Jailbreak my work phone I just got an iPhone from my company. I have to access my work email on this iPhone 4.
However, I can't use Grooveshark as my music service, since it only works on jailbroken iPhones.

How can I jailbreak my phone so that company's server is unaffected? Or would it possibly even be affected in the first place?

How do I un-jailbrake the phone later, so I can return it to my company later unaltered?

Backup with iTunes to restore later, but just go to http://www.jailbreakme.com from you're iPhone, slide to unlock, and wait


Anything in iOS 4.3 for the iPhone 3GS? I was reading up on the update and it seems that most changes are for either iPad2 or iPhone 4 (e.g. the personal hotspot).

Is there anything in this update for the iPhone 3GS?  Any performance improvements? Any reason to install it?

Personal Hotspot (using bluetooth or USB, but not WiFi).


Mac Pro hangs at startup showing white screen with spinning pie wheel MacPro 1,1; lion?

startup hard drive failed (with loud buzzing).  Removed bad drive, installed replacement, inserted Lion USB drive, verified new drive using the Lion usb drive, started installation of lion on new hd, message on screen advised that it would take some time to accomplish, but after installation would shut down and restart. So I left the room to return a few hours later to a white screen w/ spinning pie wheel.

Repeated startup attempts (with or without lion usb drive inserted) proceed as follows:  startup chime, gray screen, gray screen with apple, gray screen, white screen with spinning pie wheel, all in the first minute then nothing further.

Since the lion usb drive is apparently no longer being recognized I thought I would try to do a startup with a mountain lion disk but I don't know how to insert the disk with the machine hung in startup. By the way, the system that was installed on the failed drive was mountain lion, not lion, if that makes any difference.  Time machine resides on external hard drive and will be connected and used to restore once machine can boot.

Turn off the machine, than boot again and hold the option-key ("alt" on some keyboard layouts) right after pressing the power button. A menu should appear where you can select the device to boot. Perhaps try formatting the drive and reinstalling again.


Apple Music adds music to playlist which isn't really added to the list I currently using Apple Music since it's release and I encountered a strange problem. The first times I just thought that I've made something wrong. But now I tested it many times and won't work as expected.

I've had a song, which I wanted to be added to a playlist on my iPhone while listening to a self defined radio station. The song before that song could be added to my playlist (clicking ... > add to playlist > choose playlist). I rechecked it and it's added to my playlist without any error. The iPhone stated that the song is successfully added to my list.

The next song, I tried the same thing. I tried to add it, my iPhone stated again "added successfully". After that, I went to the playlist to check it, and it's not there. I go back to the song and tried to add it again, again successfully but no song in the list. I tried it even on different lists and no list work!
I tried another song and it is added successfully again and... it is really added to the playlist. Just this one song (which is normally available in the store) can't be added to my playlist.

Is there a limit which songs can be added per day? Is this an bug? Can some songs just be streamed but not added to a playlist (I don't talk about offline availability)?

Thanks in advance for your help. I don't have any clue whats going on there.

Well I just tested the other way round. Sorry I don't came on this on my own as I posted the question.

I edited the playlist instead, search the currently playing song, added it and saved the playlist. This worked for me. But during the save process the iPhone really stutters heavy. It nearly freeze for a few seconds. This can be caused by the temperature currently in Germany (38 degree) but it's still strange.

Anyway, it should still work the other way around. But if someone else encounters a behavior which is quite the same, he can try to solve it like I did.


Is there an OS X 'tail' tool that can monitor remote log files? I am looking for a visual tail tool that can monitor several local or remote log files.

Optional features that interest me: color highlight based on log error level, coloring for special words, filtering of messages and/or notifications on new activity.

You may try to use a combination of multitail and ssh.

https://serverfault.com/questions/53976/use-local-tools-to-monitor-remote-logs
https://superuser.com/questions/320575/mac-os-x-logfile-viewer


MAC OS X Mavericks 10.9.0 installation on VMWare Sphere Client 5.1 i want to test something on mac os x (Open VPN) and because i do n't have this os in my local machine i decided to install it on my dedicated server.
so i created a virtual machine on vmware sphere client 5.1 and installed mac using with it's iso file.
after installation i stucked on this page :

this is my first time installation of mac os x and i really do n't know what is that user name and password?
during installation i did n't create any user name and password and i think there should be a default user/pass like some linux os's. for example root and toor or something like them.

question #1 : what is that user name and password?

that image was from open console of vmware virtual machine in one of vps's in vmware and my big problem is i can not move mouse in this login page.
i really do n't know what is going on in this page for mouse move, but i can not touch apple logo or users logo with mouse.
also when i tried to use keyboard i only can switch between user name and password textboxes.

question #2 : how can i move mouse in this login page with keyboard or another way?

question #3 : what is your suggestion and how can i enter mac os x in my situation?

i can not open this console in my local machine becaouse my internet speed has problem to showing this login page and this is why i am using one of my vps's.

would be really appreciate to help me about that....

Sometimes the username is : admin
Password is : admin
Well, actually if this doesn't work a lot of times do not type in nothing, or you can type in "guest" as the username and password. Guest works for me. Sometimes writing nothing also works for me.

I think you should use an external mouse or another mouse and use a Mac mouse for example the mighty mouse or something like that because you are using a Mac Machine / VM.

My suggestion is that you should follow the steps I provided because, you never know, this might actually work out.

Notice :
If you think I posted something wrong on this topic or you need to edit / suggest something please leave a reply.


Missed calls appearing on two different phones One of my phones is an iPhone SE and another an iPhone 5S.

When you go to phone.app -> Recents the same calls appear on both devices.

They are both on the same Apple ID so this is probably why.

In iCloud Settings I found no option to disable this.

How can this be stopped without changing Apple ID's on one device?

The problem is caused by sharing the same Apple ID on both devices.

According to this, this, and this sites, you can either

Create a separate Apple ID for one of the phones, or
Turn off Settings -> (Your Apple ID) -> iCloud -> iCloud Drive:


How do I use AirDrop from the Terminal? Is there a way to share a file over AirDrop via Terminal on Mountain Lion? How so?

I have not (yet) figured out a way to send files via Airdrop using the Terminal, but you can set your computer to receive files via Airdrop using the following shell script:

#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Finder"
    activate
    tell application "System Events" to keystroke "R" using {command down, shift down}
end tell


ExFAT thumb drive not recognized in Mac OS Big Sur I'm using my first Mac ever, a recently acquired Macbook Air with the M1 chip. It has the latest version of Big Sur (11.3 (20E232)).
I was having issues with my existing thumb drives, most of them formatted with NTFS. When connected to the macbook nothing would pop up, and I couldn't see the drive even on the disk utility. Nothing, not even grayed out.
After digging a bit on google I noticed that I needed some third party software to make it work with NTFS, but there was an alternative to format it with ExFAT. Tried that, no luck. No matter what block size I choose, it won't pop up when connected to the mac.
I bought a new thumb drive that says it works right out of the box, a sandisk ultra dual drive usb type-c. Tried connecting it and again: nothing pops up. Tried on my windows machine and it works right away. It was formatted as ExFat already so I'm a little puzzle on how to resolve this.
If I go to the system report, under Hardware -> USB I see there's a device connected:

Do I need to do anything else to make it appear?
diskutil list
me@MacBook-Air ~ % diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                         251.0 GB   disk0
   1:             Apple_APFS_ISC                         524.3 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk3         245.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:        Apple_APFS_Recovery                         5.4 GB     disk0s3

/dev/disk3 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +245.1 GB   disk3
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            15.4 GB    disk3s1
   2:              APFS Snapshot com.apple.os.update-... 15.4 GB    disk3s1s1
   3:                APFS Volume Preboot                 310.5 MB   disk3s2
   4:                APFS Volume Recovery                1.1 GB     disk3s3
   5:                APFS Volume Data                    180.1 GB   disk3s5
   6:                APFS Volume VM                      1.1 GB     disk3s6

system_profiler SPUSBDataType
me@MacBook-Air ~ % system_profiler SPUSBDataType
USB:

    USB 3.1 Bus:

      Host Controller Driver: AppleT8103USBXHCI

    USB 3.1 Bus:

      Host Controller Driver: AppleT8103USBXHCI

         SanDisk 3.2Gen1:

          Product ID: 0x5595
          Vendor ID: 0x0781  (SanDisk Corporation)
          Version: 1.00
          Serial Number: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
          Speed: Up to 5 Gb/s
          Manufacturer:  USB
          Location ID: 0x01200000 / 1
          Current Available (mA): 900
          Current Required (mA): 896
          Extra Operating Current (mA): 0

me@MacBook-Air ~ %

Don't hesitate to force a little to connect this key. I noticed that on MBA M1 some USB-C / Thunderbolt devices were a bit "complicated" to plug in and sometimes were not fully connected.


Photos.app is not combining JPEG and RAW photos after small alteration My camera is currently set to take pictures in RAW + JPEG. I import the two files into the Photos app, and it combines them into one. I like this.

However, I have now used ExifTool to add in the GPS coordinates. I deleted the old files and re-imported them with the exact same file names. Now I have two pictures when I was expecting one.

If I take the original files and re-import them, they get combined again.

Is there some way to get Photos.app to realize that the two files should be combined?

I recently looked at a set of JPEG + RAW pairs that Apple Photos failed to match up. The behavior I observed was:

The images were geotagged and had GPS timestamp: GMT time of the GPS fix used to tag the images.

On the JPEG, Photos looked at the photo time and GPS time and figured that the clock time was 1 hour apart. It concluded that the camera clock was set to GMT+1.

On the RAW, it seems that Photos ignored the GPS time. Instead it worked from my computer clock. This is at GMT+2. It loaded the RAW assuming that the camera clock was set to GMT+2.

In the Photos application, both JPEG and RAW were displayed with the same clock time: the one recorded by the camera. In the library however the images were stored with timestamps 1 hour apart. The only way to “see” this in the Photos application was to sort the images by date. Pairs were not be sorted next to each other.

One fix is to use ExifTool or HoudahGeo to write timestamps including time zone offsets to both JPEG and RAW files. Once the timestamps on the JPEG and RAW are an exact match, Photos should recognize the pair.

BTW: I do consider this to be a bug in Apple Photos. The assumption that camera and computer clock are set the same time zone is rather common, yet unfortunate. The fact that Photos makes different assumptions on the JPEG and the RAW surely is a bug.

Full disclosure: I am the developer behind HoudahGeo.


How can I stop LinkedIn popups on my iPhone? The latest version of the LinkedIn app (4.2.1) is able to create pop ups on my iPhone 3. Though I have Notifications on, I do not see the LinkedIn app in the Settings, so I cannot switch these pop ups off. (It is not listed under Notifications (other apps are), nor is it listed with the other apps at the bottom of Settings.

Anyone know how to prevent this annoyance?

4.2.2 has, due to customer feedback, added a setting under You and Settings (Gears icon) to turn off the Week in Review and all notifications that fall outside the normal notifications.

In detail, click the blue 'In' icon in top left corner of screen, then the 'You' pane, then the gear icon in the top right corner of screen, then set 'Notifications' to 'off'.


Escaping characters in folder nme in Terminal I've been learning about Terminal recently, and although I've learnt about the backslash, double quotes, single quote etc. for escaping characters, how would I create a folder with this name (it's on a VM in Parallels so if I screw anything up, it's not going to affect my main Mac OS X install).

I'm using Mac OS Sierra 10.12.2 in Parallels, same as my desktop, but that's a "sandbox" machine for testing software etc. without affecting the regular Mac - if it's sluggish or software crashes I'm not losing important files and can always reset it - theoretically. (The VM isn't used for writing this though... I'm using the regular Mac now. Probably not relevant, but I'm new-ish to Parallels, but that's for another question.).

I tried this command to create a directory with a web address as the name:

mkdir 'http://www.mysite.net'

but got this error:

mkdir: http:: No such file or directory

How could I escape the : and // so a folder looks like a web URL even though it's not (this is for testing purposes, nothing more, as it's on a VM). How could i emulate those characters in a folder name?

If anyone could help I'd appreciate this!

The problem is you can't use / in the name of a directory. The / is reserved to separate directories. Maybe you could replace the // with different characters?


How large is my 2012 MacBook Air's L1 cache? Are they larger now? Discussion in comments below this answer to improving speed of this numpy-based diffraction calculator suggest that the reason the script in the answer runs slow for me but fast for others (even on earlier versions of NumPy) might be that my late 2012 MacBook Air's processor L1 cache might be smaller than others. It could also be that I am running dangerously low on disk space (I was seeing 40 MB/sec reads and writes while running).

I'm curious though, what is the size of the on-processor L1 cache for my late 2012 MacBook Air, and how does it compare to new MacBooks?

MacBook Air:   13-inch, Mid 2012
Processor:     1.8 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory:        4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Hard Drive:    251 GB Flash Storage

I'm not a developer, but I did a small test. Running the script below I see that multiplication of two NumPy arrays is fastest (a few nanoseconds per float multiply) when the array size is about 10^4. Each is about 8 bytes, so I'm estimating that my L1 cache size is about 10^5 Bytes.

Is that close?

note: I estimate time using both time.time() and time.process_time(). The former (blue, solid line, lower values) is "people time", how long I have to wait for something to finish.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import time

Ns = np.logspace(1, 8, 15).astype(int)

t1, t2 = [], []
for N in Ns:
    x = np.random.random(N)
    t1_start = time.time()
    t2_start = time.process_time()
    n = int(1E+06/N)
    for i in range(n):
        y = x*x
    t1.append((time.time() - t1_start)/(N*n))
    t2.append((time.process_time() - t2_start)/(N*n))

if True:
    plt.figure()
    plt.plot(Ns, t1)
    plt.plot(Ns, t2, '--')
    plt.xscale('log')
    plt.yscale('log')
    plt.title('estimated time (sec) per float multiply vs array size', fontsize=14)
    plt.show()

Your current MacBook Air has an L1 cache of 128 kB. So your guess of 10^5 bytes is not far off!

The latest MacBook Air has the same amount of L1 cache, so in that respect it is the same. However, other parts of the CPU are vastly different.

Note that your might see that some of these CPUs are listed as having "Smart Cache", which essentially means that some caches are shared among multiple cores. In your case, the L1 cache is never shared - so it is always a private cache for each core. This means that if your code is single threaded, then the actual amount of L1 cache used by that program is actually 64 kB and not 128 kB.

In addition to that, the L1 cache is actually not a single cache as such,. It is split into seperate portions for instructions and data. This means that with the 64 kB, you will have cached 32 kB of data and 32 kB of instructions (program code).

You might wonder why the new MacBook Air has the same amount of L1 cache and think that it hasn't kept up with the development in the industry - but that's actually not how it is. The size of the L1 has been pretty constant for years and years. 20 years ago you might have seen 32 kB L1 cache per core, the last many years 64 kB L1 cache has been pretty standard.

For comparison the latest Mac Pro (desktop computer) with the most expensive CPU option (the Intel Xeon W-3265M 24 core CPU) also has a 64 kB L1 cache per core.

Just increasing the size of the L1 cache won't really do you any good in terms of increasing overall performance. L1 cache is the most "expensive" type of cache in terms of the amount of physical space taken up on the die, and in terms of power usage. In addition, because it is even faster than TLB lookups, the extra benefit of a larger size quickly diminishes. In essence, you'll get more benefit from having a larger L2 or L3 cache than increasing the size of the L1 cache - and it's much "cheaper" to increase those.

All in all this seems to indicate that different L1 cache sizes isn't the deciding factor that determines that your computer is slow and others are fast.

I could guess that perhaps a big difference lies in the fact that your old processor does not support the same "number-crunching" instruction sets as a new processor does. This small test example doesn't really show it, but from your links it appears that you're really doing some computations with vectors. Specialized CPU instructions exists that really benefit those types of computations - and I know that numpy can take advantage of at least some of them. Your current CPU only supports the older AVX instruction sets, whereas a new MacBook Air supports AVX2 in addition to SSE4.

You might for comparison's sake try disabling AVX2/SSE4 support in numpy on the fast machine and rerun the calculation to see if that accounts for the majority of the time difference.


How to merge "Container disk1" back into my MacintoshHD? Through some failures trying to remove Bootcamp I've found myself with a 289GB Macintosh HD and a 201GB "Container disk1". I initially tried to erase the extra volume, thinking it would then give me an option to resize the space into MacintoshHD but apparently not, even in recovery mode. When I delete the volume it just leaves behind the container. I guess APFS works differently.

My main Macintosh HD drive is APFS Encrypted if that makes any difference. Id like to reclaim the entire 201.95GB from Container disk1 back into Macintosh HD.

You did not include an image for the container holding the Macintosh HD volume. If you select Show All Devices in the View pulldown, then this container will appear. If the Physical stores for this container is disk0s2, then you can apply my answer.

Enter the following commands.

diskutil apfs deleteContainer disk0s3
diskutil eraseVolume free none disk0s3
diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 0


macOS - Finder separator in Sierra how can I separate these folders in macOS Sierra? About a week ago 'iCloud' and 'Desktop' folders were not in my favorites, but I was able to move them down. Yesterday I ran out of iCloud in my macbook and disappeared from that location. Do I get separated?

From the Finder, select Finder->Preferences (or press CMD-,) to access Finder preferences.
Click 'Sidebar' tab

There you can select which items appear in Favorites, Devices and other sections in the Finder sidebar. As far as I know you can't create additional separators within these sections, but you can drag/drop items in the sidebar to reorder them.


sysctl setting net.inet.tcp.keepidle removed in 10.15. Is there a replacement setting? My work requires long-running connections to databases that required this sysctl setting in earlier OSX versions.  Since it no longer exists, these connections appear to remain open, but they disconnect.  The database client awaits the results that never come while the database shows the query as completed.  Is there any setting that can replace the functionality that net.inet.tcp.keepidle provided?

We just encountered the same issue. For now, I'm recommending that users that haven't upgraded to Catalina to not do so since there’s no documented workaround or solution for this.


Can I listen music from USB-C port by using USB-C/Jack adapter trough MacBook Pro? As mentioned in heading, can I listen to music through my headphones by using USB-C with jack adapter on Macbook PRO??

https://www.amazon.com/Headphone-CONMDEX-Converter-Compatible-Essential/dp/B07DXP213B/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1546864073&sr=8-14&keywords=usb-c+jack

Yes, in general these USB to audio adapters work well with the MacBook Pro. I haven't tried the specific one you're linking, but I have tried others that worked without problems - no need to install drivers for example.


Permission denied rm a symlink I own on OSX 10 The output below confirms to me that "emp1" the current user own the symlink "npm", thus I should be able to rwx all day if I want to.

Why am I getting Permission denied when trying to remove it?  Thanks

~$ whoami
empl1
~$ ls -la /usr/local/bin/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 empl1  staff  38 26 Dec 16:02 npm -> ../lib/node_modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js
~$ rm /usr/local/bin/npm
rm: /usr/local/bin/npm: Permission denied

Only users with write access to a directory can remove its content. In your case you can check with ls -ld /usr/local/bin who the owner of this directory is. And than either switch to this user or use sudo rm /usr/local/bin/npm to remove the link.


Crontab -l command working. No other crontab command is working New to crontab, I wanted to experiment.
Running the command crontab -l gave me the following answer crontab: no crontab for User_1
Every time I tried to issue a command like 1 16 24 10 6 ping -D -c 1 www.google.com I got the error "zsh: command not found".
Every time I modified the first number of the crontab command I got an error message saying, if for example 15 is the first number of the command, zsh: command not found: 15.
For info:
Mac OS X 10.12.6.
zsh 5.8
which crontab: /usr/bin/crontab
/usr/bin is in my path.

You need to edit your crontab to make changes. Run
EDITOR=nano crontab -e

to use the nano editor for this. Your (initially empty) crontab will be shown and can be edited (e.g. by adding the line you had in your question). Then press Ctrl-O, Return, Ctrl-X to save the changes and quit the editor.


Streaming video pauses with bluetooth I have an iPhone 4S and an LG LBS-700 bluetooth headset which I used to use a lot to watch streaming videos on my phone. I haven't watched any in a while - possibly since before iOS 7, but I'm not sure - and in the last week or so started again, and I'm finding that the video will run for about 5 minutes or so, and then start pausing every 1-3 minutes or so, for about 10-15 seconds each time, before picking up and playing again... a couple of minutes later, another pause, etc.

This does not happen when I am not using the Bluetooth headset. It also does not seem to matter what the source of the streaming video is; I've tried Netflix, Amazon and Plex Media Server; they all exhibit the same behaviour.

Does anybody know why this might be happening, and what can be done about it - aside from "don't use Bluetooth"?

To me it sounds like the Bluetooth device is experiencing a firmware issue when trying to communicate with the device running on iOS 7. I'd try either putting fresh install of iOS 7 on your iPhone, or getting in touch with LG. It's most likely an error on their part.


Safari extension to monitor web pages for changes? I am looking for a Safari extension similar to Update Scanner (for Firefox) and Page Monitor (for Chrome). Any suggestions?

I don't know any extension like this one, but I've used Changes Meter which works really fine. It's a small app in your menubar and gets the job done.


What's the 'followupd' in notifications? I'm currently running OS X 10.11.1 and find this weird thing in Notification center. So what it stand's for and how to remove if it's not necessary?

This is part of the private CoreFollowup System Framework at

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreFollowUp.framework/Versions/A/Support/followupd

There is no documentation about it, but the header files found at (that's for iOS, but I guess the framework is the same):

https://github.com/nst/iOS-Runtime-Headers/tree/master/PrivateFrameworks/CoreFollowUp.framework

don't show any evil things.

I suppose, it's for "following up" on notifications posted by other applications. There is an internal database of which the statements can be grabbed from the binary. It only contains title, body, some IDs and dates. Example:

INSERT INTO notifications (item_id, title, body, unlock_label, relevance_date, activate_action_id, dismiss_action_id, clear_action_id) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)

So, no – you should and cannot remove it.

[EDIT]

Regarding the icon. Some examples of system applications having that icon:


How do I hide Quicktime Player's controls when the video is paused? I'm trying to take a screen shot (using Grab) of a quicktime video that is paused.  The problem is that the video controls don't disappear, and thus are shown in the resulting shot as seen below:

Is there anyway to hide this UI when paused, much like it hides when the movie is playing?
I'm using Quicktime 10.0 on 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)

In case no solution for Quicktime is found, here is a solution for movie snapshots using the VLC Media Player.

In the preferences disable Add controls to the video window and click Save. Now you can take a snapshot as explained in my other answer.


Identifying which iOS app caused the notification sound to play I often hear the notification bell go off in my iPhone, but when I pull down the drop-down of alert events, I dont see anything which matches the time the alert went off. Is there a way to see what event caused the alert notification to go off?

In the settings, go to Notifications, and select Notification Center for every app with Sound selected.

Then chose to Sort Apps by time.

That way, when you hear the sound, just access your Notification Center, and the culprit app will be on top.


Execute simple script I wrote the following very simple script:

  route -n add 192.168.0.0/20 192.168.224.1
  route -n delete 0.0.0.0
  route -n add 0.0.0.0 172.20.10.1

And would like to just double click it and you know... run it... on windows 8 i would just have to save as a .bat and right click it-> run as admin... How can i achieve similar behavior in mac osx (latest version)?

Extra points if i can just double click it (cut the run under elevated mode)

Instead of .bat, save it as .command.

A .command file will run the contents of the file in Terminal upon double-click, just like a .bat would do on Windows.

If you can't run the file because you don't have permission to execute the command file, you need to set 'execute' on the file for it to allow you to run it:

chmod u+x /path/to/file.command

u is the owner of the file, +x adds 'execute', so u+x gives the owner of the file the ability to execute it

And to the the commands as admin, OS X always requires you to put in the admin password. For your script, the easiest way to do this, is to run the script as an admin user and change the script to the following:

sudo route -n add 192.168.0.0/20 192.168.224.1
sudo route -n delete 0.0.0.0
sudo route -n add 0.0.0.0 172.20.10.1

sudo stands for Substitute User DO and runs as root by default. It is likely sudo will ask for your password.


Prevent email signature from being inserted when replying Is there a way to prevent Mail.app on OS X from auto inserting your email signature when replying to a message?

I believe you can create a template for a new email (which would include you signature) and then leave signatures off everywhere else by setting our signature to none.

The template can be a draft message or a sent message. Either way you have the option of sending them again, which makes them de facto templates.


How do I know what version the Mini DisplayPort port is on my 2010 MacBook Pro? I want to connect 2 monitors to my MacBook Pro (mid-2010). The problem is that I don't if the Mini DisplayPort is version 1.2, which would support daisy chaining.  How can I figure out what version firmware my Mini DisplayPort uses and whether or not it would support daisy chaining?

The 2011 MBP (MacBookPro8,1) has thunderbolt, so either your machine is not a 2011, or it has thunderbolt. the 2010 MacBook Pros have MDP that supports audio as well as video (I have a 2009 which only does video).

Keep in mind that MDP and Thunderbolt look identical.


Help with a simple email script for OSX I would be so happy if someone could assist me in creating an Applescript to send some emails. I have seen a few examples but I am not confident that I can adapt them to my own needs.

I need to send the same email (subject & body), one at a time, to a list of addresses on a .csv file. I am using Apple Mail 5.3 and OSX 10.7.5

Many thanks in advance to anyone willing to help out.

Here's what I have so far.

    tell application "Mail"

    tell (make new outgoing message)
        set theAddress to "xxxx"
        make new to recipient at beginning of to recipients with properties {address:theAddress}
        set subject to "xxxx"
        set content to "xxxx"
        send
    end tell
end tell

I need to set theAddress to cell A1 on my excel sheet. How do I point it there? Once the email has sent I need to point it to cell A2... and so on.

The simplest and quickest way to do this in other languages would just be to drop each of your columns from excel into a list (array) and then have the whole thing in a loop and it will create the email fill the information and then send the email then loop back to the beginning and start again with values from each of the arrays at [1] and so on from there through your list. Not the most professional or efficient way but for your purposes that would work. If you can implement that then go ahead. If not I'll script it when I get back to my desktop.

----edit----

I edited script first written on this post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15386794/applescript-for-sending-emails-from-a-list-in-excel

to achieve this script. I code in java mostly so this might not be perfect so maybe somebody can come along and tweak it.
OP should go through and enter his own values for the things written in all caps. Also the excel sheet needs to be in the form that the OP from the links excel sheet is in

set {firstName, eAddress} to getData()

repeat with i from 1 to count firstName
tell application "Mail"
    activate
    set mymail to make new outgoing message at the beginning of outgoing messages with properties {subject:"INSERT SUBJECT HERE"}
    tell mymail
        make new to recipient at beginning of to recipients with properties {address:item i of eAddress}
--The next line will start each email with Hi firstName and then carriage return to the text you fill in below

        set content to "Hi " & item i of firstName & "

INSERT BODY OF EMAIL HERE"
    end tell
    --show message window (otherwise it's hidden)
    set visible of mymail to true
    --bring Mail to front
    activate
    send mymail
end tell
end repeat

on getData()
set colA to {}
set colB to {}
tell application "Microsoft Excel"

    activate
    tell active sheet
        set lastRow to first row index of (get end (last cell of column 1) direction toward the top)

        repeat with i from 3 to lastRow
            set end of colA to (value of range ("A" & i))
            set end of colB to (value of range ("B" & i))
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell

return {colA, colB}
end getData


How do I save iBooks pdf on iPhone to computer so I can delete them from iPhone? My iPhone 6s+ is running out of memory. I have so many crochet patterns on my iBooks. How do I transfer those patterns to computer so i can delete them from my iPhone? When I first bought the computer I synced my phone then started deleting them from my phone, then they started deleting from the computer.

What did I do wrong?

To delete them only from your phone, follow these steps:

In the upper-right corner of the iBooks window, tap Select.
Scroll to find the item that you want to delete, then tap it.
In the upper-left corner of the iBooks window, tap Delete.
Tap Delete This Copy.

If you tap Delete from All Devices, it will remove it from iCloud, which will cause it to be deleted from all devices (including your computer).


Messages agent wants to use your confidential information stored in “” in your keychain After upgradering to Mavericks, I have been bombarded repeatedly with the following prompt:

  Messages agent wants to use your confidential information stored in “” in your keychain
  [Allow] [Always allow] [Deny]

No matter how many times each option is used, the popup appears again after a very short while (usually less than 15 seconds).

Erasing the Messages.app/iChat-related preference files from ~/Library/Preferences/ did not work.

This fixed it for me (though note the caveat at the bottom)
Open /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app, search for message, which in my case came up with two keys that I deleted. This required Administrator rights, though.
iCloud still wonky though
Probably because I trashed some of my preferences. I can live with that for the time being as it is not in my face every ten seconds.


How do I prevent my mac's wifi from ever (not just once) seeing a particular wifi network? So here is my dilemma- I'm addicted to the internet and I don't want to have the option of using it in my home except for particular times.

On my own network, I plan to change the password to something long and unmemorizable and write it down and leave it somewhere else (say the coffee shop) /tell it to a friend etc so that I can have the option of using it- then tell my key chain to forget the network's password. Problem solved!

The only issue is that my upstairs neighbors have a network and I know the password! If only I could delete it from the keychain in my head, but I can't. I can ask them to change the password, and will, but it's not their problem and I feel silly doing so. Plus even if they do it'll take them forever..

So my question is: Is there a way to prevent my computer from using a particular network, forever - so that my computer sees it and automatically ignores it?

Any help much appreciated!

What about something even easier? There's a great app for OS X called Concentrate that will block distractions for you for periods of time. In particular it'll block your access to apps when you want to focus so you can stop surfing Ask Different when you should be studying. Have it block Chrome, Safari and Firefox and any other apps you find distracting and you might find that's easier than trying to have WiFi but not have your computer connect to it.


Laggy write/read performance w/ Samsung 850 evo 1TB on mid-2012 Macbook Pro 10.12.6 Sierra Here's a weird one: after a Samsung 840 pro 512gb has defaulted this week (applications didn't open, files couldn't be accessed any longer), I bought a Samsung evo 1TB SSD and installed it in my Macbook Pro. I restored from a time machine backup which worked fine.

The issue now is this: Using Blackmagic, I see appropriate write speeds, but only about half of the time (around 500MB/s write and read). The other half it's hovering around 200-300, and performance in general is worse than with the older Samsung 840 pro I had installed before.

When opening Finder windows and performing simple tasks I notice a lag that occasionally occurs, making the system as a whole sluggish and slow. Here's a youtube video showing the issue when using Blackmagic (any visible lag is from my system, not the video recording):

https://youtu.be/AX9bZSZvIRc

Has anybody experienced similar issues or does anybody have an idea what could be the root cause?

Some more info:

Trim is enabled
Disk utility does not show any issues
I have run both Onyx and TechTool Pro 9 to resolve any common issues such as partition map verification, ownership rights etc.
the only thing I have noticed is that the inspector window shows that my user account does not have write access to the ssd (see image below), when I try to change that it says "The operation cannot be completed because you don't have the necessary permission", which is weird since I am the admin. Could it be related to this, and how would I got about changing that?

I am thankful for any hints, what other components could be the bottleneck here? Maybe the connection cable of the SSD to the motherboard? A faulty SSD controller chip?

Here's the Ethrecheck file:

EtreCheck version: 3.4.2 (436)
Report generated 2017-08-18 18:53:19
Download EtreCheck from https://etrecheck.com
Runtime: 4:00
Performance: Good

Hardware Information: ⓘ
    MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012)
    [Technical Specifications] - [User Guide] - [Warranty & Service]
    MacBook Pro - model: MacBookPro9,2
    1 2,9 GHz Intel Core i7 (i7-3520M) CPU: 2-core
    16 GB RAM Upgradeable - [Instructions]
        BANK 0/DIMM0
            8 GB DDR3 1600 MHz ok
        BANK 1/DIMM0
            8 GB DDR3 1600 MHz ok
    Bluetooth: Good - Handoff/Airdrop2 supported
    Wireless:  en1: 802.11 a/b/g/n
    Battery: Health = Normal - Cycle count = 34

Video Information: ⓘ
    Intel HD Graphics 4000 - VRAM: 1536 MB
        Color LCD 2560 x 1440
        DELL U2713HM 2560 x 1440 @ 59 Hz

Disk Information: ⓘ
    Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB disk0: (1 TB) (Solid State - TRIM: Yes)
    [Show SMART report]
        EFI (disk0s1 - MS-DOS FAT32) <not mounted>  [EFI]: 210 MB
        (disk0s2) <not mounted>  [CoreStorage Container]: 999.35 GB
        Recovery HD (disk0s3 - Journaled HFS+) <not mounted>  [Recovery]: 650 MB

    ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB disk1: (1 TB) (Rotational)
    [Show SMART report]
        EFI (disk1s1 - MS-DOS FAT32) <not mounted>  [EFI]: 210 MB
        HDD (disk1s2 - Journaled HFS+) /Volumes/HDD : 500.10 GB (76.47 GB free)
        HDD2 (disk1s3 - Journaled HFS+) /Volumes/HDD2 : 499.62 GB (4.67 GB free)

Virtual disks: ⓘ
    SSD (disk2 - Journaled HFS+) /  [Startup]: 998.98 GB (463.40 GB free)
        Physical disk: disk0s2 999.35 GB Online

System Software: ⓘ
    macOS Sierra  10.12.6 (16G29) - Time since boot: about one hour

Top Processes by Memory: ⓘ
    1.35 GB     kernel_task
    458 MB      Google Chrome Helper
    392 MB      Google Chrome Helper
    389 MB      Google Chrome Helper
    375 MB      Google Chrome Helper

Top Processes by Network Use: ⓘ
    Input       Output      Process name
    169 MB      43 MB       openvpn
    76 KB       36 KB       mDNSResponder
    28 KB       52 KB       usbmuxd
    9 KB        5 KB        netbiosd
    96 B        96 B        ntpd

Top Processes by Energy Use: ⓘ
     16.28  Google Chrome Helper
     15.90  WindowServer
     12.36  Google Chrome
      7.86  Google Chrome Helper

I found the culprit as follows:

did a hardware test by holding 'd' key on startup
did extended system test (short one passed)
test kept on crashing when testing memory
switched both 8gb RAM sticks against new ones

Now the system works again as expected.


OS X keeps crashing while compiling I have a fresh install of Snow Leopard on a 32bit Core Duo.

Ever since I installed Snow Leopard, I have random crashes when compiling:
i.e. - during brew install imagemagick. While brew installed dependencies (tiff and little-cms) it finished just fine, but when it went to compile imagemagick itself, it crashes.

During make install for imagemagick, the system fans just spin up then my computer shuts down.

I've looked at mkmf.log and CrashReporter, but nothing is in them about this install.

I'm using Xcode is 3.2.6 with iOS SDK 4.3.

Any other log files I can view?  Any ideas?

EDIT - I noticed that this was happening during compiling only.  Also noticed that fans started to spin up before crashes but never got a chance to spin to max speed.  I guess somewhere along the way, either one of my fans went out, or something of the sort.

So I did the following:

I downloaded and installed MenuMeters, then smcFanControl.

I set the Higher RPM in smcFanControl to max.  Right before I started to install apps which needed compiling like imagemagick I turned smcFanControl to max and monitored CPU temp.  So far I've been able to install without crashes, but now I know I need to be replacing my mac soon.

Maybe this is a hardware error. Heat or memory related issues?

You should try the hardware test using your Install CD.


Is there a way to operate the camera of a disassembled iPhone X? I recently disassembled my iPhone X; to straightforwardly ask, is there a way to operate the rear camera of this model? There are all the necessary parts: the display, central processor, the front camera with the TrueDepth sensor, and the rear camera.
I want to operate the camera using an external input device; store the images and recordings taken in an external storage.
Would using Arduino or Raspberry Pi be an option?

Yes, you can. How is a very difficult question to answer.
Broadly, as with developing any embedded electronic project, you first have to correctly identify each part, and obtain its technical specification / manual from the manufacturer. This will tell you what each part does and how to assemble and connect them all together. The second part is even more difficult - if the manufacturer doesn't provide a ready made software (or atleast a device driver or template software that you can customize), you will have to write the software / program yourself to use the hardware correctly. (in iPhone, this part is handled by iOS and the camera app.)
So if you are familiar with electronics and embedded technology, and embedded programming, you should be able to do this.
Realistically, it is a very diffult task and will take a lot of time and new skillsets. It would be better to start with a smaller and easier electronic project before trying this.
Go for it if you are interested in patiently learning these skills. Even if you fail, you will still learn a lot. (Take inspiration from Alyssa, a young woman, student and hacker who is progressing on reverse engineering Apple's GPU in its new ARM processors, to create a linux driver for it).
The knowledgeable people at iFixit may be able to help you identify the parts, and even obtain the technical schematics on it. You can also ask for more help and advice from the Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange and Reddit Embedded forum.


Setting Terminal tab names in OS X and using vim I regularly ssh into a Linux cluster from an OS X (El Capitan) Terminal, sometimes with multiple Terminal tabs. I use bash and vim.

I'd like to do the following:

while ssh'd, set the Terminal tab title to the current working directory using PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\e]1;"`basename $PWD`"\a"'
while using vim, set the Terminal tab title to "vim — FILENAME"

Here are my problems:

If I do let &titlestring = "vim — " . expand("%:t") and set title in .vimrc, it changes the Terminal window title, not the tab title. If I do not separately set the tab title (parameter 1), the tab title mirrors the window title (parameter 2), but as soon as I set the tab title, it "decouples" from the window title.
If I run an external command in .vimrc with :!, I get a "Press ENTER" dialog that's annoying.
If I use :silent ! in .vimrc, my Terminal prompt ends up at the bottom of the screen after exiting vim. I really don't want to muck around with saving the prompt position and resetting it every time I want to use vim.
If I define in my .bashrc the following function:

function vim
{
    printf "\e]1;"`basename "$1"`"\a"
    vim "$1"
}

then my terminal crashes upon calling vim from the command line. Calling the function vvim instead works, but I don't want to type vvim forever. I want to alias vim.

So I seem stuck. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance!

Well, I've solved my own problem. I fail programming 101.

By defining vim as a function and then calling vim, I set up an infinite recursive loop. No wonder my terminal crashed. I need to call the "real" vim, the actual executable. This did the trick:

function vim
{
    printf "\e]1;"`basename "$1"`"\a"
    /usr/bin/vim "$1"
}


Messages no longer sorting by most recent message A few days ago my messaging app started acting really weird.

All old conversations have lost all but 1 single text (I think this was the most recent text but I'm not sure )
New Messages are coming in but he preview message is showing a much older message.
Messages no longer sort by date they seem to be stuck in the order they were in when this problem began, eg if I get a new message it doesnt appear at the top of the list.

Specs.

I am running 10.02, I have tried to update to 10.3.2 but everytime I try to install it verifys the update and then tells me something went wrong, I have tried to to delete download and do again with same problem.

I was having trouble with storage on my phone and at one point had 0 bytes free until I deleted some photos, at the same time my GMAIL app got itself stuck in a non working loop, so had to delete and redownload.

With any other app I would delete it and redownload it but you cant do that with messages.

I could turn off imessages  but am worried I might loose the few messages I have (though it probably makes little differnce now).

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  Is there a fix?

Update

I spent about 5 hours backing up and restoring my Iphone 6+ 64GB.

Upgrade to 10.3.x No change to message app sorting incorrectly
Full reset back to factory settings.  Messaging App sorting correctly
Restore backup of my phone.  Messaging app not sorting correctly again.

Anyone know where I might be able to log a bug ?  LOL

Restore from a backup.

It looks like your phone has some serious issues with its OS. Something probably went wrong with the installation, so you should restore from a backup, or just start fresh. Here's how to do that:

iCloud

Make an iCloud Backup. Go to Settings - Apple ID (big thing with your name at the top) - iCloud - iCloud Backup - Back Up Now
Disable Find My iPhone. Go to Settings - Apple ID - iCloud - Find My iPhone and turn off the switch. You will have to enter your Apple ID password.

If you have forgotten your Apple ID password, go to iForgot

Wipe your phone. Go to Settings - General - Reset - Erase All Content and Settings.
Wait for your phone to do a full wipe.
In Setup Assistant, select that you'd like to restore from an iCloud backup. Choose your desired iCloud backup.

That's it! See if it worked.

iTunes

Make an iTunes backup. Connect your phone to your computer, and open iTunes. Select Your iPhone (in the top bar) - Summary - Back Up Now.
Disable Find My iPhone. Go to Settings - Apple ID - iCloud - Find My iPhone and turn off the switch. You will have to enter your Apple ID password.

If you have forgotten your Apple ID password, go to iForgot

In iTunes, click Restore iPhone.
Wait for the restore to complete
In Setup Assistant, select that you'd like to restore from an iTunes backup and follow the directions from there.


QuickTime for OSX 10.9.5 has no sound So I did a screen recording with QuickTime using OSX 10.9.5. I was recording a video with sound. However, when I played it over from QuickTime, the sound was gone. How do I make it that QuickTime also records the sound?

To add external audio sources, you need to make sure the correct input is assigned before you start the recording

To record "in-computer" sound, you need software that can re-route audio within the Mac itself - to make it think an output is actually an input.

This has been traditionally done using a freeware app called Soundflower - originally by Cycling 74, taken over by Rogue Amoeba but not developed or supported further. Rogue Amoeba have always had their own system for intercepting Mac audio & routing it to chosen destinations, but their app, Audio Hijack, is not free ($50)
It is extremely good, but comes at a price.

Quick tutorial on Soundflower in Quicktime from CNet

  When a situation arises where you want to record the audio along with your screen recoding on your Mac, you could try raising the volume on your speakers and hope that a built-in microphone captures that audio, but that's far from elegant.

  Instead, you can use Soundflower. It is a free piece of software for Mac OS X by Cycling74 that will let you route system audio within your Mac. Download and install the utility; Soundflower requires you reboot your system after installation for it to work.

  After your machine reboots, open QuickTime Player and start a new screen recording. In the QuickTime Player window, click the down arrow to the right of the record button and select "Soundflower (2ch)" as your input. Then launch System Preferences and go to the Sound settings. Go to the Output tab and select the same "Soundflower (2ch)" option as you did in QuickTime Player.

  What this does is route all of your system audio out to Soundflower as if the utility were speakers or headphones. That means any sound made by your Mac (including Facebook notifications or similar) will be recorded by QuickTime Player.

  Now you can hit record in QuickTime Player and you'll capture both the video and audio in one recording. While this is going on, you won't be able to hear the audio to monitor what's being recorded. When you're done, change your output audio back to your original settings in System Preferences.


Generate a new table entry in one sheet from another I have a numbers file with 2 sheets: sheet1 and sheet2.

On sheet1 is where I am entering some data in some cells.
On sheet2 there is a transactions table with different entries.

Is it possible to have a button or something in sheet1, where I can enter some information in some cells sheet1, and when I press that button, it adds a new entry in the transactions table in sheet2 with some values from sheet1?

Its straight forward to use values from one sheet into another by using a format like SHEETNAME::TABLENAME::CELL in a formula, but I don't know how I can (or if I can) achieve the above.

Seems like iOS has this feature under the names of Forms, just like you add a sheet, you can add a Form for a table. Don't have it on the Mac App, but that seems to be it.


How to find delay when launching new Terminal (iTerm) When I press CMD+N in iTerm2 to bring up a new iTerm window, sometimes it takes 10 seconds before I get my prompt. If I immediately repeat the process, the whole thing takes 1 second. To me this implies it is a slow read of a file that is then cached in memory. I put a timing statement in my .bash_profile and that takes about one second, so it is not something I have manually and intentionally done to slow it down.

How should I find out where the time is spent during the shell/terminal initiation?

I tried running sudo fs_usage -f filesys > fsusage.txt and then searching for login and bash and iTerm in the resulting file, but have not been able to determine what might cause the delay there.

I had the same problem and I fixed updating the setting in:
Profile/General

The option Command:

Instead Login shell you can pick the option command and write your shell path. In my case zsh: /bin/zsh

You can reveal this doing:
which -a bash
or
which -a zsh in my case


Is there an easy way to export all movies from iPhoto into iMovie Is there some easy way to just move all of my movies out of iphoto and into imovie?

First steps, in iPhoto:

Create an Smart Album (⌥+⌘+N). Name it Movies, or whatever you like.
Under "Match the following condition:", set the first drop-down to Filename, then next to "Contains", type "mov" in the box (without the quotes). This assumes all of your movies were created with an iDevice. If you have Vine videos you'd like to move as well, you'll need to set the first drop-down to "Any Text", then next to "Contains", type "H.264" in the box (without the quotes).
Click OK. This should show you all of your movies.
The easiest thing to do from here is create a folder on your Desktop (⌘+⇧+N), name it Movies, and open it.
Then back in iPhoto, press ⌘+A to select all of your movies, and drag-and-drop them into the folder you just created on your desktop. This step may take a few minutes.

Once it's done, go into iMovie:

Go to File > Import > Movies.
Click on Desktop in the sidebar, then find the folder you created above. Double-click on it.
Press ⌘+A to select all contents.
Select "Create New Event" and enter a name. (You can sort them into separate events later.)
Click Import. This process may take some time.

Once everything is imported, go to Window > Show Event Library. All of your movies are going to be grouped into the event name you entered above. The following steps are optional, if you want to sort by events:

Go to File > New Event and create each event that you want to.
Right-click on a movie, choose "Select Entire Clip", and move your cursor to an edge until the cursor changes to the hand.
Drag-and-drop it into the event that you want. iMovie will prompt you to confirm and then move it.

At this point, you can remove them from iPhoto:

Go back to the iPhoto album you created that shows all of your movies.
Press ⌘+A to select all.
Press ⌘+⌥+delete to move them to the iPhoto trash.


iTunes mixes up Aperture and iPhoto I use iPhoto for my mobile (iPhone, iPad) pictures and I have a separate library in Aperture for the pictures I take with my DSLR.

Until now I was just transferring my mobile photos to iPhoto.

Now I want to sync my iPhoto library (at least some of my albums) to my iPhone. The problem is: in iTunes, in the photo tab, I have only one option in the "Sync photos from" dropdown, iPhoto, BUT when I select it, it's the Aperture library that shows up.

It seems to me that there was a time when I had both options, iPhoto and Aperture, in the dropdown. It must have come from an update…

Any ideas on how to sort thing up?

Ok, found it.

You just have to create a new library (open iPhoto with the alt key pressed), quit iPhoto, and open it again with alt pressed and select the original library file. Open iTunes, et voilà!


Can I dock all my apps at once? I'm using a Mac at my new job and I often want to have a clear view of my desktop quickly. So far I've bound the Exposé - Desktop function to my mouse and it works okay, but the moment I want to just bring one app back from the dock, they all come back and it's frustrating.

Is there a way to show my desktop and actually put all my apps in the dock, kind of like the bottom right corner of Windows 7/8? There is this restriction that I can't install anything on my work machine. If there's nothing in Yosemite, will there be something in El Capitan?

From within the application that you want, just go to the application menu and click "Hide Others"(shortcut alt-cmd-H)

You can create an AppleScript and/or find third party software(like MagicPrefs) to create a shortcut for this action or an "App" in the dock that can do this.


iPhone 4s Wi-Fi antenna I have an iPhone 4s (1 1/2 years old) and suddenly the Wi-Fi is acting strange.

The Wi-Fi won't connect to any network, when I open the Settings app to select a network it will either find no networks or the settings app will crash. A hardware reset (Homebutton + Powerbutton) will result in 2 scenarios:

The Wi-Fi is working again, but only for a certain amount of time until it occurs again.
The Wi-Fi is disabled and I cannot enable it again. The Wi-Fi icon in Command Center is grayed out and in the Settings I cannot change the slide.

Is the Wi-Fi antenna messed up? What can I try else?

After doing a hardware reset as you said in your question, I think there's no option left but a broken antenna.

It's worth visiting Apple OR even better a local repair-man because if you get it repaired at Apple you pay at least 2 times as much.

Since it's a 4s you could consider looking around for a good deal for a new 5 or even 5s.


Where do I put a custom ringtone for Facetime? (macos Sierra) I like that Facetime Continuity allows my phone to ring on my computer. But it repeats the sound aggressively and it loops way too fast..

I created a quieter tone with eight seconds before it loops. But I can't figure out where to put it.

Apparently in Yosemite you could unlock access to this folder and put it here:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ToneLibrary.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Ringtones/

But I don't see any info on where to put it in Sierra. Any thoughts?

Overview

Here are the steps that worked for me:

Disable System Integrity Protection (see below for details).
Put your custom ringtone file in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ToneLibrary.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Ringtones/
Edit the system's property list of ringtones at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ToneKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/TKRingtones.plist (see below for details).
Choose your custom ringtone in FaceTime preferences.
Re-enable System Integrity Protection (see below for details).

Enabling/Disabling System Integrity Protection

It looks like in macOS Sierra (actually starting from El Capitan), Apple has implemented a System Integrity Protection technology that restricts access to /System. In order to play around with custom ringtones, you would need to disable System Integrity Protection

  To enable or disable System Integrity Protection [...]

  Boot to Recovery OS by restarting your machine and holding down the
  Command and R keys at startup.
  Launch Terminal from the Utilities
  menu.
  Enter the following command: $ csrutil enable [or use the command $ csrutil disable to disable System Integrity Protection]

  After enabling or disabling System Integrity Protection on a machine,
  a reboot is required.

Sources: Apple Support, Apple Developer

Editing TKRingtones.plist

In order to make your custom ringtone show up in the list of ringtones in FaceTime preferences, you will need to edit the file /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ToneKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/TKRingtones.plist using TextEdit (or some other text editor -- you can also use Xcode's developer tools for a nicer interface). Specifically, add <string>system:Custom Ringtone Name</string> at the location shown below (you should replace "Custom Ringtone Name" with the name of your ringtone file).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    // lots of stuff omitted here
    <key>modern</key>
    <array>
        <string>&lt;default&gt;</string>
        <string>system:Custom Ringtone Name</string>
        <string>system:Apex</string>
        <string>system:Beacon</string>
        <string>system:Bulletin</string>
        // lots of stuff omitted here
    </array>
    <key>sort</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>


Trying to Free Up Space - Can I Delete Library Cache? I'm trying to figure out how to free up some space on my MacBook. I downloaded Disk Inventory X, and in looking at the storage breakdown it provides, I see that my Library folder is 119.4 GB. Library > Caches inside there has 96.7 GB. Caches > Adobe has 93.1 GB. Looks like After Effects is taking up the most space in there with 92 GB. That seems like an insane amount of space for one program cache.

Also, Library > Application Support has 21.8 GB. And Application Support > Adobe has 20.2 GB.

What can I delete without messing up my computer? I use the Adobe Suite pretty much every day, so I don't want to screw it up.

Yes you can delete anything in the Cache folder. There's no unsaved things. Just cached data. Like renderinged things in the case of After Effects.

In video editing software you can often define maximum cache size.


Cannot add a product to My Support Profile: "serial number is associated to another Apple ID" I am trying to add the iMac I bought in 2011 to "My Support Profile".

So I copied the serial number from the "About this Mac" window, but when I entered it, I got this message:

I never had another Apple ID.

How do I prove Apple this computer is actually really my computer?

This problem is really annoying, and because of the same issue I have only been able to add 2 devices out of 8 that I own...

EDIT: As of October 2016; the URL seems to have moved here for the list of devices paired with your Apple ID. And it seems that the question is also now obsolete since only devices that a user can log into (such as devices with iOS, macOS or tvOS) can be added, so no more iPods.

If you have a proof of purchase or a receipt, Apple support will likely be help you correct this. Without these, they may question whether or not you own the computer.


Hide bookmarks bar on iOS I am using iPad and the bookmarks bar takes up too much space on screen. I want to remove but cannot figure out how.

Settings → Safari → disable Show Favorites Bar.


Is there a way to download Screen Time data from iPhone or other Apple iOS devices? I am a data analyst and would like to look at the underlying data that is the basis for the relatively simple screen time reports. I want to be able to look at my phone usage data in more detail and beyond the 7 day report period that is usually reported.

Has anyone figured out how to access the data or create more in depth analyses?

I am looking into this for quite some time already and I believe there is no option to do so as of now.

However there are two ways I found to get around this issue:

Option 1 (without jailbreak):
Use an App like Moment to track your phone usage and export the data via this app. My problem with this soultion is the fact that I potentially give away my data to the app's developer.
Option 2 (with jailbreak): I found this great resource that makes use of the data Apple collects anyways. The data still needs to be extracted via a script file and you still need to put some work in in order to process the outputs, but I think this is the safest bet. With this scripts you are able to extract a lot more than 'just' the phone usage.


Shortcut to EQ in iOS? Is there a way to create a shortcut to the Settings->Music->EQ in iOS? Sometimes with my headphones I like to activate Bass Booster, but want to turn it off when listening via Bluetooth in my car...

No, there's no way to create shortcuts into the Settings app like that (from a user perspective).


What's the best new feature/change of iOS7.0.1, iOS7.0.2, and iOS7.0.3? One feature/change per post.  Please search the current answers before listing yours.  If it's difficult to explain with words, please use pictures.  Changes that can increase productivity of the user, consumption of media are likely to attract more votes.  The change could have been made in any current revision of iOS7, but has to still be available in iOS7.0.3.

My favorite new feature is the ability to 'reduce motion' via Settings > Accessibility > Reduce Motion.

When enabled, the animation for launching an app and going to the home screen are greatly reduced, which allows me to access the phone from its locked state more quickly, and is more valuable to me than having zooming animations.


Setting defaults for Magic Mouse When I log on the Guest user, the Magic Mouse settings are not as I want them to be. E.g., I would always like the right click enabled and the tracking speed set to fast, but these settings default to unwanted values. So every time after login on Guest, I must change these settings manually.

Is there a way to change the defaults setting for the Magic Mouse so that every new user will get these changed defaults ?

This is a two step process. The system make all new accounts from this template:

/System/Library/User Template

Unless you need to only change a specific localization, you'll be putting files into /System/Library/User Template/Non_localized/Library/Preferences

The two step process is knowing where to change a file and what change to make.

I don't have an answer to the second part (no Magic Mouse handy), but you might be able to do that part yourself. If you make a new account and change only that mouse preference and dig through the ~/Library/Preferences to isolate the file(s) that encode that change (sort them by date and the newest files should be the ones you changed to configure the mouse). Second, you need to copy that file into the default user template so that when the system makes a new account (guest account or any new account), that user gets the modified mouse settings you have copied into the template to replace the default values for that setting.

An alternate method is to look inside the file(s) to see if the settings can be written easily by a sudo defaults command:

How can I prevent the iCloud dialog from showing up for new users?


Can the CIA hack my iphone if I have the latest firmware installed? I've been watching the news lately about these WikiLeaks about the CIA. Can the CIA hack my iPhone with the latest iOS version installed? How do they do this if my iOS is a closed system and Apple has to verify all software that is installed?

The iOS hacks are specifically tied to jailbroken phones and phones running old software. If your phone is up-to-date, then you ought to be relatively safe from your phone being compromised remotely.  Read here for more info: http://bgr.com/2017/03/08/cia-iphone-hack-wikileaks-vault-7/


iPad iOS 5 update gets stuck during iCloud setup I just updated my iPad 2 to iOS 5.  At the step for setting up iCloud, I said no to iCloud.  My iPad appears to be stuck at this step, displaying "setting up iCloud" for over an hour.  The only recourse appears to be to start over, which suggests that the iPad will be erased. What can I do about this? Thank you.

My iPod Touch was stuck on this screen.  I powered off and on and it unstuck.

see: Apple Community Forums


How to set "default" .bash_profile when opening Terminal on Catalina I'm running Catalina, 10.15.2, which uses the new zsh shell as a default. I've created my own .bash_profile file in my home directory and I'm able to initialize this .bash_profile by typing:

source .bash_profile

The problem is that I have to keep typing "source ..." each time I open a new terminal shell. How do I default the shell to always use this .bash_profile file? Thanks!

zsh uses different config files, see the 'STARTUP/SHUTDOWN FILES' section in man zsh. You can run one of
mv ~/.bash_profile ~/.zprofile
mv ~/.bash_profile ~/.zshrc

to rename the file, see the man page or https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208050 for the difference between these:

If you're using a bash profile, such as to set environment variables, aliases, or path variables, you should switch to using a zsh equivalent. For example:

.zprofile is equivalent to .bash_profile and runs at login, including over SSH
.zshrc is equivalent to .bashrc and runs for each new Terminal session


How to split screen in TotalTerminal to end up with two terminals? Often when you have ssh'ed into a server, you could like a second terminal to continue right off there, without having to ssh again.

I know that iTerm2 can do it, but it feels buggy on multi screens.

TotalTerminal makes a solid impression but seems to lack that feature, unless I have overlooked it.  Is there a way to split the terminal horizontally or vertically and have two independent terminals working off the same place?

The way I achieve this is ensuring that tmux is installed on the machine I'm SSHing to.

Once you've issues tmux you can do ctrl-b % to split the screen vertically, or ctrl-b " to split it horizontally.

This will give you two sessions within the same terminal window, and can also be persistent across logins. This may not be exactly what you want though.


Can't send or receive MMS on iPhone 8 Plus on Verizon if on WiFi calling An iPhone 8 Plus can't send / receive MMS messages (i.e. non-iMessage group messages) when on WiFi calling on Verizon - it just sits with the progress bar when trying to send and then eventually fails.

Phone calls and individual SMS messages work fine when on WiFi calling, and going down the street to where there's 4G signal causes MMS to work immediately.

A Galaxy S9+ on the same WiFi calling is able to send/receive fine.  The underlying internet is 1Gbps fiber and works well.

In case it's relevant, there is extremely marginal cell tower coverage at this location (i.e. ~1 bar).

Updating iOS on the phone did not solve the issue.

An iPhone 8 Plus can't send / receive MMS messages (i.e. non-iMessage group messages) when on WiFi calling

This is expected.

WiFi calling has no provision for sending either SMS or MMS messages that’s a function of the GSM Network.  Also, MMS is multimedia messaging, not “non-iMessage group messages.”  Now, as long as you’re connected to WiFi, you can receive iMessage messages.

  In case it's relevant, there is extremely marginal cell tower coverage at this location (i.e. ~1 bar).

It is relevant if you have your cellular on, but signal is so low that you’re using WiFi calling instead.  SMS using a very small amount of bandwidth compared to MMS, so it’s entirely possible regular SMS messages go through and MMS messages do not.  Also, unlike SMS, MMS will typically not queue up and continue resending; they usually delete after a period of time, sent or not.


Does Windows, running on latest Apple computers, see boot disk partitioned as MBR or GPT? From my understanding, the newest apple computers boot Windows in EFI mode. Traditionally, Windows has seen the boot disk as an MBR partitioned disk. In fact, the boot disk (i.e. /dev/disk0) has aways been partitioned as a GPT disk. I would like confirm there has been a change.

To be specific, open a Command Prompt as an Administrator and enter the following:

diskpart
list disk
exit

  Note: When entering the diskpart command, it can take a while before the first prompt appears. This is normal. Be patient, the DISKPART> prompt will appear.

What I am looking for a * in the Gpt column for Disk 0. If Disk 0 is seen as an GPT partitioned disk, then Windows has booted using the EFI boot method. Otherwise, Windows has booted using the legacy BIOS boot method. An example, using an older apple (iMac/20 inch/Mid 2007), is shown below:

In the above illustration, Disk 0 is the internal hard disk partitioned as a GPT disk. To Windows it appears as an MBR partitioned disk, indicated by the absence of the * in the Gpt column. Disk 1 is a GPT partitioned USB thumb (flash) drive containing a single NTFS partition.

If you show a * in the Gpt column for Disk 0, could you report back the "model identifier" or "model/screen size/year" of your apple computer. It may also be useful to include the version of Windows and OS X you are using. Apple recommends a standard where there is one partition for OS X and a second Boot Camp partition for Windows. If you are using a nonstandard partitioning scheme, try to indicate how you differed.

If you install Windows with the Bootcamp Assistant from a standard Mac OS X system, Windows always will start from a PMBR/Hybrid MBR partition table embedded in the GUID partition table
(Legacy MBR). MBR takes precedence in hybrid configuration even if a EFI boot might be possible.

If you use a non-Bootcamp Assistant EFI install method for Windows (e.g outlined here) Windows will boot in UEFI-mode (compatibility Windows 32bit/64bit) and you will find a * in the Gpt column for disk0.


Is it possible to have my dock visible on all monitors in El Capitan? Don't mark this as a duplicate. Question has been asked several times in several places but it was years ago.

I have two monitors connected. One primary (that has dock at the bottom) and secondary. My monitors aren't mirrored (cloned). Both of them display different stuff but the dock appears just on the primary one.

Is it possible to see my dock (the same dock) on both of them?

After extensive search, I have not found any solution specifically for the native macOS Dock.

However, not wanting to put up with this nuisance, I configured the third party Contexts app to always be visible and show only icons when not hovered.

I'm more than happy with this solution. The only drawback is that you cannot configure the context sidebar to be in the bottom of the display, like the dock.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with this app in any way.


iWork '09 Keeps asking to be Registered I'm a teacher in a classroom with 8, 9 10 and 11 year olds who each have a macbook or a macbook pro. Fun job. We have a standard 10.6.6 image with iWork '09 (4.03).

In previous images, iWork would ask to be registered thrice (it changed to 'Never Register' on the third time), and then stop bugging you; but now for some reason it won't stop asking us to register. It's a real hassle. I've repaired disk permissions, but that doesn't fix it. Any ideas how to stop it from asking us to register? Bonus points if I can roll it out using a terminal script via. remote desktop.

Thanks!

I found this via google Disable iWork registration nag screen.

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork09 RegistrationHasBeenSent true

I have no idea if this will work for you. I wanted to point this out in case you hadn't tried it.

This blog was the first result in google from searching for iwork disable reg. If it doesn't work, you might see if there are more results that might help or a slightly different search that might provide something meaningful. In any event, good luck. I hope it helps.


Mobile Safari Redirects to App Store According to several news stories, the iOS 8 betas included a new feature:

  Safari now blocks ads from automatically redirecting to the App Store without user interaction.

(The last link makes it look like the feature did get into the released version of iOS 8, not just the betas.)

However, certain sites (with ads) are still managing to open the App Store on my iPhone 5S.

Is there a way to ensure this setting is enabled?

Unfortunately regardless of Apple's efforts to curb websites redirecting users to the iTunes App Store, it still regularly occurs.

There is no 'setting' which enables / disables this 'feature', my only recommendation would be to ensure the "Fraudulent Website Warning" is switched on, having the "Block Cookies" setting on anything but 'always allow' and also testing weather turing off JavaScript support (under Advanced) helps in any way.


Is there a way to click a default button with the keyboard, without Full Keyboard Access? In Xcode when I go to commit files, I get a sheet with "Cancel" and "Commit" buttons, where the latter is the default (colored/pulsing) button.  I can hit Escape to Cancel, but I haven't found any way to Commit with just the keyboard.

In particular, pressing Return doesn't work.  There's a multiline text area on this sheet, so pressing Return adds a new line there.

In this question, the first answer suggested command + first letter (which would be command-C, which is Copy, as usual), and the second answer suggested turning on "Full Keyboard Access" (which I don't want).

Is there any way to click a pulsing default button with just the keyboard, without turning on Full Keyboard Access?  Or is the pulsing purely to indicate to me that it's the default choice that I should click to continue?

When the focus is on a multiline text view, pressing enter (⌤ or fn↩) usually selects the blue default button. (At least it does in some bug report dialogs.)


Built-in mic on MacBook reacts in Sound System Prefs, but not in Skype (calls & audio settings). Can anyone help me? I can hear the person on the other side, but they can't hear me. In System Prefs, the blue bar reacts when I clap, but the same bar in Skype Audio/Video settings doesn't react. I've had this problem using Cisco WebEx as well.

In System Prefs, I selected Internal Microphone and the input volume level is up, so that can't be it.
I recently upgraded to OS X 10.6.8, and I think (not sure) it didn't used to happen before that (could be coincidence, but I thought I'd share).

I'm on a MacBook2,1.

Hope you can help :)

Sarah

Skype can select different audio input than default OSX in system preferences pane.
Have you tried going into Skype preferences and checking if you have "Internal Microphone" selected there as well?


Accessing macOS Recovery Mode without Internet access? When starting my MacBook in recovery mode with Command + s, it prompts me to Choose Network.... The process that takes place immediately after entering my Wi-Fi password can take several minutes and it's kinda frustrating.

Is it possible to access recovery mode without connecting to the Internet?

The Recovery Partition on the system disk corresponds to the version of the macOS installed and should be loaded when holding CmdR at boot (not CmdS). However, if there is no recovery partition on the disk it will automatically revert to Internet Recovery which means downloading the boot image from Apple servers. Mac will also do that if there is a version mismatch from Recovery and macOS version installed. Remember that you should be able to use option key at boot which invokes Startup Manager which lets you select the available boot volumes, including the Recovery partition (without downloading from the Internet).

Nonetheless, according to HT204904 there are actually several key combinations for Recovery:

CommandR - Install the latest macOS that was installed on your Mac, without upgrading to a later version.

OptionCommandR - Upgrade to the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac

ShiftOptionCommandR - Install the macOS that came with your Mac, or the version closest to it that is still available.


how much time does it take to set up my Apple Developer account so I can provision my app and run it on a device? I want to sign up for my Apple Developer account solely so i can provision an app and put it on a device(s) to test.

How long does it take after I submit my payment for the Apple Developer account for Apple to respond?  Is it a mechanized system so I can start putting my app on my device?

Is there any other way to get my app onto a real device in the time while I wait?

I just want to test real code -- which includes Bluetooth functionality -- on my iPad mini.  But apparently I cannot do that until I can provision the app.
But I can't provision the app until I have a dev account.
But, even if I get the dev account I'm wondering if it takes a long time before I can use the dev account.

Any help is much appreciated.

Here's the thing, I don't even have to have a Developer Account to deploy my app to my device.

Instead, all I had to do was connect the device to my Mac Mini.
When I did that XCode recognizes the device and allows me to deploy and run the app on the device.

I hadn't seen this possibility anywhere, but now that it's possible, it doesn't matter to me so much how long I have to wait for the developer account to be officially set up, since in the wait time I can develop my apps and test them on my locally connected ipad.

As I was writing this answer, I went back to XCode and was building a new app when I suddenly saw the following message:

I couldn't believe it.  I was so excited because I could build apps for my local pad and now suddenly it has limited me until I buy a Dev Account.  Apple, I'm going to buy a dev acct and I obviously cannot deploy or sell my app to anyone without your permission.  Why would you make it this difficult?  Ridiculous!!

EDIT
Wow. Now I just googled for that and found the following Apple Forum :
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49304

Someone there mentions that you just have to uninstall other apps from your device and it should work again. I had two other test apps on my device so I uninstalled them and I was able to deploy to my device again.


How do I activate the flashlight during a front-facing camera recording? How do I activate the rear-facing flashlight during a front-facing camera recording on the iPhone?

It seems you can't.

As soon as you press the record button, the option to enable the torch or flash is disabled everywhere. You must decide whether you need any extra brightness beforehand.

Check this link for more info. Note that what @dwightk said in the comments was spot-on, except that instead of apps there are jailbreaks available if you really need this control...


How to prevent OS X from launching programs from another disk? I just did a fresh install of Mountain Lion on an empty partition. How can I prevent the programs of the previous install from being shown in the contextual menus in Finder ?  I already asked Spotlight not to index that partition, but I still have references to them in the Open With menus.

Try rebuilding the launch services database using the lsregister command. That database provides the information for the open menu, etc as noted in How to rebuild the LaunchServices database  from Macworld's Mac OS X Hints. Rebuilding the launch service database while running from the newly installed partition should fix the problem of trying to open Applications on the other drive partition.

  If your "Open With" menu shows applications that are no longer installed, or shows some of them as duplicates, you can use the following Terminal command to rebuild your LaunchServices database:

For OS X 10.6 and later run:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system

For OS X 10.5 and older run:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

If the problem persists after running the above command, try un mounting your original partition before running the above command again. Additionally, as noted on the hints article and when running the lsregister  command with no arguments there is some helpful output that will allow further customization to specify where to look for Applications, etc.


Can't download apps from App Store since updating to iOS 9.3.2 I updated to iOS 9.3.2 and now I can't download anything on the App Store. It is always stuck on "loading". I also tried restarting and logging out my Apple ID and it doesn't help at all. I have a stable connection and my brother has an Android device and he can download smoothly so I'm sure that it's not a connection problem and I think the problem here is the new OS update.

Restore from an iCloud/iTunes backup

Make sure your iTunes is up to date on your computer beforehand. The update itself hasn't caused a problem on my iPhone 5s so it may be something to do with your phone.


Is it OK to use an HFS+ start disk with High Sierra? I have a clone of my internal SSD on an HFS+ partition of an external drive. I was wondering if there are issues with using such a disk as a startup disk with High Sierra.

Yes - High Sierra fully supports running / booting from HFS+ since it doesn’t even change any system over to APFS except for Apple SSD based systems. Fusion drives and spinning HDD hard drives all remain on HFS+ as do all external drives connected to your High Sierra system.


itunes commercial podcast piracy security I'm just wondering how secure commercial podcasts on itunes are protected against piracy?

Does it even matter for security if the podcast is provided over itunes or is it the content provider himself who must make the proper security adjustments?

NOTE: Yes I know that all security measures can be bypassed especially in this part of IT. But it makes a difference if it takes 2-3 minutes or 2-3 years ;)

The security must be provided by the content provider, though iTunes can access password-protected podcasts. The content provider sets up password protection via HTTP authorization and/or SSL encryption. It's then as secure as SSL, which is the standard for encryption on the Web, used by Websites for secure transactions, such as stores, credit cards, etc.

See this link for more on setting it up.

Once you've set it up, you can access the podcast via iTunes by clicking a link on the content provider's site. iTunes gives you an authorization dialog to access the podcast:

Apple says it does not list password-protected podcasts on the iTunes Store.


Enter day tasks in Calendar without times I feel constrained when I need to enter start and end time for a task because I know it can take another amount of time than entered.

Can I somehow just make a list of tasks for a day, one after another?
I saw all-day tasks, but I don't think these are what I need.

As an alternative, what tasks list could you recommend please?

In Calendar, you can use the all-day events, that are shown one after the other.
Otherwise, you can choose among multiple apps. For free:

There is the default app Reminders, that allows you to create lists of events that you can check once completed.
One app I really like is Wunderlist. It has a good layout. It does more or less the same as Reminders, but it has much more functionalities. Obviously, you can sync with other devices.
You can also use Trello, which is an app for mobile phones and you can use on your Mac through the website. I consider that Trello is very complete but a little trickier.

Of course there are much more apps. It depends to your personal taste. De gustibus...


Error in restoring iOS 5.1.1 on iPhone 4 using custom IPSW I'm trying to restore iOS 5.1.1 on iPhone 4 GSM that currently has iOS 4.3.3 and is jailbroken.

I'm using "redsn0w" to get into pwned DFU mode and then trying to restore from iTunes using custom IPSW file stitched with the 5.1.1 shsh blobs (I have my shsh blobs saved locally).

It works until iTunes reaches the point Preparing iPhone for restore.

At this point my iPhone automatically exits the DFU mode and enters into restore mode, but iTunes stops restoring with the error iPhone could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (21).

I have checked the hosts file and have commented the line that redirects to the cydia server. (I have also checked it by uncommenting that line but it still didn't work)

Any idea what could be going wrong or is there anything I'm missing?

I'm able to restore iOS 5.1.1 on my phone using sn0wbreeze. I'm posting the details here in case someone else encounters the same problem.

Initially I used redsn0w to create a custom firmware file but it failed to restore (with errors mentioned in the question and others like error 14, etc.).

Then I used sn0wbreeze to create a custom firmware stitched with my shsh blobs and iTunes restored it without errors.

Here are the steps I followed:

Downloaded a firmware that i wanted to restore (5.1.1 in my case).
Added my shsh blobs for that firmware using iFaith mode in sn0wbreeze.
Created the custom IPSW in sn0wbreeze and stored it on my desktop.
Put the iPhone in pwned DFU mode. Use iREB or redsn0w to get into the pwned DFU mode.
Used the custom ipsw file to restore in iTunes.

I don't know if these things count, but during the process my antivirus was disabled and I had commented out any gs.apple.com lines in my hosts file.


Are there any apps for Mac that have Photos extensions? Apple's website for the Mac version of photos.app states that external editors and filter apps (extensions) will be able to be used. The iPad version achieves this, but I note they don't seem to be reflected to the photo stream.

Are there any apps that support this functionality yet on the Mac?

Looks like this is coming in El Capitan; it was announced at WWDC.

Reported on multiple news sites, but an example snippet from here: "...support for third-party editing extensions that will be available from the Mac App Store and accessible within Photos itself. It doesn’t sound as though that will enable external editing in Adobe Photoshop, say, but it will go a long way toward enhancing the editing capabilities of Photos."


Prompt When Ejecting Time Machine Drive Whenever I eject the external drive that I use for Time Machine, I get this prompt:

However, in actual fact, this particular drive has got only ONE (1) partition, so it's rather annoying that I have to click on Eject All when this should have been a no-frills process.

Note that this does not happen if I simply connect the drive to the USB port and then eject it. It usually happens after a Time Machine backup session has occurred.

FYI, the backup drive I use is encrypted. Could this be the reason?

EDIT: In response @matthieu-riegler's question, this is the result I got from diskutil list. As you can see, there's only one entry for the external drive, My Passport.

Could it be that there is a hidden partition available on that drive?

Disk Utility can show hidden partitions, but be default it doesn't do this. You can enable this feature by first enabling the program's "Debug" menu. Just enter the following command in the Terminal, which will edit the Disk Utility preferences file accordingly:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

Now relaunch Disk Utility and you should be able to see the hidden partitions by choosing "Show Every Partition" from the now-present "Debug" menu. Do keep in mind that editing hidden partitions may not be a good idea in most situations.


Music app on iphone resets track to start after a while I'm listening to some audio lectures on my iPhone. I've noticed that after leaving a track paused for a while it will reset to the start of the track. For instance, I'll listen on the way in to work in the morning and when I go home in the evening the track is back to the start. I haven't listened to anything in between. It's annoying since these lectures are 30 - 40 minutes long and I have to note where I paused it to resume.

Is there a setting I need to change or an alternative app that maintains position when left paused?

According to this:

  I contacted Apple about this bug. It is not a bug. It is a deliberate
  UX decision of a fascist UX designer. Restarting songs should be the
  user's decision. Clearly somebody at Apple does not understand that UX
  is all about the behavior of the end user. This makes me very angry.
  Anger is the result of failed UX design. Clearly I could always
  restart songs of I wanted to with the back button. I now have
  absolutely no way to continue listening to music where I left off.
  This decision fixed nothing. Sadly its only one of many many decisions
  since 2008 that flies in the face of well thought out UX design in the
  pursuit of "features".


Is there a way to automate restarting with a different boot disk? I have Lion and Snow Leopard installed on my machine, and I switch between them all the time (I develop for compatibility on both platforms). Going into System Preferences and selecting the startup disk every time is quite a pain, it would be great if I could automate this process with a script that I can launch from my dock.

sudo bless -mount /Volumes/"startup disk name" -setBoot

Press Enter.

reboot

This should work.


ffmpeg giving error on launch in Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 I installed ffmpeg 0.8.5 in my Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 with Homebrew

brew install --use-gcc ffmpeg

It installed without any error. But, now when I run, it gives the following -

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/Cellar/ffmpeg/0.8.5/lib/libavdevice.dylib
  Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg
  Reason: Incompatible library version: ffmpeg requires version 53.0.0 or later, but libavdevice.dylib provides version 52.0.0
Trace/BPT trap: 5

Try using:

$ brew update && brew install `brew outdated` && brew cleanup

This script will also help you track down changes on libraries that are needed.

If you those don't work try:

$ brew doctor (check your setup for common problems)
$ brew missing (to check installed packages for missing deps)

brew doctor checks your setup for common problems, brew missing checks installed packages for missing deps.

You can always start fresh (which should take care of all the problems):

$ brew uninstall --force `brew deps ffmpeg`
$ brew install ffmpeg

then

$ brew update


Can I keep the MacBook Pro Retina's power-cord plugged in at all time? Possible Duplicate:
  Should I disconnect my MacBook Pro’s power cord when the battery is fully charged?

I'm wondering if it's reasonable to use a MacBook Pro Retina as a desktop replacement with power-cord plugged in all the time? Or does the battery suffers from this kind of use?

Well, Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time, as for a lithium-based battery, it's important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. MacBook / Pro, though, are designed to deliver up to 1000 full charge and discharge cycles before it reaches 80% of its original capacity.

A charge cycle means using all of the battery’s power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a single charge. For instance, you could listen to your iPod for a few hours one day, using half its power, and then recharge it fully. If you did the same thing the next day, it would count as one charge cycle, not two, so you may take several days to complete a cycle. Each time you complete a charge cycle, it diminishes battery capacity slightly.

Since 2009-2010 laptops carry a technology called Adaptive Charging which basically is a chip within the battery that talks to its cells monitoring everything from charge level to temperature. The chip relays this information to the computer, which uses an advanced algorithm to determine the optimal charging current. Adaptive Charging reduces the wear and tear on the battery giving it a lifespan of up to 5 years.

So, I'll actually won't worry that much about the battery. Just try not to keep it plugged all the time, and remember to do a full charge cycle at least once per month.


Force Spotlight to index specific Library folders How can I get Spotlight to index a directory in the system's Library folder?

I'm trying to get Spotlight running 10.10.3 to index some folders in the Macintosh HD/Library folder. I'm not getting any search results from these folders so it appears Spotlight is not searching/indexing them. The folder can be found at:

Macintosh HD/Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/htdocs/

I am getting search results for other Library folders, such as my web root folder at:

/Library/WebServer/Documents/

Is there a way to force Spotlight to also index the Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/htdocs folder as well?

(I want to index FileMaker Server's web root folder that I referenced above. I will not be indexing the FileMaker Server database folders as I have excluded those from Spotlight)

Spotlight is already indexing those files and folders. You can check for the file names.

The actual problem is that the importer is ignoring the "code" portion of the files so the strings you want to find are not matching.

mdfind -name fmwebd_home.html

If you copy a html file to your desktop, you can play with editing them to include strings inside the body of the html - and see if spotlight can find things. Junk names like ZZtestZZ are easy to make up that don't return other spotlight matches.

mdfind  -interpret ZZtestZZ

Also, if you search in Spotlight graphically, you might want to save smart folders/searches that include the system files since they are normally suppressed from default searches.


Command to close terminal window When I want to close a window I type exit :

 mbp-thomas in ~
○ → exit
logout

[Opération terminée]

Then cmd + w to close the window.

Is there a way to do it with a little script like if I type quit it exit the session then close the window ?

Open Terminal.
Go to Terminal → Preferences….

Select the Settings tab, then your profile, and choose the Shell tab.
Set When the shell exits to Close if the shell exited cleanly.


How do I skip verification of a .dmg file? I have downloaded a dmg file but when I click on it it keeps verifying.

I've also tried to go to /System/Library/CoreServices/Installer.app but I can't click on the .dmg because it is greyed out.

How can I open it?

The command line tools allow you to mount the DMG and skip verification.
Open Terminal:
hdiutil attach -noverify /Path/To/Your/DMGFile.dmg

If you have the DMG file on your Desktop, and the DMG was named "Broken.DMG" you could type in something like this:
hdiutil attach -noverify ~/Desktop/Broken.dmg

Rather than typing the name of the file, just drop the file icon in the terminal window once the main command is ready. If your image is bad, the warning is correct and you should get a new dmg rather than bypass the error checking step.

A more global change would use defaults, but this check is very handy in general since it flags bad images:
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify TRUE

This will stop the verification of DMG files permanently. After you've managed to skip the verification and open that file, it would be a good idea to re-enable the verification by opening Terminal again and typing in:
defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify FALSE