There are several ways to do this on Terminal, but first make sure that in Terminal preferences > Advanced you have ticked the Audible bell option, otherwise you won't hear anything.  Now you can do any of the following to get the bell:

$ echo ^G (hold down the ctrl key followed by V and then G to get ^G)
$ printf "\a" or $ printf \\a
$ echo -e "\a" or $ echo -e \\a
$ tput bel

FYI: the way you installed Yosemite, whether via Homebrew, Macports etc., shouldn't affect this issue.


Disable the "None of your preferred networks are available" dialog on OS X

Open the Network pane of the System preferences.
Select AirPort in the list on the left.
Uncheck the “Ask to join new networks” checkbox.
Et voilà!  :)


Constrain Columns of Files in Finder to only 3?

The setting your refer to, is stored in a hidden Finder file called .DS_STORE

This file is obviously overwritten by your friend’s Mac who obviously uses different settings.

As far as I know, there’s no way (other than perhaps making the file .DS_STORE read only in the USB so your friend’s Mac cannot write the “new annoying settings” to it).

You’ll need to jump into the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)

Connect your USB Drive, open Terminal.

In Terminal, type:

cd /Volumes
ls

You should see your own Macintosh HD (or whatever name your internal drive(s) have) and the USB drive (with the name it might have).

Cd into the USB drive like:

cd MyUSBDrive

if the drive has spaces in its name, you must enclose it between quotes

For example:

cd “My Strange USB”

Once in there, you can perform an ‘ls’ to view the contents of the USB. Do that to make sure it’s the right one. Else go back to cd  /Volumes and start over :)

Now adjust the settings in the finder the way you want them.

Done?

Now to change the permissions in the USB drive:

sudo chmod 444 .DS_Store

NOTE: The above command might ask you for your password, that is ok. The password won’t be seen when you type it. Just type your password and press enter. Remember the commands in Terminal are case sensitive.

What does that do?: chmod is a command that changes the permissions of files and/or directories. In this case, since the file is a hidden file from the finder, we have to do the job from the terminal (which can always see hidden things). The numbers (444) are read only for everybody.

If you don’t know what chmod does or how it works (or why 444) I recommend you take a look at the help (man page) for the command. In Terminal type:

man chmod

Will this work?
To be honest, I don’t know. I believe it will, but I’m not sure if ACLs are preserved in USB devices. If the USB is formatted with FAT32  (they usually are so Windows can read/write) the above might not work.

Other than that, there’s no magical way to tell finder do this, and do it this way. Because if there’s a .DS_Store file, Finder will read settings from there.


This doesn't directly answer your question, but may be some help.
I have an early 2008 iMac, the entry level 24" iMac 2.8GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, SuperDrive, ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB of VRAM and a 320 GB HD.
Many years ago I upgraded to 6GB RAM and installed a 2TB Seagate SSHD Solid State Hybrid Drive (a physical HDD with an SSD flash module) which mimics Apple's “Fusion“ drive. These upgrades still work perfectly.
The performance improvements were remarkable... prior to the upgrade MS Excel was taking over two minutes to load and following the upgrade, it took literally a few seconds. Boot time dropped from about two and a half minutes to less than one minute.
In fact the machine still works perfectly despite no longer been supported by OS upgrades.
The reason I'm suggesting this:

as per comments by @user3439894 the performance will be much better;
it is not difficult to do the work to swap the drives yourself.

If you're interested in pursuing this option, there is an excellent guide on iFixit that provides detailed step-by-step instructions.
Also as mentioned by @user3439894 and as quoted from Apple's support website, your machine has:

One FireWire 800 port; 7 watts

Your iMac also shipped with 4GB RAM. I'd strongly recommend you consider upgrading this to 8GB RAM. There are a few good websites that help you pick the correct RAM for your iMac and replacement modules should be reasonably priced. This is an easy upgrade as the RAM modules can be switched out without dismantling any part of the machine. Only need to remove the RAM slot cover = 1 screw. Refer to the Apple Support website for instructions.
Updates
As mentioned by others, I grabbed the technical information from Apple’s website “iMac (27-inch, Mid 2010) - Technical Specifications”
This image from Apple’s website Identify the ports  on your Mac, should help you identify which FireWire you have:

If your ports are inaccessible at the current time, instead use this technique:

Click on the Apple logo top left of your menu bar;
Open “About This Mac”;
On the Overview tab, click on “System Report...”;
Scroll down the list under the heading “Hardware” until you find “FireWire”.

Clicking on the FireWire subheading should confirm your FireWire type.
As mentioned by David Anderson in the comments, you have a few options to upgrade storage internally. Not sure if that requires a new question, but happy to provide my decision making process, if you’re interested. Essentially you can:

Swap out the SuperDrive for an SSD leaving the exisiting HDD in place;
Swap out the HDD for an SSHD or SSD and leave the SuperDrive in place.

I chose the latter because it was the easiest upgrade and in my humble opinion the most cost effective, also I was nostalgic about keeping my SuperDrive (nothing to do with a logical decision!).


Change input language in macOS Sierra beta when an external keyboard is connected/disconnected

Karabiner can be set up to activate a different keyboard layout only for an external keyboard.  See

Different key-maps/bindings for in-built keyboard and Bluetooth keyboard


I've never known Time Machine to hold up an OS update, however…

System Prefs > Time Machine [or from the menu bar if you have set it to show there] you can tell Time Machine to halt its current backup, or switch it off completely.

A late note: if you have local snapshots enabled [which I don't, in the picture above] Time Machine changes its "Time Machine keeps:" line to
"Time Machine keeps local snapshots as space permits, and:"


iPhone 4S chip overheating after replacing screen

This seems relevant: https://www.hcqs.com.cn/blog/how-to-fix-iphone-overheating-after-screen-replacement.  It indicates that while replacing the screen one could introduce a short that causes overheating.


How do I copy photos from an iMessage chat to the iOS Camera Roll?

Tap on the photo bubble in the message list.
Tap to bring up the photo controls.
Press the Share button, and select Save Image.

This works in both iOS 6 and iOS 7.


iOS 9.3 on iPhone 5 (Night Shift option is unavailable)

It's not an error – it's because of the processing architecture. The iPhone 5 is an older model, and Apple isn't going to support 32-bit devices for Night Shift.


Alternative to iOS 10 Music app which is now missing star rating

Cesium Music Player includes your iTunes metadata and allows you to change star ratings while listening to music on your iPhone

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cesium-music-player/id924491991?mt=8


How to install and configure Tomcat for eclipse IDE in macOS?

Step 01 :Download Files Required

First Download the Version you Need for your project.
Make sure you download Core zip file from the link below:

Download Apache 7 Tomcat from this link.
Download Apache 8 Tomcat from this link.
Download Apache 9 Tomcat from this link.
Download Apache 10 (Alpha) Tomcat from this link.

  Select .Zip from above section
  Once you have downloaded it, unzip it to a location

Step 02 :Setting up Server in Eclipse

Open Eclipse Environment
Click on Servers Tab
Click on No servers are available. Click this link to create a new server...
Click Tomcat v(your downloaded version) Server and Next
Choose the extracted folder as path and runtime.
DONE!


Is it beneficial to use an Airport Express's wifi instead of my modems?

The advantage is you can locate the airport potentially closer to you than the modem. The disadvantage is you need to set it up and perhaps string an ethernet if you wish to avoid delays of wirelessly extending a network.

If I could, I would always run an ethernet cable (gigabit if possible, but 100 is usually faster than any WiFi consumers use in practice) from the router to all base stations.

That allows you to choose different channels and devote 100% of the wireless bandwidth to serving clients as opposed to backhauling traffic to the router.


Which adapters serve video out from a first generation MacBook Air?

The first generation MacBook Airs were Micro-DVI

(According to Kyle Cronin.)


How to set several siri triggers for the same action (automation)

You could try System Preferences / Keyboard / Text.
Click + below to add a new text shortcut. Choose something short and easy to remember. Then define the longer, full version.
perhaps you could somehow trigger the shorter version with Siri (one that's easy to remember), and that would trigger the longer, full version.
You might be able to set this up using Soundflow (automation platform that works with all apps, not just music), or Keyboard Maestro.


Create multiple files with different extensions with one command

Something like
touch index.{js,css,html}

should work. Which of course can then be turned into a shell function with
miracle() {
    [[ "$1" ]] && touch -- "$1."{js,css,html}
}

The test ensures that the files only get created if a name is passed as an argument, the touch -- ensures that miracle -foo doesn't lead to an error.
and used as
miracle index

To have this defined automatically in bash add the function definition to ~/.bash_profile, for zsh use ~/.zprofile.


macOS Mojave Beach Ball when saving a file

Found it. SMC reset didn't fix it. It's an iCloud issue. One solution is to remove the iCloud tab from the finder sidebar through Finder->Preferences->Sidebar.

It's not perfect, but at least productivity is back. I hope they will run an update that will solve this.

Peter


Mac not showing external flash drive with turnkey linux installed

This may be far fetched, but is the USB formatted as GUID partition scheme? The Mac boot program rejects anything other than it with my experiences. And have you checked if the Linux is UEFI compatible? That may be an issue with newer Mac's.


2016 Macbook keyboard key barely working

That is obviously a hardware issue on your specific device (maybe some other devices of the same series are concerned).

The best thing to do is to contact the Apple assistance (online or via a physical Apple Store) and see what they can do.

If you take the space bar off, you'll probably lose your warranty.


Adventures In Imaging El Capitan Bootable Media
According to this macOS KB Article (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372)

"El Capitan downloads as a disk image. On a Mac that is compatible
with El Capitan, open the disk image and run the installer within,
named InstallMacOSX.pkg. It installs an app named Install OS X El
Capitan into your Applications folder. You will create the bootable
installer from this app, not from the disk image or .pkg installer."

I just attempted creating a bootable  on Catalina and when running the PKG it says it will not install on this Mac as it is not compatible.
So I attempted to work around that problem. I had to use CharlesSoft's Pacifist utility which allows the extraction of any type of Mac Package file format. Since I am a MacSysAdmin I have this utility already and it comes in handy all the time.  Unfortunately, it's not open source and it's not free. But for $20 shareware it does what it says it does and it does it very well.
I was able to extract the PKG from the DMG:
InstallMacOSX Folder
  └──InstallMacOSX Folder
       └──Install OS X El Capitan

Then I moved "Install OS X El Capitan" to "/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan" and then I ran the El Capitan "createinstallmedia" command.
sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app

Guess What? That Does Not Work!
I even tried using DiskMakerX ver 6 and ver 9 and it didn't work either. Stated my El Capitan was an incomplete download which it is not an incomplete download.
So back to the drawing board. I try it on Mojave instead. My Mac is dual boot Mojave / Catalina. So in Mojave, it still doesn't work.
Copy it over to the High Sierra Mac.  Finally, some success. The DMG PKG file installed in /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan and I was able to burn a flash drive.
It Only Works on macOS High Sierra or older
So your options are to find someone with a High Sierra Mac or maybe you could install VirtualBox (free), Parallels, VMware Fusion and install High Sierra as a virtual machine then use that to burn an installer. FYI, it can be tricky to access a physical USB in a virtual machine.
Once you get it working, hang onto that working boot USB drive since it's such a terrific pain to build one!  The way the El Capitan createinstallmedia works, varies considerably from the newer macOS versions. It doesn't have the normal InstallESD.dmg, etc.


Can I use my iPhone as a hotspot on Wifi (instead of 3G/4G)?

You can do this with USB or Bluetooth tethering on jailbroken iOS devices using an app such as MyWi.  There are many other jailbreak apps for this function, so it's worth shopping around.

Some will only share the 3G internet connection, but I understand others will share any internet connection over USB or bluetooth.

You can't use wifi tethering to connect your computer to a wifi network your phone knows about.

The hotspot creates a new wireless network, but the iPhone is capable of attaching to only one wireless network at a time.  It cannot connect to a wireless network with internet and create its own wireless network to share.

Since the iPhone is on the wireless network, though, you can get your computer on that same network since it will likely be in range.


Macbook 2011 Audio Input/Output Question

On my iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011), I have to open QuickTime Player and select File->New Auto Recording from the menu bar. This will produce the Auto Recording window shown below.

You should make sure you have Line In selected, as shown below.

You should also set the Output volume and the Line in Input volume in the Sound pane of System Preferences, as shown below.

Also, you should also set the Headphones Balance in the Sound pane of System Preferences, as shown below.

You should be able to hear the sound from the input jack. You should be able to do this without actually recording the sound.

The version of macOS was High Sierra 10.13.6.


Getting error when update mac os from Mavericks (10.9.5) to El Capitan (Latest version)

After formatting mac OS solving the issue.
Do reinstall OS 10.9.5 (Maverics) from safe mode of mac OS.
After reinstalling upgrade OS EI Capitan from app store, this is the only solution which i done in my case.


Some files in the /Developer path are referenced when you launch specific functions within  Xcode. If you need to recover space and absolutely has to move /Developer, you could try

Move the /Developer folder to the alternate path and symlink it so
that Xcode still finds it at /. Note: I haven't tried it with Xcode 4.x, so please share if this works.
alternative is to do a clean uninstall using 'sudo
/Library/uninstall-devtools' and custom reinstall Xcode by
specifying a different path.


Start Quicktime Player recording while in Split View mode

Make it a on a new desktop, and later trim it.

https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/quicktime-player/qtpf2115f6fd/mac

If it is only screen, not audio, you can even use command+shift+5 to record the screen in most circumstances.


Turns out I had the GM version installed. I downloaded the standard OS X from the App Store, installed it, and everything is fine now.


Set a keyboard shortcut to clear all tracks from the Up Next queue in iTunes

This following script will work on OSX < 10.7.

activate application "iTunes"
tell application "System Events"
    tell process "iTunes"
        click (first button of scroll area 1 of window "iTunes" whose description is "up next")
        delay 1
        click button "Clear" of UI element 1 of row 1 of table 1 of scroll area 1 of window 1
    end tell
end tell


Apple "13 2011 MacBook Pro touchpad battery faulty issue. (10.13.6 software problem)

The most likely cause is that the “tech” broke the trackpad when they removed the battery, so the Mac is looking for a Bluetooth trackpad instead. (Or at least, they 'loosened' it sufficiently that it has subsequently broken.)
Frankly, your school has given you a 10-year-old laptop, with no battery, and a broken trackpad. (And a startup disk called "aaaaaa".) Because there's no battery, the CPU performance will be throttled at best.
At worst, the power adapter can’t supply enough current at all times to even make the OS stable. Let's hope it doesn't have the original hard drive....
Take it back to them, and tell them it's unreliable. This is not a software problem. You need hardware service on this unit or a new Mac.


Roll back to Mountain Lion but don't lose saved documents

Yes, you can safely backup with Time Machine in OS X Mavericks and restore your newer files later when you're back on OS X Mountain Lion.

Complete a backup using Time Machine on OS X Mavericks to get your new/updated files into the backup
Reboot the machine with the Time Machine disk connected
At startup, hold Cmd+R to get into Recovery mode (or hold Option to select the volume to boot from and choose the Recovery HD from the Time Machine disk)
Choose Restore From Time Machine Backup from the list of actions
Select the Time Machine volume and then the backup dated before the upgrade that you wish to restore from (it will show you a list of all available backups)
After booting into the OS X Mountain Lion system, turn off Time Machine in System Preferences > Time Machine (to avoid another backup starting soon, thus slowing down the system and adding to the cognitive load on you to choose the correct versions to restore)
Browse the Time Machine disk from the Time Machine interface and pick the specific files from the latest backup to restore
Turn on Time Machine again in System Preferences


Go on iTunes and uncheck the albums you have imported. Just do the reverse of what you did to import photos...


Specify connection on launch for Microsoft Remote Desktop client

You can do this by launching from an .rdp file:
* Create the Desktop bookmark in the app
* Export the Desktop as an .rdp file to e.g. your Mac Desktop
* Double-click to start the app and connect to the Desktop.

AFAIK, there's no way to configure the app to launch a desktop at start.


Apple Watch pausing while being worn and paired with Heart Sensor

I don’t think you’ll have luck modifying watchOS so perhaps a different band to get the watch off a wrist but still in proximity of your skin would help:

https://www.twelvesouth.com/product/actionsleeve


Cheap way to import MiniDV video into macOS?

I've transferred dozens of my own MiniDV cassettes so let me share the methods I used and what I think makes sense for you. I'll preface by saying that this was a project that took me DECADES to get started, precisely because there are so many options and variables to consider. However, once I began I did it all at once, and was relieved to do it. This is an investment of time and money, but one you'll agree is worthwhile for unlocking and securing your tapes' contents.

First, to answer your question, if users were reporting that EasyCapViewer wasn't running well on El Capitan, then it almost certainly won't run well on Mojave. For what it's worth I downloaded EasyCapViewer and it launched without any errors on Mojave, but you can't know how it functions with that capture card hardware until you try it out. EasyCap isn't a 64-bit app, so it's definitely not optimized to run on modern versions of macOS like High Sierra or Mojave, but it does technically run. If you're dead-set on using that software, you could always get a copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, install it on a disk partition or external drive, and work with it from there.

Second, if your priority is to capture the highest quality of these videos, then my recommendation for you is to go the Firewire route, because it's the only option that transfers the pure digital signal from tape to Mac. If your intention is to archive and back up these tapes for posterity, you'll want to capture the highest quality version of that video, and Firewire is the only way to do that. But be aware that importing raw digital video can take up a lot of storage space, so depending on how many tapes you have you'll want to have a fair amount of disk space, and/or a backup drive to hold them all. The alternative is to important analog video, via this EasyCap tool or one of the many other options like it (there are many analog hardware and software tools just like EasyCap, so I encourage you to check those out if EasyCap doesn't sound like it has the support you're looking for). Just keep in mind that when you import analog video the video gets compressed, so you won't get the same quality video out of the analog transfer as you do with digital Firewire. You may not notice or care much about that difference, but just be aware that importing via analog will result in a loss of some quality that you would otherwise retain through a digital transfer. On the positive side though, since analog video files are compressed they do take up much less storage space.

Back to Firewire: As you noted, this setup requires a few adapters. In your case you would need a Firewire Cable (assuming your camcorder takes the small 4pin plug, like mine did, you'll need a 4pin to 9pin Firewire 800 cable). Then depending on whether you have a USB-C hub for your Mac (some of which do offer Firewire 800 ports, or else Thunderbolt 2 ports) you'll need an Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter. If you don't have a hub you'll also need to add an Apple Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter to make the direct connection to your MacBook Pro. Like most Apple dongles, these are overpriced, but you can find the same products on Amazon or eBay for half that.

Economically, buying a hub and/or a bunch of adapters would probably cost more than just picking up an old used Mac, like a Powerbook G4, and doing the video transfer with that. It sounds crazy but you actually might consider this option, since those models have built-in Firewire and often come installed with Tiger or Leopard, which would also be compatible with the EasyCap. Oddly enough it could be less of a headache than trying to make all the old hardware/software fit with your new MacBook Pro.

Lastly, a note (and warning) on tape damage: be aware of the possibility that your tapes may have video/audio artifacts or disruption (several of mine had sections like this, and they were painful to watch). Hopefully yours don't have any, but if they do I'll just save you the trouble of investigating the Why: it can be connected to recording in LP instead of SP, or using different brands of tapes whose tape lubricant doesn't get along well with other tape brands. A corrupted digital signal can make those sections virtually unwatchable, and importing those clips via Firewire looks terrible. In that case the best alternative for importing those sections is to use an analog tool. The one I used was Elgato's EyeTV to import those damaged sections of video via S-video or Composite video. Importing damaged sections via analog isn't great either, in that it won't get rid of the artifacts, and for some reason it reduced my LR sound channels to mono sound, but the damaged sections do import better with analog than with digital, so I used analog imports exclusively for that purpose.

I know this is a lot of info, but hopefully some of it is helpful for you. Good luck with your continued efforts!


2008 MacBook Air connected to a 2011 iMac from DVI to Thunderbolt?

You should search for a DVI to Mini-Display port, as Mini-Display cables are compatible with Thunderbolt ports. A quick google search turned up this  from the apple store. Be aware that this is a DVI-D adapter, which means it only outputs digital signals.


How to change file icon for macOS native file type?

My solution to the problem is:

Create a new application in Xcode that contains the icon resources for the file type.
Select that app as the default for the file type.
Substitute the app's binary inside its bundle for a hard link to the binary of the app you want to open the file.

EDIT: This only appears to work in Mojave: in Catalina, there's some code-signing fatal crash. If anyone know how to fix it...
Create a new app in Xcode
This step requires no coding whatsoever. Open a new Project as a Document-based application, using the file extension of the file type you want to change.

Under 'Assets.xcassets' in the sidebar, click on the + icon and under App Icons & Launch Images, select  create a New MacOS Generic Icon.

Add the correctly sized images to the empty squares.

Next, in Targets > Info, define the Document Types fields with the relevant data for your file type. Select the Icon resource, and you should get the icon in the empty square.

You can do the same for Imported UTIs, just to cover all bases.

Your app should build and run without any further effort. Quit it. Back in Xcode, right-click on the app product and select "Show in Finder". Move the app to the Applications folder.

The LaunchServices database may not immediately update with your new app and its icons. One tip to force it to update is to copy and paste an icon into the icon square in Get Info on any file. You can delete the change immediately.
Set your app to be the default app for the file type.
This is done in the usual way in Get Info window. The Finder might not update existing windows: close and reopen to see the icon change.

Substitute the binary
Right-click on your new app. Select Show Package Contents. Navigate to the MacOS folder, and delete the Unix executable file inside, with the name of your app.
In another Finder window, navigate to the similar MacOS folder inside the bundle of the application that you want to open the file. (In my case, BBEdit.)
In the Terminal, type ln (that's lowercase LN) followed by a space. Then drag the Unix executable of the 'destination' app onto the Terminal window. Then drag the the empty Macos folder of your app onto the Terminal window. The completed command should look something like this:
ln /Applications/BBEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/BBEdit /Applications/PostScript.app/Contents/MacOS

Press Enter.
You should now have a hard link to the destination app (BBEdit) in your dummy app.
One important thing left to do: rename this link to the name of your app. (In my case, 'PostScript'.) You could do this in one step as part of the Terminal command above, by appending the name.
ln /Applications/BBEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/BBEdit /Applications/PostScript.app/Contents/MacOS/PostScript

Done.
As long as your dummy app and the destination app are both installed, files will display the custom icons, and launch with the app of your choice, without modifying installed apps. There doesn't seem to be any speed penalty, either.


Copy iTunes Playlists from old to new Mac

Save a copy of your playlists from iTunes on macOS
You can export a playlist—for example, if you want to save a copy of the playlist, or import it to a different computer so you have the same playlist in both places.
You can also export information about a song (or songs) to use in a database or in another app.
When you export playlists or transfer song information, the actual songs or videos aren’t included—just the information about them or the playlist.
Save copies of playlists or use playlists on another computer
Do any of the following:

Save a copy of a single playlist or use it in iTunes on another computer: Select the playlist, choose File > Library > Export Playlist, and choose XML from the Format pop-up menu.

Import an iTunes playlist: Choose File > Library > Import Playlist. The imported playlist includes only songs and videos already in your iTunes library. Unavailable items are removed from the list.

Save a copy of all your playlists: Choose File > Library > Export Library. The exported information is saved in XML format.

Transfer song information into other applications
Do either of the following:

Export all the song information into a text file: Select a playlist,
then choose File > Library > Export Playlist. Make sure Plain Text is selected in the Format pop-up menu (if you use a double-byte language
such as Japanese or Chinese, or if the program you’re importing into
understands Unicode, you should choose Unicode).
All information from the Info window for each song is exported, not just the fields currently displayed in the library or playlist.

Copy the information (in the columns that are visible) for one or more songs: Select the songs and choose Edit > Copy, and then choose Edit > Paste in another application (for example, an email or text document).


How to hide folders on a windows portable disk when viewed on mac os x

There are two ways I know of.

You can start the folder's name with a ".", as in ".folder". This will hide them on any Mac, though other Windows can see them.

Or you can use the Terminal command "chflags hidden ~/Documents/folder", replacing that place with the path to whichever folder it is you want to hide. But I don't think this would hide them when connected to another Mac.

You might want to look into using an encryption service like TrueCrypt.


Try this:

open location "itmss://itunes.apple.com/us/station/listen-in-apple-music/idra.686227433?cmd=AddStation"


Creating a pre-recorded lecture on macOS

The fourth point about rewinding video and re-recording is unheard of. Let's say you made a minor mistake while speaking, best you can do is one or more of the following:

Open the video editor, add a text box that shows the correct thing to say, make it visible in the video as an overlapping window for 3-4 seconds. This is a common method to fix mistakes in post-shoot editing.

When you realise that you've made a mistake, immediately repeat the last sentence with the correct word and let the recording go on. While editing it later on, trim the portion where you misspoke and delete that part. There will be an slightly abrupt cut but not a big deal in lectures.

All this is possible in iMovie for macOS. It's free and easy to use. Also use help centre: https://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.1/#/mov5ec96da08
For screen recording, Quicktime is a good option. If you want to appear speaking in the video, use Photo Booth and put it in a corner such that it appears on the screen.
Other way is to use a camera and use clips from both the camera and the screen in the final video.


Charging an iPhone 4S with a Samsung USB charger

While I personally wouldn't attach a non A-branded charger to my iPhone, theoretically if the charger delivers 5V and does it on a USB connector, it really doesn't matter from where the power comes.

The more amps the faster your iPhone will charge.  I've been charging my iPhone with my iPad charger for years without any problems.

Currently Apple has 3 types of USB chargers

iPhone charger: 5 volts 1 amp = 5 watt
iPad 'old' type: 5 volts 2 amp = 10 watt
iPad 'new' type (from iPad 4 on): 5 volts 2.4 amp = 12 watt

The Samsung 1 amp charger you're talking about will give you the same results as the original iPhone charger.


Help creating zip files with 50 files in each

Here's a quick and dirty BASH script.

Assumptions: All of your photos are in a folder, and there's nothing else in this folder.

#!/bin/bash
zip_count=0
files_zipped=0
folder_number=1
div=50
numfiles=(*)
numfiles=${#numfiles[@]}

mkdir zips

for file in *
do

  file_list="$file_list \"$file\""
  let "zip_count=zip_count+1"
  let "files_zipped=files_zipped+1"

  if [ "$files_zipped" -eq "$numfiles" ]; then
    echo "Final ZIP..."
    echo $file_list | xargs zip -9 zips/$folder_number.zip
  fi

  if [ "$zip_count" -eq "$div" ]; then
    echo "Next Zip..."
    echo $file_list | xargs zip zips/$folder_number.zip
    let "folder_number=folder_number+1"
    zip_count=0
    file_list=""
  fi

done

You can download it here

Once you've downloaded it:

Open Terminal.app and change to the directory with your photos in it e.g. cd /path/to/photos
Run the commmand bash ~/Downloads/zip50.sh (assuming you've downloaded the script to your downloads folder.)
A new folder called "zips" will be created in the folder with your photos.


"Minecraft" is damaged and can't be opened on Mountain Lion

The problem actually was that Mountain Lion gives this nonsensical error message to any app not authorized by Apple or from the App Store, by default. You just have to go to Apple -> System Preferences... -> Security & Privacy -> Allow applications downloaded from:

Then select "Anywhere". Seems like this is useful, but I couldn't get Minecraft to run without disabling this security check.


How to rework a "System Events" command in AppleScript, so that it automatically works in all applications?

I've found an okay solution (i.e., workaround).

Insert the "System Events" block of code into a "Run AppleScript" action and save it as its own application file in Automator. Note: The file extension of this code must be .app in order for this to work (more on this in a moment).

Go to System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Privacy tab → Accessibility. Add and checkmark the newly created application to the list of apps allowed to control your computer.

Run the newly created app from within your Service. To do so, you may add the following line to your AppleScript code:

do shell script "osascript -e 'tell application \"Application Name\" to activate'"

(I habitually use osascript to activate applications when using a "Run AppleScript" action in a Service, as this circumvents a bug with Services that I've discovered.)

Your Service should now run perfectly in every application on your computer, despite the fact that only one application (the one that contains the "System Events" code) has explicitly been granted the power to control the computer.

The file must be saved as a .app file, and not as a .scpt or .applescript file. This is because it is not possible to add .scpt or .applescript files to the list of apps allowed to control your computer; only true .app files can be selected in the dialog.

Note that the .app file does not have to be created in Automator. If you create the .app file in Script Editor.app and follow the other steps, the .app file will function in the same manner.

There is one difference, however. When the .app file is created in Automator, one can use either activate or launch to run the application in their Service. But, when the .app file is created in Script Editor, one can only use activate to run the application; launch will result in nothing happening.


How to get the URL for a public album in Photos that has been marked as public website

After about 48 hours of waiting (connected to the Internet), the URL suddenly appeared:


You can upload the image to Google Drive and it will use OCR to get the text from it. Or you can use a specialized software like Abby Fine reader for more advanced work.

The quality of the text recognition will vary with image quality. I would use a screenshot to get texts from video.

In Google Drive, you need to set Upload settings below the cogwheel on the right top to „Convert text from uploaded PDF and images files“.  He will copy the recognized text in the document below the image.


My book western digital not recognized on windows after time machine backup

If by 'not recognized' you mean not able to be mounted, this is because it has been formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) — HFS+.

To be able to read/write to it in Windows, you can format it to FAT.

Open Disk Utility and connect your disk.
Select the disk and choose the Erase tab.
Select MS-DOS (FAT) as the format.

Click Erase.

All data on the disk will be lost.


Position the cursor where you want to begin copying.
Press v (or upper case V if you want to cut whole lines).
Move the cursor to the end of what you want to copy.
Press y.
Move to where you would like to paste.
Press P to paste before the cursor, or p to paste after.

Source: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Copy,_cut_and_paste


Restoring iPhone contacts from backup immediately undoes itself

It is possible that, after restore, you are syncing your iPhone with some source where the contacts have been deleted as well. If so, you will need to stop syncing and/or restore the contacts in that place as well.


What is this black bar at the bottom of my Dock?

Occasionally the progress bar that appears under the downloads folder does not go away as it should when the download completes. You should be able to remove it by simply restarting the computer or running

killall Dock

at the command line (Terminal). This should reset just the dock process without having to restart the whole machine.


Dual boot Macbook Pro MD101 (Mid 2012), with OSX and Bootcamp windows and a FAT32 shared partition

Here I will assume you are using the BIOS/MBR legacy boot method for Windows. This means you are using a hybrid GPT.

Idea 1:

You could delete disk0s3 so you only have 4 partitions. I would first copy the contents disk0s3 to a flash drive. The application needed to do this can be found here. It works with Lion through Yosemite. I have not yet tested with El Capitan.

The downside is that at some point an update to OS X will recreate the "Recovery HD" partition. So you will need to apply this fix again sometime in the future.

Idea 2:

Use gdisk (or some other tool) to create a MBR table that does to include disk0s3. In other works, you create a MBR table that contains disk0s1, disk0s2, disk0s4 and disk0s5. You then flag the fourth partition as active.

The downside is that other software (especially the Disk Utility application) will see this as a bug and may try to fix it so the MBR table contains disk0s1, disk0s2, disk0s3 and disk0s4. So you may need to apply this fix again sometime in the future.

Idea 3:

Change the order of your partitions so Windows occurs before OS X. In other words, you want diskutil list to produce the following output.

Vikrams-MacBook-Pro:~ Vikramguria$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                81.0 GB    disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data SHARED                  167.9 GB   disk0s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS MACINTOSH H             250.3 GB   disk0s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s5

The downside is this limits the use of the Boot Camp Assistant. The Assistant can still be used to create the installation media, but you probably will have to manually install Windows.

What is meant by manually install? This depends on whether you want to backup OS X and Windows to an external disk or just start over. Having copied the "Recovery HD" partition to a flash drive aids either option. Booting to the flash drive allows you to repartition the disk. Also, you can either backup/restore OS X to/from an external disk or reinstall OS X from the internet. I backup and restore Windows using a third party tool called Winclone. It works great but costs money.

If you have additional questions, please post a comment below.


why does find / rm tells me it doesn't find a folder after it found it?

You can see why this happens if you imagine that find works this way:

make a list of all folders in the current directory

for each one named "bin", run the given command

descend into each folder and start from step 1

In your case, the given command is to remove the folder. Thus when you reach step 3 and try to descend into the folder, it is already gone - giving you the "No such file or directory" warning.
In reality find works in a bit more complicated way, but the above is detailed enough to understand what happens here.
All in all the command will work like you want it to, but you'll get these extra warnings. You can make them go away by adding a -maxdepth 2 option to the command if you know that your directory structure always has the bin folder at that level, or you can use the -prune action to not ensure that the search does not descend into the bin folders.


Currently, there is no method to change the order of reminders. Neither priority nor due date of a reminder has an influence on the position in the list.


macOS Sierra / Numbers 4.0: Problem with saving on a Synology via AFP

I found this thread while looking for a resolution to a problem with my ReadyNAS device.  The root cause appears to be that Apple removed the AFP protocol from macOS Sierra, at least according to comments on Apple's discussion boards.  SMB still works, but AFP has either been removed, or at least deprecated.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/30684682


How can I turn off the dizzying iOS 7 motion effects?

Yes, she can change the behavior.

From Apple's page on "iOS 7: How to reduce screen motion":

  Learn how to reduce screen motion in iOS 7.

  iOS 7 uses a parallax effect to create the perception of depth on your Home screen and elsewhere. When this feature is on, you may notice that your:

  Wallpaper, icons, and alerts shift slightly as you move your phone.
  When setting a wallpaper in Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness, the photo or image will be slightly zoomed and cannot be scaled to fit to the screen.

  You can change this behavior by enabling Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion.

  Note: If zoomed, you will need to rescale your wallpaper to fit to the screen.

  Additional Information

  To learn more about iOS 7, refer to the user manual.

Also see "What are some hidden or undocumented features in iOS 7?" here.


On OS X Lion "client", here's what you can find:

martin$ find /usr/ -name postgre*
/usr//include/postgres_ext.h
/usr//include/postgresql
/usr//include/postgresql/internal/postgres_fe.h
/usr//include/postgresql/server/postgres.h
/usr//include/postgresql/server/postgres_ext.h
/usr//include/postgresql/server/postgres_fe.h
/usr//lib/postgresql
/usr//share/devicemgr/backend/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb
/usr//share/devicemgr/backend/vendor/rails/railties/configs/databases/postgresql.yml
/usr//share/devicemgr/webserver/gems/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/em/protocols/postgres3.rb
/usr//share/man/man1/postgres.1.gz
/usr//share/postgresql
/usr//share/postgresql/postgres.bki
/usr//share/postgresql/postgres.description
/usr//share/postgresql/postgres.shdescription
/usr//share/postgresql/postgresql.conf.sample

So no binary or similar on a default install (yet there are c/c++ headers) and rails stuff.  (note I have Xcode 4.1 installed, and this is where all these Header files may have come from).

2) OS X doesn't use a relational database for anything as far as I know. If it's there is to support development or, well, the service itself.


Changes to Touch ID warning after restarting iPhone due to unresponsive app

This looks to be an issue with your bank's app. If I remember correctly, apps are notified anytime a touchID change is made, so things like 1Password will request your Master Password to sign in. This popup seems to be of your bank's design, and a software glitch made your phone think there was a change in TouchID.

For future reference, you can confirm that all fingers enrolled in touchID are yours by going to Settings > Touch ID & Passcode. Then scroll to the part of the pane where it shows your touchID fingerprints:

Now, put each registered finger on the sensor and wait until the fingerprint is highlighted, like so:

Ensure that each fingerprint is yours by making sure that your fingers highlight all of the fingerprint options.

Or, you could just set touchID up again for all your fingers.


How to 'scroll down' when there's nothing more to show? (cause I like the blank space)

There really isn't a neat way of doing this.  I normally hit Command + down arrow.  This will bring me to the end of the page, where I can then press enter a few times, or if using textmate, you can create a snippet to insert carriage returns for you.  With an application like textexpander you can program a keypress to add carriage returns for you.


What are some useful ways to use Automator?

Automator helps you automate (pun intended) repetitive actions without requiring programming knowledge.

The basic building blocks of Automator are Actions. Each Action does a sigle task, that may take an input and produce an output. Automator lets you create a sequence of Actions, called Workflow. If you are familiar with UNIX it's like a UI for pipes.

Here is an Automator Workflow I use a lot, especially for downloading lecture notes in PDF from my professors' sites:

Creating Services is another feature I find useful.

Also, you can combine the power of AppleScript with the simplicity of Automator with the "Run AppleScript" Action.

As an example of both techniques, you can check out this service that opens the source of the current Safari page in TextMate.

If you need more information about Automator check this Mac 101 article.

If you are a developer and want to create new Actions or need more insight into Automator, check out this guide and the Apple's developer documentation.


MagSafe chargers can output variable voltage.  When disconnected from a computer, they output a very low voltage.  When connected, the computer requests the voltage it needs, using the center data pin.  Your voltmeter is acting as a resistor in this circuit, which may be fooling the charger into thinking a computer is attached.

According to this link, the original MagSafe uses 6V when disconnected, and MagSafe2 uses 3V.  So I can't explain your 0-0.5V fluctuation, except that maybe you're not making a good connection with the test leads.

http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown-and-exploration-of-magsafe.html?m=1


vim, emacs, nano and pico are all available by default with OS X 10.7.4:

/Users/ian
> which nano
/usr/bin/nano

/Users/ian
> which vim
/usr/bin/vim

/Users/ian
> which emacs
/usr/bin/emacs

> which pico
/usr/bin/pico


Apache keeps saying: You configured HTTP(80) on the standard HTTPS(443) port!

Check the configuration file of your website for "SSLEngine off". In my case, this setting had been changed by the upgrading process. Changing that line to "SSLEngine on" solved the issue.


Do i need installing antivirus on Windows partition of Mac

Of course, installing an antivirus on your Windows is recommended, but it is not a necessity. Generally, if there was a virus, your mac would not be damaged, as the OS X file format is read only on Windows AFAIK (unless the virus was so well made, that it bypassed this).

  or is all virus protection handled by the Mac?

There is no way for that to happen as when you run Windows with BootCamp, then Mac is not even running, and only mounted as a read-only format on Windows. It is almost like running 2 different systems.


How to fix iPhone no longer loading css on webpages and not connecting to internet

Make sure the clock is set correctly on the device as this will prevent HTTPS.


Why does Automatic Graphics Switching keep re-enabling itself without my involvement?

Use this script to turn off the Energy Saver Automatic graphic switching option.

Save it on your Macbook, e.g., as noautosaver.
Make it executable with chmod a+x noautosaver.
Add the script in System Preferences > Login Items.

It is the same code as in the linked question, but always turns the value Off rather than toggling the value.
 #!/usr/bin/osascript

 if running of application "System Preferences" then
     try
         quit application "System Preferences"
     on error
         do shell script "killall 'System Preferences'"
     end try
 end if

 repeat while running of application "System Preferences" is true
     delay 0.1
 end repeat

 tell application "System Preferences"
     reveal pane id "com.apple.preference.energysaver"
     repeat until exists window "Energy Saver"
         delay 0.1
     end repeat
 end tell

 tell application "System Events" to tell ¬
     group 1 of window "Energy Saver" of application process "System Preferences"
     repeat until exists checkbox "Automatic graphics switching"
         delay 0.1
     end repeat

     set cbAGS to (value of checkbox "Automatic graphics switching") as boolean
     if cbAGS then
        click checkbox "Automatic graphics switching"
     end if
     set  cbAGS to (value of checkbox "Automatic graphics switching") as boolean
 end tell

 quit application "System Preferences"

 if cbAGS then
     return "   Automatic Graphics Switching is: ON"
 else
     return "   Automatic Graphics Switching is: OFF"
 end if


How to view page source in Safari browser on an iPhone?

Apple’s native solution is Safari Web Inspector. Currently all developer tools for iOS do still run on macOS so get out your mac and dive in if you want a first party solution.
Here’s a 5 minute tech talk, but the developer site has hours and pages of content depending on what you are going to do with this.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/401/

To enable on the iPhone - use the setting app, Safari, Advanced


No, it won't work.

The app will show a prohibitory sign over the app icon.

When opening the App, it will show an error message.

Even if you managed to hack/crack/disable the check that prevents the Siri interface app from running, the parts of the system behind the scenes that actually run Siri on macOS, communicate to the network and process the speech recognition are missing on El Capitan.

  So if the door on the second floor is locked shut because the deck hasn't been built yet - you can cut the lock and eagerly exit the door, but you'll promptly fall to the ground since the deck isn't built into El Capitan yet.


Can't archive mail on one of my Exchange accounts

I had the same problem. I went into Preferences > Accounts and deselected "Enable this account." Then, I quit Mail and restarted it. I went back into Preferences > Accounts and selected "Enable this account" and it all started working.


How can I set a link to my gym so that siri can find it

Create a contact entry for your gym with phone number, website, and address. You can put the name of the gym in the company field and then you can create a nickname that just says "Gym"... problem is that Gym and Jim sound alike.

What I now tried was setting up a new address to my person vCard with a custom tag. I have gym now as a customer address on my card and why I say "Get to directions to gym" it worked.

With having the gym as a separate contact entry, does it work when you say the Gym's name?


First Admin account not showing on login page

What I did (and what seems to have worked so far) is the following:

change username and home folder of the "missing user"
create a new user with the old username/home folder
delete the old user
use the new user instead

I think I should also have reused the old UID because I got a lot of files belonging to an unnamed "501" user that I had to chown to my new user.


On OS X you'll have following :

The base PATH used is located in /etc/paths. It is used to set $PATH.

By default, the file contains :

/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
/usr/local/bin

It will also load the paths located in /etc/path.d/.

When opening the terminal I will load :

~/.bash_profile
~/.bash_login, (if .bash_profile doesn't exist)
~/.profile (if .bash_login doesn't exist).

These files can load some other files, for example .bashrc.

If you want to expand your path you can do it in one of the files by adding your  export command you gave in your question.


Apple TV gen 2 will send optical audio signal when i patch it though a TOSLINK 1to2 splitter to my Bose speaker

You need a optical switcher, not a spitter. A splitter has one input and distributes to two (or more) outputs, and is not reversible.

Two possible products are available from Amazon and Audio Authority. The second does automatic switching, which may be what you're looking for.

Disclaimer: I have no financial or otherwise tangible connections to either Amazon.com or Audio Authority.


When MDM certificates expire, can I still use my iPhone?

I would suggest you do the following things to manage it:

Your dad's company MDM must have synced with Apple Business Manager and as your dad couldn't get it in MDM, then can you ask him to check it in ABM and release the device from there. (assuming your dad has a control on it). https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/apple-business-manager/asmec4d28461/web
Have you checked whether you can remove the profile or not as you couldn't find the device in the portal? Assuming that the device is still there, in the MDM portal, there must be an option "Allow MDM Profile Removal" which you can check and then manually remove the MDM profile from your iPhone.

I guess these two methods could be ideal at this moment for you.


How to create shortcut for "⌘+¨" or "⌘+^" in BetterTouchTool?

Apparently, this is an unsolvable issue:

https://github.com/fifafu/BetterTouchTool/issues/316


Based on the model of your computer (iMac 27" Mid 2011) you should be using the drivers located at http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1720 on your copy of Windows 8/8.1.


MacBook Pro Mid-2012 Hard Drive Cable Broken

That yellow cable is a IR sensor cable, connected to a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) connector. If you don't use or plan to use IR for anything you should be fine in my experience.

As an additional reference this guide at the site ifixit.com describes replacing the hard-drive cable on what is most likely your model. Step 14 in the guide describes the yellow sensor cable: iFixit, replace HD-cable on Macbook Pro 13" Unibody mid 2012, Step 14


Is there any way to turn off the automatically opening window for a preview in Marsedit?

Yes - this is a per blog preference.

I found this on the Mars Edit support page...

Double click the blog in the main window to open settings.
Click the "Editing" pane.
Find the "Preview Defaults" at the bottom of that section.

Here's a picture showing that you can choose to have it off or remember the last state as well as the default option of opening.


Yes, you can. Just reset and restore. The backup is from yesterday, so only that information will be lost which you added today. Everything will come back. But it will take time if you have a large camera roll or lots of apps.


How this feature works is detailed in the Apple Support document, If your AirPods are lost:

  With iOS 10.3 or later, Find My iPhone can help you locate your missing AirPods. If you already set up Find My iPhone with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that you’re using with your AirPods, it's automatically enabled for your AirPods too. So if your AirPods are lost, out of their case, and somewhere close by, you can use Find My iPhone to find them again. If your AirPods are out of range of all of your devices, need to charge, or are in the AirPod Case, Find My iPhone can still help by showing the time and location where they were last connected.

So yes, your AirPods need to be in the Bluetooth range and connected to one of your devices for them to be found. If they are out of range, Find My iPhone shows the the time and location of last connection, helping you to drill down to potential location.

Basically this means

If the AirPods are within range of any your devices you see the location of that device
If the AirPods are out of range, you see the location of the most recently connected device, at the time of the last connection


Is handoff available for Safari with Yosemite and iOS8.02?

Yes handoff is available for Safari in Yosemite and iOS 8.02, I just tested it. But it does not work with Google Chrome as shown in the screenshot (at least not yet and in my case).

But you can use iCloud tabs on your iPhone. It shows you which tabs are opened on other devices, have a look a this page. It is for iOS7 but it works the same in iOS8.


How do I do custom key binding in iTunes?

For each Source/Library item (Music,Movies,Podcasts) you want to open with a shortcut, create a new Applescript as follows

tell application "iTunes"
try
    set view of front browser window to (get some playlist whose special kind is Podcasts)
end try
end tell

replacing "Podcasts" with "Music” or "Movies", and save it with to your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder (if this doesn´t exist, create it!), giving it an unique name (like "show podcasts","show movies").

Next, open "System Preferences">"Keybaord">"Keyboard Shortcuts" and select "Application Shortcuts". Click on the little "plus" button to add a new shortcut with:

Application: iTunes
Menu Title: show podcasts   —this has to be exactly the name you gave your script
Keyboard Shortcut: <press your desired shortcut, eg. "cmd+2">

Now pressing "cmd+2" (or whichever shortcut you defined) while being in iTunes will open the Podcast library item.


In a Macbook, I'm ready to change the boot disk and replace the superdrive with an SSD. How will Migration Asst work? Use APFS?

Personally, I've lost all faith in Time Machine in recent times.
I'd approach this as a cloning exercise.
I'd go with Carbon Copy Cloner [just because that's the one I know best] & do as your 2nd suggestion.
Clone to the DVD replacement, test, add the new larger SSD in place of your old HD, clone again. Remove [or just temporarily disconnect] the 1st SSD to test again.
If all is successful, wipe the intermediate SSD. If at any point something goes wrong [which barring human error it shouldn't] - you still have the original HD as belt & braces.
Once finished, neither you, your software, or your sql will know the difference.
One final check once you're done - open System Preferences > Startup Disk & make sure the new boot drive is already selected [it should be, but I've known it miss very rarely]
One thing to note when cloning:
Rename the new drive to something else first, so you will then be cloning MyDrive to MyDrive Clone.
Once the clone is complete & you are sure you can boot to it, change the names again, to MyDrive [from MyDrive Clone] & MyDrive Old [from the original]
This
a) makes sure you don't lose track… or indeed your sanity &
b) keeps anything that was reliant on the drive name sane too.


Yes, apps in /Applications are shared with all users. The standard location for apps that you only want a certain user to see is ~/Applications. You may need to create this folder if it doesn't exist—it will automatically get an icon.


How do I exclude a single day from/preemptively snooze a daily alarm?

Apple's clock app isn't very deep - it mimics late 20th century watches in functionality, it seems. There is certainly no problem with that as it serves most people's needs completely and many users needs to varying levels.

In this case, I suggest that you look beyond the app. If you only want to use that app, you will need a system like what you do know - remind yourself later, or rig a complex pattern of alarms (which wouldn't be self-reliant anyway). But either way the functionality you are requesting isn't possible with that app.

Before looking at 3rd party apps, you could use Calendar instead. If you didn't sleep until the alarm, you could simply delete that day's event and be done with it. Snooze should still be functional. But all the rest of your calendar alerts would be set with the same terrible ringer and you would miss it entirely if you forgot to deactivate the silence switch on the side of your phone.

After that, I suggest an app like MotionX Sleeptracker (24/7) or SleepCycle. They both work well for alarms and have some nice features that go along. That said, they may not work for you as you do have to start the "recording" every night. I find the process easy, but perhaps you wouldn't prefer it.

So then it comes down to going through the App Store looking for a full-featured alarm clock. I've used several but never could get away from MotionX so I didn't stay long and I don't remember enough to know if they had the ability that you described.


How can I restore the El Capitan Messages notification sound (chime) to the old sound?

Prefs > General
Take your pick…

Mine's always just gone 'ping' so I don't know precisely which sound you mean


Can there be two separate Time Machine Backups on the same external drive?

You can use an external hard disk formatted with HFS+ as a Time Machine target for several Macs without problems. Time Machine itself will make sure that the data is not getting mixed up by using the name of each Mac as part of the path.


Merge multiple Time Machine backup disk images

This is a really bad idea. How many files exist in one snapshot? Since you have hard links to contend with and protective permissions that prohibit most write operations, I would presume most attempts to construct a working hybrid will fail.

The failure modes likely are:

insufficient iops to get the job done in months to longer timeframe.
insufficient sophistication handling the unpublished checksum handling of when a backup has been tampered with or just failed to be successful.

I would love for someone to prove me wrong, but please make a backup copy of your backups if your main goal is actually preserving their viability. It’s likely you will be able to recover data from any tampered backup, but less likely you’ll be able to continue using a merged backup to make new backups. If that happens you now have another set and are further forked.


Creating a Bootable USB Drive: unable to download Mavericks again

You can not download Maverics Installer if you already have mavericks.

Next time when you download a major new OS, DO NOT RUN after download.

First find the download and make copy the Installer file.

The reason is the Installer will delete it self after installation is complete.

How to make a Bootable USB for Mavericks has been discussed and answered here.

Last not least: There is a Recovery (hidden) partition on you drive.

When called upon that one will recover (repair) your mavericks from the Internet. The recovery can be also done from a USB. as explained here, it only needs a small USB with 1 gig size.


How can I manually lock an iPhone X screen

You can press the side button once to lock your iPhone X screen. This puts your iPhone to sleep mode and locks the screen (you'll be required to verify with facial attention or input passcode to unlock).

For more details, refer to the Apple Support article:

Use gestures to navigate your iPhone X and later

  Wake and sleep

  Raise to wake or tap to wake your iPhone X.

  To put your iPhone X to sleep, press the side button.

As pointed by @ernie, it's worth noting that an iPhone X with Face ID enabled unlocks as soon as you look at the screen when it is in awake state. To test that the screen was locked using this approach, you'll need to wake the device while not directly looking at the screen.

If you are not using Face ID

If you have turned off Face ID for your iPhone X, you'll need to enter your device Passcode to unlock. However, there's an additional setting which could prevent your device from going into lock mode after turning off the display by pressing the Side button. It is possible to set a time duration until which the iPhone is not locked (when you have turned off Face ID). To lock your iPhone immediately after putting the display to sleep after pressing the Side button, go to Settings app → Face ID & Passcode → Require Passcode and tap on Immediately.


Why is my Time Machine backup failing to fire at the hourly interval?

I know you've said there are no messages in Console.app, but you haven't specified how you've searched.  So firstly follow the steps below, and just add a comment to say whether you find anything.

Open Console.app
Select 'All Messages' in the left hand pane
type 'backupd' in the search box in the top right

Are there any messages in here related to the backup doing anything at all?


How to type a circumflex for programming

Switch from using the US International PC layout to the US layout.  Then Shift + 6 will generate ^.


How to gather windows from secondary monitor while remotely connected from OS X to Windows 7

Edit the Connection setting & check 'Scale Content' and 'Use all monitors'.

'Use all monitors' is the key, 'scale content' gives you the choice of scrolling or seeing all at once, but might be too small to read easily.

Just for completeness… that option isn't directly available on Windows until Windows 8.1 & also on Windows it's called 'Smart Sizing'.
To use Smart Sizing in Windows XP or Windows 7 you need to edit your .rdp files with notepad and type in the following line:

smart sizing:i:1


Can I "restrain" safari from using large % of CPU?

Enable the Debug Menu in Safari. One of the commands is Pause Web Process, another is Crash Web Process. Or the web process can be quit (or Force Quit) in Activity Monitor or any similar app.

And be sure to keep your Flash plugin current. Keep everything current/updated!


Java issue with osx...installed latest but java apps not working

The easiest solution is to update with "Java for OS X 2014-001" at the below link. Fixed a similar Java issue on all three computers I have.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572?viewlocale=en_US


It will be best for you to run a S.M.A.R.T scan on the drive to see if its failing. You can do this by downloading the free trial of Smart utility.

If the hard drive turns out fine or passes the S.M.A.R.T Scan then just re-install the operating system after you've backed up your data obviously.


I want to delete Photos for OS X and just use lightroom. HOW do I do this?

OS X will not let you remove Photos.app. And in their ever expanding quest to make things simpler and easier, certain preferences are hidden.

So open Photos and create a new photo library. there doesn't have to be anything in it, it just has to be there so Photos will open.

Insert the card from your DSLR and photos will see the card and present you with a list of photos on the card.

There should be a checkbox (upper left if I recall correctly) that you can uncheck to prevent Photos from opening when you insert that card.

And the fun continues! You can't turn it off for all cards all at once, you have to do it one at a time for each card you have with your camera.

Perhaps a smart person can find a "defaults write" command to stop this from happening but so far this is the only way I have found to do it.


error with email account setting up iCloud on MacBook

Try signing out of iCloud.

Open System Preferences
Choose the iCloud panel
Click Sign Out


Disable "show password" in Keychain Access

The keychain is an encrypted container and only the user who has the password can unlock it.  Being an admin on a computer does not allow you to unlock the keychain.  Not even root can do it.

Of course, as an admin, there are ways to install software and get the data but it isn't as simple as opening the keychain and looking.


weird problem : whenever I copy songs from my computer to my iphone it misses the first 30 seconds?

ZoneAlarm, and other firewalls, may occasionally interfere with the syncing process.  Turn off the firewall during sync to see if it's the problem.  If it syncs well after that, contact your firewall provider and ask for the proper setting so you don't have to disable it every time you want to sync.

Also, iOS 5.x can sync wirelessly, which may resolve the problem.


Does Amazon Prime video support Dolby Vision on Apple TV?

As of now, it does not. Amazon Prime Video on Apple TV 4K will send HDR10 content, which can be converted to Dolby Vision on the Apple TV itself, or sent directly as HDR10 if the "match content" setting is enabled on your box. Amazon Prime on Apple TV also annoyingly streams 2.1 PCM audio instead of 5.1, though Amazon says this is temporary, and that Dolby Digital Plus audio is coming soon to Apple TV 4K.

For full compatibility, take a look at the supported devices / formats page on Amazon's website:

Compatible Amazon Video devices and the features available on each device.


How to convert an HTML file with referenced images on the command line to a webarchive?

Use the tool webarchiver (which you can install via brew install webarchiver):

webarchiver -url sample.html -output sample.webarchive

The webarchive produced contains the image and Safari shows the image when it displays the webarchive.


How can I fix my system lagging due to problems with Firefox plugin-container process (IOGraphicsAccelerator, too many contexts)

Restarting Firefox solved that issue for me, I no longer observe said messages in the console app and the system behaves as usual.


iPhone sending invitations to appointments it didn't create

I am fairly "late to the game", but since no answer has been accepted yet, my input might still be useful:

the "meeting highjacking" you describe in your question is fairly well known with Exchange and the iOS calendar app; in fact it can be even worse where simply accepting an invite on your phone may make you the "owner" of the meeting; this seems to happen more often the larger the number of meeting attendees gets. This issue is so severe that in my company we discourage people from accepting meeting invites from their phones.
as for the "butchered description" you describe in your answer: this, too is a well known issue between Exchange and the iOS calendar. iOS 8.3 supposedly fixed it, but since those cut off notes do not happen all the time, we do not have enough data yet at work to say for sure.


I've had this happen with a couple of new Macs at our office recently.  I'm not sure if something is off with Apple's latest imaging of new Macs but the fix is relatively simple.

Login as normal, using your regular password.
Click on the  menu in the upper left corner and choose System Preferences (4th choice down)

Click on Language & Region

Change the following

If English is already an option then drag it to the top of the list
Click the + symbol in the lower left to add English to the list of languages
Change the region to the appropriate one (Americas, North America, United States)

Click "Show All" to leave the preference pane and return to System Preferences.  Your language should now be set to English.  You might restart your Mac to make sure.


I've had good luck using the homebrew builds to start and stop daemons as they handle the launch preferences well with simply syntax.

brew install apache2
brew services start httpd

A side benefit of having this version is you can patch and upgrade faster than Apple does. The downside is you might need to move your configuration files from the system side to the /usr/local/bin side one time.

If you are running a headless mini - I also am a big fan of using Server.app to make the web service a couple of clicks easy and the server.app also helps with certificate management, gives you Apple Push Notifications and several other useful bundled services.


DNS doesn't work properly in OS X Yosemite

I experienced that problem on my MBP as well. I suppose it's a bug in Yosemite.
Here's a related question: Yosemite cannot resolve domain names maybe it gives you some insight

My work around is flushing the DNS cache:

sudo discoveryutil mdnsflushcache

if that command doesn't work try this one instead:

sudo discoveryutil udnsflushcaches

I am not sure if this helped fixing it, but I did a PRAM and SMC reset as well.


Back to My Mac: BTMM kMMServiceFailureNotification

In response to your question "Is there any solution?": Yes

Initial Feedback: I appear to have the same problem, which appeared out of the blue and which I noticed only on around 13 Jan (4 days prior). It appeared to have occurred at the same time as the last in a 3-4 week series of occasional spurious iCloud ID errors, requiring me to enter my iCloud password on each occasion. Back to my Mac is not accessible on any of the 3 macs using my personal account.

I spent 90 minutes on the phone with Apple Support. The problem could not be resolved immediately and was escalated to the level of the engineering staff for offline investigation.

Update: 3 days later BTMM was working correctly on all my machines, having been fixed at the Apple end. No explanation as yet as to the cause or how resolved. I recommend you contact Apple Support directly


Software update hangs on OS X Snow Leopard - how can I fix it?

Fixed

I was able to fix this problem by downloading and running the Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1.

After this ran and I restarted, I was able to successfully run Software Update, from the command line or the GUI; it now tells me that there is no new software to install.

Before doing this, I did check for I/O errors as @SethNoble suggested, then run the utilities that @Stephen suggested. I did not find any problems, although I had previously run Disk Utility from my OS X install disk and repaired both permissions and files.


Ok, solution found on an old superuser question, posting here for posterity.

I just needed to defrag the thing

I got Coriolis iDefrag.  I ran that on the compact setting (required restarting into it's own special mode, but no disk burning was needed).  A few hours later I tried to resize the partition and it worked fine.


Access Mac localhost from Windows parallels

As mentioned in the comments above.

localhost is the machine you are running on (Mac) so the VM (windows) will need to point to the IP address of your machine.

For example:

If you are viewing your application on your Mac at:
http://localhost:8080/#/users

Now if your Mac ip is 10.1.0.2, the url to view on the windows VM will be:
http://10.1.0.2:8080/#/users


Can I bypass the error 3194 when downgrading from iOS 6 to 5.1.1 on a locked Verizon iPhone 4S?

Unfortunately, iOS 5.1.1 is no longer being signed by Apple.
Basically, Apple provides a digital signature to iTunes when you try to restore a firmware.  If the signature isn't provided, you're unable to restore because Apple only signs the most current version of the firmware for the device you're using.

The Dev-Team Blog says this about downgrading an iPhone 4S to 5.x:

  iPad3, i4S owners will always be able to RE-restore the current 5.x OS that's already on their device. So if you're at 5.1.1 when the window closes (and you've saved your blobs), you'll always be able to RE-restore to 5.1.1 again. This makes the 5.1.1 jailbreak a lot less fragile - you don't have to worry about messing up your install with funky extensions or getting into a boot loop, because you can always RE-restore from 5.1.1 to 5.1.1 again (or from 5.0.1 to 5.0.1 again, etc). But once you fall off the 5.x train by restoring to 6.x, you'll be stuck there until the next jailbreak.

So it looks like you're stuck on iOS 6 for now.

Regarding unlocking, your best bet is to contact Verizon.  There may be a fee required before they'll unlock your phone, if they do.


Apple USB Keyboard not working on 27" iMac (Intel Core i7)

Sorry this isn't really an answer but I can't post a photo in a comment.

I have a 27" iMac i7 as well, when I connect a Key Board/Mouse and an iPhone via USB in "System Information" I see this:

What do you see?

Note that the two USB ports are on different busses.  Have you tried both of them?  You mentioned that bluetooth works; do the other USB functions work (Card Reader, iSight Cam)?


Can I tag Faces on iOS using the iPhoto app?

I'm afraid not. You can do places and whatnot from your i-device, but sadly no faces ability, although I have the feeling Apple will do it in the future. You can quite easily do it on iPhoto however. If you need any help in getting started at all in iPhoto, here's Apple's own support page: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iPhoto/9.0/en/pht2297cf5f.html

Hope this helps.


MacBookPro / MacBookAir performance question

With 4GB of RAM max, an Air would work, but you'd get tremendously better performance with 8GB in a Pro (ideally with an SSD).

I upgraded my Mid 2010 2.4GHz i5 to 8GB and an OWC 120GB SSD, and Windows (XP and 7) VMs under VMware Fusion 3 are much, much more responsive, along with the rest of the system.


How to Downgrade From iOS 11 Beta to iOS 11 Without Factory Resetting

It's been a while since I did this but if I remember correctly, go to beta.apple.com on your phone and login. Go to the IOS section and un-enroll your device from the beta program. It should then allow you to download the non beta updated version of IOS 11.

It is likely the same build that you are running now. I am not sure if beta builds have extra debugging code in them or not. If this does not fix it you may need to back up the phone, erase it and restore from backup.


Reboot the computer while holding down the mouse button - if there's no physical issue preventing ejection, the disc will be ejected.

You can of course use terminal to try to force an eject, but this requires a little knowledge of text commands and is covered here:

Is there a Terminal command that will force open the DVD tray?


FileVault sparsefile uses double of actual allocated disk space

As I understand it, when you login, the encrypted disk image gets automatically mounted (and a link created to it). Thus, making your home folder /Users/moo point to the sparsebundle file within /Users/.moo. If you right click (or CTRL + click) on your home folder in the Finder and select Get Info, you should see thats its a Volume of a disk image with something like /Users/.moo/moo.sparsebundle. I beleive du reports its twice as its simply traversing the same effective folder structure again.


Which current Macs have an infrared receiver

Currently (March 2012) the MacBook Air and the Mac Pro are the only generally available macs that lack a built-in infrared receiver.

The white polycarbonate MacBook that is still available as a refurbished product and from educational sales channels also lacks an infrared receiver.


Will one power adapter work with all shipping MacBook Air and Pro as of March 2013?

The 85W MagSafe adapter should do the trick for you.  It's compatible with the original MagSafe design and provides enough power for all of the Intel Macs up to this point.

Picking up a 45W or 60W wouldn't save any money and though they would both run all of the Intel Mac laptops they be insufficient for powering a larger (15" / 17") Mac back to life since they require 85W.

Should Apple move completely away from the MagSafe design to the slimmer MagSafe 2 design you can add the adapter.


Q1: The screen resolution of an external monitor is independent from the internal monitor, when you open display preferences the display preference pane is shown on every monitor. If you set up screen mirroring the resolution is set to that of the smallest screen unless you make it smaller. Note: the size of the tv is relatively irrelevant, it's the resolution that matters (probably it's full hd 1920x1080). If you plan to view it via RDP you probably won't have any issues using a computer with an HD monitor.

Q2: To project the screen of MBP2 on TV through MBP1 all you have to do is set up screen sharing (on MPB2) from the sharing preference pane, connect through Finder and drag and drop the window displaying MBP2's screen to the TV.


What replacement SMS/MMS app for iPhone will allow me to change convo color, etc?

There are loads of "messaging" apps on the App Store, however, none of them use SMS. And if they do, it's one-way, it's send only. All the rest of them are data calls using an external service that invariably requires registrations, and (in some cases) perhaps payment!

This is one of the infamous "duplicates Apple functionality" zones. There is one way in or out of SMS, and that's Messages.app built into the iPhone. It is unfortunate that messages can't be customized beyond how it works external to the app, and the minor details such as showing a subject field, counting characters, etc.

Without Jailbreaking, you will not find a full on frontend replacement for communicating via actual SMSes in the iOS App Store. Other, more "creative" solutions must be done here.

Per @mankoff's comment on your question itself, you could perhaps find a better way to have his name displayed, be it by Nickname or other ways.


Can't remember security questions and rescue email ends with .cim instead of .com so I can't use it to reset my questions

Apple has support personnel to help with Apple ID and purchase issues.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201485

You can use the "if you don't have a rescue email address" link to get in touch with a human. You may want to search for the answers and/or see if you have another old email address as the rescue address in addition to the one with a typo. Also, if you can document what purchases you have made in the past that sometimes helps establish your identity when calling or emailing in to support.

They will have a script to see if they can help you based on your particular account and how you set it up.


External Display and Blurry Fonts on El Capitan

The location of the Overrides directory changed to /System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides/. Note that you will need to disable System Integrity Protection to add files there.


I lost my iPad, can I track it if the battery is dead?

You can only track it when it is online and connected to the internet.  If it's not online, it could be turned off, the battery could be flat, it could just be out of WIFI range, etc - could be anything.  Use iCloud.com and Find my iPhone to set it to alert when it comes online is all you can really do.

Your best hope is that you were using IOS7 on the device, and had it logged into iCloud, because that way no-one else can use it, even if they wipe the device, without they re-enter your own Apple ID iCloud login.


Unfortunately I don't believe there are options to give you exactly what you want and prevent Local Address from being truncated (note that the entry beginning 2601:18c in your example is an IPv6 address, not a MAC address). Option -W (In certain displays, avoid truncating addresses) seems that it will give what you want but it still truncates hostnames and IPv6 addresses.

The following netstat options can get you most of the way there:

-l    Print full IPv6 address

-n    Show network addresses as numbers...

Using a combination of those two options (netstat -ln)  will give you un-truncated IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Once you have those, you can use, eg host, to do a DNS lookup of the IP address in order to get the hostname if a PTR record exists for it.


Can my Thunderbolt Macbook Air drive my Mini DisplayPort iMac as an external display?

According to this source, this should work. This other source confirms it. These are the troubleshooting steps I would try:

Run all software updates on both the iMac and MacBook Air. A lot of times there are firmware updates that address issues like this.
Open System Preferences > Displays and click Detect Displays.
Reset the PRAM on both the iMac and the MacBook Air by restarting the computer and holding ⌘+⌥+P+R on boot but until you hear the POST chime twice. Then you can let go and boot normally. Be sure to do this on both machines.

Try going through these steps and let me know if you're able to resolve the issue.


Upgrade from Mac OS X 10.6.8 "Snow Leopard" to OS X 10.10 "Yosemite"; App Store takes over 20 hours

If the desired Mac is slow, you can always use another Mac to do the download of the OS X installer.

Make a guest account on that Mac and sign in with your AppleID since you'll want to shift off your boss's password and get everything under an ID you control.
Go to the App Store and download the installer - but don't run it.
Copy that installer application to a USB drive and take it to the slow mac.

The slow Mac probably needs a back up and possible Disk Utility to repair the catalog structure.

Worst case, you can order a USB media from Apple - call in to the sales number for your country and ask to purchase a media instead of a download. They often will help you enough to get your Mac upgraded for free.

Once you get the install running, you can look at /var/log/install.log to see the progress and where things get slow or hang.


According to this Apple Support document the personal hotspot feature is only available from the third generation iPad upwards.

  Learn how to share your cellular data connection using Personal Hotspot, the Internet-sharing feature on iPhone, iPad (3rd generation) Wi-Fi + Cellular or later, and iPad mini Wi-Fi + Cellular.


Keyboard shortcut for Safari stop loading webpage button

Holding esc can stop many pages from loading/ progressing.

You can also disable JavaScript in Develop menu (safari preferences → advanced, enable it) if such popups are asking for login etc. This works only if the content loads without JS, or before banner is added.

You can install content blockers, ad blockers which can zap the troubling elements from webpages.


iPhone 5S suddenly turns off at 30-40% of battery life

When I was a Genius at an Apple Store about two years ago, this issue was relatively common. Most likely this is a hardware issue with the battery itself, but there is a chance it could be a battery calibration issue. It's best to troubleshoot calibration first.

Calibration Issue

The battery itself keeps track of how much battery life it has, and reports this back to the phone, which it then displays on the screen for you. Sometimes, the battery may be fully charged, but the battery or phone instead reports a different charge percentage.

Fixing a calibration issue is relatively easy:

Use your phone until it completely runs out of battery power and shuts off.
Plug your phone into a charger, and leave it plugged in until it is fully charged. Ideally, do this overnight so you know to be sure it gets completely charged.

This process will tell the phone and battery where its lowest and highest charge points are.

Hardware Issue

If you continue having the issue, it is almost certainly an issue with the battery itself. If you have an Apple Store nearby, make a Genius Bar appointment there and bring your phone in. They can replace your battery there the same day, and it usually takes less than an hour.

If you don't have an Apple Store nearby, there may be an Apple Authorized Service Provider near you that can help. Go through the prompts at Apple's support site, and they will help you find a good option.


if the startup disk is copied to external drive, can that external drive be used as a startup disk?

Yes you can you can use disk utilty to clone the contents of one drive to another but  you can also use Carbon Copy Cloner.

You cannot use an external disk as startup disk if you drag and drop the system files as the permissions on the files might change leading to unbootable external disk.

So do not drag and drop the system files, only clone the disk into another disk as it preserves all the file attributes, permissions, owner, group, etc.

You can use Disk utilty 'Restore' feature to clone a drive. So suppose there are two drives A and B. I want to clone drive A to B so in Disk Utilty choose drive B then click restore option then choose "Restore from A"  That's it! let it do it's job but if you want to clone a lively booted up disk then you will need a third party app like Carbon Copy Cloner.


How to properly remove old Bluetooth devices listed in the Bluetooth menu?

I don't know who directed you to do it this way but the ⌥ method is for troubleshooting/removing active devices.

As far as I know, this is how you unpair/remove a Bluetooth device:

 → System Preferences → Bluetooth → Hover over the device you'd like to unpair/remove → click the x to its right.


What is this extra partition that has appeared suddenly in macOS and how to delete it?

This is quite normal under BigSur and it is not a partition, but a snapshot of your drive. E.g. mine looks quite similar:

There is nothing you need to worry about and you should not try to delete it. This exact layout has been also discussed in Apple Forums, on MacRumors and on reddit.
To quote from reddit (user "Advanced_Path"):

Big Sur changes the way how updates are done. Now that the System volume is basically immutable, the way an update is done is with APFS snapshots. The system takes a snapshot of the base volume, updates the necessary file and from that moment forward, it boots from that snapshot.

Furher, I can recommend this article.


Apple Pages - store changes with document?

Yes. Activate it via: Edit -> Track Changes in the menu bar.


Can the files being transferred affect/slow the data throughput?

Yes, the nature of the specific files can affect the data rate.

Especially if you have lots of small files the transfer rate is usually a lot worse than if you have few large files.

The reason for that being that the backup software has to use time to open/close each and every small file and possible transfer data at small block sizes (i.e. each file could have only few bytes in them).

Compare that to large files where the number of file system calls is low, and it is possible to transfer data at the optimal block sizes from disk and further on (might for example read from disk in 4 MB blocks or similar).


It seems the issue isn't with AppleScript, but with Script Editor, after confirming it with a back and forth with an Apple engineer. I'm still not convinced of why this should be the case, but the script runs a lot better when run via osascript, especially after refactoring it to use a whose statement when fetching messages, rather than iterating over them with an if condition.


TextEdit removes Byte-Order-Mark (BOM) from Unicode/UTF files. How to fix?

This isn't the main solution you're looking for, but TextWrangler is free, handles UTF-8 (and many other encodings) very well, and doesn't have too steep a learning curve, particularly if you're just using functionality similar to TextEdit. I know you'd like to fix TextEdit, and I hope you get an answer explaining how to do that, but in the absence of a primary solution, this should be a good backup plan.


Why does Mac OS X turn off monitor #2 when an application is maximized on monitor #1?

Why?
Personally,. because I don't think they ever thought it through properly. There's a lot about fullscreen that's like that.

The fix is possibly System Prefs > Mission Control > check Displays have separate Spaces

The better fix is don't use fullscreen, use Alt/click on the green button to maximise instead.


BigSur Notes app - how to search for 'aws'?

You can try searching using Spotlight Search. Spotlight searches Notes and will list the Notes it finds. I just tried it and it found "aws" in my Notes. And it didn't include "was".


booting up my Macbook using option key and power on results in white screen with mouse

Now that an external boot recovery or internal recovery is out of the question, you have two options.

Try Internet recovery. Boot with option + command + R held
Take this Mac to another Mac, use disk utility and run an installer over target disk mode
Find another Mac to make a recovery USB drive or bootable installer. Recovery is smaller and does less. Installer is larger and does everything the recovery does plus has the install package to reinstall the os.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372 - bootable installer
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202294 - recovery assistant

Internet recovery doesn't work on all older Mac hardware. Some protected wifi  / fire walled networks prevent internet recovery. It works in most home and public wifi situations quite well. Try that first.

Target disk  varies depending on what specific Mac you have. Some work over USB, some work over FireWire, some work over thunderbolt, some work over more than one of the above.

The option of just making a bootable installer or a bootable recovery USB drive will always work assuming you pick the right version of macOS for your specific Mac.


Where does iPhone store information about current battery percentage?

All of the battery and power usage information (including approximately how much power applications and certain system processes use over time) is stored in /var/mobile/Library/BatteryLife/CurrentPowerlog.PLSQL and /var/mobile/Library/BatteryLife/Archives/powerlog_*.PLSQL. This data is both used to aid in the calculation of battery percentage and to unmask power-hungry applications.

Apple's algorithm for battery percentage is based on a number of factors: the maximum capacity of the battery (known based on the battery that the iOS device was manufactured with), the remaining capacity of the battery (calculated based on Voltage), power usage over time (stored in CurrentPowerlog), and current power usage (calculated based on draw). This data is all put together to extrapolate an estimated remaining capacity which iOS displays as the battery percentage.

When the iOS device is in a different mode other than iOS (such as DFU Mode or Recovery Mode), it does not store or read any information from the CurrentPowerlog database; it uses the direct method of determining the capacity of its Lithium-Ion battery: simply the Voltage that the battery is currently outputting. Take a look at a Voltage over time chart for Li-Ion batteries, and you may wish to read more information about determining capacities for Li-Ion batteries.


I've manually copied files from my time machine backup drive and now I cannot delete them from my computer

I've sorted it out. First, you need to look at the ACLs that got copied along with the files.

ls -le /path/to/dir

Once you've done that you can see that everything had this:

0: group:everyone deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

So, what I did was add a new ACL policy to the directory by doing this:

chmod -R +a "admin allow read,readattr,readextattr,readsecurity" dir

Followed by:

sudo rm -rf dir


New photos added to iPhoto aren't available for creating books

I have always had to place new photos into my project to be able to use them.  Once I do they are listed among the available options in the Keepsakes editing screen.

To do this:

Select photos you want to use.
Drag and drop into your project shown in the left column under "Keepsakes".
Open your project.

Voilà! They should show up as options for use in your book.


How can I mark an arbitrary file as Restricted (using SIP)?

You'll need to first disable SIP temporarily by booting up in Recovery mode (or any similar means).

Then either add the extended file attribute com.apple.rootless to the file, you want to protect - or add it to /System/Library/Security/rootless.conf.

After you reboot into ordinary macOS, the file should be restricted by SIP.


How does Airplay from iCloud actually work?

Found this unofficial item:

  Today’s update also brought AirPlay From iCloud, which lets guests
  stream their purchased music, photos, and videos stored in iCloud to
  another person’s Apple TV. If you bought World War Z on iTunes, you
  can now go to a friend’s house with an Apple TV and watch it there
  without having to log into their Home Sharing account or store it on
  your phone. It’s all streamed from iCloud.

So, I guess you browse the iTunes store (or maybe the Videos app) on your phone, select something you bought, tell it to start playing, and then AirPlay it over to your friend's ATV.  Or your own ATV, I guess, although it would seem easier to play it on your own ATV using the ATV menu itself.


Programmatically 'auto hide menubar' in El capitan

Here's how you can set the menubar to be hidden and unhidden using defaults:

To hide:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain _HIHideMenuBar -bool true

To show:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain _HIHideMenuBar -bool false

Once run, logout and log back in. Alternatively, you can run the following command as the logged-in user to restart Finder and show the changes:

killall Finder


Change channel in Airport Express when extending network

You've identified the big problem with WiFi backhaul. You have to have both radios on the same channel and half the time the radios are sending traffic between each other and the other half talking to clients.

Since wifi is half duplex and everyone has to wait for the last person to finish talking before the next can speak - you run into serious limitation once you're at the 10 to 30 client number.

For almost all cases where you want channel diversity - run a wire so that your backhaul is over power line / ethernet / coax cable - anything but WiFi will make your network so much faster and easier to manage.

For corporate settings, you almost need a third radio dedicated to the backhaul to make most mesh networks work best or bite the bullet and run wired backhaul there as well. Normally power over ethernet means wired backhaul is doable for large deployments as well as for small home / office situations.


There is no built-in support for disabling specific apps on iOS. However, there is a specific software for this (and costs $$$), but requires jailbreaking.

Currently the best way to jailbreak an iPad 2 is through JailbreakMe. It is really simple, just launch it in Safari and follow the steps.

After installing, launch Cydia. Navigate to the Cydia Store and purchase iProtect. After purchasing and activating it you should be able to "lock" your individual apps, such as the Photos application.


Why were my notes deleted when I permanently deleted emails on gmail site

If you were syncing your Notes via your Gmail account (and not via iCloud) then Gmail treats them like a plain text email. If you delete your email, then you also deleted the notes.

Restoring from backup is your only bet - either a Time Machine backup or by recovering lost email.


Printing from a remote windows computer on a printer connected to a MacBook Air

Go to System Preferences on the mac, click on the sharing icon under Internet and Wireless. Highlight Printer Sharing and select the printer from the Printers: check box. Make sure Users "Everyone" is set to "Can Print"

You should be able to see the share from the other computer.


With iOS6, the WiFi will drop when the iPad is put to sleep (via power button or closing the smart cover).  When you wake it up, it should automatically reconnect to the WiFi.  However depending on the WiFi environment (many WiFi networks to choose from, a slow/overloaded WiFi router, etc), this could take a few seconds.

If it isn't automatically reconnecting, go into the Settings>WiFi screen and choose your WiFi network.  If it is already checked, click the > on the right and choose to forget that network.  Then you can go back and set it again.