Contacts in a calendar appointment I've noticed that I can add contacts to a calendar appointment. What is this useful for? Will they be notified of the appointment? What can they do with the appointment? What is the whole purpose? I can invite contacts to attend, so I don't see what this is used for.

Adding contacts will send automatic email invitations. The contacts can accept the invitation and the appointment will appear in their own calendar(s).


Making Favorites category selected by default in Character Viewer Whenever I open Character Viewer, I want the Favorites category selected by default as shown in the image.  Instead, I find that even if I selected Favorites in the last session, next time the category selected by default is the first category below the horizontal dividing line below Favorites in the left side bar (the Greek category in the attached image).

Is there a way to make Favorites selected by default?  If this is not possible, I want at least the category selected in the last session remains selected in the next session.  In fact, that is the behavior for all the categories below the dividing line, but not for the categories above the dividing line.  For example, in the attached image, if I close Character Viewer while the Arrows category is selected, next time the same category remains selected, but not for the Frequently Used and Favorites categories.

The macOS version is 10.14.3 (Mojave).

It seems that it has been a while since you have asked this question but I still wanted to respond to it because it had gone unanswered and you or somebody else might still use a solution, even if not perfect, to the problem you described.

I have the same problem with the Character Viewer on my iMac running on High Sierra.

The most practical solution I could find was opening it using the keyboard shortcut ⌃+⌘+space and always leaving / closing the Character Viewer when it is in the compact / pop-up state (see the picture). This helps because, if invoked through its keyboard shortcut, the Character Viewer always opens in the state it was in when it was last closed and focuses on the last used category such as the Favorites. You can click on the icon at the Character Viewer's top right to switch between its compact and expanded states.

If I do the above, the Character Viewer always opens in the compact state and focused on the category I left it with. Because most of the characters I use are in my favorites, it nearly always opens focused on the Favorites or the Frequently Used & the Favorites. Interestingly, I don't have this problem with the Character Viewer on my MacBook running on Catalina. It opens focused on the category wherever I left it in including the expanded state.


Cannot boot Mac Mini with striped RAID 0 set Today we could not get one of our machines running with 10.9 and RAID 0 which stripes the data on the boot volume.

After several hours of doing the 'standard' tasks like fixing permissions etc, we've hit a dead end for troubleshooting.

Here's what's going on:

Machine starts, we can see the apple logo and the spinning wheel / activity indicator animation. Nothing else happens.

Running safe boot mode ends in the same state.

So I have tried running verbose, the last line is:

Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-226.1.1)

If I do a hard shutdown and start the verbose mode again, I can see in logs (last lines)

Executing fsck_hfs...
hfs: Removed 0 orphaned / unlinked files and 4 directories

I have started the system in single user mode.
I ran the fsck on it, it worked just as expected:

fsck -fyd

I've retried it twice before I got a note saying that file system is ok.

Reboot: same issue.

I can access all of the files and stuff on the raid when in single user mode, but there's no way the system will boot.

I woud love to hear some opinions, please limit the answers/comments to system tools or free tools available on the internet.
Also, there's no way I'm going to remove the drives and attach to another system.

When you use Apple software to stripe the two internal drives of a Mac Mini, the recovery hard disk is removed. That means you will need to boot from a next journal drive to run Disk Utility and figure out what happened to the volume structure.

Fast SDHC cards are getting so inexpensive that I pretty much make one of those for every Mac Mini so it has a recovery OS to boot from for maintenance like this. Of course a USB drive works well too.

Get yourself a new drive and worst case, use internet recovery to install the OS on to an external drive so you have something to boot from. If you have a backup, you could wipe the two drives and run internet recovery as well to just fix or reinstall the OS on the empty drives.


How can I get photographs off the iPhone 4 wirelessly? My new iPhone 4 takes pretty good pictures (for a phone); they're comparable to a lower-end point and shoot. Very convenient.

But it's a pain in the butt to get the pictures off the phone. I have to manually plug it into the computer and import somehow (I use Windows Live Photo Gallery). It works, but it's cumbersome.

Is there a way to get a whole bunch of photographs off the device wirelessly?

Eye-Fi has an iPhone app that will perform essentially the same function as the Eye-Fi SD Cards (wirelessly transfer photos to your computer and/or the web).  More information can be found on their website - the catch is that you need to have an Eye-Fi card.  No, it doesn't appear to actually use the card, but they give the app away to card owners.


How can I verify that my Photos and iPhoto library are hard linking to the same disk data? So I've discovered Apple's mystical implementation of hard linking with the new Photos app library and the old iPhoto library. Although Finder reports that both take up a significant and similar number of GBs on the disk space, they apparently are pointing to the same data on my disk, so data hasn't been duplicated.

Question is, how can I verify this? If I check the size of the parent folder, it's also reporting double GB. I imagine I can check all the folders at the root level and find that the total adds up to more than what I have based on free space... but that doesn't actually pinpoint what files are hard linking.

Hard linked files share the same inode (which kind of identifies the file in the filesystem). So what you can do is to get the path of two photos which should be the same ("Reveal in Finder" in the old application, probably something similar in the new), open Terminal and run

ls -li /path/from/old/app.jpg /path/from/new/app.jpg

to see whether the number is really the same.


Is it possible to test iMessage functionality without another person? I'm trying to switch cell carriers and I want to make sure that both iMessage and SMS text work on the new one. I can trigger an SMS anytime I want through any number of websites with 2FA. Is there a way to get a test iMessage sent to you other than asking a friend through a different channel to text you?

You can send a message to yourself. I've used this when having trouble with messages. You'll have received messages on the left and the sent ones on the right just as it is with other people.


Repair Bootcamp Windows 10 0xc0000225 I'm usually running my Boot Camp partition in VMWare Fusion. When resuming the MacBook from sleeping (Boot Camp also ran in VMWare Fusion) the computer (OS X) told me it was restarted due to a problem.
Now the Windows 10 partition doesn't boot, either in Boot Camp mode or in VMWare Fusion.
The bluescreen error is 0xc0000225

I have run chkdsk c: /offlinescanandfix from a repair usb stick, but it didn't help.
I have tried to set the Boot Camp partion active using Diskpart from the Windows repair usb stick, but it told me that the partition couldn't. GPT? Don't remember.

I can access the Boot Camp partition from Finder in OSX.

My Mac is a MacBook Pro Mid 2015 running macOS Sierra 10.12.6

I tried all available fixes, but in the end I had to reinstall. I couldn't either do a repair installation. I had to do a clean install. Despite, it moved all my old files to windows.old and my own folders in c:\ was still there.

This is the second or third time this happens. I'm going to put all important stuff in onedrive and use reinstall as first option.


What's the difference between the three wireless antennas in MacBook Pros? I’d like to know what each of the 3 antennas do.  I know one is a shared antenna (Bluetooth and WIFI) and that the other two are WIFI antennas.  What’s the difference? Why several WIFI antennas instead of just one?  Are ones for 5GHz and others for 2.5GHz?  Are ones for receiving and others for transmitting?

In general, WiFi uses the same antenna for both transmitting and receiving.

In general, multiple WiFi antennas are used to get higher capacity (i.e. higher bandwidth). For example a common setup is 3x3 MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) where 3 antennas are used to exploit multipath propagation in order to increase the bandwidth available.

In very rough terms the idea is that there's a limit to the data rate, you can send/receive at a certain frequency with the technology available. Instead of increasing the data rate, MIMO uses multiple antennas to send multiple data streams at the same time on the same frequency, but from different antennas.

The receiver can then through advanced signal processing seperate the three signals even though they're sent at the same frequency, because they arrive at the receiver in three different directions.

This idea makes it possible to reach higher data speeds over a 3 antenna link than one with just 1 antenna.

Regarding 2.4 Ghz vs. 5 Ghz - it is the case that some MacBook Pro models use one antenna for 2.4 Ghz and the two others for 5 Ghz. Other MacBook Pro models use all antennas for both frequencies.


2017 MacBook Pro Bootcamp Windows 10 WiFi crashes system I have installed Windows 10 (version 1709 build 16299.309) on my MacBook Pro 2017 model through Bootcamp.

After Bootcamp installed its drivers, I am unable to connect to my Wi-Fi router most of the time. Whenever I try to connect to the network, it will fail 95% of the time with the unhelpful message "Can't connect to this network".

When Windows is trying to connect to the network, the network sort of "resets" (icon goes red momentarily in the taskbar and the Wi-Fi connection in Network Connections goes disabled momentarily) just prior to it failing (almost as if the network driver crashed or something).

When it does manage to finally connect (after attempting numerous times), the end result could be any of the following:

Loading a page in Edge or attempting to access the Internet in any way will crash the system. Sometimes it will blue screen, other times it will just freeze for 20s then restart.
The Wi-Fi icon in the taskbar shows "Internet access" but trying to load a page in Edge will fail. I can't even access my router's admin panel by accessing the gateway IP directly.
Accessing the Internet works.

The driver version for "Broadcom 802.11ac Network Adapter" is 7.35.118.68 and has no updates. Apple software update also has no driver updates. There are no Windows updates either.

Surely there are other people experiencing this exact issue? Is there another driver I can install? The Broadcom driver installed through Bootcamp is required though, the default driver included with Windows does not work. I have also tried connecting to another network (my iPhone hotspot) but the result is the same.

Update 2018/5/25 My WiFi connects more frequently now, but can still suffer from the same issues above randomly. Most of the time it manages to connect successfully on startup, and if it doesn't then attempting to connect manually from the flyout won't usually work (unless I try like 100 times).

I do not have specific experience with this exact error however there are a few basic (Windows) troubleshooting steps to take.

Go into Windows Device Manager, click on the WiFi adapter and get the full make and model number of the WiFi hardware. Write it down.
Right click on that device and select Remove. If it prompts you to uninstall the driver, do so. Then reboot into macOS.
Download the latest Bootcamp from Apple.com. If you have the Bootcamp installer still verify it is the latest at apple.com.
Right-click on the bootcamp.app and "show package contents."
Inside the bootcamp.app package (look for it in the folders there) there will be an .exe file that holds all of the Windows drivers. Copy that out to the desktop and then onto your bootcamp partition. You can likely do that booted into Windows, if you prefer, it doesn't matter how you do it, just get that .exe to the Windows side.
Boot into Windows and run the .exe file. It should extract the drivers (make a note of where) and then start an installer. You can exit out of the installer as all you need are WiFi drivers.
When you booted into Windows it may have tried to automatically install the WiFi drivers (Windows plug-n-play). Cancel out of that and open Device Manager.
Find the WiFi hardware, it could be under network or unknown devices. Right-Click and select Update Driver. If you are given the option to let Windows search for a driver or installing manually, cloose the latter and point it to the folder that step 6 created, that contains the WiFi driver.
Windows should install that driver and though it is not strictly necessary I would go ahead and reboot.

At this point if WiFi is still acting squirrely, remove the WiFi driver again and Google the WiFi device that Device Manager identified. It should lead you to the chipset manufacturer's website. Look for their drivers for your version of Windows and (following the directions outlined above) install those drivers instead of the ones that Apple provides with bootcamp.

Usually this procedure will fix Windows Bootcamp driver issues. If that does not do it there is likely something deeper going on either with Windows or the WiFi hardware in your Mac.


Missing "Prevent App Nap" button on app I have an app for which I want to prevent app nap.  However, it does not have a "Prevent App Nap" checkbox.  What can I do?

Missing app nap prevention:

Has app nap prevention:

You can disable App Nap for a particular Application by going to Terminal.app and typing:

defaults write <app domain name> NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

Being the <app domain name> the application's name and its company's, with the following format: com.companyname.appname


The history is shared between my iTerm2 terminal tabs: how can I switch that off? I am using iTerm2 (with zsh), and for some reason the history is shared between the different tabs and windows that are open. In most of the cases for me, this is annoying, since I have tabs per specific task, and if I have to redo some commands, I just want to be able to go back (up) in history to retrieve the last action for that window/tab only.

I have no idea how to disable this shared history, I read somewhere that you can enable shared history in zsh, but afaik I have done no such thing.

Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Executing the following should do the trick (use setopt to reenable them):

unsetopt inc_append_history
unsetopt share_history


Maximising VirtualBox guest machine window size I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS inside VirtualBox on a MacBook Air 7,2, but the guest screen window size is less than the host display size. I have seen a suggestion that this is possible by installing something called a Guest Additions inside the VB instance from the Devices menu - I tried to this but I get the following error.

Open Terminal and run the following to install VirtualBox Guest Additions:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-utils


Mail.app: How can I set a different default signature for each address? I have my Gmail account setup in Mail 6.2 (Mountain Lion). From that account I can send mail with one of five different addresses (4 other accounts forwarding onto Gmail). Is there a way I can set up a different default signature for each address, rather than a single default signature for all addresses?

I have 5 addresses and 5 signatures, I just can't link them together.

1) Open Settings (Cmd + ,), click signatures. You will see a list of email accounts on the right.

2) Click the one you want to set a default signature to. Click the + button below the signatures.

3) Add you signature.

If you have more than one signature, select your preferred default on from the drop down menu below the signatures.


HDMI to Thunderbolt Display? I was given an Apple Thunderbolt Display. I would like to connect my PC laptop to it. The only problem is that the display only supports Thunderbolt (figures).
After lots of research, I cannot find an HDMI to Thunderbolt adaptor. And unless I am mistaken, Thunderbolt 2 does NOT support DisplayPort. I do not care about taking advantage of Thunderbolt, meaning no webcam, speakers, and other peripherals.
Does anyone know of a solution?

Thunderbolt displays require thunderbolt to work. Add a PCI card or see if it can be upgraded to USB 4 which is the same as Thunderbolt 3. Then the 3 to 2 adapters will work to operate the display.
Sorry there is no other way to make these work. Once you get thunderbolt hardware, windows can work with Apple products.
Essentially, you have a thunderbolt dock with an embedded display and not a display that uses thunderbolt.


iOS App with Free trial and subscribe after that So we have an app under Health & Fitness category. The app is based on only one main functionality and no other sub functionalities. Now, the client would want to give users some free trial period like 7 days and if the user likes the app they can subscribe to continue using the app, if they choose not to subscribe they will not be able to use the app any further. So, I have done some research and came up with this result:
Option 1: Lite version/Paid version
Obviously I don't see any hope that this would work for us. Since we cannot split the main functionality.
Option 2: In-App Purchase
Related : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28396357/ios-trial-app-without-in-app-purchase-mechanism
From App Store Review Guidelines

11.8 Apps that use IAP to purchase access to built-in capabilities provided by iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, such as the camera or the
gyroscope, or Apple-branded peripherals, such as Apple Pencil or
Apple Keyboard, or Apple services, such as Apple Music access or
iCloud storage, will be rejected
11.9 Apps containing content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected, except for specific approved content (e.g.
films, television programs, music, books)

As far as I understood, it states that Apps under Magazine & Newspapers category alone utilize this exception. Is that correct?
And it states we should not block the entire activity of the app instead we should limit the usage, is that correct?
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!

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

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

Contact Apple

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

  App Review

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


Messages.app on macOS won't send/receive/display messages to/from one specific contact I have a strange situation that I can't puzzle out. There is one particular contact that I can't send or receive messages from in Messages.app on macOS 10.15.7 on a MacBook Pro. I can receive and send messages with this contact normally in Messages on my iPhone (although they don't appear on the MacBook Pro), and I'm having no issues with any other contacts in Messages on either the MacBook Pro or on the iPhone.
I've tried a few things to no avail:

Restart Messages. No effect.
Restart the computer. No effect.
Delete the phone number from the contact and tried to send to the plain number. No effect; it still acts like it's associated to the contact in Messages.

Not sure what else to do here, as most potential solutions that I come across are about what to do when Messages isn't sending to anyone, not just one particular contact.
How to fix?

This post solved the issue. On your iPhone:

Open Settings.
Scroll down to Messages.
Tap on Message Forwarding.
Ensure that all the devices are selected.

I just switched from my old MacBook Pro to a new one, and I didn't even think that I'd need to do something like this.  Still not sure why it affected just this one user, but after doing this, the problem was resolved.


Apple Watch shows only new message from whats app user but not the message itself I have an Apple watch (2016, V1) and a friend have an Apple watch (2016, v1).

On my watch it shows the message directly on the watch. As you can see here:
"Person sent you a message: Hey" (Answer Button)

On my friend's watch it shows only that there is a message. And he can click on answer. But on what should he answer?
"New message from person received" (Answer Button)

This settings are the same on our both devices.
We enabled whats app notifications in notification center and in the apple watch app.

Do anyone know what my friend must change to see the messages on his watch?

Check your WhatsApp settings (within WhatsApp app itself), and under Notifications, ensure to turn on the 'Show Preview' option (or equivalent, since I don't know how it is spelt in your language).


Compress multiple files in different folders Could someone help me with compressing thousands of files?
I have a lot of folders and a lot of files in these folders, i would like to know if it's possible to compress each file separately.
Foe example, folder 01 has folder 02 and 2 files in it, folder 02 has 2 files in it. I need to compress all files in all folders and leave these archives right where original files were.

Thank you!

To do this, you can open up Terminal from inside your computer's /Applications/Utilities folder. Then change to the root directory containing all the other directories you want to zip the files in by typing this command:

cd /path/to/folder01

(replace /path/to/folder01 with wherever the folder is on your hard drive - it will give you the right path if you simply drag the folder icon from your Finder, right into the Terminal window.)

then type this command:

find . -type f -execdir zip '{}.zip' '{}' \; -delete

This will compress all files (not directories) within the directory tree starting with the folder /folder01, leaving the .zip in the same directory as the original, and delete the originals.

If for some reason you don't want to delete the originals but rather leave them in place next to the .zip archives, you can omit the -delete at the end.

I would recommend backing up the entire directory tree you're running this on first before trying it, just in case you make a typo or anything goes wrong. This worked as described for me, but you mess around in Terminal on your computer at your own risk.


Macbook 5.2 screen goes dark Can I use and external monitor even though my Macbook 5.2 screen goes dark even though I can still see images when a flashlight. The entire system works and I did bring it to Mac in Portland, Maine and the entire display would have to be replaced for $500. So can I use and external if the screen goes dark. I would like to keep this running for another year.

You can use an external display, using a mini-DVI to 'whatever your monitor needs' connector... More info from https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4195107

  The model 5,2 has a Mini-DVI port not a Mini DisplayPort. Depends on what input plug you'll be using on your TV. VGA, DVI, Composite or HDMI. You'll need a Mini-DVI adapter and a cable from that to your TV. Here's the various types of Mini-DVI adapters on Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=mini-dvi&x=9&y=13
  (Composite is the red, white and yellow RCA plugs on your TV or red, white and S-Video plugs.)

  You'll also need audio cables to the TV using a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack to RCA sound plugs or a 3.5mm stereo input plug for audio. You attach it from the headphone jack of your MacBook to the appropriate audio input plugs on your TV.

  If you connect the MacBook using a Mini-DVI to HDMI adapter you will probably need to use external speakers or a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack to RCA sound plugs connected to a stereo system for audio if your TV doesn't have separate RCA input plugs or a 3.5mm stereo input plug for audio with the HDMI plug. The Mini-DVI to HDMI doesn't carry audio and there're no audio plugs on most TVs to work with HDMI since it's expecting audio with the HDMI. Check your TV manual though to see if it might have audio plugs that work with one of the HDMI ports.


App to toggle automatic brighness adjustment? Is there an app for the menu bar that would allow me to enable/disable the:
"automatically adjust brightness" setting?

I've searched and all I've found is an app that changes the actual brightness levels, but that's useless as it exists as a shortcut on the keyboard.

If I wanted to have a Menu bar app that could toggle the check box for Automatically adjust brightness on the Display tab of Displays in System Preferences, this is how I do it...

Using modified code from this answer for the wrapper and adding in the additional code to achieve the desired functionality and goal, here is the example AppleScript code:

-- # Acknowledgment: Some of the code used herein is modified code from the following answer:
-- # https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/293307/applescript-run-from-menu-bar/293392#293392

use AppleScript version "2.4"
use scripting additions
use framework "Foundation"
use framework "AppKit"

property aStatusItem : missing value

on run
    init() of me
end run

on init()
    set aList to {"Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness", "", "Quit"}
    set aStatusItem to current application's NSStatusBar's systemStatusBar()'s statusItemWithLength:(current application's NSVariableStatusItemLength)
    aStatusItem's setTitle:"☀"
    aStatusItem's setHighlightMode:true
    aStatusItem's setMenu:(createMenu(aList) of me)
end init

on createMenu(aList)
    set aMenu to current application's NSMenu's alloc()'s init()
    repeat with i in aList
        set j to contents of i
        if j is not equal to "" then
            set aMenuItem to (current application's NSMenuItem's alloc()'s initWithTitle:j action:"actionHandler:" keyEquivalent:"")
        else
            set aMenuItem to (current application's NSMenuItem's separatorItem())
        end if
        (aMenuItem's setTarget:me)
        (aMenu's addItem:aMenuItem)
    end repeat
    return aMenu
end createMenu

on actionHandler:sender
    set aTitle to title of sender as string
    if aTitle is not equal to "Quit" then
        my clickAutomaticallyAdjustBrightness()
    else
        current application's NSStatusBar's systemStatusBar()'s removeStatusItem:aStatusItem
        tell current application to quit
    end if
end actionHandler:

on clickAutomaticallyAdjustBrightness()
    if running of application "System Preferences" then
        quit application "System Preferences"
        delay 1
    end if
    tell application "System Preferences"
        reveal anchor "displaysDisplayTab" of pane id "com.apple.preference.displays"
        delay 1
        tell application "System Events"
            tell group 1 of tab group 1 of window 1 of application process "System Preferences"
                click checkbox "Automatically adjust brightness"
                set isChecked to (value of checkbox "Automatically adjust brightness") as boolean
            end tell
        end tell
        quit
    end tell
    if isChecked then
        display dialog "      Automatically adjust brightness is checked." buttons {"OK"} default button 1 ¬
            with title "Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness" giving up after 5
    else
        display dialog "   Automatically adjust brightness is not checked." buttons {"OK"} default button 1 ¬
            with title "Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness" giving up after 5
    end if
end clickAutomaticallyAdjustBrightness

Note that the value of the delay command(s) may need to be adjusted for your system, and or additional delay commands may or may not be needed. Adjust values of and or add/remove the delay commands as appropriate.

Copy and paste the example AppleScript code shown above into a new document in Script Editor, saving it as an application, e.g. Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness and check the [√] Stay open after run handler check box while saving it.

Then in Terminal, run the following command to hide the Dock Tile on the Dock for the e.g. Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness application:

defaults write '/Applications/Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness.app/Contents/Info.plist' LSUIElement -bool yes

Now add the e.g. Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness application to:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility

While checking its check box.

Now the e.g. Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness application is ready to run and all that will appear is a yellow icon of the sun on the Menu bar and no Dock Tile on the Dock.

The e.g. Toggle - Automatically Adjust Brightness application will toggle checking and unchecking the check box for Automatically adjust brightness on the Display tab of Displays in System Preferences and display a dialog box afterwards.

The display dialog commands could be replaced with display notification commands if you prefer that instead.

Also note that this method does not work with all version of OS X/macOS however it should work with at least 10.11 and newer.

Note: The example AppleScript code is just that and does not employ any error handling and is meant only to show one of many ways to accomplish a task. The onus is always upon the User to add/use appropriate error handling as needed/wanted.


Applescript to import mail with attachments into devonthink that would expand archived files My workflow is to tag and put all incoming docs from Mail.app into Devonthink. I do this with Applescript. Script is working fine for me with one exception - I do not know how to make it expand .zip and .rar files in the attachments before moving them to Devonthink. Probably would require Unarchiver or some other scriptable archive utility. I would appreciate your suggestions. My script is below.

property pNoSubjectString : "(no subject)"

tell application "Mail"
    try
        tell application id "com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2"
            if not (exists «class DTcu») then error "No database is in use."
        end tell
        set theSelection to the selection
        set theFolder to (POSIX path of (path to temporary items))
        if the length of theSelection is less than 1 then error "One or more messages must be selected."
        repeat with theMessage in theSelection
            my importMessage(theMessage, theFolder)
        end repeat
    on error error_message number error_number
        if error_number is not -128 then display alert "Mail" message error_message as warning
    end try
end tell

on importMessage(theMessage, theFolder)
    tell application "Mail"
        try
            tell theMessage
                set {theDateReceived, theDateSent, theSender, theSubject, theSource, theReadFlag} to {the date received, the date sent, the sender, subject, the source, the read status}
                tell application "MailTagsHelper"
                    tell theMessage
                        set theTags to the keywords
                    end tell
                end tell
            end tell
            if theSubject is equal to "" then set theSubject to pNoSubjectString
            set theAttachmentCount to count of mail attachments of theMessage
            tell application id "com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2"
                set theGroup to «class DTig»
                if theAttachmentCount is greater than 0 then set theGroup to «event DTpacd08» {name:theSubject, «class DTty»:«constant DtypDTgr»} given «class DTin»:theGroup
                set theRecord to «event DTpacd08» {name:theSubject & ".eml", «class DTty»:«constant Dtyp****», «class DTcr»:theDateSent, «class DTmo»:theDateReceived, URL:theSender, «class conT»:(theSource as string), «class tags»:theTags} given «class DTin»:theGroup
                set «class DTur» of theRecord to (not theReadFlag)
            end tell
            repeat with theAttachment in mail attachments of theMessage
                set theFile to theFolder & (name of theAttachment)
                tell theAttachment to save in theFile
                tell application id "com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2"
                    set theAttachmentRecord to «event DTpacd01» theFile given «class DTto»:theGroup
                    set «class DTur» of theAttachmentRecord to (not theReadFlag)
                    set URL of theAttachmentRecord to theSender
                    set «class tags» of theAttachmentRecord to theTags
                end tell
            end repeat
        on error error_message number error_number
            if error_number is not -128 then display alert "Mail" message error_message as warning
        end try
    end tell
end importMessage

I can see two options:

First is to save the file and simply use the open command like is it shown at the link below. I tried it and it works well enough.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13651533/create-an-applescript-or-shell-script-to-unzip-and-rename-files

Alternatively, you can use a do shell script command to use the unzip command line tool to do the same thing like shown here,

https://discussions.apple.com/message/9062795#9062795

But extracting the archive contents is the easy part. Does the archive have a structure? Will it always be the same? Here is where you may run into trouble.

Hope this helps.


Split Windows on Textmate Textmate has been around for a while, I bought it in 2006. Is it possible to split windows horizontally and or vertically on Textmate nowadays? Probably someone out there made a kind of Plugin for this :-/ Like C-x 2 when I'm on GNU Emacs to split horizontally or C-x 3 to split vertically and have flexible control on each windows' width or :split on ViM.

As far as I know this feature is still not possible. Mind you many people have discussed this and it is a very south-out feature http://wiki.macromates.com/Suggestions/GUI.


Apple Aperture - Batch edit I'm just editing a time lapse video I shot and have to change the exposure on about 1000 files. Is there a was in Apple Aperture to batch edit files?

The easiest way to do it is make your edits to one photo, then save the adjustments (I think it's called save as preset in the menu), then select all your photos and apply your saved adjustments.


Where can I find dashboard widgets on OS Catalina? Here's what I'm talking about:

I couldn't find it anymore, I used to set it as a hot corner in System Preferences > Mission Control, I tried to search the keyword "Dashboard" in System Preferences but ended with no luck. Did Apple remove Dashboard on OS Catalina? If not, where can I find it? Thanks a lot!

Edit:
Seems like dashboard is removed from OS Catalina (thanks to the comment linking to other similar questions!), Is there any way to put dashboard widgets on desktop like it's shown in this video?

UPDATE:

Is there a way to get the Converter Tool somehow? (the widget that can convert currency, length, pressure, weight all in one!) Recommendation of similar Apps is welcomed too!

Dashboard nor Widgets are available in macOS 10.15 Catalina. Since Widgets are not available I don't think the question of how to place them in the video is possible.


How do I format an encrypted Integral Secure Key? I just bought an Integral Secure Key from the Apple store but am fed up with having to use its own software just to transfer files to it as it does not appear as a normal USB drive in Finder.

How can I re-format the drive so as to remove the encryption and just have a normal USB drive? Is it as simple as using disk utility?

Also how could I in the future use the encryption facilities again? Is it enough just to keep the software which is provided on the USB key?

i have the same Integral Secure Key and i can transfer all data without any kind of encryption and store it; for all more private data i use the encryption function. so there is no need to re-format the usb to store data 'more easily"


Messages app gives an upgrade notice but never finishes When  I launch the messages app on my iMac I get a notice that the Messages database is being upgraded. The notice, shown below, tells me to wait while it finishes or relaunch later. This just started recently and has been going on for 2 days now. Any idea how to check my messages? I'm running High Sierra and have been for a while now so this doesn't appear tied to the system upgrade. I've tried quitting and returning several times and also tried just leaving notice up. Neither attempt worked.

I apparently deleted my messages using Onyx. Once I restarted my machine, messages works but fine but all my previous messages are gone.


Single AD user cannot login to iMac, but others can So, I thought this was the same issue I'd seen before with the old Home folder name conflicting, but it is not. The issue is the the iMac "shakes" and refuses her password at login, but I am 100% certain it is correct AND she can login to her PC without issue (and her AD account is not locked out from password attempts).
The iMac is running OS X El Capitan, 10.11.6. Windows DC is on Server 2008 (SBS 2008 to be exact).

The BIND from the Mac to our Active Directory (Windows) Domain seems fine since I can login as my AD user, but the owner of the Mac cannot login as herself, presumably because of something left over...? She is using a local account for now, but her Mapped Drives drop overnight, so we need to get her back to her AD account. So far I have tried:

Unbind/rebind the Mac to the domain
Checked to ensure all AD users can login to the Mac in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Options
Renamed her old local account AND the home folder and changed path
Disable "Force local home directory on startup disk" under Directory Utility > User Experience
Disable "Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location" (also under Directory Utility > User Experience)

I can't find anything in the Keychain, but I don't know where else to look. What could be the issue here? Thank you.

could there be a local user with the same name?  not sure this should cause a stoppage since you checked the home folder.

if you use something like

dscacheutil -q user

do you see a local account with that user name?


I can't create a bootable OSX Mavericks Install USB Drive I've downloaded Mavericks from the App Store, repartitioned a 32GB USB key, and followed the instructions. Specifically, I ran:

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app

Here's the output. As you can see, it fails with an error:

Ready to start.
To continue we need to erase the disk at /Volumes/Untitled.
If you wish to continue type (Y) then press return: Y
Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%...100%...
Copying installer files to disk...
Copy complete.
Making disk bootable...
Couldn't mount dmg /Volumes/Install OS X Mavericks/Install OS X Mavericks.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg (error code 112)Mount of outer dmg failed.
Done.

Help?

It turns out that the Installer Image did not download correctly. To address this I deleted "Install OSX Mavericks" from the Applications folder and then re-downloaded it from the App Store.


Spotlight for currency conversion I know that Calculator app has ability to convert currencies but is it possible to get this shortcut in Spotlight like that:

currency 100 USD to GBP

Well, there is a way, actually. Invoke Spotlight, then type in your text as above. Then use the arrow key to move to near the bottom of the menu, and choose Search Web For... This will do a Google search for your conversion, and you'll get a figure and a graph.


Install modern Linux as only OS on 2006-era 32-bit EFI Intel iMac with no CD Drive, no Admin Password, no Mac Install Disk I have been given a 2006-era 32-bit EFI Intel iMac. I would like to install some modern Linux as the only OS on it. I know there are several guides on the subject, but I have several limitations preventing me from using most of them, outlined below.

The age of the iMac.
Many guides are for modern iMacs or MacBooks, which may behave differently, and since I don't use Apple computers, I don't know what applies and what doesn't).
No CD Drive and no OS X install disk.
Self-explanatory: the CD/DVD combo whatever doesn't function properly, and I do not possess any Apple installation software.
No Administrator Password.
The person who gave it to me does not have it. This prevents, among other things, installing rEFInd.
I do not run, nor am I interested in running, Ubuntu.
Any solution which requires me to do something with quasi-proprietary Ubuntu software does me no good either.

I suppose my question is does anyone know of a method or a guide that will help me in this particular situation? I have a few USB sticks lying around with Linux installers on them, but none of them work on this Mac. If I insert them and reboot it just hangs at a white screen. Pressing and holding ⌥ alt/option does nothing.

Standard pc linux install media will not work because it assumes bios. You need EFI install media (probably 32 bit even on 64 bit computers) and finding 32 bit EFI install media is difficult.

I think your machine may be a candidate for netbooting. The way to check is to hold down "n" during startup. If you get a globe (solid, blinking, or spinning) this will work. If not you will have to take it apart, remove the hard drive, put the hard drive in another computer, install linux, and put it back, but blessing the image becomes even more difficult.


Can I mount the root (system) filesystem as writable in Big Sur? After updating to big sur, I can no longer mount the root as writable (even with SIP disabled):
sudo mount -uw /
mount_apfs: volume could not be mounted: Permission denied
mount: / failed with 66

How can I fix this?

DISCLAIMER: have a good backup and plan to erase and reinstall your Mac from the internet before trying this procedure. A mistake can prevent your system from starting without assistance.

Disable FileVault
Reboot into recovery mode and run:
csrutil authenticated-root disable

Reboot back into MacOS
Find your root mount's device - run mount and chop off the last s, e.g. if your root is /dev/disk1s2s3, you'll mount /dev/disk1s2
Create a new directory, for example ~/mount
mkdir -p -m777 ~/mount

Run sudo mount -o nobrowse -t apfs DISK_PATH MOUNT_PATH, using the values from above
sudo mount -o nobrowse -t apfs /dev/disk1s2 ~/mount

Modify the files under the mounted directory
Run sudo bless --folder MOUNT_PATH/System/Library/CoreServices --bootefi --create-snapshot
Reboot your system, and the changes will take place


Very high MacBook Battery consumption on Sleep I got an alleged trouble on my late 2008 Unibody MacBook.
I've never worried about this trouble because I thought that was a normal thing but I'm start thinking that it could be a trouble trouble.

My MacBook, on stop status, consumes around 30/35% of battery a day, is it normal??

I changed battery around 2 years ago and now it has 250 cycles and health is 93%.
Since I remember it has got this trouble and a format doesn't change things.

Is it normal or could it be a trouble?

Your option to get free support that is best would be to take it to the Genius Bar where they have some fairly fancy battery diagnostics. Any Apple Authorized Service center has access to similar tools from Apple.

As a consumer, you could check the System Information (System Profiler on older OS) and review Power details under Hardware:

  Charge Information:
    Charge Remaining (mAh): 6638
    Fully Charged:  Yes
    Charging:   No
    Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 6693
  Health Information:
    Cycle Count:    54
    Condition:  Normal

The above details are from a new MacBook Pro with an internal battery. It's in great shape. The below details are from a 14 month old MacBook Air where the battery is not going to make it to it's design life. I'll have to pay for the replacement since at the 1 year point when the warranty was in force, it was still "within spec"

  Charge Information:
    Charge Remaining (mAh): 1957
    Fully Charged:  No
    Charging:   No
    Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 4357
  Health Information:
    Cycle Count:    119
    Condition:  Normal

You might be able to tell if it's just a battery by inspecting your condition, cycle count and FCC - but these data are much more valuable when you have it logged every month of the Mac's life or can compare your values to thousands of other data points (which is presumably part of what Apple does in its diagnostics).


Cannot log into iCloud after upgrade to macOS Mojave After upgrading to macOS Mojave (10.14) I face this issue: System Preferences / iCloud reports "Update Apple ID Settings: Some account services will not be available until you sign in again". When I press "Continue", confirm again with "Continue", and supply my Apple ID password, there is some kind of processing going on for a few seconds, but then the system returns to the same point and state.

So in effect I am locked out of iCloud (e.g. cannot see calendar entries previously created there) and have supplied my password in vain.

Is this a known issue and how can it be overcome? I remember that the macOS upgrade process got permanently stuck (> 1 hour; also very annoying!) very late on (after the first login prompt and presumably also were it tried to set up iCloud) and I had to reboot the machine. Things seemed normal thereafter, but now this issue is showing up, and it may well be related.

UPDATE I've meanwhile reinstalled macOS Mojave (with Command + R) but the situation is unchanged.

UPDATE I'm by now pretty certain that the root cause must be a corrupted state that is kept by iCloud locally as persistent data that resides local to a macOS user account. Where does iCloud store such information, i.e. removing what files resets the iCloud client in macOS to a "clean" state?

You're absolutely right, this is a very common occurrence right now. It is a known issue, to put it mildly. Its not entirely tied to Mojave per se, nor do I think your theory of "the root cause must be a corrupted state that is kept by iCloud locally as persistent data that resides local to a macOS user account", is it exactly (though it is not outside the realm of possibility). But far more likely is that you're experiencing the  fallout of several recent significant changes affecting iCloud authentication across the board, due to several serious security vulnerabilities discovered in the past few months. What's happening is that Apple's tring to implement a "middle ground" approach in not simply breaking iCloud syncing across the board all at once for everyone, so some processes will continue to accept the unpatched authentication tokens, while others require immediate reauthentication. Its a mess. But: its not quite as terrible as it seems (in my experience).

Having just conquered this very thing (again) on one of my my own machine's a couple of hours ago (and having done so several times in the last couple of months), I can tell you there's unfortunately not a straightforward "1. 2. 3." solution I can give you, but your best bet is to stick with working with the iCloud Preference Pane and related rather than doing a "deep dive" just yet.

Here's what I'd recommend:

First: make sure you have an up local backup (Time Machine or the like).

Then, what you'll want to do is basically attempt to fully sign out of all the places where you authenticate with your Apple ID: App Store, iTunes, Photos, etc., and then the iCloud prefpane. Try unchecking as many synced item's as possible first, particularly Find My Mac and Keychain. These may take a minute or two to actually disengage and "uncheck", but if it takes longer than that, just force quit System Preferences and try again. Also, try clicking the "Account Details" and "Manage" buttons, the same thing will likely happen, it'll freeze up for a bit, and then it will either actually bring those panes up, or hang. Again, just keep going back, and try to get to the point where you're fully signed out, or, if you get the "Update Apple ID Settings: Some account services" box again and it doesn't hang, you'll be prompted several times, alternating between asking for your iCloud password and your local admin password. This is a good thing, it means its finally updating the local Keychain stores across the board.

Eventually (in my experience, after about 20 minutes of this, maybe 10 force quits), you should either be fully logged out of iCloud, or the "Update Apple ID Settings" thing will finally work. Once you're at that point, you should be able to re-sign in, and these issues should go  away.

I know that's, um, not the most precise solution, but it has worked for me on several machines. Let me know if it doesn't work for you. But trust me, its a lot less messier than fully ripping out the iCloud keychain and authentication tokens; (at that point, you may as well just sign up for a new Apple ID).


sudo password incorrect all of a sudden sudo ls

All of a sudden it says password incorrect. I am 100% sure of my password. I don't know what happened. Hacked ?

Have you verified your password is correct by authenticating through the GUI? An easy way is to go to System Preferences > Accounts and click the lock icon. Also, verify that your user account has not lost administrative privileges (you can do this from the same preference pane). If you've lost administrative privileges the issue may be related to something else.


Does AppleScript's do shell script log in history? I frequently use the do shell script command in AppleScript (AS) to return some information, including encrypted text.

One such example is:

set encrypted to (do shell script "echo 'my secret text' | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -a -pass pass:Pass123")

If run in Terminal, this command logs in the history and can be viewed by typing: history, then pressing the Return key.

Problem:
The above example includes the plain text password as a parameter, and it shows in the history (when run in Terminal), from where it can easily be copied and used to reverse the encrypted string, no knowledge required.

AppleScript's log do shell script "history" command returns no data. Likewise, running the history command in the terminal - after the example encryption was run through AS, it also does not display the AS terminal command in this history. All in all, it leads me to believe that the AS command was obviously executed through a different shell. Knowing that the shell differs for every user (ie. my account cannot see the terminal history of another account), the question follows.

Question:
Does that mean there is no record of the AS command in any of the histories and logs kept by macOS at any time? Or is it burried somewhere accessible where it can be read, interpreted and hence the encryption reversed?

Though perhaps thought-provoking and open to opinion, I think it is within the answerable realm of questions. I am interested in the answer from a security point-of-view and hope to get a clearer picture of if / how / where terminal logs AS commands - like Terminal does with the history.
Thanks everyone.

If you run the following do shell script command in Script Editor:

do shell script "set"

Shown farther below is what's returned.

As one can see, there are no history related shell variables set and as such, to make a longer story short, there is no command history being saved.

If you want to read further, have a look at the HISTORY section in the bash manual page,

Also may be of interest, other command history Shell Variables e.g., HISTCONTROL, HISTFILE HISTFILESIZE, HISTIGNORE, HISTSIZE, HISTIGNORE, HISTSIZE and HISTTIMEFORMAT.

Also of note, when a Run Shell Script action in an Automator workflow is run, the same applies there as well, for the same reason as with the do shell script command in Script Editor, no history related shell variables are set.

Output of the set command from an AppleScript do shell script command:

Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render=/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.HPRIi1Tsop/Render
BASH=/bin/sh
BASH_ARGC=()
BASH_ARGV=()
BASH_EXECUTION_STRING=set
BASH_LINENO=()
BASH_SOURCE=()
BASH_VERSINFO=([0]=\"3\" [1]=\"2\" [2]=\"57\" [3]=\"1\" [4]=\"release\" [5]=\"x86_64-apple-darwin17\")
BASH_VERSION='3.2.57(1)-release'
DIRSTACK=()
EUID=501
GROUPS=()
HOME=/Users/me
HOSTNAME=mes-Mac.local
HOSTTYPE=x86_64
IFS='
'
LOGNAME=me
MACHTYPE=x86_64-apple-darwin17
OPTERR=1
OPTIND=1
OSTYPE=darwin17
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
POSIXLY_CORRECT=y
PPID=4330
PS4='+ '
PWD=/
SHELL=/bin/bash
SHELLOPTS=braceexpand:hashall:interactive-comments:posix
SHLVL=1
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.WQb3vmbYE7/Listeners
TERM=dumb
TMPDIR=/var/folders/w0/lht0h70x06b8hdb5lx474pkc0000gn/T/
UID=501
USER=me
XPC_FLAGS=0x0
XPC_SERVICE_NAME=0
_=sh
__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x1F5:0x0:0x0


How can I find and edit my external hard-drive's .fseventsd folder? While changing my 'file directory' preferences on Vuze, I accidentally created a folder in the .fseventsd-folder on my Seagate external hard-drive.

I can't even find the .fseventsd-folder using search Spotlight, in fact the only way I can see this folder is when I go back to the file directory preferences from Vuze and I can't edit anything from there.

Is this going to damage anything, delete my data or anything weird like that?
Is there any way of deleting this folder (the accidentally created folder not the .fseventsd-folder)?

Files and folders starting with a '.' are invisible in Finder by default. You have to activate this option in order to view/delete them.

Open Terminal and typ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true, after that, restart your Finder.
To hide those files again, open Terminal and type defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false and restart Finder again.

But remember, they are hidden for a reason, so don't mess around with this kind of folders unless you are absolutely certain of your actions...


Gmail on iPad not working ..error message I'm seeing this problem all over the web and I'm asking the same thing. I am not very computer savvy and would appreciate an answer that is easy to understand.

When I try to access my Gmail account on my iPad by clicking on the mail icon that came with the device (meaning: I'm not using my browser to access my mail and not using any downloaded apps) I get this message:

The mail server "imap.gmail.com" is not responding. Verify that you have entered the correct account info in Mail settings.

And I have. And do. Everything is correct.
This started to be a problem before the new ios6 update.  And I can access my gmail account on my iPhone just fine.  This problem is just on my iPad 2.

Also. I do have another gmail account set up on my iPad and that email works fine. They both have been on my iPad for ever and both been fine until a few weeks ago. Just one account is messed up!  Why? And why hasn't this been fixed?

Try a couple things:

Delete the problem gmail account from your iPad, and then set it up again.  See if email works.
If #1 doesn't work, then it could be possible you have too many devices accessing that email account at the same time (ie., iMac/notebooks/etc with the Mail app left open).  Try closing the mail app on your other devices and see if that works.  I believe gmail has a limit of 10 devices that can access the same email account at a given time.  A mail app left open counts as one.
Lastly, make sure you've inputted the correct password.  You might want to change your password in gmail.com and then re-enter it in your iPad.

Hope this helps!


Restore permissions on /usr? Through a series of unfortunate events I managed to run:

sudo chown -R `whoami`:admin /usr

on my 10.10.5 machine. This has left it in an awkward state. I can no longer sudo commands as sudo is no longer owned by root on the machine.

I tried booting in to single user mode and chown'ing /usr back to root:wheel but /usr is a read-only file system in single user mode.

Apart from a total reinstall of OS X on the machine, is there anything else I can do to get the permissions on /usr back to root:wheel?

Managed to make / writeable by running

mount -uw /

in single-user mode and then I was able to repair the permissions with:

chown -R root:wheel /usr


iOS emails stuck in All Inboxes In the iOS Mail app, there are 4 emails in the "All Inboxes" section. Those 4 emails are NOT in the actual inbox on Gmail.

I thought, oh well I don't mind deleting them entirely since they're just newsletters. I deleted them directly on gmail, but they still appeared in iOS. So I tried deleting them via iOS and ... they keep coming back!

Even stranger, the 4 emails ONLY appear in "All Inboxes", they don't appear in any of the sub-account inboxes.

So, I disabled "Mail" in my gmail account. They're still here!
I no longer have a "gmail" sub-account, but those 4 emails are still in All Inboxes. I tried to quit the app a few times, restart the phone. Still here...

When I tap on one of those messages, I get a black screen (dark mode), no errors.

It seems there was an inconsistent database attached to the account.

Removing the entire account from “Password & Accounts” removed the ghost emails.


unecm trouble mac os x 10.6.8 I am having trouble decoding a .ecm file on my computer.  This is my first Mac so I'm new to the different operating systems.  I'm on a MacBook Pro, Snow Leopard I believe, I know I haven't upgraded to Lion.  10.6.8 seems to be the current version.  I have the cmdpack downloaded from Neill Corlett, just not sure how to use it really.  Any help you can give would be much appreciated.  Thanks.

The cmdpack you downloaded are command line tools. If you have a recent mac, you should have downloaded the Mac OS X (64-bit, x86_64) version.

To use these tools, you'll need to venture into the UNIX command line. This is analogous to the command prompt of Windows, and can be accessed using the Terminal application in /Applications/Utilities.

Once you've downloaded the cmdpack.gz file, uncompress it to a directory by double-clicking it. For ease of explanation, then drop the .ecm file you want to work with into that directory. Open Terminal (either find it in Utilities or Spotlight search for it) and then navigate to the cmdpack directory (the easiest way to do this is to type cd followed by a space, and then drag the directory to your terminal window--the path of the folder will be inserted--then hit return).

When you're in the appropriate working directory, you can type ls to list its contents. The executable you want to run is most likely unecm. The easiest way to run an executable in your current working directory is by prefixing it with ./. If you type ./unecm, the command will run and show you usage information. If you already dropped your .ecm file into this directory, unencoding it should be as simple as ./unecm myecmfile.ecm

To recap:

Download the Mac OS X (64-bit, x86_64) command-line pack and uncompress/ungzip it.
Open Terminal and navigate to the uncompressed directory (for me this command was cd /Users/nreilingh/Downloads/cmdpack-1.02-macosx-x86_64)
Run unecm as necessary with ./unecm after cding to the ungzipped directory.


Apple ID says it doesn't recognize your finger in the morning Sometimes I would wake up and try to unlock my phone and be told that it doesn't recognize my fingerprint and that I HAVE to put my passcode to enable touch id but I thought that only happened when you put your finger on the home button too much and you don't have that finger registered or something. For me as soon as I wake up it says it doesn't recognize me like I already tried it before when I know I didn't and nobody else did either. Does anybody know what's going on?

See this article on Touch ID. It says:

  If your passcode hasn't been used to unlock in six days, and Touch ID
  hasn't been used to unlock in six hours, you'll need to enter your
  passcode or password to re-enable it.

So you should expect to re-enter your password around once a week. It's a good idea, because otherwise you might not use your password for months and forget it.


Stand alone audio spectrum analyzer I'm looking for a stand alone audio spectrum analyzer for OS X. The main requirement is that it can analyze the audio out (the current audio from any app) rather than microphone or line in.

I'm a developer (although not a obj-c, c, c++ one) so if there are no apps that can do this a library could work too.

thanks!

You can use SoundFlower to redirect audio out from any application to any other application. This removes the need to find an application that can 'snoop' the audio stream of any other application. Instead, you just route audio out from App A to SoundFlower, and then audio from from App B from SoundFlower and the two are connected.

With SoundFlower installed you could route audio from an app in to Logic and use it's spectrum analyzer tool.

If Logic is too expensive for you, you can look at combining something like Audacity (free) with Voxengo's SPAN which is a free, FFT-type spectrum analysis VST.

I'm most familiar with the plugin + DAW route because that's what I know. But for stand-alone spectrum analyzer offerings you can check out some of these:

AudioXplorer - free, but no longer activily developed. Looks reasonably feature rich though and supports real-time analysis of streams.
SignalScope Pro - very feature rich, nice UI but this is paid software. You can get it from the App Store for $200.

Hit Squad has a list of plugins and standalones for signal analysis on the Mac. Those two stood out when I scanned through it for non-plugin options.


Mac Mini Server starts to unreponsive desktop I changed some of my file shareing options on my Mac mini (El Capitan) server and now it does not start.   It does shows desktop but i have no control  no menu bar (not even hidden) no dock, no spotlight ability... basically dead.   The option that I did was to remove the Home directory form the file sharing list.   I suspect that it i got it to remove all access to home folder for all users!    Any idea on how to fix this.

It is normally running without screen and mouse and keyboard so i remote desktop into it.   Remote desktopping into it shows the unresponsive desktop, but I can still use finder on other machines to access files on it.   My plan is to connect keyboard, mouse and screen to it and try to log in in single user or safe mode and try to fix permissions from there.    Any other clever suggestions?

Let us assume you've broken all the users, to fix that, connect a keyboard and display and hold S to start into single-user mode and remove the set up file.  Making a new user is non-destructive and it gets you a usable shall immediately with superior tools available to diagnose and fix the issue.

My MBP will not startup properly!

When you type halt, you can then start up the Mac and make a new local admin user with correct permissions and a working home folder. At that point you can evaluate whether to:

restore from a backup
make a backup
fix whatever was broken or try to narrow down what broke
wipe and start over

If you're someone who's going to make a go of fixing things in single-user mode, I would enable SSH login which gives you a bunch better error message when user home folder Sprague and also debility to do remote maintenance  in many cases where screen sharing brakes.


App Recommendation for automatically stitching screenshots together on iOS As per this marvellous screenshot on another question, is there an App available (preferably an iOS app, but a Mac OS X one might do) that will take a series of screenshots that are produced by taking snaps of various sections of a scrolling App or Webpage display, and automatically create a conjoined single image file.  The example below was done in Photoshop, but the effect is what I would like to achieve.

AutoStich Panorama
...has been my choice for the iPhone. You still need to take the pictures manually fist. You can choose all the pictures which you want to stich from your camera roll.

up to 18 megapixels are supported for stitched panoramas
camera images in any order or arrangement (vertical, horizontal, mixed).
option to stich using high res images for better result


Deleting symbolic link - operation not permitted I stupidly used my terminal to create a symbolic link typing this:

sudo ln -s /bin/tcsh tcsh

And now I need to delete it. I tried

sudo rm tcsh

but when I authenticate it tells me:

override rwxr-xr-x root/wheel restricted,compressed for tcsh?

and even if I type y and press enter it tells me:

rm: tcsh: Operation not permitted.

Is there anything I can do to fix this?

It seems you are either trying to remove your original file /bin/tcsh or another tcsh copied to a different path. You can't link /bin/tcsh to tcsh if you are in the /bin folder because that's forbidden.

A soft link of tcsh usually isn't protected by SIP and you have to search for it and delete it. If you somehow managed to copy tcsh to another path, which then prevents a software you are using from working, you may have to delete it there.

To remove a protected tcsh copy, boot to Recovery Mode, disable SIP, reboot to your main volume and remove the link.

Reboot your Mac into Recovery Mode by restarting your computer and holding down Command+R until the Apple logo appears on your screen.
Click Utilities > Terminal.
In the Terminal window, type in csrutil disable and press Enter.
Restart your Mac.
Remove the tcsh copy
Reboot your Mac into Recovery Mode
Click Utilities > Terminal.
In the Terminal window, type in csrutil enable and press Enter.
Restart your Mac.

Link: How do I disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) AKA “rootless” on OS X 10.11, El Capitan? This is also valid for macOS Sierra!


Lion Fullscreen Desktop Switching Quirk I make Java programs, many of which require input from the command line before they actually open a window. When I'm using the Terminal in fullscreen mode and I run java Program, it jumps over to an open desktop and then does nothing, causing me to have to switch back to the Terminal to do the stuff it's asking and then switch over. I know it's a really simple fix of not using fullscreen but is there any way to let the focus stay on the command line until the program is ready to open the window?

I'd recommend not allocating any GUI elements until after the command line input is finished.

If you run your app from a non-fullscreen Terminal, you'll probably notice that the app launches in the Dock (even if no windows appear) before you finish entering your command line stuff. This is probably what's causing the Space-switch.


File sharing between Mavericks and non-Macs I am using a MacBook running Mavericks and my brother is on a Linux box; and we often need to exchange files between each other. Both the laptops are Wi-Fi enabled and I also understand that Mac does allow file sharing over Wi-Fi. While I do know that Airdrop works only for Apple devices, I am sure there must be some way to share files with non-Apple devices using the built-in WiFi capabilities. Any suggestions around how? I have tried checking the file sharing option in the Preferences >> Sharing module but it didn't help. Is it possible to share files with a Linux user using SMB or AFP? I understand FTP is an option but connecting using FTP involves a lot of Terminal steps each time, i.e., activating FTP, sharing password with the user, connecting, and then closing FTP. Is there any simpler method?

Here are the steps I followed:

First of all I enabled guest sharing on my Mac:

Then I activated file sharing on my Mac and designated my Public folder as the share point (default).

Then I tried the following address on my Ubuntu's Nautilus:

smb://172.17.8.212/Public

It then asked for user name, domain, and password and I entered guest for all three, as advised by @deeviate. And this gave the following error:

P. S.: I am NOT interested in installing any third-party tool for this job. Mac gives SMB as a part of the OS and thats what I want to use. There might be tools out there that work better than SMB, doesn't matter. I still should be able to use SMB if my OS provides it natively!

Thought I threw my two cents in.

Being both a Mac and Linux user - I find that once a SAMBA share is created on a Linux machine (browseable option on Linux samba turned on with or without a login - you can "connect as" from the Mac to the Linux machine), my Mac would pick it up and list in on Finder's left pane. Here's a quick SAMBA setup for the Linux machine.

Its pretty simple to setup a public share folder (or even a private one) on the Mac. Here's one guide


How do I add the LaunchPad Icon to the Dock after upgrading fom Snow Leopard to Mavericks? I have upgraded a Snow Leopard system to Mavericks. I expected to see the LaunchPad icon (spaceship icon used to launch installed apps) on the Dock, but it is not there.

How do I add that icon? I have it on a Lion system and I also see screenshots of Mavericks that have it so I don't think it's gone.

The Launchpad.app is located in your /Application Folder.

You can either

navigate with the Finder to your /Application Folder and drag it to your dock
search Launchpad.app in Spotlight and CMD+Click the App. Your Finder will open and you can drag the App to your dock


I want my Mac Mini power button to shut down the computer I’ve recently started using my Mac Mini as a media server. I really don’t want it to be powered on all the time though. I’ve removed the password prompt and have told Plex to automatically open on startup which works great, but I now need a way to shut down the computer when I’m done using it.

The box sits on a shelf in my room and isn’t connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and I’d like it to stay this way. From what I can tell the only actions the power button can take are putting the Mac to sleep, displaying the shutdown dialog, and forcing power off.

Is there any way to change my settings such that a simple press of the power button initiates a full system shutdown?

I'm not aware of a way to make the power button tell your Mac mini to perform a normal shutdown, however one solution that comes to mind (assuming you have an iOS device) is to shut your Mac mini down from your iPhone or iPad using an app like iShutdown.

There is a small application that you install on your Mac.

And then you have the app on your phone that has a list of computers you can shutdown and a big virtual power button for each.


Using a dyn.com dynamic host name with an AirPort device I have an AirPort Extreme base station with firmware 7.6.1 and would like to access it remotely using a dynamic hostname registered with dyn.com (e.g. example.dyndns.org).

An explanation is given by dyn.com on how to do this using zone updates and how to configure an AirPort device. But from reading the explanation I'm not sure whether this is only possible for domain names (like example.com) that use dyn.com's name servers or also for dynamic hostnames.

Is it possible to use the AirPort device's DNS update capability to update a dynamic hostname registered with dyn.com and is it also possible to advertise service over Bonjour over this dynamic hostname?

Quoting from the page referenced in the question:

  Note on DynDNS Free and DynDNS Pro: We currently do not support Wide Area Bonjour on our DynDNS Free and Pro services. You must use Dyn Standard DNS with your own domain name for this to work properly.

So it won't work with dynamic dns.com addresses.


iOS 5 reminders for Mac I like iOS5 reminders app and use it on my iPod touch , however I am looking for an app for OSX lion which provide similar functionality for macOSX in an app which can sync with reminders app for iOS5.

The reminders on your iOS 5 device get synced automatically thorugh iCloud with the reminders in iCal.


How does Apple's "find -regex" work? I'm trying to create a -regex expression for find on macOS.

find /Users/gerben/Library -regex '.*\(cisco\).*' -print 2>/dev/null

works, and so does

find /Users/gerben/Library -regex '.*\(citrix\).*' -print 2>/dev/null

in the sense that they both find files. Now I try

find /Users/gerben/Library -regex '.*\(cisco|citrix\).*' -print 2>/dev/null

and nothing is found. Nor does

find /Users/gerben/Library -regex '.*\(cisco\|citrix\).*' -print 2>/dev/null

nor any other variation with {} escapes and what not that I have tried. What am I doing wrong?

You can use -E flag, from man:

  -E      Interpret regular expressions followed by -regex and -iregex primaries as extended (modern) regular expressions rather than basic regular expressions (BRE's).  The
               re_format(7) manual page fully describes both formats.

In this case your find command will look like:

find -E ~/Library -regex '.*(citrix|cisco).*' -print 2>/dev/null


Activate Application Window on clicking dock icon I would simply like to activate Application Window when clicking on the dock icon.
Currently you must hold the icon to activate the functionality I would it to automatically occur just like Ubuntu's when making the 2nd click.

Please refer me to a different site if this should be posted elsewhere.

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

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


Is something on the IO logic board burnt or..? yesterday, i plugged my macbook pro to charge, and my magsafe charger got a little burn where it connects to the magsafe charger (wall->magsafe). Now my macbook pro won't charge, no light, no nothing, but it still works perfectly. I tested it with a multimeter and indeed, no voltage and no current comming out the magsafe charger, burnt. Maybe that's from power fluctuations, don't know for sure. The magsafe port has no marks of burning or something. I tried to charge it with 2 different magsafe chargers, still nothing. Could something on the IO logic board be burnt or maybe some safety cautions kicked in?

Reset your System Management Controller, based on Apple's instructions, to see if that kickstarts your charging subsystem.


Notifications showing no content Whenever I get notifications, there is no content, or the content that should be there.

In the News notifications and Google notifications, it only shows bold text, not any details like it should.
In WhatsApp notifications, it shows the name of the person and the group, but for the content it just shows "(null)".
For emails, it just shows the name of the sender, and shows "Mail message" underneath it.
For texts from the stock messages app, it just shows the sender's name and "iMessage" underneath it instead of showing the messages content.

How do I fix this and make notifications show the content properly? I have searched everywhere, but I can't find any solutions.

I am running the latest iOS version 10.2.1 on iPhone 5.

I fixed this by simply updating to the latest iOS version.


Change from iOS Developer Program to Enterprise I have enroled in iOS Developer Program. I'm creating a simple location app, but it is targeted for our company employes only. Now, I've figured out that I enroled in the wrong program, as it should have been Enterprise. I'm certain that my app will never pass in App Store review.

My question is if there's a migration path, where I could use my already paid $99 to change to the $299 Enterprise account. What will it take for me to do it?

Thanks.

Your best bet is to just contact developer support and ask them if you can do this. My suspicion is that they would possibly credit you the difference or refund your individual account if it's a recent purchase.

https://developer.apple.com/support/

Use the Contact Us link (currently) at the bottom of the page.


"man say" in macOS fails macOS 10.14.4

If I type man say at the command line, I get the error: man: no manual page say.

I've checked and the file say.1 is present in the folder /usr/share/man/man1. Why can man not find it?

I'm on High Sierra and when I do a man -aw say it shows the following:

$ man -aw say
/usr/share/man/man1/say.1

Which agrees with your location as well. You can use the following command to see how man is attempting to display the appropriate man page for say:

$ man -d say |& grep say
  (cd '/usr/share/man' && /usr/bin/tbl '/usr/share/man/man1/say.1' | /usr/bin/groff -Wall -mtty-char -Tascii -mandoc -c | (/usr/bin/less -is || true))

Based on that output my say.1 man page is located here: /usr/share/man/man1/say.1.

You can copy/paste this command in pieces to see where things are breaking for you as well.

For example:

$ cd '/usr/share/man'
$ /usr/bin/tbl '/usr/share/man/man1/say.1' | less
$ ...
$ ...

And keep adding pieces to see where it's failing on your end.


Block Ads via AirPort Is there any way to block ads via an Apple Airport? I'd rather block all ads that way so that I can block ads on my iDevices.

You can set the Airport base station's DNS to a service such as OpenDNS. Then make an account with OpenDNS and set up a blacklist.


If I've migrated from iPhoto to Photos, can I safely delete the migrated photo library? I used to have iPhoto on my machine and have migrated to Photos. I notice now that I have two photo libraries on my machine that are taking up over 10 GB each. I'd like to reclaim disk space, but I don't know if I can safely delete one of them.

The two files are:

Photos Library.photoslibrary (15.6 GB)
iPhoto Library.migratedPhotoLibrary (11.3 GB)

I'm inclined to think that I can delete the second one because it has "iPhoto" in the name, but I'm unsure of if it is still being used by the new app. Can I safely delete the migrated photo library?

If you have been using Photos only since migration you can safely delete it. The purpose of the migratedPhotoLibrary is so you still can use iPhoto with your old pictures (and perhaps import new ones to iPhoto only, if you have done this, then no, don't delete it.) After deleting it you can delete your iPhoto app as well.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204655


How to make iCloud 3.0 on Windows sync bookmarks with Safari Since updating to iCloud 3.0 on Windows 7, I've noticed that my Windows installation of Safari is no longer syncing my iPad bookmarks.

Looking at the settings in iCloud, Safari is no longer included:

As with my previous, much older question - How to make iCloud on Windows sync bookmarks with Safari, not Internet Explorer - I don't want to mix up the bookmarks of my desktop browsers with those on my mobile devices.

Has Apple really removed the ability to sync bookmarks with PC Safari, or am I missing some trick?

I was wondering the same thing when I found this:

http://9to5mac.com/2013/09/19/farewell-windows-safari-as-apple-excludes-from-icloud-bookmark-sync/

I looks like this is no longer possible.


What's the best way to back up the list of installed apps on your Mac? As I understand, Time Machine or for that matter, any backup solution doesn't backup your apps (for technical reasons, I know).

So what's the best solution to remember/backup the list of apps you have installed on your Mac in case it just stops working one day?

Apart from the obvious "manually write down the name of the app on paper", of course.

Time Machine does back up your applications. You can restore from a Time Machine backup and your computer will have the system software, applications, and user files it had when it was completely backed up. See this Apple page for details.

Some other backup solutions (such as Crashplan) generally are set to just back up the /Users folder - Time Machine is a "bare metal" backup.


Script to delete all User files automatically I'm searching a tool that deletes all personal files of an user account automatically.
We have a small network of new Imacs for students and they save all kind of stuff on the harddrive.

So we want to delete all that crap on a reboot.

We could maybe even delete the student account and create a new one automatically.

Is there a tool or script to do that for OSX 10.9.4?

Deep Freeze sounds like what you might need, restore the machine to any given state at reboot - http://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze/


Is there a way to prevent predictive text from learning what the user typed I want to prevent predictive text from being stored on the iOS device. Is there a way to do it? If I turn off predictive text, the app doesn't show the predictive text toolbar, but it still learns the text. I know if the we implement a custom keyboard, predictive text does not get saved to the dictionary on device. I was wondering if there was another option than implementing a custom keyboard

Unfortunately, this is not possible.  The only remedy is to reset the Keyboard Dictionary (Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset Keyboard Dictionary) and that too, is quite limited.  It’s an all-or-nothing scenario meaning if you accidentally added a misspelled word, you can’t remove just that one, all your custom words must go.
This is definitely something you want to submit feedback for:  https://apple.com/feedback/iphone
There is a potential solution, however, if you're willing to use a 3rd party keyboard - Microsoft Swiftkeys.  I've been evaluating it for a while now and have found it quite capable.  Specific to your question, it has the ability to delete individual auto-predicted words instead of having to remove the entire dictionary. It's contingent upon signing into the swiftkeys account so that it can back-up and store your dictionary and settings.

Swiftkeys is free with in-app purchases which seem to only be the themes.  So, if you stick to just the included themes, you won't be out of pocket anything for this app.
Bear in mind that this is a third-party keyboard and will require "Full Access" for full functionality.  This means that any third party keyboard can see and send what you type back to the developers.  Google's keyboard, while strong on features, seems to be a privacy nightmare.  While I don't trust Microsoft completely, I trust them much more than I do Google or other unknown app devs.
Why does my Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard need Full Access?


Connecting a Retina MacBook Pro to a VGA Display? I have an external monitor with a VGA connection. What is the best adapter to use for my Retina MacBook Pro? I think I've seen Thunderbolt to VGA, or USB to VGA? Or HDMI to VGA? What are the differences?

You should get a mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter (sometimes referred to as a Thunderbolt to VGA adapter, but it's the same thing). Apple sells one, but they can be had elsewhere for less, including at my personal favourite, Monoprice.

You could do HDMI to VGA, but it would require a (typically bulky) active adapter. There are some HDMI to VGA adapters that aren't active, but they rely on graphics card support that Macs don't have. The DisplayPort to VGA adapters are technically active adapters, but for whatever reason they seem to be much more compact than HDMI to VGA ones.

There are USB based display adapters, and some of them have VGA output, but I'd only recommend them for situations where other outputs aren't available. They're essentially a USB connected graphics card, which means that performance is lacking, and it takes up CPU and memory resources that the built-in outputs don't. Useful for some situations, but in your case I'd stay away.


How can I make macOS respect HOSTALIASES environment variable? According to the Apple developer documentation, setting HOSTALIASES will make a process look in that file for hostnames instead of /etc/hosts.

However when I tested this with ping and a replacement hostfile, the replacement never got used, only /etc/hosts (according to fs_usage) - I have also seen similar complaints online.

Is there a way to get a process to respect HOSTALIASES or otherwise use a different hosts file?

The man page that you referenced is very old (ancient) - it's from 1995.  Looking at the man page for gethostbyname on a machine running El Capitan (2006), that reference is no longer there meaning it's a very good indication that what you are looking for has been deprecated.


Hidden Documents folder after turning off iCloud Drive I recently tried iCloud Drive for syncing my Desktop and Documents folders. However, Documents was already being synced via Dropbox and I noticed that iCloud Drive and Dropbox don't get along. Seemingly random files inside Documents were copied over and over again for some reason.

So I decided to revert back to Dropbox and turn off iCloud sync. That worked fine on my iMac. However, doing the exact same thing on my MacBook Air made the Documents folder disappear. I quickly realized that it is only hidden (see screenshot), albeit without a preceding dot (.). I'm now struggling to unhide this folder. Any ideas?

Try run this in Terminal:

chflags nohidden ~/Documents


iMessages - same message on two devices I once bought a macbook for my friend. I logged into it using my own apple account to make sure it worked properly before delivering it to him. However, he now gets a copy of my iMessages. How can this link be removed so he will no longer be able to see my messages?

Go to System Preferences→iCloud on his machine, sign out of your iCloud account and into his.


Simulating copy and paste on applications that don't allow it Context
Some applications currently don't seem to allow copy and pasting.
For example I have an application that asks me to log in every time and it doesn't allow me to paste anything so I'm forced to type a very long and complicated password every time.
I don't think it's something they intentionally restrict but rather a limitation of the libraries they are using (maybe xQuartz?).
What I've tried
I've tried cmd+C and cmd+V in the input area. I've also tried to right-click and click on "Paste" (which is highlighted) but that also yields nothing.
Question
In any case, is there any way to simulate pasting on Mac OS X? Maybe by sending multiple key presses instead?

Turns out the problem was that the copied password (and the one with which I thought I registered) was longer than 20 characters. The input field on the application doesn't allow more than 20 characters long password and the website silently cuts them to 20.

By copying the first 20 characters of the password I was able to paste it in.


iPhone 5 won't start after an iTunes recovery I shut down my iPhone 5 phone in the middle of an iTunes purchase download.

I went to an At&T store and they reset the phone. After three hours the phone went blue.  Phone will not turn back on now after doing the recovery via iTunes on the computer. The download did complete. At this point I can get the apple logo to show but that is all.

Force it into Recovery Mode, then restore...

Switch off the device & leave it off.
Connect the USB cable to a computer with iTunes [ideally one that has been used with the device previously]
Whilst holding down the Home button, connect the device to the computer [keep holding Home until you see the 'connect to iTunes' screen.
iTunes should launch & detect the device is in Recovery Mode.
Use iTunes to restore.

Ref: If you can't update or restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch


Replacing "apple hardware test" with "apple diagnostics" According to this article, holding down the "D" key while my MacBookPro11,3 boots should bring up "Apple Diagnostics".  However, "Apple Hardware Test" comes up instead.  When I try to run in, it fails, saying my hardware is not supported.

How do I replace the "Apple Hardware Test" firmware program with the "Apple Diagnostics" firmware program?

Some more background: This is a new macbook pro, and I copied the hard drive from my old one using disk utility.  After the transfer, the laptop worked fine, but would not boot into recovery mode-- holding down option at startup and selecting the recovery drive yielded a grey screen with a white, cross-out circle in the middle.  Re-downloading and re-installing Mavericks fixed this problem.  I can now boot into recovery mode, but I still have the problem described above.

Please do not answer this question if you don't understand the difference between "Apple Hardware Test" and "Apple Diagnostics."  Linking me to Apple support and pointing out that "Apple Diagnostics" replaced "Apple Hardware Test" in mid-2013 (as the 2 current answers have done) does not answer my question.

So you didn't write this much in your original post but I am going out on a limb and gonna say that the AHT that boots doesn't work on your Retina MBP.

The only way to get the file back is reinstall the OS via internet recovery but if the /System/Library/CoreServices/.diagnostics folder is there then I would wager a small bet that internet recovery won't put Apple Diagnostics on the drive.

You can test this by deleting the current folder on your MacBook Pro and then trying internet recovery. OR (I'd first recommend this) you could start your computer into Internet Recovery and reinstall the OS on an external drive. Once the install is done just copy over the aforementioned .diagnostics folder and then move it onto your MacBook Pro's internal drive.

All the best and much fun ahead! (Please give internet recovery 1-2 hours depending on your internet connection and ethernet is highly encouraged)


How can I change the default text color in Mail? How can I change the default text color (black to dark grey) in Mail on Lion?

Unfortunately I'm unaware of any way to do this without a workaround. Here it is:

Go to preferences -> signatures and create one that uses the font color you want to use. You have to select the text, right-click, go under font and pick the color from there (at least on my Lion machine)
Set that signature as your default
When you compose a new message, put your cursor on the beginning of the line that the signature is on, hit enter a few times, and when you start typing your message it will be in that font/color. There will be a blank line at the top that is formatted black, which you can backspace to delete, just make sure you've started typing something first or it will set it back to black.


Is there any free iOS video player that allows you to transfer and keep a folder hierarchy intact? I have a video course folder that in turn has multiple folders (one for each chapter). I was using VLC on my ipad and found out that when I copy the parent folder to the device, it just copies all the files to a folder. ie removing all sub folders and adding ALL the videos in just one parent folder.

I switched to infuse. Turns out you can have only 1 level of folder. ie. if you have a Parent Folder which has 10 sub folders. You will now have just 10 folders without parent. Also this app does not even have basic functionality as playing videos as faster speed.

I'm using PlayerXtreme on my iPhone and it's keeping all level folder, you should try it !

I've only be using the free version so far, but it does the job (and you can get more feature by giving them an availiation on the Appstore)

  On their website, they claim that :

  Files and Folders: Dont need to learn the app. It is almost like using Windows or Mac OSX.
  Library Organization: Organize all of your media-videos, photos, and music


Late 2008 Macbook Pro Brightness Issues Recently my Macbook Pro's screen started looking dimmer than usual, and has a slight flicker. When I press the Brightness up and down keys, I see the visual feedback on the screen that would suggest it is getting brighter or darker, but the brightness no longer changes (even on the lowest brightness setting, it should turn the screen off but there is no change).

I have a dual boot with Windows, and recently installed new nVidia drivers on the windows side for gaming (I'm not sure if this is related, the screen is dim in both Windows and OS X). I am also running the most up-to-date version of OS 10.9 Mavericks.

I've played with the Display settings, the Power settings (tried switching between video cards), and I even tried doing an Apple Hardware Check but it wasn't able to find any issues.

Here is my Hardware overview:

Model Name:     MacBook Pro
Model Identifier:   MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:    2.8 GHz
Number of Processors:   1
Total Number of Cores:  2
L2 Cache:       6 MB
Memory:         8 GB
Bus Speed:      1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version:   MBP51.007E.B06
SMC Version (system):   1.33f8

Is the screen dimmer even over on windows?  If so the florescent tubes (there are multiple) could be failing partially or completely.


Select a poster frame for video thumbnails in Photos app? Is there a way to select a Poster Frame to use as the thumbnail of a video in your Camera Roll?

For example, many of my videos fade up from black. Because of this, the thumbnails are black and it's difficult to distinguish between videos. It also looks bad if a business is presenting videos to potential clients on an iPad.

Can  video poster frame thumbnails be added on  iOS(preferably) or Mac?

You can set Poster Frames via Photos.app on macOS.

Setting via the Mac does sync the custom poster frame to your iOS devices via iCloud Photos.

Play a video in Photos for Mac
Pause the video at the intended frame
Press the gear icon and select Set Poster Frame


Cursor lag or sticky effect on links After upgrading to macOS Sierra I've noticed that my mouse cursor tends to lag, grab or stick to links when traversing over a web page. The effect seems mostly pronounced in Safari but is exhibited in other browsers as well. Anyone experience anything like this and know how to change or disable the effect?

This happened to me when my cursor size was above normal. Check System Preferences > Accessibility > Display.


Issues with replacing the internal hard drive in a mid 2007 macbook I have a white 2007 MacBook with a 2.0 GhZ intel Core 2Duo processor with a 80GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm. Recently my hard drive crashed so I got a new 500Gb Western Digital AV-25 WD5000BUDT 500GB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal AV Hard Drive. I registered the hard drive and tried installing the hard drive into my machine. When I try to partition using the disk utility it gives a " Failed to partition ,I/O read/write error". Interestingly for some reason the disk utility tool says that the hard drive is 3.6TB when it is actually a 500Gb hdd. Has anyone ever faced this kind of problem and if yes what is the solution?

Alternatively should I go for a Hitachi hard drive?

Additional information: When removing my old hard drive I somewhat damaged the hard drive bracket. Do you think that this damaged hard drive bracket is the reason?

Any help will be really appreciated.

You're not the first person to have problems with this drive in a Mac - see http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/217444-macbook-pro-hard-drive-replacement-wont-format.html

It's possible there is a compatibility issue, as you seem to be doing all the right things (and it is connected properly otherwise you wouldn't see it in Disk Utility at all).

The damaged hard drive bracket would not be the cause of the error above.

Try a non-AV drive (one designed for notebooks rather then surveillance/home theatre use) and see if that makes a difference.


How can I change my desktop background every time I log in? I want to download all of the background images from here: http://www.surfermag.com/wallpapers/

And have a new one load up every time I log into my Mac. What's the easiest way of doing that?

First you select the folder where your custom background images are in the left section, then you just select Change picture: and choose When logging in in the dropdown.


brew doctor complains unexpected dylibs '/usr/local/lib/libecomlodr.dylib', deletable? I ran brew doctor and it complains unexpected dylibs '/usr/local/lib/libecomlodr.dylib'.  Is it deletable?

$ brew doctor
Please note that these warnings are just used to help the Homebrew maintainers
with debugging if you file an issue. If everything you use Homebrew for is
working fine: please don't worry and just ignore them. Thanks!

Warning: Unbrewed dylibs were found in /usr/local/lib.
If you didn't put them there on purpose they could cause problems when
building Homebrew formulae, and may need to be deleted.

Unexpected dylibs:
    /usr/local/lib/libecomlodr.dylib

In general, how does one determine if an 'unexpected dylibs' 'brew doctor' deports is deletable?

The dynamic link file you see has been installed by something else, not homebrew. That's why it is "unexpected".

Unless you are having a problem installing something with homebrew the best thing to do is ignore it.

It's not easy (perhaps impossible) to know what may have put the file there or needs it there to run.


Convert wireless Time Machine to wired I have been using the Time Machine backup utility wirelessly. I'd now like switch to wired. How do I do that? What problems should I expect?

Turn off wifi

Plug in Ethernet

Test a backup and restore a file it two
You should expect no problems whatsoever, you should expect significantly faster response times