I keep getting logged out when I switch users I'm running macOS 12.12.3 (Sierra).

I keep getting logged out when I try to switch users, both doing fast user switching and going back to the login menu and then logging in.

It's incredibly frustrating.

What could be a fix?

The only "weird" thing that I have running is QuickRes.

Any idea?

As you may know, troubleshooting is a process of elimination and often requires patience. There are a number of things I suggest you try to get to the bottom of this.

1. Bootup into Safe Mode

First of all let's boot up into Safe Mode. Not only can you test to see if the problem is replicated in Safe Mode, but the very act of booting into Safe Mode will run some checks, delete system cache files, verify your startup disk, and attempt to repair directory issues (if any are identified).

Follow these steps to boot your Mac into Safe Mode:

Fully shut down your Mac
Restart your Mac
Immediately press the Shift key and keep it down
Let go of the Shift key when you see the login window (NOTE: If you have FileVault enabled you may need to log in twice).
Take a note of what happens (i.e. could you boot your Mac okay, is the issue still present, etc)
To exit Safe Mode just restart your Mac as normal

Once you've booted into Safe Mode, let me know how you went. This will help determine if the issue is related to third party software etc.

2. Reset your PRAM/NVRAM

Older Macs had what's called Parameter RAM (PRAM), newer Macs use Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM). It may be worth you also resetting this.

Your question doesn't specify what model of Mac you're using, but all Macs (except for Late-2016 MacBook Pro models) use the same process. I've included steps for both scenarios below:

For ALL models EXCEPT for Late-2016 MacBook Pros

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).

For all Late-2016 MacBook Pro models (with and without Touch Bar) follow these steps:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then immediately press the commandoptionpr keys.
Keep these keys pressed down for at least 20 seconds!
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).

3. Delete preferences

If starting in Safe Mode and resetting your PRAM/NVRAM does not resolve the issue, delete the com.apple.systempreferences.plist and com.apple.loginwindow.plist files.

To do this:

While only logged into your main account and within Finder, hold the option key while clicking on the Go menu
Select the Library option from the drop-down menu
In the Library window that opens up, find and open the Preferences folder
Right-click on com.apple.systempreferences.plist and select Move to Trash
Right-click on com.apple.loginwindow.plist and select Move to Trash
Restart the computer
Empty the trash

Test to see whether this has made any difference to your problem.

4. Create a new user account

If doing all three things above do not resolve the issue, I suggest creating a new user account. However, do not do this until you know the problem isn't resolved.

Create a new user account
Reboot your Mac as normal
Log into the new account and use it for a little while (maybe some web browsing)
Now try using fast user switching to switch to another account
Take note of what happens (was the new user logged out or not?)
If the new user wasn't logged out, continue to step 7, otherwise stop here and report back
Use the account you're now logged into for a while
Now try fast user switching back to the new user account
Take note of what happens (was the old user logged out when you switched back to the new user account?)
Regardless of what happens at Step 9, now try using fast user switching to switch to another account
Take note of what happens (was the new user logged out or not?)

After doing the above, report back on what happened at Step 6. If you progressed further, also report on what happened at Steps 9 and 11.

If you found the problem was not replicated in the above 11 steps, then use your computer normally (but do not delete the new user account you created). If the problem reappears, then start using the new user account instead for a while as your main account and see whether the problem returns.


Time Machine backup .sparsebundle file inaccessible on new computer I've been at this for a solid 6 hours now, hoping like heck someone here can help me.

I've had a Time Capsule for nearly 2 years, consistently backing up two different laptops in my home using Time Machine. A MacBook and a MacBook Pro.

Last night, my MacBook Pro up and died. I was working on it when everything froze up and shut down, and it won't boot now. All indicators are that the logic board went. Whatever, **** happens. Sucks, but not entirely a loss because of my incremental backups, right?

Wrong.

Brought my work laptop (another Macbook Pro) home this evening to open up my Time Machine backups and retrieve any files that I needed or wanted to keep going forward. Or so I thought.

When I connect to the drive, I can see two .sparsebundle files, one from the Macbook, and one from the Macbook Pro. In the past, I've been able to mount these as disks and manually sort through them without having to resort to the slow Star Wars interface of Time Machine.

The .sparsebundle for the MacBook works exactly as advertised. The .sparsebundle for the Macbook Pro? Not at all. Double-clicking it gives the error "No mountable file systems." Disk Utility (pictured below) has it greyed out and refuses to run any Verify or Repair procedures on it. I've tried the Googles, gone through countless discussion threads in Apple's support site as well as other popular Mac tech sites, resorted to Terminal hdiutil mount -readwrite style hacking, all to no avail. As far as I can tell from the research I've done, what may have happened is that my MacBook Pro was in the middle of a Time Machine backup at the very second it went kaput, which seems to have locked the .sparsebundle into some kind of hyper-militant read-only state from whence not even light can escape.

The message in the window pictured below comes up immediately after I click "Repair disk", though the candybar progress stripe keeps spinning and spinning indefinitely.

I've got no ideas left. Extra sloppy-kisses may be provided as incentive if anyone can help me through this. I'm one step away from introducing the Time Capsule to the business end of the 12 lb. sledgehammer sitting in my toolshed at this point.

Have a look here and try doing what he does (I know the problem is different).

The key came from a comment buried down near the bottom of the page. Running fsck kept getting clobbered with a "Disk In Use" error, but this solved it:

FWIW, I found that even with -noautofsck, snow leopard would auto-fsck, meaning I would get ‘resource busy’ or whatever. I have no idea why it is ignoring my no-auto-fsck request. Whatever.To allow the process to go, I ‘ps auxwww | grep fsck’ to find the PID, then ‘sudo kill (PID)’ to kill this fsck so I can run my own.

Killing the auto-fsck allowed me to run it myself. Not sure how long it took, I started it at 2am and it was done by the time I got up 6 hours later, but it was on a 500+ GB .sparsebundle, so I'm assuming it took a while.


Macbook Pro starts by itself, with lid closed, since upgrading to Mojave Three times since upgrading to Mojave a few weeks ago, my mid 2014 Macbook Pro has spontaneously switched itself on, with the lid fully closed. This is happening many hours after I shut it down (sometime in the middle of the night). I find it, in my bag, firmly closed, roasting hot, fan blazing.

I generally have to hard power-off the machine, then restart. In addition to losing some work, I'm concerned about damage to the machine at such high temperatures.

I've recently done a PRAM reset and an SMC reset. I had never seen anything like this in the years of previous versions of OSX/Macos.

Is there any known cause, or way to prevent this happening? Anything I can check for? There is no wake schedule set in Energy Saver preferences.

I ran into the exact same issue, clamshell closed and in my bag (power adapter plugged into the laptop with top of bag unzipped) - and realized that "Enable Power Nap while plugged into a power adapter" was somehow set to on in the Energy Saver preference pane.

I also had:

2019-06-19 21:32:48 -0400 Assertions            PID 58(powerd) Created InternalPreventSleep "com.apple.powermanagement.darkwakelinger" 00:00:00  id:0x0xd0000927f [System: PrevIdle DeclUser SRPrevSleep kCPU kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:32:48 -0400 Assertions            Summary- [System: PrevIdle DeclUser SRPrevSleep kCPU kDisp] Using Batt(Charge: 100)
2019-06-19 21:32:57 -0400 Assertions            PID 3171(AddressBookSourceSync) Released PreventUserIdleSystemSleep "Address Book Source Sync" 00:00:30  id:0x0x100009276 [System: DeclUser SRPrevSleep kCPU kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:32:57 -0400 Assertions            PID 270(UserEventAgent) Released BackgroundTask "com.apple.AddressBook.ScheduledSync" 00:00:30  id:0x0xb00009277 [System: DeclUser SRPrevSleep kCPU kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:33:03 -0400 Assertions            PID 58(powerd) TimedOut InternalPreventSleep "com.apple.powermanagement.darkwakelinger" 00:00:15  id:0x0xd0000927f [System: DeclUser SRPrevSleep kCPU kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:33:03 -0400 Assertions            Summary- [System: DeclUser kDisp] Using Batt(Charge: 100)
Sleep/Wakes since boot at 2019-06-18 22:17:25 -0400 :32   Dark Wake Count in this sleep cycle:27

Time stamp                Domain                Message                                                                     Duration    Delay
==========                ======                =======                                                                     ========    =====
2019-06-19 21:33:03 -0400 Sleep                 Entering Sleep state due to 'Clamshell Sleep':TCPKeepAlive=active Using Batt (Charge:100%) 22 secs
2019-06-19 21:33:08 -0400 Wake Requests         [*proc=mDNSResponder request=Maintenance inDelta=2290] [proc=powerd request=TCPKATurnOff inDelta=43255]
2019-06-19 21:33:08 -0400 PM Client Acks        Delays to Sleep notifications: [com.apple.apsd is slow(3123 ms)] [mDNSResponder is slow(5014 ms)]
2019-06-19 21:33:24 -0400 Kernel Client Acks    Delays to Sleep notifications: [powerd is slow(5018 ms)] [UPSB driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(935 ms)] [UPSB driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(934 ms)] [AppleHPMIECS driver is slow(msg: WillChangeState to 2)(1088 ms)] [AppleHPMIECS driver is slow(msg: WillChangeState to 2)(1088 ms)] [AppleUSBVHCIBCE driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(310 ms)] [RP01 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 0)(1007 ms)]
2019-06-19 21:33:24 -0400 Assertions            Kernel Idle sleep preventers: IODisplayWrangler
2019-06-19 21:33:24 -0400 Notification          Display is turned on
2019-06-19 21:33:24 -0400 Assertions            PID 183(mDNSResponder) Created MaintenanceWake "mDNSResponder:maintenance" 00:00:00  id:0x0xd00009297 [System: DeclUser kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:33:24 -0400 Assertions            PID 183(mDNSResponder) Released MaintenanceWake "mDNSResponder:maintenance" 00:00:00  id:0x0xd00009297 [System: DeclUser kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:33:25 -0400 Wake                  Wake from Normal Sleep [CDNVA] due to EC.LidOpen/Lid Open: Using BATT (Charge:100%) 37 secs
2019-06-19 21:33:25 -0400 HibernateStats        hibmode=3 standbydelay=10800                                                          363
2019-06-19 21:33:25 -0400 WakeTime              WakeTime: 2.788 sec
2019-06-19 21:33:25 -0400 Kernel Client Acks    Delays to Wake notifications: [UPSB driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(544 ms)] [UPSB driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(543 ms)] [IGPU driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(558 ms)] [GFX0 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(552 ms)] [HDAU driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(552 ms)] [ADIO driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(541 ms)] [AMDFramebufferVIB driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(765 ms)]
2019-06-19 21:33:26 -0400 Assertions            PID 320(NotificationCenter) Created DisplayWake "com.apple.notificationcenter.sleeping-note" 00:00:00  id:0x0xe000092a9 [System: PrevIdle DeclUser DispWake IPushSrvc kCPU kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:33:31 -0400 Assertions            PID 320(NotificationCenter) Released DisplayWake "com.apple.notificationcenter.sleeping-note" 00:00:05  id:0x0xe000092a9 [System: DeclUser kDisp]
Sleep/Wakes since boot at 2019-06-18 22:17:25 -0400 :33   Dark Wake Count in this sleep cycle:27

Time stamp                Domain                Message                                                                     Duration    Delay
==========                ======                =======                                                                     ========    =====
2019-06-19 21:33:47 -0400 Notification          Display is turned off
2019-06-19 21:33:47 -0400 Assertions            PID 101(hidd) Summary UserIsActive "com.apple.iohideventsystem.queue.tickle.4294984775.11" 00:00:19  id:0x0x900008547 [System: DeclUser kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:33:47 -0400 Assertions            Kernel Idle sleep preventers: -None-
2019-06-19 21:33:47 -0400 Assertions            PID 58(powerd) Created InternalPreventSleep "com.apple.powermanagement.darkwakelinger" 00:00:00  id:0x0xd000092b8 [System: PrevIdle DeclUser SRPrevSleep kCPU kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:34:02 -0400 Assertions            PID 58(powerd) TimedOut InternalPreventSleep "com.apple.powermanagement.darkwakelinger" 00:00:15  id:0x0xd000092b8 [System: DeclUser SRPrevSleep kCPU kDisp]
2019-06-19 21:34:02 -0400 Sleep                 Entering Sleep state due to 'Clamshell Sleep':TCPKeepAlive=active Using Batt (Charge:100%) 420 secs
2019-06-19 21:34:07 -0400 Wake Requests         [*proc=mDNSResponder request=Maintenance inDelta=2237] [proc=powerd request=TCPKATurnOff inDelta=43255]
2019-06-19 21:34:07 -0400 PM Client Acks        Delays to Sleep notifications: [com.apple.apsd is slow(3131 ms)] [mDNSResponder is slow(5015 ms)]

after running pmset -g log

This was from maybe 10 minutes before I opened the laptop, and it had been spitting out similar entries for the prior ~24 hours worth of "sleep" I thought the machine was getting.


How can I run two instances of WhatsApp on a Mac? I have two phone numbers for two purposes and I would like to run two native WhatsApp clients in parallel on my Mac.

I don't want to use the browser (or two browser windows) since I prefer the native Mac OS apps.

How can I do that?

Simply open terminal and run this command:

/Applications/WhatsApp.app/Contents/MacOS/WhatsApp /secondary

Two remarks:

The app seems to crash if you subsequently close the terminal (even if you use &) so keep your terminal open. Sudo may solve this (as seen here) but I didn't really try.
If anyone knows how to make it launch from Spotlight, please share your ideas. I would love to improve on this method and make it easier to use.


Can I use a security key such as YubiKey to sign into Google on Safari? I have a YubiKey from Yubico which I would like to use in order to secure my online accounts.

When trying it with Google, it tells me that Safari does not support it, I have to use Chrome instead. Is there a way I can use it with Google when I use the Safari browser?

First, I assume you are using YubiKey 4 with U2F support.

Safari does not support U2F natively, but if you have Safari 10, you can add the plugin Safari-FIDO-U2F available from blahgeek on GitHub.

The author confirms that the plugin works with some of the websites (with some hacking required to show up to the server as Chrome):

  Github Account Two-factor authentication
  Dropbox Account Security
  Fastmail

but also warns it does not work with Google Account (although it does with Google's demo site).

So for now the answer is you cannot use U2F to login to Google, but it might change in future.


Is this external USB3 drive really this slow for my Macbook TimeMachine backup? I got myself this WD 2TB USB3 external harddrive for backups: http://amzn.to/1X8b3a8

I connected it to the USB 3.0 port of my mid 2015 Macbook Pro 15".

When I run Time Machine, it really takes veeeery long for the backup (about 10-20 hours for a 350 GB initial encrypted backup).

So I ran disk speed test with this result. Is this speed normal and does Time Machine backup really take that long?

The speed you see there is not unusual. I have seen various USB3 external harddrives vary from about 60 MB/s to about 120 MB/s. These speeds can be expected from ordinary hard drives - you'll to buy an SSD to get much higher speeds.

However please keep in mind that these speeds are the bulk transfer speed. I.e. if you transfer only one large file without any file system overhead, you would obtain these speeds.

A backup will contain lots of small files which are individually stored. The random access read/write speeds of these portable USB drives are usually much lower than the bulk speed.

Compared to my experience, it is not unusual for the first Time Machine back to take 10 hours.


Invisible folder after usage of trash-cli Recently, I decided to install trash-cli on my MacBook Pro after using it successfully on my Ubuntu machine. To set it up I ran the following commands.

git clone https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli.git
sudo python setup.py install

After installation, I decided to delete a folder using trash-put. So I run trash-put ~/anaconda/. However, this folder has never arrived in my .Trash folder, yet it disappeared from my Finder (see below, sorry for the mess of files).

So far so good, the folder disappeared. However, when running locate anaconda in a Terminal window the folder Anaconda is still there (only the first couple of lines are shown in the screenshot below).

Now, my question is whether any of you guys could have an idea on how I can delete this folder or at least make it re-appear in my Finder?

So far, I've tried restarting my MacBook without success. I've also tried to run rm /Users/admin/anaconda which failed, too.

Running 10.10.1 on a MacBook Pro Mid-2012. I do have administrator rights and full access to all files.

UPDATE 1

rm output

rm: anaconda: No such file or directory
felix and admin are the same user. I have renamed it for my own convenience purposes, but they are the same!

As you have seen by running ls and rm (and viewing in Finder), the /Users/admin/anaconda folder and its contents are no longer present in the filesystem.

locate uses a database that is updated approximately once a week in OS X, so deleting a file/folder and immediately (or even later that day or week) using locate will not reflect its removal.

You can manually update the locate database by running this command:

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

See the locate.updatedb(8) man page for further information.


How do I get good quality photos onto an iPod Touch? When I sync my photos with the iPod Touch, the photos are put on as very low quality.   They do not even look good at full screen size and do not cope with zooming in to see details.

I can't find a setting in iTunes to control how match it compresses the photos.

You may want to try a re-sync if you recently updated to iOS 4.x

This resolved the issue for a user here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=10844169&postcount=2

  this happened to me when I first upgraded my 3GS from 3.1.3 to 4.0, the moment the upgrade was complete, I unplugged my phone to browse the new features and I quickly noticed all my photos were low res, so I plugged my phone back to computer and hit sync, this time iTunes said "Optimizing Photos". Once that was complete, photos were back to normal.


What could be stopping my WiFi printer from working? My iMac suddenly stopped recognising my HP OfficeJet 6500 printer over the wireless network. Previously, it worked fine for years. It works with USB, and the printer connects to the router without a problem - it just doesn't see the computer, which is also connected to the same router.

Things I have tried:

I upgraded the Mac to Lion (which I guess counts as a software re-install - it was previously on Snow Leopard)
I have completely reset the printing system on the Mac, and allowed it to re-find the printer and reinstall drivers.
I have reset the printer to factory defaults, and then re-connected it to the router.
I enabled Printer Sharing in System Preferences
I have installed a new router (a different brand)

In case it's helpful: the printer problem originally appeared to be part of a general network problem (I was also having trouble connecting to the internet and to AirPlay etc.). Replacing the router seems to have cured the rest, but the printer still didn't work - that's when I tried all the other things.

Can anyone suggest something else for me to try?

One more thing you could try :

Uninstall all HP printer driver software using the HP uninstaller in Applications > Hewlett-Packard.
Reboot / restart your mac.
Reset the printing system via : Sys Prefs, Print & Fax
Right (control) click in the rectangle listing your printers and then choose Reset Printing System.

CAUTION : The above steps will delete all of your printers.

Select the plus sign to re-add it. Look for the printer, select it and wait until the "Add" button becomes available. Click it.

Hope this helps.


Sublime Text doesn't hide on startup I added Sublime Text to my Login Items, so that it starts up automatically when I start up my Mac. However, even though I have the Hide box checked already, the app still does not hide on startup.

Is there anything else I can try to get it to hide on startup?

Instead of adding Sublime Text to your login items, create an applescript like the one below and add it.

tell application "Sublime Text" to run
delay 0.5
tell application "Finder"
    set visible of process "Sublime Text" to false
end tell


Chrome prevents Macbook from sleeping Chrome prevents my Macbook from sleeping. See screenshot:

Some websites say it might be due to a chrome extension, but I've installed no new extensions in the last two weeks (I've only had this problem for two weeks). Neither did I update OSx, Chrome, or the Energy Saver settings. How do I fix this?

I had the same issue where Chrome was preventing sleep, i.e., Activity Monitor Energy tab showed that. And I discovered that when I would close a tab running "https://web.whatsapp.com/", that the "Preventing Sleep" column would go to No. When I would open that web site again, it would go back to "Yes".

I found this blog discussing it:
http://webdiary.com/2015/01/29/whatsappweb/

That correlates with the output of running pmset -g assertions, which shows:

   pid 229(coreaudiod): [0x00066e6300010845] 01:19:47 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.e8-07-bf-12-d6-97:output.context.preventuseridlesleep"
    Created for PID: 2748.


Reinstalling Lion on brand new Mac Mini without internet I have just purchased a brand new Mac Mini which came with Mac OS X Lion. I then (maybe not so cleverly) tried to restore a previous hard drive image to the hard drive. Unsurprisingly enough, the computer wouldn't start. So I decided that I would go with a fresh install of Lion.

However, when I booted from the Recovery Partition, it told me it would take 5 hours+ to download "Additional Components" needed to install Lion.

I'm assuming that it meant it was downloading the entire 4Gb Lion operating system! Is there not a copy of this on the "Recovery" partition? Is there anyway to install Lion without having to download the entire thing?

The "Internet Recovery" function only contains a small system, just enough to boot up, let you do diagnostics, browse the web, and download the install packages. It doesn't contain the full install of OS X.

A full installer can be created from the Mac App store download, but the newest minis and Airs use a special build, so that won't work for them. Even if it did, you'd still have to download it at least once.

At the moment I'm afraid your best hope may be to take it to an Apple store and explain your dilemma. They'll be able to get things installed, either by downloading it on their (hopefully faster) connection, or installing from a local copy/image.

Once you do have your system set up again, you may want to invest in a backup hard drive and use a tool like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup that you can use as a restore drive.


How to move not copy files into iTunes I have a folder containing all my Music, Movies etc. This contains various formats of music file, including some that iTunes cannot play (i.e. flac and oggs) but a lot of mp3s.

I'd like to have iTunes import all the formats it can play, moving those files into the iTunes Media folder, but leaving behind the files in formats it isn't able to play.  That way I can decide what to do with those files later, but the rest of my media is managed through iTunes.

The option in iTunes preferences copies files into the iTunes Media folder, but leaves behind a duplicate.

Am I missing something, or is there a trick to this?

iTunes never deletes original files. But you could use a simple script to remove the mp3/aac files (which are supported by iTunes).

But if you uncheck "Keep iTunes Media folder organized", files will be read from their original location without being copied;


Disabling one app's cellular data inadvertently disabling other apps? I'm trying to get around a strange problem concerning an iOS app my company produces. We use a branding process to brand a single executable, assigning it new resources and a new bundle id, but keeping the same core executable across brands.

The problem is when a phone has multiple different brands installed, disabling one app for cellular connectivity is inadvertently disabling all of them, and I can't figure out why.

To reiterate, each app naturally has its own bundle id, so why would disabling cellular data for one app cause it to break for other brands?

I did some further investigation and experimentation, and from what I can tell, iOS is identifying the disabled app based on the app binary in some fashion. That is, the actual embedded executable file inside the app bundle, instead of the bundle id as one would intuitively expect.

If I create two different builds, and brand them into several brands each, then disabling one of the branded apps disables cellular connectivity for all brands in that group (i.e. that share the same underlying binary), but do not affect those brands built with a different binary. Furthermore, renaming the embedded binary file has no effect, so it's clearly basing it on the contents of the executable (perhaps a checksum or internal identifier).

As far as I can tell this is just a bug in the implementation of this feature on iOS, and I can't think of any way around this that doesn't involve completely changing how we are branding our apps. I've submitted a bug report to Apple.


Can't access Amazon S3 bucket after mounting using s3fs I have been trying to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a OSX volume using the s3fs command line tool (installed from Homebrew). The issue is that although I run the s3fs command as per the instructions (here, for Mac-specific, or here more generally), and it returns no errors, when I attempt to cd to the mounted volume the I get the following error:

mkdir /Volumes/s3

sudo /usr/local/bin/s3fs mybucket /Volumes/s3
Password:

cd /Volumes/s3
cd: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories:
No such file or directory

The install went off without a hitch, and all dependencies appeared to have installed correctly, so I don't think that that's an issue (obviously, I could be wrong). I also know that I can't simply mount the volume, as it is not in a file system native to OSX.

I know that s3fs isn't terribly well-documented for Mac users, but perhaps somebody here has some experience getting this to work. Thank you in advance.

I am using OSX Lion 10.7.4.

You may not have permission to see that folder. Use sudo -i to become root and then try again.


Use Mac OS in virtual machine on Windows? I just got MacBook Pro 2011 and installed Windows 7 using Boot Camp.

I am a Windows user who need to develop iOS apps.

Is it possible to install Mac OS VM on Windows that is installed using Boot Camp?

There are various (hacky) ways to do this

eg http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/07/how-to-run-mac-os-x-in-virtualbox-on-windows/

But I would urge you to install VirtualBox in Mac OS X and then install Windows on that.  You can run Windows full screen.  It's going to be very quick and allow you the best of both worlds.

Best of all VirtualBox is free and available here http://www.virtualbox.org/


What are the purposes and safety to enable the hidden debug menu in Disk Utility? I'm primarily interested to know whether installation of Lion included the Recovery System.

I understand you can enable extra formats and debugging in Disk Utility, using the following commands:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility advanced-image-options -bool true

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled -bool true

Is this safe? What can this be used for?

If you need to ask, you probably don't want to mess! ;)

It's going to let you see things like the Lion Recovery Partition etc that are normally hidden from use.

It's certainly safe to turn the debug menu on.  Whether it's safe to do anything once it is enabled depends very much on your skills.

But it can;t hurt to take a look if you are curious, just remember to turn if off if you don't intend to do anything other than poke about.


How do I stop call log syncing back after iOS erase and install? I have been having this issue for quite some time now:

After I restore my iPhone to factory settings and signed in my iCloud account, the call logs would come back mysteriously, even ones dating back a few months that I have deliberately deleted.

This is really scary if you think about it.

There does not seem to be anyone else asking this particular question.

How may I solve this problem?

You simply can't. Not yet anyway. Apple hasn't added a switch for it so as long as you connect to your iCloud account, the call log is going to sync.


Compiling CUPS 2.0 on 10.9: what archflags to use? I installed CUPS 2.0.0 (cups.org) but evidently I needed to include specific architecture flags. Now several things are broken on my mac (e.g. Word won't boot). Error messages reveal that the problem is with libcups.2.dylib ("built with the wrong architecture").

Per advice I found for an earlier version of OSX, I tried re-configuring CUPS using:

configure  --with-archflags="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" --with-ldarchflags="-arch x86_64"

but that did not fix the problem. What is the correct archflag for building CUPS on 10.9?

Not sure if this is related, but now I can't get the Finder to show invisible files, which is preventing me from reverting to my pre-CUPS 2.0 configuration using Time Machine.

I do not have 10.9 and CUPS 2.0, but I had a very similar experience with 10.8.5 and trying to get CUPS 1.7.2 up and running.  The default configure and make ONLY builds a 64-bit set of libraries.  I had success with using the same architecture flags for both the effective CFLAGS and LDFLAGS parameters:

./configure --with-archflags='-arch i386 -arch x86_64' --with-ldarchflags='-arch i386 -arch x86_64'
make clean
make

Before getting this straightened out, many programs (from Spotlight to Safari to Outlook) did not work with 64-bit only libcups*.dylib libraries.


How to map Ctrl + Delete to Fn + Opt + Delete with Karabiner-Elements I would like to map Ctrl + Delete on a Windows keyboard to Fn + Opt + Delete on a Macbook keyboard, so it deletes the next word after the cursor.

I can't figure out how to represent Fn + Opt + Delete in the json, how would I modify the following?

{
    "conditions": [{"type": "frontmost_application_unless", "bundle_identifiers": ["^com\\.sublimetext\\.3$"]}],
    "from": {"key_code": "delete_forward", "modifiers": {"mandatory": ["left_control"]}},
    "to": /* What should I put here? */,
    "type": "basic"
}

Fn  is usually evaluated within the keyboard, before transmission. It doesn't generate its own event.

According to Key Codes,  Fn   Opt ⌥   Backspace ⌫  generates this data...

Key Down
    Characters: 
    Unicode:        63272 / 0xf728
    Keys:       ⌥⌦
    Key Code:   117 / 0x75
    Modifiers:  8913216 / 0x880140 ⓘ

Maybe you could use that to initiate the replacement - I don't use Karabiner so can't test.

*Characters:  doesn't actually generate any printable character on my machine.


Sign with colored signature in Preview I used to be able to change the signature color in Preview. This is no more applicable. And the camera signature yeilds black and white signature. Is there anyways to either color the signature after having it in the Preview of import colored one?

You can get a colored signature by going to Preview and at the appropriate place insert your signature. Now select your signature and click on the box shown in red in the image below. It's the third box from the right.

When you click on this box outlined in red you get the color palette shown in 2nd figure shown below.

You can select the color you desire.


iPhone is not finding Outlook calendars from other profiles I am trying to sync an iPhone 3GS with Outlook calendars on my PC (Windows XP, MS Office Professional Plus 2010).

In Outlook we have several profiles set up for different emails. At first the sync didn't appear to be working - until I realised that iTunes was syncing with the calendar from the default Outlook profile.

On the Info tab of iTunes only one calendar is listed under "Selected calendars". Similarly, only the email from the default profile is shown under "Sync mail accounts" section (though I'm not intending to sync mail).

How do I get iTunes to see the calendars from other profiles?

Figured this out in the end. I simply set the other profile as the default and synced the calendar.

I have left it as the default for now, but a comment buried in a forum thread somewhere said that even if you set the original profile back to default, iTunes will continue synchronizing with the original (non-default) calendar.


Apple Mail: Only TLS v1.0 supported on macOS 10.11 I'm on OS X 10.11.3, aka El Capitan.

I can't connect to mail servers running only TLS version 1.2 or 1.1 with Apple Mail.

IMAP as well as SMTP connections are always established using TLS 1.0.

Could that be correct?

If so, why doesn't Apple Mail support TLS 1.2 yet?

This seems to be an issue with MacOS El Capitan and lower versions.  Upgrades to Sierra and High Sierra resolve the issue.

However, there needs to be a solution for users on computers which cannot upgrade to Sierra and higher.


what does each one of the Sudo Periodic options do? There are regular maintenance tasks that can run daily, weekly, and monthly on mac OS. But what does each one do?
update: I don't mean the specific scripts per se, but what's the main idea behind the updates. In general what is this designed to do daily? Weekly? and so on.

Here's a summary of what the various scripts do. Note that the scripts have not changed much between versions of macOS; I compared them between El Capitan (10.11.6), High Sierra (10.13.6), Catalina (10.15.) and Big Sur (11.2.3), and the only change I noticed was that /etc/periodic/weekly/320.whatis vanished sometime between 10.11.6 and 10.13.6, although something else seems to have taken over its function.
The general goal of the scripts is to clean up things (like temp files) that otherwise would accumulate, check and record system status, and create/maintain various parts of the system.
As you'll see, almost all of them are pretty obsolete -- they relate to things that either aren't used much or don't exist in modern versions of macOS. The only one that I'd really consider relevant today is /etc/periodic/daily/110.clean-tmps, which (as the name suggests) cleans up temporary files. I suspect this is mostly because the periodic system was inherited from FreeBSD, and Apple tends to do cleanup/maintenance on their components differently, so most of these scripts are leftovers from when macOS (well, Mac OS X at the time) inherited this system from FreeBSD.
Note that all of these scripts load settings from /etc/defaults/periodic.conf, (and also /etc/periodic.conf and /etc/periodic.conf.local, but they don't exist by default).
Daily scripts:

110.clean-tmps -- deletes old files in /tmp (actually /private/tmp). Note that this does not clean up /var/tmp (actually /private/var/tmp) or the temporary items under /var/folders (actually /private/var/folders); those directories are (intentionally) less temporary than /tmp.
130.clean-msgs -- deletes old "system messages". This relates to the msgs command, which I doubt anyone has actually used on macOS. Ever. The modification time on this script (listed at the top) is 2000/09/14.
140.clean-rwho -- deletes stale files in /var/rwho. This relates to the rwho command, about as relevant as msgs, script also dates from 2000/09/14.
199.clean-fax -- deletes old fax scratch files in /var/spool/fax. I'm not  even sure the feature that creates files there still exists in macOS.
310.accounting -- rotates system accounting files in /var/account/acct, which relates to the ac command, which I again doubt anyone still uses. This script dates from 2001/05/30.
400.status-disks -- checks how full the local disks are with df -h -l, but doesn't seem to do anything useful with the information. (It gets recorded in /var/log/daily.out, but who checks that?)
420.status-network -- checks the status of the local network interfaces with netstat -i, but again the info just gets recorded in /var/log/daily.out.
430.status-rwho -- seems to mostly just get the system's uptime (how long since last boot); again, it's recorded in /var/log/daily.out.
999.local -- runs /etc/daily.local if it exists (it doesn't by default). This is for backward compatibility with an older organization of the periodic files that was obsolete when this script was written: 2001/06/01. Wow.

Weekly scripts:

320.whatis -- this creates/updates a database of man pages for the whatis command to search. This script was removed sometime between 10.11.6 and 10.13.6, although the whatis command still exists and seems to work (I guess it's updated some other way now).
999.local -- runs /etc/weekly.local if it exists. More extreme backward compatibility.

Monthly scripts:

199.rotate-fax -- rotates old fax logs in /var/log/fax. Again, I'm not sure this feature exists anymore.
200.accounting -- more to do with that system accounting system I don't think anyone still uses.
999.local -- runs /etc/monthly.local if it exists. More extreme backward compatibility.


macOS launchpad icons became blurry macOS launchpad icons became blurry as compared to those in the dock. See System Preferences for example. Resolution has become really low. I don't why. What could be the reason for the same?

It fixed by itself -_-

I dunno how and why...
UPDATE: The problem is in mozilla firefox, while it opened in any desktop it creates this bug somehow :/ ?!


An email as my name on other people's phone, iOS7 update Why is my email popping up on other people's phone as my name?

Ever since I did the iOS7 update on my phone, my messages are not coming up as "sussy joes" it is now some kind of email.

How do I stop this from happening?

The first thing that comes to mind would be if messages is set (or became reset during the iOS 7 upgrade) to start new conversations from your Apple ID email instead of your phone number.

Open Settings app
Swipe up and tap Messages
Tap Send & Receive
Verify that the checkmark is next to the phone number

You'll want to watch for errors like I have below where the messages is still waiting for activation. (That might force it to send as your Apple ID until the activation finishes.)

Set the "Caller ID" or send as email or phone:


Problem running rst2html from command line all. Long-time lurker, etc.

I use MacPorts to manage my Python installation, and it has worked flawlessly until ... until this moment. And I am completely flummoxed.

I am trying to teach myself ReStructured Text, and so, trusting in the power of MacPorts, I did the usual:

sudo port install py27-docutils

If I use locate to make sure rst2html.py is there, it is:

/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/rst2html.py

I cannot, as the documentation suggests, use rst2html.py at the command line:

% rst2html.py --version
-bash: rst2html.py: command not found

I have my .bash_profile set as per MacPorts' instructions:

# MacPorts
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH

# Python
export PYTHONPATH=/opt/local/bin/python2.7

And I have also used python_select, so that when you run which python you get:

/opt/local/bin/python

Here's what my path environment looks like:

% more /etc/paths
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/opt/local/Library

All I want to be able to do is to be able to type rst2html.py, or one of the allied standalone commands (e.g., rst2pdf.py) at the command line, wherever I am and have it run. I'm having the same command with sphinx -- e.g., sphinx-quickstart is not working for me -- and I'm hopeful that the solution to this problem will be the solution to others.

Try port contents py27-docutils | grep rst2html. It will tell you there's a /opt/local/bin/rst2html-2.7.py file, i.e. you can run rst2html-2.7.py on your command line.

The additional -2.7 in this filename is necessary to avoid conflicts between the different py*-docutils packages for different versions of python, e.g. if you want both the 2.7 and the 3.4 version installed. Of course you can create a symlink so you can use rst2html.py as usual:

sudo ln -s rst2html-2.7.py /opt/local/bin/rst2html.py


How to investigate high kernel task memory usage? I was using my MacBook Pro (with 16GB of RAM) as usual and out of blue I've this popup that:

Your system has run out of application memory.
To avoid problems with your computer, quit any applications you are not using.

I've obviously closed few which I could, but it didn't help.
After checking on memory, it seems kernel task ate 7GB and 22.36GB swap memory was used of total 23GB (which obviously was the case). However I've still 20GB of space free on my SDD.

Activity Monitor didn't help much whilst my OS X was heading to the destruction.

My top stats before my kernel freeze:
Processes: 344 total, 2 running, 5 stuck, 337 sleeping, 2580 threads                                                                                19:23:56
Load Avg: 1.56, 1.62, 2.09  CPU usage: 3.51% user, 8.47% sys, 88.1% idle   SharedLibs: 46M resident, 0B data, 6572K linkedit. MemRegions: 757970 total, 2139M resident, 56M private, 907M shared.
PhysMem: 9410M used (6198M wired), 556M unused. VM: 1155G vsize, 1311M framework vsize, 112872658(320) swapins, 122668389(0) swapouts. Networks: packets: 299419263/363G in, 142126838/14G out.
Disks: 58970173/1079G read, 20012389/1120G written.

At the end my OS X frozen and I had to do hard reset, repair my SDD in recovery mode and fixing afterwards (recovering lost work, fixing application conflicts, checking my lost+found folder, Chrome/Terminal tabs gone, headache, etc.).
My question is, how do I check on high memory usage of kernel task or how to properly deal with that kind of situation? I've tried to take Sample with Activity Monitor, but it's greyed out.

My MacBook Pro details:
2.3GHz Intel Core i7 (late 2013) with 16GB RAM. OS X: 10.9.5

There are many things that go wrong with high kernel task usage. Usually this is related to faulty or heavy process which overusing system resources (such as indexing storage, running VMs, too many tabs in the web browser or some other background processes).

Here are some methods which help to investigate OS X kernel usage issues:

Basic methods

Run Console.app and check on 'All Messages' to see if anything unusual currently is happening.
Use Activity Monitor to read system memory and determine how much CPU, RAM and Disk is being used.

Alternatively run top in Terminal and hold Space to refresh - easier to find the cause problem (swapins/swapouts/disks?).
Run sudo fs_usage in Terminal to report system calls and page faults related to filesystem activity in real-time (I think this is the best option from all other). Then hit Control-C to stop it.

Action: Consider killing apps which appears frequently on the list, but you're not using them.

Learn more at: How do I debug an out-of-control “kernel_task” process?
Run sudo syscallbypid.d (or syscallbyproc.d), wait a bit, hit Control-C. Now check which process generated the most system calls in that given time (last column) and if you recognise it, consider kill it. If not, Google it and learn more about it.

Advanced methods

Use sysdiagnose command (can be triggered by hitting Shift-Control-⌥-⌘-. (period) to quickly gather system-wide diagnostic information helpful in investigating system memory/performance issues (will appear in /var/tmp) either by you or Apple guys. During analysis, try to not do anything, when done - consider uncompressing the generated file and analyse the logs.

See: How do you get system diagnostic files from OS X?
Run footprint to gather detailed memory information on a per-VM-region type level and swapped bytes:

sudo footprint -a

Older version:

sudo footprint -all -categories -swapped -collapseSharing

Use spindump to profile entire system, it'll generate /tmp/spindump.txt file (including kernel and its extensions).
Use vm_stat to show virtual memory statistics. E.g.

vm_stat 1 # to display every second.

Use zprint to check information about kernel usage, it's possible by:

sudo zprint -t -s | head -n20

It'll show the most wasting kernel zones.
Use newproc.d to snoop new processes as they are executed, creatbyproc.d for files:

sudo newproc.d
sudo creatbyproc.d

Note: On newer OS X (10.11 or above) this may not work when integrity protection is enabled (check by csrutil status).
Try sar - system activity reporter which can sample and report various cumulative statistic counters maintained by the operating system.

For more useful debugging tools, check for dtrace scripts (grep dtrace /usr/bin/*). If you know the faulty process which causing the problem, you may use dtruss to debug it.

Actions

Here are some suggestions which can help you with the operating system issues.

Free up some inactive memory. In order to do this, you've to flush cache first and force disk cache to be purged:

sync && sudo purge

  sync - force completion of pending disk writes (flush cache)

  purge - force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied)

Its function is basically to terminate all the I/O pending operations which are using disk cache and then to free all the occupied disk cache, so it should free disk space to ease paging out and swapping out of main memory. It is safe to use, as it does not affect anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc.
Use some 3rd party apps to clear up some overused memory such as iBoostUp, SystemPal, etc.
You may also disable temporary Spotlight:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

And consider other services by:

sudo launchctl list | grep ^[0-9]
sudo launchctl bslist | grep ^A

Quit your web browser and check if that helps. For example using Chrome is very resourceful, especially when there is some front-end processing going on in the background (e.g. Javascript) or advert-like animations are constantly rendering the content.


Help converting Apple Script to Shell Script This Apple Script works great to mount the logged in Active Directory users network homedrive as a mounted network drive but we currently have it running as an App at login via "Login Items".

Instead I'd like to write this as a shell script so I can push it via Profile Manager as a login script since we are now succesfully running a few tasks off of a login script from PM.

Here is the AppleScript:

set username to do shell script "whoami"

set homepath to do shell script "dscl '/Active Directory/CAMPUS/All Domains/' -read /Users/" & username & " | grep SMBHome: | cut -c 10- | sed 's/\\\\/\\//g' "

tell application "Finder"

    try
        mount volume "SMB:" & homepath
    end try
end tell

Thank you for your help!

Below is a starting point.

username=`whoami`
homepath=`dscl '/Active Directory/CAMPUS/All Domains/' -read /Users/$username |grep SMBHome: | cut -c 10- | sed 's/\\\\/\\//g'`

mount_smbfs $homepath <mount_point>

I'm not really sure of the mount syntax.  This answer may help with mount syntax.


Can anybody give me the original ssh.plist file for OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)? I was trying to modify my ssh.plist file, but as a noob I overwrote my backup file with the modified one.

I am looking for the content of the original file from the install.

Can anybody give it to me?

<?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>Disabled</key>
<true/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.openssh.sshd</string>
<key>Program</key>
<string>/usr/libexec/sshd-keygen-wrapper</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
    <string>/usr/sbin/sshd</string>
    <string>-i</string>
</array>
<key>SHAuthorizationRight</key>
<string>system.preferences</string>
<key>Sockets</key>
<dict>
    <key>Listeners</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Bonjour</key>
        <array>
            <string>ssh</string>
            <string>sftp-ssh</string>
        </array>
        <key>SockServiceName</key>
        <string>ssh</string>
    </dict>
</dict>
<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
<string>/dev/null</string>
<key>inetdCompatibility</key>
<dict>
    <key>Wait</key>
    <false/>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>


Outlook for Mac 2011: How to find the folder where a message is stored? When I perform a search in Outlook for Mac 2011, I can't seem to figure out how to determine which folder each of the search results is stored.

This questions has been answered for Office for Windows: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/i-can-t-find-the-folder-where-a-message-is-stored-HA001140027.aspx

This is probably completely obvious, but I can't seem to find it...

Update: I'm still looking for a solution that doesn't require me to switch to View -> Reading Pane -> Below

The easiest method to show which folder an email is currently located is to right click on the header bar in Outlook and add the "folder" (visible columns have a check mark to the left of it) column to the current view. This will show you which folder said email is contained in when you perform a search. If you no longer wish to have the "folder" seen in the current view just reverse the process to hide it again. If this is your only customization to the current view you can alternately choose to "reset to defaults" by right clicking on the header bar and choosing the reset to defaults action.


Open the object location from find I used Spotlight to look for Atari800MacX to upgrade it. It shows me it is located in a folder called Games.

Well, where is this Games folder? No idea. Spotlighting "games" shows other folders called games, but not the one I'm looking for, and I'm not sure where any of these other ones are either.

Right-click does nothing, you can't select objects in the results (only open them)... is there any way to open the folder or otherwise figure out where the heck it is?

Spotlight is good for finding things but for whatever reason lousy at telling you where those things are, as you have discovered.

But you can still do a spotlight search in the Finder. Just open a new Finder window and type your search term into the search field in the upper right side of the Finder window.

Once you have located the file/folder you want it will show the path to it at the bottom of the Finder window.

If you hold the ⌘ Command key down while clicking the mouse on the title bar (where it displays the path again) it will give you a pop-up menu that gives you a graphical hierarchy of exactly where that file/folder is.


Terminal appears to ignore autoproxyurl setting I can't get easy_install to install anything as it complains it gets a connection refused.:

  Searching for BeautifulSoup
Reading https://pypi.python.org/simple/BeautifulSoup/
Download error on https://pypi.python.org/simple/BeautifulSoup/: [Errno 61] Connection refused -- Some packages may not be found!
Couldn't find index page for 'BeautifulSoup' (maybe misspelled?)
Scanning index of all packages (this may take a while)
Reading https://pypi.python.org/simple/
Download error on https://pypi.python.org/simple/: [Errno 61] Connection refused -- Some packages may not be found!
No local packages or download links found for BeautifulSoup
error: Could not find suitable distribution for Requirement.parse('BeautifulSoup')

If I query the interface I am told the proxy is setup and working (which it definitely appears to be as I can browse, etc.)

networksetup -getautoproxyurl Wi-fi
URL: http://webproxy.******.co.uk/wpad.dat
Enabled: Yes

Visiting https://pypi.python.org/simple/ manually in a browser also works.

It gets more confusing;

I tried setting the proxies manually instead:

djsmiley2k:~$ echo $HTTP_PROXY
webproxy.*******.co.uk:8080
tbowers@tims-mbp:~$ echo $HTTPS_PROXY
webproxy.*******.co.uk:8080

Still no dice :/

Edit:

More urls appear to be affected, unsure if this is some weird resolving error I just happened to have hit at the wrong time:

djsmiley2k:~/bin$ echo $HTTP_PROXY
webproxy.*******.co.uk:8080
djsmiley2k:~/bin$ echo $HTTPS_PROXY
webproxy.*******.co.uk:8080

djsmiley2k:~/bin$ wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
--2015-05-18 15:30:33--  https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
Resolving bootstrap.pypa.io (bootstrap.pypa.io)... 185.31.18.175
Connecting to bootstrap.pypa.io (bootstrap.pypa.io)|185.31.18.175|:443... failed: Connection refused.
djsmiley2k:~/bin$ wget http://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
--2015-05-18 15:31:49--  http://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
Resolving bootstrap.pypa.io (bootstrap.pypa.io)... 185.31.18.175
Connecting to bootstrap.pypa.io (bootstrap.pypa.io)|185.31.18.175|:80... failed: Connection refused.

I've checked and I can access the script directly in a browser, trying to go to http forwards me to https automatically.

User error strikes again!

I wasn't using the easy_install flags correctly, needs to be:

easy_install --user <package>

and not  --user.


Can I use a Time Capsule as an all-purpose storage disk? I have a MacBook Pro and am thinking of buying a Time Capsule. If I do, will I be able to use it as a backup and storage disk, and as a wireless router? I read somewhere that they can be used only as backup disks (I don't need one that much) and routers. I would also like an external hard disk to keep my photos and old stuff, though.

Additionally, do Time Capsules support connecting over PPPoE?

Yes. Time Capsules can be used for Time Machine backups as well as for general storage, though Apple recommends against it:

  Time Machine works best if you use your backup disk only for Time Machine backups. If you keep files on your backup disk, Time Machine won’t back up those files, and the space available for Time Machine backups is reduced.

I personally don't believe that they will “work better” if you only use them for backups—I haven't had any problems with my setup, and it's been this way for a few years—but that's what the official knowledge base says.

It's easy to get at the general storage. I have disk accounts set up, so the way you do it might be somewhat different. My Time Capsule appears in Finder's left sidebar. When I click on it, two items appear: one with my username and one with the Time Capsule's disk's name. I double-click on the first one, and (after waiting a few seconds for the disk to spin up again,) I get a list of the files I've stored there. Finder also puts an icon on the desktop, which I can use to quickly get back to it. When I'm done, I either drag that icon to the trash, or click the eject icon next to the Time Capsule's name in any Finder window.

Time Capsules do seem to support PPPoE for Internet connections: in AirPort Utility's Internet tab, there is an option for PPPoE in the Connect Using drop-down box. I can't be 100% sure of this, though: my ISP doesn't use it.

(Everything here was copied from my three comments.)


Is there a way to copy the HTML out of an Outlook email? The scenario is that I often get outlook emails sent to me with content that I need to paste into an HTML formatted newsletter.
A lot of this formatting is minor...namely bolded text and hyperlinks.
I'd like to be able to select the paragraph in outlook, copy, then paste into my HTML editor with the HTML.
So if outlooks has this:
This is bold and this is a link.
I'd like to paste it like this:
This is bold and this is a link

Alas, it doesn't do that, it just pastes the raw text like this:
This is bold and this is a link

So for every section I have to constantly go into my text editor and re-apply tags as needed. Not a huge deal...except when you multiple this x20 or so and then it just gets tedious.
Is there any way to copy the content from outlook and retain the HTML formatting as actual HTML?

the problem here is that styled text in Outlook is not always sent as HTML.
But you can find out easily enough.
(Note this works on Outlook 2016. other versions might be different.)
Hold down the ⌥ Option key on your keyboard and click on the message in Outlook's message list that you want to see the source for and select "Show Source" from the menu that pops-up.
If it was sent as HTML you will see the HTML code. But a lot of people use what outlook calls "Rich Text" which embeds the email as an '.rtf" document. Which is fine as far as it goes as Rich Text Format is a standard that most word processors can read and write (like the macOS textedit.app).
So some (if not many or most) of your emails won't be in HTML format at all.


What would it take to make an iPad support multiple user accounts? As a mobile computer, the iPad is very personal, but it also begs to be shared. And that's a problem. I don't want my friends to be able to check my emails or delete my high score when they play with it.

Being based on OS X, iOS could theoretically support multiple user accounts. But adding new users (even if done correctly) wouldn't play nice with iTunes.

So, what about partitioning the hard drive and installing several instances of iOS? Add a screen early in the boot process that allows you to choose the partition, and thus the user.

Itunes would thus be able to sync many users separately on the same device, depending on the chosen partition.

To be clearer: I'm not just asking the question, I want to actually do it. Can anybody suggest means to achieve this?

Continued my research: apparently, it is possible to modify the Boot Rom (cf. Limera1n).

One place to look might be at dual booting an iPhone with Android.

Update: iUsers for iPad now makes this possible. Check out the video.


How to type a blank password in terminal in Mac sierra I use Sudo commands  in terminal but it always asks for the password.This is annoying because I always have to set a password.So how do I type blank password in terminal in MacOS Sierra 10.12.5

sudo in macOS requires a password, see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202035
So it is not about typing it, it is sudo not accepting it.


Unable to access files with File Sharing in Mac OS High Sierra Has anybody know how can we share folder/files from High Sierra?

I can not access files when I followed usual process of going to "System Preferences > File Sharing > Enable AFP and adding users with required privileges”

But, when I do same for Mac having previous OS version (e.g. Sierra) File Sharing works.

Anyone any clues what am I missing?

Gordan's got the issue:
To connect to an APFS formatted volume you need to turn OFF sharing via AFP (forcing SMB connection) on the macOS devices you are trying to share.

Open System Preferences (Screen Menu > Apple icon > System Preferences
Select Sharing icon (3rd row, Folder w/ caution sign)
Select File Sharing in Right hand list (check to turn on if not already)
Select Options ... botton on right
UNCHECK Share files and Folder using AFP
Repeat as needed for Mac devices you're trying to share

Then you should be able to connect and log in to the Mac shared on you network as before.

See Apples (very) brief doc Prepare for APFS in macOS High Sierra for other items affected by the change to APFS.


Sync pictures of iPhone with Mac How can I sync the pictures from my iPhone (5, iOS 6) to the Mac (OS X 10.8.2) (but not vice versa) via WiFi but without going through the cloud? In case it matters, I am using iPhoto on the Mac.

Connect the phone to the Mac. Launch iPhoto. Click import.


Way to tell where a password dialog is coming from? Sometimes a piece of software will automatically update itself, and I'll abruptly get the "type your password to allow this" dialog. Is there any verification going on behind the scenes before the OS gives me this dialog? It seems like any random trojan could tell the OS that it's called "Update Adobe Flash Player" or something else official-sounding. For that matter, is there anything stopping a malicious program from popping up a dialog that looks just like the OS X one?

I'm aware that programs shouldn't be able to do this unless I've knowingly put them on my computer, so the burden is on me to be careful about what software I download in the first place (barring discovery of new OS exploits, which is likely to happen at some point). I'd like to know whether there's any additional verification I could do so that even if malware does get onto my system, I can at least avoid giving it an admin password.

In System Preferences you go to Security and Privacy.

Code signing is a component of this.  Choosing Mac App Store and Identified developers requires the use of Code Signing certificate.  If you want to be able to install anything unsigned, you will have to select "Anywhere."  This allows you to install anything, but it allows you to install anything :) See this pic:


Does Mac have an display driver to go for higher resolution (than the current display)? It used to be on a PC, when hooked up to a 1024 x 768 display, I can actually set the resolution to 1600 x 1200, and the display driver will pan to different part of the 1600 x 1200 section depending on where my mouse moves to.

Can a Mac do that too?  That is, if a Macbook Air only has a resolution of 1440 x 900, can I install some driver to have a resolution of 4k or 5k, and just have the 1440 x 900 showing the section of the 4k or the 5k screen, depending on where the mouse is?

I am looking for this function mainly to sometimes capture some screenshots when reading digital magazine using Zinio the web app, and want to capture the screenshot in 4k or 5k resolution even when the Mac is not hooked up to such display.

Apple, generally does not release drivers other than what ships with OS X. And video card manufacturers generally do not release drivers for their devices installed in a Mac under OS X unless it is a PCI card or some such that has a chipset not specifically supported by OS X.

I suppose the Hackintosh community may have some drivers that do that but I would tend to think that what you are looking for is not available under Mac OS


Retrieving an accidently deleted notes folder well after 30 days Back in April, I believe I essentially accidentally deleted notes at a concert. I done this through the Manage Storage section (not through the actual Notes app), and when I went into the Notes app the next day to try and retrieve them, not only was there nothing in my recently deleted, but the entire "On My iPhone" notes folder had been completely removed without a trace.

I've tried to retrieve them through several apps such as FoneLab, iMyFone and PhoneRescue to no avail. I was wondering if I've left it too late and/or the manner in which I deleted them - through the Manage Storage section and also apparently as an entire folder, not as individual notes - means they are permanently gone?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Many thanks.

If you haven't got backups of your device, it is very unlikely that you'll be able to retrieve these notes after 8 months. If you've left the device on the shelf, powered off for those 8 months, there's a slim chance - but if you have used the device, it is extremely unlikely.

You'll have to take the iPhone to a lab that does recovery from the flash storage devices on iPhones. It will be costly, and there's really only a very, very slim small chance that your notes can be found again.


Script to create iPhone Contacts Does anyone know of a way to create a Contact list with a defined amount of contacts? They can be dummy entries, but I just need to create an address book with > 2000 entries. An Automator script is what I have in mind, but I'm not sure how to go about this.

I apologize if this is in the wrong place. Was considering SU or SE, but figured I'd start here.

An Applescript can bulk-create OS X address book entries, which you can then import to your iPhone. I made up a basic one for you:

-- Change these to your desired data
set firstName to "Test"
set lastName to "User"
set numberOfEntries to "5" as integer

set counter to "1" as integer
tell application "Address Book"
    repeat numberOfEntries times
        set thePerson to make new person with properties {first name:firstName, last name:lastName & " " & counter}
        make new email at end of emails of thePerson with properties {label:"Work", value:"test" & counter & "@example.com"}
        make new address at end of addresses of thePerson with properties {label:"Home", city:"Fakeville", street:(counter as string) & " Some St."}
        set counter to counter + 1
    end repeat
    save
end tell

Open AppleScript Editor (in your Applications/Utilities/ folder) and paste that in to a new script. As is, it will make you 5 numbered contacts like so:

You can change the number in the set numberOfEntries to "5" as integer line to however many you need, and change the data if you wish. If you need other fields (like phone numbers), ask and I can show you how.

Improved version

I went a bit overboard and made a version that comes up with nicer names. I took the 20 most popular male and female names, 40 most popular last names, and added a middle initial, so you get a pretty low chance of duplicates (a bit under 5% in a set of 2000, by my math) without the goofy looking numbered contacts.

It also adds all the contacts to a group ("Test Group") so you can pick out all the dummy ones easily if you're adding to an existing address book and want to clean it up later.

Edit: I also changed it to prompt for how many items to create, so it's not necessary to edit the code.

-- name lists: 20 most popular (US) male and female first names, 40 most popular last names
set firstNameList to {"Mary", "Patricia", "Linda", "Barbara", "Elizabeth", "Jennifer", "Maria", "Susan", "Margaret", "Dorothy", "Lisa", "Nancy", "Karen", "Betty", "Helen", "Sandra", "Donna", "Carol", "Ruth", "Sharon", "James", "John", "Robert", "Michael", "William", "David", "Richard", "Charles", "Joseph", "Thomas", "Christopher", "Daniel", "Paul", "Mark", "Donald", "George", "Kenneth", "Steven", "Edward", "Brian"}
set lastNameList to {"Smith", "Johnson", "Williams", "Jones", "Brown", "Davis", "Miller", "Wilson", "Moore", "Taylor", "Anderson", "Thomas", "Jackson", "White", "Harris", "Martin", "Thompson", "Garcia", "Martinez", "Robinson", "Clark", "Rodriguez", "Lewis", "Lee", "Walker", "Hall", "Allen", "Young", "Hernandez", "King", "Wright", "Lopez", "Hill", "Scott", "Green", "Adams", "Baker", "Gonzalez", "Nelson", "Carter"}
set initialList to "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
set counter to "1" as integer

-- prompt for how many contacts to create
set dialogText to "Number of contacts to create?"
repeat
    display dialog dialogText default answer ""
    set numberOfEntries to text returned of result
    try
        if numberOfEntries = "" then error
        set numberOfEntries to numberOfEntries as number
        exit repeat
    on error

    end try
end repeat

-- populate the address book
tell application "Address Book"
    set theGroup to make new group with properties {name:"Test Group"}
    repeat numberOfEntries times
        set firstName to some item of firstNameList
        set lastName to some item of lastNameList
        set middleInitial to some item of initialList & "."
        set thePerson to make new person with properties {first name:firstName, middle name:middleInitial, last name:lastName}
        make new email at end of emails of thePerson with properties {label:"Work", value:firstName & middleInitial & lastName & "@example.com"}
        make new address at end of addresses of thePerson with properties {label:"Home", city:"Fakeville", street:(counter as string) & " Some St."}
        add thePerson to theGroup
        set counter to counter + 1
    end repeat
    save
end tell

Here's what it generates:


Some GUI elements are yellow Recently my MacBook Pro early 2011 has a video card change (the video card issues, by the extended repair program). But now the PC has a very very odd problem: some parts of the GUI are yellow (almost always the white parts). But, if I put a window over the "yellow part" of other window then the shade is white, not yellow...

And its not only OSX (or the installer). It happens also on GRUB and Ubuntu.

Also, the problem dissapears after the laptop is on for an hour or something like that... but, if I restart the problem shows again.

Both the fact that it is independent of the OS you are running and that it disappears after some time/warmup period indicate that this is an hardware issue. Take the laptop back to the place you've got the video card changed to have it fixed.


Do encrypted Time Machine backups work across a network? I see that Lion offers the option of encrypting TIme Machine backup volumes, which seems like a Good Thing.  After reading up a bit on this, it seems clear that it will handle the situation where the backup volume is physically attached to the machine being backed up.  However, I've gotten mixed signals about whether this will work with networked clients.  I have a server with a TM volume, and a number of machines on my network use that server and its disk for TM backups.  Can I encrypt the TM volume in this situation, and will Time Machine be able to back up from those clients to the server?  I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't work, but, like I said, the overall story isn't completely clear.  Thanks for any advice!

According to information from this page, the answer is no, it will not support encrypted Time Machine backups to network-attached storage. They're specifically mentioning Time Capsules and Airport Extremes. The issue Paul Eccles mentioned looks to be related to whether you can backup to NAS with Time Machine at all without regard to encryption status.

The link referenced also seems to indicate you can't use Time Machine encryption on direct-attached storage, but that may be because you can use Disk Utility to encrypted a direct-attached volume instead. Commenter Fracai calls out the classic standby of creating an encrypted disk image, storing that on network-attached storage, and mounting that for your Time Machine backups.

I'll also point out the discussion on that page (which is slightly inaccurate, but mostly on) wherein commenter TrumpetPower! cautions encrypting backups. This is a point worth repeating here. I'll rephrase (more precisely and accurately) what TrumpetPower! wrote:

The purpose of a backup is to preserve availability of data.
The purpose of encryption is to prevent availability of data without the key used to encrypt the data.

If you encrypt a backup, you add complexity to a process designed to simplify and preserve access to your information. With complexity comes increased probability of failure. Thus, the chance that you lose access to your backed-up data goes up. Do yourself a favor and make sure you understand when and why you might wish to encrypt your backups and think hard about how you'll ensure you have access to your encryption key when it counts.


How to copy path of a file in Mac OS? I am looking for a shortcut to copy the path of a file in Mac OS. I generally require it to copy paste in editor.

All you need to do to copy any items path name directly to the clipboard from anywhere in the file system:

Navigate to the file or folder you wish to copy the path for Right-click (or Control+Click, or a Two-Finger click on trackpads) on the file or folder in the Mac Finder
While in the right-click menu, hold down the OPTION key to reveal the “Copy (item name) as Pathname” option, it replaces the standard Copy option Once selected, the file or folders path is now in the clipboard, ready to be pasted anywhere

The copied pathname is always the complete path, it’s not relative.
You can get the same result with a keyboard shortcut of Command+Option+C.
Source http://osxdaily.com/2015/11/05/copy-file-path-name-text-mac-os-x-finder/


This window keeps showing every time I login Every time I login to my Mac (Lion OS X) I keep getting this windows shown, even when I shut down without the option of reopening the windows when I log back in from here:

This is the window that keeps showing:

How on earth do I stop this for appearing all the time when I login?

I had the same problem, with the same folder. The folder is within the Steam application bundle, and for some unknown reason it gets added to your Login Items.

To stop it showing up when you login:

Open System Preferences
Click the Users & Groups icon
Select the Login Items pane
In the list of items, select the MacOS folder
Click the "-" button to remove it


External monitor goes black for short periods on MBP mid 2010 but not on same machine running Windows Can anyone advise on how to stop this happening.

The external monitor attached to it goes black for a few seconds but then comes back to show the Desktop etc.

When I boot into Windows 7 64 bit Pro (via Boot Camp) this never happens. So I don't think it's a hardware issue.

Please advise.

Update

Removed OS version from title as issue occurred in several versions. Added versions where seen as tags.

It never happened with Mavericks (but did following the upgrade to Yosemite, went away, then came back after a while after upgrading to El Capitan (I think) but also Sierra).

I did have this with my Mac Air and it was a bad cable.

I replaced it and then it would crash, if that happens try this:

  system prefs > security > advanced > uncheck logout after xx minutes of inactivity

Someone on this site suggested it for display crashes and it worked beautifully for me.


Can't go to App Compatibilty I am running iOS 10.3.3 on an iPhone 7 plus.

When I go to Settings > General > About, I see Applications on the list with the number of apps I have installed. There is no ">" arrow to the right of the number of apps as I have seen in screen shots of other iPhones.

Clicking on Applications does nothing. Restarting the phone does nothing.

Anyone know why I don't have the App Compatibility screen? Do I have to turn something on somewhere else to see it?

Maybe because you don’t have any 32-bit apps installed?

I don’t see the arrow as well, but I’m on iOS 11 beta and have no 32-bit apps installed (can’t install it anyway now).

So you can safely upgrade to iOS 11 the moment it's available.


How to change serial number on a Mac Pro 5,1 (2010)? This is a very odd request, but I've had quite the fight with Apple now for over a year on my AppleID account.  It turns out that my legitimate Mac Pro's serial number has been somehow blacklisted with Apple's system, but the engineers and sys admins and the Apple Support + Apple Customer Relations rep all refuse to believe it (they say that they've had extensive dialogues with higher end engineers, but still cannot get resolution).  I've provided evidence that my account works fine on other machines with different serials, yet even on this Mac Pro with a completely fresh install, it absolutely will not work and the advanced debugging logs that only Apple engineers know (and I'm likely under NDA not to share) demonstrate the error message that indicates that it is a problem with their AppleID gateway server and my serial number.

So, to help my sanity and move beyond flat out arguing (I've even sent Tim Cook an email re: this), I am looking for a way to generate a new random serial number for my Mac Pro that will circumvent this insanity.  Does anyone know the process of doing this on a legitimate Mac Pro (I'm not seeing how the Hackintosh methodologies would tie in to an actual Mac Pro at present)?

I may have misunderstood your question, but it's not clear what you mean by:
 my account works fine on other machines with different serials, yet even on this Mac Pro with a completely fresh install, it absolutely will not work.

I'm not aware of any Apple ID account services that interrogate serial numbers. In fact, Apple instructs software developers the following caveat relating to serial numbers:

  It is possible for a system to lose its serial number so that it will
  no longer appear either in System Profiler or the I/O Registry.
  Repairing a system by swapping hardware components is one reason this
  can happen. Apple does not document the specific details of how a
  machine can lose its serial number. Once the serial number has been
  lost there is no means to restore it to the machine.

Source: Apple Technical Note TN1103

The point I am trying to make is that Mac computers can lose their serial number, or the serial number can change (e.g. through a replacement logic board), and because of this serial numbers are only used by Apple as one way of identifying/tracking computers for Warranty purposes (e.g. relating to Apple Care, recall programs, etc).

This being the case, it's not clear what isn't working on your Mac Pro in terms of your account. If you could clarify, perhaps the community may be able to address what isn't working in a different way? Please don't take this as me being dismissive - I am merely trying to find a way forward for me or someone else to help you.

Missing serial numbers

I have seen a number of cases where users thought that a missing serial number was the cause of problems (such as the Messages app being unable to connect) but the real issue was something else. Evenso, in these cases the scenario was a missing serial number not an invalid one. (I should add that I have personally seen Macs with missing serial numbers function normally in all respects.)

Valid serial numbers

In the previously mentioned Tech note, Apple also states Developers should not make any assumptions about the format of the serial number such as its length or what characters it may contain.

This being the case, I'm not sure how you could generate a valid serial number for your Mac Pro.

If, on the other hand, your serial number was missing altogether, there is a tool that allows you to re-enter a serial number, but this tool only works if no serial number is present - it doesn't allow you to edit an existing record, which you do have.

Proving your hypothesis

By the way, if you are correct about what is going on in your case, the only way you will prove it to Apple is to take these steps:

use your Apple ID on your Mac Pro and demonstrate what isn't working
use your Apple ID on another Mac Pro of the same model/configuration and show that everything is working fine
swap the logic boards between the two
use each computer in turn
if everything works fine on your machine with the other logic board, and no longer works fine on the other machine with your logic board, you've proven your case


Mouse scrolling by 'page' How can I configure OS X Mountain Lion to scroll one 'page' at a time?

OS X's Scrolling Speed in Mouse preferences doesn't have the effect of what I'm looking for.

The default/current behavour is that the first few wheel scrolls is one 'line' at a time. Only when you've scrolled a few wheel clicks in quick sequence does it start to scroll in larger chunks.

I have a Logitech MX 510 mouse. The Logitech control panel has no options here either.

Are there any Mountain Lion tweaks I can make or is there any FREE software to help?

USB Overdrive can do that but it's not free.

You could also add a rule like this to KeyRemap4MacBook's private.xml. The behavior when scrolling multiple ticks was a bit weird on the mouse I tested with; it only scrolled a full page about once every 0.5 seconds.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
    <item>
        <name>Test</name>
        <appendix/>
        <identifier>94D0530F-70BA-4DA9-BD45-C223A689A807</identifier>
        <autogen>--ScrollWheelToKey-- ScrollWheel::UP, KeyCode::PAGEUP</autogen>
        <autogen>--ScrollWheelToKey-- ScrollWheel::DOWN, KeyCode::PAGEDOWN</autogen>
    </item>
</root>

You can also increase the scrolling speed with defaults write -g NSScrollWheelMultiplier -float 200.


Change maximum size of picture-in-picture window in Sierra Does anyone know how the maximum size of the picture-in-picture window in macOS Sierra can be changed? I would really like to be able to enlarge it.

The file with settings is located at ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.pipagent.plist

You can use http://www.nightproductions.net/prefsetter.html to edit this file and set the new dimensions.

I tried changing the values, however those got reset to 0.25 / 0.225 once I restart picture in picture.

Hope this helps.


Is there a way to prevent my Mac from sleeping during a file copy? I'm copying a lot of files (over 700 GB) and it takes hours to complete. Is there a way to keep the Mac from sleeping before the copy process completes? I don't want to sit by the computer and moving my mouse from time to time.
I tried to set my Energy Saver settings as:

But sometimes it still dies. So currently, I have to sit by the laptop and wait.

caffeinate rsync
Consider using the command line tool rsync to safely copy large amounts of data on your Mac. Prefix the command with caffeinate to keep your Mac awake during the copy.
The Terminal.app command will look something like:
 sudo caffeinate rsync -vaE --progress /Volumes/SourceName /Volumes/DestinationName

rsync has the benefit of being able to resume failed or interrupted copies.
If the copy has already begun, run caffeinate with the flag -t <seconds> for a specific duration or -w <pid> for the life time of a specific process.


Mouse clicking not working on Disk Utility screen. How do I select erase button? When I returned home a couple days ago, I had a notification that some updates had been installed. This had rendered my 27" iMac basically useless. It lags horrendously with almost a never ending spinning beach ball cursor.

I'm trying to delete the HDD contents and reinstall the os, but when I boot to Recovery Mode to get to the Utilities screen, the mouse pointer will move but it will not click. I was able to figure out how to use the keyboard to get to the Disk Utility section but I cannot find out how highlight the erase button using the keyboard. If someone can come up with an answer or easier method, I'd be forever in your debt.

If I understand your question correctly, you want to select a drive and erase it. However, while you've worked out how to select the drive using the keyboard, you're not able to select the Erase button.

In your situation you can do this with by using the ShiftCommandE keyboard shortcut.

Hope this helps. If I've misunderstood your question, please let me know.


If I send my mum an iMessage it goes through to her boyfriends phone? If I send my mum a text message it goes through to her phone number, but today I sent her an iMessage and it went through to her boyfriend do phone instead. Why is this?

It's possible that at some point she has signed in to her iCloud account on his iPhone and activated iMessage thus when she receives an iMessage it is also being sent to his iPhone.


Is it possible to damage the system (macOS) by installing pirated software? In Windows, the programs are installed without problems and access to system files is simple. Any user can delete a file from the system and damage it.

However on Mac, it cannot touch system files, which in my opinion makes it safe.

Anyway I would like to ask Is it possible to damage the system by installing pirated or cracked applications?

I would like to ask Is it possible to damage the system by
installing pirated or cracked applications?

Damages
Physical damage?
Not impossible, but improbable.  There are viruses out there that can attack vulnerabilities in the CPU, for example.  Like the new CSME CPU Bug.  Pirated software ups those odds.
Software damage?
Of course.  Just because macOS has SIP, user roles, T2 chips, etc. doesn't mean a user who installs pirated software is immune.  If you install software as an admin, you've given permission to that software to do some nefarious things.
System Security

In Windows, the programs are installed without problems and access to
system files is simple. Any user can delete a file from the system and
damage it.

If you're referring to Windows 95, then you'd be correct.  Windows security has come a long, long way since then and Windows 10 security, TPM, secure boot as well their encryption is extremely strong.  DoD level strong.

However on Mac, it cannot touch system files, which in my opinion
makes it safe.

Ha!  That's a huge error in judgement!  A piece of malware doesn't need access to your system to encrypt your files and hold them for ransom. It also doesn't need access to your system to install a back door or a keylogger that sends all your personal info out to some nefarious server somewhere.   Installing pirated software is the quickest way to get a threat onto your computer.
Don't Install Pirated Software
There's more than enough FOSS (Free Open Source Software) out there to meet your needs.  Pirating is theft regardless of your point of view on software licensing.  When you use the software, you agree to the license.


Mac user name is causing irritations My Desktop Mac is about four years old. I don't remember the original OS but it has been upgraded to Yosemite. At the time of purchase / original setup I don't remember what user accounts I set up. It may have been my name only Simon xxxx or it may have been my wife only Lesleyxxxx or both. I seem to remember setting up a guest account. At some point early on I imported lesley's iTunes. After a year or so of being totally confused about who's iTunes was doing what and who's mac it was "lesley's Mac" / "Simons Mac" I decided to delete her user account & iTunes. I was then either left with "guest" and Simon xxxx or "guest"  and created "Simon xxxx" making simon the administrator. The problem or rather annoyance I now have is the name lesleyxxxx appears randomly from time to time. For example I have just set up an airport extreme & Mac TV both seem to be called "lesley's". In my user groups the only users appearing are guest and Simon xxxx. However, on opening the Terminal the first two lines read: Last login DATE TIME on ttys000 Simon-Desktop:~lesleyxxxx$. Note the title bar on opening the Terminal has a house symbol followed by lesleyxxxx – bash –No X No. At login or on the top right of the screen the only name mentioned is Simon xxxx. How can I stop the lesleyxxxx appearing as it is.

At one time you must have used "lesleyxxx" as administrator account.

Terminal shows "Simon-Desktop:~lesleyxxxx$"

Simon-Desktop is the name you gave it in the system preferences- Sharing (you can change it there.

the ~lesleyxxxx part shows you are using a home directory called ~lesleyxxxx.

That is because you are logged in as ~lesleyxxxx!- Change that in Users & Groups.

You can also delete other users but be aware they settings will be deleted as well.


How to make Photoshop use multiple windows? I'm starting to use Photoshop CS 6, coming from CS 3. The older version has an option to use multiple windows (one per document) with floating palettes. Is this arrangement available in Photoshop CS 6?

Go to the Window menu and un-check the Application Frame menu item. The palettes will pop to the edges of your screen and the documents will turn into floating windows.


F3 on Windows is what on a Mac? On Windows to quickly search something, I just press F3 and then you can type what you are searching for as "keywords", how do you do this on Mac? I am busy with HTML and I want to quickly search something.

In general, to search for something on a Mac, Spotlight is what's used and can be brought up pressing: Command (⌘)-Space bar

Have a look at: OS X Yosemite: Spotlight keyboard shortcuts

If in an application, like TextEdit as an example, pressing ⌘F brings up Find.

Also have a look at: Mac keyboard shortcuts


iOS 9 upgrade frozen at "Slide to upgrade" I'm trying to upgrade to iOS 9 from iOS 7 on a 5C but the upgrade process is frozen at "Slide to upgrade".

Reboot just restarts one view or two before "slide to upgrade" screen.

My iCloud backup is out of date due to storage issues (it wouldn't fit in the free allotment) and I can't create one ("device has not been configured") using iTunes so I can't do a restore without losing my data.

Apparently this is a known problem when updating from iOS 7 devices straight to iOS 9.

Apple has posted a workaround, which should help you out:

If the Slide to Upgrade screen won't go away after you update to iOS 9.

I'm not posting the text verbatim, in case Apple improves their answer.

Note that you will need a computer to connect the device to, to make a local backup.

Edit 2015-09-23

Apple have released iOS 9.0.1 which according to this report

  address issues users have experienced with the Setup Assistant app getting stuck on “Slide to Upgrade.”

I am guessing it will still be necessary to connect to a computer any iOS devices that are stuck at "Slide to upgrade".


How to Determine What's Using Filling GPU's Video Memory? I have a system with integrated graphics to which OS X has assigned 1.5gb (out of 16gb) of RAM, however iStat Menus is currently reporting this at around 95% full, even though I'm not currently running anything that should be making much of a demand of the GPU.

Of course it's possible there's something I'm not aware of that has been using the GPU, but only restarting has completely cleared it. I was playing Civilisation V yesterday, but even while playing it didn't fill my video memory, and that was over 10 hours ago (my computer hasn't been asleep since then, as I'm still running through a large initial backup of a huge volume).

I'm just wondering if there's an easy way to determine what's using up all this video memory, similar to using Activity Monitor to track main memory? If it happens again I'd like to figure out what's at fault so I can avoid the problem in future and/or report any memory leaks or similar issues.

There is a tool available to check a lot of graphic card parameters: OpenGL Drive Monitors

You may download it at Apple developer. You need a developer account though. Search for "Graphics Tools" and then download "Graphics Tools for Xcode - Xcode 6.1". Open the .dmg and copy "OpenGL Drive Monitors" to your Application folder.

You can't track down graphic memory usage of individual apps though.

Screenshot:


What happens to files restoring from case-sensitive to case-insensitive? If I have IMPORTANT-RESOURCE.jpg and important-resource.jpg on a case-sensitive file system, I do a Time Machine backup, then wipe boot volume, and create a case-insensitive volume, then restore from Time Machine, what will happen to the duplicate file?

Time Machine by defaults formats the backup disk as case-sensitive, even when the original source disk is case-insensitive. This means that in any case, the file names are preserved when backing up.

If you when restore files from a backup made from a case-sensitive file system to a disk with a case-insensitive file system, Time Machine detects conflicts. The first of the two (or more) conflicting files will be copied over as normal. For the rest of the conflicted files, you'll get a popup stating that the destination disk already contains a file of that name. The popup allows you to either keep only the first file, keep only the second file - or keep both, where it automatically renames the second file to include "copy" in the name.

In general I would say that you should never do this with a complete system backup. Always restore a case-sensitive backup to a case-sensitive file system. If you have a limited number of files and expect a low number of conflicts, it could be done ofcourse - but it probably more work than justified.

In fact by default, if you wipe the volume completely and let Time Machine do a full restore, it will create a file system with the same case-sensitivity setting as the original source volume. I.e. if the backup was created from a case-sensitive disk, it will format the volume as case-sensitive during restore.

You can change by altering the com.apple.backupd.VolumeIsCaseSensitive"extended attribute on the top folder matching the name of your source volume. below your computer name in Backups.backupdb.


App Store for Business How can business users update to Mac OS X 10.8 on existing machines? My question regards a business with about 2 dozen Macs currently running 10.6.8 in Germany. The licenses would need to be floating licenses, i.e., licensed per seat, not per user.

Similar issues have been discussed here and here, but the answers are not applicable to the German market.

Unless you cut a special deal with Apple, you will buy one single license for each Mac and you can circulate those machines sequentially to any number of employees. The last time I checked, you would need to purchase 100 OS licenses to get a floating license agreement with Apple.

There are two simple ways to get expert advice on the licensing terms of the Mac App store:

Ask Apple - since you are in a country with Apple Retail presence you can call any of the stores and speak with a member of the Business team for advice, consultation and assistance. Next would be going to your online store and asking for pre-sales assistance. There is typically a toll free number with assistance in your native language(s) wherever Apple has an online store.
Read the license for the software. In your case, Mountain Lion would come with a license if you purchased it in bulk from Apple directly so I presume you would know in that case what to do. Otherwise, the App Store terms/conditions take first precedence and secondly the Mountain Lion terms also apply.

The Mountain Lion terms appear to be unified for all regions here:

http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX108.pdf

You can find the App Store terms at http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/ww/ as well as from the App Store when you select your Account Information in the footer between the Privacy Policy and FAQ.

For you, the direct link is:

http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/de/terms.html

Most countries can substitute their two letter abbreviation for de above to get a localized and correct license for Mac App Store licenses for accounts based worldwide.


Quit Apps While Using AirPlay I just purchased an Apple TV 4K to use with my iPhone 6s plus after my Chromecast broke. I just noticed that when casting movies to my tv using Airplay, I cannot close the app doing the casting. For example, the Hulu app on my phone, which supports Airplay, will let me switch to a different app while casting a movie. However, as soon as I quit the Hulu app (i.e. double press the home button and swipe up), Apple TV will no longer play the movie. This is very different from Chromecast because after casting the movie to Chromecast, it is the Chromecast that does the job of pulling the movie from its internet source, and I can freely quit the app without affecting the casting. In fact, when casting Hulu movies through chrome cast in the past, I could quit the Hulu app and the movie would still be playing.

I understand that there is no need to quit iPhone apps, but that's not the point here.

My questions are:

Does Apple TV, while performing Airplay, do the job of pulling the movies from the internet by itself, or does my iPhone have to do all the heavy lifting?
If Apple TV can get the movies from the internet sources, why do the apps on my iPhone have to stay active?
Is there a way to quit apps on my iPhone without affecting Airplay?

Apple's Airplay uses a mirroring model. This is different than Google Chromecast's redirect model.

When you play Hulu on your iPhone, the iPhone supplies the video to your Apple TV.  As you noticed, it's the iPhone doing the work. That's why you can't quit the app on your iPhone.

Apple can play video itself from just about all the same sources as your iPhone. The apps need to stay active on your iPhone when using Airplay because they don't hand-off that job to the Apple TV. To get around this, just use the apps in your Apple TV instead.

Google's use of redirecting the task to the Chromecast also allows Google the ability to insert itself as the 'man in the middle' and see your viewing habits and shows so it can sell more advertising and monitize your use. Apple doesn't do this with Airplay.


ITunes/iCloud/Find My iPhone I finally caved and allowed my 16 year old daughter set up a separate iCloud/iTunes account because of all the problems we were having when using the same account.  However, now I can no longer see her phone on Find My iPhone.  I think when she set this new account up, it turned it off.  I had her turn it back on, but I cannot see it.  Any advice would be most appreciated.  I need to be able to have this capability.  I have a 12 year old and we are also having issues with using the same iCloud account, but I won't change his until I have a solution.

Have you tried setting up a family on iCloud? You can share purchases, control what they're buying, etc. Once you're in the family (or technically this works even without starting one), you can use the Find My Friends app to indefinitely share location. There's no better person to explain than Apple, so here's the link to the guide for sharing the location. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201087

If you're also interested in setting up the family, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201088

If you choose to make a family, do it before setting up Find my Friends