No. Sudo draws from the root account and won't consult your user's ~/.bash_profile.

But you can workaround this problem by adding the following alias to your profile:

alias sudo='sudo '

*Note the space after the command. From then on, sudo will work normally and you'll be able to use your user's aliases without issue (both normally and with root privileges).

Explanation: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Aliases says:

  If the last character of the alias value is a space or tab character, then the next command word following the alias is also checked for alias expansion.


macOS How do I install and use this program?

Installation:

Download the zip to your Downloads folder
Unzip displayplacer-master.zip
Enter in Terminal: sudo mv ~/Downloads/displayplacer-master/displayplacer /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/displayplacer
displayplacer
Depending on your Security & Privacy settings you have to allow execution of the file in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General

All other files included in the zip won't be required to run the exec.

Usage:

Get the properties of all your displays: displayplacer list
With the properties and the various possible switches create an arrangement. One example with four monitors is listed:

displayplacer "id:18173D22-3EC6-E735-EEB4-B003BF681F30+F466F621-B5FA-04A0-0800-CFA6C258DECD res:1440x900 scaling:on origin:(0,0) degree:0" "id:4C405A05-8798-553B-3550-F93E7A7722BB res:768x1360 hz:60 color_depth:8 scaling:off origin:(1440,0) degree:90" "id:A46D2F5E-487B-CC69-C588-ECFD519016E5 mode:3 origin:(-1440,0) degree:270"

I have no 2nd screen in my virtual machine so I partly have to guess what it means:

The first two monitors (1440x900) are mirrored and contain the menubar. The third is on the right and rotated by 90 degrees (clockwise?). The fourth is on the left and rotated by 90 degrees (counterclockwise?).

Automator:

After finding appropriate settings (at least two if you want to switch the primary display between [your] macbook's internal display and [your] external display: back and forth) you have to create two different services/quick actions/etc. each containing one shell script ("Run Shell Script") with the proper displayplacer "id:.... line.

Depending on your Mac hardware and your system version you can apply a shortcut or even add it to the Touch Bar.


Cannot find expired certificate in Keychain Access

The procedure to locate an expired certificate in a specific keychain is covered well in this answer:

How do I fix the SSL warning I get when visiting github.com?

Be sure that you look on the left of the Keychain Access window - you should have a login keychain, maybe an iCloud keychain, a system Keychain and System Roots.

If you don't find the expired certificate in the first keychain, repeat the process after selecting each other keychain. Also pay attention in case you are not selecting All Items or Certificates in the filter under the list of Keychains.


USB devices intermittently disconnecting

Disclaimer: this is an answer under construction.

Open the  > About This Mac > System Report...,
select Hardware > USB,
and open every small ▼.

Select the USB bus where is connected your USB hub, and enlarge the
lower part of the window to have a complete vue of all your USB equipments.

Make a screen capture: commandshift4, space, select the USB map window and click.
You will get something like:

Include this screen capture within your OQ (original question).

Verify that the sum of the Current Required (mA) of all the equipments
connected to the same internal USB hub don't exceed the Current Available (mA) for the hub. This value might be different depending on the USB port available outside and what is already connected on it internally.

As a basic simple rule, avoid the external USB port which is on the bus where is connected the FaceTime HD camera (Current Required (mA) = 500 mA).
For example, on a MacBook Pro, I discovered through trials that my FaceTime HD camera is on the bus with the USB external port nearest from the front.

To check this hidden cabling, just use your external mouse.

Connect it on port nearest from the front. Hit commandR in System Report... to refresh the USB connection information.
Note on which bus is this external USB port.

Repeat the same operation for port farthest from the front.


Automatically answer phone call on iPhone

Is it possible to set up my iPhone to automatically answer phone call for me?

Yes, there is a built-in accessibility setting that you can use for exactly this task.

On your iPhone, in Settings app, navigate to General → Accessibility → Call Audio Routing (Last item under Interaction section) → Auto-Answer Calls. Tap on the switch shown against Auto-Answer Calls to enable it. (The setting is turned off by default)

Once enabled, you'll get the option to configure the duration of time to wait before a call is automatically answered. You can set any time interval from 0.0 seconds to 60.0 seconds in steps of 1.0 second.

  I generally answer every call that I receive, irrespective of the caller. However, it would be nice to have the ability to know the name of the caller if the caller is a contact saved in my phonebook.

To hear the caller name announcement, you can use another built-in setting. Go to Settings app and navigate to Phone → Announce Calls (Under Calls section) and select one of the available options s desired.


How to access folder form a .tool application

You simply have to supply the full path to the DLL in the script.

When you run the script from Terminal.app, the PWD environment variable contains the path to the folder where you're currently placed. I.e. if you use cd to move to other folders, the PWD environment variable is automatically updated to match.

When you're using the GUI and double-clicking an icon, you're not really "in" a specific folder at the time. So the same concept of a PWD environment variable tracking your movements do not make sense.

Instead simply supply the full path in the script, such as:

dotnet ~/OUTPUT/Calculator.dll

Here ~ means that currently logged in user's home folder.


How can I turn on opening a link in another app again?

If I'm reading the documentation correctly, when the web interface pops up in Safari, there should be a banner across the top of the page that essentially says, "Hey, you could view this info in the app instead!" If you tap OPEN on that banner, it's supposed to re-establish the universal linking to the app instead of the website. Here it is in Apple's words:

  When a user taps a universal link that [an app] handle[s], iOS also examines the user’s recent choices to determine whether to open [the] app or [the] website. For example, a user who has tapped a universal link to open [the] app can later choose to open [the] website in Safari by tapping a breadcrumb button in the status bar. After the user makes this choice, iOS continues to open [the] website in Safari until the user chooses to open [the] app by tapping OPEN in the Smart App Banner on the webpage.

Source: Universal Links in Apple's App Search Programming Guide


Good Linux distribution for Macbook Air and VirtualBox

Ubuntu or Mint are the distros I'd recommend. They're both well-supported. Also, don't pay much attention to Torvalds. The man has an opinion on everything, and he isn't always right... I mean, he made the Linux kernel into a Monolithic kernel, and that has its issues.


Character Picker stopped working in OS X Lion

You can try disabling it.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool FALSE

Then reboot. If you want to reverse this change, you can enter the following to change the feature back to be enabled.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool TRUE


Automatically Adjust Sampling Rate Based On File

Just set the output to 96kHz.
Anything actually lower than that will either be transmitted at their own bit-rate & your DAC will auto-select or at worst will just be filled with empty bits. it won't make any practical difference; they're basically noise-floor bits anyway.


To boot into verbose mode use CmdV on boot up.


How can I add a Google Docs URL to my iOS home screen?

Try using the Shortcuts app.
If you create a shortcut to Web → Open URLs you can use your app URL you crafted above to open the correct application.
From there click the ellipsis in the top right-hand corner, give it a name and then select Add to Home Screen.


Why do text on some websites appear scrambled in Safari?

Fixed-width text not appearing correctly in Safari after Lion upgrade

This is a known bug. Check the link above and see if my instructions fix it for you.


Have you tried resetting the SMC?

Reset the SMC

It's easy to reset your computer's System Management Controller (SMC). The instructions for resetting the SMC on a MacBook depends on two things:

Does your device run from a removable battery? (Yes in your case)
Does your device run from a built-in battery?

Now, for the sake of others who may come here looking for answers to the same issue, I will provide the process for both.

For MacBook Pros, MacBooks etc that you can remove the battery from, here’s what you do:

Shut down your computer
Disconnect the MagSafe plug (power cable) from the computer
Remove the battery
Press the power button for 5 seconds and release
Put the battery back in
Reconnect the MagSafe cord (or power cable)
Turn your computer back on with the power button

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

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

Hope this helps. Please report back and let us know.

Reset your PRAM/NVRAM

Older Macs had what's called Parameter RAM (PRAM), newer Macs use Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM). It may be worth you also resetting this. Here’s how to:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then press the commandoptionpr keys. You have to make sure you press these keys before the gray screen appears or it won’t work.
Hold those keys down until your Mac reboots again and you here the startup chime.
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. mouse speed, time and date/timezone, etc).


When connected to two networks, can I tell my iMac to use a specific network for a certain application?

Well, I got a great answer from the Audiofusion team. It resolves my specific situation.
Per Audiofusion:

SoundCaster will only send audio over the Ethernet connection. Just
make sure the WiFi connection is listed first and the Ethernet
connection is listed second in your Network Preferences.

Thanks!


How do you cancel 1000's of iTunes Match downloads on the iPad without swiping each one?

I just have the same exact problem. It's a bug in iOS. If you go to iTunes App on your iOS device, you will see a Downloads section. There you will see all pending iTunes Match downloads. It's a pain if you have thousands of songs to delete them from this download queue one by one. So here's how to squash this bug.

You absolutely don't need to reset your phone and go back to square one or email iTunes. Spare yourself the trouble. Here is a simple fix.

Go to Settings > iTunes & App Store > iTunes Match
On that screen, turn iTunes Match off.
Tap your Apple ID on that screen and tap Sign Out. (I don't know if this is necessary but it works anyway. Just an added precaution for this to work.)
Restart your iOS device (Hold down Sleep and Home button for about 5 seconds until it goes black and the apple logo in a black background appears).
Go back to iTunes Store > Downloads and voila they're all gone. All those pending downloads are reset. And your iOS device won't download anymore of those songs unless you tell it to.


Can I dictate if an attachment is included in the text or as a thumbnail?

One way of dictating the choice is to choose what format you send the mail in. If you send mail as plain text then the attachment will need to be opened by the receiver (although the receiver's mail client may choose to provide a preview with the message, much like Mail.app does for some images and PDF documents). If you send the message as rich text (Format -> Make Rich Text) you can choose to place images etc. in the message and they will be visible in place to the receiver (depending on the capabilities of the receiver's client).


Mount volume over a not-previously-existing folder

Technically you can only mount a volume on an existing folder. The trick that nevertheless makes this possible for macOS in general is that a program makes sure to create the folder before performing the mount.

This kind of functionality is generally known (across operating systems) as an "auto mounter". And indeed macOS contains a program named automount that automatically creates folders and mounts according to the map setup in /etc/auto_master. This is mainly used with certain types of network shares.

The main automounter that most users will interact with is named diskarbitrationd. This program listens for events such as USB drives being connected, DVDs inserted, etc. and mounts any mountable file system on them.

diskarbitrationd uses information in /etc/fstab to determine any special options or mount point configuration that the user has set for a specific drive. Those mount points needs to exist in advance however, and they won't automatically be deleted after the file system is unmounted.

If you just want to chose a different folder name within /Volumes, you can simply open Disk Utility and right-click on the volume to choose "Rename". The next time you insert the drive, it will be mounted in a folder with that name.

If you want to do something completely different than the manual behavior, you could disable diskarbitrationd entirely, and create your own program for mounting drives automaticallly. Note however that it is a lot of work for something that sounds like it could be solved in a better wa.y

Finally a work around could be that you create a program (i.e. a small script) that is run whenever something is mounted. When your special drive is mounted, it could automatically unmount it, create the custom mount point and mount it there. You would need special handling to also delete the folder when the disk is unmounted again. If you can create small scripts, the trick to getting this working is to create a launchd daemon definition file for the script, and use the StartOnMount key. This makes launchd run your script every time something is mounted.


Is there any way to save the order of spaces in Mission Control?

What Jay said in a comment...
Uncheck the second box here:


Can't exec "glibtoolize": No such file or directory

Looks like you already have libtool installed via brew but it is not linked so the required symlinks in /usr/local/bin are still missing. To create them,

brew link libtool


Why can't my iPhone connect to the mail server anymore (and how can I fix it)?

Settings → General → Reset → Reset Network Settings.


Installed mpv with Brew, but nothing in Applications

If you want to have the application linked to ~/Applications, have homebrew do that.

brew linkapps mpv

Since "linkapps" is being removed (for reasons) across all brew recipes, you might instead tap the cask which drops a functioning mpv into Applications and runs more like an app than a command line tool.

brew cask install mpv


No - purchases are not transferable, but you could set up your new account as family share and if the purchases are eligible for sharing, you would then get to use the new appleID and password to download for free the "purchase" from the 'family member"


Send message on iPhone 4S using PC Bluetooth keyboard?

In Mail for the Mac you can send the current message using Shift + Cmd + D, so maybe try that?

On my PC keyboard, the Win key sends a Cmd in Mac OS X, yours is probably the same.


Solarized dark + Zsh for terminal looks off

There is not a good way to fix this. As it states in the documentation

iTerm2 has better color fidelity than the built in Terminal, so your
themes will look better.

That being said, you can edit the color of the prompt via the terminal preferences.
Hope this helps!


How can I stop an iPod from upgrading the iOS once it has already started the download?

Turn off wifi.  Reset All settings.  Phone reboots and download is canceled.


How do I fix disabled diacritical/accent marks?

If you look at the answer to a very similar question (but NOT a duplicate) you will see that the terminal work they suggest as an answer specifically targets the preferences for the given app - in that answer's case Terminal:

Accent popup in Terminal.app?

As a result, I'd start by suggesting you target the specific plist for the app you most frequently want this function in, and if it succeeds there, consider making that a system-wide pref.


Email app disappeared and now I can't access email

Try this.

Swipe down from the very top of your home screen. Type "mail" into the search field at the top of the screen. if the mail.app does not show up you may have accidentally deleted it. This is also an easy fix.

Go into the App Store, tap on search and type "mail app" look for the familiar icon and make sure the developer is "Apple." You can then "re-install the app like you would any other. There will be no charge to do this. This is merely the way Apple decided how to put back icons that you have deleted.


Does iCloud Calendar Backup Include Local (Non iCloud) Calendars?

Following some trial and error, and additional reasoning, I can partially answer my own question:

(1) The events from a local calendar, on an iPhone ("On This Phone", I think it is referred to), are not backed up to the calendar-specfic area in iCloud. Here:

iCloud.com > Settings > (Advanced section) > Restore Calendars and Reminders

Although it doesn't say so explicitly, it makes sense that these iCloud calendar backups cover a user's iCloud calendars. (Plus, my attempt to restore such backups with a hope to see pre-merged, local calendars, failed).

Screen shot from iCloud.com:

(2) The iPhone backup (the complete backup of the whole phone), which in my case was being backed up to iCloud (rather than iTunes), would, I presume, include the local calendars and their events.

However, by time I'd got to looking at this, my oldest 'complete' iCloud backup was just a day old... which was after I merged the local calendars into iCloud calendars.


Backup software like Time Machine and CrashPlan combined?

I am a big fan of Arq (http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/), which works just like TimeMachine but with remote backups on Amazon S3/Glacier.


Where are the default system icons for folders and files stored?

The default icons are stored in various locations inside /System/Library - is there a specific icon you're looking for?

Finder.app (/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources) has the Smart Folder icons and the Burnable folder icons for example.

Most of the more known icons (eg. pictures for the default folders among many others) can be found at /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources


You could set up a shortcut for it in system prefs/keyboard/text/replace with

Minimum 2 characters I think.


Can I choose when Siri speaks on my Apple Watch?

Yes in settings on the watch:

Tap Settings > General > Siri.
Choose: Always On, Control with Silent Mode, or Headphones Only.

Apple also points out your voice needs to download over WiFi to the watch when you select or change it on your iPhone.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205184


Check your keyboard settings.

Go to  System Preferences... > Keyboard then the Input Sources tab.

Depending on your language, you should be able to see the current layout.

Keyboards can be configured for different languages and different layouts.  The US Keyboard standard is commonly called QWERTY as many physical keyboards are laid out that way.  Notice the keys from Q to Y left to right.  If you see your preferred layout there and it is not currently selected, change it.

UPDATE: Check that your keyboard may not have physical damage (liquid) by pugging in an external keyboard via USB or Bluetooth if you have one available.  If the external operates properly, there could be some physical damage.  If it operates the same as the built in keyboard, then the problem is in software.


Photo Booth/QuickTime-recorded video is out of sync when uploaded to Facebook

All .mov videos I uploaded to Facebook are out of sync. It's Facebook fault. If I upload the same video to Youtube it works fine.


It looks like unsafe mode allows the Java app full access to your filesystem, which is enough that a malicious Java app could do anything it wants (take over your computer, infect it with malware, spy on you, etc.).  So, the name "unsafe mode" does seem appropriate here.

It's your call whether you want to take the risk.  Personally, I wouldn't, on my own personal computer.  I might set up a virtual machine and run the VPN client inside the VM, or ask the client for another solution that doesn't involve shooting holes in your computer's security.  Right now, Java security is a bit of a mess; it's a shame we don't have better solutions available.


Restore from backup on iPod touch issues

With iOS devices there are a lot of issues that can be happening between iTunes and the iPod. Backups can take a very long time depending on the amount of application data or the size of the camera roll at the time of the backup. Troubleshooting these issues go from very simple troubleshooting steps such as updating iTunes and restarting your computer all the way to the more advanced troubleshooting steps. If you are getting an error code, this can help you determine the exact issue, there is a really great article for troubleshooting the iPod on apples support site @ http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1275

Some steps that you can take to help isolate the issue would be trying a different USB cable (if you have one) or different USB port (should be USB 2.0), if you are connecting to USB through USB hub or extender try plugging it directly in to the computer, creating a test windows user account can also save a lot of headaches by letting you know it is something specific to that user account, and trying to sync music on another computer. I would try walking through that article and if your still having issues after that to try contacting apple or setting up an appointment at an apple store to make sure there is nothing wrong with the actual hardware of the iPod. Best of luck


Mail Connection issues to aol with yosemite 10.10.1

You are not alone.  I have the same problem using earthlink as email provider.  Answer is that you use "MacMail" on your computer which connects to your provider.  The connection is broken in the yosemite system.  Earthlink support has tried to remotely check and reset internal macmail settings in my computer, with no success.  Call your provider, maybe the can reset some hidden setting in yosemite.  Good luck.


How do you sync only new songs? You put them in your library, and click sync. If you have duplicates in your library, you will have duplicates on your device. What you see listed in iTunes is exactly what you will have on your device.

The answer is not any harder than this. "Sync" means exactly what it says on the tin, it updates your device with the data in your library. It will "update" songs that have had information changed (cover art, lyrics, or if a title was corrected, etc.), and it will add new ones you've put in the iTunes library.

When you click sync, iTunes does not overwrite everything and start from scratch. It synchronizes your library. It picks up new changes and writes them to the device, and it will even bring new content back from the device if you bought something from the store on your device.

Considering your exact requirements:

Do not change any settings in iTunes. Leave music syncing options completely default, and iTunes will do exactly what you want it to do.

Your exact requirement is exactly what iTunes is supposed to do.


Two different USB 3 HDD docks - disk partitioned on one not usable on the other

The problem will lie with the dock disk-controllers and the method they use when translating the hard disk layout. I recently serviced an HP NX7400 laptop and the BIOS has two different modes for dealing hard disk translation - LBA Assist and Bit-shift.

Both work, but if a drive is formatted using one method it will not be recognised if the other option is then selected after partitioning and formatting.

The acid test would be to format both disks, one on each dock, and then hook the drives up directly to a Mac. I suspect one of the drives will be recognised and accessible but the other will pop a "Disk Unreadable" message and prompt to be initialized.


How to disable service workers in Safari?

This is for Safari 12.0.3, the experimental feature set is different in different Safari versions.

Enable the Safari developer menu. Safari Preferences > "Advanced" pref pane > "Show Develop menu in menu bar" checkbox at the bottom.

Then, in Develop menu, go to "Experimental Features" menu item and disable "Service Workers" in the sub menu.


Buying in the Mac App Store for the enterprise

Apple also has a Volume Purchase Program for Business, which it says is applicable "whether you have ten employees or ten thousand". I didn't see anything saying it couldn't actually be used for even fewer than 10 employees/users, too. There doesn't appear to be a minimum quantity for VPP license purchases (that I could find, anyway).

If you choose to enroll, you'll need to set up a new Apple ID using an email that isn't already tied to an existing Apple ID.

You can find more information in the VPP Guide (PDF).


How to add a self-signed root CA and always trust it from CLI on OSX

It seems that the only way to modify the trust settings via the security command is by the trust-settings-import option.  The xml file output by security trust-settings-export would be a good place to start; but, it looks a little tricky.


How can I tag movies for use in iTunes/AppleTV?

You can do that in iTunes, select each file and click Get Info on the context menu. You can even tag several files at once if they share common info, such as the episodes of a series.

Also, you can add covers in the same manner. Just paste from IMDB or (as I do) from the iTunes browser previews


Okay, I figured out what was going on: When macOS detects a drive being unplugged without being ejected (which I don't think happened but I did get a message saying it had), the next time you plug the drive in fsck is going to go to work automatically, to check out the drive and attempt to repair it if need be. Unless you go looking, you'll get no indication that this is what's happening other than that the drive (or a partition on it) won't mount. This super helpful comment was key to my understanding what's going on: https://superuser.com/a/1013435/955941. After about 10 hours, fsck finished and the partition mounted correctly.


Why is Google Chrome not seen in the Screen Recording Options in Security and Privacy settings

Visit https://meet.google.com/
Start a meeting, then cast your screen
Then you'll prompt the permission window.

After that, it'll appear in the Screen Recording section.


Bootcamp windows drivers downloading stuck

Try getting your drivers from here: Bootcamp Drivers (Apple.com) Tell me if it works better here! Apples servers hang up a lot and I am not sure why. It may also help to try downloading while using ethernet rather than wireless just in case it is your router/AP.


Move the position of or hide the brightness/volume pop ups on high sierra

SIP needs to be disabled, then I ran these:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.OSDUIHelper Disabled -bool YES
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.BezelUI Disabled -bool YES
sudo reboot

And it's worked, I no longer see the Overlays.


Airport slows down when anybody uses VPN through it

It's more than likely the bandwidth used by your VPN rather than the Airport itself.

My work VPN connection with a corporate laptop used to use a lot of bandwidth, I'd notice other stuff slowing down considerably. Maintaining links to the domain servers, a VOIP client, and all of the other things installed on there used a lot of resources.

When I stopped using a corporate laptop and connected my personal laptop through a web based SSL VPN with terminal services instead, things improved a lot as it was only basically screen sharing rather than uploading and downloading actual files and data.

Unless you can set-up a proxy and monitor the usage of each device, you're not really going to find out how much bandwidth each device is using, but it's unlikely to be the VPN itself, or the Airport at fault, just the bandwidth used by what's being transferred over the VPN.


Cannot delete smtp server in mail application on High Sierra

I have found in Keychain two hidden entries that corresponded to smtp servers (com.apple.account.SMTP.asynchost), delete them and puff, no more ghost smtp server on the mail app.

Take caution as deleting those entry apparently can lead to keychain malfunction. Do backups of the keys before delete them.

See discussion here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/32426759#32426759


Installing Applications on Mac through Network

There are a number of ways to do this. I use Apple's "Remote Desktop" application which allows you to both copy files and install packages (in addition to other management tasks) to multiple computers.

Here is Apple's page on the software:
http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

The management software you pay for runs on one Mac. The client is already part of the Mac OS and you just have to turn it on -- System Preferences -> Sharing then check "Remote Management". You can allow access from any user or specified users. I normally limit access to the local admin user on the computer. In the Remote Desktop application you add the computer to a list of managed computers and in that process you authenticate as the user under which you will be administering the computer. If you have a lot of computers to manage, you can create lists of computers in addition to the big list of all computers.


Is there a way to force tethered data to go through an iOS VPN, instead of passing through raw to the mobile carrier?

No, it seems that's not possible.

I have made several tests with different VPNs and VPN settings on my iPhone - some on demand, some not, but even when switched on manually, tethered traffic was never sent through the VPN.

I've also tried setting OverridePrimary to true as described here (it is false by default when creating the profile in the Apple Configurator), but that did not change the tethered traffic either.

The remaining solution is to install the VPN connection on your tethering client.

BTW, if that client is a Mac, you can simply import the same VPN profile by double-clicking on the mobileconfig file created for iOS.


What is the 'xmessage' command equivalent on macOS?

AppleScript
On macOS, displaying simple dialogs is possible with AppleScript:
/usr/bin/osascript -e "display dialog \"Hello world\""

See Displaying Dialogs and Alerts in Apple's Mac Automation Scripting Guide.
Additional buttons, choices, and other limited interface elements can be added:
set theDialogText to "An error has occurred. Would you like to continue?"
display dialog theDialogText buttons {"Don't Continue", "Continue"} default button "Continue" cancel button "Don't Continue"


Adding "Lookup in the dictionary" in the pop-up list in Firefox?

There is a firefox addon to add this in the context menu: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/look-up-in-dictionary-7261/


Catalina: HTTP downloads in Terminal stall without sudo

After some more digging (using lsof), I found the culprit to be Sophos AntiVirus.

If you run into a similar issue, open Sophos preferences, disable Live Protection and anything enabled in Web Protection.

Then try running wget (or whatever was blocked) again.

Once that works, you can reset Sophos preferences to their defaults again and check if everything still works.

Looks like a bug in Sophos AntiVirus to me.


can't sync Calendar events from Mac to iPhone

Ok, after looking at some error entries in system.log I found a link to this Apple KB article: Mac OS X: Resetting the SyncServices folder, which solved my problem. It is important not only to reset the sync services, but also to enable them after that as shown at the end of the KB article.


Running Time Mechine Backup from Recovery HD

The Recovery HD doesn't have the ability to make a backup other than using Disk Utility or the terminal app to copy files.

If you have a spare HD available or don't want to risk reinstalling the OS (which isn't designed to delete any user files - but could if there is directory damage) I would say go buy a USB external drive and reformat it as GUID/Mac and use Disk Utility to "restore" the boot drive to the external drive. Then you can run the OS installer from Recovery or erase and install.

Reinstall Mac OS X Mountain Lion before selling a Mac
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904


Some items missing from my iTunes Purchase History

ok, the best way I found, is to use the Express Lane.  Just google for: Apple Express Lane and you will find it.


most likely, one of two things is happening:

when you are typing you are accidentally touching the trackpad and moving or scrolling or clicking outside the text box you are typing in.

or when you are typing the case is flexing causing accidental clicks (heavy keyboard typists beware)

The clue here is the backspace functionality of the browser, as when inside a text entry field, the backspace works as a backspace delete, but when outside of a text entry, pressing backspace works the same as pressing the back button in the browser (i.e. go back to the previous page)


How to get the first name of the recipient to be auto-added to new messages in Mail.app?

You can implement a mail merge using AppleScript. Gianugo Rabellino shared his initial AppleScript for creating such messages in Poor man’s mail merge in Apple Mail.

The comments on Rabellino's post suggest improvements and other approaches.

tell application "Mail" to set allAccounts to name of every account
choose from list allAccounts with title "Choose the Mail account to use..."
set theAccount to result as string

set subjectDialog to display dialog ¬
    "Enter the subject of the email to send" default answer "no subject"
set theSubject to text returned of subjectDialog

set sendOrPreview to the button returned of ¬
    (display dialog ¬
        "Send the messages right away or preview and send manually?" with title ¬
        "Send or Preview?" with icon caution ¬
        buttons {"Preview", "Send"} ¬
        default button 1)

set theText to (choose file with prompt "Pick a text file containing the email text")

set theContent to read theText

tell application "Finder"
    set addresses to paragraphs of ¬
        (read (choose file with prompt "Pick a text file containing email addresses, one by line"))
end tell

tell application "Mail"
    activate
    set activeAccount to account theAccount
    repeat with i from 1 to (the length of addresses)
        set newMessage to make new outgoing message ¬
            with properties {account:activeAccount, subject:theSubject, content:theContent}
        tell newMessage
            set sender to ¬
                ((full name of activeAccount & " < " & email addresses of activeAccount as string) & ">")
            make new to recipient at end of to recipients ¬
                with properties {address:(a reference to item i of addresses)}
            set visible to true
        end tell
        if sendOrPreview is equal to "Send" then
            send newMessage
        end if
    end repeat
end tell


Migration Assistant won’t copy (some) files, though running through smoothly without error

I want to commiserate because the exact same thing happened to me after using Time Machine to restore my drive recently after I put a new SSD in my older Macbook. The restore took a good amount of time and seemed successful according to the UI however I noticed that exact 2 folders you mentioned hadn't been restored. (I didn't notice anything else missing.) So I manually copied the contents from my backup and went along as usual...
I ended up here however with a new issue; for other reasons I ended up getting a new machine a short time after that. I set up the new Mac using Migration Assistant with my Time Machine backup, which seemed successful this time. (all folders appear OK, although my Plex Media Server app database seems to be corrupted now).
My big problem now is that I went to restore that particular file from Time Machine, and see that I have no history  dating to before the migration! I looked at the backupd folder for Time Machine and it's now got a new folder where the new backups are being made named "my username 2"... the migration somehow forked me into a copy of my username, making my backup files longer accessible to Time Machine's UI. I probably should post my issue here separately... I also have no confidence now in Time Machine.


Screensaver does not offer option to use any photos

[[Note: if you see a spinning "Beachball" it may be that your photo library is quite large so the processor may need time to display everything.  You may find that placing photos you wish to display in a folder stored outside of iPhoto or the Photos app will improve performance.]]

Assuming you have photos in a folder or imported into the Photos app, this procedure should help.

Go to System Preferences
Select Desktop & Screen Saver
Select the Screen Saver tab
Choose one of the photo type screen saver options such as Floating or Reflections
From the Source pop-up menu select your source from Photos or a folder with your pictures by selecting Choose Folder... or Photo Library...


Headphones unexpectedly stopped working?

The headphones were broken; try different ones.


Installing Mavericks on a brand new machine that shipped with Yosemite pre-installed?

It's a great big "Maybe".

The installer will likely decline, but it will really depend on the hardware and drivers the hardware needs.

Here's what you do:

Get an external drive. USB > 8Gb will work. Plug this drive into a Mavericks-compatible machine and install Mavericks on the external.

Now plug it into the new Mini. Reboot holding the Option key, wait for the boot picker to appear. Choose the external with Mavericks.

If you get a kernel panic, the new Mini will not run Mavericks.

If it boots to the desktop, you're good. Get some cloning software like Carbon Copy Cloner, erase the Mini's internal drive and clone Mavericks from the external drive to the Mini.


My Itunes has an unauthorized name on it

Your Apple account may be compromised and some (not so smart) idiot logged into it and enabled Home Sharing, that causes his media library to appear on your side and most likely yours also appears on his side.

Change your Apple account's password and consider enabling two-factor authentication on it, but most importantly try to understand how he got the password; was it a really bad password and he got lucky via brute force, or something more serious like a compromise of your computer or e-mail account ?


You generally can't substitute a list for a string and have things work without some other changes.

A good way to get around this is to use a repeat with variable in list approach. This lets you go through each item in a list and run your code with each item in the list individually.
Here's how to apply that to your code:

set browsers to {"Google Chrome", "Firefox", "Opera", "Safari"}

repeat with browser in browsers
    if application browser is running then
        tell application browser
            activate
        end tell
        tell application "System Events"
            tell process browser
                keystroke "r" using {command down}
            end tell
        end tell
    end if
end repeat

Everything is the same except that your code is wrapped in a repeat with block and the "Safari" literal is replaced with browser, a reference to the current browser in the list of browsers (the code will be run once for each browser in the list).


What determines whether applications can broadcast to multiple AirPlay speakers?

This isn't directly a feature of Remote.app but of iTunes on the desktop, Remote.app just gives an UI for this. At this time, only iTunes running on Mac/Windows or other desktop apps like Airfoil are able to distribute to multiple speakers at once.


Nevermind, got it.

App Store -> Purchases -> Press Option and you will see cancel.


Try the following (one-line command) :

sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /opt/local/var/lib/couchdb/ /opt/local/var/log/couchdb/ /opt/local/etc/couchdb/ /opt/local/var/run/couchdb

Then reboot.

If it doesn't work, what version of MacPorts and CouchDB do you have ?


Can an iPad become damaged by leaving it in a bathroom during and after a shower?

I take shower while my electronics are in the bathroom, and I've never had a problem. I also don't do any what I've said below.

There's not an verifiable easy way (for me at least) to answer this question with proof. If you'd like to minimize the likelihood of moisture damage and you don't want to remove the iPad from the bathroom (or you can't) there are a three things I can think of that might help:

Plug something into the headphone jack. Tt's what's most likely to cause a failure in the iPad from moisture.
Placing the iPad close (but not on) to the floor. The warm, moist air from the shower will collect at near the ceiling first.
Avoid rapid temperature shifts when leaving the bathroom. If the iPad does have some moist air trapped, the shift to a cooler area will cause the moisture in the air to condense into liquid water.


Is there a shortcut to play the audio preview on Finder?

Press the space bar to open quick look, which will automatically play the sound. Space again will close it.


Energy saver: do the battery settings apply during charging?

This sounds like a bug in the power management software and I cannot reproduce the issue with my current MacBook Air.

Have you been watching the power settings with the pmset command?

The -g log command might show you something to help debug why this is happening. Worst case, you can have a few tabs open in terminal and watch -g pslog and -g assertionslog to see if some program is somehow overriding the defaults that you have set.

These logs and the timings would also make for a good bug report if you determined that it was simply an error in programming on Apple's part.


Macbook Pro Mid 2014 stuttering and small lag spikes @ 4K 30Hz with HDMI 2.0/1.4b

I have a new 15 inch MacBook Pro. it has 4 thunderbolt ports on the sides. 2 on each side. no USB ports. so I bought an adapter for it. its  called a lention and has 4 different ports,3 usb an one lightening so I could plug my mouse in to it.i  began experiencing stuttering on my games and video. every 4 seconds it would stutter. my frame rates were going from 60fps to 30 fps and back an forth causing the stuttering.i unplugged it(the lention adapter) from my MacBook Pro an stuttering stopped!I went too the apple store an bought a different one(white one with just 1 USB port)an the stuttering has stopped completely.just wanted to share this in hopes it will help.


Why are my iPad landscape screenshots rotated the wrong way?

This is default behavior and is not an issue with jailbreaking. Even my new iPad 2 straight out the box does this on 4.3. I see this as a bug and hope Apple fixes this.

The fastest and simplest iPad app that I've found that I like for rotating, cropping and flipping is called Crop Suey HD.

UPDATE: It appears as though iOS 5 has finally fixed this annoying bug. And the even better news is that they are now throwing in photo editing tools right in the photo viewer app; including the option to rotate.


Is there a keyboard shortcut to bring up Finder?

It's actually easy. On Yosemite, just press option ⌥+command ⌘+spacebar. That will open a new Smart Finder window. You then can navigate from there. It works on a system level no matter what application you're running.

No need for scripts or complicated setups.

Turn this option on in System Preferences > keyboard > shortcuts > spotlight > "show finder search window" in recent versions. This can be mapped to other keys too, but it can cause conflicts in other apps that might be using your desired shortcut.


Your best bet is to go through Apple's diagnotic utilities, but be prepared for it to tell you everything is fine.

Put you machine on a flat stable surface and plug it in.  Perform a restart or a power on and immediately hold down the 'd' key (d for diagnostics).  It should at least test your power adapter which is goverened by the SMC chip.


Time Machine stopped recognising backups on the NAS storage and does not make new backups anymore

So it seems that the problem is related to my router or one of the recent MacOS upgrades that probably introduced something new or broke compatibility because just weeks ago it worked properly. Just for the record the model of my router is Keenetic Giga.
How did I understand it? I created a blank HFS+ partition, connected my HDD to the router and fed it up to Time Machine. I got the same error as described in my question. So it is clear that the cause of the error is not associated with the backup itself.
So I decided to migrate all my backups to a new partition on that drive and use it as a local backup storage instead of NAS. And because I had that .sparsebundle file I needed to figure out a way to "burn" it (copy its contents) to the new APFS volume. It seemed like an easy task to do but it's really not...
I'll skip a story with all my tries and failures and move directly to the solution.
So to convert a .sparsebundle file to APFS volume there is a feature called "Restore" in the Disk Utility. But UI is not much helpful because in general this functionality sucks when it comes to the .sparsebundle format. So we need to arm ourselves with patience and Terminal. And at first we need to mount the ".sparsebundle" image through Finder and then change metadata of the mounted volume a little:
diskutil apfs changeVolumeRole /dev/diskXsY t
where diskXsY - is the identifier of your volume which you can find running diskutil apfs list

This command will change the role of your volume and MacOS will no longer know that it is a backup storage. Without doing it the next command will fail (due to a bug).
sudo asr restore --source /Volumes/EXTERNAL_HDD/{the name of your computer}.sparsebundle --noverify  --target /dev/diskAsB --erase  --debug --verbose
where /dev/diskAsB is the identifier of a volume that you want to use as the backup storage.
--noverify is needed here because there is also another bug in this utility.

After you enter a password (if you have an encrypted backup) and agree to erase the volume this command will replicate the contents of your ".sparsebundle" onto the target volume. It will take a while...
After it finishes you will almost receive a functional (unencrypted) backup storage. To make it fully functional you should run:
diskutil apfs changeVolumeRole /dev/diskAsB T

This command will assign a Backup role to your target volume and Time Machine will recognize it.
Later you may want to encrypt your storage with "hdiutil" (warning: it will take hours to complete).
At this stage I configured Time Machine to use the drive as a local backup storage and after doing that one of the folders changed its suffix in the name from .inprogress to .interrupted.
At the end of the day Time Machine copied an increment only and it looked like this:

After the backup process finished I looked into the contents of the drive and found out that Time Machine killed my old backups and during the Cleaning up phase it went from this:
$ ... % ls
2021-05-06-201324.previous  2021-05-22-195414.inprogress
2021-05-06-212814.interrupted   backup_manifest.plist

to this:
$ ... % ls
2021-05-22-212814.previous  backup_manifest.plist

I believe that it is due to the interrupted backup which you can see above but I don't want to spend any more time on that. So technically I still didn't get my old backups back and all I got was pain from multiple Apple bugs and inconveniences but at least I have more knowledge now how it is built under the hood and probably this information will be useful for someone who want to convert .sparsebundle to APFS (or to be more concise - to a local backup disk formatted as APFS).


How to use my Apple Remote Control with Windows 10

You can use http://www.eventghost.org/ to map the infrared receiver to forward the Apple Remote's buttons to keyboard presses within Windows.

See also https://superuser.com/questions/278951/my-keyboard-has-no-media-keys-can-i-control-media-without-them

Quoted from http://gegensystem.blogspot.de/2013/11/using-apple-remote-for-power-point-on.html :

  Download: http://www.eventghost.org/

  Don´t forget to support this project if you are satisfied with it.

  First klick on configuration (Konfiguration) - then add an PlugIn -
  choose Generic HID for your Apple remote.

  By clicking some of the keys of the remote, eventghost now shows the
  keyentries of them.

  Build a new macro belonging to emulated keyboard entry (Emulierte
  Tastatureingabe) and choose (for example) LEFT. Now drag and drop the
  Keyentry of your remote to the new macro and the key on the remote is
  now connected to this new event.

  I connected the LEFT key and the RIGHT key to the LEFT arrow and the
  RIGHT arrow of apples remote. Now it is possible to use the remote to
  control the power point presentation. Be aware that you have to start
  eventghost manually or drop it into yout autostart directory. Without
  it running in the background, the system can only work with the
  predifined remote actions!


Automator to execute shell script with an input text file, copy it to specific directory

EDIT: Workflow now works with one bug: running the workflow twice results in two copies of the control file being copied

Make a new Automator SERVICE. At the beginning, for "receives selected as input" choose "documents". Add the process "set value of variable" and make a new "destination path" variable (default variable name is "destination path"). Add the process "open finder items" to the beginning to open the control file. Add the process "run applescript" to the workflow the code is the following:

on run {input, parameters}

set LineNumber to (the line in which the path is specified in the control file)
tell application "TextEdit"
    set theVariable to paragraph LineNumber of document 1
    set thePath to POSIX path of theVariable
    set thePath to text 1 thru -2 of thePath
end tell

return thePath
end run

I don't know why this couldn't have been in the same block, but you need to add a separate AppleScript process. The code is as follows:

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Finder"
    set theFolder to POSIX path of input & "/DEBIAN"
    try
        make new folder in folder input with properties {name:"DEBIAN"}
    end try
end tell

return theFolder
end run

Add the process "set value of variable" and make a new destination path variable (default name is "destination path 1").
Add the "get value of variable" process and get the value of the variable with the path of the input file ("destination path"). Click on "options" on this process and check "ignore this action's input".
After this, Automator has a process called "copy finder items" and this can be used to copy the input (the output of "get value of variable", which is the input file). This worked for me, hope it works for you as well. Good luck :)


Your options aren't limited to the numbers printed below the scroll bar. You can drag between the options to select a value closer to your desired value:

You can set custom values if you really want to though. The cache size is stored in the CacheLimit key in the configuration plist which is located by default here:

/Library/Server/Caching/Config/Config.plist

<key>CacheLimit</key>
<real>268586281855</real>

The integer is bytes.


iTunes stops playing song without reason

I managed to fix my problem by calling Apple hotline. They asked me to do a lot of manipulation and I cannot say precisely what was going wrong. We did a test on a new test user I created on the system. I started iTunes, connected my Apple id and Apple Music was working fine.

We removed together some iTunes configuration files and managed to restore Apple Music playback in my session.

Hope it helps!


Saving output from PDFs merged using Automator

When working with Automator workflows, it’s always good to check hat an action takes as its input and what it returns as output. Usually, this is indicated in the action’s description (accessible either in the bottom left below the action browser, or by clicking on “description” in the action’s bottom row. The actual output when running the action can also be checked (by clicking “result” in the bottom row of the action).

In your case, checking will show the “Combine PDF Pages” returns a PDF Document file. This file can be processed by any Automator action that can handle files in general (for file operations) or PDF files (for further editing). A look in the “Finder” category of Automator will show you likely candidates:

Move Finder Items will move the file to a target folder of your choice. You can set a fixed one, or tick “Show this action when running the workflow” in “options” (bottom row again) to select each time you run the workflow. This action, again, returns a PDF Document, which
Rename Finder Items will rename a file. As the action returns a PDF Document, you can daisy chain rename actions with different settings, for instance to give it a selectable base name (choose “rename single item” and tick the show option), add a date stamp (add another actions et to append the date) and a time stamp (same procedure, now with the time).


How can I make files invisible from to the shell?

Not really. What you seek isn't something shells try to support. Shells are really about open access to a system, not hidden access.

Some shell commands and functions will ignore directories and files that are prefixed with a . by default. For example, ls does this:

IanCsiMac:~/code/tmp
> ls

IanCsiMac:~/code/tmp
> ls -lah
total 16
drwxr-xr-x   3 ian  staff   102B Oct 15 15:06 .
drwxr-xr-x  44 ian  staff   1.5K Oct 10 11:03 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 ian  staff   6.0K Oct 15 15:06 .DS_Store

But the .-prefixed file in the above example isn't considered "hidden". Just "not displayed in the default view". Any sort of hiding like this would necessitate you rename your files and folders so they're prefixed with a . and then they'd also disappear by default from Finder.

As you can see from answers on other SE sub-sites (1, 2, 3), the prefix-with-a-dot is really the only consistent way to keep a file or folder out of the normal view of most shell functions and commands.


Do computer mice really feel different when used on a MacBook? Will using a mouse specialized for Macs feel any different?

Apparently it's just a difference in the mouse pointer acceleration.

It can be adjusted in System Preferences > Mouse > Then adjust the tracking speed.

Thanks calum_b.


No on a technical level. If you know how to clean up your keychain, you can do it as well after you enable sync as before.

Yes on a philosophical level. You might have items you don't want in the cloud where the chance of error, surveillance or disclosure are higher and your ability to permanently erase the data is lower.

So, I would only clean an item you don't want on Apple's servers directly.


Why don't my arrow keys work in vim under iTerm?

The following worked for me.

In iTerm2:

Profiles -> Open Profiles...
Edit Profiles...
Keys tab
From Load Preset... drop-down, pick Terminal.app compatibility


Does free iWork iOS entitle older devices?

Yes, providing you use the same Apple ID. When you purchase iWork for free on your new device, it is added to your purchases and then available to download on your other devices.


It turns out that my default shell was set to CSH which does not support:

. ./

I have switched the default shell to bash and this now works. I think the default shell as changed when my company imaged the MacBook or this is now the default with a fresh install of Sierra.

I will accept this as the answer after the 2 days stackexchange waiting period.


Bluetooth 5, Multiple Speakers, and iPad mini 5 on iPadOS 14.5.1

Your issue is not with bluetooth but with iOS's audio out selection.
Your device is connected to both devices as both are present as options in the airplay screen as seen in your image. You can confirm this by going into bluetooth in settings and seeing that both devices are connected.
The issue you have is that iOS can only output to one device at once, with the exception of the airplay compatible devices (e.g. Apple TV, HomePod, 3rd-party airplay 2 compatible devices, etc.) or headphones/earbuds with and apple chip, either W1 or H1 (AirPods & beats).
So the only way at the moment to get multiple bluetooth speakers playing audio from your iPad is to buy one that are airplay 2 compatible.


Can I sort Spotlight results by most-recently-used?

I do that in Finder Search window with custom settings.

It looks like this

I save that search in the finder side bar, so now just click it and it shows me the results.


Is there a tool to save a snapshot terminal session for later recovery, like a virtual machine?

Have you tried using screen ?

With screen you can disconnect from the terminal and then reconnect to it later.


Try View menu…
Hide

Tab Bar
Path Bar
Status Bar
Sidebar
Toolbar

Doing that I can get a window down to this...
about 318 x 224


MacBook Pro 15" Mid 2010 Update Firmware to read APFS hard drive?

Installing the full "Install macOS High Sierra" app over again will re-apply the firmware update, whether or not it was done previously.
Installing 'over the top' in this manner will leave all your data intact.

As an added bonus, it will add or fix the Recovery Partition too.


Why is my external HDD active when I'm not using it?

It's probably the 'Spotlight' indexing that is busy indexing the drive 's content.


Is there any alternatives to Karabiner in Sierra, which lets you use whatever keybindings you like to open an application?

You should try 'Keyboard Maestro' as an Alternative. You can bind actions to different Application-States as Macros, f.e. when Application X is open, do Y etc.

They offer a Testperiod, so you can try before you buy and test if it is meeting your requirements.


Enter on Zagg keyboard with iOS causes message to be sent

Have to use the "cmd" key and enter together for a line space when using message for texting.


Is it possible to watch mp4s on an iPod Nano 6th Gen?

The 6th Generation iPod Nano does not support video decoding or playback1.

However, it can demux video files and play any supported audio streams in those files2. Instead of the video stream, it displays a single keyframe. This is useful for music videos or podcasts, where you might still want to listen to the audio only, but it's not the same thing as full video playback.

Note that the 5th- and 7th-gen both support video decoding and playback3; its omission from the 6th-gen seems to be an anomaly.

1 Sources: everymac.com, apple.com, wikipedia.org.
2 Source: ilounge.com.
3 Sources: 5th-gen, 7th-gen. For those devices, handbrake is a great option, as per @iamkrillin's answer.


Sync directories without too much overhead

cron + rsync
Use rsync to sync the folders, and cron to schedule the backups. You can open up your cron table (list of scheduled commands) with crontab -e. First you can create your backup with:
rsync -a ~/Documents <backup folder path>

This will create a backup named "Documents" in the directory you specify. Then you can schedule this command to run at certain times with cron. For example:
0 12 * * * rsync -a ~/Documents <backup folder path>

This will backup your Documents folder to the backup folder path every day at noon. The format is:
# ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
# │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;
# │ │ │ │ │                                   7 is also Sunday on some systems)
# │ │ │ │ │
# │ │ │ │ │
# * * * * * <command to execute>

An asterisk means the task will run for every value of that time interval. So leaving all the asterisks would make it run every minute of every hour of every day of every month for every day of the week. In the example command I wrote earlier it would run at minute 0 of hour 12 (noon) of every day of every month for every day of the week.
It detects and updates only the edited, deleted, or added files so it will be very fast once you have already backed up the folder once.


Can a factory unlocked iPhone 5 be used with Sprint?

Sure, if the device is UNLOCKED it can be used with any carrier in the world.


Max (freeware) can drop stereo to mono - though I'm not certain if it will take .mov as input (never tested it). You might need to convert it to a distinct audio format first.


"This certificate was signed by an untrusted issuer" problem after updating to El Capitan

Same issue. It is certificate related on your own mac.
Your machine has expired certificates which can be deleted using: - applications > utilities > keychain Access.
- Select a) Keychain: Login and b) Category: Certificates
- Scroll each certificate and if it has expired delete it.

I found the answer including instruction and images via link
http://tiffanybbrown.com/2015/10/cant-connect-to-itunes-app-store-https-sites-el-capitan-upgrade/


Can I remove admin rights from an OS X account without using the command line?

Aha — the reason why this option was greyed out is, I think, because I was still logged in under the everyday account.

When I logged out of the everyday account, and logged into my admin account (instead of just switching straight to the admin account, leaving my everyday account logged in), then the “Allow user to administer this computer” checkbox for my everyday account was enabled, and I could uncheck it.


Homebrew gives a warning: "You have MacPorts or Fink installed"

Note that some 3rd-party packaging tools may sometimes automatically install MacPorts. I recall RVM does that (or at least used to, I don't know the current state), so while you're not aware of actually installing it manually, it might still be there.

If you move /opt/local to a different location that might break whatever pulled in MacPorts in the first place.


Using VirtualBox on Mac HighSierra - installing Windows 10 via external hard drive, not working!

VirtualBox can emulate a DVD (optical) drive. To insert a DVD into an emulated drive, you must first convert the physical DVD to an iso file. You can select this iso file under Settings, as shown below. By the way, if Virtual Box did recognized your external DVD drive, then this external DVD drive could also be selected here. In the image below, my internal DVD drive is listed as Host Drive 'HL-DT-STDVDRW  GA32N'.

  Note: You can click on an image to get a better view.

The instructions below were copied from this Apple website.

Create your own ISO

Use these steps to make an ISO copy of your Windows DVD:

While your Mac is started from OS X (or macOS), insert the Windows installation DVD in an external optical USB drive.
After the installation media mounts in the Finder, open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder (choose Go > Utilities).
Select the USB optical drive so it's highlighted in the Disk Utility window.
Choose File > New Image, and then select your Windows DVD from the submenu.
Choose DVD/CD master from the Image Format menu, then choose none from the Encryption menu.
Give the new file a name, then click Save. If prompted, enter an administrator user name and password. A progress bar appears while the image file is created (it might take some time to create the image file).
After imaging is done, eject your Windows installation disc. Disconnect the external optical drive from the USB port after the disc ejects.
From the Finder, locate the disk image file you created earlier. Single click on it to select it, then press the Enter or Return key on your keyboard to rename the file. Change the disk image file extension from .cdr to .iso. When prompted, click "Use .iso" to verify this change.

Note: Another possibility would be to download the Windows iso from this Microsoft website.


Not everything makes perfect sense, but I believe this set of instructions will help you along.

Review the entire articles below:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH18872 - for the erase and reinstall
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250 - for setting up backups once the restore is complete

Outline of the process:

make sure the backup is safe and doesn't get erased. Also, be sure to not back up to this volume until your new OS has all the data you need since a new backup could cause older backups to be erased.
boot to recovery mode and open disk utility
erase the hard drive on your Mac
install a clean copy of Yosemite
make a test account (user name test-admin or something that isn't the name you used on the backup Mac)
update all software on the Mac
then connect the backup and use the Migration Assistant to move users and data. (you could move apps here too if you have any backed up)
reboot and log in to your "old account" instead of the test-admin account
verify the apps and data are there
then, connect and make a back up of the fixed Mac
delete the test-admin account and remove the home folder
enjoy your success


Mac mini Mac OS 10.6 server migration to new hardware

Apple prepared a nice, long document listing the steps needed to prepare for and implement a migration from an existing Snow Leopard server to Lion server.

Have a look and come back and ask more specific question if you run into any snags...

Lion Server: Upgrading and Migrating For Mac OS X v10.7 Lion Server


ClamXav not protecting against Malware and Trojans, what to do

The operating system you're using (OS X) is the best protection against Malware, Spyware and Trojans.

Just be careful that you aren't putting in your password for anything you're not sure about.

I've run my Mac systems for many years without any anti-virus or other "protective" software.  I'm simply just careful with what I install, and ensure it comes from reputable sources.

By no means am I saying that the Mac is 100% uncompromisable.  Just saying that if you are careful, the chances of problems are minuscule and not worth the concern or system resources to keep running in the background.


How to change time zone on iPod touch 4?

Go into the Settings app.
Enter the General pane and select Date & Time.
Set your time zone.


How do I open X11 on Mac OS X? Is it possible to add an icon to my applications folder?

I'd recommend installing XQuartz, which is a very nice X server for OS X.


Why doesn't my MacBook Air wake up from sleep when I touch the trackpad?

In Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, Apple removed the ability to wake the Mac by moving the mouse. This stopped knocks to the table and pets moving the mouse accidentally from waking the Mac.

By clicking or pressing a key, you are being more deliberate about your intention to wake your Mac. Ideally it should help avoid waking your Mac accidentally and save a little power.

As ever, this improvement benefits some users more than others.


How do I move widgets on the Dashboard that are out of the viewing area?

Just try to remove them (Manage widgets...) and than add again to dashboard.


Skype for Mac doesn't remember my password

By clicking Sign me in when Skype starts
If you are on the latest version of Skype, it supports sign-in using Skype Name or Microsoft account.

If you select, Sign me in when Skype starts it automatically stores the password and logs you in the next time. This worked fine for me on the latest version just now.

On version 7.17 (377), you get the option to select this option from Preferences


How to set "date added" metadata in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

When I run xattr -l on items in my Downloads folder, I get a field that looks something like this:

com.apple.metadata:kMDItemDownloadedDate:
00000000  62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 A1 01 33 41 B4 83 4D BF  |bplist00..3A..M.|
00000010  4C 4F E3 08 0A 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00  |LO..............|
00000020  00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000030  00 00 00 00 13                                   |.....|
00000035

This is a binary plist. When I use HexFiend to create a file with those bytes (yes, I manually entered them; blast from the past like entering assembler code out of a magazine into my Apple ][GS), then save it as a .plist file, I opened the file in TextWrangler and got the following uncompiled xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
    <date>2011-11-28T05:03:59Z</date>
</array>
</plist>

That said, while Apple seems to store the dates in compiled XML, plain text seems to work.

In other words, if you can get the file's modified date in string form, you can run the command xattr -w com.apple.metadata:kMDItemDownloadedDate "2012-02-19 16:34:47 +0000" file to change the "downloaded date", which appears to be the field actually sorted on, not actual Date Added.

Finally you got no error when adding the (unused) kMDItemDateAdded field because, as I learned in this article, xattr will happily set whatever metadata field you want, used or unused.

That's the core of the answer. I'll work on writing an AppleScript to get the modified date for each file, check to see if kMDItemDownloadedDate is set, and if it isn't, set kMDItemDownloadedDate to the modified date, but I wanted to get the core of the answer posted.


How to decrease trackpad tracking speed on demand?

BetterTouchTool is the free tool of your choice:

With a simple modifier key you may decrease or increase tracking speed temporarily after configuring the different speeds:

To toggle cursor speed, create a new gesture (optional with a modifier key) or a keyboard shortcut (no screenshot here - just choose the keyboard menu instead of the trackpad menu) and choose the predefined action -> Other Mouse Actions -> Toggle Mouse Speed.

I don't own a Magic Trackpad but this works at least with my MacBook Pro trackpad.


Automator services run with 0.5 second delay

Well, I decided to give FastScripts a shot, since I've heard positive things about it in the past. Guess what? Scripts run instantly now. It's a wonderful app all-around. If you're even slightly bothered by the delays I'd highly recommend it. Keyboard Maestro is probably great as well but FastScripts seemed more like the light-weight app that I was looking for.


Is it possible to burn a DVD (or usb bootable drive) out of the Mountain Lion app store install?

Yes it's possible, you can find a couple of useful guides for the steps required. Here is one from Macworld.

The main points are to do it before installing Mountain Lion as the installer will delete the install files, and use the disk image in the application package as the source for your USB key or DVD.

The USB key will generally give you better performance if you need to reinstall OS X later.


Replace German keyboard of Macbook Pro MC700

You can replace the entire keyboard. See how to tear down macbook pro unibody.


How can I check to see if my Mac is running in dual channel mode?

Pretty simple.  Sorry if I go through stuff that you know but... you never know.

Dual Channel

Dual channel RAM is a chipset thing. DDRx is a RAM type.  DDR2 and 3 are NOT Dual nor Tri Channel RAM...  Your motherboard/chipset determines your Dual Channel ability.

So look up your motherboard's specs or use Crucial's System Scanner which is good stuff.  So if you are not sure if your system supports DC you can verify that there.

Dual Channel RAM

"If you have a dual-channel platform and you want to take advantage of the performance gain it offers, our advice is to simply purchase your DDR or DDR2 memory in pairs. However, be very careful to order two modules with the exact same specifications; the modules must be identical to each other to perform correctly. "

so Dual channel only works with two SO-DIMMS with the EXACT SAME specs

Here is more from macrumors.com/guides:

"All Intel Core Macs support dual channel memory access if matching modules are installed. The customary estimate is that this gives a 6% - 8% real world performance benefit. The modules do not have to be the same brand. That means it is quite possible but not 100% guaranteed, that adding a 3rd party SODIMM to an Apple supplied SODIMM of the same size will make a matched pair."

Verification

you can click the Apple Menu at the top left, About This Mac then More Info then click System Report... click Memory on the left hand side.

If you want to get nuts you can use TechTool Pro (not verified on Lion) and get a very detailed report which I've attached images of below of my RAM.  This is just running a terminal command I'm sure - I just don't know it.

Point being is, there is not an indicator because ... if your system supports it, and the RAM is bought in identical pairs... its running Dual Channel.

Best of luck.

In the pics, all I'm doing is looking at the numbers besides the S/N and for peace of mind making sure they match.


How can I check the build number of the current available macOS / OS X installers?

There is an app for that :) https://apps.apple.com/app/mactracker/id430255202?mt=12

It seems like there is no web service or similar providing this info, but I just took a quick look at the app and it seems to provide infos on every mac- and iOS, with build informations for every version.

Screenshot:


2011 MacBook (10.6.8) connects to AirPort but intermittently won't connect to webpages

The main thing that looks odd from the setup that you've mentioned above is the DNS server. It appears that the IP address your computer has allocated is being assigned as the DNS server? If you're not running DNS services on your computer, this won't work very well.

Try to remove the single DNS server (i.e., your computer's IP address) from the list of DNS servers, and see if the machine populates that list with other entries (that were potentially provided via DHCP). If there are no DNS servers listed in that dialog box after you remove the single entry, I'd suspect configuration problems on your network.

Alternately, it may help to manually configure that network interface to use Google's open DNS servers (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) to see if they will respond correctly to DNS lookups.

You can use the Network Utility program at /Applications/Utilities to perform further network troubleshooting. For example, it should be possible to "ping" the DNS server, router (gateway) and some outside host from where you are. This lets you know that your machine can communicate with those devices. First, I'd recommend trying to use Network Utility to ping the DNS servers that are being provided via DHCP. Under the "Ping" tab, you can enter the IP address of each of those hosts, and click "Ping" to see if you get a response. If all of the DNS servers are responding to pings, see if you can ping the gateway (10.58.204.1). If you receive responses for pings to all of the 'internal' hosts, see if you can ping some outside host (gmail.com?) to see if your computer's network traffic is being routed to the Internet.

If all of the ping tests are passing, I'd recommend trying to perform DNS lookups on the servers that are showing up in the DNS table in Network System Preferences. You can use the Network Utility program to perform lookups, but it may be more helpful to diagnose the DNS servers individually using 'nslookup' through the Terminal program. Open Terminal from /Applications/Utilities. When the program opens, you'll see a command prompt. Type in the following queries, and observe whether or not you receive valid responses from all of the DNS servers provided:

nslookup gmail.com 172.16.2.5
nslookup gmail.com 172.18.82.11
nslookup gmail.com 4.2.2.2

Those servers should respond with some answer (and IP address for gmail.com) within milliseconds. If you're seeing the commands hang for excessively long periods, that particular DNS server may not be responding correctly.

It's odd that you're having intermittent issues when using Google's DNS servers...If you're on some larger private network (as it appears you are based on the private addresses being provided), it's possible that traffic is being filtered.

Lastly, the Awarenet profile that you're using is simply utilized for authentication to a wireless access point named "Awarenet" that uses 802.1x (WPA Enterprise) security to authenticate users (you're signing in as egoodwin). If you no longer use/join a Wi-Fi network named "Awarenet" (for work, or school?), the profile can likely be deleted.


Is there a way to hide a user's home folder from other users seeing that it even exists?

You have two options. The first is to use Terminal to set the folder's hidden flag. Open Terminal from /Applications/Utilities and type the following command:

chflags hidden /Users/SHORTNAME

where SHORTNAME is the name of the user's home folder. This will hide the folder from Finder, but other users could still find it, or change Finder's preferences to show hidden folders.

Alternatively, you could place the home folder for that user in a different location. Open the Users & Groups (or Accounts) pane in System Preferences, click the lock to unlock it, right-click on the user, and choose Advanced Preferences…. Then click the Choose button after Home directory and find a different location (you might want to press Shift+Command+. to show hidden folders for this). Now, the user's home will be in a different place so others will have a harder time finding it.


How to disable sidetone (voice feedback) on USB headset on macOS Catalina?

I got an answer from the Plantronics (Poly) support team, all their products have sidetone enabled.

On macOS, the driver (Plantronics Hub) they provide is not that good and doesn't allow to disable sidetone which is probably firmware enabled.

I've also tested the headset with the 3.5mm jack on my smartphone and the sidetone is not present that why I tend to think that the sidetone is handled by either Plantronics Hub or headset firmware.


How to find tagged files/folders using the command line in Terminal?

The correct command to perform Spotlight searches on the macOS Terminal command line is mdfind.
mdfind "kMDItemUserTags == '<your_tags_here>'"

The list all the kMD codes:
mdimport -A


It's hard to say for sure, but I'm guessing there was a problem with the network discovery service. Apple uses Bonjour to advertise various network services (iTunes sharing, file sharing, AirPlay support) without the need to manually input configuration data. Unfortunately it can be a bit prickly at times, so if somewhere along the way the "Hey, I'm an Apple TV" message got lost, didn't get sent or received by your iPhone or Mac, it won't show up as an available device.

Unfortunately, the way Bonjour broadcasts the data seems to be a bit temperamental at times. I'm not aware of any real fix, but a restart almost always seems to fix it. If you're on a Mac, you can try restarting the daemon responsible by running the following two commands in Terminal:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

But that will only fix things if the problem is the Mac not receiving the messages properly - if it's on the Apple TV's end, then restarting that is the best fix.


How to batch combine mkv and srt files to mp4 with ffmpeg

Using and adapting code from

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12907517/extracting-file-extensions-from-applescript-paths

Add to the top of your code:

-- overcome finder limitation...
set text item delimiters to "."

then later extract the name and extension portions...

if new_item contains "." then set item_ext to (text item 2 of new_item) as text
if new_item contains "." then set item_name to (text items 1 thru -2 of new_item) as text

That should do it... :)


If you press the power button and nothing happens, there's no special or secret combination of keystrokes that will get you into diagnostic mode,

Given that it is so new (and still under warranty), you want an exchange, not a repair.  This is way too new for you to be having this type of difficulty.

As to your question, "what will Apple do?"  They will look at it, press the power button, check your charger and then then they will give you another machine.  They won't attempt to repair it.


If you're running Yosemite or later, click Apple symbol (top left) -> About This Mac & it's there.


How to export Contacts version 9.0 data or .abbu file to .csv or other usable spreadsheet format

Really simple:

In Contacts select all contacts you want to export or press CMD-A.
Press CMD-C (copy to clipboard).
Open a new, empty Numbers document.
Delete any existing table in that document.
Press CMD-V to paste your clipboard.

This gives you a nice spreadsheet with all your selected contacts and proper rows and columns.


Can I use the software on my mac to help me claim my eligibility for the Up-to-date-program, so I get Mountain Lion?

If you bought your Mac on-line directly from Apple, then your name, date of purchase and serial number of your Mac are enough.

It worked fine to upgrade my new MacBook Air (bought on apple.fr) to Mountain Lion.


High memory usage on MacBook PRO retina 16Gb i7 2,5ghz

That's perfectly normal for Yosemite - the new rule is "empty RAM is wasted RAM."

The system will fill the RAM so that any process needing to quickly use it has it already available, rather than having to request more.

As you see from your pictures, the Swap file is zero, so nothing is being traded off to the hard drive. That's about as good as it gets - everything that needs RAM has all it needs & nothing has to use the slow swapfile instead of real RAM.
You also have zero memory compression, so there is no pressure at all on the machine's resources. Everything is as it should be.

Old-style memory flushers are actually less than useful under the new memory handling routines & will slow the machine down rather than speed it up.


Schedule multiple wake up times for Mac?

Sorry, I only know command-line tools to do the job.

You can use pmset for that (like in pmset schedule wake "02/12/2012 12:42:00").

More explanations here and, of course, man pmset.

  Setting Multiple "Power On" & Power Off" Events

  Currently, it appears that pmset will NOT allow you to set more than  one pair of "power on" & "power off" events when using a repeating schedule.

  For example...

# pmset repeat shutdown MTWRFSU 02:00:00 wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 06:45:00

  The above command would set a repeating schedule that would shutdown the Mac nightly at 2 AM in the morning and startup daily at 6:45 AM.

  But, if you want to set multiple "power on" & "power off" events, you could specify a specific date/time and with a little scripting you could setup a schedule for a month.

# pmset schedule wakeorpoweron "06/07/2007 07:00:00"
# pmset schedule shutdown "06/07/2007 22:00:00"
# pmset schedule wakeorpoweron "06/07/2007 00:00:00"
# pmset schedule shutdown "06/07/2007 01:00:00"


First you should be able to boot into OS X if you press and hold the ⌥ key just after pressing the power button.

For the Bootcamp control panel to appear, you should install the Bootcamp drivers from Apple. Run Boot Camp Assistant to get them or try these tips.

Also: More on Boot Camp.


Just execute in terminal

sudo mkdir -p /Library/Server/Mail/Data/spool
sudo /usr/sbin/postfix set-permissions
sudo /usr/sbin/postfix start

That did the trick for me.


Problem with changing Apple ID on iPhone

One new feature of iOS 7 is an activation lock - and this means that you can't sign out or erase the device without entering the proper password for the account to which your device has been locked.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5818

Towards the bottom of the article, it has a link to use My Apple ID web page to check and reset your password if you have forgotten it.

https://appleid.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyAppleId.woa/

Presumably, if you can't reset the password, you might need to reach out to Apple directly and see if there is an administrative process such as mailing them proof of purchase or correctly answering questions about past billing events to have them reset the account password.


How to determine which files are on SSD on Fusion Drive?

Because the Fusion drive is one logical volume, there are no separate "partitions" to browse to determine this. You can however check which drive an given file is stored on with some command-line utilities.

Determine Your Drive Setup

First we have to figure out how the SSD and HD portions of the Fusion drive are identified in your system.

Run diskutil list in Terminal.
You should see output similar to this:

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 121.0 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 999.3 GB disk1s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk1s3
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD *1.1 TB disk2

Take note of labels of the disks with a GUID_partition_scheme line. In this case, that's disk0 and disk1. These are the two physical disks, and we can see by the sizes, the smaller one (disk0) is the SSD, meaning disk1 is the HD while disk2 is the logical volume.

Monitor Disk Activity

Now we need a way to monitor disk activity for each device.

Open Terminal, enter iostat -d disk0 disk1 1, replacing the disk numbers with those you found in above.
Run the command, and leave the Terminal window open. You should see output similar to this:

       disk0           disk1
 KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s
 26.52  13  0.33     9.35   0  0.00
 0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00
 0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00
 0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00

This shows you the disk activity on a per-device basis, updated every second. The MB/s columns are the most relevant.

Read a File

Now we'll read a file, and use our monitoring solution to discover which drive it resides on.

Open a second Terminal window, and run dd if='/path/to/some/file' of=/dev/null. Replace the path with the proper path to the file (be sure it's quoted if it has unescaped spaces or other special characters).
In the terminal window running iostat, watch the to see which disk shows some activity when dd is running. That's the drive the file resides on.
For large files (especially those on the HD, the dd process may run for a while, you can safely quit it with control+C

Readings like this indicate that disk0 (the SSD in this example) contains the file:

       disk0           disk1
 KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s
 28.49  13  0.37   113.92   0  0.00
 31.70 4500 139.29     0.00   0  0.00
 31.64 3870 119.56     0.00   0  0.00
 31.58 3294 101.58     0.00   0  0.00

Whereas these readings indicate that the file is stored on the HD:

       disk0           disk1
 KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s
 0.00   0  0.00   128.00 275 34.33
 0.00   0  0.00   128.00 255 31.83
 7.62  53  0.39   126.90 178 22.03


unplug externally plugged HDMI display from MacBook Pro

This shouldn't result in a problem (and well-written apps will go back to their original monitor when it is plugged back in). System Preferences has no utility to disconnect monitors that are still physically connected.

One alternative may be to turn the monitor off: many monitors stop identifying themselves when they're off, so your Mac will think it's been unplugged without it physically being unplugged.


How do I remove websites from the Limit Adult Websites > Always Allow list in iOS 12

In iOS 12, you can remove an added website from the "Always Allow" list by swiping left to delete.

In the image below, I created an entry for "StackExchange."  I then swiped left which brought up the delete button.


MacBook Pro won't put external display to sleep when idle

So I think the reason is that the new monitor supports audio, and putting the display to sleep would also kill audio output. Even if the monitor isn't selected as the default output device, coreaudiod prevents display sleep in case some application wants to use it.

I found a solution. I installed ScriptSaver, which will run an AppleScript when the screensaver starts. I have it run an AppleScript containing:

do shell script "pmset displaysleepnow"


Is it possible to export from the Photos app without the dual dialogs?

As I mentioned in a comment, anytime I have something repetitive to do, I script it in one form or another, and this is how I handle your scenario.

In Automator, create a new Service workflow with the following settings:

Service receives no input in Photos

Add a Run AppleScript action.

Replace the default code with the following example AppleScript code:

set thisLocation to (path to desktop)

tell application "Photos"
    set theseItems to selection
    if theseItems is not {} then
        -- # Remove the '--' from in front of 'with' to export the original files.
        export theseItems to thisLocation -- with using originals
    else
        display dialog "No files were selected to export!" buttons {"OK"} ¬
            default button 1 with title "Nothing To Do" with icon 1
    end if
end tell

Save the Automator Service workflow, e.g.: Export Selected Files

Assign a keyboard shortcut for it, in:

System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > General

Example: Export Selected Files       ⌃⌘E

Now in Photos, after having selected the file(s) to export, press ⌃⌘E and the selection is exported to the Desktop. No need to deal with multiple dialog boxes as when pressing ⇧⌘E.

Obviously this is just example AppleScript code and while thisLocation is set to the Desktop, nonetheless it can be set wherever you'd like, where the folder already exists. It just has to be in the form of an alias if not using any of the folder constant path to (folder) locations e.g.:

set thisLocation to alias "Macintosh HD:Temp:"

Also, on a side note, Automator offers a number of different actions for Photos and those along with other actions provided can make for nice solutions to some repetitive tasks.

Note: As stated, this is just example AppleScript code and can be modified as needed beyond modifying the value of thisLocation, as wanted, e.g. adding with using originals at the end of export theseItems to thisLocation, or other code as wanted. The onus is upon the User to add any error handling that may be appropriate and or necessary.

When using a Run AppleScript action in Automator, you may find it handy to test your AppleScript code in Script Editor, where you'll have access to the AppleScript Dictionary for Photos, in the Library available from the Window menu, or press ⇧⌘L in Script Editor.


Big Sur update causes beachball icon frequently and Finder to be unresponsive

You can begin by doing : Reset SMC, Reset NVRAM and booting in Safe mode to clear System caches.
Then you reboot the system.


There's always LineIn (I'm not the developer), which allows you to route audio from different inputs to different outputs as you choose.

The setup for routing audio from the microphone (or any other input source) to the speakers is as follows:

To start or stop audio routing, click the Play Thru button.


If your nas supports DLNA then that opens out great possibility's. Just write DNLA photo any you will find plenty of Apps otherwise you will be stuck with NAS unfortunately i dont have any recommendation for nas connection.

This is what i recommend..

https://itunes.apple.com/bh/app/smartstor-fusion-stream-dlna/id410280827?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/bh/app/imediashare-lite-video-on-tv/id302026401?mt=8


I have an Apple keyboard that isn't recognized by my Mac

Have you tried re-running the Keyboard Setup Assistant? First, get macOS to "forget" your keyboard:

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

and then reboot your Mac. If it still doesn't recognize the keyboard, you can try manually running the setup assistant

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/KeyboardSetupAssistant.app/Contents/MacOS/Keyboard SetupAssistant

to see if it detects any keyboards it's not sure about.


How do I take an iPad screenshot that includes a picture of the iPad border around it?

Thanks, for mentioning my app, AutoScreenshot 3D!

I created it for myself, as well as other developers, who want to superimpose their screenshot onto an actual image of an iOS device, and have it displayed at an angle, with mirror effect.  Makes a nice screenshot for iTunes or web or print!

The PRO version, for $0.99, lets you provide your own background image.  By default, it ships with an iPhone 4.  You can also download images that you can use for free, from http://www.AutoScreenshot.com.  We will add iPad images in the future, but you can google for an acceptable one.

A free version is awaiting Apple's approval and it only uses the default background.


Gmail App on iOS shows badge count for unread Chats

Inbox by Gmail solves this annoying issue! I've switched over my personal email accounts, and haven't had any problems since.


How to reset the built-in Dictionary app for Look Up function?

This is a bug specific to MacBook Pro 16-inch with Catalina 10.15.X (In my case X=2), so reinstall the OS will not help. If you're in the same situation, I can solve this problem for you as follows, which is my conclusion from the Apple Communities thread discussing the same problem:

Remove all folders under /System/Library/AssetsV2/PreinstalledAssetsV2/InstallWithOs/com_apple_MobileAsset_DictionaryServices_dictionaryOSX.
Restart your computer. (In my case the Look Up didn't show some dictionary definition before I restarted my computer.)


Block unwanted/pop-up Ads on iOS browsers

The best suggestion here is to not open sketchy sites.

Alternatively, you can install one of the many available content blocker or ad blocker apps on the app store. Starting with iOS 9, Apple has started approving Ad blocker apps on the iOS App Store.

Search for "Ad Blocker" on App Store. There are various such free and paid apps available on the App Store.


Sync Photostreams from different Apple ID's to the same PC

My thought: create separate user accounts for you and your wife on your PC. Or create a Virtual Machine. I don't believe you'll find a simpler option for this. iCloud Control Panel is your only real choice for getting PhotoStream onto your PC.


If on Wifi only, how does Mail work when not connected?

Yes. Email works well when not connected to internet.

You will get warnings that it cannot connect to your email accounts. One warning pops up for every email account that you have set up on your device (and possibly one for all the outgoing servers as well). After canceling all of these, you are home free.

If you send an email and are not connected to the internet, it will sit in the outbox, and should send automatically as soon as you reach wifi connectivity. (It may alert you that it failed to send.)

Like you thought, there is an icon that appears for any attachments that aren't downloaded. If you aren't connected to the internet, you won't be able to engage the download of the attachment.


How can I move files by USB between a version 6.1 iPod Touch and a Linux machine?

TL;DR — Try GtkPod. If no luck, install the latest version of libimobiledevice and try Rhythmbox. You may need to bootstrap the process using iTunes. You may be completely out of luck with a 5th-generation iPod Touch.
iPods and iOS devices use a proprietary database-style design, with seemingly arbitrarily named files scattered around the filesystem; not a simple artist/album/track hierarchy of audio files like you probably have on your computer. You will not be able to achieve what you want just by using a file explorer. What you're looking for is a drop-in replacement for iTunes, software which understands how the iPod handles music files. Back in the the day, YamiPod was a very good option (I personally used it on Windows Me, since iTunes only supported XP onwards), and GtkPod is still a popular choice for Linux users of older devices, but both now appear to be unmaintained.
Most music library managers and players for Linux, such as Rhythmbox, have implemented iPod syncing (music only), so I'd try using that, but YMMV. For a larger list of such software, see Comparison of iPod file managers on Wikipedia (though do note that some of the info there about what supports what seems to be outdated).
Under the hood, most apps that support interacting with iPods and iOS devices, including Rhythmbox, use libimobiledevice, which is an impressively feature-rich API. Unfortunately, there is a clear lack of user-friendly software that takes full advantage of it (beyond music syncing). The library is probably available in your distro's repos, but they may not have the latest version; ensure you have the latest version installed if syncing in Rhythmbox doesn't appear to be working. It doesn't have support for the latest devices/iOS versions (indeed, their FAQ emphasises the lack of full support, but doesn't go into detail about what specifically is and isn't supported), but I believe there is good support at least up to iOS 6.1.2, so it's worth a shot.
If none of that works, or if you want to explore additional functionality, take a look at the Debian article on the subject.


How can I see in iTunes how much time is left in audio books and podcasts?

In iTunes, when a podcast is playing, you can click the top bar where it says how long the podcast is. Clicking that will change the total time into the time remaining.