Mountain Lion System Freeze - Poor Memory Handling?

Since re-install Mountain Lion my system freezing very often (randomly). It seems like disk freeze for 15-30sec. I suspect some bug. But after huge effort to investigate problem I found that in my case the solution is to delete sysem logs.
In terminal:

sudo rm /var/log/*

I don't know what was wrong (it was clean install of ML) but it work for me (two days until now) and looks stable.


On iPhone 6+ my text message shows my husbands name as sender, not mine

The recipient has an address book entry of your number and/or email address with your husband's name. The easiest way to fix this is to send them your address book card - share it from the contacts app.


Is there a Fortran compiler/emulator for iOS?

It can be accomplished using the Dragonegg plugin for GCC (frontend), a generic LLVM installation (backend), and the Apple linker.  I have been able to successfully build and run a 64-bit Fortran application on iOS 8.1 built on Mac OS X 10.10 using GCC 4.8 and LLVM 3.5.  The process is not very straightforward and requires a number of hacks and some scripting, but the high-level steps are:

Install GCC 4.8 from HPC for Mac OS X into /usr/local
Install Clang/LLVM 3.5 from llvm.org into /usr/local
Download the Dragonegg source code from the LLVM website
Build dragonegg.so and install it to /usr/local/lib/gcc/x86_64-apple-darwin12.5.0/4.8.1/plugin
Download GCC 4.8.1 sources
Build libgfortran for arm64 using a combination of Apple clang for C/C++, Dragonegg for Fortran, and some wrapper scripts to piece together the compilers
Install libgfortran.dylib and libgfortran.3.dylib to /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS8.1.sdk/usr/lib
Install libgfortran.3.dylib on the iPhone under /usr/local/lib

Now if you got this far, compile a Fortran source file into an iOS binary using:

gfortran -O3 -fplugin=dragonegg -fplugin-arg-dragonegg-llvm-codegen-optimize=3 -fplugin-arg-dragonegg-emit-ir -S -o main.s main.f
llc -mtriple arm64-apple-darwin -filetype=obj -o main.o main.s
ld -arch arm64 -syslibroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS8.1.sdk -lSystem -lgfortran main.o -o main

Precompiled binaries for Dragonegg and libgfortran can be found here: http://download.zeroepoch.com/gfortran-ios/gfortran-ios.tar.bz2

UPDATE: The precompiled binaries archive now contains fat libraries (armv7s, arm64) and some bug fixes to the wrapper scripts.


OS X Server Mavericks stuck on "Preparing Services"

Try resetting Server.app permissions:

sudo chown -R root:wheel /Applications/Server.app
sudo chmod -R g+rx,o+rx /Applications/Server.app

This has been discussed on this Apple Support Communities thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/24122772#24122772


Using truetone with external monitor in clamshell mode

Well I couldn't find a terminal command line, but what I did was,

Turn off True Tone altogether.
set a custom nightshift mode that matches the warmth of the display with true-tone for 24 hours.


PK-UFONE is a Pakistani carrier.

Pakistan is not listed as a country that doesn't support FaceTime, but some have similar problems and can't use FaceTime:

  (Sep 8, 2012) i do not have facetime option on my iphone 4 with operating system IOS
  5.1.1 please help me.

In another post a user states:

  (Aug 14, 2012) I have bought my iphone 4s from Apple Store in Birmingham,UK.I am now
  in Pakistan and connot use Facetime as the verification phone number
  displayed is that of UK.

Others successfully activated FaceTime, but activated it abroad:

  (Feb 3, 2011)
  I am not sure if it will 'activate' on a carrier in Pak. Can only
  share my experience that I hd similar situation but I activated it
  before coming to Pak and FT worked just fine on Ufone carrier.

I'd recommend that you contact PK-UFONE. Maybe you simply need a different plan to activate FaceTime.

I doubt this will help, but you can also check this Apple article for troubleshooting: iOS: Troubleshooting FaceTime.

There is a similar question related to an iPod here.


Since you're a JavaScript programmer and you need to see your SVGs in a browser there are two potential solutions. First, you can use the chrome dev tools to simulate a non HiDPI (Retina Display) screen in the browser. Or you can use the EasyRes app to quickly switch the resolution of your entire display.

Solution 1

Steps to view websites as different devices on Google Chrome:

Open up desired page in Google Chrome and enable Developer Tools for the page ⌥+⌘+I
Click the device toolbar located in the upper left of the dev tools window ⌘+⇧+M
Click the type of device at the top toolbar and click on edit to add a new device to emulate
Now in your case you want to be able to emulate a non-retina display so would you add "Laptop with MDPI screen" to your list of emulated devices. If you wanted to emulate any other device add it from this list. Or for instance if you wanted to emulate a retina display you would choose "Laptop with HiDPI screen." Note: If you want to switch quickly between both resolutions to compare add "Laptop with HiDPI screen" as well.
Close the emulated devices window and click on the current device chrome is emulating (on the left side of the toolbar above the webpage) and switch it to "Laptop with MDPI screen"
To get a better view of the webpage, undock the dev tools window into a separate window by clicking the menu options (the three vertical dots on the right side of the dev tools window) and the selecting the leftmost option for the "Dock side." Or use this shortcut ⌘+⇧+D. This will pop out the dev tools into a separate window so you can view the whole page as if you were browsing normally
Then your browser should look like this. You can also change the zoom options of the emulated webpage in the toolbar to better suit your needs.

Solution 2

http://easyresapp.com/

Link to download EasyRes from Mac App Store.

Also, here is a link to a video demo of EasyRes


Why Does My MBA Close All My Apps After 5 Mins Idle?

Looking true your log, I would say it is your Sophos acting up.

SophosUIServer

Uninstall it and live without it.

It does not do any good anyway AFIK.


Installation of Yosemite is interrupted by a white screen at ⅓ of progress bar

I had the same problem. I had to format the ssd in another Mac before I could move on.


Why doesn't iBooks save my place between the iPhone and iPad?

iBooks uses your iTunes account to sync bookmarks and places.  My wife and I share an account for app and book purchases, so I setup a separate iCloud account for her thinking that her bookmarks would go there.  It turns out that I'm wrong, and it's the iTunes store account that stores it.  I wish iCloud was the storage location, since the other app settings and backups do work using separate accounts.


Unidentified hard disk space getting in OS X apps section

Actually I'm a newbie to the OS X operating systems. After long time scavenging through the forums I finally found a answer for that. Most of the people said it's a normal issue in the mac operating systems. It's because of the Spotlight indexing issue. If you guys have any trouble like this, use this method to solve your issues. I dropped here the link that I have found for my issue: Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac. Hope this will help.


Sidecar shows blank screen. Unless I reboot

Go to display preferences > arrangement > tick and then remove the tick from mirror display option. For more info see here


Perhaps not the solution you're looking for, in that it is not free (the "Basic" plan is $6/mo), but Landr offers a great online tool to "Master" all audio, add levels, tone, warmth, etc.  Hope some of this helps.


Open Terminal and run locate qtz to get the list for your system. You may need to install Xcode to get the full set, with the added benefit of being able to run "/Developer/Applications/Quartz Composer.app" to develop your own.


Sending USB and audio to LCD through thunderbolt

There is no Thunderbolt to DVI adapter. You're using a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter. Mini DisplayPort doesn't support anything other than DisplayPort data. USB cannot travel over this. If the monitor requires an external power supply, presumably Mini DisplayPort doesn't have enough power either. If this was a Thunderbolt monitor, it would likely still need a power cord, but it wouldn't need the USB cables, because Thunderbolt basically supports everything.


Switch off keyboard backlight on new MacBooks

The easiest way is probably to just hold down the dimmer key. Should turn it off less than a second. However it sounds like you want a single press button to turn it off.

It's a bit convoluted, but it should work:
Using Automator, make an application out of the Applescript from this MacRumors thread. To do this, open Automator, choose Application from the options, search for the Run AppleScript action and add it to the workflow, paste in the script and save. You should end up with something like this:
That should give you an application that will disable the backlight.

QuickSilver is free, and you can set a "trigger" to launch the app and bind it to any key you want. If you want to use a function key, try FunctionFlip. It lets you choose which function keys on your MacBook you want to work as actual F-keys and which you want controlling the hardware functions. You can rebind whatever F-key you like and still use the rest for hardware functions if you like.

It's worth noting that the Applescript seems to be a disable-only script. There are directions on the accompanying post to make an enable script. With a bit of modification you could probably make it a toggle script, maybe someone else could chime in with that?

Hope that helps.


Keyboard: how to enforce option-X system shortcuts when a program intercepts these shortcuts?

A alternative would be to create a custom keyboard layout where the characters that cause a problem are remapped to other convenient keys with Ukelele.

You can also try a keyboard shortcut for the problem characters via: System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > Replace With


In iTunes, select your iPad, select Podcasts, then select "Automatically include (smaller number) episodes of (selected podcasts or all podcasts)"

For your iPod you can set it to all or a larger number.

Alternatively you can manually sync your iPad's podcast episodes in the same location.


Sync a computer as an iPod: Is a way to sinc one computer's iTunes library from another in the way of an iPod available?

I would highly recommend looking into iTunes Match.

It allows you to sync all your music across multiple computers, iPads, iPhones, and iPods.  Not only that, but it will let you stream music that is in the cloud that you have synced and not on your computer.  This may be a good solution for you when you want to listen to songs but don't have them on your machine.  It is 25 dollars a year and it does require a internet collection to stream.

You can also just download a playlist of songs you want to listen to if you need to have the songs with you when you don't have an internet connection.

It also syncs playlist together between all your machines.  Also, in iOS 6, it will allow you to stream the music as well.

It also works with music that you have ripped and not purchased.

You can read more here:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/

I know it isn't the most perfect solution but at least it will probably save you from a few headaches of trying to make sure things sync between the hard drive and your external.


Why doesn't mobile Safari have a JavaScript console?

You mention "standalone" so you may be aware of this already and have discounted it, but I thought I'd mention it anyway just in case.

It is possible to use the development tools within Safari on a Mac (including the JavaScript console) to diagnose faults and develop sites for iOS devices.

Connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac using a USB cable.
On your iOS device, go into the Settings, select Safari then Advanced. You should see a switch for "Web Inspector". Switch it on.
On your Mac, go into the Preferences within Safari and on the Advanced tab you should see a tick box for "Show Develop menu in menu bar". Tick it.
Now if you open the Develop menu within Safari on your Mac you should now see a submenu for your iOS device listing the available "inspectable applications". I've only seen Safari on this list, but I assume other applications that use UIWebViews are inspectable too.

Arguably more useful than having web development tools built into the devices themselves.


How to connect to my web app running on mac over WiFi?

There could be a few reasons, but your security settings are probably the most likely candidates.

Temporarily turn Off the Firewall

The easiest way to test this is to (very) temporarily turn off your firewall:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Firewall > Turn Off Firewall

Retest your connectivity, if it works, turn your firewall back on and then allow the app through the firewall.


How to sync mail accounts between iMac and iPad2 properly?

It sounds like the account type might be POP instead of IMAP. POP stores messages and all message attributes on each client (iMac, iPad, etc). IMAP stores messages and attributes on the server, so every client has the same view of the messages (including unread/read state). So, the solution for you is to use IMAP if the account supports it.


El Capitan changes language input after reboot

One workaround is to open System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Login Items and enable "Show input menu in login screen".

After enabling the checkbox you can choose between several input sources in the upper right corner.


Time Machine - multiple backup destinations for a "separate weekly"

Basically, I would recommend not trying to constrain time machine to only a weekly interval on the offsite drive.

That being said, you can have both drives work totally independently as that is how the software is engineered. If you really only want a weekly snapshot, only connect the weekly drive once a week and force a rotation of the destination:

 tmutil startbackup --rotation

Once you have a backup to the weekly drive, eject it and send it away. As long as all dives get reattached every 14 days or so, you won't get a warning dialog that any are out of date.

Again, you can certainly enforce a single weekly backup by the procedure you follow but two things make that practice less needed than you might expect:

The backup intervals are very low space overhead compared to the size of cheap backup disks.

On my worst Mac, the system averages 5 MB of overhead for system log files so in absence of user files changing, you have 24 daily and 31 monthly snapshots you would avoid storing 275 MB (or 0.0003 of a one TB drive) if you were on a strict one per week schedule.

Since the cleanup of old backups is so fast and the storage impact so low, most clients with offsite rotation end up just swapping disks each week and let the software cull the extra snapshots per the normal schedule, leaving weekly snapshots more than a month old.


DISCLAIMER:  I have never tried this - though it should not hurt your system.

You could remove /System/Library/LoginPlugins/BezelServices.loginPlugin... but removing this package would take all the bezel style interface items with it.  (volume up/down, brightness, remote paring, etc.)

Removing this package could have undesired effects, beyond just removing the bezels, but I can't think of any specifically...   It should work...  However, keep a copy of it, make note of the permissions, and put it back if it dorks other stuff up.

Also, expect later updates of OS X to replace this package...

Some may suggest viewing the contents of the package and removing just the bezels you don't want from /System/Library/LoginPlugins/BezelServices.loginPlugin/Contents/Resources/BezelUI/HiDPI but I notice there is a _CodeSignature directory here: /System/Library/LoginPlugins/BezelServices.loginPlugin/Contents/_CodeSignature and that may invalidate the entire package.

After making whatever changes you want to the BezelServices.loginPlugin you should probably restart your computer, or at the very least log out and back in - before you will see the desired effect.

Sorry for not providing a clearer answer.


How to play a dvd movie with external subtitles?

This is a temporary answer as I don't have a Mac at hand now.

I have to test on a Mac, but the Windows version of 5kPlayer can do it very well; and it has a Mac version.

Also, KMPlayer can also do it (also tested just in Windows for the moment) and it has a Mac version it seems (here - Mac Alpha Version: have yet to test too).


Is there a way to create a small-caps character style in Pages 6?

To create a new style, you need to have some text with ONLY that style selected: if in the style inspector the "Characters Styles" dropdown menu shows "multiple styles" or "none" or the name of an existing style WITHOUT a trailing '*', the "new style" button will be grayed out.


A mysterious "Other…" user has appeared on my login screen

Most likely you have recently installed an app that utilizes a new user account.
NoMachine is one example. if you delete it, other... icon will be gone.


Is the trackpad surface different on MacBook Air than the Pro?

The trackpad surface is the same on both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. It's the iconic glass on metal design (patent D674382). The trackpad design and hardware has been the same since it's introduction in 2008 with the new MacBooks.


Home network with wired and wifi, force local data over wired

Note:  Answer not complete....
"Local" Data

Home network with wired and WiFi, force local data over wired

There's a bit of a rhetorical question here - what's local data?  The answers will vary depending on how you see this whole thing configured however, we have to step away from that and look at from the perspective of the network.
In other words, "local data" is data that resides (is local to) that particular network.  Let's look at your two networks: 10.0.10.0 and 10.0.11.0.  We'll call them 10.0 and 11.0, respectively for the sake of brevity.
Traffic sent on 10.0 to a particular node, say 10.25 is local to that network.  Likewise, traffic sent on 11.0 on the same network is considered local to it.  This is all traffic - web, ssh, ftp, smb, etc.
Multiple Networks, Multiple Adapters
Can a node (computer) have two or more network adapters to connect to multiple networks?  Sure!
You don't even need multiple adapters if your equipment makes use of 802.1Q VLAN (Virtual LAN) specification (we'll save that for another day).  However, you can attach multiple network interfaces to a single node to access more than one network.

In this scenario, we have a single node with two network adapters connected to two different networks, 10.0 and 11.0.


Partition Type: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF appeared when tried to remove Linux(UBUNTU 18.04) from dual boot from Mac

Remove the second and the third partition:

gpt remove -i 3 /dev/disk0
gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk0

Add the (former) second partiton with the proper size and partition type:

gpt add -i 2 -b 409640 -s 461916744 -t apfs /dev/disk0

Check disk0 and the resulting synthesized APFS container scheme with diskutil:

diskutil list #get the deviceID of the APFS container scheme
diskutil verifyDisk disk0
diskutil verifyVolume diskX #diskX: deviceID of the APFS container scheme

Assuming you want to resize the APFS container to the full size of the disk (500 GB) you have to enter:

diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 0


MacBook Pro takes 10 minutes to shutdown

The first thing I would do is reset the System Management Controller. Do this as follows:

Shut down your MBP
Keep the 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.

Once you've done that, test for any differences and report back.

Resetting NVRAM

You mentioned that you reset the NVRAM. Just in case you weren't aware, resetting this on the late-2016 MacBook Pros is different to all other Macs. The correct process is:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then immediately press the commandoptionpr keys.
Keep these keys pressed down for at least 20 seconds!
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Note 1: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).

Note 2: These steps will also work to reset the NVRAM (or PRAM) for all Macs. However, the late-2016 MBP models actually required the commandoptionpr keys to be held down for 20 seconds, while earlier Macs did not require this, but doing so did not cause any problems either.


How often should one shutdown a MacBook instead of just closing the lid?

Whether to shut down or keeping it in sleep state (by closing the lid) depends on the time usage in between. The short answer is:

If you use it daily, enter sleep mode is recommended.
If you rarely use it, shut it down.

So let‘s see the difference between each option.

We’ll start with this statement:

  An interesting opinion - cannot find the link for that now - was that shutting down / restarting serves no purpose for macs, except when that is needed after installing or upgrading applications or the system, unlike in Windows, where shutting down was (is?) very important. Also, that macs do periodical system maintenance work during operation and even sleep, which eliminates the need for restart; possibly restarting would even come against all this, etc., and "not shutting down" is in fact a typical differentiating Mac feature. Is this true?

It’s true that OS X has a periodical maintenance script that runs daily, weekly, and monthly. Each script has  a different purpose to remove logs, rebuild whatis database, and bunch of maintenances on user levels. I can say that it doesn’t affect our day to day usage. It’s more like system maintenance to clean up and sort logs.

In fact, for MacBook models, we should decide whether to shut down or enter sleep state by focusing on which method can keep the battery healthy. Healthy in the way the battery can maintain a maximum capacity in its lifespan.

Most of the MacBook models use Lithium-ion polymer batteries which requires low level discharge to get the maximum usage. Based on the explanation by Battery University:

  Similar to a mechanical device that wears out faster with heavy use, so also does the depth of discharge (DoD) determine the cycle count. The shorter the discharge (low DoD), the longer the battery will last. If at all possible, avoid full discharges and charge the battery more often between uses. Partial discharge on Li-ion is fine; there is no memory and the battery does not need periodic full discharge cycles to prolong life, other than to calibrate the fuel gauge on a smart battery once in a while

For the maximum battery health, you should use your MacBook Air at least until the it depletes to ±60% level before you keep it plugged in again.

It‘s okay to just close the lid without harming your MacBook. Beside, it can run the maintenance script on time.

The only time when you should consider shutting down is when you’re not going to use the MacBook for more than 36 hours. Apple recommends to discharge the battery around ±50% before shutting them down.

  If you don’t plan on using your notebook for more than six months, Apple recommends that you store the battery with a 50% charge. If you store a battery when it’s fully discharged, it could fall into a deep discharge state, which renders it incapable of holding any charge. Conversely, if you store it fully charged for an extended period of time, the battery may experience some loss of battery capacity, meaning it will have a shorter life. Be sure to store your notebook and battery at the proper temperature. (See “Notebook Temperate Zone.”)

I know I’ve emphasized too much on battery health in this answer, but instead of asking if shut down or sleep is better, the decision affects your battery health more than the performance of the operating system.

Feedbacks and corrections are welcomed in the comment below.


Mid-2010 Macbook Pro won't boot after trying to install macOS Sierra

Try to remove the corrupted 'prelinked kernel' first, then rebuild the kextcache.

From the Recovery HD (putting your own volume's name instead of "Macintosh\ HD") try those three commands in Terminal in succession (pressing 'enter' after each):

rm -f /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/PrelinkedKernels/prelinkedkernel
touch /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/Extensions
kextcache -u /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

See also:

man kextcache


There is another trick how to free up some space:
1) make sure you have less than e.g. 3gb free space left
2) go to you iTunes Store and try to "rent" a movie which will require much more than 3gb. (most movies need 5gb or more).

once you try to rent, your "purchase" will fail but your device is cleaning up space. you will notice some Apps as "being cleaned" on your home screen.


Can't copy media to iPad through iTunes File Sharing because not enough free space is available

Identifying the problem

This issue is widely reported on Apple support and individual app support forums all over the Internet. I believe it has little to do with the amount of free space on your iOS device, but instead iTunes is ambiguously informing you concerning the amount of free space on your computer's hard drive. Though the support article I link is concerning backups failing to restore through iTunes, it does describe the issue.

What is happening is iTunes has determined there is not enough free space on your hard drive to backup the iOS device once that file syncs over. The reason for this is that by default, iOS device backups include all apps and all documents those apps store (including your large mkv file), which is why when you sync, the longest process is usually the first one, the notorious backup process, which occurs at every sync.

Solutions

disable full iTunes backups

Changing the behavior of iTunes backups to ignore the documents stored on your iOS device is one solution to your issue.

to disable full iTunes backups on OS X, enter this command in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app :

 defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

to reenable the full iTunes backups switch to false:

 defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false

For disabling full iTunes backups in Windows, please see these instructions.

free up space on your hard drive

delete iTunes backups

One easy way is to delete the old iTunes backups you're storing. See the "Deleting a backup in iTunes" section of the Apple support article linked here, which I will quote below:

  If you want to delete a backup created by iTunes, follow these steps:

  Open iTunes Preferences:

  Windows : Choose Edit > Preferences
  Mac: Choose iTunes > Preferences

  Click Devices (the iOS device doesn't need to be connected).
  iTunes will show the phone number, IMEI, and serial number of the backed up iPhone when you position your mouse pointer over a backup (iTunes shows only the serial number for iPad and iPod touch). You can use this to find the backup you want to delete.
  Select the backup you want to remove and click Delete Backup.

5 Quick Tips to Free Up Disk Space in Mac OS X

See the article linked in this subheading for easy ways to clear space on your hard drive if you have a Mac. For clearing up free space on Windows, try this guide.

Monolingual

Another reasonably painless way to free up hard drive space is to use an open source utility like Monolingual to remove unnecessary language resources from OS X, which by itself can free up hundreds of MB.

Other recommendations

You can view your video in the iOS native media player without transcoding

Subler is a utility designed specifically for adding subtitles to video files. It will also, however, simply copy and rewrap, and not transcode, the AVC (h.264) encoded video wrapped in mkv to a friendly format, and it will transcode the audio from ACC to AAC if necessary. Further, it will also optimize the location of the mpeg-4 atom in the resulting file for iTunes friendly use. It uses a friendly drag and drop paradigm. Download Subler, unzip into your Applications folder and launch Subler. Type command-n to begin, and drag your mkv file into the window, and choose from the simple available options to convert your mkv file without transcoding. Then import your new mp4 file into iTunes and sync to your iOS device.

For Windows systems, MkvToMp4 is an application that similarly will reformat your mkv to mp4 without transcoding. Whether the resulting mp4 file will be friendly to iTunes remains to be seen, but it is worth a try to be able to losslessly convert video files from one format to another.

Alternatively, this bash script uses ffmpeg, SublerCLI and HandbrakeCLI to batch rewrap, transcode or otherwise convert video files of various codecies and iTunes/iOS incompatible wrappers to iTunes/iOS friendly formats, automatically choosing a method that retains the best possible quality resultant file. It, however, takes bit of reading and understanding the script to get it to install its dependencies. Also it will take a lot of time to complete processing if set upon a lot of files requiring HandBrake transcodes, and while doing so eventually eat up all your free memory in the process. It is very covenient once it is working and set in your $PATH, will eat through directory structures converting unfriendly video formats where it finds them, and nondestructively will place original files in your ~/.Trash so you can preview the resultant files before eliminating the originals.

Technically, you can use bash scripts on Windows if you first install Cygwin. The script linked above would likely need some adjusting to work under Cygwin, but if learning a little bash doesn't kill you, then it will only make you stronger. ;-)


When you plug the device into Win 7, you should be prompted with an AutoPlay box.  Click the "View more AutoPlay options in Control Panel".  This will give you the ability to change the defaults for the device (you'll see iPhone at the bottom).  Next to Apple iPhone is a list of applications that windows will auto load when the device is plugged into the USB.  Good luck.


It's something built in the system . Sometimes it's able to detect a captive portal and it displays it in a separate window.

As @George Garside pointed out, it's a separate program located at /System/Library/CoreServices/Captive Network Assistant.app.

Also, if you have a iDevice you'll see a similar feature.


If you have to stripe data across both drives, then you'll be constantly limited by the SATA II bottleneck.

You'd be much better off just buying a larger SSD for the hard drive slot, or installing two separate SSDs as separate drives.

At best, you might want to look at creating a Fusion drive between a larger mechanical in the Optical slot and an SSD in the HDD slot. (Or even two SSDs...?)


Disk format for HDD with both APFS and HFS+ volumes

I have done this by starting with a whole disk APFS partition, I believe.  I gave the whole disk to APFS, and then I followed the directions in this article to shrink the APFS partition:

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/deep-dive/resize-your-apfs-container/

This freed up unused space on the disk, which I think I was able to assign to a new partition in HFS+ format using Disk Utility.  I needed to do this because I wanted to have a ZFS partition on the same disk with an APFS boot partition, and ZFS doesn't really interface with APFS (ZFS can replace an HFS+ partition, though).


iCloud Backup only stores the most recent backup of your device. Every time you take a new backup, the old one is automatically erased.

This is how it is supposed to be, and how it always has been (or at least for multiple years). It’s not something new, nor is it specific for your account. It doesn’t matter how much space you’ve bought, how much you’ve paid or how much free space you have.

You can have multiple iCloud backups stored on your account when you have multiple devices, or backups of older devices that you no longer have. As far as I recall, it is also possible to have multiple iCloud backups stored if you have done a major iOS update, so that you have the latest backup from before the upgrade, and the latest backup from after the upgrade.

There’s no user-accessible way of accessing backups that have been overwritten in this fashion. I doubt that Apple has any way to restore such backups either, as the disk blocks probably have been reused for other purposes in the mean while.

There's also no user-accessible way of asking iCloud Backup to keep two or more backups of the same device at different points in time.

If you want to have multiple point in time backups of the same device, you’ll need to use iTunes and backup on a local computer.


Import other peoples calendar from Outlook

ha! Actually it is possible
Here we go: http://www.it.cornell.edu/services/ical/howto/view-shared.cfm


how to run open -n applicaton name from command line?

You're missing the initial line of your script file - the "shebang".

Put the following in your script file:

#!/bin/sh
CX_LICENSE=LS
open -n /Applications/Inspire\ Designer\ 10.0\ GA/Inspire\ Designer.app/

That should work - the file you had before did not have enough information to tell the operating system how to run your script. You want to run a set of shell commands, so you need to tell the operating system it's a shell script, which is done by including the #!/bin/sh as the first line of the script.

See this answer on Stack Overflow for more information.

Update

Just to confirm, I've just tested this script and it works fine:

#!/bin/sh
open -n /Custom\ Applications/MacVim.app

As correctly pointed out by @fd0, you should name the script <script>.tool or <script>.command for it to be executed from Finder (where <script> is a meaningful name for the script).


How to speed up my iMac after upgrading to Sierra?

Putting an SSD inside will give the most speed boost possible for general computing. If you have a specific benchmark or measurement you want to optimize, there might be other options.

Since that’s an internal upgrade, you should consider what value you can recoup selling it used and buy a better / newer used Mac than trying to upgrade internal parts on most iMac.

Since you have a hard drive, you will get the best performance with a hundred free GB and rebooting once a week or so. Other than that, watching for RAM hogs and keeping browser tabs under control are good tips as well.


iOS 6 activation error on iPhone 3GS without SIM card

I had a similar error once, and if I remember correctly, it was that the time on the iPhone was wrong (months or years, I think). Setting the time correctly allowed it to go through.


Are you accidentally double clicking the window's title bar?
In modern versions of macOS, double clicking a window's title bar mimics the behavior of the old "Zoom" button that was semi-replaced in OS X Yosemite. I find that I sometimes activate this behavior accidentally.
To disable the behavior, go to System Preferences ➞ Dock and uncheck "Double-click a window's title bar to (Zoom)"


How to disable the warning when saving names that begin with a dot?

You can't easily disable that on OS X. You can easily set up a folder action to rename files you save once they hit the filesystem. It's clunky, but better than renaming things by hand.


iMac retina 27" with Mac OS X Yosemite. Reduce space between lines in Pages

Select Format on the icon menu bar, and then under Spacing Lines adjust the distance to your requirements.

This is an example:


Automator comes to the rescue. If you have time, you should really dive into it. You can do amazing stuff with it. I've a lot of custom actions and automations. Love this app. It's built into every Mac :D

Use this Automator Action: Combine PDF

Download Automator Action (starts downloading)
Install automator action
Select PDF files you want to combine in Finder
Right click on selected files
Choose from Services the action Combine PDF files
Give the new file a name


No, that's not possible. iOS will reorganize the apps and folders from the top left to bottom right automatically.

Reorganising your apps and folders on a per-page basis is the closest you can get: 1st page "Main", second page "Games", third page "iCrap", and so on.


Not able to store Wi-Fi network passwords in keychain

Keychain First Aid may solve your problem. It has been removed in later Mac OS versions (starting with 10.11 El Capitan), but it should still be available for 10.10 Yosemite.

Launch the Keychain Access app, located in Applications > Utilities
From the Keychain app, go to the Keychain Access menu in the top-left and then select Keychain First Aid.
From the Keychain First Aid window, select Repair and click Start


I like to just do speed tests as you adjust the antenna when I don’t have a software defined radio and/or oscilloscope to measure the actual signals.
I’ve not seen any good tool that uses the compass or just shows that weak a signal since the noise is so large compared to the signal.
So, no - you’ll need to try them sequentially and also sight things visually or do even more measurements.
Hopefully someone has a better guide to field test, it’s so changeable based on hardware I try to do anything else but use that anymore. It was great when ATT and iPhone original came out, but after a while it’s needing a PHD to decipher.


What can slow down/How can I speed up the pre-kernel boot steps?

The boot selector scans all possible boot devices, including network, firewire, and USB devices.  Try disabling WiFi, unplugging everything, resetting PRAM (like cksum said) and then rebooting again.  The fewer choices the boot-loader has, the faster it will load.  The ultimate speed up, is to go into System Preferences -> Startup Disk to select the desired partition.  It sounds like that is not what you want, but it illustrates the process.


macOS Catalina + Mac Mini: How to (reliably) use external speaker + control volume with media keys?

I have had this problem before, especially since I use a Digital Audio Controller (DAC) connected to my Mac mini (2018), connected via USB.

To solve this, I used a piece of software called SoundSource, which supports "Super Volume Keys":

  Enables keyboard volume control for audio devices that do not natively support it.

As my DAC is just a controller, not an amplifier, it does not have native volume controls, and yet I'm able to control Mac's output volume thanks to this little trick.

It's a paid software ($35), but has so much more additional functionality you may like, I think it's worth it.

Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to solve this problem without resorting to purchasing a third-party software, but maybe you can use Feedback Assistant to send feedback to Apple about it?


Terminal: grep recursive - don't search in symlink contents

If you look at the man page for grep, there is no option to exclude symlinks, and therefore an alternative method will need to be applied. One such method is to use find to output only file pathnames using the -type t option, where t is set to f for regular file.

Example:

 find . -type f -exec grep -l 'search' {} \;

Where 'search' is whatever you're greping for, and the output will be the relative path filename of the file(s) containing it because of using -l with grep.

In the example above, grep will be executed for each relative path filename that find passes to -exec. As grep can handle multiple filenames, you can change the ;, at the end of the command, to + to tell find to pass all the matching filenames to grep at once. Note that if the number of matching filenames is large, then the allowable length of the command line could be exceeded.

Also note that find has a rather large set of options, and as such you may be able to narrow down the output passed grep, depending on your needs.


How can I activate the text preview in Finder's column view for an arbitrary filetype or document type

Column previews in Finder are in fact provided by QuickLook, not Preview – as are the icons displaying the file contents, the CoverFlow icons and the QuickLook preview proper you invoke by pressing Space or Cmd+Y on a selected file.

QuickLook uses plugins to display file contents – a piece of code rendering the file contents and telling the QuickLook server it can do so (see the QuickLook Programming Guide if you want the technical details). You need plugins because files can be binary data – without knowledge of its structure, no representation of the file is possible – or textual data that needs processing – HTML for instance, which you’ll probably prefer to preview rendered, not as raw source. They also must be limited to specific, known file types (to be precise: Uniform Type Identifiers, or UTIs for short) for this exact reason – a rendering plugin for HTML will not give you a usable preview for a JPEG. OS X provides quite an impressive default collection of these plugins (located in /System/Library/QuickLook), and applications you install add their own (located in the application package itself, /Library/QuickLook or ~/Library/QuickLook). You can also add some yourself to those two last locations.

In the case of text files without an extension, the problem is OS X’s built-in plain-text QuickLook plugin is not assigned to these as they do not correspond to a UTI it handles. However, there is a 3rd party QuickLook plugin adding that functionality: QLStephen. Just download it and install it according to its installation instructions on GitHub and you should be good to go.


Whats a keyboard shortcut for cycling through open windows in Mail.app on Yosemite?

To cycle through windows of an active application You can use keyboard shortcut: ⌘ CMD+` - (` is the key with ~ tilde).


For those of you who are still curious, I ran across this site, explaining how to turn subpixel rendering on and off for a webpage. Make sure to check out the demo page. I still don't know how it's handled at the OS level, but I'm guessing that to get any farther I'd have to actually learn about how fonts are rendered, and I don't think I'm prepared to do that. It also looks like there is a debate in the community over whether subpixel antialiasing is better than pixel antialiasing. Here is the case for subpixel rendering.


Is there a way to mirror to HDMI display on FileVault login screen?

Is the laptop plugged in? If not, it has to be plugged in in order to output to a display while closed


Just go to your Applications folder in Finder and double click the application "Backup and Sync from Google.app".  If that does not work, other options may need to be explored.


how to change the day output from 2 days to lets say 50 days

There is nothing in the one-liner which limits by days. If you want to see all visited pages, remove the trailing \  | head -n 30 (which currently cuts off the output after 30 lines).

If you still don't see more than two days, check the history settings in Safari.


How to find if iPhone is unlocked for worldwide GSM use

If the Iphone is unlocked just trying with a difference SIM card from another carrier should be work without any problem.


Differentiating Apple products by their MAC addresses

No, sorting or determining a pattern in the MAC address isn't a feasible way to map to model of Apple product.

Over years of watching MAC addresses on networks as well as the explosion of devices on the iOS end of things, if there were a nice pattern, it would start showing in deployments with hundreds of devices.

For example, I have one Mac that has data on about 1,000 iOS devices that have been connected over time to that Mac while iPhone configuration utility was running. Looking at the data now, there are no clear patterns to help differentiate between the device types.

This also applies to Macs. Sadly, my data here is in the hundreds and not thousands presently. Yes - a string of MacBooks when ordered together will usually have sequential addresses (more so than sequential serial numbers in fact) - but over time, the iMacs seem mixed in with the Airs and the MacBook Pro.

It could be that there is some encoding present and no-one has stumbled across which bits are coded with model numbers, but a simple sort of the MAC addresses has the devices all jumbled up. Perhaps if you can find someone that runs the mobile device management software for a very large company or school district and see if they are curious enough to see if a larger data set would yield some better results for you.

I haven't seen a case where a Mac and an iOS device share the same smaller block of MAC addresses, but I can't even rule that out for you based on my experience running networks that log MAC address and are in a position to know what hardware is associated with which MAC address over the years.

My guess is the addresses are issued sequentially rather than by final destination. It would make sense to dole out parts of each region to factories that are expected to make 5 or 10 thousand devices in the next month and onle issue more once the existing addresses are consumed. If so, we might have better luck trying to bin the numbers by approximate manufacturing date rather than by where it ends up in a shipping product. Also consider on the Mac end, repairs often give a new MAC address to portables and even desktop Macs when the ethernet controller is replaced.


There is no link in the verification email for a new Apple ID I created

It seems that your email client is not displaying images. (Many email programs disable images by default for security purposes.) However, the verification link will probably be an image button, so you must enable images in order to see it.

(Alternatively, if you configure your email account in Mail on your iPhone, you should also be able to see the button there, since Mail displays images in emails.)


The 3 pass erase method, where two passes are random data and one is known data is listed in DoE M 205.1-6. The DoE among their other sensitive operations, designs, tests, and builds the US nuclear arsenal. Different agencies often develop different methods to achieve same results.

Also, I don't think either agency uses either of those methods anymore.


Where do I put a custom ringtone for Facetime? (macos Sierra)

Overview

Here are the steps that worked for me:

Disable System Integrity Protection (see below for details).
Put your custom ringtone file in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ToneLibrary.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Ringtones/
Edit the system's property list of ringtones at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ToneKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/TKRingtones.plist (see below for details).
Choose your custom ringtone in FaceTime preferences.
Re-enable System Integrity Protection (see below for details).

Enabling/Disabling System Integrity Protection

It looks like in macOS Sierra (actually starting from El Capitan), Apple has implemented a System Integrity Protection technology that restricts access to /System. In order to play around with custom ringtones, you would need to disable System Integrity Protection

  To enable or disable System Integrity Protection [...]

  Boot to Recovery OS by restarting your machine and holding down the
  Command and R keys at startup.
  Launch Terminal from the Utilities
  menu.
  Enter the following command: $ csrutil enable [or use the command $ csrutil disable to disable System Integrity Protection]

  After enabling or disabling System Integrity Protection on a machine,
  a reboot is required.

Sources: Apple Support, Apple Developer

Editing TKRingtones.plist

In order to make your custom ringtone show up in the list of ringtones in FaceTime preferences, you will need to edit the file /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ToneKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/TKRingtones.plist using TextEdit (or some other text editor -- you can also use Xcode's developer tools for a nicer interface). Specifically, add <string>system:Custom Ringtone Name</string> at the location shown below (you should replace "Custom Ringtone Name" with the name of your ringtone file).

<?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">
<dict>
    // lots of stuff omitted here
    <key>modern</key>
    <array>
        <string>&lt;default&gt;</string>
        <string>system:Custom Ringtone Name</string>
        <string>system:Apex</string>
        <string>system:Beacon</string>
        <string>system:Bulletin</string>
        // lots of stuff omitted here
    </array>
    <key>sort</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>


How can I know whether an app supports the iPad Retina display?

Unfortunately there is no way uniformed way to verify iPad Retina Display support. But I wouldn't expect there to be one since Retina and Non Retina iPad applications, from a hardware support standpoint, are identical. Retina Display capable apps will run perfectly fine on the first and second gen iPads. Therefore, there would not be any need for Apple to list this under the requirements section. You're only option is to read the the change log found within the description section of each application.

I don't think there is any need for you to avoid buying any application simply because it does not support iPad's Retina Display. I would expect any of these apps in question will eventually get the update needed. I would suggesting checking out the last updated date for whichever app you're interested in purchasing. It is always a good sign if the app has been updated recently since it shows active support from the developer. Any app that hasn't been updated in a year is likely one you would want to avoid.

Lastly, a lot of these applications scale wonderfully on the iPad and even if you notice the pixelation from the lacking support of the iPad's Retina Display, that pixelation will be rather minor and hardly ruin the app experience.


How to show custom previews for all fonts in 10.9 Font Book?

This works (at least in Yosemite Public Beta 2):

Open Font Book, select "Custom" from the View menu, double-click in the preview area and type what you want. Then, close Font Book. Then, re-open Font Book. Now, whatever you had previously typed should be the preview text for every font.

Annoying, yes, but it's a lot better than nothing!


How to view real time dynamically updated information on thermals and fan speed through the terminal?

This Github repo has a program that can provide CPU temperature and fan speed on macOS and may be useful to you. If it only displays the readings one time, when you run it, just use the watch command to run it continously. (You can install watch using MacPorts or Homebrew).

With regards to CPU temperature and power monitoring:

If you have an intel based Apple Mac, the Intel Power Gadget is a very useful application in getting accurate cpu core, temperature and power usage information.

While Intel Power Gadgets is a GUI based app it also includes a command line tool called PowerLog. (You can find PowerLog in Intel Power Gadget folder in Applications, after you install the Intel Power Gadget App).

Intel PowerLog doesn't display the information in realtime in the terminal, when run, but produces a log file. But you can use the unix tail command to view the log while it is being generated and thus get the output in realtime.

If you know how to code, Intel also provides an Intel Power Gadget API that you can use to create your own cpu monitoring program.

The app Mac Fans Control provides realtime infromation on cpu fan speed and temperature:

If you are willing to pay for their software, contact them and ask if they can provide a command line version of the same app.


Scroll to zoom on a mac with a non-mac usb mouse

Some programs may allow you to use cmd+scroll to zoom in or out (it works in Firefox at least)


How to disable WebGL in the Chrome browser on Mac OS X

Chrome lets you disable WebGL using the about:flags page.

Type about:flags into the URL bar and press return.

Find the Disable WebGL flag and enable it. Restart Chrome for changes to appear.


AFAIK iDevices MUST use Wifi for internet accesss. So No USB.

iDevices can provide an internet connection only when Personal Hotspot is enabled (So it's only for Cellular iDevices). In this only case you can use USB for internet connection.


How do I download all photos to a HDD from iCloud?

Go to https://privacy.apple.com/account , sign-in and request download for photos.

Another method can be to allow Download originals to Mac in Photos app preferences and then go to /Users/yourname/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters after all the photos are downloaded.

  You can request a copy of the data that Apple stores which is
  associated with your Apple ID. This information includes, but is not
  limited to:

  Your Apple ID account details and sign-in records.
  Data that you store with iCloud such as contacts, calendars, notes,
  bookmarks, reminders, email, photos, videos, and document.

from https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT208502


Why does the OS X Software Update check take so long?

Mac OS X keeps a list of all installed packages in /var/log/receipts.

When software update is run it checks for updates for every (or perhaps only Apple) package individually by sending a HTTP request with a signature of the package to Apple's servers and waiting for a reply. This is necessary because of the wide variety of configurations possible for any system.

On my Snow Leopard system running software update sent ~322 HTTP requests to Apple's servers.

So basically it is just looking up if there are any updates, but because of the sheer number of separate and sometimes optional (Java, X11, printer drivers, etc.) packages, combined with the fact that it's sending each request separately, it can take awhile.


stderr error log from launchd scripts filled with non-errors

There is nothing wrong with the output you are capturing.

Convention Only

Developers are free to output anything they want to stdout and stderr. Convention suggests passing error related output to stderr but nothing enforces this choice.

In this instance the php script authors have written debug or progress information to stderr. I presume they expected stderr to be ignored, until a problem needs debugging.

See Confused about stdin, stdout and stderr? for a detailed question and answer on the subject.


Setting the system-wide PATH environment variable in Mavericks

Yosemite

/etc/launchd.conf is no longer supported in 10.10. See man launchctl:

  The /etc/launchd.conf file is no longer consulted for subcommands to run during early boot time; this functionality was removed for security considerations.

You can now for example save this plist as ~/Library/LaunchAgents/my.startup.plist:

<?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">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>my.startup</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>sh</string>
    <string>-c</string>
    <string>launchctl setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

The launchctl setenv command is ran as the user, so it only applies to processes launched in the user domain.

This method doesn't apply to applications that are reopened at login if "Reopen windows when logging back in" is checked.

Mavericks and earlier

In 10.9 and earlier, you can for example run

echo setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin|sudo tee -a /etc/launchd.conf

and then restart to apply the changes.

Other methods

/etc/paths and /etc/paths.d/ apply only (or mainly) to shells. The lines in /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d/* are added to the path by path_helper, which is run from /etc/profile, /etc/zshenv, and /etc/csh.login. I don't know any programs other than shells that would consider /etc/paths or /etc/paths.d/.

~/.MacOSX/environment.plist stopped working in 10.8.


How to run terminal commands when terminal itself isn't responding?

No. When you’ve gotten a system in extreme and memory is fully committed, your only home is to ssh in remotely or get lucky with an app launch.

You might need to just power off the machine and pick up the pieces of lost and unsaved data as needed.

Unless you have the shell already open, chances of spawning a new one are slim.

Force quitting any non needed apps might also get you a narrow window to resume control.


After updating my iPhone to iOS 13.5.1, I can't login to my Apple ID - "Verification Failed '' error

I would set aside the phone that’s not working and get control of your AppleID using a web browser on any convenient and secure computer.

https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage

By design it is difficult to bypass activation lock unless you are the original purchaser of the phone and can provide proof of purchase to Apple Support.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201365


iPad and iPhone Default to Driving Instructions in Google Maps Would Like Default to Map

The URL you listed explicitely passes information to Google Maps to put it into "driving instructions" mode. So unless you use a different URL (or just plain http.//maps.google.com/) there is no way to avoid that.


Can I install an older OS X over a newer OS X without restoring from backup?

No - the installer will refuse to run unless you follow the erase and install procedure.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904 - go to the Erase your drive and install OS X section at the bottom of the article.

You would have much better luck with:

Back up the Mac - make a bootable clone if you like that flexibility or Time Machine is fine.
Install the older OS on to an external drive. Make a junk/admin user when the setup assistant runs.
Add a new user and point that user's home folder at your "current" /Volume/whatever/Users/shortname folder.
Test things that are likely to break: Mail, Contacts, Photos - things that are stored in a database are likely to not be happy going back to older file structures. Once you have a hit list of the things that do and do not break, you can decide to clean things up or manually migrate things to a second "clean installation"

If you don't like the complexity or are not comfortable with the concepts above, you might want to just start with the old OS and move things over one by one when you need them. Having a bootable backup here is key since you may have to boot to the newer OS and export things with a tool or by hand for data that doesn't migrate easily.

If you're comfortable managing several backups and several OS and several home folders, you may never go back to having your OS run on the same volume as your user home folder. I know people (mostly NEXT era Apple employees and others in the profession) that use this method all the time to make OS changes less intrusive and to separate the backup of user data from the backup of system data and caches.


Actual Image not shown in the Body of Apple Mail client

Are your CIDs universally unique? I.e., do they change from email to email? RFC 2392 requires this (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2392). Although it mentions that most reasonable implementations would not index content separately from the message itself, which is (one of the reasons) why it usually isn't an issue.


Is there an USB adapter for the Earphones that will let you use both audio and mic simultaneously for a phone conversation?

I'm not aware of a USB adapter that directly takes the 4-pin 3.5mm connector that the Apple headset uses, but you could combine one of the many USB adapters with an adapter cable like this. That will convert the 4-pin connector to the separate 3-pin stereo & microphone connectors that are standard on PCs and should work with any USB adapters with an in & out. You will likely lose the volume and clicker controls on the headset.


The OS X upgrades on the MAS are very different than all other products.

It is an installer as opposed to the actual program that you run.

What is available is the chance for you to re-download the installer before you need it and save a copy. Apple initially made it hard for people to re-download the installer - presumably since many are equally confused as you are. However, lots of people were confused on how to re-download the app and a change was made a while back to show it as a download to anyone that "purchased" an upgrade.


Delete downloaded files in Firefox and Safari

It depends where you are saving the downloaded files. By default, they are saved in ~/Downloads (the Downloads folder in your home folder). This folder is a stack on your Dock (unless you've removed it) and files can be deleted from there.


How can I retrieve files cached in the RAM?

Run sysdiagnose on the process ID and look over the leaks and allmemory commands to get a feel for the syntax. You will need to know a lot about the data structures for this to be feasible. With that, you can drop the program into the debugger and dump the required data structures to screen.


Internal SSD: Create a partition in unallocated space

If solved the problem by
- Boot with ALT CMD P R
  After this the former bootcamp partition was again there.
- New partitioning of the ssd with only one partition having 1TB
- By using Web-recovery installation of Mac OS X
- Creating a new bootcamp partition with bootcamp assistent.

My concern was when remove the partition disk0s2 (with recovery OS X) a new installation of Mac OS X is not possible, I wasn't aware of the function Web-recovery.


How to change the default app for callto/tel links from Facetime to Skype/other?

Two options:
1. Do this via Facetime (Preferences > Settings > Default for calls)
2. If this doesn't work, try RCDefault App: http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/

For me, Skype was not showing in Facetime's list, but RCDefault App made it possible to add a custom app there. What I haven't yet managed to make work is that the number would get copied to Skype.

By the way, this has been answered also at https://superuser.com/questions/1132108/how-to-configure-the-default-app-to-open-tel-links-in-macos-x


Yes, you can run Snow Leopard and Leopard Server as a guest. You cannot, however, run Leopard or Snow Leopard NON-server OS as a guest, as it is prohibited via Apple's EULA.

EDIT: See Parallels KB here.


How to make Spotlight promote results to the top?

I ran into the same problem.  What worked for me was to use command-space to begin the spotlight search, type in the characters to search for, then clicking on the app I want to be the first in the list.  For example, if I type just a "t", the textEdit app was the first choice, but I wanted the terminal app to be first.  After clicking on the terminal app in the list, the next time I typed just "t", the terminal app came up first!


If I already set up Apple Pay in USA, can I use it when in other countries and will there be any foreign transaction fee?

Yes. Assuming the card you linked to Apple Pay allows foreign transactions.

Once setup you can use an Apple Pay-linked credit card in any country with a contactless payment terminal when they accept your credit card. Your linked card will be charged in the currency of the vendor where you use Apple Pay and you may incur foreign transaction fees on the transactions.

Consult your card holder agreement to determine if your card functions outside of the country of issuance and whether foreign transaction fees will be charged.

Apple Pay is a means of presenting a credit card to complete a transaction. It doesn't replace the credit card and your credit agreement with the card issuing bank. All of that still applies when you use Apple Pay.


How to paste a smiley () within Pages or Keynote?

Emoji simply wasn't supported in Pages 4.3 or Keynote 5.3

Our very own fonts guru, Tom Gewecke mentions such in https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4025411?start=0&tstart=0

The 'fix' is to update, I'm afraid.
It works perfectly well in Pages 5.6.1 & Keynote 6.6.1


What advanced calendar scheduling can Siri do?

While I am sure its not a complete list (the only people who would have that would be Apple), here is a list I found on many of the phrases Siri understands:

Adding Events

Set up a meeting at 9
Set up a meeting with Michael at 9
Meet with Lisa at noon
Set up a meeting about hiring tomorrow at 9am
New appointment with Susan Park Friday at 3
Schedule a planning meeting at 8:30 today in the boardroom

Changing events

Move my 3pm meeting to 4:30
Reschedule my appointment with Dr. Manning to next Monday at 9am
Add Lisa to my meeting with Jason
Cancel the budget review meeting

Asking about events

What does the rest of my day look like?
What's on my calendar for Friday?
When is my next appointment?
When am I meeting with Michael?
Where is my next meeting?

More available at http://www.iphonehacks.com/2011/10/iphone-4s-features-exhaustive-list-of-phrases-siri-can-understand.html

I personally have found that many of these features are available through the UI, but so complex or have a confusing workflow that most people wouldn't deal with it (for example, think of how many taps it would take to set a meeting at a time somewhere and invite someone?). For example, in the linked question about every three days, I wonder if it set a repeat that way (which is not available in the UI), or created new independent events.

After seeing your updated question, related directly to recurring monthly events on a certain day-of-week, I could not reliably get this to work. Using a phrase like 'schedule _ for the first Thursday of every month' did prompt for a time, but then tried to create the even for every day. This may work on a month to month basis, as in 'schedule __ for the second Tuesday of April'. I did another test just now, and it actually created a repeating event, but nothing more than a repeating one on the 30th of every month (it said it was creating a new event starting today). This was using the same phrase, and gave obviously different results.

I am not sure if this was due to a limit of Siri, or the fact that the recurrence options of Calendar on iOS is limited. This feature is easy to do on iCloud.com or in iCal itself.


First steps after acquiring a new MacBook Pro (w.r.t ensuring optimal battery life)?

Nothing. Use it and charge it when it gets low. There aren't any "tricks" to ensuring a healthy battery anymore, but Apple does recommend the following:

  Be sure to fully charge your portable when you plug it in for the
  first time, and then run Software Update to ensure you have the latest
  software.

The new Apple notebooks (2009 and up) monitor the health of your battery and charge it accordingly, so there is very little maintenance required anymore. In fact, they no longer even require battery calibrations. All new Apple notebook batteries are pre-calibrated and ready to use.

As for usage trends to ensure longevity, that too is all handled by the OS and you can consult Apple's battery article for more details.

To be honest, storing the battery in the fridge or freezer, running it down and then charging it, pulling it out when using AC, or all the other myriad of "tricks" you'll read about are snake oil. Batteries have a limited life-span, and they start to deplete as soon as they are manufactured. That is the nature of batteries. Using them only exacerbates this phenomenon. There is no magic wand to turn back the hand of time.

In closing, Apple has some tips on how to maintain your notebook's battery. Just follow their recommendations, and enjoy your new computer.


Cannot activate iTunes Connect account as a team

It is not clear but you have to authenticate here first: https://appleid.apple.com/#!&page=signin


Prevent auto-pairing for headphone (Bluetooth)

This can indeed be a pain. I myself own and use BT headphones and I rarely connect them to my MacBook Pro laptop. Fortunately, my headphones remember the device I last connected them to, and will auto-reconnect to that device when they power up, but only if that device is available.

However, this auto-reconnect will only happen if the device (iPad, iPhone, etc) has already been paired with the headphones. So, one way to keep your headphones from pairing with your laptop is to remove the pairing record for it. This is done via the "Bluetooth" preferences panel. Just select the pairing entry for your headphones and remove it by clicking on the "X" button after selecting the right entry.

The only downside to this is that you need to re-pair your headphones each time you want to use them with your laptop.


monitor displays shows no picture in display settings and goes black randomly

Assuming your cable is connected securely at both ends, the first thing to try is connecting the HP V270 display to a different USB-C port to see what difference, if any, this makes.

If this has no effect then I'd reset your NVRAM.

Resetting the NVRAM

Your Mac uses Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM). To reset the NVRAM on your MacBook Pro model follow these steps:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, so go to Apple > Shut Down so you’re not just logging out.
Press the power button (in your case this is the Touch ID button) and then immediately press the commandoptionpr keys.
Keep these keys pressed down for at least 20 seconds!
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. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).

If you still have problems after doing this, let me know.

Since resetting the NVRAM and swapping the ports has had no real impact, I'd strongly recommend testing your display with another computer and/or trying a different cable.

In terms of the MacBook Pro itself, you could use Apple Diagnostics to test its hardware for some peace of mind. You can do this as follows:

Fully shut down your MBP
Restart your MBP
Immediately press the D key and keep it down until you see the Diagnostics screen appear
Wait for Diagnostics to finish (this typically only takes a few minutes)
Once complete, one of two things will appear on the screen:

a No issues found message
a brief description of any errors found plus further instructions

If the diagnostics test does find errors, take a note of what they are

Note: If pressing and holding the D key at Step 3 doesn't work, start again at Step 1 and, at Step 3 press and hold both the OptionD keys instead. This will try and run diagnostics from the internet instead, so you will need to allow more time for it to complete.


Blue screen when booting from USB backup of Mountain Lion

Lion Disk Maker is a third-party utility. It’s likely that updates to OS X changed the startup behavior slightly for how your machine operates.

Any reason you wouldn’t use Recovery Disk? (Command + R on boot.)

You can also try booting to the USB drive, but enable verbose mode (before you select the USB drive, hold down Command + V) to see if there are particular errors shown when it is at that blue screen.

Last bit of hope: the author appears receptive to personal technical support questions by e-mail (that’s pretty cool).


Can I connect 2 monitors to my 2015 Macbook Pro Retina via 2x DisplayPort connections?

I found conflicting information about this subject, so for the sake of clarity for anyone asking the same question:

As per the comment @James left on @Bret's answer, the Mid 2015 MacBook Pro with Intel Iris graphics CANNOT drive two DisplayPort monitors simultaneously, so it is not possible to run two external 4K displays at 60Hz. This was tested on the 15" model with standard Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cables.
You can however run one 4K display at 60Hz through a DisplayPort and a second 4K display through the HDMI port at 30Hz.


My keyboard stopped repeating - how to fix?

Well it looks like there are a couple solutions:

Option 1. Enter this in terminal: defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false. To disable repeating keys again, enter the same command except change the false to true.

Option 2. Download Mountain Tweaks (I assume you're on Mountain Lion, if not, download Lion Tweaks) and click the "Yes" option for "Enable Repeating Keys":


No Keys Repeating on New MacBook Pro After Changing Key Repeat Speed

It probably wouldn't help, but you could try changing the keys directly in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist or ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/.GlobalPreferences.*.plist.

defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 2
defaults write -g InitialKeyRepeat -int 15
defaults -currentHost write -g KeyRepeat -int 2
defaults -currentHost write -g InitialKeyRepeat -int 15

2 and 15 are the fastest settings shown in System Preferences. The changes aren't applied until you log out and back in.

The file in the ByHost folder doesn't normally have keys for the settings, but it has precedence over the normal .GlobalPreferences.plist.

You can remove the keys with the delete subcommand:

defaults delete -g KeyRepeat
defaults delete -g InitialKeyRepeat
defaults -currentHost delete -g KeyRepeat
defaults -currentHost delete -g InitialKeyRepeat


How to view pid of process listening on port using netstat on macOS?

Try using the -v option for verbose output. That will give, well, verbose results so you can filter a bit with -p  and then maybe pipe to grep for your port number. Something like this to find the process using TCP protocol on port 80:
netstat -anv -p tcp | grep "*.80"
Here's a helpful resource with other options: https://www.btaz.com/mac-os-x/find-the-process-listening-to-port-on-mac-os-x/


How to use two internet connections independently

This is an admittedly convoluted method, but you could run the torrent app in a vm. Vbox, Parallels, Fusion, whichever. Then you can bind the vm's networking to a specific network interface. The default for the vm networking is usually "Auto" which means it uses what the Mac uses and that's dictated by the service order in the Networking System Prefs. But you can also bind to a specific interface and that will keep the vm's traffic on that connection.


Help with MacBook Pro (unibody) keyboard damage

Could it have "melted" due to the screen heat?

No. Impossible.

  Also, is there a way to easily clean the keyboard?

You can pop out the keys if you like (see this YouTube clip). I would advise against pulling out the entire keyboard as you won't be able to clean it any quicker and may damage it (depending on your dexterity) in the process. It is also a lengthy process that requires removal of the logicboard (hit up iFixit for details). Technically, the keyboard is attached to the top panel of the notebook (unlike the pre-unibody MacBook Pros).

As for a cleaning solution, you can use any monitor cleaner or a high concentrate (99%) isopropyl alcohol (70% will if you can't find the 99%, but not preferred). Apply it using q-tips or a small micro-fiber rag.


Force launchd to re-read environment variables

There is no way to do this, "launchd" is the master process, the equivalent of "init" in other unix systems, the only way in any other daemon would be to perform some sort of kill -HUP to reload config files etc, but this operation is not permitted on launchd.  If you look it up in the process table it is the number 1 process, every other process that is currently running is in some way a child of it, so a reboot is the only way to achieve this.  You may have further luck in setting those environment variables in another area that is more inclined to allow restarts.

    Dans-iMac:etc stuffe$ ps -ef | grep launchd | grep -v grep
    0     1     0   0  9:40am ??         0:09.47 /sbin/launchd
   65    18     1   0  9:40am ??         1:53.64 /usr/sbin/mDNSResponder -launchd
  213    73     1   0  9:41am ??         0:02.55 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/usbmuxd -launchd
    0    85     1   0  9:41am ??         0:00.08 /System/Library/CoreServices/ODSAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ODSAgent -launchd
   89   230     1   0  9:41am ??         0:00.01 /sbin/launchd
  501   238     1   0  9:41am ??         0:00.23 /sbin/launchd
  501   933   238   0 10:53am ??         0:00.01 /System/Library/CoreServices/AirPort Base Station Agent.app/Contents/MacOS/AirPort Base Station Agent -launchd -allowquit

EDIT:

Of course, missing the obvious solution that you can add the relevant variables into the config file, and then just run the commands manually in order to escape the need for a reboot, nothing that only newly start programs will take account of any changes.  I found this page which explains it in more detail:

    Environment variables set in launchd will be available to all programs on the system. However since $HOME/.launchd.conf is not
    supported, this approach is used for global environment variables
    only.

  The /etc/launchd.conf file contains a list of commands to be run by
  launchctl during startup. However environment variables set in
  /etc/launchd.conf cannot have spaces and cannot reference other
  environment variables; launchctl when run in Terminal does not suffer
  these limitations. Do note that /etc/launchd.conf does not exist by
  default, so we will need to create it.

  A reboot is necessary to load the contents of /etc/launchd.conf.
  However if you were to run the corresponding launchctlcommands in
  Terminal, you can alleviate the need for the reboot. Just remember
  that if you only do the launchctl commands, and do not put the entries
  in /etc/launchd.conf, it will not persist after reboot.

  If you want to have a system wide environment variable that uses
  spaces or be dependent upon another environment variable, you can put
  the launchctl commands into one of the files Terminal reads. You will
  have to quit and relaunch Terminal to access the newly set variables.


Configure emacs to cut and copy text to Mac OS X clipboard

Add this to ~/.emacs:

(defun pbcopy ()
  (interactive)
  (call-process-region (point) (mark) "pbcopy")
  (setq deactivate-mark t))

(defun pbpaste ()
  (interactive)
  (call-process-region (point) (if mark-active (mark) (point)) "pbpaste" t t))

(defun pbcut ()
  (interactive)
  (pbcopy)
  (delete-region (region-beginning) (region-end)))

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c c") 'pbcopy)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c v") 'pbpaste)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c x") 'pbcut)

If you use Emacs in iTerm 2, you can also remap key combinations in the preferences:

Then add something like this to ~/.emacs:

(global-set-key (kbd "<f13> c") 'pbcopy)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f13> v") 'pbpaste)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f13> x") 'pbcut)


Will it notify my mom if i turn my phone on?

Potentially.

If your mom selected the 'notify when at this location' switch, your phone will notify her when it comes online at your house. It is highly unlikely that this is enabled, though.

However, this will show your phone as online, so if she happens to check Find my Friends while your phone is turned on, she will be able to see it on the map.


Where is the dns server configuration file located in OS X Server App on OS X El Capitan?

What is the dns server bundled with OS X Server app on OS X El Capitan and where is the configuration file located?

The dns server is a domain name server used for resolving hostnames to IP adresses. The software used are bind. The configuration files for the Server.app are located at /Library/Server/ and the DNS configuration are in a subfolder called "named".

To restore your Server.app functionality, since you haven't configured anything else I would recommend removing the Server.app from your local computer, then remove the /Library/Server folder, and reinstalling the Server.app from the App Store once again.


You actually have some errors in the config snippet you posted, try this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host.example.com
    DocumentRoot "/Users/me/site"
    ServerName me.com
    ServerAlias www.me.com
    ErrorLog /private/var/log/apache2/dummy-host.example.com-error_log
    CustomLog /private/var/log/apache2/dummy-host.example.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

You don't need to <Directory> section for these directives, and you were missing the closing </Directory>. This might have caused Apache to not load your config and serve the default virtualhost instead.


need help I screwed my macbook so bad thiere is one drive and no partitions, please read below

This is a duplicate of many questions where you boot to Recovery and re-partition / re-download an installer and set up a new OS.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

You can bring another bootable volume to the Mac as well or bring a bootable installer or just a drive with a local recovery partition as well. You don't have to erase anything - main thing is to get another OS running so you can decide if you need to backup or do data recovery. If you have a full backup or can walk away from all the data - just erase the volume and set up a new OS.

Can't start Mac in recovery mode - only get folder with question mark instead


On my machine (iMac late 2015, macOS 10.13.6, Safari 11.1.2), the cause of the bad rendering was the AdBlock extension. I removed it, restarted Safari, and Safari rendered correctly. I then re-downloaded AdBlock, and Safari continues to render correctly.

I moved too fast doing this, and didn't note the version number of the AdBlock I removed, so don't know if the not-working AdBlock I removed was the currently-downloading version. In any event, the just-downloaded version doesn't interfere with Safari's rendering.


Finder does not show Path Bar and Status Bar, what to do?

Is it just this you are looking for? Finder > View > Show Path Bar?

Also here: http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/findertip1.htm


Keyboard shortcut to switch between Application tabs

That might sound a bit funny now: you spelled  out you answer all the time.

Use Tab to switch between all those controls and "Tabs".

In System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts you might want to enable Full Keyboard Access: All Controls.

Some applications might be too 'dumb' to respect that. For Safari or iTerm: they are not.

Note that while cycling through the Tabs with:

Tab = forward
Shift + Tab = backward

the highlighting halo that indicates your position might be a bit smallish or dim, depending on your settings

Space = select/toggle what is highlighted

Also note the varying options if you talk about browser-like tabs.
The first 10 can be usually switched to directly by using Command+1 etc.

If cycling through browser-like tabs is your goal, the Tab key  also works, but really cycles through all elements.

To only rotate through the tabs as such use Ctrl+Tab


Does a 2017 15" Macbook Pro top case fit on a 2016 Macbook Pro?

No - the parts, keys, electronics and case cables are different.

I'd consider selling the 2016 and buying new if that's the way you want to go.


The problem was in the Xquartz preferences. Have clicked the "full-screen" mode. Unclicked it and all working nicely, without the black screen.


You need to open finder's preferences and check your username :

You'll be able to find your home directory in finder next.


Keyboard shortcut to switch between Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres, Videos, Playlists in iTunes?

You could assign shortcuts to scripts like this:

tell application "System Events" to tell window 1 of process "iTunes"
    if exists radio button 4 of radio group 1 of splitter group 1 then
        click radio button 4 of radio group 1 of splitter group 1
    else -- if the sidebar is not shown
        click radio button 4 of radio group 1
    end if
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
    set view of browser window 1 to user playlist "Music"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to tell window 1 of process "iTunes"
    if exists radio button 4 of radio group 1 of splitter group 1 then
        click radio button 4 of radio group 1 of splitter group 1
    else
        click radio button 4 of radio group 1
    end if
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
    set view of browser window 1 to (get user playlist 1 where special kind is none)
end tell


Catalina: After some hours various things start to crash and/or stop working

I would pick one app and troubleshoot it.

Remove chrome extensions (make a list so you can reinstall them later)
Remove Chrome
Reinstall Chrome
If it still crashes - remove it and make a new admin account (clean environment)
Reinstall Chrome when the main user is logged out and only the new user is logged in.
Pursue support with that one vendor to isolate further if the app is supported on your version of Catalina.

Apply any Apple patches that are released while you are isolating things above.


Upgrade mid 2011 27" iMac: replace Superdrive with SSD and create Fusion drive?

Be carefull when working on an imac and ensure you have the correct tools - corrct size Torx drivers and a suction cup or two to remove the glass safely. Also use iFixit for a guide on how to do this such as https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+and+2374+Optical+Drive+Replacement/1637

I would suggest a superdrive HDD enclosure. You will need a 12.7mm one such as: http://www.amazon.co.uk/adapter-caddy-Apple-iMac-slot-/dp/B00C0NU1TU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415181905&sr=8-1&keywords=imac+superdrive+enclosure They are around £10-£25.

Ensure that you remove the optical drive thermal sensor and replace it back onto the SSD.

As far as SSD choice I have used Crucial, Samsung and OCZ. The Samsung evo series are very good speed over price.

I would also suggest moving your mac os install to the ssd and using the normal HDD as storage, this will improve speed.


iPhone 7+ text message with no contact or text but location is on?

This could be a corrupted Messages database. If you have your texts set to expire after a certain amount of time (under Settings → Messages → Keep Messages), your message threads would normally get emptied out, although the number would remain at the top.

You can find out for certain whether you’re sharing your location with anybody by going into Settings → Personal Profile (at the very top) → iCloud → Share My Location. If the list there is empty you should be fine, though you might still want to Stop Sharing My Location to see if an error/change occurs.

The Personal Profile submenu exists in iOS 10.3 and later. Otherwise just directly scroll down to iCloud after opening Settings.


I had similar problem not long ago, it was because I updated to iOS 11 and I had to agree to new terms and conditions and review my payment method.

Try to GET a new, never downloaded app and wait to see if any messages will appear, I'm sure that a message will come up.

If that happens, after you've reviewed everything, try to download your app.


Is it possible to install both Xcode 3 and 4 side-by-side, alternate use either one or the other

I believe you can only have one version of the command-line tools installed at the same time, and I believe it says this during the installation process, so you won't really be able to switch between them.


Is it possible to show subtitles in an embedded movie in Keynote?

The easiest solution for you would probably to burn-in the subtitles (e.g. render the subtitle into the video). This can be done with a multitude of applications like Handbrake, FFmpeg, FCP X etc.

While it is generally possible to show embedded movie subtitles (e.g. subtitle tracks in the movie file) in Keynote, this is not usable for presentations. While the subtitles are shown in the editing view, they are hidden in the presentation view.

Anyway, to show embedded subtitle tracks in editing view:

Open any movie w/ subtitles in QT Player (e.g. your movie added to Keynote), enable the wanted subtitle track in QT Player.

The subtitle setting from QT player carries over to Keynote (for some reason only Apple knows).

Mojave 10.14.4, Keynote 9.0.1

EDIT:

Fixed in Keynote 9.0.2!

Update notes from Keynote in the Mac App Store:

  This update addresses an issue that caused closed captions for videos
  to fail to play during a slideshow.

Tested, works, subs show in the slideshow now.
Same technique as before (enable subs track in QT player).


What's a good iPhone app for playing MP3 music?

VLC is very popular on any device or computer. The iOS Version has a really nice design (iOS 7 like) and supports any kind of transfer (Wifi, Networkstream, ...).

More information can be found here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html


I forgot the passcode for my iPad restrictions. How can I disable them?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is wipe the device and then start over. If you have a backup, hopefully it's from before the restrictions were set.


Send Command to Add remote users through ARD

The error you're getting is related to the sudo command.  You're probably trying to run the script as the normal administrator.

Instead, you can run it directly as root.


According to Apple, your iMac supports the following as second displays:

This model can simultaneously support the internal display at full native resolution and up to one 5120x2880 (5K) external display at 60 Hz with support for one billion colors; two 3840x2160 (4K UHD) external displays at 60 Hz with support for one billion colors; or two 4096x2304 (4K) external displays at 60 Hz with support for millions of colors. It supports both extended desktop (second workspace) and video mirroring (internal display duplicated on the external display) modes.

This means that only one 5K external monitor is supported. Two 4k monitors are supported however. I suspect this is due to the throughput of Thunderbolt, which is 40Gbps. A 5k monitor requires 28 Gbps alone. Also, you can not daisy chain the video connections, so you will need a thunderbolt dock with either displayport or HDMI port connectors for the monitors.
In response to questions below:
A Thunderbolt dock doesn't change the throughput of Thunderbolt or the Mac, it just adds additional connections. So, the dock will not allow two 5k monitors. It only provides additional connections. Now, perhaps your iMac already has two Thunderbolt/Displayport connections on the back to support the 4k monitors (not sure). If not, this is the role of the Thunderbolt dock, so you should purchase one with the needed connectors (they are all different so consider wisely).
An eGPU can drive your desired 5k monitors, but you will have to research the available eGPU options to find support for your configuration.
Note that the biggest limitation in this is the cable and connectors: Apple introduced 5K in iMac first, because Thunderbolt 2 only supported 20Gbps, which is not enough bandwidth for 5k, so they built the monitor into the system and created a sort of dual Thunderbolt 2 connection inside.
Thunderbolt 3 introduced 40Gbps, allowing 5k (Thunderbolt used mini-displayport connections and now usb-c style connections). Displayport connections (minidisplayport on Macs can support 5k with some displayport1 and all displayport2, which is on the Mac. For HDMI connections, HDMI 1.2 can support 1080p, with HDMI 1.4 needed for 4k. To get 5k, you need to have support for, and a cable that offers HDMI 2/2.1. Even then, most systems get 5k by compressing the signal.
So to get dual 5k on your system, you will need to use Thunderbolt to an external GPU, and then either Thunderbolt or HDMI 2.x from the eGPU to the Monitors, which means you need the proper monitors as well.


Does resetting the rating on an app also reset the top "Most Helpful" rated reviews?

I'm not sure about the rating of "Most helpful" reviews, but according to https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/ it does not not reset your apps' written reviews.

  In addition, keep in mind that resetting your summary rating does not
  reset your app’s written reviews. Past reviews will continue to
  display on your product page.


Does a Corsair CMSO8GX3M1C1600C11 RAM works on a MBP mid 2012?

Yes, it will work fine with Mac.

I have personal experience. I've tested out that configuration.


Can I recover a deleted Whatsapp conversation in iPhone?

I wonder if it may have been saved to the Google servers?

WhatsApp backup from an iPhone is never saved to Google's servers.

From your problem description, you have apparently lost the conversation forever.


Transferring Catalina system drive to older Mac — possible?

In the past, you could quite simply move a boot drive from one Mac to another & have it work as though nothing had changed. The only proviso was that both machines were of an age to know what each OS is, not too new, not too old.
I've been doing this with Macs for decades.

If the 'jump' between OSes would have required a firmware update, that may be a stumbling block, however, if the Mac you want to transfer the drive to cannot run the OS on the drive, then this simply will not work at all.


How to uninstall Zoom outlook client from outlook 365 from Mac

I found it! The zoom plug-in / add-in is not provided by the Microsoft store, rather installed by zoom itself, so you won't find it in the Microsoft store > my add-ins area. If you go to finder > applications, you will see a folder called 'Zoom plugin for Outlook', in that folder is an uninstall icon. Close outlook, uninstall, and voila....zoom gone!

This has been especially important since the zoom client no longer works in macOS Catalina, so it's useless to keep it in outlook.


I recommend installing the rEFInd boot manager as it recognises more OS's than those officially supported by Apple.
Once rEFInd is installed on your Mac it should present you with a list of boot options automatically each time your Mac is rebooted or powered on.


Disable caps lock on backspace in iPhone

It happens because you hit caps before typing a letter, so what the iPhone is doing is rather deleting all the code associated with that letter, it deletes the letter leaving the code, so if you backspace again it removes all the code from that space and moves back another space.

If you backspace one step further it removes this formatting.

The settings you have changed do not relate to your issue.

The first is to capitalize proper nouns that grammatically require a capital (which I wish would happen on all applications) the second is to enable the locking of the caps key, which means if you tap it twice in quick succession it will lock in uppercase.


macOS catalina install error - this disk doesn't use GUID partition scheme (Au Contraire!)

Catalina will only install to APFS, which probably means you will have to install High Sierra first - which will install on HFS+ & convert as it runs.
See How can I download an older version of OS X/macOS? for deeper info on this in general [which unfortunately has got rather long & confusing over the years.]
Jumping this far… definitely have a known-good backup before you start.


I can't see Google Calendar on macOS Calendar app

You need to tick the calendar in your synchronization settings.


There's a DTerm fork maintained by muhqu on GitHub. I'm using it on Sierra and it works well.

Repo here: https://github.com/muhqu/dterm


Correcting Pronunciation Errors in 'Say' Command in Terminal

According to this 2007 thread at discussions.apple.com the VoiceOver utility only fixes pronunciations in VoiceOver itself, not in text-to-speech.

So if you want to get say to correctly pronounce the words you should run a find and replace on the text file for each mis-pronounced word. There is probably a good way to do this in one step with a script, but if you just want to do it once you could:

Open the file in Text Edit (or any text editor you prefer, I like Text Wrangler)
Find (e.g.) "women" and replace all with "wimmen" (Located at Edit > Find > Find and Replace... in Text Edit)
Move to the next word you want to correct finding and replacing all until you've corrected all the mispronunciations.
Run say on the now incorrectly spelled text file.


Automatically Edit Plist files with Automator

You need to add a shell script action to your automator script, and do the actual setting in the shell script. I don't believe its possible to obtain the start time of the automator script, so you'll have to settle with a time stamp relative to the time when the shell script is executed. If you really need the start time, you'll have to add an action to record it yourself as the first step in the automator script.

In the shell, time computation is done with date.

date -v 1M

gives you the time one minute ago. If you really need it formatted in the specific way that you give above, you need to format it yourself, like so

date -v -1M '+%b %d, %Y, %H:%M:%S %p'

Here, %b, %d etc are place holders for the various timestamp components; see the man page for strftime.

Next, you need to know how to change a plist file. You can use plutil for that, like so

plutil -replace SULastCheckTime -string newvalue foo.plist

Putting it all together, the shell script could read

time=`date -v -1M '+%b %d, %Y, %H:%M:%S %p'`
plutil -replace SULastCheckTime -string "$time" foo.plist

Here, the backticks take the output of date and put it in a variable time; plutil then puts it in a file.

If you are going to use shell scripts anyway, you may consider dropping automator altogether in favor of shell scripts.


(Update Needed?) after PRAM reset, File Vault seems bricked

Entering my User-Password or the FileVault-Password didn't help. Recovery disk wouldn't work either.
After a lot of fiddling around I managed to access my internal TimeMachine drive. It's encrypted as well but here my backup key for the FileVault worked and I have another restore partition on this drive.

Once in restore mode I did still not manage to unlock my boot drive, and I finally had some textbox to check my typing. No idea what went wrong :( When I set up FileVault I checked all my backup codes and they worked all.

Currently I'm reinstalling 10.9 from my TM Recovery Drive, so in the end not a lot of harm done but still very frustrating.

Solution (sort of): Do backups and put Recovery Drives on those backup disks.