If you suspect your Mac may have malware or adware installed on it, I would recommend trying BitDefender, a lightweight antivirus app for Mac (available for free on the Mac App Store), which I have found to be especially good at detecting both adware and malware and then removing it. BitDefender scans your machine when prompted (good for an ongoing issue) but does nothing in the background.

If you want constant protection in the future (that promises to block malware from being downloaded onto your Mac in the first place, and has fulfilled its promise twice for me) you can try Avast, which is also free (but not available from the Mac App Store, just their website).

Hope this helps, let me know if your problem reappears in the future.


Contacts keep disappearing from iPhone 4 when iCloud is turned on

I've had this problem with iPhone 5
Updated IOS, about 2/3 of contacts disappear. Tried some of solutions, best one yet
Settings > Contacts>
Import SIM Contacts>
iCloud
And boom they are back, for now!


You forgot to install and launch the related launch daemon and modify some other things. To fix this do the following:

Copy a pre-made plist:

sudo cp /usr/local/opt/rstudio-server/share/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist

Check permissions:

sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist
sudo chmod 644 /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist

Modify the plist:

sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist

and replace

<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
    <string>/usr/local/opt/rstudio-server/bin/rserver</string>
    <string>--server-daemonize=0</string>
</array>

by

<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
    <string>/usr/local/opt/rstudio-server/bin/rserver</string>
    <string>--server-daemonize=0</string>
    <string>--auth-minimum-user-id=500</string>
</array>

This step is necessary because rstudio-server's default auth-minimum-user-id is 1000 and the common OS X user's first ID is 501, the second user's ID is 502 etc.
Copy a pam:

sudo cp /etc/pam.d/ftpd /etc/pam.d/rstudio

Launch the daemon and start rstudio:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist
sudo rstudio-server start

Finally launch a broswer, enter localhost:8787 in the address bar and log-in with your OS X user credentials.

To stop rstudio server enter sudo rstudio-server stop. After a reboot you have to enter sudo rstudio-server start to start it again.

If you want the rstudio-server to be launched automatically while booting, stop the server, unload the launch daemon,

sudo rstudio-server stop
sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist

modify the file /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist with nano and set the RunAtLoad key from false to true. Finally load the launch daemon again:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist


Spell check multiple languages at the same time, at the same input field?

The best you can do for apps that use the Apple facilities is to go to system preferences/keyboard/text/spelling/setup (at the bottom of the list) and check the boxes for only those languages you want to check, and then set it to "automatic".

How well it works for your particular requirements can only be determined by testing.  As far as I know, multilingual only works with languages for which dictionaries are provided by Apple.

Some apps like MS Word have their own spellcheck systems.


How do you add a "click effect" to a video using video editing software?

Use AssistiveTouch
This isn't a perfect answer to the question because this doesn't help you after you've already recorded a video, but you can use the AssistiveTouch feature built into the accessibility settings in iOS to display your touches while recording.
AssistiveTouch wasn't made for this purpose, so this isn't the "best" solution, but it's probably the easiest and least intrusive to implement as it only uses features already built into iOS.

The biggest issue with this approach
This is an important caveat of using this approach: you can't show touches while dragging/scrolling.
You have to manually exit the "touch recording" (if we may call it so), do the scroll/drag actions you want to do, then re-enable the "touch recording" (see the GIF above for an example). You can always edit out the manual switching in post. ♂

How to enable AssistiveTouch and show touches
In short:

Settings
Accessibility
Touch
AssistiveTouch
turn on toggle for AssistiveTouch
Create New Gesture...
tap anywhere in the large blank box once
tap Save at the top right of the screen
Name the gesture whatever you would like (e.g. "touch")

You're done!
To enable showing touches:

tap the AssistiveTouch menu button (the button that floats around your screen when AssistiveTouch is on)
tap Custom
tap touch (or whatever name you chose in step 9)

To disable showing touches (and allow scrolling/dragging)

tap the AssistiveTouch menu button
tap anywhere outside the AssistiveTouch menu

With pictures
Here's a pictorial explanation of how to create the special "touch" gesture (iOS 13.5.1).

Go to the "Settings" app and find Accessibility.

Go to Touch.

Go to AssistiveTouch.

Turn on the toggle for AssistiveTouch.

Go to Create New Gesture....

Tap anywhere in the large blank box once, then tap Save at the top right of the screen.

Name the gesture whatever you would like (e.g. "touch") and tap Save.

Check out the GIF at the beginning of the answer for an example of using the gesture.


Galaxy S7 user with inactive iPhone 6 - Can I get iMessage with my active phone number?

Once you start using the iPhone on your account, and activate iMessage, you will no longer be able to receive SMS on the Galaxy from any contacts who use iPhones, because from Apple's perspective, your number will now be an iMessage number.

If you wait until you're ready to leave to do this, that will work. However, if you pause/cancel/whatever your service with Sprint, you will only be able to receive iMessages if the person has the email address associated with your Apple ID in your contact on their iPhone, and you have that email address set up for receiving in iMessage settings on your iPhone. If your service stays active, messages from other iPhone users will still be received by your phone via your phone number, but only if you're connected to Wi-Fi (or enable data roaming, which would probably be a bad idea if you like keeping your money).

Once you get back, assuming you want to resume using the Galaxy, you'll want to deregister your number from iMessage or you will back in the same predicament as far as not being able to trade messages with iPhone users.


It's possible that your school, or school district, has the device under control of an MDM which can set a lock code remotely. This action may have been accidental, or deliberate, but your only recourse is to ask the IT department to fix it for you.

This functionality, and many other options, is available in Meraki, and I have used it myself.


Safari showing website in different language than what's set in Preferences

Regional Settings in Preferences sets your "localization" preferences.  In other words, it sets the language, the decimal notation, the date format, etc. for your local computer.

It does not force remote computers to conform to the standard you selected.

Whether or not a website displays in your preferred language has to do with the website/web developer and whether or not they chose to implement a translation mechanism or alternate websites based on country of the visitor (this is usually done by a combination of location and browser agent string).

If the website you visit doesn't provide either an English version or an automatic translation feature, there are online translators available.  I prefer to use Bing Translator


Mail application captures huge disk space

Check that your are not keeping a copy of every email you've received, with their attachments. Under Mail / Preferences / Accounts, by selecting your account and then Advanced, you'll find an option regarding this matter.

There are several options which may help you saving some space.


Archive submission failed: ITMS-4238 "Redundant binary upload"

If you have already uploaded a binary and have rejected it and wish to upload to the same version number:

Go to your plist file and change "CFBundleVersion" so if you're uploading version 1.2 change it to 1.2.1 but keep the "CFBundleShortVersionString" as 1.2 so you should have

CFBundleShortVersionString - 1.2
CFBundleVersion - 1.2.1

Archive and submit, then in iTunes Connect you will see all the builds you have submitted for the version 1.2


Select the folders and press optioncommandI (the letter i)
This will show a "get info" window for the combined items.


iOS 9.1 ipad cannot connect to the App Store

I went to a Genius Bar to fix this.

The genius said that I needed to reinstall 9.1. He said that sometimes when 9.1 is installed something gets messed up, so it needs to be installed TWICE.

Unfortunately, you can only do this from a PC or Mac desktop computer, because iOS on the iPad does not give any option to re-install an operating system you already have.

After re-installing 9.1 the App Store did indeed work on my iPad.

Note that this machine is an original iPad.

Also, another important note is that the App Store can get munged if it is accessed from a blocked network. If you trying to use the App Store from a place where there is a firewall or advanced packet filtering, like a company network, then the App Store can get blocked and this will mess it up because it will timeout and then not attempt to connect again. The App Store uses many different ports and if any of these are blocked by a firewall, it can get messed up.

To fix this:

(1) get a clean, unblocked, unfiltered connection

(2) close any open instance of the App Store by using a 4-finger swipe up

(3) start App Store again


Size of text in the new Retina MacBook Pros

As you can see on the new MacBook Pro page (under the Retina-feature item), if you use the binoculars on the text, it doesn't look smaller. It just looks much, much, much sharper!

It's the same as the iPhone 4(S) comparing to the iPhone 3G(S). You don't need better glasses to read the text, because it's not smaller. It's just much sharper and easier to read.

Maybe, I can make my point even better with the iPad Retina page. You'll see you can fit as much text on both the Retina screen as the normal screen. It's just sharper!

Before you make a comment, YES, I know it's a screenshot of an iPad and the question is about the new MacBook Pro, but I didn't found any image with this much text on the new MacBook Pro, so hence the iPad Retina screen.


You could try:

Sign out of the appstore, then sign back in again.
Backup and restore the iPod Touch


Alex.. please be careful.  OS X generally doesn't need maintenance like most Windows installations do.  If you just leave it, it will be fine.  The only thing I sometimes tell clients who I'm tutoring, is that the maintenance scripts run themselves by default at 3AM.  They're not doing anything too serious, log rotations and the like.  So if they don't run, I don't think it's the end of the world.  But once in a while you may want to leave the computer on all night so they get done.


Changing page background colour of a Pages document

Per that support document, you can only change the background colour of a Page Layout document, or one of its master pages. By default, Pages creates new documents as Word Processing documents (which don't have master pages), so you will need to select File > Convert to Page Layout before the background fill option appears.

Note that this will remove any body text that you'd previously entered, so you might need to start with a new document, convert that to Page Layout, and copy your content over.


\tag is part of the amsmath LaTeX package rather than LaTeX itself. Pages doesn't support ams.

Internally, Pages uses blahtex to generate PNGs from the rudimentary maths environments. These individual equations don't have context of the page width, so it's not possible to add a correct amount of right spacing automatically within the equation environment.

However, Pages can do this. You can use the ruler to correctly center align the equation, and right align content outside of the equation.

Optional Create a new paragraph style for your equation lines. This preserves the ruler adjustments so you don't have to recreate this manually for each equation. Use the blue Update paragraph style button each time you make a change to the style to preserve the adjustment.

Create two tab stops:

Half width, center aligned. This becomes the center alignment for the equation.
Half width can be calculated by taking the 1 column width shown at the top of Layout (here, 17 cm) and dividing by 2 (here, 8.5 cm).
Full width, right aligned. This becomes the right alignment for the tag.

In a paragraph of your new equation paragraph style, press Tab. Insert your equation as normal. This will be center aligned on the page.
After your equation, press Tab. Insert the tag for the equation, which will be auto. right-aligned.


Much ado about nothing. Here is the solution. Open Info box for the Partition. Go down to Sharing and Permissions. Unlock with password. Add entry for the administrative account you are in - uh oh - it is set to read only. Change to read and write. Problem solved. Everyone I talked to, including Apple, who wanted me to bring the computer in to the store, led me to believe this was some weird problem due to installation, so I never bothered to check for the OBVIOUS.


As an Adaption from @mat-burns code in this post
( Note You'll also need xcode installed. )

       #!/usr/bin/env xcrun swift

import Foundation

let kDelayUSec : useconds_t = 500_000

func moveMouseClick( p1: CGPoint) {

    let mouseMove = CGEventCreateMouseEvent(nil, CGEventType(kCGEventLeftMouseDragged), p1, CGMouseButton(kCGMouseButtonLeft)).takeUnretainedValue()
    let mouseDown = CGEventCreateMouseEvent(nil, CGEventType(kCGEventLeftMouseDown), p1, CGMouseButton(kCGMouseButtonLeft)).takeUnretainedValue()
    let mouseUp = CGEventCreateMouseEvent(nil, CGEventType(kCGEventLeftMouseUp), p1, CGMouseButton(kCGMouseButtonLeft)).takeUnretainedValue()

    CGEventPost(CGEventTapLocation(kCGHIDEventTap), mouseMove)
    usleep(kDelayUSec)
    CGEventPost(CGEventTapLocation(kCGHIDEventTap), mouseDown)
    usleep(kDelayUSec)
    CGEventPost(CGEventTapLocation(kCGHIDEventTap), mouseUp)
}

func main() {

    let pointX = 396
    let pointY = 214

    let p1 = CGPointMake( CGFloat(pointX),  CGFloat(pointY))
    moveMouseClick( p1)

}

main()

Change the lines:

let pointX = 396
let pointY = 214

to reflect you click point.

Save this code down as moveClick.swift

And then in Terminal.app run /bin/chmod +x ~/scripts/moveClick.swift to make the script executable

Change ~/scripts/moveClick.swift to your actual path to your swift file.

I do not have Keyboard maestro But I see it can execute a shell script.

Execute a Shell Script Action

~/scripts/moveClick.swift

In the example above we have hard coded the click point.

But if you want to make it versatile, we can make the code take arguments.

Using this code instead.

    #!/usr/bin/env xcrun swift

import Foundation

let kDelayUSec : useconds_t = 500_000

func moveMouseClick( p1: CGPoint) {

    let mouseMove = CGEventCreateMouseEvent(nil, CGEventType(kCGEventLeftMouseDragged), p1, CGMouseButton(kCGMouseButtonLeft)).takeUnretainedValue()
    let mouseDown = CGEventCreateMouseEvent(nil, CGEventType(kCGEventLeftMouseDown), p1, CGMouseButton(kCGMouseButtonLeft)).takeUnretainedValue()
    let mouseUp = CGEventCreateMouseEvent(nil, CGEventType(kCGEventLeftMouseUp), p1, CGMouseButton(kCGMouseButtonLeft)).takeUnretainedValue()

    CGEventPost(CGEventTapLocation(kCGHIDEventTap), mouseMove)
    usleep(kDelayUSec)
    CGEventPost(CGEventTapLocation(kCGHIDEventTap), mouseDown)
    usleep(kDelayUSec)
    CGEventPost(CGEventTapLocation(kCGHIDEventTap), mouseUp)
}

func main() {

    let p1 = CGPointMake( CGFloat(atof( C_ARGV[1])),  CGFloat(atof( C_ARGV[2])))

    moveMouseClick( p1)

}

main()

Again in Keyboard maestro.

Execute a Shell Script Action

~/scripts/moveClick.swift 396, 214


I have just fixed precisely the same problem on a site. Its annoying when a debugger chokes so it can't help you find the problem!

My problem was caused by a stray class making its way into a style.

<div style="background: #ffb380; padding-bottom:30px; width:300px; text-center;">

Removing the text-center fixed the problem and web-inspector loads correctly.  I would expect you also have an error in the page that is causing web-inspector to choke. Two approaches I can recommend:

An online error checker e.g. http://www.onlinewebcheck.com/
Track down the issue by removing content from the page until web-inspector loads.


Error importing videos to Photos in Catalina: Unsupported resource set: video,xmp

macOS 10.15 (Catalina) has removed support for a number of things, the old Quicktime Pro no longer works (unfortunate as it is a nice, simple, movie editor) and (among other things) support for older codec movie files.

It is likely that those files that won't import are in a (now) unsupported format.

I would recommend just re-encoding them into a modern format like H264. Handbrake is what I use for such tasks. it is free and open source, updated regularly and highly recommended.


This is just a guess as you've not mentioned the cables you're using, but:

Could it be that you're using a non e-Marked USB C cable? If so, the cable may be the problem. Try your charger with your friend's cable to check this.


With the "small" Mac keyboard, how to simulate a HOME, END, and PageUp, PageDown key?

The Command+Up/Down keys you mentioned for Chrome and Safari are coincidences. The Fn+Up/Down keys are not. Those key combinations are actually mapped to the Page up/Page down keycodes, so the application thinks you actually pressed those keys. There are similar mappings for Home and End: Fn+Left and Fn+Right, respectively. These Fn+Arrow mappings will work exactly like Page Up/Down and Home/End in any application, unless it somehow is working around the system.


With Pages '08, can I add a top border to a title?

This is possible in Pages '09, so it probably works in Pages '08 as well.

Select a heading in your document
Open the Inspector (in menu bar click View -> Show Inspector)

Select the Text section
Select the "More" tab
Under "Borders & Rules", click the dropdown that says "none" and select the line you want to use
Below the dropdown select the icon depicting the line above the content

Open the Styles Drawer (in menu bar click View -> Show Styles Drawer)

Since the text is still selected, the heading you're using should already be highlighted
Click the arrow beside the style
Click "Redefine style from selection"

Now everywhere that you used that heading will now have a horizontal line over it, and it will automatically appear whenever you insert new headings.


Mobile app development using Xcode. Single Graphics vs Dual Graphics?

A Mac with dual graphics (integrated + dedicated) is preferred when working on graphic intensive projects.

Generally speaking, a more recently introduced model is equipped with better internals (such as newer generation of processor and faster RAM/internal storage).

You should pay attention to the machine specifications and your use-case to choose an appropriate one as it can differ from person to person and task to task. You need to base your decision on criterion such as:

Processor generation, frequency and performance gain (year-over-year)
Amount and frequency of RAM
Amount of speed of internal storage
Screen size/real estate and supported resolutions
Ports, their speed and support for external display and accessories.

  Can any one please tell me which one is better for Xcode based on the year?

Depends on your specific use case (and budget) as discussed above. You can compare the detailed specs for the two mentioned models and base your decision on that. Check the following link:

Table of third generation MacBook Pro models.

  Also what is the difference between single and dual graphics?

A MacBook with dual graphics quite literally means that it is equipped with dual graphics card. The one with single graphics card comes equipped with Intel Integrated graphics (which is generally speaking fine for day to day usage). Dual graphics MacBook Pro includes a dedicated graphics card in addition to the Intel Integrated card, and the operating system includes the support for automatic switching between the two.

A dual graphics machine is preferred when you need good performance in graphics intensive tasks/projects, gaming, or have a project that needs to utilize GPU compute.


How do I make my cursor return to its normal size?

Have you try: System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display ->  Cursor -> Cursor size


How to download and install Darwin 13 OS in x86?

The PureDarwin project is attempting to maintain a complete and bootable implementation of the Darwin OS. From their website:

  One current goal of this project is to provide a useful bootable ISO of Darwin 10.x and Darwin 9.x.

Darwin itself is a modified FreeBSD OS with Mach microkernel.

Note though that having Darwin is not a necessary part of developing in Obj-C. Both gcc and clang support Obj-C development in newer versions. You are, of course, limited in what you can do relative to using Obj-C on an OS X machine because there are far fewer standard libraries available outside of the OS X world for Obj-C.


How do I start a fake SMTP server automatically?

Login Items

You can use your account's Login Items to automatically launch an application when logging in.

System Preferences.app > Users and Groups > Login Items

This though will only launch the application. A better solution is to find a GUI-less server and use launchd.

postfix

postfix is an open source SMTP server and it is included with Mac OS X. This is likely to be your best option for setting up a server either to do nothing but accept connections, or to become a full mail server.

launchd

Mac OS X uses launchd for starting services on power on and logging in. You can learn more on the launchd manual page. Apple also has developer documentation for creating launchd job tickets.

To work with launchd, you will need an SMTP server that can be started from the command line.


Is it possible for me to use my iPhone4 microsim dataplan on an iPad2?

No, not since 4.2 can you do this because the APN settings disappeared off the devices.

Though, there are videos on youtube and tutorials in other places that can walk you through adding the features back on to your device. Whether or not they still work or will work for you depending on your current iOS version installed on iPad is a different story.

A particular Video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUnPQ68DNO8

If you read the comments though, it doesn't work for everyone, and some people it did work for had issues with their sim cards after about a week of use, with AT&T disabling them.

Other people on here might tell you to jailbreak your device and enable tethering but that is your choice.  Jailbreaking isn't for everyone.

A website here talks about making a wifi hotspot with your iPhone the legal or jailbroken way and talks about the pros and cons of each:

http://www.gadgetreview.com/2011/09/how-to-turn-your-iphone-into-a-wifi-hotspot.html

I hope that this answer helps you out.


2 external displays on your macbook pro 2015

The Thunderbolt ports can be used as regular miniDisplayPorts. Modern Dell screens have DisplayPort or miniDisplayPorts. The only difference to HDMI is that DP supports higher resolutions.


How to fix macOS Big Sur Dock after having customised it on Catalina for uBar

I executed commands from this HowToGeek article to reset the Dock and restarted the Mac; which didn't help (yet). I had used both the commands - "The Simple Fix" killall Dock and "The Slightly Less Simple Fix" defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock.
Then I relaunched the Finder as recommended in the same article and now I'm back to my fantasy setup.
Sorry for the bother, I hope this helps others as well. I had to set preferences for dock again. On Big Sur we no longer need to follow the Terminal commands from the Ask Different question mentioned above.


Help with waiting while a process is running

I took your script and changed

Changed the PID assignment to pgrep
Changed -o s= to -o stat= for ps
Removed the unnecessary ; at the end of some lines

It's a bit hard to test, but something like

#!/bin/bash
PROCESS="Installer"
PID=$(pgrep "$PROCESS")
while s=`ps -p $PID -o stat=` && [[ "$s" && "$s" != 'Z' ]]; do
    echo "$PROCESS is running, waiting for it to terminate"
    sleep 1
done
echo "$PROCESS is not running anymore"
SCRIPT HERE

should work.

If you are not worried about the Installer getting into Zombie state you could rely on the fact that ps exits with 1 if no process is found, and significantly simplify the loop condition.


I'm running macOS 10.12 after a factory reset, how can I upgrade to macOS 10.15 to run Xcode?

You are asked to install macOS 10.15 Catalina because macOS 10.15.4 is the minimum required version of macOS for running Xcode 12.2 which in turn the current latest version of Xcode available on the App Store.
The latest version of macOS Catalina is 10.15.7 which can be downloaded and subsequently installed via the Mac App Store by using this link:

macOS Catalina

There's a newer version of macOS, macOS Big Sur which was recently released by Apple and the same can be downloaded from the Mac App Store by using this link:

macOS Big Sur

Most Macs from 2013 and later support running macOS Big Sur, so your Mac should definitely be supported if you bought it brand new 3 years ago.
If you are looking to run an older version of Xcode, macOS Sierra 10.12 would support running Xcode 8.3.3 and if you have the latest point release  of macOS Sierra installed, i.e. 10.12.6, the latest version you can install is Xcode 9.2.
Mac App Store makes available the current latest public version of Xcode. If you are looking to download an older version, you can do so from Apple Developer Downloads website.
Refer to the Xcode - Version Comparison Table to determine the supported Xcode version information)
Each version of Xcode comes built in with a specific version of SDKs for macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS. If you are looking for SDK targeting specific version of any of the OS, refer to the Version Comparison Table linked above to determine the appropriate version of Xcode to use.


Errors in installing OpenMPI on El Capitan

I find the solution to my problem. The the license agreement was required to be completed before ./configure --prefix=/usr/local (as I suspected and @klanomath confirmed). If not so, the command make all can't be run.


There's a company called SkyHook that sells a wifi-based geolocation product to many companies, but not sure if Apple is one of them. It was a couple of years ago though.

You can ask them to update their database here: http://www.skyhookwireless.com/submit-access-point. If Apple is doing their own geolocation services now, you're likely out of luck.

ETA: changing your (E)SSID probably won't do anything; the location services are more likely to use the BSSID, which is the wireless MAC address of the equipment.


Using Siri to automatically add Outlook events to iCal Calendar

I have a solution to display all Outlook Calendar events in the Apple Calendar app.
(Is that what you want?, your question is mixing many things, I have solutions for each of them but what is your real need?)
I will provide screenshots but everything is in French, I hope you can locate things and/or use Google Translate ;)

Open https://outlook.live.com/calendar/0/view/month

See my calendar is empty I added a test event...

Go to settings like that :

Share/Publish the calendar

Copy this link :

Thanks to this link we can go to the Apple Calendar app and subscribe to it.

Open Calendar app and click to something like subscribe to a calendar :

Paste the previous copied link

You can give it a name and a colour, set few settings.

We are done !

As you can see the test event appeared. From now everything that is added/modified/deleted in the Outlook Calendar will be updated and showed here in Apple Calendar app as read only.
P.S. click CMD+R to trigger a refresh of Apple Calendar if needed
EDIT 1:
The solution above works for Outlook, but what if you directly have an Exchange account?
The solution is even better, you can directly add the account in the Apple Calendar app (Menu Calendar > Settings > Accounts. Then tap the add button (bottom left). And finish by login your Exchange account.)


WhatsApp Web in Fluid throws JavaScript exception

I don't have a solution that works with Fluid, but Aluxian/WhatsApp-Desktop on GitHub provides an open-source wrapper for the WhatsApp web app which works well and provides similar functionality to what Fluid would.


How to automatically mount NFS shares on OS X

If you try default /etc/auto_master file, you can see line

/net            -hosts      -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid

Then you can cd /net/host/exported/path and found that mac tries to mount this exported path.


Change timezone in Russia 26.10.14 in mac os x 10.9.5

If you want to check your system to change the time zone , you can run this command in terminal:

zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2014

If you see two lines:

/etc/localtime  Sat Oct 25 21:59:59 2014 UTC = Sun Oct 26 01:59:59 2014 MSK isdst=0
/etc/localtime  Sat Oct 25 22:00:00 2014 UTC = Sun Oct 26 01:00:00 2014 MSK isdst=0

Time zone will be changed automatically.

You can manually update time zones:
You can find time preferences on the Mac OS on the two files: /etc/localtime and /usr/share/icu/icudtXXX.dat.

Settings for console time are stored on the /etc/localtime.

For other programms - on the /usr/share/icu/icudtXXX.dat

Update /etc/localtime:

download last tzdata on the [iana][1]
extract: tar xzf ./tzdata2011l.tar.gz
apply: sudo zic europe
check: zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2014

If all ok, you see something like this:

/etc/localtime  Sat Oct 25 21:59:59 2014 UTC = Sun Oct 26 01:59:59 2014 MSK isdst=0
/etc/localtime  Sat Oct 25 22:00:00 2014 UTC = Sun Oct 26 01:00:00 2014 MSK isdst=0

Update /usr/share/icu/icudtXXX.dat - you can compile icudtXXX.dat or download it.

Compile:

Download [source][2]
Extract: `tar xzf ICU-400.42.tar.gz && cd ICU-400.42/icuSources`
Copy actual tzdata to the sources: `cp ~/tzdata2011l.tar.gz ./tools/tzcode/`
compile: `./runConfigureICU MacOSX --with-data-packaging=archive && gmake`
Backup origin tzdata: `cp /usr/share/icu/icudt40l.dat ~`
Install new: `sudo install -o root -g wheel -m 0644 -Sp data/out/icudt40l.dat /usr/share/icu/icudt40l.dat`
reboot


iPhoto and Image Capture only access photographs that are on your Camera Roll. I suspect that the 67 photos they find are the only ones on the photo roll. Other images—those in albums, etc.—cannot be downloaded by iPhoto and Image Capture.

Some third-party programs can access the non-Camera Roll photographs on your device. I haven't tried any of them, but PhoneView from Ecamm seems to be recommended frequently.

http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

I have also seen programs that attempt to extract photos from backups of the iPhone. Again, I haven't tried any of them. But they may be worth considering.


I selected to send SMS instead of iMessage to a contact once, and it won't switch back, Why?

The easy way to fix this is to look at the contact card. (Assuming the issue is on your side of the sending)

You could temporarily move the phone numbers to the notes section and delete them. Then sending a message has to go via iMessage if their email is registered for iMessage.

If not, just add back their mobile number and initiate an iMessage to them from the address book/contact card view. Tap the chat bubble next to their email or phone to initiate an iMessage transmission.

It's often required to start a new thread if you keep sending to the wrong email/mobile number since Messages wants to hold on to the way the last message was sent and not jump back to iMessage if the other person's AppleID hasn't claimed the mobile number, so keep in mind the problem might be on the other person's account - not your address book or contacts.


How can I remove all my downloaded YouTube videos in the YouTube iPad app in one go?

In the YouTube iPadOS app, tap on the account profile picture at the top right of the screen, tap on Settings, scroll down to the Offline section, and tap on Delete downloads item. You'd be alerted stating that all downloaded videos and playlists will be deleted from this device.
Tap on Delete button to delete all the videos downloaded and saved for offline viewing on the device.

Tap on the account profile picture shown at the top right of screen to access your account.

Scroll down on the account sub-window and tap on the Settings item. Scroll down on the Settings screen and tap on the Delete downloads item.

In the pop-up window that appears, tap on the Delete button to delete all offline videos in one go.

This would instantly delete all the offline videos in one go and and you'd be able to re-claim the storage space on your iPad.


(Mavericks) Appstore repeatedly updating Xcode to 5.1 (fixed?)

I was having the same problem with the Xcode 6.0.1 update continually showing up in the App Store. I applied the same update several times during my troubleshooting, even though during the process I kept deleting Xcode from my hard drive, I have no need for it any more. I didn't have more than one copy of Xcode on my drive, one possible reason for this issue.

I just solved my problem. I had disabled Spotlight indexing a while back, on the advice of a web page I had seen, because it was using too much CPU and I didn't believe I really needed it. What I didn't know was that the App Store depends on the Spotlight indexes to determine whether you have an app installed; it was looking at a stale index.

I just re-enabled indexing ("sudo mdutil -i on /"), and as soon as Spotlight actually started re-indexing, the App Store decided I didn't have any updates to be applied for Xcode.


Can I edit an iPad photo and save both the edited and original version?

You could make a screenshot of the photo by pressing the home button and power putton together.

After this you can edit one of those photo's


Is it possible to restore messages to an iPhone when they're backed up on a computer?

You can restore the whole backup to your iPhone, which will obliterate/replace all of what is on your iPhone now with the contents of that backup. Unfortunately the restore is an all-or-nothing thing, and replaces all of what is on the iPhone now. Also a big caveat that if you use iCloud Messages syncing, then iCloud will just tell the iPhone to "re-delete" those messages from the phone again shortly after you restore it, since their deleted state is tracked in iCloud. (You can see if you use Messages syncing by going to Settings app > your name > iCloud, and see if the Messages switch is turned on.

Another alternative is to read the messages to your computer out of the backup where they're not deleted. This will at least give you access to the messages on your computer but not restored to the iPhone. There's a few programs to do this. One that I am a developer for is called Decipher TextMessage https://deciphertools.com/decipher-textmessage.html

Honesty disclaimer: I am a developer/owner of the company that I just linked to, so I stand to benefit, financially or otherwise, from my link. ;)


Can I use BootCamp on an existing Windows partition?

This is a whole bunch of links so I'm not really sure it qualifies as an answer...

Windows -> Parallels - possible with the Parallels Transporter Agent software - http://kb.parallels.com/uk/115007

Parallels -> Bootcamp - http://www.tylercrumpton.com/?p=90

Windows straight to Bootcamp [needs WinClone, not free] - http://twocanoes.com/winclone/support/migrating-a-real-pc-to-boot-camp-with-winclone-4


How Can I Stop My Mac From Reopening Applications After A Power Failure?

Hold shift whilst logging in to temporarily disable Resume from re-opening applications.

Apple KB article: Automatically re-open windows, apps, and documents on your Mac


This continues to work for me, as long as Word is currently running - 2011 or 2016 editions.


To add Microsoft mail accounts to mail, you have to select 'Add other account...' from the internet accounts list. Then enter your hotmail email and password as normal.


Restart Screen Sharing Service on Mac mini Server

I had the same trouble, and to a headless Mini also. This is what I found that worked…

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.screensharing.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.screensharing.plist

I had the opportunity to install an SSD in my Mini, and did a clean install of Lion at that time, and the issue persisted.

I made an alias

alias fixscreen='sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.screensharing.plist &&  sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.screensharing.plist'


Why can't Preview Export 16-bit HEIC images?

Apple doesn't appear to support 16-bit HEIC.
I can't find anything official on this, but I can find a whole lot of user complaints bemoaning it.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251072024
I'd be seriously tempted to try Nikon's own ViewNX-i [freeware] to do your conversions. Though as yet it doesn't support HEIF at all, it is far better at interpreting Nikon RAW files than any other app. Overall you will probably lose less information going NRW > ViewNX-i > PNG than you would via Preview, or even Photoshop.
BTW, NRW isn't 16-bit, it's 12-bit. Nikon's higher spec RAW file NEF is 12 or 14-bit.


Is there a web browser I can use safely on Mac OS 10.5.8?

For the impatient:

You have two possibilities:

PowerPC-based Mac: TenFourFox and no Flash.
Intel-based Mac: Opera (thanks to Cybermatatu for this one!) with  older Flash 10.3 (beware, Flash 10.3 is an archived version and is no longer supported nor updated with security fixes by Adobe).

Long version:

If you use an Intel processor you can use Opera:

  Opera 12

  OS X Leopard (10.5), or greater: 32-bit and 64-bit Intel
  systems supported

Opera supports Flash Player plug-in.
If you use a PowerPC processor you may want to try TenFourFox. TenFourFox seems to be actively developed (version 17.0.3 was released Feb 16 2013). TenFourFox supports add-ons, but not plugins, that is, you can't use Flash at all.

Please notice that Flash Player 11 only supports 10.6 and newer. You can still download version 10.3 for 10.5 Intel (beware, Flash 10.3 is an archived version and is no longer supported nor updated with security fixes by Adobe).

As for other browsers:

Firefox no longer supports PowerPC processors (PowerBook, PowerMac):

  Firefox 3.6.28 is the last version of Firefox that works with Mac OS X
  10.4 (Tiger) or with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on a computer with a PowerPC processor.

Firefox 16 is the latest version that supports Leopard on Intel-based Macs as Firefox 17 requires 10.6 or newer.
Apple no longer releases Safari updates for Mac OS X 10.5 (as stated here).
Chrome doesn't support Leopard, either:

  Google Chrome on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will stop receiving any
  updates following Chrome 21.


You should modify this script to your needs or check if it already solves them as-is

https://github.com/andyyoung/Process-Monitor-for-Chrome


How to voice activate iPhone without touching it?

At the moment is not possible, but this is one of the features of the upcoming iOS 8:

  With iOS 8, users won't have to have their iPhone or iPad in their hands to invoke Siri. Instead, the device will listen for the voice prompt "Hey Siri" to initiate.


Can't log into my iCloud account from Windows 8

Is this the first time you've tried to access your account through iCloud's App on windows? I also had a similar issue with Windows 8.1 a week ago.
The way I managed to solve this problem was uninstalling the iCloud from my computer, restarting, and reinstalling back the application.

Here is the Apple Support Guide for Setting up iCloud on Windows.


I would say you should not be worried however since you do have Apple Care I'd backup your files using Time Machine and then make arrangements to have it looked at and repaired.  As to whether or not they can fix it or just replace the part(s) in question that will be decide by Apple however since it's under warranty the'll have to fix it or replace it.

From Contact Apple Support ...

  A Genius Bar reservation is an easy way to get hardware repairs, but
  we can solve many issues over the phone or by chat. Tell us a little
  about what’s going on and we’ll suggest the right support option.


Using another laptop's keyboard as Macbook Pro's input device

You can try Synergy: https://symless.com/synergy. I had good results with it in the past .


Macos Mojave: how to deal with corrupted bsd_flag in a private/var directory?

After further research I found out it's safe to delete some files in private/var/folders (please do your own research), so I cded to the folder and deleted the file via Terminal:

sudo rm fr.madrau.switchresx.app-559924946001.conf

Disk utility reports are clean. If my SwitchResX settings are messed up I can always re-install it or re-configure.


If you're not using it for piracy (I assume you're maybe trying to access class method names to make a jailbreak tweak?) use dumpdecrypted.

It allows you to decrypt a code-signed application, but due to the decryption method it wont allow the binary to run on iOS.

All decryption is handled on the device (you perform it over SSH by copying the dylib and running the binary), which means the app you wish to decrypt must also be installed to your device (or extracted and copied to /var/mobile/Applications or wherever iOS 8 changed it to)


How can I list my open network ports with netstat?

netstat -anvp tcp | awk 'NR<3 || /LISTEN/'
Active Internet connections (including servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q  Local Address          Foreign Address        (state)     rhiwat shiwat    pid   epid  state    options
tcp46      0      0  *.62981                *.*                    LISTEN      131072 131072  34548      0 0x0100 0x00000006
…

sudo lsof -PiTCP -sTCP:LISTEN
COMMAND     PID      USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
BetterTou 34548 grgarside   20u  IPv4 0xa42a1d0ade5d3585      0t0  TCP *:62981 (LISTEN)
BetterTou 34548 grgarside   21u  IPv6 0xa42a1d0ad67f7a5d      0t0  TCP *:62981 (LISTEN)
…


You can set the service order in the Network preference pane in Preferences.app.

Open Network preferences, click the small cogwheel icon below network connection list (next to the + and – icon), choose "Set Service Order…" in the menu.

Then you just drag the entries in the dialog (w/o typing all the interface names).

Btw., in the Network pref pane you can also delete unused network interfaces (– icon) or make them inactive (cogwheel menu).


Sure, on iPad you just hold the document until the options line pops up (copy, rename, move etc.) - the second last on the right should say tags.


My SATA hardrive was ejected, and is unable to be remounted due to issues

To determine what's wrong with your hard drives or volumes you first have to get an overview. The best tools to get this are diskutil and gpt – both command line tools which have to be executed in Terminal.app.

Open Terminal.app and enter:

diskutil list

To execute a command you always have to enter the Enter key.

The command above will yield something like this (depending on the number of disks in your Mac):

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk2
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data tower 1                 1.0 TB     disk2s2

The example shows the following:

disk0 is your system drive containing an EFI partition (disk0s1), your main system volume "Macintosh HD" (disk0s2)  and a recovery volume (disk0s3). All partitions sizes (0.2 GB + 499 GB + 0.7 GB) add up to the total size of the disk (500 GB)
disk1 is a 1 TB drive only containing an EFI with a size of 200 MB and with 999.8 GB empty space
disk2 is a 1 TB drive containing one 1 TB volume probably formatted to FAT32, ExFAT or NTFS

Now one can deduce that the missing volume tower 2 once resided on disk1.

After a reboot the disk identifiers of the second and the third disk may be exchanged! So always execute diskutil list before manipulating partition tables!

To get a closer look on disk1 use gpt:

sudo gpt -r show /dev/disk1

This will reveal:

      start        size  index  contents
         0           1         PMBR
         1           1         Pri GPT header
         2          32         Pri GPT table
        34           6
        40      409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
    409640  1953115495
1953525135          32         Sec GPT table
1953525167           1         Sec GPT header

This means:

The disk has a GUID partition table (GPT)
The first partition (index = 1) is an EFI type partition (C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B), starting at block 40 and with a size of of 409600 blocks (~209.7 MB)
Starting at block 409640 1953115495 blocks (~1 TB) of the disk are not allocated to a partition.

You can assume that your "lost" partition (with the volume name tower 2) once resided here.

After adding a partition it has to be formatted and a file system has to be created. The file system may be (beyond others): HFS+, ExFAT or NTFS

If you know the previous file system you can continue restoring a partition. If you don't know the file system you can determine it by searching for typical file system headers.

To determine a previous HFSJ volume use:

sudo hexdump /dev/disk1 | grep "48 46 53 4a"

This will search for the string "HFSJ" on your raw disk. After getting the first results simply enter ctrlC to abort the command.

On your type of disk you should get the following results:

c805400 48 2b 00 04 80 00 20 00 48 46 53 4a 00 00 01 ff
ca13e00 48 2b 00 04 80 00 20 00 48 46 53 4a 00 00 01 ff
ca40e00 48 2b 00 04 80 00 20 00 48 46 53 4a 00 00 01 ff
...

Here the important line is the first one: c805400 48 2b 00 04 80 00 20 00 48 46 53 4a 00 00 01 ff with c805400 being the offset in hex. Converted with a hex2dec service this means an offset of Byte 209736704 (dividing this by 512 Bytes/block, the result is equal to block 409642). Typically the 3rd block of an HFSJ volume contains the string "HFSJ". So you have found the beginning of an HFSJ volume: block 409640 (BlockF).

The end of an HFSJ volume can be found accordingly because the 3rd last block contains the last HFSJ occurrence:

sudo hexdump -s 930g /dev/disk1 | grep "48 46 53 4a"

The option -s means: Skip offset bytes from the beginning of the input.

With the last offset (and doing the math like above) you can determine the last block (BlockL) of the previous HFSJ volume by simply adding 2 blocks. The size of the HFSJ volume is then (BlockL-BlockF).

With all necessary data gathered you can now try to restore the lost volume tower 2 with the sudo gpt add ... command.

To add a partition entry you have to execute:

sudo gpt add -i number -b number -s number -t type diskX

with

-i index number
-b number of the first block
-s size in blocks
-t partition type

I don't know neither the first offset nor the second offset of your volume tower 2, but the command below may work and the entered sizes are probable defaults:

sudo gpt add -2 -b 409640 -s 1952443704 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk1

After adding this entry in the partition table the volume should be mounted automatically.

Check the disk and the volume with:

diskutil verifyDisk disk1
diskutil verifyVolume disk1s2

If a repair is necessary use the "prefix" repair instead of verify!

If you have any questions or can't find the string "HFSJ" please add a comment with @klanomath!


Why is the iPhone label available on some contacts but not others on my iPhone 5S?

If they are stored locally instead of on iCloud they will not sync.
If you can place them in iCloud they will sync correctly.

Uncheck all accounts to find the wrongly placed contacts, happy hunting! (:


I've been in communication with the creator of Chax, and no, it doesn't work on Lion (it definitely works in Snow Leopard). He says he's working on it.

His site is here.

Addendum 9-11-11: The main awesomeness of Chax is the ability to auto-accept Screen Shares with certain people in your Buddy List... including yourself. For instance, if you travel with a laptop and suddenly need to get files from your Mac back home, you simply get a second iChat/AIM account for that laptop, set up Chax on the home Mac, set it up to autoaccept the laptop's account, and you can screen share automatically with your home Mac. I've come to completely rely on that weekly for the past couple years.


Why doesn't "su - user -c defaults read" work?

You're correct about the su picking up the args incorrectly - you need to quote them together:

su - mheath -c "defaults read"


A simpler method would be to use Messages to send a message to yourself with the text, links, and images. They would show up as notifications on the watch making it easy to tap into them - instead of having to open up Mail, find the right mail, open attachment, etc.


How do I setup VNC on Windows to connect from Mac OS X?

What is happening - are there any error messages? - Can you ping your windows machine from your mac?

A pretty easy alternative would be TeamViewer.

  TeamViewer - the All-In-One Solution
  for Remote Access and Support over the
  Internet

  TeamViewer connects to any PC or
  server around the world within a few
  seconds. You can remote control your
  partner's PC as if you were sitting
  right in front of it. Find out why
  more than 100 million users trust
  TeamViewer!


It turns out this is a false alarm. Following a restart a queued update made in error by my IT dept mean't that the user account had be deactivated - Thanks for your input otherwise


WhatsApp Web is active even after putting Mac to sleep

WhatsApp Web is currently active

This is just an information notification that you receive on your mobile device, some time after you log into WhatsApp Web or WhatsApp desktop app (which is just a wrapper over the web app).

You can safely ignore this and rest assured, the app is not running on your MacBook while it is asleep.


Can I have a stable IP address for a virtual machine under VMWare?

You can do this -- just configure the Ubuntu virtual machine with a static IP. The choice of IP will depend on the network you're connecting to... You didn't mention if you were using a NAT or Bridged connection, and the choice of IP will different based on that. I can provide specific instructions if you like, but, they'll be all things you do within the Ubuntu VM, not within the Mac environment. (So you may find better luck asking on http://askubuntu.com or https://unix.stackexchange.com/)

You could also install the "avahi-daemon" package in Ubuntu and then you won't need to remember the VM's IP address, you can use vm-hostname.local as if it were a Mac with Bonjour.

EDIT: I see you're using a NAT interface. I typed up a long list of instructions only got get stuck on the final step. I'll do more research into this, but in the meantime, here's some instructions which I have not tested, but might work on the Mac side...

Here's incomplete instructions, I will finish them up shortly:

VMware Susion starts assigning IPs via DHCP at .128 (at least on my machine). The first three octets of the IPs are defined by a network probe which happened when you installed VMware, so you'll want to determine what network VMware chose for you, and then choose an IP underneath the range VMware assigns via DHCP to avoid conflicts:

Determine what network VMware chose: In the Ubuntu Virtual Machine, choose System > Administration > Network Tools. In the window that appears, under "Network Device", choose "Ethernet Interface (eth0)". In the list below, look for "IPv4". Look at the IP address in the right hand column, and make note of the first three octets (numbers between the dots). On my machine, this is: 172.16.1
Choose a new static IP: You can make up any number from 2 to 127 which will be appended to the network from step 1, as long as it doesn't conflict with any other static IPs you have assigned. Let's say you choose 15, because I like the number 15. In my example your static IP would then be 172.16.1.15.
Configure Ubuntu to use a static IP: Go to System > Preferences > Network Connections in the Ubuntu VM.  Under "Wired" choose "Auto eth0" and click "edit". Go to "IPv4 Settings" and set "Method:" to "Manual". Next to "Addresses", click the "Add" button. In the new row that appears, under "Address", enter the IP you close (172.16.1.15 in my example). Under Netmask, enter 255.255.255.0. Under gateway, enter the first three octets of your IP, followed by .1. (In my example, the gateway would be 172.16.1.1). Under DNS Servers, enter... oh, crap, this is being provided by DHCP. Let me figure out a way to make this work :-/


Where are photos imported via iPhoto stored on disk?

iPhoto Library → Right-Click → Show Package Contents
You have to search for your pictures. The order is not logical - i.e. sorted by events.
It's easier to choose the following options if you send an email:

In iPhoto go to Share → Email or ...
...export your pictures so that you can attach them manually File → Export

Why is the iPhoto Library stored in a package?
The reason is actually quite simple: People break things. When you accidentally mess around with the pictures by unintentionally moving them - you break the library. Photo Booth has its own package for the same reason.
However, if you want to have control over the hierarchy of your picture folders in Finder, you should not import pictures into iPhoto. The setting is located at iPhoto Preferences → Advanced → Importing.


Recognise command and colour it on the terminal?

Not a bash answer, as I don't have one, but if you switch your shell to zsh (a close relative of bash) and install the configuration framework prezto you'll get this functionality more or less out of the box, as well as significantly better autocompletion. Switching to zsh most likely won't change your day to day bash workflow at all, but it'll open a a lot of doors in terms of customisation and extension, and also adds some clever features worth learning - like shared command history across all prompts that can be included in the autocompletion dictionary, file globbing to efficiently work with multiple files at once, and most importantly compatibility modes, whereby zsh can emulate another shell - meaning that if some of your bash scripts don't work the way they used to after switching to zsh, you can just emulate it - although personally all the bash scripts I've written still worked fine in zsh.

Useful links:

Installing the latest version of zsh in OS X
Installing prezto
Some in-depth discussion of how switching can improve your workflow


How can I tell what kind of iPod Touch I have if the case can't be removed?

Plug the device into any computer with either iTunes or the iPhone configuration utility and it will tell you the model, serial number and much more about the device. Both software packages run on Mac and Windows and are a free download from Apple.

An alternate method of determining whether the Phillips Hue app will run is to have them download that app since the App store includes built in checks to ensure the device meets the app's minimum requirements. I could see how this might not be ideal if part of the gift is to be a surprise that downloading the app might spoil.


Can launching an app trigger the launch of another app?

Open Automator, and choose 'Application' from the pane that appears.

In the sidebar, there should be an item called 'Utilities'. Click this, and drag two 'Launch Application' actions into the main workflow pane. In the first one, choose the application you want to use with Spotify, and in the second one, choose Spotify. (See the picture below.)

Then, save the document with a name you'll remember (something like 'Spotify Launcher') in /Applications, and replace Spotify in your dock with the Spotify Launcher app that's been created. It will launch both Spotify and the companion app you want to use with Spotify whenever you invoke the application.

Hope that helps!


Is there a way to prevent apps from staying in Dock after quitting?

I think I understand your problem.. Open System Preferences, Click on dock, uncheck "Show recent applications in dock". This should probably solve your problem.


Is there a command to view Primary Volume Descriptor in iso images?

The drutil command is the OS X utility that's similar to isoinfo. The dumpiso verb inspects and interprets ISO-9660 and Joliet structures. The format of the command is:

drutil dumpiso <device> <block> [format]

where the arguments are (see man drutil for details):

device   Disk node, e.g. /dev/disk1.

block    Block number to dump.

format   If format is not specified dumpiso will attempt to guess.
         If present, this argument should be one of the following:
         None, Boot, BootCat, PVD, SVD, VPD, VDST, MPath, LPath,
         Dir, or HFSPlusVH.

The drutil command allows a shortcut that avoids the need to attach, mount or detach an ISO image file. The command is:

drutil dumpiso <image> <block>

where <image> is the name of an ISO image file. For example, drutil dumpiso image.iso 16 displays block 16 from an image file named image.iso and guesses the block's format.


In the Clock app, click on the Alarm button and create or edit an alarm. The four settings are Repeat, Sound, Snooze, and Label. Type your desired text in Label and it will display when the alarm fires.


Static IP address per wifi connection? Configuration in router doesn't seem to take, am I doing it wrong?

The airport settings go by location, not which of the possible SSID you join, so make a home (or Jensen) location and use manual IP or DHCP with manual address to get things going.

Check your firewall as it can block DHCP responses, but I'd guess the router has issues before the Mac, but something is broken for it not to just work.


A Fusion Drive is a composite of two physical drives: a fast but small SSD and a slower but larger HDD. Each of the physical drives contains three partitions: an EFI partition, a so-called physical volume and a special volume. The special volume on the HDD usually is the Recovery HD.

The two physical volumes are part of a Logical Volume Group. Creating a default Fusion Drive means building one Logical Volume in the LVG spanning both physical volumes. The Logical Volume is the one mounted to root (and if enabled - the volume visible on the desktop).

A file stored on the Logical Volume may reside on the SSD as well as on the HDD. System files may also reside on both drives. Usually an algorithm ensures that system files are stored on the faster SSD but there is no guarantee.

Removing one of the physical drives means removing one of the physical volumes and therefore tearing the LVG as well as the LV apart. After destroying the LVG/LV the file system as well as system files or other files are corrupted and the remnants won't be bootable.

To replace either of the drives, backup your exisiting volume(s) first with Time Machine. Then check whether you can boot to Internet Recovery Mode or create a bootable thumb drive and also try to boot to it.

Shutdown your Mac and replace one (or both) of the old drives. Then boot to Internet Recovery Mode or the bootable thumb drive.

Open Disk Utility and completely erase both disks (each to one volume/GPT/Journaled HFS and assign names e.g. "fusion1" and "fusion2" but not "Macintosh HD"). Don't erase your thumb drive or a drive visible called Boot OS X
Open Terminal in the menubar Utilities > Terminal and get the device identifiers of the two hard drives by entering diskutil list. Booted to Internet Recovery Mode you will get a list of 14-16 drives - only two of them are your hard drives. Simply check the sizes. The drives related to Internet Recovery Mode have a size of 1.2 GB or smaller!
Create a new LVG and LV (here I assume the 120 GB SSD has the disk identifier disk0 and the 3 TB HDD disk1 - they might be different though!):

diskutil cs create Fusion disk0 disk1
diskutil cs createVolume lvgUUID jhfs+ "Macintosh HD" 100% #replace lvgUUID with the UUID shown in the output of the previous command

verify the Fusion Drive with:

diskutil verifyDisk disk0 # use one of the disk identifiers found previously

Enter exit to quit Terminal.app
attach the Time Machine backup drive and in the Utilities windows choose Restore from Time Machine Backup > Select backup source > ...choose the drive and restore it to your Macintosh HD volume.
After the restore task has finished successfully, boot your Mac normally. Check if a RecoveryHD is present by opening Terminal and entering diskutil list.
When the RecoveryHD is missing, simply reinstall Sierra with the latest Sierra installer downloaded from the App Store  - which shouldn't affect your data but creates an additional RecoveryHD - or use the Recovery Partition Creator 4.


How can I get OS X to challenge me for password after sleep?

Go to System Preferences > Security and check "Require password"

There are several selectable time delays if immediate locking isn't what you prefer.


How can I restore iPhone from iTunes Backup BUT keep iCloud Notes?

When you have restored the phone from the older iTunes Backup, it should automatically start downloading the newer notes and contacts from your iCloud account (requires internet connectivity ofcourse).


"Hunk #5 FAILED at 2001." when upgrading wine through homebrew

I was able to solve it by deleting these lines:

# Patch to fix screen-flickering issues. Still relevant on 3.0.
# https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34166
patch do
  url "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/formula-patches/74c2566/wine/2.14.patch"
  sha256 "6907471d18996ada60cc0cbc8462a1698e90720c0882846dfbfb163e5d3899b8"
end

in /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core/Formula/wine.rb. Take note that, as the comment states, "screen-flickering issues" may be present when this patch is not applied.


This is not an issue that I have ever seen before. A Macbook automatically connecting to a secured network is something out of a science fiction book.

 As for your sons iPhone, type your subnet mask into your address bar and mess around with the settings for you WEP Key and add his iPhones mac address to your router settings. This should enable your router to talk with your sons iPhone in this case that it is not connecting.

You can also go ahead and remove the network from his phone by forgetting it, and re-entering the credentials for your router in again manually so it can have a fresh start at trying to get to know your sons iPhone connection. My iPhone has trouble recognizing my iPhone sometimes and adding the mac address to my router settings fixed the issue but I am more experienced with stuff like than than your average Joe so try and "Forget This Network" and see if that works if not, try the first option. If all else fails, give Apple a call.


Is there any way to change the directory bash works out of, so as not to junk up my Home folder?

Is there any way to change the directory bash works out of.....

This is a misunderstanding of what Bash is.  Bash is a Unix shell that's a command line interface to the operating system.

It doesn't "work out" of your Home folder.  When you start a non-login, interactive shell, it starts you out in your HOME folder as a matter of convenience.

For simplicity sake, Bash is just a "portal" (Terminal window) into the operating system; nothing more.

  ...so as not to junk up my Home folder?

Your HOME folder is becoming "junked up" because whatever you're installing is using the default location $HOME for it's support files.

Just looking at a sample of the files/folders, things like JUNK, New Folder with Items, doc, core, layers, news, etc. are either files created by applications sourced from somewhere other than the App Store or created by the user.

  ...but it’s like every application wants to store a million configuration files in my home directory.

Apps usually store their files in ~/Library or more granular, in ~/Library/Application Support (this is the Library directory in the individual user's HOME directory).  There are exceptions...iCloud, and Adobe Create Cloud store files in the HOME directory.  I personally put my VirtualBox VM's in my HOME directory instead of my ~/Documents directory.

  I’m actually surprised Apple allows this.

Thank goodness they do!  I wouldn't welcome any OS that restricts me from modifying MY home directory the way I want it to.

That said, it's important to note that this is not an "Apple thing."  This is a BSD and more generally a Unix thing.  Your HOME directory is a predefined variable in the OS and many applications and scripts use this directory to store it's files.

As stated before, App Store apps (the ones with oversight by Apple) conform to a standard place for their support files.  Things you download from Github...well, you're at their mercy.

  ...Where I want it to look like this with a nice, neat little folder for
  the shell to do whatever it wants.

You could do this, but bear in mind that the app you installed will be looking for it's support files in directory defined by the environment variable HOME.  Move those files somewhere else and you could break the app.

To make this work, you would have to let the app know (by modifying it) that it's files are located in $HOME/bash.

TL;DR

You're expecting HOME to be a pristine place that doesn't get touched; that's an ill conceived expectation.  Use the HOME directory for what it's designed for - a user support directory and focus on keeping ~/Documents, ~/Downloads, ~/Music, nice and clean.


External Monitor not working on MacBook Pro 2015 with HDMI-VGA converter

Try a PRAM and SMC reset. Usually helps.

Also try replugging in the connectors on both ends


Stolen Mac - Help Finding Serial Number?

Someone stole my iPads last week and I didn't have the serial numbers. I found the serial numbers on appleid.apple.com. Once, logged in, scroll down to Devices and click view details. You will need to answer your security questions, but any of your devices that are linked to Apple ID will be shown with their serial numbers. I hope this helps someone.


How do I copy music from iphone 4 to iphone 5s and windows computer?

iFunBox should allow you to copy the music from any iOS device (jailbroken or not) onto a Windows or Mac computer.

See this support article for more relevant information.


Will BigSur Beta update do a fresh install or upgrade Catalina?


Where can I download a full OS X 10.11.1 Public Beta installer?

I believe, unless you have a paid developer account, the only way to get it is to download thru the app store.

I installed the GM version and the .1 update was offered to me as well. So you should get the GM and then the .1 update too.


Dead backlight on iMac, LCD and all else OK

Try to reduce the screen brightness to minimum. Put the computer to sleep and wake it up.

Better (90%)?

--> e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSzmyqQFZ2M

Not better (10%) -->

Toast your graphics board in the oven

e.g. https://macman860.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/baking-a-graphics-card/

Better (90%) --> You're welcome

Not better --> New inverter board


Why can't I see some chinese characters (eg: ) on macOS BigSur 11.2.1?

The display of any unicode character requires that your machine has a font installed which contains the glyph for it. Apple doesn't provide fonts for all 130000 unicode characters, so when there is one you can't see it normally means you have to download and install an extra font.
This page gives you a list of fonts that will show the example you give, U+26CCA.


How to add bluetooth menu to login window?

You can't.  It's not designed this way.
First off, the Mac keyboards aren't designed to have multiple pairings.  If you want to swap between two machines, you need a keyboard and mouse with that capability.  The same thing goes for the mouse.
Secondly, allowing the ability to do a Bluetooth pairing outside of an authenticated session is a major security flaw.  This would allow an attacker to install any sort of device, including nefarious ones, without your consent.  It's more than likely that in your use case scenario that would never happen because it's "just you" in your environment, but computer manufacturers don't implement security in one off environments.


You can use zip command in Terminal to zip the files without the .DS_Store, __MACOSX and other .* files.

Open Terminal (search for terminal in spotlight)
Navigate to the folder you want to zip using the cd command
Paste this:
zip -r dir.zip . -x ".*" -x "__MACOSX"

Example
Let's say you have a folder on your desktop called Folder with stuff to zip.
Open terminal and write following commands:

cd Desktop/Folder

zip -r dir.zip . -x ".*" -x "__MACOSX"

Now you have a file called dir.zip without __MACOSX and .* files in the folder Folder on your desktop.


Should I use the same Apple ID for iCloud and iTunes?

In any of the common scenarios in which you store your Store credentials on devices under the control of others, it makes good security sense to have those be different from the ones you use for iCloud.

For example, it is common to share music among family members by using an Apple ID for purchases on all of the family's machines. If that Apple ID were the same as the one you used for iCloud, then (unless you can be sure that all family members have secured their machines) anyone who got his hands on one of those machines could potentially gain access to your e-mail, calendar, and documents (and, in typical configurations, could even log on to your machine if he had access to it).


How to omit apps from external drives in "Open With" menu?

You can prevent the applications on your external drive from appearing in the Open With… menu by preventing Spotlight from indexing the drive.
To do this navigate to System Preferences > Spotlight. Select the Privacy tab and add your external drive to the list. Mutineer in the screenshot below is my SuperDuper clone drive.

Update:
My best recollection is that this was all I did to solve the problem, but if the problem persists, two additional steps may be necessary:

Make Launch Services reload the list of available apps with the command /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -all local,system,user. As apps on the second drive are not available via Spotlight anymore, the new database will only contain those on your main drive.
Restart Finder to rebuild its Open With context menu (Option-right click on its Dock icon to get the restart option, or do killall Finder in Terminal).

Credit to @kopischke for providing this concise answer on SuperUser.
If you want to avoid the terminal incantations, you can use Onyx to rebuild the spotlight index and launch services database.


The only thing that comes to mind mind are screen shots.


Firefox: double-click on titlebar maximize window instead on open new tab

Double-click to maximise is a System pref

 menu > System Preferences > Dock

Uncheck "Double-click a window's title bar to…zoom"


How do I find the root cause of launchd crashing?

Start by increasing the log level of launchd. Maybe the logs can tell you more about what happens right before launchd crashes.

sudo launchctl log level info

The available log levels are: debug, info, notice, warning, error, critical, alert and emergency. I believe the default level is error.


Time Machine drive takes long time (~5 minutes) to mount on boot

On macOS you don’t need to install any drivers for external drives that comply with the USB Mass Storage class, which the Samsung does (unless you’re doing something funny like using their proprietary encryption scheme). Any external USB SSD will ‘just work’ when you plug it in. I would uninstall the driver as it can do more harm than good, particularly with the major rewrites to the driver architecture in Catalina and Big Sur which not all third-party developers have caught up with yet.
You’re definitely right to worry about the slow mounts on boot, though. That can be due to a variety of things. One of these is a heavily worn SSD, which could be the case if you’re using it for Time Machine, but two years isn’t a very long time. It may still be valuable for you to run the Smartmontools package (which will also require you to install USB SMART support) in order to determine the wear & lifespan on your SSD. Heavily worn SSDs will have increased latencies which get worse over time. If you’re only seeing this issue on first mount and you’re not seeing a reduction in read or write speed, though, then that’s unlikely to be the issue.
It sounds like you’re more concerned with your kernel panics. Without seeing the panic reports, we can’t determine if they’re something you should worry about or if they’re even related to your SSD. Can you please provide your panic logs? They’ll be found in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports and have the file extension .panic. Put those up on PasteBin and we can review them.
To your question of preserving your backups: I don’t know of a straightforward way to cherry-pick specific checkpoints (although there may exist tools out there that I just haven’t looked for, so feel free to DuckDuckGo it). Time Machine is persnickety about the contents of its backup bundle and any omissions could result in an unreadable backup. I would instead try cloning your entire SSD to another drive wholesale and pointing TM to that. (But I have never done this and it’s entirely possible that TM will detect the different device UUID and force you to recreate the backup anyway.) You have to be ready to accept that you might need to start from scratch.


How to completely remove Folx on Mac OS X?

For prior version than Folx 4

Go Download the Folx.dmg from their website, and open it. In the dmg image, there will be a package file called uninstaller. Run that.

It is only for prior versions than Folx 4, as said by Eltima Software. For Folx 4 or newer, it is mentionned on their website that it is enough to remove Folx.app to permanently remove it.


How can I have my Mac mount a network drive when an application launches?

Using Automator and the excellent SleepWatcher utility, I have a setup that automatically connects to my network drive when the computer starts, then automatically reconnects when the computer wakes from sleep.

I've written a tutorial in a blog post.

An update in response to CajunLuke's question:

The Automator app connects to the network drive and incorporates a 10 second delay to ensure the network connection is ready.

SleepWatcher runs as a daemon, and allows you to schedule the execution of scripts when your computer goes to sleep or wakes from sleep. In this case you configure it to run a shell script when the computer wakes that calls the aforementioned Automator app.


How to use Keychain to Auto Login into Authenticated Websites

I'll talk you through this... what does a traditional keychain do? It organises your keys in a central location for you to access in an adhoc fashion. I'd argue that a keychain also mitigates risk of you losing any one of your keys accidentally. Food for thought... would you leave your front door unlocked with your keychain (including other keys) sitting freely in the key slot?

So the Mac Keychain is conceptually the same, it organises your cryptographic keys and mitigates risk of loss by securing it with your Mac password. Given that your password IS the entry point keychain, you got yourself a chicken and egg scenario. But anyway, I would sternly advise you not to pursue this idea any further. If somebody stole your device or remotely logged into it, and you had your system automatically logging you in, you'd be handing over your keys to a potential thief. In some ways, this might be even more dangerous than compromising your physical keychain.

So by concept, the Mac "Keychain" would be referred to in general IT terms as a "Key store", that is responsible for facilitating the storage of private and public keys. What you are asking for is essentially an "Authenticator" or an SSO (Single Sign-On) solution.

My recommendation: if you configure your everyday user account as a non-administrator, then you should be able to have it auto login to OSX. You shouldn't be using an administrator or Root level account for general purposes. If you get hacked or attacked by malware while logged in as an admin then youve pretty much handed over those admin rights to the Malware.


Some PDFs created by MS Word 2007's Save-as-PDF feature (on Windows) don't display correctly on Mac OS / iOS

There isn't anything you do to Word to improve its PDF output. The best way to guarantee solid cross-platform PDFs is to get Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not Reader) and Distiller and make PDFs through those applications. Unless something has changed since the last time I did this on Windows, you'll output to Postscript through the Print window and create the PDF with Distiller, but you need Acrobat to get the drivers and converters. PDF is an open ISO standard, but Adobe's products are still the best way to go here.


As it turns out, TUAW had an article on this subject earlier this month. How I missed it (or didn't remember it) is beyond me.

Due in part to price (as opposed to karmatic's suggestion), and also the features, namely choice of hosting regional, I'm going to sign up for OverPlay.


Subscribing to a Photo Stream in iPhoto 11

Edit: I failed to notice that the poster is on OS X 10.7.5, and Shared Photo Streams require OS X 10.8.2 or later. Therefore it will not work unless the OS is updated. I am leaving the below answer for others to reference.

The lower portion of the screen is the section under "Family and Friends' Photos". It's just lower than the "My Photos" section.

Assuming you're already subscribed to the other person's Photo Stream, you would just double-click on the shared stream to open it and view photos.

If nothing appears here for you, ensure that you have Photo Stream turned on in iCloud settings. Go to Applications > System Preferences and click on iCloud. Check the box for Photo Stream. Click the Options button and check box boxes on this screen.

To turn Photo Stream on, go to iPhoto menu > Preferences and click on the Photo Stream tab. Check all applicable boxes.


Apple doesn't define active calories in the manual for Apple Watch, but they are a common measurement in sports physiology.

If you are in a coma, your body uses up calories from two of the three muscle types: smooth and cardiac muscle. The third type is skeletal muscle and that's what Active Calories tries to estimate using a physiological model that clearly considers average human statistics and then incorporates input data you feed Apple's Health App (height, weight, sex, heart rate) and then uses the accelerometer to pick apart your specific activity level for input to the model.

Presumably a large amount of PHD level research went into Apple's internal algorithms and models based on who they hired to work on the fitness teams in several internal laboratories.

Since you mentioned some sports, here are my thoughts:

The watch can't know about what weights you are lifting since it doesn't have sensors for that (yet). In fact, the algorithms may mess up since it's seeing your wrist move slowly yet your heart rate goes up much more than it might expect/anticipate. Active calories will be far more accurate for people that run, walk and move without machines or weights attached to their bodies. So pilates (non-reformer), yoga, and 7 minute workouts without weights will be more accurately reflected in Active Calories than will reformer pilates and weight lifting.

Hopefully, weight machines or extra data input can arrive some time later for people to get excellent results with weights. I could see non-free weight machines interface with an app or health kit directly to enhance the recording of your workout profile and progress. Also, indirectly your heart rate will reflect your weight lifting, so without needing specific input, the active calorie measure should still be useful in an absolute measure and highly useful for comparing one workout to another as you add weights and change your metabolic response to physical stress.


Adding a new executable to the PATH environment variable?

The cleanest way to achieve this would be to symlink the binary in the /usr/local/bin directory (which is included in PATH by default). You might need to create this directory if it doesn't exist yet. You can check to see if these directories are already in your PATH by opening Terminal.app and typing:

echo $PATH

This will generate a colon delimited listing of all directories in your PATH.

If the directories /usr/local or /usr/local/bin do not exist yet, execute the following:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin

Symlink the binary, replace (/Applications) with the path to phantomjs.app if it differs:

sudo ln -s /Applications/phantomjs.app/Contents/MacOS/phantomjs /usr/local/bin

Now you should have no problems executing phantomjs from the command-line.


Application update, what will be the release date in appstore

Nowadays, apps submitted to the App Store will take 6 to 8 days to be reviewed based on how many apps are queued for review.

If your application is showing the status Waiting for Review, it means your app is not yet reviewed by Apple. Once the review process has started, your app will show the status  Under Review.

Updates and new releases follow the same rules.

You can also refer here.


Can I connect to any AirPlay device from the WatchOS 3 Control Center?

On the Apple Watch, go to the Settings app, go to Bluetooth, and pair each of the devices you want to use.

The Apple Watch is connecting directly to the device by Bluetooth, not using your iPhone's connection.


Sounds funny, but Control Panel only works in user mode, but the .exe file is marked to require Admin rights.

Follow this guide and it will work (trust me).

Start Notepad and paste the following (see ** comment below):

  runas /trustlevel:0x20000 "C:\Windows\System32\AppleControlPanel.exe"

Save the file as "BootCampControlPanel.cmd".
Create a shortcut to this file and save it in the start menu or on your desktop.
Right click the shortcut file. Select properties. Click "Advance..." and check "Run as administrator".
Use this shortcut to start the Control Panel (the icon tray icon still does not work)

So basically we run a Command Prompt in Admin mode, and use this to start the applecontrolpanel.exe in user mode (sounds weird I know, but it works).

** 0x20000 might be different on your machine. From a command prompt run "runas /showtrustlevels" and use the hex number for (Basic User).


Single-track (.iso) vs. multiple-track (.img)

  Any single-track CD-ROM, DVD or Blu-ray disc can be archived in ISO
  format as a true digital copy of the original.

  But ISO files have limitations. For example, a CD can have multiple
  tracks, which can contain computer data, audio, or video. File systems
  such as ISO 9660 are stored inside one of these tracks. Since ISO
  images are expected to contain a binary copy of the file system and
  its contents, there is no concept of a "track" inside an ISO image,
  since a track is a container for the contents of an ISO image. This
  means that CDs with multiple tracks can't be stored inside a single
  ISO image; at most, an ISO image will contain the data inside one of
  those multiple tracks, and only if it is stored inside a standard file
  system.

  Formats such as CUE/BIN, CCD/IMG and MDS/MDF formats can be used to
  store multi-track disc images, including CD-Audio discs. These formats
  store a raw disc image of the complete disc, including information
  from all tracks, along with a companion file describing the multiple
  tracks and the characteristics of each of those tracks. This would
  allow an optical media burning tool to have all the information
  required to correctly burn the image on a new disc.

Shamelessly copied (an slightly edited) from wiki/ISO_image (24-10-2015).


Every time I connect my iPad, iTunes wants to back it up

Found the solution:

Under Edit / Preferences / Devices, check the "Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically" item.


Rebooting iPhone Doesn't Kill off All the Process

As a developer I can assure you that if you reboot the phone, those apps are no longer running in any way. At that point it's literally just a list of apps that you've launched in the past in reverse chronological order.

Edited to note: I've since verified (as @ughoavgfhw pointed out) that backgrounded apps can in fact have their services restarted after a reboot. You can still kill all non-Apple services using the method I describe below.

If you still don't feel comfortable, you can manually quit the apps any time. Simply double-press the home button to reveal the list of "running" apps -- the multitasking bar -- and tap-and-hold on one of them, the same way you rearrange you apps in Springboard.

They'll begin to wiggle, and instead of the black circle with an "x" in it that appears in the upper-left corner of each app icon (used to delete apps off the device entirely) you'll see a red circle with a "-" in it. Tap the red circle and the app will be completely forced from memory, killing an associated processes. After you've quit the first several, even if you haven't restarted your phone you're in the "totally suspended" territory.

Press the home button again to stop the wiggling, as normal.

Deleting an App: Black Circle with "x"

Quitting an App: Red Circle with "–"

Empty multitasking bar, all apps have been dumped


Ok, I've found that using log command will read these files in a formatted way, e.g.

log show file.tracev3 | less

Source: New macOS Sierra Artifacts

See also:

Unified Logging and Activity Tracing (+PDF slideshow)


Where does OS X store accessibility preferences?

The database is located at /Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db.
To query the database from the command line, use sqlite3.

You can query what access a certain app has.
sqlite3 /Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db \
  'select service from access where client like "com.apple.Terminal"
    and auth_value = 2;'

kTCCServiceDeveloperTool
kTCCServiceListenEvent
kTCCServicePostEvent
kTCCServiceScreenCapture
kTCCServiceSystemPolicyAllFiles

You can query what apps have access to a certain permission like accessibility.
sqlite3 /Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db \
  'select client from access where service like "kTCCServiceAccessibility"
    and auth_value = 2;'

com.apple.AEServer
com.apple.MobileSMS
com.apple.dt.Xcode-Helper
…

To perform these queries, Terminal needs full disk access (kTCCServiceSystemPolicyAllFiles).
Replace auth_value = 2 with allowed = 1 if on an older macOS like High Sierra (not sure at which point it changed between High Sierra and Big Sur).


You can disable them in most text views by saving a property list like this as ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict:

{
    "\UF700" = noop:;
    "\UF701" = noop:;
    "\UF702" = noop:;
    "\UF703" = noop:;
    "$\UF700" = noop:;
    "$\UF701" = noop:;
    "$\UF702" = noop:;
    "$\UF703" = noop:;
    "~\UF700" = noop:;
    "~\UF701" = noop:;
    "~\UF702" = noop:;
    "~\UF703" = noop:;
    "~$\UF700" = noop:;
    "~$\UF701" = noop:;
    "~$\UF702" = noop:;
    "~$\UF703" = noop:;
    "@\UF700" = noop:;
    "@\UF701" = noop:;
    "@\UF702" = noop:;
    "@\UF703" = noop:;
    "@$\UF700" = noop:;
    "@$\UF701" = noop:;
    "@$\UF702" = noop:;
    "@$\UF703" = noop:;
}

If you use bash, you can disable arrow keys (without other modifier keys) by adding this to ~/.inputrc:

"\e[A":
"\e[B":
"\e[C":
"\e[D":

If you want to disable them completely, you can add this to KeyRemap4MacBook's private.xml:

<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_UP, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_DOWN, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>

This would only disable them in TextMate, TextEdit, Terminal, and iTerm, and only affect some key combinations:

<only>TEXTMATE, EDITOR, TERMINAL</only>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_UP, ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_DOWN, ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, VK_SHIFT | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, VK_SHIFT | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_UP, VK_SHIFT | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_DOWN, VK_SHIFT | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, VK_OPTION | VK_SHIFT | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, VK_OPTION | VK_SHIFT | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_UP, VK_OPTION | VK_SHIFT | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_DOWN, VK_OPTION | VK_SHIFT | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, VK_OPTION | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, VK_OPTION | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_UP, VK_OPTION | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::CURSOR_DOWN, VK_OPTION | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::VK_NONE</autogen>


Making the auto-hidden menu bar show up faster

There appears to be no easy way to do this.

In previous versions of OS X, the preference com.apple.springing.delay controlled these timings, but setting this no longer affects the menu timeout on Yosemite (at least not for me).

The keyboard shortcut Ctrl - Fn - F2 pulls down the menubar immediately and focusses it so you can use the keyboard to select menu items (e.g. then press E to select the Edit menu; hit 'Enter' to pull down the menu, then press F to select Find, and Enter to activate). Switching to keyboard shortcuts can improve productivity because your mouse can then stay with the action in the middle of the screen.

Alternatively, commercial software Moom should do what you want.


How to shorten startup time after Lion to Mountain Lion upgrade?

Once you've paid once for an OS upgrade, you own the right to download the OS again at any time. Reinstalling will not require another purchase. If you wish to try your luck with a fresh in a fresh install, consider watching TLDToday's video series:

How to Create a Bootable Mountain Lion 10.8 USB Install Thumb Drive

How to Clean Install OS 10.8 Mountain Lion


TestFlight - What happens to the installed beta-app when that version goes live in AppStore?

The user can 'update' to the newest version on the App Store to remove the 60 days 'trial' for your beta version.

TestFlight checks your build version that is marked as test version and the live version on the App Store. If they match Testflight won't show the same version anymore.


How to switch between multiple fullscreen windows of same application in OS X?

Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to switch between fullscreen windows of the same application.

You have two alternatives that are not ideal but enough:

Shortcuts to switch between spaces/desktops or jump to a specific one

Gestures to switch between spaces/desktops

To make this workflow work well, just put your fullscreen windows side by side.


Does using a case with iPhone cause excess heat to linger around and does it have any significant impact on battery life?

Whether or not the case can cause a thermal problem depends entirely on the case.

Is it possible for a case to impact battery life by not dissipating heat - yes.

Is that true for any case - no.

Imagine a well fitting case made of a metal - it would easily dissipate just as much heat from the phone as when not using a case.


How can I lengthen the time text to speech pauses after it reaches a full stop ("period")

Use the following  after the word to tell your mac to take a break for 1000 milliseconds after that word:

  [[slnc 1000]]

"The silence command causes the synthesizer to generate silence for the specified number of milliseconds. You might want to insert extra silence between two sentences to allow listeners to fully absorb the meaning of the first one. Note that the precise timing of the silence will vary among synthesizers."

You can change the number of milliseconds.

Hopes this answers your question.
More information on https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SpeechSynthesisProgrammingGuide/FineTuning/FineTuning.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004365-CH5-SW11


How to reinstall Snow Leopard on my MBP?

Just put in the Install DVD.
You can do that with the computer running and run the installer from the disc.
You can also boot directly to the disc by turning off the computer, putting it in, holding down the c key, and turning the computer on.

Follow the directions, and you'll have a clean install. Your personal files and preferences will be saved, but system files will be replaced.


Why running Time Machine on OS X Server slows down my Mac?

I found an article that suggests some troubleshooting steps, I'll summarize it here:

Test the drive: copy some files to find out if your read / write speeds are normal. This will help you rule out your internal or server drive.
Check the drive for errors: Again, you can check internal and server drives for errors (bad blocks, permission problems).
Run a general maintenance routine: you can follow the steps they propose here.
Back up in Safe Mode: reducing the system to a bare minimum may help in isolating the problem.
Uninstall or disable drive-monitoring or scanning utilities: Antivirus and other drive scanning software may get triggered by Time Machine activity.
Disable Spotlight: and check for other processes that may be scanning the disk permanently.

There are a couple of additional suggestions on the article, check it out if this steps do not solve your issue and for a full description of each step.

Also, your colleague may provide a good comparison for troubleshooting: you said your hardware is identical, so:

Is the software setup the same? Any differences may point out the culprit.
If software setup is similar, testing hardware on both machines can give you comparison points. For instance, what happens if they use the same Time Machine destination?

Finally, check the Activity Monitor prior to and while Time Machine is running, to single out resource hogs.


How to fix the OS X Server "LibClamAV Error: mpool_malloc(): Attempt to allocate 8388608 bytes." reboot loop?

I ran across this page dealing with the issue on a carefully rebuilt OS X server running 10.6 (I have reasons). The compile-it-yourself answer by Pro Backup is fantastically detailed, but I may have run across a simpler answer, at least in the short term. I noticed another machine I had, also using 10.6 Server, didn't have the issue. Checking the versions of each using /usr/bin/clamscan --version, I saw they were the same engine versions, but different definition versions:

Has the issue

ClamAV 0.97.8/22421/Sun Oct 23 22:58:38 2016
ClamAV 0.97.8/22422/Mon Oct 24 12:02:38 2016

versus

Doesn't have the issue

ClamAV 0.97.8/22470/Wed Nov  2 19:05:24 2016

Manual download clamAV definitions

So, decided to try manually downloading the virus definitions using /usr/bin/freshclam (as sudo). It ran through lots of versions, finishing with 22471. Not yet sure if this will do the trick, but I'm hoping it's on the right track.


How to increase "tracking speed" beyond the maximum?

The value of the preference is stored in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist and can be changed with something like defaults write -g com.apple.trackpad.scaling -float 5.0. The normal maximum value is currently 3.0. Applying the changes requires logging out and back in.


Apple Mail 8 shows welcome screen on every launch

As there were no other suggestions, I fully deleted ~/Library/Mail/V2 as well as ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, rebooted the system, re-added my IMAP account and had my ~50k mails re-indexed. This took about two hours but now Mail.app behaves as expected (at least in this case).


By putting Mac to sleep(holding the power button for couple sec) and then log in again it solves the problem, and I'm able to switch languages again.


External usb webcam flickering (ripple effect) on MacBook Pro

I've found a temporary solution:
Open google meet and switch to the usb cam. That's it - it will adjust the capture frequency.