MacBook Air with small SSD, BootCamp, Windows 7. Can I use an external hard disk for dual boot? I'd like to setup a dual boot onto my MacBookAir 128GB, with Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate in BootCamp. However, I'm already close to the 128GB limit (games + CS suite + Eclipse + XCode + a lot of Web development tools).
Therefore, it would be ideal for me if I could use the same HDD I will run my Time Machine saves on... when it's finally delivered!
The question is therefore: is it reasonnable to create a dual partition on that and run Windows 7 from the first one?

Would MacBook Air tolerate launching Windows 7 from an external disk?
Is there a risk (save for USB deconnection) that HDD might not be a working solution, as in too much lag? Could (eventually) a Thunderbolt external SSD be an acceptable workaround?

Since you must boot Windows 7 from the internal SSD, and since you also want to run Mac OS X from the same volume, I recommend that you concentrate on cleaning out your existing Mac OS X system and freeing up as much disk space as possible.

You should research on how to make the smallest Windows installation possible, so you can create the smallest BootCamp partition possible. From what I can see, you could do with as little as 12GB if you are meticulous.

For instance, once Windows is installed, you can permanently disable hyberfil.sys and reduce or limit the size of pagefile.sys, and this will save you many GB.

I would also look into the differences between the size of the installation in Windows 7 32-bit versus 64-bit, and see if Windows 7 Ultimate takes up a great deal more space than Windows 7 Professional or Windows 7 Home Premium (I suspect it does). You will want to refrain from installing any features of Windows that you decide you don't need, and you will want to make sure that you don't install any Windows applications that you don't absolutely need.

Here are some links to discussions I found. I cannot vouch for any of these methods.

Reference One at Tom's Hardware

Reference Two at Microsoft TechNet

There is a utility for reducing the size of a Windows installation before you actually install it. It is called vLite. It is not exactly kosher and has its detractors. I have no personal experience with it. To use it, you need a working Windows system to configure a special custom installer DVD that vLite helps you create.

Reference Three, a discussion of the benefits of vLite and how many GB you can save.

Regardless, you are going to have to wipe the internal drive on your MacBook Air and try different partitioning schemes, so you must have yet another a large external hard drive for making backups of the system you already have. Use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!.

On the Mac side, there is a lot you can do to reduce the size of your Mac OS X partition by removing components of Lion that you do not need.

Make a complete backup disk image first before you start deleting things!

Similarly, it is possible to permanently delete the Mac OS X sleepimage file, which will save you the same amount of disk space as the amount of RAM that you have.

Information about sleepimage file

SmartSleep utility for controlling the sleepimage file

Delete the contents of /Library/Printers, which could be several GB, and when you restart your Mac, Lion will prompt you to download only the drivers for the printers you actually use.

You should completely remove any applications in iLife that you don't use, including all their support files in the /Library/ folder. iDVD, GarageBand and iPhoto have many GB of support files, themes, templates, and audio files, and if you don't use any one of those programs, you can clean out that disk space.

Utilities such as MonoLingual can remove more than 1GB from your Mac OS X installation by removing all the files for languages (Spanish, French, German, etc.) that you will not use.

Use OmniDiskSweeper or WhatSize to examine your Mac OS X installation and look for user documents that you feel safe in archiving and removing, or deleting.

There is an analogous freeware tool for Windows called WinDirStat.


How come YouTube videos play without Flash support in OS? A relative told me that iOS can playback YouTube videos.

I thought that YouTube requires Flash. How come this is possible without Flash in iOS?

YouTube videos are offered in multiple formats, not only Flash. If viewing on an iOS device, then you get H.264 format.


Transfering file and folder permissions to a clean install with rsync? I'm periodically backing up my Mac user-folder to a remote machine by running rsync with a cron job on my machine. I'm thinking that anything useful will be in the user-folder and I can always reinstall the missing software with homebrew, so no use backing up anything else.
My backup command looks something like this:
rsync -av --delete /Users/oxprox_1/ -e "$SSH_OPTS" remote_machine:/backups/oxprox_1/

Now I recently had to replace my hard drive and do a clean install of a new OS. It was the first time I had to rsync my whole user-folder back. During the OS install I changed my username so the user folder on my machine is now named differently and I guess this UID number is also different even if the name had been the same (or is it?). If I remember correctly, I ran something like this on my machine to pull my files back:
sudo rsync -av remote_machine:/backups/oxprox_1/ -e "$SSH_OPTS" /Users/oxprox_2/

I think I used sudo because it wouldn't modify files without it. If I remember correctly I had some issues with the permissions of my files and I managed to figure it out somehow, maybe by manually changing all the permissions, but I have been having some weird problems and issues after that.
Now I'm planning to do a new clean install and pull my old backups again, as I have not been updating the files on the remote machine after the hard drive change. So how should I do this to get the permissions correctly when returning files on my clean install, even though the username is different? I guess it should transfer all the permissions to the new user on the destination side. I want to transfer all the preferences and setting for the applications and not just my documents etc.
I have been reading about the rsync archieve option and I think maybe it could work if I just use -rlptDv instead and omit the -o option, but I'm not sure. Also what about the group permissions, I'm the only user on my computer.
Could you help me to understand how to do this properly? I have been reading answers here but I still don't understand this fully. I'm also open to suggestions if there are some better options to do the backups. I would still rather use rsync than Time Machine because it's so neat and easy to automate. Thanks!

As you have discovered Time Machine and the system migration scripts handle all the little corners where files are customized per unique account or tied into a system file or just not to be backed up. I would probably rsync back the files into a new short name for which no user exists on the system.
Then take advantage of the system to fix permissions by creating the new user and answering yes when it sees the home folder present matching the short name of the user you are about to create.

Delete oxprox_2 account or copy into oxprox_3
Create the account to match the restore path
Let the system fix permissions on the restored files
Log in to the new account and test

Basically, delay making the account until after you’ve done the restore.


Is there an app or another way to make an iPod Touch or iPhone emulate an older iPod Device? Specifically I am trying to play music from my iPod-Touch through my XBOX360, but I know there are other devices that only work with the old iPod interfaces and not the touch/iPhone.

I was wondering if anyone knew of an app, or some other method to make these devices emulate for the purposes of the USB connection more primitive iPods (Classic, Nano, Shuffle, etc.) so they can work with devices that only support the older interface.

I'm thinking the solution here would take some major development. The app would have to stop the driver for the current iPod from being installed and instead present a driver for the older device you want to emulate. Most likely your current device running the app would probably have to be jailbroke. It would also take some testing and playing around to make sure the driver worked with the current device.

Before going as far as creating an app or something you could try playing around with different drivers on your own system while having your current device connected. Just go into Device Manager, find your device, right click and update driver. Then try to manually add the driver of a shuffle or something. See what works. Then decide if it is worthwhile to pursue.


Prevent any direct internet traffic when OpenVPN is down If OpenVPN down how to prevent any direct internet traffic (http or whole tcp) on MacOS except local network?

Just manually configure your IP address settings and remove the default gateway.  When OpenVPN is up, you’ll be assigned that tunnel as the default gateway and when it’s down, it will fall back to the original settings where there isn’t one.


No Partition to install Yosemite to I wanted to have a clean Yosemite installation.
Therefor I deleted the existing partition to make sure a completely clean installation is made.
The problem is that I cannot choose the partition to install to any more.
After accepting the license there is no partition to select from. Except for the recovery partition itself.
Macintosh HD is still there in the partition tool. but I cannot select it or rework it in any way because all options are greyed out.

Tried booting via recovery partition and stick.

How do I get back to having a partition to install to?

This post is for a different problem, but contains the same solution:

How do I fix my SSD after installing Yosemite and Enabling TRIM? No boot & can't erase

I had to go to the terminal (it is available in the installation tool) and do as described in the link:

Use diskutil list
and check which volume/partition you want to delete (for me the clue was the size corresponding to my hard drive).

Then type diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ name disk0.
"name " will be the name of the volume you create.

Close the terminal, go back to the installation tool and install as you would expect.


Can I sync podcasts only with iPhone5? I just subscribed to a bunch of podcasts for the first time.
Never had podcasts on my phone or iTunes before today.
I would like to sync them directly to my phone without saving them permanently on my computer.
Is this possible ootb?
Is there a free app that would make it easier?

I'm pretty sure you need to use a third party app in order to not have them sync with iTunes. I've bought three different podcast apps and I finally found one that I like and I can live with the bugs.  None of these apps are very expensive, but Instacast keeps putting out new paid versions, instead of updating the old one.

In order of My preference:

iCatcher $3. The interface is a bit cluttered, but it works and syncs with other iOS devices via iCloud flawlessly. Has an option to resume playing when the headphones are plugged in.
Downcast $2. Has many of the same options as iCatcher, but it is pretty buggy and  crashes on older devices (iPod Touch 3rd generation) after playing for 20-30 minutes. Also has issues with the integration in my car.
Instacast $5. I didn't like the organization or the interface. The playlist & sorting options are very limited.

I have deleted Downcast and Instacast from all of my devices since iCatcher works so well for me.


Mavericks screen lock occurs immediately instead of after 15 minutes of sleep I'm on OSX 10.9 on a late 2013 Macbook Air. iCloud Keychain is disabled, FileVault is turned off, and my Energy Saver settings are all at their defaults. I want to require a password after 15 minutes of sleep or inactivity, which should be straightforward. However, I am getting some strange behavior.

A- With the Require Password <option> hours after sleep or screen saver begins option in the "Security and Privacy" preference pane unchecked, my machine does not ask for a password if I close and immediately open the lid.

B- With the "Require Password <option> hours after sleep or screen saver begins" option in the "Security and Privacy" preference pane checked and the timeout set to 15 minutes, my machine requires a password if I close and immediately open the lid.

I want to be able to wake from sleep without a password if it has been less than 15 minutes since I last used my mac. This should be simple, but for some reason the appropriate setting isn't having the desired effect. Any ideas on how to fix this so the setting works as it should?

I have tried to replicate and analyze your problem.

The key word here is close the lid and "immediately" open it again.

There is a file called com.apple.screensaver.plist located in your user library preferences folder that should change when you change the settings for password timer.

While observing it there is actually a slight delay in writing that file, since a temporary version is written first. If you do the immediate stuff it is possible the .plist file is not correctly completed so your 15 min delay is not working.

In your case I would take a wild ques that plist file does not change the settings to 15 minutes and it is stuck to the "Immediately" request password.

That can also be caused the corrupt ACL permissions, or the immediately action you are doing.

Make sure the plist file has the accurate date/Time stamp before attempting to close the lid.

To test log in as another user and try again. If it works with other user reset your ACL.


How can I listen to DAB+ radio on my iPhone? In my home country we have switched off FM radio and done a full transition to DAB+.

So, I'm now in the market for a portable dongle (or similar) that will enable me to listen to DAB through my iPhone.

I have come across the POPyourPHONE product that is compatible with Android devices that support OTG and the Lingo iRis for iPhone 4 (1, 2). However, I haven't yet come across a similar device compatible with modern iPhones.

My iPhone has a Lightning connector, but how the dongle connects to my iPhone is not so critical (i.e. it could connect via Bluetooth or even using Apple's Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter).

The main requirement is that I can use my iPhone to listen to DAB+ radio, preferably with my AirPods. It would be strongly preferable if incoming phone calls were handled OK and that radio could play outside of any dedicated apps.

Can anyone recommend/suggest a product that will meet these needs?

I offer this answer as a possible software solution to meet your needs, although any software solution will require data usage.

I've just checked and TuneIn Radio is available on the Norwegian iOS App Store. For full details refer to https://itunes.apple.com/no/app/tunein-radio/id418987775?mt=8

I've personally been using TuneIn Radio for many years now and have generally been very happy with it. It provides access to over 100,000 radio stations and even offers users the ability to submit station requests in the event a station you want to listen to isn't available.

There is also a Pro version available (obviously at a cost).

NOTE: I am not affiliated in any way with TuneIn Radio.


How to fix my partition table after messing it up trying to install Linux Mint I tried to install Linux Mint alongside my working OS X Yosemite. I have a Macbook Air released mid 2013 with a 128gb SSD and 4gb of memory.

Well to achieve my aim I first added a partition using Disk Utility. To do so I simply took 30gb away from my "Macintosh HD" partition and left it as "Free Space".

Somehow the installation of Linux Mint from an USB drive failed and I wanted to get back my old partition table. Trying to do so something went wrong and I had to use Internet System Recovering to get a fresh copy of OS X 10.8.5, which I´m running now.

The problem is: when I call from the terminal : diskutil list
I get:

The Disk Utility App shows:

So maybe you already guess my question: where are my missing 30gb of ssd space gone?
When I run Disk Utility, I only can make the Macintosh HD partition smaller. There is no possibility to erase disk0s5 partition, since: "MediaKit reports no such partition".

I have all my data stored in an external drive, so there is no measure I have to be afraid of in terms of loosing stuff... In fact I already "lost" the data I had on my computer.

I would really appreciate your help!

Update 1:

After executing the command

sudo gpt -r show /dev/disk0

I get the following:

      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6
         40     409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
     409640  173751112      2  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  174160752    1269544      3  GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  175430296    1269536      4  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  176699832   56370760
  233070592    3905536      5  GPT part - 0657FD6D-A4AB-43C4-84E5-0933C84B4F4F
  236976128       2015
  236978143         32         Sec GPT table
  236978175          1         Sec GPT header

I have to add: my goal is to assign the whole space to my Macintosh HD partition again...
Thanks

You first have to remove the swap partition and the visible Recovery HD with gpt and then you will be able to resize your Macintosh HD with Disk Utility.

Boot to Internet Recovery Mode by pushing altcmdR while booting.

Then open Terminal.app and enter (assuming disk0 is your main disk):

gpt -r show /dev/disk0

Unmount your main disk with:

diskutil umountDisk disk0

First remove the Linux swap partition with:

gpt remove -i 5 disk0

(which means: remove the partition with the index number 5 on disk0).

and then the Recovery HD with the GUID 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC:

gpt remove -i 4 disk0

The Recovery HD with the GUID 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC is the proper one. Don't delete this one.

Finally remount disk0, quit Terminal, open Disk Utility, verify/repair your main volume "Macintosh HD" and finally expand it to the full size of your disk with the slider.


I deleted an important contact on my iPhone I deleted a contact on my old inactivated iPhone 4.  This to my surprise deleted to from my new iPhone 5s.  Is there anyway to retrieve it?  I realize now my new iMac, new iPhone and old one are all synced from the cloud.

If you look at your restore options in iTunes, there are usually a couple of previous backup versions. You could make a new backup, try restoring an older one, save the contact you want on another system then restore your new backup.


How to turn off Apple TV? I have a Apple TV 3rd generation and I know that I can navigate to Settings etc to turn it off. While this works, it's kind of cumbersome. Are there easier ways to turn an Apple TV off?

If you mean sleep. Which effectively is turning it off.

On 3rd Gen.

Hold down the Play/Pause button for 5 seconds.
The Apple TV will go to sleep.

On the 4th Gen.

Hold down the the Home button for a couple of seconds, Looks like a TV.

You will then get a option dialogue to Sleep or cancel.


Why does correctly logging in take less time than an incorrect try? I entered a wrong password on my lockscreen today, and saw it took around 1-2 seconds for it to shake and prompt for a retry. However, if I enter the password correct, it takes fractions of a second to verify. Is there a reason for this? Shouldn't an equality check take the same time regardless of what was entered?

It is not the actual password check that takes the time. An equality check (which is not what is done here) takes <1 millisecond on a modern computer, so it's not something you can experience.

The delay is actually introduced by purpose by Apple programmers, so that an incorrect attempts results in this slight delay. It is an intentional delay which is purposefully inserted.

The reason for having the delay could be to alert the user that the password entered is incorrect, and to "pause for second" and try again with more precision. This way the user cannot quickly type lots of differents things, but will have to wait a bit between each attempt.


Is there a way to export iPhone slideshow to PC? I’m using an iPhone 5s and windows computer.

I’d like to watch and share the beautiful slideshow iPhone creates with Photos.

If you really really want it you can try a third-party app called, CoolPixel. It will let you record the slideshow as it plays. However, I am not sure of any issues that may arise from using it. (It's not in the App Store yet), but I have used it for a year now and I haven't noticed anything wrong with it. Try it at your own risk, though.


What scale or measure does Mavericks' and Yosemite's "memory pressure" adhere to? Mavericks' (and also Yosemite's) Activity Monitor shows a new diagram, the memory pressure. Sadly, its help text only vaguely explains what exactly it measures. How is memory pressure calculated?

Picture creds go to this answer from a poll question on Mavericks' best new feature.

Memory pressure isn't a simple gauge of percentage of memory free and seems to be a 0 to 100% graph. The sysctl value of vm.memory_pressure is calculated in relation to a computed target that tracks the ratio between free and inactive memory pages to the wired and active pages. The absolute counters are viewed using the vm_stat command line tool to inspect detailed allocation of virtual memory. Jonathan Levin has excellent documentation at http://newosxbook.com/articles/MemoryPressure.html covering both macOS and iOS virtual memory and how they calculate memory pressure as well as the actions taken when the pressure index is high.

The relevant virtual memory (vm) that feed the calculation of vm.memory_pressure are:

vm.page_free_count - an absolute count of free pages
vm.vm_page_free_target - a calculated target or goal for a "pressure free" situation
vm.page_free_wanted - what the vm system would like to free to alleviate the current calculated pressure index

So - if you are tracking your memory pressure with Activity monitor (or my checking the sysctl values programmatically or at the command line shell) you would do well to look at these four values:

sysctl -a vm | egrep "page_free|pressure"

There is a new command memory_pressure introduced with Mavericks and when I run it to drive the memory subsystem into a warning state - you can see the memory pressure increase into a yellow range.

The tool allocated about 4 GB of memory to the tool as the pressure graph increased steadily to this state where apparently the "warning" level is graphed: sudo memory_pressure -l warn. As you can see, the system before the pressure had 5.9 GB used and after was up to 7.99 GB used which doesn't even need to add up due to swapping and compression.

After watching how vm_stat 15 showed the warning result in no measurable paging, I quit the tool (Control-C) and then re-ran the tool to make memory pressure critical: sudo memory_pressure -l critical

I didn't let this run for more than a few minutes as paging was starting and once the tool said I had 5 GB of RAM paged to disk, I didn't want to fill my drive and quit the tool.

You can observe how rapidly the system freed RAM after the warning was ended and also how it ramped into "red" territory to show that the virtual memory system couldn't compress enough pages to avoid swapping to disk. My educated guess is red on the pressure indicates swapping and dramatic over-allocation and/or a time where the free pages are below the amount the system prefers and it's actively purging inactive pages and/or swapping pages expected to be used to swap. Similarly, the system rapidly recovers once the allocations are released and pressure is taken off the virtual memory system.


Are there services that offer to recover data from irreparably water-damaged iPhones? I have an iPhone 6 which took a dump in a river. Since then, it will not turn on and does not register when connected to a computer, i.e. it is dead for all intents and purposes.

Does anyone know of a company that offers to read the data directly from the iPhone's flash storage or if this is even feasible (considering that damage is likely with the logic board since exchanging first the battery, then the Lightning connector and plugging into external power did not allow booting the device)?

I am aware that such services may be very costly. I was just wondering if there is a market for this kind of problem at all.

Yes, contact any major data recovery company, ex Drive Savers.

http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/devices-supported/apple-iphone-data-recovery/


iPhone 3GS stuck on home screen after updating Cydia I updated some tweaks in Cydia. After doing it, my iPhone is now stuck on the home screen. I am not even able to slide and unlock it and if a call comes, I cannot attend it.

What do I do now?

Try booting into Safe Mode. Safe Mode disables all tweaks, and unless the tweaks use something else, will not start Mobile Substrate.

Force shutdown your phone. Now, turn it on. Hold down the volume up button until the phone turns on.

Now you are in Safe Mode. Delete all tweaks, and slowly install them back, one by one, so you can see which one is causing trouble.


Infinite "Verifying *.pkg" I have been staring the following to dialogs for about an hour:

This problem does't only occur on one specific application. Instead, all applications seem to experiencing an infinite verification progress. What's wrong with my computer?

In fact, this issue emerges exactly after I upgrade my system. The current system version is OS X 10.11.4 (15E65) and here is the upgrades I've just installed:

Thanks in advance.

Many times (not every time) this is because of a Keychain certificate/network issue.  You can try turning off Certificates and see if this helps.  After you do this, restart the MacBook, finish the installations, then turn Certificates back on.

Go to Keychain Access --> Preferences --> Certificates.  See the image below.


Is there a way to number list items in reverse order in Pages '09? I want to create an ordered list in Pages '09 with decreasing numbers, like:

4. Most Recent Item, 2010.
3. Another Item, 2009.
2. An Old Item, 2008.
1. Oldest Item, 2007.

But it looks like there is no option to do this, but prefix items with numbers manually myself.

Does anyone know how to do this automatically with Pages '09?

Nope, you can only tell Pages to start at a number, and it will add +1 to that number. Pages ’09 doesn’t have the option to perform a reverse numbered list.

However, a “workaround” exists by using an old school table.

Click on the table icon on the toolbar to create a table.
Resize the table to your preferred size (Inspector > Table > Table: for better control on the cell’s size).
You will need two columns, the first column will be for the “numbers” and the second one will be the item itself.
Type the highest number in the 1st column/first row and the next number in the first column, second row. (see image)
Drag the little white dot downwards and the sequence will be automatically completed.
Modify the table properties in the inspector to remove the borders.
Silently grin because nobody will know this is a table… you can make evil sounds too.

If you need more rows later, you can add them, modify the first two items in the “sequence” and re-drag to regenerate the new sequence, for the same price.

Additional Info

This “automcomplete the secuence” magic also works for other datatypes, for example: Letters (try a, b, … drag).

8. Don’t forget to profit!


In iTunes 12 on macOS, how can I reset the skip count of a song? Everything I can find on the internet seems to refer to a different version of macOS/iTunes than the ones I'm running. I want to reset the skip count of tracks without resetting their play counts, as well.

I'm fine with AppleScript, if that's how it has to be done, but something would be nice :)

This following AppleScript code works for me using the latest version of macOS Mojave.

tell application "iTunes"
    tell its track "Insert Your Song Title"
        set its skipped count to 0 -- Enter Your Desired Number
    end tell
end tell

The following code addresses the issue of multiple songs with the same name.

tell application "iTunes"
    set theTrack to "Insert Your Song Title"
    set tracksRef to a reference to (tracks whose name is theTrack)

    set trackCount to count of tracksRef

    if trackCount is greater than 1 then
        set theArtists to artist of tracksRef
        set chooseArtist to (choose from list theArtists with title "Choose The Artist" with prompt ¬
            "Choose The Artist" OK button name "OK" cancel button name "Cancel") as text
        tell (every track whose name is theTrack and artist is chooseArtist)
            set skipped count to 0 -- Enter Your Desired Number
        end tell
    else
        tell its track theTrack
            set its skipped count to 0 -- Enter Your Desired Number
        end tell
    end if
end tell

This following code should work if you want to reset skipped count of every track.

tell application "iTunes"
    set allTracks to every track
    repeat with i from 1 to count of allTracks
        set thisItem to item i of allTracks
        tell thisItem
            try
                set its skipped count to 0 -- Enter Your Desired Number
            end try
        end tell
    end repeat
end tell


External drive does not mount after plug off without eject I accidentally unplugged my hard drive without properly ejecting it, and now the drive does not mount when plugged in.

What can I do to make it work again?

I can see the disk in lsusb and diskutil list.

So far, I've tried:

sudo diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk2
sudo diskutil unmount force /dev/disk2
Reboot with disk.
Reboot without disk.

It seems that the disk is working because it's vibrating very slowly, but I can't see it in Finder.

SOLVED. Had this problem today. OLD external drive, had its own power source, plugged into a surge protector. I hit the power button on the surge protector when I was unplugging something else, and the drive was turned off while in use. I turned it back on and it sounded normal, but my computer wasn't recognizing it, and Disk Utility wouldn't load when it was plugged in. I tried restarting with and without the disk,  mounting, unmounting, all of the above recommendations.

"unmount" led to "the disk is already unmounted or has a partitioning scheme...."

"mount" and "eject" said the attempt timed out.

"mountDisk" said it was successfully mounted, but I still couldn't access it, and "unmountDisk" would be successful as well, but no luck to "mount" or "mountDisk" afterwards.

I finally found the order that worked.

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
diskutil eject /dev/disk2

then I just plugged it back in to my computer and we were golden.
Thanks for all your help everyone.


What was the original Mac's (1984) development stack? What software did original Macintosh developers use and what were common languages used to write that software?

In short, I am wondering what the original development environment was like.

Actually the original Macintosh development environment was not on a Mac at all. Quoting from this article on Folklore.org...

  Macintosh development in the early days (circa 1983-1985) was done
  using the Apple Lisa computer and its Lisa Workshop development
  environment

Most of the stories on folklore.org are written by the Apple employees who did the work and no longer work at Apple. A fascinating site. Careful, once you get started you may not come up for air for hours.


How to turn off "Enable WiFi" alert message on iOS? When I disable Wi-Fi and open "Maps" I get the message:

Location Accuracy
Turning on Wi-Fi will improve
location accuracy.

Can this message be disabled?
I know, I can just leave WiFi enabled, but I don't want to do this. When I am in airplane mode, I don't want to get notified that I am offline.
Is there a way to prevent this? I don't want to jailbreak my iPhone. I am currently running iOS 7.1

Yes this works

Settings>Privacy>Location Services>System Services (all the way at the bottom) and toggling wifi networking.


Wiping old iPhone without touch or me.com? I want to sell an old iPhone 3G for a few bucs... But I have a problem: the touch screen of the phone is broken and the phone has no internet-connectivity.

Is there any chance to delete the content on the phone? I can still make backups with iTunes.

Thanks for help :-)

If you can connect it to a PC/Mac, you can fully restore the phone using iTunes.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US


Why does the Note I shared via AirDrop to my Mac from my iPhone not show up in Notes.app? I can successfully AirDrop the note from my personal iPhone to my work Mac (seems to work fine), but when I go to Notes.app on my Mac - the note is not there.
I'm logged into Notes with iCloud on my iPhone and I'm logged into Notes.app with Microsoft Exchange on my Mac.

The note will not show up in the Exchange account, but it will show up if you enable "On My Mac".

Open "Preferences" in Notes.app
Check the box next to "Enable the On My Mac account"

Now notes shared with your Mac via AirDrop will show up under "On My Mac". You can always copy these over to your Exchange account.


Keyboard shortcut for Force Quitting the current application? Instead of pressing Command + Option + Esc to bring up the Force Quit menu, is there a way that I can force quit the application that I'm currently using directly?

Well, the Force Quit dialog opens with the currently running application already selected. So the shortcut is kind of Cmd-Opt-EscReturn (which IMHO is good enough for all practical purposes).


Keep color but not font or font size when copying into TextEdit I'm copying some text from a web page into a TextEdit document. I want to be able to keep the color, but not the font or font size. Is that possible?

If you pop open your Web Inspector (or the equivalent in your browser) there will be a Javascript console. You can run your own code and apply your own styles to the page.

You could set all the text to be the same style, and leave the color alone:

var myStyle= document.createElement('style')
myStyle.textContent= "* { font:normal 16px/1.4 sans-serif !important; }"
document.head.appendChild(myStyle)

Then copy the text. Good enough? :)

You can make a bookmarklet, so that you can do that in one click on any page.

Magic

Make a text file with that content, name it magic.html, open it and drag the link to your Bookmarks bar.


How to add a New Action when viewing a Custom Perspective in OmniFocus 3? I have created a custom perspective in OmniFocus 3.11.2 for macOS. How do I add a New Action when viewing this perspective? Trying several approaches, I always just get an audible signal and nothing else happens.
Strategies that produce this:

menu bar File -> New Action
the keystroke shortcut for File -> New Action
the Return key

No combination of grouping or sorting has enabled me to add a New Action.
Background: my custom perspective filter rules only show actions that are

Available
In an active project
Contained within a few projects or folders

Thanks!

It's not possible to add a new action while viewing a custom perspective, as it's not possible to know where to put the action. Perspectives can combine projects, tags, etc., so there's no simple destination for the new action.
To create a new action from anywhere including a custom perspective, use Quick Entry.


Iphone 3G shows 'no service' eversince I came back from Malaysia I'm using Iphone 3g for a year exactly and have no problems at all until recently I went to Malaysia. it says 'no service' where the carrier name supposed to be. so I assume its because since I'm out of the country, Singtel can't get coverage where Im at. I returned to Singapore 2 days later and still it says 'no service'. I tried doing all hard reset, clean restore, wipe everything out, tried toggling the airplane mode, still no improvement.. I thought maybe my line got cut and called Singtel but they assured me that the line is working perfectly fine. The singtel iphone tech support guy tried advising me to do the network reset but still no use.

I doubt it has anything to do with my sim card as I tried using it on other nokia phones and I can get full signal. I'm sure its the phone with the problem.

I can't get a replacement phone from Apple as my 1 year warranty ended last month! why is this happening! feels like iphones go into self destruct mode just when the warranty finish so we have to fork out money in repairs.

anyone experiencing the same problem?

it's been 5 days.

If you have done a full restore (ie reset the software) and the sim card is working in other phones then the phone hardware is faulty.


make my laptop tell me when battery is low even while "show battery status in menu bar" is not checked I unchecked "Show battery status in menu bar" in System Preferences > Energy Saver, because I use coconutBattery instead (and obviously I don't want to just re-check that).

But this means that now my MacBook doesn't alert me when the battery is getting low and just drains itself to 0% then dies on me.

I want to make an automatic AppleScript/cron job/whatever to alert me when the battery is less than 50%, and again when it's less than 20%.

How can I do that?

I had the same issue when I use a Bitbar plugin on OSX and have the default battery menubar unchecked.  Here is what I use in my shell script to include a osascript call to create a notification pop up.

# Get info
power_source=( $(pmset -g batt | awk 'FNR == 1 {print $4$NF}' ) )
battery_level=( $(pmset -g batt | awk -F"\t" 'FNR == 2 {print $2}' | grep -o '[0-9]\+' ) )

# Notification when battery level is low
if [ "$power_source" != "'ACPower'" ] && [ "$battery_level" -le 5 ]; then osascript -e 'display notification "⚠ LOW POWER! ⚡" with title "Battery"';
fi

You could use this as a cron job. =)


75 GB is missing under 'Other volumes' category I think I might have created a partition a while ago for Boot Camp. Can you please help how to get the space back?

First, nothing is really missing. An APFS container composed in this manner looks like this in Terminal and Disk Utility.

A standard boot volume APFS container in Catalina accommodates five volumes:

a preboot volume (your disk1s2)
a recovery volume (your disk1s3)
a VM volume (your disk1s4)
a read-only mounted system volume (your disk1s7)
a read-write mounted data volume (probably your disk1s1)

The last two are combined in one APFS volume group.

Your container disk0s2 houses two additional data volumes  (disk1s5 and disk1s6) though. Both adhere to the standard naming scheme of the default read-write mounted data volume of an APFS boot container: [name_of_main_volume] & [ - Data]. The larger of the two additional data volumes (disk1s6) is not mounted and therefore "missing".

Considering the size of the various data volumes disk1s6 is probably your former data volume. I assume that it was replaced by the very small disk1s1 data volume in the APFS volume group accidentally.

To solve your problem additional info (as stated in my comments) is required.


Is it practical to use Gmail for mail and calendar and Exchange for contacts while using iOS Mail? In the past I used the Google Mail provider on my iOS devices to sync mail and calendar. Major drawback was that it doesn't sync contacts. I had to use iTunes for that which is a mess.

I recently switched to the Exchange provider for GMail which can sync contacts but also has several disadvantages:

Searching old mail on the server doesn't always bring accurate results
It doesn't sync the drafts folder so you have to finish and send a draft from the same device you created it on. Usually I want to email a photo from my iPhone, create a draft, save it and finish the email on my computer or iPad.
It doesn't use my default notification settings from GMail for new appointments in calendar. You can also only specify one notification (with GMail provider you can set 2).

Now I was wondering if I can set up a combination of the two. Using GMail for my mail and calendar and using Exchange for contacts. Could that bring any problems? Anyone tried that?

I had that configuration - and also used for friends & family -  and it worked just fine.

The only drawback is that mail is no longer pushed to your phone. But apart from that, it's the best solution to have Gmail (actually working) and Google Contacts / Calendar on your iPhone.


How to add a terminfo entry systemwide? I would like to add terminfo entries systemwide for rxvt-unicode and rxvt-unicode-256color. However, when I try to run:

HOST:terms alexreinking$ ls
rxvt-unicode        rxvt-unicode-256color
HOST:terms alexreinking$ sudo cp rxvt-unicode* /usr/share/terminfo/72/
cp: /usr/share/terminfo/72/rxvt-unicode: Operation not permitted
cp: /usr/share/terminfo/72/rxvt-unicode-256color: Operation not permitted

I get "Operation not permitted" even with sudo. I am aware this might have to do with macOS's system integrity protection. Must I go through the process of disabling it, copying the files, and then re-enabling it just to do this? Or is there a better way?

What worked for me is to create a directory ~/.terminfo/72 and put the files there.


How can I keep track of source code changes with git and box.net? I have a school project where I have to make a program(java), therefore I need some way to keep track of the changes I make to the sources; I decided the best way to do this it to create a git repository on my box.net account. How is this done?

Go with Git. If you want a GUI client take a look at Gitbox (paid) or Github for Mac (free)


Partition showing as 'FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFF'; attempted to fix it but made it worse MacBook Pro 2015. I recently dual-booted my Mac with Linux for school however I changed my mind on which distro to run and figured the best way to change would be to format and remove the Linux partitions and start over.

After I formatted the partitions I attempted to remove them but only one could be deleted and it turned into one 24.4gb partition which would give me an error everytime I tried to delete it and merge the partition back into a single Macintosh HD volume. I also noticed my boot volume was showing as 'ahfs' and not 'apple_boot' and my Macintosh HD volume was showing as 'FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFF' so I followed a guide to change the boot drive back to 'apple_boot' and attempted to follow this guide (Data Not Backed Up, Partition Type: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF) and made it to gpt add -i 3  -b 188093184 -s 1269536 -t 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0

This command returned erorrs:

gpt add: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
gtp add: disk0: error: no space available on drive

I researched ways to fix it and came up with this solution,

gpt destroy /dev/disk0

but received an error of suspicious MBR at sector 0 so I removed the hybrid MBR with

fdisk -i -a hfs /dev/disk0

and received

fdisk: could not open MBR file /use/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory

ATTENTION - UPDATING MASTER BOOT RECORD

Do you wish to write a new MBR and partition table? [n]

I entered y
and received no confirmation.

I then tried to add back my partitions with

gpt add -b 40 -s 409600 -i 1-t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B /dev/disk0

and received the erorrs:

gpt add: error: bogus map
gpt add: unable to open device '/dev/disk0': Undefined error: 0

Now when I am stuck with both the bogus map and undefined error 0 error everytime I attempt gpt show or gpt add.

Is there anyway to recover my data? I went to go get my backup HDD out of the office but my little brother had dropped it in soda a few weeks ago and told no one so it's useless. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

The disk lost any gpt partition in the partition table because the secondary GPT mismatched the primary GPT (and its CRC was wrong) and thus was bogus.

To recover everything the following was done:

boot to a working external macOS boot disk
get the details:

diskutil list
gpt -rvvv show disk0
fdisk /dev/disk0
diskutil umountDisk0

completely zero out the 1st and 2nd GPT and the MBR:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk0 count=34 bs=512
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk0 seek=(size_of_disk_in_blocks-33) count=33 bs=512

create a new gpt:

gpt create -f /dev/disk0

add all partitions

gpt add -i 1 -b 40 -s 409600 -t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B disk0

a hexdump of block 409640 revealed a CoreStorage partition - a pic taken by the OP before, suggested a size of 187683544 blocks for the second partition:

gpt add -i 2 -b 409640 -s 187683544 -t 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

the volume verified with 0 errors and had to be unlocked: the volume is encrypted!
Tried to restore a previous recovery partition:

gpt add -i 3 -b 188093184 -s 1269536 -t 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
diskutil verifyVolume disk0s3

No file system was detected; the diskutil verifyVolume command failed. The recovery partition and its content was deleted previously. The third partition has to be removed again:

gpt remove -i 3 disk0

Since the recovery partition - usually containing an intermediate FV key required while booting to FV - is missing, the main volume was reverted to HFSJ:

diskutil cs list #get the lvUUID of the main volume
diskutil cs revert lvUUID #old (admin) password needed to unlock the volume

The volume was expanded

diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 0
diskutil verifyVolume disk0s2

Booted to the restored and expanded main volume the system (Sierra 10.12.6) was reinstalled to restore the missing recovery partition.
Re-enable FileVault.


iPhone - Running hot, odd CPU usage I have a really strange issue with my iPhone. I had an iPhone 6 and suddenly I would notice the rear case was very warm and the battery was being discharged at an excessive rate. I have an app called System Status Pro which shows CPU usage. When the issue occurred, the CPU usage was fluctuating around 20-30%. I left it thinking iOS was busy doing stuff, but the battery continued to discharge quickly (i.e. 100% to empty in an hour or so). I force restarted the phone and everything returned to normal. CPU usage averaging 3-5% with no apps running.

This issue continued to return randomly. I could last a week with no issue, then it would happen 3 times in one day.

My investigations so far:

The issue is not related to my phone’s hardware. I upgraded to an iPhone 8 (restoring my phone’s from a backup) and the issue continued
The battery app in Settings, which shows each app’s CPU usage does not show a particular app causing the usage
Background app refresh is turned off
No obvious Apple services (i.e. iCloud backup) are running at the time of high CPU usage
When the issue occurs CPU usage is always 20-30%. Never more, never less
It is not iOS version specific
The phone is not hacked/jailbroken
The phone does not have Enterprise certificates installed (which would allow non-App Store approved apps)
High CPU usage continues with no apps running (double clicking home button shows no apps running)
The only resolution is to restart the phone and usually a single restart fixes it, although occasionally it returns and another restart is needed, sometimes even a third restart. But restarting always fixes it eventually
I have 15GB free of the phone’s 64GB storage
I realise I could wipe the phone. This is my last resort and I want to avoid this

Has anyone experienced something similar?

Does anyone know how I can view CPU usage at a more granular level, ideally identifying each individual processes CPU usage?

Many thanks in advance for any advice!

I finally found the issue!

It was an iPhone game called Minesweeper which runs as a widget in the Notification Center/Today View. I guess to be in the Notification Center/Today View as a widget, it has to be running, yet it was not listed as a running app when I double tapped the home button.

I have no idea why Minseweeper was causing the high CPU or why it occurred randomly, but as soon as I deleted Minesweeper, the problem went away.

The only reason I discovered the cause of the problem was because I was in the Battery app in Settings and I happened to tap a section of the Battery Level graph and it showed app activity for that specific moment in time. Minesweeper was there at 30% usage and I hadn't run that game for months.

I hope this solution helps someone somewhere!


How can I get right-size this column to show entire filename? How can I get right-size this column to show the entire filename in the Finder on Mavericks?
It used to work in previous OSs. I am in column view. Right-size all columns doesn't work either. It keeps leaving ... where the filename should be.

Just double clic on the separator between the columns ;)


Mac OSX: strange shaking (jitter) of screen I noticed that sometimes a strange interference in rendering happened on my screen. I thought it was some minor issue with hardware. It happened 2 or 3 times a few months ago and I didn't think much of it.

Now it is happening much more frequently... Just for fun I tried to capture it with a screen recording... I thought I won't be able to do that anyway because it's in hardware.

But it turns out the interference / jitter does appear in the recording:

See here: the upper part jitters: http://youtu.be/6hA3ugF5sME

(better quality video: http://cl.ly/2i460o0X3e3O/download/jitter.mp4)

It's probably not Chrome rendering issue because the jitter is not just in one textbox as it maybe seems by non careful observation. Logo and "How to format" section are included. I also think that it didn't always happen while in Chrome, but I'm not that sure.

Very strange?

UPDATE: actually this could still be hardware issue, of course... for example problems with graphics card. It is just that it's not the hardware problem in some circuit on the screen at the end of pipeline... if it was, then I couldn't capture it in the recording...

That jitter is pure software. The CSS/javascript are not executing fast enough to prevent a redraw from being noticeable.

You could try reducing the load on the CPU by quitting other apps or just run some instruments on the pages where you see jitter and either block the js that is slow or decide to edit your text elsewhere and then copy/paste it to avoid seeing the constraints being redrawn.

The detailed video was awesome and allowed me to be certain what I was seeing was software.


How can I track/login to stolen MacBook Pro My MBP got stolen in January 2017 and is not shown in Find My iPhone but I just found out that it shows up under signed-in devices in iTunes with the serial number and the first name of the new user (Aleksej).

Is there any way to track the MBPs location with the serial number or the sign-in information?

No

Unfortunately, There is no way to track it to an accurate location without Find My iPhone enabled. If your able to get the devices serial number your best bet would be to file a police report at your local police station.

If it was stolen back in January odds are it has already been erased and/or resold. So even if there would’ve been a way to track it, you wouldn’t be able to anymore.

Edit 1

If you enable 2 step verification, if the thief tries to log into you Apple ID on the stolen computer, it will show on your other devices an authentication code for that devices, aswell as the location of the device that is requesting permission.

So if the thief tries to log into your Apple ID and you have Two Step Verification enable, it will show you the stolen devices location.

Apple cannot track your device as it would most likely violate some privacy policy, though if you give them your consent they might be able to track your device. I would suggest you contact them and see what they can do.


email delivery - ms outlook set up I recently purchased a 15" MBP.
The unit is set up and fully operational, but I am uncertain about Outlook set up.
I have MS Outlook '11 installed with 3 POP accounts created and receive mail into the inbox folder.

I have imported my old .pst files from my Windows PC and those folders appear below the inbox.

I would like emails to be automatically delivered to the relevant folder for that account and not all collectively in the inbox.

Is there any way of setting this up?

This should happen automatically and no special setup is required. Click on the email account's inbox (on the left side of the window) that you would like to see just that inbox. This should pull up the inbox for that account only.


Convert Eudora 6.2 on Apple to 2011 Outlook on Apple I have MAC Power PC running OS 10.4.11 with Eudora 6.2.

How can I convert the above to a later MAC OS to run 2011 Outlook email?

Happy to pay for a service, as I am not very technical.

According to this post (Whats the last OS X that supported Power PC?) Power PCs can only use up to 10.5, which is 7 versions prior to the current, and likely not worth attempting to upgrade.

Also, since this OS came out in 2007, it likely does not support modern versions of Outlook (such as 2011), though I did not confirm this.

TL;DR - computer is really too old for any upgrades that you are looking for.   Sorry :(


My iMac won't boot. Every time, no matter what mode I try booting in, it boots and stays on a blank white screen I have a problem with my iMac. When I tried booting it, the loading bar went half way, slowed way down, then about 20-30 min later, the bar had gotten all the way to the end... But it stayed on the booting screen. So I forced shutdown my computer, then tried booting up it again. But it didn't even try to load. It just showed a blank white screen. No text what so ever. I tried many different methods to fix this, booting in safe mode, single user mode, reset nvram, recovery mode, etc. But every time I tried any of these methods, I would still get a blank white screen. I am at a loss. I can't even try to reinstall the OS if I wanted to since it only boots to this white screen. Does anyone know how what I can do to fix this? (I believe my computer is a 2010 iMac, if that helps)

Quick Update: I just tried booting it while pushing the power button + option button. Even though the screen is still completely white, now the mouse pointer has shown up on the screen and I am able to move it around. But not sure if that indicates something or not.

Try to boot up using Cmd + Option + P + R to reset the PRAM.

Also try booting up with Cmd + R for recovery mode.

It seems likely the main hard drive has failed.

If you can boot up into Cmd + option, you will be able to boot into a Boot CD or other recovery disc/USB drive to help restore your main hard drive.


rsync -a not preserving file ownership or group I'm rsyncing from a remote linux box to my local solid state hard drive on my mac running High Sierra. I'm using the -a switch (archive) which is supposed to preserve the ownership of the group but the files are saved with my owner and group, not the ones on the remote server. Using disk utility, I see Owners is set to enabled.

I seem to remember being able to do this and the files would be saved with the UID and GID numbers.

Is this still possible?

I encountered the same problem and found a solution that worked for me. I created a Sparse Image called Backup. On a hard drive directory, file ownership was preserved during the rsync backup but not on the backup image.
1. Ownership of the Destination
I noticed that the ownership of the backup image was the current user (me) and I changed to something like that:
drwxrwx---@ 13 root    staff   510B 12 jul 10:59 Backup

2. Run rsync as sudo
And on the Linux host I modified the command to run rsync as sudo.
rsync -avh --rsync-path="sudo rsync" ...

And for the macOS backup host accept to execute rsync as sudo without password:
sudo visudo
# and add this line
# replace username with your current user name.
username ALL= NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/rsync

I also added these flags to the command but I cannot say that this would help to resolve the current problem:
/usr/bin/rsync -avzh  --sparse --super --numeric-ids --relative --rsync-path="sudo rsync" ...

Hope this help.


Mac doesn't wake up from sleep since latest OS upgrade (Big Sur) Since upgrading the OS - currently on Big Sur 11.2.2 (20D80)
I experience failure of my Mac to ever wake from sleep. Only thing that would wake it up is a forced restart using the power button. After restart I get the following error details. I tried to also boot in safe mode, but it didn't help.

Sleep Wake failure in EFI

Failure code:: 0x00000000 0x0000001f

Please IGNORE the below stackshot

================================================================
Date/Time:        2021-03-09 08:33:51.920 +0200
OS Version:       ??? ??? (Build ???)
Architecture:     x86_64
Report Version:   32

Data Source:      Stackshots
Shared Cache:     77B63435-1866-32DD-98A1-47090B666EFA slid base address 0x7fff20248000, slide 0x248000

Event:            Sleep Wake Failure
Duration:         0.00s
Steps:            1

Boot args:        chunklist-security-epoch=0 -chunklist-no-rev2-dev

Time Awake Since Boot: 24s

Process:          swd [363]
Architecture:     x86_64
Footprint:        508 KB
Time Since Fork:  1s
Num samples:      1 (1)

  Thread 0xe85    1 sample (1)    priority 4 (base 4)
  <thread QoS background (requested background), thread darwinbg, process darwinbg, IO tier 2>
  1  start + 1 (libdyld.dylib + 87585) [0x7fff20574621] 1
    1  ??? [0x102d41454] 1
      1  ??? [0x102d411e8] 1
        1  __stack_snapshot_with_config + 10 (libsystem_kernel.dylib + 143386) [0x7fff2054701a] 1
         *1  ??? [0xffffff80002601f6] 1
           *1  ??? [0xffffff80009698cb] 1
             *1  ??? [0xffffff80008733c1] 1
               *1  ??? [0xffffff80002831c9] 1
                 *1  ??? [0xffffff80002ba3ed] (running) 1

  Binary Images:
        0x7fff20524000 -     0x7fff20552fff  libsystem_kernel.dylib (7195.81.3) <AB413518-ECDE-3F04-A61C-278D3CF43076>  /usr/lib/system/libsystem_kernel.dylib
        0x7fff2055f000 -     0x7fff20599fff  libdyld.dylib (832.7.3)            <4641E48F-75B5-3CC7-8263-47BF79F15394>  /usr/lib/system/libdyld.dylib
Model: MacBookPro16,1, BootROM 1554.80.3.0.0 (iBridge: 18.16.14347.0.0,0), 8 processors, 8-Core Intel Core i9, 2.3 GHz, 32 GB, SMC
Graphics: kHW_IntelUHDGraphics630Item, Intel UHD Graphics 630, spdisplays_builtin
Graphics: kHW_AMDRadeonPro5500MItem, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M, spdisplays_pcie_device, 4 GB
Memory Module: BANK 0/ChannelA-DIMM0, 16 GB, DDR4, 2667 MHz, SK Hynix, -
Memory Module: BANK 2/ChannelB-DIMM0, 16 GB, DDR4, 2667 MHz, SK Hynix, -
AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0x7BF), wl0: Sep 11 2020 17:01:15 version 9.30.440.2.32.5.61 FWID 01-1d69e4b4
Bluetooth: Version 8.0.3d9, 3 services, 27 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: Wi-Fi, AirPort, en0
PCI Card: pci8086,15ec, sppci_usbxhci, Thunderbolt@196,0,0
USB Device: USB3.0 Hub
USB Device: USB 3.1 Bus
USB Device: Hub
USB Device: StoreJet Transcend
USB Device: Hub
USB Device: USB Controls
USB Device: USB 3.1 Bus
USB Device: USB2.0 Hub
USB Device: Microsoft® 2.4GHz Transceiver v9.0
USB Device: USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter
USB Device: Apple T2 Bus
USB Device: Composite Device
USB Device: Touch Bar Backlight
USB Device: Touch Bar Display
USB Device: Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad
USB Device: Headset
USB Device: Ambient Light Sensor
USB Device: FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)
USB Device: Apple T2 Controller
Thunderbolt Bus: MacBook Pro, Apple Inc., 63.5
Thunderbolt Bus: MacBook Pro, Apple Inc., 63.5
Thunderbolt Device: UltraHD 4K, LG Electronics, 1, 36.1

Installations history:

Sleep Wake failure in EFI
Failure code:: 0x00000000 0x0000001f

Big Sur has introduced a significant number of sleep-wake bugs that possess this signature. This is not user error and only Apple can fix this issue because it is a result of programming errors in their firmware and/or software.
The best that you can do is collect as much useful diagnostic information as you can and file a bug report. You’ve already collected your sleep-wake failure report, which is essential to provide.
An important step to take prior to filing your report is to eliminate potential hardware catalysts. Try cumulatively adding each of the following steps in order and see if the problem persists or goes away after each one:

I notice that you have several external devices attached to your system, including an Apple multiport adapter, an LG display, a Microsoft wireless dongle, and a Transcend external hard drive. Try disconnecting these and any other devices and dongles.
Try disabling WiFi and Bluetooth.
Try reproducing both on AC power and on battery power.

The next few experiments are intended to exercise the multiple internal routing paths for sleep & wake signals:

You are presumably initiating sleep either via lid close or the Apple menu. Try doing it both ways.
Try setting a sleep timer and a wake timer (System Preferences -> Battery -> Schedule -> Sleep) for one minute away and two minutes away, respectively, and letting the system sleep and wake itself via the timer without you touching it.
How are you waking the machine? Keyboard press, trackpad click, lid open? Try each one in order. If all still fail, re-enable Bluetooth, pair a Bluetooth keyboard or pointing device, and press a key/button on the Bluetooth device to wake the machine.


Unable to enter Recovery Mode -2006F I'm using a MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2013). I recently reformatted and reinstalled the OS via Internet Recovery, but I suspect something went wrong.

Now, when I boot normally, I get the infamous Flashing Question Mark.

When I boot with Alt+Cmd+R, I get the spinning globe with

  Starting Internet Recovery. This may take a while

and then:

  apple.com/support
  -2006F

When I boot with Cmd+R, I get the exact same thing as above. Maybe my Recovery Partition is corrupted, so it defaults to Internet Recovery?

This MacRumors thread Flashing Question mark in folder after start up seems similar to my problem, but the OP is able to get into Internet Recovery, unlike me.

Any suggestions?

Considering you can't boot into an OS, the first things I'd try are resetting the NVRAM and SMC. Below are the steps for doing so, as well as the order you should do it.

1. Reset the NVRAM

Older Macs had what's called Parameter RAM (PRAM), newer Macs use Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM). Here’s how to reset it on your particular Mac:

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).

2. Reset the SMC

Here’s what you do to reset the SMC on your particular Mac:

Shut down your computer
Keep the MagSafe adapter (power cable) plugged in.
Press at the same time shiftoptioncontrol (on the left side of the keyboard) and the power button
Let go
Turn your computer back on with the power button.

Once you've done both of these, check to see whether the problem behaviour (i.e. an inability to enter Internet recovery) is still present. Let me know how you go.


macOS Sierra slow in calculating on the Storage tab After upgrading to macOS Sierra I find that if I do, Apple > About This Mac > Storage, it just remains stuck on the "Calculating..." for a very long time.

I am pretty sure that this was not the case with OS X El Capitan.

Does anyone else also see the same issue?

All you have to do is leave the storage window open for a long time, say ten minutes. I am running 10.12.4.


Macbook Snow Leopard Unzipped file I used Terminal command to unzip an audio file downloaded from a public library.  Command used: unzip -v /<zip filename.zip>; rm -rf _MACOSX.  Terminal displayed 31 files were extracted and stored. I used both Search in Finder and Go to Folder to find the files and only 1 pdf file was found.  The other 30 files, all mp3, went missing.

I noticed that the more than 1gb of disk space was gone.  So I assume the files are residing somewhere.  Could anyone please help.  Many thanks!

The unix command to search for files is find.

You can use the command man find to get more information. The usual form is the following.

find  <starting folder>  -name  <file name>  -print

For example, if you are looking for all mp3 files in the current folder and all nested folders, use the following command.

find  .  -name  "*.mp3"  -print

Sometimes you can get a lot of "permission denied" or other meaningless error messages. If so, then you can remove all error messages by appending a 2>/dev/null to the end of the command. See the example below.

find  .  -name  "*.mp3"  -print  2>/dev/null


How do I delete photos only from my iPad but not from iCloud How do I go about deleting all photos from my iPad Pro (A1701) and still have them on iCloud?

You don’t need to worry about deleting your photos. If you download apps and things, photos will dynamically remove pictures to free up space. It knows it is backed up in iCloud, so it doesn’t worry about keeping your photos saved on device.

edit: If you absolutely  must have them gone, i'd suggest turning off iCloud photo library for the device in question. go to setting  and tap on your name, click on iCloud, then photos. Turn it off and tap remove from this device. remember you won't get any further photos synced to that device until you turn it back on.


Web Pages acting weirdly in Safari. (All other Browsers tested, the web page acts weirdly only in Safari for macOS) I don't know why but for some days Instagram (Web Version) is acting weird when it (webpage) is being loaded in Safari.

When I am clicking on my account page, all the contents within the my account page is getting aligned to the left, this wasn't the case a few days before, everything (All Contents - Posts, profile Pic, etc.) used to be centrally aligned.

This happens only in Safari. I have tried with other web browsers, this weird issue doesn't occurs in other browsers for macOS

This pic depicts my Account page where everything used to be centrally aligned be fore and now it's left aligned

The Single Post page is also left aligned, which used to be centrally aligned before.

This is a screenshot from Firefox and everyhting seems to be fine over here. (It's centrally Aligned)

Reload from Origin

Try asking Safari to reload all the page resources from the origin server. Do this with the hidden menu item:

  In Safari, hold down the Option key and select View > Reload Page From Origin

This will ensure that all the files are downloaded from the original web site and not from various caches. Occasionally an out of date cached file can conflict with a partly reloaded page, causing the strange layout you are seeing.


External display attached to MacBook Pro has washed out colours I have a BenQ BL3201 display, connected via HDMI (and a USB-C dongle) to my 2019 15" MacBook Pro.  Light grey areas are completely washed out, and appear white.  I've attached some photos to demonstrate.
Built-in Display:

External Display:

I've adjusted the brightness, contrast, gamma, and every other setting on the monitor, but none of it resolves this problem.  The monitor even has a special 'M-BOOK' mode for MacBooks that doesn't improve things at all.  I've gone through every available display profile, and the only one that helps with this issue is 'ACES CG Linear' (but it looks worse in other ways, colours are very dark and muted).
The monitor was previously attached to to a Desktop Linux box, and it didn't show the same issue there.
Is there any setting or tweak that I can use to resolve this issue?

I finally fixed this by following the instructions at this blog post:
Fixing the External Monitor Color Problem with My 2018 MacBook Pro
Read the blog post, it's good!  But just in case it becomes unavailable, here's
a short summary:
The external monitor is using the YPbPr colour format over HDMI.  Something about the MacBook Pro YPbPr output is not compatible with the monitor.  It's possible to create override settings to force the HDMI connection to use RGB instead, using a script at https://gist.github.com/adaugherity/7435890.
Here are the instructions from the above post:

Connect the problematic display.
Download and run this script
(./patch-edid.rb). Take a look at the generated file and remember
its path.
Reboot into recovery mode (⌘-R at boot).
Mount your main disk (enter Disk Utility, select the gray Macintosh HD, click
Mount, provide your password, close Disk Utility).
Open up a terminal (Utilities ->Terminal), backup the overrides directory,
copy in your new override file, and reboot:

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources
cp -R Overrides Overrides.bak
cp -R <path to directory generated in step 1> Overrides/
reboot


How to set dark mode appearance to auto in terminal I found the way to set dark mode:
defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool true

But have no idea set it to Auto with defaults write.
It could also be great to explain how you discovered this.
Thank you!

The answer is in step 7 and step 9.

Setup git in the ~/Library/Preferences/ folder to determine the incoming changes.

cd ~/Library/Preferences/
git init
git add .
git commit -m "init commit"

Open System Preferences -> General, change Appearance from Light to Auto. I found only .GlobalPreferences.plist has been changed.
Open .GlobalPreferences.plist in VSCode with Binary Plist plugin to view plist file as xml syntax.
Copy the .GlobalPreferences.plist file content in VSCode and paste to Diffchecker Original Text.
Change Appearance from Auto to Light.
Copy the .GlobalPreferences.plist file content in VSCode and paste to Diffchecker Changed Text. I found the diff content is:

<key>AppleInterfaceStyleSwitchesAutomatically</key>
<true/>

Run the defaults write command to set the Appearance to Auto

defaults write -g AppleInterfaceStyleSwitchesAutomatically -bool true

Remove the .git in ~/Library/Preferences/
Log out and log in the computer.
Open System Preferences -> General. You'll see the Appearance is set to Auto.


How to delete downloaded iOS 6 update? I have an iPhone 4 with iOS 5.1.1, and the other day I found that it had downloaded on its own the iOS 6 update and it was sitting there in my phone, ready to be installed and taking about 2 GB of space. Since I have no interest at all in iOS 6 right now, I'd like to delete that update, but I don't know how. Does anyone know if it can be done?

I had exactly the same problem: OTA will download software updates and they take up space on the device until the user installs them. Then when the next one is released, it takes up more space. You notice them under 'Other' on the capacity graph in iTunes.

To fix I jailbroke and installed the package called "Software Update Killer". It not only prevents future automatic downloads, it deletes the software that's awaiting installation. Notice the shrink in 'Other' next time you sync. For me both 6.0.1 and 6.1 were downloaded and I recovered almost 1.5 GB.


How to allow the "Word of the Day" screen saver to fetch the words with LittleSnitch? A friend of mine (not on StackEchange) has used LittleSnitch to explicitly disallow Internet access for every process/app that attempted to access the Internet except the ones he actually needs to do this (e.g. Safari, Skype etc.) (to save traffic and maintain better privacy). Everything he wants works great but one thing doesn't - the "Word of the Day" screensaver, it won't show the words, obviously because it can't fetch them from the dictionary server. Looking through the rules list (the blocked executables/apps names) doesn't suggest any obvious candidate to allow. What is the name of the process that is responsible for fetching the words for the screen saver and needs to be allowed?

I believe you should be allowing connections from the ScreenSaverEngine.app, which is located at

/System/Library/CoreServices/ScreenSaverEngine.app


iOS 8.4 app download problem Whenever I try to download an app it will buffer forever and on my home screen the app will only say waiting.

Why is this and what is the solution?

I had this problem with Pages. I made a backup of my iPad to iTunes (just in case) and then I deleted the apps from the iPad through iTunes, then I clicked Sync and the apps were gone, then I just reinstalled them through the App Store and they worked again. Strangely, this happened again, but with Pages and Numbers this time and I didn't have enough space on my MacBook to back my iPad up again, so I gave up. Fortunately, when I installed the iOS 9 Public Beta from Apple, both apps were fixed. iOS 9 Public Beta 2 is pretty buggy, so update at your own risk. You may just want to wait until iOS 9 comes out in the fall (probably late-September) if the app is not too important.


iPhone home button no longer works Recently I dropped my iPhone, breaking the screen, so I had that replaced with a new screen by myself that I brought from Amazon.

Now that I replaced it, the iPhone home button doesn't work at all because when I press it, it doesn't do anything, no matter how hard or many times I press it, it still won't do anything.

Later on, I took apart the iPhone and replaced the home button with a new one, and this didn't solve the issue and yet I don't know why it doesn't work at all.

I have pictures of my iPhone 3GS, hopefully it should help or whatsoever.

How can I get the home button working again?

If you can't fix the Home button mechanically, you can use a workaround to still be able to use your device, provided you have upgraded to iOS 5 or later.

Enable "Assistive Touch": Settings -> General -> Accessibility. It essentially shows a home button on the screen. A good way to breathe life into a broken phone.


Apps keep crashing after OS X update I've just updated my MBP 13'' mid 2010 to OS X 10.10.5 (14F27).
I remember that the last update was iTunes 12.2.2.25.

After this update, Mac rebooted and installed all the features.

Now I'm unable to open a lot of applications because they always crash.
I'm trying to figure out what is happening.

I've already tried to:

Repair disk and disk permission.
Run OnyX to delete all the caches and indexes to rebuild them.

Nothing solved my issue.

Here some crash reports: Safari, Dash, Mail, Dashboard, ClipMenu, Spotlight.

It seems that all this problem are related to web component.
Now I'm posting this answer using Google Chrome on the same Mac, and it works fine.

In Safe Mode here is the crash report of Safari which quit unexpectedly while using WebCore plug-in.

It seems that I've fixed it.
I made this steps:

Restore /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/ from a Time Machine backup.

This fixed all the crashes but now is quite impossible to close Safari tabs or the program itself.

Reinstall OS X 10.10.5 update. It is available for download here or here as combo update.

This fixed everything.
As mentioned below in comment, the combo updater runs checks and balances for every update between the 10.10.0 and the current version. This is the best solution.

I think that is sufficient to perform only the step 2.


How to avoid re-verifying app store? My iPhone says “since this is the first time you ...” when it ISN'T.  And then it asks security questions which are NOT the ones I set.  Did the same thing last time I tried to download a non-free item, and I had to call Apple and spend ten minutes proving my identity through an e-mail exchange.  And that won’t work right now, because I can only get that e-mail on an iPad that just died.

How can I get around this, and more importantly, make it stop happening?

Log in to your email somewhere else, then contact Apple.


How to make apps not start up automatically on iPhone and iPad? It seems that even when I restart my iPhone, some apps will send me notifications... so how do I make them not run by itself? (kind of like making it not in the Start Up folder on Windows 7).

The reason is that Pokemon Go is eating up a lot of RAM, and with some apps starting up and/or running in the background, it causes the Pokemon Go to run very slowly sometimes, so I would like to limit the running of other apps.  (mine is iPhone 6 Plus, and I think it has 1GB of RAM. It may be that iPhone 6S Plus has 2GB of RAM and won't have this issue).

You might try turning off Background App Refresh.

Settings > General > Background App Refresh > Switch to OFF


Deleting space on my iphone/icloud If I am storing photos on my Dropbox or Google Photos, can I delete them from my iCloud and still access them through these other apps?

Yes, those services are not connected.

However, once you delete items from iCloud, they'll be deleted from every device you have that uses that same Apple ID.  iCloud is a sync services whereas Dropbox and Google Drive are cloud storage that can also be used for backup.


Installing two DDR3 SO-DIMMs as non-matched pairs in a MacBook I've just upgraded my girlfriend's MacBook (I think it is a 2011 Model, one of the last white plastic ones) to Mavericks, and it has slowed down significantly. I'd like to upgrade the RAM on the MacBook to get it running faster. Currently, it has a total of 2GB installed in two separate RAM slots.

If I take one of these DDR3 modules out, what are the performance implications of replacing it with a bigger module to run alongside the remaining 1GB module?

Or should I make sure that the RAM modules are installed in pairs?

In a testing lab with unlimited funds, matching RAM (matching CAS, the controllers and the size perfectly) can benchmark faster than non-matched RAM of equal total size.

In the real world, you get a max of two RAM slots on the MacBook line and most people don't a) wait on their RAM for any significant amount of time ever b) don't throw away good RAM just because it doesn't match another chip they might put inside. (Also, I'm not saying no one waits on RAM, but that the matched vs unmatched situation doesn't cause people to wait)

For MacBook that are now vintage (especially the plastic MacBook with the removable batteries in black and white case) - the VRAM was part of the RAM and having matching chips was actually noticeable when you didn't get it right. Games might even be unplayable vs playable in some cases.

For anything Mac that is Unibody (not with a removable battery / frame is solid Aluminum) - just buy the most RAM you can afford from a vendor that will accept a return within a week if you mess up picking the right CAS latency and it doesn't work when you insert it. I run Mac Mini servers hard with constrained RAM and just buy a pair of 8 GB sticks for each pair of Macs. They come with 2x2GB so the macs have 10 GB of RAM and there is no measurable speed difference between a matched 8 GB and a non-matched 10GB and since the initial 2 GB stick is free I would never go with a pair of 4 GB sticks in that computer.

As a rule of thumb - adding more total but unmatched memory is always faster than adding less total matched memory on aluminum case Apple products released between 2009 and 2014. (And let's exclude the Mac Pro since that can have enough RAM slots and CPU to complicate the generalization I just made)


What is the function of /home in Snow Leopard? I would like to mirror the directory structure that I have on my linux machine at work. There, my home directory resides in /home/emiller rather than /Users/emiller as it does on Snow Leopard.

I was intending to create /home/emiller and use it as a sshfs mount point for my files on the linux machine - thus permitting to me run all my scripts without having to change any paths.

However, when I try to mkdir /home/emiller, I get:

mkdir: /home/emiller: Operation not supported

Why is this? What is the function of /home? It appears empty of all files.

~emiller

It's got an NFS automounter map mounted on it, so NFS home directories will be automatically available there.  Quoting man auto_master:

  The auto_master file contains a list of the directories that are to be
  automounted.  Associated with each directory is the name of a map that
  lists the locations of the filesystems to be automounted there.  The
  default map looks like this:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master            # Use directory service
/net                    -hosts          -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home                   auto_home       -nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers        -fstab
/-                      -static

The default auto_home on SL expects to get the home directory-to-machine mapping from NIS or LDAP, but you can add entries manually.

You can remove the auto_home line from /etc/auto_master and sudo killall automountd (which should cause launchd to rerun it with the new map) or reboot.  Alternately, add your sshfs mount to /etc/auto_home (and again restart automountd or reboot).


LaTeX on OS X stoped working after update I have TeX Live installed on my MacBook Pro with OS X 10.9.2. I installed TeX Live through MacPorts. Not long ago, I did an update of out of date packages. I just tried to compile a Tex document, and I get the following error message:

dyld: Library not loaded: /opt/local/lib/libpng15.15.dylib
 Referenced from: /opt/local/bin/latex
 Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap: 5

I have seen that this error comes up for other questioners in different contexts with different commands. None of the fixes suggested in those contexts worked for me (or sometimes didn't make sense in this context). Is there a simple fix?

Try 'sudo port rev-upgrade' (which searches for and tries to repair broken linkages like this) or ask the question on the MacPorts mailing list. https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users


How to open the next message in the currently selected mailbox in mail.app When viewing a message in a separate window in Apple Mail (Mountain Lion), how can I open the next message in the list with a keyboard shortcut?

I found navigating email in a thread incredibly frustrating especially for long email that have hundreds of lines of quoted text, and was trying to find the answer to this.

So here goes:

first highlight an email in a thread: click next to the title, the email borders should be highlighted
use the right/left arrow buttons to go to the next/previous email in this thread


iTunes on Windows 7 loses connection to other iTunes or Apple TV 2 I can start iTunes on my Windows 7 desktop, and can browse it from my Apple TV 2. It works fine for a while, then randomly in the middle of the movie I'm watching it completely loses the connection and kicks me back to the Apple TV home screen. I have to restart iTunes to get it to work again.

This does not happen streaming from my MacBook Pro.

This also happens when Home Sharing between my MacBook and the desktop. I go to browse the desktop in iTunes to transfer something, it spins for a minute, then disconnects. Once again, a restart of iTunes on the desktop is required to get iTunes on my MacBook to see the desktop library again.

I've tried disabling the Windows Firewall to no avail.

Both iTunes and the Apple TV are up to date.

The network is solid with gigabit and a Linksys/Cisco E4200 with latest firmware. I had to disable WMM support to make AirPlay work.

Your iTunes Library file might have been corrupted, a more frequent problem with the last iTunes update, especially if your computer turns off, on or restarts frequently (more then once a day).

Your exact problem happened to me 1, maybe 2 weeks back and after a bit of research on similar problems, I found that my iTunes Library file had been corrupted during a boot. All you have to do is rebuild the iTunes Library file as per Apple's instructions and it should be working perfectly again.


Is there a way to quit an app when the last item is closed? When I'm working on MS Office 2011, when I close a document, spreadsheet, presentation, etc., the application stays open. This is confusing (to me anyway) and I find myself having to explicitly quit these apps all the time (to get them out of the way).

Is there a way to quit an app when the last item is closed?

Thanks in advance!

It's an implementation detail that the developer has to implement. In your example case, for Office, it's Microsoft.

Here is the Cocoa Objective-C code that allows the developer to implement this feature:

- (BOOL)applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:(NSApplication *)sender
{
   return YES;
}

What you're observing is normal behavior on almost all applications on OS X and even the classic Mac OS. It's one of those things you should get used to on the Mac. However, these days, you are in luck that things are changing in your favor in Lion and probably later as OS X gains more features from iOS. As referenced in Lion Is a Quitter.

    Lion will quit your running applications behind your back if it decides it needs the resources, and if you don’t appear to be using them. The heuristic for determining whether an application is “in use” is very conservative: it must not be the active application, it must have no visible, non-minimized windows — and, of course, it must explicitly support Automatic Termination.

Clearly, it looks like that version of Microsoft Office does not support Automatic Termination yet, but it may be coming.

So for now, the most you can do is check the program's preferences for options relating to quitting the application when it has no more windows open. Also, I encourage you to give Microsoft and / or any developer of apps feedback that you would like to see "quitting on last window closed" as a preference option or suggest they add support for Automatic Termination to their products.

Until then, just remember to use ⌘+Q when you are done with those applications that do not automatically quit when you close all its windows.


Will Lion X be downloadable for everyone? I'm new to the Apple world. I was wondering if the update to Lion X will be free for users that has recently bought a new MacBook Pro (like me). If not, how much will it cost?

No, the update will not be free (though it is yet unclear what the price will be, possibilities ranging from $29 to $129), and will only be free for those who purchase computers within 2 weeks of the update coming out (this is usually the time window for the free upgrades that Apple offers) in the summer. If you've purchased your computer recently, sorry, but you'll have to pay for it.


Iphone 5 is refusing to turn on I've read earlier that after completely recharging iPhone 5 it should automatically turn on. But only in case when battery was drained to 0% and phone turned itself off.

I have recharged the phone to 100% but it is refusing to turn on. My power button is not working. Are there any other means to switch it on?

If an iPhone or iOS device doesn’t self start after 15 minutes of charging, the proper step is to force a reset and then repeat this pattern four or more times before seeking a repair of the hardware.

Since your home button is broken, you could try disconnecting from power and reconnecting at each 15 minute point and hope.

You likely have two problems that need fixing, though. The button and the power circuitry or the electronics to start / run are failing. The tech (or you) will need to open the device to figure out which.


Dust went into my MacBook left speaker So last night when I finished using my MacBook and then I noticed the left speaker had some small ball of dust. So I thought of taking it out in the morning tomorrow. So then when I tried to take it out it instead it went inside I tried gently shaking the MacBook to make the small dust particle to come out through the speaker. But no luck/ Should I worry about my speaker getting damaged or dust flying into the logic board and making my MacBook slow. As dust is a poor conductor of electricity.

PS. Can I just set my MacBook fan speed to 6000RPM to kick out the dust?

Because dust doesn't conduct well, you should not worry about anything getting damaged, especially not if it's small enough to fit through the speaker.

Fact is that a lot of dust slows down electronics, but such small quantities, as said, shouldn't be a problem.

If you still want to get it out, you should probably do as Solar Mike said and just vacuum it a little.


Apple headphone remote doesn't always work Once every couple of days or so I'll plug my apple headphones in (the new ear pods) and the volume/play/skip controls will fail to work.  In order to get them working I need to unplug and re-plugin.  It's not that big of a deal to do so, however I'm wondering if anyone has experienced this or knows why it happens.

There are 4 contact areas (poles) on your headphone jack, off the top of my head it's Left Audio, Right Audio, Ground and Control (doesn't matter of this isn't wholly right) and each one when inserted into the socket forces a tiny switch to be pushed in, thus alerting the device to the presence of something plugged in.

My google-fu cannot get a diagram as it would explain it better, but when you insert the headphone end into the socket, you are essentially applying vertical force to the rounded end of a tiny sprung push switch, and forcing it to move horizontally to engage the switch mechanism.  It's doing this 4 times against 4 tiny switches.

When these switches get gummed up, they can act odd.  It's not hard to see how they can get dirty given that they are essentially open to the environment, albeit down a little hole.  More common is the switches refusing to reset to the normal position when you take the headphones out, resulting in muted devices as it still thinks headphones are attached, but it's perfectly possibly for them to not push in properly too, or have enough dirt accumulated to make a poor contact.

To rectify it, insert and remove your headphone jack loads of times as fast as you can, spin it round in the socket, and generally agitate the switch mechanisms.  Some would have you apply a tiny bit of WD-40 to the headphone end (Don't spray into the socket!) first.


iPhone 5 not charged enough to boot after 2 hours plugged in Today I drained my iPhone 5's battery (went down to around 10%) and then went out in the cold (it is winter now and very cold, around 0ºC/32ºF). The phone died, and now I've left it on the charger for the last 2 hours, and the phone still hasn't turned on. Should I be worried? How long should I wait?

The iPhone turned on the Apple logo and is now fully back on after almost 3 hours of charging. Turns out it may take 3 hours if battery is drained completely for iPhone 5 to turn back on.


How can I open a Terminal window directly from my current Terminal location? Related to How can I open a Terminal window directly from my current Finder location?, I would like to have a terminal window open in one location, and open another one.

E.g. under Linux, I could be in ~/foo/bar/files/ in one terminal window, and type Ctrl-Shift-N and a new window would open at that same location.

In Mac OS X, I can only do ⌘N which opens a new terminal in my home directory. Is there any way to open the new terminal in the current directory?

Simply change the Terminal settings Terminal -> Preferences -> Startup -> New windows open with: Same Working Directory.


wireless connection with macbook pro I have a macbook pro (mid 2008). Right now I'm experiencing problems with the wireless connection at work. It goes on and off. Every time I loose the connection I have to turn Airport off and on again, and it works. But  this happens quite frequently.

The administrator says that he does not see network problems. Any idea of what could that be?

Go to Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration and trash the com.apple.airport.preferences.plist file.

Reboot and a new file will be regenerated. This would eliminate a corrupt file.

If the problem persists, you may have some interference in your cube so moving any printers or other electronic devices further away might help.


Open CSV wtih Excel from Finder Is it possible to open a CSV file with Excel direct from Finder and have the data grouped into columns. I know this is possible through the "File > Import" route, but it takes a lot of time if you are working with CSVs a lot.

If I simply set Excel as the default application, it opens the data as follows:

I would like to have that data in separate columns.

I managed to solve the problem by changing my region to the United States and customising the rest of my preferences.


Cron log to Notification bar I have a couple of cron jobs that I would like to log output to the Notification app in Mountain Lion. I've searched and and figured out how to log cron output by editing the plist file, but nothing specifically about how to integrate into the Notifications app.

You need to use a third party piece of software to send messages to the Notification Center from command line tools and scripts.

terminal-notifier appears to be a popular solution. OSXDaily has an article walking through how to set terminal-notifier up.

Alternative methods are covered in the answers to, how can I trigger a Notification Center notification from an AppleScript or shell script?


Can't set different Java version in Mojave with jenv I want to have different Java versions on my machine.
I installed jenv for that reason. However, I can't set the desired Java version to it. Actually couldn't set any version.

I have Java 8 and 11 installed. I want to set Java 8 as a global.`

Here is snippet what I have tried:

sdos-MacBook-Pro:~ nazar$ ls -la /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  4 root   wheel  128 Nov 28 16:58 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 root   wheel  160 Nov 19 19:41 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 root   wheel   96 Nov 19 12:04 jdk1.8.0_192.jdk
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 nazar  staff   96 Oct  6 15:25 openjdk-11.0.1.jdk
sdos-MacBook-Pro:~ nazar$ jenv versions
* system (set by /Users/nazar/.jenv/version)
sdos-MacBook-Pro:~ nazar$ jenv add /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_192.jdk/Contents/Home/
ln: /Users/nazar/.jenv/versions/oracle64-1.8.0.192: No such file or directory
sdos-MacBook-Pro:~ nazar$ ls -lg /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_192.jdk/Contents/Home/
total 52224
-r--r--r--   1 wheel      3244 Oct  6 19:57 COPYRIGHT
-r--r--r--   1 wheel        40 Oct  6 19:57 LICENSE
-r--r--r--   1 wheel       159 Oct  6 19:57 README.html
-rw-r--r--   1 wheel    108062 Sep 12 12:20 THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME-JAVAFX.txt
-r--r--r--   1 wheel    155003 Oct  6 19:57 THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME.txt
drwxr-xr-x  46 wheel      1472 Oct  6 20:01 bin
drwxr-xr-x   3 wheel        96 Nov 19 12:04 bundle
drwxr-xr-x   9 wheel       288 Oct  6 19:57 include
-rw-r--r--   1 wheel   5207430 Sep 12 12:20 javafx-src.zip
drwxr-xr-x  10 wheel       320 Oct  6 19:58 jre
drwxr-xr-x  14 wheel       448 Oct  6 19:58 lib
drwxr-xr-x   5 wheel       160 Oct  6 19:57 man
-rw-r--r--   1 wheel       427 Oct  6 19:57 release
-rw-r--r--   1 wheel  21242800 Oct  6 19:57 src.zip
sdos-MacBook-Pro:~ nazar$ java -version
openjdk version "11.0.1" 2018-10-16
OpenJDK Runtime Environment 18.9 (build 11.0.1+13)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 18.9 (build 11.0.1+13, mixed mode)

I can't understand what is missed there.
How to set Java 8 with jenv?

I executed in terminal:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.jenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'eval "$(jenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile

And after it could configure jenv as it is described on the manual page. However, it didn't take effect:

sdos-MacBook-Pro:~ nazar$ jenv versions
  system
  1.8
* 1.8.0.192 (set by /Users/nazar/.jenv/version)
  11.0
  11.0.1
  openjdk64-11.0.1
  oracle64-1.8.0.192
sdos-MacBook-Pro:~ nazar$ java -version
openjdk version "11.0.1" 2018-10-16

Only after opening new terminal I could see:

sdos-MacBook-Pro:~ nazar$ java -version
java version "1.8.0_192"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_192-b12)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.192-b12, mixed mode)


Launch terminal in new window by default Is it possible to set up Terminal to launch a new window by default? I recently came from running Ubuntu and I normally open hundreds of terminals a day. It's a pain to have to always right-click on the shortcut and select "New Window". If I could use Spotlight and have it open a new window instead of giving focus to the existing window, it would speed things up a lot.

Not precisely the answer you asked for, but when Terminal is open, hitting Command-N will open a new window. Also, the first set of Terminal preferences (Settings tab, the "On startup, open:" buttons might be useful to play with.


iPhone Wireless Sync and iTunes remote management I've managed to finally get wireless sync working between my iPhone and main server in my house. Now I'm trying to manage what syncs to my iPhone from the device itself rather than having to do it from iTunes on my machine. I checked out the Remote app, and while that hooks up to the library, I'm not able to select anything to sync.

Is this even possible, or if I want to add any media from my library to my device do I need to select it in iTunes directly and then launch the wireless sync?

My understanding is that you must be on your computer to select which media you want transferred to the device. After manually dragging media to your device or setting up what should be transferred under the correct tabs (i.e Music, Videos, etc.), you must then initiate a sync. I believe wifi sync to be, in short, the same as a USB sync, only over wifi instead of USB, minus a few features such as restoring a backup.

One note - you have probably already figured this out, but after your phone is plugged into USB, don't eject it, just unplug it. Wifi sync will work properly if just unplugged and not ejected.


Which user name do I need to remotely log into my Mac? My username in the Mac login screen ("My Name", there is a space) doesn't match the one in Finder and terminal ("anothername"). Which one is my real username? The reason I'm asking is that I want to share media files over my home network, and when I was trying to access the media from another computer, it ask me for username and password. I don't know which one is my username I only know the password. I tried both and neither worked. Always says wrong username or password. I'm sure I know my password because that's how I login to my Mac. Could there be a third username? I'm completely lost.

Either works. You have a short-name and a long name. Here's a great article about it.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201548