How can I get explicit versions of songs from iCloud? I use iCloud / iTunes Match and have just discovered that all my lovely songs with explicit lyrics have been replaced by versions with clean ones.  In some instances it's fine, and it doesn't bother me, but other times it just sounds strange.  I'd like to force iTunes Match to find the explicit ones.

How can I do it?

Just to clarify, I'm what has happened is that my iTunes match version of a song is the clean version.   What was uploaded was not.

I know this is not what you want to hear, but there is currently no workaround for this problem, and Apple has supposedly been working on this since February.

When you say

  Just to clarify, I'm what has happened is that my iTunes match version of a song is the clean version. What was uploaded was not.

it makes it seem (from my understanding of the question) that you have a misconception of the iTunes Match service.  iTunes Match identifies your songs (and the explicit ones) and ties them to your Apple ID so that every device on that Apple ID can have streaming and downloading rights to higher-quality DRM-free (256kbps) songs it matched it to, not the songs that you "uploaded".

Although, the fact that it probably isn't really fully uploaded may contribute to your problem.  Apple's "uploading" process most likely fingerprints the song by taking a short sample of it rather than the full song.  This means that it is difficult to tell whether the song is clean or explicit, and Apple has acknowledged this.  Some users have even reported iTunes Match giving them the instrumental version of an album.

This is a bug in iTunes Match that will require a new method to match songs.  Currently there are no workarounds, but you may phone Apple to fix the songs that you want explicit or complain on their feedback page.


Can you update to macOS 10.14 (Mojave) without converting to APFS? At WWDC 2018 macOS 10.14 or macOS Mojave was disclosed.  I am currently on macOS Sierra (10.12) and am looking forward to upgrading to macOS Mojave once its released.  I was wondering if it will be possible to update to macOS Mojave without converting to APFS, similar to this trick from OS X Daily on how to upgrade to macOS High Sierra (10.13) without converting to APFS with the command /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall --converttoapfs NO.

No

(at least it’s not possible in beta 1)

--converttoapfs isn’t a recognized option in startosinstall.


iPhone 6S very slow after upgrading to iOS 11 Recently I upgraded my iPhone 6S to iOS 11 from iOS 10. After upgrading many animations stutter a lot, sometimes screen transition animations are delayed by seconds. When I press and hold on the screen to get the cursor selection magnifying glass there is a delay of about 3 seconds until I see the magnified text.

Is there any way to improve this other than downgrading iOS?

I'm currently on iOS 11.0.2.

See below for jankiness when pressing back button. There's a few seconds delay for the title to appear.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zx5lo22wj4hhbjf/42CDDAD7-103E-4555-8E2D-511D655F2F70.mov?dl=0

The next best thing is to restore the iPhone software. Meaning erase the software and then using iTunes on a computer to restore the software with a refreshed iOS 11.0.2.

Backup iPhone via iCloud (optional but highly recommended)
Plug in iPhone to iTunes and click restore iPhone. iTunes should also automatically backup the iPhone also. - https://support.apple.com/en-ph/HT201252
**Make sure iTunes is up to date and then restore.
Once restore is done you are going to get the hello screen on the iPhone. Set up the iPhone properly then when you get the Apps & Data screen, restore from iCloud backup (unless you chose not to back it up). - https://support.apple.com/en-ph/HT204184
Then your phone should be back up and working with your stuff back on it and the software cleaned up.

Let me know if you have any concerns/questions/issues.


iPhone 4 issues with updating whats app My whats app is requesting me to update in the App Store, when I agree, it takes me to a screen which requests my password, but the id is not mine, so I cannot update it. This only happens with whats app, and not with any other apps.
I had no problem with previous Whats app updates.

Please advise.

Thanks

It is difficult to know the answer as to why this happened now and not before.  Fact is that the WhatsApp app you have installed right now had been downloaded with the Apple ID displayed to you.  What I would do is to uninstall, then re-install the app from the App Store using YOUR Apple ID.

Speculation is that you installed the app using iTunes from a different computer or someone (maybe a friend of yours?) logged themselves in with their Apple ID on the device to do so.

IMPORTANT: Any app you uninstall will also remove its settings and contents.  So, if the messages you have inside are not stored elsewhere (e.g. iCloud or on WhatsApp's servers, in case they store such items there), you will lose them.


How can I diagnose really poor performance of my 13" MBP 2011 on 10.6? The specs are:

2011 MBP 13"
Core i7
4Gb RAM
320Gb HDD (not SSD)

I use the system for work everyday, I almost always run the following:

Mail.app
Chrome (7-10 tabs)
Terminal (2-3 sessions)
Skype
TextEdit (2-3 docs)
Adium (5 accounts across gTalk, Jabber, MSN)
Finder (1-2 windows)
PGP Encrypted Drive

Occasionally (less than 50% of the time) I also run:

Firefox (2-3 tabs)
MAMP (Apache / PHP / MySQL)
LibreOffice (1-2 docs)
MS Office (1-2 docs)

I have a menu bar icon that constantly tells me CPU / Memory usage. Best case scenario, almost after I've booted up and turned on the minimum amount of my always on apps, I'm using 2-2.5gb RAM.

After a few hours I'll be up around 3gb and it'll generally stay around that point, where loading any app seems to be much slower than required and try to run heavier stuff like Excel / Calc or VMWare Fusion is almost unusable and takes years to actually get up and running.

Once the memory gets 3gb+, I often get system freezes (throbbing mouse, no apps respond) for 5-10 seconds, and a massive spike in CPU Usage for the 5-10 second period.

I'm in an office of about 10 people, and all of us run very similar applications, including the PGP Disk Encryption.

I'm wondering if anybody could give pointers on improving performance, or how to diagnose poor performance on OSX? At home I'm a Windows/Ubuntu person, and I feel like I've figured out how to diagnose any performance issues I get on those platforms, but in the OSX world I feel totally inexperienced.

Thanks for any tips.

When the wired and active RAM pass 50% - most tasks are measurably slower. You will see increased paging activity (vm_stat 15 in the terminal - watch for page outs - they indicate some memory had to be written to slow hard drive and constant page out and page in above 10-20 per minute indicates you have a RAM starved system.)

When starved for RAM, you can buy more or do less. You might want to get a monitoring software like Activity Monitor and keep the memory indicator in your dock. The system is likely thrashing based on the time delays you report. Each of the active programs needs some memory that just got paged to disk to free up extra space for memory needed by another program. It is a bad cycle and the computer just spends time running circles rather than getting done the work you wanted.

Here is a mac with every indication of RAM pressure:

But, quitting a large app like Aperture and starting it again still has no paging and the system is very responsive. Ignore the first line after the headings in vm_stat as it's the total since boot, but do watch for pageout as you have apps that are not responsive:

mac:~ me$ vm_stat 15
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes, cache hits 0%)
  free active   spec inactive   wire   faults     copy    0fill reactive  pageins  pageout
260482  1186K  74303   275275 234520  323478K  2276158  188709K   120292   640158      482
260689  1187K  74303   275275 234038     4117        0     3256        0        0        0
261310  1185K  74001   275250 235835    10668       77     7115        0        4        0
292087  1153K  74711   274313 236770    32927      972    21684        0       18        0
521469 928347  75754   269861 235897    77208      130    63300        8       41        0
517897 936518  75766   269215 231981    27678     2504    13059        0       22        0
463894 987202  72076   274852 233371   126855     2712    89422        2       50        0
223701  1180K  77834   283568 265396   589512      255   562957        1     7278        0
205013  1186K  82765   291561 265293   389442      255   369664        0     7334        0
201401  1173K  89671   301672 265595   495426       82   472316        1     9286        0

However, starting about 4 of the Adobe CS4 apps can push this machine into thrashing and the slowness you describe with the apps taking 30 seconds to launch and lots of bouncing of square icons in the dock.

Here is the associated vm_stat 15 showing the problem. Look specifically at the free memory plummeting to the minimum and pagein / pageout climbing.

mac:~ me$ vm_stat 15
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes, cache hits 0%)
  free active   spec inactive   wire   faults     copy    0fill reactive  pageins  pageout
 21822  1190K   4746   585056 228411  332621K  2315577  196418K   121439   781551     1806
 86862  1152K   5123   570803 215710   124555      932   102117        0     2086       15
 73080  1161K   8631   571301 216607    24404      337    14931        0     1994        0
 29655  1196K  13500   572024 219284   188966      535   112913        0     3606        0
  1668  1208K   9616   594723 216954   174145      215   144996       16    15268      121
  4142  1206K   5795   595393 219564   322750        0   320426        0        1        0
  3043  1204K   3485   596990 223264   138981      136   136653        0       28        0
  2338  1205K   2782   598556 222416   332263      321   321321        0      164       30
  3251  1204K   2919   598770 222027    90135       82    85050        0        5        0
  2606  1203K    212   600436 224678   114502        1   112450        0       35        0
  1188  1200K    174   600230 228582   162660      117   157230    33127      860     9914
 22069  1200K  27612   550547 230304    89953       38    82383     8274      159     2071
  1910  1200K    349   600071 227976    24382        0    23465     7332        1     2985
  1164  1201K    174   600281 228423     4940        1     4046     7087        8     2500
 30404  1203K    186   567418 229475    16087        1    16045     8566        4     2235


Does Spotlight keep a search history? Occasionally, I use Spotlight to quickly compute some expression because I'm too lazy to do it in my head, on paper, or fire up some program. Sometimes I would like to view the result again, but when hitting ⌘-Space again, it has disappeared. I'm not sure if this happens only when you search for something else in the meantime or also after some period of time.

The question is, can I somehow cycle back through my previous searches?

System info: OSX 10.10.4

I don't think Spotlight keeps a search history. I have confirmed this with numerous web searches. Sorry.


Magsafe charger getting really hot My MagSafe connector gets really hot to the point that it burns my skin when I touch it. Everything else is fine, my macbook charges fine and does not heat up that much. Is this normal?

A Mag Safe Adapter that gets warm is normal.  So hot that it burns your skin? Definitely not normal.

This could be a couple things:

Your Power Adapter is failing.  If this is the case, replace it with
a GENUINE Apple Power adapter.
Magsafe DC I/O Board is bad.  From your comments, you said you have a Mid 2015 15" rMBP.  If that is the case, then you will need something like this MagSafe DC Jack

You may want to look at this post Magsafe connector Scalding hot when charging

To replace the board, is fairly easy.  Just view the step by step instructions from the same site, ifixit.com


Is it possible to make Finder order on modified at, recursively? If I visit ~/code in Finder and order on modified at it does not recursively order. That is, if I have a file X in it which was modified yesterday and a folder with a file Y in it that was modified today, file X would be ordered before the folder with Y in it. Can it be achieved?

If that is not possible, is there a script that is triggered each time a file is saved which touches the parent folder to get same result?

Solved it by creating a script which watches for file writes and touches the written file's parent to update its modified timestamp.

fswatch is needed too watch for writes.
Install through homebrew with brew install fswatch.

Then follow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6442364/running-script-upon-login-mac/6445525#6445525
TL;DR

Start Automator.app
Cmd + N
Add "Run shell script" (from the Actions/Utilities)
Copy-and-paste your script into the window

fswatch -0 ~/ | while read -d "" event do touch -cm $(dirname ${event}); done

You can modify ~/ to a path of your liking.
Save it as touch_parent.app
Go to System Preferences → Accounts → Login items
Add touch_parent.app

Next time you restart it will start the script


Accidently deleted some small sized partitions when installing Windows. OSX Partition wont boot First off my problem is incredibly similar to this thread where the answer was almost reached but wasn't fully finished. Accidently deleted some small sized partitions when installing WIndows(Bootcamp). OSX Partition wont boot

I did the same thing, when I went to install Windows I saw four partitions two large ones: OSX and Bootcamp and two small ones which I thought I accidentally created. Unwittingly I deleted the two smaller ones via the windows installer, I now believe they were the recovery and EFI partitions. Anyhow when I went to reboot holding the option key there is nothing bootable that shows up, just a blank grey screen.

I did the cmd+opt+R and tried to reinstall OS X in place but the OS X  partition isn't mountable. I also ran some things in Terminal to give a better idea of what's going on.

I have very important files I need to get to so reinstalling isn't really an option, I need to fix this and make it bootable or need to do data recovery. Any input is very welcome! Next time will use Time Machine....

You didn't delete any partition. Instead the MBR got bogus by using Windows' Disk Management tool.

Instead of the MBR you should have a pMBR. After removing the bogus MBR you have to destroy and recreate the GUID partition table:

Boot to Internet Recovery Mode
Open Terminal in the menubar Utilities -> Terminal
Get an overview (especially the gpt command is important!):

diskutil list
gpt -r show disk0

Unmount disk0:

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0

Delete the MBR:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk0 bs=512 count=1

Destroy the GUID partition table and create a new one:

gpt destroy disk0
gpt create -f disk0

Rebuild all previous GUID partitions:

gpt add -i 1 -b 40 -s 409600 -t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B disk0
gpt add -i 2 -b 409640 -s 166939584 -t 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0
gpt add -i 3 -b 167349224 -s 1269536 -t 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0
gpt add -i 4 -b 168620032 -s 68356096 -t EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 disk0

If you get a resource busy error after one of the steps, just unmount disk0 again with

diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0

Depending on your Mac model this will render your Windows installation unbootable. Check one of David Anderson answers how to restore a proper MBR entry to boot Windows if you have a MBR-bootable Mac (in contrary to GUID-bootable Macs since ~2013).


What is updated by "a software update is required to connect to "? I am running macOS 10.14.6 and trying to connect an iPhone running iOS 14.3
It shows the message: "A software update is required to connect to <phone>" with a link to https://support.apple.com/HT208831
Unfortunately nothing on that page or the internet in general tells me what the update actually is. Is this a patch, an iTunes update, or a full operating system update? I'm cautious because I can't yet upgrade beyond macOS 10.14 (I have several 32-bit applications which I still need).
If I install this update, will it update me to 10.15 / 11?

That Apple page reads, in part:

If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch has a newer version of iOS than is supported by your Mac, you may see this alert: "A software update is required to connect to your iOS device. Would you like to download and install this update now?"

Click Install to download and install the software so your Mac can update or sync your iOS device. If you continue to see this alert, make sure that your software on your Mac and iTunes are up-to-date.

All this does is install software on your Mac which allows macOS (usually an older version) to work with a new version of iOS on your iPhone. As for which specific software is updated (system files and/or iTunes) I do not know, but this update will not update your Mac to a newer version of the operating system.
I saw this window pop up after I'd updated my iPhone 8 to the latest iOS some weeks ago. My iMac is still running Mojave because of some 32/64 bit app incompatibilities.


"This version of OSX is not supported on this platform." when booting 2012 Mac Mini with SSD drive from previous system When trying to boot a 2012 Mac Mini (purchased from apple.com) with the SSD drive from my previous system (a 2009 MBP), I get "This version of OSX is not supported on this platform". The version of OSX is Mountain Lion with the latest updates. I have attempted another drive from another system, and this wont boot on the Mac Mini either. Just for comparison, I can boot the 2009 MBP with the disk that came with the Mac Mini just fine, and that disk still boots on the Mac Mini as well. My question is, how can I get my SSD working? I really dont want to reinstall all my apps, settings, etc.

Each Mac has a minimum build number that has the necessary drivers to run that Mac. Sometimes a build will run tens of Macs and some builds are very narrowly scoped to handle all the existing models and that one new release until those drivers can be incorporated into the next numbered release of the OS.

Mac OS X versions (builds) for computers

What this means for you, is you'll need to try booting to the recovery HD on that SSD and hope the version of recovery is new enough to work to download he proper installer and let you proceed with the build for that Mac. If not, you'll need to place the drive that came with that Mini back in (or into an external USB enclosure that costs about $5 to $10 and hold the option key) to select that external drive.

At that point, you can re-run the installer or migrate the data from the SSD to the external drive. Then you can wipe the SSD clean using recovery and migrate back without having to reinstall or lose any data or settings.

There are many paths to getting back in business - but knowing the minimum builds will let you check things next time to run the updates before you move the drive.


How to force a page refresh in Chrome on iOS? I'm testing a mobile website and when changing javascript it doesn't seem to refresh it, even when using the "reload" in the menu or when appending a random variable, for example "?test=123" to the end of the url.
I also force quite the app but still no luck.
Any other ideas?

Per your comment that "a way to delete the browser cache completely" may be suitable, you can go to the Chrome menu → Settings → Privacy and clear the cache.


Automatically create monthly Photo Stream albums in the new photos app Back in iPhoto, when using Photo Stream with my iPhone, photos would automatically be put into albums in the main page, one for each month. Eg Dec 2014 Photo Stream followed by another album called Jan 2015 Photo Stream and so on as the months progressed.

Now in the new Photos app, the albums have been imported across, however as the months continued onwards, the corresponding albums aren't being created.

Is there any way to get this functionality back in the new Photos app?

Thanks!

What was created in iPhoto was an Event for each month's worth of Photo Stream photos. Since the concept of Events no longer exists in Photos, that automatic creation has gone away too.

You could manually replace them with Smart Albums. There are a couple of different ways you could approach it:

Create a new Smart Album for each month. This can be done ahead of time, with the future months' albums just sitting empty until photos with those dates appear. Settings for this would be:

"Date"
"is in the range"
"5/01/2015"
"5/31/2015"

Obviously changing the dates for each month.

You could also create one Smart Album that just shows the last month's worth of photos. It wouldn't always align to calendar months, but instead just show the last 28 days worth of photos. Settings for this:

"Date"
"is in the last"
"1"
"months"


AppleScript get filename from URL and apply Decode URL I've got the following AppleScript that displays a notification once a download has been added:

set yourpath to (the clipboard) as POSIX file
set a to do shell script "basename " & quoted form of POSIX path of yourpath
display notification a with title "Added Download"

It works pretty well, except when the url being downloaded has a filename with html entities. Here's an example of a URL:

https://dskjflkosdjfksdajf903094.example.com/g/f/OWZehaoqssVuXRuxqEivP_9dsa89dosidlzkxck_wqezxcd33sda-34sdf34r/%5BEBOOKS%5DEbook%20Title%20-%20Ebook%20Author%20Name.pdf

So with my AppleScript I get the following inside the notification:

%5BEBOOKS%5DEbook%20Title%20-%20Ebook%20Author%20Name.pdf

I'm trying to get:

[EBOOKS]Ebook Title - Ebook Author Name.pdf

You can use Cocoa’s NSURL class via some AppleScriptObjC:

use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite (10.10) or later
use framework "Foundation"
use scripting additions

set test to "https://dskjflkosdjfksdajf903094.example.com/g/f/OWZehaoqssVuXRuxqEivP_9dsa89dosidlzkxck_wqezxcd33sda-34sdf34r/%5BEBOOKS%5DEbook%20Title%20-%20Ebook%20Author%20Name.pdf"

set theURL to current application's NSURL's URLWithString:test
set testName to theURL's lastPathComponent as text
display notification testName with title "Added Download"


How to submit an error report to app developer? I'm developing a custom dictionary add-on to add to Mac's Dictionary.app.

I would want my user to report dictionary add-on's errors or his/her comments (if any) to me as the developer. So far, I have been using the following AppleScript to send such reports to me using Mail.app.

tell application "Finder"
set current_path to (container of (path to me) as string) & "VT_icon.icns"
end tell

display dialog "Intro. to Dict Add-on." with title "My Dictionary for Mac" with icon file current_path buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button "OK" giving up after 500

if the button returned of the result is "OK" then
tell application "System Events"
    if not (exists application process "Dictionary") then
        tell application "Dictionary" to activate
    end if
    set frontmost of process "Dictionary" to true
end tell

delay 2
tell application "System Events"
    set the clipboard to ""
    keystroke tab
    keystroke tab
    keystroke "a" using command down
    delay 1
    keystroke "c" using command down
    delay 1
    set selected_text to (the clipboard as text)
end tell

tell application "Mail"
    set myMessage to make new outgoing message at the beginning of outgoing messages with properties {subject:"Về: My Dictionary for Mac"}
    tell myMessage to make new to recipient at beginning of to recipients with properties {address:"myemail@hotmail.com"}
    set myMessage's content to "My precoded message: " & (the clipboard as text)
    set myMessage's visible to true
    activate
end tell
end if

So far so good. The above script works flawlessly. However, a big problem arises: The user cannot submit reports if s/he does not use or configure Mail.app to send email.

So my question is: Can I use an Apple script to send email without using Mail.app?

Implementing the sending part of a mail client in AppleScript is probably rather a challenge, but there might be other means:

Use a mailto: scheme to launch the mail client the user is using. You won't be able to provide a mail template though (but you could prepare something in the clipboard and have the user paste it into the new mail), and it will fail for those users who don't use any mail client at all.
Create a web form on a web server of your choice and direct users to this site if they want to give feedback.
Collect user feedback within your application and just post it on your web server in the background.


What could I use to read epub books on OS X? I would prefer a good and free solution for reading epub books on OS X.

It looks that by default OS X is not able to open epub books.

Calibre

ePubRead Firefox Addon

Crossplatform Sony book reader

Mac OS X Port of FBReader

Adobe Digital Editions


The website tomahawk-player.org maybe has an expired certificate. Should I ignore that? I have an iMac running High Sierra 10.13.6. I wanted to download the Tomahawk music player from the developer site at www.tomahawk-player.org. Safari tells me the connection is not private. It appears their certificate expired 99 days ago. This seems like a long time for that to go on without the owners of the website upgrading their certificate. I just want to know if I should ignore this warning. I'm very hesitant to go there.

According to sources that project has been "essentially abandoned" (nobody is working on it)

So, even if you download it, you are on your own with any problems that might occur.

As for accessing websites with expired certificate, you have been warned not to proceed, but you can at your own risk, witch could be major or minimal.

If you wish to proceed you can download the player from here

Just tried that and it Opens fine on HighSierra


Auto open 4 terminal sessions and SSH them to a given host I'm doing Rails development on a MacBook via a VirtualBox setup that's somewhat similar to Vagrant. My inconvenience is that I like to have at least 3 terminal tabs connected to the VM via SSH (one for running the Rails server, one for the Rails console and the third to run general command, possibly others for running tail, etc) and I have to open these connections every time I start developing.

Is there a way to automate this?

You could try creating a profile for each tab (changing Shell > Run command), opening tabs for each profile in some window, and then saving the window as a window group. See this answer.

Or use an AppleScript like this:

tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    do script "echo 1" -- this always opens a new window
    tell application "System Events"
        keystroke "t" using command down
    end tell
    do script "echo 2" in window 1
end tell

Other related questions:

How can I write a script to open multiple terminal tabs and execute code in them?
How can I open multiple customized terminal shells?
Is it possible to script opening terminal with 3 tabs?
Trying to use applescript to launch cmd line 3 scripts in new tabs


Tracking with find my iphone Can I see on "find my iphone" a sort of tracking of where my iphone has been for a day? For exampel Between 1 and 5 pm my iphone were on this addresses..etc

it does not show history but if the device is shut off or location services disabled, find my iPhone will show the last known location of your device


Transfering old photos in the cloud off my phone I linked my iPhone to my account in hopes of transferring the photos off of my phone to free up space. What happened was four years of photos transferred to my phone and it will not let me transfer the older ones off - what can I do to reverse this?

iCloud isn't for keeping photos permanently.

Bring them into iPhoto [Mac] or Photo Gallery [part of MS Essentials, Windows] for permanent storage.
After transfer you will get the choice to delete the copies on your phone.


Copy pathname from Finder with tilde (~/) instead of absolute home directory Since OS X El Capitan, right-clicking on a file in Finder while pressing "Option" shows a menu function Copy "File.txt" as Pathname.

I wonder if I can replace the absolute path of the home directory so that I get the tilde as in

~/Documents/File.txt

instead of

/Users/My-User-Alias/Documents/File.txt

No.  The ~ substitution is a shell construct.


iPhone 4S Gray Light in Middle of Black Screen Fix? I'm having trouble with my iPhone 4S. It rarely turns on and whenever it does, it shows a gray light in the middle of a black screen with some kind of halo around the light. Also, whenever I hook it up to a charger, it makes the charging sound over and over and over, every 7 or 8 seconds. I was wondering if anyone has/had the same or similar problem? If so, any suggestions, other than repair? Thanks in advance.

Tap it! I have one on my iPad. When you tap it it  brings up your control buttons, I.e. Home screen,notification centre or whichever you use for your iPhone. CAnt help with the charging noise, but perhaps it's incoming notifications?


Is there a way to make an iPhone 5S read an SD micro card? I have an old point-and-shoot Lumix DMC-FP8 that I would like to be able to directly connect to my iPhone 5S for editing purposes. I bought a camera USB to lightening connector, but the camera is not supported. I tried putting the SD micro card into an adapter and plugging that into my phone, but it says that the device requires too much power. Do I have any options?

I purchased an eye-fi SD card and it works perfectly...once you download the app and connect via wifi to the card, the images transfer right over, where they can be edited just like all the photos taken from the iphone.


How to resume OS X apps that have been suspended by the system I often run into the situation where the OS will suspend some of my apps because of low memory.  If I am lucky, a window will appear that allows me to select which apps I want to quit and which apps I want to resume, which works reliably and is fine.  However, often that window does not appear.  This is usually the case when my machine (mid-2015 MBP 15", 16GB RAM, OS X 10.11.2) has just woken from sleep.  In that case, the only symptom is that I have a bunch of unresponsive apps that show as (Not responding) in Activity Monitor.

I have tried to resume processes by sending the CONT signal (either via Activity Monitor or via the Terminal) and for a small number of apps this works, but for the majority of apps it does not.  For example, when this happened to me just now, I force quitted Preview (which was the chief memory hog) and tried to resume the other apps with CONT.  This worked fine for Clear, but not for anything else.  In some cases, such as Emacs, it had no effect - process still shows as (Not responding).  In other cases, such as Bibdesk, it leaves the app in a strange unusable state where the main window refuses to appear on screen and the menus don't work.

So how can I force that process management window to appear, or otherwise do whatever magic it is doing to "resume" apps?

More googling revealed that the process management window I am looking for is the "Force Quit Applications" dialog, and that it can be easily accessed from the Apple () menu or with the keyboard shortcut Command Option Escape.  In normal use, this only has a Force Quit button, but it should also have a Resume button if the system suspends any of my processes again (although I can't directly test this at the moment).


How does iPhone know I'm travelling with location services switched off Recently acquired an iPhone SE (after a factory refresh), and I have location services turned off.

Twice recently I've taken a train, and had the pop-up/splash screen offering to turn on do no disturb when I'm driving.

How does the phone know I'm "driving"? It would be easy to tell via GPS from my speed, but I'm sceptical it would be possible using an accelerometer (trains are pretty smooth). Is my phone still recording/tracking my location even with location services switched off?

It's not geolocation. It's detection of specific motion. See Settings > Do Not Disturb.

See How to Use Do Not Disturb While Driving


Movies uploaded to iTunes How do I get the movies that I have uploaded to iTunes from my Mac to show up on my iPad? I have several movies that I would like to see on my iPad. I figured the best way to upload to iTunes, but when I launch iTunes on my iPad I cannot see or find them.

I don't believe there is any such thing as "uploading" to iTunes on the Mac. Rather, you import/add your own video files to your library or purchase them from the iTunes store.

Any movie or tv show purchased from the iTunes store should automatically be in your Mac iTunes library and also be able play on your iPad after you sync it there.

You can import pretty much any movie file of your own to your Mac iTunes library. From there, you can use iTunes to sync it to your iPad; however, your iPad can only play a few specific movie formats (scroll down to TV and Video). If your movies aren't in that format, you won't be able to play them on the iPad whether you sync them or not.

Once your iPad is connected to your Mac, you have options in iTunes on the Mac to auto-sync certain playlists of videos or all videos to your iPad. You can also use it manually, and simply drag/drop the desired video files from your Mac iTunes library onto your iPad library when it is connected to iTunes.


iOS: auto-repair unreliable/malfunctioning Wi-Fi connection? All too often, iOS fails to automatically detect and repair faulty/unreliable Wi-Fi connections, which means I have to go into settings and manually reset it. Incredibly annoying and downright stupid.

Most of the time the fix is no more than manually reconnecting. You'd think that this would be automatic, especially with auto-join enabled. Other times I have to manually connect to another hotspot that was already on auto-join (which means that the auto-join feature is broken, low-quality, or failed).

Other times, a Wi-Fi connection stops responding and the Wi-Fi indicator on the iOS device fails to indicate that (access available to hotspot and no internet access available).

I'd like a configuration or utility (can be a third-party tool) that auto-repairs the Wi-Fi connection.

Requirements:

Detect spotty access and intermittent outages on Wi-Fi hotspot; automatically reconnect to hotspots marked as auto-join without any input from the user.
Link, network, and transport layer monitoring and profiling to detect errors and failed/unreliable connections.
Automatically drop low-quality hotspots (those that drop many packets, lack proper internet access, or often fail to respond for any reason) and connect to higher-quality hotspots without input from the end-user.
If a Wi-Fi hotspot goes out or becomes unreliable, it should automatically switch to another auto-join hotspot.
Round-robin poll-and-connect for multiple failed hotspots: Maintain a list of auto-join hotspots and repeatedly attempt to join each one in turn. Make every effort so the end-user doesn't have to manually go into settings and do what should have been automated from the beginning.
(Bonus - no idea if this can be done in iOS) Automatically monitor failed connections/timeouts and launch connection auto-repair on failed connection.
(Bonus) Parallel reconnect. When the iOS device loses its Wi-Fi connection, make connection attempts on all auto-join hotspots in range (in parallel) and associate with the first one that accepts.

Unfortunately, there is no way to configure your wifi settings without jailbreaking and installing a non-approved third-party application. By default applications on iOS devices are not granted access to configure wifi settings. Sorry.


Configure Google Calendar notification sound on iOS On iPhone we can configure notification sounds for iCloud Calendar and the iPhone Reminders app, but I cannot find any way to configure a sound for Google Calendar app on iPhone. I find the default sound to be too meek.

Be reminder.

There is no way to customise the notification sound for 3rd party applications until the app developer build that functionality into their app. Applications like WhatsApp has options for that, you can change the notification sound from the app settings itself.

I suggest your can sync your account with Calendars and change Calendars notification sound.

Settings > Calendar > Accounts > Gmail(your account) > turn on sync Calendars


Safari - Top Sites disappears after another app went rogue A few days ago an app went rogue and leaked memory taking up all 4gb of RAM and more than 8gb of page file space. The result was a machine which was unusable and took about 20 minutes to (eventually) shut down.

After rebooting Safari would not show my "Top Sites", instead showed me a "This page could not be found" (or something similar, I can't remember), would not display the "Top Sites" button on the menu, and the button was not available in the list of buttons to add.

After a reboot this was resolved, but I would still like to know what went wrong.

Does anyone know what could have gone wrong here?

I don’t really know the right answer, but I have a guess.

You mention that you use safari on Windows, but you don’t mention the window’s version. In any case, the extreme load your computer had (in terms of RAM/HDD) might have caused a corruption in the Safari’s config and/or cache. Your computer, in an effort (desperate!) to save its information and write to the page file, might have had problems saving all the info before the shutdown actually occurred.

When you returned after the reboot, safari’s settings may have been corrupted preventing the TopSites button to appear.

I don’t know much about Safari’s architecture under Windows, but on OS X if the preferences are corrupted, we simply remove them and the program regenerates them upon first start.

This is just a guess of course.

But remember that your computer was struggling to save its state when you shut it down. You had no RAM and your pagefile was enormous.


Does app store show a limited impressions for every account? Does apple have something like a quota "limited views monthly" for every developer account? Do I need to have another account to get more reach through impressions and installs??

1- I used to to get about 150-200k impressions in the first 1-2 days for every new app I publish in the old days = means more installs too but this is no longer happens.

2- I don't see any much difference on my profits I know this: from my Admob ads analytics/daily impressions almost the same range every day.

  I'm looking forward to understand the changes so I can improve my
  efforts and ROI. Is it legal to have more than account on app store?

That's the reply from app store support on this question:

  One developer account would suffice to get the same results for your
  apps as different accounts. You may avail of this


OSX: Pick screen for notifications I recently hooked up 2 displays to my MacBook.
Now the notifications always show up on my right screen. This means that I have to turn my head and in addition move my mouse a considerable long way to click on a notification.

Is there a way to make the notifications show up on a different screen?

Notifications appear on your primary display. The primary display is typically the one showing the menu bar; however, you can show the menu bar on every display.

To change your primary display:

Open System Preferences.app > Displays
Select the Arrangement tab
Drag the menu bar to the desired display


When quitting one application, quit additional ones I'm trying to figure out a way to do the following: when I quit Logic Pro X, I want to also automatically quit other apps that I use with it, as they are no longer needed. Is this possible?

You can create a simple Applescript to quit the other apps. To do it, open Script Editor and type the following:

tell application "AppName1" to quit
tell application "AppName2" to quit
tell application "AppName3" to quit

Save as Application.

Then when you quit Logic Pro, you just need to double click on your new app, and it close all your defined programs.


Where does Time Machine server store its backups? Not the /Volumes/backupdrive/Shared Items/Backups, but the actual Backups.backupdb you see in backing up locally. Where does it store that data? I know an external machine backups successfully to it often, but the data doesn't seem to be anywhere. Any ideas?

Since OS X server is just an app that runs on top of the standard OS X, you would open the Time Machine system preference pane to see where the server itself is backed up and which files may be excluded. (This is exactly the same as non-server app Macs, but Time Machine knows how to kick off server data snapshots as needed.)

In my case, I exclude the large backups and back up the small backups all to the drive XXX Backup A.

Then you can see that each of the machines either back up to the service destinations of Small Backups or Large backups.

And the storage lineup for this server is:


Can't add music to iPhone anymore I have seen this: Greyed out songs when trying to add from itunes to iphone? but though the issues are similar, I think my version has a different cause. Anyways, none of the answers there did work for me.

When I try to add an album to my iPhone, it does not synchronise the album. I think this is the case because:

When I click "Synchronise", it only takes a split second. This is strange, since the album is a little over 100 MB in size (according to iTunes itself).
The album does not appear on my iPhone
They do appear in iTunes->iPhone->On My iPhone, but greyed out, with a dotted circle to the left of the tracks.

What I did first was (as I have always done and never had problems with) just select the album from iTunes->iPhone->Music (with "Sync Music" and "Sync only selected items" checked), but this gave the result described above. I then tried to do it manually (after checking the "manage music and videos manually" option in the summary) but this gave the same result. I even tried another album, which doesn't work as well. Both albums come from CDs and do play normally in iTunes. (In fact, I'm listening to one right now.)

I do not mind deleting all songs from my iPhone, since restoring that wouldn't take long, even manually (it's just one album right now), but future visitors might benefit more from your answer if it didn't require that.

What I think to be the cause:
I reinstalled the operating system on the computer with iTunes a while ago (see my previous questions for more info) and didn't want to restore from the Time Machine backup, since I had accumulated a lot of superfluous bytes, and the reinstallation seemed like a good opportunity to get rid of those. I restored my iTunes library by simply restoring only the ~/Music directory, which restored all my songs. But when I connected my iPhone to my computer it asked me if I trusted the iPhone (and the iPhone asked if I trusted the computer). I think my manual restoration of iTunes didn't include some files connected to managing devices with iTunes which causes this now.

There could be several reasons for this as far as I can tell, but my solution, after hours of research was rebuilding the iTunes library.

You might be able to check if this will actually work by addig some new music to your library and then trying to sync it to your device.

If becomes available (black instead of gray in the Music section), then this might work for you.

The steps for rebuilding your library are pretty simple, described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201561

Basically:

Close iTunes
Go to your iTunes Music folder
Move the itunes library xml to a different location (e.g. desktop)
Delete the .itl file (the actual library information)
Reopen iTunes and import the moved xml (Import Playlist)


How can I modify or eliminate the mouse pointer while recording the iOS Simulator with QuickTime Player? I would like to use QuickTime Player to create a screen recording of the iOS Simulator running an app. I need to simulate taps on the simulator with the mouse, but I don't want the standard arrow mouse pointer in the recording. An alternate appearance of the mouse pointer (such as a circle to represent the tip of a finger) would be preferable to hiding the mouse pointer entirely (I still need to see where it is so I can use the app correctly).

What options do I have for modifying or eliminating the mouse pointer on OS X? My machine is running Lion 10.7.5.

I am using ScreenFlow for my video. It allows me to change the mouse cursor into a white or black circle, with a varying level of opacity. It's exactly what I need.


How to fix freezing mplayer on Mac for music play? I want to play music on a MacBook Air (10.14.6) with mplayer on the command line. But sometimes when I load a page in a browser, the music briefly stops, and then continues. Sometimes even for some seconds. This is very annoying. I want to listen to the music continuously (while using a browser!).
I have tried to run the following command:
sudo nice -n -20 mplayer -shuffle Music/...

Is there anything else I can try?
Maybe there is a better command line tool?

Your browser may be at fault for consuming excessive system resources. Try switching to Safari and don’t run Chrome or Firefox at all for a while and see if the glitches persist or go away.
UPDATE:
Since you’ve confirmed that your browser is at fault, here are a few routes we can take.

Obvious first step: Make sure you’re on the most recent build of Firefox and mplayer in case there have been bug fixes or performance enhancements made. You can also try updating to a more recent macOS for similar reasons. (Big Sur is not recommended, though.)
We can try to do a deep dive and start doing DTrace profiling of Firefox and mplayer, possibly uncovering bugs in one or the other (or in other parts of the OS).
You could try switching to a different music player (e.g., try the default Music.app for a bit and see if it’s better-behaved) in case there’s a specific resource contention between browser and mplayer.
Depending on how much free RAM you have and how big your music library is, you could copy (a part of) your library to a RAM disk and stream from there. This would help if the bottleneck is I/O.


Tabbing between application windows while using spaces The weirdest thing happened to me. I reinstalled OSX Lion on my macbook, and when all done I noticed how I could not switch between application windows on different spaces using cmd + tab.

I'm positive I've been able to jump to different application windows that are on different space before. Now it will only switch to another application window if it's on the same space. If it's on another space, it will switch to the app but remain on the same space.

I've also noticed how I cannot jump to application windows on other spaces when I single click their icons in the dock.

Is there a stupid setting I've missed, or have I been living in a wonderful fantasy for many months while using Lion?

Have you got an existing screen sharing connection? It is one of the main reasons why switching between applications does not work. Failing that try restarting the dock by opening a Terminal window and enter the following command:

killall Dock


Notification sounds not playing after upgrading to Yosemite Every time a system notification sound should be played, the screen simply flashes. The Flash screen option in Accessibility is turned off but the system seems to be smart enough to flash screen instead of playing a notification sound when it is unable to do so.

Every other sounds works, even Skype's notifications.

I've checked the permissions in /System/Library/Sounds and I do have read permissions there. I can even play the sounds manually.

Any ideas what could be the cause of the problem and how to fix it?

EDIT: I have made sure that the "Sound effects" output device is set to the correct one.

I've had this problem happen a few times, and it can be fixed by killing the Core Audio daemon (it'll get restarted automatically):

sudo killall coreaudiod


Bluetooth Explorer removed from Xcode Tools in 12.x? Apple's Additonal Tools for Xcode package includes a great set of tools that are useful even for non-developers. One of these  is Bluetooth Explorer, which, among other things, can help enable the hidden higher-quality AptX audio codec for paired devices.
I noticed this tool is now absent from the 12.0 disk image. Additional_Tools_for_Xcode_11.4.dmg contains the tool, but Additional_Tools_for_Xcode_12.dmg does not.
Anyone know if this means it's gone for good?

Not only it's been removed, I've tried to use the Bluetooth Explorer for Xcode 11.4 and it's not functional.
I believe it is part of Apple's new changes of making their prperietary chips, M1  and thereafter,  part of a single ecosystem where if the iPhone and iPhone don't support other chips, like intel and Qualcom, then the OS XI won't neither.


Changing Word 2011 Save Location Drop-Down Menu Right now when I try to save a document the location options are simply: Documents, Pictures, Downloads, etc. and then "Recent Locations". I want to be able to browse through my documents for the correct folder to save to but I cannot figure out how to enable these feature. I just updated OS X and it disabled the "browse" feature.

I think what you are looking for is the button that expands the save dialog to the expanded size. I took the below screenshot in Word 2016 running on Yosemite, but as this is (almost) the standard OS X save dialog I think you should find it in the same place in Word 2011.


How to enable Mac OS X server email alerts I have a specific Mac mini server that does not send out email alerts, even though I have an email address configured.

I also want to note that I am not using the mail server within server.app.  I have other servers that are sending email alerts correctly and none of them have the mail server within server.app turned on.

Questions:

1) Do I have to enable Apple Push notifications and configure an Apple ID for this to work?

2) Do the email alerts go through Apple's servers after step 1 is configured above, or do they come directly from my server?

3) If they come directly from my server, can I specify a relay host to go through my ISPs SMTP gateway?

4) Is there any way to generate a test alert to test whether this is working or not?  What is happening is that the disk on this server is filling up and I am not getting any notifications.  It only happens once every couple of months, so I am never sure when it is going to happen.

I've come up with my own answers for this in case anyone comes across this question.

1) No, you do not have to enable Apple Push notifications.

2 & 3) You can configure them to go through your ISP's SMTP gateway with the following steps (for 10.7.x and 10.8.x).

Go to Server.app
Go Mail
Check "Relay outgound mail through ISP"
Click edit to the right of that checkbox
Specify your ISP's SMTP gateway in the "Outgoing Mail Relay" field.
Specify SMTP relay authentication if required. Click OK.

4) Use the command line shell to issue this command:

echo hello | mail -s TESTSUBJECT youremail@yourdomain.com


I "erased all content and settings", but did not sign out of iCloud before selling my iPhone? Before selling my iPhone, I erased my iPhone with all of its content and settings, but my problem is that I forgot to sign out of iCloud first. I somewhat remember being asked to provide my Apple ID in order to turn off Find My iPhone, but I am not fully sure. After erasing the device, I also removed it from my iCloud's devices lists as well. My question is, will my iCloud's data still be synced on that iPhone and accessible to the new owner? As I did not sign out of iCloud before. I know that the data will still be on the iCloud's server, but will it be synced with that iPhone after resetting it as well? I just want to make sure my personal data is fully wiped out on that device from everywhere.

No, once you "Erase all content and settings" your iPhone is basically back to factory settings and the new owner will not be able to sync with or sign in to your iCloud account.


Actual Image not shown in the Body of Apple Mail client Products witnessed: iPad 2, iPad & iPhone X; iOS 11+;

We send email broadcast of our reports to corporate customers; The email carries an attachment (*.pdf) as well as an image embedded in the body (any image *.jpeg, *.png, *.jpg etc; We use the Content-ID {CID} to attach the Image).

We witnessed that some iPhone X and iPad users were complaining that the image embedded in the body is an old one from a previous mail and not the actual one that was attached. We observed that these users were using Apple's native email client. We had checked all other email clients' and the image embedded into the body was the actual one; Email clients' under our observation were MS Office Outlook 2016, Outlook for Android, Outlook Web client, Samsung Mail Client for Android, Hotmail, Outlook and Yahoo web email interface all displayed the actual image except for Gmail, where the image is not shown at all for some security reason.

We would have been happy if the Apple's native email client did not show the image at all, but having shown some older image from a cache source in its device have sparkled lot of criticism to us.

Did anybody came through this problem? How did you all overcome this?

Are your CIDs universally unique? I.e., do they change from email to email? RFC 2392 requires this (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2392). Although it mentions that most reasonable implementations would not index content separately from the message itself, which is (one of the reasons) why it usually isn't an issue.


How to get Photos Library v2.0 content to Photos Library v1.5? I'm in the unenviable position of trying to merge multiple Photos libraries together. On an OS X El Capitan.

Two of the Photos Libraries are version 2.0, so how do I merge their content into a v1.5 Library, so that my wife, who'll be using my OS X El Capitan -capable machine, will be able to continue with her photo escapades?

I'd hate to have to export the contents of v2.0 Photos Library to some  folder and then have to import it back, possibly with data loss. Is there some solution?

The problem: No way to open a Photo Library that is newer than 1.5 if you   are stuck in OS X El Capitan -land.

Solution: Inside of each Photos Library is a folder called Masters. You can access this even without having the newest version of Photos.

Start by right-clicking (ctrl-click if on touchpad) on the Photos Library and selecting Show Package Contents.

Follow that by going into the folder Masters. It will look somewhat like this:

Launch the Photos app and make sure you have that specific Photo Library open - and drag the contents of the Masters-folder onto your Photos -app. After a serious amount of waiting, the import process will start.


Why do I have to double click right mouse button to get the pop-up menu It happens after I get a new macbook for work. This is a Macbook Pro(Retina, 2012) with OS X Yosemite. I created a new user, and checked 'click or tap with two fingers' for the 'Secondary click'. However, the right-click menu doesn't show up when I tap or click with two fingers, nor if I right click an external mouse. I have to right click twice, very quickly, either on the trackpad or an external mouse, in order to get the pop-up menu.

This is really annoying and I haven't found any solutions online.

Update 1: I changed the 'Secondary click' setting to something else and then back to 'click or tap with two fingers'. And now everything works expect for Google Chrome. I still have to double-right-click on a webpage in Chrome to bring up the menu. However, interestingly, on the tab bar and tool bar, etc., (i.e., everywhere except for the webpage itself in Chrome), a single-right-click works...

I uninstall Chrome extension "crxMouse Chrome Gestures" and install Smooth Gestures Plus and its plugin SmoothGesturesPlusExtras. Solve my problem but the extension isn't free.


Cannot Update iMac, OS X, From 10.11.2 to 10.11.6 I have attempted multiple times to update my iMac from the App Store updates section like I did when I updated to Mavericks, Yosemite, then to El Capitan. It would finish the download and then nothing. No attempt at installing the update.

Next I found the update in a dmg file at Apple's website. I would run the package contained inside but would get the error during the installation:

  "OS X El Capitan Update can't be installed on this disk. This volume does not meet the requirements for this update."

What must I do to get my Early 2009 iMac updated?

(I am still learning about Macintosh computers.)

I'm not sure what's going on with the App Store update, but I have a guess about the downloaded update: did you get the "OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 Update" (759.1 MB), or the OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 Combo Update (1.5GB)? If you downloaded the first one, it won't work because it's only capable of updating from 10.11.5 to 10.11.6; since you have 10.11.2, you need the "combo" version, which rolls in all of the earlier 10.11.x updates, and is therefore capable of updating from any earlier version of 10.11 to 10.11.6.

(BTW, this requirement is listed on the download pages for the two updates, but you have to click "System Requirements" to actually see it, and even then it's not very explicit. The first says it requires "OS X El Capitan 10.11.5", but the second just says "OS X El Capitan 10.11".)


How can I speed up iMovie? iMovie is basically unusable for me at this point. I've got over 1000 video clips (most of them around 6 seconds since they were taken in Vine) and any time I try and switch events or projects it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes (I've timed it).

I'm frustrated enough at this point to drop the $300 on Final Cut Pro X if that's what it takes to actually be able to do anything with my video files. Anyone know if this will actually address the issue? Is Final Cut Pro X going to be able to handle this amount of video files better than iMovie? I really don't want to spend the money and then have the same problems...

I have a Mac Mini purchased in 2011. 8G RAM. 750GM 7,200RPM HD.

I think I've fixed my problem. I had 1000+ movies in iPhoto, and since iMovie just treats them as 1 huge "event" it was trying to open an event with 1000+ movies in it. My HD only had ~10GB empty. I exported them all out of iPhoto, moved them to an external HD, separated them out into individual folders and imported each folder 1 by 1 as a separate event, keeping the files stored on my external HD. I've now got my 3 years of video files all imported and have created 3 different projects which I've taken to completion and posted to Youtube. iMovie is lithe and snappy once again!

So, tips for speeding up iMovie:

Free up HD space so you have >10~15% free
Make sure your events don't have too many video files in them (anything over 50 is getting close to the upper limit it seems)
Consider an external HD, preferably SSD (You can use multiple drives to hold your "events". You're not just limited to your primary HD)


Can't install BASH patch: OSX 10.9.5 update installed, but system still says it is 10.9.4 I wanted to install the BASH patch, but the install failed, saying it had to be applied to OSX 10.9.5.  But I installed that last week.  Looking in the App Store, it clearly says that 10.9.5 was installed on 25th September 2014, but the "About this Mac" box says I'm at 10.9.4:

I have restarted the machine since the update was installed.  Any ideas?

The best thing to do when the system gets confused is to download the latest combo update (or the equivalent combo update) from Apple and then install it from the package:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1761

Once that is done, I would reboot and then download the bash patch and re-apply it as well.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1769

Only then would I let the App Store have a crack at more updates.


Storage used by applications doesn't match between folder info and system report I'm running on Macbook Pro OS X 10.11. I'm curious that when I check my storage the system reports I've used for apps 100.15GB whereas the applications folder size is just 39.56GB. Is it probably counted for storage that apps use to store their data?. If so how could I inspect those data (e.g. location and size) to consider removing them?

Thanks in advance.

Not all applications are stored in /Applications. That's the default install folder for most applications, but it doesn't include all applications. In fact, since applications are really just bundles of files, most applications can be run from anywhere.

To demonstrate this, take a look in System Profiler at Software > Applications. You'll see lots of software that isn't in /Applications

With that said, using this as a method to eliminate large applications probably isn't the most efficient or easy. You'd be better off using a disk scanner like DaisyDisk, Disk Inventory X, or some other alternative.


External Monitor Flickering when Chrome is running I have a new macbook, v 10.14.3. It is connected to two external monitors --  both of them DELL which are connected via a DELL docking station using mini Displayport cables which came with them.

My monitor is blickering sporadically and I am mostly certain that it only happens when I use Chrome browser (in particular when I open a new tab or load a new webpage). But on the other hand both monitors including the one where browser window is not launched are flickering.

Any way to solve this? I did find a link suggesting resetting SMC -- but did not try it out as I could not make any sense why such an act would resolve it if it happens only for Chrome

I reset System Management Controller as suggested here.
(for macbook touchbar, make sure that you really press the power button, not just touch it).

But this did not seem to help as problems reoccured. What seem to have helped now is disabling hardware accelerations for Chrome browser. Go to chrome://settings and disable it and that could solve the problem


MacBook Pro heat problem My MacBook Pro 13" fell down from a coffee table and its getting heated up after that. Although the laptop is working with no problem of memory or hard drive, sometimes it makes a strange noise and gets hot pretty quickly.

Can I analyze/fix this issue myself or do I need to contact Apple Support (and if the later, would this be free)?

It sounds like the fall may have damaged the fan. That would account for the heat and the noise. It's also possible the heatsink got slightly dislodged, which would also cause heat issues (although likely more severe).

In any event, unless it's clearly an unrelated problem (like a firmware or software bug), this damage is almost certainly not covered by Apple's warranty, as it's the result of an accident, not a part failure. However, from time to time Apple has been known to waive the repair charges on incidents that fall outside warranty coverage, although it seems to be on a case by case basis, and only with a bit of luck.


How to use (sync) Apple Address Book with multiple accounts from Google? My impression is that by adding an "Exchange 2007" account to the Address-book does not work with Google Mail.

I tried to configure Google by using the iPhone method: exchange server on m.google.com but it doesn't seam to work.

I need to sync contact from 2 different gmail accounts (to be able to see and edit them as separated addressbooks)

Any ideas?

There are third party, paid, services available to sync multiple Gmail, Address Book and Exchange accounts. I can't speak to the effectiveness of any of them. I signed up for Soocial and then decided I didn't care if the two gmail accounts I use had out-of-sync address books -- I just sync one with my Address Book and iPhone now using the built-in sync manager in OS X.

Soocial
Sync'Em


Disable Little Snitch in guest account? It's annoying as hell to let others use your computer on a guest account with Little Snitch installed, all the consecutive popups one after another...it's really ridiculous.

Also in the event my Macbook is stolen, a user logs into guest, all the dialogs will clearly let him know to disable connections.  So little luck there using "Find my Mac."

Anyway to just disable this or set a rule to allow everything?  Of course any rules created in LS within the guest account do not save after logout.

Login to the Guest Account.
Disable Little Snitch Network Filter
Open Library > Preferences,  copy at.obdev.LittleSnitch... to a shared folder
Logout and Login to Main Account
Open Terminal and run sudo su
Open Library/username/Library/Preferences and overwrite file with copied file.
Logout and Login to Guest Account.  LS is Disabled.


Creating User to Run Postgres I'm setting up a postgres server and want to create a separate postgres user to run the process, as recommended in the manual. How do I do this? I installed postgres via Homebrew and have experience with Linux but not much with Macs.

Have you checked to see if it is already there?  Most postgres installers will create it for you, and so running grep postgres /etc/passwd will tell you if it exists.  Most system accounts on macs start with _, so if you do have to create it, you might consider calling it _postgres, which seems to be common.

The question is similar to question 82472, which should provide what you need to create an account from the command line. There are some useful additional caveats in the comment thread and other answers there. Basically, you use the dscl . create command to create the user in Apple's Directory Services with all of the properties needed to define the user.


How do I undelete an app without losing data? My little sister accidentally deleted one of my iPhone games. I know I can get it back by "rebuying" or resynching it via iTunes, but this will give me a clean install, without all my saved game state. Is there any way for me to reverse the deletion without losing all this information?

You can restore from your last backup that contained the game, however you will lose any new additions you've made on the phone since the backup. iTunes normally makes a backup every few syncs or days, depending on how often you have plugged it in.

I would first try and just re-install the game since she may have removed the game but not the actual data associated to it.

Apart from that there is no way to recover the data, since the iPhone does an immediate delete of all files once instructed to do so.


Corporate alternatives to DropBox for iPad I am currently the only iPad user in a large company, and am loving using it, especially for meetings. I keep a lot of information relevant to meetings on DropBox, such as minutes, reports, spreadsheets and so on, and tend to refer to them a lot. I like the fact that I can easily navigate my own directory tree in DropBox, and view common file formats on there. However, whilst I have permission to use dropbox for the files I use, I find that I am limited in scope with some meetings, as I'm not allowed to place others on servers that don't belong to the company. I end up having to either bring a laptop, or, more commonly, look over somebody else's shoulder.

So, can anyone recommend a solution similar to Dropbox that would work for shares on Windows Server 2003, and allow me to:

Easily navigate a directory tree, possibly with shortcuts to commonly-used folders
View files in MS Office 2003 and 2007 formats and PDFs without lengthy conversion processes
Not have to go through an intermediate "copy to the iPad" step that I might find with, say GoodReader or Quickoffice

I'd ideally lie a solution that works on the company wifi network without further modification of the current server architecture, though I can see that in the future, it may need to work over a secure VPN connection from the field if a few other managers decide to take the plunge, so something that's preferably easy for our system administrators to configure and support. A proxy solution that would work in Linux or Windows is possible.

A search on the iTunes store for SMB file browsers finds something called - ahem - FileBrowser that sounds like what you need. Haven't tried it myself - although thinking about it something like this might be a help in my workflow. Did I just cost myself $3 by answering a question?

It's at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/filebrowser-access-files-on/id364738545?mt=8


Is there any way to print to an old Diablo-command-set parallel printer from a modern Mac? This question is mostly about software. There exist many hardware adapters that allow one to connect a parallel printer to the USB port on a Mac, but I can't find any way to stream text to the adapter such that it actually prints. Has anybody been able to do this?

I figured out how to make it work from the terminal using a standard USB/parallel adapter. Instructions here: http://www.wheels.org/monkeywrench/?p=909


Conkeror as default browser on Mac OS 10.6 I'd like to use Conkeror as default browser in Mac OS 10.6. Selecting conkeror.app as default browser with Safari does not work. While it is possible to start Conkeror via Firefox command line arguments (-app), opening additional URLs with that instance is not.

If anyone has been able to setup Conkeror on Mac OS 10.6 in a way that...

uses Conkeror as default browser for all applications
reuses a running Conkeror instance when opening an URL (either current or new buffer)

..., could you post the steps necessary to do so?

P.S.: Feel free to retag with 'conkeror'

EDIT: In addition to the Info.plist solution posted below, you also need the line

url_remoting_fn = load_url_in_new_buffer

in your .conkerorrc, if you want to open URLs in an existing window.

Select Conkerer as your default through Safari's preferences.

Update per the comment: From their website: "Unfortunately, at this time, there doesn't seem to be a way on OSX to configure conkeror as your default browser. " I just happened to stumble across that. I had never heard of Conkerer until now.


What resolution (in pixels) should videos taken in the new iPad (3rd generation) be? After recording a video in the "new" iPad, and transferring it to PC (via email or Dropbox), the resolution is 568 x 320.

Images are 2592 x 1936.

I can't find any information about what resolution to expect, except that it should be 1080p, but I don't really know what that means.

When filming, the picture is zoomed in compared to when taking a photo.  I can't find a way to zoom out.

Is this resolution normal?

Email (and I guess dropbox) compresses the video to a .mov file about a fraction of the size.

I was able to view the images and videos by directly connecting the iPad to the PC and mounting it as a drive.

The actual dimensions of the video appear to be 1920 x 1088.


What iPad apps are available that support handwriting recognition? What iPad apps are available that support handwriting recognition?

Are there any good iPad apps for taking notes that can recognize handwriting?

You might like to checkout Writepad - it sounds like it does pretty much everything you are asking. I've used it before, and found it worked pretty well. It's only $4.99US at the moment as well, so maybe a good time to give it  a go.

I also use Plecodict which is an English-Chinese dictionary, which has handwriting recognition for learning new characters (and an optical recognition mode as well) - just mentioning it because you didn't specify a certain language.

Good luck.


Do I need to upgrade from Mavericks GM Although the GM should be identical to the final version, I am concerned about not being able to log into my computer in the future because of an expired developer/trial period.

The App Store normally shows a disabled button for installed apps which also will get future upgrades. However Mavericks shows with the "Download" button.

Should I go through a Mavericks reinstall?

Yes, you should install the final release of Mavericks.

The seed of Mac OS X 10.9 GM, Mavericks, is different to the edition available through the Mac App Store.

The seed had build 13A598.
The final release is build 13A603.

This suggests bugs were found and fixed since the final preview release. We have had reports of behaviour changes between the two versions.


Mac running like a snail after 15 minutes After booting up my Mac (2011) it runs fine for the first 15 minutes then runs like a snail. My memory and CPU usage is fine and I have scanned for viruses countless of times an comes back with nothing. I have checked my spotlight search and apps running in the background (all the tips everyone gives you to check). If anyone has any suggestions it would be much appreciated.

Here are some ideas for troubleshooting a slow Mac

Open the console app (it is located in the utilities directory). Watch the log for any strange behavior.
Hold the shift key while booting to boot into safe mode, see if the issue continues.
Turn off half of the programs in the startup, see if issue persists, then turn off the other half. Keep repeating until you find the program that is the culprit.
Try creating a new user account
Lastly, backup to time machine, and format.


Exclude from log by pattern matching I want to exclude some firewall notices and certain benign error messages from the system logs.

They occur every few seconds and make it hard to find real problems, especially when the files get rotated away.

man syslog.conf does not mention string pattern matching like it does on Linux. Can Apple's daemon do it? Are there other options?

The command grep -v allows filtering out a term or regex from the input. You can use a pipe (|) to combine multiple grep -v commands.

Example: grep -v firewall /var/log/system.log | grep -v imagent | grep -v mdworker

The first grep command in this example operates on the file contents; the subsequent grep commands operate on the output of the previous grep command.

grep is located at /usr/bin/grep on my Lion system. For more information on using grep, read the man page with the command man 1 grep or just man grep.

Edit: Command line can be shortened to

grep -v 'firewall\|imagent\|mdworker' /var/log/system.log


What is this black bar at the bottom of my Dock? I have this strange bar at the bottom of my Dock:

What could it possibly be and how could I remove it? It is non-blocking but distracts me when using the Dock.

Occasionally the progress bar that appears under the downloads folder does not go away as it should when the download completes. You should be able to remove it by simply restarting the computer or running

killall Dock

at the command line (Terminal). This should reset just the dock process without having to restart the whole machine.


How can I find the reason for my Mac's recent "restart"? My Mac just "restarted" while I was looking away and I'd like to know if it was a crash or a postponed restart due to an update.

My Mac does sometimes crash and restart but hasn't done so for a couple of months.

I installed some OS updates in the past couple of days but chose not to restart yet.

Google Chrome was getting slow and had been displaying the green update arrow for a day or two. I clicked on the update button and wandered off to do something before it responded in any way.

When I turned back to the computer it seemed to be "restarting". I'm using the scare quotes because I don't think it was rebooting from scratch since I didn't see the Apple logo with progress bar, which can be a little slow on my system.

I verified that it had restarted by switching to the Terminal app which showed the Restored text with a timestamp from about a minute ago.

When I check when the last reboot was using uptime or System Information it tells me 32 days.

The App Store is telling me that I still need to restart to complete updates.

So how can I check why it just "restarted"? I want to know if my crashing problem came back after such a long time of stability, if asking Chrome to update somehow allowed the other pending upgrades to restart the OS, or if it was some other reason.

I use Terminal a lot, so my answer will include commands used in that application.  I know Console provides details, but I rarely see it as more than a GUI to access the logs.  Terminal can be found in the Utilities folder which is found in the Applications folder.

On newer macOS (macOS 10.12 and later) with the unified logging system, the processing of the text files doesn't show the whole story, so use the log show command below:

log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' --last 24h

Of course, expand the time if your restart happened more than 24 hours in the past.

After a while, you should see a message which contains a number indicating a reason.  To find the meaning of that number, you can use this site:
https://georgegarside.com/blog/macos/shutdown-causes/.  For example, my last shutdown cause was "-128" which, unfortunately, is "unknown".

On older systems, you should be able to find the text "Previous shutdown cause" in your system log.  You can find this by using this command (which you can copy/paste into terminal):

grep "Previous shutdown cause" /var/log/system.log


Adding a line break to a shell output in AppleScript I've got a script working but not the way I want. Here's the script

return do shell script "BLUETOOTH_DEFAULTS=$(defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth); SYSTEM_PROFILER=$(system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType); MAC_ADDR=$(grep -b2 \"Minor Type: Headphones\"<<<\"${SYSTEM_PROFILER}\"|awk '/Address/{print $3}'); CONNECTED=$(grep -ia6 \"${MAC_ADDR}\"<<<\"${SYSTEM_PROFILER}\"|awk '/Connected: Yes/{print 1}'); BLUETOOTH_DATA=$(grep -ia6 '\"'\"${MAC_ADDR}\"'\"'<<<\"${BLUETOOTH_DEFAULTS}\"); BATTERY_LEVELS=(\"BatteryPercentCombined\" \"HeadsetBattery\" \"BatteryPercentSingle\" \"BatteryPercentLeft\" \return\"BatteryPercentRight\"); if [[ \"${CONNECTED}\" ]]; then for I in \"${BATTERY_LEVELS[@]}\"; do declare -x \"${I}\"=\"$(awk -v pat=\"${I}\" '$0~pat{gsub (\";\",\"\"); print $3 }'<<<\"${BLUETOOTH_DATA}\")\"; [[ ! -z \"${!I}\" ]] && OUTPUT=\"${OUTPUT} $(awk '/BatteryPercent/{print substr($0,15,1)\": \"}'<<<\"${I}\")${!I}%\"; done; printf \"%s\\n\" \"${OUTPUT}\"; else printf \"%s Not Connected\\n\" \"${OUTPUT}\"; fi" # Version 2.3

It returns:

L: 82% R: 88%

What I want it to return is:

L: 82%
R: 88%

I can't for the life of me figure out how to add the break. I've tried \n, \t, \r, & return &,... nothing works. This is probably just my ignorance though. I know enough to get myself in trouble.

Any thoughts?

In the correct context, Unix uses \n or 0x0A.

mac $ echo -e ".\nhi\n."
.
hi
.
mac $

If you use command substitution ($(...)) newlines will be stripped. From man bash:

  Bash performs the expansion by executing command and replacing the command substitution with the standard output of the command, with any trailing newlines deleted. Embedded newlines are not deleted, but they may be removed during word splitting.

# avoid bash from messing with string, since $z is quoted in the echo.
mac $ z=$(echo -e "L: 82%\nR: 88%")
mac $ echo "$z"
L: 82%
R: 88%
mac $

# With command splitting since the variable $Z isn't in quotes.
mac $ z=$(echo -e "L: 82%"; echo -e "R: 88%")
mac $ echo $z
L: 82% R: 88%

mac $ echo -e "L: 82%"; echo -e "R: 88%"
L: 82%
R: 88%
mac $

I'd just parse the output and add in the Applescript reserve word return.
assume the Unix output is in fromUnix

global debug
set debug to 0

log alterString(fromUnix, "%", "%"&return)

-- ------------------------------------------------------
(*
alterString
  thisText is the input string to change
  delim is what string to change.  It doesn't have to be a single character.
  replacement is the new string

  returns the changed string.
*)

on alterString(thisText, delim, replacement)
    global debug
    if debug ≥ 5 then log "in ~~~ alterString ~~~"
    if debug ≥ 6 then
        hexDumpFormatOne("alterString: input text, thisText,", thisText)
        log "alterString: delim is -->" & delim & "<--"
        hexDumpFormatOne("alterString: input search string, delim,", delim)
        log "alterString: replacement is " & replacement
    end if
    set resultList to {}
    set {tid, my text item delimiters} to {my text item delimiters, delim}
    try
        set resultList to every text item of thisText
        set text item delimiters to replacement
        set resultString to resultList as string
    on error
        log "alterString: ==>error altering the string. "
        set resultString to thisText
    end try
    set my text item delimiters to tid
    if debug ≥ 6 then hexDumpFormatOne("alterString: resultString", resultString)
    return resultString
end alterString


If i cancel Apple Music subscription, and then resubscribe almost immediately, will my previously downloaded music still be there? I need to change from another country's App Store to the US App Store as I have relocated. Some apps, like Venmo, are only available in the US App Store. So to download them, I need to change to the US App Store. But to do so, I have to unsubscribe from Apple Music.

My intention is to resubscribe to Apple Music as soon as I am on the US App Store.

My question is: would my downloaded music from Apple Music (not previously purchased) still be there when I resubscribe?

I'd rather not the hassle of having to search and download all the tracks i previously downloaded when i resubscribe.

Is this documented or explained by Apple or someone’s personal experience?

Google venmo for the App Store to change it if you go via browser you won't have to cancel subscription ; now to go back if you don't intend on staying in us App Store you'd have to find an app only available in whatever country/region your needing to go back too hope that helps


Two factor Auth code sent to same device I logged into iCloud today, and the two factor auth code was sent to the same mac that i logged into iCloud with. My iPhone was right next to me with a full signal, but did not receive the code.

What's the point in that? This seems a bug to me, unless anyone knows any different?

This is not a bug. The attack that is being prevented here is the case where someone would steal your password and log into your account from their own machine.

So in this case, two factor helps us establish trust by proving that it is in fact you who is trying to log into iCloud and not some attacker who stole only your password. The ways in which we can achieve this can be classified as "something you have", "something you are" and "something you know".

In this case, your password is "something you know". Your iPhone and Mac are both "something you have". Remember, your Mac is signed into iCloud already and is trusted by Apple on system level.

If someone did steal your password (the something you know), they would still require access to either your Mac OR your iPhone. These are both "something you have". As stated previously, your Mac is already trusted by Apple, so presenting this two factor code on your Mac is no less secure than presenting it on your iPhone. For an attack to be successful, the attacker would have to steal your password as well as obtain access to one of your trusted devices (your Mac or iPhone). So two factor is just as valid being presented on your phone as on your Mac.


Seagate External Hard Drive locked, can only read not write What Happened:

I plugged in my Seagate backup hard drive today (not Time Machine) after a few months and my computer can read the drive but not write to it.

Two obvious problems:

1) The drive is formatted as NTFS
2) The drive has (from top to bottom) "Read & Write", "Read-only", "Read-Only" permissions.

I know what you are going to say, but the NTFS writing software that Seagate has to write to these type of drives doesn't work on this version of macOS I guess the upgrade killed it because I have used the drive before on previous versions.  When I try to run the software mac says "the developer needs to update this software to work with this version of Mac".  I know each of those two problems are the cause of this issue but I am unable to find a solution.  The "Ignore Ownership on the Volume" checkbox in the drive's show info box is not there.

Does Seagate have new software for writing to these drives? (I use a lot of open-source stuff, but for this I would prefer seagate official software)

Seagate provides an OEM-version of Paragon's Microsoft NTFS for Mac. The software is availbale at: Paragon Driver for macOS (10.10 and above). Direct link: NTFS_for_Mac

The installer build date is Sep 12, 2019. The installer's info.plist indicates compatibility:

MACOSX_MAX_VERSION 10.15

After downloading and installing it (and probably rebooting your Mac), you should have normal access to the NTFS volume again.

This OEM-version only works for Seagate drives!


iPhone screenshots have wrong date info on PC I recently exported several screenshots from my iPhone SE onto my Windows 10 PC. I noticed some photos, but specially the screenshots, have a wrong value for the date taken and the date created.
The images on the phone have the correct date before exporting them.  They are only incorrect after transferring to the computer.
There does not seem to be a constant factor by which the date is off.  Sometimes, only the time is wrong and others both the date and the time are wrong.
For what is worth, the screenshots have a PNG extension while photos have a JPG extension and I have already check that the system clock of both my PC and my phone are set correctly.
Is there anyway to get these to offload with the correct times?

I'll start by saying that the file extension itself has nothing to do with the time metadata alterations for your photos.
Now to address the problem at hand: it depends on how you exported your photos. If you copied the files over to your PC using Windows Explorer (which I suspect you did) then Windows will not reliably preserve the original time/date metadata of your photos. As you mentioned yourself, Windows isn't even consistent in the fashion in which it alters the time metadata. If you're copying just one file, the metadata should be correct. Other times, if you're doing a bulk copy, not only will Windows sometimes change the time metadata for certain files, but it'll also change the filename for certain files. Why this happens, I don't know.
I haven't used iTunes in a while (I use iMazing instead to manage my iPhone – you should check it out if you're interested in an alternative to iTunes) but I do believe that if you import your photos and videos via iTunes, then all your files' metadata will be correctly preserved and handled.

You can also try uploading the screenshots to a cloud service (Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, etc.) and then downloading them onto your computer. There shouldn't be any reason for the upload process to alter any of the files' time metadata.


Can you remove PDF's after you add them to iBooks? I have iCould sync on. So all my books get sync across my devices. Great!

Now, my question is: can I remove the PDF's (from my Downloads folder) after I added them?

I tried it, it seems to work, but im not sure. Unlike with music you can right click on the book (in iBooks) and click Show in Finder.

All the books that you move to iBooks stored in

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/

iBooks make a copy of every books that you move on it.

With iCloud Sync the Documents are stored in the following location - Thanks to @Rogier

~/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks/Documents/

Personally I recommend that you make a backup or move your original ebooks on an external drive.


Upgrade MacBook Pro Bluetooth Is there a way to upgrade my MacBook Pro late 2011 MacBook Pro 13" Bluetooth to Bluetooth 4.0 without using a usb extension? As I only have one working USB port.

I do not see a way to do that.

Aside of software/firmware from Apple, there is the hardware issue as well.


When I close my MacBook - my Ultrafine 4K display stays on (I want everything to sleep) When I close my MacBook - my Ultrafine 4K display stays on (I want everything to sleep). It's connected via USB-C.

I can find nothing about this on Google - in fact I found articles telling people what to do to make an external display stay on (like it goes off by default).

Mine stays on by default - when I have stopped using the MacBook and want to step away from my machine - I just want to close it, have the machine sleep & monitor go off and be done. How can I do this?

This is normal closed clamshell mode for the MacBook so you would need to script a sleep event or to sleep your display:

Control–Shift–Power button or
Control–Shift–Media Eject - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

You can make use of normal lock timeouts for screen sleeping, power savings and locking.

If you had no keyboard or input devices connected, it should sleep automatically once the system detects you can’t type or mouse with the lid shut.


When I open the Music D/L app, it quits immediately I have an iPad mini, and I have this app called Music D/L. So, a few months ago, I decided to download a song and when I went into the app, it had a black screen for a split second, and it just crashed.

In the comments please don't say "delete the app and download it again, everything will be fine!". Trust me, it won't :(. This music app was taken down on the App Store, so I can't get it again if I delete it. All of my songs are on this app and I don't want to delete the app and get a new music downloader because:

There isn't that many good ones out there.
I won't be able to remember all of the music I downloaded.

Please tell me what to do ASAP!

P.S. Yes, I tried resetting my iPad and turning it off and all that stuff, I tried everything!

I googled a bit and you're not the only one with this problem. It could be that Apple has decided that this app is a bad app. That would explain why it's not available in the App Store anymore and why it won't start anymore: Apple can do that (I think it has to do with the certificate of the developer).

Another possibility would be that you upgraded to a newer version of iOS and that the app is not compatible with the newer version. And for some reason, the developer is no longer supporting the app.

Either way, I don't think it is possible to retrieve your songs. Please don't shoot the messenger.


Delete/disable app-installed services? I've written a bunch of services for my own use that I use frequently, but recently it's getting tougher.

I installed some apps (such as Skim.app, apptivate) that introduce their own services (eg. Open URL in Skim) which I don't need/use. These services clutter up my services list though (Skim alone add about 4 services to the list you get when you right click a Finder item).

Is there a way of removing these services from the list? I've tried looking for them in ~/Library/services but they aren't there. Where should I look?

In 10.6, you should be able to disable them by unchecking them in the Keyboard->Keyboard Shortcuts->Services list in System Preferences. For previous versions of OS X, there's a handy little app called Service Scrubber.

Hunting down and deleting services for apps you've already deleted can be troublesome; there are some detailed hints and tips in this article. Summary: find all the Info.plist files on your system that contain "NSServices", using a terminal command like:

find / -name "Info.plist" -exec grep -l "NSServices" {} \;

and (carefully) edit the suspect Info.plist files by hand.


How to get full path of MP4 file used by portal in Safari? I am looking for the full url of this video on this portal: http://www.atv.hu/videok/video-20141102-havas-a-palyan-1-resz-2014-11-01

In source of the HTML I found this:

I have tried to load http://www.atv.hu/201411/20141101_havas_1.mp4 but this link does not exist. Any other idea?

What is a way in Safari to see URL of any opened streams?

Open the web inspector and look in the resource list for the active network connection (indicated by the spinning pinwheel next to the resource) as this is usually the stream file.

Clicking the resource will show the Full URL under the Location section of the resource inspector.

Note that some URLs won't be able to be played directly due to licensing restrictions.


Is there anyway to use GNOME terminal on macOS? Can I download GNOME terminal on macOS?

If you install MacPorts, you can install the GNOME Terminal from the macOS Terminal.app:

sudo port install gnome-terminal

You can also install many other GNOME apps.

$ port search gnome
[...]
gnome-calculator @3.26.0_1 (gnome)
    Calculator with financial and scientific modes.

gnome-calendar @3.24.3_3 (gnome)
    Calendar is a calendar application for GNOME.
[...]
gnome-terminal @3.26.2 (gnome)
    Terminal component for the GNOME 3 Desktop

[...]
Found 158 ports.

MacPorts has a collection of over 20,000 open-source software for Mac. You can see all of the available ports here.


How to connect external display to MacBook Pro without a cable? I have MacBook Pro 16” and want to connect an external display, but it is not convenient for me to plug in a cable to my MacBook.
Is there a some way to use a wireless connection? I don’t expect 4 or 8K, at least FullHD.

Do I need to buy Apple TV, special display or some wireless connector?

I've used a few wireless dongles and other devices in the past and they've been hit and miss due to driver issues and other complications.

By far the easiest method is to use a AppleTV and use AirPlay to mirror or extend the display to the screen.

You would connect the AppleTV to the display using HDMI. After setting it all up you would then click the AirPlay icon in the upper right of your Mac's screen and select your AppleTV from the choices.

If your WiFi is nice and strong for both units, you should be good to go.


Does macOS Mojave support NightShift on external monitors? After upgrading to Mojave, I could have sworn I saw Night Shift kick-in on my external 4K BenQ monitor. But no more.

Did I dream that? Or is Mojave supposed to be capable of supporting Night Shift on external displays? If so, might it stop working because of sleeping/waking and/or attaching/detaching the monitor?

Night Shift is working on external monitors in Mojave.

Sometimes Night Shift deactivates itself on the external display when you wake the system from sleep. (Maybe a Bug?)

Just reactivate it manually.

If Night Shift is off, go to the Night Shift tab in System
Preferences>Display and check the box labelled Turn on until
tomorrow.
If Night Shift is on, click on the Schedule menu in the Night shift
tab and choose  ‘Off.’
Use the color temperature slider in the same window to control the
degree to which colors change when Night Switch is turned on or off.


iOS: Stop Photos app from opening automatically after receiving photos via AirDrop When i send some pictures to my iPhone from my MacBook via AirDrop, the Photos app on my iPhone opens automatically.

How can I stop that from happening?

iOS is programmed to automatically open the default handler app after it receives file(s)/data via AirDrop.

There is no native way built into iOS to change this behaviour.


How to install S/MIME certificate on iOS 10.2 I tried to create my own S/MIME certificate with the help of this code:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 4096
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key ca.key -out ca.crt
openssl genrsa -des3 -out smime.key 4096
openssl req -new -key smime.key -out smime.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in smime.csr -CA ca.crt -CAkey ca.key -set_serial 1 -out smime.crt -setalias "Self Signed SMIME" -addtrust emailProtection -addreject clientAuth -addreject serverAuth -trustout
openssl pkcs12 -export -in smime.crt -inkey smime.key -out smime.p12

First, I have to say, on my Mac, everything works fine. I was able to import the root certificate on both devices and I also was able to load the .p12 file. I am even able to send certified emails to my iPhone which can be verified. But when I want to sign a message on my iPhone I go to the advanced Settings in E-Mail and the certificate is just not there. Are there any special requirements for the certificate which I miss here? Is maybe the key length an issue?

UPDATE: An 2048 bit RSA certificate seems to work. I am not sure, if this is because it's shorter or because it's not self-signed. I also encountered problems installing the same (and valid) certificate on iOS 9.3.5.

I would recommend CAcert which is a recognised free certificate provider.

You need to use Apple Configurator 2 tool to package your s/mime root certificate and personal certificate into a .mobileconfig otherwise iOS won't trust the certs.