text:
How do I view title text for a web page on a mobile device?
XKCD on my kindle or phone just doesn't cut it.  I do all my other morning reading from the comfort of the ivory throne, but always have to revisit XKCD when I'm at a full blown computer with a mouse because I can't access the title text for the comic.
Is there any way to display the title text on a mobile device?

In that particular case, the solution (probably a workaround) is to visit the mobile version, m.xkcd.com. I don't know of a more general solution for sites that don't provide a mobile version. There may not be one, depending on the browser implementation.

It's not generally possible unless specifically supported in some way by your browser, but you can create bookmarklets in JavaScript that add image title text to the web page as regular text paragraphs. How well that works depends on the layout of the web page.
One possible implementation is the following as URL of a bookmark:

javascript:(function(){for(var i=0;i<document.images.length;i++){var t=document.createTextNode(document.images[i].title); document.images[i].parentNode.insertBefore(t, document.images[i].nextSibling);}})();

This will add the image title text just after every image on the web page. For XKCD, it looks like this:

It's not easy to type on iOS, but you can use iCloud to sync it between desktop and iOS device.

Woah - great catch on javascript code injection via a bookmark. XKCD is just good enough to make this sort of solution worth the effort. +geek points

Not easily without preparing a tool for the job - the title text from XKCD uses the mouse pointer and a hover timeout to present the title text as shown below:
<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/good_cop_dadaist_cop.png" title="NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS." alt="Good Cop, Dadaist Cop" />

On iOS in the mobile safari, there is no mouse pointer that exists to hover, so that information does not surface in the normal interface. You may be able to get at it using VoiceOver, but the learning curve and delay in turning that on or off makes it a very slow workaround.


text:
How can I configure my keyboard to be backlit at the login screen?
I recently had to reinstall Lion.  Now, when I boot the keyboard is not backlit when at the login screen.  It used to be backlit when at the login screen.
I'm using a Macbook Air 11" July 2011 model.  In System Preferences I have the checkbox: Automatically illuminate keyboard in low light checked.  The setting for Turn off when computer is not used for: is set at Never.

It appears that the problem is related to FileVault.  When I turned FileVault off and rebooted in safe mode the problem went away.  I could change the brightness of the screen and the keyboard at the login screen.  Volume controls worked too.  Now that I've turned FileVault back on the problem is back.

I believe that's because, with FileVault 2 enabled, that initial "login" screen must be bypassed before OS X actually boots. Hence, no settings can be applied there - they're all still sitting encrypted on your disk.

What you wrote makes sense.  Thanks for the insight.

Have you tried turning up the keyboard backlight brightness at the login screen, logging in and restarting to see if it will keep your setting? Typically, the setting for the backlit keyboard is stored in the PRAM. Once setting the brightness to your desired level, it should retain the setting after a restart providing you don't reset the PRAM. Give it a shot.

I am unable to change the brightness of the keyboard at the login screen.  I can't change the brightness of the screen or the keyboard when I'm at the login screen.  I have both at full brightness when I restart.  Keyboard isn't backlit but screen is at full brightness.

So, what happens when you press the display brightness and keyboard backlight brightness keys on your keyboard at the login screen? Any prohibitory signs or sounds? Do the adjustment HUDs show themselves?

Nothing happens.  No sounds, no change. Nothing.

Hmm, that's odd. Try resetting the PRAM. Restart and hold down the Command + Option + P + R keys until you hear the startup chime sound twice.

I tried this and it didn't work.  I turned FileVault off and booted in safe mode.  Then rebooted again in normal mode and the problem went away.  I could change volume, screen brightness, and keyboard was backlit.  Then I turned FileVault back on and rebooted and the problem was back.  Thanks for your help.

That's crazy. Must have been some kind of encryption/permissions error disabling access to those kexts.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Strange user named "Other…" on 10.6
Recently, I tried logging out of my machine (rather than just shutting it down) and I noticed that a user with the name "Other ..." was present. I don't recall adding the user. I tried checking out System Preferences >> Accounts and it just lists a disabled "Guest" account and my main account.
Why is this?

"Other" is not a user. It just allows you to enter a username and password into textboxes instead of clicking on an icon.
It can be used to connect to a network domain user. It can also be used for special users, such as "Root" (which gives you unlimited control over all hidden and restricted files) and ">console" (which logs into your Mac in command-line-only mode.)

I see. However, I dont recall seeing this when I first installed my machine; are there settings to turn this particular display on and off?

Check out post #8 on this site: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1166153.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Improving security of Mac OS X 10.6
I own a 10.6 Macbook Pro with which I have to use a public IP (that does not change) frequently. I'm also required to idle at various IRC channels. As part of security, I use pretty strong passwords, have my firewall up and I do regular updates. I use the Google Chrome browser (again updated) for online browsing. I have file sharing turned off.

Are there any more suggestions you'd make to keep my machine more secure?
Are there any ways to detect if I have keyloggers installed on my machine?
Any anti-viruses that you would recommend?
I use colloquy to connect to IRC channels, is there any way I could mask my public IP from people who query it?

FYI: Macs don't have viruses. Proof of concepts exist (not the same as Windows) but nothing that is of any concern in a real life scenario. To detect key loggers, fire up Activity monitor and look at the running processes. If anything looks suspicious, Google it and get some more info. Chances are slim that anyone has managed to install one on your box, unless you make it a point to piss off LulzSec.

I used the term "AV" as you hear the term "AV vendors", not "anti-malware" vendors. The information you provided regarding Macs not having viruses/malware, is obsolete I'm afraid.

Macs are vulnerable to malware, requiring a user to install an "evil" payload but are highly resistant to viruses.

@eQuiNoX__ Obsolete? Hardly. Macs don't have a virus threat. Period. Malware, yes, some exist, but you can count them all on one hand. And they do nothing more than trick the user into shelling out some cash by buying some product they don't need. The install process is also quite user-intensive, forcing the user to click through a number of windows (just like installing any other app). Common sense and avoiding the installation of unknown material is SOP for any computer user, Mac, Unix, or Windows. The threat is nowhere near the scale of Windows. Not even close.

Turn on FileVault, don't run suspicious applications, don't use public networks too much, etc. I would also suggest you have a look at Little Snitch or HandsOff. These are applications that detect all incoming and outgoing network connections and allow you to block them. Great apps to see what processes are communicating to what servers, and if you see anything suspicious, you can deny the connection.
For Keyloggers I suggest you have a look at this site. It has some useful recommendations.
I don't actually recommend any antivirus for mac. Macs are pretty virus-free: I'd say you are pretty much completely safe if no one hates you, and if somebody does they aren't going to infect your computer with a virus; they'll attempt to hack you, so anti-viruses seem pretty useless on Macs.
As far as I know, Colloquy should automatically mask your IP. I'm not completely sure about this, and I suggest you have a look at websites that talk about IRC security, such as this one. The final option, I'd say, would be to use a proxy.

Last, if you would like a complete security guide to Mac OS definitely have a look at this manual by Apple. It has pretty much all the security options you might encounter on Mac OS X. It's quite long, but a few chapters (4, 5, 8, 9, etc) might prove useful to you.
Hope it helps!
Kevin

+1 for little snitch and using a proxy.  You could also just ssh to IRC sessions running on a VM in the cloud.  Re-image the cloud/VPS VM periodically.

Just to clarify, Little Snitch does not examine inbound connections, only outbound (you rely on the built-in OS X firewall for this which is usually good enough - depending on how you have it configured). If you do want to do both with a GUI tool, take a look at Hands Off! which provides this in addition to DNS and file system filtering. Despite the advice above, if you did want to use Antivirus, you could do a lot worse that Sophos Antivirus for Mac (although I have heard it doesn't play nicely if you have Filevault enabled).

HandsOff not only controls all network traffic, but also allows to control and block where programs write to.

The problem with firewalls isn't really their robustness these days, it's the user behind it (how it's configured, used, etc.). Anyone not familiar with TCP/IP stacks, network protocols, best practices, etc. will risk circumventing their entire defense system by allowing the wrong thing in or out. When presented with a pop up, most people just click yes if it's asking them to allow something they're unfamiliar with. I think knowledge and education is the best place to start when trying to roll out any kind of security strategy. Having 8 dead bolts doesn't work if you don't lock any of them.

Do not log into an administrator account on your Mac.  Create a user account with limited privileges and use that for IRC and browsing.  Turn Bluetooth off when not using it, and consider not using it at all in public.


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Icons on the desktop may slow down Mac?
When I ask a question about if I run too many process will slow down my Mac for Magican measured my Mac is high CPU usage. A Mac user tell me the icons on the desktop may still influence the performance of my Mac. Is this true?

Reputable sources like Macworld indicate that the Finder draws non-generic Desktop icons the same way it draws open windows, and the more of them there are, the more memory and processor time it takes to refresh the Desktop. I have not found any sources that indicate this is a major factor in system speed, but yes, more custom icons on the Desktop take more resources when the computer redraws the Desktop.

What do you mean with "icons on the desktop"? Having files (docs, pictures, etc) does not slows your machine down though. Now, if you are referring to the apps on your Doc if you have a lot open and depending what apps you have it might. Widgets can slow somewhat the system. You might want to look also into upgrading your memory if your system just came with the minimum. I have a MBP and after upgrading the memory from 4 to 8 GB I saw a huge positive improvement.


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Launch program after inactivity

Possible Duplicate:
How can I automatically launch an application whenever the Mac goes idle?

I'd like to launch an AppleScript/ App after 30 minutes of system inactivity. e.g. no cursor movement or keyboard input?

What qualifies as inactivity? There are background processes running all the time on OS X.

Clarified inactivity to be no mouse or keyboard input.


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Does Apple's wireless keyboard work cross-platform such as in Ubuntu, Windows and *ixes?
My friend bought me the mStand here and it is quite cool passive heat conductor, placing the screen to the right level and I can use it for books etc besides laptops. It requires a wireless kbd and the only such kbd I would tolerate is probably by Apple (because it is small and function at least in Mac). Now I have different laptops such as Ubuntus, Windows and Linuxes. Can I use this keyboard with them also through Bluetooth?

Sure, there's nothing keeping it from working with Windows other than the fact that it's missing some keys. I'm not sure if it's compatible with the various distros of Linux, but you can try it out and look on their associated forums.
Also, for Windows, be sure to check this out:  http://www.kudzuworld.com/blogs/Tech/20080101.EN.aspx


text:
LaunchBar script that returns the path of a folder "dropped" on it
I want to make a LaunchBar script that displays in a dialog the path of a file or folder that's chosen in the first pane and then "dropped" on a script. But I can't make it work.
I've got a couple of working scripts that almost do what I want:
Return contents of first pane (used with a shortcut):
tell application "LaunchBar"
   set x to selection as text
   return x
end tell

Display text written in the first pane and "dropped" on the script:
on handle_string(textFromLaunchbar)
   tell application "LaunchBar"
       display in large type textFromLaunchbar
   end tell
end handle_string

The latter uses the handle_string() handler but I can't quite make the open() handler work for files and folders:
from the LaunchBar manual:
http://www.obdev.at/resources/launchbar/help/index.php?chapter=SendingItems
Sending items to AppleScripts
To pass a selected file, URL or text to an AppleScript, press the Tab key to trigger the “Send to…” action, select the desired AppleScript and press Return. Files will be passed to the script’s open() handler, URLs will be passed to the handle_string() handler.

Are you trying to use the path in another application? If so, Cmd-C on the file in LaunchBar will put the POSIX path to the file on the clipboard, no need for AppleScript.

no, but that's a very useful little trick

The open() handler gets passed an alias (which is a kind of a pointer to a file or folder). You can then simply convert the alias to text, but it will show you the path with colons as separators (e.g. "Macintosh HD:Users:Username:Documents:Folder:").
Use POSIX path of to convert it to a UNIX-style path with "/" separators, and if you want to paste it into Terminal, especially if the path has spaces in it, you should use quoted form of to properly enclose it in quotes.
The following script works with both folders and files for me, when an item is passed to it via LaunchBar:
on open (thisItem)
    display dialog (thisItem as text) -- alias
    display dialog quoted form of POSIX path of thisItem -- POSIX path
end open

I see you know about LaunchBar's "large type" feature -- did you know you can send selected text to it with the "Display in Large Type" action? I.e.

Select your file in LaunchBar
Tab, "dla", return


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How to display iPhone/iOS device on Projector?
I want to display my iPod screen in my PowerPoint slide show, or on a projector through WiFi.
How can I do that?
I mean something like what TeamViewer can do.

You need to register your account to gain ownership of this question again.

This question might be better if it listed which iPod you have. With the iOS iPod Touch and various classic and previous generation iPods you will have differing capabilities and tools to connect to any given projector.

Three possibilities:

Use AppleTV.
Use an appropriate adapter, such as an Apple Digital AV adapater or Apple VGA adapter. (Works only if you have a 4th generation iPod Touch.)
Use a document camera to record and project your device's screen. For demos where you want to show interaction with the device, this is a common setup.


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Can Time Capsule/Airport (4th gen) serve local DNS?
I just got a 4th gen Time Capsule for my wife to use as her own backup server, and I'm potentially interested in using it as the main router and Wifi AP on my home network. My current router and AP is running OpenWrt and I'm used to it providing several useful services. Can the Airport/Time Capsule provide enough functionality?
I see that it can take a list of MAC addresses and reserve IP addresses for each in its DHCP config. I can also set up arbitrary TCP and UDP port forwarding although not other protocols :-/. But what about local DNS?
My OpenWrt router is configured to be a caching recursive DNS resolver for the local network, and to inject a few records in the results for static assignments I've made (that go along with static DHCP assignments) for various hosts on the local network.
I don't want to hear anything about how Bonjour/mDNS should be the answer to all my problems. It isn't.
I suspect the answer is no (that's too complicated to be "Appley"), and that I'll need to leave the OpenWrt box as the router, and simply add the Time Capsule to the LAN, maybe also serving 5GHz Wifi.

I would recommend letting the apple device do your wifi and leave your wrt do the routing. I have a simliar setup and it works without issue. You'd still need the wrt for the modem side of things anyway (unless you've got a standalone one of those also)

@Lyken No modem - WAN connection is ethernet to a cable modem. If apple speaks directly to the WAN, then I might let it serve its alternate ESSID guest network which could be a cute feature. If it's just sitting on the LAN though, that's out. OTOH, I don't have a computer that will run the Airport Utility to configure the damn thing, and it doesn't seem to have a web interface. So leaving WRT in the picture is probably the best plan.

It will cause less hassle just leaving it in.


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Not able to extract any .gz or .tar file (Mac OS X 10.5.8)
I have Mac OS X 10.5.8. I am not able to extract .tar or .tgz files with any of the extractor utilities (Mac OS Default Archiver or WinZip or 7zip or any other, I have tried almost all possible).
Each of them give same error:

"Unable to unarchive. (Error 32 - Broken pipe.)"

There is no problem with archived files, I can extract each of them when I use same extractors on Windows.
Would someone please help me with this?

Does it work from a terminal for tgz files? Open a terminal and cd to the folder that has the files and try something like this:
tar xvzf file.tar.gz

Or for plain tar files:
tar xvf file.tar

I usually face the same problem and go back to terminal to extract the archives. I get this even with zipped files.

There may be too many NUL blocks at the end of the tar file, so that the tar command prematurely finishes its executions (and closes its standard input) after having received two NUL blocks while the gunzip command is still trying to write to the pipe that now has no reader anymore (which raises an EPIPEerror message with error number 32 for a broken pipe; for more information see: Tar-filled pipes).
According to the output of newproc.d Archive Utility.app seems to use the following commands (Mac OS X uses bsdtar by default):
/usr/bin/gunzip -c file.tar.gz | /usr/bin/tar xf - -C dir

To see the number of trailing NUL blocks in the tar file use:
gnutar -tzf file.tar.gz -i --block-number | nl | tail -n 25

To extract the tar archive try:
# -i: ignore blocks of zeros in archive (normally mean EOF)
gnutar -i -xvf file.tar.gz

.zip files can be tested with:
unzip -lv file.zip
unzip -t file.zip

check the directory and the path, the scipt may lead you to users/download/folders/blah
but you keep it on users/favourite/folder/blah (example) thats make the error.

Could you clarify that a bit?

Your Hard Drive may also be running out of storage.


text:
App/solution for having alerts for emails
I have following case: when something bad happens with services I'm responsible for, I get email to specific email account. And I'd like to get alert about it from my phone.
But I don't mean just notification with a single sound. I want the alert to sound until the email is deleted or I actively disable the alert in the phone. This is for the cases when alert is raised in the night, and I just don't wake up after single, even loud, notification sound.
So is there any solution or app that would let me define something like this:

When there is email in a specified imap account, play a configurable sound, perferably with rising volume, using loudspeaker in the phone. After the sound finishes, wait 30-60 seconds, and repeat the procedure, until the mailbox is empty again or I do something on the phone to silence the alert.

This wouldn't be possible on a non-jailbroken iPhone, and I'm not sure it even would be easy to accomplish on a jailbroken one. Have you considered using an SMS gateway to send you a text message instead? Text message alerts can be repeated up to 10 times on iOS.

I did, but I still need infinite alerts.

I also am not totally sure why would jailbreaking be a necessity.

Jailbreak is necessary because the standard Mail app doesn't provide this kind of functionality.

Sure, but there is app store, so theoretically, there can exist app in appstore that does.

It isn't possible to have the kind of alert you're looking for. Apps' alert sounds while in the background (including apps in the foreground while the device is locked) are limited to 30 seconds in length.

Instead of multiple alerts for one email message, can you arrange getting multiple email messages (and of course one alert per message)?

@TimothyMueller-Harder - I don't need the sound last forever. It can be (that's how I do it now on a PC): play a file, wait a minute, repeat. with increase of volume after every play.

@Trieu: I am not in control of the mails. I could possibly write a procmail rule on the account these mails come to, and make it resent mail after mail, but it doesn't sound as simplest approach.

Maybe we're looking at this problem the wrong way for you. What about a solution where your PC would call you in addition to playing mp3? Is there some way to program Skype to make a call?

afragen: no idea. But - if I need my PC to be on all the time - there is no point in using the phone for alerts anyway.

@depesz There are some great answers here that actually address the question you asked, the way you asked it.  Whether they suit your budget or not is actually not part of your question -- and I want to point out that in terms of how valuable the question and answers are, it would be great for the community if you would acknowledge that these are good answers, and let someone have credit for the solutions offered.  Even if they're not exactly what you're looking for, they might be exactly what you asked for.

@Harv: I know that I should accept answer, and award bounty - I am just in process of looking into the new answer provided by afragen - which looks like it could actually be IT.

@depesz Wonderful.  I'm glad.  My comment was more about what seems to be your attitude towards people who are giving you what seems like good information (based on the question), rather than specifically selecting a definitive answer.  Hopefully the solution pans out, good luck to you.

There might be another app that will work, eNotify. While I haven't tried it there is a lite version you can use to see if it works for you. This is along the think different solution. Send the email to a special email account and get annoying alerts.

eNotify provides direct local notification for incoming messages along with custom email alert sounds for different accounts, senders, subjects, and recipient addresses. Easily silence background email noise and stay aware of important message traffic!  In addition, the message sender and subject can be shown via local notice, so you'll always know when your spouse wants you to drop by the store on the way home, without unlocking your phone!

not sure what is "think different" about it - it looks like it is doing precisely what I need - i.e. check given email account, and alert me when something happens. Not sure if it does alert repetition, will check it.

Forgive the old reference for when Steve came back to Apple.

Looks like it does exactly what I need ( and then something more, but that's reasonable). And since it doesn't require any infrastructure on their end ( differently than onpage ) - it just has purchase price, and no subscription fee - perfect.

I'm glad we could get this sorted out for you. The primary difference from a service like OnPage would seem to be Push notification. With eNotify it seems you must set the frequency of checking the email account, but the price tradeoff is great if you don't need the immediacy.

They (eNotify) seem to support email push protocol. Didn't test it much, but looks rather well.

Apple does not allow 3rd party applications in the iOS App Store to interact in such a way with the default Mail application to make such a feature possible. 3rd party applications run in a sandboxed environment and are strictly prohibited any access to your mails.
On the other hand, Apple also does not allow 3rd party mail clients in the App Store, which theoretically could implement such a feature, but will never be accepted after the App review process (unless Apple would choose to change that policy in the future).
You could circumvent these limitations by jailbreaking your iPhone. However, even then it is very unlikely you'll find a ready-made solution which works exactly as you described it. You'd probably have to develop such an app yourself, and then install it on your jail-broken iPhone.
If you don't want to jailbreak, nor go through the trouble of actually developing such an app yourself, I suggest you go for a different approach. You could for example keep resending the notification by the server until you confirm reception at the server-side.
I also suggest sending an SMS through an SMS gateway instead of an e-mail. This has the added benefit you can configure a custom tone (and a more attention grabbing one if you will), just for that specific contact number. Also SMS notifications can be configured to repeat every 2 minutes for up to 10 times, so you would only need to resend the SMS every 20 minutes. Finally, this would also work when you don't have a data connection available (for example when roaming), and in case you don't have a push mail account it should reach you faster than an e-mail too.
You could also do both SMS and email for yet another fail-safe. I'll leave it up to you on how critical these notifications actually are!

I'm not entirely sure I follow - I mean - such app wouldn't need to interact with mail application. It could be separate. And calling it "mail client" - well, technically it's true, but I don't expect to read anything via this thing. Which would mean that I'm out of luck :(

Like the man says, "There's an app for that."
It requires a paid service. The app is OnPage. It's a pager service that runs via an app on your iPhone. The service is quite reasonable for a pager service and I believe there's a 30 day trial.
After you download the app from the iTunes App Store you register with the OnPage company via the app. Registering gets you an email address like xxxx@onpage.com. Those who want to page you, send an email to that address and there's little way to ignore it.
I don't work for company but I'm a trauma surgeon and I've been using this app instead of a pager for the past 6 months or so. It works.

This looks interesting. Very interesting. Checking. OK. Checked. Premise is great, but monthly cost is higher than just leaving my pc running all the time.

The price is actually good if you're trading a pager in for this service. But I understand free as in beer.

I don't require free. Just make the cost reasonable for what it does. I don't require any additional service. And I am not trading pager for this - I'm trading the need to keep my PC on all the time.

I'm not understanding why the need for keeping a PC on all the time. Honestly, if you're looking for a solution with jailbreaking, not that I know if a solution exists with jailbreaking, using the OnPage service will do exactly as you want.

I am not looking for solution with jailbreaking. I am looking for solution. OnPage is simply too expensive - in comparison with alternative - which is to keep my pc on all the time, and run there simple script which does the check/alert loop.

So your PC being on is what sends the email?

No. On my PC i have a script that does the alarm - i.e. it checks mail account, and plays, loudly, mp3 file with alarm.

@depesz - I respect that are looking for a less expensive solution. But unless yor are carrying your PC around with you, the answers that have been provided are not equivalent. You asked for a solution that will responds continuously to an email sent to a specific address that will wake you out of a dead sleep. OnPage will do this. You seem intent on finding a solution. OnPage has a free trial. Is the cost justified. I don't know, I guess it depends upon what happens if you don't get that notification and you can't/don't respond to your server issues. Is it not worth a couple $100 a year?

I get exactly the same feature with my pc. If I'm around, I hear it, and get to fixing the problem. If I'm not around - someone who is, will call me. And the PC is at home, so when I'm asleep it's < 10 meters away from me.

Only other solution that I can think of would be to code your own bare bones email app and set up the alerts like you want.

yeah - did it for pc, was hoping that on iphone, i will "have an app for that". looks liks i was wrong.

They do have an app. It just requires a monthly service fee. Though it does present an interesting idea for an app.

We use PagerDuty and our iPhones to accomplish alerts similar to what you're after. You can setup your own escalation scheduler for your account in PagerDuty. Ours typically look like this:

Send an email to @mywork.com right away
After 15 minutes send an SMS to their phone
After 15 minutes call their phone
After 15 minutes move to the next person on the escalation list, repeat
If after it's been escalated through everyone on call, no one has ack'ed the page, SMS everyone in the company (we're a small company)

So far so. The SMS alerts can be customized on your iPhone to be highly annoying. And, of course, you can assign custom ring tones so when they call it's also unique and annoying.

While helpful, it's (just like OnPage) - too expensive for my limited needs.

You won't be able to do something like this out of the box. Our monitoring solution calls us at night instead as people sleep through alerts.
It's available from monitis. http://portal.monitis.com/index.php/products

I have been dealing with this dilemma since eNotify 'repeat' has stopped working (iOS 8.1) and it is eating away at my battery.
Here is what I am doing now:
My email server (gmail in this case) is now set to forward my emails to my SMS email address. For Verizon, it is ##########@vtext.com. This forwards the email as a text message to my phone - from me. I have the text tone for this contact (me) set to a loud, annoying ring tone. In Settings, Notifications, Messages: turn on Badge App icon, Show on Lock screen, Alert, and Repeat Alerts 10 times.
I also have that email account set to be the only Badge App icon (otherwise my personal junk mail account will show 99 daily unread emails.)
Cons: It seems if my phone is not at the lock screen, I get the large Alert box but repeat will not happen unless it is at the Lock screen? Is what Apple intended or a bug? I suppose Apple assumes we all have perfect memories and aren't constantly multitasking.
Pros: If you walk away from your phone or it is in your pocket/purse & locked, you will get the repeat notifications. For this reason, set Lock to 1 minute to optimize.
Wouldn't life be easier if we could just set 'Repeat' on emails?? C'mon Apple. You make me miss my Blackberry.


text:
listing all processes in iOS 5.0.1
How could one go about viewing all the processes in an ssh session to my (jailbroken)iphone? I'm currently able to ssh in, I have bash installed, core utilities installed, shell-cmds package installed and the system-cmds package installed.
I would have expected the "ps" command to be available from the core-utilities package, but this does not seem to be the case. What am I missing?

I believe the package Cydia package adv-cmds contains a copy of PS

There's also a package that contains top.


text:
ios and mediaserverd
I just read about playing media files via the browser, which in turn uses mediaserverd in iOS. Is there any place(a wiki perhaps) where I could find details about which file formats are supported by mediaserverd across various ios versions? The iOS version I'm particularly interested in, is 5.0.1, so any information would be appreciated!
Thanks!

The mediaserverd daemon/process handles almost all (audio and video) media in iOS, so to answer your question, there is a long list of supported media formats/types for iOS 5.0.1 on Apple's website: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html. There haven't been any significant changes to this list since iPhoneOS 3. Mediaserverd mostly encodes/decodes media, so the player may differ, but the core process does not.

Could you provide more info on how the mediaserverd works, perhaps some dev documentation, I'm trying to do something similar to OP.

Apple doesn't provide any documentation on this daemon, sorry.

It's a low-level process, so you're probably going to need to change your perspective on what you need for your project (this also falls out of scope for AskDifferent, so you'd have to take any additional questions over to StackOverflow).


text:
Mac mini Mac OS 10.6 server migration to new hardware
I have a Mac Mini with Mac OS X 10.6 Server installed. It has two external drives attached to it. One is for Time Machine and other contains data. I have bought the latest Mac Mini with Mac OS X 10.7 and two new hard drives. I want to migrate to the new hardware (the new Mac Mini and the new hard disks). Can Migration Assistant do that for me or do I have to transfer the data in the external drive manually?

Apple prepared a nice, long document listing the steps needed to prepare for and implement a migration from an existing Snow Leopard server to Lion server.
Have a look and come back and ask more specific question if you run into any snags...

Lion Server: Upgrading and Migrating For Mac OS X v10.7 Lion Server


text:
Organising wallpapers in subfolders
What is the simplest a way to have the desktop wallpaper cycle through images that are in subfolders?
This is not possible using the normal way of setting a wallpaper in
System Preferences --> Desktop & Screen Saver

The format of the images:
>Wallpapers
-> Folder one
--> one 1.jpg
--> one 2.jpg

-> Folder two
--> two 1.jpg
--> two 2.jpg

Do you want to cycle through images of a folder and it's subfolder at the same time?

All the images are in subfolders

The Mac Screensaver won't use smartfolders in Mountain Lion (10.8.2). You can create the smartfolder... and you can actually select it in the drop down from the Screensaver, but when you do, all the files listed inside the Smartfolder are grayed out, as is the 'Choose' button. So, smartfolders don't work at this time. :( I am looking for another option, or a fix, for this as well, as it's driving me nuts that it doesn't work. I have over 5,000 pictures per year for about 10 years, so putting them into one folder isn't practical. And I don't want to use iPhoto... I use Picasa and like it much b

It looks like selecting multiple different folders for images for your Desktop or Screen Saver is not a native function. In other words, if you have a hierarchy of a main folder, Pictures, then underneath you have folders (for example) Family, Vacation, and Wedding, and you only want to display Family, and Vacation, there would be no way to do that. I think the simplest would be to create a folder with all the images you want on your Desktop/Screensaver.

Or create a smart folder that contains all the files from all subfolders so you don't have to duplicate anything.

@ThomasPloeger very cool idea. But Desktop system prefs doesn't let you select smart folder as location.

I found a way!
You can use the terminal ln -s command to create soft links from all of the folders you want into a single folder.
For example, if these 3 directories have wallpapers located in ~/images1, ~/images2, ~/images3, and you want to use all of them as your wallpapers:

Create a wallpaper directory somewhere: mkdir ~/wallpapers
Create soft links of all the images from the 3 directories to the ~/wallpapers directory: ln -s ~/images1/*.jpg ~/wallpapers/, for one.

This isn't a real copy, since you're creating soft and not hard links. It'll barely take any space on your hard-drive.
There's a small catch, though: If you add new wallpapers to the directories, you need to link them manually. However, I believe this can be automated using AppleScript or Automator.

I slowly built a terminal command through trial and error and some Googling, exactly for this purpose. It will take all JPGS from a folder and it's subfolders and create symlinks in another directory which you will use to give to the desktop wallpaper chooser.
Be sure both directories exist first.
dirPictures="/path/to/pictures"
dirTarget=“/path/to/symlinks/folder
find "$dirPictures" -type f -iname "*.jpg" -print0 -exec ln -s {} "$dirTarget" ';'


text:
How can I trigger scripts (lock screen) when leaving a specific WiFi on OSX?
I dimly remember hearing about an OSX application that let you, for example, enable password lock when leaving the current WiFi, but I can't find it anymore. Does anyone know how it's called? Thanks!

Long shot...MarcoPolo, or its "successor" ControlPlane?

I believe that you're actually looking for a setting in OS X:
System Preferences → Network → Advanced

Not exactly… this setting only prompts you with a password dialog when changing networks. What I'm actually looking for is a way to require a password to login only on the go while granting free access at home. Sorry for not being clear enough.

I'd be surprised if this exists.
Typically when you walk out of/into a wifi network's range your mac will be turned off, which means nothing can run while you're crossing the boundary. Unlike iOS, there is no API on OS X for running code when you enter/exit a specific location even while the device is turned off. This is a feature that needs hardware support, and Macs don't have it.
Scripts executed by utilities like ControlPlane will not run until after you actually wake your mac up again, and by then it's too late to change the wake-from-sleep behaviour.
It might be possible with some deep hacks into the system, but I'd be surprised.

Yeah, you're right.

I have a feeling you may be thinking of Sidekick.app
http://oomphalot.com/sidekick/

Months later, but I came across this post so thought I'd share my findings. ControlPlane is a free alternative to Sidekick, and does exactly what you're asking. By default, you can have your screensaver password enabled, and disable only when meeting certain criteria, such as joining a particular wifi network, identified by SSID or BSSID.


text:
Why doesn't trackpad work in Preview or TextEdit?
I open a PDF document.  It's a document I've created.  I have my trackpad set on "tap to click" from the trackpad system preferences.  Right now the tap with one finger doesn't work when I have the PDF document open. Physically clicking with the trackpad doesn't work.  The two-finger tap for a right click works.  Physically clicking in the area of the trackpad that signifies a right click works.  No left click works.  This is true for all PDFs I open.  This is true for any file I open with TextEdit.  Everything works fine in Chrome, Safari, Mathematica, etc.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  I have tried this with a mouse since I don't have a mouse.  I'm using a Macbook Air 11" late 2011 model running Lion.

I attached a mouse and the behavior persists.

Can you please clarify what you mean by "doesn't work" with respect to the one finger click? Especially given that each of the clicking methods you describe can or does do something different by default (e.g., two-finger clicking on a page in Preview "works" by bringing up a contextual menu)

Two finger clicking works.  This corresponds to right clicking with a mouse.  The single tap doesn't work.  This corresponds to left clicking on a mouse.  Using a mouse gives the same behavior.  Left clicking doesn't do anything.  Can't highlight, can't click to close or do anything else.  Physicall clicking the trackpad gives the same behavior.  Right click works and left clicking doesn't do anything.


text:
Is it possible to upgrade from ios 4.3.5 to 5.0.1 even though the current version is 5.1?
My iphone has ios version 4.3.5 (8L1). I want to jailbreak/unlock it. I see that the latest jailbreak is for version 5.0.1 (by redsn0w). Itunes only allows me to upgrade to the latest version which is 5.1. But if I do that the jailbreak would be undoable.
Is there a way to upgrade to 5.0.1?
If not, is there a jailbreak available for 4.3.5?

Why are you trying to Jailbreak your phone?

You won't be able to unlock it unless it's a 3GS or you've been saving your baseband.

Actually, you don't even have to hunt it to a Bittorent. You can just download it from the Apple servers by visiting the RedMondPie website. Links are listed below the page.

Excellent find, did not know about that.  Cheers.

Very nice! But is it really official? I cannot make any sense of the domain http://appldnld.apple.com.

They claim to be official (Here are the official download links to iOS 5.0.1:). If it's really official, I don't know...

I don't believe Apple is still signing the iOS 5.0.1 IPSW anymore, so this wouldn't work unless you had your SHSH blobs for 5.0.1.

Yes, those are official IPSW download links - the URLs indicate that they're hosted on a subdomain of apple.com. If you want to restore an iPhone 4 (or earlier device) to iOS 5.0.1, you have to download the appropriate IPSW, stitch your SHSH blobs to the IPSW file, and use the result to restore your device. See this guide for detailed instructions.

If you have the download, it's possible, but as you don't you will likely have to hunt it down on Bittorrent, at which point you are in your own, but in essence you can apply any version you have got the file for so long as you are upgrading, downgrading will not work
The file was originally hosted here but the actual download link has been removed.  Apple only keep the most current versions available to download, so you will have to hunt a copy down and I am not able to assist in that (although if you know someone who has already used that level more than once then rifling through there Time Machine backups or iTunes folders may yield results.  Actually, as indicated in @michiel's answer, the links remain, they are just hard to find, so if you can find a list like the one maintained here you are good to go.
To perform the upgrade once you have the file, and to stop iTunes simply checking for the most recent update and offering to apply that, you should select your iPhone in the connected device list after connecting by USB, go to the summary tab, check in the versions section.  Instead of just clicking update, hold the option key down and then click.  You will now be offered a finder style file picker to allow you to point it at your downloaded file.  Selecting this will allow you to upgrade to your choice of OS.
NOTE:  Perform a full backup of your phone before doing any upgrade.
NOTE: I am not able to explain why you cannot back level in the same manner, it's something to do with baseband and I don't understand why.

If you try to restore/upgrade/downgrade a device to an iOS version that Apple isn't signing right now (even if you have the right IPSW file), and you don't successfully replay the device's saved SHSH blobs (signature files) for that version, iTunes will deny the restore/upgrade/downgrade with an error message.

You can just download the ipsw file for ios 5.0.1 (im sure you'd find it somewhere in google) and restore with pwned dfu mode on the latest redsn0w version 0.9.15b3

This looks like it has potential. However, we are looking for more in-depth answers. Would you mind editing your answer with more details on how to do this?


text:
Is there a way to install and use PowerPC applications on Intel Macs?
Is there any way to install and use PowerPC applications on Intel based macs? I have older Adobe software that I would like to use, and cannot use on my new iMac.

I assume you mean on intel Macs running Lion, right?

This question is somewhat vague. Rosetta (PPC Library) dependencies aside, whether or not a given application will run is going to depend on many things. Perhaps you can provide a little more information about what you're trying to accomplish.

Yes I should have mentioned that, did not think it would make that large of a difference

There was an emulation layer called Rosetta to allow Intel Macs to run PowerPC applications that Apple provided from Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.6. Sadly, they removed it in 10.7 Lion and it no longer works. Given that you said your iMac is brand new, it presumably came with Lion preinstalled, and is unable to run anything older. So, unfortunately, the answer is no.
Your options are to upgrade your Adobe software to an Intel version, trade in your new Mac for a slightly older used Mac (from early 2011 or earlier) and put Snow Leopard on it, or continue to use your old hardware for your Adobe software.

Adobe Photoshop 7 stopped working under OS X 10.5(?-memory may be failing  me here) for reasons other than Rosetta. The base answer is the same—no—but a future Rosetta magic box won't necessarily allow all PPC software to run under Lion.

There is a solution: Use Snow Leopard. It comes with rosetta which is an emulation layer for PPC apps.
If you use Lion there is also a solution: Use Snow Leopard:
To achieve a dual system configuration use either VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop for Mac.
Install Snow Leopard on a virtual machine.
Install Rosetta and your applications.
Run the applications on the virtual machine.
It is not the most efficient or the most convenient way, but until LionRosetta is released it should do.
An up to date setup is described here.
Edit: LionRosetta is no more.

According to the Mac OS licensing terms, you can not virtualize Snow Leopard client (only server). In this case, I would recommend installing SL on a separate partition/disk and booting to it when needed.

Your link for LionRosetta goes to a page stating "Buy this domain! This domain is FOR SALE!". Perhaps the project never got off the ground? You might want to remove the reference.

Instructions for installing Snow Leopard (and Rosetta) into Parallels 7 in Lion:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

Answers on Ask Different need to be more than just a link. It's okay to include a link, but please summarize or excerpt it in the answer. The idea is to make the answer stand alone.

Unfortunately, I have to have a Snow Leo partition. Pro Tools 9 only runs in SL and upgrading is not all that cheap, plus, it performs like a champ. Also, I use an app called DrumCore, which is amazing for solo recording musicians. It contains tons of loops played by top session drummers  and allows you to change the speed without degrading sound. You can cut up the loops, use midi data & a sound replacer if you want, etc etc. There is a newer version, but it is SOOOO expensive. Version 2 is PowerPC only. Running a VM isn't really feasible for audio production. So, I have to do all my drum tracks is Snow Leo & PT 9, then if I want, reboot into newer OS and open session in PT 10. But I also still have a dual 2GHz G5 which runs lightning fast with the versions of apps that were designed for it.
In short, don't emulate and keep your PPC Mac or buy one used is the best option.

I bought Lion when it very first came out and it did support my camera which is a PowerPC based Canon.  The guys at the Apple Store recently ran updates and now it will not. So it is untrue that the original Lion did not support it. For some reason down the line Apple decided not to support it anymore on Lion. It was never an original cannot do that on an original Lion.
Wish they would offer me going back instead of Yosemite. I'd take them up on that one.
Marjorie Cameron

Per Wikipedia (and everybody else...search for "lion support for powerpc applications" on google): "Rosetta is not installed by default in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but can be retained as an option via the installer... Rosetta is neither included nor supported in Mac OS X v10.7 "Lion" or later. Therefore, with Lion and later releases, the current Macintosh platform does not support PowerPC applications."

I was experiencing the same problem and was shocked that I can't use PPC on the Mac I bought.
So, after reading all of the sheepshaver and Snow Leopard forums, I finally came across "winebottlercombo.bmg". Look it up, download it and set it up. You might have to download xquartz.dmg as well, I had to.
When you download and set up these two programs, they allow you to use a .exe (Windows execution file) and from there you can use what is known to the Mac as an "unsupported" ppc file as a .exe Windows file through "Winebottler". Totally bypasses the "unsupported PPC" on Mac OS X Lion.
So just copy the image of the CD that you want using a
Windows pc, make sure that you are copying the .exe file and open/set it up with the wine file on your Mac and it will work like a charm, without having to go through all of the set up procedures.
After it is set up, whatever .exe and .lnk file you want to use, always "Open With--> wine.app"
Note: you may have to look for the .lnk file via search in Finder. That is the file I needed to find to use the program I set up.
So sorry if this is not so clear, I am also new to the Mac world and don't know all of the Mac lingo yet.

You were shocked that you couldn't use software written for a processor that Apple hasn't used in its computers since 2006?

I am confused here - Wine (of which there are easier ways to use) runs windows programs nor PPC

ALso if you found winebottlercombo please give a link rather than ask us to search for it.

Wine can enable running Windows exe files on an Intel Mac and Winebottler creates standalone application bundles for running Windows programs.  Neither of these has anything to do with running a PowerPC Mac application or any Mac application.

I just used terminal to install FCP6 on my new intel macbook pro.  I was getting hit with the "Cannot install PowerPC" error when clicking on the installer.
screenshot1
screenshot2

How does this solve the problem of running PPC applications on recent OS X versions?


text:
Screen Sensitivity of the retina display iPad (3rd generation). Is it better than before?
Does the new iPad support higher resolution tapping, or just more pixels for display. Stylii and the existing iPad feel like writing with a big marker on a big index card. Will the new iPad feel more like pen-and-paper when using a stylus?

Not really an answer to your question, but worth mentioning it. A while ago their was a great project on KickStarter, Jot. It was an ultra sensitive stylus for your iPad. And although it's not available anymore by KickStarter, you can still buy it on their website. It really worth the money!

I practice, I can't tell any difference at all between the two models for most finger gestures on non-drawing apps.
Two things make this measurement hard - we don't get to see the raw pressure points and the unsmoothed and smoothed multitouch input. The end result of touch is highly processed which could easily hide changes in the detection grid / chip that does the processing / algorithms or tuning to make one iPad feel like the others.
The other is that our fingers cover the area we are selecting and for fine adjustments, you don't have to actually move your finger - just roll it to change the contact area of your deformed finger pad area that is either in direct contact or close proximity to the glass surface.
Once I learned to pivot and wiggle my fingers in place rather than try to slide it for fine adjustments - my precision (and feel of being able to control the precision) jumped immensely.
On the other hand - drawing with a stylus or deft and rapid strokes with a finger in a good drawing program makes the end feel on a retina iPad much better than before. I don't know if this is mental or real, but getting a finer line out of the same repeated gestures is incredible and makes the new hardware feel much more like pen or pencil and paper to me. I can't tell if it's the CPU/GPU or hardware or illusion, but the feel is quite real after a short adjustment period.

For what it's worth, I found I was far more accurate on my iPhone 3G than on both my 4 and 4S.

Thanks. What drawing program do you use? None of mine have updated to the higher resolution yet (nor would it matter as I don't have a new iPad). Also, is your stylus still a big finger-like pad, or do you have a stylus with a 'sharper' tip?

I'm using the cosmonaut and my finger exclusively. When I want a finer line, I increase the zoom factor. (programs are pre-release)

Only if you file your fingers down to double precision ;)
But seriously, no, the actual capacative touch screen layer is unchanged, because the thing that is needs to interact with (your finger) remains unchanged.
To take a simple drawing application as an example, drawing a spiral will receive input from your fingers in the same way as on an iPad or iPad 2.  It takes the locations of your touch and tries to take an average of the "centre" of your touch point and this will produce the same results, although when translated into your drawing the enhanced resolution allows the touch algorithm to smooth out the centre area to a slightly more accurate level which may result in a more accurate looking drawing, but it's not due to any resolution changes in the touch sensitive layer, just a more accurate rendering of the existing input.

Your premise is flawed, as I don't interact with my finger, I interact with a stylus. Therefore, the higher resolution could be useful. You state that the capacitive touch screen layer is unchanged. Do you know this, or are you just guessing this because your finger is unchanged?

"could be useful", could being the operative word.  But the essense of locating your touch input is to calculate what it considers the center point of any touch contact, and providing an x/y co-ordinate to produce a pixel location.  that location has by it's nature to be at a "higher resolution" that previously, but it doesn't mean that it's actually any more accurate.  The premise isn't flawed in my view, it doesn't matter if you use a finger, a stylus, a sausage or a moon rock, it calculates the center point the same and smooths the input - the rest is just maths.

I should note that using a stylus does not necessarily improve the accuracy of any touch input, it's merely allows you to see where you are touching with more clarity, hence the illusion of greater fidelity.

But a stylus is a smaller point than a finger. Or a moon rock... You're answering a question about a precise input device with comments about sausages. I'm confused...

That was exactly my point (if you excuse the pun), it doesn't matter how large or small your pointing device, it's "centre" is the same.

There is definitely a difference in screen touch sensitivity between the iPad Retina and the iPad 2. The former has a harder feel and is less sensitive to the touch. I still prefer using my iPhone 5 for everything even though the screen is smaller, the feel is so much better and way user friendly / faster on the touch.
As for stylus: the best for your iPad is Maglus by Applydea (love it!)
And for very fine writing and intricate stuff: Adonit Jot Pro.


text:
Mirroring iOS device app layouts, find apps more easily when switching devices
As an iPhone and iPad user I have many apps in common and I spend a lot of time swiping back and forth on one device looking for an app that I know was in a certain place on the second screen... only I was thinking of the other device and it's actually in the third screen.
One scheme I thought of is to map the iPhone's 4x4 grid of icons onto the iPad's 4x5, showing the apps that appear on both devices on the same relative screens on the iPad with iPad-only apps displayed in the bottom row. That way when swiping between screens I could have the same apps on the same numbered screens, with the iPad apps that don't appear on the iPhone in a position that won't confuse things (in the fifth row, assuming portrait orientation - I realise this comes unstuck in landscape but I don't use that much).
Of course I could sit there for hours arranging manually or doing it the somewhat faster way in iTunes (though I find myself not doing a lot of device syncing since iOS 5.0).
Is there a way to automate positioning of these apps or could there be a way to Applescript this process? Could any of the enterprise device management tools be used to find apps from a list of known apps and to move them into groups or positions (and of course move the groups too) that are common across devices?

Sorry, there is no way to do this apart from restoring from a back up and clonning a device, but that is not ever an option.
The only way to do it is to manually move apps around from screen to screen, and like you mentioned the easiest way is in iTunes.


text:
longevity of iPad Smart Cover
Since the launch of the iPad 2 I have been using a cover that I painted so I am reluctant to replace it. However the inside surface of the cover seems to be thinning or just becoming generally less fuzzy and it is doing less to clean the screen. In particular it is leaving vertical stripes that don't get cleaned. What kind of time are people getting out of their covers and is there any way to rejuvenate them or is there any material thin enough and effective at cleaning that can be bonded to the inside of the cover?
This cover dates from iPad 2 launch - have these covers changed during their lifetime or are they still the same inside and out? I know they have not changed specifically for "new iPad" but I read one forum post that claimed the inside material had changed.

Looks to me like the leather covers might be less resilient - I saw one only about six months old that looked very shiny and polished inside, like worn suede.

For what it's worth, my brand new leather smart cover also leaves vertical strips of finger grease where the folds are located.

@bmike - same for my polyester cover.

Ditto for my leather one.

The smart covers, generally do leave the vertical stripes. This happens when the fold areas of the cover do not touch the screen when it is closed. If you remove the smart cover fold it up and hold it horizontaly while wiping down the screen you will remove these stripes.
I have found that after owning 2 covers, both ployuretherene, that the microfiber lininng does start to fade away, but this like most things will be determined by the amount of use, and whether you take care of the cover.
Try not to let the microfiber part touch any dirty surfaces when it is off, or you are using it as a stand.
To clean the microfiber lining you are better to use another microfiber cloth.
They have changed since first release. My first one was a lighter green on the outside and grey on the inside, the covers now all have matching inside colours and slightly more contrast in the clolour of the outside


text:
Mac OS "Go to desktop #" keyboard shortcourt
I am looking for a shortcut to change desktop in Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I am used to awesome WM in which you can do + to go to desktop #
I am looking for a keyboard shortcut in MacOS X to do this. I tried to make one using jiTouch but I didn't succeed.
Note: I am not asking to show/display the current desktop, only moving between them directly by their ID.
I have 5 desktop and going from #1 to #5 can take some time especially with the sliding effects. this is a productivity killer.
Thanks for any help.

As defined in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts, you can use ^N, where N is the number of the desktop, to move between desktops.

Thanks, I didn't saw this in the configuration. Works ok.


text:
Analyzing the iPhone's moisture sensor
Every time I'm near a Genius Bar I see a lot of ENT (ear, nose, throat) microscopes peering down the headphone jack of various iPhones. I asked about it and found that the moisture sensor is down there, and if your device got wet then it turns red, and the purpose of that is that you don't have a warranty and don't get a free new device if it has mysteriously died but the cause is moisture.
I'm curious about how these things work and whether this simple examination could be subverted. I don't have a wet iPhone and I'm not looking to defraud Apple here, but I'm curious.

The sensor must involve a chemical reaction, if it didn't show the indicator color when it dried it wouldn't be much good. What is the reaction and is it reversible? Would the required reagent be safe to drip down the headphone opening?
Could one buy a new sensor component, open the phone and replace it?
How about simply getting a material that looks like the sensor, opening the phone and putting it in place of the sensor - an inert sensor?
Simplest of all, painting the sensor - if the "OK" color is white then a paint marker should do.

Again, not trying to get a free phone here. I'm curious about devices like this since I saw my first "tip-n-tell" on a shipping carton, and played with Maxim iButton temperature loggers.

While these questions are interesting, I'm not sure they're very well suited for Ask Different...

The FAQ says nothing against it. I think it's a legitimate question for AskDifferent.

I certainly think it's legitimate. I don't think these sensors are in use in any other device I own.

You say you don't want to defraud Apple, but all your questions aim to do just that. You ask of ways to reverse the chemical reaction, replace the sensor entirely with one that hasn't "gone off," a chameleon sensor, or to mask the color. None of those questions have any serious scientific merit or aid the community at large. They only serve to do exactly what you claim you have no interest in doing.

Although you may not be looking to defraud Apple, some others will be and will find this question if they search on Google, we should not promote this type of activity.

Well how far does this go - do you think pentalobe drivers (or for that matter tri-wing or torx) should be outlawed? Knowledge is interesting for its own sake. In contrast with the thermochron button and the tip-n-tell sensor these do seem like fallible devices. If I'm really a criminal and want free iPhones, simply stealing them is surely a better way. Don't do that either, readers.

I don't see a reason for this question to be downvoted. And beside, there are MANY devices containing such sensors (it make my head ache calling those snippets sensors grr), but Apple is famous for using them.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/31110/how-can-you-find-out-if-your-iphone-ever-got-wet/31113 could interest you as well!

Thanks Max. FWIW I'm not seeing any justification for downvotes either.

Every cellphone and most laptops contain them, and have long before the iPhone came out.  This is not an Apple specific query, and I disagree that it's suitable for this site.

Change the Title from "Hacking..." to "Analyzing..." and see if you get a different reaction.

Changed. But the dog pile is already on! I'm not deleting it, those who want to play tactical voting - for obvious reasons - can take away as many points as they want. I want to know.

As I said, if you asked "how do those moisture sensors work?" I'd be cool with this question. But you didn't. You went out of your way to riffle off several questions that all deal with pullin the wool over Apple's eyes and hiding moisture damage. You don't ask if they were even a reliable indicator of water damage. You can compare this to pentalobe screws or IDE connectors all day long but none of those are used to indicate damage to hardware. Apples to oranges.

An inert "sensor" would be white paper.
An actually working sensor could be paper coated with cobalt(II) chloride, whose hexa hydrate (cobalt chloride "containing" water) turns light red.
If you want to tamper with the original sensor, think of water free clear coat.

Thank you. I know next to nothing about the chemistry of these sensors and this is interesting to me. I hope nobody assumes you're interested in facilitating fraud by telling me this.

@AdamEberbach Actually, I don't know what kind of water sensor Apple uses. But this reaction changes from light blue to light red. This could be what they are using. And it's one of the most common test reaction for water.

Why does this answer get downvoted?

For the same reason that people are downvoting the question...you're being judged as guilty by association.  It's unfortunate.

This is white hat hacking.

Too many people see no difference. I wonder if anyone thinks my old 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter for the G4 Mac mini was fraudulently depriving Apple of Mac Pro sales?


text:
Maintain an email group on iPad - no Mac involved
I can't find an answer to this one here or elsewhere, so here goes. I have a friend who would like to maintain some school-based email lists using an iPad. She doesn't use any computers for this purpose and would like to keep it that way. As one of the people who organises social activities and volunteers among the school community it is often necessary to send an email to a group of people. The groups are typically between three and 20 people - think "3rd grade mothers jogging group" or "classroom volunteers".
Ideally the groups would

be created on the iPad through Contacts, from existing Contacts
send email without exposing the complete distribution list in the To: line
easily add or remove recipients as required

Group features provided by software like majordomo (self-subscribe, list digests etc.) are a little beyond what we want here. I just can't see how to make Contacts create a list of people and easily send an email to them without including a huge To: line in each email. Nobody is that paranoid about their emails being exposed but it seems like best practise not to, there's always that person who thinks everyone wants to be on their "funny" picture mailing list, some addresses will be corporate and that kind of thing can cause problems for the recipient.
It's fine if there's a free or paid app you can suggest, ease of use is the number one requirement.

May I suggest our unique "MailShot Pro" app, which is the ONLY app on the store that lets you create contact groups in your address book that you can use from any app to send email, just as you would use a single contact.
We have tens of thousands of users using it for exactly the sort of thing you describe

You can protect privacy by adding the contact group to the Bcc line.
You can edit the group permanently in the MailShot app, or temporarily just before you send an email (simply by saving and retrieving the email from Drafts)
And you can share groups between multiple devices using iCloud contact sharing.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mailshot-pro-group-email-done/id445996226?ls=1&mt=8. (A free trial version is also available.)
Peter
Soluble Apps
Full Disclosure:I am the developer of MailShot and will benefit from its sale, but so might you :)

I looked at Mailshot when I was preparing my own answer and was a little confused as to how it interacted with the address book, and whether or not a Mailshot server was involved in any way. Can you elaborate? Also, with concerns about access to private data coming to light, does Mailshot have a clearly stated privacy policy? Thank you!

Thanks Peter, always happy to hear from a developer who is proud of their app. I'll take a look.

@Jasberg, thanks for your question. No server is involved, MailShot Pro creates special group contacts for you right in your device's address book. We have no access to your personal information. Please let me know on support  solubleapps.com if you have any more questions. I'm always happy to help.

hi Adam, cool, please let us know how you get on, and if you need any help, get in touch.

@Jaberg just to say that even though they work in very different ways, you can put a MailShot group contact into the Bcc line to protect privacy,  the same way as you mention doing for another app.

I know it's not strictly an iOS app, but my suggestion would be to use Google Groups for her mailing lists. I've set up a few for immediate and extended family and they work very well. Sending email to everyone in the group is as simple as sending it to the @googlegroups.com email address you pick when setting up the group, and because it's been sent to the @googlegroups.com email address the email addresses of the recipients are naturally kept private.
Administration is web-based (can easily be done on Mobile Safari) if she wants to add or remove people, but the advantage of using Google Groups is that she can configure it so that people can add or remove themselves to the group, so she doesn't have to bother with doing that.

The easiest solution may be to purchase an app like Group Email! I don't have any experience with the app, but it well rated in the App Store.
One trick I use to keep group members email addresses private: I put my own email address in the To: field and put the group address(es) in BCC:
Unfortunately, iOS Mail doesn't provide a way to make use of them (yet?) but you can create and manage Contact groups on your iPad using Bento, the simple database solution from Filemaker.
(Why do I suspect that if Apple updates Mail.app to work with groups, they'll also provide a way to edit groups, making this explanation moot?)
Bento reads the Contacts core data automatically and creates an Address Book library. Any groups already defined (in Address Book on the Mac) will be added as collections and contacts that are part of a group will be added to that collection. (A record can be part of multiple collections).
You can add new members to the group by adding them to the collection. You can create new groups by adding a new collection. Bento is sharing the core data with Contacts so these collections are in turn displayed in the iOS Contacts.app as groups, but you may have to manually quit and reopen Contacts to see them.

Easiest way: Use Dolphin browser and log in to www.icloud.com
There you can access your contacts and create a group there and move people into the group. The iCloud will sync this to iPad contacts.

Why Dolphin browser? Does Safari do some kind of magic that Dolphin avoids?


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stop iTunes from auto-playing after import
I drag a movie onto the iTunes icon. iTunes imports the movie, and then begins playing it for me automatically.
How do I stop it from playing the movie automatically?

according to this macworld article, do the following in Terminal, quit & relaunch iTunes
defaults write com.apple.iTunes play-songs-while-importing -bool FALSE

Doesn't work for drag-and-drop of mp4 video into iTunes 11.3 (54) 64-bit on Mac OS X 9.4 Mavericks.

Use cmd+O inside iTunes instead of drag and drop, at least that worked for me!

There is a thread here on the Apple Support forums that mentions your problem.  Here's what you can try:

The most consistent way I've found to solve this is to drop your files
  into the "Automatically add to iTunes folder."   How I do it on a Mac:
  Navigate to Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/ Seconday click on
  "Automatically Add to iTunes" Select "create alias." - this makes a
  shortcut, for those who didn't know Click and drag the new shortcut
  you just made to your desktop or launchbar or somewhere else where it
  is more convenient for you. Drag any new files that you want to add to
  iTunes onto that from now on, if you don't want them to autoplay.

Another user suggests that you can use the shortcut of ⌘-O, or just use the open dialog to open your media.

Another way is to drag the movie or song to their respective folders in your library, and then use the file - import method in itunes to add it to your library without having it play when it's done importing.


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How to hide video on an iPad?
So Walking Dead season 1 was a welcomed recent gift, it isn't The Sopranos but it's not bad. But it's pretty graphic. With a couple of hundred hours of Left 4 Dead 2 I don't mind but I don't think it is suitable for children.
Is there a means to hide either selected video, or ideally, all episodes of a show in iTunes?
Failing that are there third party apps to achieve this that are still good for playing and watching video? I'm thinking along the lines of Comic Zeal which does a great job for comics - drag and drop iTunes syncing, great organization tools etc. The difference would be that if older son switches away from the game I said he could play to my app, without an extra password the videos would either be unplayable or just not appear at all.
Disabling iTunes isn't an option because sometimes I'll want to hand over the iPad so he can watch a video that is OK. So global Parental Controls options won't really work.

I feel that this is absolutely third-party app territory. One that fills your needs well would be OPlayer HD (not a Universal Binary, iPad specific), chiefly due to it's capability to password protect content, with a few very notable caveats:

Put the 'safe for everyone' videos in iTunes, sync it and use the Videos player for those.
Use OPlayer's sync mechanisms (iTunes Document Sync, WiFi Transfer, etc.) for getting the restricted videos into the app, and then password protect it.

First, note that OPlayer does not support a simple pin/passcode, instead you have a full keyboard to type out a password. (You can always make your password a simple pin, I'm just stating that the input interface uses the full keyboard and not a "ten key" digit mode.)
Second, note that OPlayer's password protects the WHOLE app. Not just specific videos. This is why I suggest you split up the videos between the built-in player/iTunes housed videos, and OPlayer specifically.
Lastly, and perhaps most annoyingly, if you are done using OPlayer you should absolutely double-tap the home button and manually close OPlayer when you're done with it. If the app is running at all, even "suspended", you will NOT be re-prompted for the password when you return to the app.

Cool - I wasn't going to leave the Zombie content on iTunes anyway because I don't want them watching it on Apple TV either. I'll take a look at that one. Sounds unfortunate about having to kill the app though, we know apps can demand reauthentication after idle - like 1Password.

1Password, Mint, LastPass, indeed. I also have plenty of apps that behave better than OPlayer. Perhaps you could (search first!) then request it from the Developer(s)?


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My Notes app accidentally got deleted from my iPhone 4s and I cannot locate it in the app list in iTunes when I synch. Any ideas?
I accidentally deleted the Notes app and cannot find it (although when I do a spotlight search it does come up).  Any ideas how I restore it to my screen?  Thanks!

It sounds like it's not deleted, but just off of the screen. I've had this happen to a few of my apps. What I always do to fix it is go to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Home Screen Layout. You'll get your Notes app back, but your Home Screen will be arranged into alphabetical order, and unless you're JailBroken, this is pretty much the only way to get it back without restoring.

Any advice on how to replicate this?  My question...

What if you got hundreds of apps?

@OliverDixon This was a bug in iOS 3, 4, and 5, and a lot has changed since then. If you're having a similar issue, I would suggest asking a new question.

Ah most questions/searches let to this. For anyone else having problems it's really easy. You can download any default app for free on the app store.

It's not possible to delete it, as it is one of the built-in apps that you cannot remove.  You can, however, move it somewhere daft.  If you check in your app folders, and do the press-and-hold to move jiggle, it should show up somewhere, possibly on the mystery last screen.
You aren't close to the app limit by any chance are you?

This happened to me today. The solution for me was simple.
Look carefully in each of your folders amoung your Apps.  It is possible that you moved it by mistake into one of them.

Have you tried restoring your iPhone?
See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414 for the details on how to do this.


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Will a reset make my old iPad faster?
I have an old iPad (the first generation), and over time it has become unbearably slow. Now I understand that I cannot expect apps designed for faster iPads to work perfectly on this old device. However, it often responds slowly even to trivial actions, such as typing.
I have never reset an iOS device, and thus I am not sure if it would help. However, I have an Android device that gets an impressive performance boost once I reset it every now and then (the same can be said about most Windows devices, I guess). Thus, my question: does it make sense to try and reset my old iPad? Would it become more responsive, or should I be looking for issues elsewhere?

You could try downgrading if you haven't already. While Apple is usually good, they have made some ioses make earlier devices slow. (ios 3? and iPhone 3g)

I thought (based on many questions and answers here) that it is not possible to downgrade?

It's certainly extremely difficult.

I wouldn't expect it to be any faster, especially if you are comparing the performance increases of doing the same thing on an Android device.
The reason is that, on an iPad, Apple goes through a great deal of trouble to ensure that applications don't mess up your operating system (e.g. by using up too much resources in the background). Compare that with a Windows or Mac system where each application you install can load up its own background processes. In an environment such as that, you would expect a reset of the entire computer to speed everything up.
The only thing affecting your performance on the iPad, however, is iOS, which Apple provides. Assuming you reset to the same iOS you are currently using, you should expect the experience to be the same at the end.
My guess as to why your iPad is less responsive than it used to be is that Apple is optimizing their iOS updates for the newer generation iPad models rather than worrying about how it might affect the user experience on the 1st generation iPad.
Therefore, I think the only thing that could potentially increase your performance is if you downgrade the iOS on your device (which is beyond the scope of this answer), or wait for Apple to release an update which fixes the issues you are experiencing (unlikely with older generation iPads). A final option might be to jailbreak and see if there are any solutions available there (I'm not familiar with jailbreaking, so I can't point to specifics).
The one caveat might be that you are running multiple applications (several of which may be consuming up resources). However, the fix for that is to simply shut them down rather than reseting the entire iOS.

It is possible but not that likely. I have had a reset fix WiFi on an iOS device, but in general system management of processes is very strict. If an app is running in the background when it should not or is eating too much memory, it gets killed.
Your question is very similar to Does an iPad consume more battery power when there are multiple applications open? - where using battery is pretty much the same thing as using system resources that could otherwise make your iPad faster. It's worth reading the replies and accepting that iOS just doesn't allow apps to run wild. A lot of people will say that killing applications helps, but it just isn't true.*
If you did reboot you would find the same apps in the task list. That's because it isn't a list of running apps, but of recently-used apps. Seeing them there means they might be running but they're probably not.
*Why isn't it true? As the linked question and answers show, only a few limited use cases are allowed for an app to remain "running" in the background. If you have one of these active you will typically know about it and want that behaviour! If you don't you could shut it down but telling you to shut down those apps is a bit like telling you not to run any apps because they will run your battery down. The bottom line is that apps are NOT doing useless random things in the background and wasting your system resources.

I respectfully disagree with the statement that killing apps dosen't help performance. Killing background apps will make the performance either stay the same, or improve performance. There is no way that it will make the performance worse. Therefore, you should kill apps to be on the safe side. All I would need is a single example of a rouge app that's consuming resources in the background to disprove the statement that killing processes doesn't ever help. Numerous times, I've had background apps use up so much resources that I could actually feel the phone heat up in my pocket.

I can only tell you how it works, can't make you believe me. Apple docs, WWDC2011 videos, other developers will tell you the same.


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What programs have trouble with case-sensitive (HFSX) filesystems, and how to fix them?
There are some programs that require a case-sensitive filesystem, and others that require case-insensitive. Even though Apple warns against using case sensitive file systems, in some situations it is useful.
What programs have trouble with Case Sensitive (HFSX) systems?
What are the work-arounds?
In general, the problem is that the developers have a file in their app called FOO, but try to access the file by the name foo. In an HFS+ system that is case preserving but case insensitive, searching for foo will find FOO. That is not the case in HFSX. The general solution is therefore to

Find the misnamed file or folder
Make a copy, a link, or rename so the expected name is found

No ability to add answers, but this site lists some software and provides explanations how to debug and get them working again: http://www.jms1.net/osx-case-sensitive-fs.shtml

MODERATORS: This question has been closed and voted to re-open already: http://meta.apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1374/requesting-re-open-votes-for-a-question
Please read that and consider before voting to close.

The meta discussion has no objections lodged to re-opening this, so I'm going to over-rule the closure and ask that people join us on meta if I missed an opinion / reason to close it. Discussion is here and here

According to this question, Photoshop CS5 won't work on HFSX.
Convert a partition from case-sensitive to case-insensitive

Apparently, CS6 doesn't work, either. http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/61665/i-want-to-install-adobe-cs6-on-external-hard-drive-but-cant-select-the-install

I thought that Adobe Reader had the same issue, but it seems to work on my iMac. Adobe Acrobat Reader DC 2019.021.20058.

MeshLab version 1.3.2 does not work on HSFX systems. The CFBundleExecutable in Info.plist specifies MeshLab, but the binary in the Contents/MacOS folder is meshlab. The solution is to edit Info.plist (change MeshLab to meshlab) or:
cd meshlab.app/Contents/MacOS
ln -s meshlab MeshLab

A bug report has been filed here: https://sourceforge.net/p/meshlab/bugs/323/

Bug still exists on 1.3.3

Thing (beta, 1.6b24) does not work with HSFX. The solution is to rename or link the Versions folder to versions
cd Things beta.app/Contents/Frameworks/CulturedRuntime.framework
ln -s Versions versions

I can't reproduce the problem with version 2.5.4.

Console 10.9 (536.100.1) in Maveicks, OS X 10.9.5 (13F1096)
The order of system log queries is dependent upon file system capabilities. This is troublesome only if you expect queries to be sorted alphabetically without case sensitivity.
With case-insensitive HFS Plus (a before A):

With case-sensitive HFS Plus (a after Z):

My guess that Console would behave in this way – with HFS Plus with Mavericks – was based on past knowledge of how Console behaved with ZEVO ZFS on Mountain Lion. The relevant topic, in the GreenBytes area (before it was closed by Oracle) was disorderly representations of files in apps such as Console; Don Brady described it as a bug in Console.

OneDrive
OneDrive won’t synchronize your folder if it’s in a case-sensitive volume. The application itself seems to work, so I created a case-insensitive data volume and moved my OneDrive folder there.
Version: 19.192.0926.0012
Note: I’m using APFS not HFS+ but I think they will cause same issues.

Steam

I then put the path on a case-insensitive filesystem, but the program exits after update. I then tried manually run the binary from command line (to see whether it provides more detailed error message):
/Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx

Running this twice and it works. Note that the log is different, so it definitely did something different the second time, even though it looks the same in GUI.
Note: this doesn’t mean that all games work. It’s only about Steam itself.

The CrashPlan backup software (v 3.6.3) has a known case sensitive issue.
Solution is:

Open Terminal
Stop the CrashPlan service by entering this command:
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
Open the CrashPlan plist file by entering this command:
sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
Enter your password for the computer when prompted
Locate the following string:
<string>/Applications/CrashPlan.app/Contents/MacOs/CrashPlanService</string>
Update it to (note capital s on MacOS):
<string>/Applications/CrashPlan.app/Contents/MacOS/CrashPlanService</string>
Press Control+X to exit
Press Y to confirm the changes
When you see the prompt File Name to Write, press Enter to save to the existing location
Start the CrashPlan service by typing:
sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

I should not expect the same problem with 4.3.0; output from the following command looks fine:
sudo launchctl list com.crashplan.engine | grep -i macos

Correct. Not currently an issue.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Is it possible to hide my device's UDID from iOS apps?
A few days ago I read an article how iOS app developers can uniquely identify my iOS device using its UDID. The thought of various apps being able to track me (with an ID attached) is somewhat unnerving. Also, I do not feel that I am getting a service of higher quality in exchange for letting developers learn about my preferences and habits. While Apple is apparently moving towards deprecating UDIDs, it will take time. Thus, my question: can I somehow restrict access to my device's UDID?

In a word, no, it's currently available for any App to read, and then subsequently use as it sees fit.  However, Apple recently made clear that they would not approve future Apps that request it, and so it's use will be negated over time, but of course this won't necessarily apply to the millions of apps already approved.

It's possible to spoof your UDID but only if your iDevice is jailbroken. You can freely try  PMP -  Protect My Privacy app from Cydia store which helps securing your UDID, Contacts and Location info by shuffling and generating random data access.

Nowdays access to the UUID has been replaced by the Advertising Identifier that you could control if your want to share it with apps. Go to the Privacy section in settings and flip the switch to disable it.

It says "Limit Ad tracker". You can chose it to be on or off. So in other words it will always be ON. That's how I understand it.


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Why does deleting a Mac OS X app leaves its shortcut in the Launchpad?
Whenever I delete an app from the Applications folder, its shortcut stays in the Launchpad. In order to delete it, I have to click on it (a question mark appears), and then drag to the trash can. Is it a bug, or does this mean I am doing something wrong?

It may be a bug, but I am thinking it may mean your Spotlight index is corrupt.
I just tried deleting Evernote from my Applications folder. After authenticating, it moved it to the trash. I then checked launchpad again, and it was no longer there. Then, when I dragged it back out of the trash and placed back into Applications folder. Relaunched launchpad, and it was there again on the last page. As in, worked as expected here.
Launchpad keeps its own plist of what files there are, etc, and thats why there are some modification tools to allow to you to edit it. But I am assuming they would use spotlight to 'watch' your Applications folder to add new items not through the Mac App Store. I assume Spotlight because its a great tool for the job, installing Lion does a huge spotlight re-index, and they do use spotlight often behind the scenes.
First, the GUI way I have seen online is to do this (I do the command line way below):

In system's preferences -> spotlight -> Privacy add the drive you want to re-index
Quit System's preferences
Logout of your sessions
Login again :-)
In system's preferences -> spotlight -> Privacy remove the drive you want to re-index
Wait.. a faily long time. You should see mdworker and/or mds running

Personally, I have always done it through the command line.

Launch ‘Terminal’ (located in /Applications/Utilities/)
At the command prompt, type this exactly: sudo mdutil -E /
You will be asked for your password, provide it, as this command requires
administrator privelages to run
You will receive a confirmation message saying that index will be rebuilt
Wait until index is finished rebuilding, this can take a while depending on the size of your hard drive, amount of files, etc.

While I can't find any documentation online that 100% confirms that Launchpad uses Spotlight for this, this would be the first place I would look for the problem you are having.

Thanks for a very informative reply. If Launchpad uses the Spotlight index, then rebuilding it could indeed help. I'll try that out as well, and report back. Oh, and +1 for the command line suggestion, I just learned something new!

I think that it is expecting you to remove the application directly from LaunchPad.  Launchpad obviously reads it's apps list and folder groupings/layouts from some configuration file, and so when you remove an App it hasn't necessarily had a chance to remove that icon and it's associated positioning etc from it's config.
It would be interesting to see how often it checks for removed files etc, maybe it's a one-time boot or login process (perhaps you can test this by removing (or moving) an app and seeing if the icon remains after effectively restarting the LaunchPad process.
The best workaround, is to remove directly in LaunchPad.  This should remove the App from /Applications, and remove it fully from the LaunchPad configuration.

Interesting. It that is indeed the case, it is not very user-friendly (for it is only possible to remove apps directly from Launchpad when these apps are downloaded from the Mac App Store).
I'll play around with my apps later on and see if these shortcuts disappear after logging out or restarting the Launchpad process. Thanks!


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What methods are there for making a screencast from an iPad 2 or 3 with iOS 5?
I need to find a way to output, or possibly make an internal recording of, a screencast of everything on the iPad screen, so that I can record demonstrations of an app my company is developing.
Of course I could position the iPad on a table with a video camera over my shoulder, but there must be methods available now for providing video output that can be captured by another device, or making an internal screencast.
I'm not talking about streaming video from within an iPad app for display on an Apple TV or another device. I need to output or record everything on the iPad, and at a sufficiently high frame rate.
I know there are means of making a screencast from the iPhone Simulator on XCode in Mac OS X, but that does not meet my needs either.

Do you have some kind of recording device that accepts HDMI input?

I'm willing to invest in such a device if it's the best method. Do you have a recommendation?

Reflector App
I have purchased and evaluated a newly released program called Reflector App (which runs on your Mac) that does everything I need it to do. It costs US $15 and works using Apple Airplay on your iOS device, so it supports iPad 2, iPad 3, and iPhone 4S. It makes its own QuickTime recordings with audio and video. If you have a good connection with a WiFi N router (such as my Apple Time Capsule) and an Ethernet connection to your Mac, you get a frame rate good enough to record yourself playing Angry Birds, at full iPad screen size. It records audio and video from your iPad.
This app is quite new and small updates are being released frequently. The documentation is sketchy but the tech support via email is responsive.
You can download a trial version that will only work for 10 minutes total; after that you must pay for the app. It's not available in the Mac App Store and I suspect it won't be. You can purchase it directly from the web site.

Based on what you've described, this currently is not possible unless you JailBreak your device. If you're willing to do that, there are a couple options available through Cydia. First, there's ScreenSplitr, which pairs your device with your computer through a program called iDemo and allows you to have real-time iOS demonstrations. If you just want to record a screencast on the actual device, you should use Display Recorder. It does precisely what you're looking for. It records anything that happens on the screen and can save the video to different formats. If you don't want to use the iOS simulator, then I'd suggest you JailBreak which can be reversed.

One way to do this is potentially to use AirPlay mirroring.
Assuming that the App that is being developed supports (or for the purposes of creating the demo can be made to support) Airplay, you can then run a piece of software on a Mac called Airplay Receiver which will allow you to direct the airplay output to your Mac rather than to an Apple TV.  Once this is working, any number of Mac based screen capture programs can be used to record the stream.
There may well be a way to use a Mac to record output from the iPad simulator also, but without proper access to those tools I am unsure how to detail this further, although a future answer may be able to comment further so I include the thought anyway.

With the new mirroring available since iPad 2, you can use an HDMI recorder to capture screen output of recent iOS devices.  There are many available and can be found via google search for "hdmi recorder mac".  There are more (and lower cost) options for Windows computers if you have access to windows machines for this recording session.
The HDMI output is generally displayed with black bars at 1080p output over HDMI, so you'll need to use a video editing program to crop to just the 1024x768 portion you'll need.  You won't be able to get the full resolution of the new iPad via any means right now, though eventually jailbreaking and screen capture will become available for the new iPad.
You can get just the 1024x768 video data out using the VGA output adaptor, but VGA recording devices appear to be more expensive and less available than HDMI recording devices.


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Apache virtualhost - Mac OSX 10.7.3
After upgrading to Lion, all my virtualhosts stopped working. They redirect to "It works" main apache page on my device for some weird reason.
Example:
/etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1  myhost.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents/testproj/"
    ServerName myhost.com

    <Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents/testproj/">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/testproj-error_log"
    CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/testproj-access_log" common
</VirtualHost>

Did anyone else face the same issue? How can I fix this?

There could be multiple causes to this issue.
First, have you tried restarting Apache?
You can do so by typing sudo apachectl graceful in the Terminal.
If that doesn't work out, try to create a folder in the predestined folder (Sites), and see if it works. Alsoo, make sure you've enabled the proper settings:

And just for the record, my httpd-vhosts.conf file (on a Windows though) looks like this:
NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName dev.test.be
    ErrorLog "logs/test.log"
    CustomLog "logs/test.log" common
    DocumentRoot "C:\Users\me\workspace\test\drupal"
</VirtualHost>

Tried all... nothing happened. The virtualhost configs are unchanged since the upgrade and they used to be working quite fine

Where is that snippet of VirtualHost config? Are you sure it's being read in?
I notice that by default, the /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf file is not read in by the main httpd.conf so you'd have to uncomment the line to read it in.
You can check what Apache thinks of the current vhost config with
sudo httpd -S

and verify that your myhost.com is there.
Please update your question with the results of this if it's not the problem so we can start narrowing it down.