MacBook Pro appears to be completely dead and the charger is showing only a very dimmed green light

In the absence of a repair shop to run diagnostics, you might try isolating things in the following order:

Disconnect all external devices
Different power adapter
Remove RAM
Disconnect / remove the battery and then reset the SMC
Disconnect hard drive and optical drive

As you remove items, you remove causes of failure. The mac should still POST and beep if everything listed is taken away from the mac. Often, it's an odd part that is causing a failure of the system to charge or drawing too much power when these isolate the issue. In reality, it's likely the DC in board or main logic board, which means it's good you have warranty to cover that eventuality. Do use prudence in doing the above steps, you don't want to physically damage things and run the risk of warranty service being denied due to external damage or someone not technically capable doing work on your mac.

Even if you don't do all of the steps, you can rule out a few more things than you listed initially in the question. Also, Apple service providers will possibly be able to revert your firmware or at least confirm you have a working firmware install as well as be faster to isolate the cause than most consumers doing the steps listed above as they are set up to do this day in and day out.


How long would it take for FileVault to encrypt my Retina Macbook Pro?

The process to enable FileVault will read the entire 500 GB of data - whether the block is empty or full and encrypt it with the keys you set up as part of the process. So, the background IO will run the fastest if you don't have other user level disk IO running. The encryption itself will take less than 10% of one CPU on that powerful (fast) Mac - so you are really just going to see a sustained 60 to 80 MB/s re-write of the entire drive if you let the Mac sit idle. A Mac with a spinning hard drive would see between 20 to 30 MB/s so an Air or any Mac with solid state drives will be two to three times faster in this operation.

So - from the time you start, I would estimate 2-3 hours if you are getting at least 70 MB/s for writing the encrypted data back to the disk. This process does run in the background and isn't really reversible once it starts, so you can kick it off and then track the progress with diskutil.

  diskutil cs list


Apple Mail stuck on "Preparing to Move Messages"?

I deleted my imap account on my powerbook and then added it again. Apple Mail then downloaded about 4000 msgs and everything is back to normal.


MacBook not turning on after replacing trackpad cable

Listen buddy i have a similar problem. When you changed the ribbon cable you have probably forgot to remove the cable for the battery. This is why probably your battery went wrong. I also changed the ribbon cable myself and managed to unplugged my battery. This however did not fixed my keyboard and mouse issue (wish it did but it did not) but when i tried to turn it on it was just fine. I would suggest you unplug your battery leave it for few minutes check any cables around take off the ribbon cable put it back on. Then plug the battery properly put the protector on and try to start your mac. If that does not solve your second problem then you better start browsing for a new laptop.


Resizing/moving windows with keypress and mouse in Mac OS X

Afloat does moving and resizing as explained, and does more than that. I really loved this application.


leopard forgot password+launch_msg socket is not connected

The above worked on osx 10.5.8

I didn't use the "/" in mount -uw and once I did that it let me reset the password

Working command: mount -uw /


Excel Data Analysis ToolPak available for download for Microsoft Office for Mac 2011?

Yes, it appears to have been discontinued.  Sorry.

Refer to the discussion at What happened to the Data Analysis Toolpak or Solver in Excel for Mac 2011? – answers.microsoft.com. Quote:

  The Data Analysis Toolpak was removed in Office for Mac 2008. [emphasis mine] However,
  the following is a free third-party tool [...]

  [... goes on to mention the StatPlus software you already mentioned ...]

See also: I can't find the Analysis ToolPak – Microsoft Office Mac Troubleshooting. Quote:

  Cause: Excel 2011 does not include the Analysis ToolPak.

  Solution: Download StatPlus:mac LE for free from AnalystSoft, and then use StatPlus:mac LE with Excel 2011.
  ...

That last link used to include loads of comments from disgruntled Office for Mac users, but Microsoft seems to have removed comment functionality from that help center article. Surely you can find disgruntled comments re: the above elsewhere on the net.


How do I edit current shell command in VI

You want set -o vi (add it to your ~/.bashrc). Then, to edit the current line, just hit Esc to enter command mode.

See http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Readline-vi-Mode

To edit the current command in a full-screen editor, set your VISUAL environment variable to vim (I assume you want vim), then in command mode in the current comment, hit v.

To show the mode in the prompt:

$ cat ~/.inputrc
set editing-mode vi
set show-mode-in-prompt on
set vi-ins-mode-string +
set vi-cmd-mode-string :


Converting PDF to Powerpoint, importing each slide as a singular picture

You could use web services such as Zamzar to convert your PDF to PPT directly, but the downside is lack of privacy and watermark on your PPT.

It is better to split the process into two steps:

Export PDF into images
Import images into PPT

Export PDF into JPG using Preview

macOS' Preview has built in functionality to export your PDF into PNGs. Once you have your PDF open in Preview,

Choose View > Thumbnails or press ⌘ + ⌥ + 1
Select all the pages you want to export, click on File > Export
Select JPG format and the appropriate quality

Use ImageMagick

If you have ImageMagick installed, use a similar command as

magick -density 200 -trim input.pdf -quality 100 -flatten output-%02d.jpg

assuming the PDF is created with 200 dpi. You can adjust the density and scaling accordingly to create the best quality image. See this StackOverflow answer.

Note: Imagemagick uses Ghostscript in the background. You can use Ghostscript directly but the syntax is not as user-friendly. For example:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=jpeg -r200 -dJPEGQ=100 -sOutputFile=output-%02d.jpg input.pdf -dBATCH

Import Images into Powerpoint

Open up a new Presentation in Powerpoint and click Insert > Photo Album

Select all the images and click Create

And now you the PDF content is imported into Powerpoint


My late-2008 MBP keeps restarting itself

You could try following investigating method using Terminal.

What is shutting down the computer

syslog -k Sender kernel -k Message CSeq 'n Cause: -' | tail | awk '/:/{$4=""; print}' | pbcopy

The output is in the clipboard, so paste it in a text program like Notes or others. You can paste it in here for us to help you evaluate the result.


What's the benefit of using shift (for slow animation) when minimizing windows?

As with @napcae's answer, the "slow motion genie" effect is just a bit of fun, but I have used it in the past to demonstrate (usually to Windows users) some of the finer points of the Mac OS X display subsystems.  Namely, that rather than drawing each window on a pixel by pixel basis (think of Windows systems that leave random stray parts of windows as you drag them around and the window subsystem struggles to keep up with all the redraw mechanisms resulting in scroll bars hanging in mid air, or that nasty windows trail thing), OS X essentially draws a windows contents using something that is more akin to a 3D game engine mapping a texture to a polygon.  You can demonstrate this by having the following command ready in a terminal window, and quickly executing it while you slow-minimise a window:

killall Dock

The dock process is the thing that governs all this sort of thing, and if you kill it it will happily respawn a new one, but the operations that it was part way through completing won't get finished or reversed.  You will end up with a half minimised window that is warped into a strange shape and yet which is still fully usable.  Check it out with textedit, and note that you can still type in it (selecting text is more difficult!), or try it with a Quicktime movie window and notice how the thing is still playing.

Essentially its not just a daft effect, it's demonstrating the window drawing capabilities of the display layer, and how they are managed in a superior way to many other desktop OS window systems.

Note that this effect has been around since at least 2001 (according to a Google search), and I first knew about it in 10.4 where I saw it used to show off the new graphical window manager that used the Quartz Extreme engine to draw the windows.  If I recall the details correctly essentially every windows is basically made up of Quicktime, Open GL or Quartz 2D data source, the latter of which is essentially internally rendered into postscript (essentially all your window dressing elements, toolbars, scroll bars, are a PDF...), which is then rastered into a single window combining all the elements (Your PDF window dressing, with it's quicktime or openGL contents, or a mix there of for a web page etc) as a 3d "texture" on a 2d plane by Quartz Composer to make the window you see.

For more details read the following 2 pages from the Siracusa Tiger Review over at Arstechnica which discusses the way in which the window manager has evolved and has a pretty good explanation of how it works, which is by and large the same now as it was for Tiger (or at least, the changes are not as large since Tiger as they were before Tiger which is when the GPU started to take over pretty much all window drawing tasks from the CPU)


New hard drive in Mac Book Pro leading to occasional crashes and kernel panics

Try resetting NVRAM just to be safe. I do this whenever I service a MacBook.

Resetting NVRAM / PRAM
1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

You may also want to make sure your RAM chips didn't dislodge when you dropped it. Here's how to find your RAM bank.

Hope this helps!


Update Nov 2017:
Opus is now included in iOS 11.

iOS 11 and Android Spearhead Universal Support For Opus Audio Codec, MP3’s Overdue Successor

Judging by this conversation on the Apple forums, it seems unlikely an iPhone can use the format directly.

  Since Opus is not compatible with most popular players and devices so far, it's absolutely impracticable, no matter directly play Opus files on Windows Media Player, Android, PS3, Xbox 360 and iTunes or sync Opus to iPhone, iPod, iPad via iTunes, or edit these Opus in iMovie and QuickTime.

  Under the circumstances, the best solution is to convert Opus to MP3 and other more compatible audio formats in order to play or edit Opus in the above popular players and devices.

One of the posters mentioned that Adapter (freeware) can convert then to a playable format, MP3, AAC etc.


Core 2 Duo Macbook OS 10.6.8 to OS 10.7.5

Yes, you can update to 10.7.5 - I'm running it on my older (2006) white MacBook. You will have to purchase it through Apple for $20 here.


Type any one of the five bars at the bottom of the App Store (Featured, Top Charts, Explore, Search, Updates) 10 times in rapid succession. You will see the page redraw itself. This is a little-known feature in iOS that resets the App Store on the device. Try this, and then try to update the app.


Xcode appears to be installed but xcodebuild is unusable

Did you run sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app? This message: error: can't exec '/Developer/usr/bin/xcodebuild' is telling you that your system is looking for xcodebuild in `/Developer/usr/bin/' but as of Xcode 4.3 (the one that's installed from the App Store) it's located in the Xcode.app bundle which is in /Applications.

Edit

In a comment to your question you say you've run sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app. Now run xcode-select -print-path and make sure it says "/Applications/Xcode.app".

Also, you may need to download the command line tools separately. (I don't know from first-hand experience because I'm stuck on Snow Leopard for the moment so I haven't installed Xcode 4.3.)


Enable Internet Sharing over Bluetooth PAN

Maybe you need to update Snow Leopard via combo update. It happens sometimes that an earlier version has problems with internet sharing (sometimes even an update could break it).

For example I could not establish successful Internet sharing on OS X Tiger 10.4.11, but with 10.5.8 I had the best experience.

For Snow Leopard, maybe you could try 10.6.8? 10.7.5 Internet sharing is working, although sometimes, it's not fully stable. It can be that you need to click on connected iPad/iPhone and same time on "Connect to" on established Bluetooth connection on the Mac to get it working.


Where to submit ticket about printing PDF issue

File bugs at https://bugreport.apple.com

Start with https://developer.apple.com/programs/which-program/ and at the bottom of the page is a free option to start up a developer account (which will need an  AppleID) you want to use for bug reporting.

Lastly, check out QuickRadar and http://openradar.appspot.com/ if you want others to see your bug report.


How can I open files in the Coda editor file browser using the keyboard?

Both return and command + O work to open files in my version of coda.

Is your enter key only an enter key or combined?

It doesn't look like that plug in changes key bindings so you might have to search elsewhere for something that is altering the standard behavior. Other tweaks or software possibly?


I eventually managed to find the issue by poking around in console. I got the following error messages:

Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: _CGSFindSharedWindow: WID 6963
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSGetWindowTags: Invalid window 0x1b33
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSGetWorkspaceWindowGroup
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSGetWindowOwner
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSGetWindowBounds
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSSetWindowListSystemLevel: Failed
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: _CGSFindSharedWindow: WID 6963
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSGetWindowTags: Invalid window 0x1b33
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSGetWorkspaceWindowGroup
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSGetWindowOwner
Dock: kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGSGetWindowBounds

While I'm not positive what causes these, sure enough, restarting the Dock using killall Dock did the trick. Though I still have no idea what causes this in the first place, this is at least a fix for the rare problem.


As you say with each little change in a file will mean it will be backed up again by Time Machine. Often this makes hardly any sense and will bloat the Time Machine backup drive unnecessarily.
I recommend excluding folders that contain large files and change often from Time Machine backups. To do so, go to System Preferences > Time Machine > Options > +. My exclusion list includes the following paths:

Download folder /Users/[me]/Downloads
My virtual machines (Parallels Windows, etc.) /Users/[me]/VMs
Caches, such as Spotify /Users/[me]/Library/Application Support/Spotify/PersistentCache
Dropbox folders /Users/[me]/Dropbox

Naturally you should decide for yourself what is meaningful to exclude on your machine and have another backup strategy for those files.
Alternatively, or on top of that you can use the free utility TimeMachineEditor to lower the time interval of backups (default is one hour). From the webpage:

TimeMachineEditor is a software for macOS that lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine. You can change the interval or create other types of scheduling (see the screenshots below).
This is useful if you don’t need to backup every hour and don’t want the performance penalty. For example you might be frequently creating or modifying files which would cause long-running backup operations throughout the day.


Magic Mouse 2 Only Connects When Plugged In

It may be an issue with one of the bluetooth radios.

Can your MBP connect to other BT devices?
 - If not, you may need to get your MBP to Apple Service.

Can you connect the MM2 to a different computer via BT?
 - If not, you may need to get your MM2 to Apple Service.

If you can't test this yourself, you should get both units to an Apple store and let them diagnose it for you.  They are usually pretty good at root-causing such issues.


Is there a way to name an Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro?

On iOS 12.1.1 and lower, there is no way to name pencils if you have more than one or just wish to see a different name when it connects or looking at the battery levels.

You can open settings app and see the serial number of the paired pencil if you tap in General and look towards the bottom of the data. Tap Apple Pencil and you can see details.
You can't edit the name in the bluetooth settings - but the name there does match what's shown elsewhere "Apple Pencil" in English.


How to succesfully create a bootable Windows installation USB stick on Mac?

I found a guy who told a work around how to create, in the "right way", a USB bootable for both (on bootcamp and windows machine). The "Answer 1" works for me. I hope it helps you too.

Boot Camp Assistant fails to create the USB installer from the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

See ya!


Apple TV (1080HD) - Macbook to HDTV Streaming Issues

I have a new Apple TV and stream from iPhones, iPads and various macs via AirPlay... and love it!

Two places I'd suggest you focus:

the operating system

upgrade to 10.8 (if you don't want to commit to ML, install it on a partition, thumb drive or RAM card and boot from there to AirPlay)
while not a principle cause of what you're experiencing, how much RAM does your MacBook have? If you have 4GB or less, upgrading to 8GB is a small dollar investment that provides a great return in speed.

the wireless router

are you experiencing slow or choppy wifi performance anywhere other than AirPlay?
does your MacBook Pro intermittently drop its wifi connection even when you have a full signal?
what wireless router(s) do you have, and how old are they?

just because it says G or N doesn't mean the wifi router is "any good" or supports all the protocols needed for AirPlay

how far is the wireless router from your tv and MacBook?

within reason, the closer the better

You call yourself a technophobe and moron, and I'm not here to dispute either of them (but I think you can achieve what you're hoping for!). My simple suggestion to resolve your problem: replace your wifi router with an Apple AirPort Extreme (less than $200) or AirPort Express (about $100).

I have used macs and iOS devices with a number of different brands of wireless routers, to limited success and happiness, usually defendant upon the age of the router. Older wifi gear does not support all the tricks and new technology Apple (and Intel) builds into the newer computers.
I've had the best success with Apple's AirPort Extreme or Express base stations... for working with both Macs and Windows boxes.

the AirPort Extreme let's you hook up a USB hard drive as a centralized TimeMachine backup disk for all your Macs backups
both the Extreme and Express let you attach a USB printer for remote printing

Either of the two routers are quick to set up, work with your Internet gateway, and should accomplish what you need. If you have an Apple store nearby, swing by and pick one up. You already have the software on your MacBook to configure it.

Good luck!


Can I use a different email/calendar/address book provider for Mac OS X and iOS?

Googles Services

iOS

(Push) Email using the IMAP protocol

Push is not default. You have to set it up manually.

bi-directional contacts sync (Exchange supported)

If you do not sync contacts using the exchange protocol, you only sync via iTunes.

bi-directional calendars sync

I don't have good experiences with the bi-directional sync using the iOS calendar app. Luckily, there are plenty of third-party apps available which offer a tight integration of Google Calender. CCal has been quite an enhancement to my Google experience.

OSX

iCal, Address Book and Mail allow to integrate sync with Google's services in Preferences → Accounts.

Google Services on other platforms

Google's Services are more widely available than anything else I know. It allows to keep contacts/calendars/email in sync on OSX, iOS, Android and Linux. In Ubuntu I use Google's Services in Thunderbird and Google Calendar/Contacts extensions.


Switching back to 'production' version of Mac

Go to System Preferences → App Store → Change… → Do Not Show Pre-release Updates


How to disable Spotlight indexing when on battery?

jherran's answer helps you with disabling Spotlight indexing, but does not address the part of the question about toggling automatically when AC power is connected or disconnected.

You could use sudo mdutil -i off / and sudo mdutil -i on / in conjunction with a listener for when AC power is disconnected. Using something like ControlPlane will satisfy your requirement for automatic toggling. It supports "Current power source" as an event to listen for. It is free and open source.

You might be against using a third party solution. To roll your own, try writing a script that loops checking pmset -g ps | grep -c 'AC Power' with a sleep interval in between. If AC is connected, it outputs 1 (0 otherwise).


No, file location isn't something that's tracked and without any form of backups, that would have path recursion, you're out of luck. At least you have the files and didn't loose them. You might want to consider using Time Machine going forward!

Source: comment by user3439894


Mac OS X Mavericks freezes, stops responding when running out of memory

When the OS is starved for room on disk, bad things happen by design in an effort to try to keep the critical parts of the system online long enough to let a controlled crash happen and potentially let apps with changes to save survive until the cleanup activity starts.

Mavericks is much less likely to allocate the full amount of RAM to /var/db/sleepimage so people used to having that space preallocated can run into surprises when the OS needs a little room to grow the sleep image if operating conditions dictate.

The main tip would be to preserve several gigabytes of free space on the bootable volume when you have a workload that stresses the virtual memory system and runs with memory pressure in the red.

Here are my recommendations:

What scale or measure does Mavericks' and Yosemite's "memory pressure" adhere to? has some good information on monitoring and causing memory pressure on command
boot your system, log in one user, quit all applications
open activity monitor and observe / record the memory screen
put the machine to sleep and wake it 30 seconds later
run sudo du -sm /var/vm/* and note how large your sleep image file is as well as whether any swap files have been created on disk.

You will want to have ideally enough space on disk free to match your total memory footprint if you intend to run programs that take the virtual memory system into yellow territory for memory pressure. You probably won't need all that space for just the OS, but especially if you are getting mach memory errors like you are listing, the workload you are running needs a little more free space to grow than you are allowing.

Additionally, if you feel the system tuning is incorrect, you could easily file a bug report by running sysdiagnose after a clean boot as described above, once again when the system is running the intended workload properly and one last sydiagnose run once you've caused the memory allocations to start breaking the system. It's possible there are better choices Apple could have made, but it also could just be your software is buggy / leaking memory and the system is breaking as it was intended when the finite resources it has have become exhausted. Without more details it's hard to tell which is the case.


The Apple ID "example@email.com" cannot be used to unlock this iPhone

Apple’s activation servers are generally instant. I’ve gone through the official process maybe 20 times in the past two years for work, and it has never not worked within 1 minutes let alone waiting 5.

Here is the official guide and link for the previous user to remove that lock:

https://support.apple.com/HT201365

Activation Lock is part of the iOS Activation status here:

https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

So if you believe it’s failing, the instructions there are correct - contact Apple Support directly. The only thing I can add, is Apple doesn’t tell you the full email of the previous owner, so unless you have the passcode, you won’t really know which email is “example@email.com” above.

How exactly are you connected to the internet from the device to try and unlock / activate it?
Do you actually know the email some other way or were you putting something hypothetical in the question?


What app is this screenshot from? Is it only a mockup?

That's a screenshot from Reminders, part of iOS 5


Safari extension to check if you're currently logged-in to Google/Facebook/etc.?

I don't know of an extension that will warn you about remaining logged into Facebook or Google accounts. However, since your goal is to block web trackers from services like these, a better solution is to install an extension that blocks web tracking bugs. I personally use and recommend Ghostery. Ghostery works with Safari, plus Chrome, Firefox and IE, and it blocks Facebook and Google trackers, plus a slew of others as well. With a plugin like this you can also safely remain logged into your Google and Facebook accounts as well.


Are there any photos in your "Recently Deleted" album? These still count towards your photos storage.

Try signing into iCloud and uploading the photos to iCloud Photo Library (enable at Settings > iCloud > Photos). The size of your iCloud Photo Library (Settings > iCloud > Manage Storage) should represent the size of the photos on your phone.

Some people have suggested performing a hard shut down (hold Power and Home buttons for 5 seconds until screen goes black) to reset Storage usage info.


I just had a similar issue and resolved it by:

going to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy.
Click the "lock" icon to make changes.
Scroll down the list on the left-hand side and select "Full Disk Access"
Click the "+" icon on the right and select the Terminal app (or in
my case iTerm)

You'll now be prompted to close the app if it's already open, restart it, and on next run you'll be asked if you want to allow the app to make changes - grant the permissions and you should be back up and running.


Is it possible to execute the package (located in FTP) from terminal of Mac

Shell script: curl & installer

If you can host the package on a web site, the installation can be reduced to the following two commands.

Download the file to the local computer:

/usr/bin/curl https://www.example.com/mypackage.pkg > /tmp/mypackage.pkg

Install the downloaded file:

/usr/sbin/installer -pkg /tmp/mypackage.pkg -target /

You can combine these commands in a text file called install-mypackage.command:

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/curl https://www.example.com/mypackage.pkg > /tmp/mypackage.pkg
/usr/sbin/installer -pkg /tmp/mypackage.pkg -target /
/bin/rm /tmp/mypackage.pkg

When the .command file is opened by the user, the package will be downloaded and installed.

This approach assumes:

The software is distributed as a flat .pkg file.
You can host the package somewhere privately.

Using sftp instead of curl

If your files are hosted on a Secure File Transfer Protocol (sftp) server, use the sftp client. To script the client, use a batch file or follow answers to Single Line sftp from Terminal.

Improvements

Please note this script has no error checking. Consider this script a starting point for your own script.

You could add a password to your web site and then use a URL with the credentials embedded, such as https://username:password@www.example.com/mypackage.pkg.

Given you have ssh access to the computers, you could run this script or commands remotely.


Can I buy one time membership of iCloud to backup my mac?

No, you can't backup your Mac with iCloud (via Time Machine).


With which carriers can I use an officially-unlocked iPhone?

You will find an up to date list of carriers and frequencies on this list for the United States. For other countries see here.

You can use your iPhones as follows (source):

iPhone Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
iPhone 3G In addition to previous: Tri-band 3.6 Mbit/s UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz)
iPhone 3GS In addition to previous: 7.2 Mbit/s HSDPA
iPhone 4 quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (800 850 900 1800 1900 MHz). Quad-band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (800 850 900 1900 2100 MHz) (800 MHz not yet officially supported by Apple)
iPhone 4S quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (800 850 900 1800 1900 MHz) Quad-band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (800 850 900 1900 2100 MHz) (800 MHz unannounced)

This means you can use your iPhones on any carrier on the 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz frequencies as a GSM phone, and access to data at the slow GPRS/EDGE speed.

For higher speed access you will have to look for carriers who provide the right technologies at the right frequencies.

This mean the iPhone will not work on networks operating in the 1700 MHz frequencies and it will not work on 1800MHz 3G (UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA) networks as it only can use this band for GSM.


The ghost mount is probably due to an application or some aspect of the system attempting to check something after the external drive is unmounted during the shutdown process (or crash). In this case, a directory (and even subfiles) may be created.

You can get rid of this directory by simply removing it as a script. The trick is to get the script to run when the new volume is mounted. There's probably a way to do this with autofs, but I'm not so familiar with its intricacies. I would instead recommend using Lingon to automatically run the script in response to the mount request.


Is it possible to bind my Mac OSX Dictionary.app to Google Translate?

Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be possible, or at least straightforward. As an alternative, you may want to consider creating an OS X Service that opens Google Translate in a browser window, for any highlighted word or phrase you have selected.

If this sounds suitable, follow the procedure below:

Creating a translation Service

Open the Automator app from your Applications folder
Select Service as the type of document and click Choose
In the window that appears, click the search field and type 'AppleScript'
Drag and drop the Run AppleScript action from the list on the left into the area labelled 'Drag actions or files here to build your workflow'

Copy the script below and paste it into the Run Applescript action:

on run {input, parameters}
    set phrase to input as string
    set phrase to quoted form of phrase

    set ui_lang to "en"
    set from_lang to "en"
    set to_lang to "zh-CN"

    do shell script "open 'https://translate.google.com/?hl='" & ui_lang & "'&sl='" & from_lang & "'&tl='" & to_lang & "'&text='" & phrase
end run

Your window should look like the following:

There are three values that you may want to change in the above script:

ui_lang - the language used for the page interface
from_lang - the source language
to_lang - the destination language

Change one or more of these to achieve the desired translation. To find the correct language parameters, refer to the Language Reference. In the example above en refers to English, and zh-CN to Chinese (Simplified).

After making your changes, click File > Save... and in the panel that appears type a suitable name (e.g. Translate English to Chinese).

Using the translation Service

After saving your workflow above, you can make use of your translation service with one of the following two methods:

1. The Service Menu method

Highlight a word or phrase in any application
Click the Application Menu to the right of the Apple icon (), then click Services and Translate English to Chinese (or the name you gave your Service when saving it):

2. The Contextual Menu method

Highlight a word or phrase in any application
Right-click the text and select Services then Translate English to Chinese (or your custom named Service):

Whichever method you use, a browser window should appear with your translated text:


How can I switch between language input sources using Alt-Shift on Catalina?

Punto Switcher works. Unfortunately, its main job is automagically converting Russian to English and back, and the UI is, AFAICS, only in Russian.

Still, it can map Cmd+Shift to input source switcher.


How to use Bluetooth PAN and WiFi simultaneously in OSX

You should be able to achieve this by making adjustments to your routing table. Have a look at the manual page for route on how to tell your Mac to send your default traffic over the PAN, and traffic for those other machines to your wifi interface.

One of your challenges I know from experience is going to be that your Mac will drop them upon reboot. And when you address this and make the routes persistent, the second challenge occurs in that and the routes will get in the way in situations other the one for which you need them.


How to speed up old iPad 2 (maybe replace iOS?)

The only practical thing that might help is if your battery is failing - putting in a new one might pep up the processor.

The actual browser is going to be hard to make faster and jailbreaking and running another OS is going to be likely far less optimized than iOS 9 is already for that architecture.

Your main help for browsing websites quickly would be to select websites that don't use javascript much or block that from running and consume text / html / light css.


Why are my earbuds making dolphin noises?

It's not a driver/software/audio card issue, because the dolphin noises don't occur with other headphones or when playing music through the speaker (via Buscar above). It's probably a bad ground (via soulshined above), but without stripping the wires and testing each connection, it's impossible to say for sure.

I went to the Apple Store with a Genius Bar appointment for another issue (cracked iPhone screen) and asked them about it. Apple replaced my headphones for free.


Ian C. put me on the right track. I checked out the items that were running in Java by using the Open Files & Ports tab on the process.

This lead me to ElasticSearch running on my machine. So I removed that and now it looks to be running without overheating again. Yay!


Slow Macbook Pro Early 2008 Running on Mountain Lion (Possibly due to GPU Failing)

Yah this is one of those errors that likely mean a hardware failure and generally speaking the only way you are repairing a failure like this (unless you are into completely disassembling your Mac) is via an Apple Store or an AASP (Apple Authorized Service Provider).

Failing all the suggestions above you may need to (first: make a backup) make a Genius Bar appointment and let a tech that does this for a living run some diagnostics. I believe such diagnostics are free, if they can do them in-store.

If they can't do them in store they'll tell you and give you the cost. An AASP might be able to beat the price. you could call them with the Apple Genius Bar diagnostics for a ballpark estimate.

Unfortunately there is no great solution to this one. Unless you can afford something new...


Request Mobile Site after requesting Desktop Site Safari

This can be done by closing the tab, opening a new one and opening the site again there.


Buy Mac OS X 10.7 and install on an empty drive

Follow these steps

Create a USB key for setup with DiskMaker X.
Replace HD by SSD (keep HD safe)
Boot on USB key newly created.
Format SSD with Disk utility (already in the top menu on the USB key)
Clean Install on the new SSD!


What iOS apps will take pictures and not send them to Photo Stream by default?

Since Photo Stream backs your Camera Roll, any app that uses its own storage space rather than the Roll should do - and I doubt many have been (or can be) updated to backup their own storage to Photo Stream at this early stage.

I'm a fan of Camera+, myself. It saves photos to its own storage, and lets you push them to the Camera Roll (and, therefore, Photo Stream) if and when you want to.


How to mouse copy a very long line in vim terminal OS X

You can use a little trick: save that long line to a temp file and copy that.

Select the desired portion of the line by moving the cursor to the first good position. By pressing v f [character], you select everything from that position to the next occurence of [character]. Pressing v $ would select to the end of that line. Use the power of Vim to select just the portion of the text you need.
Write the selection to a temp file by typing :w /tmp/long_line.
If the command already starts with :'<,'>, that's fine (it's a mark for your selection), just type ahead: :'<,'>w /tmp/long_line
Exit Vim and process the /tmp/long_line file as you like. A simple solution would be cat /tmp/long_line and selecting the output

Alternative: Buy a larger screen ;)


Is there quick access to network settings such as Wifi, 3G and bluetooth?

There is a website ( http://brdrck.me/settings/ ). But this will only work with iOS <= 5.0.1.


Do I need Parallels Pro to run Visual Studio?

In general, the pro version offers support for larger memory and more cpu cores. The said VS plugin offers cross-platform debugging and testing, as well as many other automation and command-line support for it.

This doesn't, however restrict that you're able to install VS on the virtual machine.

Therefore it would be possible for your use case.


If I buy a Mac that was shipped before Mavericks was released, will it have Mavericks preinstalled?

Update: The info below is still valid for past practices but Apple yesterday released Mavericks and announced that it is free to download through the Mac App Store.  New Macs shipping today will still more than likely have Mavericks pre-installed, but if you do end up in a situation where a Mac you ordered a few days ago ships with Mountain Lion installed you can simply upgrade by installing Mavericks from the Mac App Store at no charge.

In the past Apple has included "drop in" upgrade DVDs with new Macs that shipped prior to the official release of the new OS.  This means that for a month or so after Snow Leopard was released you were likely to buy a new Mac that booted to Leopard but had a Snow Leopard disc tucked away in the box.
Once the new OS' went to a download only method Apple switched to an "up to date" program, where you could submit the Mac's serial number to a webpage and receive a redemption code to download the new OS from the Mac App Store.  The same time frame of "about a month" seemed to hold true with this last new release.
Obviously I can't say with 100% certainty that this will be the case with Mavericks but I would be surprised if any significant changes were made.
The up to date webpage is no longer active but this MacRumors article has a screenshot from when around the time it launched.

Source - I worked at Apple, at an Apple Authorized Reseller and have received Macs in bulk for my current job, all at times when Apple launched new operating systems.


OS X has a mechanism, called the Disk Arbitration framework, through which programs can control what happens when disks are inserted or ejected.  It also provides an opportunity to intercept a disk insertion event and prevent the usual automatic mounting behaviour.

To change the behaviour, though, requires a third-party utility, since the Disk Arbitration framework is just a programming interface.  One good utility is Disk Arbitrator, a free (BSD-licensed) tool by Aaron Burghardt.

While Disk Arbitrator is running, you can choose to either veto the mounting of newly inserted disks, mount them read-only, or just let the normal automatic mounting happen.  After Disk Arbitrator exits, the normal mounting behaviour is restored.


This question has been asked may times in the passed. Although, multi-session (osx/windows) was probably not mentioned in the past. The Snow Leopard DVD (OS X 10.6) has an additional session containing the Windows Boot Camp software. Below are the instructions for creating an ISO from this type of DVD.
I did test the Snow Leopard ISO using both macOS and Windows 10. Both operating systems open the ISO to different sessions.
Create your own ISO
Use these steps to make an ISO copy of your DVD:

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

Below is the output from diskutil list disk3. The identifier for the optical drive on my Mac is disk3.
/dev/disk3 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *7.8 GB     disk3
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         30.7 KB    disk3s1
   2:         Apple_Driver_ATAPI                         1.0 GB     disk3s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Mac OS X Install DVD    6.7 GB     disk3s3


AlphaBaby http://alphababy.sourceforge.net

But I do feel that Google is, in this case, your friend. Try, toddler games OS X. Older OS X games work fine.


Applications frequently become permanently unresponsive

OK,

I will work with you on this step by step.

First to eliminate the following:

process plugin-container[1362] caught causing excessive wakeups. EXC_RESOURCE supressed due to audio playback
9/11/14 7:58:33.000 AM kernel[0]: process firefox[1359] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 163; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 61563

These messages are triggered by a plugin that you're running.

Go to Tools : Add-Ons : Plugins (in Firefox), and one-by-one, for each plugin listed, please do the following:

1) Disable the plugin.
2) Restart Firefox and check if you still see the message.

Update and part 2:

Your Preview is generating lots of problems?

Lets start with obvious.

  Open Preview:

  File,

  Open Recent,

  Clear Menu

The reason: There seems to be a croup file in your Preview.


My mac Automator Application script is not working with two arguments

From Terminal on macOS Catalina 10.15.1, exiftool -ver returns 11.78.

I used the ExifTool-11.78.dmg from https://exiftool.org to install it.

exiftool -all= filename does not make a backup, nor does exiftool -overwrite_original -all= filename; however, in both cases a filename_exiftool_tmp file is created during the process and I'm just left with filename when the process completes.

As an example, I take a screenshot of the Desktop and just use exiftool filename from Terminal and it prints out 90 lines of metadata.

Then I use Automator on it, then back in Terminal using exiftool filename it prints out 20 lines of metadata.

The metadata of the 20 lines left cannot be removed by exiftool.

I then run exiftool -all= filename from Terminal and it prints 0 image files updated and 1 image files unchanged.

This is exactly as it should be as some of the information is not being pulled from the file when queried by exiftool.
Some of that info comes for the filesystem, attributes of the file and what info is shown that comes from within the file just cannot be removed by exiftool and I've actually read that somewhere within the documentation, whether it be at https://exiftool.org, or from where I just don't remember exactly where, sorry.


Is there a way to require USB drives that are connect a Mac OS X to be encrypted?

I found this article, New USB Enforced Encryption Device for Mac OS, and possible solutions:

  It has always been a challenge for IT administrators to find solutions
  and tools compatible with Mac OS X, but now securing the network and
  data Mac users access is also becoming a priority.

  CoSoSys' Endpoint Protector 4 with Enforced Encryption on
  removable storage devices for Mac OS X solves these problems.

  It offers an easy, yet secure way for Mac users to encrypt data copied
  onto USB storage devices. With intuitive 'drag & drop' and copy/paste
  features, all information copied on the device is instantly protected
  by password-based military strength AES 256-bit encryption. The
  Enforced Encryption functionality also incorporates an additional
  security feature that deletes information if an attempt is made to
  tamper with the data, or when the device gets lost or stolen.

 Therefore, stopping users from taking classified information from Macs minis, iMacs, Mac Pros, MacBooks onto portable devices has become an imperative for the companies' data security. Locking down and monitoring proactively the use of USB, CD/DVD, card readers, etc. is possible with Device Control by Endpoint Protector for Mac OS X and can be managed centrally from the intuitive web-based interface.


External SSD Samsung T5 doesn't show up anymore

Probably a format issue. There should be nothing left that was on the disk when new!
Format the drive completely in Mac OS Extended (journaled), completely, everything!
Then partition it in the three partitions.
Then install Mojave in one partition (the format will be changed only in that partition).


Change update frequency of App Store in Yosemite?

The same command still works in Yosemite:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate ScheduleFrequency 3

The integer represents the check interval in days.


If you format the drive as HFS+ (essentially Mac formatted) you can set permissions on it (which any admin user can change of course). If it is anything else (PC formats: FAT, exFAT, etc.) you can't set permissions

Probably the best thing would be to put an encrypted DMG on the thumb drive. Anyone could get to the DMG but only the person with the correct credentials could open it.


Move all "All on My iPhone" contacts to "All Gmail" group

There is no easy way to move contacts between accounts. No company wants to make it too easy. The only option on iPhone would be to merge the On My iPhone contacts with an iCloud account (turning Contacts on and off if necessary under Settings > iCloud).

From there you can log into iCloud.com > open the contacts web app > click the gear at the bottom left and select all > Click the gear at the bottom left and export vCard

Then you can import that vCard into gmail.com

Finally turn off the Contacts for iCloud and it will offer to delete.

Under Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars if there iOS a default account listed under contacts make sure it says gmail.

Alternately - type lots.


hmmm… initially I thought this couldn't be done, however.

From messages, start a new conversation, from the top right icon. Start typing your own name until you can select your iMessage-capable account, accept then type the message.
Send.
A few seconds later the message will arrive on both devices & you can then converse with 'yourself' - though it will all appear in both columns, as though you were actually talking to 'yourself'.

Looks odd - but it works.

Tested initiating on both iPhone & Mac. Both work.

iPhone seems to generate multiple conversations for some reason, but the Mac keeps it inline.
Minor inconvenience, I'd say, for the benefits of being able to talk to yourself ;-)


Document Container seems to be specific to iCloud. And given that the other two reference "project", I would guess they are related to Xcode, except I have Xcode installed, and they don't appear on my system. They are probably related to another development IDE.

Try running this command in Terminal:

mdimport -A | grep '[Ff]older'

This will provide a list of metadata attributes installed on your system that contain the word "folder" somewhere in their identifier, name or description. "Folder Name" and "Containing Folder Names" should be contained in that list. All the way to the left on each line it will list an identifier, such as "com_panic_transmit_dockSendEnabled", which is the identifier for an attribute installed by Panic Software's Transmit. This should allow you to determine what application installed the attribute.

If the attribute identifier instead starts with kMDItem, then it is installed by default (and I'm wondering why I don't have it on my system).


How to change the default Mail account in Mountain Lion?

Instead of trying to drag the account(s) into the desired order in Preferences, drag the account's mailbox to the desired order from the mailbox list in the sidebar of Mail.app main window. Open the inbox and drag the desired sub-inbox to the top. The position in the other places like the trash and drafts boxes will follow.

Then quit Mail.app and open it again to make the changes take effect.

Whichever account's mailbox is at the top of the list will be the default mailbox.

If an account mailbox is at the top, but the account is not the default, drag it down and then back up to the top. This will reset the order and establish the top one as the default.


You are copying a file to a block device. Let us consider the two.

A file is usually stored in a file system. The file is broken up to equal size blocks and generally stored non contiguously. The file system contains a table that links the blocks together.

Block devices also contain equal sized blocks. When the block device is an actually a physical device, such as a USB flash drive, these blocks are stored contiguously. Since the blocks are contiguous, there is no need for a table containing links.

Now, there are virtual block devices that are not physical devices, but rather are actually files themselves. Stored somewhere in these files is all the information needed to represent a physical block device. Also, these files may contain additional information needed to describe the physical device. An iso file is this type of file.

Block devices generally contain a table which define contiguous blocks called partitions. Not all block devices have such tables. File systems are usually stored in these partitions. Again, not all files systems require a partition container and partitions do not contain file systems exclusively.

Initially, the 16GB USB flash drive contained a partition table. This table had an entry that allowed for a FAT formatted file system to reside contiguously on most (if not all) of the remaining blocks.

The command you entered completely overwrote this partition table and partially overwrote the file system. In other words, the iso file was copied sequentially to the flash drive starting a the first block of the drive.

The end result? Well, the disk utility (actually macOS) thinks there is at least one partition on the USB drive and that this partition should contain a Windows_FAT_32 file system. Of course, this is wrong, but this what was interpreted from results of your dd command.


Assuming you’ve exhausted the usual steps:

iOS App stuck in 'Loading...'

Then you could either contact Apple support to check on their services and your account or make a backup of your phone - erase all content and seettings and see if things are better after a restore.

Worst case, you’d have corruption on the OS level and need to restore the OS, but usually you can remedy this by taking lighter handed steps as opposed to wiping the system or the data of all apps being loaded.


Outlook for Mac 2011: How to find the folder where a message is stored?

The easiest method to show which folder an email is currently located is to right click on the header bar in Outlook and add the "folder" (visible columns have a check mark to the left of it) column to the current view. This will show you which folder said email is contained in when you perform a search. If you no longer wish to have the "folder" seen in the current view just reverse the process to hide it again. If this is your only customization to the current view you can alternately choose to "reset to defaults" by right clicking on the header bar and choosing the reset to defaults action.


How can I log OS X Server disk performance?

You can use traditional unix tools to start monitoring now.

iostat 60 | tee /tmp/iostat_60.log

The free space statistics can be generated with the df command, but you might just set your warning levels on server app and rely on alerts to notify you when space fills. I can't imagine needing to track storage space more than once a day to graph the growth or manage things, but your needs might be quite different.

I'd say 15 minute (900 seconds for iostat) snaps of io activity would be sufficient and hourly or daily disk space logs would be overkill for most servers. You would probably decrease the monitoring interval during an investigation / performance tuning period, but day in and day out these
stats usually just chew up CPU and disk space and don't really help you manage the server.

Once you decide upon how often you want to capture the data, you can get more fancy with a wrapper to start and stop the script / cut and process the log files daily, etc...

I would say you're going to want to instead look at the tools you want for actually analyzing and acting on the data. For one server, you could probably get away with one free instance of splunk running and just log the data to syslog.

From there you can graph / extract to spreadsheet / act on the data in a very flexible manner. Also, you might look at elasticsearch, logstash and kibana.

There is an excellent write up at http://krypted.com/windows-server/stashbox-turning-a-mac-mini-into-a-logstash-server/ by Charles Edge explaining the how and why you would use those tools to tame the logs and graph things. If you had that, sending the statistics to the system log might be a very easy way to solve your problem of monitoring IO on your server.


Disappearing dock and menu bar only on other desktops

I'm having the same problem, my dock and menu bar hides, which started a couple of days ago.


How to delete iPad calendar events when no edit option appears

Go to  Settings app → Passwords and Accounts and scroll down.
The subscribed calendars should be there and click it and click delete account and you should be good.


Can Apple decline my iPhone warranty just because my phone has dent even without looking inside the phone?

If your iPhone is still under warranty then Apple will not reject a warranty repair unless they can determine that any damage is the cause of the issue.

Of course this will depend on how much damage there is to the phone, what the issue is, etc. Unfortunately your question doesn't specify what the actual issue is, and without a photo of your phone we don't really know what you mean by a small dent at the corner and small cracks on the screen.

Also, how do you know they didn't even check if the problem is caused by the dent or if it is manufacturing issues? In most cases there is no need to physically open the phone to determine if there is a fault.

If it was me I would be calling Apple directly and discussing it with them.


Is it possible to use Intel AMT to manage MacBooks?

Neither SCCM nor AMT are viable management suites for macOS. The former has some limited success doing anything, AMT flat out isn’t well documented. One recent vulnerability seems to cover chipsets Apple uses, but there’s no Apple link amongst the 30+ vendor links to patch those vulnerabilities:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000025619/software.html

I would look to one of the traditional Mac MDM solutions to manage your Macs. I would also contact intel and Apple if you have a specific serial you want to check is or is not vulnerable and get an on the record answer.

As far as pragmatic solutions to manage macs, start with a free hosted MDM like https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-now/ and then you can evaluate if you want to pay for a hosted service as you grow or partner / build your Mac MDM solution from open source like https://www.munki.org/munki/


Stuck on "Preparing iPhone for software update"

iTunes is often stuck for no reason. Usually, I would restart iTunes and it works. If that doesn't work, you should reinstall iTunes.


Easiest way to create a graphical representation of Application Usage Report?

Presuming that you want to have a pie chart for each user, and you want to group by application, and by time spent with each, I would recommend using Excel to do so. In a nutshell:

Create a PivotChart for each user, with the data grouped as you prefer. In my exercise, I selected Application and Time. Highlight the columns, with the top row being the header, and select Insert | PivotChart. Check the fields to add to the report, in this case Application and Time.
You can configure your chart to your liking. I tend to add value labels to my pie chart slices.

You can see my crude, 5 minute example below.


Stop Spotlight from indexing a drive that is regularly unplugged and reattached

This ended up being a SuperDuper! problem.  It was doing a fresh copy rather than a smart update and when it does that, it sets the drive to be indexed in spotlight rather than retaining your previous setting.  Once I set it to smart update the problem was fixed.


Restore file to previously saved version?

I managed to figure it out. Fortunately I am a mac user and I was able to use Time Machine to help me sort this out!.


Possible to change Quick-Reply buttons in Mail Notifications?

It looks like it is impossible for now, but will hopefully be in next year's release. All that I've seen that you can do to is to style notifications by changing button names and menu title and with Mjolnir. Beyond that isn't built in to the API yet.

Similar question here


I wrote a Qt based utility specifically for handling and fixing double encoded filenames:
https://github.com/dennis97519/EncodingConverter


There are a couple options.

lhf is right -- holding down shift will disable all extensions on startup in System 7.x. If you are running OS 7.5, holding the shift key will bring up the extensions manager, allowing you to choose the extension you want to shut off.

If that does not work, you can boot from a disk as if you were going to install software. You can download Mac OS 7.5.3 from Apple. You technically only need the first disk to boot. Once you create the disk from the first image, boot from it by holding down command and option.

That should boot into a very minimal version of System 7.5 and bypass the screensaver.


I usually just run

sudo grep "Previous shutdown cause" /var/log/system.log

or (if the above returns empty)

sudo zgrep "Previous shutdown cause" /var/log/system.log.*.gz


Identify disk manufacturer in Macbook Air

The article which you linked to from the Verge says there is a firmware update on the app store which will test your drive.  If your firmware cannot be updated Apple will replace your drive for free.

I would back up my data and run the mentioned firmware update.

I could not find the firmware update on the app store but I found it on the Apple support site here.


Open file dialog doesn't allow to select tagged folders

Ok, looks like it's a browser issue with a upload field. When it has attribute accept="image/gif,image/jpeg,image/jpg,image/png,video/mp4,video/quicktime,video/x-m4v" - I can't select a folder.


How can I see the history of stories I've read on Apple News?

You can view the "History" of your viewed articles!

iOS:
Click the "Following" tab on the bottom right, and click on "History" toward the top.

Mac:
Show the sidebar and click on "History" toward the top.


Using the mac app, Music.app, I can go to the Music Store but how do I search for an artist or a song

In the Music app, click in the Search bar at the top of the left sidebar. When you do that buttons will appear on the right to select either Apple Music or Your Library. You can search for artists, albums or songs. Note that I subscribe to Apple Music, so your details may vary if you don't, but I think the search should work just as well.

I tried signing out and got similar results - plus an iTunes Store button! So give it a try.


Is it possible to reserve exact amount of space for the indexing and virtual memory?

As SSDs age, it takes more and more work for them to store data.  This is only made worse by having less than 1GB of space available.  In my experience (with a 2010 Macbook Air, with the 250GB SSD), performance GREATLY improved when I had >10% free space.

Do what you can to give your computer some breathing room!  Delete some files now!

Here's a classic article on how SSDs work.  Probably TMI, but...
   http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/inside-the-ssd-revolution-how-solid-state-disks-really-work/


Where can I find an iPhone 4S skin image?

By snooping around in the iPhone simulator app bundle, i came up with this in
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/iPhone Simulator.app/Contents/Resources/:

It's higher quality, already has the middle (screen area) cleared out, and the aforementioned folder even includes a sprite for the pressed home button


Basic OS X folders - folder structure regarding users

Just a quick answer....

Items in the Applications are system wide, not per user.  You can deny Users access to particular applications, but in general they are available to everyone.

The User folder holds items that are specific to each user and only available to each user individually and the superuser (root).

Macworld has a good article that goes into this further

Also, OS X Daily had a nice summary table of the folder structure which should be helpful:


Storage devices that work with both iPad and iMac

I think making the Mini into a fileserver is your best shot. That way they can access the files on it through Files on the iPad. You can also access the Mini this way (when you're at their place) and so it's easy all the way around. This approach means you don't even have to buy anything else. Just allow the Mini to be shared across the local network and you're golden.


An AppleScript is one approach to doing this.
See MacScripter / Calendar: Incrementing Name property for recurring events which has a script making each year an event that says "John Doe's #th Anniversary". The script is also below, for your convenience.

main()

on main()
   set calendar_name to "Anniversaries"
   set number_of_anniversaries to 75

   -- Get the required info from Contacts in iCalendar or intermediate form.
   set seed_data to get_seed_data()
   if (seed_data is {}) then
       display dialog "None of your contacts have anniversaries!" buttons {"!"} default button 1 with icon stop
   else
       -- Compose an iCalendar spec for a calendar containing the required events and save it to an .ics file on the desktop.
       set iCalendar_text to compose_ics(seed_data, number_of_anniversaries)
       write_ics_file(iCalendar_text, (path to desktop as text) & (calendar_name & ".ics"))

       -- Import the file into Calendar as a new calendar.
       import_calendar(calendar_name)
   end if
end main

-- Identify "anniversary" custom dates in Contacts and return the corresponding names, ids, and dates adapted for use in the construction of an iCalendar spec. Monogamous and once-only marriages assumed!
on get_seed_data()
   tell application "System Events" to set Contacts_open to (application process "Contacts") exists

   -- Get the name, id, and custom-date data for every person in Contacts.
   tell application "Contacts"
       launch
       set {names, ids, {date_labels, date_values}} to {name, id, {label, value} of custom dates} of people
       if (not Contacts_open) then quit
   end tell

   -- Find any "anniversary" date labels and store the associated person/date data converted as follows:
   -- name: as the start of an iCalendar SUMMARY entry, with the name in the genitive and a trailing space.
   -- id: as a complete iCalendar URL entry, the id being part of an "addressbook"-protocol URL.
   -- "anniversary" date value: as event start and end dates in zoneless ISO format, but stored as integers instead of text for ease and speed of manipulation.
   set seed_data to {}
   repeat with person from 1 to (count names)
       set these_labels to item person of date_labels
       if (these_labels contains "anniversary") then
           repeat with custom_date from 1 to (count these_labels)
               if (item custom_date of these_labels is "anniversary") then
                   set start_date to item custom_date of item person of date_values
                   set end of seed_data to {|SUMMARY start|:"SUMMARY:" & (item person of names) & "'s ", |URL entry|:"URL;VALUE=URI:addressbook://" & item person of ids, |start date|:ISOT_integer(start_date), |end date|:ISOT_integer(start_date + days)}
                   exit repeat
               end if
           end repeat
       end if
   end repeat

   return seed_data
end get_seed_data

-- Put together an iCalendar specification for a calendar containing recurring events whose initial summaries indicate weddings and recurrence summaries indicate the inividual anniversaries.
on compose_ics(seed_data, number_of_anniversaries)
   -- The list of iCalendar components could get very long, so it'll be referenced via a script object for speed of access.
   script iCalendar
       property components : {}
   end script

   -- Initialise a VEVENT template. It'll serve for both main events and recurrence instances.
   set VEVENT_template to {"BEGIN:VEVENT", missing value, missing value, missing value, missing value, missing value, missing value, missing value, missing value, missing value, "END:VEVENT"}
   -- Get process and host data for use in the UIDs.
   set my_Name to name of current application
   tell application "System Events" to set unix_id to unix id of first application process whose displayed name is my_Name
   set host_name to host name of (system info)
   -- Prepare to use CRLF line endings.
   set CRLF to return & linefeed
   set astid to AppleScript's text item delimiters
   set AppleScript's text item delimiters to CRLF

   -- Create and store the opening VCALENDAR spiel.
   set beginning of iCalendar's components to {"BEGIN:VCALENDAR", "VERSION:2.0", "PRODID:-//Apple Inc.//iCal 4.0.4//EN", "CALSCALE:GREGORIAN"} as text

   -- Create and store the VEVENT sections for each main event.
   repeat with event_number from 1 to (count seed_data)
       set {|SUMMARY start|:SUMMARY_start, |URL entry|:URL_entry, |start date|:start_date, |end date|:end_date} to item event_number of seed_data
       -- Load the VEVENT template with the data for the main, recurring event.
       set item 2 of VEVENT_template to "CREATED:" & ISOT_GMT(current date)
       set item 3 of VEVENT_template to "UID:" & new_UID(unix_id, host_name, event_number)
       set item 4 of VEVENT_template to "DTEND;VALUE=" & end_date
       set leap_wedding to (start_date mod 10000 is 229) -- Did these idiots get married on 29th February?
       if (leap_wedding) then
           set using_Mar1 to (button returned of (display dialog (text 9 thru -1 of SUMMARY_start & "wedding is/was on 29th February! Are the non-leap anniversaries celebrated on 28th February or 1st March?") buttons {"28th February", "1st March"} default button 2 with icon note) is "1st March")
           if (using_Mar1) then -- The anniversaries have to recur on the 60th day of every year …
               set item 5 of VEVENT_template to "RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1;BYYEARDAY=60;COUNT=" & (number_of_anniversaries + 1)
           else -- … or else on the last day of every February.
               set item 5 of VEVENT_template to "RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1;BYMONTH=2;BYMONTHDAY=-1;COUNT=" & (number_of_anniversaries + 1)
           end if
       else -- Normal anniversaries simply recur on the same date every year.
           set item 5 of VEVENT_template to "RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1;COUNT=" & (number_of_anniversaries + 1)
       end if
       set item 6 of VEVENT_template to SUMMARY_start & "wedding"
       set item 7 of VEVENT_template to "DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:" & start_date
       set item 8 of VEVENT_template to "DTSTAMP:" & ISOT_GMT(current date)
       set item 9 of VEVENT_template to "SEQUENCE:7" -- Cheating with the sequence number!
       set item 10 of VEVENT_template to URL_entry

       -- Coerce the template to text and append the resulting VEVENT entry to the component list.
       set end of iCalendar's components to VEVENT_template as text

       -- Now create the required number of linked VEVENTS for the anniversaries, inserting the relevant dates and summaries into the template and coercing it to text each time.
       repeat with anniversary_number from 1 to number_of_anniversaries
           set start_date to start_date + 10000 -- Add 1 to the year.
           set end_date to end_date + 10000 -- Ditto.
           if (leap_wedding) then
               -- Use months and days pertinent to the anniverary-date convention.
               set y to start_date div 10000
               if (isLeapYear(y)) then
                   set start_date to y * 10000 + 229
                   set end_date to y * 10000 + 301
               else if (using_Mar1) then
                   set start_date to y * 10000 + 301
                   set end_date to y * 10000 + 302
               else
                   set start_date to y * 10000 + 228
               end if
           end if
           set item 4 of VEVENT_template to "DTEND;VALUE=DATE:" & end_date
           -- This entry links this VEVENT to an expression date of the original event's recurrence.
           set item 5 of VEVENT_template to "RECURRENCE-ID;VALUE=DATE:" & start_date
           set item 6 of VEVENT_template to SUMMARY_start & anniversary_number & ordinal(anniversary_number) & " anniversary"
           set item 7 of VEVENT_template to "DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:" & start_date
           set item 8 of VEVENT_template to "DTSTAMP:" & ISOT_GMT(current date)
           set item 9 of VEVENT_template to "SEQUENCE:8" -- Cheating with the sequence number!

           -- Append this linked-VEVENT text to the output components.
           set end of iCalendar's components to VEVENT_template as text
       end repeat
   end repeat

   -- Lastly, append the END:VCALENDAR line.
   set end of iCalendar's components to "END:VCALENDAR" & CRLF
   -- When all the components are gathered, coerce the lot into one text.
   set iCalendar_text to iCalendar's components as text

   set AppleScript's text item delimiters to astid

   return iCalendar_text
end compose_ics

on write_ics_file(iCalendar_text, hfs_path)
   set fRef to (open for access file hfs_path with write permission)
   try
       set eof fRef to 0
       write iCalendar_text as «class utf8» to fRef
   end try
   close access fRef
end write_ics_file

-- Delete any current calendar with the given name and import an .ics file to a replacement.
on import_calendar(calendar_name)
   tell application "Calendar"
       activate
       if (calendar calendar_name exists) then delete calendar calendar_name
       -- This assumes there'll be at most one calendar with the name, but it's easy to modify.
   end tell

   -- "Double-click" the ics file. Calendar will offer to import the new events.
   tell application "Finder" to open file (calendar_name & ".ics") of desktop

   -- In the Add Events dialog, select the bottom item ("New Calendar") in the pop-up menu and hit return. The calendar should be created automatically with the name of the ics file.
   tell application "System Events"
       tell application process "Calendar" -- GUI Scripting.
           repeat until (window 2 exists)
               delay 0.2
           end repeat
           tell pop up button 1 of window 1
               perform action "AXPress" -- Click the pop-up menu button.
               perform action "AXPress" of menu item -1 of menu 1 -- Click the "New Calendar" item.
           end tell
       end tell
       keystroke return -- "Click" the dialog's "OK" button.
   end tell
end import_calendar

-- Return the "yyyymmdd" representation of a date as an integer.
on ISOT_integer(theDate)
   set {year:y, month:m, day:d} to theDate
   return y * 10000 + m * 100 + d
end ISOT_integer

-- Return the GMT equivalent of a date in ISOT format.
on ISOT_GMT(theDate)
   set {year:y, month:m, day:d, time:t} to theDate - (time to GMT)
   return ((y * 10000 + m * 100 + d) as text) & "T" & text 2 thru -1 of ((1000000 + t div hours * 10000 + t mod hours div minutes * 100 + t mod minutes) as text) & "Z"
end ISOT_GMT

-- Construct an "@"-style UID from the current date and time and the given data.
on new_UID(unix_id, host_name, iteration)
   return ISOT_GMT(current date) & "-" & unix_id & "-" & iteration & "@" & host_name
end new_UID

on isLeapYear(y)
   return ((y mod 4 is 0) and (y mod 400 is not in {100, 200, 300}))
end isLeapYear

on ordinal(n)
   set units to n mod 10
   if ((units > 3) or ((n - units) mod 100 is 10) or (units < 1)) then
       return "th"
   else
       return item units of {"st", "nd", "rd"}
   end if
end ordinal


Config AppleWatch to not dial 911 during "Fall Detection"?

Source:

Fall detection on your Apple Watch Series 4 is off by default unless you are age 65 or older.  There's no way to get Fall Detection to do what you want, it's not configurable that way.  I think your only option is to turn it off.

From Apple's Support document:

  If you've entered your age when you set up your Apple Watch or in the
  Health app and you're age 65 and over, this feature automatically
  turns on.

If, for any reason, you decide that you don't want Fall Detection on, you can disable it in the Watch app on your iPhone.

Launch the Watch app on your iPhone.
Tap the My Watch tab at the bottom left.
Tap Emergency SOS.
Scroll down and turn off Fall Detection.  The switch is to the left when it's off.


Claims by mobile operator of iOS7 'secretly' using mobile data

A majority of the time the issue is with a random app or service running in the background.  Less often it's because the carrier has to update their software on the device.  In both cases, turning off cellular data would solve this issue.

Occasionally there is a problem with the phone itself. Go to Settings>Cellular and note how much cellular data is being used.  Then turn off Cellular Data.  After two or three hours check if cellular data usage has changed.  If it has, restore the iPhone, and if necessary replace it if you have the option.

If there is no change in the cellular data usage I would contact your carrier and let them know.


Why is bash echoing instead of running Apple Script

The problem are the single quotes in osascript -e '...'. Single quotes prevent variable expansion. This means that ${2} remains ${2} instead of being replaced with Spotify for example.

Try this:

function addtologin(){
    if [ $3 = "hidden" ]; then
        osascript -e "tell application \"System Events\" to make new login item with properties {path:\"${1}/${2}.app\", name:\"${2}\", hidden:true}"
    else
        osascript -e "tell application \"System Events\" to make new login item with properties {path:\"${1}/${2}.app\", name:\"${2}\", hidden:false}"
    fi
}

Here we use double quotes which allow for expansion. To not confuse them with the inner quotes we need to escape those with \.

Now running the command with Spotify will output login item Spotify. This is just the result from the AppleScript, a login item was created. To suppress this you can add >/dev/null to the command: osascript -e "tell ..." >/dev/null.


Can't format SD Card after OS X Lion update to 10.7.4

There are two likely possible causes for this:

It's a hardware fault that just showed up, or
It's a bug in OS X 10.7.4.

The best fix for both of these (currently) is to visit your local Apple Store's Genius Bar. In case 1, they'll fix your SD reader. In case 2, they'll pass the bug in OS X up the food chain so it can get fixed in 10.7.5 (they'll probably try to fix the hardware, too, just in case).


Why can't I move the first Desktop in Mission control?

The first desktop is considered the master all of others (more like the one ring of Lord of the rings ... One ring to rule them all) ...
For example, if you try changing the background on one of your desktops, it will only change for this one. Except the first one will change the background of all your desktops.


Use Force Click to open link in a new tab in Safari?

BetterTouchTool does work. Add a Safari specific Trackpad gesture. add Force touch and assign keyboard shortcut.

I used Chrome, and assigned CMD - SHIFT - ENTER to force touch. Worked like a charm.


How to select power direction over USB-C

Method 1: Reverse/inverse the sides/plugs of the USB-C to USB-C cable. Might works or not.

Method 2.1: Use a USB-C to micro-USB(male) cable and a micro-USB(female) to USB-C(male) adapter.

Method 2.2: Use a USB-C to USB-A(female) adapter and a USB-A to USB-C cable.

Method 2 should always work. However you cannot use PD charge then.

Explain for method 1: I've heard C-C cables have sides to determine host / device. But I can't find the source. From my personal experiment, it depends on cables.


You can specify a custom size for your slides by going to Document in the top right corner, it wil open a box on the right side of your screen and there wil be an entry regarding the size of your slides, the default is 1024 x 768.
Open this selector and you see "custom size".
If you enter 768 x 1024 in the resulting window the slides wil be in a vertical orientation.

ps. my keynote version is 6.2 and it is in dutch so I don't know what the menu items will be called in your version


How to prevent iPhone from being turned off? (security intention)

No software prevents powering off many iPhone.

physical control over the power buttons means you can power down all Apple products.
Putting it in lost mode via iCloud is still your best move to hope to recover a device that you suspect or know is stolen.
Filing a police report and contacting your mobile carrier are good as well.

Opting in to Offline Finding is one new development Apple has to combat the scenario you mention.

This does use Bluetooth, which works when power is on. However, this makes it more likely the device might get located when powered on and in range of cellular, known WiFi, or just Bluetooth on.


Fastest way to transfer a bunch of photos TO iphone camera roll?

Phoneview - is a great option.  It's fast too.  Connect iphone, copy the files to your desired directory, disconnect.  Connect other iphone, copy files to desired location on iphone.  Boom!

Drag n drop ease.  Free download, and cheap too. edit: it allows you to see entire disk media folder :)


How can I enter recovery mode (for Mac OS, on an iMac) remotely?

You can set NVRAM options from command line to boot into recovery:

sudo nvram "recovery-boot-mode=unused"
sudo reboot

This will put your system into recovery mode.

NVRAM (nonvolatile random-access memory) is a small amount of memory that holds certain settings and can be accessed at boot by the Mac's firmware.


I can't create a bootable OSX Mavericks Install USB Drive

It turns out that the Installer Image did not download correctly. To address this I deleted "Install OSX Mavericks" from the Applications folder and then re-downloaded it from the App Store.


Since OS X no longer has extensions per se managing them is not necessary. (Thankfully)

I still have horrifying memories of managing different extensions which had varying degrees of incompatibility often requiring different load orders and multiple reboots to straighten out.

Here is an excellent article, although old, that still outlines the OS X system startup process:

http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx//arch_startup.html

The closest thing to an extension manager is this freeware utility that manages items in your Library folders, allowing you to enable/disable them. I don't use it myself and have no idea if it still works with recent Mac OS X releases.

http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/Diablotin.html


Find my iPhone can "online, location services turned off" show if someone has not turned off location services manually?

If location services are enabled and the location can't be obtained by the device because there's no GPS, etc, it will say so: 'location unavailable'.

The fact that it says the location services are off means literally that: the location services have been switched off.


How to get the fully resolved path of a symbolic link in Terminal?

I think that pwd -P and readlink are going to be your friends for this task.

"How can I get the behavior of GNU's readlink -f on a Mac?" is a handy resource.

pwd -P only works if you're inside the symlink directory:

14:07:13 jason@mac ~ $ cd bin
14:08:08 jason@mac bin $ pwd -P
/Users/jason/Applications

readlink works by specifying the target (thus it can be used against files):

14:09:03 jason@mac ~ $ readlink bin
Applications

14:09:34 jason@mac ~ $ readlink /var
private/var

The output of readlink appears to be relative to the parent of the specified target.

Ex: The parent of /var is /, so private/var is correct, relative to /. Per my above example of bin -> Applications, both are in my Home Directory, no matter where I run it, the output is the same.


I highly doubt that they put an explicit trigger inside your device only. My iPhone 6 works fine in the cold.

It is however likely that you could help the problem by replacing the battery in your device. Sudden shutdown is most often caused by battery related problems.


To-Do List App with Sync, Repeating To-Dos for daily food tracking

Check the out "Things". Things is a great to-do app that has cloud sync, repeating to-dos, and notes. For organization, a "to-do item" can be tagged, placed in a project (like a folder), or in an Area Of Responsibility (like a tag). Things is very flexible and would probably work for your diet plan.

You can try the app for free, but the Mac version is $49.99, and iPhone version is $9.99. Unfortunately, there is no web-app.

https://culturedcode.com/things/


Is there such a thing as a iPad stylus with a (relatively) fine and hard nib?

Thoroughly recommend the Cosmonaut:
http://www.studioneat.com/products/cosmonaut

Still a relatively soft nib but the size of the stylus nib seems to reduce the squidgy resistance I've experienced with smaller stylus. Also the chunkyness of the Cosmonaut grip feels great in the hand.


Updated Mac to El Capitan is asking for 4 digit PIN

The Mac has been locked via Find My iPhone. Whoever locked it has the code. Try logging into Find My iPhone on iCloud.com or on another Apple device and see if you can unlock it there.

If that doesn't work, somebody posted a (somewhat complex) work-around on the mac-rumors forums.

Last resort: go to Apple store with proof of purchase. They'll sort it out.


This can happen because System Integrity Protection (SIP) is active. You'll need to disable it first using the command:
csrutil disable

You would commonly do this by rebooting your Mac into Recovery Mode by holding Cmd-R at boot, launch the Terminal and run the command above.


Afaik there's is no "automatic" sort. But you can drag them in the order you want.


Does macOS ship with software developed by third parties?

In short, yes.

Apple is built upon Open Source technologies.

Familiar projects like Apache, Bash, CUPS, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH, Python, Xorg, and Zlib are all parts that make up macOS. For a full list, see the link above.

  Open Source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer
  tools, and Apple continues to both lead and make significant
  contributions to many Open Source projects. Major components of Mac OS
  X, including the UNIX core, are made available under Apple’s Open
  Source license, allowing developers and students to view source code,
  learn from it and submit suggestions and modifications. In addition,
  Apple uses software created by the Open Source community, such as the
  HTML rendering engine for Safari, and returns its enhancements to the
  community.

Even the underlying core OS is comprised of third party technologies - FreeBSD for the kernel, filesystem, and networking.

(This is one of the reasons, I left Linux and went FreeBSD - there's a great deal of portability between macOS and BSD)


How to add your university timetable to iCal?

Some schools provide CalDAV links or iCal subscriptions for their events calendars.   Often this will show up as an RSS feed link somewhere on the page that contains the calendar.

You may need to ask this question of the Technology Department folks or whomever manages the events calendar.

Also, if you need to provide access credentials in order to get to the calendar, expect to run into some problems. iCal doesn't know how to do this.


If you bought the iPhone at full price ($549 or $649) then yes it is unlocked.

If you and bought it subsidised (where the price is $99 or $199), no it is not.

This restriction is required by the carrier, because they paid the remainder of the price, and will claim it back from you (with a tasty profit!) over the duration of your contract with them.


macOS Sierra does not fully eject my external hard drive

You can try to eject it via Terminal.app. Go to Spotlight and search for Terminal. It should be the first option. In the interface first type in diskutil list. You should get a list that looks a little like this

diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Encrypted               499.8 GB   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk1s3
/dev/disk2 (external, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS TMBackup               +499.3 GB   disk2
                                 Logical Volume on disk1s2
                                 AED60A02-41C4-46B8-B762-3D37E10A09CE
                                 Unlocked Encrypted

Now this part is completely in your hands. You have to identify which of those disks is the one that you are having problems ejecting. If you find this tough, you may ask me and I'll tell you which one it is.

After you have obtained your disk's identifier (column on the extreme right) you have to unmount the logical volume, followed by the physical disk. Therefore first unmount the logical volume by running

diskutil unmount /dev/*

Over here you need to replace the "*" with your identifier. The logical volume is the one the looks like this: disk2 <-- This is an example, your's may be called something else.

Then you need to unmount the the physical disk by running the same command

diskutil unmount /dev/*

But this time the identifier will look something like this: disk2s1 <-- This is an example, your's may be called something else. Unmount all the physical disks in your specified drive.

and then finally run

diskutil eject /dev/disk*

Her you have to put your own disk's name. You can see this on the left column of the terminal output.


Are any priorities among criteria that are checked during app review?

No, it just depends who's reviewing it. Some reviewers spot the first error and reject the app there and then, whilst others will notify you of all the problems that they find.

For example, my latest rejected iPhone app was rejected mainly for not running correctly when scaled on iPad, but the rejection reason also had some comments from the reviewer regarding the metadata.


How to convert a .cer file to .p12 without the keychain password?

Private Key

You will need the password for the Keychain to export the private key associated with the certificate.

Alone the certificate can not be used to sign. You need the private key as well.

The private key was probably created along with the original CSR (certificate signing request) sent to Apple. By default, the private key is stored in the user's Keychain.

The certificate is public and often stored in an unencrypted .pem file.
The key is private and often stored in the Keychain or an encrypted .p12 file.

New Certificate and Key

You can ask Apple for a new signing certificate, using a new private key and CSR. This does not require administrator access or access to the existing Keychain. You will need access to the online Apple Developer account of the company.

As a precaution, consider creating a separate Keychain for the company - marked as Default while creating the CSR. The private key will then be saved into the separate Keychain and can be passed to codesign as an absolute path with the --keychain flag. You can also store the certificate in this Keychain file.


Each .pkg file generally differ in where they install the files, so unlike a .app bundle, there is no generalized way to uninstall the contents of a .pkg file.

A .pkg file is an installer package. It is run with the help of the macOS built-in Installer app, and allows the installation of the files contained under the package under various directories as programmed by the developer of the software.

Here's are a bunch of approaches that can be tried:

Check the .pkg file and any associated files provided by the developer. Sometime, such software package also come with either a dedicated or a built-in uninstaller. Running the uninstaller generally takes care of uninstalling the files/apps installed by the package.

If you don't find any obvious uninstaller, consider contacting the developers of the app and ask them.
Use a 3rd party utility such as AppCleaner to uninstall the .pkg installed app. It gives you a simple interface to look through and select from all the installed apps, locates all the files associated with an app, and let you uninstall the app(s) completely.

From the app website:

  AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.

  Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily.

  AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them.

  Simply drop an application onto the AppCleaner window. It will find for the related files and you can delete them by clicking the delete button.

Prefer using Homebrew Cask to install the desired GUI app(s), if the developers is distributing them via Homebrew. To use Homebrew Cask, start by installing Homebrew and then run brew cask to install Homebrew Cask.

To see if an app is available via Homebrew Cask, simply run the following command to search the Homebrew database:

brew search <app_name> --casks

where <app_name> is full or partial name of the desired (GUI) app.

Homebrew Cask lets you easily install an app by running:

brew cask install <app_name>

To uninstall an app installed via Homebrew Cask, run:

brew cask uninstall <app_name>

To unconditionally remove all files associated with the given app which is installed via Homebrew Cask, run:

brew cask zap <app_name>

Make sure to update the Homebrew's local repository of all the available packages by running the following command, before attempting to search for and install packages:

brew update


How do you remove fonts from the Favorite collection in the Fonts dialog?

Grab it in the list & drag it out to the desktop - like you would with an app in the dock, etc.

You should see the little puff of smoke & it's gone.


Hide a User Account in macOS
This works in OS X Yosemite (10.10 and newer). The general syntax to use to hide an account is as follows, replacing admin with the user home directory of the account to no longer display:
Hiding from User Menu
For example, to hide the user account “admin” on a Mac with the given user directory being /Users/admin, the syntax would be:
$ sudo dscl . create /Users/admin IsHidden 1

then reboot for the change to take effect.
Hiding in Finder
You can move the hidden user's home directory to a place that's not visible from the Finder. And you can remove the hidden user's Public Folder share point.
This command moves the home directory of "admin" to /var, a hidden directory:
$ sudo mv /Users/admin /var/admin

This command updates the user record of "hiddenuser" with the new home directory path in /var:
$ sudo dscl . create /Users/admin NFSHomeDirectory /var/admin

This command removes the Public Folder share point for the user with the long name "Hidden User”:
$ sudo dscl . delete "/SharePoints/Admin's Public Folder"

Unhiding
$ sudo dscl . create /Users/admin IsHidden 0

Changing the number from 1 to 0 changes the hidden status of the account. You must reboot for changes to take effect.

Source:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203998


How can I erase Bluetooth devices on my Mac

In System Preferences > Bluetooth, make sure that Bluetooth is on and the Show Bluetooth in menu bar check box is checked. Then hold down alt or option before clicking the Bluetooth toolbar menu icon.  Now, in the device's contextual menu you can remove it.


How can I do an unthethered jailbreak for iPad Wifi running iOS 4.2.1 if you do not have older SHSH?

Greenpois0n rc5 Has been released and can do an untethered jailbreak on 4.2.1 without older SHSH blobs.

http://www.greenpois0n.com


Apple Configurator 2 - How to edit a profile

You need to go to File > Open, then select your profile.

(Posting Alex's comment as an answer, as he seems to be inactive since Dec 4, 2015, and I nearly missed the solution as I tend to skip reading the comments.)


Adding a username alias using the command line

The information is accessible through dscl. To add the alias "visitor" and be able to use this username for guest login, use the following command:

sudo dscl . -merge Users/Guest RecordName visitor


Can a MacBook Pro be tracked when disconnected from the Internet?

There is no way to trace your MacBook Pro if the thief does not connect it to the internet, because at the very least the MBP needs to 'dial in' to announce it's location.

Since you did not enable "Find my Mac" and did not install any other recovery software, you might want to check in with some other services installed on your MBP.

Dropbox for example shows the last connected IP address for any given device you linked to your Dropbox account. If you use Dropbox, force a sync by making a change in your Dropbox folder. If the thief connects to the internet and Dropbox syncs the changes, you'll know the IP address he was connecting from. You can find this information on the Dropbox website, in your account settings.

Gmail is another popular service that allows you to see recently connected IP addresses. If you set up a Gmail account in Mail.app for example, you might want to check this information. You can find a link on the bottom right of your Inbox page.

Have a look at all possible cloud-based services you installed on the MBP, possibly others allow viewing a list of recently connected IP addresses as well.

However, if the thief does never connect to the internet, this will not help you either. There is also a possibility the thief reinstalls the OS from scratch to prevent the MBP from dialing in.


Where does Photos.app store the iPhone videos I've imported?

I figured out the answer by going to Terminal and doing find ./ -name *.MOV -print.

The Photos Library is different from the iPhoto Library. If you've upgraded from iPhoto to the new Photos app, then for any video files you've imported, you can find the originals at:

~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters

This way, you don't need to export your video files; you can just copy them.

In Finder, go to Go > Go to Folder
Enter ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters
Navigate to whatever video files you want and copy them to your destination.


Apple MacBook air is stuck on log in loading screen

Anything attached to the USB or Thunderbolt ports? I’ve seen that happen when a HD or improperly formatted USB stick isn’t able to mount.


Have you tried:
Shut down your Mac.
Press and hold the power button for 10 seconds, then release the button.
Wait a few seconds, then press the power button to turn on your Mac.

This method and another one is given here.


Is it still possible to order the reinstall disk for a MacBook 2007?

I think what you mean is the restore disk that came with the computer. If so your best bet is to just call the Apple Store and speak to a sales rep. Those kind of things are generally unavailable on the web site or stores but are available through Apple itself.

Apple Contact info here.