Pages Equation Editor - Inserting Equations - Blank Spaces?

Well, I'm not sure if Equation Editor would work with Pages since it is a Microsoft product and comes with the Office. I might be mistaken but this would seems to be a case of apples and bananas.

On the other hand if you have LaTeX installed in your system and are familiar with it then you might try to use a small and free utility called LaTexit. You can check this explanation to get you started on using equations in Pages.

An Addition:
An alternative way to insert equations into Pages would be to use Grapher utility which is included in the standard OSX install. Check in your Applications > Utilities to find it. Not only this utility allows you to produce graphs but it also allows you to copy the equation in variety forms (PDF,TIFF, ... LaTeX equation) into your document. The program has quite good "Equation Palette" where you could in principle create your equations to be pasted somewhere else.


curl

You can use a curl client for iPhone/iPad to do this (e.g. iCurl or iCurlHTTP). Than you can use this client to download multiple files like this:

curl -L -O http://www.example.com/file[1-5].pdf


How can I easily transfer videos from iPhone to iPad

If you do not use iCloud and would like access on a PC or a web browser then you can use DropBox, this free app (sign up required) will allow you to save photos and videos to a folder in the cloud. You can access this folder on both iPhone, iPad and also your computer.

You also have to give Dropbox permission to access your photos from the iPhone app

In the app go to Uploads, (on the bottom)
Click the + button
Allow access to your photos
tap on the videos you wish to put onto your iPad
choose a folder to upload them into(you can create new folders here too.
Choose the folder and upload.
Wait a short time and navigate to the file using DropBox on the iPad. you can then save the video tyo your videos and open in iMovie.

The benefit of this over using iCloud is that you are instantly starting the process, iCloud and photostream can take a few minutes to start the sync process, you also have th eoption to be able to open the videos on a web browser, which you cannot do on iCloud.com


Use the built-in CUPS web interface to get detailed printer information:

http://localhost:631/printers/

On newer versions of macOS you'll need to run the following command to enable the web interface:

cupsctl WebInterface=yes


Buzzing noise after reassembling iMac 20" 2009

The most likely cause would be the fan causing the noise. See this post from bMike 'Is it possible to install an SSD ...imac'  where he points out that
"..the immediate downsides - You will need special tools and be handling some delicate parts. Also, there is concern that the temperature sensing since the 2009 model iMac causes the fans to run faster with non-apple drives."  I have also had the problem with the fan going into overdrive and creating a horrible buzzing, so I am aware they are susceptible to this happening.  It is also possible that some foreign material got lodged around the fan, so that is worth checking too, and definitely keep an eye on the temperature.


How to remove automatically subscribed calendar for public holidays on my iPhone?

You can't delete the iOS holidays calendar, only hide it. It is a subscribed calendar but it's part of iOS.


Can you passlock specific Apps on an iPhone?

Individual apps from the App Store can't be passcode protected in this way without jailbreaking which you mentioned you don't want to do. You may be able to use restrictions, but you will need to go to Settings each time to enable/disable access, and restrictions are only available for certain pre-installed apps and features.


Rsync can't look into the content of Alias files which would be needed to convert them. So if you want to have your backup be useable as is (without restoring it to the orignal drive) you will have to replace the Aliases with symlinks.

There is a solution for this on MacOSXHints.com. It needs to be run on your original disk (not on the backup), I would also recommend to test it on some sample directories first.

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Usage: alias2ln alias1 alias2 alias3..."
    echo "  where alias1, alias2, etc are alias files."
    echo "  Each alias file will be converted into a symlink."
fi

while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
    if [ -f "$1" -a ! -L "$1" ]; then
        item_name=`basename "$1"`
        item_parent=`dirname "$1"`
        item_parent="`cd \"${item_parent}\" 2>/dev/null && pwd || echo \"${item_parent}\"`"
        item_path="${item_parent}/${item_name}"

        linksource=`osascript<<EOS
tell app "Finder"
set theItem to (POSIX file "${item_path}") as alias
if the kind of theItem is "alias" then
get the posix path of (original item of theItem as text)
end if
end tell
EOS`

        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            if [ ! -z "$linksource" ]; then
                rm "$item_path"
                ln -s "${linksource}" "${item_path}"
                echo "\"${1}\" -> \"${linksource}\""
            fi
        fi
    fi
    shift
done

To run

save the code above into a text file (e.g. alias2symlink)
execute chmod 755 alias2symlink
change to the folder where you want to convert the aliases in
execute /path/to/alias2symlink alias1 alias2 ...


Disable font anti aliasing in Firefox in OSX?

Try doing this:

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced panel -> General tab -> Remove Checkmark from "Use Hardware Acceleration when available"
Click Ok
Restart FireFox


Difference between macOS login root and Darwin Terminal root

The root user (UID 0) exists in every Unix or Unix-like operating system. Every process of a Unix operating systems must run as a valid user/UID, independently of system processes, daemons, services or user-initiated applications. Every basic system-process runs under UID 0 (root), and every system-relevant file is owned by that user. For reasons of security, some processes are running as different "users" with lesser privileges than the superuser root. Such users are there for the solely purpose to start services, such as a webserver, a database, the window server and so on. This means, not every user configured on Unix (or macOS) is a "real" user. In fact, most of those system-users can not log-in interactively.

For example a webserver (nginx, apache, ...) will be started by a script running under UID 0 (=root). The webserver-process afterwards drops the privileges to a specific UID (in this case, it could be the user www). www is not a real user and cannot be used to log in to the system interactively.
There are two ways to "deactivate" a (system) user:

set the user shell to /bin/false (or any non valid-shell)
disable the users's password, setting it to an invalid, empty or specific value.

On macOS AFAIK a non-valid user has an empty password and a specific property set on the local OpenDirectory server.

Usually, for a request like "is this a valid user" the OpenDirectory service in macOS does a simple check on the requested user and returns true (user can log in) or false (user cannot log in).
It seems, Apples bug was not to check user's validity but to set it to enabled. On already enabled accounts this had no effect, but disabled accounts  became valid, enabled accounts. And since a disabled user has no password, an empty password was accepted as a valid option to log in as superuser/root.


Should I disable Virtual Memory on SSD in OS X Yosemite?

For how to do that, I recommend this excellent sophisticated answer: How can I move virtual memory swap files to a different drive or partition?

But keep in mind that your SSD does NOT wear out as bad as most youngsters tell you. In fact, I experience HDs breaking a lot more often than SSDs. Besides, your computer only swaps if it's really necessary as it comes with enormous memory access speed penalties. And even if it was: I'd prefer keeping the swap on the SSD rather than moving it to a slow HD.

But always keep in mind: Storage media are expendable parts.


How to open different emacs version from the shell?

To do this for just Emacs, use

alias emacs=/usr/local/bin/emacs

in your shell startup file which will make Emacs always run Homebrew emacs instead of whatever is first in your $PATH.

But the better way to do this is to make your shell always look for Homebrew versions of commands first, by putting /usr/local/bin first, or at least early, in your $PATH.

So if your $PATH is set like this:

export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin"

change it to this:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

/usr/local/bin is a directory containing symlinks to all Homebrew-installed commands, Emacs included, and your shell starts at the beginning of the $PATH to figure out what executable to use, so putting it first will in effect choose the Homebrew emacs first.

One last thing - please remove /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.4/bin from your $PATH. It's going to break when the next version of Emacs comes out. If you use /usr/local/bin instead, Homebrew will automatically manage the symlinks when you update things.


Access denied when creating a Python file?

It's trying to create a file in the system installation of Python (i.e. it's going in the root Library folder). That folder is only writeable by root (to prevent damaging important system files), hence why you're getting a permission error.

Running the command with sudo preceding it, i.e. sudo foo bar will give you the proper permissions, after asking for your password. Alternatively, you can use virtualenv to set up your own Python environment that will allow you to mess around without worrying about changing the system default install.


Made DIY fusion drive.... now recovery partition won't boot

Well, I was able to "solve" this in a round-about way.

I used the recovery disk assistant with my MacBook Air to make a recovery SD card. With that plugged into my mini, I was able to successfully boot into it and the disk utility there was able to comprehend my fusion drive.

That done, I then checked and saw that the recovery partition on the SD card was the same size as the recovery partition that wasn't working right, so I did a dd from the SD card overwriting the recovery partition.

The result: my option menu now offers the choice of the fusion drive (booting normally) or the recovery partition, and both work.

What I think may have been going on is that core storage seems to want to turn the recovery partition into a 'boot helper' on encrypted volumes. Perhaps it was trying to do the same thing on this machine, despite the fact that there was a separate boot partition intended to serve that purpose.

I'm not going to mark this as "solved," however, because I think there has to have been a better way.


Using older macOS on MacBook Pro with updated EFI firmware

Yes.

It's not the firmware that dictates what OS can be installed, but the Model identifier (i.e. MacBookPro 12,1 for a 2015 13" MacBook Pro).

If your Mac was capable of running a macOS version before, it will continue to be able to support it after a firmware update.


You probably have a SD card or a device which stores photos plugged in your Mac.

To prevent Photos from auto-opening, follow these instructions:

  Connect the iPhone, camera, SD card, etc to the Mac and let Photos app launch itself as usual
  Under the “Import” tab of Photos app, look in the upper left corner to find the device name, this will indicate which hardware will no
  longer automatically activate Photos app
  Click the checkbox so that “Open Photos for this device” is no longer selected (likewise, toggling this on would enable Photos app to
  open itself again automatically when this device is connected)
  Quit out of Photos app, the change is immediate for that device – this can be switched back at any time in the same OS X Photos app

Via: http://osxdaily.com/2015/05/31/stop-photos-opening-automatically-mac-os-x/


E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version on macvim

It may be because you do not have the correct clang-format.py file downloaded. If vim is compiled using python3 then you need a different file because it is in python2. I downloaded a new python file and changed the key mapping recommended by in the clang python file to the following in my .vimrc:

    map <C-I> :py3file <path-to-this-file>/clang-format.py<cr>
    imap <C-I> <c-o>:py3file <path-to-this-file>/clang-format.py<cr>

This solved the E319 problem I was getting.


Finder seems to be broken, Desktop files missing

Massive thanks to @Tetsujin. It worked.

Just a small tip if you experience the same issue, the re-install seemed to be stuck at '1 minute remaining'. I dug a little bit and the system was copying everything from a temp folder to the final destination.

You can activate the logs by pressing Cmd/L or just wait until it finishes (it can take several hours/days).


AppleScript to spit out Incremented Number with Leading Zeros

Add a .txt extension to the file you're saving to. If counter is the folder, do this:

set theFile to "z:Users:zachphillips:Dev:AppleScripts:counter:save.txt"

Assuming that you have a valid path, this should fix the problem. Otherwise, you're trying to save to a folder.


Too many activated fonts - identify those in use and remove/archive others

MacOS comes with fonts installed in two locations:
/System/Library/Fonts

/Library/Fonts

The fonts in the /System location cannot be disabled**, and are required for the 'safe' rendering of all text that the interface needs.
The fonts in /Library/Fonts can all be disabled in Font Book. This location is also where some applications install fonts that they use. (Though well-behaved apps will store fonts that they need inside their bundle, so they are always available, but not shown in the font menu.)
It is possible to open a document that requires some font which is not currently enabled. Some apps may give you a warning of that fact.
** Catalina introduced a 'Supplementary' folder to the  /System fonts folder, some of whose fonts can be disabled.
There are third-party font managers which offer greater degree of control and 'auto-activation', where fonts can be enabled when requested.


Is a paid Apple Developer account required for notarizing macOS apps?

Yes. Only paid-up developers can notarize their apps, or have certified apps.

I asked a similar question on Stack Overflow. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60736568/xcode-create-app-that-passes-macos-quarantine-without-payment


Macbook boot problems - 1 long beep, then nothing, then it's fine

I once had a similar issue with my Mac Mini. Swapping the two RAM Modules seemed to help temporarily, but the issue came back and got more frequent over the next weeks/months. At the end replacing the RAM with another brand fixed it persistently. (It was "third-party" RAM from Amazon.)


applescript to find contacts that are not in any group

Try this, I have a huge contact list so testing it fully on mine would take a billion years. But the initial tests work

These sort of script are really only handy on small lists as the overhead with all the repeating is exponential the larger they get.

property orphan : "Orphans"

tell application "Contacts"
    if not (exists group orphan) then

        (*Create the new group*)
        make new group at the end of groups with properties {name:orphan}
    end if

    --set thePeople to first person whose first name is "TEST"
    (*get all entries*)
    set thePeople to every person

    (*iterate through the entries*)
    repeat with i from 1 to number of items in thePeople

        (*get the entry*)
        set this_person to item i of thePeople

        (*get the entries group list *)
        set inGroup to name of group of this_person

        if inGroup is {} then
            (* entry is not in any group*)
            add this_person to group orphan
            save

        else if inGroup contains "Orphans" and inGroup is not equal to {"Orphans"} then
            (*if entry is already in a group/s then check it is not also in¬
             Orphans or only in orphans*)

            (* entry is in orphans and another group so remove it from orphans*)
            remove this_person from group orphan
            save
        end if
    end repeat
    save
end tell


Can I make my bootcamp partition bigger without formatting it?

Not with the built in tools. Moving the start of a partition is no trivial task. Resizing your main Mac partition only grows/shrinks it, but because your bootcamp partition resides further on your disk, it needs to be moved up before it can be grown. This is not a trivial operation and is not supported out of the box in either OS X or Windows.

You will need a specialised 3rd party tool like iPartition, but use with care and triple check compatibility.


Does Apple allocate a different app id for an app when submitting multiple builds for different geos?

No, you can't do this the way you're describing, only 1 build is allowed at a time for each app name and App ID. So obviously you can have different builds (v1, v1.1, v2, etc), but only one is live on the App Store at one time.

To solve your issue, you should look at having the code in your app handle the different locations (or language/Region Format) of each user.

It's generally thought that having different versions of the same app makes it more difficult to promote (which is why there are less Lite/Pro apps now, and more with the freemium approach with in in-app purchase to unlock more features), so having a single version of the app would also help here.

I would also point you to the following two entry points that describe how to use app-id wildcards.

App ID under iOS
the recently updated App Distribution Guide

Without getting too deep into the guts of how code signing works, there is truly no "one size fits all" answer since your marketing needs may override the extra work needed to properly localize one unified release. Additionally, app id choice has ramifications for iCloud data storage and will affect a small but highly vocal subset of customers that want to switch their Apple ID to another country.


Can I play my music on the iOS Music app with a sleep timer?

I can't tell you what app you were using on your iPhone 4, but I can tell you how you can still play music on your new iPhone using a sleep timer.

To do what you want, follow this process:

Launch the Clock app
Tap on the Timer option at bottom right
Set the timer to 30 min
Tap on the When Timer Ends option
Now swipe up until you see the Stop Playing option at the very bottom and select it
Tap on Set at top right

Now you can use the Music app (and most 3rd party music apps as well) to listen to your music and your iPhone will stop playing it 30 minutes later.

[EDIT]

So, the reason for your confusion (understandably so in my opinion), is that Apple’s implementation of this is OS wide, not as a specific function of the Music app.

The advantage of this is you can use the feature with 3rd party apps like Spotify, but IMHO it would have also been good to have the option within the Music app itself. If you feel that way too, you can submit feedback to Apple.


How do I change my (non-interactive shell) PATH?

You should create the file ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist with inside

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PATH</key>
<string>/Users/gio/.dotfiles/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin/:/usr/sbin/:/bin:/sbin</string>
<key>PYTHONPATH</key>
<string>/Users/gio/.local:/Users/gio/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages</string>
</dict>
</plist>

What I wrote above is just an example, but I think you get the main point here. After you create the file, log out, log in, and you should be all set. You could have a ruby path as well, etc.


How do I change iTunes country with family sharing and child accounts?

original poster here - I did basically what Mitchell D suggested and it worked.   I actually moved my wife's account to UK first, set up family sharing with her, invited my child to join my wife's new family, then disabled my family sharing and moved myself to the UK, then invited child back to my family.  Phew!

So far, all seems to have gone OK but was a bit of hassle and entirely non-obvious!


How to remotely push "defaults write" settings to OS X server clients

The plists for the iWork suite are stored here:

/Users/accountname/Library/Containers/com.apple.iWork.AppName/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.AppName.plist

with AppName: Pages, Numbers or Keynote.
Note: If you browse the folder "Containers" with the Finder the "directories" com.apple.iWork.pages and com.apple.iWork.numbers look like files but are indeed folders with file extensions like valid Pages or Numbers files (which are packages itself). Just right-click open -> Show Package Contents to dive deeper.

One way is to edit the files manually with nano or PlistEdit Pro:

Just add the following to the respective plist files:

<key>ApplePersistence</key>
<false/>

Another way (depending on your setup) is to ssh to the machine/account and execute:

defaults write com.apple.iWork.AppName ApplePersistence -bool no


received an sms from my stalker after changing number

If the message is in a green bubble, it came as sms, if it's in blue, is came through Apple/iMessage. If you go into the Messages settings on your phone, you will see Send & Receive addresses and you should see how his message arrived. It will probably your apple id email there and he won't need your new phone number.


How can I convert a .eml file to a .mbox file for Apple Mail?

Assuming you have access to the PC with windows live mail.

Install thunderbird on the PC. This will allow you to import windows live mail, outlook express
mails etc.
Create a gmail account, with IMAP enabled. Upload your imported email from thunderbird to gmail. This should be as simple as dragging the mail over.
Point your Mail.app at gmail and download your mail.


Aura Pro X SSD upgrade for MacBook Pro Mid 2014 issue

I got a replacement hard disk, and ran it through all diagnostics including the apple system diagnostics. It passed everything except the default Apple Diagnostics with the error -  'VDH002 - There may be issues with storage' error.

So it looks like Apple Diagnostircs doesn’t recognize the OWC hard disk as good for some reason.

Hope this helps someone else!


Main partition on original Apple SSD or new Samsung PRO SSD in 2011 Macbook Pro?

I don't think that this question can be answered with authority.

However, if you are worried about failure due to memory cells wear, we can speculate. Every thing else being equal I would expect the SDD disk to last longer. That's because the SSD controller tends to spread writes among the available memory cells, and the more cells available the less writes each cell will receive.

And of course I would expect a new drive to fail later than an old and used drive.

Then I would say that generaly speaking a newer and bigger SSD will last longer than an older and smaller one.


What data counts as "photos" or "movies"

Spotlight is the system that classifies files, so if you use the command line tool in terminal.app to list the spotlight information of a file you can see how the classification is performed:

Open terminal
Type mdls and then drag any file from your desktop (or anywhere in finder) to the window and drop the icon.
Press return

The fields to focus on are kMDItemContentType and kMDItemContentTypeTree and a bit further down the list is kMDItemKind ;

kMDItemContentType             = "public.png"
kMDItemContentTypeTree         = (
    "public.png",
    "public.item",
    "public.png",
kMDItemKind                    = "Portable Network Graphics image"

In my example I used a screen shot png file - which is one of many image formats that will then be counted against the total. Under kind information, you can also see the logical (size of the bits) and physical size (how much space the file takes up on the drive with overhead for block sizes and accounting) which would get summed up for each "category"

So - to find out what might be categorized as an image - type this command out (or paste it if you trust me/it/whomever edits this last):

mdfind "kMDItemKind = '*image*'" | head -3

The pipe symbol | takes all the lines of text that mdfind produces and shows you the first three lines of text. Instead of piping to head -3 you could also pipe to more to page through the list one screen at a time. Press spacebar to move, q to quit and h for help in more.

To count all the files with the string image in the kMDItemKind field:

mdfind "kMDItemKind = '*image*'" | wc -l

For context, my two smaller Mac have between 85k image files and 110k image files. Note, on newer OS - some of the images will be marked "purgeable" so you might over count at the command line but you should have a better feeling of what images exist and if you need to uninstall apps or they are just part of the operating system to have images to show you for the controls in Safari, the default desktop backgrounds, etc...


Can I add all Junk Mail to Mail's home screen?

You cannot add a Mailbox for all Junk mails, and the only option is to create different mailboxes for each of the accounts.


How to remove duplicate songs from itunes playlist?

After selecting the playlist you would like remove duplicates from in iTunes, you'll then want to select "Name" in the "Sort By" menu (located under the "View" main menu item).

This will sort the songs in alphabetical order to where you can easily identify any duplicates since they'll appear right next to each other.

You'll then want to select a duplicated song and hover over the selected song to reveal the ... (More) menu.

Then select "Remove from Playlist" to delete the selected duplicated song.

And, just in case you're wondering, yes – doing this operation will only delete the selected duplicate, not all instances of the song within the playlist. (Which was a secret worry of mine.)


In your iTunes Music Library, right-click on a song's title and select Show in Playlist from the menu. A submenu will pop out, showing all of the playlists to which the song belongs.


You can't have direct Siri commands but you can get the current time and you can also speech to text things, here is a reddit link that seems close to what you want to achieve


Unable to log in to open directory account

I happened to solve this, though perhaps not the "right" way. Changing the server to a local server with the address myserver.local instead of myserver.com fixed the issue with me. I then just use a dynamic DNS service to point my domain to my IP. Now everything works correctly and I can login on both the client and the server.


iPhone 6 recognizing my External lavalier mic as an headphone not microphone

It would be helpful for you to include the make and model of the mic that you are using, as anything we say will be nothing more than a guess.

That said, if you compare a pair of generic earbuds with Apple's earbuds you will find that there are more "rings" around the shaft of the Apple earbuds than the generic ones you get elsewhere.

One of the "extra" rings is for the mic. And to match up with the iPhone the microphone "ring" needs to be in the exact same place the iPhone's jack expects it.

Which leads me to what I think might be your problem:

Unless your mic specifically says "iPhone compatible" it is likely that the plug on the end of your mic does not have the connectors in the right place for the phone to recognize your mic as a microphone.

And when you get down to it a microphone can be thought of as a specialized speaker, which it is. Hence the reason you can play sound out of it now.

So what do you do about this?

There are options. You could return it and get a mic that specifically says it works with an iPhone. You could contact the manufacturer and see if they have an adapter that would do the same thing with your current mic.

Also if it IS specifically compatible with your iPhone then it is not working and should be returned for replacement, if possible.

If you edit your original question and add the make and model of the microphone we might have better guesses.


How to tell generation of Intel processor of Macs on Apple's website?

I'd check out other resources, such as EveryMac: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/index-macbookpro.html

Although the details aren't there yet, they will be shortly, and they include the full CPU specs you're looking for.

Wikipedia also has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specifications_4

Unclear what their source is though.


How to save a pdf file in a browser window without downloading it again?

If you have a PDF file in the browser window you can just go to the File menu and save the file. It will save as a regular PDF and you can choose where to save it.


I'm going to stick my neck and say that you cannot do this.  No matter what materials you have to hand, your MacBook requires open access to the internals via vents and grills etc for fans to push unwanted air out, or suck cooler air in etc.  You can't safely just block all this up.  You can get a wide range of keyboard covers to allow you to type with wet/dirty hands etc, but protecting the entire unit isn't really practical at all. Servers are amenable to being bathed in mineral oil but that requires special cabling, removal of all blowers and potentially modifying the heat sink depending on the specifics of the CPU and coolant temperatures.

http://www.grcooling.com
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Server-Cooling-Hardware-mineral-oil,17348.html


How to recover a deleted book in iBooks?

Happily, it seems that by readding the eBook file in the iBooks, the notes and bookmarks are back.

I had to redownload the eBook and open it in iBooks.


User-specific display brightness settings

The way you can accomplish this

Brightness control program (can be installed via Homebrew or compiled from source)
A per user bash script that set's the brightness
Script Added to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and loaded with launchd

OR

There is an AppleScript method that you can use instead of using the brightness program reference above.  I am not a fan of this method because I have not found AppleScript to be as reliable as bash (things break when Apple does updates).  Scroll to the bottom for details.

Install Brightness

If you have Homebrew, issue the command brew install brightness.  If compliling from source, download from the link provided then compile.

cd /brightness   ---- (or whereever you downloaded the source)
make
sudo make install

Test it out by issuing some brighness commands:

brightness 1    <------- set to 100%
brightness .5   <------- set to 50%

Write a bash script to be executed when you log in

#!/bin/bash

/<path-to-brightness>/brightness .75
sleep 20           # I put this here because I find lauchd needs some "time"
exit 0

Do this for each user and place the script in an easily accessed location.  For example, create a "scripts" directory in each user's home directory:

/Users/<username>/Scripts/set_brightness.sh

This is just an example, you can place the script anywhere you like, but remember, you need one that is executable by each user.  Speaking of "executable" make sure you set the permissions of the script to execute - chmod +x set_brightness.sh

Be sure to test out by executing the script directly from the command line by calling it:

$ ./set_brightness.sh

Your screen brightness should change to the setting in the script(make sure you change the setting manually first to make sure you are not changing it to what it already is).

Create a .plist file and Load to launchd

Your .plist will execute every time you log in, so it must be located in the ~/Library/LaunchAgents directory.  As for the filename, my preference is to use something like the following:

com.user.setbrightness.plist

The .plist should look something like this:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
     <key>Label</key>
     <string>com.user.brightness</string>
     <key>KeepAlive</key>
     <key>RunAtLoad</key>
     <true/>
     <key>Program</key>
     <string>/Users/<username>/<location of script>/set_brightness.sh
     </dict>
    </plist>

Load the .plist to launchd

launchctl load com.user.brightness.plist

Do this for each user so that every time the user logs in it will execute the bash script setting the brightness automatically.

Alternative Method (for 5K monitors)1

You can also do this via AppleScript and skip the brightness program altogether (I tested this on a non-5K iMac running 10.11.6 and it works).

AppleScript Code:

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    reveal anchor "displaysDisplayTab" of pane id "com.apple.preference.displays"
    tell application "System Events"
        delay 1
        set value of slider 1 of group 1 of tab group 1 of window 1 of process "System Preferences" to 0.5

    end tell
    quit
end tell

Save this AppleScript in the same way as described above.

Make this change to your .plist (relacing Program with ProgramArguments):

<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
    <string>osascript</string>
    <string>path-to-script/set_brightness.scpt</string
</array>

1 Adapted from this post: Is it possible for an Applescript to dim/up 0%/100% screen brightness on OSX 10.9 Mavericks when connected to external display?


My iPad2 won't charge and needs activation

If the stock charger isnt working on the iPad, schedule a repair with Apple to get the battery tested for diagnostics and possibly replaced. You may have to pay if out of warranty.

As for activation lock-

You will need to remember the password. If you forgot the password, go to http://appleid.apple.com and choose "Forgot Apple ID or password" option below the sign in. It'll take you to http://iforgot.apple.com and then just add your apple ID email address and the captcha code. Once you hit continue (if it asks for a verification code then you need to check your other devices and see if you can get the code from a device that is signed into the same apple id). If you are already signed into the other device with the same account. Go to settings on the device, then your name (or iCloud then your name) and look for password and security. Once you find that, select change password. If you try to do it through the website it may have you go through account recovery, which takes some time before they let you reset your password.

(If it doesnt ask for a verification code then you'll need to choose reset password and ask to either send to email or answer security questions to reset the password.)

If you cant get the password for that account via either method then you'll need to provide Apple with a proof of purchase. You can either check your email for a receipt or contact your carrier/location where you purchased it. Without the receipt AppleCare can't help you.

If you bought the iPad from someone else and they are logged in, then you need to contact them and have them sign in (or reset their password to sign in via the methods mentioned above.)


iTunes syncs only one songs from each album

This is a bug in iTunes. Restarting iTunes and re-syncing solved the problem.


The say Command is not Working in High Sierra

Bug?

I could tell something was wrong because the Speech section of the Accessability pane in System Preferences was stuck loading voices and the voice sample play button also did not work. I killed some speech and audio-related processes with some luck.

I was also able to reproduce the hang by using the -o option of the terminal say command.

Workaround without reboot:

Try killing speechsynthesisd after finding it with

ps ax |grep speechsynthesisd

or just kill it this way:

kill `pgrep speechsynthesisd`


Is there a way to see current CPU frequency in macOS from terminal (not Intel power gadget)

Since your comment mentions that you're really just focused on enabling Terminal (or more accurately not desktop)...

I think that the Intel Power Gadget will help you get your info from Terminal. From Intel:

  Intel® Power Gadget also provides a C/C++ Application Programming Interface (API) for accessing this power and frequency data in your program; the API is supported on Windows and Mac OS X. For more information on the API's, see:

And on that same page, also a link to Using the Intel Power Gadget API on Mac OS X

Sorry this isn't a link to an out of the box solution; I spent a few minutes with google to see if I could find someone who already did this without luck.


With Safari, can I allow pop-ups for specific sites?

Yes, with Safari Version 12 or higher, you can allow popups for a specific website. Here are step-by-step instructions:

Right click on the URL (when you're NOT in a text entry mode)

Select "Settings for This Website..."
Select "Allow" under "Pop-up Windows"


Actually, it works more like SSL. Upon signing up for an Apple account Apple generates a Public/Private Key pair for your username. It then gives you your private key and it keeps your public. (That's why when you first buy or when you restore your iDevice you must activate it with your iTunes account). Upon activation it transfers your private key to your iDevice. Basically what happens is when you buy an app (free or paid) Apple generate a 4096 byte long header that is encrypted with your public key.

If you have any understanding of Public/private keys, the public key can encrypt for it's private pair... For example I would use a servers public key to encrypt data to send to the server. The server would then use it's private key to decrypt it. When it wants to send data back, it uses my public key to encrypt the data and I use my private key to decrypt it! Public keys can only encrypt data and cannot decrypt and vice-versa for private keys.

When you download your app it has a header encrypted with your public key. Only your private key can decrypt the header embedded in the app. So for example, if I copied an IPA generated for you, and put it on my iDevice (this is assuming you can get It there, iTunes would refuse to sync it anyway), and then I tried to run it, it would simply crash because my private key wouldn't be able to decrypt the header! Also its worth noting that the IPA file (an IPA is essentially a zip file that's been renamed) doesn't have the header, if you take a look at the contents of an IPA you will realize that it contains an extension-less file, take Facebook's app for example, it would have a file named 'Facebook'. This is the app's binary, and this is the file that has the encrypted header in it.

Yes, as stated above your apps will continue to run so long as you can remember your Apple ID as the iDevice (and iTunes) does NO signature checking with iTunes what-so-ever! This means you can install removed apps and also sync older IPAs to your device so long as they are yours and you still have the IPA indefinitely!


Where in the file system is my shared folder? (AKA: Where is /Volume, and Why Can't I Open It in Finder?)

The folder you are looking for is under /Volumes in your file system. /Volumes is sometimes called a hidden file in MacOS parlance.

Using Finder with Hidden Files:

There are at least two ways to expose hidden files in Finder:

Use the Finder menu to navigate to arbitrary folders:  Go, Go to Folder..., (ALTERNATIVELY: shiftcommandG), and then enter /Volumes in the text box. Of course this method requires that you know the name of the file/directory you're looking for, but once that's known this will get you there.
If you're running macos Sierra (or later), you can view all hidden files/folders in Finder like so: shiftcommand. (shift-command-period). Repeating this sequence will hide the hidden folders again.

Note: To see /Volumes using the 2nd method, you must position Finder at the proper place in the file system; i.e. at the Macintosh HD level (selected from Finder's sidebar if you have it enabled!).

Once Finder has listed the hidden file/folder of interest, use the menu (File, Get Info) or shortcut (commandI) to yield the info window with lots of handy information.

At this point, your questions re. Finder and hidden files have hopefully been answered. Now let's move on to the rest of your question re. how to display usage stats from the command line:

Hidden Files from the Command Line:

Open a terminal window (bash is the default macos shell). Just like every (?) other *nix system in the universe, the file system root is simply known as /. So, let's see what's in /:

$ ls -l /
total 13
drwxrwxr-x+ 80 root  admin  2560 Mar 17 18:42 Applications
drwxr-xr-x+ 64 root  wheel  2048 Feb  4 01:43 Library
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel    64 Feb  4 01:39 Network
drwxr-xr-x@  5 root  wheel   160 Sep 21 05:05 System
drwxr-xr-x   7 root  admin   224 Feb  4 01:39 Users
drwxr-xr-x@  4 root  wheel   128 Mar 17 22:48 Volumes
drwxr-xr-x@ 37 root  wheel  1184 Feb  8 02:57 bin
drwxrwxr-t   2 root  admin    64 Feb  4 01:39 cores
dr-xr-xr-x   3 root  wheel  4512 Mar 17 12:17 dev
lrwxr-xr-x@  1 root  wheel    11 Feb  4 01:37 etc -> private/etc
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root  wheel     1 Mar 17 22:10 home
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel   313 Aug 18  2018 installer.failurerequests
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root  wheel     1 Mar 17 22:10 net
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96 Sep 26  2016 opt
drwxr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   192 Feb  4 01:39 private
drwxr-xr-x@ 64 root  wheel  2048 Feb  8 02:57 sbin
lrwxr-xr-x@  1 root  wheel    11 Feb  4 01:37 tmp -> private/tmp
drwxr-xr-x@ 10 root  wheel   320 Feb  4 01:44 usr
lrwxr-xr-x@  1 root  wheel    11 Feb  4 01:38 var -> private/var
$

Listed here are all of your files and folders, including links, and the hidden files, including /Volumes. If this makes you wonder about the conventional wisdom (or current practice) re. "ease of use" for Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), then you are on the right track :) But I digress...

Now, take a look to verify that your mounted shares are listed under /Volume. In your case, assuming your raspberrypi share is the only one mounted, you'll see something similar to this:

$ ls -l /Volumes
total 32
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root    wheel      1 Mar 17 12:17 Macintosh HD -> /
d--x--x--x+ 2 macusr  wheel     64 Mar 17 12:18 passport2tb
drwx------  1 macusr  staff  16384 Mar  4 23:56 passport2tb-1
$

The first line is a link showing the mapping from the Macintosh HD to the file system root /. The second line will show your mounted network drive, but note the permissions - you won't be able to use this one. It's apparently an artifact. I don't know why it's there other than to set the executable permission bit for the folder; perhaps someone else can offer an explanation? At any rate, while we needn't be overly concerned about why it's there, automating this task will require that we identify the correct share name.

Automating the process via bash script:

The correct share name can be found as follows:

$ ls -l /Volumes | grep drwx | head -1 | awk '{print $9}'
drwx------  1 macusr  staff  16384 Mar  4 23:56 passport2tb-1
passport2tb-1
$

To recap: grep will filter the output of ls -l to get the actual share (instead of the artifact), head -1 will filter duplicates (which may show up as passport2tb-2, etc) and awk '{print $9}' will get the 9th field in the string which is the share name. If you have other shares mounted in /Volumes, simply add another grep stage to get the one(s) you're interested in.

Knowing the location of your mounted share will allow you to successfully execute the du command to display the usage statistics of any folder in the mounted share; for example:

$ du -sh /Volumes/passport2tb-1/data_lib
 75G    /Volumes/passport2tb-1/data_lib
$

In this case, the folder data_lib folder contains 75GB of data... and this may take a few minutes to tally, even on a fast network.

Some command line gymnastics that might be useful:

If you don't want/need the path information in du, use awk to strip it:

$ du -sh /Volumes/passport2tb-1/data_lib | awk '{print $1}'
75G
$

And if you don't want the "G":

$ du -sh /Volumes/passport2tb-1/data_lib | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d "G" -f 1
75
$

To wrap this up in a script:

#!/bin/bash
SHRNM=$(ls -l /Volumes | grep drwx | head -1 | awk '{print $9}')
SIZE=$(du -sh /Volumes/$SHRNM/data_lib | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d "G" -f 1)
echo $SIZE

Finally: Save it, name it, make it executable, and add it to your crontab to be executed periodically.

This answer has gotten long-winded, so I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.


Spilled water on Macbook Pro 13 inch, early 2015

You won't know anything until you take it apart, that is the sad truth. In the mean time, keeping it angled with the vent up and the trackpad down will hopefully make any liquid that got in stay away from the motherboard until is evaporates. If any corrosion is happening, you may not notice until an electrical connection is actually disrupted by it.


Does Health.app intelligently count step from multiple sources?

See answer in this thread, and official Apple KB item here.


I figured it out.

I had started another instance of httpd by mistake earlier. I typed:

httpd --help

And while httpd doesn't recognize this command (what I was looking for was httpd -h), it did start a daemon, that was listening according to the old config file.

I'm very surprised that brew services start thought it was starting the server properly (brew services list did display it as started), even though it probably wasn't running because of the conflicting instance.

This is really confusing as start/stop did toggle between "started" and "stopped", even though it probably wasn't doing anything under the hood.


Apple MFI: Is there any fee for entering the program?

You have to purchase a credit review and have your credit approved in order to enroll in the program.  That is the only cost to enroll.

Be aware that this is for large companies that intend to sign an NDA, receive Apple confidential information and pay royalties for access to and/or participation in the program.

The credit check is required so that Apple can ensure your company has the financial resources to bear the costs of participating in the program:

From http://mfi.apple.com/faqs :

  Why do I need to complete a credit review?

  A credit review must be completed in order to determine your company's
  ability to meet the financial obligations associated with the MFi
  Program.


Scheduled startup/wake while on battery power

No, you can not schedule your Mac to power on when it is battery powered.

Design Choice & Deliberate Limitation

A scheduled power on event requires the Mac be connected to mains power. This is a deliberate limitation enforced by Apple's engineers. This is to protect your Mac from powering on while in confined or poorly ventilated spaces such as in luggage. In these situations your Mac risks overheating and being damaged.

Being able to power on while on battery is a common feature request to my Power Manager software. Sadly it is not possible without risking damage.


Command-line arguments for "Remote Desktop Connection for Mac"?

There is no command line access for the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client. But the free and most excellent CoRD remote desktop client does handle rdp:// links which would let you call it from a launcher of your choice or even via open on the command line.

The CoRD documentation on github lays out how you can use URL encoded parameters to open full-configured RDP sessions.

rdp:// URL syntax

CoRD handles rdp:// URLs, which you can use from many places inside OS X. Unfortunately, there is no way to extend Finder's "Connect to Server" dialog, which supports launching VNC URLs, so we can't launch CoRD from there. If Apple changes this (or if anybody is aware of a way to extend it) we would love to hear about it.

  Saved Servers

  If you want to use rdp:// urls with existing saved servers, you can (as of 0.5.3)! Just use the label in place of a hostname:

  open rdp://label

  New Servers

  From a shell (using Terminal):

  open rdp://hostname

  Additional parameters can be used to start a fully-configured session via the URL:

  open rdp://[username[:password]@]hostname[:port][/domain][?parameters]

  The following parameters can be set for the session via a query string (as of 0.5.2):

  screenDepth ### [8|16|24|32]
  screenWidth <width in pixels>
  screenHeight <height in pixels>
  consoleSession ### [true|false|yes|no]
  fullscreen ### [true|false|yes|no]
  windowDrags ### [true|false|yes|no]
  drawDesktop ### [true|false|yes|no]
  windowAnimation ### [true|false|yes|no]
  themes ### [true|false|yes|no]
  fontSmoothing ### [true|false|yes|no]
  forwardDisks ### [true|false|yes|no]
  forwardPrinters ### [true|false|yes|no]
  forwardAudio ### [0|1|2]

  0 - Forward Audio to the Local Machine (Currently not used since CoRD doesn't present audio)
  1 - Leave Audio at the Remote Machine
  2 - Disable Audio at both  Machines

  Example

  open rdp://jsmith:securePassword@hostname.bigco.com/BigCoDomain?screendepth###24\&consoleSession###true\&themes###false\&screenWidth###1280\&screenHeight###800

  Note:

  When using ampersands (&) from the command line, they have to be escaped with a backslash (). Colons (:) can be used in place of ampersands for the same effect, without needing to be escaped.

  Passwords with any special characters in them, @, :, &, etc need to be encoded according to the URL Encoding Format

  Command Line Use

  CoRD supports the following command line options: -host -port -u -d -p -a [8|16|24|32] set screen depth -width set screen resolution width -height set screen resolution height

  Example

  /Applications/CoRD.app/Contents/MacOS/CoRD -host example.com -port 3389 -u username

  Caveats

  Launching CoRD from the command line this way causes a fresh instance of CoRD to be opened. One symptom of this is multiple Dock icons. This overrides or decreases the effectiveness of many of CoRD strong points, including unified sessions, etc. For that reason, we recommend using the open command, and rdp:// URLs to launch sessions.


It will not work with a Xeon processor.

The CPU you should get is anything from the Haswell line of CPUs.  If I were doing the upgrade, I would install an Core i7 (4771).


Caps lock option for input switch is absent

+Go to Apple > About this Mac and double check that the machine is actually running 10.13 and not 10.12 (caps lock does not work for Russian in 10.12).

+Add an Arabic keyboard to your input sources list and restart.

+Do a safe boot

+Set up a new user account and see if you have the same problem when logged into that.


How to use dictionary look up on websites that prevent it?

Assuming I understand your question correctly, you should be able to use the context menu to select the Look Up option.

More specifically:

In your browser double-click on a word to select it
Then right-click (or use ctrl+click) to bring up the context menu (e.g. if you double-click on the word house to select it and then right-click on it, you'll see a context menu such as:

From this menu you can select the top Look Up option and then you'll get the dictionary definition.


Can I store and run applications on an external drive?

You can store and run applications in the non-standard /Application location on OS X, which means you can keep things on your external drive and run them from there.

You just have to be aware of the limitations of doing it this way:

The applications and data on the drive won't be available when it's not connected.Seems obvious but this can come up in surprising ways so I think it's worth saying here. Let's say, for example, that you have a text editor installed on your external drive and it's the default application for text files. When you double click on a text file when the drive is not connected you'll get an error about the application not being found. You'll need to right click and select an alternate application in that case.
The bandwidth, especially the sustained rates, for accessing the data and applications on this drive is limited to the connection method.For Thunderbolt it's pretty darn good but still not as good as a drive in the machine. For USB it's hit and miss. It depends a lot on the USB chipset used in the drive and what else is sharing the USB buss. Most applications will load resident in to memory when you launch them so for applications on an external USB drive you'll have some start up latency and that's it. But if you have to access a lot data or if the application loads itself in pieces as you access different features, you might find the I/O wait tedious. Expect beachballs here and there for sure.

Most applications can be safely relocated to the external drive by dragging them from /Applications to the new location on the remote storage. Applications are bundled in a nicely self-contained way. Note though that relocation the applications .app bundle from /Applications to the remote drive only moves the bundle. The configuration and ancillary data the application uses, generally found in /Library or ~/Library will remain on your primary drive. That data is harder to move. It's also usually smaller than the application bundle.


Is there an easy way to reduce quality of .mov files taken from an iPhone?

Most of this is documented:

How do you convert video within 10.7 without any 3rd party software

The Finder has built in video encoding and you could even use these to set up watch folders and attach a pre-set conversion using Automator if you found one setting that you prefer...


tail

tail can tail multiple files. Donovan Bray's article explains more, tail: can tail multiple files simultaneously, who knew? and other tail tricks.

To tail multiple files, pass in a file pattern:

tail -f Log-*

multitail

You can ask multitail to combine the output of multiple files. The examples page contains a useful approaches and tricks.

This command combines and tails two logs:

multitail /var/log/apache/access.log -I /var/log/apache/error.log

If you need to tail any logs in a folder, including those actively being created, use the -q flag:

multitail -q 'test*'

This will tail any files matching the pattern test*, including those that appear after the command has been issued. Thanks to @folkert-van-heusden for this suggestion and code fix.

If you have homebrew installed, you can install multitail using the Terminal.app command:

brew install multitail

See also:

How-To: Tail Multiple Files With Multitail
Is there any Mac text editor with tail or watch files change feature?


How do I configure Yosemite to be able to resolve DNS ending in ".local"?

Apple has provided some related documentation here.  In which they recommend avoiding .local if you can and instead using a suffix such as .private, .intranet, .internal, or .lan.
The reason .local should be avoided is because it's used by the Bonjour service.

Short Answer
Add the following Search Domain as in the screenshot (you can disregard my DNS Server settings):

Long Answer
Another possibility is documented here in an article about using Dnsmasq for local development on OS X and a related StackOverflow question in which someone seems to have found it successful except when their offline (which doesn't make a lot of since.. but the key point here is, it seems to work for them at least part of the time)
The linked article directs that you should create a directory at /etc/resolver if it doesn't already exist by using the command
sudo mkdir -p /etc/resolver

Now you should create a new file in this directory for each resolver you want to configure.  Configure with at least these two options (there are more options available):

the name of the resolver (corresponding to the domain name)
the DNS server to be used.

For more information about these files, see the resolver(5) manual page:
man 5 resolver
Create a new file with the same name as your new top-level domain in the /etc/resolver/ directory and add a nameserver to it by running the following commands:
sudo tee /etc/resolver/local >/dev/null <<EOF
nameserver 127.0.0.1
EOF
Here local is the top-level domain name configured to respond to and 127.0.0.1 is the IP address of the server to use.

I looked to see if I had that directory by default and I did not, but I did notice I had a file /etc/resolv.conf which existed by default.  I have not attempted, but if the solution in the article is unsuccessful I would try using this pre-existing resolv.conf file.. under the assumption.. it must be there for a reason.


You have multiple options depending on your needs.
The most straight-forward option would be to format your external disk in the ExFAT format. This format is supported for both read and writes by both macOS and Chrome OS. It also supports large files, which is otherwise a problem with older versions of FAT.
Another option would be to format the external disk with HFS+. This format can be read and written to from macOS, and you can read the files from Chrome OS. You'll need to copy them over to other storage (internal/external) once on Chrome OS, as you will be able to only read the files - not write to them again on the HFS+ formatted disk.


How do I force-quit an individual app on Apple Watch?

For watchOS 3 and newer:

Press and hold the Side Button
Press and hold the Digital Crown

For watchOS 2:

When the app that you would like to terminate is open:

Press and hold the Side Button and wait until the shut down screen appear. Then let go of the side button.
Press and hold the Side button again until the home screen appears.

Your formerly active app has now been terminated.

PS: The Side Button is the button below the Digital Crown.


This is pretty easy if you have a network that works or a second Mac.
I’m not sure you have either based on the initial version of your question. You may have both based on the edit.
The erase install process works great for us on the hardware you have. I wouldn't mess with bootable media if you can download from Internet Recovery.
Instead - erase the disk, which returns you to the Catalina installer. While it's running - look for Command-L and Command-3 to show the log file and show all logs.

Since you’re between versions: - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904 -  use Shift - Option - Command - R.
This is the most reliable erase process: - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496
This is the most reliable recovery process: - https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-2/revive-or-restore-mac-firmware-apdebea5be51/mac

It's unlikely you need Apple Configurator, but know you can bypass everything and start by restoring the T2 chip and then write a new BridgeOS if needed on T2 Macs.


AppleScript to toggle dark mode with fading

I believe at the moment this is not possible.  Even when you switch between Dark/Light modes in Automator, it will call the same API that your AppleScript does and change it immediately.  Which makes me believe if Apple didn't make it fade nicely for its own tool, it currently can't be done.


Applications installed with brew cask install won't launch for other users

The issue seems to be some directories in the app folders missing the execute bit. You can check permissions using for example:

find /Applications/Spotify.app/ -type d -exec ls -ld {} \;

Directories should have permissions drwxr-xr-x@ but some were drwxr--r--@.

The following command will change all directories to have the execute permission present:

sudo find /Applications/Spotify.app/ -type d -exec chmod og+x {} \;

The same needs to be run for all apps having this issue.


Magic Keyboard on Windows - How to get Media keys to work

I would assume the media keys on the Magic Keyboard would work with Windows 10, if the following were true.

The Boot Camp Assistant was used to install Windows 10.

The model Mac is listed under Compatibility at the Apple Magic Keyboard website.

Under Windows settings, the Apple keyboard is chosen as the current input method. See image below.


You have to remove the iCloud lock to become the rightful owner of the phone. The previous owner should be able to remove the lock using his/her password. Otherwise it is essentially a stolen phone.


How to filter logs via processImagePath?

As per Apple support response, string constants must be quoted within the predicate expression.

So the command should have syntax like:

log stream --level debug --predicate 'processImagePath contains "Google"'

See: Creating a Predicate Using a Format String at Apple Programming Guide.


Is it possible to move all windows from one space to the other?

You can still do this in OS X Lion.

Move to the space you want to move the application's windows to. Right-click on the application icon in your Dock, select Options and enable "This Desktop" in the sub-menu. All of the windows should now move over to the current space.

Out of interest, how do you do this in Snow Leopard?

Edit: At last, I found a way to do this. Open Mission Control, and left-click and drag the application icon under the application windows to a new space at the top of the screen. You can create a new space entirely, or move all of the windows to an existing space. Hope this helps.


Ideally you can restore whatever you‘ve deleted from a backup.

If you removed the standard Python installation of macOS, boot into the Recovery Partition (if any) and reinstall macOS from there. This should leave your other files intact, it‘s not a bad idea to do a backup before nevertheless.

Alternatively, you can through Homebrew.

Once Homebrew is installed, run:

brew install python@2

That won't likely install the same 2.7 revision you were using.

If you need an exact match, or don't/can't use Homebrew; I'd build it from source (if so, comment for further instruction).

Python 2 is end of life by January 1st 2020. Please don’t use it unless you are sure you are using an OS default.

If I am not in mistake, as of June 2020 macOS 10.15.4 (i.e., not fully up to date) is still at Python 2.7 (2.7.16).

If you are at 10.15.5 or later you are welcome to comment your mileage.


How to programmatically construct the name of application used to open directories?

An indirect solution I'm currently using is M-!, and type open . in the mini-buffer, which opens the directory in the system-default application, which is Path Finder on my computer.


How do I keep an ssh tunnel alive using launchd?

I think you need to add "ServerAliveCountMax".  Since you don't have it set it defaults to 3.  Try setting it to something higher than 3 and see if it relives some of your issues.  In your case it would disconnect if the server is not responsive for 180 seconds.

From the ssh man page:

 ServerAliveCountMax:

     Sets the number of server alive messages (see below) which may be
     sent without ssh(1) receiving any messages back from the server.
     If this threshold is reached while server alive messages are
     being sent, ssh will disconnect from the server, terminating the
     session.  It is important to note that the use of server alive
     messages is very different from TCPKeepAlive (below).  The server
     alive messages are sent through the encrypted channel and there‐
     fore will not be spoofable.  The TCP keepalive option enabled by
     TCPKeepAlive is spoofable.  The server alive mechanism is valu‐
     able when the client or server depend on knowing when a connec‐
     tion has become inactive.

     The default value is 3.  If, for example, ServerAliveInterval
     (see below) is set to 15 and ServerAliveCountMax is left at the
     default, if the server becomes unresponsive, ssh will disconnect
     after approximately 45 seconds.  This option applies to protocol
     version 2 only.


Use option-arrows with Unicode Hex Input

I've disabled the ⌘+⌥+space shortcut for Spotlight window (since I never used it anyway), but enabled the same shortcut to switch to the next input method. (You can configure this in the Keyboard preference pane.)

So whenever you need to use the ⌥ key to navigate, you can punch the three keys, do your navigating, punch them again, and be back in Unicode mode (if you only have two input sources; otherwise you'll cycle through them.)


Here is the fix! It has to do with the EDID settings.

https://michaelcivitillo.com/overriding-edid-on-osx-for-external-monitors/


Using Karabiner for multi key to multi key remapping

Ok I solved my two specific problems, though I am still not sure how I would replicate multiple key presses if more than one of them were not modifier keys.

Put the following two json files in user/.config/karabiner/assets/complex_modifications

{
  "title": "Shift + Enter",
  "rules": [
    {
      "description": "Shift + Enter to Option Enter (newline in messenger)",
      "manipulators": [
        {
          "type": "basic",
          "from": {
            "key_code": "return_or_enter",
            "modifiers": {
              "mandatory": [
                "shift"
              ],
              "optional": [
                "caps_lock",
                "option"
              ]
            }
          },
          "to": [
            {
              "key_code": "return_or_enter",
              "modifiers": [
                "option"
            ]
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

This one (shift enter) is really frustrating me but not because of karabiner. In messenger i need to option+enter to get a new line character, but in the browser option-enter refuses to do anything. I wish I could get a key combination that does a consistent "safe" new line character, rather than making me fear I am going to accidentally press enter to send or complete or publish or something like that.

{
  "title": "cmd + angle brackets for workspaces",
  "rules": [
    {
      "description": "Use CMD + comma  (left angle bracket key) to switch to  left workspace",
      "manipulators": [
        {
          "type": "basic",
          "from": {
            "key_code": "comma",
            "modifiers": {
              "mandatory": [
                "command"
              ],
              "optional": [
                "caps_lock",
                "option",
                "control"
              ]
            }
          },
          "to": [
            {
              "key_code": "left_arrow",
              "modifiers": [
                "control"
            ]
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "description": "Use CMD + .  (right angle bracket key) to switch to  left workspace",
      "manipulators": [
        {
          "type": "basic",
          "from": {
            "key_code": "period",
            "modifiers": {
              "mandatory": [
                "command"
              ],
              "optional": [
                "caps_lock",
                "option",
                "control"
              ]
            }
          },
          "to": [
            {
              "key_code": "right_arrow",
              "modifiers": [
                "control"
            ]
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

A solution to a similar question can be found here: How to bind a key to press two separate keys


How do I connect power to a NVIDIA GTX 1070 Founders Edition in a 2009 Mac Pro?

You will need a Y cable with 2 x male mini 6 pins at one end and 1 x male 8 pin on the other end.

You will have to connect both mini 6 pin ends to the motherboard. 1 x 6 pin will not provide enough power. Only both 6 pin ends will be able to provide the power your GPU needs under full stress.


If you don't mind using some command-line tomfoolery:

osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to activate' -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "Terminal" to keystroke "t" using command down'

This is from a stack overflow question on a similar topic.

If you want you can even create a new URL handler (or replace the ssh:// one) with a shell script as described at another stack overflow question.

EDIT1: you can get command line args from osascript by using something like the following (taken from the osascript man page):

a.scpt:
on run argv
    return "hello, " & item 1 of argv & "."
end run

% osascript a.scpt world
hello, world.


How to make smart playlist that contain more than 1 artist

Switch the first part

Match "all" of the following rules

to

Match "any" of the following rules


Certain Calendars do not trigger iPhone Notifications

In your Calendars app, press the "Calendars" button on the bottom, and press the (i) that shows up next to each calendar in the list of calendars. Scroll to the bottom of the settings there, and there should be a toggle for Event Alerts. Turn this on for each individual calendar.


iTunes music purchases after changing country

Your account has an associated country based on your credit card address. As long as you keep your account you should have access to the content, but I think you'll need to make a new account once you get a credit card in the new country. I don't know if you can have 2 accounts active in iTunes at the same time but I'm pretty sure you can switch between accounts.


automator to run AppleScript for a shell script

You'll need to get the POSIX path of the input file:

on run {input, parameters}
    tell application "Terminal"
        activate
        do script "/Users/myaccountname/Applications/TeXcount_3_0/texcount.pl \"" & ( POSIX path of input as string) & "\""
    end tell
end run

I found the answer over at StackOverflow.


How to select a paragraph using 3D Touch

When you use 3D Touch, there are two levels of pressure that it can detect. In order to use the keyboard as a trackpad (to control the cursor position) you only need to press to the first level of pressure. This is important because the "deeper" or second level of pressure is what enables selecting text.

Once you have control of the cursor, move it so that you are in the middle of a word (if you weren't already). Then "click" harder on the screen and the current word will be selected. Drag the cursor around to select additional words.

To select an entire paragraph, after getting control of the cursor, you need to "triple click" just as you would on a real trackpad or with a computer mouse. The difference is the "clicks" are hard presses on the screen.


Does anyone find that spotlight forgets docx files every day?

I was having a similar issue with Numbers files, with them being remembered by Spotlight for varying lengths of time and then being forgotten. Often I had to open files from the 'Open Recent' menu because Spotlight didn't return them. Usually that got them back into the spotlight index, but only temporarily. Perhaps it wasn't only Numbers files, just that those were the ones I'd been searching for.

In my case, it turns out that I had very little free disk space. Enough for what I thought of as my storage needs, but apparently not enough for the system to operate correctly.

I moved 30GB of files to an external drive, emptied the trash, rebooted, ran sudo mdutil -E /, waited for indexing to complete, rebooted again.

That was yesterday, and so far so good. Spotlight has returned everything that I've thought to search for. Also, my machine had been getting quite sluggish but now feels quite responsive. I hope this helps you, or others who find this thread.

[Update: things are better but not solved. There's still some mysterious gaps in my spotlight search results. Doesn't seem to matter whether it's files on the local disk, on iCloud drive, opened recently, etc.]


Momentary freeze in Mac OS X on attaching a USB device

Do you happen to have the Android File Transfer application installed? Various users on macrumors have noted the same issue, and have narrowed it down to having AFT installed.

I'm getting the same problem, and I too have AFT installed, but I won't be removing it any time soon as it's the only way to get anything to/from my Android devices.


It should still be there, if it never downloaded? I suggest you contact in to Apple iTunes Support and explain you had items in your downloads queue, when you restarted, they disappeared.

First try signing out and back into your iTunes Store account in iTunes, if they download queue is still empty, email in.


Why does my terminal open with "Basic" settings

You probably just missed a setting. The "Default" button makes whatever you have selected in the Preferences menu the default.

(Selected in red)

I do find it kind of annoying that you can't set Terminal to just open with the default settings, so you have to change it in two places. edit - turns out I'm completely wrong, it does change the Startup automatically if you change the default. I guess I had the same problem as OP :P


2015 13" MacBook Pro Trackpad and Keyboard stop working

Since I ran into the same problem and this comes up on Google, I will provide an answer, even if there is no question.

When my keyboard and touchpad stopped working, the power button was still ok.
Resetting NVRAM did not help.
Using an external keyboard and mouse was fine.

Typing sudo dmesg | tail on the command line was showing similar messages:

AppleHSSPIController::_enqueueSPICommandGated SPICommand timed out. Interface 208, transactionType 64, frameNumber 0
Error: AppleHSSPIDevice::_DoDescriptorRequestGated Failed issue request error: 0xe00002ed
Error: AppleHSSPIDevice::getDeviceDescriptor Failed to get descriptor with error 0xe00002ed
Error: AppleHSSPIDevice::start failed to get device descriptor
Error: AppleHSSPIController::_enumerateDevice Start failed
Error: AppleHSSPIController::_handleEnumerationFailureGated Failed to enumerate the device. Resetting the device and trying to enumerate again. Attempt:1
IO80211AWDLPeerManager::setAwdlOperatingMode Setting the AWDL operation mode from AUTO to SUSPENDED
IO80211AWDLPeerManager::setAwdlSuspendedMode() Suspending AWDL, enterQuietMode(true)
AppleIntelLpssGspi1::calcSpiClockParams: fSysClockPeriodPsec 10000, spiClockPeriodNsec 125
Error: AppleHSSPIController::doSPITransfer ERR received from device

I brought it to the local Apple support partner. They first tried it by updating the touchpad controller software. Since that did not work either, they changed the HSSPI cable.


How to enable Double-Tap to Drag in Mac OS X Catalina?

System Preferences → Accessibility → Pointer Control → Mouse & Trackpad → Trackpad Options…

Enable dragging → Without Drag Lock (or With Drag Lock per your preference)


Yes - deleting an app from any device will not remove it from other devices.

Only if you:

Delete the app from iTunes
Sync more than one device to iTunes
Bypass the warning that an app is present on the device but not iTunes and skip the chance to import that app back into iTunes

will the deletion of an app in one place cascade over to other devices. You might also want to review which devices automatically download apps so that you don't get apps that are purchased and intended for another device.


Broken iPhone 5s screen, can't authorize iTunes

Ask Apple if there is a store near by. Usually they charge $129 (plus tax) to fix a broken iPhone 5s screen. If you can't get to an Apple store, you can mail your device in to Apple for a shipping fee of $6.95. If you purchased AppleCare+ ($99 for two years) for your device, you'll only have to pay $79 for a screen repair -- though AppleCare+ only covers two incidents of accidental damage. If you don't have Applecare+ you can choose a reliable supplier to buy a screen replacement and then do the repair by yourself or a repair man.


How to show or hide Keyboard Viewer with a keyboard shortcut?

Launch Keyboard Viewer with a Service (Improved)

You can launch the Keyboard Viewer with a shortcut by using Automator and the OS X Services functionality.

The Keyboard Viewer program lives at /System/Library/Input Methods/KeyboardViewer.app (in versions prior to Lion, it may be at /System/Library/Components/KeyboardViewer.component/Contents/SharedSupport/KeyboardViewerServer.app). You open it with a hotkey by using Automator to create a simple launcher service.

Open Automator and select Service as the type of your new document.
Set the options (at the top of the workflow area) to "Service receives no input in any application".
Add the Run AppleScript action to your workflow, and replace the text with the following lines:

if application "KeyboardViewer" is running then
    quit application "KeyboardViewer"
end if

activate application "KeyboardViewer"

-- wait until the window has been closed, then end the KeyboardViewer process
set numberOfWindows to 1
repeat until numberOfWindows = 0
    delay 5
    tell application "System Events"
        tell process "KeyboardViewer"
            set numberOfWindows to count windows
        end tell
    end tell
end repeat
quit application "KeyboardViewer"

Save with a name like "Open Keyboard Viewer", then open Keyboard Preferences to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Select Services in the left pane and scroll to the bottom, where you should see the name of your Service under the General Section.
Make sure the box is checked to enable it, then select it and click add shortcut to set a hotkey.
After setting the hotkey, open the Services menu in any application (i.e. Finder > Services), then close it. For some reason my hot key didn't work until I did this.

A couple notes:

The script requires that you check the Enable access for assistive devices box in the Universal Access preference pane.
Closing the Keyboard Viewer window doesn't actually quit the application, and as Lri points out, it can be a bit of a resource hog, so the repeat loop checks every 5 seconds if Keyboard Viewer has any open windows, and if not, quits the process.
If you're running a pre-Lion OS, you may need to replace the instances of KeyboardViewer with KeyboardViewerServer. I don't have anything pre-Lion handy to test this (if someone else could report back in the comments, that would be great.
Because the script loops until the Keyboard Viewer is closed, the Automator spinning gear icon will show in the menu bar until it closes.


How do I backup account passwords and and other data on Catalina?

https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT205220#encrypt
Has the screenshot

From the General tab or the Summary tab, select "Encrypt local backup" under the Backups section.


iOS App with Free trial and subscribe after that

The App Store Review Guidelines are clear, an app that expires will be rejected:

  11.9 Apps containing content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected, except for specific approved content (e.g. films, television programs, music, books)

Contact Apple

Talk to Apple's App Store staff about how best to approach your app and how to avoid being rejected:

  App Review

  Find out the status of your app and submit general questions for the App Review Team.


Can we get "Enqueue" or something similar in iTunes [10.7]

The current (and previous) version of iTunes only supports this for the iTunes DJ playlist. This playlist selects music from your library to play automatically and shows some upcoming songs. You can choose a song to be next by right-clicking (control-clicking) on it and choosing "Play Next in iTunes DJ". You can also choose "Add to iTunes DJ" to put it at the end of the list already in iTunes DJ.

The next version of iTunes will support this from any playlist, through the "Up Next" feature. After playing the song you choose, it will return to the playlist you were in, even if that song wasn't in the playlist.


My fiance's iPhone 4 is still running on iOS 5, now that 6.1.3 has been released can I upgrade her to 6.1.2 so she can use evasion?

you can download ipsw file for 6.1.2.  apparantly there is a way to do this for iphone4 but newer hardware will not allow it.


The download links for some of the older versions of iTunes are available here:

https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes

iTunes 12.6.2 for macOS, iTunes 12.4.3 for Windows 64-bit are the latest under 12.7 listed.


Try restarting and then press Command+S. This will boot the computer in single user mode. After everything loaded, type in ( /sbin/ mount -uw /)first, then (rm /var/db/ .applesetupdone), and finally (shutdown -h now )or (reboot). This erases the previous setup and makes the mac think its brand new. All you would need is to create a new admin account.


An alternative to the text editor TextMate for PHP development?

Have a look at Sublime Text. It basically is what I would expect TextMate2 to be.

http://www.sublimetext.com/


Can we upgrade PowerPC Macs to OS X 10.7 now that 10.8 is out?

If your attempting to upgrade a PowerPC Mac the most you can upgrade one of those is Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, since it was the last version of OS X to support PowerPC processors.

So the answer is no to upgrading to any OS beyond Mac OS X 10.5 if the Mac your trying to upgrade is has a PowerPC processor.

If you have an Intel Mac that support OS X Lion and you really want Lion or if Lion is the last version of OS X that your Mac can run, you will be able to contact Apple and arrange a way to purchase it via Apple's legacy products list as noted in the following MacWorld article: Apple pulls Lion from the Mac App Store

  ...while Lion is no longer available for sale from the Mac App Store, customers can still purchase it from the legacy products list via Apple phone sales.

So if you really want lion contact Apple at 1-800-MY-APPLE and let them know you want to order OS X Lion.


How to disable Macbook Pro internal display when using external monitors

Turning the brightness down as suggested above turns the monitor off on my MacBook Pro - mid 2014 model. Keeping the lid open allows better dissipation of heat and keeps the fan noise to a minimum so this is my preferred mode of working.


Macbook Pro uses Wi-Fi from USB-connected iPhone

You most likely have turned on your iPhones hotspot, which also works over USB.
On your iPhone open the settings app. Head over to personal hotspot. Turn it off and you should be good.
On the Mac side you should be able to check to which network you are connected to by opening the settings app and viewing the connected network under the network pane.


Is Xcode with Swift on Mavericks possible?

A quick search for Xcode at the Wikipedia give you the answer. With the OS X version 10.9.4, you are able to install Xcode 6.2 and below.

On Xcode 6.2 you can code in Swift, but I'm afraid is not the latest Swift version.

This is the table where you can find out the requested information.


Change a Mac Mission Control wallpaper using the terminal

This isn't automator, but works well for me.

In the space that you want to change the desktop, open System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Select the picture you want for that space/screen.


Mac Terminal: Get list of Chinese fonts from a given folder

fc-scan -f "%{file}\t%{lang}\n" PATH | grep 'zh' | cut -f1 | sort | uniq

Replace PATH with the folder you want to scan. This spits out all filenames inside this directory which are at least of some language containing 'zh'.


Script to check to see if certain applications were installed

There are several ways via the command line to look to see if an Application is installed:
View the Applications Directory

To list all Applications installed system wide:
  $ ls /Applications

To list Applications installed by/for a specific user:
  $ ls /Users/<username>/Applications

Query system_profiler
The following command will list every single Application installed on the system that's in the Applications database:
$ system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType

It lists everything including obscure apps/utilities installed by Apple (or 3rd parties) that was included with the macOS installation.  Using grep we can limit it to a particular application.
$ system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType | grep -i Excel
    Microsoft Excel:
      Location: /Applications/Microsoft Excel.app

The caveat with these is that it must have been "properly" installed and registered with the system.  If you happen to download a binary directly from a website (ffmpeg is an excellent example), it won't show up using any of these methods.
Use which or type
For binaries that weren't installed, but rather just downloaded or copied onto a system and assuming they are in the path, you can use the command which or type
$ which ffmpeg
/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg

$ type ffmpeg
ffmpeg is /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg


Using GarageBand + Jam Packs in commercial games for iPhone

The article your linked is pretty clear: as long as you don't SELL the loops or tracks as loops or tracks, you can use them as you wish. Same would apply to the Jam Packs.


Performance issues, can I recover memory?

To answer your question, yes, applications and processes continue to start up and if you have not manually closed them or restarted the computer, you will be "losing" RAM. You can turn the inactive memory into free memory with this command in Terminal:

sudo purge

You can also run Activity Monitor to diagnose what apps are running and sort the list by most memory.


No signal to external monitor until after login (MacBook Pro 2020)

How can I make it work correctly before logging in?

It is working correctly.  Your built in screen is the main screen and during boot all boot/console messages are sent (they’re usually hidden by the Apple logo).  The login screen is set to display on the main screen so until you login to the GUI, there’s nothing to display on the secondary display.
But, based on your comments, what you want to do is use your Mac in closed lid or closed clamshell mode:

I have the displays mirrored so I was hoping to see the logon screen. The MacBook sits at the back of my desk partially hidden by the external monitor and I use the external monitor as my main screen so it’s a little inconvenient that I have to move it to see the screen better just to log in

If the display is partially hidden/obstructed and you have the contents mirrored and not as an extended display, this is a perfect scenario to use the Mac in closed clamshell mode.  The secondary/external display will become the main display and boot and login screens will appear there.


MacbookPro bootable Windows USB not visible

I managed to install Windows 8 on the system, and would like to post my findings, since I am sure others will run into the same issues I faced.

The problem reported in this post had to do with the windows iso images themselves, not with Bootcamp or EFI. To make sure your system will even see the USB at all, make sure it has the file /efi/boot/bootx64.efi otherwise Mac will not even see the usb as a bootable device.
To anyone speaking Russian, this link will be very informative on how the entire process works http://geektimes.ru/post/213223/.
If you are installing Windows 8 (I would still like to know if anyone managed to install Windows 7) make sure you do everything through BootCamp, especially partitioning, since the first time I tried editing the partitions manually, I managed to screw up my recovery partition (repaired by downloading and installing El Capitan again without data loss). Not only that, I managed to stop seeing 'could not set up bootable device' errors only when I went through all three steps in Bootcamp on a single session. What I really dislike is that downloading fairly large amount of drivers during step 2 of BootCamp fails if there is a network problem, and I had to restart the entire process a lot of times.
I ran first aid on recovery partition as shown in this post:
Problem Installing Boot Camp Windows Partition on new Mac Pro
but judging from documentation of El Capitan this should not be necessary since the OS should repair write permissions automatically, therefore I am not sure whether the method shown here is necessary any longer. I did not reset my PRAM.
During the last part of Windows installation, the one after you create the user account and wait, the computer froze. However, after hard reset the system started normally and I could make the last step of installing BootCamp drivers from the USB.

To sum it up, make sure the Windows image is x64 and bootable by EFI and make sure to carry out USB creation, driver installation and partitioning of the system by BootCamp only and in a single clean swipe.


Look at MacPar deluxe it checks each part - and if the parts include .par files it can recover from some errors


iPad memory used if far higher than sum of all App's memory usage

When your iPad is connected to the computer, click on the Device and look at the bottom of the screen. There is a bar that shows how much data each category is using.  What is the size of the "other data" category?

Your iPad stores not only the Apps but there is a lot of stuff like:
Browser cache,
Mail cache,
Mail messages,
Mail attachments,
Safari's Reading List,
iTunes Backups,
Game data,
Saved data files,
Call history,
Notes,
Media,
Voice memos,
etc.

To see what is using the memory space on iPad: Settings->General->Usage

In this list: All installed Apps are listed, tap on any App to see the actual App size and the amount of documents and data used by this App.

To delete this data, you have to delete the App, restart your device (press and hold Home and Sleep until you see the Apple logo) and reinstall it from the AppStore.


How do I put an HTML page to be displayed when opening a website from hosts file?

One has nothing to do with the other.

A hosts file is just a "directory" of host names and their IP addresses.  It's not limited to websites.  You can think of it as a "flat file DNS lookup."

# Sample hosts file
#

123.456.789.001      foo.bar

With this address, you can...

Go to a website - http://foo.bar
SMB share :  smb://foo.bar
SSH connection:  ssh user@foo.bar
Copy files securely from one host to another - scp stuff.ext user@foo.bar:/path/stuff
and much more

In order for your browser to display a web page, it must be "served" that page.  Since, by default, your clients aren't running a web server, there's nothing to serve.

I'm assuming that you want to display this "web page" when someone goes to a site you "blocked" by using a custom hosts file.

You need to do this at the (your) network level where the DNS lookup redirects (or firewall intercepts/redirects) to a server hosting your error page.


Is there anyway to disable network connections on 3G for some application?

You can't, at least at user level.

The App's Developer can, of course, detect if the device is connected either by WiFi or 3G, and act accordingly.


Run Command Line Script from Finder's contextual menu

If you're using Snow Leopard, you can create a Service, and it'll show up in a submenu of the contextual menu (as well as in the Services submenu of the Finder menu).  To do this:

Run /Applications/Automator.app
Choose the Service template
Set the Service Receives Selected pop-up (above the workflow column on the right) to "Files and Folders"
Find the Run Shell Script action in the second column (the search field at the top can help), and drag it to the workflow column
Set the action's Pass input: pop-up to "as arguments"
In the template script that appears, replace echo "$f" with exiftool -all= -overwrite_original "$f" -- the script should now look like this:

for f in "$@"
do
    exiftool -all= -overwrite_original "$f"
done

Save the Service with some descriptive name


Is there a keyboard shortcut in OS X Mavericks for quick reply when an iMessage notification appears?

You could assign a keyboard shortcut to a script like this:

tell application "System Events" to click window 1 of process "Notification Center"


How I can make rm to single pass secure delete items in macOS?

No, that is not possible with the standard rm command.

You could download the rm source code (rm.c) from opensource.apple.com and edit the rm_overwrite() function to only do a single pass.

Or you could use an alternative program that overwrites the file, and then afterwards use rm to delete it. Such an alternative program could just be to use cat or dd to copy bytes from /dev/urandom or /dev/null over the file.


Connect a desktop PC wirelessly to a home network via Airport Express

This doesn't answer your title, but your question I suppose.
Unless you just have the AirPort lying around without any use, a cheaper solution would be to get a USB Wireless Adapter. You can get those for almost a tenth of the price of an Airport.


The symbol you see, letter A in a box with rounded corners, is most probably the generic glyph is used in some fallback fonts like LastResort. It means the data contains some Ascii (Basic Latin) character, and for some reason, a fallback font is used.

It’s more difficult to say. On the pages in the screen shot, the text rendered that way have Arial set as the primary way, so it almost looks like Arial was somehow replaced by LastResort in your computer. But this would affect the page more widely, and your use of the computer in general, so it’s probably something in Safari.

I would first try re-installing Safari.


How can I tell if I'm viewing a secure page in Safari (6.0.2)?

On HTTPS pages Safari shows a small padlock.

 (screen made with Safari 6.0.2)

You can see this a little easier in these larger snaps - one of a site where the SSL certificate was not trusted implicitly (signed or otherwise trusted by your Mac) and another where the certificate was valid and signed up the chain by the Mac and shown in green.


How do I un-trust or remove blacklisted root CAs from mobile Safari on my iPhone or iPad?

You don't. (not without jail breaking iOS) More sadly, we've gone from the situation on iOS 4 -> 5 ->6 -> iOS 7 and still cannot choose what certificates are trusted by the OS.

This is either a bug in the iPhone configuration utility or an unimplimented feature. If you care, do reach out to apple to ask for this.

http://www.apple.com/feedback or http://bugreporter.apple.com

Unless you are comfortable writing a technically correct bug, the feedback link is a better avenue. Calling AppleCare or asking for this at the genius bar might also be worthwhile.


What's the difference between Export as PDF and Print, Save as PDF in Apple Pages?

In short: Not much. The only significant difference between the two is the different options that are displayed in the dialogs in each process.
Export PDF gives you image compression, the ability to include various metadata.

"Save As PDF" gives you options to set keywords such as Title, Author, and lets you set Security options.

There may conceivably be slight differences in the way that the PDF is formulated - it's likely that using "Save As PDF" from the print menu will involve the print driver for the selected printer in some way. (Though, for example, note that a mono printer still produces colour PDFs.)
It's all just a conversion from CoreGraphics (which is conceptually similar) to PDF. Apple's PDF-creating routines don't have the latitude and range of options that you find in GhostScript or Distiller.
Comparing two PDFs created by each of the two methods reveals that the data is substantially the same for the vast majority: the differences lie in things like decimal precision of page sizes (again, likely due to page definitions in the print driver).


Downloads folder is showing empty when it's not!

The ls manual page explains this:

total 16

Total, here, does not represent the number of items, but the sum of the number of BLOCKS allocated to the files in the directory.

For example, if the block size is 512 bytes (don't quote me on this, but the math checks out), and the total disk space used by the directory is 8KB on disk:

8 KB = 8000 bytes
8000 B/512 B = 15.625
Rounding this value up equates to 16 blocks.

My empty Downloads directory reads the same:

njboot$ ls -axhl ~/downloads
total 16
drwx------   4 njboot  staff   136B May 16 20:17 .
drwxr-xr-x  20 njboot  staff   680B May  9 10:02 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 njboot  staff   6.0K May 16 20:17 .DS_Store
-rw-------   1 njboot  staff     0B Dec  8 14:27 .localized


Is it possible to change the system font to a monospaced font?

Unfortunately there is no built-in way to change the system default font, there are, however, a couple of utilities that let you change the default system font or at least some of the system fonts. How well this will work with a monospaced font like Courier is anyone's guess, and mine would be probably not very well.

You can change the font back to something many thought was more readable than the current font. By changing it to Lucida Grande.

There is another utility called TinkerTool that lets you change the font for some of the macOS. I don't believe it will change everything but it likely worth the try.

Those are all I know of, there may be others that work better but these should give you a good start.


The @ is the at sign for siri according to this unofficial guide:

http://www.siriuserguide.com/siri-dictation-guide/

I don't see any official Apple resource but this wikipedia article documenting the Basic Latin Unicode block (which also maps directly to ASCII text) has english pronunciation that works well with Siri.

The things I can't get to work from that table are:

^ - circumflex
_ - low line - (but underline works)

Also, dictating quotes needs to be with the quote on/quote off command and not by dictating when the quotes should be typed.


Macbook retina scaled resolution quality

Best for retina = every on-screen pixel is represented by four pixels on the display (1440 x 900 displayed on 2880 x 1800 pixels)

More space = every on-screen pixel is represented by 1.8 pixels on the display. (1920 x 1200 displayed on 2880 x 1800 pixels)

In between these two settings every on-screen pixel is represented by an uneven number of pixels on the display. Because there is no such thing as half a pixel, the drawing is not exact so there will be fuzziness. But the physical pixels on the retina display are supposed to smaller than we can perceive from a normal viewing distance so most people cannot notice it.

Maybe you are sitting closer to the screen than most people do. Maybe you are just perceiving a difference that is not really there. Maybe your text zooming is doing something weird. Or maybe you just have sharper eyes than most and are more sensitive to fuzziness.


Is there a simple way to temporarily grant network access to a single application?

You could create a custom rule set to achieve this using Little Snitch:

https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html


Our Canon MX340 printer/scanner is connected wirelessly to my MacBook Pro, but I can't get the scanner function to show up anywhere

This might help:
http://www.mac-forums.com/apple-notebooks/212319-canon-pixma-mx340-macbook-pro.html

Let us know if it does or not, please!