore.

Maybe there is nothing listed then just delete GarageBand and reinstall it.


Can I use multiple Twitter accounts on Safari?

On Safari, or any other browser that supports private/incognito mode, you could start a new private/incognito window by pressing ⌘+Shift+N File | New Private/Incognito Window and enter different credentials.

Every new window will store account information isolated, and will be deleted once you close the window.


It's not clear if you are looking to evaluate things or make a permanent move, but there is a free solution to evaluate the software as long as you meet the terms for an evaluation license from Microsoft.

Get VirtualBox and run it to make a default Windows 8 container
Register for or log in to your Windows Live account
Download a 32-bit copy of Windows 8 to your Mac
Set that Windows ISO disk image file as the file in the "Optical disk" of the virtual machine by using the Virtual Media Manager window (Command-D)

Start up the Windows 8 container (it will confirm you are using the "Optical disk" to start the machine
Progress through the agreements and start buttons until this screen:

Do not choose the default Upgrade since you have nothing on this "new PC". Choose Custom: Install Windows only (advanced)
Choose the rest of the settings as you please for making your account tied into the Windows Live email and you should be up and running within 10 minutes and a couple reboots of the software "PC".

Other than learning how VirtualBox allocates the keyboard and mouse, you should have 90 days to experiment with the new Windows OS and decide if you want to dive in with BootCamp or a commercial VM solution such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels.


How to move all iPhoto video files to an external disk or a NAS?

Try this (not automated, because i don't like automated delete for anything):

Make a "smart album" in the iPhoto with the condition "Photo is Movie". With this you get all movies into your new smart album.
press info (for check how much MB they're occupied)
Simply drag&drop movies out of the iPhoto (long time)
ensure (double check) they are really OK
move the movies from the smart-album into the Trash
empty

(triple check before deleting - do not blame me, when your computer get destroyed or so)


How to run a performance benchmark on my MacBook Pro?

I would run Geekbench on it and then you'll have some actual statistics to make comparisons with and go from there.

I would guess your HDD is the problem.


Can I use Google's new CardDAV-based contacts sync to sync between my Exchange contacts and Google contacts on my iPhone?

I haven't had an opportunity to test this out, but I'm pretty sure that the iPhone silos contacts on a per-account basis. When you set up a CardDAV or Exchange account in Settings, it's unique from anything else. The contacts don't intermingle, beyond showing up in the same app.

You can think of it like having two different email accounts that your phone checks. You can access both, they'll even show up in a unified inbox, but emails in a folder on one account don't get synced to a folder on the other account.

Off the top of my head, to synchronize the two accounts, you'd probably need an app running on a computer that could synchronize between the two, and then connect your phone to either the CardDAV or Exchange server as the canonical version.


MacBookPro9,2 does not recognize drive as bootable after clean Install

It turned out the hard drive cable was faulty. I found a couple of Q&A's on the net (like https://de.ifixit.com/Antworten/Ansehen/356610/Hard+Drive+SATA+cable+failing+related+to+the+battery+brackets) that highlighted the issue and so i decided to give a new cable a try. I ordered a new one, replaced it and now everything works without any issues.


Why for some actions wifi is required (ie. cellular is not enough)?

That mechanism is in place to protect customers unaware of the data limits and to conserve the network's bandwidth, this means that everyone gets an equal share of the network. Although what I normally do is USB tether to my Mac then Wi-Fi share the USB connection then connect to that with my iPhone


Okay, after a long period of troubleshooting, I determined it was the MP3 file that was having issues. After importing it into GarageBand and exporting it from there, it finally worked! I received the MP3 file from the client. He is a preacher and they recorded it at the church. Then he uploaded it to Google Drive and I downloaded it from there. It sounds like it was not encoded correctly, but I am not an audio expert.


I haven't found anything that officially says there's an iPhone file-size limitation, but I have noticed that over 3G, some larger pictures will not download to my mailbox. Try over WiFi or get 3G Unrestrictor and see what happens.


How to remove Calendar event without the sender's notification

I found this free workaround over on Superuser.

Basically, you disable networking, delete the event, then delete the notification from email:

Turn off networking on your Mac
Delete the event from iCal
Wait for the notification to show up in your Outbox
Delete email from Outbox
Turn back on networking

Once networking is back on, the sync will remove the other events from iCloud and your phone.

Echoing Jaime Santa Cruz's comment below, you should definitely block the sender.  You have already confirmed your email because it (probably) already sent a notification that you accepted; best to be safe and not sorry.

As to your second question, "...it is enough reason for me stopping using the insecure Apple's calendar?" it would generate too much opinion to go into.

That said, I personally use Office365 Exchange Online ($48 for the year), Outlook.com, OneDrive and Azure for my cloud services with my iMac, MacBook Pro, XServe and (soon) a refurbished Mac Pro.  I don't know if that says anything...


When should I register (i.e. pay to be) an apple OS X developer?

You don't need a website, but it's nice for your users to have a place where they can contact you and perhaps see some screenshots about the game/application you develop.

I don't think you need any protection as they are all under Apple's terms and conditions. At our work we've got a developer account and nobody bat an eye.

Just sign up and leak the name here, once your app is available (:

Oh yes, if your app costs money I'd like a coupon ;)


There are no drivers for NVidia 3rd party cards in Mojave.
Support ended at High Sierra.

MacVidCards - Which driver should I install for my new GPU? is pretty much the authority on this topic.

You can get to Mojave if you have a supported* ATI/AMD GPU with Metal capability, otherwise stay on High Sierra.

*Recommended GPU list, again from MacVidCards - I want the best graphics card for my Mac Pro, where do I start? No 3rd party drivers are needed for AMD cards, they still have Apple support - but only to Mojave, no further, for Mac Pro 3rd party cards.


This does indeed ring a bell, as I've seen similar issues on a variety of systems ranging from 10.3 through 10.6.  Here are some of the causes I've observed, in no particular order.

Incorrect DNS server addresses in the network configuration
Incorrect LDAP server or server aliases (if the machine is part of an LDAP or OpenDirectory network)
Faulty PAM modules (if you have installed third-party software which uses PAM or installs into /etc/pam.d)
Mixing Local/BSD accounts with LDAP/OpenDirectory accounts.  This can happen if you have accounts which have been repeated migrated across many versions.
Account GUIDs becoming out-of-sync due to migration or other corruption of the OpenDirectory database.
Note that it can take up to a minute after the machine wakes from sleep or finishes booting before the authentication system is fully operational.  Network connectivity issues can delay this substantially, especially if the system is part of an LDAP/OpenDirectory network.

Since you've been migrating accounts, try setting up a fresh new account and see if the problem occurs there.  It may be possible to fix the problem by digging into the OpenDirectory database, but it may be easier to just recreate the problem account from scratch.

Update

Since the UID was changed at some point in the past for NFS reasons, it is likely that the GUID and UID are out-of-sync.  Try the following Terminal commands to see if unix and Directory Services are on the same page:

dscl . -read /Users/sbnoble GeneratedUID
dscl . -read /Users/sbnoble UniqueID
id

The UID output by "UniqueID" and "id" should match each other and the NFS UID you expect.


This may or may not be related to how smart invert and neither night shift NOR true tone can operate together. Try your comparison with night shift off?

Edit: I tested it some more, and although true tone being off affects the tone a lot, the visual hues of non-inverted items in smart invert do look a lot more desaturated and just generally poopy. I think there is some incorrect colorspace handling going on in here.

When I take a screenshot in smart invert mode, the actual saved image appears to be truly inverted. this seems to indicate to me that under the hood everything does get inverted, and smart invert actually goes in and re-inverts some of the things back that it thinks shouldn't have gotten inverted. This process is likely what fails to bring colors back to their original vibrance.


Try using a tool like CleanMyMac, they usually have an option around the lines of "Remove System Junk".


How to fix a completely unresponsive MacBook Pro 2018 keyboard?

It's worth taking it to the Apple Store. There have been hardware/manufacturing problems with recent MacBook keyboards, and if it is such a problem, then Apple should fix it free.

Apple currently has a "Keyboard Service Program" for a range of laptops, including yours.


Drag images from browser and drop it into Finder

After a reboot everything works fine again. Finder was probably bugging (again ...).


Is there any way to suppress the "incompatible accessory" warning on the iPhone?

Gotta be jailbroken AFAIK. There's a package called Popup Blocker that suppresses alerts. This is probably the best option.

I recommend Spirit for jailbreaking 3.1.2 or 3.1.3. It's super easy and works well for everyday (non-hacker) use.


How to disable all iOS notifications temporarily while actively using/mirroring the device?

(Since the accepted answer for this question is outdated and the actual answer is buried as a comment, I’m providing a better answer for all future people with this question, in hopes that it will become more visible.)

The default behavior for the Do Not Disturb feature is stopping notifications while the screen is locked, so that your iPad/iPhone won’t keep buzzing in your pocket/backpack/desk while you’re trying to concentrate on something else.

That’s good, but not what we want. We want to stop notifications while we’re using the device.

Well, at least since iOS 12 there’s an additional setting within Settings > Do Not Disturb that you can turn on, here:

All you need to do is change the “Silence” option to “Always” in this screen. It will keep any and all notifications away from your screen as you write, read, present content to others, play a game, etc.


Not exactly. You can't (although that can be overridden) and should not update anything in /bin as that is controlled and updated by Apple.

However you can install zsh from elsewhere and put it in another place and use that path to start it from Terminal.

One way is to download the source from here and compile it.

However it is probably easier to install from a package manager like Macports or Homebrew both of which  will have compiled up the binary.


How to get the amount of selected files in automator

You can use the following Apple Script to set a variable (named item_count) to the number of items returned from the previous action:

on run {input, parameters}
    set (value of variable "item_count" of front workflow) to (count of input)
    return input
end run

The list of items is simply passed through.

You could use it like this:


Is my Mac partition secure if it has FileVault 2 but the Boot Camp partition is unencrypted?

Yes -

if you ask if Mac HD was safe. The Bootcamp partition, however, is not. Any attacker could easily gain access to your Windows system or any other unencrypted partition on your drive. Make sure not to store sensitive information there (e.g. WiFi password, etc.). But normally the bootcamp partition does not contain information compromising the security of your filevault2 encrypted partition (Mac HD in your case). Those two are independent.

So in short: Having further unencrypted partitions on a filevault2 system disk does not degrade your security.


Can You Turn Off Swipe Gestures On iPad 2?

Yes you can. Go to Settings>General and you can turn off multi-touch gestures.


Can I copy a recovery partition from an HD to an SSD?

Ok, I figured it out.

What are the purposes and safety to enable the hidden debug menu in Disk Utility?
Mount both recovery partitions
Select the HD's recovery partition and use Disk Utility's Restore function to copy it to the SSD's recovery partition
Boot from a USB drive and use the gpt remove/add commands as described at Dmitry Dulepov's blog to change the recovery partition's type from Apple_HFS to Apple_Boot. (Since the partition already existed at the correct size on my SSD I was able to skip the Create a new partition and Fix recovery partition size steps.)

   /dev/disk0
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *240.1 GB   disk0
       1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS SteveBook2 SSD          239.2 GB   disk0s2
       3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD (SSD)       650.0 MB   disk0s3
    /dev/disk1
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *750.2 GB   disk1
       1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS SteveBook2 HD           749.3 GB   disk1s2
       3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD (HD)        650.0 MB   disk1s3

Find My Mac is now enabled on my MacBook Pro.


There are several reasons why you can’t select none:

You have unpaid balance or a payment due.

If this is the case you have to pay your balance until you select none.

  You can't select None as your payment type until you pay your balance. To see which order you need to pay for, view your purchase history on a Mac or PC.

You have an automatic renewing subscription.

  You might not be able to select None until you cancel the subscription. If the subscription has a free trial period, we use the payment method that you have on file to make sure that your service won't be interrupted after your free trial period is over. If you don't want to continue a subscription after the free trial, you can cancel the subscription to prevent any charges when the free trial ends.

If you are not in the country or region you created an Apple ID for.

  If you're creating an Apple ID for the first time, and you’re not physically located in the country or region at the time you create the Apple ID, you must enter a payment method. When this happens, you can't choose gift cards or store credit as your payment method. For example, if you’re in the United States, but you're creating an Apple ID with a billing address in China, you won't be able to choose None as payment method.

If you changed your country or region.

  When you change the country or region of an existing Apple ID, you must provide a payment method and update your billing options. When this happens, you can't choose gift cards or store credit as your payment method. If you want to remove your payment method after you change the country or region, you can change your payment information to None.

If you’re part of family sharing

  When you set up Family Sharing, the family organizer must provide a valid payment method. This payment method will be used for all purchases initiated by family members and can only be changed by the family organizer.

(Source)


How to make Find File dialogue NOT sort by kind

Have you tried this icon on the top left side of the attachment popup?

This preference is saved for some time, long enough for you to not get frustrated.


How do you install a graphics card on mac pro 1,1?

There's nothing to install since OS X has the drivers predelivered. You pull out the old one and stick in the new one. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+Pro+Graphic+Card+for+Mac+Pro+(Early+2008)+Replacement/14161


Does “Expired” certificate gets removed from the Apple's Developer Portal automatically?

My experience is no - Apple will not mess with your certificates and profiles and you will need to manage them once they are expired.

Think of the hassle of having a cert expire but not seeing it in your list so you know to take action to renew and replace it.

I'm gun shy to let Xcode "fix anything" automatically since then I'm at a disadvantage to remedy things when I need to manually make a change.


Try holding down the Volume + button while booting up your phone. This should completely disable your jailbreak (in order to get it back you would need to reboot your phone regularly). If your phone now works, then it is an issue with your jailbreak substrate or a tweak. This will at least allow you to narrow down your issue.


Is there an iPhone app to control the volume depending on traveling speed or surrounding sounds?

I do not know of such an app. I have looked extensively, but have not found any that does this specifically.

Apple has a patent for a technology that would, among other things, build in this sort of feature. Think of it as an extension of the proximity sensor on the front of the phone that turns the screen off when your ear is against the receiver. If implemented, the phone would gain much more situational awareness. I say 'if' because I'd expect to hear something about this during a product announcement.

The full text of the patent (#8384684) is available here. EDIT: this is a related patent, but not the one I intended to attach. I'll correct shortly.


Try opening Terminal and typing in:
sudo purge

or you can try Memory Clean at
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memory-clean/id451444120?mt=12

BTW: It would be beneficial to post screenshots or use EtreCheck (created by an Apple Support Community User) and copy and paste the results. Etrecheck can be found at http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck


Download all linked files at once from a website in Safari

I have found this software for my own use just now and then I remembered your question. That's what I have found, perhaps that can help you :

Folx

Folx is a free download manager for Mac OS X with a true Mac-style interface.
It offers convenient downloads managing, flexible settings, etc.
Folx has a unique system of sorting and keeping the downloaded content.

iGetter

  Site Explorer allows exploration of the entire web or FTP sites, so
  you can easily find and download files you're interested in. To
  explore a HTTP, HTTPS or FTP site select the Site Explorer group item
  and choose the contextual menu function "Enter Site URL" to set a site
  URL. When you reach the file that you want to download double click on
  it or choose the contextual menu function "Add to queue" and it will
  appear in the queue for download. If you want to cancel the processing
  just push the "Pause" button on the Toolbar. Site Explorer analyzes
  HTML pages for all available links even looking in the JavaScript
  functions, so it will show a complete list of web page contents.

And I've found the following, when I was searching about your question:

How can I download all MP3 files from a web site?

SiteSucker is a great (free) application! It will allow you to download folders from a site. So, just enter in your URL and click "Download"

  SiteSucker is a Macintosh application that automatically downloads Web sites from the Internet. It does this by asynchronously copying the site's Web pages, images, backgrounds, movies, and other files to your local hard drive, duplicating the site's directory structure. Just enter a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), press return, and SiteSucker can download an entire Web site.


Temporarily turn off all notifications on iPhone

There is no single settings/toggle that will let you turn off/on all notifications on your iPhone. The way notification are implemented in iOS, you are limited to configure them on a per app basis only.

A couple potential solutions are:

Turn on Do Not Disturb. This will have a side effect of suppressing any regular phone calls.

Make sure to set Allow Calls From to Everyone under Do Not Disturb settings. This will suppress all the notification banners while you are watching videos/playing games in full screen, while keeping the phone function active.

Once you have configured Do Not Disturb as above, you can easily toggle the setting via the Control Center icon.
Turn off Internet connectivity by toggling Wi-Fi/Mobile data from Settings app or Control Centre.

The second approach will have a drawback that you won't be able to access the Internet. Also, turning off Internet connectivity won't suppress local notifications.

However, disconnecting from Internet is possibly the best way to temporarily cut-off from the barrage of notification that one receives, while keeping the basic phone functionality (calling + SMS) active.


MacOS Sierra, Mail can't create smart mailbox based on another mailbox

OK, I can't explain why this happened, but this issue appears to be fixed.  I was trying to resolve a different issue (Gmail emails going to Recovered Messages for unknown reasons), so I deleted my Gmail account from the Internet Accounts in System Preferences.  Then I quit & relaunched Mail, and in Mail Prefs I added the GMail account back again.

Suddenly, both the Gmail problem I was trying to solve, AND this Smart Mailboxes issue, were fixed!  I don't know what the actual problem was, but for whatever reason this appears to have solved it.  I'll accept the answer after I've lived with this a day or two and it stays fixed.  So weird...


Mail uses the word "mailbox" instead of folder.

In the left sidebar, right-click (or Control-click if on a laptop) and select "New Mailbox" from the contextual menu. You will be prompted with a message similar to: "Enter name for new mailbox to be created inside “[parent folder name]” in account “[account name]”.


Suddenly Apple Wired Keyboard not working

This is what solved it for me:

  Eventually I found this thread on the Apple website, and followed the rather bizarre advice of adding a USB extension cable between the keyboard and the Mac (luckily the keyboard comes packaged with one). Bingo! Keyboard fine, mouse plugged into it also fine.

http://www.zigpress.com/2014/12/30/has-your-apple-mac-external-usb-keyboard-stopped-working/


Time Machine Backing Up Large Amounts of Data Each Time

On Lion you can use tmutil to compare Time Machine backups:

sudo tmutil compare                      # compare computer to latest backup
sudo tmutil listbackups                  # list available backups
sudo tmutil compare <backup1> <backup2>  # compare two backups from backup list

This should give you a good idea about where the volume is coming from.


Try restore it through iTunes. First of ALL you should back it up using iTunes or iCloud. If you own an iMac , iTunes app is a built one.
If you don’t have a Mac download iTunes app to your computer and make an iTunes account.
Then connect your iPhone to your Mac/windows PC - login to your iTunes account - back it up - when backup is complete, Restore it (there is a RESTORE button ).
This way your issue will be resolved IMO. Cheers.


Key combinations CTRL+SHIFT+D/E/F not working

I just found out that the problem is caused by Sougou Pinyin, a Chinese input software, who recently updated itself with some features along with these new shortcut keys as shown below (pls excuse the Chinise interface)

(Obviously I missed the shift+cmd+E).
Now I have disabled them all.


Using terminal and the open command I am trying to open a new browser instance followed by 2 tabs

Set an alias to the executable inside Firefox.app.

alias firefox_cli=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox
firefox_cli --new-tab "site1"
firefox_cli --new-tab "site2"

For more help, run

firefox_cli --help

To remove alias,

unalias firefox_cli


Does app will be removed in installed phones if the app unpublished from AppStore?

No, removing your app from the App Store won't remove it from other people's devices (iPhones/iPads).

Yes, an app that was removed from the App Store but is still installed on a user's device. If the app relies on data from another server (getting data from a database or a news source) an this data cannot be accessed anymore at least parts of the app won'be functional anymore.


What app can I use to create a PowerPoint on an iPhone?

I highly recommend Keynote for this. Whilst Apple haven't perfected importing all the functionality of PowerPoints yet, the exporting works flawlessly and you can create great presentations on Keynote.


You haven't said what Terminal commands you've tried, but don't forget that Trash can exist on other volumes besides the one in your home folder. Run this to remove all Trash.

sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash /Volumes/*/.Trashes

Be very careful when entering this command


MacBook Pro suddenly does not boot and acts very strange

It is hard to tell in cases like this as the hardware test and Disk Utility don't always find hardware or disk errors.

However that the system can boot and run diagnostics bodes well for the hardware in the system. It sounds like it is possibly a damaged macOS install. I would be inclined to reinstall macOS right over top of what you already have there. Normally an OS install will not wipe any of your data. But, as always, verify you have a good working backup before proceeding.

If it still acts wonky after an OS reinstall I would say that you possibly have an issue with the HD/SSD and a 3rd party disk utility might be able to either tell you what is wrong and/or fix it. Failing that a visit to the Genius Bar may be in order.


App to organize my photos into folders by date

Here's a bash script that sorts files into year/month/day/ directory paths.

#!/bin/bash
dir=/path/to/directory
find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f | while IFS= read -r file; do
  year=$(stat -f "%Sm" -t "%y" $file)
  month=$(stat -f "%Sm" -t "%m" $file)
  day=$(stat -f "%Sm" -t "%d" $file)
  [[ ! -d "$dir/$year/$month/$day" ]] && mkdir -p "$dir/$year/$month/$day";
  mv "$file" "$dir/$year/$month/$day"
done

Untested, have backups, etc

Save the script as something.sh, change the second line of the script to the path that you want to sort the contents of, then run chmod u+x /path/to/file.sh && /path/to/file.sh. However, if you are unfamiliar with shell scripts I wouldn't recommend this hacked-together, untested script that I wrote late at night be the very first script you run!


Numbers: menu or list to jump to a specific sheet?

Is there a way to access a menu or list of all the sheets in a Numbers document, so I can quickly jump to one specific sheet without having to scroll or page one-by-one with the previous/next keyboard shortcuts?

The only way I know of is to AppleScript it and use some mechanism to trigger the script, e.g. an Automator Service1.

As an example, pressing ⌃⌘S in Numbers with a Stocks.numbers document opened and frontmost, I get a choose from list dialog box as shown in the next image:

I then selected sheet 1-Year History and then clicked OK and was taken to that sheet in the document. Note that double-clicking on any list item takes one to that sheet directly without having to click OK or press Enter. (You can also type the first character of the list item or use down/up arrow keys too.)

Obviously with a Numbers document that has only five sheets this isn't really necessary, and is just an example for when the document has the number of sheets that would necessitate scrolling through the sheets tabs in the document to get to the one wanted. On my MBP 15" Retina display, I was able to see 37 sheets without having to scroll in the Go To Sheet... list box. (This will vary based on the screen resolution and height of the Dock.)

Create an Automator Service1 as show in the next image:

Example AppleScript code:

tell application "Numbers" to set sheetList to name of every sheet of document 1

tell current application to activate
choose from list sheetList with title "Go To Sheet..." with prompt "Please select a sheet name:"
if the result is not false then
    my selectSheet(result as text)
end if

on selectSheet(n)
    try
        tell application "Numbers"
            activate
            -- # The following code causes Numbers to go to the selected sheet.
            -- # It is not modifying the existing data in the target cell, however,
            -- # it does cause a saved document to show as edited, temporarily,
            -- # and resolved by the code in the following System Events tell block.
            set value of first cell of first table of sheet n of front document to ¬
                (value of first cell of first table of sheet n of front document)
        end tell

        tell application "System Events"
            -- # Undo Typing so the document doesn't show as edited if already saved,
            -- # and if already saved the modified date/time stamp shouldn't change.
            keystroke "z" using command down
            -- # Press the escape key to remove focus from cell A1.
            key code 53
        end tell

    on error eStr number eNum
        display dialog eStr & " number " & eNum buttons {"OK"} ¬
            default button 1 with icon caution
        return
    end try
end selectSheet

AppleScript Code Note: As far as I know, Numbers does not have an explicit AppleScript command to select a given sheet and this is sort of an alternative method and it does cause a saved document to show as edited temporarily, even though it's not altering the value of the target cell, and resolved by the code in the System Events tell block. It works by setting the value of cell "A1" to it's current value, so while it's perceived as an edit, no data has been altered from its current value and if it was already saved, the modified date/time stamp shouldn't change. This works for me in Numbers 5.1 in macOS High Sierra on a read-write document, and is why I use it. As coded, it is not intended to be used on a locked or read-only document. Additional coding would be necessary for that scenario.

For System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services:

Note: Sometimes with an Automator Service1 and assigning a keyboard shortcut, you may first have to trigger it from the target App's Services menu one time. From then on the keyboard shortcut should work normally.

1 In macOS Mojave an Automator Service is called a Quick Action.

Note: The example AppleScript code is just that and sans the included error handling does not contain any additional error handling as may be appropriate. The onus is upon the user to add any error handling as may be appropriate, needed or wanted. Have a look at the try statement and error statement in the AppleScript Language Guide. See also, Working with Errors.


FileVault security hole when used on SSDs

Your making a test user account with a short name different than the eventual user to be migrated is sound.

In practice, you will in time over write more and more of the data, but if you have the time to first establish a file vault key and have the drive completely encrypted before copying any sensitive data, you have a more secure system and can know that the data can be sanitized cryptographically as opposed to being over-written or actually erased.

You'll want to look for these lines in the diskutil cs list output to know it's ready for the start of data migration:

|       Conversion Status:       Complete
|       High Level Queries:      Fully Secure
|       |                        Passphrase Required


Ways to scroll with a mouse without the wheel or dragging the scroll bar

Looks like someone already answered this on SuperUser

SmartScroll is a third party app I've not used, but appears to enable this.


Unable to Sign Out of my Apple ID on my mac

Some people have solved this by going to System Preferences/Internet Accounts, selecting an iCloud account there, and signing in. You need to repeat this for each iCloud account. Might be a corrupt .plist.

Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.
Quit System Preferences.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J.  When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder.  Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist.  Move the .plist to your desktop.

Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.

If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.


Wifi connection has password issue with my Macbook Pro

You could try 'Forget this network' in the Airport settings through System Preferences -> Network, then reconnect fresh again


Gnucash and macports conflicting libgio-2.0.0.dylib

Problem is solved now.
I have completely uninstalled macports, removed /opt/local directory, and then reinstalled macports.
I tried to install macports gnucash, but it is still impossible.
But the dmg gnucash works now perfectly.
I have no explanation.


Honestly, trying to individually replace any/all occurrences of the  Cmd ⌘  key with  Ctrl ⌃  is futile.

You can globally swap the keys in System Prefs > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... but I'm not even sure I'd recommend that.

Long term, I'd recommend,
"Get used to it. Don't fight it."


Is VMWare Fusion bought through the MacUpdate Spring 2012 Bundle a full valid version?

In addition to the answer of Diago, I got this from the MacUpdate FAQ :

  What's the catch?

  There isn't one! You get the exact same versions of the apps as if you
  paid full price! The same support, update, and upgrade options are
  available to you, as well.

So, yes! Buying the spring bundle will give you a full valid version!


Apps won't sync to jailbroken device from iTunes

You could try using AppSync to sync the apps, or just redownload them.


iTunes updated on my iPhone 5c to 9.0.2 but now iTunes on my laptop won't connect to my phone

I just got the same error message.  Do you have a Windows system?  Is it Vista Home Premium?  I believe the problem is that iOS 9.0.2 needs iTunes 12.3, but Apple stopped supporting Vista with iTunes 12.3.  When I check for iTunes updates on my computer with Vista it tells me it's the current version.  It is 12.1, which IS the most current version for Windows Vista but the problem is iOS 9.0.2 needs iTunes 12.3.  They could have warned me before updating the iphone that it wouldn't work on the iTunes program that I was using to update the iphone.  Now what?  I have to upgrade Windows just to use itunes with my phone?

UPDATE:  Bingo!  I went to Apple's website and found a page with "older" versions of iTunes.  It's crazy but there was a newer version of iTunes for Vista, even though the iTunes update check tells you 12.1 is the latest. More specifically, I had 12.1.2.7.  I downloaded 12.1.3.6 which still works with Vista and I can connect to my iphone again!  I hope it works for you too!

So to recap, iTunes 12.1.3.6 will work with Vista AND iOS 9.0.2.  Here's the link for the download. Make sure you choose the right one for your version of Windows and video card (32 bit, 64 bit, or 64 bit for older video cards)
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6562#versions


Word stop when navigating text with option-key

You can choose between a few settings in System Preferences, but I don't know any way to customize them.

The standard setting treats period and colon as part of (some) words.

ASCII special characters that are part of words:

'.:_ in Standard
'_ in English (United States, Computer)

ASCII special characters that are not part of the start or end of words:

$+<=>^` in Standard
$+<=>^` in English (United States, Computer)

aa.11 and aa'11 are never single words. 11.11 and aa_11 are always single words.


MacBook Pro 2017 headphone jack seems to go to sleep when the laptop is idle

The problem seems to be that OSX selects the wrong output device when returning from sleep mode. For me the issue is that it selects the DisplayPort audio instead of the headphone port.

I did the following to fix this:

Install switchaudio-osx and sleepwatcher (I personaly use Homebrew for this)

brew install switchaudio-osx sleepwatcher

Check the name of the audio output device you want to use by running

SwitchAudioSource -n

(for me this was Built-in Output)

create a wake-up script using the output device from step 2:

echo -e "#\!/bin/bash\n/usr/local/bin/SwitchAudioSource -s 'Built-in Output'" >> ~/.wakeup

Set the permissions for the file

chmod 700 ~/.wakeup

Test the script (execute the command below and let your Mac go to sleep)

/usr/local/sbin/sleepwatcher --verbose --wakeup ~/.wakeup

Set-up the launch configuration for sleepwatcher

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/sleepwatcher/de.bernhard-baehr.sleepwatcher-20compatibility-localuser.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/de.bernhard-baehr.sleepwatcher-20compatibility-localuser.plist
brew services start sleepwatcher

Done! Now every time your machine returns from sleep the script will run and select the correct output


Unfortunately it sounds like your optical drive bit the dust.

The fact that it tries to read a presumably good DVD and can't and you get an error opening DVD Player AND can't get the disc out of the drive speaks to likely needing a new drive.

You will need to take it in for repair which will likely mean a replacement optical drive.


Identifying mail marked as junk; marking and unmarking mail as junk

Many mail servers have their own spam filters and will add a special header to the message to indicate spam (some are yes/no, others will use a number system where higher numbers indicate the more likelihood the message is spam)

Select a message and Select View -> Message -> Raw Source from Mails menu to see all the headers and info. You may see something like this (highlighted):

Based on what you find, you may set up a rule based these headers. (in Mail -> Preferences -> Rules, you may need to add the header in mail (see img))

Repeat this for each Mail client.

As for Mail.app's custom heuristics... That's a bit trickier, but if you are consistent they should end up pretty close on each machine. (I tend to trust my server's filtering more anyway)


App crashes, dock icon remains, can't reboot, yet no process in ps aux to kill

(I know this is an old question but I think this might help somebody)

I had the same problem with NetBeans and this is what worked for me:

sudo killall launchservicesd
sudo killall Dock

I hope this helps.


Go to: System Preferences - Network - Select your current adapter - Advanced ->
Uncheck the "Web Proxy" && "Secure Web Proxy" option


How to make and alias list from multiples results of a shell script?

Let’s assume that your new videos folder is located on your desktop.  This AppleScript code does not create an alias list.  The list created will be Posix paths.

property moveToFolder : POSIX path of ((path to desktop as text) & "New Videos" as alias)

set fileList to do shell script "mdfind 'kMDItemDateAdded >= $time.today && kMDItemKind = *movie'"

set fileList2 to paragraphs of fileList

repeat with thisMovie in fileList2
    tell application "System Events"
        move disk item thisMovie to folder moveToFolder
    end tell
end repeat


The Apple () menu provides a way for you to lock your MacBook’s screen.


Why can I airdrop from my MacBook to my iPhone, but not my iPhone to my Macbook?

I think this could be a problem of the Handoff feature. Deactivate Handoff both on your Mac and your iPhone. Wait for a couple of minutes and then turn Handoff on again on both devices and take care that both devices are unlocked at the same time!


Why is an album in Apple Music marked with an "E" and grayed out?

The E symbol means "Explicit".

You can enable or disable explicit content within Settings on your device. You'll find the "ALLOW MUSIC & PODCASTS RATED" option under General -> Restrictions -> Music & Podcasts.

You may need to enter a PIN code to access the Restrictions settings.

You can disable the restrictions entirely by selecting the "Disable Restrictions" option at the top of the Restrictions window.


How do I remove my email address book from my iPhone 7 contact list?

iCloud for Web can be used to restore the contact list before merging. Go to iCloud Settings and under Advanced click Restore Contacts.


How can I download the installer for macOS Sierra 10.12?

Apple now has a page up and live store links to download Sierra after High Sierra was announced.

Apple makes Sierra available even after High Sierra is released.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

The link to the installer on the Mac App Store is: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-sierra/id1127487414?ls=1&mt=12

If for some reason that article or link are gone, you may need to have an Apple ID that previously downloaded 10.12 Sierra - then it will be in purchased and a quick download. If you feel it’s missing, check with Apple Store support and your “purchase” receipt emails / purchase history. This is a change from older releases where you had to make sure and get an installer purchased before general release.

If Sierra legitimately isn’t in your purchased list, and for some reason the KB above gets pulled at some point:

You might be able to take your Mac to Apple Service and have the OS loaded.
You might be able to use Internet Recovery to install the OS that came with your Mac - so you’d need to buy or have a Mac that shipped with 10.12.
Find someone you trust to make you a bootable Install macOS Sierra installer drive - a 8 GB USB drive works well for this.


The top-right corner of iTunes has a search box. Typing in "mongol" gives "Search for "mongol" in Apple Music". That gives "Showing Results for "mongol" in Apple Music".

Listed amongst that is "Top Results", "Albums", "Songs", "Artists" and "Stations". Stations lists radios such as "Mongol Radio".

Seems a rather roundabout approach, but at least it works.


I get an error sed: 1: "1~2d": invalid command code ~ when I use sed '1~2d' sample.txt

An adress like 1~2 is a GNU extension, it's not available in the BSD sed which is part of macOS.
The probably easiest way out of this is to install GNU sed with
brew install gnu-sed

and then run gsed '1~2d' sample.txt.
If you don't want to install additional software see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2560411/how-to-remove-every-other-line-with-sed for alternative approaches.


Disable internal keyboard on high sierra

I assume you're talking about some sort of MacBook model. I would reset the Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM) to see if that resolves things for you.

Resetting the NVRAM

You don't specify your specific Mac model, so these generic instructions should cover all Macs (except for the iMac Pro which I'm assuming you do not have). Follow these steps:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then immediately press the commandoptionpr keys.
Keep these keys pressed down for at least 20 seconds!
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Notes:

Do not be concerned if your Mac appears to restart during the 20 second period.
When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).
If the problem is still present after you've rebooted, then proceed to resetting the System Management Controller (SMC) below.

Resetting the SMC

As you haven't specified your specific Mac model, these instructions apply to all MacBook models on which you cannot remove the battery (i.e. it's a built-in battery). If you have an older MacBook model or a desktop Mac, please refer instead to How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac. Otherwise proceed as follows:

Shut down your Mac
Unplug the power cable from your Mac
For 10 seconds, press and hold at the same time the shiftcontroloption keys (on the left side of the built-in keyboard) and the power button
After 10 seconds let go of all keys and the power button
Plug in the power cable
Turn your Mac back on with the power button.


How to get folder path in Automator Folder Action?

I don't think you can get the folder an action is attached to, but I think a good analog would be to get the parent folder of the current file. So, the parent folder of a file in ~/Downloads/MyDownloadedFile.pdf will be the Downloads folder, and you could save that to a variable.
This action is not built in to Automator. However, if you are running macOS 10.13 or earlier, you can purchase a package of third-party Automator Actions from http://automatedwork.server323.com/products/apps/automator-actions-for-mac-os-x-10-610-7-snow-leopard-lion/. The action you want is "Get Parent Folders of Finder Items" in the "File and Folder Automator Action Pack". At the time that I bought it (a few months ago), the developer charged $20.

(You may also be able to accomplish this without third party actions by using an Applescript block—something like tell application "Finder" to return container of (input as alias). However, when I tried this myself, Automator seemed unable to save the variable properly. I'm not sure if that's due to a limitation of Automator or a problem with my Applescript.)


macOS High Sierra internet recovery is frozen

This is why it is better to first download macOS from the Apps Store to your Applications folder. You then can create a USB flash drive installer for offline installations. The instructions are given at this Apple website: How to create a bootable installer for macOS.

You have already erased your drive so this is no longer an option on your Mac. In your case, you would now need another Mac to download High Sierra and make the installer.

  FYI: I usually have two installations of macOS per Mac. Each installation is in separate partitions. I usually the edit the /etc/fstab file so each installation can not access the other installation, unless I do a mount. This way I usually can avoid having to use macOS Recovery.


My country ( i.e. Bangladesh) is not listed on the billing information?

Apple lists the countries where services are available when you choose your location.

https://www.apple.com/choose-country-region/
https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/
https://www.apple.com/macos/feature-availability/
https://www.apple.com/watchos/feature-availability/
etc...

As of January 2019, the only Apple Features offered in Bangladesh is Maps and Satellite Maps. Also, keep in mind that the features are enabled in almost all cases based on the region where you purchase the device, so if your phone was purchased in Saudi Arabia and then used in the US - you might retain all the Saudi restrictions despite your attempt to change. App Store and other services for billing purposes typically are more flexible and you can take advantage of them when you move about.

My speculation and research why Bangladesh isn’t listed is due to Apple not obtaining some rights from the government or is in the process of obtaining them.

In order to run an iTunes store in any given country, Apple has to secure licensing rights for the content, legal rights from the local government, payment processes, and numerous other legal hurdles. Either Apple hasn't applied for those rights yet, or they're in progress, but the size of the user base as well as the ease (or otherwise) of doing business in any given country are the driving factors here.
You can add your voice via Apple's feedback page here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html but at the end of the day you can be the most ardent, vocal fan in the world, but if the Bangladesh government don't give the licenses to operate, it all means nothing.

(Source)


Google Chrome Helper for "GPU Process" constantly shown as non responsive in OS X 10.9

I've been experiencing the same issue for about a month, except it predates Mavericks (10.9) when I was still using Mountain Lion (10.8.4 and 10.8.5 specifically).

I've found the only way I can remedy the issue is to force quit the unresponsive Google Chrome Helper and all other associated processes (all "Google Chrome ..." named items) except for Google Chrome itself (the one with the icon). That will crash most, if not all, browser plugins, but it will make Chrome useable for a decent amount of time if you keep down on your number of open tabs.

It's not fantastic by any means, but my other remedy is going back to using Firefox for the time being and keeping my fingers crossed Google is working on a fix for this issue.

MacBook Pro 6,2 (15-inch Mid-2010)
2.53GHz Intel i5
4GB RAM
128GB SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD/500GB Toshiba HDD
OS X 10.9 "Mavericks"


How can I send rendered Markdown files to the printer from the command line?

TL;DR You need a markdown renderer which creates Postscript or PDF as output. How to convert from a Markdown file, to PDF may be a bit dated but lists some options on how to accomplish this.

Any output device (be it a Terminal, be it a Printer) uses control codes within the data to display in order to render it properly, usually these control codes are different for each device. Sometimes (e.g. for Postscript or PDF) they are even a whole language on its own.
Now lp relies on CUPS to talk to the printer, CUPS usually only understands how to handle plain text, PostScript, PDF, and image files directly. So you can do cat foo.md | lp/lp foo.md or cat foo.pdf | lp/lp foo.pdf to print the plain markdown file or any PDF. If you send text formatted for terminal output (as mdcat does) it will not lead to the expected result (neither does running man lp | lp usually).


It sounds like you're looking at your available iCloud Storage rather than your device storage (which is different than 5 GB). You may have, for example, 15 GB out of 16 GB used on your phone (depending on total storage).

If you are trying to update many apps at once, or a very large app (there are some in the gigabytes), you need enough storage on your phone, and deleting a few small apps may not be enough. Try deleting apps that use more space and try updating just one or two individual apps that are small (in the Updates page of App Store it says the file size for the app updates) and see if you're still getting an error.


In general, remapping a modifier key to another modifier key is relatively simple; Apple provides a system preference pane to do it. Remapping a standard key to another standard key is slightly more complicated, but easy enough by editing or creating a keyboard layout. The tricky part is converting a modifier key to a standard one, or vice versa. For that, you need a specialized program.

You will need a System Preference Pane called PCKeyboard Hack.

First, go the the Keyboard preference pane, select the Keyboard tab, and click the Modifier Keys... button. In the resulting sheet, set Caps Lock Key to No Action.

Then, install PCKeyboard Hack.

In the preference pane it installs, go to Caps Lock, select "Change Caps Lock", and set the key code to 48 (the key code for the tab key).

Instructions on a related question are available on Stack Overflow.


is there a way to disable update notifications in iWork apps (Pages, Keynote, Numbers)?

Yes, you can disable this. It is very easy, although completely unsupported and undocumented by Apple.

Install the PrefsEditor application. (You can also do the following steps with Xcode… but ew.)
Open PrefsEditor and select the com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist bundle.
Find the TSAAUNPersistedState dictionary and click its disclosure triangle.
Edit the nextAlertPresentationDate field to some date far in the future (for example, change 2018 to 2030).
Save with Cmd+S.
Repeat for com.apple.iWork.Numbers.plist and com.apple.iWork.Keynote.plist.
Profit! (No more obnoxious popup dialogs.)

These instructions are summarized from a wonderful post on MacRumors.


I doubt you have summer 2006 iMac. Those models are all Core Duo and don't support Lion. And by the way they don't support more than 2GB of RAM anyway.

Only thing you can do about memory usage is to turn any service in System Preferences that you don't need especially under Sharing tab and watch for autologin items in Accounts tab.

Also you may uninstall Adobe Flash to make browsing more responsive. Or go back to Snow Leopard or even Tiger(though it's poorly supported now).