In my experience data for macOS adoption (as opposed to iOS) is fraught with inconsistencies. Many sources just lump the different versions of macOS together in the one bucket. Others even lump macOS and iOS together in the same bucket. In some cases, the data is based on web traffic which is also fraught with difficulty (as the same version of browser can be installed on multiple versions of macOS).
One thing to keep in mind is the sale of new Mac hardware will include the latest version of macOS (e.g. the M1 Macs all come with macOS Big Sur pre-installed, etc).
The last figure1 I recall seeing of new Mac sales was  for the three month period ended 26 December 2020 (8,675,000 Macs, a big jump attributed mainly to M1 Macs). However, many new Mac sales occurred prior to the release of macOS Big Sur or the release of M1 Macs, so that figure will be a mixture of macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur.
However, the reason I mention Mac sales figures is because your post asks at the end about macOS Big Sur having "at least 1k Mac users a month" - which of course is well and truly below the millions it will be based on those sales figures.
In any case, over time sites like statcounter (which you've already referenced) and statista will include the latest version of macOS in their charts etc. And for most people, that is all they can really wait for or rely on in terms of these figures.
1 Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations, Apple, 27 January 2021.


External hard drive not recognised by MacBook Pro.

First off if you notice issues with an external drive like you describe that is the drive trying to tell you that it is failing. Hope you have a backup.

If it is not showing up in Disk Utility you could try rebooting the Mac, with the drive attached, a time or two. Power cycling the drive, unplugging it and plugging it back in, all of which might get it working or might do nothing at all.

If you can get it to mount and there is nothing you need on the drive try re-formatting it. If that fails then you definately have a bad drive instead of just a corrupted one.

If you have a third party disk repair utility (I like DiskWarrior) and it will see the drive run that.

Honestly it sounds like the drive is dying and needs to be replaced, either under warranty or by buying a new one.


In Unix, it is very easy to find words in files using tools like grep, awk, sed etc.
Here, I reckon, we can create a small shell script to find the word you want in a text file using grep and then we can call it directly from your AppleScript as shown below:
Solution 1 Putting the search keyword and filepath inside a shell script.
Let's call the shell script: find.sh:
#!/usr/bin/env bash

grep -w <search-word> "text-file-path"

Let's assume that we want to search for the word foo in a file called bar
Our shell script will look like this:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
grep -w "foo" "bar"

Note: grep -w will look for an exact match. For more info, look at man grep
Save the script find.sh in your working directory.
You can test it by:
bash find.sh

Now, you can call find.sh from your AppleScript like this:
try
  do shell script "bash /path-to/find.sh"
on error
  display dialog "no word found"
end try

It is needed to satisfy the sanity check by yourself, by making sure that you pass the correct filename and filepath (bar in our case) in your script.
Solution 2 Putting the search keyword and filepath inside your AppleScript.
If we can guarantee the sanity check of correct filepath, the shell script can be simplified further, especially if you want to put your search keyword and filepath in your AppleScript instead.
After simplification, find.sh will look like this:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
grep "$@"

Save the script find.sh in your working directory.
You can test it by:
bash find.sh "foo" "bar"

And your AppleScript will look something like this:
try
  do shell script "bash /path-to/find.sh -w 'foo' 'bar'"
on error
  display dialog "no word found"
end try


What will happen if I copy more pictures to my iCloud account than my iPhone has in spare space?

In the Photos Settings in the Settings app on your iPhone, you can select optimize storage.

Then will it only save often viewed pictures in full quality, and rarely viewed as a thumbnail, if you're looking at a picture on your iPhone it'll automatically start to download the picture in best quality.


Open Terminal and try entering following:

df

which will give a listing of your mounted volumes similar to:

Filesystem    512-blocks       Used  Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2  1951845952 1655141456  296192496    85%    /
devfs                477        477          0   100%    /dev
map -hosts             0          0          0   100%    /net
map auto_home          0          0          0   100%    /home
/dev/disk1s2  1952853344  754604936 1198248408    39%    /Volumes/Backup

depending on which drive you need to unmount you can then try:

sudo hdiutil eject -force /dev/disk1s2

which would force /Volumes/Backup to be unmounted.


Download and install Java from java.com.

If it doesn't seem to work, check if it is installed using Java Tester. If it only doesn't work in Firefox, make sure that the Java plugin is enabled in the Add-ons Manager tab:

On the menu bar, click on the Tools menu, and then click Add-ons. The Add-ons Manager tab will open.
In the Add-ons Manager tab, select the Plugins panel.
Click on the Java Applet Plug-in to select it.
Select Always Activate in its drop-down menu if it's not already set.


How to edit icon for Korean input source?

Go to System/Library/Input Methods/KoreanIM.app and view its Package Contents/Contents/Resources.  There you will see .pngs for the various Hangul IM's.  Try replacing the relevant one of those and see if that does the trick.


What does "Vector 0xdd(TMR)" do and how can I fix a problem that I'm having with it?

I have two other suggesting that also helped me fix issues that I was having. Both of them are pretty easy too (no need to mess with any system files or change plist or anything else like that).

1) Go to the Disk Utility app on your computer and press the buttons in following picture in the order that they are numbered. This will make OSX scan your hard disk and attempt to fix any potential file permission problems you may have. If this doesn't fix the memory issue, it should a least make your computer run a little smoother. I find that doing this one in a while really helps performance on my computer (which is fairly new by the way, so this helps even on relatively resent systems).

(PS. 1(b) is optional, most likely it will be grayed out anyway unless you run the Disk Utility app from Network Recovery Mode or while running off a separate hard drive.)

2) If you have antivirus installed on your Mac and you turned on the Scan Archives option, turn it off. The reason this feature is not on by default is that it affects the computer's performance a lot any time you run a local java program. It sounds like a really cool thing to have on, but it comes with a serious performance draw.

I'm not sure if this will help free up your RAM, but if nothing else helps, this is a quick and easy way to speed up your computer. :)


Unable to connect to TP-Link wireless router with iPad 2

Despite going through the TP-Link support channels I ended up resolving this problem by using the 'Forget this network' option in iOS and then manually connecting again by entering the AP name.


Open a new MacVim window with AppleScript

To open a new window in MacVim, you can use the following example AppleScript code:

tell application "MacVim"
    activate
    delay 1
end tell
tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "n" using command down
end tell

Note that the value of the delay command may need to be adjusted for your system, and or additional delay commands may or may not be needed. Adjust values of and or add/remove the delay command(s) as appropriate.

Note: The example AppleScript code is just that and does not employ any error handling and is meant only to show one of many ways to accomplish a task. The onus is always upon the User to add/use appropriate error handling as needed/wanted.


How to recover a deleted file on Mac OS X?

PhotoRec is the best tool I've found for recovering files.  It does have some baffling limitations however, like the fact that it can't recover .dmg files.  It's a command line program but still very easy to use.  And it's free :)

This step-by-step guide on their wiki makes it even easier.


Can I force AirDrop to work on High Sierra without WiFi hardware?

Please note that my answer has not been updated after it was made clear that the Wi-Fi hardware had been disabled/removed.

You can add AirDrop to Finder favourites by going to Preferences->Sidebar and ticking the box next to AirDrop.

If it's missing from there, you can reset the Finder settings by deleting the following files:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist

Log out/reboot/force quit Finder to reload the settings.

The Apple support page says AirDrop is supported on 2009 and newer models


Make spotlight open new instance of application instead of going to application

Found a solution using flashlight, which allows you to create custom search terms for spotlight.

Install Flashlight
Enter the Flashlight app
Click New Plugin > Run an Automator Workflow
Edit contents according to needs - mine is:

Click Edit Workflow
Remove notification and add Run shell script
Add command that fits needs - mine is:

Test your command works by clicking Run in the Automator window.
Close Automator and the window for the new plugin in Flashlight
Searching for any of the keywords in Usage examples input to the Flashlight plugin will allow you to run the script.


Displaced Xcode text on file new project

Xcode 7 is not supported in macOS Sierra. You should use the Xcode 8 beta from developer.apple.com.


There is no way 3 GB is transferred under 10 secs. It would need >300 MB/s speed. Most probably your backup was already there.


How to move archived Outlook for Windows Files to Apple Mail?

Sorry Kevin, but Apple Mail doesn't support Outlook's .pst or .ost files; there's no direct way to import them into Mail.  There are, however, 3rd-party apps that will convert the files for you.

A quick search did turn this article up: https://www.macworld.com/article/2151263/importing-windows-outlook-messages-into-apples-mail.html

which may be useful to you.

Good luck!


Always Show / Always on Top for Text / Note / Checklist / Calendar

You can use the built-in Stickies.app in macOS. Go to Launchpad or in the Applications folder in Finder, and launch Stickies.app.

You can create a new note by pressing Command + n or selecting File → New Note from the Menu bar. To float a sticky note on top of all the other windows, press Option + Command + f or select Window → Float on Top from the Menu bar.

You can assign different colours to different notes and independently set them to float on top.


Disable dictionary results in Spotlight?

TinkerTool also allows you to change this preference via a GUI (rather than a Terminal command). It's under Applications > Spotlight:

Note that you will have to log out and back in for the changes to take effect.


Can I use the Sites folder for whatever I want?

It's fine, just realize the built in apache server will share the files you have placed there unless you change the apple supplied httpd.conf should you start up web sharing.


Apple Watch Apps Not Available for Download

Could be a bug. Try updating to watchOS 2 and see if that helps.


Disable workspace switch when opening a new window of a program already opened in another workspace

You can do this by turning off the "When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application" checkbox in Mission Control preferences.

However, this will mean that when you toggle to a different application, with Cmd+Tab or another mechanism, you'll stay in the same workspace. This may or many not be convenient for your workflow.


How to start Internet Recovery Mode of El Capitan with multiple OS installed?

3 Solutions, or more likely workarounds
(Found them myself, but thanks to Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen anyways!)

To reiterate and clarify: I want to start in recovery mode of El Capitan on a MacBook Pro 2011 which has said OS as a partition and on another the ("factory set") Snow Leopard. Since El Capitan had - for an for me unknown reason?! - no recovery partition installed, my actual goal was to start internet recovery mode of El Capitan. This did not work since whenever I pressed [Cmd + R] at the chime, it started into recovery mode of Snow Leopard, which doesn't contain the wanted terminal command "csrutil" yet.

I went with option E)2. (above) and installed OS El Capitan on an empty external disk. After rebooting and holding the [Opt key] at the chime, I was able to choose the recovery partition of the newly installed system on the external drive, and afterwards disable SIP.

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersens solution will probably work too: A bootable USB stick - that's essentially the same as I did, but might be faster (?)... A third solution is probably (E)2.) reinstalling El Capitan to get the recovery partition (again?).

But even though those solutions (might) work, all of them include the time and space consuming (re-)installing of El Capitan. Since El Capitan should also have a internet recovery mode option it's unfortunate that one does not seem to be able to boot into that, if you have multiple (and older and "factory set") OS installed. (Option D)2., change the default start up disk to El Capitan and hit [(Opt +) Cmd + R] at the chime, should be working, but doesn't...)

So my Question is actually not solved completely, so I'll leave it open...
Thanks to every one who can give further advise! :D


Connect 2 external HDMI monitors to one USB-C port through dual HDMI adapter

The dock you have bought operates over USB-C and requires MST support from the operating system in order to do extended mode on the connected monitors. MST is not supported in macOS, both it is in Windows. This is why it works in BootCamp, but not in macOS.
The Amazon product page you link to actually contain this information. If you look at the illustrations, you'll see that the monitors connected to a Windows PC shows different content on each monitor - whereas the monitors connected to the Mac shows the same content on both monitors.
In order to solve this you need to connect the second monitor with a cable directly to the MacBook Pro instead of through the dock - or by replacing the dock with a Thunderbolt 3 dock. Those docks do not require MST in order to function, as they work with Thunderbolt display multiplexing instead.


Cannot enable FileVault on macOS High Sierra

Being on MacOS Mojave 10.14.6 the following worked for me. Process was partly derived from below mentioned reddit and https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/unable-to-enable-filevault-on-macos-mojave/.

Tested for all user accounts on the computer in terminal the command sudo sysadminctl -secureTokenStatus USER_NAME_HERE. It returned for all accounts "Secure token is DISABLED for user". If this is different, see below.
If for all users step 1 returned "Secure token is DISABLED for user", boot into Recovery mode (reboot and hold command-R)
In Recovery mode start Terminal window (menu Utilities -> Terminal)
Execute command resetFileVaultpassword to change the passwords for all users.
Then restart back into normal mode. For me changing all passwords resulted in TouchID becoming disabled, but I could re-enable without issues.
Now back in normal mode, terminal confirmed for command from step 1 that "Secure token is ENABLED". Go to System preferences and enable FileVault.

My understanding is that if for at least one user the return in step 1. says "Secure token is ENABLED for user", this user could be used to re-enable the desired admin user by

a) promoting the TOKEN_user to admin,

b) login with the TOKEN_user,

c) change the password of all non-TOKEN_users (according to https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/74scld/unable_to_turn_on_filevault_on_high_sierra_apfs/do1beb1/ this will make them users with a TOKEN as well), and finally

d) change promoted TOKEN_user back to normal user.


Boot from different drive without using Alt/Option

If you could boot OS X, you could use the Startup Disk preference pane to select an alternate boot disk.

There are a few other boot-time options you can try: hold C to boot from an optical disk or hold T to boot into Target Disk mode so you can read the hard drive from another computer (over FireWire or Thunderbolt).


Do there exist any products that provide USB-C to DisplayPort with USB Power Delivery?

Usb type c to display port adaptors with 4k 60Hz resolution are available on the market.

In order to get a 4k 60Hz resolution output on the display port side your usb-c port must support Display Port alt mode. Laptops that have this type of usb-c ports are MacBook, ChromeBook Pixel™ and Dell™ XPS™ models 15 and 13.
When the usb-c port does not support the Display Port Alt mode then the max resolution is limited (mostly to 1080p) regardless of an extra power supply for the adaptor.


How can I restore a file from the trash back to its original folder?

I think you can just right-click the file and select "Put Back"


Apple's wired keyboard (with adapter) doesn't work on MacBook Pro 2019

Resetting the System Management Controller on my MacBook seems to have solved this problem.


Mac server keeps "disappearing" and "reappearing" on local network

The Finder uses mdns (bonjour) to populate the list of servers in the sidebar. You can look at the advertisements directly using:

dns-sd -B _afpovertcp

This will show you all the afp fileservers on the local subnet. You can replace the _afpovertcp with _smb to browse for windows fileshares.  Run this command for a while and look to see if there are any "Remove" messages mentioning the file server.
Time machine is likely using something similar to:

dns-sd -L servername _afpovertcp

to contact your server.

If you see a bunch of similar names with a 1 or 2... at the end, you may be seeing the server reregistering its name for some reason and not being able to get its old name. This could be due to some other network machine running a sleep proxy, and not releasing the name when it should.


iOS birthday calendar duplicates not removable

What email addresses that you have added to your device have calendar checked on as an option?

Its likely that your calendars are the possible culprit. Try turning off the ones you don't need.


Are applications required to be installed to the /Applications folder in order to be sandboxed?

No, it is not really so. Being or not being stored in /Applications is not the determining factor in deciding whether or not an app is sandboxed.

No, other folders are not "less secure" than /Applications.

You haven't described which application in particular you're dealing with, but I would guess that you're running into a specific limitation on sandboxed applications - namely helpers:

An application can include a helper that is run in background using LaunchService - i.e. it runs even though you haven't started the main application.

However, a sandboxed application can only automatically start a helper if the application is stored in /Applications!

Note that there are other requirements that must be fulfilled also, but this is the one with relevance to sandboxing and the /Applications folder. The other requirements are for example that the helper must be signed (similar to the main application) and that the user must have manually started the helper before it can be automatically started.

You can read about macOS sandboxing in more detail here:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Security/Conceptual/AppSandboxDesignGuide/AppSandboxInDepth/AppSandboxInDepth.html


Why firefox 10.1 uses full screen on Snow Leopard while Chrome and Safari do not?

I love Divvy - it's something that I feel OSX needs and that would allow you to set a shortcut for it. Otherwise the green orb on the top left will take you to full height, and then you can drag out horizontally to your chosen width.

Alternatively, should you upgrade to Lion, Chrome has a full-screen mode which hides all the other apps.


How can I set the time before the screen dims?

It is determined by the Auto Lock time and cannot be set independently of it. The Auto Lock can be changed in Settings > General > Auto-Lock. The longer you set it to not auto-lock, the longer the display will maintain it's normal brightness.


AirPods case flashes orange and doesn’t charge

Flashing amber light indicates that you may need to set up your AirPods again.

From the Apple Support document, Charge your AirPods with charging case and learn about battery life.

  When you connect your Wireless Charging Case to a charger, or place it on a Qi-certified charging mat, the status light will stay on for 8 seconds. If the light flashes white, your AirPods are ready to set up with one of your devices. If the light flashes amber, you might need to set up your AirPods again.


Scroll with mouse in 'less' without clearing the screen

This question is nearly identical to a question asked on SuperUser. Here's a portion of the answer:

So there you are: Either you switch to alternate screen and the terminal's hack converts scroll events into keypresses for less, and the normal screen is restored when you quit; or you don't, and then there can't be any magic converting scroll events to keypresses and less doesn't understand the scroll events.
So what could be done? Well, either implement mouse support in less and let it handle scroll events itself (and live with a nondefault click or copy-paste behavior), or implement another weird hack: upon quitting, after reverting to the normal screen, less could for the last time print a screenful of content, repeating whatever was displayed before you quit.


Office for Mac 2011 Font Tahoma working but not showing in font list

Microsoft's applications use their own font cache. You could try deleting the cache and launch one of the applications again. It should just generate a new cache file.

You will find the cache file named "Office Font Cache" in "~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Preferences/Office 2011".


what does each one of the Sudo Periodic options do?

Here's a summary of what the various scripts do. Note that the scripts have not changed much between versions of macOS; I compared them between El Capitan (10.11.6), High Sierra (10.13.6), Catalina (10.15.) and Big Sur (11.2.3), and the only change I noticed was that /etc/periodic/weekly/320.whatis vanished sometime between 10.11.6 and 10.13.6, although something else seems to have taken over its function.
The general goal of the scripts is to clean up things (like temp files) that otherwise would accumulate, check and record system status, and create/maintain various parts of the system.
As you'll see, almost all of them are pretty obsolete -- they relate to things that either aren't used much or don't exist in modern versions of macOS. The only one that I'd really consider relevant today is /etc/periodic/daily/110.clean-tmps, which (as the name suggests) cleans up temporary files. I suspect this is mostly because the periodic system was inherited from FreeBSD, and Apple tends to do cleanup/maintenance on their components differently, so most of these scripts are leftovers from when macOS (well, Mac OS X at the time) inherited this system from FreeBSD.
Note that all of these scripts load settings from /etc/defaults/periodic.conf, (and also /etc/periodic.conf and /etc/periodic.conf.local, but they don't exist by default).
Daily scripts:

110.clean-tmps -- deletes old files in /tmp (actually /private/tmp). Note that this does not clean up /var/tmp (actually /private/var/tmp) or the temporary items under /var/folders (actually /private/var/folders); those directories are (intentionally) less temporary than /tmp.
130.clean-msgs -- deletes old "system messages". This relates to the msgs command, which I doubt anyone has actually used on macOS. Ever. The modification time on this script (listed at the top) is 2000/09/14.
140.clean-rwho -- deletes stale files in /var/rwho. This relates to the rwho command, about as relevant as msgs, script also dates from 2000/09/14.
199.clean-fax -- deletes old fax scratch files in /var/spool/fax. I'm not  even sure the feature that creates files there still exists in macOS.
310.accounting -- rotates system accounting files in /var/account/acct, which relates to the ac command, which I again doubt anyone still uses. This script dates from 2001/05/30.
400.status-disks -- checks how full the local disks are with df -h -l, but doesn't seem to do anything useful with the information. (It gets recorded in /var/log/daily.out, but who checks that?)
420.status-network -- checks the status of the local network interfaces with netstat -i, but again the info just gets recorded in /var/log/daily.out.
430.status-rwho -- seems to mostly just get the system's uptime (how long since last boot); again, it's recorded in /var/log/daily.out.
999.local -- runs /etc/daily.local if it exists (it doesn't by default). This is for backward compatibility with an older organization of the periodic files that was obsolete when this script was written: 2001/06/01. Wow.

Weekly scripts:

320.whatis -- this creates/updates a database of man pages for the whatis command to search. This script was removed sometime between 10.11.6 and 10.13.6, although the whatis command still exists and seems to work (I guess it's updated some other way now).
999.local -- runs /etc/weekly.local if it exists. More extreme backward compatibility.

Monthly scripts:

199.rotate-fax -- rotates old fax logs in /var/log/fax. Again, I'm not sure this feature exists anymore.
200.accounting -- more to do with that system accounting system I don't think anyone still uses.
999.local -- runs /etc/monthly.local if it exists. More extreme backward compatibility.


I can't write to my flash drive, and it is already in the MS-DOS (FAT) Format. Why?

So, here's what I did after much face-palming and cursing of Apple and their absolute disregard for their users:

From the terminal:

Identify your USB by NAME and IDENTIFIER:

diskutil list

Output is:

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE    IDENTIFIER
0:               FDisk_partition_scheme              *2.0 GB     disk3
1:                 DOS_FAT_32 MIXTAPE                 2.0 GB   disk3s1

In this case, NAME=MIXTAPE and the IDENTIFIER=/dev/disk3s1

Now unmount the USB:

sudo diskutil unmount /dev/$IDENTIFIER

Example:

sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1

Output is:

Volume MIXTAPE on disk3s1 unmounted

Now create the Volume directory - this appears to be the key!

sudo mkdir /Volumes/$NAME

Example:

sudo mkdir /Volumes/MIXTAPE

No output.

Now mount the USB to the Volume:

sudo mount -w -t msdos /dev/disk3s1 /Volumes/$NAME

Example:

sudo mount -w -t msdos /dev/disk3s1 /Volumes/MIXTAPE

No output.

Validate that the USB is now writeable:

touch /Volumes/$NAME/tmp.txt

Example:

touch /Volumes/MIXTAPE/tmp.txt

You should now be able to see that you were able to create the tmp.txt file on your USB in the Finder app or by:

ls -al /Volumes/$NAME

Example:

ls -al /Volumes/MIXTAPE


Why is the dictionary shortcut unreliable using Chrome?

This bug is known to the Chrome developers and has been filed under...
Issue 90461: Dictionary keyboard shortcut doesn't work in Lion
Basically the problems are timing issues for some websites which take too long to respond to information needed to show the dictionary.
This is what resek@chromium.org says:

There's likely not much that we can do here. We have to block the UI
thread to implement this feature, which is bad and so that's done on a
timeout. If the web page takes too long to respond for the information
we need to display the popup, we give up and unblock the UI. If we
didn't do this, Chrome would look like it's hung, waiting on the web
page to respond.
We collect timing information about this, and most pages succeed well
below the timeout, but there's also some class of pages that do not
respond in time (more than 1500ms, which is what starts to be
perceived as sluggish/hung).


How can I rename music videos on my iPhone?

I don't believe it is possible to rename the title of the Music video. The workaround would be this (NOTE: This does involve using a paid Cydia package, Bridge ($1.99)):

Open Cydia and search for "Bridge". Buy it, install it, respring.
Navigate to /var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/Music via iFile (or SSH Client of choice)

This is where your music, music videos and movies are stored on iOS.

Tap on the gear icon in the left lower corner, go to File Manager > Search Format and change it to Wildcard if not already selected.
Go back to File Manager and turn on "Song Titles" if not already on. Press Done in the upper right corner.
Swipe up to reveal the search field, select "Hierarchy" and type "*.m4v"

NOTE: If your video files are not M4V, then you would type their extension in it's place eg. *.AVI or *.MP4.
This should search all of the subfolders (F01, F02…) for any video files.

Unfortunately iTunes names them things like "AAWA.mp3", that is why we turned on song titles. It should display the title above the file name for the video.
Once you find the file, note it's location in case you mess up the next step:
Long press over it and choose "Select".
Tap the clipboard in the lower right corner and select copy.
Navigate to /var/mobile/Documents/Downloads and paste the video.
Go to Bridge on the home screen and navigate to /var/mobile/Documents/Downloads
Choose the video file to import, on the info page select "Music Video" and choose a title for it.
Tap import and you should be all set! :-)

It is quite a long and convoluted way to rename a video file, but it is possible (sort of!).


OSX Terminal no longer save my commands in history

Based on this question and answer the following should work:

Disable ~/.profile and ~/.bash:profile by renaming it:

mv ~/.bash_profile ~/off.bash_profile
mv ~/.profile ~/off.profile

Create a new file ~/.bash_logout with the content shell_session_update

echo "shell_session_update" > ~/.bash_logout

Enter killall Terminal
Open Terminal and enable ~/.profile and ~/.bash_profile by renaming it:

mv ~/off.bash_profile ~/.bash_profile
mv ~/off.profile ~/.profile

Enter killall Terminal
Open Terminal and check the behavior now. Remember to always enter exit now before closing a Terminal window or quitting Terminal.


It's a new feature for iOS 8.

Disable it in the settings app under Mail, Contacts, Calendars

About 2/3 of the way down the settings (swipe up) you can tap on Show in App Switcher and decide if you want either favorites or recents.


How to reformat Macbook Pro SSD to regain "Free Space"

You can simply create a new partition using Disk Utility to regain those 60 GB for usage. Another possibily is to change the size of your existing partition, depending on its current file system.


in Preview show side thumbnails - select - shift select your range - cut or copy - file - new from clipboard -save - done


What is this no-name item in Activity Monitor's Energy tab?

That could potentially be deleted apps, especially if you did a full delete of them (clearing caches/appdata/etc.).

Try to catch them running, so you can double click them to get more info.

If you aren't noticing any problems with your Mac's battery life, you can just ignore this.

Remember: High Sierra hasn't been out for very long, and is one of the buggiest release of Mac OSX to date. You may have to ask Apple Support if this continues to bother you.


First of all, this recovery partition usually takes less than a gigabyte of storage, as researched online and in my early 2014 MacBook Air. You may want to look more into why your Recovery HD partition is that large.

First of all, this partition is incredibly useful if you accidentally destroy your MacBook somehow, for example deleting your MacOS. It allows you to recover and restore your MacBook without having to either bring it to the Apple Store or download the MacOS installation of some sort and install it yourself. Although, if you are concerned about your security, you can delete this partition, because others can boot your MacBook into the Recovery partition and erase your data. So it's just your choice to delete it or not.
Now, I don't think merging is a great idea since you won't be able to boot from the Recovery HD partition after you merge. The extra 70 gigabytes that are now in your main hard drive are basically a waste of space now, so no don't merge.
Here I'm not sure about this, so you may want to check with others before taking my advice. You can create a separate flash drive installer for MacOS, but I don't know if it requires the Recovery partition. According to Apple Support, it does, but I think there are other ways to install MacOS without the partition.

I hope this helps. :)


How to make the Notification Center menu icon glow, (like Twitter does) when notifications are present?

The only solution is jailbreak - which is not advised... In iOS 7 you don't get it either (I'm running the beta) and there is no hidden setting.


Is there a way to transfer many photos from iPhone to Mac without losing filters & edits?

The best way I have found is with the new Photos app.

In Photos, go to the Import tab, then select the photos you want to import.

This will create a new album with the date of the import.

In the new album, press:

cmd-A to select all
cmd-shift-E to export
> choose options
export
cmd-backspace to delete all

note: do NOT choose a subfolder name unless you want every single day to have its own folder.


Can I combine message conversations from one contact's different phone numbers?

On stock iOS, different contact numbers or email addresses are given their own "conversation". This answer still applies, even on iOS 6.


How to go back to list view of songs in playlists on iTunes 12.6

View menu > View as.

Pick your favourite.
Playlist has 'mini covers' Songs is most minimal, text only.

Unfortunately, it's not a global setting, it's per playlist.


a and c keys not working on macbook, even on an external keyboard

You can start by rebooting into safe mode as a troubleshooting step. Restart and hold down the shift key, when booted into safe mode you can test the keys:

Delete the preference file which can be found here  /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

Restart normally


Looks about right to me, just tested with a random folder, made an alias, threw it in the trash...

Comparatively, I tested against a small jpg image. Image was 273KB, alias is 957KB


I fixed the issue using automount

  sudo mkdir -p /mnt/scan

  sudo echo "/mnt/scan      auto_scan" >> /etc/auto_master

  sudo echo "scansnap -fstype=smbfs ://MYUSER:MYPASS@192.168.1.2/scan/scansnap" >>
   /etc/auto_scan

  sudo chmod 600 /etc/auto_scan

  sudo automount -vc

  ls -la /mnt/scan/scansnap


iOS9 how to change back to ALL CAPITAL keyboard?

Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Keyboard and set the 'Show Lowercase Keys' to off.


How can I reduce the size of a continually growing Mail app on my iPhone 5?

Delete App Mail, just delete. Reinstall the Mail app. Add your email accounts and the hidden hidden storage will disappear


Deleting photo in text message conversion (iPhone 5s, iOS 9.1)

Only photos in your camera roll are uploaded to iCloud, if your iCloud settings are set to sync photos.

You would have to select to save the photo from the MMS message to your camera roll first.


Edit URL in address bar when title matches in Safari

The answer might simply be: You can't.

Whether or no this is desirable could be debated, but having worked on a couple of these things in Mozilla/Firefox days, I think it is clear that someone (aka Apple) would create a browser location opener-thingie to do it this way.

Here's why I think this is Safari expected behavior:

The match you are looking is a match to a Bookmarks and History via the Title. The URL is being provided for your convenience (or if you come from a certain period of browser design and/or security orientation, its to mitigate more obvious versions of URL spoofing). It isn't trying to present TITLE PLUS URL... because if it were a mult-mode search /bookmarks+history / location interface, that would not make any sense. (You could argue it could support this, but that's yet-another input syntax, and a whole other round of feature development...)

The URL is not mean to be editable text in this context.

I do think there is a bug which could be either:

The auto-completion shouldn't be implied with a normal selection color, because you can't trigger completion to make the editable text appear in the location field. (Nor does cut and paste operate correctly on this string).


Paused & want to delete partially downloaded Yosemite

There are two simpler ways for this:

In Mac App Store Updates page, simply hold down option, and you'll see the Pause button changes to Cancel.
In Launchpad, hold down option and you'll see apps icons begin to wiggle (just like they would on iOS). Click the X that has appeared and the update will be canceled.


Mimic Xcode's camelCase selection keyboard shortcuts in OS X

Sorry but what you want is not possible.

You could try adding the XCode keybindings that do this

"^\UF702" = "moveSubWordBackward:";                     /* Ctl-Left Arrow */
"^$\UF702" = "moveSubWordBackwardAndModifySelection:";  /* Ctl-Shift-Left Arrow */
"^\UF703" = "moveSubWordForward:";                      /* Ctl-Right Arrow */
"^$\UF703" = "moveSubWordForwardAndModifySelection:";   /* Ctl-Shift-Right Arrow */
"^\177" = "deleteSubWordBackward:";                     /* ctl-delete */
"^\UF728" = "deleteSubWordForward:";                    /* ctl-forwardDelete */

into your ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBindings.dict file but unless the application is written to respond to these methods, it won't work.  As you've said, these methods are not part of the standard Text System so these calls in an app will just go unanswered or you will get a system beep.


Your guess was correct.

.ipa stands for iOS App Store Package

Each .ipa file is compressed with a binary for the ARM architecture that can only be installed on iOS devices. If you change the extension to .zip you will be able to unzip it and view the contents.


First, reboot into recovery by restarting your Mac while holding down Cmd+R. From Utilities, select Terminal and enter the following command to disable System Integrity Protection.

csrutil disable

To check if it is already disabled, run csrutil status.

Now, just run this:

mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle /System/Library/CoreServices/Search_disabled.bundle

Then restart your Mac and Spotlight will be completely disabled.
Don't forget to re-enable System Integrity Protection once your are done.


Sometimes right-clicking on magic mouse does not work

I have that problem too. You are not right-clicking on the correct position on your mouse. You should play with it and make a note or put a mark on your mouse to show where on the mouse you need to press to get a right-click. I found placing your finger on the right side of the mouse near the edge and towards to top works best for me.


Can I customize the iPad 2 HDMI output or has it just a mirror function?

The answer is, it depends on the app that you are using.

Apps can choose to present different content on the external display if they want. For example Keynote can display the slides on the external display and the presenters notes on the built-in display.


How to transfer documents from iPhone to my Mac

See https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/transfer-files-iphone-computer-iphf2d851b9/ios#:~:text=1%20Connect%20iPhone%20to%20your%20Mac.%20You%20can,of%20the%20Finder%20window%2C%20click%20...%20See%20More
Use AirDrop
Enable File Sharing on the Mac (System Preferences -> Sharing), take note of the name of your Mac, and then

open the Files app on the iPhone
Tap "Browse", tap the three bullets at top right, select "Connect to Server"
Enter the name of your Mac as `Mac Name.local, on the next screen enter your login data (from the Mac)
Your Mac will now be listed under "Shared" in Files app
Navigate to the folder you want to copy
Tap "Select", select the folder, tap the sharing icon on bottom left, tap "Save to Files" and navigate to your Mac there to copy the folder.

As long as both the iPhone and the Mac are in the same local WiFi network, transferring documents over WiFi won't use the Internet.


Cycle between Mac apps and VMware 7 using cmd+tab

I had this same issue, which I resolved by enabling mission control (I had disabled it).

defaults write com.apple.dock mcx-expose-disabled -bool FALSE && killall Dock


This is a good tutorial for beginning with "pf", because system preferences do not allow you to enter manual rules.

http://krypted.com/mac-security/a-cheat-sheet-for-using-pf-in-os-x-lion-and-up/

I used to use the very good firewall fronted "HandsOff!" by metakine (but they sold it), where you can do what you like, but honestly I do not know whether there is a Yosemite update for that.

Update:
https://www.oneperiodic.com/products/handsoff/


Backups.backupdb folder is greyed out on my external time machine drive

This is a time machine backup that never completed.  The only way to get rid of it is to use Disk Utility and erase the drive and reformat it.  Sorry.


How can I download book from Kindle app to Kindle Volume?

I would use a different book manager on your mac. I would install something like Calibre to manage your e-books.

Calibre is very flexible and there are plug-ins which allow you to remove DRM. This then allows you to share your content across devices without having to have the device registered with Amazon.

I would then download your purchased e-books from Amazon using the "transfer via USB" option. You only need to have one device registered with Amazon for this method to work.  However if you have your paperwhite registered you can also do the transfer via USB with DRM in tact, as stated in the other answer.

When you import them into Calibre the DRM is removed and you can then move the books via USB to any device you want.


You may need to recheck the Podcasts checkbox in the menu iTunes | Preferences... | General tab.  OSX Daily suggests that it may be unchecked by default. Once checked, podcasts should appear under Library rather than as a playlist.


Change the default application (for a file extension) via script/command line?

Launch Services is responsible for default file associations.

Let's say I wanted to change all text files to open in Sublime Text 2.

First I need the kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier for Sublime Text 2. I can use mdls to get this information:

> mdls /Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app
_kTimeMachineIsCreationMarker  = 1
_kTimeMachineNewestSnapshot    = 4001-01-01 00:00:00 +0000
_kTimeMachineOldestSnapshot    = 2012-02-22 03:49:19 +0000
kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier      = "com.sublimetext.2"
....snip....

I can find out the content type value for text files by inspecting one of them with mdls:

> mdls test.txt
kMDItemContentCreationDate     = 2012-03-25 04:18:50 +0000
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2012-03-25 04:18:50 +0000
kMDItemContentType             = "public.plain-text"
kMDItemContentTypeTree         = (
    "public.plain-text",
    "public.text",
    "public.data",
    "public.item",
    "public.content"
)
kMDItemDateAdded               = 2012-03-25 04:18:50 +0000
kMDItemDisplayName             = "test.txt"
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate     = 2012-03-25 04:18:50 +0000
kMDItemFSCreationDate          = 2012-03-25 04:18:50 +0000
kMDItemFSCreatorCode           = ""
kMDItemFSFinderFlags           = 0
kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon         = 0
kMDItemFSInvisible             = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden     = 0
kMDItemFSIsStationery          = 0
kMDItemFSLabel                 = 0
kMDItemFSName                  = "test.txt"
kMDItemFSNodeCount             = 975
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID          = 20
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID           = 501
kMDItemFSSize                  = 975
kMDItemFSTypeCode              = ""
kMDItemKind                    = "Plain Text"
kMDItemLogicalSize             = 975
kMDItemPhysicalSize            = 4096

In this case I'll change the default application for all public.plain-text types.

To do this I type:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSHandlers -array-add '{ LSHandlerContentType = \"public.plain-text\"; LSHandlerRoleAll = \"com.sublimetext.2\"; }'

If I want the changes to take effect I'll need to restart Launch Services like so:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

And to give credit where credit is due, I learned about this approach from this stackoverflow.com question and answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9172226/how-to-set-default-application-for-specific-file-types-in-mac-os-x


Why doesn't my iPod Classic show all the songs it holds?

Could it be that some albums are tagged as "Compilation"? In this case the artists in these albums are not shown in the "Artists" submenu... Uncheck the "Compilation" check-box (or something like that - I don't use iTunes!) in the Information tab and they magically appear in the list.

PS. When you select an artist that "has" a proper album, the songs in the Compilation albums are also shown.


How to zip a script-file for MacOS under Windows and give it correct attributes?

I haven't used Windows in to many years; however, I understand there is a new Windows 10 feature called Windows Subsystem for Linux. Have a look at Everything You Can Do With Windows 10’s New Bash Shell and How to Install and Use the Linux Bash Shell on Windows 10. Maybe using this feature will enable one to create and zip a bash executable and retain its attributes once unzipped on a Mac. I haven't tested it, so this is more informational then a working answer.

There are quite a few steps in the two linked articles and so as not to make this a so called link only answer, since I'm not quoting any of the steps, let me tell you something you can do from Windows that will work for sure...

Install Linux in a Virtual Machine and do your scripting, make it executable, and zip it up in the Linux VM. A zipped bash executable from a Linux Virtual Machine will be executable on macOS when unzipped.


Logging in to main user turns off the mac

The best thing you can do is creating a new admin user and inspecting the assaulted main user/the system.

Boot to Recovery Mode (hold cmdR while booting).

Unlock and mount the main encrypted volume either with Disk Utility or Terminal:

#list all CoreStorage items
diskutil cs list
#unlock the locked Logical Volume (replace lvUUID by the UUID found above. Usually it's the last one listed and looks similar to this one: 21019876-ABA9-5678-1234-123453789012!)
diskutil cs unlockVolume lvUUID

Get the name of the main volume (usually it's the last one of the many):

df

The name of the encrypted main volume is also visible if you enter diskutil cs list again. Example:

    ...
    +-> Logical Volume 21019876-ABA9-5678-1234-123453789012
        ---------------------------------------------------
        Disk:                  disk16
        Status:                Online
        Size (Total):          1106191572992 B (1.1 TB)
        Conversion Progress:   -none-
        Revertible:            Yes (unlock and decryption required)
        LV Name:               Macintosh HD
  --->  Volume Name:           Macintosh HD
        Content Hint:          Apple_HFS

Change the working directory (here I assume the main volume name is "Macintosh HD"):

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/var/db

List all files:

ls -laO

Remove the file .AppleSetupDone

rm .AppleSetupDone

Check if the file was deleted:

ls -laO

Reboot the Mac. After rebooting you will be asked to unlock the encrypted volume. Enter the password even if it is the one for the only configured user.

After booting has finished you will be asked to set-up your Mac. After configuring locales create a new admin user. Log-in as new admin user.

Now you may either back up the data of the infected main user. Or you can inspect LogIn items, launch agents of the user or system wide launch agents/daemons.

You may also install an anti-malware solution like Anti-Malware for Mac and check for an infection.

Report back if you can't find a culprit.


How to bring up the virtual keyboard on iOS when a Bluetooth keyboard is connected?

Long press the arrow in the keyboard menu bar (or whatever this thing is called) to bring up the keyboard:


Short answer - 'No'

Apple stopped signing iOS 7 in Sept 2014 for any device capable of running iOS 8.

There is no going back, even if you have a legitimately downloaded ipsw file for iOS 7, as it will never validate.


try deleting all unnecesary items photos videos and also every ios update adds other or ios___ update ___mb


Save As in MS Office for Mac to a different location

If you click on the little triangle to the right of the Save As box it will open more detailed window to choose where to save it. OS X has both a simple and expanded Save dialog and applications can choose to show one or the other as the default Save dialog. Looks like MS Office defaults to the simplified view.


Removing free partition on Macbook Macintosh HD

You a not suppose to remove the EFI partition. This partition was created when macOS was installed. To remove the Ubuntu files from the FA32 formatted volume stored in this partition, take the following steps.

Note: I realize, it is to late for you to follow these steps. I post the steps for others who may have the same question.

Boot to macOS and open a Terminal application window.

Enter the command below to mount the volume stored in the EFI partition. This volume will have the name EFI.
sudo diskutil mount disk0s1

Use the Finder application to remove the EFI/BOOT and EFI/ubuntu folders from the EFI volume.

Enter the command below to unmount the volume stored in the EFI partition.
diskutil unmount disk0s1


Samsung G9 not working with MacbBook Pro 2012

Older Macs will often require two cables and Picture-by-Picture mode for it to work. On a newer mac, Thunderbolt ports can handle the connection.
Try to use two DisplayPort cables to accomplish this, not HDMI of any sort.
Macbook Pro 2012 info.


How to create a .app folder from an executable .jar?

If you want an easy way without need of third-party apps:

Launch AppleScript editor
Write the following:

--do shell script "java -jar /Contents/execute.jar"

I commented that line out because we have yet to put the jar there. Save as application. Now Right click on produces .app file -> Show Package Contents, go to Contents and drag the .jar file there. Now go to Resources -> Scripts -> main.scpt and open that. Now remove the double dash (--), compile and save.

If it doesn't launch, try executing in terminal chmod 777 <path to jar file> simply drag the jar into Terminal.


Using TimeMachine backups after changing (short) username on OS X?

The tmutil inheritbackup command in Terminal will let you inherit a backup from a different disk or computer. However, I doubt that it will inherit files from a different user account. In other words, it might give you access to the backup, but not to the files in the account with a different name. It's worth trying though.


MacBook Pro 13" M1 has 2880-by-1800 resolution

In short, macOS uses resolution independence. This results in more than one answer for physical, rendered and logical resolution / pixel counts. If you are coming at graphics from the standpoint that every pixel is physical and there is no variance, it’s quite concerning.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202471
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-your-displays-resolution-mchl86d72b76/mac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence

Depending on the settings you make for scaling factor and whether an app is toggled for low resolution mode, you will see quite different “overall” resolution as well as actual and rendered resolution. The hardware and software will scale up and down components and select 1x or 2x or 3x artwork to keep items like the menu bar visible, but thin lines thin and text crisp (at least most of the time).


How to access my MacBook's Serial Number

If the main thing you're after is the serial number, you can use Terminal to fetch it.

More specifically:

Launch Terminal
Copy and paste the following command:

ioreg -l | grep IOPlatformSerialNumber
Press return

NOTE: If the above doesn't work then something strange is going on. However, depending on the model of MacBook, you may be able to remove the battery and check around the battery bay to see if the Serial Number and Ethernet ID are printed there.


After trying some suggestions from https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/341 (An open issue for OSXFUSE), the following command worked for me -

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Use of option -K:

 -K      When adding identities, each passphrase will also be stored in the user's keychain.  When
         removing identities with -d, each passphrase will be removed from it.


iMovie: Crop and letterbox (ignore aspect ratio)

Leaving this for future reference: now you can crop a video from the imported media section before adding it to the movie.

iMovie will add black bars automatically to fit the video, which you can control using the cropping tool on the clip after adding it to the movie.


Sync Apple notes app on MacBook to Android

Synchronizing Apple Notes to Gmail puts the notes under a Notes section within Gmail itself.

Google Keep has a synchronization feature, but it's only accessible from Google Keep apps on other platforms and cannot sync with or import from any non-Keep apps. Several years ago, Google stated they were going to be introducing sync to Google Drive within a few weeks, but that never materialized. (The only available interaction with Google Drive is to export a note to Drive as a document, but the reverse is not possible.)

Your options are to continue to use Apple Notes and interact with them in Gmail, or to use the Google Keep web app or a relatively poorly-reviewed Chrome app.


Does my MacBook Pro 3.5mm audio jack accept microphone input?

All PowerBook and MacBook models support TRRS style audio input. Check with the vendor of your headset if you want to use any buttons or volume control if you have questions. Apple branded headphones work well, as do many third party options.


Download Auxiliary Tools for Xcode - Late July 2012 from http://developer.apple.com/downloads - it works on OS X 10.11 fine.


If I remote wipe my iPhone, can I still locate it remotely?

No, you won't be able to. It tells you that on icloud.com, before wiping your iPhone:


Upgrade 2011, 64 GB, iPad 2 (GSM model) running 5.1.1 to iOS 6 or 7 only - not jailbroken

Apple no longer signs any software older than iOS 9, so installing iOS 6 or 7 on your iPad 2 is impossible, whether it's jailbroken or not.

The iPad 2 is getting pretty old anyway, if you need to run newer software then you may as well upgrade to a newer iPad. I suggest looking for a used one on eBay.


iPhone cropped photos upload to Facebook uncropped

This is a known behavior with the iOS photos app. When you try to share the image, It always uses the original version of the picture which means without the crop or the iOS camera filters.

Solutions to cropping the photo on iOS

Crop the picture using a third-party app and export the image to the photos app
Crop the picture and take a screenshot of the photo and upload the screenshot.


Clicking on an app icon in dock opens the oldest instance (window) rather than the latest

If you minimise a window but have another window from the app still open, clicking on the Dock icon brings the older window to the front because that's the one that's open. If you want the minimised window, click the minimised window in the Dock, not the app icon.


It seems that the short name and the username on your Mac do not match. To test this just type id and echo ~ to confirm that the Mac is fine, but the short name and home folder are not to your liking. Apple has an official procedure to fix this at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1428 and we have several questions here that also cover the topic when people have found that HT1428 didn't work for them.

There are several procedures to edit the short name but they're all a pain. Furthermore, they often don't clean everything up correctly and traces of the old name you didn't like will remain on the system in folders and lists. Your best bet is to go into the users preference and create a new admin user with a password that you know.

Then you can follow the steps on this other answer here to delete and re-create your account with all of your files intact and the correct short name  that you prefer. You will find that you prompt now matches the short name that you like. Before starting this process, you might make a good backup if your system just in case you make a mistake of my instructions are not clear or if the computer just crashes at the wrong time.


Can I use Airport Express to repeat wifi without physical access to the router?

Your Airport Express will only work as a wireless extender/booster if your main access point is an Apple Router, like another Express or an Extreme or Time Capsule.

However the way around this for a non-Apple router is if you hard-wire it (run an Ethernet cable straight from your modem or router to the Airport Express).

This might be not applicable to your situation since you do not have physical access to the router.

There are other (more universal) Extenders on the market, for example from Netgear (for about $50). I use one, and it works like charm in extending existing wifi network that I do not have physical access to.


There is a method to change the internal name of a font - so you can see it differently from within an app - but you'll need to use Terminal, but it is not very hard:

Make sure you are on an admin account
Install Xcode (You'll need to login with your Apple ID for free, I'm not sure if this is actually necessary, so do it last if the next few steps don't work. I have Xcode installed so I can't tell whether having it makes a difference)
Download TTX
Open Terminal (from Applications > Utilities)
Type cd with a space at the end, find the place at which you downloaded the fonttools-2.4 folder at (in step 3) and drag it onto the Terminal Window. Press enter
Copy and paste this: sudo python setup.py install
Enter your admin password when asked. You won't see it being typed it.

You've now installed TTX. Now I will tell you how to change the font name:
Type ttx with a space after it, find your font file and drag it onto the Terminal window. Press enter. OS X stores fonts at many places. Check here for more info.
Now, in the font directory you just dragged the file from, you will find a new *.ttx file. Open it in Textedit.
Press Cmd + F. Type in fullname in the Find box. You will find something like: <FullName value = "*" />
Copy the name in the quotes. Press Cmd + F again and paste this in the Find box. In the Replace box, type in your desired Font Name. Click Replace All.

  Note: If your font has a name that would commonly be used in a font file such as “Glyph” or “Asterisk” you may get some unwanted text replacement and possibly produce an unusable .ttx file. In these cases you should manually scroll through the font file and replace the instances where the name listed.

'Save As' the file. Leave the name as it is - or you can change it to anything because this is the file name not internal name. Make sure the filename is *.TTX. Save it in the desired location for the new font.
Go back to Terminal. Type ttx with a space after it, find your font file that you just saved and drag it onto the Terminal window. Press enter.

You will now find the new otf file in the same directory.

  Note. If you want to repeat this with a new file, start with step 8.

More info here (this is a little bit confusing, but it may help.)


XCode 5 requires 10.8.4 as a minimum.

If you have a Apple developer account, you could try to download an older version (XCode 4.6.3 should work in 10.7 or 10.8).

However, XCode 4.6.3 is still a hefty download (1.81 GB). It may be cheaper for you to download & install OSX 10.8.5 rather than XCode 4.6.3 - especially if you've already downloaded XCode 5...


Four finger swipe not working on Magic Trackpad

Solution: Go into settings -> trackpad -> turn off the four finger swipe, and turn it on again.

(Credit to Stiwi for the very efficient Jeopardy Question)


How to remove or rename a folder with a "bad" name on El Capitan?

Using the bash shell, you can try the completion feature. Example

Ravens-Claw:tmp garex$ mkdir "this\ is\ a\ bad\ folder\ with\ äü\ encoding"
Ravens-Claw:tmp garex$ ls -ltr | tail -1
drwxr-xr-x  2 garex  wheel   68 13 Jun 19:17 this\ is\ a\ bad\ folder\ with\ äü\ encoding
Ravens-Claw:tmp garex$ rm -rf "this\\ is\\ a\\ bad\\ folder\\ with\\ äü\\ encoding"/

Just type rm -rf "this, hit TAB key and bash will do the rest. Don't forget to close the ".

For files with strange filenames, you can try:

rm -- "<start typing filename and hit TAB key>"


After logging into OSX all I see is a black screen

I tried the PRAM many times and it didn't work. Thank you Reve. Your link solution was the one that worked. Dunno why your solution was down voted.

I am copy pasting the text:

In the three years of using my MacBook Air, I have never had any major problems with it. It was totally reliable, even after I accidentally spilled coffee on it. However, the update to macOS Sierra 10.12.2 ruined its streak, leaving me with a blank screen that only displayed the cursor.

I initially blamed the update for this, but after I saw no similar reports from other users I started doing some digging. As it turns out, this problem predates Sierra by a couple of years. Apple has not addressed it yet, but, don’t panic: it is pretty easy to fix it yourself.

It is not clear what exactly is causing macOS to act up after installing an update, but it rears its ugly head after powering on the Mac. You can try to reboot or reset the PRAM and SMC — the first things that Mac users can try when something isn’t working right — but that will not fix it.

So, here is what you need to do. First, you need to shut down your Mac, if it’s powered on. Pressing the power key for a couple of seconds will do the trick.

Next, you have to boot your Mac in single-user mode. That’s done by pressing the Command and S keys at the same time, right after pressing the power key. If you did it right, you should see a whole bunch of lines on the screen in what is a Terminal-like interface.

(I’ve seen someone recommend that you reset the PRAM three times before booting in the single-user mode. There is no harm in doing that. Hit the Command, Option, P and R keys at the same time, right after you power it on, and wait until you hear the startup chime for the third time before letting go. Then, quickly press the Command and S keys, to get you into the single-user mode.)

You then need to type the following commands:

/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /
rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
rm -f /var/db/.AppleUpgrade
reboot

You will have to press the Enter/Return key after each one. The fifth command restarts your Mac. It will show the login screen. That’s normal, even if you previously bypassed it. Type in your password and you’re back in business.

You may run into this problem even after macOS Sierra 10.12.2, but know that you will be able to apply this method again if that happens.


macbook air: unable to assign static IP on USB ethernet adapter

Put a small switch between the device and the Mac.

Whatever "device" you're using, it's not bringing up the physical layer (OSI layer 1) and thus, your Mac is not seeing that anything is physically there.  That's why you're getting a "Status: Cable Unplugged" error message.

However, when you connect your Mac to a PC, you immediately get a self assigned IP address indicating that not only is a physical connection, but you made it all the way to Layer 3, the network layer.  You don't get an IP because there's no DHCP server, but you can now successfully set your desired IP and ping the PC.

A switch will between your device and your Mac will set bring up the link layer allowing you to set the IP.


How do I move a third-party application's menulet from one location to another in the menu bar?

You can't move it into the same area as the OS icons.  The only way to rearrange the third-party apps is to close programs and re-open them, because they appear in the order the programs were opened.


It's an issue of what device you'll be using, how many of them will be connected simultaneously, if you need to stream music, etc. But based on what you said, here are a few suggestions:

In general, if you have a new Mac (mid-2013 or later, for most models), it probably takes advantage of 802.11ac, a spec which only the Extreme supports. However, if you want to stream music via AirPlay to speakers connected to your router (especially if your router is in a room you use a lot), and you're willing to give up some power, the Express might be a better choice. Another thing to note is that the Extreme allows for  both the connection of printers and external hard drives, should you wish to perform wireless file transfer/backup, while the Express only supports printers. If you plan on attaching Ethernet cables to your router, you may want the Extreme as it features four Gigabit Ethernet ports, whereas the Express has only two older-spec 10/100BASE-T ports. If you have a bigger house that needs better coverage, perhaps consider the Extreme.

For further reference, and a very useful comparison table, see Apple's "Compare WiFi Models" Page.


Why do my iMessages (green bubble) don't appear on my iPad 2? but only on my iPhone

The iMessage app on iPhone can send both an iMessage message as well as a regular SMS. An iMessage is shown as a blue bubble, while an SMS as a green bubble.

Assuming you are signed into both your iPhone 6 and iPad 2nd generation, you can receive and reply to SMS (green bubble) from your iPad (as well as other Mac and iOS devices signed in using the same Apple ID), by using a feature called Text Message Forwarding. The option can be found by going to Settings apps → Messages → Text Message Forwarding and turning on the switch which appears against your iPad device in the list.

For step by step instructions, you can go through the Apple Support articles, Use Continuity to connect your Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple Watch and How to forward SMS/MMS texts on your iPhone.

The messages in the cloud feature also might be worth enabling if you care to have your messages sync status by checking in with iCloud as opposed to relying on every device being online all the time.


is it worth it to install SSD internally, instead of using USB3?

YES, it's definitely worth it. With my setup, sustained transfer speeds were roughly 75% better using SATA, vs. USB3.

I tested both configurations using ZoneBench as follows:

SSD: 120GB OWC Mercury Electra 6G

Mac: Late 2012 Mac Mini, 2.6Ghz core i7, model ID Macmini6,2, 16GB RAM

Hot-Swap unit: StarTech USB3-to-SATA dock, model SATDOCK22U3S ver2

  All speeds are in MB/sec (mega-bytes per second)

  Configuration A: SSD connected via Hot-swap USB 3 Dock
  Lowest / Avg / Highest R/W speeds:  95 / 150 / 185

  Configuration B: SSD installed in internal HDD bay in 2012 Mini (direct SATA):
  Lowest / Avg / Highest R/W speeds: 145 / 250/ 460

All tests were repeated 5 times at intervals of 1 hour, under normal system usage. (A few apps open & idle, CPU & system I/O load 99% idle.)

As one can see, in this configuration, taking the trouble to mount the SDD in the Mini's internal SATA bay is well worth the massive performance gains.


Mac mini running Catalina has no sound input

Apple Menu > System Preferences > Sound is the place to look for Input Sources:

I've selected the Internal Microphone in the screenshot below for legibility. To use the Snowball mic (an amazing mic, BTW,) just select it. You can adjust the input volume, too.


Erasing everything on my current I phone besides contacts

Unless there’s a compelling reasons to not take the easy route:

ensure the iCloud backup is complete for all data
Restore the contacts after erasing all content and settings.

For 10,000 contacts, this takes about 10 minutes in my experience in the US. You might need more time to backup and restore the further away from Apple data centers you are, but contacts are very small amounts of data to back up and then restore.
When you sign in again after erasing the device, just don’t sign in to iCloud when asked. Skip it from the setup assistant screen.
Sign in later from the settings app so you can control and turn off all the items except contacts.


How to disable apps from auto launch if I have already disabled them?

EDIT: Having re-read the question, my original answer may not be necessary. By default, when you log in, OS X opens all the windows you had open when you logged out. If you don't want it to do this, then uncheck the option "reopen windows when logging back in" that appears when you log out:

This should give you an empty desktop when you log back in. If not, then it's back to my original answer (below).

Some apps unfortunately don't respect that option, and create Launch Agents (processes that run at login) or sometimes Launch Daemons (which run at boot) to manage their lifecycle.

Such apps often do have a preference buried somewhere to change their login behaviour, so double-check that first, as that's always the safest solution.

If there isn't a preference, you can see what Launch Agents are running by going to your terminal and running:

launchctl list

If you want to see which Adobe-related agents are running, pipe the output to grep with something like:

launchctl list | grep -i adobe

If you see anything there, then it's likely that Adobe is using this mechanism. So what to do about it?

Have a look in the following folders to find files with the same names that you saw in the output of the launchctl command... in your case, probably called com.adobe.<something>.

~/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/System/Library/LaunchAgents
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

Once you've found them, try renaming rather than deleting them (e.g. by adding ".ignore" to the end of their filenames). Then reboot to see if that's had the desired effect. If it has, you're good to go... but watch out for other side-effects in case the Launch Agent has more than one function, and be prepared to go through the process again whenever you receive a software update.

If it hasn't worked, restore their original filenames to avoid any undesired side-effects, and keep digging...


How do I see site blocked from Safari's Top Sites?

The list of blocked sites is in the BannedURLStrings array in ~/Library/Safari/TopSites.plist


macOS no longer finding Windows Partition

The command given below will add the free space back to the container. You need to enter the command in a Terminal application window.

sudo  diskutil  apfs  resizeContainer  disk0s2  0

I thought this command could be entered while booted to High Sierra. Evidently, the OP needed to boot to recovery mode.


How do I prevent my Mac from opening so many windows every time I restart?

When you go to shutdown/restart, unclick the check box to disable the resume feature, which is likely what is opening all these windows (that were present upon shutdown).

If this doesn't do it, check that these applications are not in your user start up list.


Unable to install python mysqlclient - OSError: mysql_config not found

I found this answer on StackOverflow titled: How to use MYSql from xampp for python 3?.

An answer there shows 3 ways to install the Python drivers/connectors for working with MySQL DBs.

method 1 - MySQL-python

To install the MySQL-python package, type the following command:

 $ pip install MySQL-python

Method 2 - mysql-connector-python

To install the mysql-connector-python package, type the following command:

$ pip install mysql-connector-python

Method 3 - pymysql

To install the pymysql package, type the following command:

$ pip install pymysql

Examples

$ cat mysql_connector_exs.py
hostname = 'localhost'
username = 'USERNAME'
password = 'PASSWORD'
database = 'DBNAME'
def doQuery( conn ) :
cur = conn.cursor()

cur.execute( "SELECT fname, lname FROM employee" )
for firstname, lastname in cur.fetchall() :
    print firstname, lastname
print "Using MySQLdb…"
import MySQLdb
myConnection = MySQLdb.connect( host=hostname, user=username, passwd=password, db=database )
doQuery( myConnection )
myConnection.close()
print "Using pymysql…"
import pymysql
myConnection = pymysql.connect( host=hostname, user=username, passwd=password, db=database )
doQuery( myConnection )
myConnection.close()
print "Using mysql.connector…"
import mysql.connector
myConnection = mysql.connector.connect( host=hostname, user=username, passwd=password, db=database )
doQuery( myConnection )
myConnection.close()


Yosemite does not like emptying the trash

To find out what file(s) in your Trash are in use, and by whom:

lsof +D ~/.Trash

The command name in the first column will be truncated. If it's truncated so much that you cannot identify the process, the second column contains the pid (Process ID), which you can cross-reference in Activity Monitor. Or get additional info using ps -p pid.

Note:

It has been suggested that the command:

sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash

may be useful here. This is not the case!

If a file is in use (which is the scenario the question is about), it cannot be removed! Not even by root.

The suggested command may be useful if:

You are in an admin account (or in sudoers, which I discourage as a security weakness), and
The only reason you cannot remove the file is that its permissions deny deletion.

In general there are three reasons why you might not be able to empty the trash, and each reason has its own cure.

If the file (or folder) is locked, you can either unlock it or hold down the option key while emptying the trash.
If permissions do not allow you to remove the file, you can either change the permissions to allow it, or use sudo to override the file's permissions.
If the file is in use, your only recourse is to find the process that is using the file and make it stop using it. In the simplest case, trying again after a short wait is all it takes. It may be necessary to force quit the app, and the purpose of the lsof command is to determine which app needs to be quit. However, even root cannot remove a file that is in use.

The takeaway is that the problem "I cannot empty the trash" does not have a one-size-fits-all solution. When you are told that something is in use, do not waste time trying to apply a fix that doesn't fit that situation.

I have also seen it suggested that Secure Empty Trash may be helpful. Again, this is not the case! Secure Empty Trash will overwrite the sectors on disk that the file's data was stored in, but only after the file is successfully deleted. If you can't delete the file, for whatever reason, it won't be deleted or overwritten. If the file is hard-linked, deleting it only deletes one of its links. As long as other links remain, the underlying inode is not deleted and the file's disk space is not overwritten.


How to know what percent of document that I read in Safari?

If you initiate a scroll a little bit either up or down a scrollbar will appear in Safari letting you know where you are in the document unless it has been disabled by code in the website.

You could use a "User Style Sheet" to have the scrollbar always appear: http://webdesign.about.com/od/css/ht/htcssusersafari.htm

Or you can do it the easiest way and go to "System Preferences > General" and choose "Show Scrollbars > Always".


How to connect an early 2013 MBP to a 4K LG Television

Most Macs with an HDMI port (besides Mac mini late-2012 and older) support 4K, but are capped at 30Hz or 24Hz. The MacBook Pro Retina 15" mid-2014 model supports 60Hz at 4K, but older models do not.
I personally have a MacBook Pro Retina 15" late-2013 model, and it can only do 4K at 30Hz
(4K is defined in my answer as 3840 x 2160.)


What software is available for 3D diagrams and graphs?

This won't help with graphs, but for making molecular diagrams I highly recommend the open source Jmol, which is free for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It lets you create all sorts of molecules and export them as Java applets, images, or animations.


Updating 1Password macOS client broke Safari extension

I've seen this one. It just means that the 1Password background app is either hung or quit somehow.

Usually a reboot does the trick, if not after a reboot launch the 1Password app, and see if that does it.

Still not working? Uninstall the extension and reinstall it. that should do it


Do Banners always slow down an app when they appear?

This is the current state of iOS. You'll notice that incoming calls and pop ups (the old style notification) also negatively affect the performance of current app.


XCode: code signing entitlement file in command line

I managed to have it working by calling:

xcodebuild ... CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="" CODE_SIGNING_REQUIRED=NO"

and then:

codesign --entitlements .../Entitlements.plist -s signing_identity


Nokogiri gem fails to install in OS X Mavericks

You can't assume that the version of ruby built-into OS X is compatible with any gems you want to use. Do not try to remove the version of ruby that ships with OS X or update or upgrade it unless with App Store/Software Update/softwareupdate. Most rubiers will tell you don't even bother useing the ruby that ships with OS X. But you can install multiple versions of ruby, and you'll definately need a ruby version manager if you intend to use lots of gems.

ruby was once quite easy to use, but now, the number of versions that necessarily need to be supported are legion, and gem developers sometimes force you to install a new version of ruby at some other version when you already have a perfectly good ruby installation! Grr. ruby is really starting to chafe, because while the support information might be out there, it is looking more and more like a fishing reel that has birdnested. IMO, ruby is broken, someone's going to have to pull it out and get it neatly reeled in for it to be fixed, and I'm just not up to it. I'm not the guy. Not me.

brewinistas enthusiasm notwithstanding, the homebrew package manager has growing pains typical of an immature package management solution. I use MacPorts to manage... all my installations, but also the various versions of ruby installations that are necessary to use the gems I want. MacPorts requires an appropriate version of xcode; xcode_5.1.1.dmg is the most recent version for Mavericks. rvm uses MacPorts by default if it is installed.

It appears from your provided logs that you're missing stuff. That's what's nice about MacPorts (and any mature package manager); it takes care of the dependecies for you if they're not installed.

Install MacPorts

 curl -Ok https://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/MacPorts-2.2.1.tar.bz2

 tar xf MacPorts-2.2.1.tar.bz2

 cd MacPorts-2.2.1

 ./configure

 make

 sudo make install

 cd ..

 rm -rf Macports-*

 sudo /opt/local/bin/port -v selfupdate

add MacPorts to your $PATH:

 export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH

take a look at what MacPorts has for ruby

 port search ruby |less

and/or just install nokogiri

 sudo port -vsk install ruby19 libxml2 libxslt

 sudo gem install nokogiri

 port -vfp clean ruby19 libxml2 libxslt

if there's trouble try

 sudo port upgrade outdated

MacPorts won't affect OS X version of anything, nor homebrew (except to make it superfluous) and keeps everything it installs in /opt making deinstallation a breeze (but this has nothing to do with where ruby keeps its gems, ~/.gem ). But you should really get to know and love MacPorts, it is your friend.

to completely uninstall MacPorts

 sudo port -dfp uninstall --follow-dependencies installed

 sudo port -dfp uninstall all

 sudo rm -rf /opt/local

 sudo rm -rf /Library/Tcl/macports*


How do I split a large Pages document into multiple Pages documents

Although you could script this in AppleScript since Pages is scriptable, I've never had enough sections to make the time spent crafting a script worth the time needed to figure out the syntax.

I simply duplicate the document as many times as needed in finder, batch rename them using Finder.

If you had 64 sections, I would use a "binary search" approach.

split the document in 2
split in 4
split by 8
split by half

I've never liked copy/paste since things get odd sometimes. Chopping out the unneeded parts always seems to work better for me, but your manual copy/paste method also will work.


Will upgrade of iOS delete any of my videos or photos?

The photos and videos in Camera Roll are not synced with iTunes - they are, instead, the "raw" photos meant to be synced to the photo-organization tool you use - whether that's a set of folders in your filesystem, or iPhoto.

In other words, when your iPhone is mounted as a "USB camera" (on Windows) or when iPhoto opens (when plugging it into your Mac), the contents of the Camera Roll are what you see.

That being said, iOS 5 will delete all of this data during the upgrade, so you absolutely should back them up before going forward! Assuming you're using a Mac, plug in the phone, open iPhoto, and import everything before doing the upgrade.

(And I recommend making a backup of your phone, transferring purchases, and then syncing everything you can with iTunes before going forward... the iOS 5 upgrade appears to be a very destructive procedure.)


You would need to turn on debugging in Lync and see what was being logged. As you mention, there is no off switch for reconnect and it does work sometimes with the setting you have - but not all the time.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2629861

I would wager you need to flush your dns cache per the above link, though, based on experience and your reporting of the issue. Although, there are about a dozen different failure modes contemplated in that guide, so you might start from the top and systematically work through the troubleshooting steps.


How can I find the location of my current user account picture?

You can run the following command from terminal to get your user account pictures. This would be an easy way.

dscl . -read /Users/Yourusername JPEGPhoto | tail -1 | xxd -r -p > accountImage.jpg

Just you will get a 256x256 pixel version of your account picture


Large zip files created in OS X cannot be opened in Windows

The built-in Archive utility on Mac OS X creates invalid Zip files when they are larger than 4 GB. This is still the case on Sierra (10.12.6).

In Windows 10, trying to open such a .zip file in Explorer fails, saying the file is invalid (which is true).

Current versions of Total Commander, 7zip and probably others have workarounds for this particular bug, and should be able to open and uncompress these large files.

Conclusion: do not create large .zip files (over 4GB) with the Mac built-in compressor but use some other tool instead.

For the gory details, see Apple Archive Utility (and ditto) and very large ZIP archives (which is, ironically, only available on archive.org since the original web site has shut down)


Can MacBooks backup when in hibernation mode?

If your MacBook Air has flash storage, supports Power Nap and is connected to a power adapter at night, then it will back up to Time Machine when in sleep. If any of these criteria is not met, then the backup will not take place.

A firmware update is required for the late-2010 MacBook Air to support Power Nap. Make sure that all updates are installed in the Mac App Store and you can check for Power Nap functionality in System Preferences → Energy Saver → Enable Power Nap….

For more information on Power Nap, see:

OS X Yosemite: About Power Nap


How to partition External HD for both Time Machine and other purposes?

You can make the partitions any size you want. The larger you make it, the more backups you can save. TM deletes the oldest backups when it needs more space. You can also define what you backup in TM options. I don't like the methodology, but it takes the approach to back up everything.

You have to exclude things for which you don't need backups. For example, you may not want to back up the System itself. You may not want to backup some apps - where you can reload the installers.

Basically, you want to backup only stuff that you don't want to lose. So documents, images, music, work, etc.

If you have a 100GB of that stuff, you may want to make a 200GB partition. Then, other than a full backup of this data, TM has 100GB to make incremental backups of things you create or change.

I hope this helps. From your question, it appears that you know how to partition the disk so I did not go into that. Let us know if you need more on that.


How do I also sync the web calendar feeds that are in my Gmail/Google calendar into iOS 6?

How do you sync Google calendar on your iPhone? Is it a CalDav account or Exchange?

I've got several calendars on Google which sync without any problems using Google's exchange server. But I'm not sure if it also works with CalDav. See this page on how to set up Google exchange on your iPhone: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740


Is the macOS recovery also upgraded when i run mac upgrades?

When you restore a Mac from Internet Recovery it restores the OS version that came with the Mac when it shipped. So if your Mac came with Mavericks than it will reinstall Mavericks. From there you can then reinstall Mojave right over top of the new Mavericks installation.

It will not install beta OS versions as there must be an OS in place with the necessary macOSPublicBetaAccessUtility installed.

As for the recovery partition OS version, I am unsure of what happens to that during major macOS upgrades. I would think that it would not change as Internet Recovery works even with the recovery partition deleted. Which tells me that Internet Recovery is (at least mostly) built into the firmware of your Mac.

Correcting During an OS upgrade recovery is upgraded as well so you will get the latest (non beta) version of macOS. Thanks to @Tetsujin and the OP.

Going back a revision or two and then upgrading from there works perfectly well, it just takes longer. For that reason I always make a bootable USB installer of the last two versions of macOS and keep them in a drawer for eventualities such as these. 8GB flash drives are cheap and it takes little time to create a bootable macOS installer. Perhaps something to consider for the future.


Is there a way to connect my iPod touch to the internet without wireless connection (say, by usb)?

Not that I know of however you could try turning internet sharing on on your computer. This will create a wireless network that you can use on your iPod Touch.

This is easy to do if you are using a Mac. Assuming that internet comes in over Ethernet, go to the Sharing tab in the System Preferences application. Click the internet sharing tick box and configure it to share over Airport. (this is from memory as I don't have access to a Mac right at the moment but you can probably work it out.

Some further details are available here.


The easiest to create a unique temporary folder is to use mktemp:

my_tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)

This will generate a unique name (e.g. /var/folders/8b/mn2vgjs42gs83krfy1fwxwb80000gp/T/tmp.LYnaqveK), create the directory with that path automatically and assign the path to my_tmpdir.

What I usually do within shell scripts or functions is

function do_stuff() {
    local t=$(mktemp -d)
    trap "rm -rf $t" RETURN
    (
        cd $t

        ## do stuff
    )
}

This will run the whole script in a temporary directory, it will also make sure that the directory is removed again afterwards.


My macbook pro (2011) updated to OS X 10.10.5 and Photo was installed. Most of my older Photo events are missing

I can open iPhoto on my Mac with Yosemite, so it might be as simple as upgrading.  I have version 9.6.1.

Photos for me does not show a 'iphotos event' tab, rather, the images from iPhoto are simply in Photos.

If you think the iPhoto images did not get imported into Photos app, then do the following: Open the "Pictures" folder, and look for the old iPhoto Library icon. Right click and choose 'Show Package Contents'. Within this is a folder called 'Masters'. Open this and you will see all your photos.

Now, do the same with the new Photos Library. 'Show Package Content' on it, and you will see a 'Masters' folder. You will notice that this Masters folder contains the same images, including your old images. If it does not, something happened on the import during install.

You can simply select all the images within the iPhoto 'Masters' folder and drag them into Photos, which will add all those photos to Photos app. It will duplicate those images, which the Photos app install does not do.


Can I boot my recovered SSD as a Mac OS X installation

It depends on the system installed on the SSD. If the Mac Pro is capable of booting with it and it fits physically, then I see no problem why it shouldn't work.

MacPro1,1 - 2,1: max system version: 10.7.5
MacPro3,1 - 6,1: max system version: latest
all MacBookPros 2008 (4,1 and 5,1) can run the latest system

Usually all necessary drivers for any Mac (which can run the system) are included in a standard system install.

There is only one exception: systems for new Macs with absolutely new hardware usually contain new drivers though the minor system version number is equal to the general current one. The build number is different though. The newly released Mac can't start from the general system release valid for all other Macs.


How is the tab chosen when opening a link from an external location?

It's usually not a random tab but the current active tab. But with 111 tabs open, I'm surprised the app's memory is not hosed so much that it's making mistakes now. That count seems a bit high. Try to reduce the tab count--after restarting Safari--and check the behavior then.


What you can do is go to your home folder, press "command + up" and open the Shared folder. This folder is fully accessible to all users. The files themselves though need to be made readable and writable to everyone. You can do this by right clicking on the file and opening "Get Info", scrolling to the bottom and changing permissions till they're how you'd like them. You can add users to the list for more fine-grained permission control, or just allow everyone to read and write it for simplicity.

EDIT: Sorry, I'm crazy tired. Some of the original post wasn't true...


What is the difference between "Learn" and "Ignore" in spell checkers

"Learn" means you are teaching this word to the machine so it knows the word for the future and even suggests you the word if you type it slightly wrong in the future.

"Ignore" means that the machine still does not know the word, but does only not highlight it as wrong anymore in this specific case when you selected "ignore".


How to determine which process is creating a file?

fs_usage is your tool for this.

The file system usage tool is ideal since it taps in to the real time file system events and dumps activity to a file or the screen. Since you know the exact path of the file, you can filter out all the thousands of irrelevant (to this case)  filesystem changes and see what reads / writes to that file pretty quickly.

If your home directory is /Users/me then you can filter for /Users/me/aa

mac:~ me$ sudo fs_usage | grep /Users/me/aa
09:35:21  stat64            /Users/me/aa      0.000033   touch
09:35:21  utimes            /Users/me/aa      0.000104   touch
09:35:21  fsgetpath         /Users/me/aa      0.000119   Finder
09:35:22  lstat64           /Users/me/aa      0.000039   fseventsd
09:35:22  fsgetpath         /Users/me/aa      0.000027   mds
09:35:22  getattrlist       /Users/me/aa      0.000064   mds
09:35:22  listxattr         /Users/me/aa      0.000012   mds
09:35:22  getattrlist       /Users/me/aa      0.000130   mds
09:35:22  getattrlist       /Users/me/aa      0.000033   mds
09:35:22  open              /Users/me/aa      0.000071   mdworker_sha
09:35:22    RdData[AT2]     /Users/me/aa      0.000331 W mdworker_sha
09:35:22  getattrlist       /Users/me/aa      0.000042   mds
09:35:24  lstat64           /Users/me/aa      0.000114   rm
09:35:24  access            /Users/me/aa      0.000209   rm
09:35:24  unlink            /Users/me/aa      0.000909   rm
09:35:25  lstat64           /Users/me/aa      0.000042   fseventsd
09:35:25  lstat64           /Users/me/aa      0.000006   rm

(note: I deleted a lot of white space above - the fs_usage command outputs a wide amount of empty space so you can't easily see the touch command on the far right if I copy/paste the exact output.)

Here I use the touch command to create the file, append a string to it and then rm it from the command line.

mac:~ me$ touch ~/aa
mac:~ me$ echo foo >> ~/aa
mac:~ me$ rm ~/aa

There will be tons of other apps that read, so you can filter on the stat64 and lstat74 operations if there are too many attribute reads and spotlight activity around the file once it's created.

http://toddsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/02/use-fsusage-to-monitor-file-system.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/FileSystem/Articles/FileSystemCalls.html

The manual page for this command is quite dense (and not a "how-to") which is typical but better than no documentation from Apple on how to use it.


The text indicates that you pay $1 at the end of the financing term. So no, you pay $1 in addition to whatever agreement you sign with Apple, not $1 in total.

This is essentially a lease with option to buy.


How best to reintroduce files after clean MacOS install

"I've created a new, test account to see if the same crashing appears -
  it doesn't. So I am going to do a clean MacOS install."

If a new user account works fine, then there is nothing wrong with the system installation, and a clean OS install is unnecessary.

The problem is something in your original user account.

Either migrate to the new user account, or go back to the old account and find the problem in your user Library. It may be a Login Item or Launch Agent that is loading an unstable or incompatible process; corrupt caches or incorrect settings in preference files.

Test by removing files from your user Library, (restart/relogin if necessary), then check whether the problem remains. If it is fixed, put back half the files you removed, and test again. If not, remove the remaining half.

For your specific problem, you may want to remove things relating to CUPS, the printing process, Adobe CC or Preview. Anything in <user>/Library/Application Support/Adobe can be entirely removed: the apps will just revert to their default settings.
Anything named Adobe in <user>/Library/Preferences is also fair game, and the same for things with cups or print.
The same for <user>/Library/Caches.

The thing about migrating to a new user account is that it fixes the problem but doesn't solve it, and if it happens again, you'll have to move to a third new account, and so on.


Can spotlight locate/find files in a VM, specifically Outlook 2010?

It is definitely possible, but you will need to write your own Spotlight Metadata importer for Outlook database, because there is none.

Difficulty level: HARD

Here is documentation
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/MDImporters/MDImporters.html


How effective is Itunes "error correction" for CD imports?

Besides the raw audio data, CDs come with error correction codes, which, usually, are not read, assuming the data integrity. This leads to the typical poping or clicking sound heard when the CD has any defects, such as scratches, fingerprints or even manufacturing defects.
By turning on Use Error Correction, iTunes will read and process these error correcting codes along with the audio samples, correcting any found errors.
These error codes are called Reed-Solomon and this Wikipedia's extract explains how it works:

In the CD, two layers of Reed–Solomon coding separated by a 28-way convolutional interleaver yields a scheme called Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon Coding (CIRC). The first element of a CIRC decoder is a relatively weak inner (32,28) Reed–Solomon code, shortened from a (255,251) code with 8-bit symbols. This code can correct up to 2 byte errors per 32-byte block. More importantly, it flags as erasures any uncorrectable blocks, i.e., blocks with more than 2 byte errors. The decoded 28-byte blocks, with erasure indications, are then spread by the deinterleaver to different blocks of the (28,24) outer code. Thanks to the deinterleaving, an erased 28-byte block from the inner code becomes a single erased byte in each of 28 outer code blocks. The outer code easily corrects this, since it can handle up to 4 such erasures per block.
The result is a CIRC that can completely correct error bursts up to 4000 bits, or about 2.5 mm on the disc surface. This code is so strong that most CD playback errors are almost certainly caused by tracking errors that cause the laser to jump track, not by uncorrectable error bursts.


All my music needs to be downloaded again?

If you have the music on your computer, connect to iTunes and sync
again. If this appears, you should download all music from iCloud.


The reality is that anyone who repairs the phone, and in this case it sounds like it has a logic board issue, will have full access to the phone if it wasn't protected by a passcode. A lot of micro-soldering repairs can be surprisingly straightforward.

In practice however, an iPhone 5 doesn't have much value as a phone so it will most likely serve as a donor device for repairing other phones. If the data on the phone is THAT sensitive to you, then you should consider selling it minus the logic board or see if it can be repaired so that it can be properly wiped clean.


A rather simple way would be to run

find / -type d -wholename "prog" -print 2>&1 | grep -v ": Permission denied"

(which would filter out any folders with "Permission denied" in the name as well, but that's probably not an issue).