Will video and photo editing wear out a 2015 macbook pro's SSD significantly?

SSD's have been found to be quite durable. That article goes into depth with respect to SSD issues, and they performed hardware tests upon several manufacture of SSD.


How to specify a startup folder in the open command to launch MacVim?

Since you're using MacVim, and it doesn't seem to be a problem with the open command:

MacVim comes with its own script called mvim.

You can use it just like gvim to open files in the MacVim GUI, or pass -v to it to open in regular text mode with the ability to use :gui later.

Also, you can just use open -a MacVim <file>, no need to use --args. It'll figure it out just as if you double-clicked on the file in the Finder.


Disable App Store Update Notifications - All Users

If you go to System Preferences there an icon for AppleStore. Click on this and a panel opens with several settings. There is a checkbox to notify you when an update is ready to be installed. Uncheck the box to turn off the notification.


All the way at the bottom right corner of the Apple Store screen there is a round symbol representing which country Apple store are you in.

Click on it and it will bring you choices to switch country.


How do I open old Notes saved on my external hard drive?

You could use an app like https://www.sqlitepro.com/ to open the SQLlite database. But are you sure your data is there? At my system there is nothing in it.


How can I delete my Mail App and re-install it?

Before you delete it, see if you can repair Mail.

In Mail, go to Window → Connection Doctor and let it verify your connections to see if all works there.
Next step is to rebuild your Mail database. Go to the Mailbox tab and at the bottom click on Rebuild.

If 1 and 2 are not accessible (grayed out)
Try to reset Mail settings. - which you will need to set up after following:

Quit Mail, then go to Finder and press ⇧⌘G and enter (or copy) the following:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences

Look for "com.apple.mail.plist" and drag it the Desktop, then restart Mail.

Alternatively, you can use this one-liner in your Terminal app (located in the Utility folder):

killall Mail &> /dev/null; mv ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist ~/Desktop && open -a Mail

Source: http://georgegarside.com/o/se/resetMail.html

If all else fails you can reinstall the operating system (Mavericks) that includes the Mail.app. Boot into the Recovery HD with ⌘R, then follow the instructions.

For more information about recovering a broken Mail.app, see this:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/apple-in-the-enterprise/how-to-recover-email-from-apple-mail-corruption/

You can check if a 3rd party app/extension is causing the problem by performing a safe boot (hold shift on boot).

In rare occasions your user permissions or ACLs might need some repair. This answer describes the process.


Can you do a group Google chat with Messages?

You can do a group conversation in Messages, but there's no way to automatically have it set up based on a group from Hangouts.

To start a group conversation in Messages for iOS, tap on the paper/pencil icon at the upper left of the threads list, then simply enter as many contact names or phone numbers as you like. When you send a message, it will create the group automatically.


How to edit writable locations in a document in Pages '09?

You can change the page borders in the property sheet:


OS X takes long to boot after starting rEFInd once

Turns out resetting PRAM and NVRAM via pressing ⌘+⌥+P+R at boot (before the gray screen appears; hold until computer restarts and the startup chime has been heard twice) fixes the problem.

I have since successfully booted both OSX and Ubuntu via rEFInd without any excessive waiting.


How to push GMail to iPhone without Exchange?

This is a great question and I hope that it will get a lot of answers.

(For the sake of this discussion I'll assume by 'push' you mean 'near-instant notification of new messages.' IMAP has something called IMAP IDLE which is similar but I don't think iOS supports it, or maybe Gmail doesn't, or both. Anyway, I don't want that term to become a distraction, I just wanted to make it clear that my working definition of 'push' is "not waiting for Mail.app to check for new messages every X minutes." I'm also not going to get into a debate about whether we "should" or "shouldn't" be "tied to our email" or "overuse quotation marks.")

Here are the solutions that I am aware of:

Pay Google: A paid "Google Apps" account will allow you to use ActiveSync.

Con: I can't find anything to confirm that you can pay for a Gmail account and get ActiveSync back, so you have to change your email address.
Pro: Should work reliably, does not require any 3rd party services.

AwayFind: A paid AwayFind account (pricing information available here: http://awayfind.com/plans.php) will let you get push notifications for messages which match certain. You could set this up to alert you to all of your messages, but my guess is that once you use the service, you'd realize that you really only want alerts for some messages.

Pro: much better and more granular control over notifications. Works with Gmail or Google Apps (or Exchange, IIRC)
Con: 3rd-party service (That's not a 'con' for me… AwayFind uses Google OAuth for login, so you're not giving them your password).  I use and recommend their service, but am not otherwise affiliated with them.

Boxcar: You can forward some/all of your email to Boxcar. I used them before AwayFind. They had some reliability issues a few months(?) ago, but I've heard that's gotten much better. Haven't used them for awhile. I think the iOS

Pro: Low cost. App is free with ads, US$5 to remove ads.
Con: Potential reliability issue, and requires you to forward your email to a 3rd party.


How to edit videos keeping existing geotagging?

You can geotag videos with Picasa, but I don't know if the geotag is saved along with the file...


How to add calendar entries in iPhone 6?

You may be inadvertently saving the event to the wrong calendar. Often email accounts, such as Gmail automatically enable a calendar when being set up. If the event shows up only on your iPhone, and nowhere else, chances are your default calendar is set to something that you are not used to checking.

When you create an event, scroll down to where you can see the menu item "Calendar". Tap that, and choose one of your iCloud calendars. If the event then shows up on iCloud, and your computer, you have chosen the correct calendar.

If this is case, you will probably want to change your default calendar by opening your Settings.app, scrolling down and selecting "Mail, Contacts, and Calendar". At the bottom of this screen is a section titled "Calendars". Change the "Default Calendar" to reflect the one that worked correctly.

here


Macbook permanently crashes while updating to El Capitan

I did it with simply press Cmd + R, and then press off. Cmd + R I kept pressed until Apple logo appeared, then I get into Install OS X mode. There you should once again connect to the internet, choose language,and waiting for new install.


This seems to be done on purpose. However, it is possible to use a workaround:

Tap on More in the top right corner.
Select the option "Disconnect Audio" which is written in red.

To re-establish the connection, tap the icon in the upper right area on the far left named Join Audio.


External hard drive not indexed by Spolight on Mac OS X Mountain Lion

From the Terminal application type the following:

mdutil -s /Volumes/<your_disk_name>/

If indexing is disabled you will get something like that:

/Volumes/<your_disk_name>:
Indexing disabled.

You can turn it on by typing (it will request your password):

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/<your_disk_name>/

Now erase all the existing entries in the index for that drive (if any):

mdutil -E /Volumes/<your_disk_name>/

Check that indexing has been enabled:

mdutil -s /Volumes/<your_disk_name>/

If indexing is enabled you will get something like that:

/Volumes/<your_disk_name>:
Indexing enabled.

Now just reboot your system or wait some minutes until Finder begins the indexing.


Gmail passwords don’t show up in Keychain Access. Are they saved somewhere else?

I've tested it out and it seems that Microsoft Outlook for Mac sets up a sort of automatic authentication system. I didn't even have to put my password in it just logged me in.  I assume it got my Gmail password from the Keychain as I had it setup with Apple Mail. I assumed wrong. I also noticed the password field is not filled in on the account settings for Gmail in Outlook for Mac.
It seems Google Supports OAuth2 and Microsoft implemented it.
https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/auth/about-auth
https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2
High level overview of OAuth2 and how it works:
https://youtu.be/CPbvxxslDTU
OAuth2 allows for credential-less authentication. When you setup your Gmail account in Outlook for Mac (likely PC as well) it asks you to allow Microsoft to access your Gmail account. Then you never even have to provide the password.  Google is doing to check to ensure you are who you say you are. If it knows this already it just lets Outlook login. If not it will have you authenticate but credentials go to Google not Microsoft. Then next time it connects it doesn't even send the ID/Password.
The Gmail password is not saved in the Mac Keychain as a result. If something breaks the chain of trust I am sure Google will prompt for your credentials, etc.  I didn't even have to use my Multi-Factor Authentication either.
Try adding another Gmail account or changing to a new user profile in Outlook for Mac.  Go to /Applications and right-click Microsoft Outlook then Show Package Contents. Go to Contents/SharedSupport and double-click the Outlook Profile Manager. Create a new profile and make it the default. Restart Outlook.  Add the Gmail account. In order to rectify any authentication problems you work with Google this way. i.e. Forgot Password, etc.
Creating a new profile will not affect the old profile. The data for a profile is kept here:
/Users//Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/
If you drill down that path your old email should be in there and you could import it back into the new profile.


Due to the way iOS sandboxes apps, when you delete an app, it along with its data are gone. The only remains are in the App Store purchase history. The iOS security means you can't easily undelete these files via a jailbreak - so if you want to ensure the data gets securely erased, you should erase all contents and settings which will either destroy the key used to encrypt.

Don't forget to delete the app from iTunes on any computers you have and then make a backup of your iPad with the app deleted. That gets rid of two other potential copies of the app.

The game is probably just buggy. You can tell the developer and make sure to mention what iDevice you have, its iOS version, and specifically what the bug is.


Does the Mac version of BitDefender detect Windows malware?

The BitDefender website does claim that the Mac version will remove Windows malware. I can't find anything specifically mentioning email or network drives, but it would be a significant and unlikely oversight.

It's worth pointing out that BitDefender contains (and has contained) security vulnerabilities that can be exploited in itself.


Create ZIP files from containing related files from multiple folders

Heres your script as promised. Any questions or suggestions? Comment below :)

What the script does: Searches through a selected folder for folders. Searches through each one of those for files. If those files contain a specified search parameter then the file is moved to a folder in a location specified. Once all files are checked, the files in the folders at the location specified is ziped up.

For what you want: First Prompt choose the /files folder. In the second prompt enter 8199.

The Script:

set myFolder to choose folder with prompt "Choose a Folder" # Choose the /files folder
display dialog "Enter Your Search Paramaters" default answer "" #Enter "8199"
set mySearch to the text returned of the result
set myZipLocation to the POSIX path of (choose folder with prompt "Choose where to save your ZIP file")
display dialog "Enter the Name of Your Compress File" default answer ""
set myZip to the text returned of the result
tell application "Finder"
    set myFolders to every folder in folder myFolder
    set myFiles to {""}
    repeat with i in myFolders
        set myFiles to myFiles & every file in i
    end repeat
    do shell script ("mkdir " & the quoted form of (myZipLocation & "/" & myZip))
    repeat with i from 2 to count of myFiles
        if the name of (item i of myFiles) contains mySearch then
            set myPOSIX to the quoted form of (the POSIX path of (item i of myFiles as alias))
            do shell script "cp " & myPOSIX & " " & the quoted form of ((myZipLocation & "/" & myZip) & "/" & the name of (item i of myFiles))
        end if
    end repeat
    do shell script "cd " & the quoted form of myZipLocation & "&& zip -r " & quoted form of (myZip & ".zip") & " " & quoted form of myZip
end tell


Repair or recover drive from recovery mode

there may be no way to rescue the system without reinstalling Mac OSX.
you might look into booting into single-user mode
that said, to the extent you care about un-backed up data on the hard drive,  it might be wise to recover files BEFORE trying to reinstall/recover further
I have had good luck with DiskWarrior
You MAY be able to boot the broken disk/laptop in "Target Disk Mode" - if it has Firewire, if you have the cable, and if you have another Mac with Firewire to attach it to.
Failing that, you or a person with appropriate tools could remove the internal disk drive, attach it to a USB/SATA adapter of the appropriate kind and use DiskWarrior on it.

Good Luck!


Ipodwizard claims to do what you want and claims to not do any permanent damage.


There is no option integrated into MacOS, but I think the software TextExpander is doing what you are asking for. You can specify shortcuts like "adr" to paste your whole address for example.


Need menu bar app to show output of Terminal command every 60s

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "osx/cocoa"
include OSX

app = NSApplication.sharedApplication
statusitem = NSStatusBar.systemStatusBar().statusItemWithLength(NSVariableStatusItemLength)
while true
    statusitem.setTitle(rand(999))
    sleep 1
end
app.run

(If anyone who actually knows Cocoa wants to improve this, feel free to edit.) I more or less just copied the script from taw's blog: Personal experience points and OSX menulets, which was mentioned in display - Is there a way to have AppleScript output displayed in the menubar? - Apple.


Is it possible to make a mbr legacy bootcamp win 10 from a gpt partitioned catalina hdd 10.15.7 with bootcamp 6?

Using the boot camp assistant, loading a usb 2.0 usb stick with the iso and drivers, partitioning the drive in boot camp assistant, then letting it reboot into the usb 2.0 installed windows fine on a 2012 macbook air with all windows functionality.
no need to mess around with efi and weird workarounds to get audio and having screwy drivers.


Mac OS Sierra - Can't merge former time machine partition on external hard drive

Try First Aid button on  Disk Utility.
See what will came up. Maybe this way the app recovers / fixes all of your HHD issues.
Then try to erase (once more ) and merge your disk.
In many cases First Aid is a necessary step in order to get your job done.
Cheers.


How do I prevent my photos from automatically syncing from my iPhone to my Mac?

Firstly, you can't prevent your iPhone from doing things on the user end of tasks. Thats the user's job. Secondly if your concern is privacy, automatic sync to iPhoto is the lesser of your worries. iCloud automatically syncs your photos to the cloud which can be seen from any device using your apple ID. If your computer is a publicly used computer a specific password protected login account would be a better fit for you.

Regardless, to answer your question is a quick and easy method. Go to your spotlight search and type Image Capture or you can find the application in your 'Applications' folder.

When the device is plugged in you will see its title populate in the left sidebar. Click on it. This is what your screen will now show:

You may or may not see the bottom bar, if not just expand it to show more options and your screen will now look like this:

Simply change your method to No Applications. Alternatively, this can be done within iPhoto preferences, however, I just wanted to point this option out to you for future references.


Changing the Desktop background of the current Space does not change the background for other Space(s)

This is the default behaviour in macOS. If you have more than one Space, the desktop background is changed only for the current Space and not for the others.

Disabling use different spaces for displays have no relation to this behaviour whatsoever.


Mac ports package name search from command line?

port search $TERM

The MacPorts Guide is really useful for these sorts of things.


Can I upgrade my iPad 2 to iOS 9 after the release of iOS 10?

iOS 10 is not available for the iPad 2.

Because of that, you will continue to be able to upgrade to iOS 9.3.5 at any time in the future. Apple continues to sign the last available firmware for all devices, which will be iOS 9.3.5 for the iPad 2.

Examples of how the last supported version of iOS for a device continues to be signed: here


Folder actions has stopped importing photos into iPhoto

I decided to scrap the import into iPhoto option, and have no created an alias for the Auto Import folder within the iPhoto package itself, placed this in another folder, and created a new folder action within Automator to:
Copy finder items (as I want to leave the original picture in my uploads folder) which points to the alias for Auto Import.
Launch application, which opens iPhoto, and therefore imports anything within the Auto Import folder.

This seems to be working reliably after taking several photos on my phone, and rebooting the laptop several times.


Use emacs -f <function>

E.g.: emacs -f life in this case.

GNU Emacs Manual


How much will macOS High Sierra upgrade cost me?

First you'll need to check the compatibility of your Mac with the subsequently released version(s) of macOS. You can refer to the support document from Apple, Use the Mac operating system that came with your Mac, or a compatible newer version. This will help you in determining if your Mac can run macOS High Sierra (if not than what is the latest released supported by your Mac). Specifically, to check if your Mac can run macOS High Sierra, check if your model of Mac is listed under Can your Mac use High Sierra? section in the document, How to download macOS High Sierra.

As mentioned, you are already running OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5. All the subsequent releases of OS X (later re-branded as macOS starting with macOS Sierra 10.12) are released by Apple free of cost and can be easily downloaded using the Mac App Store available on your Mac.

If you can visit an Apple Retail store, you should be able get assistance with upgradation to the latest supported release for free. If you do not have one in vicinity, you can also check with an authorised Apple retailer and check for the pricing. There are no costs from Apple whatsoever for upgradation (in your case).


Mission Control slow and jerky on 2011 MacBook Pros: any fix?

Only a couple of suggestions, and neither is sure to work, but worth a try.

Safe boot - Start up in Safe mode with the Shift key held until the progress bar appears.  Select Restart (normally) at the login in window.  Safe boot mode does a Repair Disk during boot.

Re-install the OS - Your data and settings will be preserved.  There may have been a glitch in the original installation that could be fixed this way.

BTW, have you tested for this problem by logging in as a different User?

I have 3 Macs on Lion: 2007 iMac, 2009 mini, 2011 i7 MBP, none of which exhibit this problem.  This leads me to suspect that those with the problem have some 3rd party software in common, especially since it happens in such a wide range of Macs.


Is it possible to hide the scrollbar in Terminal?

As of OS X Lion 10.7 scrollbars can be hidden system-wide, including in Terminal, with

  System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars

If you have a “touch” input device, like a trackpad or Magic Mouse, they are hidden by default.


How to login into Gamecenter without my password

Connor, you can't access Game Center without your iCloud password. Otherwise I could access your Game Center account without your permission using only your email address.

If you've forgotten your iCloud/Game Center password, as Tetsujin suspects you have, visit iforgot.apple.com where you can reset it.


You don't need to tap and hold. You can just tap the URL and you will see a 'X' icon. You can tap the X to delete the URL and enter new URL. You can also enter directly without tapping the X as the text is already selected. Typing over will delete the existing text.


How not to miss the elimination of Optical Audio Output from 3rd to 4th gen Apple TV

The understanding in the question is correct.

With a very recent somewhat-high-end LG TV, I have been unable to find or to activate a feature that functions like Active Return Channel, nor one that is called a synonym of ARC or "pass through".

The conclusion is that when Apple omitted Optical Audio Out on the most recent Apple TV 4, they were basically assuming that those using an ATV4 to listen to music will upgrade their receiver and buy one centered on HDMI connections. Given the expected lifetime (and price) of nicer receivers, this is not necessarily a good thing, and so you may be better off with an ATV3 than an ATV4, until you're ready to upgrade your receiver.

But there is one caveat. If you stream your lossless audio files through AirPlay to an Apple TV (either 3 or 4) from your iphone, iPad, or Mac, you are not listening to lossless files on your sound system. This is fairly easy to confirm by a listening test. Presumably Apple designed things that way to conserve bandwidth (strangely, since a quick calculation will reveal that there is more than enough WiFi bandwidth to spare to transmit an audio stream with no further compression). It may even be the case that mp3 (or other lossy) files go through a compression-decompression cycle when they are sent from iOS/OS X to an Apple TV. I haven't been able to confirm this conclusively one way or the other.

Hence if you do listen to Apple-lossless files, you would not want to use AirPlay anyway (and there is no other way to go through the Apple TV). You then need a (dedicated?) iOS/OS X device hooked-by-wire to your receiver, and then it's a moot point whether your TV has ARC. It's even a moot point whether you chose Apple TV over the competition. There is of course a (significant) advantage in using a Mac rather than an iPhone/iPad since Macs provide an optical digital signal out. Using an iOS device (which would anyway be scarce on storage and would introduce its own problems if you hook additional storage) would indeed send a lossless file, but you'd still be losing by using whichever D/A converter Apple uses in their iOS devices. Whether this would be perceptible will vary from one setup to another.

Sequel question: how are things like on the Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Google Chromecast? Do any of these make it possible to transmit/receive lossless files (perhaps in the non-Apple-centric FLAC) from some device (Android, Linux, Windows, or Mac) without going through a compress-decompress cycle?


Is it possible to restore from Time Machine backup if there is no OS installed on main drive

Yes, it's possible via recovery (Hold during startup ⌘ Command R). If you can't find a Time Machine backup in recovery, try holding ⌥ Option during startup and after that choose Time Machine drive.


Web-based screensharing applications that works with MacOS 10.5 Leopard?

Have you tried Screenleap? I'm not sure which versions of Mac OS it supports, but it's worth a try.


What does "Does your app contain, display or access third-party content?" mean for me?

You seem to be of the understanding that answering "yes" to the question means that your app is not allowed on the App Store - that is not the case. You can just answer "yes" and continue with your app submission.

You will be asked if you have the rights to use the contents, or otherwise follow relevant laws in the countries where you will sell your app. If you cannot answer yes to that, you have a problem - not so much with Apple, but rather by risking getting sued (or worse).

If you do indeed answer yes, you do not need to provide any confirmations or documentation at that moment. You'll be able to continue app submission right away.

However note that as everyone else you have to follow the rules of the App Store Guidelines set forth by Apple. In particular, Apple requires that you upon request can document your authorization to use third party material, such as trademarks or patents. I guess this is likely to happen if a third-party complains to Apple that you're not authorized.


iPhone 5s: Which consumes more battery, 4G, or 4G LTE?

"Standard 4G" is kind of a meaningless phrase.  According to this article, disabling "LTE" means it's limited to either CDMA 3G or HSPA+.  HSPA+ is supposed to have performance comparable to LTE, so I would guess that if you disable LTE and see a "4G" icon, it means you're getting HSPA+.

PC Mag confirms that Apple (like their competitors and partners) started using "4G" to refer to any post-3G network, like LTE, WiMAX, and HSPA+.

Anyway, most of the articles I've found comparing power usage between HSPA+ and LTE suggest that LTE has slightly lower power consumption, but it seems to be a pretty small difference.  The signal strength where you are located probably has more impact than this setting.  Early LTE phones apparently sucked a lot of power even when idle, but with newer phones this seems to have been improved, e.g., this iPhone 5 user claims battery life is "nearly identical" whether LTE is enabled or not.

So you can try both settings and see which works better for you, but I wouldn't expect a huge power savings.


How to bypass the Lync for Mac error complying about incompatible version of Lync server?

See this link.
Basically, you have to edit the plist for Lync, and enter a registry key equivalent.
The explanation is below:

Basically, the equivalent to the registry keys for windows needs to be entered in the Lync config plist file on the mac, a file named MicrosoftLyncRegistrationDB.xxx.plist that you can find in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost.
In it, you will need to create an entry for each segment of the reg key path for the DisableServerCheck flag (all lower case). It should look like this:
hkey_current_user\
hkey_current_user\software\
hkey_current_user\software\policies\
hkey_current_user\software\policies\microsoft\
hkey_current_user\software\policies\microsoft\communicator\
hkey_current_user\software\policies\microsoft\communicator\disableservercheck
The value for each of the path segments is "<>" and type string. For the disableservercheck flag, the type is "Number" and the value is 1.
You can use a plist editor (there's a few free ones for the mac, or you can also use Xcode) to edit the plist file. The screenshot below shows you how it should look like.


How to create a recovery disk after using the up-to-date program?

Apple's Recovery Disk Assistant
...enables you to create a recovery USB. While this recovery USB does not contain the installer image, it is able to install Mountain Lion (see 3rd paragraph).
You can download the official software from Apple here. Note that you can create the recovery USB only if you have a Recovery HD partition on your Mac. You can verify this in the Terminal using: diskutil list.
The Recovery Disk Assistant requires just 1GB because is does not store an OS X installer image (usually named InstallESD.dmg). Instead it will download the latest version of Mountain Lion right before the installation - if the recovery USB has been created in Mountain Lion.
You are still able to use the recovery USB without internet access if you just want to open Disk Utility from it for example.


Select a cell within the table so that the column and row headers
appear.
Then click on the nine-dot square between in the top-left
corner between the column and row headers. The headers should
disappear and the table should be left with a faint blue selection
border.
Hit the Backspace/Delete ⌫ key on your keyboard.

The table should disappear.


Is it possible to develop an app only on specific device size?

Hope this helps you.
As of May 1, all new iPhone apps and app updates submitted must support the 4-inch display on iPhone 5. All apps must include a launch image of the appropriate size. Learn more about iPhone 5 support by reviewing the iOS Human Interface Guidelines.
And as per App Store Review Guidelines

2.10
iPhone Apps must also run on iPad without modification, at iPhone resolution, and at 2X iPhone 3GS resolution..Please refer this

Else Apple may reject your app if app is not as per apple review guidelines


In-app purchase or third party payment vendor for app subscription model for a physical device?

late but may be useful for new people

for unlocking features/content you shall use in-app purchase
for products/consumables (that not implies the previous item) you can use external payments like Stripe
if you want to avoid in-app purchase, you can do the netflix way, give the app without register/guest, just login with an account previously purchased in the web or android device. But for this your app should have a known brand, otherwise no one will go to your web, make a purchase, come back to your app and login.

source: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#payments


What tools are there for measuring Macbook wireless strength?

If you're just looking for a quick signal strength number, option-click on the AirPort icon in the menu bar. Under the connected network you will see several pieces of information:

RSSI is your signal strengh in dB. Higher (closer to 0) is better.

If you're looking for noise or the signal strength for multiple access points, I suggest checking out iStumbler:


I read that things slow down when it is less than 20% free on a SSD or HDD on a Mac. I noticed my read/write speed seemed to improve when I freed up some space to get near the 20%.  I don't know about IOS devices but 20% seems reasonable there as well.


Is there a mac utility that can magnify parts of the screen?

Go to System Preferences, then Accessibility. There will be a column on the left for Zoom, which you can use a keyboard shortcut to activate.

Once activated, hitting ⌥-⌘-+ will zoom the screen.


How to copy/paste a formula down an entire column in Excel 2011?

You need to use an absolute reference with $.

So that the cell references never changes when doing a copy and paste or fill change it from A1:B5 to $A$1:$B$5.

If you want you can even make a reference that is half absolute. The reference $D1 means that when you copy and paste the D will stay the same but the row number will change.


Can't print from OS X 10.7 to shared printer on OS X 10.6

Solved the Problem. The shared Printer was connected to a Belkin USB Hub, which again was connected through an USB slot to the Mac OS 10.6 Laptop. I disconnected the printer from the Hub and plugged it straight into the usb slot of the laptop, when I tried again print out a document, it succeeded


How can I find what is using the rest of my drive?

I use Daisy Disk to keep tabs on what's using up space on my disks. Like @Hoshts and @Joonas have mentioned in their comments on another answer it's not free, but gorgeous and easy to understand. Money well spent, in my opinion, unless you're just looking for a one-time solution.

One thing to keep in mind - the Mac App Store version of Daisy Disk is sandboxed - which means only the files your user can read will be counted.

If you use the direct download version of the app (which will assume the license from the MAS version if you install both and run the direct version after launching the MAS version one time and quitting it.) - it can run as Administrator and show all the files for all users on your Mac.


Apple Time Machine: Not backing up every hour

Time Machine backs up only the files that changed since the previous backup, to make future backups much faster, if nothing has changed on the Mac or the computer has been asleep then there's nothing to warrant a backup.


It's pretty ridiculous that this slipped both me and Parallels's support to the point that I went through all the effort above, but there it is - if you go to Parallels's preferences, this setting is under General > Virtual Machine icon. Select none.

I believe my question has implications extraneous to this particular case, but since the submission is under the Parallels's title and confers much specificity to the case, I'll close it as it is.


sms/imessage's allert don't work for one contact

is it possible that you have muted or limited the alert on this contact?

Or, if you have added them to the Spam or Block, then alerts would be suppressed.
https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-block-someone-on-imessage-on-iphone/

Open the Settings app → Scroll down and tap on Messages.
Tap on Settings then Messages on iPhone
Now, scroll down again and tap on Blocked → To check a person from this list

You can unblock them by taping on Settings → Messages → Blocked → Edit → Tap on Red minus sign → Tap on Unblock → Finally tap on Done.


Can I put this RAM into my iMac 27" mid 2010? (Corsair CMSO8GX3M2A1333C9)

Apple's memory upgrade page for your model iMac calls for PC-10600 SO-DIMMs.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4255

Those Corsair SO-DIMMs meet all the stated specifications, even though some sites erroneously list them as PC-10666 (Corsair lists them as PC-10600).

Furthermore, if you look through the reviews on Newegg and other sites for this memory, you can see reports of people using it successfully in their Macs.

So I would conclude that yes, it's safe to use it in your 2010 iMac.


Where to find online documentation for older versions of Swift?

If you're using a modern Apple Device, which you must be in order to develop with Swift 3, you can use iBooks' Swift 3.1 Guide. Once Xcode 9 and Swift 4 are finalized, this book may receive an update to Swift 4, but you should be able to decline the update.
Check out the book here: The Swift Programming Language (Swift 3.1)


'The requested version of macos is not available - macOS Catalina

You can check if you have a non-standard update source:

defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL

If CatalogURL does not exist, that's OK and the standard situation to pull from the non-beta updates. To force a beta source, you write this key (as root if needed with sudo)

sudo /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.15seed-10.15-10.14-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

Choose About This Mac > Software Update. Wait a moment. An item for macOS Catalina Beta appears.

You can request an update as well from the command line just as you set the default:

softwareupdate -al

Change the lower case L to a lower case I above and prepend sudo to download and install all updates.


I think an iPhone 6 is causing connection issues with other devices connected to my router (with Ethernet), how can I avoid it?

Troubleshooting is basically a process of elimination, but this one may be a little hard to do through the comments, so here we go.

TEST 1

Let's start by doing this test:

Switch Wi-Fi off in your iPhone settings (not just disconnect).
Totally shut down the iPhone.
Use your Wi-Fi as usual to play your real-time game for about a half hour and make a note of the results.
Switch the iPhone back on but do not switch Wi-Fi back on.
Use your Wi-Fi as usual to play your real-time game for about a half hour and make a note of the results.
Switch Wi-Fi back on in the iPhone and connect it to your Wi-Fi.
Use your Wi-Fi as usual to play your real-time game for about a half hour and make a note of the results.

After following the steps of test 1 you should have three sets of results to share back. This will greatly help you and the community to narrow down your problem, one way or other.

TEST 2

Okay, Power Line adapters are notoriously 'fussy' and it doesn't take much for something to interfere with the quality of their connection. Let's do this test:

Disconnect both ends of the Power Line connection, totally removing them from power etc.
Connect your MacBook Pro directly to the router via ethernet.
Ensure the iPhone is not connected to your Wi-Fi and play your real-time game for about a half hour and make a note of the results.
Now make sure the iPhone is connected to your Wi-Fi network and play your real-time game for about a half hour and make a note of the results.

Let us know the results.


Remove the default desktop space on a second monitor?

Apple does not seem to have provided a way to remove the 'normal' Desktop display in Mission Control and only allow Full Screen apps. However, you can broadly achieve most of what you want:

Tick "Displays have Separate Spaces" in System Preferences > Mission Control, then you can have Full Screen apps in a second display.

Then configure applications to only appear in Display 2 (right-click on the app's Dock icon; Options > "Assign to Desktop on Display 2").

While the apps are in Full Screen mode, you won't see the Desktop.


Disable File System Cache for USB Devices?

On SuperUser Q&A another user asked a similar question. The solution is a little bit tricky/efforty:

This should be possible by manually mounting the drive via the terminal. You'll have to eject the drive when you plug it in and then remount it in the terminal using the noasync option.
The best way to go about this would be to run mount in the terminal and take down the device so you know what to remount. Then umount /dev/disk1s1 (where disk1s1 is the device name) then mount -o noasync /dev/disk1s1. This method would also apply to most linux distros.
As you can see, it's easier to just remember to eject.


How To Launch Steam Games from Terminal?

To Run on Mac Location:

ll /Users/YOUR_USER_PROFILE/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/steamapps/common/

Command to start a game app directly:

open -Fa /Users/YOUR_USER_PROFILE/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Realm\ Grinder/RealmGrinderDesktop.app/Contents/MacOS/RealmGrinderDesktop

Details

man open

  -F  Opens the application "fresh," that is, without
           restoring windows. Saved persistent state is
           lost, except for Untitled documents.

  -a application
           Specifies the application to use for opening the
           file

How To Find Your (Game) Path:

Note: * lines are hyperlinks to images.

Open the Steam App
Navigate to Library *
Right Click on your game.
Open Properties
Navigate to the 3rd Tab Local Files *
Select Browse Local Files
Right Click on the GameName.App
Select Get Info *
Left Click & Drag on the Where
Right Click and select Copy *
Open your text editor and Paste

That will give you the path.

Open Terminal
Add open -Fa ToYourCopiedPath
Press Return/Enter
Your app will launch.


Weather app shows animation on one iPhone 4 but not another

The "Reduce Motion" setting in accessibility controls the movement in Weather.


Are WhatsApp voice calls recorded on your device?

The audio of the calls is not recorded and is not available in the app container.


Remove Catalina update files form High Sierra

Try doing a search for "Catalina" or "Big Sur" in Finder or delete the Install macOS [Catalina/Big Sur] from your ~/Applications folder.
Though that won't remove the reminder. That annoying little bit of Apple self promotion is near impossible to remove these days.


Is there really a Mid 2014 13-inch Macbook Air?

The simple answer here is yes, but the mid 2014 version was ONLY a processor bump. And most importantly the cpu bump was only in the two lower end models. Not the highest end i7.

Thus if you (like me) get the max spec cpu MacBook air, and click about this mac - it will say "mid 2013". If you get any other spec it will say 2014.

Confused? I was too!


Can OS X access files in my Dropbox account without using space on my local hard drive?

Update: See nassimhddd's answer below about ExpanDrive allowing you to mount your DropBox account as (external) drive - since
  its Mac version 3.0.3021 May 2013.

The short answer to this is: No. As far as I'm aware, you can't mount your Dropbox account as some sort of remote file share - its synced files are always written to your local disk.

That said, you can change the location of the Dropbox folder away from its default of ~/Dropbox, so if you have a separate internal or external disk you could put the Dropbox folder there.

You may encounter problems if Dropbox occasionally can't access the detached volume holding its folder, however. See here:

  Your Dropbox folder must be available when your computer boots and
  before the Dropbox desktop application starts. Some USB drives, for
  example, take some time to mount before your computer recognizes them.
  The Dropbox desktop application could start before such a drive is
  ready and get confused. You will receive an error and Dropbox will
  give you the opportunity to relink your Dropbox account or exit if it
  is unable to find your Dropbox folder.


Assuming that you have an iCloud backup since you tagged your question with the "iCloud" tag.

If your old iPhone was backed up via iCloud then you just start the Setup Guide (the thing you see when you first start up an new iPhone) and go through some basics like language and connecting it to your Wi-Fi network. After that you will be asked if you want to set up the phone as A new iPhone, From an iTunes backup or From an iCloud backup. Choose iCloud backup. In the following step you will need to enter your Apple-ID login credentials. After that your iPhone will start downloading the data and it will take care of everything by itself.

The Setup Guide is easy to follow. Just read carefully and follow the instructions.


It feels like this is happening a bit too often to blame on "Well
  sometimes ya just get a bad one!", and I'm wondering if I am
  overlooking other factors?

Yes!

Based on what you're doing, your using your drives not as a typical home user but more of a "pro" and you should be getting the hardware to match.  Most consumer (especially the entry level drives) have lower MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) numbers - higher is better - than their "workstation" or "NAS class" drives.  The higher end models also have longer warranties - typically 3 to 5 years.

There are some additional factors you may wish to consider:

Seagate drives are notoriously unreliable.  WD drives are better, but the really reliable ones are made by HGST.
Look to get a Thunderbolt enclosure, rather than a "consumer grade" USB drives.
Populate your Synology with NAS rated drives.  They are designed to run longer, cooler with greater reliability.

  Could it be an electrical issue? ... All my computer hardware is
  plugged into a couple surge protectors which are in turn plugged into
  a UPS batter backup/surge protector.

A battery backup is also a surge suppressor/protector so daisy-chaining one to the next is not a good idea - you could be creating issues if/when there are surges.  If you must add ports to your battery backup, use a power strip, not a surge protector.

Your Backup Strategy

It sounds like you're off to a good start with your backup strategy.  Here's a few points to consider:

Having RAID is good, but don't depend on it for backup.  RAID is designed to maximize data availability (up time), not be a backup.
The two USB drives attached to the RAID is a good idea.  However, you should be alternating backups between the two.  One for "odd" days and the other for "even".  This will require you to have to different backup jobs but it ensures your data is backed up to two different locations.  Also, to ensure you don't backup corrupted data....

Don't backup the backup!
Backup the actual data only!

Adding Crashplan is also an excellent idea.  Having this backup your files to an offsite location is a very smart thing to do.  Having a regimented backup workflow will ensure your access to data even if your NAS and both backup drives are inaccessible.


Assuming you have access to the file from your Mac system, for example through a shared folder, you would run it locally (through Terminal) like this:

perl /path/to/windows/shared/folder/scriptname.pl

In AppleScript this would be something like:

do shell script "/usr/bin/perl /path/to/windows/shared/folder/scriptname.pl

However, this still executes the Perl script from your local Mac instance. If you want to actually invoke it on the Windows server, that's a different ballgame. This would require you to setup remote access, through for example SSH or IIS on the Windows machine.


How do I spin down a secondary disk when not mounted?

Solution is a terminal command with which you can control the sleep timer.
I set it to 1 minute.

sudo pmset -a disksleep VALUE

This still means the disk wakes up every hour for the time machine backup, and also every 15 minutes-ish for god knows what reason.

But its much better than before, just annoying that it regularly wakes up for a minute, which is distracting.


Could my spotlight search index have really been 2.5 GB on a 256 GB drive?

All that you write sounds perfectly normal to me.

    does it all somehow get indexed?

Yes it does.

    Is there some magic way to stop it from opening file types I'm not interested in indexing?

Well, not directly. But you can exclude folders, by either adding .noindex to the folder name, or by going into System Preferences → Spotlight → Privacy. You may want to move all the files you don’t want indexed into such a location.

Also see How can I make spotlight ignore certain file types and directories? As far as I know there’s no way to tell Spotlight NOT to index certain file types.


Find symbolic links (’s names) with Spotlight (Finder)

You can use the find command to show you the target of the symlink then have awk throw away the rest of the line.  Then wrap that in a loop that tells you what it's doing then feeds the names to mdimport:

for linktarget in $(find ${HOME} -type l -ls | awk -F'-> ' '{print $NF}'); do
    echo "importing ${linktarget}"
    mdimport "${linktarget}";
done

It's probably easier to cut and paste this little script since there are some spaces that are easy to miss.  (like the one after the arrow in the awk statement).


I found the answer in iTerm FAQs :: Where does iTerm2 store its settings?:

defaults delete com.googlecode.iterm2


How do I stop my iPod from playing audio books when I 'Shuffle Songs'

In iTunes, view info on the problem audio books and ensure "skip when shuffling" is checked.


Apple Mail in El Capitan - where is data that used to be in Accounts.pilst?

I recently tested Mail in a new User account to find all the files that are modified after adding an account to Mail.

These following files contain account info. I can't say with certainty that you will need to reset all files in order to reset your account. Remember to log out/in and empty the trash before resetting. Make sure you have backup if needed.

~/Library/Accounts folder

Accounts3.sqlite
Accounts3.sqlite-shm
Accounts3.sqlite-wal

~/Library/Preferences/MobileMeAccounts.plist

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist


Is Pinch To Zoom in TextEdit feature available in Lion?

No, not at the moment.  They decided to remove it in Mountain Lion for some reason...but they'll probably add it back due to complaints.


Why my "Copy picture of selected area to the clipboard" does not work as usual?

You can switch between area/window screenshot with a spacebar. Here's the Apple website about the screenshots.


Can I use El Capitan on a MacBook that is shipped with Sierra?

Nope, the 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro can not run El Capitan. The oldest it can run is 10.12.1 (16B2659).

If you attempt to boot El Capitan, it will present you with the prohibitory symbol.


I was able to update my 1st Gen iPad to iOS5. I would begin by shutting down the iPad and rebooting it. Make sure that all your apps are closed out and then try the upgrade again.


What font does the macOS Character Viewer use?

For any character you can see how different fonts display it in the Font Variation pane on the right side of the Character Viewer, and choose whatever seems closest.


MacBook Pro lags when at 0% and charging

This is known/expected behavior as the processor lags noticeably when the battery is removed on any recent MacBook to MacBook Pro. If you can avoid getting the battery below 10% or replace the battery - all normal performance should resume.

Is it possible to disable CPU throttling on a MacBook Pro with a completely dead (not recognized) battery?
How to disable the SpeedStep when using MacBook Pro without a battery?


How about:

On the Ubuntu machine, make a ZIP file of the installation package.
Copy this file across to the Mac, using your existing sharing setup.
Expand it on the Mac and run it.

Edit
The actual solution can be found in the comments below: use sudo mkdir /media/test; sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/cdrom /media/test to mount the CD on the Ubuntu machine.


Fixed.  After inspecting the exact JS error when accessing the twitter login page, the offending line was trying to access the browser local storage.

The "Privacy" settings in Safari had the "Block cookies and other website data" set to "Always".  I've set this to "From third parties and avertisers" and now it's working again.


Access back-up of Pictures folder on network drive

As it turns out, trying to set the permissions  via the command line does not work on NAS drives, as pointed out in the response to this question.    The mystery user ("daapd") that has ownership of the Pictures on the WD My Book LIve (MBL) is the name of the streaming service that streams the pictures, video, and  music on some shares of the MBL -- and this "user" appears to have exclusive read & write access to directories containing music, pictures and video on shares that are set to allow streaming.

I came across a solution stating "Just copy the contents to a windows computer" which works because the extended unix permissions do not prevent windows machines from accessing the data.

MY SOLUTION:

Since the extended *nix permissions prevent any user not named "daapd" to access those files, I created a user on my Mac named "daapd" and voilà, I could accsss the Pictures folder.  I then created a new share on my MBL with streaming disabled, and I copied the contents from the old share to the new share and I now have access to my data.


Since you're saying it prints from Preview correctly, then I'd actually combine all the PDFs into one single PDF and print the one document.

To do this in Preview:

Launch Preview
Navigate to and select all of the PDFs
Go to View > Thumbnails
Click on one of the thumbnails
Use commandA (or just go to Edit > Select All) to select all of them
Now drag all thumbnails onto the first one (you'll see a green plus symbol) and let go of your mouse
The first PDF now becomes a single PDF with 884 pages
Select the first PDF
Now hold the Option key down and go to File > Save As to save your  PDF as a different name

Once you've done the above, I would quit Preview and reopen it again, but only to open up your newly combined PDF. Then do a test print, say for pages 1 - 5 to see if it's going to do what you want. If so, then proceed to print the entire document (or perhaps in batches of 50 or 100 pages at a time).

NOTE: If you have trouble combining 884 pages into a single PDF, then maybe create 8 PDFs of 100 odd pages each.


Paragon-NTFS only let me save files into NTFS Drive from Finder Application

That error is not related to MS Office. It is a filesystem error related to writing to the NTFS disk. I'm guessing that the version of Paragon NTFS you have isn't compatible with Lion. Looking at Paragon's forum for Paragon they have v9.0 which should work better.

You can also check out the OSXFUSE project which provides similar support for writing to NTFS.


How to write a text in Terminal using AppleScript?

You can try something like, first copying the text to your clipboard, that you want inserted into Terminal, then have the AppleScript code paste the clipboard into Terminal.

tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    tell application "System Events"
        tell application process "Terminal"
            set frontmost to true
            repeat while not frontmost
                delay 0.1
            end repeat
        end tell
        keystroke "v" using {command down}
    end tell
end tell

If you have all of your Terminal windows set to open in tabs rather than separate windows, this following AppleScript code should account for any of the situations as mentioned by @user3439894 in his comment to your post.

tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    repeat until frontmost
        delay 0.5
    end repeat
    set windowCount to count of window
    if windowCount is not 0 then
        tell its front window
            set isMinimized to miniaturized
        end tell
    end if

    if windowCount is 0 then
        tell application "System Events" to tell application process "Terminal"
            set frontmost to true
            repeat while not frontmost
                delay 0.1
            end repeat
            keystroke "n" using {command down}
            delay 1
            keystroke "v" using {command down}
        end tell
    else
        activate
        repeat until frontmost
            delay 0.5
        end repeat
        delay 0.1
        if ((processes of selected tab of front window) is {} or isMinimized) then
            tell application "System Events" to tell application process "Terminal"
                set frontmost to true
                repeat while not frontmost
                    delay 0.1
                end repeat
                keystroke "n" using {command down}
                delay 1
                keystroke "v" using {command down}
            end tell
        else
            tell application "System Events" to tell application process "Terminal"
                set frontmost to true
                repeat while not frontmost
                    delay 0.1
                end repeat
                delay 0.5
                keystroke "v" using {command down}
            end tell
        end if
    end if
end tell


You can also fix the dock on a other screen:

Go to System Preferences
Click on Displays
Click on Arrangement
Swipe the white bar from one screen to the other

If this won't work, also check the alt + cmd + d keycombination to show / hide the dock.


Try turning off silent switch and turning up ringer volume.


Apparently, Server.app messed up /etc/bootpd.plist by inserting a </dict> in the middle of the configuration.


Anyone else having problems joining domain in OS X 10.10.2?

Alright, this was purely my own fault. After turning on Directory Services logging and discovering that no attempt was made it turned out to be the Ethernet jack the Mac was plugged into was going into another non-production lab environment. 5502 isn't super helpful by itself!


What is the simplest way to dual-boot linux?

Formatting a partition with Disk Utility on OS X and letting the Ubuntu installer do the rest of the work is a simple and straightforward approach.
The Ubuntu installer also takes care of configuring and installing the bootloader.

Theoretically, you could boot Linux with only Grub-EFI, as the Linux kernel supports direct EFI boot. But this requires a lot on work on Macs, because you need to configure and install grub-efi. See also this page.

So i recommend using rEFIt or rEFInd in order to boot Linux on a Mac.


How can I force-update HP printer drivers?

First tnx for the reactions.
I've found a different driver on the Mac mini with the printer-problem. HP update didn't work (Big Sur has issue, developer has to update). Trying to manually replace/update driver (maybe thru the terminal). Have to find out where drivers can be found in the system. Until then using printer share (tnx @David Anderson). Will be back when issue resolved but it isn't a showstopper (anymore) because I seldom print. Tnx guys, appreciate the help and directions.


Unable to use disk removed from Synology NAS with a Mac - wrong partition size showing

This usually happens for one of two reasons: Either your partition table is incorrect/corrupted, or you have a limiting disk interface converter connecting.

Corrupted partition table

You'll need to wipe the partition table and write a new one, which will then allow you to use the full disk.

Follow the instructions below the heading "Erase and repartition a device" on this link to do so:

https://support.apple.com/kb/ph22240?locale=en_US

If you want to be absolutely sure that you have wiped the partition table, then choose to make it an MBR table first, and then do it again and choose GUID the second time.

Limiting disk interface converter

Some old USB to SATA adapters actually limit what drive size they will report over USB. This is because they convey the number of sectors on the drive as a 32-bit number only. Your disk (3 TB) requires 36-bits to describe the number of sectors. This would make the drive report as approx. 750-800 GB instead of the correct size.

You'll need to use a different adapter to connect the disk to solve this.


Without Match, how do I remove songs from the cloud?

You can have her delete it / stop it being stored in the cloud (see this help page: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201323 ) - basically just click 'Also delete this song from iCloud'.

Alternatively keep them in iCloud but just turn off Automatic Downloads as suggested above by GeF.

EDIT: Remember, choosing to 'Also delete this song from iCloud' doesn't mean the purchase is wasted - you can always re-download previously purchased tracks.


How do I migrate the @me.com email from one Apple ID to another?

No - Apple doesn’t split the mail accounts or aliases - once one is associated with one account, there’s no releasing it or migrating it or reassigning it. I’ve tried twice to do this with support and it got escalated to engineering both times.

The answer was no - set up forwarding or make a new mail account. Maybe this changes, but Apple treats an email associated with an AppleID in any way as unmovable. The only time I’ve had any relenting from that stance was for rescue and security emails. I argued that then can’t tie my external address to one AppleID since I may choose to move to a new ID for the reasons they explicitly designed.

If you control the @ domain - you can have some measure of moving, but I wouldn’t assume you could move it on to a new account - just that you could discard it and never use it on the new account if we’re talking about the AppleID and not a secondary mail.

If in doubt, get in writing from Apple before you change that they confirm it will be reversible. That saved me when I got my rescue mail and needed them to fix it like they told me. Without written confirmation, I suspect I might have gotten a no.


Green screen while starting up MacBook Pro

Seems like a hardware issue, probably GPU. Run Apple Diagnostics and something GPU heavy like Unigine Heaven and see if it exhibits any issues. In any case, I'd say take it into an Apple store and explain your situation.


I know this is probably a little late but I hope it helps someone else.

I found the reason Safari was using so much CPU was due to faulty permissions. It was stuck in a loop trying to access a file it couldn't.

To see if this might be an issue for you run:

sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs /

And see if there are any files wile damaged permissions.
For me it was:

Permissions differ on "Library/Java", should be drwxr-xr-x , they are drwxrwxr-x .
User differs on "private/var/db/displaypolicyd", should be 0, user is 244.
Group differs on "private/var/db/displaypolicyd", should be 0, group is 244.

So it is a good chance Java permissions are the culprit. To fix run:

sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --repair --standard-pkgs --volume /

And then restart Safari. For me this immediately dropped CPU use from 150% to 14%.

One should note if you have 100s of faulty permissions, it could be an early sign of disk failure. As always, keep backups.

I hope this helps someone else out there.


How can I open my Downloads folder in one click?

If you have the Downloads stack in the Dock, you can ⌘-click it to open a new Finder window to the Downloads folder.
If you want to create an AppleScript application to put in the Dock that when single clicked opens a new Finder window to the Downloads folder bringing it to the top without bringing other Finder windows to the top also, then the follow line of AppleScript code is all that's needed to be saved as an AppleScript application and placed in the Dock:
do shell script "open $HOME/Downloads"

If you want it to always be in the same location on the screen and set to a particular view and size, you can use information in my answer in question you linked in your OP.
Example:
do shell script "open $HOME/Downloads"
tell application "Finder" to ¬
    tell window "Downloads" to ¬
        set {current view, toolbar visible, bounds} to ¬
            {list view, true, {1475, 871, 2499, 1360}}

Notes:

If the Downloads folder is already open it will just bring it to the front without bring  other Finder windows to the front also.
If you close the Downloads folder it will bring other Finder windows to the front and this is the default behavior and has nothing to do with having opened the Downloads folder with this script.


Headphone audio with Mini DisplayPort to HDMI cable

Yes you can, by going into the system preferences -> Sound.
Then select the tab: Output and select your output there.

As a shortcut you can ALT-click the volume icon in your top bar to quickly switch between outputs.


What might be causing Safari 6.0.2 to crash several times a day?

It appears to have been due to me having an older version of the 1Password Safari extension which had a bug with Mountain Lion. I thought I had the latest version because I had the latest version of 1Password installed, however to update the browser extension, you need to run the browser install again.


The system-wide spell-ckecker is accessed through System Prefs > Keyboard > Text... top right, 'Correct spelling automatically'...
 but I'm not sure Chrome doesn't just ignore it, it does most other things set system-wide.

If you look in the Edit menu in Safari, for instance, you'll see "Spelling and Grammar" & also "Substitutions"
Chrome only has part of the Spelling and Grammar menu, & Substitutions is missing entirely.

So, I think the TL:DR is Chrome can't/won't do this.


Connecting new 2014 Mac Mini and 2009 Mac Book Pro thru one VGA display

Both MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini have Mini-DisplayPort on them.
You can connect the Mini-DisplayPort to an Minii-DisplayPort-to-VGA converter and then,
connect VGA cable on it to a two-port VGA DDM KVM switch, such as ConnectPRO's UR-12+.

I had been using this configuration for years without problem.


How can I hide a recurring Calendar event?

The best way to do this is to create a new calendar within the Calendar app, label it what you'd like (perhaps "Hidden"?) and move any events you'd like to hide over to this calendar. When done, just uncheck the box next to the calendar and it disappears.


How to prevent text replacement from being triggered by alphanumeric characters?

When I'm using Messenger on Chrome, this triggers text replacement and becomes "2 like-you arei". This doesn't happen on StackExchange, but it does happen on Messenger.

Text Replacements work on apps that utilize the Cocoa interface.  This means any Apple application and any third party app like Chrome, will have text Replacements compatability.
To better control the replacement triggering as  well as gain functionality whether or not you're using a Cocoa based app, you need an an app like Text Expander ($3.33/mo) or aText ($5).   Both can be configured to use a short cut, a hot hey, or  delimiter (like Tab) to trigger it.  So in your example, you'd have to type "ur" followed by Tab for it to trigger.  Firefox, however doesn't  support it.
An alternate method would be to put a special character in front of your replacement pattern like a tilde (~) or a an exclamation  mark (!) as its highly unlikely you'll ever type that sequence of characters as a "normal" sequence.  This has the advantage of being free, but you don't get the increased functionality of the 3rd party apps like customized triggers and universal availability (not limited to Cocoa based apps)


"brew install python3" fails to compile pyexpat

I eventually fixed this by

uninstalling XCode altogether (and relying on the xcode-select command line tools)
cherry-picking this commit into my homebrew-core Taps directory
reinstalling python3


iCloud sign out not possible on High Sierra

I was able to fix the issues by deleting the files in ~/Library/Accounts/ and ~/Library/Preferences/MobileMeAccounts.plist then logging out and in again before opening the panels again. Warning: This also removes every other account you have listed in the accounts folder.


Cannot install macOS Mojave on external spinning drive. Error: This Mac can only install macOS on APFS-formatted drives

You are almost there. Check again in Disk Utility app.

Format

You will find APFS as an option in the Format pop-up menu.

Scheme

You make the same choice of GUID Partition in the other pop-up menu Scheme.


Using an iMac to extend a Wireless network

Is this what you're looking for? WiFi Sharing

If so, you can create a network with the same SSID and password as your existing network


App Store not allowing me to upgrade to Sierra

Forget that guide. It is incorrect at this point and giving you misleading instructions.

The Update tab is only for updates for your currently running system.

As you phrased correctly in your question title, you want an upgrade.

That means a completely new system.

Currently, the Sierra installer – or upgrade – is on the first tab. The Featured-tab marked with a star. Top link on the right. Text only.

You may also search for "macOS Sierra" in the search box, upper right corner.

All respecting the prerequisite that your machine is supported for this kind of upgrade.


Mac OS X El Capitan, Option key alone as keyboard shortcut

It seems that modifier keys like cmd, ctrl, option, shift cannot be used alone and have to be combined with other keys as shortcuts. Alternatively you may also try using option + space as the shortcut to toggle input sources.


The used space will likely be cached images, audio and video - there's not a lot you can do to clear the space with the exception of uninstalling it! Don't trust apps that claim they can save you space - they generally end up breaking things!


How to print full presenter notes without slides in Keynote

This applescript should do it for you:

global presenterNotes
tell application "Keynote"
    activate
    open (choose file)
    tell front document
        set presenterNotes to presenter notes of every slide as text
            set the clipboard to presenterNotes
        do shell script "pbpaste > ~/keynote-notes.txt"
    end tell
    quit application "Keynote"
end tell


How make BBEdit Color Scheme follow system dark mode setting

BBEdit 13.0 introduced automatic color scheme switching based on the prevailing OS color scheme. (And it runs on macOS 10.14.2 and later, so you'll be able to use it.) Here's a screen shot of what it looks like in 13.1 (the current public release, as of when I wrote this answer.)
This is probably a simpler and more reliable solution than trying to automate it externally.


Boot Camp ‘bootable USB drive could not be created’ and ‘EFI system partition formatted as NTFS’

I had the same problem. I formatted the disk manually using disk utility to ms-dos first, restarted the bootcamp assistant and it worked.


I upload through the Safari browser. You have to be in desktop view, but it works every time for me.


How can I turn on my iPhone using assistive touch?

By default, charging will turn the phone on. You can try charging the phone.


How to recover data from a mac that crash on login?

Your response indicates that you can boot into the recovery partition so I am making that assumption for this answer.

If you can boot into the recovery partition (accomplished by holding down Command+R while your computer is booting), there are a couple things that may work. Either using Disk Utility to create a disk image (easy but time-consuming) or using the terminal to transfer files (hard if you're not comfortable with the command line but more likely to work).

To create a disk image:

Connect an external hard drive to your computer, then boot into recovery mode by holding down Command+R at boot until you see the Apple logo.
Choose a language, then select Disk Utility from the options you are presented with.
In Disk Utility, you should see a list of all disks connected to your computer on the left-hand side. Choose the one that says Macintosh HD (or whatever you call your HD).
Click the New Image button from the top of the window.
Change the Where field to your external hard drive but leave the other settings alone (Image Format: compressed, Encryption: none), then click Save.
It will take quite a while if it works but, once done, you will have a mountable disk image containing all of the files from your computer. Test it by opening it on a working computer before erasing your HD though (I've made that mistake before).

If that fails, you can use Terminal to transfer files from the recovery partition by following these steps:

Connect an external hard drive to your computer, then boot into recovery mode by holding down Command+R at boot until you see the Apple logo.
Choose a language, then click on the Utilities menu option from the menu bar and select Terminal.
Once in the terminal, you can use standard terminal commands to find and copy data from your internal drive to your external drive.

I can add more info on using the Finder to copy files if you need it but this is a useful primer.


Toggling iterm2 with F12 hotkey on touchbar doesn't work

Turned out the issue was in Karabiner-Elements, after enabling "Apple internal keyboard" under Devices cmd+F12 started to work fine. After all, the issue wasn't in iterm2 ignoring F12 but in the fact that cmd+F12 combination didn't work.


Is it faster to resize a Time Machine partition, or completely wipe it and back up again from scratch?

Unfortunately, I cannot give a catch-all answer. So my suggestion is to resize the partition, and, chances are that that may be faster. But if I'm being truthful, there are too many variables to determine which method would be objectively better at which sizes and such. Sometimes, these things will just take their time and no matter how you do it, you will be spending a significant amount of time waiting, so yes. Just choose a method and wait it through.


I don't know that you can reorder them, and they don't reorder themselves, but you can remove unwanted channels, according to this blog entry:
http://imho.nu/iMHo/media-player-position/.
Essentially, you SSH in and rename the file of channels you don't use. The website gives some more detail, so I would check it out.


How to cancel Finder search via keyboard?

It depends on your locale and how you started the search:

If you started the search with no window open, it's simply ⌘W (which closes the window)
If you started the search in an open window, it's ⌘[ (US)(or e.g. ⌘Ö (German)) which goes one step back to the previous window. The shortcut is usually visible in the menubar of the Finder > Go > Back.


Where osx 10.10 notification center settings are stored

The database has moved on Yosemite. The following command takes to you to its new location:

cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`/com.apple.notificationcenter/db


Turns out, the bracket cable is broken. Nothing is wrong with the hard drive.


Here's how to export a Terminal theme (profile settings) from Terminal->Help->Terminal Help, search for "exporting".

To export a theme (profile settings file):

  Export profile settings

  Choose Terminal->Preferences, then click Profiles
  Drag a profile from the Profiles list to the Finder

  Terminal creates a settings file in the Finder that can be used on
  another computer.

To import a profile setting:

  Import a settings file

  If you want to use the settings from another computer, you can import
  a Terminal settings file from that other computer.

  The file name of the Terminal settings file usually ends with a
  “.terminal” extension.

  Before you can import the settings file, it must be exported from the other system and placed in a location where you can access it.

  Choose Terminal > Preferences, then click Profiles.
  In the Finder, locate the settings file, then drag it to the Profiles list.


Can I prevent OS X 10.8 Mail.app smart mailbox configuration changes/corruption?

The problem indeed was with synchronisation: my iMac had this account configured as name@company.com, while MBA had this account configure as name.alias@company.com. Once I have deleted all IMAP accounts from both iMac and MBA and created it once again, problem disappeared.


Reducing Lion OS Footprint by removing unnecessary files/folders

We get a lot of questions about this topic here. You can search for earlier similar questions and answers.

Backup first

Make a full backup of everything, a complete disk image, before you go on a spree to delete resources from your Mac.

Deleting More Unused Human Language Resources

Monolingual, which is free, can delete unwanted language support files in the /System/Library/ and /Library/ folders itself, whereas XSlimmer (which I also use) is only set up to delete language support files in the Applications folder.

iPhoto

You can "thin out" iPhoto by removing its voluminous printing templates, but if you delete them, you won't be able to print anything from iPhoto at all.

Right-click on iPhoto in /Applications/iPhoto/ and select "Show Package Contents". You'll discover several hundreds of megabytes of files in /iPhoto/Contents/Resources/Themes/. You can actually delete these (authentication required) but it will change the behavior of the iPhoto app.

Speech synthesis voices

Removing system support files from the /System/Library/ folder is dangerous. The only files I know of that you can safely delete are the speech synthesis voices in /System/Library/Speech/Voices/. You should leave one voice in there should you ever need that feature.

Fonts

You can save several dozen megabytes by deleting certain Asian fonts if you don't need them. Don't delete system fonts directly in the Finder. Rather, do it through the Apple Font Book application, which will prevent you from deleting the "reserved" system fonts that Mac OS X expects to see when it boots up, but permit you to delete "non-essential" fonts.

Screen savers and desktop pictures

Screen savers are in /System/Library/Screen Savers/.

/Library/Desktop Pictures/ has a couple of hundreds of megabytes of files you don't need.

Dictionaries

Mac OS X has a Japanese dictionary and thesaurus, several hundred megabytes in size,  in /Library/Dictionaries/. You can safely delete these if you will never need them.

GarageBand and iDVD files

If you do not use GarageBand or the older iLife program iDVD, you can save many tens of gigabytes by deleting their applications but especially their support files in the /Library/ directory.

With regard to GarageBand, depending on your installation, several gigabytes of data can be removed from two places:

/Library/Application Support/GarageBand/

/Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple/Apple Loops for GarageBand/

Printer drivers

Depending on your installation, you may have several gigabytes of printer drivers for printers that you have never actually used. If you are willing to take the trouble, you can delete everything in /Library/Printers/. The next time you turn on one of your printers and try to print to it, Mac OS X Lion will prompt you to download and install the driver needed for that printer alone.

Utilities to help you find files to delete

There are several utilities to list all the files on your hard drive and sort them by file size in various types of charts and graphs. These include: OmniDiskSweeper, which is free; WhatSize, a commercial app; and DaisyDisk. All these are useful not only for looking at system files but also for examining your Documents and user data. You'll find old files that you don't need and can archive or delete, saving further disk space.

Just remember

Just remember that if you do not know what you are doing, you might damage your system and then the only remedy would be to do a complete re-installation of your OS, which would put you right back where you started.


Increase fade in/out from/to black time in iMovie 10.1.4?

No, you cannot change the fade time in Settings > Fade Out to Black.

Even the manual Transitions > Fade to Black does not work well because it fades to black too quickly (in about 1/3 of the duration of the transition), then it's black for the remaining 2/3 of the duration.

If you want a linear fade to black that you can set the duration, just add a Cross Dissolve to the end of the timeline and set the Duration of transition.


It's tough to tell precisely what you're after.  Perhaps you could give an example of what you're looking for.

My first response is to recommend that you look into R http://www.r-project.org/ and some of the GUIs based on it.  It's quickly becoming a standard in any field requiring statistical analysis, from quantitative finance, to medicine, to social sciences.

It has a hideous programming language but a huge package archive http://cran.r-project.org/.  I would recommend poking around the statistics stack exchange site for pointers, but some notable GUIs include RapidMiner (http://rapid-i.com/content/view/181/190/), RStudio (New and just getting out of the gate, so don't expect a lot right now http://www.rstudio.org/), Red-R (http://www.red-r.org/), R Commander (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/), and Rattle (http://rattle.togaware.com/).  R is also integrated in SAGE, with which you may already be familiar.  One huge benefit of R is Sweave, which allows integration with LaTeX, so your papers can render your data and publication at the same time.

If you just want a graphing solution, WaveMetrics IGOR (http://www.wavemetrics.com/) is probably the best bet.  It's available on Windows and Mac OS so you can share files with other people fairly easily.

KaleidaGraph (http://www.synergy.com/) and pro Fit (http://www.quansoft.com/) are notable options as well.

One of the secrets you'll find out when hanging out on various visualization forums, especially Edward Tufte's (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1), is that a large number of the published graphs (especially his) often start in Excel and are exported to be manipulated in Adobe Illustrator.  You may have a graph in mind that comes from this pipeline, which has a large manual effort but a magnificent potential output.  I've also done similar with Mathematica (my tool of choice) when needing print-quality output.


It's default behaviour and it is not really problematic. If you deactivate it, the terminal will see default python installation, 2.7. That is troubling if you're using conda for python > 2.7.

If you're troubled by the (base) appearing in the prompt, Run:

open ~/.bash_profile

and add this line at the end

conda deactivate

How do I remove the source (base) from my terminal?
How to get rid of (base) inside terminal app in 10.14.6?


Erase signatures from the Mac OS Catalina V10.15 Preview app forever

Signatures are stored in a property list file at the following path:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.signatures.plist

You can remove this file and empty your trash to be sure they're gone. Any security/assurance you need beyond this will require advanced techniques or a complete wipe of your hard drive.


WindowServer and kerneltask using a lot of CPU in Big Sur

I will copy my answer from WindowServer high CPU usage, spikes when moving cursor on M1 MacBook Big Sur, as the problem and probable cause appear to be the same:
Big Sur has many known issues related to UI performance. It’s almost certain that you’re experiencing one of these bugs, and so you’re unlikely to be able to do much about it yourself. We can try to confirm or refute this hypothesis if you’d like.
Does this occur if you’re running in Safe Mode? (Shift during boot) If so, do the following in Safe Mode. Otherwise, do it when the problem occurs.

Run the following command to enable kernel symbolication: sudo nvram boot-args="keepsyms=1" (this may require you to disable SIP first).
Reboot your machine and don’t open any apps except for Terminal.
Do the minimum required in order to reproduce the problem.
In Terminal, run the following, making sure you’re only running it during the window of time that you experience the system slowdown. (In particular, do NOT have Activity Monitor running when you do this.): sudo spindump -reveal -noProcessingWhileSampling
After waiting for 10 seconds to collect a sample and another minute or two to symbolicate and format, you’ll get a file in /tmp/spindump.txt that contains a stackshot of every process.
Upload the file to PasteBin or some equivalent place and we can take a look to see what’s causing the CPU usage spikes.


If you can't uncheck it, the app doesn't support it. App Nap requires support from the developer in the app for it to be available. In this case, IDEA is a Java app which doesn't support App Nap.


How to draw onto a shape that I just drew in Preview.app?

In Preview app and once the shape is drawn, you can only move, rotate or resize it.
Here is an article that comes from the Apple's Preview User Guide :

You can add a shape to a PDF or to an image using the Shapes tool in the Markup toolbar, and then rotate the shape or change its sides or angles.

If the hand cursor persists or the shape you just drew does not suit you : click on the Sketch or Draw button again to draw a new shape.
If you want to draw onto a shape you have just added : close the image preview you were editing after saving it and re-open the file so the shape will be considered as part of the image.


Notes.app on Mountain Lion: How can I change the default folder view?

I guess the answer's 'no', then. Will send feedback to Apple about it and hope that it changes in a future update.


Bought first mac ever (mac mini), but stuck on install

The second image, at least, clearly indicates that your computer wants you to turn on the mouse. You need to have a mouse either plugged in through USB, or available to pair via Bluetooth. You say you already have a keyboard plugged in, so that should be okay.


Recompiling bash to avoid shellshock seems to have messed up bash

Well, wget isn't installed by default on Mavericks. You could install it through homebrew though.

If you installed wget yourself at one time then you may just need to adjust your $PATH to find it again.

PATH=/path/to/wget:"${PATH}"

Take a look in /bin and /usr/bin to see what tools are installed and try one of them to see if Bash is working correctly.


How do I set a textfields string to a variable in AppleScript?

You must use a method from the NSControl class --> Getting and Setting the Control’s Value

textField's setStringValue:variable1 -- variable1 must contains a string


Can I delete any of the default apps the come with OS X?

Instead of Uninstalling these apps, you could just hide them.

Doing this in Terminal:
sudo chflags hidden /Applications/Chess.app
Will hide the application from sight, but will still be there.

Here is the link for the source:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20091229093051878


Might be interesting if you have a MacBook...

http://mac360.com/2011/05/free-add-motion-detector-security-to-your-mac/

  iAlertU is an alarm system for your Apple MacBook that uses the built
  in motion detection to trigger the alarm and the iSight to capture the
  image of the thief. Among many other features, it incorporates the
  ability for users with iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to connect to and
  control iAlertU remotely.


"macOS Sierra Update" could not be verified

I was able to update by using the combo updater for 10.12.3. The DMG file can be downloaded outside of the App Store and I can explicitly know that the file is good because it verifies itself.


How do I regain access to Font Book? It opens, hangs, then requires Force Quit

Make a backup of /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/FontCollections, and then delete that folder. Most likely, it's a corrupt font collection. Then, recreate the folder, and add each one back if you really want to investigate.

Otherwise, just delete the collections and start over.


how to cancel download of iOS7 on iPhone

You can probably back up your iPhone with iTunes and then restore that backup, and that should cancel the update.

Restore Back Up and not Restore iPhone

**There is another way too, which just worked for me: your iPhone can't install the update if it doesn't have the free space available, and this is a pretty big update.  You can simply copy a bunch of large files to your iPhone (e.g., lots of music or audiobooks) and the update will stop and you will get a message saying that the download cannot finish installing due to lack of space.  This essentially stops the update (and then you can go back in and immediately remove the big files that you moved on there).


Mac office, outlook keep calendar invite in e-mail box

It's simple (until MS changes the pref on this): just accept the invitation to the meeting from the calendar, NOT your inbox.


Retina Nvidia Control Panel Settings for Gaming

Here are my settings for BF3 - I also have a rMBP (15"). You can modify these settings under Manage 3D Settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel:

I leave everything else to default, except I also turn off Anisotropic Filtering.

For the above settings to take effect, the following setting must also be set under Adjust Image Settings with Preview:

Also, don't forget about BF3's settings. I use Realmware BF3 Settings Editor to edit settings out of the game.


Is the iPhone magnetometer sensitive enough to detect solar storms?

I don't think anyone here will be able to give you a definitive answer to this, unless of course they've tried to do something similar.

Apple only provides very basic specs in terms of its sensors (e.g. accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, etc) and doesn't go into their individual specifications.

However, considering that anyone can build a magnetometer from easily available materials to measure slight changes in Earth’s magnetic field due to solar storms, my guess would be that an iPhone's magnetometer will pick up on these fluctuations as well. But of course, this is nothing more than an educated guess.


How to lock the keyboard in Mac OS X, but not the screen?

KeyboardCleanTool is a tool which 'locks' the keyboard. It can be enabled or disabled with the mouse.


Password Hash - External drive encrypted with Disk Utility

The disk encryption employed by Disk Utility does not store your password as a hash. Thus is there no hash to get, and John the Ripper is not the right program for brute forcing this type of encryption.

For File Vault encrypted disks, you could look at a program such as VileFault to try brute forcing the passphrase.


What is the max number of SMS & MMS messages that the iphone can store?

If there is a limit apple has not posted that information on the web as I've not been able to find anything related to that.  I did turn up a few threads back from 2011 and the iOS 5 release that claim the SMS limit is 75,000 messages.  Whether that is accurate or not I do not know.

In my research I also found this application that you can use to download messages off your phone and onto your computer.  You could use this to archive old messages if you are concerned about message limits.  This can be used for SMS and iMessage.  Haven't tried it myself but it looks like a neat tool.

http://deciphertools.com/tm-mac2.html


Music app on iphone resets track to start after a while

According to this:

  I contacted Apple about this bug. It is not a bug. It is a deliberate
  UX decision of a fascist UX designer. Restarting songs should be the
  user's decision. Clearly somebody at Apple does not understand that UX
  is all about the behavior of the end user. This makes me very angry.
  Anger is the result of failed UX design. Clearly I could always
  restart songs of I wanted to with the back button. I now have
  absolutely no way to continue listening to music where I left off.
  This decision fixed nothing. Sadly its only one of many many decisions
  since 2008 that flies in the face of well thought out UX design in the
  pursuit of "features".


The 3rd party software may scan the raw data for photo files and identify them by whatever signature it may find (JPEG or other). Mac OS X doesn't come with that feature since it naturally assumes the file system will work correctly and it does everything thru the file system. Data recovery software just isn't a standard feature of an operating system.

PhotoRec is a well-known multi-platform software that would probably be able to help in your case and is free/open source if you want to try that. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
"PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted."

Be aware, the more you write data to your hard drive, the more chance the underlying data that might be recoverable will be destroyed by overwriting. The best way to do it would be by removing the hard drive and using it as a secondary drive to another computer that's running PhotoRec to completely minimize the chance of overwrite damage.


You can back up as many iDevices to your computer as you please (technically). On my computer, I sync and have backed up at least three different iDevices.

All you need to do, is plug in your iPod Touch to your laptop, open iTunes, and back it up. It will know the difference between your iPod touch and iPad.

The difference comes in if you sync music from a computer (but that isn't relavent to this question, so I won't elaborate).


Finding the directory an application uses for temporary files

There are a few tools you can use to monitor file accesses but the two I'd recommend are (with their manual page descriptions):

opensnoop - snoop file opens as they occur. Uses DTrace.
lsof - list open files

Both are shipped with Mac OS and should do what you need. You'll need to run opensnoop in a terminal session before you start your cloud backup (it only displays changes after it's started) but lsof can display detail about all currently open files.


I'd guess at 11pt, SanFransisco.

Standard list views are 12pt, the headers are smaller, but not small enough to be 10.

You can test by eye...

Open any finder window
Hit  Cmd ⌘   J
Change the text size until it appears to match the status bar.
Zooming the screen might help comparison [ Opt ⌥  + scroll wheel by default]

This is a quick attempt at matching, artificially zoomed in Photoshop...


Upgrading the from OS X 10.6 to OS X Server 10.6 in-place to remove the 10-user FTP limit in client?

No - server needs additional packages to be run at install time and there is no general upgrade path or migration assistant to move a client mac to server.

Even at $499 Snow Leopard Server provides a lot of bang for the buck - but if you can compile open source and don't need this NOW a free solution might make more sense.

I've never had to bypass the limit - but my first step would be turning off the mac delivered ftpd and compiling Pure-FTPd (you need to use PAM when you compile for Max OS X)

Once you confirm the new binary works as planned for more than 10 users, you can dig into launchd and set it up to call your ftpd instead of the built in one.


Are the Retina MacBook Pro 15" suitable for PC (Windows) gaming?

There are a great many games that support 2880x1800 and most of them support 2560x1600 (Cinema, Dell, and HP 30" resolutions)

Windows 7 & 8 don't support the quad-pixel and dual-pixel modes of OSX, they do things a bit differently. You always have the 2880x1800 resolution, and simply select larger font size (150% in my case).

Most games will work out fine, but some will need some tweaking (mostly selecting the option Disable display scaling on high DPI output on the compatibility tab.

If you regularily use an external monitor i would reconsider the retina display. Having upgraded to it from a 17" i5 I found out the hard way that neither OSX nor Windows can display different DPI to 2 monitors, hence my 30" Dell is pretty much useless.


cgpdftraster quit unexpectedly: Report sent to apple; just after installing Sierra ; canon 640 will not print from rear tray

From Cannon KB : Canon PIXMA MP640

  Please Note: There are currently no macOS 10.12 Sierra printer drivers available for PIXMA products. This issue is being investigated and we hope to have these drivers available soon.

I guess you'll either have to wait, or go back to El Capitan.

It's always wise to check compatibility for mission-critical apps & devices before jumping to a new OS.


Apple MacBook Pro 2013 with 512Gb SSD cannot install OS X

Usually you shouldn't be urged to restore the backup twice. Probably something went wrong in the first and/or the second run.

To quickly resolve your problem boot to Internet Recovery Mode or an external drive/thumb drive containing a Recovery HD or full OS X, erase/reformat your internal drive and restore the 10.10.3 backup. If you boot to IRM or a second drive you may manipulate the internal disk without any restrictions.

Just erasing a volume is not recommended because it might not recover any faulty or wrong partition table. So better repartition the drive.

Boot to Internet Recovery Mode by pressing altcmdR. The prerequisites for an Internet Recovery are listed here: Recovery/Internet Recovery.
In a few words you need the latest firmware update installed, either ethernet or WLAN (WPA/WPA2) and a router with DHCP activated for a successful internet recovery.
On a 50 Mbps-line it takes about 4 min (presenting a small animated globe) to boot into the Recovery Netboot image which is loaded from an Apple server.

(Alternatively you may boot to an external drive containing a Recovery HD or a full OS X system or an OS X thumb drive.)
open Terminal and enter:

    diskutil cs list

copy the UUID of the Logical Volume Group (it's the first one listed) and enter:

    diskutil cs delete UUID

The content of the main volume will be lost doing that. A backup is required.
Quit Terminal and open "Disk Utility" and partition your internal disk: GUID partition scheme (use the "Options..." button at the bottom of the main pane for this), one partition, journaled HFS+.
Close "Disk Utility".
Attach your Time Machine backup drive.
Open "Restore from Time Machine Backup" and restore your main drive if you have booted from a Recovery drive.
If you've booted from a full OS X external drive just open Time Machine and restore your internal drive.


Remotely Access WD MyCloud EX2 Using Finder

Your router needs to forward the required ports to your NAS.

AFP: 548, 427
SMB: 445

Then you can connect to your NAS the same way you do now, but you'll have to use your EXTERNAL IP. If your external IP is dynamic (regularly changing), I'd recommend using a service like dyndns (which keeps track of your IP and binds it to a domain).


MacBook Pro fan is not running on default settings regardless of how hot it gets

Have you tried resetting the SMC?

For MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, and MacBooks where you can’t remove the battery on your own (i.e. it's a built-in battery), here’s what you do:

Shut down your computer
Keep the MagSafe adapter (or power cable) plugged in.
Press at the same time shiftoptioncontrol (on the left side of the keyboard) and the power button
Let go
Turn your computer back on with the power button.

Let us know if this resolves your issue.

[UPDATE]

A lot has happened in the Mac space (incl. the various MacBook models) over the past couple of years and the process for resetting the SMC can differ now due to additional criteria (e.g. if there's a T2 chip installed, etc).

For the latest advice refer to How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac on Apple's website.


Adding functionality to macOS pre-boot process

Apple doesn’t prevent you from running other EFI unless you have trusted OS / T2 chips. You can disable these security steps on Mojave and current T2, but that’s pretty manual and not automated.

You’ll want to look at tools like BootRunner or the two canoes MDS with automaton to automate the pre-boot environment for all modern Mac hardware and modern macOS.

Much easier to handle things with the tools Apple gives than trying to re-engineer EFI / customize things that don’t have sanctioned support. Extending PAM / authentication is long supported, but changing EFI is not something most enterprises take on in my experience.


You don't need to use grep at all:

[[ $(defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles) = 0 ]] && bool=true || bool=false
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool $bool
osascript -e 'quit app "Finder"'

defaults read prints boolean values as 1 or 0. For example True or YES as a string is also interpreted as a boolean value, but -bool true specifies the value to be actually boolean.


You could try testing the hard drive with Smart Utility, but it sounds like to me that it is your Ram that you installed. I have personal experience with bad/incompatible ram and the symptoms you are describing are exactly what happens if the ram is the aforementioned.