Paste stops working ("CFPasteboardRef: Lock timeout") Pasting from the clipboard stopped working on my Mac. Nothing is pasted, and the following line appears many time in syslog.

Apr  5 **:**:** *** com.apple.WebKit.WebContent[6583] <Warning>: CFPasteboardRef CFPasteboardCreate(CFAllocatorRef, CFStringRef) : Lock timeout

This seems related to a clipboard tool I installed ("FlyCut"), but I have since uninstalled. I can see no running process related to the tool (using ps -ef).

Rebooting temporarily solves the problem. Is this a virus? At any rate, how do I get rid of the problem? Found nothing of value searching for the log message. Malwarebytes reports nothing.

Update: Reported the issue to Apple, and they said it was caused by an app called "Time Out". They are still working to resolve the problem. In the meantime, uninstall this app.

Doesn't appear to be malware for me.

The workaround (though totally crappy) is:

Launch Activity Monitor
Find pboard process and quit the process.
Restart applications where you would like to copy from or paste into.


Any way to get Bluetooth to work on MacBook 12″ Boot Camp? I know that it’s not officially supported, but there is any manual way that I can get Bluetooth to work on a MacBook 12″ Windows Boot Camp partition?

Use Boot Camp 6.0, it will let you use Bluetooth on the MacBook 2015.


macOS 10.12: MacBook Pro Retina takes hours (literally) to boot I've got a mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro Retina (MacBook10,1 - i7-361QM - 8GB RAM) running Sierra 10.12.6 (16G1036) that can take, literally, several hours to boot. I am not able to boot into recovery or verbose (I think I gave up holding the command-r combo after 10 minutes when my hand started cramping), or diagnostics. I will note that it is operating as usual once it does boot.

Here are some of the symptoms I've observed:

with AC power connected, select "reboot" (normal situation)

shutdown initiates, screen goes black
startup chimes
... then ... nothing ... sometimes the keyboard lights up, sometimes not, sometimes it lights up when I press a key or trackpad
... wait ... wait ... wait some more ...
next day it's finally ready to use

without AC power connected (this has happened once)

same as above, except after sitting all day with a black screen and no apparent activity ...
connect AC power, immediately get startup chimes (I haven't touched the keyboard or trackpad) and normal startup (progress bar and everything) occurs within a minute or two

with AC power connected, start reboot

next morning still not started, unplug and take to work
open bag at work to discover things are very warm
open lid, still nothing ...
hold power down for 10s+, press power again, repeat several times ...
get startled when the login screen appears suddenly only 1 minute after attempting power on

Ran EtreCheck (summary, can make full report available if it will help):

SSD SM256E disk0, Trim: Yes

disk0s1: FAT32 not mounted, EFI, 210MB
disk0s2: CoreStorage, not mounted, 250.14GB
disk0s3: Journaled HFS+, not mounted, Recovery, 650MB

Vitual Disks

disk1, Journaled HFS+, 246.77GB, 20.53 GB free

Kernel Extensions

org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv, *.VBoxNetAdp, VBoxNetFlt, VBoxUSB all 5.1.22
com.intel.kext.intelhaxm 6.0.5

The last diagnostic event EtreCheck reports is a Kernel Panic several days ago, and, IIRC, I was running the Unity editor, VS Code and possibly playing with Metal in Unity, so that's not completely unexpected. EtreCheck hasn't flagged anything as a problem. I've been running Virtual Box since long before the problem started, and I didn't upgrade it around the time the problem started. The Intel HAXM might have been installed or upgraded around the time I started having problems, but I'm only about 20% confident in that. I'm pretty sure I had the same issues with it removed.

I don't see anything obvious in the logs, but there are also a lot of log entries and I'm not entirely sure what to look for.

My battery is reporting "Service Battery" (cycle count = 895) and it definitely doesn't last as long as it used to (probably 3-6 hours at best).

I've done SMC reset, and NVRAM reset. Disk Utility First Aid reports that the volume bitmap needs "minor repair for orphaned blocks" and an invalid volume block free count and that I need to run First Aid from Recovery, which, as I've previously mentioned, I can't get into.

Any suggestions on what to look for in the logs, or other things to try?

UPDATE: Tried booting from a bootable USB created from High Sierra installer (that was already downloaded). Set startup disk from System Prefs, and that resulted in the same black screen/no boot. Held power down to force off, then held option to get disk selector, but only got the internal drive showing (the USB activity LED did light up during the startup). I selected that and got the usual progress bar then the login screen, but after logging in everything froze and the screen went black again. That's something new.

UPDATE 2: And now Startup Manager won't load anymore.

It appears it was a hardware issue... I hope. Machine is currently with Apple having the logic board replaced. I recently discovered that the discrete GPU was not showing up under System Report, nor could gfxCardStatus detect or force it to be used. It seems my machine was one of the "very few" impacted by the nVidia chipset issue affecting machines from about 2011-2013, and apparently OS X is resilient enough that it just carries on in the face of soldered-on hardware suddenly disappearing, and doesn't consider that something worthy of bothering the user with.


New iCloud email added to iPhone5 without changing Apple ID,in order to automatically copy all iMessages that uses that new iCloud email to said email If we create another icloud e-mail can we:

1) Add it to our phone to send and receive emails without affecting the Apple ID being used on the iPhone 5?

2) Use that "New iCloud email" to iMessage with a specific person (i.e. Coworker A will only send us texts with their iPhone using that new iCloud email and we'd only contact them and respond to their texts with that new iCloud email?

3) If, all of the above are possible, then could all your conversations with Coworker A be automatically copied to our email? In other words, we can view the conversation on our iMessage and on our email that we added the new iCloud email to?

If not, how can we have our conversations automatically copied to an email in order for us to that not have to screen shot every Conversation which is quite cumbersome?

Thanks

Yes, it is possible to have several iCloud email account on your single iPhone 5. You cannot have multiple Apple ID's on the same phone, but can have many email accounts.
No, you really cannot iMessage from multiple iCloud email accounts. That said, it is technically possible, but would require going into the Settings app every time you wanted to message from a different email account and would prove to be quite cumbersome to setup. Even then, they could easily message your other iCloud accounts that were linked to messages. This could quickly result in your having several message threads from the same recipient - an unfortunate situation.
Yes, you could technically set up a rule that would forward emails received from the Coworker to another email. Then you could set up that email to automatically tag or mark emails from that iCloud account as read or whatever was needed. It would not be possible with iMessage.

Honestly, it sounds like coercing iCloud and iMessage into what you need is a little too much for what it was designed for. While it may be possible to figure a solution out, it is more likely that you could find a third-party solution that would suit you well. Case in point, Google offers Gmail and Hangouts which would allow for emailing and instant messaging - all for free and with associated apps if desired. There is chat history and emails can be archived forever.


OSX High Sierra: Bluetooth audio mutes when a video ends in browser? Using iTunes or Spotify to play music through bluetooth headphones. While the music is playing, I watch a YouTube video in Safari. When the video ends, the music is muted. I can see in the music app that it is still playing, just muted.

This only happens when using Bluetooth audio. Built-in speakers behave as expected.

This only started happening since I upgraded to High Sierra.

Macbook Pro
OSX High Sierra 10.13.2 (17C88)
Bose Wireless SoundSport headphones

Some of these issues seemed to go away when I updated the firmware on my Bose headphones to 1.3.4.


Constant Firewall Messages in Console: How can I find the source? I constantly see messages in Console (coming from /var/log/appfirewall.log) that look like this:

Aug 21 08:08:39 silverscreen Firewall[97]: Stealth Mode connection attempt to UDP 10.0.1.11:8612 from 10.0.1.2:64755

Click for a longer sample of the log.

So, it seems that some device on my network (10.0.1.2) is trying various ports to connect to my machine (and being refused).

What tools does my Mac have to help me figure out what this device is and what it's trying to do?

The command "arp -an" will list all the MAC addresses and IP addresses of all the devices seen on the local network.

Once you have the MAC address, you can look it up to determine the manufacturer of the device, which might give you a clue as to which one of your toys is talking to your machine.  One such lookup site is here:

http://www.coffer.com/mac_find/

UDP Port 8612 is sometimes associated with a Canon printer driver.


Cloned OS X to new HDD, startup starts same programs each time Recently I changed my HDD, and used SuperDuper to clone the drive. Each time I boot it up, however, Terminal and Chrome start once I hit the desktop, no matter what programs I had open when I last shut it down.

At first I was worried it was booting to the same state again and again, but new files I create are still present on the system if I shut the computer down and start it up again.

Is there any way I can stop my computer from booting up the same two programs as though nothing has changed since the clone to the new drive?

Please see Matt Ball and my comments for the answer. The problem was:

A HTML file had somehow found its way onto the list of login items, and it was loading via Chrome, and presumably booting the Terminal window as well. After removing this file from that list, the problem has, as far as I can tell, vanished.


How to sync time between Windows and OS X? I'm using OS X Mountain Lion with Windows 8 installed via Boot Camp. When I switch between Windows and OS X the time in each operative system is different, exist a difference approximately of 4 hours with the same Time Zone.

So, I need to change the time when start Windows or OS X, but automatically change the time of the other operative system.

Exist any trick that solved this issue using the same Time Zone?

Thanks.

The easy way is to set Windows to use UTC, I didn't test with Windows 8 but I think will work.

Start with Windows and create a new file with the name setUTC.reg and paste this text inside:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
"RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001

save and close, after double click to add the value to the windows registry.
Restart Windows and set the time, after the time zone will not change anymore.


Auval and Auvaltool not working through SSH I was successfully validating audio unit plugins with OSX 10.11 over SSH. On my new machine which runs OSX 10.14 (Mojave) everything works fine until I try to validate a plugin from an SSH connection. I use the same command in the same directory both in local and over SSH.

/usr/bin/auvaltool -v aumf MyPl Loco

The thing is, using SSH, auval do not detect my plugins (/usr/bin/auvaltool -a), but only Apple default ones. When doing the same on the screen sharing, my plugins are in the output.

This does not seems to come from $PATH.
This does not seems to come from permission (I have tried a chmod 777 on every .component)
This does not seems to come from group/user (I have tried to chown it to diferent user)
This does not seems to come from administration (I have tried to sudo it)

So my question is, do you know any SSH security limitation that can break my execution of auval and auvaltool ? What can be different on SSH that could make some execution behaviour changes ?

Thanks.

EDIT: How to reproduce ?

Install any non-apple AU plugin.
Launch a terminal and:

"auval -a" will output the previously installed plugin.
"ssh localhost" will connect to you machine through SSH
"auval -a" will NOT output the previously installed plugin.

This is a long shot, but I once had to install tmux with brew install tmux (and I already had https://brew.sh set up and ready to run) so that I could graphically log in and establish a terminal session for the user in question.

With fast user switching, you can then return to the log in screen - leaving that one user console session blessed with full GPU and full graphical console permissions and then ssh in to attach to the existing TMUX sessions.

Hopefully someone has a more direct answer, but after several days of bounties and some great comments trying to back into the answer, I wanted to get on the record that a graphical log in does have higher powers and permissions and you just might need that for now if no-one has a better fix for this.


Changing autocorrect settings on Macbook Pro, shortcut does not work, cannot access dictionary (easily), can I just reset autocorrect? I typed in my email address incorrectly once, and autocorrect will not let me forget it. This leads to problems all the time (with autocorrect changing my email address in forms when I hit "enter" to submit). I miss receipts, keep signing up a stranger for different services, and so on.

My first name is Megan so my email address is something to the effect of "lastname.megan@gmail.com". Autocorrect changes it to "lastname.mean@gmail.com".

In order to remedy the situation, I created a "shortcut" that supposedly changes "lastname.mean@gmail.com" to "lastname.megan@gmail.com". This is unreliable, and when I type in my real email address the fake one still pops up as a correction.

Is it possible to simply reset autocorrect settings? I don't want to mess around in the terminal. The shortcut I made to change the wrong email address to my real one (created in the Keyboard settings) has also failed to address the problem.

Using OS X Yosemite Version 10.10.1
MacBook Pro (Late 2011)

The file is ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary
You can open it in TextEdit & add or remove words.

Quick way to get there, if you're not sure…

From Finder, hit  Cmd ⌘   N  for New Window
Hit  Cmd ⌘   Shift ⇧   G  for Go…
Paste ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary [including the tilde ~]

On the other hand - the fastest way to type your email address is how you almost did it… in System Prefs > Keyboard > Text

use myeml as the trigger & your full (correct;) email address as the auto-replace.
Works in iOS too.


Seagate Backup Plus Mac reformatted to NTFS don't mount on Mac I have a Seagate Backup Plus Mac drive that, as the name implies, came with the HFS format for Mac. I reformatted it to NTFS to be compatible with a Windows PC (I was not working with Mac at the time). I tried recently to read the disk on a Mac, but unlike other NTFS disks (which can be read, albeit don't written), it don't mount at all. I also tested at other computers and my results are:

At some Linux version, it read fine out of the box
At a Windows PC it don't read by default, but it reads when I install a HFS driver (despite the drive itself still being recognized as NTFS when is mounted)

Is there any way it can be read on Mac as it is, or even, reformat the disk erasing its data so it can be HFS again?

You can surely wipe it using Disk Utility and choose ExFAT or HFS+ or partition and use both. If cross platform is your goal, I would see if ExFAT works for your needs.

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/erase-a-volume-dskutl14079/mac

For any of the choices above, use GPT the GUID Partition Scheme.


iTunes Wi-Fi Sync stopped working with iOS 11.2 Syncing from the iPhone using Settings > General > iTunes Wi-Fi Sync doesn't work (just get "searching for computer" which goes away after about 1 minute) and the device never shows up in iTunes.

I was able to get it to work by syncing once over USB. iTunes put up a "Trust this computer?" dialog as if I hadn't ever synced before. After that everything worked as before.


Getting list of pids and process names By running ps aux I can get list running processes with command associated with them, e.g.

USER               PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
_windowserver      142   2.0  1.3  4559968 224672   ??  Ss    7:11AM  33:21.95 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SkyLight.framework/Resources/WindowServer -daemon
lrogalsk          6419   1.9  0.5  2703580  77588   ??  S     2:15PM   0:40.88 /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal
...

Unfortunately, COMMAND includes command line arguments and absolute path of file, both of which may contain spaces. How can I get process name in deterministic manner?

Apparently I'm blind.

 -c      Change the ``command'' column output to just contain the executable name, rather than the full
         command line.

ps auxc works just fine.

USER               PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
lrogalsk         18670  15.6  1.4  3913100 241624   ??  Ss   12:12PM   0:09.93 com.apple.WebKit.WebContent


OSX doesn't recognize a gaming keyboard I want to use this Genius keyboard with my 2014 MacBook Pro 15".

When connecting the keyboard, the Keyboard Setup Assistant opens, saying that keyboard could not be identified. Then, it asks to press the key on the left of right shift. When I pressZkey three times, it says that the keyboard still could not be identified and asks to chose the type of keyboard manually.

Despite of the answer, keyboard starts working improperly. When I pressq it types x,w->4,e->l,r->y,t->1,y-6and so on. When I chose different type of keyboard (ISO/ANSI) nothing changes and the same wrong buttons mapping preserves.

The keyboard itself is working fine on another PC. Other keyboards are working well with this mac.

Maybe there is some software to properly fix usage of gaming keyboards on mac?

Would really appreciate your help to make it work.

Then, it asks to press the key on the left of right shift. When I press 'Z' key three times

Z is on the right of the left Shift key. You sure you pressing the right keys? According to your post you should be pressing the "/" key.


How to have podcasts autoplay after the iOS 11 upgrade? So once a podcast ends, it doesn’t just automatically to the next episode anymore. Is there a way to get around this?

Yes. On 11.1.2 (maybe earlier versions as well, haven't checked), you can create your own station and the app will play the next one in the list after the podcast ends.

Example to autoplay all episodes of a single podcast:

In the "Library" screen of the podcast app, choose Edit -> New -> Name it something.
Set Station Play to "Oldest to Newest" (to mimic play order of previous podcast app versions)
Set Include Episodes to "All Episodes"
Choose Podcasts -> the Podcast you want to auto-play.

Now play your new station and autoplay next will work.


Slow loading/transparent menu bar during startup Sometimes when I startup my Mac, I notice that the menu bar doesn't load fully. It remains completely transparent and doesn't have a title (or any menu options) for the current application. It doesn't even have the Apple logo on the top left side.

Here's a picture of what it looks like:

Any idea what causes this or how to fix it?

This happens to me too sometimes. A guaranteed solution: Restart the menu bar. Here's how:

Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities). Type: killall SystemUIServer.killall restarts the following process, and SystemUIServer is the process in charge of the menu bar. Once you press enter, the menu bar will disappear and reappear. It should be working fine.


When will we have LPDDR4x memory in MBs/MBPs? Apple just announced their much expected 16" MBP, which still features DDR4 memory in order to be able to support more than 16GB RAM. I find that a bit disappointing, and am a bit puzzled as to why we still haven't seen a shift to low-power memory on macbooks.

If my understanding is correct, Intel's newer CPUs should in theory support LPDDR4x memory, and that these should provide significant improvements in terms of power usage.

Could someone explain what is the bottleneck in the wider adoption of this technology?

The actual "bottleneck" here is the fact that your "theory" is incorrect.

The Intel CPUs used do not support LPDDR4 memory at all. It won't work no matter what you do. They support only DDR4 and LPDDR3 RAM. Only the 10th gen Intel mobile processors support LPDDR4 - and the new MacBook Pro has a 9th gen CPU.

The 10th gen Intel mobile processors have been announced and some models have just recently launched - they support the new LPDDR4 RAM, which is almost the only new feature. However, they're not used by Apple yet. It is logical to assume that at some point, Apple will switch to newer CPUs that support newer types of memory - but this time around was not it.


How to have links open in Google Chrome from emails? Before switching to the Chrome browser app from mobile Safari when I would click a link in a email it would automatically open the page in Safari. Now clicking a link does nothing and I have to copy and paste it into Chome. How to have it open like before but in Chrome instead of Safari?

You cannot do this on iOS. Maybe a future iOS will let you select your default browser but iOS, as of version 5, does not.


Time Machine: How can you confirm a backup? Can you just delete the backup and it will automatically redo it? I use Time Machine to backup to an external hard drive. That external drive also has a lot of other photos and unique info on that drive, too.

I'm not sure my Time Machine backed up my whole computer because of the computer turned off in the middle of the first time I used it (recently).

Questions:

Is there a way to confirm that the backup on the Time Machine is complete?
Lets say I just want to redo the backup from scratch. I can't format the external drive since it has a lot of other unique info. How can I delete the Time Machine information and have Time Machine automatically redo the backup?

The first question, how can you be sure a backup has completed, is answered by checking the menubar Time Machine item. It will tell you the date of the last completed backup.

Secondly if you want to perform another complete Time Machine backup you can stop Time Machine, eject the Time Machine drive, plug in a fresh drive and re-enable Time Machine using that drive as the backup destination. A complete new backup will be performed.

You could also just delete everything on the original Time Machine drive but it is slightly more risky. If something bad happened before the new backup completed you would be without the backup you are not sure about and the new backup.


How to prevent macOS from putting icons on some areas of the desktop? I have a 49" 5120x1440 ultrawide monitor with some windows always open on the sides and I don't want any kind of item hidden behind them (for example, mounted external drive, downloaded/copied file, etc...)

The worst case is when I save or move something to the Desktop and I waste a lot of time trying to understand why I can't see the file – because it's hidden, say, behind my music player window.

Right now I've badly solved the issue with a very inelegant solution, which is filling those areas with empty files so that nothing goes over there, the problem is that those then show up on Finder and it gets kind of annoying when I have to work with files on the Desktop

So, right now, there are two acceptable solutions for this:

Find a way to tell macOS not to put icons on a certain area of the screen

OR

Find a way to tell Finder to not show, say, files with zero byte dimension or with a file name starting with "empty" or whatever filter we can apply.

EDIT: this would not work as there is no way to tell Finder to show a certain type of file on the Desktop but not in a Finder window. Disregard this option.

Here's a picture to better show you the problem and how I've partially (ie: badly) solved it for now:

Thanks!

EDIT: I believe that I need to make a point about the answers given so far (which are ALL very appreciated, by the way): All the answers have been addressing my own bad solution instead of addressing the original problem which is clearly explained in the title: "How to prevent macOS from putting icons on some areas of the desktop?"

This is the ultimate goal: I want to tell macOS "whenever I put something on the Desktop, DO NOT PUT IT INTO THOSE AREAS.

My solution was to fill those areas with empty documents, but it's ugly, not on the desktop, because those icons are hidden by the windows, but on a Finder window because it's filled with trash.

Hopefully this clears it up a bit!

EDIT 2: this is how it looks normally, those windows are ALWAYS there, so it doesn't matter that there are all those files behind them, but when I open a Finder window, they'll all be there. Hoping this helps it up more.

https://i.imgur.com/8mYPw8w.jpg

What about creating a smart folder “Desktop” and put it onto your sidebar. Try omitting parameters like show only files larger than 1kb. If you go to more options/show more from the query menu in finder... you can add a ton of parameters including “raw” query. Raw can be used to make some really complicated and effective searches. I think you can even extract the raw query from a saved smart folder.


Unable to retrieve deleted iPhone contacts My contacts were linked to an iCloud.com account and not my gmail.com account. I only created an Apple ID with my gmail account and have no idea how that iCloud.com account was created. Now my contacts got deleted and I only have the password for my gmail.com account but my contacts are not synced to that account. My contacts are synced to the iCloud.com account and I don't have the password for that account.

Your iCloud account was probably something you created when you bought the phone or updated. It's part of the Find My iPhone feature that prevents your phone from being used by someone else if it's stolen.

You need to regain access to your iCloud account, using http://iforgot.apple.com is a good start to reset your password.

You should check your iPhone Settings app in iCloud to see if Find My iPhone is enabled, if it is you will not be able to disable this without the password, and if you ever have to restore the phone again you will require this password.


To take off the Transparency features in Yosemite I have the newest Macbook Air with maximum flash memory and processor power.
Still, the search functionality lacks i.e. there is a time gap when hitting a button and getting the result in Finder.
No such gap exists in Terminal.

How can you take of the new features of Transparency and others which can make my Yosemite faster?

Open up System Preferences.
Click on Accessibility.
Place a checkmark next to Reduce Transparency.

How to Improve OS X Yosemite Performance


iPhone SE touch recognition and battery problem Recently, I purchased an iPhone SE, 32GB, on 13/10/2018. The manufacturing month written on the box was Aug/2018. The phone came with pre-installed iOS 11.4.1 and on the same day I updated it to iOS 12.0.1.

I am facing some major issues with touch and battery backup. I also do not know how the iPhone was performing in iOS 11.4.1, since as soon as I opened the box and set all things up, I updated it.

The issues are:

1) Touch Screen Problem: The upper left corner (where the back arrow of most of the iOS apps is situated) fails to register the correct position of a touch. Tapping the arrow right on it does nothing. I need to tap little bit to the right of the arrow. This is also same for the upper right corner. In this case I tap a little bit to the left instead of touching the exact location of the target. This is extremely annoying.

Tap targets which are minute in size require several taps to activate. Surprisingly, this is not true for all the small-sized targets. Some small-sized target can very easily be activated without any false tapping.

For example, in the Weather app, the "Add city" option (plus sign inscribed within a circle) requires 10-15 taps to activate, and still, I am searching for the right spot for it. This is same for a small "More" target which appears on the right side when an app is being updated in App store. However, a very small cross arrow which comes on the right side while typing in the search bar of Safari is extremely fast in recognizing a touch. I do not know whether this is a software issue or a hardware one.

This is also happening for third party apps. In Messenger, if I tap the account info button (the very small circle on the top left corner, which contains the profile picture), nothing happens. But if I tap slightly to the right of it, the phone recognizes the tap. In the Twitter app, the account info button (placed exactly at the same location as in Messenger) easily recognizes the touch. (However, the size of the info button is slightly bigger in Twitter than that of in Messenger.)

Deleting the first row apps in any of the home pages is also troublesome. Tapping the cross mark on the app icon does nothing. I need to tap little bit below the cross mark. This is true for any app which I place in the first row. Deleting apps in other rows is, however, normal.

There are a number of examples can be provided regarding this calibration problem of touch.

2) Battery life: In short, really bad battery life. Today (24/10/2018) I got a "Screen on time" of 6 hr 20 min, during which the battery percentage went to 5% from 100%. The total time including the "stand by time" is 15 hr 40 min. At 08:00 hours battery percentage was 84% and at 16:40 hours it came to 5%. For this entire discharge cycle (100%-5%) I kept the phone in low power mode.

Is everybody with an iPhone SE on iOS 12.0.1 facing the same problem with touch?

Is battery draining more in ios 12.0.1 compared to ios 10.3.3?

iOS 12 should bring better performance and battery life, not make it worse.

Since you have just recently bought the device, you should tell whoever sold you the device that it has these defects and request to exchange/return the device for a new one. You should probably hurry before you run out of time to return it.


Black screen with cursor after logging out of guest account on High Sierra When I log out of my guest account, it gets stuck with a black screen and a cursor that I can move around but can't do anything except do a forced restart. In my searching, I have seen an old recommendation to remove the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist file (that didn't work for me). I've also seen that someone disabled System Integrity Protection with csrutil disable.

I looked in the Console after restarting and saw the following line:

Apr 24 12:45:55 my-computer com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]
 (com.apple.xpc.launchd.user.domain.201.100028.Aqua):
 Caller not allowed to perform action: loginwindow.1627,
 action = service removal, code = 150:
 Operation not permitted while System Integrity Protection is engaged,
 uid = 0, euid = 201, gid = 201, egid = 201, asid = 100028

This mentions both loginwindow and System Integrity Protection. Is disabling SIP the only way to fix this?

How I solved this issue on Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra:

Boot into Recovery Mode (Command-R)
Open Terminal, disable SIP (csrutil disable), restart
Login to Guest, logout (it should not hang on a black screen now)
Boot into Recovery Mode (Command-R)
Open Terminal, enable SIP (csrutil enable), restart
Login to Guest, logout (it still works!)


How do I change my health app from a bar graph to a line graph? I was using the Health App under iOS 9.2 - and in the 9.3 upgrade the Health App switched display from a line graph to a bar graph.

I like the line graph better. I can't figure out how to get it back.

My question is: How do I change my health app from a bar graph to a line graph?

Simply the answer is: you can not change because of the update


Mounting shares with Login Items at login, Finder windows popup I have some shares that are mounted during login. I used Users & Groups' "Login Items" panel to do this. When I login, all of the shares pop up in their own Finder windows.

How can I keep the Finder windows from popping up at login? I've already tried checking the Hide checkbox.

Here are two very simple solutions made possible by automation tools baked right in Mac OS X, AppleScript and Automator.

AppleScript

You can use AppleScript to make a a very simple app that will mount your shares without opening any new Finder windows.

Open AppleScript Editor and put in this script:

tell application "Finder"
    mount volume "afp://Share.local/folder" as user name "username"
end tell

Adapt it to your need (configure your shares).
Save it as an application.
Add it to your login items in the "Accounts" preference pane.

It may ask your password the first time, but you can save it in Keychain and won't bother you anymore.

Of course, you can mount multiple disk by adding some additional mount volume lines.

Automator

If you prefer a visual interface, you can use Automator as well.

Open Automator and choose "Application".
Add action "Get Specified Servers" (in the "Files & folders" section).
Add your shares in the list.
Add action "Connect to Servers" (in the same section).
Save the application.
Add it to your login items in the "Accounts" preference pane.

Here's a screenshot of the process:


Is it possible to find the serial number of stolen devices using a Mac that they've been connected to? For a number of devices that were stolen, can I find their serial number on a Mac that I still have and which the devices have been connected to at some point? In other words, are there any applications (or the OS) which might have kept a record of any of these devices' serial number(s)? I'm specifically thinking about:

iPod
Cinema Display
Time Capsule
another Mac
a camera

Would the connections have shown up in a log file somewhere with their serial number included? At least for an iPod, I wouldn't be surprised if its serial number gets recorded by iTunes somewhere. And iPhoto just might record a camera's as well.

How to get serial numbers for displays:

Go to /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist. Open this with TextWrangler or a similar utility. Look for a DisplaySerialNumber key with an integer value that isn't 0. With any luck, this should be the s/n of your display.
If you haven't used this display for a while, the records of it may be gone.
Also, it appears that this isn't guaranteed. Double-check if possible.

How to get the serial numbers for iPods:

Open /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ipod.plist.
 Look under the Devices dictionary. Any iPod you've connected will have all its info there, including the s/n (under Serial Number).

Good luck.


Macbook Pro freezes after sleep The above mentioned Macbook Pro Retina (Mid 2015) with SSD, running Sierra seems to be freezing most of the times, after attempting to "wake" it up from sleep. The situation has the following observed characteristics:

Seems to "wake up" (you can see the backlight of the screen activating) but the screen remains black
Sometimes the mouse pointer may appear but the screen remains black
Some times it wakes up, gives the login screen but freezes (spinning ball) after logging in
Happens only after some time has passed (perhaps 15') after initiating the sleep.
It has higher possibility to happen when connected to power
Thought there may be a conflict with the Energy Saver Display-off settings but keeps the same behaviour in all possible different settings including when choosing not to allow the display to switch off.

In all the above cases the system has to be hard rebooted by pressing the power button.

I would welcome any ideas on what may be wrong but also advice on where to look (log files?) to debug the situation.

The first things I'd try are to reset both the NVRAM and SMC in that order. Before following the steps below, ensure you have no external hardware connected (so, unplug your external display) and make sure you use the built-in keyboard.
Reset the NVRAM
Older Macs had what's called Parameter RAM (PRAM), newer Macs use Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM). Here’s how to reset the NVRAM on your particular MBP:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then press the commandoptionpr keys. You have to make sure you press these keys before the gray screen appears or it won’t work.
Hold those keys down until your Mac reboots again and you here the startup chime.
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).
Reset the SMC
To reset the SMC on your particular MBP, follow these steps:

Shut down your computer
Keep the power cable plugged in.
Press at the same time:

optioncontrol (on the left side of the keyboard)
shift (on the right side of the keyboard for computers with the T2 security chip; on the left side otherwise)
power button

Keep holding for 10 seconds and then let go
Turn your computer back on with the power button.

After resetting both the NVRAM and SMC, use your computer to determine if the issue still persists.


Spotlight overlay stopped working on Catalina The spotlight overlay that is available via cmd+space suddenly stopped working. First I thought it was maybe a conflicting keyboard shortcut. But clicking on the little search icon in the top right bar also doesn't work. Using Spotlight in a Finder window on the other hand is working.

Restarting my mac solves the issue, but only for a moment. Then it stops working again. I don't see any crashed processes in Activity Monitor.

This is happening on macOS Catalina 10.15.2

Has anyone seen this before? Not really sure what to do about it.

Nevermind. I had an external screen connected and am using spaces. The overlay did just open in a not active space not visible to me...


How to determine what an app does and if it contains malware? How can we know on iOS and OS X what an Application really does?

On OS X you always can do the following: right click on an .app and "show package". Contents -> MacOS and double click the executable Unix file. Terminal opens and somehow tells you what the app does.

I don't know if you've heard but it seems somebody modified Xcode's compiler to add malware to apps. This modified compiler is as the media says widely spread in China so many apps are affected. So also as the media says a company has detected about 400 apps that seem to be infected.

My question now is, how you could tell what an app does on iOS? How to determine if it contains malware or something else harmful.

And is there another way to tell what apps do on OS X than starting the exacutable Unix file located in the app's package?

Short answer: you can't know

A bit longer answer: Simply running and using the application will not show you what might be going on behind the scenes. To dig into that, you'll need to run the application in a debugging environment to analye data and process flows, keep track of any subprocesses created, monitor any network communication initiated by the application etc. etc. As this is rather cumbersome and requires a lot of skills and experience, it usually comes down to trust at the end.


How to install a bootable ISO onto a single partition of a usb stick? Previous questions/answers dealt with the simple case of a single partition on the USB disk that was just overwritten with dd.   Also it looks like the disk utility gui doesn't allow creation of multiple partitions on a usb drive now.  Anyway:

I've created 3 partitions on my stick, with the command:
diskutil partitionDisk disk4 3 APM hfsx d1 1.35G ExFat d2 1.25G ExFat d3 13.0G.

This actually left me with 5 partitions:

Finished partitioning on disk4
/dev/disk4 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *16.0 GB    disk4
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk4s1
   2:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk4s2
   3:                 Apple_HFSX d1                      1.2 GB     disk4s3
   4:               Windows_NTFS d2                      1.3 GB     disk4s4
   5:               Windows_NTFS d3                      13.4 GB    disk4s5

I've got a bootable linux ISO.   Which device should I dd it to?   The original target was supposed to be the 1.2Gb partition that is marked disk4s3.   I don't know what the other stuff before it is.   Should I just dd to /dev/disk4s1 and let it overwrite stuff after it?

You can use Unetbootin to copy the Linux ISO to 1.2GB partition(disk4s3).

If I were you though I would first rewrite the partition type as GPT instead of APM by running:

diskutil partitionDisk disk4 GPT fat32 Linux 10% ExFat d2 10% ExFat d3 80%

Then select the Linux partition on disk4 in UNetbootin to be the destination for the ISO copy.


Mac Equivalent to Windows CMD f8 In Windows if I entered several commands and built up a little history, I could execute previous commands by typing a prefix at the command line and pressing F8 (Windows Keyboard shortcuts) to cycle through all commands in my history matching that prefix. Is there any equivalent in MacOS?

By way of example If I sequentially executed these commands

dir .
echo IgnoreThis
dir /b %TEMP%
dir /s .
dir /b %USERPROFILE%
echo IgnoreThis

If I then entered

dir /bF8

I would first receive an autocompletion to

dir /b %TEMP%

and if I pressed F8 again it would autocomplete to

dir /b %USERPROFILE%

For another example if I instead entered

dirF8

For the first, second, and third times I pressed F8 I would get

dir .
dir /b %TEMP%
dir /s .

Add this to your ~/.inputrc:

# ↑
"\e[A":history-search-backward
# ↓
"\e[B":history-search-forward

# Try to stay at the same the cursor position when moving through the history.
set history-preserve-point on

The way this operation works is you first type your partial command prefix and begin pressing ↑ and ↓ arrows to begin cycling in reverse and forward respectively through the command history matches to your typed prefix.


A good iPhone app for it when standing in the dock I have an Apple dock for my iPhone 4 and find it beautiful so I like to have it in my desktop or my bed table while charging. The thing is I'd like to have a simple app that shows me the time, weather, maybe a small brief of my social network accounts, dunno just useful info so the phone isn't just standing there with the screen off.

I find difficult to find something like this with a decent graphics quality in the iTunes Store. Any suggestions?

I'm using Alarm Clock (there's a free version, but with an ad on the bottom, so not very "beautiful").

It shows the time of the day (obviously) and can also show the date, and the weather/temperature.
Nice touch: sliding your finger increase/decrease brightness.

(But no social network)


I upgraded to macOS Sierra. Now my disk utility doesn't show what types of files are taking up space I have a mid-2012 Macbook Pro (non-retina) running macOS Sierra and I recently upgraded the hard drive to a 240GB SSD and moved the 500GB HDD to the CD bay, and then more recently upgrading to MacOS Sierra. Now in disk utility it does not show what file types are taking up space like it used to in all the previous versions of OS X. Am I being stupid or is this a glitch?

Screenshots:

Spotlight can get stuck and show you wrong information, so right after an update, you might need to wait a day or so if you don't leave the computer running.

Open About This Mac from the Apple menu and then select Storage:

The gross storage should match Disk Utility which his out of the business of knowing what's in the drive - just that it's used. If you get a blank or wrong diagram - there's no progress bar letting you know background processes are recalculating, but eventually you should see a better image like below:

Note:

the size of the free space is NOT TO SCALE.  I have 45% and 42% free space above but the "free space" white area is clearly not to scale.
the "System" can include data from other users that you might expect to be calculated as photos or documents or videos. Even some of your iCloud data can get lumped into System.


Removing Files after Successful Extraction unrar rm shopt globstar shopt -s globstar
for f in **/*.rar; do
    dir=`dirname "$f"`;
    unrar e "$f" "$dir" && rm -frv "${f::-2}*";
done

From echoing out testing the rm command, the file is the correct path.  I don't receive any errors about an incorrect path or anything.  I know there are other methods to use find, but that would be pointless and use extra cpu cycles this should be working from everything I found.  Any ideas on how to use the rm command properly?

It should work with removing the double quotes:

shopt -s globstar
for f in **/*.rar; do
    dir=`dirname "$f"`;
    unrar e "$f" "$dir" && rm -frv ${f::-2}*;
done

Bash expansion of the star char * doesn't occurs inside quotes.

For example:

echo dir/*.rar might give:

dir/file1.rar
dir/file2.rar
dir/file3.rar

But echo "dir/*.rar" will give:

dir/*.rar

(rm command will try to delete a filename which contains literally a star character.)


What is the difference between a 2011 i5, and a more recent i5? I am looking at my daughter's MBP.  It is circa 2010/2011, and has a 2.4 i5. Why are processors today called the same name, but are advertised with slower clock speeds?

So lets compare the i5 family of CPU on MBP.

The i5 is a brand name for a family of processor, that is why is it still called i5.

Core i5" 2.4 13-Inch (Late 2011) features a 32 nm "Sandy Bridge" 2.4 GHz Intel "Core i5" processor (2435M), with two independent processor "cores" on a single silicon chip with a 3 MB shared level 3 cache.

The 2015 MBP has up to 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz) with 3MB shared L3 cache.

Based on this alone the 2015 model is >30% faster.


How can I map a Service's Keyboard Shortcut on the Command Line? I'm trying to write a program that adds some new services to the Mac.

For this to work I need to add keyboard shortcuts to some installed services. Doing it though system preferences is not an option.

I need a command line operation that will let me map a keyboard shortcut to user created service.

The service shortcuts are stored in pbs.plist and can be modified like this:

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'Delete NSServicesStatus:"(null) - \
  servicename - runWorkflowAsService"' ~/Library/Preferences/pbs.plist 2>/dev/null
defaults write pbs NSServicesStatus -dict-add '"(null) - \
  servicename - runWorkflowAsService"' \
  '{key_equivalent = "^~@1";}'

Source: https://apple.stackexchange.com/users/3936/

^ = control, ~ = alt, @ = command; replace servicename with the name of the service


Sharing a single Dropbox between multiple accounts on one Mac - possible? This seems like it should be easy, but...

My partner and I use a single Dropbox.com account to keep all of our joint projects synced up between our computers - and this has been working great for years. We've now added a MacBook Air to the mix, and we each have accounts on it and can grab it and go when we need to do some remote work.

I've been trying to get the Dropbox synced to the Air - but I want to have it in the "Shared" directory so that we both can access it - it shouldn't matter who is logged in. This doesn't seem to be working.

I can located the Dropbox in the shared directory fine - but when I change the user who is logged in that user has no permissions to sync the Dropbox or access the files.

I can get it to work if I create a separate ~/Dropbox folder for each user, but this ends up with 50GB duplicated twice over if the entire Dropbox syncs - a particularly ridiculous waste of space on an SSD.

Any ideas how to make this sharing work????

You can do this using ACLs, which will avoid permissions problems when new files are created:

sudo chmod -R +a "$USER allow read,write,append,delete,list,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,file_inherit,directory_inherit" "$DIR"

where $USER is the username of the other user, and $DIR is whatever directory (Dropbox or otherwise) you want the other user to have full permissions in.

We use this to share a single Dropbox folder between four users (2 adults with full access, 2 kids with access to their subdirectory only), and it has been working well for us.  The only limitation is that the user running Dropbox has to be logged in and running Dropbox.  The other users don't have the Dropbox icon and status info in the menu bar.


Making app for iPhone Is it possible to develop an app only for me and my friends?

Just make the app and upload it directly to my iPhone.

It depends. If you have an Apple Developer account ($99 per year), you can create either a ad hoc distribution profile or use a development certificate. For more information on that, view here. Although it is called beta testing, it serves your purpose.

Now if you don't have an Apple Developer account, you can use jailbroken devices and Jailcoder. To use this method, follow the steps below:

Jailbreak your iDevices. If you don't know which ones to use, google it.
Make sure you have Xcode (Here if you don't have it)
Download Jailcoder from here.
Go through the "Guided Patch"
Now develop your program. YOU CANNOT RUN IT ON AN IDEVICE YET!
Open Jailcoder and drag-n-drop your .xcodeproj file into the box.
Connect the jailbroken iDevice and configure Xcode as you would if you had a legit developer account (https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/ToolsLanguages/Conceptual/Xcode_Overview/RunYourApp/RunYourApp.html)
Click run

An older video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NAm1MOGabw. Ignore the fact that it says Xcode 4. It works on Xcode 5.


2013 MacBook Air 13" won't boot - green MagSafe LED I have a 2013 Macbook Air that suddenly won't boot.

It was working as of yesterday. I woke up this morning and it wouldn't start. At the time, the Magsafe2 Adapter was not lit up.

My wife has a similar laptop, so I was able to test my adapter on her Mac and her adapter on my Mac. There doesn't seem to be a problem with the adapter itself based on that.

After moving where the adapter is plugged in, I am getting a green light from the Magsafe2 in my MBA, but it doesn't appear to be charging. I tried:

pressing various keys and moving mouse.
power button
doing an SMC reset (doesn't respond in any visible way to ShiftControlOptionPower)
Leaving it plugged in for a while, etc.

Any suggestions?

There's no fan noise and no probable cause for damage.

To add a further detail, I can get either

Green light if I switch cables with different mac in a short amount of time.
Green light if I remove and then reattach the cable in short amounts of time ( approximately 2 minutes or so)
No light if I leave it unplugged for a bit and mess around with trying to turn it on unplugged for a while

(I don't know if any of this is relevant or should be considered relevant)

The problem is unrelated to the status of your MagSafe light.  Green means "charged" and amber means "charging."  Seeing a green light on your MagSafe means it's getting the signal that they battery is fully charged; there's no other diagnostic info related to this light.

The problem you are having is that your Mac won't turn on.  This could be due to:

an issue with the power button on the top case assembly - the only way to diagnose this is for the battery to run down completely and then connect to power with auto power on enabled and/or open the case and begin repair level triage / fault isolation / part replacement or repair ( hereafter called open and repair)
an issue with the SMC - the only way to diagnose this is to try one time to reset the SMC - if after one reset, it doesn’t power on, open and repair.
an issue with the logic board - open and repair
an issue with a failed battery dragging the power too low to start - open and repair

If you have some technical skills, you can DIY diagnose the first two by bypassing the button and shorting the power pads on the logic board to simulate a button press or disconnect the battery for 30 seconds to reset the SMC.  This will triage and isolate the failure to the connectors running the keyboard and assure the logic board and storage and OS are all functional.

However, the key to this that points in the direction of a logic board failure is this statement:

  There's no fan noise...

Regardless of any other issues, if the logic board is functioning properly, the fan will spin at 2000 RPM on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

If you're not technically inclined, or it's the third option (likely), it's time to take it in for service to someone that has the tools and training to perform the open and repair steps.


How do I "pin" Notes in Mountain Lion? The official feature list for Mountain Lion says that individual notes opened into their own windows from the Notes app (1.0) remain "pinned" open "even if you close Notes", but this isn't true. Closing Notes closes any notes that have been opened into their own windows.

How do I get the Notes app's note "pinning" feature to work as described.

The feature description is a bit misleading. It appears that by "close Notes", Apple means "close the main Notes window", not "close the Notes app", which (not surprisingly) leaves other windows open.

In fact, the context menu refers to the main Notes window as Notes:

So what Apple's description basically means:

  Even if you close Notes, the note stays open on your desktop.

= You don't need to use the overview window at all times. You can use Notes.app similar to Stickies.app

By the way, Stickies.app is still available in Mountain Lion and has been upgraded to version 9.0.


MacPorts: Continue installing other updates after error Say I have the following outdated packages:

foo
bar
baz

I want to update as many as them as possible, so I try to run:

sudo port -n -f upgrade outdated

However this fails with:

Error: org.macports.build for port foo returned: command execution failed
Please see the log file for port foo for details: ...

How can I make macports try to upgrade bar and baz, if foo fails?

I would like to generally make macports try to install/upgrade other ports if installing/upgrading some of them fails and just continue.

From the man page:

 -f       force mode (ignore state file)

 -n       don't upgrade dependencies (affects upgrade and install)

Edit: foo, bar & baz, are 3 total unrelated ports, that doesn't depend on each other in any way.

Edit 2: Next time I run this the outdated ports might be a, b & c, instead of foo, bar & baz, so I can't hardcode the failing ones and I can't just do:

sudo port update foo
sudo port update bar
sudo port update baz

The -p seems to work for me.

From the manpage:

-p       Despite any errors encountered, proceed to process multiple
         ports and commands.


How could I output audio to the microphone port on Macbook Pro 15" Late 2011? I've seen cases where people record audio with the headphones port, so is it possible to listen to audio with the microphone port? I do not have any torx or triwing screwdrivers right now so a headphone port replacement is not possible.
Thanks!

Recent Macs (from 2012) have a headphone jack which also has a contact for a microphone, using the same contacts as the iPhone headset. That's how you can record from the headphone jack.

Unfortunately, the microphone jack is not wired to support audio output, so there is no way to do it.

If you want to listen to headphones with your MacBook without a hardware repair, USB Audio devices are cheap and widely available. That would be the best way to go.


Pros and cons of enabling “Put hard disks to sleep when possible?” I'm not big on saving electricity at all and I'm trying to decide whether to select Mac's “Put hard disks to sleep when possible.”

What are the pros and cons of doing so?

For example, can I expect the hardware to last longer by keeping the hard disks on 24/7 versus putting them to sleep?

I'm using MacBook Pro (2017) running Sierra (10.12), but question is also interested in other (future) versions.

And why is “…hard disks…” plural when there's only one?

Advantages:

on older traditional rotating disk drives it will save some power
on the same type of drive it often parks the heads making it less fragile in cases of unplanned moving/shock/drop

Disadvantages:

rotating hard disk drives will live shorter due to the fact that it’s the starting and stopping that kills them, not running idle
slower initial access to the disk as it starts after it was put in standby (it needs to spin up before it can be used)

None of this really matters to solid state disks as they are pure electronical devices with no mechanics. Their power use is directly proportional to disk activity. While they often do have extra low power modes, you won’t actually benefit much from it since it is not much less than its normal power regulation.

The reason this is plural is because it can also apply to external disks, and desktop macs used to have space for up to six harddisks. The 2009 Mac Pro has 4, for example.


How to get the amount generated by app before deleting it from iTunes Connect I recently removed my app from sale from iTunes Connect, revenue generated from that app is around $103, I want to delete the app but before deleting how can I get this amount?

The amount earned will be transferred into your bank account automatically without you having to do anything. However, when that happens will depend on a number of factors, such as whether you still have any others apps on the App Store and therefore still generate an income from them, etc.

If you have some concerns, or wish to just generally discuss this with someone, then contact the Apple Developer Program Support number for your country. You can find it at: https://developer.apple.com/contact/phone/.


How can I add fonts to GIMP 2.8.2 on OS X? Starting with GIMP 2.8, the application is no longer visibly dependent on X11, so suddenly all the advice I'm aware of for adding fonts to GIMP don't seem to work.

(This worked with GIMP 2.6)

Now what's a reasonable way to get GIMP to accept new fonts?  Preferably I'd like it to use all the same fonts I've got installed in the system Font Book.

You can add fonts from the preference menu item:
Gimp-2.8 -> Preferences -> Folders ->Fonts.
Now simply add the folder containing your fonts.

/Library/Fonts/ for systemwide fonts
~/Library/Fonts/ for user installed fonts


How to format a cell with data YYYYMMDD in Numbers to be a date type? I created a custom format to try and format a date column to be used within categories. However, Numbers tend to keep reverting my custom format to "Automatic" and I'm unable to group the data as part of a category.

How do I set cells to use my custom date format to be used in categories?

Setting the field to use the new format

Click away from the cell and go back to the field and see that the format has reverted back to "Automatic"

You can assign you custom format to an empty cell. If you then enter a value that contains a hyphen (-) or a slash (/), such as "1/21/2019", Numbers assumes it’s a date and assigns it your custom date and time format automatically. And keeps it.

Otherwise, if you already have a number in a cell or enter value that is a number, such as "20171214", Numbers cannot recognize it as a date and assign it your custom date format.

Hope, this little video may help to understand as well: https://youtu.be/fUwRHtRLaec


Searching by Finder Tags not working in Spotlight on macOS High Sierra I started using Finder Tags very extensively a while ago. However, I noticed this strange bug (at least on my macOS High Sierra): Searching for tags by writing

tag:<name_of_tag>

is not working for me in Spotlight.

I can successfully write <name_of_tag> into Finder search window, and it will both recognize it as tag and show me the relevant files. Therefore, it looks like a bug specific to Spotlight, as searching for tags is supposed to work system-wide.

Is there any workaround or fix for this issue?

After searching the internet a little bit, I found a recent post in Apple Discussions explaining the reason for bug. In non-english versions of macOS (at least German and Slovak), searching by

tag:<name_of_tag>

query does not work. Replacing the tag keyword by kMDItemUserTags fixes the problem and properly shows relevant files even from Spotlight:

kMDItemUserTags:<name_of_tag>


Can iTunes be configured to have the 'Store' be default screen at startup? I like to use iTunes predominantly to check things out on the iTunes store (and make the occasional purchase), not to browse a library of downloaded media by default.

Is there a setting or way to make the store be the default initial screen in iTunes for Mac?

There may be other even more elegant ways to do it, but here's one way to automate the process:

Download Keyboard Maestro (it's a paid app, but you can try it out at least and see if you like it - it's an extremely powerful app that is worth purchasing if you are committed to enabling tweaks such as this one), and open the app.
In the 'Macros' pane, click the + button at the bottom of it to create a new Macro. Give the Macro a name as prompted. Click on 'New Trigger' and select 'Application Trigger'. Select iTunes. Then under iTunes where it says 'Activates' click on that and change it to 'Launches'.
Now click on 'New Action' further down. An 'Actions' pane will appear to the left. Scroll down or search within the pane to find 'Execute an Applescript'. Double click on it or drag and drop it into the 'No Action' box in the right-hand pane.
Insert the following code in the Applescript box:

tell application "System Events"
tell application "iTunes" to activate
    delay 1.0
    keystroke "H" using {command down, shift down}
end tell

And the process is complete. It is already enabled in your list of active Keyboard Maestro Macros and you can test by opening iTunes afresh to see the Store Home open by default when it opens.

N.b. there's a 1 second delay in the above Applescipt code due to it not working if I didn't include the brief delay. Tweak it as desired, maybe less than a second is fine but 1 second is not much to wait when launching the whole app anyway.

And also to explain: ⇧+ ⌘ + H is the default assigned hotkey for Store > Home for iTunes in OS X, so that's all this Keyboard Maestro macro is emulating. (Obviously, the hotkey combination can be customised in System Preferences keyboard shortcuts.)

Upon brief googling it appears there may not be any free apps/tools available to automate such a 'execute applescript/hotkey action upon app launch so Keyboard Maestro might possibly be the only way. But I only did a quick search, there's probably some tool on github somewhere that can do it, and it'd be nice to know of any free solutions for this problem too.


Can I safely charge an iPhone 4S with a 5V 2A source? I just bought a New Trent IMP99D external battery, to keep my phone alive while gaming during long-haul flights. It has two USB ports to connect to, one which supplies 1 amp at 5 volts, another which supplies 2 amps at 5 volts.

The instruction manual says to connect smartphones to the 1-amp port, and any iPad 2's to the 2-amp port.

Is there any harm, or do I incur any inefficiencies, if I connect my iPhone 4S to the 2-amp port instead of the recommended 1-amp port?

When I travel, I only bring my iPad charger and use it interchangeably with my iPhone 4 without noticing any battery life performance and by that extension it should be the same for iPhone 4s.

Apple's website seems to confirm this; For the 10W USB iPad charger - "It also charges iPhone and all iPod models with a dock connector."


Blank Mail screen which then crashes but reminas open in background The title sums it up.
Once opened it simply doesn't show any emails and then eventually seems to crash but is open in the background still not showing anything.

Try to restart your Mac and see if that fixes it.


Running .NET binary with mono When I have abc.exe generated from C#/Mono source, I use 'mono abc.exe'.

Is there a way to run abc.exe with 'abc.exe' not 'mono abc.exe'? I mean, when I run 'abc.exe', can I make 'mono abc.exe' called automatically?

See this link

Basically what you have to do is to use one of the Mono tools (mkbundle is a generic one while macpack is designed to work on Mac OS X) to link all your application executables, resources and dll in a single executable file that can be later run as a single app.

From the macpack doc:

macpack is a tool that must be used to bundle Cocoa# applications into Double-Clickable, Finder friendly, bundles on Mac OS X. It bundles static libraries and resources, as well as generates a basic info.plist into the .app bundle.

For example the following commands are used to build the CurrencyConverter.exe into an application bundle:

$ mcs -g -debug+ CurrencyConverter.cs -out:CurrencyConverter.exe -pkg:cocoa-sharp
$ rm -rf CurrencyConverter.app
$ macpack -m:2 -o:.  -r:/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/lib/
  libCocoaSharpGlue.dylib -r:CurrencyConverter.nib -n:CurrencyConverter
  -a:CurrencyConverter.exe

The resulting CurrencyConverter.app is just another Mac OS X application as far as the Finder is concerned, and can be opened from Finder, or launched from Terminal using the open -a CurrencyConverter command.


"Client Authentication" certificate for iPhone for school Wi-Fi My school Wi-Fi, which requires that I log in using my username and password, requires that I accept this certificate (which I think might be a trusted root certificate?) in order to connect:

What does this allow them to do? Does this certificate mean they can run man in the middle attacks and decrypt my HTTPS searches?

Help is very much appreciated, thanks!!

This certificate only identifies your device as a trusted known device and to be allowed on the network.

Credentials (usernames and passwords) can be stolen.  Hardware identifiers (MAC addresses) can be spoofed.  This unique certificate gets generated at the time of request is and cannot be spoofed.  So, even if someone steals your username and password and tries to access the network using their MacBook, it won't allow them onto the network.

It's a cert for authentication, not encryption/decryption.


Do Solid State Drives need Power Management? Do they need sleep? Is there any positive (or negative) to checking the power management option "Put hard disks to sleep" when I only have a SSD drive installed?

Is there any difference if I'm connected to another external drive, or Mac in Firewire taget mode?

There is no advantage or effect on SSDs with the "Put hard disk to sleep". This setting enabled a spinning disk to spin-down while not in use. With no mechanical moving parts, there is no effect on an SSD.

Externally connected mechanical drives will still adhere to the setting.

See Apple Support page: OS X: Saving energy with Sleep


On-screen text unexpectedly read to me, despite Voiceover (Mac) being disabled On Mavericks, I have Voiceover turned off in both Accessibility settings and Users & Groups.

In the past week, Voiceover has started occasionally reading small bits of text to me, seemingly unrequested.

It seems to primarily be subject lines of new mail in Gmail (running as a webpage in Chrome), but this could be a red herring.

Is there a keyboard shortcut or trackpad gesture that I'm accidentally doing to make this happen? What could be going on?

[Update: see comments - I'm now certain it's only emails that are getting read aloud, but not sure whether it's anything to do with Chrome or not. OS-level email integration?]

Edit:

Read this Apple Discussions article.

I think this is the same problem you are having.

  I think I got it. I was sitting at the screen when a message popped up with the voice over. There was a little spanner icon in the top right which allowed me to turn off this feature.


Is it safe to install Windows Updates on a Boot Camp'ed OS? I just installed Windows 7 on Boot Camp, and when I login to windows, it says that there are Windows Updates available. The problem is that one time when I tried to install these updates, it prevented Windows from starting up again. So I'm wondering if it's okay to run all of the Windows updates as they appear, if I have to avoid some of them, or if I have to wait until Apple releases a patch which would permit the updates to be installed without any adverse effects.

Here is the series of events that occurred as I remember them:

Installed boot camp
Installed Apple's drivers via a USB flash drive
Restarted
Connected to internet
Windows noticed that there were a few recommended updates and installed them.
Restarted
I manually checked for updates in Windows Update to see if there were any more, it showed 40 or so.
I began the update process.
While it was downloading and installing the updates, I ran Apple's Software Update. It showed that there was an update to Boot Camp (3.2, I believe). I didn't install it since Windows Updates was already in the process of installing updates.
Restarted
Windows didn't load, instead Startup Repair loaded which said that Windows was unable to load normally.
One of its suggestions was to perform a system restore, I approved this.
After some time, Startup Repair said that wasn't successful at finding a solution. (It's ambiguous as to whether or not the restore worked.)
Restarted
This time it launched Windows correctly.
I checked how many updates there were in Windows Updates, and it showed only 4.
I launched Apple's Software Update, and updated to the latest Boot Camp.
Restarted
This time when I checked for Windows Updates, it showed more than 40.

My guess is that the restore did work, since after restarting, Windows launched. Plus, it showed more than 40 updates left.

For practical purposes, when you boot into your Boot Camp partition you are on a regular PC: All updates pushed thru Windows Update should work as expected. I have used Boot Camp since the beta period all the way to Snow Leopard and I have never experienced a situation like the one you describe.

I believe that Windows Update will only push updates that are critical (like security updates) and everything else (like driver updates) is listed as optional. I recommend enabling the option that makes Windows Update prompt you whether or not it should install updates when available. That way if you are in doubt, you can always review and make sure any driver updates are not pushed into your system, and things like security updates are.

It might be a good idea to stick to the drivers provided by Apple.

I am unsure why you had to manually install the drivers on a USB drive, since they are usually installed automatically from the Mac OS X DVD right after Windows completes its setup. I wonder if there is a particular situation with your system and that the fact you had to install the drivers separately is related to what is causing your hardware to be unreponsive now.


Difference in encrypting a sparse bundle for Time Machine before or after mounting the drive? I created a sparse bundle to use as my Time Machine back up

hdiutil create -size 800g -encryption -type SPARSEBUNDLE -fs "HFS+J" -volname TimeMachineEncrypted TimeMachineEncrypted.sparsebundle

When I mount the drive I need to use my passphrase to decrypt it. Once mounted I examine the drive in Disk Utility and see that it is not encrypted.

What's the difference in encrypting the image bundle and the mounted drive?
Is one better than the other performance, security, and automation wise?

Encrypting via Disk Utility after the sparseimage is created consistently failed with

Mounting disk
Unable to create a new Core Storage logical volume group.
Operation failed…

The answer to my question is that encrypting the mounted drive is not an option, the image must be created with the encryption flag.


How to set a wallpaper for apps in full screen (in Yosemite and higher) Some apps, like Terminal and Textmate, offer transparent windows. With a good wallpaper, this can look really great.

But apps in full screen mode have a black background, not your wallpaper.

Is there a hidden feature or setting to set the background of fullscreen apps to a wallpaper?

It doesn't look like there's a safe way of doing this; looking at this Apple Support Discussion answer, I can still find the referenced background image in my Yosemite install at:

/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/Resources/NSTexturedFullScreenBackgroundColor.png

Since this is buried in /System, it's highly unlikely there's .plist file/attribute you could change to point to an alternative background – so you would need to replace this image file with another to change the background. As you may or may not know, editing anything within the /System directory is tempting super-bad juju and very, very, very strongly discouraged by Apple and any IT people worth their salt.

Personally, I would recommend that if you really want a window background image in these apps that you instead configure each app to use the background image and dispense with the transparency (or submit a feature request to Apple and embrace the restriction in the meantime).


Export iTunes music library information (album, artist, track names) to CSV or spreadsheet format? Is there a way to export album/track information from an iTunes music library into, say, a comma-separated values (CSV) file, or another spreadsheet-friendly format?

I'd like to be able to grab a snapshot of at least basic metadata – being artist name, album name, and track name – and copy into a spreadsheet or database software for reference, cleansing, & analysis.  (If you want to call me a music nerd for wanting to data-mine information about my CD collection, go right ahead! :-)

Is there a way to do such a metadata export within iTunes itself, or else might there be a third-party tool that can extract such information from iTunes library storage?  Or perhaps you have a quick & dirty homebrew script of your own you could share here?

I'm aware there is XML somewhere in the bowels of my iTunes library, and I'm a programming nerd too, but I'm hoping somebody has already invented this particular wheel.

Thanks!

Make sure all the columns you want metadata for are visible in the playlist or library you're looking at. Then, select the tunes you want with shift-click or ⌘-click or whatever:

Then, hit ⌘+C to copy. This will allow you to paste what's visible in the iTunes playlist into any sort of spreadsheet you like:

It won't label the columns for you, but it'll do the trick quickly.


How does iPhone's facetime work even when the phone function is off? It's a bit inconvenient that iPhone's FaceTime can only be used on WiFi. And yet you call people by using their numbers.

But my mom's iPad only has wifi and she has no number, and I call her iPad via my iPhone by using her email address. I don't quite understand how it knows her iPad and makes the connection? Is it through her Apple ID?

What's doubly confusing is when I traveled to Europe for a couple months I put my iPhone account on hold; so text and phone did not work. I kept the wifi on though. But I was blown away that mom could still call me from her iPad. Somehow FaceTime worked though WiFi with my phone number even though my phone account was turned off? I'm assuming it somehow associated my number with my Apple ID, but wow, I'm confused?

Initially Apple used the phone number as the FaceTime "account" and non-user-visible SMS validation as the "password" to avoid forcing end users to enter/remember/forget yet another set of credentials.

The SMS validation happens behind the scenes - but SMS does have to be active on the phone at the time of first verifying (and potentially when re-verifying?) your FaceTime account on Apple's servers. If you switch off FaceTime in the Phone settings, wait a few seconds and turn it back on - you can see this checking process. The status message will change to say "Waiting for activation..." until Apple's servers verify your account. Once it says "Your phone number will be shared with people you call with FaceTime." the account is verified.

You can now use AppleID for credentials for devices that do not have SMS and an easily accessed/understood phone number. SMS is needed one time at activation to ensure Apple's push notification goes to the correct device - there shouldn't be a problem dropping SMS later once the device is registered.

This data lets the address book facilitate dialing and location over WiFi. Apple runs servers that let each device check in and request to initiate a call if the receiver is online anywhere. There is no technical reason why FaceTime cannot use cellular data for the call (bits are bits) but in practice the carriers would probably have to charge more for supporting everyone video chatting on networks that are currently straining to contain the data already flowing over them.

On devices that allow an email address - if someone calls you - all the devices currently on ring but only one picks up. For example, it's possible to receive incoming FaceTime calls ringing on a Mac, an iPod touch and an iPad - and any one can pick up the "call".


Using osacript to access Finder from crontab (or from non-interactive session) I have a script that generates a dmg file from my application bundle. This is generated every night from our subversion repository.

If would be interesting to set up things like the DMG's window size, background image, etc, directly from the script. Currently the only way I know to do so is using osascript and calling Finder's applescript functionality.

The problem is that this script is ran from crontab, so there is no graphical session open - obviously it will never find a Finder open.

I copied this snippet from here: http://asmaloney.com/2013/07/howto/packaging-a-mac-os-x-application-using-a-dmg/

# tell the Finder to resize the window, set the background,
#  change the icon size, place the icons in the right position, etc.
echo '
   tell application "Finder"
     tell disk "'${VOL_NAME}'"
           open
           set current view of container window to icon view
           set toolbar visible of container window to false
           set statusbar visible of container window to false
           set the bounds of container window to {400, 100, 920, 440}
           set viewOptions to the icon view options of container window
           set arrangement of viewOptions to not arranged
           set icon size of viewOptions to 72
           set background picture of viewOptions to file ".background:'${DMG_BACKGROUND_IMG}'"
           set position of item "'${APP_NAME}'.app" of container window to {160, 205}
           set position of item "Applications" of container window to {360, 205}
           close
           open
           update without registering applications
           delay 2
     end tell
   end tell
' | osascript

So, is there a way to launch finder without an active graphical session open (that is, someone logged in the machine)? Or is there a way to perform the same, without using applescript and Finder?

The following page describes the process of creating a template, including background, views, etc, and then using a Makefile to update the DMG package with new files anytime you need to. It doesn't use Finder so it should work for batch updates.

https://el-tramo.be/guides/fancy-dmg/


Smooth zoom in safari You know the way you smoothly zoom-in in mobile safari? How do I do that on my Mac + magic trackpad in regular safari?

Its a pinch motion just like mobile safari.  To activate it, make sure Pinch Open and Close is ticked in System Preferences


USB Hard drive has very small chance of being recognized by Macbook Pro each time it is connected, but works with other machines I have a WD "My Passport" 1TB external hard drive. It isn't recognized by my Macbook Pro (retina, 2013) or a friend's very similar model, but it works with every other machine I've tried, including two Linux netbooks and an older iMac.

Sometimes, it mounts after multiple tries unplugging and replugging the cable. Usually, the hard drive spins up and lights its status LED, but it is not mounted or recognized by Disk Utility or the diskutil list command.

This question seems to describe a similar issue, but their drive doesn't connect every few dozen attempts like mine does.

What could be causing this issue?

Edit: When the drive is plugged in, this is output to dmesg:

Starting poll type 4
Restarting poll type 4
Command 0x2 completed. inCount: 2 data:0x5Command 0x1 completed. inCount: 2 data:0x1001Command 0x16 completed. inCount: 2 data:0x40e0Command 0xa completed. inCount: 2 data:0x0Command 0xb completed. inCount: 2 data:0x0Command 0x12 completed. inCount: 2 data:0xffffCommand 0x13 completed. inCount: 2 data:0xffffCommand 0xf completed. inCount: 2 data:0x1b6eCommand 0x10 completed. inCount: 2 data:0x1bacSmartBattery: finished polling type 4
kxld[net.lundman.spl]: In interface net.lundman.kernel.dependencies.28 of __kernel__, couldn't find symbol _panicstr

kxld[net.lundman.spl]: The following symbols are unresolved for this kext:
kxld[net.lundman.spl]:  _panicstr
Can't load kext net.lundman.spl - link failed.
Failed to load executable for kext net.lundman.spl.
Kext net.lundman.spl failed to load (0xdc008016).
 Dependency net.lundman.spl of kext net.lundman.zfs failed to load.
Kext net.lundman.zfs failed to load (0xdc008015).
Failed to load kext net.lundman.zfs (error 0xdc008015).
Kext load request buffer from user space still retained by a kext; probable memory leak.

Edit 2: That output is still displayed when connecting a working flash drive, along with other stuff about USB media and about filesystems. It is not unique to the drive in this question, but it is the only thing outputted when this drive is connected.

Edit 3: So I did in fact have openZFS installed, at least partially. (No idea how or why). After running their uninstall script, nothing is output when this drive is plugged in at all.

Edit 4: Connecting with an ordinary MicroUSB cable instead of a USB 3 cable works every time. I realized that every other device I tested it on that worked didn't support USB 3. I just tested it with a Windows device that supports USB 3, and while it is better than the Mac, it still has a problem recognizing the drive. Interestingly, the Windows computer shows the drive as not supporting USB 3.0.

I had the same issue with a WD Elements 2.5" 2TB disk on my retian macbook with macOS High Sierra.

My assumption is that the disk "fell" off the USB bus and macOS instead of gracefully retrying is just giving up.

In my case the disk worked for an hour or two, but then I got the error that I should eject Disks before unplugging them and the errors in the dmesg.

I guess this is a combination of macOS being not very forgiving and the WD on-disk USB controllers being a little wonky.

I was using a USB3 hub between the macbook and the disk, so maybe that was the source of wonkyness.

I have no ZFS drivers installed.


L2TP error sending Hello (Can't assign requested address) Since the Yosemite upgrade, my VPN isn't able to connect using either PP2P or L2TP protocols.
L2TP is giving me this output: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/a71bf9318062543c3567
PP2P results in this output: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/6e822f1f18378af0cc40

It seems that both protocols are able to connect to th server, but something goes wrong when receiving the server configuration.

I've set up the connections from scratch numerous times, tried different server locations, Wi-Fi/ethernet and so forth. Nothing helped.

Any idea how I can resolve this?

It appears other users are also noticing the issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6605525

  When using a static IP address and manual entries for subnet and
  router in the network settings, Yosemite VPN fails to stay connected.
  This is probably a bug or an error that Apple needs to fix.

  When having the client computer (the one you are using) network settings
  configured to either just use DHCP or DHCP with manual address, the
  VPN connections (both L2TP and PPTP) work.  If using ARD to access
  computers on the local network, the results are better if you select
  "Send all traffic over VPN connection" under advanced options for the
  VPN connection.

I just switched to OpenVPN to work around this issue.


Launch agent invoking python script returns permission error I'm trying to use the following .plist to invoke a python script.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>KeepAlive</key>
        <true/>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.apple.inMemTask14</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
            <string>/Users/open/Library/Containers/.heheOSX/MacOSHighSierra.py</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>300</integer>
    </dict>
</plist>

For some reason when I execute:

launchctl load -w /Users/open/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.inMemTask14.plist

I get the following errors in my system.log:

Mar 27 11:39:19 openZ-MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.inMemTask14): This service is defined to be constantly running and is inherently inefficient.
Mar 27 11:39:19 openZ-MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.inMemTask14[1335]): Could not find and/or execute program specified by service: 13: Permission denied: /Users/open/Library/Containers/.heheOSX/MacOSHighSierra.py
Mar 27 11:39:19 openZ-MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.inMemTask14[1335]): Service setup event to handle failure and will not launch until it fires.

I have given execute permission to the python script. Is there something wrong with my .plist? How can I fix the errors displayed in the logs?

You have one error and a minor one in your plist and probably one inconsistency in your file system:

Keeping a job alive no matter what and starting the same job every 5 minutes is like being forced to stay in the bathroom and going to the bathroom every five minutes because of ... an ablutomania.

So remove the part:

    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <true/>

Add the python bin in the program arguments:

replace:

<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
    <string>/Users/open/Library/Containers/.heheOSX/MacOSHighSierra.py</string>
</array>

with:

<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
    <string>/usr/bin/python</string>
    <string>/Users/open/Library/Containers/.heheOSX/MacOSHighSierra.py</string>
</array>

If you prefer another python bin (e.g. some brew/python), use this one instead.

Finally make sure that the logged in user (i.e. the one launching the agent) has at least read access to /Users/open/Library/Containers/.heheOSX/MacOSHighSierra.py!

Regarding the last problem:

I use the following alias in my .bash_profile to get all permissions/ACLs of a path:

alias lspath='(IFS=/; set -f -- $PWD; for arg; do path="${path%/}/$arg"; paths+=("$path"); done; ls -dlaOe@ "${paths[@]}")'

Entering lspath after cd'ing to a folder will reveal all permissions/ACLs:

$ cd /Users/user1/Library/Containers/.heheOSX
$ lspath
drwxr-xr-x  39 root   wheel  - 1394 27 Mär 17:44 /
drwxr-xr-x   7 root   admin  -  238  5 Aug  2014 /Users
drwxr-xr-x+ 60 user1  staff  - 2040 26 Mär 23:58 /Users/user1
 0: group:everyone deny delete
drwx------+ 72 user1  staff  - 2448 16 Mär 00:40 /Users/user1/Library
 0: group:everyone deny delete
drwx------  57 user1  staff  - 1938 27 Mär 20:26 /Users/user1/Library/Containers
drwxr-xr-x   2 user1  staff  -   68 27 Mär 20:26 /Users/user1/Library/Containers/.heheOSX

In this example no other user except user1 (and root) will be able to launch/load a *.py in /Users/user1/Library/Containers/.heheOSX because other users can't traverse neither /Users/user1/Library nor /Users/user1/Library/Containers because of their restrictive drwx------ permissions.


Possible to sort iTunes Artists View not by Album? (iTunes 12/macOS Sierra) I have many music tracks on my computers which are free downloads from SoundCloud. They usually don't have all the proper ID3 meta-data.

In iTunes 12 (released with macOS Sierra), is there a way to sort the "Artist" view, not by Album?

Almost every single Web DL track will have the header "Unknown Album" which feels a tad bit ugly and useless.

On the image below, I'm in the "Artists" view of an iTunes Remote Library. I've looked around at View Options and some other obscure buttons sprinkled here in there in the iTunes UI, but can't find a way to disable these headers and just display the tracks themselves.

To add the proper ID3 meta-data, you can simply select the tracks you want to put in same album, then cmd+i and change the artist or album artist to make them fall into the same album. Example: name both the artist and album artist of all the selected tracks, "Soundcloud".

Or you can select Songs on the left pane, then click on Name, Artist, Album, etc. column headers to sort them according to your choice. :)


Is macOS Sierra currently bug-free and stable to run Adobe programs? I'm thinking about updating to macOS Sierra, but I'm worried if there are still any bugs. Has anyone used it yet?

No, it is not bug free.  The question is whether its bugs matter for your particular needs.  To find that out, clone you current system to another partition, upgrade that to Sierra, and verify that the apps and external devices you require for your work all operate the way you need them too.


Files Greyed out in Finder - Potential extended attributes issue? I am having a rather strange issue with some image files I have on a local file server. I have spent a while trying to figure it out, to no avail. Hopefully someone on here can offer some assistance.

Recently, after I import image files from my camera, they appear greyed out in my finder window, and I cannot open them or copy them. Terminal sees them just fine, and I can operate on them without issue. If I copy the files to a new directory after clearing the xattrs, they work just fine. This is somewhat of a pain, and does take time for large amounts of files, so I'd like to avoid this if possible. I have seem some people suggest that the xattrs are at fault with similar issues, so I first checked that out. There are indeed extended attributes on the affected files, notably com.apple.FinderInfo. If I either delete com.apple.FinderInfo, or completely remove xattrs with:
xattr -c *
the files are no longer greyed out and are accessible again.

The crux of the issue is that after some time (about 15 secs or so), Finder regenerates the com.apple.FinderInfo xattr, and the files are greyed out and inaccessible again.

Some potentially helpful notes I've compiled:

Before being greyed out, the date modified shows correctly as Today
After being greyed out, the date modified (in Finder) shows as
January 24, 1984
Interestingly, even after being greyed out, the date modified from
a GetFileInfo command shows correctly as Today, even though it shows at 1984 in Finder
Performing a touch on the greyed out file doesn't change the incorrect Date Modified in the Finder window
Performing mdls on either the parent folder or the greyed out file shows one interesting field: kMDItemFSCreationDate      = 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000
If I copy the affected folder from within Terminal while the files are greyed out, the problem persists in the new folder; If I copy the folder after deleting the xattrs without giving com.apple.FinderInfo a chance to regenerate, the new files don't seem to have com.apple.FinderInfo regenerate, and are able to be opened and copied just fine
For some reason, I can't seem to update permissions on the affected files. After a sudo chmod a+rwx * I still get this permissions string from ls: -rwx------@
The files are stored on a smb share from a local networked server running ZFS on FreeNAS 9.2.1.8; I believe I first encountered this issue sometime after updating the FreeNAS version, but I can't be sure whether or not that caused it, as I'm sure other software on my computer changed during that period as well.
At some point in the past I changed some Finder preferences to disable .DS_Store creation on network shares, as there is no .DS_Store file generated in these directories

Any help on this issue would be much appreciated, as it's starting to drive me a little crazy. Thanks in advance!

This worked, but after external disk (NTFS) eject the problem was back

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo fileToUpdate

(or for all files in a folder xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo *)

This worked after eject/re-mount

xattr -wx com.apple.FinderInfo

0000000000000000001000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 fileToUpdate

Notes from man xattr:

 xattr -w [-rsx] attr_name attr_value file ...
 xattr -x  Force the attribute value to be displayed in the hexadecimal representation.


Inviting someone to iOS development team but restrict his access to one app I want to invite someone as team member to the iOS developer program. Is it possible to restrict his rights to only one app? He should be able to create/edit/delete certificates for app 1A but not for app 2B.

You can set which user has access to which apps in iTunes Connect
(Appe Support Article)

    From the homepage, click Users and Roles, then click iTunes Connect Users.
    Click the Apple ID for the user you want to edit, then click Roles.
    In the Apps section, choose an option from the pop-up menu:


External WD Drive showing read only I have WD External SSD Drive and macOS Catalina. The drive is formatted in ExFAT
Initially, I used my external drive 2-3 times and it was working fine. Suddenly today I am not able to write anything in my Drive as its showing Read-Only.
output from mount
/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/MUKESH (exfat, local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, noowners)

I have tried running following command but it did not work.
sudo chmod -R 777 /Volumes/MUKESH

Here is what I see in disk utility

In Get-Info section I see this.

If you can, go into Disk Utility (like you are), and use First Aid on the partition in question.  Depending on the size of your drive, it will take a while, but when it should restore write capability to your disk.
Source: I did the same thing when my MyBook 2TB was randomly showing up as read-only.


Forcing Rich Text by default for iPad/iPhone The company I work for uses an Exchange 2010 server, and we have a fair number of users that have iPads/iPhones as secondary devices.  We use a custom signature rule on the exchange server to sign each outgoing email that is not a reply (first-sent emails).  Unfortunately, the iDevices seem to only send in plaintext.  Is there some way to force them to always send as rich text, or alternatively, some sort of cheap/free alternative app that would do this?  Currently, we are unable to implement the signatures for the whole company (only IT has them at the moment) because they will look like trash coming from iDevices.

It has been solved.

There seems no native way of doing this on iDevices, for some very strange reason.

But, since they'll automatically encode in rich text if there are any HTML tags placed in the message by the device itself, putting a single space (&nbsp) in the signature via the mail app itself, and then bold/italic-izing said space makes it work.


White iphone Home button defect? Recently 1 week back I bought a new white iphone... I have found 1 problem in iphone... Actually the problem is: white iphone home button is little bit deep.. i can feel edges/corner while pressing home button. I think it shouldn't be like that.

Anyone have faced similar problem ? ... Is this problem with every white iphone devices ? ... or only my device is defective ?

Thanks

I can feel the edges of the button on both my black iPhone 4 even when the button isn't depressed - so your description alone doesn't necessarily mean there is a defect (but you should be very happy with your new purchase and it could very well be a defect).

If you can go to any retail (cell carrier or Apple) store and compare your device to others (or have friends with any iPhone 4 to compare) it will be very easy for anyone to agree if your phone's button is different than the rest. No matter where you bought the phone - Apple will exchange it if the hardware is defective at no cost.

You also can return a new phone to the seller within 30 days - but getting it in the hands of an Apple tech will be the fastest way to know it's covered or a defect - or if it's just a normal variation of the manufacturing process.


Can Mountain Lion take a sleeping Mac and write the RAM to disk after a timeout? Is it possible to configure OSX Mountain Lion to go from suspand-toRAM to suspend-to-disk after certain amount of minutes?

The default sleep mode seems to be suspend-to-RAM until the battery is almost empty. This makes it troublesome for traveling with the laptop as the battery is guaranteed to go to empty after closing the lid and putting your computer to the bag for a day or two.

According to the pmset man page,

  hibernatemode = 3 (binary 0011) by default on supported portables. The
       system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and
       will power memory during sleep. The system will wake from memory, unless
       a power loss forces it to restore from disk image.

But then also

  standby causes kernel power management to automatically hibernate a
       machine after it has slept for a specified time period. This saves power
       while asleep. This setting defaults to ON for supported hardware. The
       setting standby will be visible in pmset -g if the feature is supported
       on this machine.

  standby only works if hibernation is turned on to hibernatemode 3 or 25.

(which it is by default on supported portables)

  standbydelay specifies the delay, in seconds, before writing the hibernation image to disk and powering off memory for Standby.

On my machine, with settings that I believe are default, when I type pmset -g |grep standbydelay I get the result of 4200, meaning that after 70 minutes of sleep, the machine cuts power to the memory and restores from the memory image saved to the hard drive.

If your settings do not look like this, the pmset command just might be your new friend.