Terminal git:master after oh-my-zshell installation

Typically some of the oh-my-zsh themes provide special prompts for directories that are Git repositories. The 'git master' just means that it thinks that the directory you're in right now is a Git repository, with new, unstaged changes. All of this has to do with source control. I don't know your background with source control but you can look it up if you're curious.

I would start with looking at your ~/.zshrc file and see what ZSH_THEME is set to. Then, I would look inside ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes/ and look for the theme that's set in ~/.zshrc. This latter typically has the prompt set that you're seeing right now. After this I'd change the prompt to look the way you want. In your case you might just want to disable the Git-related stuff from the place where the prompt is setting those variables.

Good luck!


Tmux with iterm2 integration won't start when invoked with tmux -CC

I installed tmux as part of homebrew and it works just fine.

Once you have homebrew installed

brew install tmux will install tmux for you.


Preferences changes using "defaults" not applied

The preference you wish to set is saved in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost, so you have to add the switch -currentHost to the defaults command

Try the following code with Value set to 0, then set to 2 and see the difference

Value="0"; \
echo "before"; \
: read actual values; \
defaults -currentHost read -g "com.apple.trackpad.threeFingerTapGesture"; \
defaults read com.apple.AppleMultitouchTrackpad TrackpadThreeFingerTapGesture; \
: close System Preferenes; \
pkill -u "${USER}" \
      -f "^/Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences$" 2>/dev/null; \
: set value in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/.GlobalPreferences.#Hardware UUID#.plist; \
: where your hardware uuid can be determined with; \
: ioreg -c IOPlatformExpertDevice  -d 2 | awk -F'"' '/IOPlatformUUID/ { print $(NF-1) }'; \
defaults -currentHost write -g "com.apple.trackpad.threeFingerTapGesture" -integer ${Value}; \
: set value in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist; \
defaults write com.apple.AppleMultitouchTrackpad TrackpadThreeFingerTapGesture -integer ${Value}; \
: kill the preference cache process; \
pkill -u "${USER}" -l "^/usr/sbin/cfprefsd agent$" 2>/dev/null; \
: wait a second otherwise you get errors on the defaults commands; \
sleep 1; \
echo "after"; \
: read set values; \
defaults -currentHost read -g "com.apple.trackpad.threeFingerTapGesture"; \
defaults read com.apple.AppleMultitouchTrackpad TrackpadThreeFingerTapGesture; \
: open trackpad preference; \
open "/System/Library/PreferencePanes/Trackpad.prefPane"

gives me

before
2
2
after
0
0

regards

Gerd


System using old version of rSync instread of new version

The answer depends on how you have setup ActiveBackup, as you can run it in three different ways:

1) Rsync shell mode via SSH

2) Rsync module mode (directly)

3) Rsync module mode via SSH

When using mode 1, ActiveBackup will login to the Mac and start up rsync itself. This does not go through launchd at all. I can see that you have been advised to use "--rsync-path", but that is not an option for you, simply because ActiveBackup does not let you set this parameter.

Instead what you need to do is to ensure that when ActiveBackup starts rsync on the remote server, it will start up the correct version - WITHOUT the possibility of changing which command ActiveBackup sends over. There's two ways of doing this depending on whether your ActiveBackup version is the one that issues the "rsync" command or the one issuing the "/usr/bin/rsync" command.

If it is the first one (try this first), then edit the /private/etc/paths file and make sure the "/usr/local/bin" line comes before the "/usr/bin" line.

If it is the second one, then use these steps:

Reboot the Mac in Recovery Mode
Open Terminal and disable SIP: "csrutil disable"
Reboot and open Terminal
Move away old rsync: "mv /usr/bin/rsync /usr/bin/rsync.orig"
Link in new rsync: "ln -s /usr/local/bin/rsync /usr/bin/rsync"

You'll want to test this with ActiveBackup, and then reboot into Recovery Mode to enable SIP again with "csrutil enable".

Note that a subsequent macOS update might replace rsync. If that happens, just repeat the process. Note that as Apple hasn't updated rsync for years, it is not that likely to happen.

If you're using mode 2, ActiveBackup communicates directly with the rsync daemon, and does not start the rsync command itself on the Mac. In this case you cannot use the advise of using "--rsync-path", as it doesn't apply here at all. How to fix it depends on how you have actually started the rsync daemon. As you haven't detailed anything about starting it, I assume this means that you haven't actually started it.

However if you did follow a guide to enable rsyncd - you have probably done it through adding a launchd "LaunchDaemon". In that case you'll need to change your launch daemon file and find the key "Program" and change the corresponding string element to:

/usr/local/bin/rsync

If you're using mode 3, you'll want to follow the guide for mode 1 as it is the same steps necessary.


iPhone won't connect to some Wi-Fi hotspots

I'd go into settings and erase all the stored SSID/passwords by choosing:

General > Reste > Reset Network Settings

At that point, you would need to try joining the network and be prepared to gather more information about that location. Do other iPhone work with the router, can the router be rebooted (or checked to be sure that there are DHCP leases available - many routers issue only a fixed number of valid IP addresses).

You can troubleshoot things quite well following Apple's guidance too:

iOS: Troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks and connections


Disable File Vault if you don't want this two step log in process. You can be sure FileVault is off by seeing the following from terminal:

Mac:~ me$ diskutil cs list
No CoreStorage logical volume groups found

Alternatively, you could disable and re-enable the File Vault encryption and watch for the prompt where it asks if the OS user should be permitted to unlock the drive with the user's password.

If you select yes from that, the user will show up on the first login screen and both unlock the FileVault protected volume and log in with the same credentials.


Unable to install pgAdmin on MacOS Big Sur; possible verification problem

that program needs to install software in non standard locations. I don't have the equipment you have but am confident this is a Big Sur issue.
Go TO System Preferences:Security and Privacy:Full Disk Access (on the sidebar)
You will likely need to authenticate then add the pgAdmin installer.
Untested and best guess answer...


mount is adding a quarantine flag, causing: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted - but not the usual suspects

The script was being run from inside a .dmg that had the quarantine flag set on it. When the .dmg was mounted, it was mounting it with a quarantine flag that is inherited, but doesn't show up. I unmounted the .dmg, removed the quarantine flag, and re-mounted it, and all was well.


iOS 9 Public Beta: Diagnostic & Usage Data not being cleared

There's a program called phone clean by imobie. You only need the free version. Use quick clean on it and it'll go through and delete all crash logs and diagnostic logs from your phone. I use this method all the time to free up a lot of space. https://www.imobie.com/phoneclean/


Minimize other windows of an application

This doesn't work with Preview or other aplications that don't support AppleScript.

tell application (path to frontmost application as text)
    try
        set miniaturized of windows where visible is true and index is not 1 and miniaturizable is true to true
    end try
    try -- at least Finder
        set collapsed of windows where visible is true and index is not 1 and closeable is true to true
    end try
end tell

I don't know how to get the focused window or hidden windows with System Events. The focused window isn't window 1 or AXMain or AXFocused. Setting AXMinimized to true didn't work with Tweetbot either.

tell application "System Events" to tell (process 1 where frontmost is true)
    windows where value of attribute "AXMinimized" is false
    --repeat with w in result
    --try
    --set value of attribute "AXMinimized" of w to true
    --end try
    --end repeat
end tell

There are many ways to assign shortcuts to scripts, but shortcuts for Automator services don't work reliably in 10.7 or 10.8.


Setting environment variables for scripts run by launchd?

Open your Script Editor(Launch Pad -> Other -> Script Editor)
Type scripts like this:

do shell script "launchctl setenv autoBackupImagesInProgress false"

Use multiple lines if you want to set multiple variables.

Save this script as Application, open SystemPreferences → Users & Groups → your user → Login Items and add your saved script.

To apply changes, logout your account and log in again.


Is it possible to create a default .profile or .bash_profile with default configuration intact on macOS?

On user creation, the home directory contents are copied from a directory /System/Library/User\ Template/<language> (where language is for example English.lproj), so you could copy the original file using:

sudo cp /System/Library/User\ Template/<language>/<file> ~/

The problem is that .bashrc is non-existent in the default profile, so you can just delete it from your home directory to get the initial state.

Though you might check your installation to be 100% sure.


What are you trying to accomplish? Finder.app is hidden. If you wish to quickly open finder, command-tab is easy.

If that's your goal, some of these suggestions may be helpful. Personally I use finder windows accessed via command-tab. I dragged my Downloads directory into the sidebar (it should be there already). So: command-tab to finder, click Downloads in the sidebar and viola. Alternatively, you could drag the downloads folder to the dock (it should be there already). Or, swipe 4 fingers down to reveal desktop (an option in system preferences -> trackpad), then click desktop to select finder.

In Automator you could build a workflow and save it as a service. In Automator use open finder and save as a service. This will put it in your Library to be available across applications. Then enable a quick key assigning a keyboard shortcut in system preferences -> keyboard -> keyboard shortcuts -> services.


If you are loging in with your google account in Chrome browser:
It can be done by signed out your google account after clear all the autofill setting in Chrome setting and un-sync auto-fill setting. Then you will not get any auto fill drop down even though you sign in with your google account again.


MBP 13' (mid-2010; 7,1) 2.4 Core 2 Duo P8600 supporting 16 GB RAM under Win7?

According to Apple your MacBook Pro only supports 8 GB RAM, however Mactracker says it will support 16 GB.

Also at MacSales.com have a look at Upgrades for MacBook and MacBook Pro 'Unibody' Models 2008 – 2010 and 16.0GB OWC Memory Upgrade Kit show your model MBP supporting 16 GB RAM. Or at Crucial, see: Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2010) compatible upgrades


is there an application to manage bookmarks?

Take a look at Xmarks. It stores the bookmarks on an Xmarks-server, so they are available from everywhere. It's compatible with Safari, IE, Firefox and Chrome.


The easiest way would be to create new user with admin privileges and delete all others.

That should get rid off the unwanted.

You can try rebuilding your user account as described here.


Move files using shortcut keys in Forklift for Mac

You can use

Tab to switch between left and right pane
Cursor keys to move up and down within a pane
Cmd-C/Cmd-V to copy/paste files and folders


Can I sell Snow Leopard DVD? Does the license transfer?

From the License Agreement page 2

  Transfer. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software.  Subject to the restrictions set forth below, you may, however,
  make a one-time permanent transfer of all of your license rights to the Apple Software (in its original form as provided by Apple) to another party, provided that:
  (a) the transfer must include all of the Apple Software, including all its component parts (excluding Apple Boot ROM code and ﬁrmware), original media, printed
  materials and this License; (b) you do not retain any copies of the Apple Software, full or partial, including copies stored on a computer or other storage device;
  and (c) the party receiving the Apple Software reads and agrees to accept the terms and conditions of this License.

IANAL, but the terms of the licence clearly anticipated your wish to sell.


I'm getting a connection timed out error with SVN after installing OS X Yosemite

The problem was the client I normally use (Versions) has a crash bug in Yosemite.  The fix for that, which I carried out yesterday, is here: Versions crashing in OS X Yosemite

That fix has the side effect of breaking SVN (but it stops the Versions crashes!).

Reverting the change gets rid of the error message I was seeing.


You should be getting a pop-up like the below screenshot:

Then you'd be able to share via any app you like. It will create a link to the song you've chosen to share.

Sources:
iOSHacker


Prevent Apple Watch face from showing when Do Not Disturb on

In watchOS 3.2, Apple added Theater Mode, accessed by swiping up from the Watch Face and tapping the bottom-left icon.

Theater Mode silences the WATCH and prevents the screen from lighting up on wrist-raise or when receiving notifications. Taptic feedback will still be triggered.

You can combine Theater Mode and Do Not Disturb to silence Taptic feedback, as well. Alarms will still ring as normal.


How to get custom favorites icons in Safari 8 on Yosemite?

This is not related to OS X, so I’ll let the moderator move this question to other network. But I’m still going to answer this. The one you’re talking about is Apple Touch Icon which can be implemented by using the markup below:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="57x57" href="/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="114x114" href="/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="72x72" href="/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="144x144" href="/apple-touch-icon-144x144.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="60x60" href="/apple-touch-icon-60x60.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="120x120" href="/apple-touch-icon-120x120.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="76x76" href="/apple-touch-icon-76x76.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="152x152" href="/apple-touch-icon-152x152.png">

There are multiple sizes because it needs to support Retina and non-Retina display.

Source: CSS Tricks


Use the modulo operator !

set Auch to {...}      --list with all windows
set positionArray to {{..}, {..},{..}} -- The array where you store the positions you want.

set ind to 0
repeat with theWindow in Auch
    tell (windows whose title contains theWindow)
        activate
        set position to item ((ind mod (count of positionArray)) + 1) of positionArray --AppleScript arrays start at 1
        set ind to (ind + 1)
    end tell
end repeat


Is it possible to identify what the parent program/app is from a running process?

ps has an option to access the PPID/parent PID of a process:

$ ps aux -o ppid
USER               PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND           PPID
admin            65694  10.9  0.1  4385132  13340   ??  UN    9:32PM   0:00.07 /System/Library/     1

PPID is the last column in this case.

(Or use Activity Monitor by selecting View -> All Processes, Hierarchically)


What are Icon\r files and how do I delete them?

The Icon\r file is used when you're about to change folder's icon: when you change the icon, it is not actually applied to the folder itself but rather to the Icon\r file inside the folder in question.

You can remove the file via terminal with rm $'Icon\r'

Alternatively, if you want to delete the file through Finder, you must make it visible first; also something you can do via terminal: SetFile -a v $'Icon\r'

Somewhat related info on how to change file's or folder's icon via Terminal: Changing a file or folder icon using the Terminal

… And be sure to see Icon? file on OS X desktop on Super User.


Sync / Transfer Spotify Playlist to Apple Music

Alright I have found a way online to do it, the article was in Dutch so I will translate it for you all.

Things you Need:

MAC, preferred latest version
An TextEditor, if you don't have one get the free TextWrangler
Charles Proxy, free to download proxy tool
Python 3, download the MAX OS X installer here
Spotify2Music script

The process:

Step 1 - The Setup

Create a folder on your desktop, this will be our working folder. Place the 2 files from the Spotify2Music zip in here.

Step 2 - Exporting the Playlists

Login into Exportify and extract the playlists you want. You can export the playlist by using the green buttons Export. Once you have done this successfully a window opens containing the CSV file. Select the whole file and create a file spotify.csv and place it in the desktop folder you created in step 1.

Step 3 - Matching songs

We must match the Spotify songs to Apple Music songs. Open a terminal and cd to the folder on the desktop (see Step 1). By this step you should have installed python 3. While in the Desktop folder type: python3 retrieve-identifiers.py. The script will start working.

Step 4 - Retrieving the cookie from iTunes

We are going to retrieve cookie data from iTunes using Charles Proxy.

From the Menu Proxy go to SSL Proxy Settings
Check 'Enable SSL Proxying'
Click on add and insert '*itunes.apple.com'
In the same Menu check on 'Mac OS X Proxy'
Go to iTunes go to an Apple Music playlist but don't do nothing
Check you have enabled recording (please refer to image below)
When recording is enabled add the playlist to my Music

When Charles is stopped go to to the tabs as shown in the screenshot above. Copy the fields (x-dsid, cookie, x-guid) to TextEdit or Word.

Step 5 - Inserting the Cookie data

The 3 data files we have just "stolen" from iTunes need to be inserted into 'insert-song.py'. Open this file with TextWrangler (or equivalent) and go to lines 30,31 and 32. Paste the x-dsid, cookie, x-guid data and save the file. Remember all files must be in the same folder.

Step 6 - Ready to Import!

Open a terminal navigate to the folder from Step 1 typ in 'python3 insert-songs.py' and you are now importing all the (Matched) Spotify to Apple Music.

Tips and Tricks:

I have made folders like this to enable a quick import of all my playlists. I suggest you do the same.

If you run into sync problems, check out this post http://www.idigitaltimes.com/apple-music-problems-how-fix-issues-syncing-playlists-icloud-library-offline-455939

Remark

Don't over do it! I had all the playlists open in tabs in my terminal and I overflowed the Apple Music buffer. This process takes time so do 1 playlist at a time and go sleep or take a nape or a coffee :)

Credits

All credits go to This Post


How can I prevent shift selection from expanding?

I have to agree with the comment that it is working as you state you want it to work, at least for me in Chrome 41.0.2272.64 beta on OS X 10.10.2.

That said - there are two ways of creating selections in OS X, from a programmer's point of view: anchored and unanchored. (There is also a third that seems to be employed by Apple applications, mentioned in the Betalogue article as a "smart unanchored" selection.) The way you describe it currently working for you would be an unanchored selection, whereas your desired behavior is an anchored selection. You can read more on the difference and programming implications on Daring Fireball (from 2006) and a slightly more recent 2009 article on Betalogue.

More specifically to your question, it is up to the developer of the program you are using to determine how it operates in that program. I don't have Chrome v40 to test it on but the commenter did and states it works as I am seeing it work in v41 beta. What version of Chrome are you using?

I wrote the below before I realized what you were actually stating is occurring. Hopefully it is useful for somebody else, so I am leaving it here.

The difference is how you created the selection.

If you select text by dragging the cursor from left-to-right, Shift plus arrow keys will expand or shrink the selection on the right edge of the selection. Conversely, if you select by dragging right-to-left, the keyboard shortcut will affect the selection starting from the left edge.

I've confirmed this to be the case in both an Apple-created app (Dictionary) and Chrome 41.0.2272.64 beta.


Disk is almost full after restoring to factory defaults

The install didn’t do well. If you have a good backup, I would perform another erase install (or the first erase install if you just reinstalled the OS. Apple doesn’t define a factory reset, so we have no clue what that means unless you reference a written process you performed).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

What makes an erase install is step 2 - format the disk. Your disk wasn’t formatted correctly. Specifically which of your disk1s1 and disk1s5 contains your user data is in question. You should only have one Macintosh HD - Data per Catalina system volume and not two.


How to install Mac OS X in Parallels VM without extra `OS X image file.hdd` file on host Mac?

For Parallels 11.2.2 and macOS 10.12 Sierra as guest OS, I had the same problem. Once the VM is installed make sure you configure the VM, go to the Hardware tab, select the Hard Disk item in the lefthand column that represents the unnecessary "OS X image file.hdd" file and click the minus sign button to remove it. You can delete the actual "OS X image file.hdd" file and your VM won't complain about it being missing when booting.


Looking for crossplatform solution to sharing sensitive files

Create a password secured zip archive of your sensitive contents.

Create a terms of use simpletext file or optionally a pdf version with the same text as these will be easily readable on just about any system.

An overly simple example:

"if you disagree with these terms of use, close this zip/image archive and securely delete zip/image archive immediately"

or

"if you agree, use _ passcode to unlock _ zip/image archive"

Create and place the password protected zip file and the terms of use plain text and/or pdf documents into an unsecured zip file.

The user that opens the content would not be able to miss the terms of use before opening the sensitive content.

If you're scratching your head. we are leveraging nesting as a technique to ensure users have read and accepted the terms of use before accessing the contents. Here's a picture of and a link to the Wikipedia article on Matryoshka Dolls to better visualize how this works.


How can I insert a step into a Shortcut?

You can firm touch and hold on a action and drag and drop it where ever it's appropriate in the workflow.


Two-finger scrolling stops working after a while

A simpler solution that seemed to work for me in Firefox:

open about:config

and then find the properties

browser.gesture.swipe.left
browser.gesture.swipe.right

and set them from Browser:BackOrBackDuplicate and Browser:ForwardOrForwardDuplicate to empty. It's a workaround for a known bug ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=927702 ).


Can you pair Mac AND iPad with same Apple Wireless Keyboard?

Yes you can.

First, make sure Bluetooth is turned off on your iPad. And enable it on your Mac (make sure the box that says "discoverable" is checked). Then turn on your keyboard and follow the steps to pair it using the Keyboard System Preference pane. Once the keyboard is paired, uncheck "discoverable" (which should remain off unless you wish to pair another device) and then turn off Bluetooth.

Next, head over to your iPad and enable bluetooth. Turn your keyboard off (hold the power button till the light glows and then dims). Turning it on again will get the iPad to pick it up and a prompt will ask you to enter a 4-digit sequence of numbers and the "ENTER" key. Follow the steps. Once that is done, it will be paired.

To use the keyboard on the iPad, make sure the device has bluetooth enabled and that your Mac has that service disabled (you should disable the service before trying to connect the keyboard to the other device).

I just tested it using my Mac and my iPhone 4 and it works perfectly. Sometimes the device takes a second attempt to locate the keyboard, but it does indeed work.


I am afraid not, it's not possible to virtualise Mac OS X in order to allow it to run within Windows, at least not by effectively opening up your genuine OS partition and running is as though it was a virtual machine, which can be done for a Windows Partition within OS X.

It is possible to run Mac OS X in a virtual machine from a Windows OS, but it is not officially supported by any of the major vendors, and requires a lot of messing around.  Even if you did this, you would not have the ability to genuinely boot straight into that instance of Mac OS X, as it would only be available as the virtual machine.

If you need to access both simultaeniously, you need to stick to booting to Mac OS X, and then opening the Windows partition as a VM.


USB external hard drive is mounted on one MacBook Pro but not another

My intuition would say that the drive might be drawing a little more power than the USB spec allows and one Mac can supply that power and the other cannot, but that's just speculation.

You would need to measure the voltage or try a different drive in the same enclosure with the same two Mac to start to pick apart why you get different results on two hardware setup.


How can I tell if my Mac is keeping the clock updated properly?

10.14 Mojave

Mojave still uses timed, but ntpdate and the helpers ntpq are removed. To check and update your system time, you can call sntp directly.

$ sudo sntp -sS pool.ntp.org
Password:
sntp 4.2.8p10@1.3728-o Tue Mar 21 14:36:42 UTC 2017 (136.200.1~2533)
2018-09-29 19:42:41.448103 (-0200) +1087.742403 +/- 725.183462 pool.ntp.org 188.68.36.203 s2 no-leap

Out of the box, a tracking file is missing. So if you get the error below when checking time:

kod_init_kod_db(): Cannot open KoD db file /var/db/ntp-kod: No such file or directory

create the file and change ownership to root. Some people reported this was actually breaking the ntp synchronization.

sudo touch /var/db/ntp-kod
sudo chown root:wheel /var/db/ntp-kod

Then run again to check if the error message is gone.

sudo sntp -sS pool.ntp.org

10.13 High Sierra

High Sierra uses timed, from /usr/libexec/timed, run by the system user _timed.

  timed maintains system clock accuracy by synchronizing the clock with reference clocks via technologies like NTP.  Inputs are merged inside of timed, where it calculates uncertainty to facilitate scheduling proactive time jobs. timed is also aware of power/battery conditions.

timed is managed by the LaunchDaemon /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.timed.plist. timed runs…

when the daemon is loaded at boot (RunAtLoad: true)
every 3600 seconds (StartInterval: 3600)
when Airplane Mode is disabled (com.apple.systemconfiguration airplane mode changed: com.apple.radios.plist AirplaneMode false, which appears to be carried over from iOS)

You can see how 'off' your clock is by looking at the contents of /var/db/timed/com.apple.timed.plist, under the TMLastSystemTime dictionary in the TMTimeError key and the TMScaleFactorError key.

$ sudo defaults read /var/db/timed/com.apple.timed TMLastSystemTime
{
    TMCurrentTime = "537303485.281592";
    TMReliability = 1;
    TMRtcTime = "351422.381868388";
    TMScaleFactor = "0.9999958233107684";
    TMScaleFactorError = "3.468751755688052e-05";
    TMSource = TMTimeSynthesizer;
    TMTimeError = "0.6127951619022057";
}

timed uses the time server set in /etc/ntp.conf, which by default is

server time.apple.com

timed also uses TMTimeSynthesizer, something which CoreTime on iOS uses to update the clock with but I'm unaware of its history on macOS:

Don't run the timed binary yourself, as mentioned in the man page:

  timed takes no arguments, and users should not launch it manually.

According to Apple Developer Forums user granada29 in the post ntpd, timed and chronyd in 10.13, timed performs the following:

  timed appears to be a simple sntp client - i.e. it polls the NTP periodically (15 minutes) and uses the settimeofday() system call to set the sytem clock. I assume it has some cleverness to avoid stepping the clock backwards but there is no way to tell.

10.11 El Capitan to 10.12 Sierra

pacemaker is the daemon responsible for managing the time in macOS. It uses adjtime to adjust the clock per the content of /var/db/ntp.drift.

You can see how 'off' your clock is by looking at the contents of ntp.drift — for example, my file contains the following:

-23.640

This means that the clock is -23.64 PPM away from the time that it should be. The units of this number is PPM, or Parts Per Million. 1 PPM is 1 microsecond/second, or 3.6ms/h.

You can make the clock update more often by running pacemaker with the -a option, providing a time in seconds to wait between time movements:

/usr/libexec/pacemaker -a 10

To see the parameters being used by OS X for pacemaker, open /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.pacemaker.plist.

{
    KeepAlive = { PathState = { "/private/var/db/ntp.drift" = :true; }; };
    Label = "com.apple.pacemaker";
    ProgramArguments = ( "/usr/libexec/pacemaker", "-b", "-e", "0.0001", "-a", "10" );
}

To find your current settings, run with the -i option:

/usr/libexec/pacemaker -i
Jan 19 18:20:08 g pacemaker[12544] <Info>: --- settings for external power ---
Jan 19 18:20:08 g pacemaker[12544] <Info>: interval = 1 seconds, tolerance = 0.000000, drift = -23.640000
Jan 19 18:20:08 g pacemaker[12544] <Info>: --- settings for internal power ---
Jan 19 18:20:08 g pacemaker[12544] <Info>: interval = 1 seconds, tolerance = 0.000024, drift = -23.640000

You can show the log by running with the -v option:

sudo /usr/libexec/pacemaker -v
Password:
Jan 19 18:23:17 g pacemaker[13202] <Info>: power status check: using external power
Jan 19 18:23:17 g pacemaker[13202] <Info>: created file monitor for /var/db/ntp.drift
Jan 19 18:23:17 g pacemaker[13202] <Info>: interval = 1 seconds, tolerance = 0.000000, drift = -23.640000
Jan 19 18:23:19 g pacemaker[13202] <Debug>: drift -23.640000 residue 0.000000 delta -23
Jan 19 18:23:20 g pacemaker[13202] <Debug>: drift -23.640000 residue -0.640000 delta -24
Jan 19 18:23:21 g pacemaker[13202] <Debug>: drift -23.640000 residue -0.280000 delta -23
Jan 19 18:23:22 g pacemaker[13202] <Debug>: drift -23.640000 residue -0.920000 delta -24
Jan 19 18:23:23 g pacemaker[13202] <Debug>: drift -23.640000 residue -0.560000 delta -24
Jan 19 18:23:24 g pacemaker[13202] <Debug>: drift -23.640000 residue -0.200000 delta -23
⌃C%


Do the M1 Macs "shutoff" RAM or CPU Cores?

No, the issue you're seeing is not in any way caused by the M1 "turning off memory" or "turning off cores". It is entirely caused by the manner in which this particular software program is structured.
Remember to check your BOINC settings - you can actually decide how large a part of your RAM that BOINC can use. The lower you set it (all else being equal), the more you'll see "Waiting for memory".


UPDATE:
Adding feedback from @Tetsujin:
Apparently the developer of the app themselves can disable Screen-lock from activating while there's on-going activity. However, if they don't, the following is a hack to stop Screen-Lock from activating and busting your uploads.
In "Settings,":
"Display & Brightness" > "Auto-Lock" and choose "Never"
Don't forget to restore the previous value to something more reasonable after your upload completes or you'll run your battery flat quickly.
It's a bit counter-intuitive that just because screen-lock kicks-in, your connections should all break.  If we say Screen-Lock is to stop an unattended phone being abused, it doesn't necessarily follow that you want all your uploads to be killed...


Can You "Turn Off" Order of Preference For Wi-Fi Networks

No, not without special functionality on the accesspoints themselves.

The thing you are referring to is called wireless roaming, something that usually can't be done with simple consumer hardware.

As for OS X, it only reconnects when the current connection is lost. If you can make sure there is no overlap between the accesspoints or repeatets, the connection will always be lost and then you will switch to the next network. This might be possible in your situation if your repeaters or accesspoints allow you to reduce it's radio power in it's settings.


How can I make Vuze work with Lion? (It cannot transfer any data)

Essentially, Mac OSX Lion has issues with java.

I'm pretty sure this is a Java issue. Apple's support for Java in 10.7 is severely lacking. I had to download (wasn't installed with 10.7) Java 1.6.0_24 using Apple's ADC (developer) site.

Installed Java and restarted my Mac. Launched Vuze and I was able to receive incoming traffic. Paused the download and it all ended there. Vuze now keeps crashing and I'm still not receiving any incoming traffic again.

Source: http://forum.vuze.com/thread.jspa?threadID=96592


How can I resize my Lion partition to fill up the unused space on the drive?

My suggestion

Don't try to resize from the Recovery partition. Boot into the normal partition and resize from there.

Background

diskutil list is misleading you. It is not the position of the recovery partition which is your problem.

I had a very similar setup, and here is the output of diskutil list for me:

  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            423.6 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS Temp Partition Test ... 74.8 GB    disk0s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             792.2 MB   disk0s5

Partitions 4 and 5 had a dev version of Lion on them. I have just used Disk utility to delete partitions 4 and 5 and resize partition 2 to fill the space.

This worked - Disk Utility resized the main drive with no problem. So what have I done which is different to you? Well, I resized the main partition from booting into the main partition not the Recovery Partiion. You can resize a partition that you have booted from in Disk Utility.

It makes sense that the recovery partition would "get in the way" if you have booted from it, so I suspect that above suggestion might work for you.


Go to Settings > General > Restrictions

If you have setup Restrictions, enter your Restrictions passcode.

If you have not set it up yet, enter a password (twice) and enable Restrictions.

Make sure you will never forget this passcode; it is required even when resetting the phone. If you forget it, not only will you be disallowed from entering the Restrictions section, you will also not be able to reset your iPhone.

On Restrictions page, go down to the “Allow Changes” section and click on “Mobile Data”.

Set “Mobile Data” to “Don’t Allow Changes”.

Leave the “Data Plan” to “Allow Changes”.

Open control center once and close it.

For iOS 12 here are the instructions


How can I recover an unresponding application without quitting?

Regardless of how important the process is, if it’s hung it’s hung. Quitting the finder is one way to see if you can recover it.  Quitting all open applications is anther suggestion.

I would recommend opening up a terminal window and typing the following to see if you get any clues:

sudo lsof | grep matlab

lsof is a Unix command that basically means “list open files”. The | next to that is a pipe command which basically means output should be processed by the command to the immediate right. And grep basically filters out the output based on criteria. In this case, matlab itself.

If you run that it should list all open files which also means connected processes. If you are not used to the terminal output this could be overwhelming, but looking through the output line by line might reveal something.

And if you are up for it, I would recommend installing htop in OS X. It’s a very nice and—in my opinion—more useful version of top which shows all system basics in a live updated screen. Installing in not easy and might require Xcode, but once up and running it will help you further debug things.

For example, if you can start htop and then hit the T key to show all processes in threaded mode.  Meaning you can then see all the child processes connected to matlab and get more clues there.


I have a Macbook Air, early 2014. How do i get 3840x2160 resolution output?

That Macbook Air is only capable of 2560 x 1600 maximum resolution, according to Everymac

  Although Apple only reports that this model can support a single external display up to 2560x1600, Intel reports that this model can simultaneously support two external displays up to 2560x1600 "daisy chained" via Thunderbolt.

There's a possibility you are limited to 1080p by the HDMI cable. make sure it's HDMI 1.4 capable.


How to restore less recent Whatsapp backup from iCloud drive?

Do you backup WhatsApp messages in WhatsApp settings or iPhone Settings? If so, you cannot access or view the backup files in iCloud Drive because it is not saved in iCloud Drive. It is unreachable like your iPhone backup.
As for the situation that you just got one chat history back, I think it is a bug. You can reinstall WhatsApp and try again.


Is there a limit for devices where I can download my purchased apps?

You can download any app and other media purchased with your apple ID to a new device - as long as you authorize your new device with that apple ID.
This is what the official Apple documentation says:

Your Apple ID can have up to 10 devices and computers (combined)
associated with it. Each computer must also be authorized using the
same Apple ID. Once a device or computer is associated with your Apple
ID, you cannot associate that device or computer with another Apple ID
for 90 days. You can view which devices or computers are currently
associated, remove unused devices or computers, and see how long
before they can be associated with a different Apple ID from the
Account Information page in iTunes on your computer.
Last Modified: November 14, 2011


SSD for Mac Mini 2012 -- Need Second Opinion

There is a small element of historical truth in their recommendation. Until quite recently (10.10.4), the Mac didn't support TRIM on 3rd party SSDS. That meant that in some use cases with some SSDs, the drive could theoretically wear out faster and suffer from performance degradation over time. The practical effect was always hotly contested but it doesn't really matter since TRIM for 3rd party drives is supported in Sierra.

There's no obvious reason that your WD Blue SSD wouldn't work

A Fusion drive is a bit trickier as you have to completely disassemble the Mac Mini to install two drives in it. Replacing a single drive isn't too bad as long as you have the right tools, a reasonable amount of dexterity, and are good at following directions. There are a couple of tricky bits and sliding the drive back into the right position can be frustrating but nothing too bad. I've done it about 10 times without screwing anything up. One SSD failed but it was after 5 years so I doubt it was related to the install.

Macsales is a good source of the right tools, adapters/parts, and instructional videos. They also provide good tech support if you buy one of their drives.

Either look for another shop that is more comfortable doing the upgrade, tell the current shop that you appreciate the advice but you want what you want, or do it yourself. For a simple replacement, MacSales sells the toolkit for $5.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TOOLKITMHD/


Can many iPads have a "master" Apple ID and a second, "personal" Apple ID?

The Apple Configurator app was designed for deploying large numbers of iOS devices within institutions like schools. The Apple Configurator documentation explains the three different supported configuration modes (Prepare, Supervise, or Assign), and a video introduction is also available. Based on the wording of your question, the either the Prepare or Supervise method will likely be the best choice.


Can I use a PC3-10600 memory on a MacBook with PC3-8500 slots?

You should be able to use the faster RAM without a problem.  No guarantees when it comes to RAM compatibility that hasn't been vendor qualified (which is seldom an option) so make sure you buy from someone with a good return policy.

You might consider buying through somebody like OWC (macsales.com) that specializes in Mac parts.


'tmutil listbackups' doesn't work with tmux in Mojave

You must run the command inside Terminal without any ancestor other than the program itself: that is no screen or tmux or any other terminal helper.

Otherwise the calling program will be the helper and not Terminal itself, and you will need to add that helper to the Privacy settings of MacOS.

EDIT: add pstree info

This happens, at least for tmux, because it spawns another process wich is not a child of iTerm/Terminal. With pstree I see the following:

-+= 00001 root /sbin/launchd
...
 | |-+= 12748 maxxer /Applications/iTerm.app/Contents/MacOS/iTerm2 --server login -fp maxxer
 | | \-+= 12749 root login -fp maxxer
 | |   \-+= 12750 maxxer -zsh
 | |     \--= 14144 maxxer tmux
...
 |-+= 14146 maxxer tmux
 | \-+= 14147 maxxer -zsh
 |   \--= 14170 root top
 |--= 14212 maxxer /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mdworker_shared -s mdworker -c MDSImporterWorker -m com.apple.mdworker.shared

PID 14144 is tmux launched in iTerm2, while 14146 is the actual tmux program running top in the first shell


Dynamically setting HOME environment variable in a launchd script?

You are right: launchd performs tilde-expansion only for ProgramArguments. But you are free to let a shell do the job:

<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
    <string>/bin/sh</string>
    <string>-c</string>
    <string>export HOME=~; /usr/local/bin/salt-minion</string>
</array>

Note that the ~ in this example is not interpreted by launchd (using EnableGlobbing) but by the shell itself.


Bootcamp won't start after resizing partition

This error occurred because in a Boot Camp setup, your hard drive has a hybrid GPT/MBR partition table, which is unsupported by Microsoft.  When you resized the partition in Windows, it only modified the MBR partition table because it was unaware that the GPT table existed.  You now have a situation where the GPT partition table and the MBR partition table disagree about the start/end boundaries of the Windows partition.

To fix this, you will need to use the gpt command line tool, and for that you must boot from OS X install media (either a USB flash drive, or Internet Recovery if your model supports that feature -- the recovery partition will not work for this).

Boot from OS X install media and open up a command prompt.
Type fdisk /dev/disk0 to see the MBR partition table. Write down
the partition number (it's usually 4), the start sector, and the
size of the Windows partition. The start sector and size will be big
numbers so make sure you write them down correctly.  This is
critical.
Type diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0  This will unmount the disk
so GPT can write to it.
Type gpt remove -i 4 /dev/disk0 NOTE that the '4' here
references the partition number of your Windows partition you got
from fdisk earlier.  This will delete the GPT partition entry for
your Windows partition (but not the MBR entry)
Type fdisk -d /dev/disk0 >/Volumes/fdisk.txt  This will  make a
backup of the MBR partition table.
Type fdisk -e /dev/disk0  This will put the fdisk command in
interactive edit mode. You will need to enter the following input.
NOTE that the '4' here references the partition number of your Windows partition you got from fdisk earlier.  This will delete
the MBR partition entry for your Windows partition.

e 4
0
q
y

Type diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0 again because the gpt
command caused OS X to remount the disk and we need to modify it
again.
Type gpt add -b <start sector> -s <size> -i 4 -t windows
/dev/disk0 where 'start sector', 'size', and '4' are the values you
wrote down from the fdisk command earlier.
For good measure, type gpt show /dev/disk0 to view the GPT table.
Make sure the partition number, start sector, and size match the
fdisk output from step 2 EXACTLY.
Type diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0 again because the gpt
 command caused OS X to remount the disk and we need to modify it
 again.
Type fdisk -r -y /dev/disk0 </Volumes/fdisk.txt This will undo
 the changes made in step 6.
For good measure, type fdisk /dev/disk0 to view the MBR table. Make sure the output matches the fdisk output from step 2 EXACTLY.

You have now repaired your GPT table.  You should be able to reboot the Mac into either operating system now.


Is it possible to use an Apple Watch to authorise sudo in Catalina?

There is a PAM module for this on GitHub:

https://github.com/biscuitehh/pam-watchid

(This is forked from a TouchID PAM module, btw.)


Lost my APFS partition after using EaseUS partition manager on Bootcamp

From Windows, you can open a Command Prompt window as an Administrator. Next, you could enter the commands given below to change disk0s2 to an APFS type.

diskpart
select disk 0
select partition 2
set id=7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC override
gpt attributes=0x0000000000000000
exit

Update

The output from dd if=/dev/disk0s2 count=1 bs=512 | vis -c contains the character sequence NXSB which gives evidence that disk0s2 is a APFS container. The sequence that follows NXSB is \0\^P\0\0?\M^B?\^B\0\0\0\0\. This sequence indicates the size value of 49283834 in the GPT is wrong for the 2nd entry (disk0s2). This incorrect value would cause the APFS volume to remain unmounted. Unfortunately, because the sequence contains question mark (?) characters, the correct value for the size can not be precisely determined.

Based on this new information, I can only guess at a solution. Below is my best guess.

Enter the following commands while booted to macOS Internet Recovery.

diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk0
gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk0
diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk0
gpt remove -i 3 /dev/disk0
diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk0
gpt add -i 2 -b 76806 -s 49316602 -t 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0

How to determine the exact size for disk0s2.

While booted to macOS Internet Recovery, copy the first 512 bytes of disk0s2 to a flash drive. Below is an example, where the flash drive volume label is MYFLASHDRV. You will need a flash drive that is MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT formatted.

dd if=/dev/disk0s2 count=1 bs=512 of=/Volumes/MYFLASHDRV/hexdump.bin

Print out a hex dump of the saved file. Post the output to your question.

Upload the hexdump.bin file to the website File to hexadecimal converter.

  Note: Before uploading the file, make sure the box labeled "Use 0x and comma as separator (C-like)" is unchecked and the box labeled "Insert newlines after each 16B" is checked off.

Or, find another Mac and run the command shown below.

hexdump -Cv /Volumes/MYFLASHDRV/hexdump.bin

Or, boot to Windows, then download and run the command shown below. Here, I assume the flash drive is assigned the drive letter D:.

writehex < D:\hexdump.bin

  Note: You will need to download the readgpt1.1.0x64.zip file from the readgpt website. You can extract the writehex.exe application from this zip file. This is a website that I created.

Determine the size in 4096 bytes sectors of the APFS container partition (disk0s2). I can do this for you and update my answer. Or, you can read the accepted answer to the question: Tried to fix filesystem type: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF and probably made it worse.

Alternative method to determine the exact size for disk0s2.

While booted to macOS Internet Recovery, enter the commands given below.

export LC_CTYPE="ASCII"
dd if=/dev/disk0s2 bs=1 count=16 skip=32 2>/dev/null | vis -wc; echo

If value of 49316602 posted in my above guess is correct, then you should get the following output.

NXSB\0\^P\0\0\M-z\M^B\M-p\^B\0\0\0\0

If your results are different, then you can post your results and wait for me to update my answer. OR, you can proceed to step 2.
Find another Mac and enter the command shown below. Here you need to replace the string with your results.

  Note: It is important that the string be enclosed by single quotes ('). Do not use double quotes (").

echo -n 'NXSB\0\^P\0\0\M-z\M^B\M-p\^B\0\0\0\0' | unvis | hexdump -Cv

The above command would produce the following output.

00000000  4e 58 53 42 00 10 00 00  fa 82 f0 02 00 00 00 00  |NXSB............|
00000010

Determine the size in 4096 bytes sectors of the APFS container partition (disk0s2). The procedure for doing this is posted in the accepted answer to the question: Tried to fix filesystem type: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF and probably made it worse.


Sync my husband's Exchange with my iPhone 7 plus

You add it just like you would an email account. you will need his email address, password and possibly the active directory domain name depending on that version of Exchange they have.

Tap settings, scroll down and tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
Tap Add Account...
Tap Microsoft Exchange
Enter the mail address and the password and tap next
If everything is copacetic you'll get green checkmarks and then the screen to choose what parts of the account you want to add.

In your case turn off everything except Calendars and tap save.

Some versions of iOS and Exchange will REPLACE the current contents of your calendar for it's own information. So you may want to back up your calendar on your Mac before you do this, just in case.

Or you could use the free iOS Outlook client. I use it for my work email, it's a good client and helps to keep my work and personal info separate.


You should be able to download an update manually.

Generally speaking Apple releases what they call combo updates that will update all previous versions of an OS release to the (current) latest version.

You can search out "Mac OS 14 combo update" and you will end up here:

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2000?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

With the latest revision of macOS Mojave 14.5.

This also works with previous versions of macOS. Combo updates are also a good way to fix a "misbehaving" OS installation.


How to print from an iOS device to a remote office?

AirPrint isn't likely to help you here. It's a basically a local network only technology, because of how it functions, it's very unlikely that you could get it working over an iOS device's 3G connection. The only way I could see it working is with a VPN, but I'm not aware of any solutions that can pipe AirPrint over a VPN.

What I would suggest (in rough form) is using email or Dropbox to send documents to be printed remotely. Pretty much any document you can access on iOS can be sent via email or Dropbox.

The basic idea is a computer running in your office that monitors an email address and/or a Dropbox folder, and automatically prints email attachments or files in the Dropbox folder. How you go about this depends on what software you're running on that computer, but on a Mac, you could print email attachments using Mail.app's rules filtering and some AppleScript, or files in Dropbox using a Folder Action.


How to create a custom repeating reminder?

Reminders doesn't seem to have this functionality at the moment. However, you can set an alarm in the Clock app that will go off at 5pm (or your chosen time) and you can select specific days like Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thu.

Hope this helps.


My Windows 7 PC can find my Mac but can't connect to it. No password prompt?

It is likely just authentication issues.

On the PC RIGHT-Click on the computer icon and select Map Drive. Enter the path name (I'd use IP address but hostname might work) like this:

\\192.168.x.x\[SHORTUSERNAME]

Use the Mac's IP address, then a backslash and then the short username of the account you want to connect to.

There should be a checkbox for "log on with different credentials." check that

You'll click done (or OK, I don't remember exactly) and the PC will prompt you for a username and a password. Try the username and password of the Mac. If that fails try the fully qualified username, which includes the hostname (computer name) of the Mac, a back slash ( \ ) and then the username on the Mac, followed by the password. That usually works for me.


Safari extension to get rid of Google redirect links in search results?

Canisbos has released another extension called gDirectLinks, which is a more efficient subset of LinkThing focused solely on the task of removing the hidden redirects from Google's links. It handles both regular Google search and the more modern Google Instant search (AJAX; most people are using that version these days without knowing it, as it's on by default). It also has the option of re-writing Google Images results to point directly to the image.

It's very important to note that gDirectLinks (and its big brother, LinkThing) is the only extension of its kind that properly handles Google Instant results.

More information is available at the official website. Enjoy!


The iPhone 3GS is only upgradeable up to iOS 6.1.6, released February 21, 2014. [Wikipedia]


What makes the bash interpreter utility interpret differently standard and smart double quotes, present in a shell script, created in TextEdit?

There are two things going on here: First, bash recognizes the plain ASCII double-quote, " (character code 0x22) as a double-quote; it does not recognize the fancy unicode left double-quote, “ (unicode U+201C, UTF-8 encoding 0xe2809c) and the corresponding right double-quote, ” (unicode U+201D, UTF-8 encoding 0xe2809d) as anything other than random sequences of bytes (or maybe as random characters, if it's using a UTF-8 locale). This is the fundamental thing to realize: as far as bash is concerned, “ and ” are not actually quotes, they're just things that happen to look like a quotes when they're printed out.

The second complication is that the unicode double-quotes are multibyte characters, so if bash isn't in a UTF-8 locale it may treat some of the bytes differently than others(!)

To see the effect of the first thing, try replacing each occurrence of a double-quote with the string WIBBLE -- another arbitrary sequence that has no special meaning to the shell:

$ echo "The path to my home directory is: $HOME bar"
The path to my home directory is: /Users/gordon bar
$ echo “The path to my home directory is: $HOME bar”
“The path to my home directory is: /Users/gordon bar”
$ echo WIBBLEThe path to my home directory is: $HOME barWIBBLE
WIBBLEThe path to my home directory is: /Users/gordon barWIBBLE

In the first command (with ASCII double-quotes), the quotes are parsed and removed by bash before the argument(s) are passed to the echo command, and hence not printed. In the second and third (with fancy double-quotes and WIBBLE in place of plain quotes), they're just treated as part of the strings to be passed to echo, so echo prints them as part of its output.

$ echo "The path to my home directory is: $HOME (foo) bar"
The path to my home directory is: /Users/gordon (foo) bar
$ echo “The path to my home directory is: $HOME (foo) bar”
-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('
$ echo WIBBLEThe path to my home directory is: $HOME (foo) barWIBBLE
-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

In the second and third commands (with fancy double-quotes and WIBBLE), bash sees parentheses in a non-quoted portion of the command (remember: as far as bash is concerned, fancy quotes are not actually quotes), in a place where they aren't allowed by shell syntax, and therefore complains.

$ echo “The path to my home directory is: $HOME”
“The path to my home directory is: ??
$ echo WIBBLEThe path to my home directory is: $HOMEWIBBLE
WIBBLEThe path to my home directory is:

Here, something weirder is happening. In the second command, it's looking for a variable named HOMEWIBBLE, not finding it, so replacing it with blank. In the case of the first one, with the fancy double-quotes, it looks to me like it's treating each byte of the UTF-8 encoding of ” as a separate character, treating the first as part of the variable name (again causing the variable not to be found), and then just passing the second and third bytes through, giving an invalid UTF-8 character, which gets printed as ??. Using a hex dump to get a better idea what's going on gives this:

$ echo “$HOME”
“??
$ echo “$HOME” | xxd -g1
00000000: e2 80 9c 80 9d 0a                                ......

Note that the first “ goes through fine, and shows up in the hex dump as e2 80 9c (the expected UTF-8 encoded fancy double-quote), but after that is just 80 9d -- the first e2 of the second fancy quote got eaten somehow! (BTW, the 0a at the end is a linefeed, marking the end of the output.) To see what's happening, let me define a shell variable as HOME+the first byte of the encoding of ”, and watch what happens:

$ eval $'HOME\xe2=foo'
$ echo “$HOME”
“foo??
$ echo “$HOME” | xxd -g1
00000000: e2 80 9c 66 6f 6f 80 9d 0a                       ...foo...

...So there's what's going on: it's treating the first byte of the double-quote's encoding as part of the variable name, substituting it (if defined), and then just passing through the orphaned second and third bytes, leaving invalid UTF-8. I'm not sure if this is a bash bug, oddity of its parsing, or what.

Anyway, the details are rather messy, but the takeaway should be clear: don't use fancy quotes in your shell scripts; they won't work right. And the same applies to fancy single-quotes and other unicode punctuation marks.


How can I make AirFoil detect the speaker without rebooting the Mac?

I am not sure, but does Airfoil have a Helper application running in the background? Maybe you have to quit that one as well instead of just restarting AirFoil?

Also, do you have the latest version? I have just checked and the Release Notes on the Rogue Amoeba website have a bugfix in the latest release 4.6.2 from a few weeks ago that seems to match your problem:

http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/releasenotes.php

  Airfoil now disconnects from remote speakers upon sleeping, to prevent error messages on waking.

Maybe that update can solve your problem?


Your HD storage space is the limiting factor

There is no reasonable limit to the file size of Photo Booth video's. Photo Booth stores video's with AAC audio and H.264 video compression.

Video will take the most storage space. The H.264 uses a lossy video compression method. The amount of compression is usually defined by the amount of motion in your video. A tripod mounted camera recording of a vase with flowers will result in a smaller file size than a hand filmed recording of a flock of birds.

So your answer in short, your HD storage space is the limiting factor. Record for one hour and see how much space you needed for your type of video.

If you are only interested in 'changes in your scene', try another option, like senstic (the first google hit, nothing special)


Microsoft Edge Legacy Virtual Machine doesn't start in VMWare Fusion 12 Pro

It appears the VMWare Fusion .dmg installation image file was put under the MacOS Quarantine, which made the application not function properly.
Uninstalling VMWare Fusion (I removed all files with AppCleaner), downloading the .dmg file again, and then running the following commands on the file, followed by running the installer solved the issue for me:
xattr -l ~/Downloads/VMware-Fusion-12.1.0-17195230.dmg
xattr -dr ~/Downloads/VMware-Fusion-12.1.0-17195230.dmg


How do I pass a password to hdiutil attach?

Ah! A little more digging, and careful reading of the man page. I need a null terminated string.

So

printf '%s\0' 'test' | hdiutil attach test.sparsebundle -stdinpass

works.


Can't rip CD into my Son's iPod because of Apple Music

As I suspected, once you turn iCloud library on, it is reluctant to allow you to add music using iTunes alone, as there could be file duplicates and a storage war.

Per Apple's forums, turning off iCloud musing will allow you to sync music manually, then you can turn it back on. Note this will delete all the 'iClouded' music and then re-download it, you you'll probably want to do this when you have a spare hour or so and a stable wifi connection.


Some keyboard keys not working on password input to Yosemite login screen

The fact that the keyboard works at the boot screen before user level code runs is curious.

I wonder if one of the kernel extensions or control panels that customize that keyboard are causing issues. As I don't have that hardware, it's hard to poke and see what files might be causing the issue.

You can try several things to corner this:

Make a new user account and turn off auto log in in the Users preference pane
You could hold shift down when booting to rebuild all kernel extensions and then log in safely without most third party apps running
You could uninstall any drivers and/or open a support ticket with the vendor

In each of the above cases, you can test logging in to the new account / safe boot system and see which are broken and which are working. Worst case, edit the question and/or open a new question with the details of this triage.


Sync Google contacts and iCloud contacts

Just saw a question similar to yours, Apple does not allow sync of contacts between various cloud accounts (i.e. between Google and iCloud), however you can use this tutorial to transfer or copy contacts from one iPhone cloud account (Google) to the next (iCloud).


With iTunes 12.7 no longer managing iOS apps, can I delete IPA files from my Mac?

Yes, you can remove the apps from the Mobile Applications folder in your iTunes library and Transfer Purchases will no longer re-download the apps. However, should the app be removed from your App Store purchased list, the IPA will be the only way to reinstall the app in the future.

This may cause some regret since the IPA that iTunes used to download were special versions of the apps that contain all of the app. Most apps on the store these day have been thinned and when you download an app on the iPhone, it it a thin version skipping parts only needed on the iPad for instance.

If you don’t keep a backup copy of the full IPA and a copy of iTunes older than 12.7 you will lose the ability to reinstall from the full image.

This is not much of a problem if your app of choice neve changes or never gets removed from the online App Store. This also isn’t much of a problem if you upgrade your hardware often. For people interested in running older and not supported hardware and/or abandoned apps or old versions of apps, this can be a substantial problem.


How to sync passwords between Chrome and iCloud Keychain

I found this:

  You can no longer share Google Chrome passwords with iCloud Keychain.
  Google Chrome 45 was the last one that could do it. Since then its
  been removed as an option.

  Perhaps reaching out to Google Support and giving them something to
  pass on to the devs for Chrome for Mac could inspire something.

  Until they replace it, I recommend using a 3rd Party option since they
  work with nearly every platform and device type. Such as LastPass,
  Dashlane, Roboform, Keepass, 1Password, Privacy, GNOME keyring, etc.

  They may work with Keychain and gather passwords saved in Chrome.
  Thats the only auto-sync solution that is available.


There’s no native way to move (or adjust the sensitivity of) the escape key on the Touch Bar.

Some potential solutions:

Upgrade to a new MacBook with a physical ESC key
Use Better Touch Tool to temporarily hide your entire Touch Bar (solutions below)
Use an external keyboard

Using BTT to hide the Touchbar

This solution was posed in a BTT GitHub issue:

  Uncheck "Show MacOS Control Strip" and "Show Escape Button" in general touchbar settings.
  Create a button with no action and put a bunch of blank spaces in the name and make the button black (this moves the button you'll
  create in the following step over to the right so your pinky won't hit it).
  Create a "Toggle BTT Touchbar" button with "Toggle BetterTouchTool Touchbar" as its action. This let's you get the standard touchbar back if/when you need it.

This solution is from the Apple discussion board:

  Click "TouchBar"  Click "General Touch Bar Settings"  Check "Enable
  Touch Bar Support"    Uncheck "Show macOS Control Strip"  Check Show
  "BTT icon in Control Strip"   All Other items are unchecked   Click
  Close     14  ￼   Click "+ TouchBar Button"   Give the button a Name...I
  chose "Unhide the Touch Bar with Satan Spawn ESC key" For "Predefined
  Action:" choose "Toggle BTT Touch Bar” ￼    Click "Advanced
  Configuration" for the button and choose where you want it to
  appear...I chose the right side for "Item Placement..."   ￼   Now my
  Touch Bar looks like this:   ￼   With nothing else on the Touch Bar:
  ￼
    This Touch Bar persists across all apps. If I tap the button, the
  regular Touch Bar returns

NOTE: You may also need to hide the BTT icon in settings, as it will replace the ESC key when the Touch Bar is empty.


Clicking on dock icon makes windows for other applications disappear

It appears that Single Application Mode has been activated. Open /Applications/Terminal and copy the following command:

   defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool false killall Dock

To reverse this, replace false with true.

Alternate GUI Way

You can also Option + Click the app icon in the dock to reverse the behavior.


3Gs after 5.0.1 upgrade, all third-party apps can not open and work

Try this:  Delete one app, then add it back.


What's the difference between Final Cut Pro X and Final Cut Studio?

Yes. Final Cut Pro X is the new high-end professional video editor. When it was released, the pro video editors revolted, as they rewrote Final Cut Pro, changed the interface, and took out a lot of features they relied on. So, if you're a pro and you want to spend a lot of money on the old version, you call Apple and make an arrangement.


Once you get beyond simply searching in files and enter the realm of doing things like find/replace and file extension filtering, you can't get faster or more extensible than Unix tools like sed, awk, and grep (or ack), particularly when working on hundreds of thousands of files, as you specify.

Bash supports file globbing, so you can easily do extension filtering. Pipe the filtered files into sed for search and replace. I'm not sure exactly what kind of presets you're looking for, but if you find yourself doing the same type of thing often you can put together a script with common "presets".

I've tried TextMate and TextWrangler, and both slow down considerably when running on lots of files. I'd highly recommend familiarizing yourself with the above tools, if you haven't already.


Migrate 1 TB of iMovie '11 to iMovie 10.x if migration requires twice the disk space?

Convert to the internal drive, and as movies are converted, delete from external, and move there.

If your drives are getting this full, it's time to consider an update. 3TB externals are sub $100.


Show the Mobile Safari Debug Console on demand

No.

You can only turn it on or off, there is no way to set it only to certain sites.

Instead of using the (limited) debug console on the iphone, try using Safari on a desktop and set the user agent to iPhone (From in the Developer Menu, to enable the developer menu, open Safari preferences and choose Advanced where there is a checkbox to enable it).

You should then be able to catch almost all of the console logs, as Safari and MobileSafari are naturally similar. Although there are things you will need to use the iPhone for (like viewport issues)


Why am I getting Facebook push notifications even though I have all Facebook push notifications disabled?

The answer Matthew Frederick gave should do the trick, but if you want to disable them from within the Facebook app itself, the alternative approach is to:

Open the Facebook app
Press the ≡ button in the upper left and scroll down to Settings
Select Account Settings
Select Facebook Notifications
Select Push Notifications
Uncheck any of the four boxes there

Close Friends List Activity
Group Posts and Comments
Tags You in a Post
Mentions You in a Comment

If you are receiving additional notifications, they may be coming from the Facebook Messenger app which is separate from the main Facebook app and I believe has it's own settings for push notifications relating to private messages.


Does Time Machine also restore files from older backups not present in newer ones?

Doing a full restore from Time Machine will restore exactly one snapshot (usually the most recent one), without any files/folders only available in other/older versions. Which actually kind of makes sense if you consider that TM also backups OS files etc where you don't what to have a flattening effect with files from previous versions.

You can recover files only available in older snapshots through the Time Machine interface from Finder though.


Try to open your binaries.
Open System Preferences.
Go to Security & Privacy and select the General tab.

Source


Email setup on iPhone 4S deleted contacts, reminders, and calendar dates

When you created the Exchange account, I think it ask you if you want to keep your contacts or replace them with the ones on the Exchange. And it surely works the same for calendar events and reminders.

It appears you asked your phone to replace your already existing contacts list with the empty one from Exchange.

Your best shot to get your contacts back is to restore a previous backup, and then, when re-setting your phone, be careful to what it's asking you.


Can Garageband Loops be removed after removing Garageband?

You can safely remove the GarageBand loops. Note: These loops can also be used by Logic.
Remember - should you want to use GarageBand in the future, the loops can be re-downloaded any time.
Edit in light of benwiggy's comment.


Apple Store Amazon app has an update but is not available anymore

Updating to the new iOS fixed my problem.


How do I write a script to disconnect all network drives?

Are these shares automounted?

You could use AppleScript, or even bash quite effectively to do this using a Log Out Hook (or running manually):

tell application "Finder"
    if ((count of disks) > 1) then
        set drives to disks
        repeat with drive in drives
            eject drive
        end repeat
    end if
end tell


I deleted my appdata\roaming\apple computer\mobilesync\backup files and now I can't backup

Did you delete the Backup folder too? If so, if you recreate the Backup folder, you should be able to back up again :)

Windows 8 and 10: In the Windows search bar type %appdata% (with the percents) and press return/enter. A file browser window will open to the Application Data folder. (or Roaming inside of Application Data)
Windows 7, Vista, XP: From the start menu, select Run. In the run box, type %appdata% (with the percents) and press return/enter. A file browser window will open to the Application Data folder. (or Roaming inside of Application Data)
From there, navigate to Apple Computer (creating if needed) > MobileSync (creating if needed), and then create the Backup folder again.

If that's not it, can you let us know what error you're seeing in iTunes, and what version of Windows you are on?


Mac exhibiting inexplicable network disconnects?

It sounds like you're having DNS issues. Most Cocoa apps make DNS calls that are handled via mDNSResponder nowadays, so if the mDNSResponder process is having a problem, even traditional unicast DNS lookups will fail.  Next time this happens, try...

sudo killall -9 mDNSResponder

...this is sure to kill mDNSResponder. Don't worry, launchd will automatically restart it.

It's possible that whatever was causing mDNSResponder to hang was cleared up by your troubleshooting steps, or maybe you triggered a network configuration change that cause mDNSResponder to reload itself.

There are still a few command-line tools that use traditional Unix DNS resolver libraries that don't leverage mDNSResponder. These include host, dig, and nslookup.  Another way to see if it's just mDNSResponder and not DNS in general is to use one of those three tools to do a DNS lookup the next time the problem happens.

I also agree with another user's suggestion to ping a host by IP address. I would recommend that you do...

ping -n 8.8.8.8

...the -n tells ping not to try to do a reverse DNS lookup on the host you're pinging. 8.8.8.8 is a nice memorable IP address for one of Google's publicly-accessible resolving DNS servers.


Where can I find the phone numbers of my contacts on an iPhone 5C?

When you select a contact, their phone number should show up towards the top.

If it doesn't show a phone number, it's possible that the phone numbers didn't import. It's also possible that there could be multiple contacts for a single person. You can also try and dial a phone number of a contact in your list and see if the name shows up below it.


Not Getting Twitter Highlights/Recommendations on iOS

Twitter is A/B Testing this feature between accounts. It's possible only one of your accounts is part of the active test group for this experiment. There's nothing you can do to change this currently.


Setting up automatic red / green notifications for continuous testing and TDD?

Under OS X, you can create a simple solution using two off-the-shelf utilities: fswatch and terminal-notifier and three simple bash scripts.  Here's how:

download fswatch and terminal-notifier

$ brew install fswatch
$ brew install terminal-notifier

set up project directories

My project directories are laid out as follows, but of course you can choose alternate strategies:

$PROJECT_ROOT/
  logs/
  lib/
  scripts/
    icons/
  tests/

create three bash scripts

file: scripts/run-tests

This is a simple script that invokes your framework's tests.  In this case we're running python's unittest, but you can customize it to suit your needs:

#!/bin/bash
# Run unit tests over the test directory

PROJECT_ROOT=$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )/.." && pwd )

PYTHON=python                                                           # customize for your needs
export PYTHONPATH="$PROJECT_ROOT/lib"                                   # customize for your needs
${PYTHON} -m unittest discover --start-directory "$PROJECT_ROOT/tests"  # customize for your needs

file: scripts/growl-tests

This script invokes run-tests and captures stdout and stderr in log files.  It then displays a growl-like message based on the results of run-tests. You must customize this script to parse the results of run-tests and decide whether to display a red or green icon.  The example shown here parses the output of Python's unittest.  If you use a different system, you'll need to make appropriate changes to the script.

#!/bin/bash
# Run tests and display results in a "growl"-like window.

PROJECT_ROOT=$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )/.." && pwd )
TEST_RUNNER="$PROJECT_ROOT/scripts/run-tests"
STDOUT_LOG="$PROJECT_ROOT/logs/unittest_stdout.log"
STDERR_LOG="$PROJECT_ROOT/logs/unittest_stderr.log"

# Run the tests, copy stdout and stderr to STDOUT_LOG and STDERR_LOG
# respectively
$TEST_RUNNER > >(tee "$STDOUT_LOG") 2> >(tee "$STDERR_LOG" >&2)

# Capture the exit status of TEST_RUNNER.  We will use this for the
# red / green distinction in our Growl display.
TEST_STATUS=$?

# The following lines are specific to the Python `unittest` output,
# and aren't required for the red / green display.  We extract a few
# extra bits of info so the Growl window can display something like:
#     Ran 452 tests in 8.300s
#     FAILED (failures=3)

# extract "Ran n tests in n.nnns"
TEST_SUMMARY=`tail -3 "$STDERR_LOG" | head -1`

# extract "OK" or "FAILED (failures=n)"
TEST_RESULT=`tail -1 "$STDERR_LOG"`

# Compose the two strings to make the entire message
GROWL_MESSAGE="$TEST_SUMMARY
$TEST_RESULT"

# Pick a sound and an icon based on TEST_STATUS
if [ $TEST_STATUS -eq 0 ] ; then
    GROWL_SOUND="Submarine"
    GROWL_ICON="$PROJECT_ROOT/scripts/icons/GreenBead.png"
else
    GROWL_SOUND="Purr"
    GROWL_ICON="$PROJECT_ROOT/scripts/icons/RedBead.png"
fi

# Now display the results in a Growl-like window
echo "$GROWL_MESSAGE" | terminal-notifier -sound $GROWL_SOUND -contentImage $GROWL_ICON

file: scripts/autorun-tests

This script invokes growl-tests once at startup, and then again whenever some file is modified.  Under most circumstances, this file may be used verbatim without any modification.

#!/bin/bash
# Run tests automatically whenever files change in the PROJECT_ROOT

PROJECT_ROOT=$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )/.." && pwd )
TEST_RUNNER="$PROJECT_ROOT/scripts/growl-tests"

# run tests once at startup
"$TEST_RUNNER"

# Run tests whenever anything under PROJECT_ROOT changes
# Note that we explicitly exclude the log files, since they get
# written as a result of running the tests.  If we didn't exclude
# them, fswatch would retrigger continuously.
fswatch --one-per-batch "$PROJECT_ROOT" --exclude logs | xargs -n1 -I{} "$TEST_RUNNER"

add icons to make it pretty

Put these icons in your scripts/icons directory.  These will be used as the red and green icons in the Growl window.

scripts/icons/GreenBead.png:

scripts/icons/RedBead.png:

to run it

Simply open a terminal window and launch autorun-tests:

$ scripts/autorun-tests


Create a snapshot of Mac that I can restore from

You can indeed go into recovery mode and use Disk Utility to image your drive to another location (like an attached USB drive or the like.

There are also 3rd party programs (SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner, and others) that will make a bootable image of your drive to either a DISK image (think multiple copies) or directly to another drive so that drive is bootable. The advantage of these is that they can do it on a live system without booting into recovery mode. The only downside is that you'll have to pay for them.


Installed additional python2.7 to Snow Leopard. What happens to modules I want to install?

Install of python modules goes in x/Library/FrameworksPython.framework/Versions/2.6 etc where x depends on the install.

nothing for the one from Apple as port of OSX. python executable in /usr/bin

nothing for pythons from python.org. python executable in /usr/local/bin

/opt/local if installed via macports (as I do)

You have to look at easy_install etc to see the path to the python they use. e.g. /usr/bin/easy_install has /usr/bin/python so using this will install in /Library/FrameworksPython.framework/Versions/2.6.

You cannot choose to run under a minor version of  python e.g. 2.7.2 as only one major version at a time is set up normally e.g. 2.7.2 replaced 2.7.1
Each major version of python will have its own executable e.g. python2.7 s to have a script use that verstio make it begin with #!/usr/bin/env python2.7 pr the full path.


How to limit log file size in /var/log/DiagnosticMessages?

While I suspect that this is not what you want to do, you could always do something like schedule a maintenance task to run to limit the size of the file.

Something like this in a shell script that you schedule:

tail -n 10000 /var/log/DiagnosticMessages > /var/log/DiagnosticMessages

Or if you want to keep a history of the contents, something like this:

mv /var/log/DiagnosticMessages /var/log/DiagnosticMessages_$(date +%y%m%d)

If you want to get fancy, you could:

cat /var/log/DiagnosticMessages | wc -l

and then only rename the file if > 10K.  As usual it all depends on how much effort you want to put into it, and whether or not you want a history of this file.

And as you said....this doesn't actually resolve the root cause.


Your option is to continue letting it download. Apple does give the installer file, through Recovery Mode.

It sounds like you have an exceptionally slow Internet connection. I recommend that you do this somewhere with a better connection.


For more modern video cards (and software renderer) OSX does use 3.2 See Apple's doc on current video cards


What is wrong with my iMac? (video corruption, unstable)

Backup first! Copy all your essential files, and make a Time Machine backup if possible.

It can be about software or hardware, it's hard to say.

I would first recommend creating a new user account and try there.

Then, reset NVRAM and SMC and try if that help.

The last good solution is Safe Mode and cleaning cache with apps like CCleaner or CleanMyMac.

The bad solution is just installing Mountain Lion on the same partition without cleaning your old system. If that doesn't work, upgrade to Mavericks and try. If that still doesn't work, you might need to do a clean install.

[EDIT: You can also just install to an external drive.]

Please remember to backup your Mountain Lion installation app if possible, or you might need to find is somewhere else later.

If all those above doesn't work, you might have to send it in for repair.

EDIT: Try BootCamp and run a benchmarking tool which pushes your CPU and/or GPU to the limit. That will show if it's a hardware problem.

UPDATE: Check out this Apple Discussion Thread, there's apparently people having problem like yours.

There's also a guide to testing your memory, something you can do if you want to.


question about MacBook Pro and external monitor configuration

Will the video from the MacBook to the monitor be as "computer perfect" through the HDMI in as it would though VGA or DVI inputs? Or will it be some kind of different reformatted "home theatre" image?

This question, as it's worded, is difficult to answer.

Quantitatively speaking, that monitor you're looking at has a native resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Your MacBook can handle that and you will see a 1920 x 1080 pixel desktop on that monitor. Whether that's "computer perfect", given the term isn't something in the common lexicon, is up to you. My personal opinion is that 1920 x 1080 at the working distance most people sit at when they're at their desks, on a 27" screen, is going to look at little pixelated. Especially coming from a 1440 x 900 native resolution screen that's only 15" across that you have on a 15" MacBook Pro.

  When it's all set up, will I just be able to sit at the desk, turn on the laptop, plug in mini Display Port cable to the Thunderbolt output, close the lid on the laptop and start typing away?

Yes. There's a small delay as the keyboard and mouse pair with the BlueTooth on the MacBook pro but it's usually less than 30 seconds.

  Or even worse, will I have to keep the laptop lid open?

Keeping the lid open is not required but bear in mind that the MacBook Pro venting doesn't function well when the lid is closed. The cooling vents operate best when the lid is open. If you're running CPU-intensive applications you may find you need to operate with the lid open just to cool the computer adequately.

  I'm not sure if the monitor has built-in speakers, but if it does, will the computer's audio come out of the monitor's speakers through the Thunderbolt-to-HDMI cable?

That cable passes audio, so yes.


Making a FaceTime Audio call using AppleScript

I found it!

I tried many different combinations, such as facetimeaudio://[phonenumber] and facetime://audio/[phonenumber], but nothing worked. I was starting to think that there wasn't a way to do this.

However, today, I decided to take another crack at it with some different combos, and this one works: facetime-audio://[phonenumber].


Unexplained and persistent "OS X 10.13 is not supported" dialog

The problem is with the docker application.


Can you tell different iPad Configurations by their Weight?

According to Apple, the LTE version is 9 grams heavier than the WiFi version.

When you look at that picture of the logic board of the iPad Air (http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/rqfMxwyBxWTko3xN.huge, taken from iFixit iPad Air 16 GB teardown, the yellow one is the Toshiba NAND Flash chip) you can see that there's not much room for more chips, so they would just integrate the same chip size with more NAND inside for e.g. 128 GB configuration. So I did some research about that and it seems there are up to 128 GB chips in the same size since 2010/2011 (just that time Apple first released a 128 GB model, what a coincidence :D). So theoretically this would be possible. Of course, you'd need to see a teardown of a larger model to say for sure.

Having said that it'd be hard to tell the difference in weight between those configurations, independent if they put more NAND in one chip or used maybe 2 chips for larger configurations (what looks difficult if you take a look at the layout of the motherboard: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+Air+Teardown/18907). The difference would be just below 1 gram...


Neither iPhoto nor Photos stores any photos—they are applications which access the photos stored within iPhoto libraries and Photos libraries respectively. The library is what stores the photos, which is what you should be transferring from your backup.

The library is stored by default in your Photos folder within your home folder, and stores all of your photos (providing you are not using referenced masters). Photos (the application) is part of OS X and you should not be restoring it from a backup.


Where is the error message for a failed podcast download?

Yes, when you are downloading episodes in iTunes 11, this icon shows up:

Click it and you can open your download progress:

If downloading fails, an error message will show up to the right of the status bar with an error code. You can Google this code for info. In my experience, this downloader is very unreliable if you have anything else downloading at the same time, or if you allow simultaneous downloads, although if you allow simultaneous downloads it generally finishes quicker if there are no errors.


Users & Groups: Change Account Name, but not Home Directory?

Yes, the full name is unrelated to the short name and you can change the full name without needing to change the short name.


How to install OS X again with no access to a recovery partition?

If the Mac is new enough to support it [roughly late Snow Leopard or Lion as its original OS], Internet Recovery would be the way to go.

Hold  Cmd ⌘   R  at the boot chimes to get started.


Remote management on OSX platform over the internet (dynamic ip)

If you and your parents both have an Apple ID, you can use screen sharing via iMessage (Messages app).
Open a conversation w/ your parents, click on the "Details" link in the top-right corner of the Messages app window, then on the two screens icon, then on "Ask to Share Screen". Your parents have to confirm the request dialog with the option allowing to control their computer selected. This will open the Screen Sharing app and will allow you to control the remote Mac. You can even copy files to their machine via drag-and-drop from your local machine into the remote screen window.

Administrative tasks in the Finder can be performed in non-admin accounts by just entering admin credentials into the respective prompts (for instance, login/password dialog after clicking a lock icon in Preferences.app or when installing an app via Installer.app). Just add an admin account for you and a non-admin account for your parents.
Administrative tasks in the command line can be performed via sudo.
Additionally, for remote administration/access, you can try
• TeamViewer (free for private use) https://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/mac-os/
or
• Screens (ca. 35 € one-time license) https://edovia.com/en/screens-mac/
Both have methods/software components to work with dynamic IPs/behind a NAT.


What is the recommended headphone hardware spec to pair with Apple Watch Series 2?

According to a support article from Apple the Apple Watch Series 2 has a Bluetooth 4.0 chip. So common bluetooth headphones should also work with the Watch.


Can I get to iTunes Match library from more than one Mac?

Yes, you can add the second Mac once the first has completed. While one is currently uploading, I think the others can only be linked and start viewing.


Using El Capitan, why can't I install some dmg files

You are opening a DMG (Disk Image) file that is mounting a volume which contains the installer package to run.  To see mounted volumes on the desktop, go to

  Finder > Preferences... > General

and check the External Disks checkbox.


Is there anything to worry about with time machine on my macbook pro laptop?

Time machine keeps a local store of backups if the time machine drive is not available. This is transferred to the backup drive when it is next connected, so you don't even miss an hourly save. You can see these highlighted in a different colour if you enter time machine a few hours after being disconnected from the backup drive.

Source: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878


Chrome back/forward gestures reversed on Big Sur

That sounds like the right direction. The previous page is semantically to the left of the current page, so swiping right with natural direction is going left. This is the same as swiping PDF pages in Preview — swipe right to go to the previous page on the left.
This description of natural scrolling in the macOS User Guide:

Scroll direction: Natural
Select this option to move the contents of a
window in the same direction as your fingers.

and the animation in System Preferences > Trackpad > Swipe between pages:

make this logic hopefully clear.


Go to System Preferences > Users & Groups.

Click Login Options. Check the box next to Show Input menu in login window

You will then see a keyboard icon when your screen is locked.

Command + Click the keyboard icon should allow you to change the input.


Errors running certain apps under macOS 10.14 Mojave Beta 10

Does it run with gatekeeper disabled?  If so it can be a codesigning issue. There is a terminal command 'codesign':  You'd want to look at the hashes and and certs auths in the output.

codesign -d --verbose=4 /Path/Application.app

Documentation regarding codesigning is here


Can the Internet sharing on proxy network be tracked?

Yes and yes and yes.

The ssid of the mac mini will be broadcast. Most offices have a couple of their access points listening for other ssids and trying to figure out if based on signal strength it's from within the office. They probably automatically email someone about it. Whether that person cares is another matter.

The mac being proxied has all its network traffic monitored and/or filtered. If it's NATing for your phone, that will be visible. Again, unclear on if they care. But even if they don't that proxy might be blocking several things that the only phones access, like maybe the ios app store.

IT companies lock down networks because they have resources within them that they can't effectively lock down any other way. That is sad, but if they're limiting what devices can join the wifi that's probably why.

If you can configure the sharing so that each device ends up on a vpn that can only communicate externally (like to the internet) and back, then probably you'll be keeping things secure and can make a case for doing so. EG two phones connected to your wifi point shouldn't be able to talk to each other, nor to the mac, nor to any of the internal ips that the mac probably can talk to.


First, I would check the command-line diskutil list to see what the partitions look like.  The command-line also shows hidden partitions like your Recovery partition, so there are chances that other non-visible or damaged partitions are shown there as well.

Then, depending on what you see, you can try to either expand the internal partition, merge two (or more) partitions or clone the current partition onto an external hard drive (if you have one available, or at least the disk space), then reformat the internal drive and put the clone back.  The latter two options have a high chance of you losing the local Recovery partition.  While 2011 and later models of computers do have the ability to directly boot from the Internet, some may want to keep a local version as well.  So, use it at your own risk.

To expand the volume, try the following command:

diskutil resizeVolume <disk_slice> 120G

<disk_slice> is the disk you see on the same line of the name of the disk in the list output (e.g. disk0s2).
After you ran this command, you need to visit System Preferences > Startup Disk to make this volume the boot drive again.

To merge partitions, you can use the following command (as stated before, this can result in losing your recovery partition, if it is in the range of to-be-merged partitions):

diskutil mergePartitions JHFS+ Macintosh\ HD <1st_disk_slice> <last_disk_slice>

If you have spaces or other non-alphanumeric characters in the name of your partition, escape them using the backslash ("\") character as shown above for Macintosh HD.

For any of those commands, you can get help by typing just the first part(s) in: diskutil (showing the valid "verbs"), diskutil resizeVolume (showing help on how to resize) and diskutil mergePartitions (showing help how to merge).

Finally, if you have a Mac OS Extended-formatted external hard drive (not in use or at least with sufficient disk space) available, you can see about cloning the internal drive over, then re-partition the entire drive and clone it back.  This will, with almost 100% certainty, remove the Recovery partition.  So, again: Use at your own risk.

Here is how:

start Internet Recovery (Cmd+Alt+R at boot)
open Disk Utility
choose the volume (by default named Macintosh HD)
click on New Image at the top of the window and choose the external hard drive as a destination
once done, choose the disk above (not the volume), choose Format from the right-side tabs, provide a name (Apple-default is "Macintosh HD"), then format the drive
choose the volume again (it should now be again 120 GB in size) and choose Restore from the right-side tabs
click on Image and choose the image from the external hard drive
select the image on the left side navigation bar (it should be placed in there now) and choose menu "Images" > "Scan Image for Restore" (this can take some time)
once finished, drag the disk image into the "Source" box to the right and the "Macintosh HD" into the "Destination" box
Double-check that you have it this way and not the other way around
click on Restore and confirm it (I recommend reading that confirmation dialog as well, so that you are sure you do the right thing).
Restart the computer once done


MacBookPro Migration - All File Corrupted and actually they are not

I found the solution to this error (btw. the error message is "____ file is damaged and can't be opened. You should put it to trashbin."):

The gatekeeper function on Sierra is a bit altered and the last option "From any source" is not available for security settings. So I had to run this command in terminal:

sudo spctl --master-disable

Now the option "from any source" is available for gatekeeper. After I selected this option the files became available again.


How can I test if my hard drive is going bad?

When i am having all sorts of issues like you describe, i try booting up from Disk Warrior and running its tests.

From your description of symptoms I would suggest that it is a possibility your laptop could have directory, memory/RAM or even at its most extreme, motherboard issues.

Apple's Disk Utility only goes so far. Oftentimes the issues it discovers are caused by other problems from the machine. The best indicators I have seen to an HD failing involve files not being able to write to the disk, or files becoming corrupted. Also, if parts of the System files become corrupted, you would see finder and other system issues ... Like you described. A previous poster's suggestion of booting from another drive is a good one to eliminate this as a possibility. (I use an external HD instead of a memory stick.)

The absolute best safe guard against losing data on a HD is regular back-ups.


it looks like I haven't been the only one wondering about "owning" the license to an app and being able to reassign it.

  App Store license management.

  The App Store Volume Purchase Program now offers businesses the ability to assign apps to their users while keeping full ownership and control over app licenses. Companies purchase app licenses through the VPP website, and can use their MDM solution to assign apps to employees over the air. [...] Apps can be revoked at any time and reassigned to other employees. [...]

http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7/business/


In Preview, what properties are the top three level sliders?

The control is a histogram, also called "levels". When you adjust the sliders, you are adjusting the exposure of the image.
Photo editing technique is probably out of scope of Ask Different, but you can read more about it in Apple's documentation for Photos: https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/apply-levels-adjustments-pht362f9034f/6.0/mac/11.5


is 8GB enough for iOS dev and occasional VM?

According to Visual Studio's system requirements, it requires 1.5GB when in VM.
Usually you will assign a max of 4GB on the windows VM which should be sufficient for a satisfactory operation of Windows inside the VM with the Visual Studio.

In this case there will be 4GB left for the hosting OS. Which usually is again adequate.

Also, Yosemite does a really good job in handling CPU and Ram, so in my opinion you should be ok.

My personal experience with a 2009 MBpro, 8GB Ram on Yosemite running windows on VM shows that there are very rare the occasions where I am out of RAM.


MacBook Air frequent shutdown with shutdown with shutdown cause -128

From our own George Garside's blog

  -128 --  Possibly linked to memory issue. If the issue is persistent, try replacing the RAM with known-good if your hardware has removable
  RAM.


Monitor and automatically restart a process

Lingon is a GUI to launchd command line utility that manages OS X processes that run in the background.

Basically,  to have launchd manage your FileMaker server, all you need to do is to create a special XML file called a property list (.plist) and place it an appropriate place.

Here is a nice (and easy) explanation of how it works and how to configure it.