Mystery IP cache problem one macbook all accounts all browsers

Solved, and obvious in hindsight:  there was an entry for her site in /etc/hosts.  Sister knows nothing about hostfiles and has no memory of editing it, but provider not so helpfully advises people to edit /etc/hosts to preview Wordpress ahead of domain transfers, and doesn't bother to warn them to clean up after, so we assume that's what happened.


I accidentally removed way too many files with `rm -rf`. Anyway to recover?

What you do need to do is stop using that drive until you have sourced your recovery software of choice. Every file you write increases the chances of total loss.

You need something that can scavenge the actual data still on the drive itself & hopefully recognise enough contiguous data that it can recover the files - hence anything that writes to the drive, including even booting from it, will lessen the chances of success.
You cannot, of course, use the same drive to recover to - you would be overwriting what you are trying to rescue.

Something like maybe Data Rescue or Disk Drill specialise in this type of recovery . The trouble with having done rm -rf is your files never even went through the trash, they went straight to data heaven, so a scavenger is your only hope, I think.


What is the most classic keyboard shortcut for switching between input sources (languages)?

If you want your shortcut don't interfere with spotlight you can use option + cmd + space or something else.

but as you said cmd + space is really good as myself use this and replace control + space for spotlight, and use option + space for QuickSilver.


If your archive comes with recovery files(.rev) you can regenerate missing or broken parts.

I use command line version of rar for this.
Just execute this command: rar e archive-name.r01. This will extract from all the parts and rebuild the broken ones.

Instead if you don't have rev files you can't do nothing. You can't just skip.


One thing to check is that your desktop volume control is actually connected to the device whose volume you're trying to control. In Lion, Alt+clicking the volume icon allows you to switch its function (and that of the keyboard shortcuts) between all connected output and input devices, plus any software devices such as Soundflower or Boom that might be running. I do find that it occasionally gets confused when plugging/unplugging devices, although not usually with simple headphones/speakers.


Ukelele should be able to kind of do this by making 4 a "deadkey" that generates the uppercase letter for any key typed after it, unless there is a limit on the number of keys you can have in such a sequence.  (Just like alt + e is a deadkey that generates acute accented versions of any vowel typed after it)

Of course this is not exactly like Shift, because you can't hold it down, you have let 4 go before you hit the next letter.


Macbook Pro 2009 15” Recovery mode non existant os x 10.5.8

If you have another mac, donwload High Sierra, which is the newest version compatible with 2009 iMacs, create a bootable disk and follow Apple's instructions on how to reinstall macOS.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208969


Can I get Command-H to hide an Emacs window?

If emacs is built with Cocoa (e.g via brew install emacs --cocoa), by default s-h (Cmd+h) should be bound to ns-do-hide-emacs

If somehow it is not, you can do this manually with:

(global-set-key [(super h)] 'ns-do-hide-emacs)


Customizing Finder like Windows File Explorer

Go to List View.
Control-click on the bar that says "Name  Date Modified  Size  " etc.
Uncheck all the fields (Date modified, Size, Kind, etc.)

You should now have long filenames and expandable folders.


How do you lengthen the amount of time that Time Machine keeps hourly backups?

The answer is this isn't easily done. Apple doesn't expose the timing which means it's likely to change if you apply any updates to the system or the change might even break backups so they don't run.

I've left a comment asking about the use case. I've employed scripts to get around this in several cases for customers, but I'd need to know more about your actual use case before providing an alternate solution that would work even with the default Time Machine scheduling.


Press both the sleep/wake and the home button simultaneously, and release quickly. The screenshot will be taken (in any app) and saved as an image, available within the Photos app.


I've been working on the same issue and I just found something that worked.

Once you've created your playlist of voice memos and converted them into the AAC format, then sync your iphone/ipod.

To listen to the voice memo's in shuffle: go into your music app and click artists. All your voice memo's will be under one artist and click shuffle.


Is there a way for registering iWork apps on App Store?

No, I'll link to some of the questions that cover this. The App Store version is sold and licensed differently than the version licensed online.

Do I have to repurchase Apple apps through the Mac App Store to get updates there?
Is there any reason to buy the iWork bundle instead of the apps separately from the App Store?
Can I update apps that I've already purchased through the Mac App Store?


Does Apple tailor iOS software in any way for specific regions?

To my knowledge so far the only differences in iOS that depend on the country are a) Facetime is omitted at governmental request in certain countries, and b) at present, 10-key/T9 screen keyboards are only available on devices bought in China and Korea.


What hardware needed for multiple monitors (3) on a 2009 MacBook Pro 5,5 with displayport (NVIDIA GeForce 9400M video card)

A new product has been announced today about this. On the Windows side, the Matrox DualHead/TripleHead were common, but not available for Mac.

That has recently changed because Matrox Introduces New Mac-Friendly DualHead2Go DP and TripleHead2Go DP Multi-Monitor Adapters.


Settings for CalendarAgent, Mingler and iCalExternalSync services

It's a bit of a workaround, but these unload commands seem to do the trick. I put them in a script that I run when I need more of my CPU:

#!/bin/bash
launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.AddressBook.SourceSync.plist
launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.CalendarAgent.plist
launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.syncdefaultsd.plist

For when processes are acceptable, replace "unload" with "load"


Question about printer repairing permissions

Fixing permissions simply means that macOS is going through it's files and ensuring that all the files have the correct ownership and permissions (to read/write/execute).

For more detailed explanation on permissions, have a look at this article.

Usually, when something isn't working right, "fixing permissions" solves the problem because the system process that handles the operation (like printing) didn't have the permissions to access the necessary files.

In your case, it sounds like you have the wrong printer driver.


How to Change Hyperlink Color in macOS Notes

As someone who's done a lot of UX (user experience) work over the years, I have to admit I was very surprised when I first saw the hyperlink colour in Apple's Notes app. Not so surprised that someone would actually propose it, but very surprised it passed through all the review processes at Apple.

Anyway, I do have a couple of workaround options that may help you until Apple addresses this, as I fully expect they will at some point. These options are far from perfect, but if the default hyperlink colour is enough of an issue, they are worth considering.

Hyperlinks displaying the actual URL

If your hyperlink text displays the actual URL (e.g. "apple.stackexchange.com" instead of "Ask Different") you can do this:

Right-click on the yellow link
From the context menu, select Remove Link

You will notice that the link text now changes to black* and the actual link no longer activates by just clicking on it. However, you can still use it as a hyperlink by selecting it (just double-click) and then right-clicking to select the Open URL option from the context menu. If you prefer, you can also change the text colour to something you prefer.

*If the URL is a full URL (i.e. it starts with http: etc), then you will need to manually change the text colour from the default yellow after removing the link.

Hyperlinks displaying words

If your hyperlink text displays words instead of an actual URL (e.g. "Ask Different" instead of "apple.stackexchange.com") you can do this:

Right-click on the yellow link
From the context menu, select Edit Link...
This will open up the Link Destination window with the full URL already selected. Copy (commandC) or cut (commandX) the link and click on the OK button.
In your note, Paste (commandV) the URL over the original hyperlink text
Right-click on what is still a yellow link
From the context menu, select Remove Link

Once again you will notice that the link text now changes to black* and the actual link no longer activates by just clicking on it. However, you can still use it as a hyperlink by selecting it (just double-click) and then right-clicking to select the Open URL option from the context menu. If you prefer, you can also change the text colour to something you prefer.

*If the URL is a full URL (i.e. it starts with http: etc), then you will need to manually change the text colour from the default yellow after removing the link.


What's a good tool to jailbreak iPad mini?

I'd use evasi0n - it is fully compatible with the iOS 6 and hence the iPad Mini. The process if fully automatic. More about how to jailbreak here: How to jailbreak iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS6?


Is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) safe to be used as a developer instead of the Case-sensitive type?

Will this case-insensitive partition give me any problems in the future?

No. You should be fine.

In the default installation mode, the disk is formatted with case-insensitive filesystem (true for older OS releases before APFS). All the developer tools will continue to work fine without any issues. (I'd go ahead and state that the majority of folks run a Mac with this default case-insensitive format).

I have personally seen apps (Photoshop, Steam) not working with case-sensitive filesystem and hence have abstained from using it. (I once formatted the drive on my MacBook with case-sensitive filesystem, sharing similar concern as yours.)


I believe that you don’t consider Deferrersender (web based) to be decent. It’s not, but it delivers.

UPDATE: An alternative, that doesn’t use Mail.app (but Thunderbird) would be to use SendLater. An extension that does exactly that. But it’s for Thunderbird. I couldn’t find a similar plug-in for Mail.app.


How to choose which connection to use for SSH

The answer is :

ssh -b bind_address_of_wifi_ip ......


Go to
App Store > Updates > Purchased > Not on this Phone. Anything you 'bought' but didn't download or later discarded should be there, with a cloud symbol & down arrow.


`brew install openvpn` vs. Tunnelblick for OpenVPN client

According to it's official website:

  Tunnelblick is a free, open source graphic user interface

When I used Tunnelblick, it worked flowlessly with MacOS. So I would recommend to go forward to run:

brew cask install tunnelblick

When you choose a software for Mac, if it's included in home brew or home brew cask package list or not is one point to consider. See if it's useful enough or popular enough to be a brew package.


Is it possible to select which version of Swift to use in Xcode?

You have to migrate all your code to Swift 1.2 if you're using Xcode 6.3.  If you go to Edit > Convert > To Latest Swift Syntax, it will help find many of the changes.  However, there's still a lot of manual editing to do.

In the long run, it will serve you better to keep your Swift code at the latest version so that future migrations are easier and so that you can take advantage of future enhancements to the language.


Why are dot underscore ._ files created, and how can I avoid them?

You can't avoid them (but see the dot_clean answer by Saeid Zebardast --they can be removed from a directory if that is what you need).  They're created to store file information that would otherwise go into an extended attribute on HFS+ (Apple native) or Unix/UFS volumes; in earlier Mac OS this would be the resource fork.  Finder file operations will create them automatically to store the icon information, plus Time Machine stores some information in them so if you copy a file backed up via TM it will have that information copied as well.

(This is nothing new; I've noticed that XP and later leave various turds around as well, although not quite as many.)


Is Xcode not what you're looking for ? It's the Mac OS X IDE. It'sn't installed by default, but is present on your Mac OS X DVD.


iOS and Objective-C Training in Melbourne

Check out an iOS/iPhone Developer Training (Melbourne/Sydney) by jTribe

Schedule:

  DAY ONE: Introduction to iPhone Development and the Objective-C
  Language On day one we start with Objective-C and will cover
  everything needed to start building iPhone applications. We will  dive
  straight into the core Objective-C syntax and constructs, use of Xcode
  as a development tool, the Foundation  framework, how to build your
  own Objective-C classes, properties and methods, a thorough
  explanation of memory  management issues on the iPhone and will use
  Xcode and GDB to debug an iPhone app.
  DAY TWO: Building a basic iPhone
  application, using Interface Builder, Views, View Controllers & Table
  Views Day two starts with the build of a complete iPhone app. We then
  look in depth into views, the iPhone view hierarchy,  the concept of
  delegates, Interface Builder and view controllers. We look in more
  detail into table views, navigation  and navigation controllers and
  learn techniques to ensure that our app can scale in the real world.
  DAY THREE: Application Navigation, Animation and Multi Touch,
  Deployment, Provisioning Profiles and the App  Store. On day three we
  look at image handling, resources and how to create those beautiful
  custom table cells. We  then go on to interacting with web services
  and building our very own Twitter client before we take a deeper look
  at  the development and deployment process, iTunes connect, the App
  Store and marketing


How do I make my Mac speakers sound like iPad 2 speakers?

Depending on your budget, I would use something like Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack 3 to process the sound output and model the speakers of the iPad.

If you have extra budget, you'll want to record in a acoustically quiet room some songs and test tone generators out of the actual iPad speakers (and maybe sample several devices to see how much variation is present in the iPad line). Use a high quality microphone if possible for this.

You'll have issues correcting for the Mac speakers though and should probably invest in some good powered studios monitors or headphones if you really want to hear what the iPad would sound like.

If you don't have decent audio analysis software, you might want to look at something like Spectre

p.s. FWIW - My MacBook 2015 (40% volume) sounds about the same as my iPad Air 2 (90% volume) and passing the MacBook audio through the AUBandpass filter. Configure the bandpass to be centered around 2 kHz and a width of 5000 cents.


Mobile Safari requires external Javascript from another domain which is blocked or failed to load

Turning on the Developer Toolbar showed lots of JavaScript errors, specifically:

undefined, typeerror, can't find variable $

This indicates that $, the "root" variable for jQuery was not set and therefore jQuery was not loaded.

Further, the error ajax.googleapis....ery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js - syntaxerror - parse error showed that the cached version of the jQuery library was corrupted and this is the reson why jQuery's $ was not loaded.

Force quitting Safari and clearing the cache again resolved the issue.


Skipping .DS_Store files when copying between two external drives

Try rsync -rv --exclude=.DS_Store <source> <destination> from terminal.

for example

rsync -rv --exclude=.DS_Store ~/Documents /Volumes/Backup/Documents

will do:

(-r) recursive (copy everything below ~/Documents)
(-v) verbose (tell you what it's doing)
(--exclude) excluding any file named .DS_Store
from ~/Documents
to  /Volumes/Backup/Documents

rsync is like a suped up cp command with way more options, most specifically --exclude


This is the inverse of this solution on superuser.

The easiest way is to use a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner, clone the volume to an external drive, format your drive as case sensitive and restore it back. As this inverse question "Can CCC backup a case sensitive volume and restore to a case insensitive volume?" and answer on the CCC forums describes:

  Yes, that should work fine. I just did a quick "backup bouncer" test with this scenario (10.6.2) and it worked great. The only potential issue is if you had some items with the same name, differing only in case, in the same directory. Only one of them would be copied over to the case-insensitive filesystem. For example:

  /Users/david/Desktop/Files
  /Users/david/Desktop/files

  You could have both those folders on a case sensitive filesystem, but the last item to be copied to a case insensitive filesystem would overwrite the previous item with the same name, different case. I really doubt that you've created such a scenario yourself, and the OS certainly doesn't do it for the standard installation, so I would be too concerned about this. Clone away, it should work great.

  Mike

The other solution is to experiment with this older HFS Converter tool. Have a backup before you attempt this.


What is this olympic icon in the iPhone status bar?

Changing the iOS carrier name/logo is possible using external tools on your mac or on the iPhone, if the iPhone is jailbroken. There is no indication that this iPhone is related to the olympics at all. Changing the carrier logo is relatively easy.

To change the carrier to a logo using a mac on a non jailbroken iPhone, use the following tool: http://uhelios.com/downloads/.

To change the carrier on a jailbroken phone, use the tool Zeppelin. A how to can be found here: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2013/12/change-iphone-carrier-logo-ios-7-zeppelin.html.


Do you get notifications for new email from your other Gmail accounts?

I just tested with two Gmail accounts I use. On my computer, I sent a message from account #1 to account #2, waited until I heard the tone on my iPhone and saw the notification on the screen, then sent an email from account #2 to account #1. Both times I heard the tone and got a lock-screen popup.
In Settings > Gmail I have this configuration:


how to force sync of calendars on iPhone?

In iOS 7 and later:

Open Calendar app
Click Calendars
Drag down to refresh


Can I run a virtualized OS X operating system (bought on eBay) on my PC via VMware Player

Actually, it's a complicated little issue. While it isn't supported by Apple's Terms and Agreement, it is possible to run Mac OS X in VMware. However, you would need an unlocker of some sort, that provides a copy of Darwin.iso, and a few other tools for debugging and overall performance on virtual hardware. From there, you would then need to modify VMware as well (also done via an unlocker), seeing that it doesn't support Apple software by default. It's also noted that using an AMD cpu/apu will require additional kexts and verbose-mode commands during boot-time to run properly. When this is all handled, you should be able to run almost any version of Mac OS X, as demonstrated here (in fact, I'm currently using this vm on an Intel Core i5 to post this answer online - for testing purposes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-r8CvCnen4

In fact, this exact video uses VMware Player. I haven't gotten this to work for Workstation 12 (after weeks of debugging and trial-and-error), so I would assume that there is a compatibility issue with Workstation in the current version.

WARNING: I do not endorse the misuse of Apple products. I am simply answering a question from knowledge and experience, to correct a widely-supported assumption that is untrue.

As such, yes - it is possible. But NO, you should not do this for anything beyond testing purposes (even if it is FREE with an AppleID).


I believe this is a feature. Depending on what automation you do, you may need to have it run in the HomeKit controller so it triggers from a device that is running and cleared for background tasks.
You can certainly report it to Apple as a bug, but everything I see from power management, automations are designed to be user triggered or relevant to the device in a near term sleep state, not that it wakes itself up and runs work in the background.
I would expect it to run once you wake the device after 6 am, though. That would be worth a bug if the task never triggers.
I’ve had an automation run each day for a week, so I’m not so sure this is a bug at all in iOS 14.


Decrypting Login Keychain encrypted with smartcard

If you performed your initial login and profile setup using your "smartcard" then your login keychain password will be your PIN.

If you find this is not the case (& no passwords you enter work either), you may just have to trash your login keychain by deleting the login.keychain & login.keychain-db files from ~/Library/Keychains, restarting, logging in again with your "smartcard" & PIN to create a new login keychain, the password for which will then be the same as your PIN.


How to get rid of a standard user in my accounts on Mac?

System Preferences > Users & Groups

select the user in the list on the left.  Click the minus sign at the bottom of the list.

If the preference pane is locked (see lock icon and text in lower left corner) you will need to unlock the pane before you can make changes.


Based on the message saying that your Entourage database is corrupt and needs to be rebuilt, I have to guess that your Entourage database is corrupt and recommend that you rebuild it.

As the saying goes, "Garbage in, garbage out."

Here are the directions on how to rebuild your Entourage database.


App Store won't update iTunes; inconsistent with iWork

I just solved this on my Macbook Pro 15" Retina (Intel Iris, late 2013) by downloading iTunes from Apple's website and installing 11.1.2 that way. Now the App Store shows everything as up to date.


The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition

Yes, collaps the second partition into the OSX partition. After that you have one partition.
Then use Bootcamp to Partition/install Windows


Big Sur bootable installer cannot be created or corrupted after creation

I ran into a similar issue when trying to create a bootable installer for Big Sur as well. I found this page to be helpful:
https://mrmacintosh.com/big-sur-installation-failed-an-error-occurred-while-installing-the-selected-updates/
Basically you open Safari and access this URL to directly download the installer:
http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/50/49/001-79699-A_93OMDU5KFG/dkjnjkq9eax1n2wpf8rik5agns2z43ikqu/InstallAssistant.pkg
For me, it would pause every minute or so, but I just kept clicking resume and eventually I had downloaded the whole thing, and I was able to generate a working bootable installer that has worked on at least 2 macs for me.


Changing my administrator user's username has removed privileges

If it's not already, make sure your Mac mini has an up-to-date backup.

Then follow these steps:

Shut down your Mac mini
Power up your Mac mini and immediately press and hold the command + S keys
Keep the keys down until you see text on the screen
Now enter the following command:

/sbin/fsck -fy

and press enter
Next enter the following command:

/sbin/mount -uw /

and press enter
Now enter the following command:

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

and press enter
Finally, enter the reboot command

and press enter

Your Mac mini should reboot and you can log in normally, after which point the Setup Assistant will launch. Now you need to create a new admin user. Don't worry, your other user accounts should be intact.  NOTE: You should choose a new user name for this admin account.

Once you're back up and running you can go to Apple > System Preferences > Users & Groups and select the Allow user to administer this computer checkbox for the 'grant' user.


How can I disassociate a single app (e.g., Xcode) from all file types it's mapped to?

You could delete the CFBundleDocumentTypes array in the Info.plist, but it is also used to define file types like xcodeproj. It would also invalidate the code signature (so you'd have to enter a password to access keychains), and the changes might get overridden by updates. Some applications like TextEdit crash on launch if the Info.plist is modified.

To update the Launch Services database, run /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -R -f /Applications/Application.app/.

You could also unregister the application by running lsregister -u -R -f /Applications/Application.app/, but I don't know if it would get registered again at some point. It would also remove the icons of file types defined by the application.

If you are looking for a faster way to change default applications, take a look at duti. I have published my configuration file (which includes common code and video file types) here.


How do I remove the 'Quit' action from an application on OSX

In system preferences you can go to keyboard/shortcuts.

 In the list on the left side click: app shortcuts and create a new shortcut.
Pick Wunderlist and for menu item pick stop or close wunderlist just type it exactly like it is typed in the menu in wunderlist.
in the last field put a custom key code and save.
Like I did for safari
this should do the trick


Run Terminal Command from .terminal file

In the .terminal file, RunCommandAsShell should not be set to <true/>.

This correlates to the "Run inside shell" checkbox in the "Shell" section of the preference window; which is more intuitively named.

When the preference is not selected (RunCommandAsShell is true), then the default shell is replaced with whatever command you've used.  If the preference is selected (RunCommandAsShell is either false or not listed in the .terminal file), then the command is run after the default shell is loaded for that Terminal window/tab.


How do you do command-line video screen capture on OS X with libav?

I found a solution that works really well. You're able to record with ffmpeg using an input device called avfoundation.

Details
More options
ffmpeg options

Here is an example command-line:

ffmpeg -f avfoundation -pix_fmt yuyv422 -i "1:1" -t 10 -vf crop=1280:720:1:65 -r 30 output.mkv

You may or may not get asked to specify -pix_fmt when this option is not included; it might be worth trying other formats to see if you get better performance.
As explained in the details link, -i selects both video and audio input. If you want to capture audio playing on your computer, you'll need something like iShowU Audio Capture.

To get that to work, you'll need to press Option + F11, select iShowU Audio Capture as an input device and as an output device. You'll notice that once you select it as an output device that you can no longer hear the audio yourself through your speakers or headphones.

A quick fix is opening Audio MIDI Setup, create a Multi-Output Device and adding iShowU Audio Capture and your normal output device. Select this new Multi-Output device in your sound outputs and there ya go, you can now hear the audio and have it captured.

Unfortunately you aren't able to control the audio levels now...if someone knows a solution to this please let me know.
-t is the time in seconds to record.
-vf is very useful for cropping and offsetting. The current setting is cropped to 1280 width 720 height, offsetting 1 pixel to the left and 65 pixels from the top. You'll need to use a third party tool to get exact pixel measurements of your screen.
-r is framerate.


What software extends quicktime to support codecs as an alternative to Perian?

If even Perian themselves do not suggest anything that has QuickTime integration — they should know — I assume you are out of luck. I miss Perian, too, but have made the switch to Zongyao Qu’s MPlayerX, which is current, useful and pretty (not the Sourceforge flavor!) …


Safari: Any way to initiate pinch-to-zoom without trackpad?

My mouse has a scroll wheel as its middle button.
For zoom out or in I can use command with scroll up or down.

I don't remember if that was the default behavior, or I selected it at some past time.

This is set at:

System Preferences > Accessibility > Zoom


How do I install Mavericks onto external HD but from inside VirtualBox

First make sure your external HD is attached. Then find out what device node your HD is. In your case it's /dev/disk2. Umount it with

diskutil umountDisk disk2

and wait until it disappeared from Finder. Change the owner of the device node to your user:

sudo chown `whoami` /dev/disk2

Then create the vmdk:

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/disk2.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk2

Right then attach it to your VM and start it. If you unplug the drive, the ownership and permissions get reset, so you'll have to do the chown step again.


iMac shut down due to power outage; started working after a few hours

Once power came it is not starting but when I tried after few hours it started.

Switching power supplies have a re-settable fuse that will trip if there is a power surge and reset itself after some time or if you remove the power cord and hold the power button to dissipate any remaining charge in the circuits.  So, the symptoms you describe are very much in line with how these circuits work.  They cut off current for a period of time and then reset themselves so your power supply works again.
When you have a power outage, it is very common for the power to come back with a power surge (also known as a voltage spike).  This fuse is built into the power supply to protect it from surges like this.
That said, I wouldn't depend on it as it's not designed to absorb higher spikes like those that come from lightning strikes - get a quality power surge protector (not a power strip, but an actual surge protector (they are significantly more expensive than a power strip).
Resetting the NVRAM or SMC will not have any effect.  The NVRAM only holds pre-boot environment variables and the SMC doesn't control this fuse.  For the SMC to function, you need to have power (3 VDC), if the power was cut off (like the fuse did), the SMC is in an off state and won't respond to anything.


chflags nohidden not unhiding hidden files

Once I copied files via terminal from an iPod to a Mac and somehow they appeared hidden, chflags nohidden <filename> did not work, neither the same command with different option flags. Finally, I found this answer which worked fine. So:

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo <filename>
chflags nohidden <filename>
killall Finder (just in case)

I did it using * so I did not have to go one by one.
Hope it helps,


If you want to custom name the combined PDF files, then add a Rename Finder Items action between the Combine PDF Pages action and the Move Finder Items action, with the Options set to checking the Show this action when the workflow runs check box. Set the Rename Finder Items action to Name Single Item and Name: Basename only to: [], where [] is and empty text box.

Note: When first added, the Rename Finder Items action shows as Rename Finder Items however, once you select Name Single Item in the first pop-up list box it changes the name of the action to Name Single Item.

The reason I suggest setting Name: Basename only to: [] is the .pdf extension is added automatically when the document is saved, so there is no need to type it.

That said, I was able to reproduce the issue of double pages when using the above workflow as an application See mu Update: note below for the explanation. Another way to do it, without running as a workflow from within Automator, is to create it as an Automator Service workflow as show below:

This is then available in Finder from the Finder > Services menu or the Services context menu when selecting PDF files and right-click or control-click the selected files.

Update: The cause of the double pages when used as an application with your original actions is because of Application receives files and folders as input, which already receives the selected files and by adding a
Get Selected Finder Items action it is passing the selected files again and hence double the number of pages. If you want to use it as an application just remove the Get Selected Finder Items action from your original workflow.


How to permanently disable "reopen windows"?

Just disable the corresponding checkbox in the "regular" shutdown dialog (hold the power button for a few seconds). The setting is carried over to the auto-shutdown dialog.


From here:

Mac to Mac screen sharing, using the username/password, is done in a secure manner.
Using a VNC client and the "VNC viewers may control screen with password" is not secure.


Batch edit ID3 music tags using custom algorithm

A Combination of AppleScript (or Shell Scripting if you are so inclined), along with a command line tool like id3v2 should do the trick.

You can build id3v2 from source:
http://id3v2.sourceforge.net
Or use MacPorts or HomeBrew to do the building and installation for you.

Once you have it installed you can view the help page by typing in "id3v2 ah" from the terminal. The help page is more helpful than the man page is.

Then it is just a matter of writing the AppleScript to pass the filenames into variables and use those variables on the command line script like such:

set shellScript to ("id3v2 -T " & trackNumber & space & numberofTracks & space & "/path/to/file") as string
do shell script shellScript

You may also want to think about changing the name of the file itself so that it no longer has the track number in the name!

I hope this can get you started!


Hard link '~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs' to ~/iCloud

ln(1) on OS X does not support folder hard links. A symlink would work fine instead.

ln -s /Users/Rowan/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Documents /Users/Rowan/iCloud

If you really want a hard link, you can install coreutils with Homebrew and use

gln -d /Users/Rowan/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Documents /Users/Rowan/iCloud


Add a custom dictionary to manageable dictionaries?

I'll answer but with a question at the end.
First of all you need jail broken device or any other way to access system files.
On your browser press on some word and select 'define' then 'manage'
Install some other dictionary and then you need file system access to navigate to:
/var/mobile/Library/Assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_DictionaryServices_dictionary2

There you will see several folders, enter inside and then once again inside assetdata folder, there you will see name of the dictionary that you installed previously. Enter inside that folder and then inside 'contents'.
Basically this is the folder of the dictionary and all the data.

Now on your pc search on the net for OS X dictionary files (they will be in zip file) extract from that file only the files of 'contents' folder and replace the files on your mobile idevice.

I did it to add Hebrew language dictionary.


How to determine reason for SSH broken pipe

Check for local keep alive settings on your mac. These were mine...:

sysctl -a | grep tcp.keep
net.inet.tcp.keepidle: 3600
net.inet.tcp.keepintvl: 150
net.inet.tcp.keepinit: 75000
net.inet.tcp.keepcnt: 8

I needed to change the keepintvl setting to some higher value:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.keepintvl=7500

Then the ssh "write failed: Broken pipe" error messages vanished.


Activate Application Window on clicking dock icon

No, there is not. Expose is built in to the core of OS X. You cannot replace it, but you can turn it off in the System Preferences. As far as I know there is no third party Expose for OS X.

Ubuntu is probably using a similar version of expose used in earlier versions of OS X. Most operating systems implemented such a thing a few years after the first time OS X was published with that functionality. It changed over the years (and is now mostly taken over by Mission Control), but the ones used in other operating systems might not have taken the same path.


You have a solid troubleshooting technique, so I'd agree the adapter, or the VGA cable are  likely culprits. Sometimes it's as easy as the cable not sitting well in the connector, and that could mean it connects the necessary pins for detection/sync but not for actual display.

One other thing I could think of is if the monitor has a source selector, i e if it has multiple inputs for VGA/DVI etc, and the right one isn't chosen. That's probably not the case though as you say it responds to resolution change.


How to get pass "Downloading Windows support software" in Boot Camp Assistant?

The problem got solved by formatting the disk.

I formatted the disk first in FAT format. Then the Boot Camp Assistant worked easily.


Black screen after login with user and password in MacBook Pro

If your computer works fine in Safe Mode that's an indication that maybe an extension or a startup item may be the culprit. If you've loaded a new extension try removing it and restarting and see if that works. After that, remove all startup items by going to System Preferences/Users & Groups and clicking on the Login Items tab at the top of the panel. Now select each startup item and remove each one by clicking on the minus sign under the app's part of the panel. After removing all login items, restart the machine in regular mode and see if it works.

If it works fine after removing the login items you can put them back one at a time and see which one causes your problem.


You can't simply install Ubuntu on your internal drive, because Apple's EFI and GRUB (the bootloader) don't get along.

You will also need an EFI bootloader, like rEFInd (a fork of rEFIt):

  rEFIt is a boot menu and maintenance toolkit for EFI-based machines like the Intel Macs. You can use it to boot multiple operating systems easily, including triple-boot setups with Boot Camp. It also provides an easy way to enter and explore the EFI pre-boot environment. Source: The rEFIt Project


Reset custom Mail UserHeaders settings in Terminal

To remove all customisations to UserHeaders, use the delete verb in your defaults command:

defaults delete com.apple.mail UserHeaders

To replace the single Reply-To value with a blank entry, use:

defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Reply-To" = ""; }'

The defaults manual page explains other available verbs.


Restore Downloads icon to Finder Sidebar

Even though what you need is very little, there seems to be no easy workaround except for the SIMBL plugin:

How can I change Finder's sidebar icons in OS X El Capitan?

As an experiment I uploaded my downloads folder to google drive. You can try downloading it and see if it works:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1U3dY4N_ZDLtnq93yoKVYVi4F5WqBaa8i?usp=sharing


Submitting job to launchd gives error "no plist returned", "nothing found to load"

That error is usually shown when there is a syntax error when checking with plist command.

In this case:

label should be Label,
and:

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Aple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN">

should be:

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">


Internet Sharing on Mountain Lion not working

I fixed it! What wound up working for me was going to the Network prefpane, deleting the Ethernet and Wi-Fi interfaces, and re-creating them.


Log in and out of iTunes account on separate computer

Yes, it's possible, but it takes quite a long time. The simplest way would be to enable iTunes Match on your own computer, and then sign in to the other computer. Another way would be to backup the com.apple.iTunes.plist file in your ~/Library/Preferences directory to an external hard disk, along with the ~/Music/iTunes folder. Then, on the other person's computer, move their com.apple.iTunes.plist file to a safe place (desktop, etc) and copy your com.apple.iTunes.plist file to their Preferences folder (see path above). Then, repeat the process for the iTunes folder in their Music folder.

It's complicated, but it works well for me.

P.S. Don't forget to replace the original person's files.


Review site specifically for Apple products?

Do you mean reviews of Apple-produced (and only Apple-produced) hardware and software? Or reviews of software and accessories by anyone for Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, etc.?

If the latter, there's always Macworld's review section.

If the former, you could combine the RSS feeds for Macworld's Mac reviews + iPod review + iPhone reviews + iPad reviews, I guess.


Can't type ' / ' (slash) after the letter ' l ' (ell) in Terminal, makes 'l' with stroke character 'ł'

This looks like the behavior of some very old Mac fonts (Palatino was one of them) where you could make the character l with stroke (used in Polish and elsewhere) by typing such a sequence.  Try changing your font.  If this is in fact the cause of the problem,  you should get rid of the font that does this, which should not be on any modern mac.


Macbook sees Japanese keyboard instead of native US English

It sounds like your machine is not recognizing the "keyboard type" correctly, thinking you have a JIS (or ISO) type instead of ANSI.   See this article for some suggestions on fixing it:

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2009/12/fixing-keyboard-type-problems.html


Mac mail shows thousands of incoming emails in Activity

If you've just set up Mail, it will attempt to download all the mail that it can find from your mail server. This can't be configured in Mail, only in the mail server/provider's settings.

For gmail - set IMAP sync off for just about all your mailboxes to let one sync start. Once you have a clean sync - then re-enable IMAP sync for the others.

Keep in mind, your Mac will download every mail that google has locally if you don’t prune the list or disable sync for things like archive folders, etc...


Some keyboard keys are not working on login to Yosemite

On the Yosemite login screen, you should see the current Input Method (keyboard) icon in the upper right corner.

If you click on the current input method, a drop-down menu will let you choose which alternate keyboard you can use. That should let you enter it in.

If your keyboard isn't listed, the dropdown menu also has an exhaustive list of other input methods, so you can select one that should let it work.

Note: I haven't tried to change my password to use an alternate keyboard just to see if it works. Maybe for 1000+ rep... ;)

Also, it took about 5 seconds for the input method menu to drop down, so just keep at it until it drops.


How to setup Dual Apple Thunderbolt Display 27 inch with Thunderbolt 3 MacBook Pro and Ethernet

The product page indicates that you CAN use the adapter for the display.

  In addition, it can be used to connect Thunderbolt-enabled displays — such as the Apple Thunderbolt Display and LG Thunderbolt 2 displays — to any of the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports on your MacBook Pro.

Please note the distinction between Thunderbolt and mini-DisplayPort. The Apple 27" Thunderbolt Display ISN'T primarily a display. It's actually a Thunderbolt-connected hub with a built-in display. Why is this distinction important? Because it means that the data traveling from the computer is being transmitted via Thunderbolt, not DisplayPort protocols. While it is true that you wouldn't be able to use the Thunderbolt 2/3 adapter for a mini-DisplayPort monitor, using it to connect your Thunderbolt monitors WILL work. According to the products webpage:

  This adapter does not support DisplayPort displays like the Apple LED Cinema Display or third-party DisplayPort and Mini DisplayPort displays

Source: Apple Product page

Edit: I assume you mean the 2016 MBP, as no 2017 model has been released as of this question.


Where are Photos projects stored on the drive?

Here is the official answer from Apple (specifically, Jack, a senior advisor with Apple Developer Program Support):


How to enable Normal Scrolling on MacBookPro 10.8.3?

Try increasing the scroll speed in System Preferences > Mouse > Scrolling Speed:


How to restart or shutdown a Mac when it says app running but cannot force quit the app?

Good to hear that the shutdown worked.  Remember to precede it immediately with a 'sync', executed as the root user or via the sudo analogue, to flush the hard drive caches to disk from volatile memory.

If you desire to investigate deeper, in hopes of learning what is going on ( I hope you seek more info... ), then please do the following:

 1.  Open Terminal, and then open two, distinct windows.

 2.  In one window only, type:

     sudo dtruss -afloe -n VLC > ~/Desktop/tracevlc.txt 2>&1

 3.  In the other window, type:

     open /Applications/VLC.app

 4.  Attempt to reproduce the original problem.  If you need to shutdown, do so.

 5.  When the machine reboots, read the tracevlc.txt on your Desktop -- it might well provide a clearer understanding of what is happening...

Hope that this helps!  Let me know if you find anything of interest...

F.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=
my previous response follows:
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=

Do you get anything from executing as your login-user (non-root) the following in a Terminal:

launchctl list | grep -i vlc

or

sudo pgrep -f -l -i vlc

Try this:

obtain a root shell via:

sudo -s

Sync drive buffers to hardware:

sync

Attempt to terminate vlc by various means:

pkill -KILL -f -i -l vlc

killall -9 -z vlc

killall -9 -z VLC.app

Attempt to tear down user-space, terminate all userspace apps, shutdown system services, and reboot.  If you are running a recent version of OS X, then this works best:

launchctl reboot system

Otherwise, do this:

    shutdown -r now


I have a MacBook Air and I lost (forgot) my Admin (root) password

There are two ways. If you account is in the sudoers list, you can use this command:

sudo passwd root

Otherwise, boot into Recovery Mode

Restart the Mac.
Right after you hear the chime, press and hold the Command and the R keys for a few seconds, then release. Soon, you'll see the Apple logo and spinning gear.
This will force the Mac to boot into OS X on the recovery partition that was created when you installed OS X 10.7 or later.
When booting is complete, you'll see a window of "OS X Utilities." You won't do anything there. Instead, you'll go to the Menu bar at the top and select Utilities > Terminal.
In the terminal window, type the following and press the Return key.

resetpassword
A new window will open and click on the volume of interest and select the desired user account in the popup. Then enter the new password twice. A password hint is optional. Click "Save."
Go back to the Apple Menu at the top. Select OS X Utilities > Quit OS X Utilities. That will prompt you to restart the Mac.

You can find the guide here to reset the root password here.


How to install working GrowlVoice from scratch on Mac OS 10.9.5 (Mavericks)?

According to this discussion, on approximately 2015-05-26, users first noticed that Google broke the API that supported GrowlVoice.


I see you downloaded multiple apps after the 10.9.2

One of those might have done something to the App Store log saved on your computer.

So when checking it id not find and did the 10.9.2 again.

Check this and see if it fixes the problem.


How can I make OS X's bash expand $PWD to be case sensitive?

You have two choices really: convert $PWD to a consistent case before comparing to your other string (which should also have consistent case). Or drop case-sensitive comparisons.

Converting it to lower case before comparing:

#!/bin/bash
if [ `echo $PWD | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]` != /users/myuser/documents/backup ]
then
    echo "Wrong path: $PWD"
    exit 0
fi

Dropping case sensitive comparisons:

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nocasematch
if [[ "$PWD" != /Users/myuser/Documents/Backup ]]
then
    echo "Wrong path: $PWD"
    exit 0
fi


How to play every album of an artist in sequence with the new music app?

There's no way to do this natively without playlists or queuing, but Picky (https://appsto.re/us/e-uOD.i) can do it.


Trying to get a Symlink but it turns to be an Alias

The command you used is ok. This created a link in ~/Library/"Application Support"/MobileSync that points to /MacintoshHD/Backup. And this is is a symbolic link.

However, is you get the info on Finder it will catalog as Kind: Alias.

The first letter of the output of ls -l will show you that is a symbolic link:

lrwxr-xr-x   1 username staff    8 Dec 10 18:27 MobileSync -> /MacintoshHD/Backup/


No security options for external hard disk erase in Disk Utility

MacOS doesn't let you do a Secure Erase on encrypted volumes because there's no point: a single erase will delete the encryption keys; and any residual data on the disk will be meaningless junk that cannot be decrypted.

Multiple zeroing of a mechanical disk can put significant stress on it and shorten its lifespan.

Similarly, MacOS doesn't let you secure erase SSDs, because that's also a pointless exercise: doing the erase doesn't actually make it more securely erased.

Why is a secure erase 'not necessary' for SSD's?


After MacOS High Sierra install, localhost fails and apache has syntax errors

Here an (old) 3rd party PHP probably from entropy.ch was installed to /local/usr/bin/. The Sierra httpd.conf was modified to work with the different PHP (and virtual hosts).

While updating to macOS to High Sierra, the Sierra httpd.conf was backed up to httpd.conf.sierra, a new High Sierra httpd.conf was installed and gained control, but won't work with the custom PHP5.

After backing up the High Sierra httpd.conf to httpd.conf.high_sierra:

sudo mv /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf.high_sierra

reactivating the httpd.conf.sierra:

sudo cp /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf.sierra /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

uncommenting the httpd.conf line

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

and changing the version number from 5 to 7 so that it reads:

LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache2/libphp7.so

renaming the custom /local/usr/bin/php to php5:

sudo mv /local/usr/bin/php /local/usr/bin/php5

replacing the soft link /private/etc/apache2/other/+php-osx.conf (linking to /usr/local/php5/entropy-php.conf) with the High Sierra default /private/etc/apache2/other/php7.conf

and removing any reference to the custom PHP5, apachectl configtest was OK and Apache worked again - now with Apple's PHP7.


Can I switch between multiple Macs connected to an iMac with Target Display Mode?

As I understand it you want to alternate between using the iMac display to display a) itself b) a connected MBP c) a simultaneously connected Mac Mini

When you enter Target Display Mode, you do this on the target, i.e. the iMac. There is no option to tell the iMac which connected computer to display, if there are multiple connected.

According to Use your iMac as a display with Target Display Mode in the section Exit Target Display Mode it mentions,

  "Your iMac also exits Target Display Mode if you disconnect the cable
  that connects the two computers, or if you shut down or sleep either
  computer"

I have since tested with a Late 2012 iMac 27", Late 2013 15" Macbook Pro, and a Mid 2011, 13", Macbook Air, all running Yosemite.

a) I first connected the MBP and iMac via Thunderbolt cable, and pressed Command-F2 on the iMac. This caused the iMac to go into target display mode and displayed the MBP.

b) I connected the Macbook Air, via a second Thunderbolt cable and this caused the iMac to exit target display mode (as both the Macbook Air and the MBP were not sleeping).

c) I put the MBP to sleep (by closing the lid), and pressed Command-F2 on the iMac. This caused the iMac to go into target display mode and display the Macbook Air.

d) I then alternated target display mode by alternately putting the Macbook Air and the MBP to sleep and pressing Command-F2 on the iMac.

This all seemed to work ok, except one annoyance and that was the iMac seemed to have a dim display every time I entered target display mode. I had to manually adjust the brightness of the iMac display, using the display settings.

NB: From step b) that you cannot have the two computers connected to the iMac awake at the same time and have the iMac in Target Display Mode. At least one of the computers connected must be sleeping. The linked Apple support page fails to mention that.


How to initiate a specific keystroke using automator?

You can use the keystroke scripting command available through the System Events application.

Add the following block to your script below (and at the same indent level as) the activate:

tell application "System Events"
    keystroke tab using {command down}
end tell

This will simulate cmd+tab and have the effect of switching applications.

To simulate the "ALT" modifier key, use option in place of command in the above.


How to increase the size of the system partition (container) on Catalina?

If you shrunk the second (visible) partition to create free space. The free space is directly below this partition. You can not add this space to the APFS container, because the free space is not adjacent to the APFS container. In other words, the partition with the HFS volume is between the APFS container and the free space. This prevents adding the free space to the APFS container.

One possible solution would be the following.

Move all the files from the HFS volume to an external drive.
Convert the partition containing the HFS volume to free space.
Add all the free space to the APFS container.
Shrink the APFS container and add a new HFS volume.
Move the files from the external drive to the HFS volume.

Another possibly better solution would be to replace partition with the HFS volume with a new APFS volume inside the existing APFS container. The steps are given below.

Move all the files from the HFS volume to an external drive.
Convert the partition containing the HFS volume to free space.
Add all the free space to the APFS container.
Add a new APFS volume to the APFS container.
Move the files from the external drive to the new APFS volume.

The external drive would not have to be a HDD or SSD. You could use a 256 GB flash drive (or maybe a smaller flash drive).


iMac inconsistenly hanging and showing beach ball

Your own advice is fairly good in this scenario.
There is a possibility that you have just some serious file system corruption, but usually Disk Utility should catch that. If you want, you can boot into single user mode (CMD S on boot) and it will give you a little file system cleanup command you can run
fsck -fy and then press enter, when it finishes you reboot.

If this doesn't help, reinstalling after performing a backup is not a bad idea because it will isolate it to a software or hardware issue. The hard drive going over some area repeatedly could be just file system screw ups, but usually repeated noises are a bad sign for a hard drive, clicking etc.

If the problem comes back after the reinstall you definitely want to look into a new hard drive. Four years is not an uncommon life span for some hard drives.

Also just a quick point of clarification, the S.M.A.R.T status doesn't predict all failures, it just presages specific ones it can determine. Just because it isn't telling you your drive is failing doesn't mean it wont. Keeping everything backed up is a really good idea at this point.


Well, it seems it was a bug that is solved in the new version.


This problem hasn’t bothered me for some time, but I remember it used to occur (though I couldn’t pinpoint the exact circumstances). I have tried two different things:

After invoking the Keyboard Viewer, don’t close it by clicking the red close window button, but by clicking Hide Keyboard Viewer on the Input Menu in the menu bar.
If that doesn’t help, try deleting the Keyboard Viewer preference file: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.KeyboardViewer.plist.


iPhone 5 tethering, device hard to discover, normal or a problem?

You should verify which software level you're on. 6.1 isn't available to the public yet. iOS 6.0.2 specifically fixes a Wi-Fi bug (Apple doesn't say what the particular bug is, but it affects Wi-Fi). Check to make sure you're not on 6.0.1. If you are, upgrade to 6.0.2 and see if the problem is resolved.


Are you running OS 3.1.x or 4.0.x? I've had some inconsistencies with hiding certain icons on my jailbroken 4.0.1 phone. It may be that SBSettings isn't fully compatible with OS 4.x yet.

edit: Fail on my behalf. Somehow I missed "iPad" in both your question AND tag. /facepalm


Try the commands given below.

sudo diskutil eraseVolume free none disk0s4
sudo diskutil eraseVolume free none disk0s3
sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 0

The partitions with the identifiers disk0s3 and disk0s4 are of the type used for (pre)boot and/or recovery volumes. I assume these partitions are left over from some previous macOS installation(s). You no longer need these partitions since the APFS container has both (pre)boot and recovery volumes for the version of macOS you are currently using.


On an iPad 2 which is partly responsive touch, how to check if digitizer cable or rather, connector is broken?

Sadly the best way to check would be with another whole display assembly. It sounds like it could be the actual digitizer layer (sits under the LCD display that is covered by the gorilla glass) or at least part of it that's broken. If the cable was the issue  if expect the whole display to stop responding to touch. Good thing is the part is easy to find, ifixit should be able to help with that and any tools you might need.


I got an image on terminal from the output of homebrew package manager

That would be an emoji. You can insert them anywhere by clicking Edit > Special Characters > Emoji. The beer one is under the Objects subcategory.


Mounting an SMB share uses the share name and not the local directory name

I think that you might be looking at the /Volumes/ folder with Terminal, right? But it shows the proper name of the same folder using Finder.

The share$ name in /Volumes/ only affects my shell scripts, so I've ignored the difference and life is not too bad ;)


MacOS's built-in RAID handling is limited. For decent RAID support, I recommend SoftRAID, which does RAID 0, 1, 4, 5 and '1+0'.
https://www.softraid.com
(Just a satisfied customer.)


Is it possible to buy a legal third-party MacBook (Pro) charger?

I have long-term professional expertise regarding electrical safety.
Legal power supplies have extensive and expensive certification and testing and manufacturing controls to ensure the user's safety.
Some of the most safety sensitive aspects are:

Isolation Voltage - How high a voltage may exist between the computer electronics and the mains wiring without a breakdown occurring.
Leakage Current - How much current can flow through the power supply (and ultimately you) if you make contact with a grounded contact or even a live wire while you are contacting the computer electronics.
Fire or burns

I will not claim that the "knock-off" supplies have NOT had the testing, but you decide for yourself if you think that Chinese manufactured supplies, even those bearing CE, UL, or CSA marks have actually passed or even been tested with the ultra-expensive tests and whether the manufacturing operation is well-controlled enough to guarantee that the product has not been modified.
How much would you spend to ensure that you or your child is not electrocuted?


After release of ios 8 that is no longer possible.

Apple no longer signing iOS 7.1.2, closing the downgrade window.

Apple has finally ceased signing iOS 7.1.2.

This means that you can no longer downgrade to the older firmware from iOS 8.x, or upgrade to it from older versions.


MBP freezes for 30 seconds all the time since this afternoon

@Tetsujin is completely correct about the disk. My first hope is that you have a recent backup. If you don't, try to get one, but if the disk is actually the source of the problem, getting a new backup may be difficult or lengthy.

If you don't have a recent backup, you Time Machine with an external hard drive will produce one for you. My preferred first-line-of-defense backup, however, is a clone, which I create with Carbon Copy Cloner. Once this software has successfully created a clone, you should be able to boot from it with little noticeable difference from booting from the internal drive (other than, hopefully, a lack of trouble).

Once you have a clone and have booted from it, if that confirms that the problem has been resolved you can be pretty sure your hard drive is the problem and take steps to replace it.


Time Machine fails shortly after starting to prepare backup

For others who may read, the following will give you 24 hours of Time Machine logs...
log show --style syslog --last 24h --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

I stumbled across your post because I've gotten the same thing, which is not the first time.  Apple has broken Time Machine in previous OS updates as well.  I'll bet this started when you upgraded to 11.3, as I did.
I see other errors which probably give more info...
localhost backupd[1175]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:EventCollection] Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD - Data ...

and also...
localhost backupd[1175]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:EventCollection] Failed to enumerate snapshot diffs, error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=22 "Invalid argument"

localhost backupd[1175]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:EventCollection] Failed to collect events for "Macintosh HD - Data" (device: /dev/disk1s2 mount: '/System/Volumes/Data' fsUUID: ... : ...), error Error Domain=com.apple.backupd.ErrorDomain Code=304 "(null)" UserInfo={FailedStrategy=32}

localhost backupd[1175]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:General] Backup failed (304: BACKUP_FAILED_PREFLIGHT_STAGE_SNAPSHOT_DIFFING)

I would guess our friends at Apple are learning the hard way as others have done that UUIDs are a bad means of storing a unique ID, because they wind up changing for unknown reasons and then your thing is broken.
In any case, the last in the string of failures for me was an invalid excluded directory...
localhost com.apple.prefs.backup.remoteservice[37280]: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:General] Failed to size '/Users/robertclayton/VirtualBox VMs', error: -43

I would classify this as a bug as well, since a directory being excluded doesn't need to be "sized," after all I told it to exclude the folder there's no reason for the OS to want to know how big it is.
So if you've restored a backup recently, check and see if you have excluded folders in your Time Machine settings that are no longer present. If you do, on 11.3, apparently that causes the backup process to fail. After I removed the non-existent excluded folder mine started back up again normally.


Using external USB hard drives via a USB hub connected to a MacBook Air

There is no 100% rule that applies in all situations.

For example:

there are portable USB hard drives that do not require their own power source
there are portable USB hard drives that do not require their own power source with some computers, but do with others
there are USB hard drives that do require their own power source no matter the computer
some USB hubs are powered hubs, while others are not
some USB ports deliver more power than others

My recommendation

If you wish to connect external hard drives via a USB hub, especially is you're going to connect two of them simultaneously, then you should invest in a powered USB hub. By a powered USB hub I mean one that has its own power source. This way you're not relying on the MacBook Air to power the USB hub and two external hard drives simultaneously.


Does the grayscale feature of iOS 8 extend the battery life?

There are two approaches that could lead to less power consumption:

a display that is enabled to have a dedicated greyscale mode; less pixels to be in charge of
software that automatically renders "less" if you tell it not to render any colors

Whilst the first is definitely not applicable as the iPhone features an LCD screen, the latter is something I once inspected. I made an iPhone draw a couple of dozen lines per second and then print how many it could render  in 30 seconds.

Having the accessibility feature enabled I hoped for a higher score in my little "benchmark". However, it resulted in no improvement at all. Actually the iPhone was slower having grayscale activated.

It might be misleading but a lower benchmark, here, indicates more CPU cycles, hence more power consumption.

So unless the iPhone actually caps CPU power on grayscale mode (which I doubt) your iPhone consumes even more power in grayscale more. This is probably due to the fact that it first renders the view in color, then caches it and puts the gray-filter on it.

Side fact: on iOS9 you will have a "low power mode" available for your iPhone. I already use iOS9 on my main device on a daily basis and the power saving functionality is awesome! My iPhone survived a 6-day music festival whilst taking pictures, checking mail in the mornings and sometimes calling people. So don't worry about it too much, in a few weeks your iPhone will last surprisingly long.


Unable to download the newest bootcamp drivers for my windows partition

Updating any drivers for Windows 10 can be accomplished through the following methods.

While booted to Windows, run Apple Software Update.
While booted to Windows, run Windows Update.
While booted to macOS, run the Boot Camp Assistant. Look for Download Windows Support Software under Action on the menu bar. Copy the files to a FAT32 or ExFAT formatted flash drive. Boot to Windows and run the setup application in the BootCamp folder.
Download the Windows Support Software directly from Apple. The procedure is outlined in Chris F Carroll's answer. Unfortunately, your question does not provide enough information to determine which PKG file to download.


How to remap "quit application" to Command+ESC system wide?

Well this sure turned out to be a question that seemed simple, but snowballed into a hassle to solve.

I'm going to kind of start from the beginning:

Turns out disabling ⌘+Q natively is only possible if you are ok with actually just replacing it with another function. Just outright disabling it is a no go... But, some third party apps can overwrite it. I'll get to that later. Also, as simple of an idea as it seems, you can't set a new shortcut for "Quit" through the native keyboard shortcut editor thing, because that relies on the full menu item name and wouldn't you guess it, it's most often: "Quit {application name}" so it's impossible to target all apps with that single shortcut.

Then I thought... Alright, how aboutAutomator Service. I could use an apple script to close applications with that... Well, you can't set the shortcut ⌘+Esc for Automator Services apparently, but you can set that shortcut globally in some third party apps, which is the way I ended up doing it all.

Solution:

So I tried to find the cheapest third party app I have that can do all that we want to happen, enter BetterTouchTool.

Karabiner should be able to do this for free, but a version that works in Sierra and later is under a rewrite,
 not sure if it currently has the power to do it...

In BTT, I made a new global keyboard shortcut ⌘+Q and defined no action for it, essentially disabling it.
Then I made another shortcut: ⌘+Esc with the predefined action Run Apple Script in background:

tell application "System Events"
    set frontmostApp to name of the first application process whose frontmost is true
end tell
tell application frontmostApp to quit

You should know that this applescript should work in most applications, but not all of them. I'm not aware of a bulletproof way to do it.

This shortcut could just be "Trigger other keyboard shortcut: Cmd+Q", but since we disabled that shortcut, that is no longer an option.

That's it.


iTunes requesting password to create the very first iPhone backup

The encrypted backup password is stored on the device itself, not in iTunes.  This indicates that you have used a different iTunes previously to make an encrypted backup.

If you don’t know the encrypted backup password that is stored on the device, the only option is to enter Settings on the phone and ‘Reset all Settings’ which will preserve user data, but restore all settings to default.

See this Apple support article.  (Password reset info in the last section.)


Connect to a VPN server through a Raspberry (connected VPN client)

As @andrew-morozko suggested, Raspberry does not not redirect incoming packets to the vpn connection without configuration:

  sudo iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING 1 -o tun0 -j MASQUERADE
  sudo iptables -I FORWARD 1 -i tun0 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
  sudo iptables -I FORWARD 1 -i eth0 -o tun0 -j ACCEPT


How can I get persistent Dictionary popups to go away?

This popover is built into the NSView class (showDefinitionForAttributedString:atPoint:). Since (as far as I can tell) it isn't controlled or powered by a distinct system process, it is completely owned by the app that owns the view where the popover was triggered.

In short, since the popover is owned solely by whatever app triggered it, there's no way to get rid of a stuck one without killing its parent app.

FYI, if the popover isn't dismissed with the escape key or by clicking outside of its body, something has gone wrong. I would file a bug report with the developers of the app where this happens.


Is it possible to set the output language of shell commands to anything other than English?

If you change LC_MESSAGES, it changes the language of error and help messages shown by bash, but only a part of them are translated for many languages:

$ export LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8
$ aa
bash: aa: Kommando nicht gefunden.
$ help alias
alias: alias [-p] [Name[=Wert] ... ]
    Definiert Aliase oder zeigt sie an.

    Ohne Argumente wird die Liste der Aliase (Synonyme) in der Form
    `alias Name=Wert' auf die Standardausgabe gedruckt.

    Sonst wird ein Alias für jeden angegebenen Namen definiert, für den ein
    Wert angegeben wurde.
    A trailing space in VALUE causes the next word to be checked for
    alias substitution when the alias is expanded.

    Options:
      -p    Print all defined aliases in a reusable format

    Rückgabewert:
    Meldet Erfolg, außer wenn NAME nicht existiert.

Terminal and iTerm 2 set LANG (which changes all actual locale variables like LC_MESSAGES) based on the region selected in System Preferences by default.

Some GNU/Linux distributions come with man pages in other languages than English, but OS X doesn't. Some Homebrew packages add localized man pages to /usr/local/share/man/ though:

$ LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8 man -w ps2pdf
/usr/local/share/man/de/man1/ps2pdf.1
$ LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8 man ps2pdf|head
PS2PDF(1)                         Ghostscript                        PS2PDF(1)

NAME
       ps2pdf - konvertiert PostScript nach PDF mittels ghostscript
       ps2pdf12 - konvertiert PostScript nach PDF 1.2 (kompatibel zu Acrobat 3
       und spAxter) mittels ghostscript
       ps2pdf13 - konvertiert PostScript nach PDF 1.3 (kompatibel zu Acrobat 4
       und spAxter) mittels ghostscript

You could for example copy /usr/share/man/de/ from a Ubuntu VM to OS X, but only a small part of the man pages are translated:

ubuntu:~$ find /usr/share/man/de -type f|wc -l
113
ubuntu:~$ find /usr/share/man/man* -type f|wc -l
2857


How to increase font size of Eclipse globally?

Go to Preferences > General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts, expand the "Basic" folder and select "Text Font" and change that to whatever size you like.

For Eclipse Neon:
To Increase Ctrl +
To reduce Ctrl -
for Macs, use the command key, not the control key


A few initial tips/suggestions/thoughts

The random guy at ‘Power Mac Center’ was close. It’s not the speed of the internet that matters, it’s the combination of: A) the speed at which Apple sends the files, and B) the bandwidth capabilities of your connection. In my experience “A” never comes close to “B”.
Large downloads from the Mac App Store should be resumable, but for some reason they often aren’t. You can pause them for awhile, but if you pause it for too long, it always seems to start over.
Someone told me that their download speeds from the iTunes Store varied greatly depending on which DNS servers they were using. I don’t pretend to know why that would be the case, but he said that it made a great deal of difference in his experience. So if you are using your ISP’s DNS servers, you might try OpenDNS or Google DNS and see if that helps.

The excruciatingly long and nerdy answer that just might help. But no promises.

GUI progress meters are often not very helpful. If you want the real scoop on what is happening, you’ll want to get down into the place where the actual files are being downloaded.

In this case, that’s (somewhere under) /var/folders/.[1]

Now, you could try to do this in Finder, but really, you’d be much better off firing up Terminal.app from /Applications/Utilities/. Then you can copy/paste this command:

find /var/folders -ipath '*/com.apple.appstore/*' \
-name manifest.plist 2>/dev/null

Note that you can copy that command as two lines as long as the first line ends with \ or just remove the \ and keep it as one long line.

Translated into English, that command says “Look in the folder /var/folders/ for any file called ”manifest.plist“ in a path (series of folders/directories) that has ”com.apple.appstore" in it.

For example, on my computer right now (with no active Mac App Store downloads), I have only one of these, which is at:

/var/folders/bk/cb9y7rbx30q_6n40wp096grc0000gn/C/com.apple.appstore/manifest.plist

Once you find that plist file, you need to look inside it for the name of the ‘package file’ which is being downloaded from the Mac App Store.

Usually that file will end with “.pkg” so if you wanted to skip a step, you could try just looking for .pkg files:

find /var/folders \
-ipath '*/com.apple.appstore/*' \
-iname '*.pkg' \
-ls 2>/dev/null |\
egrep '\.pkg$'

This is a similar command as before, except that now we are asking find to look for any files which end with ‘.pkg’ and then show us the output of ls on any matching file or folder.

If you track the file size of any ‘.pkg’ files found in that directory, then you can see how much data has been downloaded.

Example: Since I don’t have any downloads currently, I don’t have any .pkg files to show, so I’ll use a ‘.plist’ file for this example. Here’s what the output of that command would look like for me:

4446464 8 -rw-r–r– 1 luomat staff 226 Dec 3 01:03 /var/folders/bk/cb9y7rbx30q_6n40wp096grc0000gn/C/com.apple.appstore/manifest.plist

Most of the stuff on that line we don’t care about. You can probably pick out the date “Dec 3” and the time “01:03” but actually the only part we really care about is the size of the file, in bytes, which is the number just before the date: 226.

(Just stay with me here.)

If you count the number of ‘columns’ in that line, you’ll find that the ‘226’ is the 7th column, and the filename is the last column. Using another Unix tool called awk we can run that command again and only see the fields that we want to see: the file size and the file name.

find /var/folders \
-ipath '*/com.apple.appstore/*' \
-iname '*.plist' \
-ls 2>/dev/null |\
awk '{print $7" "$NF}'

Again, from top to bottom, that says: (1) look in /var/folders (2) for anything in a path of folders/directories which contains ‘/com.apple.appstore/’ (3) and files which end in ‘.plist’ (which you’d want to change to ‘.pkg’)
and then (4) show us the file listing (ls) output for anything that matches, and filter (|) the results through (5) awk and print out only: the 7th column, a space (that’s the “ ”) and the last column ($NF means ‘last’ to awk).

Whew! Ok, did you get all that? I hope so. If not, don’t give up yet. There’s a surprise at the end of this post. I’ll stop with the details there, but just imagine if you ran a loop which kept checking the size of that .pkg file every, oh, 15 seconds or so. Then you would be able to see how many bytes had been downloaded, and if you kept the old value and compared it to the new value, you could even tell how much of the file you had downloaded since the last time you checked.

But what! There’s more! In that manifest.plist file that I mentioned before, not only does it give us the name of the .pkg file that is being downloaded, it also tells us how many bytes it is supposed to be.

So, if you really wanted to, you could:

Look for the manifest.plist file
Find the name of the .pkg file that the manifest.plist said we were currently downloading
Find the total size that .pkg file is supposed to be when it has completely downloaded
Run a loop as long as that .pkg file exists, checking its size, comparing that to the previous size, and the total size, and give you an idea of how much has been downloaded, how fast it is being downloaded, and how much more there is to go.

Wow. Doesn’t that sound fün?

Well, I have some good news. These sorts of tedious tasks are just the sort of thing computers are really good at doing. All you need is someone who tells the computer what to do, and put it together in some kind of a ‘program’ or ‘script’.

Which is what I did. You can find it at https://github.com/tjluoma/maswatch. My script uses Growl, and, more specifically, growlnotify to send you a notification every time the script loops.[2] That notification will show you the total size, the downloaded size, and the difference between the current downloaded size and the previous download size (to give you an idea how fast it is downloading).

To use the script, you’ll need to:

Download and install Growl and growlnotify.
Download the script

curl -L –remote-name https://github.com/tjluoma/maswatch/raw/master/maswatch.sh
Make it executable:

chmod 755 maswatch.sh
Then start your download from the Mac App Store using the App Store app.
Once the download has started, run the script in Terminal:

./maswatch.sh

It should find the .pkg file and then start reporting the download size.

If you have stray ‘pkg’ files in /var/folders/ (inside the “/com.apple.appstore/” folder), it might be that a corrupted download is interfering with subsequent attempts. That seems unlikely, but is theoretically possible and it felt like I should at least mention it.  ↩

Someone with a basic understanding of Un*x could read the script and change it to use echo instead of growlnotify, but that, as my Comp Sci professor used to say, “has been left as an exercise for the reader.”  ↩


How can I burn an Apple Music playlist onto a CD?

iTunes for Windows: Disc burning overview

  You can use iTunes to create your own CDs and DVDs with audio and
  video from your iTunes library.

  Important: You can’t burn the following to CDs or DVDs:

  Movies and TV shows purchased from the iTunes Store
  Songs or music videos downloaded from Apple Music

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH20378?locale=en_US


SSH No Longer Working After Sierra Update

Comment out or remove the lines

gssapikeyexchange no
gssapitrustdns no

from your /etc/ssh/ssh_config and you should be good.


Preventing MacBook from sleeping when closing lid on Sierra

InsomniaX works perfectly on my MBP 13" 2015. I am using macOS Sierra 10.12.

There's also an app called NoSleep, but it hasn't been updated in years, only use it if you're on older OSX like Mavericks or Yosemite.. I wouldn't recommend using it on Sierra..

UPDATE: 1st FEB, 2020
InsomniaX is not being mantained anymore & you SHOULD NOT use it. No sleep is a better option until MacOS Mojave. Haven't tested any of these with MacOS Catalina. If anyone has tested with Catalina, let us know in the comments.


Have you "installed" python via homebrew. This doesn't actually install python but sets up a number of things so the built in python plays nicely with homebrew.

sudo brew install python

This fixed a couple of these sort of problems for me when getting iPython working.


Turn off macbook screen when connected to a monitor

If the idea was to just hide doubled picture on laptop display, you can just lower brightness level to 0 using fn + F1


To avoid confusion I'll call:

x.x.x.20 -> local1
x.x.x.30 -> local2
Apple device outside your home network -> remote1

You say:

  I've setup NAT on the AP to forward external ports 22 to the x.x.x.20
  and 10022 to x.x.x.30.

which I interpret like this:

                 ________                 +-----------------+         +-----------+
                /        \ -  port 22 ----|-----------------|------>  | local1:22 |
+---------+    (          )               |                 |         +-----------+
| remote1 | -  ( Internet )               | Airport Express |
+---------+    (          )               |                 |         +--------------+
                \________/ -  port 10022 -|-----------------|------>  | local2:10022 |
                                          +-----------------+         +--------------+

That is, local2 is reachable on [public IP address of Airport Extreme]:10022.

However, the ssh commands you run in your question use the default SSH port (that is, 22/tcp), and connect to local1:22 (more exactly: they connect to [public IP address of Airport Extreme]:22, which forwards the connection to local1:22).

You must modify the ssh command you run on remote1 like this (notice option -p 10022):

remote1$ ssh -p 10022 -f -N -R 2222:localhost:22 [username at local2]@[public IP address of Airport Extreme]

-p 10022 tells ssh which port to connect to, while 2222:localhost:10022 tells ssh to allocate a socket on local2 to listen to port 2222 and forward any packet sent to that port to port 22 on remote1:

 +------------+                         +----------------------+
 |            |                         |                      |
 | remote1:xx | -- SSH (port 10022)-->  | local2:10022 (SSH)   |
 |            |                         |                      |
 | remote1:22 | <--- SSH tunnel ------  | local2:2222 (alloc'd |
 |            |                         |              by ssh) |
 +------------+                         +----------------------+

Now you can access remote1 from local2 as follows:

 local2$ ssh -p 2222 remoteuser@localhost

(You use -f in your command which sends ssh to the background. The sshd process that binds to port 2222 and runs on local2 will continue to execute even if you stop Remote Login in System Preferences:

To stop it, list it:

local2$ lsof -i | grep 2222
local2$ sshd   855 jaume   14u  IPv6 0x4857f   0t0  TCP localhost:2222 (LISTEN)

and kill it with kill <PID>:

local2$ kill 855

where PID is the second value in lsof's output line.)


Same here. I found a easy 2 step approach to solve the problem.

1.) Make sure you have ticked the compilation box in iTunes and delete the album artists completely.

2.) After your Apple TV updated the music library the compilation will be together as one (with "Verschiedene Interpreten" in German, wich is "Various Artists" in English). After that you can re-enter any Album Artist you want, the ATV will not split up the Album again.


How do I connect to a Windows Remote Desktop with a Terminal Services Gateway in OS X?

Unfortunately, neither Microsoft's own client nor the popular CoRD alternative currently support it, and the latter likely won't for a while.

I haven't tested it, but the €20 iTap claims to support it.


What file format should I use to format my new external HDD?

FAT32 works on every system, but files cannot be larger than 4GB in size.

There is exFAT, which works with larger files, but it isn't natively supported by Linux. You can however see this link how to get it working on Ubuntu for example (read and write support with this solution).


Can I use automator to select text then search spotlight for it?

I think the closest you are going to get is something like this.

( In a Automator Service  Document )

I am just show two folders here as an example.

The first action gathers the selected text into a variable.

Each Spotlight Action ignore the above actions output/input and uses the variable token as the search term.


Can I remove the text beneath apps on the iOS 7 home screen (SpringBoard)?

No this is not possible. Not in the standard iOS package anyway.

I have no experience with jailbroken iOS, but I would assume so, although there is no JB for iOS 7 just yet.


Is there an extension for safari like RightToClick or RightToCopy or some workaround with the same effect?

I found this Safari Extension called Right Click.

This extension re-enables the right-click, selection and copy function on website which block those


Video Transitions Stopped Working in Final Cut Express 4.0.1 on OS X 10.6.8

You have to trim at least .5 seconds off the end of your clip. In other words, uncut clips = no transitions, so lengthening it as you had tried won't help.

Also, do you have handles enabled? See the referenced article below:

FCE Transitions/Troubleshooting


Rename iOS app in iTunes Connect - "name will be reviewed"

There shouldn't be an additional delay more than the time it usually takes for your app to be reviewed. The message is simply to indicate that your name change must be reviewed at all (so it may not get approved), not to indicate any additional time penalty for review.


You should first make a full backup and restore the new iPhone to factory default. Don't worry about your settings, it's stored in the backup so you can place it back if you miss something. Or you could try this fix on the iPhone 5 first.

Problem resolved?
If the problem is gone you shouldn't place the back-up back, as something might be damaged inside. You can now manually download every app and add the Wi-Fi settings.

Unfortunately: You cannot put any part of your back-up back, as it's damaged somehow.

Please
Please don't worry about Wi-Fi settings. You can always ask everyone for their passwords (at least in my circles) they're given out pretty easily. You rather have a fully functional phone and battery rather than all Wi-fi passwords, don't you?

Please note I didn't add an answer to when restoring to clean default does not fix your issue.


How to install Windows 7 on Mac mini server?

Boot Camp requires a $29 Snow Leopard OS X DVD (not the server DVD) and an external drive. The MacBook Air SuperDrive works excellently with no driver hassle.

Sorry I don't have a list of drivers and steps to make up for the work done on the OS X since I'm a wimp and will pay good money to save an hour or two my time. Apple only bundles the Windows Drivers for it's hardware with the client version of OS X (AFAIK)

I hope if someone else has done the hard work, they post their experience. The official Apple solution is simple and works well.


Why did I unexpectedly get a notification on my iPhone that says "Use this iPhone to reset your Apple ID password."?

What happened?

This is actually a widespread issue that was reported by others on macrumors' forums yesterday. Likely we'll see this happen to more and more iPhone users.

This Twitter Thread explains that there is a security flaw in Apple's password reset process which gives explicit confirmation once a correct phone number is inputted for a given Apple ID.

It shows a failure for an incorrect number:

And triggers a notification to your devices for a correct number:

This notification is what caused your iPhone to prompt you to reset your Apple ID password.

What does this mean?

Your Apple ID was not broken into.

It's good practice to update your passwords periodically anyway.

An attacker now knows your Apple ID and corresponding phone number.

I'm not certain what they'll do with this information, but it's valuable.


iMac hangs trying to restart or shutdown 10.13.3

I had the same issue. In my case I was able to see in log that there was problem with cache files permissions. I removed them and now I'm able to install update and restart MacBook without issue.

sudo rm -rf /var/folders/zz/zy*
sudo shutdown -r now

NOTE: some of cache files ware skipped due to system integrity protection - Operation not permitted


Parental filter which blocks Tarot and other Black magic

In my home, we use a combination of:

OpenDNS filtering.
Locking down the devices so that the end user cannot change the Internet settings, specifically DNS.
The Mobicip browser, which has a free version, but for advanced features such as specific site filtering, costs $9.99 annually.

I don't specifically filter Black Magic, but there are other things I do block, and these tools allow me to have control over what gets into my network via the Internet.


How can I simulate light to heavy disk access and light to heavy CPU usage?

The best configurable tool I've found to simulate light to heavy disk access for testing purposes is filebench.

I didn't get filebench-1.5-alpha3 to compile properly. So download an older installer package (filebench 1.4.4) from FileBench ported to Mac OS X or direct link.

Install the app. You may have to disable SIP and - in Sierra - Gatekeeper to do so. The package will be installed to /opt/filebench.

To start the app in interactive mode enter in Terminal.app:

/opt/filebench/bin/go_filebench

Now choose a workload at the prompt - preconfigured workloads can be found in /opt/filebench/config (e.g. fileserver.conf):

filebench> load fileserver

Set a working directory and other variables (most have default values):

set $dir=/tmp
set $filesize=612458

and a run time in seconds:

run 600

To create your own workloads visit filebench Wiki and check the WML link.

To "simulate" CPU-load install prime95 and configure it.

In my virtual environment (Sierra - 2 CPUs/4 GB memory) running go_filebench alone already creates a total CPU-load of 70% (go_filebench: ~140%). So I don't have to start prime95 additionally. In your environment you may have to start it though.


Sure, there are lots of applications that allow you to remotely view a feed from any camera connected to a Mac, including the built-in camera: EvoCam, RemoteSight, SecuritySpy, or if you're handy with command-line tools, iSightCapture.

Most of these products stream the feed from the camera to a web server, which you can then view on your iPhone or work computer.


MacOS Safari iCloud tabs stop working randomly after some time

I managed to find an easy workaround which doesn't require to terminate the user session.

Quit Safari
Open Activity Monitor
Type in the search box "safari" to filter the processes list

Quit and Force Quit (where required) every user process matching the "safari" search
When the Activity Monitor list is completely empty, open Safari and wait some seconds

The iCloud tabs button should appear enabled again.


You really need to put this Mac in target disk mode and connect it to another Mac - or you can accomplish the same things buy installing a fresh copy of Mac OS on a USB external drive and booting that.

Once you're running normal Mac OS on another drive, you can run SMART Utility to see if your drive is having a hardware failure. If it is, time to replace it. If it's not, you should run a good drive repair utility like DiskWarrior. Unfortunately, while Apple's Disk Utility technically performs these functions, it's fairly useless at both.


Hide name of the user and computer name from terminal window title

The reason for that is because you are running zsh shell. I'm running the bash shell and no name or directory shows up in terminal window name. You can run bash before running terminal and that should give you the window name you want.  If you type zsh the terminal name will change back.

I don't have Catalina but I've read its changed initial terminal setting to zsh.


iPhone doesn't sync calendar to iCloud, calendar via iCloud.com still works

Try creating a new calendar within her iCloud account. Don't share it yet. Add, edit, and delete events both on her iPhone and iCloud.com through a browser. If this works as expected, share the new calendar with your iCloud account. Repeat the add/edit/delete cycle to see if changes propagate across all devices now. If this works too, use the new calendar instead of the old calendar going forward.


How can I change the SMB server address my Music files are on?

Oddly enough it is both more complicated and easier than it seems. Why? Because Apple wants you to do it their way, work-arounds sometimes fail and this is one of those times.
So, don't remove the iTunes library just reset it to default (inside Preferences > Music) mount your drive and then select the new location.
That should do it.


How to remove a folder link from side bar in OS X Lion

Hold down ⌘ Command while dragging the item out.

I found this Lion change interesting; I don't necessarily like it, but I think it mirrors the way that you have to hold down ⌘ when rearranging toolbar items.


How to tell which app added a photo to my iCloud Photo Library

I've figured it out after some investigation.  Since some apps don't write anything to the log, we have to search the Photos database.  The metadata exists here just as I suspected, in a column called ZCREATORBUNDLEID.  To find it, first you need to install the "iCloud Photos for iOS" profile to enable diagnostics from here:
https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/profiles-and-logs/

Then trigger the diagnostic in Settings > Photos > Run Photos Diagnostics.  Airdrop this file to your computer, untar it, and find the database inside called Photos.sqlite.  Search like this

sqlite3 Photos.sqlite "SELECT ZCREATORBUNDLEID FROM ZADDITIONALASSETATTRIBUTES WHERE ZORIGINALFILENAME = 'IMG_8313.JPG';"
ZCREATORBUNDLEID = com.ifttt.ifttt

In this case, it turns out the photo came from an IFTTT applet that I had forgotten about.

Note: This metadata is available only in the iOS database, not in the macOS Photos database.


Mac Backups - 5xMac's with a synchronized catalog?

I would look at getting a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box which appears to be basically a disk that can be accessed from anywhere on the network and is added to the network like any other machine. I would suggest using Ethernet to the router rather than WiFi.  (I just got a very simple 2TB NAS for £80 so can be inexpensive, although given this is a work setup I would expect to look for a more complete set up costing more, remember to work out the cost of losing a design before saying any solution costs too much)

In the simplest form a share can be mounted to each Mac where it will look like another disk in the finder. Then users can copy from their machine to the NAS.You would also have to set up another process to backup the designs from the NAS. Most NASes come with software that sets up automatic backups from Macs to the NAS. The other benefit of having the data on a NAS and not on DVDs is all the designs are quickly available. Your X11 catalog should also be able to work off this.

More complex NASs will include things like

RAID which means you don't lose data when one disk fails.
allow you to add more disks to increase capacity
Do unattended backups to cloud or other off site storage
Could burn DVDs itself


Is it possible to sort the user accounts in the login dialog?

This is a great question. A hack has not been created for this yet. The only temporary solution that I know of (I once wanted to do the same thing) is to add spaces to the beginning of a username to sort them (a single space will appear first, two spaces will appear second if I remember correctly).

I would definitely love to see someone find the pref file where it organizes them in alphabetical order so that it can be hacked a bit, although I can imagine it wouldn't be the easiest thing to change and that someone would have to write some sort of script for it.


MacOS Mojave Install - About 2 minutes remaining, for 2 hours

Turns out, something on our network, who knows why, was blocking some aspect of the OS update. As soon as I moved the PC to an external line, the update completed in about 40 minutes.


Well I thought I figured it out, but it stopped working shortly after.  So after much troubleshooting, I really did figure it out.  Wifi has to be enabled on the Apple Watch for the unlock to work.
It's funny that none of the apple support documents say that.  I just use bluetooth on my watch, so I tend to keep Wifi off.  When I reset my watch, Wifi was automatically turned back on, which would explain why it worked for a while.


Activate FaceTime and Messages on Wi-Fi iPad with email address only?

it is possible. I'll try to walk you through the process in the best and clearest way possible.

Create an iCloud account. (You can create this with an existing email address, just click the “use my current email” button)

Go to “Settings - Messages - Send and receive” than make sure the email you want to use is checked in both the “receive” and “start” sections. (I know we are setting this up in message settings, it will also apply to FaceTime)

Go to “Settings - FaceTime” and check the email in both the “Caller ID” and the “You can be reached at” sections. You may have to scroll down.

You're done! Open the FaceTime app and begin a call! Note that if you only have the wi-fi model, you will need to be in wi-fi.

Hope this helped!


No facebook wont see your calendar. it doesn't work like that.


My iPhone 3gs "isn't eligible" when updating to 4.3.4

Apple have now released iOS 4.3.5, so they may have disabled the authentication for 4.3.4, as they do with all legacy versions of iOS.. Try downloading and installing iOS 4.3.5.


Extracting Data from a Broken Hard Drive

At this stage it is normally not a job for amateur to extract data from the drive.

If you highly value the data on the drive, I wouldn't recommend bringing it to a standard service shop, as they wouldn't have the means to do anything. I would hire a specialized data recovery company to recover the data.

If you have no such option, one of the cheapest and easiest ways to recover after such a problem is to replace the electronics on the drive. Buy a 100% identical hard drive (new or used), replace the PCB on the old drive with the PCB from the new drive. If this works, copy over your data straight away to a backup drive.

Note: This only fixes some types of disk errors. If for example the drive heads or platters themselves are damaged, replacing the PCB won't help. But it also means that you have to have very special tools and facilities to be able to read data from the drive.