Compare any checksum with proposed checksum by website I often download files from the Web and many websites suggest to compare a proposed checksum with what I obtain from my computer (usually in Terminal).

However, as the checksums tend to be quite long 64 characters for sha256 or 32 for md5 for example, I was wondering if a universal Terminal line could be created to use what a website might propose as a checksum?

I found askUbuntu question that is similar to mine, however restricted to md5sum. What I would like is a little bit what the contributor suggest but with any checksum algorithm (e.g., sha1, sha256, md5, etc.):

$ echo "checksum_suggested_by_site_to_be_put_here  filetohashA.txt" | md5 -c -

Any ideas?

Here are two different approaches that can be taken, one using Automator and AppleScript, and the other using a bash script and Terminal.

Using Automator and AppleScript

The following example AppleScript code, used in an Automator Service1, set to Service receives selected files or folders in Finder, with a Run AppleScript action, will allow one to paste a copied MD5, SHA1, SHA256 or SHA512 checksum value into a dialog box and verify it against the selected file in Finder.

In macOS High Sierra, I saved the Automator Service1 as Verify Pasted Checksum. Then in Finder selecting a downloaded file for which I had a checksum copied to the clipboard, I right-clicked it and selected Verify Pasted Checksum from the Services context menu. I then pasted in the copied checksum and pressed the Enter key. It then returned the appropriate message.

1 In macOS Mojave, and later, an Automator Service is called a Quick Action. There are also other minor nomenclature differences but they should be more obvious when comparing them to pre-macOS Mojave Automator workflows.

Example AppleScript code:

global pastedChecksum
global fileToCaculateChecksum

on run {input}

    set fileToCaculateChecksum to POSIX path of first item of input

    set pastedChecksum to text returned of (display dialog ¬
        "Paste checksum here:" buttons {"Cancel", "Verify Checksum"} default button ¬
        "Verify Checksum" default answer "" with title "Verify Checksum Matches Provided Value")

    set L to (length of pastedChecksum)

    if L = 32 then
        -- Validate MD5 checksum.
        set caculatedChecksum to do shell script "/sbin/md5 -q " & fileToCaculateChecksum's quoted form
        displayValidationMessage(caculatedChecksum)
    else if L = 40 then
        -- Validate SHA1 checksum.
        set caculatedChecksum to do shell script "/usr/bin/shasum " & fileToCaculateChecksum's quoted form & " | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}'"
        displayValidationMessage(caculatedChecksum)
    else if L = 64 then
        -- Validate SHA256 checksum.
        set caculatedChecksum to do shell script "/usr/bin/shasum -a 256 " & fileToCaculateChecksum's quoted form & " | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}'"
        displayValidationMessage(caculatedChecksum)
    else if L = 128 then
        -- Validate SHA512 checksum.
        set caculatedChecksum to do shell script "/usr/bin/shasum -a 512 " & fileToCaculateChecksum's quoted form & " | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}'"
        displayValidationMessage(caculatedChecksum)
    else
        -- Unrecognized checksum.
        display dialog "The length of the pasted checksum was not recognized!" buttons {"OK"} ¬
            default button 1 with title "Unrecognized Checksum" with icon caution
    end if

end run

on displayValidationMessage(caculatedChecksum)
    if pastedChecksum is equal to caculatedChecksum then
        -- Checksum matched.
        display dialog "The checksum for '" & fileToCaculateChecksum & "' matched!" buttons {"OK"} ¬
            default button 1 with title "Valid Checksum"
    else
        -- Checksum did not match.
        display dialog "The checksum for '" & fileToCaculateChecksum & "' did not match!" buttons {"OK"} ¬
            default button 1 with title "Bad Checksum" with icon stop
    end if
end displayValidationMessage

Scroll to see additional code.

Note: The example AppleScript code is just that and does not contain any error handling as may be appropriate. The onus is upon the user to add any error handling as may be appropriate, needed or wanted. Have a look at the try statement and error statement in the AppleScript Language Guide. See also, Working with Errors.

Using bash and Terminal

If you want a bash solution for Terminal, use the following example bash code, saved to a file and made executable with chmod.

In Terminal:

touch vpc
open vpc

Copy and paste the example bash code, shown further below, into the opened document, then save and close it.

Back in Terminal:

chmod u+x vpc
./vpc

Note: I used vpc for: [V]erify [P]asted [C]hecksum

You can also place the, e.g., vpc executable in a directory that is within your PATH and be able to use it without ./ or its full qualified pathname.

Example bash code:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $# -ne 2 ]]; then
    echo "  Missing argument!"
    echo "  Uasge: vpc pasted_checksum filename"
    echo "  Example: vpc 98d9402a8b446bdd57b4b6729b4d575e /path/to/filename"
    exit 1
fi

l=$(/usr/bin/awk -v var="$1" 'BEGIN {print length(var)}')
[ -f "$2" ] || l=0

case "$l" in
    32 )
                # Validate MD5 checksum.
            c="$(/sbin/md5 -q "$2")"
        ;;
    40 )
                # Validate SHA1 checksum.
            c="$(/usr/bin/shasum "$2" | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}')"
        ;;
    64 )
                # ValidateSHA256 checksum.
            c="$(/usr/bin/shasum -a 256 "$2" | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}')"
        ;;
    128 )
                # Validate SHA512checksum.
            c="$(/usr/bin/shasum -a 512 "$2" | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}')"
        ;;
    0 )
            echo "  Bad Filename!"
            exit 1
        ;;
    * )
            echo "  Unreconized Checksum!"
            exit 1
        ;;
esac

    # Verify checksum matches provided value, using case insensitive matching.
shopt -s nocasematch
if [[ $1 == "$c" ]]; then
    echo "  The checksum for '""$2""' matched."
else
    echo "  The checksum for '""$2""' did not match!"
fi
shopt -u nocasematch

Scroll to see additional code.

Note: The example bash code contains some error handling. The onus is upon the user to add any additional error handling as may be appropriate, needed or wanted.


Missing BPM information I have hundreds of songs that are missing BPM information in ITunes.  How do I force ITunes to update the BPM?

Please note that deleting and re-adding songs back is not a very good option for me.

iTunes won’t do this itself, but I found this tool very helpful http://www.beatunes.com/itunes-automatic-bpm-detection.html


Prove that I visited a site for medical school interview 10 days ago I was awarded an interview at my dream medical school, and immediately signed up for a time slot on their website. However, I recently got an email that I actually DIDNT sign up for a time slot and I’ve therefore lost the opportunity. I must have failed to click confirm!

So my question is, how do I prove that I visited the sign-up page on the 12 or 13th of December? I’ve checked my browser history for Safari and Firefox from those days, but for some reason the website is not in there—is it possible that it got inadvertently deleted? I know that I visited the pages and that I was not in private browsing mode.

A couple of specific questions:
1. What are your suggestions in terms of finding the missing browsing history in my Mac? I’m running OS Mountain Lion and I didn’t have Time Machine running. I have found my history.plist file, but it seems really short and only seems to have websites that visited in the past couple days.

Is there any way that cookies might help me? I unfortunately don’t think that the university’s site collects them, and I didn’t see the site in my safari cookies, but might this be an avenue to pursue?
Is there anything that the university might be able to do to check website activity? I’ve sent them my IP address, but I’m worried that it may have changed since 10 days ago and won’t match. Is there anything else I can ask them to do?
Anything else in terms of proving that I thought I had signed up? The only thing I have right now is that I entered the interview time slot into my iCalendar as soon as I signed up, so the time stamp on the item in my calendar matches the day.

I appreciate any help you can give, and let me know if I should provide any more information! I desperately want the chance to interview at this school!

10 days ago...immediately signed up for a time slot on their
  website...how do I prove that I visited the sign-up page on the 12 or
  13th of December?

History

Safari keeps history in a database that's capped at 80M.  That's quite literally a metric ton of browsing you would have to do in the span of 10 days for the history to be over written.  If you're not seeing it in your history, and especially if there are older entries, it wasn't deleted from your history, it just simply isn't there.

There are two more places you can look:

Cookies - ~/Library/Cookies
Cache - ~/Libary/Caches/com.apple.Safari

Cookies

If the site you went to had a form that you were filling out, chances are they were using cookies (if just to identify your session).  Search in your cookies cache directory for anything that potentially matches the site you were on.  Listing this directory will show all the cookies stored in your user profile:

$ ls ~/Library/Cookies

Caches

You can search the Caches to see if anything was stored during that time.  Using a similar method to the link above to search for cookies, create a text file called commands.txt (in your caches directory) with the following:

.mode csv
.once caches.txt
select time_stamp, request_key from cfurl_cache_response where time_stamp BETWEEN date('2018-12-11') AND date('2018-012-14');

Then issue the command:

$ sqlite3 Cache.db < commands.txt

If there's anything in that time period that matches your site, then you have "evidence" that you were there.

Conclusion

I don't see how this can help you in your situation.  This data is useful if a manager was trying to prove that you were somewhere (a website) where/when you shouldn't have been, for example.  However, you being at a particular website at a particular time doesn't negate the fact that the required task wasn't completed.

This is like standing in line for days to be the first to buy the very first iPhone ever made only to not pay for it.  It doesn't matter that you were there and you may even have pictures of you holding it; you didn't do the critical part and actually complete the transaction.


Bootcamp USB drive: No bootable device I'm trying to install Windows 10 in BootCamp on my 2012 Macbook Pro, running mac OS Sierra, but fail to boot from the USB drive on which the Windows install tools reside. The error message I get is No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key.

What I did so far:

Tried to create a boot medium using Boot Camp assistant. This failed, because on the ISO-Image I have there is a file install.wim, which is too large for a FAT32-formatted drive.
Tried to manually create the boot medium, using the above ISO-image, formatting the drive using ExFAT. This resulted in the above error message. I did some research and it seems that ExFAT is not bootable?

The most promising attempt was the following:

So, since I have another device running Windows 10 available, I ended up installing Microsoft's MediaCreationTool and creating a FAT32-based bootable USB drive.
Using this drive; I was once able to boot into the Windows 10 Installation. Since I was not able to quickly obtain a product key and thought I needed one for the installation, I canceled the installation at this point.
After cancelling the installation, the Windows partition stopped showing up as a startup disk!
I restarted the Boot Camp procedure, erasing- and re-creating the Bootcamp-partition.
The USB drive stopped being recognised; I again get the above error message No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key. In macOS the USB drive shows up without any problem.

I did a few more attempts (each time erasing and creating the bootcamp partition; trying to create another USB tool), but always with the same result.

Any help in getting this to run is appreciated. If possible, I'd like to avoid updating to mac OS Catalina.

The Boot Camp Assistant works under very strict conditions. Failure occurs when any one of the conditions is ignored. In your case, the condition was using Sierra. Apple expects you to install the latest version of macOS available for your model Mac.

The firmware needed to allow booting from ExFAT formatted media is installed when upgrading to High Sierra. Since you are using Sierra, your Mac probably has not had this firmware upgrade. The default Windows 10 ISO file, downloaded from Microsoft when running macOS, contains the file install.wim, which is to large to store in a FAT32 formatted volume. However, the Windows 10 ISO or USB flash drive, created using the media creation tool, substitutes a install.esd file for the install.wim file. Basically, .esd files use a better compression algorithm than .wim files. The result is the install.esd file can be stored on FAT32 formatted volumes. You could use a ExFAT (or maybe FAT32) formatted flash drive to transfer the Windows 10 ISO, created using the media create tool, from machine running Windows to your Mac running Sierra.

  Note: I do not know, if the install.wim file contains the same data as the install.esd file. There may very well be extra files in the install.wim version that Macs need that does not exist in the install.esd version.

Your model Mac is designed to BIOS boot Windows 7 and UEFI boot Windows 10. When BIOS booting Windows, the installation drive needs to be hybrid partitioned. The Boot Camp Assistant automatically determines, if hybrid partitioning is needed for a Windows installation by inspecting the Windows USB flash drive. Of course, the assumption is the files on the flash drive were created by the Boot Camp Assistant. From the way you worded your question, apparently the only files on the flash drive were put there by the Microsoft media creation tool.

The GUI Windows installer will only install for BIOS booting when the installation drive is hybrid partitioned, otherwise Windows will be installed for UEFI booting. Your model Mac should install Windows 10 to UEFI boot, primarily because the Windows Support Software is designed for a UEFI booting Windows 10.

  Note: The message No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key is a indication the firmware is trying to BIOS boot the Windows installation media. The media should be UEFI booting.

Options:

Try using the ISO file which can be created using the media create tool.
Upgrade to a newer version of macOS.
Install Windows using the macOS and Windows CLI. This option requires many steps which were omitted from this answer.


Where VIM keep its recordings? I was trying to use VIM and it kept blinking "recording" all the time. Now I know that it means VIM was recording what I was typing. Where does it keep these recordings? I would like to delete these.

The "recording" label usually appears when you press 'q' key to record a macro. It is not recording what you are typing, it is recording a command sequence to be re-used for later use.

See: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Macros


iPad - multiple users on one account I recently bought iPads for my kids and set them up under my iPad/iPhone account. I did set up separate email accounts but all their text messages are coming to me and they have access to my pics, contacts etc. I am not extremely tech savvy but there must be a way that they can have their own texting accounts and I can block access to my stuff? Please help!!!

The term "AppleID" is being used here to refer to two different accounts and that's where it gets confusing.  Your actual Apple ID is what logs you in to the App Store, has your credit card linked and keeps track of your purchases.  The details are in the Settings App under "iTunes & App Store".  As @Gabkano said you can now use Family Sharing to put your kids' Apple IDs under yours so that if you buy an app, song, movie, etc they get it too without having to pay for it again.

But that's not why you and your kids are seeing each others' photos, contacts, iMessages, etc.  Those are all part of your iCloud account which also includes calendars, reminders, Safari bookmarks, and, if you've enabled it, password saving through Keychain.  The login details for that are in the "iCloud" tab of the Settings app just above the AppleID tab.

Most people use the same e-mail address for both the AppleID and the iCloud ID but you don't have to.  For example, my wife, kids and I all share a single AppleID but we each have our own iCloud accounts.  That way we only have to buy apps once but my contacts and such stay separate from hers and from the kids'. I also log my iPhone, iPad and Mac into my iCloud account so that all of my data is synced between them automatically.

To make matters even more confusing there's a third account that often gets lumped in with the AppleID: your Game Center ID, which tracks scores and achievements in games.  Your kids will almost certainly want their own GameCenter IDs so I suggest using the same email address there as your iCloud ID.

Maybe this will help:
  Me:   AppleID=us@me.com, iCloud=dad@me.com,   GameCtr=dad@me.com
  Wife: AppleID=us@me.com, iCloud=mom@me.com, GameCtr=mom@me.com

With Family sharing you can set up individual AppleIDs for everyone and link them together but for years I've been doing it the way I explained above and it's worked out very well.

I hope this helps.


OSX virtual machines for Visual Studio and Azure I will be starting a new job in a couple of weeks, and I've been asked to spec out a machine I'd like to work on. As a UI Developer, I am much more comfortable developing in OSX.

The company I will be working for develops on .NET and deploys as an Azure cloud application. I know that I can run Windows as a virtual machine, but I need to make an informed decision about whether I will be able to smoothly run Visual Studio and run the Azure cloud application.

Any thoughts? Performance issues? Workflow headaches?

I program a lot in Visual Studio. I use parallels and Windows 7 and a MacBook Pro. Works great. You'll want to max out the ram on your machine, other than that you shouldn't have any problems.


How to get Audio Drivers for Macbook in Windows 10 I have installed Windows 10 on my Mid 2012 Macbook Pro. I already had a separate partition which was a leftover from Ubuntu in it, so I didn't partitioned it using Bootcamp and directly formatted it in NTFS. I then used Bootcamp assistant which automatically detected the NTFS partition.
I made a bootable usb and installed Windows 10 using it. It does have latest drivers too. Everything is working in it after installing Bootcamp drivers except the sound. I just get a red cross on the Volume icon in system tray and when I click on it, Windows starts to troubleshoot and the result always points that the hardware change might not have detected and it's been fixed now.

However it never gets fixed. In device manager, I get a yellow warning mark under High Definition audio controller and no other audio device. I have tried installing both Realtek and Cirrus drivers, but they doesn't get installed saying that they are incompatible.

How can I get the audio to work in Windows 10?

Apple just released the Bootcamp 6 for Windows 10.

Check in this article if your Model qualifies and how to do it.


How do I fix the iOS 11 update not appearing on an iPad Air 2? How do I fix the iOS 11 update not appearing on an iPad? Oddly, the Software Update menu item in the Settings app is showing a red “1” badge, indicating that an update is available. But when opening the item, there’s only a message that the iPad is running iOS 10.3.3 and is up to date. This seems like a bug? I already tried restarting the iPad, but this hasn’t resolved the problem. The iPad is a family member’s iPad Air 2, and there’s more than enough free space to download the update (> 30gb). Is there anything else I can try or is my only recourse to bring a laptop and use iTunes?

Try restarting it one more time using a force restart. After that it should appear in Settings.


How to disable default keyboard layout shorcut in OS X 10.8? When I select the "Simplified Pinyin" layout in Mac OS X 10.8, the shortcut Shift+6 is assigned to "Display smileys" (see screenshot below).

However, since this is a French keyboard, Shift+6 is normally to print the number 6, which means I can no longer type this number.

Is there any way to disable or change this keyboard shortcut?

Edit:

I've tried reassigning the menu item to a different shortcut but that didn't work:

Is there any other way to change or remove this shortcut?

You can change the shortcuts from the keyboard preference pane:

In 10.9 the Show Punctuation and Show Facemarks menu items were combined into a single item that has option-shift-B as the shortcut.

On some keyboards you can also insert 6 by pressing fn-O.


How can I find the product key of Office 2011 after restoring from backup? I had to restore my iMac from a Time Machine backup.

Everything seemed fine until I tried to start Office 2011 and it is asking me to re-enter my product key. I am trying to locate my key (I believe I downloaded this version originally and it should be in my email but I can't find it)

I tried a program that is supposed to "find the keys for products installed on your computer" (Mac Product Key Finder) and it found my very old Office 2008 key, but not 2011.

I am surprised that if I had a totally working install before recovering from back-up that this wasn't restored as well - do I have any options to find it hiding somewhere on my drive?

Note: The recovery was after a hard drive was replaced by the Apple store - if that makes a difference, so this is a new internal drive.

This thread is a bit old, but in case someone else finds themselves looking for the answer, this just worked for me:
To move / re-install your licensed copy of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac on a different computer / OSX installation, and re-authorize it without the license / serial / key available, copy the following from the old machine to the corresponding (same) spot on the new computer.
Please note that you should be looking for these folders in the root directory of the drive on which OSX is installed-- NOT in your user directory. To get there, in the Finder click Go-->Computer-->[name of the hard drive that has OSX installed...usually "Macintosh HD"]...then look for the following folders:

/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011 folder (copy the entire folder, with all its contents)
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper.plist
/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensing.plist

From:
http://cwl.cc/2012/02/easy-way-to-move-your-microsoft-office.html
Note NOV2020: If you just copy/paste the last file "/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensing.plist" as instructed above, it should work as well. For transparency, this was tested on an old mbp with El Capitan and incoming connections blocked with Firewall (unsure if Firewall would affect outcome).


Get rid of Mail VIP list I upgraded to Mountain Lion a couple of months ago. But only just today did the VIP mailbox show up in Mail. I'd like to get rid of it. But apparently there is no way to get rid of it.

But that seems odd, since it only first showed up today, for no reason I can discover. For some reason it had an "Angieslist" subfolder, but with nothing in it.

Very odd. Annoying too.

What most likely happened is, somehow, you clicked on a star icon which appears just to the right of the senders name. I've done this myself, more than once, thinking it was a bookmark / favorite button.

That star sets the sender as a VIP – an easy way to filter emails from important contacts, which is really what the VIP under the hood.

The reason it was empty is, I assume, because there were no Angielist emails in your inbox.

To remove, and I'm assuming you found this already, is by control-clicking on the name in the VIP list and selecting Remove VIP. Restart Mail once and the VIP sidebar item should be gone for good.


Aperture and exporting videos and photos at the same time I just bought Aperture, as a last ditch attempt to try and get a good export of all of my "projects" (photos and videos in many of the projects) into folders named by event/project. I tried first using the Unified library (my source is originally iPhoto), and then brought them in via a complete library import.

What happens is this, when I select:

All of the projects in the Projects view, I can only Export Library.
If I go to Photos view, and select all, I can do the Export Versions and get all of the photos cleanly exported. BUT no videos are exported. All videos are MP4 and completely fine in iPhoto/Quicktime.
I can set a filter in Photos to show only Video, and the files show up fine, but I seemingly have to export them separately which is not ideal. They should export embedded in the Project.

I've also tried iPhoto To Disk, but it has its own bugs and they have been unable to resolve them. (Double folders, some files don't export, etc.)

I've spent about $150 now trying to do the simplest thing, export about 5,000 photos and videos to:
2008-8-Baby photos
2009-9-Dog photos
etc.
(All events are named as above, so it's using project names vs EXIF dates)

Can anyone help? I can use iPhoto OR Aperture, but since I paid for Aperture and it's more flexible, I feel like I should get some use out of it :)

(At this point I just can't justify $140 for Lightroom, or commit to their CC to get it...)

While this doesn't answer your question precisely, this may help prevent frustration attempting to export all photos and all videos simultaneously.

Create a smart album in Aperture or in iPhoto setting conditions to find all the video like in the image below:

Its just not clear what video formats are compatible with Aperture or iPhoto, so adding every format you can think of to these conditions won't hurt anything.

Once the smart album is created, you can select all the videos in the album and export them in one step.

Alternatives

  (At this point I just can't justify $140 for Lightroom, or commit to their CC to get it...)

darktable

Alternatively, for an application more powerful than iPhoto, and holds its own against Lightroom or Aperture, I've discovered darktable, which

  "is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them."

darktable can be installed manually, but is also maintained as a port using MacPorts, if you prefer to use package management. I've included step by step instructions for installing MacPorts and darktable below.

GIMP

An extremely powerful alternative to editing photos is using the GIMP. The GIMP can be installed manually, or built from source using MacPorts. I've included instructions below on how to install the GIMP using MacPorts. If you know Adobe Photoshop well, you may want to demo using GIMPshop, which very cleverly and conveniently reconstructs the look and feel of the GIMP to appear and behave nearly just like Photoshop... and its all for free.

MacPorts

MacPorts is a robust, stable, mature and easy to use package management solution, for OS X. It is modeled after FreeBSD's ports system, which has been adopted as the basis of NetBSD's pkgsrc. I highly recommend MacPorts.

install Xcode 5.1.1

MacPorts requires an appropriate version of xcode; xcode_5.1.1.dmg is the most recent version for Mavericks (after registerring for a free developer account, and logging into developer.apple.com, that link will begin your xcode download). Once the download completes, lets just do it all in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app (don't be afraid of the terminal!):

 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ hdiutil attach -quiet -noverify -nobrowse -noautoopen ~/Downloads/xcode_5.1.1.dmg
 goodytx@stack:~$ cp -npR /Volumes/Xcode/Xcode.app /Applications/
 goodytx@stack:~$ hdiutil detach -quiet /Volumes/Xcode
 goodytx@stack:~$ open -g /Applications/Xcode.app; sleep 8
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ killall Xcode.app

install MacPorts

Get to know  MacPorts

 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ curl -Ok https://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/MacPorts-2.2.1.tar.bz2
 goodytx@stack:~$ tar xf MacPorts-2.2.1.tar.bz2
 goodytx@stack:~$ cd MacPorts-2.2.1
 goodytx@stack:~$ ./configure
 goodytx@stack:~$ make
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo make install     # *not war!*
 goodytx@stack:~$ cd ..
 goodytx@stack:~$ rm -rf Macports-*
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo /opt/local/bin/port -v selfupdate
 goodytx@stack:~$ diskutil quiet repairPermissions /
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$

add MacPorts to your $PATH:

 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
 goodytx@stack:~$ export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/ man:$MANPATH
 goodytx@stack:~$

install darktable and the gimp

 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ port info darktable
 darktable @1.1.2_5 (graphics)
 Variants:             gcc44, gcc45, gcc46, gcc47, gnome_keyring, quartz, universal, [+]x11

 Description:          Darktable is a virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers: it manages your digital
                       negatives in a database and lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable. It also
                       enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.
 Homepage:             http://www.darktable.org/

 Build Dependencies:   cmake, pkgconfig
 Library Dependencies: cairo, curl, dbus-glib, exiv2, gettext, glib2, gtk2, gtk-engines2, jpeg, json-glib, lcms2,
                       lensfun, libglade2, libgphoto2, libpng, librsvg,           libxml2, openexr, sqlite3, tiff, zlib
 Platforms:            darwin
 License:              GPL-3+
 Maintainers:          julians37@gmail.com
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ port info gimp
 gimp @2.8.10 (graphics)
 Variants:             animation, gmic, quartz

 Description:          This is a META port for the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) which includes support
                       for icns, JP2000 and RAW formats, content-aware rescaling, Gutenprint and scanner frontends
                       and, optionally, an animation tool (the GIMP Animation Package) and an image processing and
                       scientific visualization tool (GREYC's Magic Image Converter).
 Homepage:             http://www.gimp.org/

 Library Dependencies: icns-gimp, gimp-jp2, gimp-lqr-plugin, gtk-nodoka-engine, gutenprint, ufraw, xsane, gimp-app
 Platforms:            darwin
 License:              none
 Maintainers:          devans@macports.org
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ # the port info commands above are unnecessary, you only need one command to install both ports:
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo port -vsc install darktable gimp

migrating from Aperture to darktable

That's really all there is to it. If you can follow a recipe to bake a cake, you can do this too. And you can keep all your ports updated to quite simply with:

 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo port -vsc selfupdate
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo port -vsc upgrade installed

MacPorts will not interfere with the use of OS X, Aperture, iPhoto, Lightroom, nor with any other software. It keeps everything it installs in its /opt directory (and any full gui applications it builds in /Applications/MacPorts/ ).

more free software available

searching macports for "photo" returns 17 more ports besides darktable, while searching for "image" returns a whopping 260 more ports of image utilities

 goodytx@stack:~$ port search photo
 goodytx@stack:~$ # too much to list here
 goodytx@stack:~$ port search image
 goodytx@stack:~$ # way too much to list here

If for whatever reason you are unsatisfied and/or need to remove MacPorts:

to completely uninstall MacPorts

 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo port -dfp uninstall --follow-dependencies installed
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo port -dfp uninstall all
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo rm -rf /opt/local
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Tcl/macports*
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ # if you also want to delete any stand-alone gui applications you've built with macports, then there is one more command:
 goodytx@stack:~$
 goodytx@stack:~$ sudo rm -rf /Applications/MacPorts
 goodytx@stack:~$


iPhone restore and recovery My iPhone wouldn't accept my passcode, so I looked online, and it said to put the phone into recovery mode, then sync it to a computer with iTunes. It said to hit restore when iTunes gave me the option.

I am aware of what this will do to my phone, however it won't turn on, and I'm wondering if when it restores, will it turn itself on. And also, if the reason why it won't turn on is because of recovery mode. what should I do?

Make sure your battery is charged.

(If the phone is already powered on, hold in the home and power button until it shuts off, then do the following)

If/when it's charged and powered off, hold in the round home button, and the power button on your iPhone.

Once it turns on and you see the Apple logo on the screen, let go of the power button, but continue holding the home button.  Keep holding the home button until you see the iTunes logo on a black screen indicating for you to plug your phone into iTunes (This is recovery mode). (You may have to try this a few times until you get it to boot into recovery mode)

Once it's in recovery mode, plug your phone into your computer with iTunes installed on it, using the data cable. Then, restore your phone using iTunes.

Hope this helps :)  If you need anything else/have any issues/questions/etc, feel free to let me know, and I will do my best to help you get this sorted out ;)

James


Time Machine to Sparsebundle image on Windows 2012 server So I've got this MB Air (Mojave 14.1 -all updates applied-) at work and thought I would try backing it up using Time Machine to an old PC running Windows Server 2012 (All updates also applied) and I go through the setup procedure:

Create a Sparse Bundle image (tried HFS+ & APFS images)
Copy image to previously set up Windows share with correct permissions and login saved to the macOS keychain
Mount image from the Windows share and verify I can write to it.
Run terminal command to set Time Machine to use the mounted share as a destination:

  sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/MBAir

And I get an error

The backup destination could not be set

After much Googling where a lot of answers pop up from AskDifferent none of them seem to have this particular issue using macOS Mojave.

Pretty sure I have the correct options for the sparse bundle selected. I tried both HFS+ and APFS format on the sparsebundle. And once it is mounted on the desktop on the Mac I can put files into the sparse bundle, so it is writable.

Wondering if anyone has any experience with this?

===
I tried the suggestion, "sudo tmutil setdestination smb://username@server/share -p instead, and allow tmutil to create it's own sparsebundle on the server." which returned an error. See comment below.

It turns out that when you create a sparse bundle disk image that resides on an APFS volume that it is ALWAYS formatted as APFS even if you specify the the format as HFS+ like this:

I created a few of these (just to be sure) and each one failed as a Time machine Destination.

As @user128998 pointed out in his comment Time Machine relies on a feature of HFS+ to do it's job and will not work on one formatted as APFS.

I had assumed that disk utility was creating an HFS+ formatted sparsebundle because I had selected that option when creating the image, as shown in the screencap above.

In frustration I did a Get Info on the mounted sparseimage bundle and it showed as an APFS volume. Grr... So I deleted it and created another one and was very careful to NOT select APFS.

When I mounted that sparseimage it too showed as an APFS volume.

Opening Disk Utility I selected the mounted sparseimage volume and reformatted it as HFS+. The operation took longer than I expected (3 - 4 minutes) but it was successful. And this time when I ran the command

  sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/MBAir

It worked!

So maybe I found a bug in Mojave (14.2) with disk images and/or sparsebundles. Or maybe it is expected behavior and I didn't know it, either way this can be marked as solved.


How do I recover a deleted file from an iPod Touch running OS 4.1 How do I recover a deleted file from an iPod Touch running OS 4.1?

Unless you have a recent enough backup in iTunes, you can't. But if you do have a recent backup in iTunes, you'll have to do a full restore (by clicking the "Restore" button in iTunes) to get the file back.


How can I generate a password-less version of a protected PDF? I have a PDF file that has been password protected.  I know the password.  The password's only use, in our case, is to protect the PDF during email transmission.  Now that I have the PDF, I'd like to remove the password, as it is annoying to have to look-up and type it in every time I want to use the PDF.

In a pre-Lion version of Preview, I was able to print and "Save As PDF" to create a copy of the file that didn't have a password.  However, when I try the same maneuver in Lion, the "Save as PDF" entry is greyed-out.

Is there some other software (preferably free) that would let me save the PDF without the password?  Some other thing I can do to the file to enable Preview to "Save as PDF"?

Open the document in Preview, select File > Duplicate, enter the file location and save a copy.

You can do a similar thing with File > Export.


Fully disable MacBook Pro's Touch Bar I constantly keep touching my MacBook Pro's Touch Bar by accident. I have larger hands and my fingers accidentally press buttons on the Touch Bar without me noticing all the time.

I like the Touch Bar and I'd like to use it, but I can't seem to find anywhere that will allow me to enable a lock screen type feature on the Touch Bar.

I'd really like to disable input unless explicitly enabled. How do I do that?

You can tinker with the Keyboard Settings to get something close to your desired behavior. Here's one idea:

Set "Touch Bar shows" to "Expanded Control Strip" and remove all buttons on the Control Strip using "Customize Touch Bar...". Then set "Press Fn key to" to "Show App Controls".

Now your Touch Bar will be empty unless you press fn to show the App Controls.

—

I also outline some ways to use Better Touch Tool to temporarily disable the Touch Bar in my answer on a related question.


Transfer a large amount of PDF files from PC to Adobe Reader (on iPad) I've a bunch (~200) of PDFs, organized in directories, (Topic wise), that I need to transfer to my iPad for offline reading.

I've two problems: First, emailing is not an option. These are around 720 megabytes in size, and the current connection I'm on is barely able to download 40 megabytes in half an hour. Besides, I could try GZIP compression, but I don't know if Adobe Acrobat can handle GZIP files.

Secondly, I would like to retain the directory structure of my documents.

I want to transfer all these PDFs to the Acrobat Reader on my iPad. I looked online and I'm told that under the Apps section of my iTunes library I must find "Acrobat Reader" and continue from there. I don't see anything in my iPad's Apps Library on the iTunes store!

I'm really stuck and would appreciate any help. Thanks a lot.

(I'm running on Windows 10, btw)

The latest version of iTunes removed much of the abilities to upload directly to an app.

While I don't know a shortcy, you could upload the files in one of two ways (making sure your device is connected via USB for the quickest upload).

A Personal favourite is WALTR, but it's a paid option. You just drag your media into the Waltr screen and it uploads it. It will go to iBooks, however (I'm not sure about your specific requirement about Adobe Reader).
Something more apt could be to copy the files into the files section that's created when you have the iCloud Windows app from Apple and upload the files into a folder there. I'm certain (but do not actually know) that you can then open the files using the file browser within Adobe reader, or the sharing function from the Files app on your device.

I really hope this helps give some guidance.


Bluetooth Not Available I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) running 10.13.6 and I am now getting "Bluetooth: Not Available" in the menu bar. I also cannot access the "Bluetooth" section within System Preferences.

Under "Network" in System Preferences it says "Bluetooth PAN is not connected" and "No PAN devices found".

Under System Report, it says "No Information Found" under Bluetooth.

I have tried the following in an effort to troubleshoot:

Simple restart
Simple shutdown, turn back on
No USB devices are connected, so I have none to remove
Reset the SMC
Delete .plist files in ~/Library/Preferences/ (there were no com.apple.Bluetooth.plist file in this directory for me, I had to go into ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost to find two com.apple.Bluetooth..plist files
Reset NVRAM
I'm unable to reset the Bluetooth module as Shift+Option and clicking on the Bluetooth menu in the menu bar does give me an options.

What other options do I have to troubleshoot this? If this is a hardware issue, do you have a recommendation for a Bluetooth USB adapter that I can use to limp by with?

If one reset of the SMC doesn't restore the function, you've done all the triage except for one last ditch option before hardware repair or dropping an USB BTLE adapter on.

Install a clean new 10.14 Mojave installation onto an external drive and let it update the firmware and then test without any user data migration or app installations. A total clean OS install can sometimes restore the drivers or state of the adapter if it's hung up and not a hardware issue.
Hardware repair is likely going to be costly so I've had very good luck with all manner of BTLE 4.0 dongles that use USB connectors. They cost $9 or so for good quality - try and look for one that says Mac compatible or buy from a company that accepts returns or can offer pre-sales assurance your chosen macOS will work. OWC is a good solid Mac centric vendor but I don't see them stocking, so this Amazon search should get you going: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_4?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=btle+dongle


How do you send a photo from your photo files? The enter key does not act as a submit key How do you send a photo from my photo files?
The enter key does not act as a submit key

There are a number of ways you can send a photo from the Photos app on your iPad.

To send photos, you can:

Launch the Photos app
Tap on the photo you want to send (or, in the case of multiple photos, tap on the Select option and select the photos you want to send)
Tap on the share icon (see image below)

Now select how you want to send it (e.g. via Message, Mail, etc)

You can also send photos directly from within apps. By way of example, you can compose a new email message and tapping on the screen will give you the option to Insert Photo or Video. Doing this will open the Photos app from where you can select the photos/videos you want to attach to your email. Likewise, within the Messages app you can tap on the camera icon to be presented with a choice of taking new photos or accessing existing photos in your Photos library.


Preserve app data when moving to new Apple ID (complication: can't log in to old Apple ID) I need to set up a new phone with a new Apple ID for a friend. We're facing two technical problems:

We need to preserve some data from the old phone (specifically, the WhatsApp chat log).
We don't know the password to the Apple ID the old phone is linked to.

Current situation: We have the old phone (associated with the old account), and we have successfully updated it to the latest iOS version and backed it up via iTunes. The old phone does not have iCloud services/backup activated.

We have the new phone (factory reset), updated to the same iOS version (11.2.2).

I was able to successfully restore the backup to the new phone. However, in order to install the apps (and thus access their data) from the old phone, they need to be downloaded with the old Apple ID, for which we don't have the password (and no way of resetting it either).

If I bind the phone to the new Apple ID, I have to delete and reinstall WhatsApp, so the chat logs will be gone. Is there any way to back them up and restore them to the new ID (the phone number/SIM card remains the same)?

You could try backing up the old iPhone's WhatsApp chats to iCloud. This is a feature of WhatsApp and would only backup and recover WhatsApp Data. This is different from the 'normal' iCloud backup, which backups App Data.

The WhatsApp feature is described here: https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/iphone/20888066/#backup

To backup the chats to iCloud:

  To make a manual backup of your chats at any time, go to WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Chat Backup and tap Back Up Now.
  This will back up your chats and media to your iCloud account; you can choose to include or exclude videos from the backup.

To recover the chat history on the other iPhone:

  To recover your chat history from an iCloud backup, first verify that an iCloud backup exists in WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Chat Backup. If you can see when the last backup was performed, delete and reinstall the app from the App Store. After verifying your phone number, follow the on-screen prompts to restore your chat history. The same iCloud backup requirements apply for iCloud restore. In addition, the phone number used for backing up and restoring must be the same.

This should work to manually backup WhatsApp data to iCloud.


El Capitan Realtek 8812au Installation stuck at "Destination Select" I'm trying to install driver for my D-Link DW-182 rev. C1 which uses RTL-8812AU Realtek chipset and supports Mac OS X via this ftp link. ( ver. 2.3.1 )

What's the problem? Any help?
At least can I unpack it and install it manually?

I've a ticket with D-Link Egypt and here's their reply:

Simply it's working :)


Using a Mac Mini as a central photo repository Is it possible to setup a mac mini as a central photo repository and have all the tagging and extra info follow to the other computers on the network? Or would each computer have to access iPhoto on the mini or have their own index?

With the way that iPhoto is built it would be quite difficult to share the library across computers. We have had some success with having an aperture library sit on a network share and have multiple installs access that library but not simultaneously. If you want central I'd suggest something like picasa web from google. That way all machines can access the existing stuff and also contribute to the main repository.


How do I tell if a disk image (.sparseimage) is encrypted? Is there a way to confirm that an image is encrypted? When I choose "Get info" in Finder, it reveals nothing, and when I use Disk utility I also can't seem to see the information.

I know I could try mount it on another machine and see if I need to use a password, but I'm looking for a clean way to get OSX to tell me that it's encrypted.

from the command line you can use 'hdiutil isencrypted {image-name}'.

bash-3.2$ hdiutil isencrypted unencrypted.sparseimage
encrypted: NO
bash-3.2$ hdiutil isencrypted encrypted.sparseimage
encrypted: YES
blocksize: 512
uuid: FC3C26ED-3056-4F98-8248-DD2F16B39357
private-key-count: 0
passphrase-count: 1
max-key-count: 1
version: 2
bash-3.2$


Does an app exist for the iPhone that sends a push notification if it detects that the device has physically been moved? Does an iPhone app exist that sends a push notification if accelerometer movement is detected? A good use case for this would be in environments where a phone is left unattended - I'm sure I saw an app a while ago that does this, but can't find any references whatsoever now!

You can use the Find My-app to let a friend know when your location changes or also get a notification when your friend’s location changes.

More about Find My-app www.support.apple.com


Safari won't display the all page (to wild) I noticed that some webpage won't be displayed correctly in Safari since 10.11.
The page are to wild and we can't see the left side (even if trying to scroll right)

Actually its not even the page itself, even if you try to do a search ( CMD + F ) we won't even see the search field.

What I realise its this happen when the tab is pinned.
The resolution I found its to unpin the tab, open a new tab with the same URL and pin the tab again.


Will internal HDD spin down when a Mac is booted from another internal SSD? On my MacBook Pro, I am planning on removing the optical drive and adding an SSD to the mix. Since Apple doesn't support this configuration, I don't find any official documentation covering SSD in the optical bay or HDD in the optical bay.

I presume the energy saver setting would spin down any spindle-based drive when it's idle (like in a Mac Pro), but would like to ask others that may have experience with this configuration in a recent MacBook Pro.

When booted from OS X installed onto an SSD, will the internal HDD be spun down when not in use?

I had this setup for a while and yes, the hard drive in the primary disk bay would spin down when booted from the SSD. It was fairly easy to tell, because when accessing the drive there was a noticeable delay when first accessing the drive after leaving it idle for about 10 minutes. This was on an older machine (2009 MacBook Pro 15", running Mac OS X 10.7).


iTunes starts randomly opening every time iPhone is connected -- settings contradict I've seen a few OLD articles on how to prevent iTunes from opening up every time you plug in your iPhone to your mac; however, none of those solutions seem to work or either they do not exist anymore.

For example, in iTunes preferences, there is no "Open iTunes automatically when this phone is connected" from the phone's summary tab, so I can't uncheck that. "Prevent device from syncing automatically" is also checked off so I'm not sure why it still opens.

Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to fix this? I'm surprised I can't find anything that's more recent and actually works. I'm running the latest version of iTunes and Mac OS X

In iTunes, open "Preferences",
Select "Devices" tab,
Check the box marked "Prevent iPhone, iPods and iPads from syncing automatically"

It started annoying for a few day and this fixed for me.


iPhone apps think they are under old iTunes username after it has changed Ever since apple has decided to make iTunes account access your email address instead of a username I have noticed the apps that were bought under the old username do not recognize this and there doesn't seem to be a simple way to fix this. For example when an app has an update it asks me to enter my old username/pw combo, however if I make a new purchase and then it has an update the new email/pw info is displayed. This more of an inconvenience than anything, but the other day I was trying to make and in-app purchase and the new email/pw dialog displayed for an app I purchased with the username/pw and the transaction would not go through saying I needed to purchase the app first. Is there an easy way to fix this?

Have you tried removing the app from iTunes and and the iOS device and then downloading them again? iTunes should see that you had already bought it and just downloads it.

This way I changed some apps when I got the iOS device from my girlfriend, which were bought with her account.


Use different Country/Region from Family in App Store My family is from Brazil and I live in Romania. I use family sharing so I can use Apple Music from my family account without paying for an extra individual subscription. This is the main feature I am interested in. However, I need to use Romanian apps and I cannot find them in the App Store because my Country/Region is set to Brazil, and not Romania. I cannot change it in the settings because it says:

  The country/region for your Family is managed by

Is it possible to use another Country/Region so I can purchase Romanian apps while still using my family's Apple Music subscription?

This is not possible. All Family Sharing members have to be in the same Country/Region.

As stated in this Support article:

  Not all content and content types are available in all countries or regions. To share purchased content, all family members must use the same Apple ID country or region.

https://support.apple.com/HT201085


How do I make the Microsoft RDP client for Mac play nice with Windows 10? Been beating my head against a brick wall trying to connect to my Windows 10 Pro workstation using Microsoft's RDP client for Mac. The symptoms I'm seeing (black screen or frozen screen) are very similar to the issues I had using mstsc.exe on a Win 7 machine. The Windows solution to the bug so far is to turn off Persistent Bitmap Caching in the Experience settings. Even this doesn't work for everyone.

Sadly, I can't find any exposed settings to turn off that feature in the Mac client.

It's not exposed in the App or menus.
No mention of it in the plist file located at:

/Users/$USER/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.rdc.mac/
Data/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.rdc.mac.plist

Any ideas?

I believe the bitmap caching was an option with earlier versions of RDC on the Mac; but according to this link, it is no longer possible to change this.

Duplicate IPs

Are there conflicting IPs on the network?

A possible cause I've seen given these symptoms is duplicate IPs. Duplicate IPs on either the Windows 10 box or the Mac can cause this issue.

Try refresh the IP (assuming DHCP) on one or both sides and monitor the stability.


where is "SERVER.APP" in Snow Leopard OSX server? The textbook answer to stopping the server in OSX Leopard server is to remove the SERVER.APP. Unfortunately I can't find it anywhere, visible or not. Where should I be looking ? Is it's absence related to "available servers (0)"?

"Server.app" does not exist in Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server as the server aspects of the OS are integrated into the OS itself, as in everything came preinstalled. Below you'll see a screen shot of the Applications folder, with the Server folder selected and there is no "Server.app".
In Terminal using the following command, it did not find  "Server.app":
find / -iname '*server*'

It found a lot of things with "server" in its name but none explicitly "Server.app".
That said, the current macOS Server available from the App Store contains "Server.app", per its tech specs page macOS Server Tech Specs, under What’s Included in macOS Server it shows:

Server app


How can I force command-line arguments to a program shortcut in the dock? I have Chrome installed in Applications, and a shortcut to it in the Dock.
How can I achieve to force some command-line arguments to each start-up of this app?

Let me be clearer, in the Terminal, I can do this:
open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args --explicitly-allowed-ports=6666
And that way I modify Chrome's behavior as I like it.
How can I have this option by default when launching the app from the Finder of the Dock?

One way to do this is with AppleScript.

Open AppleScript Editor (/Applications/Utilities) and type this in:

do shell script "open '/Applications/Google Chrome.app'  --args --explicitly-allowed-ports=6666"

Save it as an Application, and add that application to the Dock.
Click on the app's icon and you Chrome will open with your custom parameters.

This way works, but it isn't exactly ideal for a couple reasons:

Running the AppleScript will take a little longer than just opening the app
You'll have two icons in your dock (the script and Chrome)

This will work, but I'm interested to see if someone comes up with a better answer.


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?

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.


Is there any Mac OS X app that I could use to show my Google Calendar on a Desktop? I would like to show a Google Calendar right on my desktop (possible one of them, not the one I'm using most often). Is there any app that I could use to do that?

You could use the combination of GeekTool and iCalBuddy (which you can install using Homebrew).

On my desktop, it currently looks like this:


What exactly enforces secure boot on the iMac Pro? It's not clear to me how the iMac Pro enforces secure boot chain - specifically if this performed by the x86 processor, EFI firmware, the T2 or a combination of some or all of the above?

The T2 enforces secure boot. At the highest level on all Macs before the iMac Pro - High Sierra and the OS runs on the main CPU so there is no separation of power to check that the CPU / code is executing properly (or even that the parts of the OS Apple wants to protect is signed / verified with a checksum type calculation).

The T2 has it's own operating system and performs all storage operations so it's perfectly placed to enforce code signing / kernel extensions / system integrity protection.

Some additional details on this technically are presented below:

  In essence, it’s a two-stage process, first driven by the T2, then driven by the more traditional system boot process.

https://www.macworld.com/article/3245764/macs/the-t2-chip-makes-the-imac-pro-the-start-of-a-mac-revolution.html#toc-4

Startup Security Utility configures the operation of the T2, so that when Full Security is enabled…

  The boot.efi bootloader is copied from the selected macOS in /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi to the PreBoot APFS partition in /usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi.
  The efi-boot-device variable in EFI is set to the path to the copied boot.efi.

https://twocanoes.com/secureboot-imac-pro/

The T2 is the first step of any boot thereafter:

  Once the Mac is rebooted, the signature on the boot.efi specified in NVRAM on the PreBoot partition is verified.

https://twocanoes.com/secureboot-imac-pro/

  When you start up the iMac Pro, the familiar Apple logo appears almost immediately. This is a sign that the T2 is taking control. For security reasons, the T2 is the iMac Pro hardware’s “root of trust,” and it validates the entire boot process when the power comes on. The T2 starts up, checks things out, loads its bootloader, verifies that it’s legitimate and cryptographically signed by Apple, and then moves on to the next part of the boot process.

https://www.macworld.com/article/3245764/macs/the-t2-chip-makes-the-imac-pro-the-start-of-a-mac-revolution.html#toc-4

Once the T2 is happy, EFI continues as usual:

  If the bootloader signature check succeeds, then control is passed to the boot.efi and the Mac boots normally.

https://twocanoes.com/secureboot-imac-pro/


What is `applewebdata` and how do I avoid it? I'm using Workflow on iOS, specifically, an iPad Air 2. Whenever I get the contents of a web page or the links from that input, I notice that all of the links are re-written as

applewebdata://{guid}/the/rest/of/the/path

I'm unable to use this input in the rest of the Workflow, because the steps don't know how to work with applewebdata://

For example, if I get all of the links on a page and try to resolve their content

Get Contents of URL
|> Get URLs from Input
|> Get Contents of URL

I get an error like

  unsupported url

This means I have to do horrible things, like store the scheme and host of the input URL and recombine those with the path from the mangled URL to use more Workflow steps. This is not sustainable!

How do I avoid or work with applewebdata:// URLs?!

The support folks at Workflow replied in an email

  Those applewebdata:// URLs are likely local references to the image files that have been downloaded with Get Contents of URL that are now stored in the currently-running workflow. With Get Contents of Web Page, the input page converts the HTML to Rich Text and maintains the web links to each of the images.

The "solution" is to use the Get Contents of Web Page action, then.


Could downloading Tumblr videos damage/infect Mac? I have downloaded quite some Tumblr videos, both cat videos, funny clips, porn.
I downloaded them manually, you can save them with right click and save-as with right method - no download program used.

I have old external hard drive where I keep them, downloaded both in Mac and in Windows. After clean install (due to technical issues not malware), I was going to put my collection back to fresh Mac, but heard these videos could contain malicious code/trojans/malware?

Haven't done it for a month now - likely never will again just in case - but it would be pity to delete them all so... do I have to for security reasons?

My question is - how likely could videos downloaded from Tumblr be malicious?
After all, it is one platform for many different blogs - cat videos, funny clips, porn - they are all uploaded to same server so how likely is they can be infected by
a) uploader
b) tumblr itself?

Short answer yes but probably -- no.

You should definitely keep your videos. Don't delete them because you're concerned they could contain malicious data that could trigger errors in the video codec implementations that will lead to code execution on your computer. In fact waiting for some time will lower the likelihood of getting infected since any attack vectors will be invalidated in newer versions of codecs/applications. Keep your video players up to date. Don't use unsupported software which is not receiving updates.

If you like to still download and watch those cute movies and have a better conscience I would propose you install VirtualBox and a simple linux distribution for watching and downloading and have backups from your movies. Should that virtual system be infected by whatsoever thingie, just delete that virtual system and install a new one. Infecting a virtual system AND breaching the Hypervisor (the technique that drives virtual box, vmware et al.) is not very likely.

And remember to have BACKUPS! Then you are quite on the safe side. Let there be cat videos.

Adding to this, it may be also possible to share your media on your local network and watch it with guarded devices / OSs like an iPad running a non jailbroken recent system.

Some notes about downloads:

Downloading a file will not infect your system unless it is run or interpreted (like displaying a JPEG oder a Video or running javascript code). So browsing a site may infect your system, since the web-browser will interpret all kind of files not just the desired video. You could use a web scraper like jDownloader or something else to just download stuff from a given URL. My opinion is they do less interpretation. But who knows.


How do I recover a file which cannot be opened due to using Japanese characters in the file path? I saved a word document to a path similar to: "something/にほん.docx" then closed down Word as it appeared to save successfully. I looked in Finder and the file wasn't there. I opened Word again, and I can see the file in the "Recent documents" folder but when I try to open it I get "this document is either deleted or not currently accessible". Is there a way to recover it? Obviously I can rename it to something using the roman alphabet.

Possibly relevant info:

I am on macOS 10.13.1 on a 15 Inch Mid-2015 Retina MacBook Pro.
My Mac system language is English (UK).
I have enabled hidden files in finder.

I have tried:

Using the mv terminal command to rename the file. It says the file cannot be found.
Setting my primary system language to Japanese. Still no sign of the file.

Does anybody have anything else I could try?

I got it. Even though the file didn't appear in the folder, I searched for it within Finder and it came up. Simply renamed it and then opened it in Word normally.


see call history from a computer Is there a way to access the call history on an iphone from a computer?

My phone has a problem with the display that stops me from using it, it still turns on, but the screen only displays vertical bars, I can tap the screen and it seems to doing something, it makes various sounds that you would expect it to make when tapping the screen, i think i managed to unlock it, but I can't see what is going on.

I plan to take the phone to someone to see if they can fix the display problem. Until then I would like to retrieve a number from the phone that I most recently called. How can I do this?

Also is there a way to redial the previously dialed number, by pressing a combination of buttons without being able to see the screen?

Answer for question #2: use Siri and ask "Redial last number called." I use it all the time while driving (with a Bluetooth headset, of course!)


Chown to make sudo unncessary? I am setting up a new Mac for mobile app development and so I need to install a lot of things through the Terminal. Its asking me for sudo to do a lot of things and I vaguely remember a chown command that makes my user the owner of the root directory so that I don't need to do sudo. What is that command?

(Most of my searches so far have taken me to people messing up that command and breaking things and so I didn't just want to try something.)

The tool chown isn’t good for this. Instead use sudo -s to be root. Now you’re the owner of the root directory.

If you want to ask a follow on question showing a specific path and specific command you get a specific error, there might be a better way to set things up - root won’t help with system read only files and the restricted flag in System Integrity Protection. Also, avoiding root entirely or adding your user to the sudoers file for the things you need also will get you less friction without tearing down all the protections of using a non-root user provide.


How to Backup from OS X to a Windows Home Server I have a Windows Home server in my basement that I've been using as a backup solution when I had a house full of Windows machines. Since making "the switch" to Mac, I haven't been able to find a backup solution I'm happy with.

I tried CrashPlan, but it's way more complicated than I really need. When I was using Windows machines, I just used SyncToy 2.1 and copied files to the server on a predefined schedule. What is out there currently that will let me do something similar on a schedule?

I need a program or script that will let me copy files from specific folders to a Windows server. Keep in mind I'm talking about the old Windows Home Server, not the 2012 version.

I'm not really married to keeping Windows Home Server, but I'd prefer not to have to install a completely new operating system just to backup files.

You might find that Carbon Copy Cloner will do what you want. It certainly allows you to create a task to copy a given set of folders to any destination you can mount. It's not expensive ($40 US) and offers a trial version so you can check it out before ponying up the dollars.

I'm assuming you have figured out how to mount your Windows Home Server via SMB.


First time iPhone user here, some of my App icons on my Home Screen sometimes “blink” (turn to grey for a second), whats the meaning of it? i've just got my first iPhone (7), and i'm kinda new to the iOS and everything, but today i've noticed something that i'm not exactly sure what it was, but it seemed like some of my App's icons on my homescreen blinked/flickered (turned grey) for just a sec in a random order, then went immediately back to normal, is there any info on what happened?

The app likely updated. When the app update is installing, the app is temporarily unavailable.
Alternatively, iOS may be cleaning the app. If your device is running low on space, iOS may delete temporary/cache data from the app’s container. This will temporarily make the app unavailable, for a couple seconds and show ‘Cleaning…’ in place of the app name.


Disable Calendar Location Correction in Yosemite In Yosemite, the Calendar application will automatically clean up addresses entered in the Location field of a calendar entry. Unfortunately, it does so badly. For example, an entry for Brasserie Zedel, 20 Sherwood Street W1F 7ED gets corrected to 20 Sherwood Street London England W1F 7ED United Kingdom, adding some information that's not needed (London, England and United Kingdom are all pretty much implicit) but deleting the crucial item, the name of the restaurant. Is it possible to disable this flawed autocorrection? Disabling general text autocorrection does not do the trick.

It appears to be a known issue without a switch yet. Check out this forum https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6634705

  Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there
  is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem
  solved sooner.


App review process (testflight): In review for a long time? An app I submitted a while ago to testflight changed to "in review" a couple of days ago, and is still in review. Is this normal to be in review for this long?

Typical review wait for an update to a released app is about a week, and then the review itself is typically less than a day. I have no experience yet with the beta review.


Can I disable Mac sleep mode even when lid is closed? Possible Duplicate:
  Is there any way to set a MacBook Pro to not sleep when you close the lid?

I have a Macbook Pro (early 2011) with Mountain Lion installed.

Is there a way to prevent my Mac from going to sleep even on lid close?

If you have an external monitor plugged in, it will happen automatically.

Otherwise, you can use InsomniaX.


Installing the Festival Speech Synthesis System with Mavericks I am trying to install Festival onto my Macbook Pro running Mavericks. I tried installing it on my own, but that didn't work.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any up-to-date instructions out there on how to do this properly.  There are these dated instructions from 2007, and these slightly less dated instructions from 2011, but neither worked for me.

When I download the 4 different packages I need and then try to use the less dated instruction set, I run into this error (along with some other warnings) with GCC 4.9:

../include/EST_String.h:576:16: error: friend declaration specifying a default
      argument must be a definition
    friend int fcompare(const EST_String &a, const EST_String &b,
               ^
../include/EST_String.h:579:16: error: friend declaration specifying a default
      argument must be a definition
    friend int fcompare(const EST_String &a, const char *b,

So I go into the source code and change the declarations where it sets const unsigned char *table=NULL within the function call and remove the =NULL.  I then keep compiling and run into this error:

../include/EST_TIterator.h:292:7: error: no matching function for call to
      'begin'

Can someone provide a complete instruction set on how to install Festival onto a more recent version of OS X? I have Homebrew 0.9.5 if it helps.

Here is an email reply I got from Rob Clark (one of the creators of Festival):

  Use the speech_tools and Festival packages, then
  unpack and run make in each directory.

  You will also need dictionary and voice packages from the standard download site.
  The festvox and festlex packages should be unpacked in the directory
  above festival (i.e. where you unpacked the festival package itself)

  Regards. Rob Clark.

Since Rob responded to my email with in hours, feel free to contact him for more information if needed robert@cstr.ed.ac.uk

As mentioned in the comments, unpack the festvox and festlex packages with the command line, and not the Mac's default unpacking software.


How can I tell who posted a photo in a shared iCloud photo stream? Can you determine which/whose device took a picture in a shared iPhone photo stream?

Open the photo in the Shared Photo Stream, then tap to show details if necessary.

It should show the poster of the photo, as below ("Posted by you"):

Individual devices can't be determined from this view though — only the Apple ID.


Sudden proliferation of 'Too many open files in system' errors. Can't do backup My computer is showing signs of impending hard drive disaster. Time Machine recently killed all my backups and has not cooperated since. I tried backing up with Super Duper, but it quit after about a minute. The Super Duper log reported 'Too many open files'. I attempted a backup with Rsync and it hummed along fine for about an hour until it too started spitting out 'too many open files' errors and not copying anything. Carbon Copy Cloner worked longer but skipped a bunch of files.

Based on other posts here, I have maxed the open file limit and am running rsync again.  Though this process has not completed yet, I am posting here because I do not feel optimistic. I am seeing this 'Too many open files' error all over the place suddenly, so I fear that maxing the file limit is a workaround at best. (assuming it even works)

The first time I saw the 'Too many open files' error, I was running a shell script that involved uploading an archive to a remote server and unzipping it. I had done this numerous times before without incident. The number of files hadn't changed. I got this error again while running a Python script to build files using Jinja2. This was also a script I had run previously without any problems.

The sudden proliferation of errors of this kind coincides with a general degradation in the performance of my computer, which most frequently takes the form of app and system freezes that can only be resolved with forced restarts. At the very same time rsync choked this evening, Safari was hanging also. As ever, Force Quit was not available and so I had to force a shutdown. There are also more crashes than usual. A recent Apple update that crashed my computer on restart seems to have made everything much worse.

Carbon Copy Clone's Disk Center said my Hard Drive seemed to have Read/Write errors, though the Apple Hardware Test and Disk Utility have reported nothing out of the ordinary. Activity Monitor also does not show anything unusual, though I am not an expert in interpreting its output. I think there may be more disk activity than usual. CPU and Memory stats all seem fine.

Any ideas on what's going wrong here? Is it appropriate to assume the hard drive is the problem? It came with the computer, which is now four years old. Any other possibilities? Any recommendations on how to get everything backed up before the drive -- or whatever -- dies altogether?

I am running Snow Leopard on a mid 2010 15" MacBook Pro. I am attempting to back up to a brand new portable USB-connected portable drive which seems to work fine.

I have several suggestions that I'll put into two different posts.

Here's the  first one:

This seems to help with practically everything, so why not try it.

Open your Disk Utility app, and after selecting your main hard drive (or partition), follow the steps in the picture below. This operation will attempt to find and repair any disk and disk-permission errors.

Please note that step 1(b) probably will not work unless you are booted into the Network Recovery Mode, or running off a different hard drive (not the one you are trying to fix). If running step 1 reveals a lot of errors then doing 1(b) would definitely be recommended.

The easiest way to do this is to borrow someone else's Mac and connect your computer to it in Target Disk Mode. This will allow you to run Disk Utility on their computer thus letting you perform step 1(b) to your hard drive.

If you don't have another computer to borrow, your will need to put you computer into Network Recovery Mode (aka. OS X Internet Recovery). Please see the OS X Internet Recovery section in this hyperlink before proceeding with this fix. Also note that Network Recovery Mode is different from Recovery Mode; the regular recovery mode will not help in this case. To start your Mac in the Network Recovery Mode, please see this link.

If none of the above are available on your computer, or Network Recovery simply takes too long on your internet connection, there is a third option. You can make a Bootable OSX Recovery Drive from a USB stick as described at the bottom of this page from Apple.

Hope this helps! :)


Office for Mac buy from Sweden I am interested in buying Office for Mac 2011. I am in Sweden. Whenever I want to buy it from a website it shows like Office för Mac Hem och Student 2011 - 1 Paket (Svenska). Does it means software language is Swedish? I want it in English, as I am not Swedish. And my MacBook Pro (OS X Lion) language is English. Should I buy this one?

This is not a problem. What matters is the serial.

The same serial should work with any language version of Office Mac 2011 which you can download from Microsoft's official websites.

I had a similar problem like you. I had purchased an English version via Ebay,  but I needed a German one. I downloaded the German version and used it with and US version serial without any problems.

In your case you can download the US version here: www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads


iPhone Music app: music with an iCloud status of Uploaded can't be played? I have a PC (running Windows) with a collection of MP3 files I ripped from CD. I installed iTunes (12.7.0.166) and setup iCloud Music Library, and it went through the uploading/matching process on my files.

From my iPhone (iOS 11.0.3, and which has iCloud Music Library enabled), I can see all of my library in the Music App. However I noticed that some files would not play - a popup would appear saying "Item Not Available" and "This item can't be played".

I did a little digging in my library, and I found that I have this problem with files with an iCloud status of Uploaded. I can play files with a status of Matched just fine.

The files with a status of Uploaded are not available on Apple Music or the iTunes store - e.g. Turkish music from the 60s. So they will never become Matched. But, I should still be able to play them as an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscriber - that is supposed to be a selling point of iCloud Music Library.

Is there something wrong with my library (iTunes side or iPhone side) that is preventing these songs from playing? I have fewer than 100,000 songs, so that is not the problem.

The problem should be in iTunes on your PC.

Since Apple Music couldn't find any matching, iTunes Match should automatically upload your song, only if they are matching the specifications. They are found in the section "About file formats"


App Store wouldn't recognize my Logic Pro X I have LPX version 10.0.6 installed on my system and I recently heard that Apple just released a new updated version 10.0.7 on the App Store. However, not only I didn't receive any update notification on my App Store, it refuses to even recognize my installation! When I visit the LPX link on my App Store, it shows the price instead of "installed" like it says for Aperture, iWork, Garageband, etc. How can I make it recognize the installation?

P.S. Elsewhere, someone had suggested renaming the app to Logic Pro (removing the "X"). I did try it and unfortunately it didn't work.

Logic Pro X is only available on the Mac App Store and the Logic Pro X bundle will contain a MASReceipt that tells the Mac App Store who the app is registered to.

This means the Mac App Store won't claim knowledge of the app unless you are signed in with the Apple ID that you used to purchase it. As you say you didn't purchase it from the Mac App Store, it won't be assigned to your Apple ID and the Mac App Store won't update it for you as it sees it immediately as pirated software.

Aperture is available elsewhere on physical media. This means that there won't be a Mac App Store receipt assigned to the app and the app can be assigned to an Apple ID.

This means that the Mac App Store will assign your Aperture that was purchased outside of the Mac App Store to the currently logged in Apple ID. This is the same for the retail version of iWork which can be purchased elsewhere and the Mac App Store will 'accept' it (like iLife).

You can read more about this problem when it occurred on this blog post by The Verge:

The Mac App Store is upgrading illegal and trial software for free


Can my laptop turn itself on after I've shut it down? I have a MacBook air, practically new, no problems until now.
I usually just close the lid and the computer shuts itself down instead of entering sleep mode.
Friday night, I shut my laptop down properly and didn't turn it on until this Monday afternoon.
Except I didn't turn it on - it was already on.
It was on, and very hot, and had a flashing file icon with a question mark.

So my question is
How could my laptop turn itself on, heat up, and fry my hard drive?

At one time, I used to run a couple applications that would inhibit my iMac from going to sleep.  So, if you have something running in the background that stops your mac from sleeping, that would be a candidate.  If it woke up, you may have a backup while plugged in turned on.  That does wake the Mac while it does that trick.

Now as for frying your HD?  Well, who knows.  Fried HDs do happen, and I suppose it could happen while a laptop is shutting down, which would answer both questions.  I did recently replace a HD on an older laptop.


How can I put my music on dropbox without moving the iTunes folder I want to copy just my music (not films/tv/etc, so I cant just move the iTunes folder) on to dropbox, so I can listen to it from anywhere for free, but without copying the music as my hard drive space is becoming limited and I don't want to have to recopy everything, everytime I add a new track).

Is there anyway to make Dropbox include the music folder inside the Dropbox folder? If you create a shortcut in the dropbox folder it will just sync the shortcut itself, can I make the shortcut actually be the music folder?

The easiest way to this would be to simply create a folder in DropBox and then create a Symbolic Link to your Music only folder in iTunes.

There is a useful article on symlinks available here. Another one specific to DropBox is available here.

In example you could create a symbolic link to a folder named Music in DropBox as follows:

  ln -s ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Music ~/DropBox/Music


Is there are a simple tool to organize photo based on date? I have lots of photos and most of them are in unordered folders.

Is there a simple tool (no batch script) which can just read those images and based on EXIF date put them in a date based folder?

Something like: /year/month/day/foto_1.jpg

The only things I can find so far are bash scripts.

Found a free tool which does it all:

exifrenamer


How to prevent iPhone from being turned off? (security intention) Is there a way to prevent the phone from bring turned off while locked? The idea is to prevent thieves power off the phone so I could still track phone location using iCloud Find My Phone tool.

No software prevents powering off many iPhone.

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

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

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


Is there a way to see if a macbook had a time machine backup done? I was wondering if there's any way to see if someone did a Time Machine backup on a macbook.

From what I'm gathering you want to see if anyone accessed your computer to make a backup of it. I found this thread which might answer your question for how to retrieve the time machine backup logs from your Mac. Run the following command in Terminal

log show --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

which will show the most recent backups made. There is one change needed since log files can show activity of another account, if your Mac doesn't have your log in trusted as an administrator, you need that permission to do the search. Just add sudo to the above command as shown below:

sudo log show --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info


Brand new hard drive encryption taking too long on time machine I have a brand new hard drive with nothing on it. I also bought a brand new external hard drive to use with my MacBook Pro. I'm in the process of backing up to time machine and the encryption is taking forever. Why is it taking so long when there's nothing on my hard drive?

The amount of time it takes to encrypt a drive is a function of its size, not its contents.

Your brand-new hard drive full of zeroes still needs to be scrambled so that no one can figure out that it’s full of zeroes. That will take just as long as encrypting the same amount of arbitrary values.


Sync video recording from two iphone 6 or 6+ I use my iPhone 6plus as a high speed video recorder of my son's golf swing. Is there a way to record two at the same time? I would like to capture the swing from behind and directly across (we both have iPhone's).

Thanks

It can be done, yes. However, it's somewhat involved.

One way would be start filming on both iPhones and then play a high-pitched sound of some kind. Then, later, you can use video editing software like Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut Pro (or even iMove, I suppose) to visually sync up the videos by looking at the audio tracks of both videos and aligning them up visually by looking at the sound spike created by the high-pitched sound played during recording.

This is kind of like what video professionals do when working with multi-camera setups. Not exactly easy. But technically possible, if you know how to do video editing.


How do I disable Auto Switching to the first Space on opening a new app and entering a different full screen app (different Space) in OS X? I am using OS X El Capitan, 10.11.6.
I've noticed that whenever I open an app (irrelevant of which Space I open it in), continue operating in any Space other than the first, once the opened app is loaded, an auto-switching takes place, pulling me back to the first Space.
Is there any way to disable this?

This is extremely frustrating as it gets in the way of multitasking quickly, very often.

No, there is no way to disable this.

There are a couple of ways to prevent an app from automatically gaining focus when you launch it (and shifting the Space you're in) but they are not practical solutions.

You can open an app from the command line using open -g -a [app name]. The -g flag means "Do not bring the application to the foreground." This only works to keep your focus in Terminal or a similar app. Some discussion of this technique here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3882355?tstart=0

This article by Topher Kessler describes a way to edit an app's internal properties to force it to open in the background, but I can't recommend that. Errors made while editing the app could break the app, and updates to the app could revert the change.


Lock iPhone with home button I have an iPhone SE under iOS 12.3.1 and I would like to be able to lock my iPhone using the home button by holding the button for instance. My lock button isn’t responding for a while and Assistive Touch is quiet annoying for a small screen like mine.
Any suggestions? Thanks a lot.

It's not possible to use Home button to lock your iPhone. If your iPhone's lock button is broken, using assistive touch is your only resort.

You can optionally set up your iPhone to auto-lock. The minimum duration you can set for auto-lock is 30 seconds.


How can you log out of iCloud if you forget the password? I recently bought an iPhone 6 from a friend, and there's still an iCloud user on the phone. How can I log out of iCloud if I have no clue what the password is? Keep in mind I have no clue what my password is to the email set on the phone either.

Since you bought it from a friend I would refer them to: What to do before selling or giving away your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and ask them to take these steps.

You should also familarise yourself with the above info.

In summary though, before selling any iDevice, you should:

Do a full backup of your device
Unpair your Apple Watch (if applicable)
Sign out of iCloud (if applicable)
Also delete the device from Find My iPhone (if applicable)
Sign out of iTunes and the App Store
Do a full Erase of contents and settings

It's fortunate for both you and your friend that you bought your iPhone from a friend.


Time Machine seems to think my MacBook Pro is a new backup after Yosemite upgrade I've been regularly backing up my 2011 MacBook Pro using Time Machine with two separate external drives (1Tb at work, 2Tb at home) while running Mavericks.

Today I upgraded to Yosemite, and Time Machine seems to think I have a brand new computer - the backup on the 1Tb disk failed with "not enough space", and the backup at home is currently attempting to back up the entire 350Gb on my computer.

(Previously with the 1Tb drive, Time Machine would automatically delete old archives when the drive was full.)

Is this a common problem (ie a bug)? Is there a way to tell Time Machine to continue where the last backup finished, rather than starting a brand new "branch"?

You may want to check this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/message/27031297

It seems that if you backup external drives with Time Machine and you disconnect them at a later point, for instance for a few hours or days, and reconnect them, Time Machine will want to make a full backup of them (even if nothing has changed). That behavior appeared with Yosemite. I have not heard about any solution or workaround (yet).


How can I reset my password with "reset password"? I cannot find my password. Tried to reset from terminal by typing reset password  I see the prompt, but it does not allow me to fill in any blanks

Typing reset password on the terminal will not reset the password.

reset is a command to initialise the terminal, and takes a terminal type as argument. Typing reset password will only generate an error:

$ reset password
reset: unknown terminal type password
Terminal type?

The command you are looking for is resetpassword (without space): see https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4101

boot in recovery mode (press command+R during boot)
open a terminal (Utilities, Terminal)
type resetpassword


How can I display the date on actual photos taken with iPhone? I need some photos that I have taken to be dated. The date must be displayed on the actual photo (in a similar fashion to how one would think of film photos), but I have no idea how to do this? My understanding is there is an app that does this, but I haven't been able to find it.

Is there an app, or any other way, that would facilitate this?

DateCam S is a free app that will add the date to photos that you take automatically.

  This app simply adds date on your photos.

  So now, you can see when the photos were taken!

There are also apps that let you manually add any text (e.g. a date) to your photos. I have used and recommend Camera+ due to its stylistic formatting of the text.


Input not recognised when using Switch Control remotely Because I support a few friends with their iOS devices, I've been trying to figure the best way to circumvent Apple's limitation of not being able to remotely control iOS, and right now I am THIS close.

The setup is simple. I use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) to connect to and control my friend's Mac computer, which is USB connected to the iOS device so I can see the screen through QuickTime. From here I talk to my friend on the phone or chat to tell them what they should do as I see exactly what's going on on the screen.

The next level is when I activate this Accessibility feature called Switch Control on the remote Mac, which essentially lets you do actions on a LAN connected iOS device. And just when I thought I worked out my magic, it appears Switch Control won't recognise any keystroke or mouse clic that are not physically performed on the remote computer. Even the onscreen keyboard doesn't work ...damn!
If I create a switch button (trigger) remotely, the remote Mac will register it, but neither me or my friend can use the trigger for Switch Control. If the trigger is registered based on a physical input, my friend can use it, but I can't, even through the onscreen keyboard.

So it appears no matter what trigger you register, Switch Control will never recognise remote/virtual input for actual use of the triggers. However, I cannot believe there is no way to simulate that physical input so that Switch Control does listen to my input sent remotely through ARD.

This is the only one single way to remotely control an iOS device in the context of Apple actively not supporting it, and yet just that small little detail prevents it from functioning. I'm basically looking for a way to simulate physical input in a manner that would be recognised by Switch Control.

Note: jailbreak is not an option, and anyway Veency is no longer working as of iOS 12.

I found out myself and I hope it'll be useful to other people. I don't think this has been done before.

You need to use BetterTouchTool to assign your remote input to the local trigger you want to use on the target machine, then go into BTT's preferences and tick the box "Always use the old keyboard implementation" in advanced keyboard settings. Now you have it, Switch Control will finally recognise your remote input and transmit it to your iOS device.

Couple that with QuickTime's ability to display a USB wired device on the target machine, and you can now 'remotely control' that device using ARD or any other Mac-to-Mac remote control app such as iTeleport or AnyDesk. Of course Switch Control is very clanky way to control an iOS device, but at last it's now finally possible!

Thank you Apple for making my life a clanky hack joy. Next time please make an ARD that directly tunnels to iOS.


8GB 1333mhz SODIMM in Macbook Pro 13" 2010 (7,1) alongside original 2GB stick I understand that 8gb modules are not officially supported in this MBP. However, this indicates that they are, as long as they are 1067mhz modules:

Can I use 16 GB RAM with my MacBook Pro 7,1?

I also understand that while 1333mhz modules are not supported, if they are paired with a 1067mhz module, the EFI automatically downclocks the faster module, and they both run at 1067mhz, eg:

http://tylermilner.com/?p=342

Here's my question:

Is is likely to work if I buy an 8gb 1333mhz module and pair it with one of the existing 2gb 1067mhz modules?

The reason for this over an 8gb 1067mhz or 2x4gb are:

I get more RAM (10gb) than replacing with 2 x 4gb
I can upgrade in future if I want (add an 8gb 1067mhz stick)
It's much cheaper - 8gb 1333mhz modules are far cheaper in the UK now than 8gb 1067mhz

It should work, but it's not recommended.

You should always use the same module, also I believe that way you got some performance benefit. MacRumors has a post about this.

Also, I believe your MacBook Pro won't support more than 8 GB of RAM according to the post, but that I'm not sure. Check out Apple's guide or technical documents for these information.

Another thing to be aware of is if your machine supports 8 GB on a single stick.

This is what I suggests. Buy two matching 4 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 RAM for your MacBook Pro. That way, you won't get into any trouble. It might cost a little more, but it's much more reliable.


NetCut Alternative For Mac OS X Any NetCut like app available for Mac OS X?
I wonder if there are available alternative out there to scan and cut all devices that in our LAN connection.

Thank you.

JamWiFi is an open source project that allows you limit user sessions on your WiFi network.

  JamWiFi allows you to select one or more nearby wireless networks, thereupon presenting a list of clients which are currently active on the network(s). Furthermore, JamWiFi allows you to disconnect clients of your choosing for as long as you wish.


Is there a standard uninstall procedure on Mac OS X? I've seen advice on an per-application basis, but is there a standard approach like Add/Remove Programs in Windows?

Remember that (most) Mac OS X apps are installed self-contained; i.e., you simply drag a copy of the *.app folder into the Applications directory of your choice.

Once reason for this is to simplify the uninstall - delete the app folder; simple.