Is $PATH just a file with a list (in order of preference) of directories? I'm having trouble understanding exactly how $PATH works?

I am on a Mac..  If I install Python with Homebrew, it will install Python into the /opt/local/bin directory.

Now assuming Homebrew didn't make any changes to my bash profile, if I run a generic Python script, that will run using the system included Python located in Library I think.

My understanding is that if I go into my bash profile and add this line:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH

then it will add these directories to the front of the list.

I guess the question I have is, why do I add this line here.  Why can't I go directly to the source which I think is $PATH and add the line manually there.
Is $PATH a file?  And if so where is it located?

The shell path (i.e. PATH) for a user in OSX is a variable defining a set of locations in the file system whereby the user can use certain applications, commands and shell scripts without the need to specify the full path to that command or program in the Terminal.

If you enter abc in Terminal the first occurrence of abc in one of the paths defined in PATH will be executed.

To access or print the variable PATH you have to use $PATH.

Example:

echo $PATH

The variable PATH has a general and a user specific part.

1. General part:

The general part is defined by the (superior) file /etc/paths and by the (inferior) content of the folder /etc/paths.d.

The default content of the file /etc/paths (in OS X) is:

/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
/usr/local/bin

The default folder /etc/paths.d is empty. On older systems with an X11 installation the folder contains a file named 50-X11 with the content

/usr/X11/bin

which adds an additional path (/usr/X11/bin) to PATH.

The prepended number- just defines the load order.

My /etc/paths.d folder contains the following files:

/etc/paths.d/40-mysql    #file content: /usr/local/mysql/bin
/etc/paths.d/50-X11      #file content: /usr/X11/bin
/etc/paths.d/60-testdisk #file content: /usr/local/testdisk
/etc/paths.d/70-git      #file content: /usr/local/git/bin

The resulting PATH is

echo PATH$
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/local/testdisk:/usr/local/git/bin

2. User-specific part:

The user-specific part is defined by the file ~/.bash_profile. If you have created a folder bin in your user folder and installed some apps in there you can add the following line in ~/.bash_profile

export PATH="/Users/username/bin:$PATH"

or

export PATH="$PATH:/Users/username/bin"

The first entry preferably executes a command abc found in the /bin folder of the user, the second one a command abc found in the general path before executing an identical named one in the ~/bin folder.

This part of PATH defined by .bash_profile is only effective for the respective user.

To add the path entered in .bash_profile to the current PATH immediately you have to source the file once:

source ~/.bash_profile

3. Temporary paths

By issuing export PATH="/Users/username/bin:$PATH" or export PATH="$PATH:/Users/username/bin" in Terminal you can add a path temporarily.

This part of PATH is lost after closing the Terminal window, logging out or rebooting the Mac.

Examples (using the general part from above):

The file ~/.bash_profile contains export PATH="/Users/username/bin:$PATH" and you issue in Terminal export PATH="/Users/username/bin2:$PATH" then the resulting PATH is:

/Users/username/bin2:/Users/username/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/local/testdisk:/usr/local/git/bin
\____temp. path_____/

The file ~/.bash_profile contains export PATH="$PATH:/Users/username/bin" and you issue in Terminal export PATH="/Users/username/bin2:$PATH" then the resulting PATH is:

/Users/username/bin2:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/local/testdisk:/usr/local/git/bin:/Users/username/bin
\____temp. path_____/

Summary

PATH (or $PATH) is defined by several files: /etc/paths, the files in /etc/paths.d and ~/.bash_profile and in case of adding a temporary path by additional RAM content.


Can't Add Printer with lpadmin I am trying to add a Pharos printer to a Mac, running Yosemite, and the command isn't working. The problem is that the printer queue has a space in the name. The genius that set it up didn't think that would ever be a problem. The command is:

lpadmin -p "Pharos Printer" -E -D "Pharos Printer" -P PHAROS_PRINTER.PPD -v popup://pharos.domain.com/Pharos%20Printer

%20 and quotes, or a combination of the two haven't worked yet. Anything else I can try? The above command works on printer queues that do not have spaces in their names.

I know that in the Terminal, you can escape the space using the \ character. So, what I would write is: Pharos\ Printer.
That way Terminal knows that a space character is incoming.


Streaming Netflix offline on Macbook using Windows I've decided to install Windows 10 on my MacBook Air (256GB, 2019 Model) using bootcamp in order to stream Netflix offline using their app. I'll be downloading movies using their app, to watch them offline later.

I want to ask :

How much memory would be ideal to allocate to Windows for above usage?
Will I lose on video/audio quality? If yes, then how much? Will it be too terrible to drop this idea altogether?

I think by memory you mean disk space - that really depends on how many movies and other files you want to store at a time.

There should be no difference in video/audio quality. The only exception is if you're running something else that is so taxing on the computer that it is not able to play the video in real time. If that happens, close down the other programs while watching video. This is no different than when streaming Netflix on a PC.


How to add apps or files to the Finder toolbar in 10.9 Mavericks? In previous versions of OS X, I could drag an application or any file onto the Finder toolbar, creating a persistent shortcut that works in all Finder windows.  It's no longer working in Mavericks.

cmd + drag does the job! This got me trying for a while.


How can I buy Yosemite apps from a Mavericks installation? I am trying to buy an app which runs on 10.10 only, from a computer that has 10.9 installed. The App Store does not like it:

Translation: Your purchase could not be completed. OmniOutliner could not be installed […], as it requires […] 10.10 or newer

In other words: I would like to just perform the buying process, not install the application on my computer (Which is not compatible – yet. Long story). Any help is greatly appreciated.

Nota bene: I can not buy from Omnigroup directly, or use a gift card. Another long story.

I know this is a fringe case. I can report that as of Summer of 2015, buying an app for a newer OS version from an older version is not possible. I solved the issue by installing 10.10 on a different partition, and bought the app from there.


Verification Failed. There was an error in connecting to your Apple ID I have an iPhone 5c and I've been trying to log onto my iTunes and Apple Store in my settings, but I keep getting a "Verification Failed. There was an error in connecting to your Apple ID." error. I don't know how to do resolve this. When I go onto my iCloud on my iPhone it says that my email is not verified even though I went to my email and verified it, it isn't recognized as verified on my iPhone.

This was driving me crazy! Accidentally the "set time/date automatically" had been turned off and the date was way off. Turning this back on made everything work again! Apple ID worked and all Google apps (YouTube) started working again.


In Spotlight search results, how do I find which folder contains a specific file? In OSX Spotlight, how do I find in which folder a document is? It used to be that hovering the mouse over the doc would show the folder. I miss that functionality!

You might want to try the following:

Search for and highlight the file in Spotlight as usual.
Hold down cmd (command) and press Enter (return).

This should open the file's containing folder, and works in all recent versions of OS X.


Installing applications from disk images - what about the resources? I know that the way to install an application on Mac is to drag the icon from the disk image onto applications. Often these folders don't just contain an application but resources (such as a readme as well). How do I then access these resources later? Do I have to save the disk images as well? This seems kind of silly as then the default instructions for installing the application mean that you can't easily access the readme later (as the disk image has probably been saved to the downloads folder where it will eventually end up being deleted).

What I do in these cases (which I seem to run into fairly often lately) is create a new folder in Applications, and then drag everything from the disk image into that folder. It's one extra level, but it works just fine for almost every application.


Text Messaging Forwarding code not showing up on macbook pro On my macbook, I successfully set up iCloud and can view all my contacts and such in the Contacts app.

On my iPhone6, I went into settings -> Text Messaging Forwarding and turned on the indicator for my macbook pro.  Then my iPhone6 asks me for a code "shown on your Mac".  But no code is showing up on my mac?

What now?

The iPhone and the macbook should be on the same wifi network.

Open the messages app in your macbook, then go to preferences. Click on iMessage account and you should see your iCloud account, check the box near email and phone number
go to your iPhone settings -> messages -> Send and receive, and see if your email is there.
turn on text message as you did before, the code will show on your messages app on the macbook


Pin Application to Specific Screen Is there anyway to pin windows that an application launches to a specific screen? As an example zoom launches two windows when starting a meeting one that for video and one with meeting information. It used to keep launching them in the same screens but lately I have noticed that each window will open on a different screen each time. The pattern seems random as sometimes they will just swap places but other times they will go to a different screen where it is not normally on to begin with.

Apps will launch to a given Space, if set - right click the app in the Dock > Options , *.
They will only launch to a given physical display if you don't have "Displays have separate Spaces" on in System prefs > Mission Control.
Apps do not like being spread across multiple Spaces.
*Apple use the terms Desktop and Space interchangeably, unfortunately. Display, however, always means 'physical screen'.


Confusion about recommended clock speed Recently  I have been facing issues with multitasking with my Macbook Pro (13-inch, Late 2011) and decided to upgrade my RAM. Now, my laptop currently has 2-2GB DDR3 1333 MHz for a total of 4GB. I wanted to upgrade my RAM to a total of 8GB.

Here's my confusion:

The Apple Support page on upgrading RAM recommends 1600MHz for my model.

So what should I do? Stick with 1333MHz or buy 1600MHz?I'm willing to spend the extra money if the motherboard will be able to utilize faster memory. Will I notice a difference? Also, what about warranty? Will my warranty be voided by installing either of these myself?

The MacBook Pro: How to remove or install memory article you linked does not state 1600 MHz for MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2011)!   It actually states "PC3-10600 DDR3 1333 MHz type RAM".  I would not purchase 1600 MHz RAM and instead purchase what is specified.

As to voiding the warranty for upgrading the RAM yourself, I was told at an Apple store that it wouldn't however If you live close to an Apple store and your Mac is still under warranty I'd suggest you have them do it unless you have the proper tools and knowledge to accomplish the task.


Is there a way to make launchd stop a service on sleep and start it up again on wake? I have several pieces of server software installed on my MacBook Pro for work using Homebrew. There is one service in particular, that likes to peg the CPU after the OS wakes up from sleep until I restart it. The service is currently managed by launchd, and I am wondering if there is a way for me to tell launchd to stop the service when the OS goes to sleep, and then start it up again on wake.

You can use SleepWatcher:

  It can be used to execute a Unix command when the Mac or the display of the Mac goes to sleep mode or wakes up, after a given time without user interaction or when the user resumes activity after a break or when the power supply of a Mac notebook is attached or detached.

Run launchctl load <path> and launchctl unload <path> with SleepWatcher on wake and sleep respectively.


Use IR sensor integrated Mac to listen to IR signals I am trying to understand if under the hood of my MacBook Pro I can have access to its IR sensor (the same used for Apple Remote)?

The goal is to read/listen to IR signals, for example a TV controller or my child's remote control car controller.

Are there any tricks or software I can use to achieve this?

Apple's IR sensor only works with the two versions of the Apple remote (white plastic and aluminum).

To use another remote you need to attach an external IR receiver and install additional software.

See remote buddy


Shrink all images in pages document I have a huge (filesize) pages document, which I suspect is due to all the images in it.

The images were copied from elsewhere and pasted in.

A lot of the images are original resolutions of 1080 minimum (in most cases higher)

However, in the new document they obviously don't need to be that large.

Is there a way for me to reduce the document's filesize by limiting the images' sizes?

I hope you can understand what I mean.

(I need to be able to convert this to a word document afterwards if that matters)

Preview can reduce the file size though you don't have much control over exactly what it does and how. For that you may need a purpose-built PDF editing tool, or Adobe Acrobat Standard or Pro.

Open the file in preview and then go FILE > DUPLICATE. A new identical window will open. Now save the new file and from the Quartz Filter menu select CompressPDF. Give your document a different name or location and click save.

Depending on what is going on in your PDF you should get a smaller file. But again you will have better control over the process with one of Adobe's Acrobat products or one of the third party PDF tools available for the Mac.


What is the "boost_interprocess" folder in iCloud "Documents"? While cleaning up old files I've found an empty "boost_interprocess" folder in my iCloud "Documents" folder (it's really empty: checked in Terminal).

Any idea what this folder is for - a quick search seems to find a lot of references to this folder in Windows and one answer on Stack Overflow, but I'm mystified as to what created this?

I'm on OS X Mojave 10.14.4, MacBook Pro.

QuarkXPress creates a "boost_interprocess" folder

I've just found the answer. This folder can be created for several process, but in this case it's QuarkXPress, as outlined in this QuarkXPress support post.


Batch edit ID3 music tags using custom algorithm I like to keep my iTunes library organised and all files well-tagged, so I often spend enjoyable yet unreasonably long amounts of time editing all the ID3 tags manually. Call it OCD or perfectionism, that's how I roll. Thankfully, iTunes is rather convenient for basic operations like batch-changing tags or artworks, but it only goes so far. The problem is that for much music I get, the tags have to be edited for each track individually, taking into account details like numbers and such. Here's an example of what I mean:

Notice that files have no embedded track numbers, and are numbered within the track name instead. This picture is more to my liking:

To achieve this within bare iTunes, one would have to input track numbers by hand and then remove the ХХ - from each name. Now, I can of course do this by repeatedly mashing the favoured combo (holding ⌥: ← → → ← ⌫ Left Mouse Button), but when I need it for 300 tracks across numerous albums, this turns into a problem.

So I want to have a quick way for my Mac to do this for me. I imagine something like a script that extracts track numbers from file names or name tags through use of wildcard characters and applies them to respective ID3 tags while removing numbers from names. Finder has a handy built-in dialog for batch-renaming, but as far as I know it doesn't have this specific formatting functionality. I tried Automator and MusicBrainz Picard, but they don't have that either.

Is there anything that can be of help? Script libraries for Automator or Terminal commands? Maybe some handy AppleScript functions I don't know of?

A Combination of AppleScript (or Shell Scripting if you are so inclined), along with a command line tool like id3v2 should do the trick.

You can build id3v2 from source:
http://id3v2.sourceforge.net
Or use MacPorts or HomeBrew to do the building and installation for you.

Once you have it installed you can view the help page by typing in "id3v2 ah" from the terminal. The help page is more helpful than the man page is.

Then it is just a matter of writing the AppleScript to pass the filenames into variables and use those variables on the command line script like such:

set shellScript to ("id3v2 -T " & trackNumber & space & numberofTracks & space & "/path/to/file") as string
do shell script shellScript

You may also want to think about changing the name of the file itself so that it no longer has the track number in the name!

I hope this can get you started!


How can I speed up the iOS speech Ever since I update to iOS 9.3, text to speech has been super-slow in Instapaper and Pocket.

I tried going to settings -> general -> accessibility -> speech and changing the speed, but it's not helping.

Got any advice for how to fix this? (Or is this a bug in this version of iOS?)

With iOS 9.3, iPhone 6s and 6s Plus can utilize Offline Dictation. Check Settings > General > Keyboard and try toggling "Enable Dictation" off then back on.


Mac doesn't go into sleep mode Sometimes my mac mini doesn't go into standby after the inactivity time specified in system settings. This happened with Yosemite, and continues to happen with El Capitan.

Quite sure, there is some application that prevents sleep, but I'm still unable to identify it. Is there a systematic way to identify the guilty application?

After trying everything i could find on the web, i figured out that it was a page in the (HP) printer queue that was keeping my Mac from sleeping for days. Turned on the printer, forced the page to print and my Mac is now FINALLY going back to sleep.

There was no indication of this in the Activity Monitor nor the "pmset -g assertions" command that pointed to anything printer related. Hope this helps someone !


How to remove old epson software from iMac? My iMac has been running slow and hanging.  I looked and found that a lot of old EPSON printer software is still running and installed. I found an uninstall executable in finder:

But when I try to open that I get this error:

So I tried looking at that file via terminal and I found that is actually a directory and the actuall executable is here:

MyiMac:/ root# /Applications/Epson\ Software/Uninstaller.app/Contents/MacOS/Uninstaller

and when I execute that executable this window eventually pops up and hangs:

How can remove this epson garbage off my system?

Update: I have followed the instructions described here: https://epson.com/Support/wa00350

and the EPSON folder has been removed from the /Library/Printers:

Yet there is still EPSON software running on my system:

And I can still see EPSON applications in launchpad:

Note I did have trouble rebooting my iMac and had to pull the power plug out because the system hung during boot up.  Fortunately, the second boot attempt was successful.

The solution that worked (for other users):

Follow the instructions here:

  From the Apple menu, select System  Preferences.
  Click Print & Fax.
  Highlight any Epson printers and click the ￼ button to remove them from the Printers list, then click OK.
  Open the hard drive

  Select Library > Printers.
  Select the folder labeled EPSON and drag it to the trash.

  Note: This will remove all installed Epson printer drivers. You’ll
  need to reinstall any printer drivers that you still need.

If the software is still on your computer then try using the uninstaller.

This should completely remove all the software.


finer control of Preview anti-aliasing (font smoothing)? I have just updated to Yosemite and something must have changed in the way Preview renders fonts.

I find that Preview display of text in PDF files is rather sloppy, I am pretty sure it used to be much sharper in Mavericks. At the very least now Preview is significantly less sharp than Acrobat Reader, you can check out a screen-shot to convince yourself of what I am talking about.

In the rest of the UI I am quite happy with how fonts are displayed. So I was wondering if there are ways to control the anti-aliasing of Preview. In the preferences of Preview I can find only a global switch for anti-aliasing, but I would like to play around with the strength of the anti-aliasing so to find the optimal setting.

I am looking into defaults of com.apple.Preview but in my current values there seem to be no setting about Font Smoothing or anything evocative of anti-aliasing. Any suggestion about possible values to edit here?

Thanks for your suggestions,
Roberto

I have found a solution to this problem: replacing Yosemite's PDFKit with Mavericks' PDFKit. As simple as that. I replaced the contents of /System/Library/Frameworks/Quartz.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/PDFKit.framework/Versions/A and everything is working fine now.

For those who don't have a copy of Mavericks from where you can take the PDFKit files, I have uploaded a copy to: http://www.filedropper.com/pdfkit (hope there are no copyright issues with this - I will remove the link if asked to do so).

By the way, changing the Current symlink to point to the Mavericks version and keeping the original A/ directory DIDN'T fix the issue. I had to remove the Yosemite version completely and put the Mavericks version contents inside A/ (it seems Preview and Skim both are hard coded to Versions/A and do not follow the Current symlink).


Does APFS reduce the needed free space on SSD's? I've seen recommendations for the minimum amount of free space one should have on an SSD that range from 20%—33%.  For instance, this answer (Can MacBook Pro get slower after SSD is almost full?) cites a 2012 Anandtech study (https://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op) that concluded:
"Whatever drive you end up buying, plan on using only about 75% of its capacity if you want a good balance between performance consistency and capacity."

The Anantech study was, however, pre-APFS.  I understand that APFS is optimized to work with SSDs, so my question is whether that optimization changes (reduces) the minimum free space needed to obtain, using Anandtech's words, "a good balance between performance consistency and capacity."

Further, it's also possible that APFS's different design might mean that the minimum free space needed to obtain a "good balance" should be expressed in absolute, rather than relative (percentage) terms.

I currently have a late-2014 MBP with a 1 TB 4-lane PCIe SSD, with 200 GB free out of 940 GB available on my main partition (I have a 2nd partition with 60 GB available).

I understand APFS can reduce the total storage space needed to store a given set of files (see https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/06/08/inside-macos-1013-high-sierra-apfs-benefits-end-users-with-space-speed), but that's a different attribute from the one I'm asking about. Please also note that I know I can move little-used files to other disks (obviously), but that's not my question. I'm purely interested in learning if APFS affects the minimum free space needed for "a good balance between performance consistency and capacity" and, if so, why it does this.

If we assume that the Anandtech study's conclusions are correct, then no, there's no change in the needed free space when using APFS instead of HFS+. You would need no more and no less free space.

It is important to note that the "free space" that Anandtech talks about is not the free space inside the file file system (i.e. part of the filesystem structure that is not currently used for storing user data), but rather free space outside the file system (i.e. part of the disk that has never been written to).

As both HFS+ and APFS support the TRIM command, the essential here happens outside the file system, and thus the change from HFS+ to APFS does not affect the result.

However, you might still observe a performance difference when using APFS compared to HFS+. This is not caused by the free space issue itself, but rather that APFS and HFS+ simply have different performance characterics. Some things APFS does faster than HFS+, and vice versa.


How do I prevent AppleScript from using short numbers? So AppleScript by default uses the exponential notation of numbers - for example, 2.99E+68.
How do I prevent that from happening? I want the number written out as it is.

An AppleScript function convertNumberToString is provided by Apple.

Mac Automation Scripting Guide: Manipulating Numbers

  Converting a Long Number to a String

  In AppleScript, long numeric values are displayed in scientific notation. For example, 1234000000 is displayed by a script as 1.234E+9. When this value is coerced to a string, it becomes: "1.234E+9". The handler in Listing 20-3 converts a number, regardless of length, to a string of numeric characters instead of a numeric string in scientific notation.

on convertNumberToString(theNumber)
    set theNumberString to theNumber as string
    set theOffset to offset of "E" in theNumberString
    if theOffset = 0 then return theNumberString
    set thePrefix to text 1 thru (theOffset - 1) of theNumberString
    set theConvertedNumberPrefix to ""
    if thePrefix begins with "-" then
        set theConvertedNumberPrefix to "-"
        if thePrefix = "-" then
            set thePrefix to ""
        else
            set thePrefix to text 2 thru -1 of thePrefix
        end if
    end if
    set theDecimalAdjustment to (text (theOffset + 1) thru -1 of theNumberString) as number
    set isNegativeDecimalAdjustment to theDecimalAdjustment is less than 0
    if isNegativeDecimalAdjustment then
        set thePrefix to (reverse of (characters of thePrefix)) as string
        set theDecimalAdjustment to -theDecimalAdjustment
    end if
    set theDecimalOffset to offset of "." in thePrefix
    if theDecimalOffset = 0 then
        set theFirstPart to ""
    else
        set theFirstPart to text 1 thru (theDecimalOffset - 1) of thePrefix
    end if
    set theSecondPart to text (theDecimalOffset + 1) thru -1 of thePrefix
    set theConvertedNumber to theFirstPart
    set theRepeatCount to theDecimalAdjustment
    if (length of theSecondPart) is greater than theRepeatCount then set theRepeatCount to length of theSecondPart
    repeat with a from 1 to theRepeatCount
        try
            set theConvertedNumber to theConvertedNumber & character a of theSecondPart
        on error
            set theConvertedNumber to theConvertedNumber & "0"
        end try
        if a = theDecimalAdjustment and a is not equal to (length of theSecondPart) then set theConvertedNumber to theConvertedNumber & "."
    end repeat     if theConvertedNumber ends with "." then set theConvertedNumber to theConvertedNumber & "0"
    if isNegativeDecimalAdjustment then set theConvertedNumber to (reverse of (characters of theConvertedNumber)) as string
    return theConvertedNumberPrefix & theConvertedNumber
end convertNumberToString


Can't download anything with enough storage? I have 478 MB available, and this game is 228 MB. Every time I try to download it, I get a message saying I don't have enough space. But I do. What am I supposed to do?! I really want this app!

You actually don't have the required space.

Apps are shipped in containers called IPAs. An IPA is actually just a zip file, and compresses some of the content. Each app, depending on how they are built, can achieve varying degrees of compression.

In the above image, you can see just how much disparity exists between the App Store's reported size and the actual install size.

Infinity Blade 3 is listed at 1.7GB by the App Store, but installs to 2.6GB. Additionally, Bastion reports requiring 534MB, but actually needs more than twice that amount of space (1.2GB).

Since it would be impossible for Apple to gather the required information from actual install size, they offer the size of the IPA as a guideline. To be safe, one should allow for 3x the existing space. In your case, you may require about 800MB free (ballpark).

And remember, you need some free space (for caches, app data, etc.). It's unwise to operate with absolutely no free space, typically leading to a negative impact on performance.


How have I got two identical Amazon Prime Video apps on my phone? I recently clicked a link which took me to the App Store to download the Amazon Prime Video app. This was confusing to me because I already have that app. I downloaded it anyway, and now I have two identical (looking) apps on my phone? How is this possible? I have an iPhone SE.

I can answer this one for you. Amazon are trying to transfer everybody to a new app. The one you linked to is the old one. Search the app store and you'll find the new one (at V6.4 vs 6.1 for the old).
A while back Amazon sent a push message with a link telling everyone to update. You probably did and didn't delete the old one.
What the difference is at this point in time between the two? Probably nothing. That might change though.


How to use 2009-era Airport Extreme in Bridge Mode Wifi I have a 2009-era Airport Extreme that used to provide routing and WiFi for our cablemodem. Time Warner updated our cablemodem to a DG860, which comes with its own built-in WiFi.

I'd like to re-purpose the Airport Extreme as a WiFi bridge. Specifically, I'd like to be able to plug my wired ethernet devices (e.g. a printer in the basement) into a LAN port on the Airport Extreme, and have it bridge to the Time Warner WiFi network.

When I attempt this in Airport Utility the most logical option seems to be "Add to an existing network", but it seems to expect to be physically plugged into the network. I.e. it wants to be plugged into the other router:

Is there a way to bridge the Airport Extreme over WiFi?

What you are describing is a WiFi extender. EG extending your Wifi network over WiFi. The basic two things you need to know are:

No this Airport won't do that. I don't believe any will.
WiFi repeaters just (usually) don't work very well.

TheWirecutter.com has a good take on it AND recommendations here http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-extender/.


How to remove local snapshots on mojave Asking for a friend...

He's having issues with local snapshots being taken by Time Machine.  He doesn't want to disable Time Machine entirely, but due to disk space issues causing performance issues, he wants to have local snapshots disabled - he connects to the network regularly enough that the networked time machine does backups frequently enough.

On previous versions of MacOS, he could run the command

sudo tmutil disablelocal

to only have the remote backups enabled.

This command aparrently does not work any more.  What can be done to configure the system in the same way?

I also had problems with running out of disk space due to Time Machine/APFS local snapshots and the macOS disk purging system not working quickly enough -- I didn't find a way of disabling local snapshots, but I did find the following commands can help, if making management a little more manual.

If you want to delete all local snapshots, the following command will work -- but it's possible the next Time Machine update will take longer as it will have to work out the differences between the last Time Machine backup and the current state of the drive.

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /

If you just want to delete some local snapshots, you can try the following command, the numbers I've used are completely arbitrary, I was just trying to force it to free up some space:

 sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 1000000000 3

The first value is the purge amount (1 GB in this case) you'd like tmutil to try and reclaim, the second value is the urgency, which can be from 1 to 4.  I've no idea which is more urgent, 1 or 4, it doesn't seem to be documented.  If you use this command repeatedly it will delete more snapshots each time, until they're all deleted.


How can I hyper customize the MacBookPro Touch Bar? I want my Touch Bar to have:

Esc

F1-F12

Toggle Mute

Volume Slider

Screen-Brightness Slider

I don't care if the buttons have to be squished to achieve this. I know you can do some customization through System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard, but it doesn't give you much fine control. Is there another interface or maybe even a config file one can use to hyper customize the Touch Bar?

MTMR , it's free but it does need some editing to get it fully customized


Importing album art from ripped music I have over 130+ artists with 1000s of tracks all sorted and with valid metadata externally to the Music / iTune app on my Mac (Catalina).  The folder layout is Artist / Album / CD in Album (ranges 1-12 currently) / Tracks (e.g. 01 - Composer - Track Name.p4a)
When I import the artist / track, Music does not apply the artwork even though its in the track metadata and stored as Folder.jpg in the source folder.  The latter works on a couple of music players and Volumio on the Raspberry under the TV :-)
I'm happy to delete the whole Mac music library and start again if needed.
Though I can, if needed, hack around in Python, I'm not an Apple script creator.
I could go through the whole lot and manually link the jpg to the album but does anyone know of an easier way?

Turns out if you leave it about 20 minutes and exit out of Music and go back in it sorts itself.


Iphone 5 and Ipads sharing photos We have an Iphone 5 and 2 Ipads - the photo stream is currently set so that all photos taken on any of the three devices are all in one place.  This is now becoming annoying as I don't want to see all of the photos my daughter or my son take, and vice versa with mine.  How can we create an area where we have three separate photo streams, but have access to them all automatically?  If I want to find one of my photos I have to wade through all the stuff they might have taken.  Thanks.

While not automatic, you could setup separate iCloud accounts for each of you (but still use the same iTunes Store account so that you can access the music, movies, apps, etc. you have purchased) and then share a Photo Stream with each so that you can choose what you are sharing with each other.

That would be using Photo Stream. I'm not sure if there are better ways of doing it with some other apps.


Enable SIP without reboot? Some time ago, I read somewhere that Apple had decided to provide a way to enable SIP without a recovery reboot.  If that’s true, how?  It isn’t csrutil enable (at least not on my system).

It would be an obvious security risk to allow disable in normal use.  But when I need to edit something “special,” it would be nice to do it with two reboots instead of four.

Of course, it may be that what I read was neither from Apple nor accurate.  But I definitely read it, and my possibly faulty memory says it was in release notes for one of the updates.

No matter how much I try to make "enable" mandatory, web search gives me tons of hits on "disable."

Generally, you can use sudo csrutil clear, follow by a reboot, to enable SIP. So the command enables SIP without a reboot, however this does not go into effect until the next reboot. This get it down to 3 reboots to enable/disable SIP.

You can get it down to two reboot by using rEFInd.

If you want to disable SIP with a single reboot, then install rEFInd. If you specify the --usedefault option when installing rEFInd, then rEFInd will be installed to the /EFI/BOOT folder in the EFI volume. This will allow rEFInd to appear in the Startup Manager. A boot to rEFInd is almost instantaneous, as opposed to macOS Recovery which is not. Once rEFInd is properly installed, changing the status of SIP can be done by the following steps.

Reboot and hold down the option key to boot to the Startup Manager.
Select to boot to rEFInd.
From the rEFInd menu, select to enable or disable SIP.
From the rEFInd menu, select to boot to macOS.

If you have Windows or another Linux installed which uses the /EFI/BOOT folder in the EFI partition, then you will need to create another small partition for rEFInd to boot from. This can be another EFI partition, a FAT32 formatted or ExFAT formatted partition. You can even put rEFInd on a flash drive, if you do not rEFInd installed on your internal drive.

I also should note that rEFInd now includes gdisk, which is a command that is easier to use than the gpt command included with macOS. So, if you need SIP temporarily disabled to edit the partitioning on disk0, you can do this in only 1 boot.


Turn on and off MacBook Pro Retina connected to a Thunderbolt Display monitor I would like to know if there is a way to turn on and off a Macbook Pro Retina connected to a Thunderbolt Display monitor when it is closed.

Should I open my MacBook Pro Retina each time I need to turn on my computer?

Is the only solution to not turn it off and putting it into sleeping mode?

You can bring up the power menu by pressing Control-Eject. You can also directly sleep (Command-Option-Eject), shut down (Command-Option-Control-Eject), restart (Command-Control-Eject), or turn off the display (Shift-Control-Eject) using the keyboard. You can also press any key to wake a sleeping mac.

There is no known way of turning on recent Macbooks via keyboard except for the power button.


Is it possible for two users to mount the same Shared disk on Time Capsule? (On one Mac.) The situation is this; 1 shared Mac Mini with user switching.  If I leave the Shared disk mounted and the other user logs in, they get prompted for Administrator credentials (which disconnects me.)  We both need to be able mount and use the share without disrupting processes running under each user.

I just tried the same thing, without any problems... Do you use user accounts to authenticate the users on the time capsule ? If yes, you should probably configure it to use the airport network. With this, both users will connect with the same "account", and should be able to use the same share concurrently (that works for me)

Here is a screen cap of the setting (sorry, it's in french) :


How to download a game twice with an apple ID? Could you pls inform me How I could download a game twice with my apple ID on my Iphone, since I deleted it by mistake and now I can not download it.

Anything you buy on the App Store is able to be downloaded again as many times as you like, it's not like it used to be on iTunes where you downloaded it once, and then couldn't do it again if you lost the file.

To do this, just go back to the app store, and search for the app in question.  Instead of listing a price, or saying FREE etc, you should have a little icon showing a cloud and an arrow which you can tap to redownload.  Note, you can only download the latest version of the App, so it it has been updated since you last used it, then you cannot go back to an older version (unless you have a local backup of the file on your iTunes machine).  Also, you must be logged into the store using the same Apple ID that was used to make the original purchase.

The only way I know of that you cannot use this method, is if the app is no longer available on the App Store, in which case you can still get it, but you need to go through your purchase history to get to the download link instead of getting it from searching the store.


Are there any free and  lightweight spreadsheet programs for the Mac? I'm looking for a free spreadsheet editor that is simple and lightweight. I don't want to install OpenOffice just to use a some spreadsheets every once in a while.

If Chrome isn't too heavy for you Google Docs has very capable spreadsheet facilities that improve all the time. You can even run it offline if you're going to be away from an internet connection.


Pressing Siri button disables fans Whenever I press the Siri button on the Touch Bar, it temporarily disables the fans on my laptop, is there a way to prevent this?

This is an intended feature of macOS and has been noted since as early as 2016 for Siri and dictation.

Even with third-party utilities like Temp Monitor that control fan speed, Siri and dictation will slow down fan speeds to an acceptable level while in use.


Can Find My iPhone password be different than my Apple ID? Can my Find My iPhone password be different than my Apple ID password? I would like it to be different so my girlfriend can see where I am but not be able to access my entire phone.

In short, no.

Your alternative would be to use the Find My Friends app, which should be already installed in anything since iOS 9.


Macbook lists all WLAN-networks of another machine. How and why was they shared? Maintaining my wife's MacbookPro, that never left the house over many years, i've found in the list of preferred WiFi-networks ALL networks, that i was ever connected to worldwide with another Macbook, even a complete new one. Also all networks, we was ever connected to with our iPhones are listed on this Mac.

We don't use a shared iCloud-account. The only thing in common is, that all those devices are connected with the same WiFi at home quiet often.

Although it's not an issue here for me ;), maybe it will be for others getting leaked their locations where they've stored a WLAN-connection that shouldn't be visible to colleagues, partners, children and so on.

My question is: how and why are the networks shared across machines and across accounts/different persons? Isn't it a privacy issue? I don't know if passwords to the networks are also present on her machine, because i don't know how to test it without travelling. If so, she could connect into the networks of several companies i have worked for recently

All stored wifi are stored in the user and system keychains. You can open up Keychain Access and search for all known / saved networks in the system and your user account.

Repeat for other user accounts and you'll know how or when they arrived.

iCloud Keychain syncing seems the most logical source along with not changing the default "remember networks I have joined" but rather than speculate, you can go to the source keychains.


What are the domains of the iTunes & Software Update CDNs? Background info: the various iTunes stores (and I think Software Update) use the a CDN to deliver all those jigabits of data. Google DNS can mess with the speed of these CDNs.

I like using Google DNS (speedier, avoids my ISP's annoying DNS hijacking), but also like speedy downloads from iTunes. I've discovered that I can tinker with the DNS settings on my router to use my ISP's DNS to lookup certain domains, and keep the rest on Google DNS. However this of course means I need to know which domains to lookup via my ISP's DNS. So far I've got itunes.com, itunes.apple.com and phobos.apple.com.

Doing some non-scientific tests monitoring download speeds via Activity Monitor, it seems like this has sped up my iTunes downloads, but not in all cases and not uniformly. Are there any domains I'm missing that I should also add to my list? Am I tilting at windmills?

The domain names are from a1.phobos.apple.com to a1999.phobos.apple.com.  These domains are for downloading from the App Store or the iTunes Store.


Copying data from unbootable Mac Two days ago I turned on my Mac to find out that it doesn't boot anymore. I tried everything, Safe Boot, NVRAM reset, repair disk from recovery mode everything; but, no luck.  So, I finally decided to reinstall Yosemite.

But before that I want to copy some files from the hard disk. So what should I do?

If you have another computer that can support target disk mode, simply boot with T held and connect per your MacBook (usb or thunderbolt or FireWire are all possible target disk mode). Your Mac is now a hard drive to copy / recover the data.

If not, Assuming you do not have a current Time Machine Backup then...

If you can boot to the Recovery HD, then attach an external USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt drive (whichever works for you since you didn't state what Mac you have, and boot to Recovery HD and then use Disk Utility to make a Disk Image of your Home Folder to the external drive.  Or a Disk Image of whatever Folders you want to save.

In Disk Utility click, File > New > Disk Image from Folder...

In the Select Folder to Image dialog box navigate to the target location, e.g. /Macintosh HD/Users/$USER and select the Folder, then click the Image button.

In the New Image from Folder dialog box, name the image and then navigate to the external target location to be saved and then click the Save button.

In this example, you now have a disk image of your Home folder on an external drive and can copy your User Data back from that image after you clean install the OS.


Safely Wipe Mac OS SSD In order to sell my Mac (running High Sierra), I would like to know if there is an absolutely secure way of wiping all data preventing any recovery possibilities from the next owner?

I've read many articles or blog entries stating that the usual "secure deletion" tools do not really work for SSD disks.

Thats true. SSDs work a little different than the usual HDDs. A program that overwrites the memory multiple times does more harm than good on SSDs. You kinda have to trust apple that their ERASE function actually securely removes any information. There are also certain SSD erasing tools, but it comes to trusting them once again. If you don't want to trust them I suggest you to encrypt your SSD and then erase it. You can use FileVault (or third party encryption software) and after setting it up simply use erase. This method is very safe and as long as you don't try to hide secrets from the government you should be fine thehe.

In SSDs you first have to erase the target area before you can write to it compared to HDDs. The Flash memory is divided into blocks, those are again devided into pages. You can directly write into an empty page. However if you want to delete, it can only be a whole block. SSDs tend to wear out after extensive use, so it's generally a bad idea to write unnecessary ammount of times. When writing a sentence the SSD's controller will read the page, then write a new page (with the sentence mentioned earlier) to another location. Old page will be marked as empty. The old page number will be assigned to the new page. If you overwrite the SSD multiple times, the reserve space is not gonna be touched, hence leftover information could be investigated by an attacker. Once again this comes down to trusting the vendor that provides the erasing functionality. Encrypting the whole disk eliminates this problem.


Why I can't use the 'define' button after updating to iOS 9.0.2? I just updated my iPhone to iOS 9.0.2, then I want to define some words. When I clicked the 'define' button, there's nothing appear. But, before I updated to iOS 9.0.2, I still can use the define button. So what should I do to allow it to define the words I want?

Go to Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> and make sure the languages you want your iPhone to recognize are in the "Preferred Language Order" list.

If the language you prefer is already in that list, tap "edit" to delete the language, and then add it back up. This should add the language's dictionary and enable the "define" function.


What is this infrared light on my iPhone 4 and how do I turn it off? This is a picture of my iPhone 4 that I just took with an infrared-capable camera.
As you can see, there is a light on top, around the middle. You can only see it with with an infrared-enabled camera, and it usually blinks whenever the screen is lit up and turns off when the screen gets turned off.

I find it super creepy, and would LOVE to turn this thing off. Whether I'm in my right mind to freak out about something that is a) concealed (not visible by human eyes) and b) whose purpose is super shady is really mostly my problem, but I'd love to know if it can be done.
Besides from the freaky part, I used to be able to use my iPhone 3gs all day long with the same charge and the battery on this sort of newer iPhone 4 has a much lower duration, maybe because this little light-thing blinks so much all the time?

The information I've found online mentioned Siri being the cause of this, so I turned off Siri. Before I took the picture.

Well, that is the proximity sensor which should detect when you hold the phone to your ear and turn off the touch screen, etc. On my iPhone 5 it is only active when I make a phone call or use a App that uses it (e.g. SmartSleep). It is also visible to the eye when you are in a dark room.

These (rather old) articles (1, 2) has more info and states that this is a known problem on the iPhone 4. They suggests to try the following:

Hard reboot (hold power and home button until the Apple logo appears again)
Reset your settings (Settings > General > Reset > All Settings)
Reset Network setting (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings)

After resetting you should also reboot the device.


Is it possible to purchase an iPhone app now to download later? I was wondering if there is a way (or at least if it is possible) to purchase an app from the app store now, but do not download it now (to save on disk space) and download it later when required.

Often there are apps on sale (e.g., Lonely Planet city guides) that are not immediately useful. These are great apps, but not immediately useful. So, instead of downloading the app right away and use up disk space, it would be nice to purchase the app and download later when required.

You could purchase the app, then tap on the icon as soon as it appears to pause the download, and leave it paused indefinitely.


What are some good ways to free up disk space on OS X >= Yosemite? I am fed up with all these useless "Delete old pictures" "Delete your trash" BuzzFeed-tier articles so I am hoping for some qualified ideas here.

What I've done so far (and how much it deleted) is:

Monolingual (2.5gb) : deletes unused languages in applications.
I only kept Chinese and English. It can also delete classes for older architectures but that was only a few mb, languages is the main focus of that app. Many people say it destroys your applications but I've been using it for 5 months straight now and never experienced any problems
OmniDiskSweeper (countless gb) : like TreeSizeFree on Windows it lists directories by size.
This way I for example found about 8gb of iTunes cache files that haven't been deleted, some xCode caches and simply big folders of other applications. If you "lower your standards" every session you will eventually end up even looking for folders smaller than 100mb but it's totally worth it as e.g. 6 of them already make half a gigabyte
CCleaner (5gb) : well-known on Windows but not too popular among mac users it took care of my cache files (basically Chrome (2.2gb) and Ableton(1.5gb) but it also deleted some system caches
OnyX (300mb) : it's rather fixing stuff than deleting but it also looks for some temporary files that were meant to  be - but never have been - deleted
deleting Garage Band (maybe 3gb) : as I am using nothing but Ableton for music production I deleted the app and most of its contents except for some fine drum samples

What else can i do? Having a 120gb MBA I have no choice but to locate every single file that's not completely necessary. It's just weird that, without installing applications, I see my drive getting more and more filled up with junk (I guess). Of course a system won't just magically lose "weight", but I can remember being at 45gb of free storage 10 months ago and my computer usage hasn't really changed since. (I am at 18gb now)

I might try CleanMyMac 3 at some point but I haven't heard about it too much yet.

EDIT: I will include your ideas in OP if it helped, but the best hint still gets a tick tho

More Suggestive answer supporting with everyone's answer as our main purpose is to delete unnecessary file and folder for iOS developer:

DeviceSupport - You can keep the simualator which log's you may need in future. It's actually symbolicate crash logs for different device/iOS.
Delete this folder after every few days interval

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData
All your targets are kept in archived form in Archives folder. Before you decide to delete contents of this folder, here is a warning - if you want to be able to debug deployed versions of your App, you shouldn’t delete the archives

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/Archives
iOS Device Support folder creates a subfolder with the device version as identifier when you attach the device. Most of the time it’s just old stuff. Keep the latest version and rest of them can be deleted (if you don’t have an app that runs on 5.1.1, there’s no reason to keep the 5.1.1 directory/directories).

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport
Core Simulator folder is familiar for many Xcode users. It’s simulator’s territory; thats where it stores app data.   It’s obvious that you can toss the older version simulator folder/folders if you no longer support your apps for those versions. And, it’s safer to use ‘Reset content and Settings’ option from menu to delete all of your app data in a Simulator.

~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator
Caches are always safe to delete since they will be recreated as necessary. This isn’t a directory, it’s a file of kind Xcode Project. Delete away!

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.dt.Xcode
Additionally, Apple iOS device automatically syncs specific files and settings to your Mac every time they are connected to your Mac machine. To be on safer side, it’s wise to use Devices pane of iTunes preferences to delete older backups; you should be retaining your most recent back-ups off course.

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

i got back about 40GB! For more help go to: http://ajithrnayak.com/post/95441624221/xcode-users-can-free-up-space-on-your-mac


How can I disable the rubber band effect of the Preview program? According to other sources, I've disabled the NSScrollViewRubberbanding system option, and it works in my browsers and other softwares. But it doesn't work for the Preview program, specifically when I read the PDF files. How can I disable the effect for the Preview too?

This is currently not possible for apps such as Preview which use a different scroll view.

You can provide feedback to Apple here:

http://apple.com/feedback/macosx.html


Handbrake Settings for New iPad (3rd Gen) What tweaks can be made to the existing presets for iPad output in Handbrake to optimize for new high resolution of the iPad 3rd Generation?

The iPad 3's H.264 playback chip is the same as the iPad 2 (and the new Apple TV's) - that is it will support up to:

1920x1080
30 FPS
High Profile at level 4.1

The biggest difference you'll find is that the 8x8 Transform option is now respected instead of being discarded when making sure the resulting settings matches Baseline or Main Profile specs.

  The 8x8 transform is the single most useful feature of x264 in terms of compression-per-speed. It improves compression by at least 5% at a very small speed cost and may provide an unusually high visual quality benefit compared to its compression gain. However, it requires High Profile, which many devices may not support.

From Handbrake's tooltip on the 8x8 transform.


How do I migrate my Transmission torrents & settings from an old Macbook to a new one? How do I transfer my Transmission 3.0 torrents, torrent data files, and colour tags/labels from 1 Macbook Pro to another.

My old Transmission app is in the old Macbook Pro MacOS boot ssd on a 2.5" OCZ vertex 4 ssd ~128GB. The actual torrent data files, 960 GB of anime, is on 2.5" HGST HDD 1000GB inside a macCaddy in the Superdrive slot. MacOS El Capitaine.
I plan to remove the MacCaddy and HGST drive from the old MAcbook and place it into the new Macbook's Superdrive bay.
The new Macbook Pro MacOS Catalina boots off a 2.5" OCZ 460 Vertex ssd ~256GB. How do I put transmission app settings into that drive and have it recognize the location of the torrents in the new HGST Hdd 1000GB drive?

Note:

On my old Mac I customized it so that my Home Folder (Documents, Downloads, Music, Photos, etc) was stored on my huge 1000GB HGST Hdd, it is not on the MacOS boot drive.
Transmission automatically puts my anime torrents in my Downloads folder so my data is targeted to go on my HGST drive automatically.
This setting will be important to transfer from my old Mac to my new Mac.

On your New Mac you do not need to install Transmission, in fact remove it.
Remove the HDD caddy with your 1000GB HGST hdd from your old macbook and install it in your new Macbook
On your new Mac customize the location of your Home folder so it points to your HGST 1000GB hdd
Take out and place your old Mac Vertex 4 SSD into an external 2.5 HDD enclosure, the Nexstar CX 2.5 is a great choice
Attach the HDD enclosure to the USB port of your new Mac
On the new mac type Migration Assistant in the spotlight search bar and the app will find your external drive
Select the external drive (orange coloured) and it will find transfer your applications, files, and everything!
You can include/omit 3 categories before migrating: files, apps, and network settings

When you open Transmission 3.0 (yes all othe Mac apps will migrated as well) all torrent colour tags/labels and torrents will be preserved. The file integrity check will be skipped, saving your hdd from checking everything all over again.
Notes:

Some apps on an older version of MacOS will not work once migrated to newer versions of MacOS. Download updates for them.
Pirated apps may not work depending on how they were cracked.
If you don't have an external hard drive enclosure, manually copy everything off your old Mac hard drive onto a usb key or external drive and it will work as well, but try to get the whole thing to fit into 1 drive. No partial transfers.


Blue bar for "Google Maps is Using Your Location" missing Typically, if Google Maps is closed while in use, there will be a blue bar indicating that Google Maps is still in use. Recently this bar has stopped appearing for me.

Why might the location bar have stopped showing up?

iOS 11
According to Techcrunch, iOS 11 will show the blue location bar when an app is using your location regardless of your privacy settings.

In iOS 10, if an app was set to use location “Only While Using the App”, and you pressed the Home button, a blue bar would appear. In iOS 11, the blue bar functionality has been expanded to those apps that are set to “Always,” too.
That means the blue status bar displays when those apps are using the continuous background location service – sort of like how the green bar shows up when a phone call is active, but you’ve exited from the Phone app to go to your home screen.

iOS 10
Check Settings → Privacy → Location Services → Google Maps and make sure location access for Google Maps is set to "While using the app". The blue bar won't show up if it's set to "Always".


iOS printing without AirPrint I have HP Laserjet 1020 connected to Airport Express and, after installing HP drivers, can print from MacBook Air. But there is no way to print from iOS devices because they need AirPrint compatible printer. Firstly, i installed handyPrint on mac, and everything was fine, but it works only when mac is on. So I tried and Printer Pro Lite application on iPhone. App can see printer but doesn't print anything. So I try to understand is there any possible way to tune my printer as AirPrint printer to print whenever I want? Or maybe install the right app on iPhone which can print?

Printer Pro won't solve the problem because

  Printer Pro is the application that lets you wirelessly print from the iPhone. It can print directly to many Wi-Fi printers and to any printer attached to your Mac or PC via helper application installed on your computer.

If you search for "HP print" in the App Store, there are quite a lot of hits. HP All-in-One Printer Remote looks kind of helpful (but I can't test it myself).


External drive's files not showing, but I know it has been half-filled with data. It works fine on Ubuntu but not on macOS? My external hard drive used to work just fine (my OS is Mojave) - I can read and write because I used NTFS Paragon software free trial. But now that I wiped all traces of said software, my external hard drive won't show its contents anymore. I know it's not a problem of the hard drive because when I click on Get Info it says it's half-full. And when I use Ubuntu, I can see and edit the files.

I tried Disk Utility (unmounting,mounting,repairing), booting into Recovery Mode and using Disk Utility to perform the same steps, leaving the external drive for hours, but none worked.

Please help!

EDIT: Solved. I reinstalled NTFS For Mac, restarted by 10-day trial.

On extra checking macos should be able to Read ntfs but not write. But this solution should still work

If you have removed paragon then you have removed the programs that can convert binary data on the disk into something macos understands. Thus you need something like paragon for macos to read it

Now Ubuntu includes the programs to convert the binary data to something Linux can read. So gives a possible solution.

I think the solutions are

restore from a backup not under ntfs eg from you cloud backup. You should always have something like that if you use a Computer
Use paragon or something like that to read the data.
Boot into Ubuntu or Windows and copy the data to another drive formatted in a way that Linux or Windows and macos can read  I think that has to be exFat. Copy the data onto this drive. Or copy to a network file server  or cloud based server. Then reboot into macos and copy the data from the exfat partition.


How can I take custom printer settings from one computer and transfer them to others on the network? I have a new printer on the network with four paper trays. If I set custom print settings on one computer. How can I transfer these setting to other computers?

Find the file

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.(your printer name)

and copy it to the other computer into the same location.


Set default sending account on a contact by contact basis in OS X mail I have several different mail accounts setup in Mail. Is it possible to define which account to use on a contact by contact basis? I'm trying to avoid sending mail from the wrong account, to the wrong person.

I would love to see this feature in Mail (because I would likely use it a lot), but this currently isn't supported.


My iphone 5c won't turn on, it just uzzes while plugged in I recently fell on my iPhone while it was in my back pocket. The screen wasn't cracked but it refused to show the home screen. All the same noises were present (i.e; siri, charging). I tried a hard reset and now it won't turn on or light up at all and it buzzes constantly while on the charger. Any suggestions?

While the glass did not crack it is highly likely that the digitizer itself was broken. It's a little uncommon for this to happen but I've fixed my fair share of phones like this. You need a new screen. (Full screen replacement(digitizer and glass))


Keep Finder location when switching between list view and icon view In Finder, if you are at a deep in folders or files while viewing as list mode and then you clicked on icons mode, the Finder shows all folders from the root of volume.  That is very annoying.  Because now you have to go to look for that location again.

See pictures for more details.

How do we keep the Finder to stay at the same location when switching from icons to list mode and vice versa?

You are at the same location, namely your root: "Mac1 Sys". You only expanded the folder contents, you did not move into that folder.

It is annoying to others as well ;)
I solve this by cmdmouse-dbl click on the folder and move to icon view (cmd1)

In my opinion Finder is old and needs some updating...


How to make Safari open all PDFs in-browser? For the majority of PDFs I view in Safari, they are opened in-line, which is what I want. For example, these all open in Safari:

MSP430F665x Data Sheet
MCP1700 Data Sheet
BAT54 /A /C /S Data Sheet

However, some PDFs, for reasons I have not been able to determine, are instead downloaded. For example, when I click on each of the following links, a PDF is immediately downloaded, instead of being displayed in-browser.

1825910 Drawing
OS Series Data Sheet

I suspect that the servers for the last two links are doing something like what is described in the StackOverflow question "force a pdf download automatically", but I'm not sure. I have already removed the last vestiges of Adobe's PDF reader, which I regret ever installing, including the internet plugin in the /Library/Internet Plugins directory.

How can I make sure that whenever Safari encounters a PDF, it is opened in the browser, and not downloaded?

As pointed out, the first three examples are direct links to the PDF files in question while the other two are controlled by a server script in the background.

There is nothing what you can do about it on your side since the server fully controls the distribution of documents in the two last example links you provided.


Modify iPhone restrictions passcode Is there a way to change the restrictions passcode on an iPhone without restoring the phone? I haven't forgotten the passocde; I just want to change it.

Erasing the phone in iTunes will remove the restrictions along with everything else.

Per my comment, you can change the passcode for restrictions under Settings > General > Restrictions

By clicking [enable restrictions] it will prompt you for password, you may disable it and then re-enter the passcode.

Reference as well here:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2478010?start=0&tstart=0


How to use Ctrl+left/Ctrl+Right (instead of Alt+left/Alt+right) to move to the previous/next word On a Mavericks system, I would like to use Ctrl+left/Ctrl+right instead of Alt+left/Alt+right to move to the next word or the previous word.

Mission Control is not using Ctrl+left/Ctrl+right (I changed that from the default value).

Is it possible to do this with some system setting (i.e. without a keymapper)?

You can use KeyRemap4MacBook with a private.xml such as this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <item>
    <name>⌃← & ⌃→ to ⌥← & ⌥→</name>
    <identifier>remapCtrlLeftAndCtrlRightToAltLeftAndAltRight</identifier>
    <autogen>
      __KeyToKey__
      KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, VK_CONTROL | ModifierFlag::NONE,
      KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L
    </autogen>
    <autogen>
      __KeyToKey__
      KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, VK_CONTROL | ModifierFlag::NONE,
      KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L
    </autogen>
  </item>
</root>

I'm not aware of any System Preferences setting regarding this.

With regard to comment, change the contents of the <autogen> to…

__KeyToKey__
KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, VK_OPTION | ModifierFlag::NONE,
KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, ModifierFlag::CONTROL_L

__KeyToKey__
KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, VK_OPTION | ModifierFlag::NONE,
KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT, ModifierFlag::CONTROL_L


Is it possible to change the name of a bluetooth mouse? I bring my MacBook Pro back and forth between home and work. I have a Magic Mouse in both places. I guess because they are both the same model, I have to re-pair the mouse with the computer every time I go back and forth. They have very similar names so I'd like to rename them something like "Work mouse" and "House mouse". So far I haven't found a way. Is it possible?

With the new update, you may not find the cog wheel, so instead you can go into bluetooth settings and right-click (click with two fingers) the device you wish to rename.

It should come up with a context menu.

Select Rename, which will open a window where you can rename your mouse to anything you like.


How to get the chrome tabs to always show when in full screen mode? I would really like to use Chrome on my new 2013 Macbook Air with tabs, but without the menu bar.  So, I use full-screen mode, but it hides the tabs.  Is what I want possible?  And, if so, how can I get it to work that way?

With latest version of Chrome, there is the option to show the Toolbar (which includes tabs) in the View menu.


Deleted photos continue appearing in screensaver I use one of OS X's built-in photo screensavers and point it to my Dropbox folder so that photos I add to Dropbox automatically appear. However, I've noticed that photos I've deleted from Dropbox continue appearing in the screensaver, long after they've been deleted.

I suspect that when I first set up the screensaver, OS X cached a copy of the photos in my Dropbox folder, so they remain even after I've deleted the source photos.

If so, is there any way to clear this cache to keep the deleted photos from appearing? I've tried toggling between different screensavers, but they still show up. And I thought maybe the cache would clear itself after a few hours or a day, but it's now been nearly a week and the deleted photos are still appearing.

I can't reproduce your problem in Mavericks or Mountain Lion; if I add an image to the watched directory and start the screensaver, the new image appears; if I delete the image and restart the screensaver it disappears. So a logout/login cycle and/or restarting the Mac seems called for.

But if those fail, I saw a similar issue some years ago that resulted from a corrupted screensaver preferences file, and you could try solving it the same way: Try flushing the screensaver preferences by deleting the plist file.

To do that, in the Terminal, run the following (quit System Preferences first):

rm -i "$(ls -t ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.[0-9A-F]*.plist | head -1)"

The -i is for safety; it should ask if you want to remove a single file, like this:

remove /Users/trey/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.65BC01F5-7A67-5B3E-9193-9464C78533AD.plist?

Confirm by pressing y and return. If it asks to remove a file that doesn't look like that, or tries to remove more than one file, press Control-C to abort.

Now re-open System Preferences, select the screensaver again and point it at the Dropbox directory again. The screensaver should now update normally.


Are the mid-2012 Macbook Air compatible with older MagSafe adapters? Will the mid-2012 Macbook Air models be compatible with the MagSafe power supply of the previous generations?

Electrically yes, physically not without an adapter.

Only the physical layout of the pins and metal end that connects to the Air is different. However, with the MagSafe to MagSafe 2 Adaptor ($10) lets any original sized MagSafe adapter slim down to work with the new thinner Mac-side of the MagSafe 2 connection.


Why won't kern.maxfiles setting in /etc/sysctl.conf stick? I've been getting various "too many files open in system"-type errors on Yosemite (10.10.1). Searching around suggests setting kern.maxfiles and kern.maxfilesperprocess in /etc/sysctl.conf.

I've tried this, and kern.maxfilesperprocess sticks after a reboot, but kern.maxfiles doesn't.

% cat /etc/sysctl.conf
# NB DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THIS INTO YOUR CONFIG FILE - IT DOESN'T WORK
kern.maxfiles=20480
kern.maxfilesperproc=18000

(reboot)

% sysctl kern.maxfiles
kern.maxfiles: 12288
% sysctl kern.maxfilesperproc
kern.maxfilesperproc: 18000

If I set it manually at the command line, it works, so it doesn't seem I'm exceeding any upper limit:

% sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=20480
kern.maxfiles: 12288 -> 20480
% sysctl kern.maxfiles
kern.maxfiles: 20480

I have seen warnings about these values being overridden in /etc/launchd.conf but I don't have this file:

% cat /etc/launchd.conf
cat: /etc/launchd.conf: No such file or directory

Spotlight search doesn't find any other mention of kern.maxfiles, so I'm out of ideas. Any other suggestions?

Though not directly answering your question you will find two solutions at superuser:

To adjust open files limits on a system-wide basis in Mac OS X Yosemite, you must create two configuration files. The first is a property list (aka plist) file in '/Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxfiles.plist' that contains the following XML configuration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
      <key>Label</key>
        <string>limit.maxfiles</string>
      <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
          <string>launchctl</string>
          <string>limit</string>
          <string>maxfiles</string>
          <string>65536</string>
          <string>65536</string>
        </array>
      <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
      <key>ServiceIPC</key>
        <false/>
    </dict>
  </plist>

This will set the open files limit to 65536. The second plist configuration file should be stored in /Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxproc.plist with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple/DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
      <key>Label</key>
        <string>limit.maxproc</string>
      <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
          <string>launchctl</string>
          <string>limit</string>
          <string>maxproc</string>
          <string>2048</string>
          <string>2048</string>
        </array>
      <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true />
      <key>ServiceIPC</key>
        <false />
    </dict>
  </plist>

Both plist files must be owned by 'root:wheel' and have permissions '-rw-r--r--'. This permissions should be in place by default, but you can ensure that they are in place by running sudo chmod 644 <filename>. While the steps explained above will cause system-wide open file limits to be correctly set upon restart, you can apply them manually by running launchctl limit.

In addition to setting these limits at the system level, we recommend setting the at the session level as well by appending the following lines to your 'bashrc', 'bashprofile', or analogous file:

ulimit -n 65536
ulimit -u 2048

Like the plist files, your bashrc or similar file should have -rw-r--r-- permissions. At this point, you can restart your computer and enter ulimit -n into your terminal. If your system is configured correctly, you should see that maxfiles has been set to 65536.

Adjust the maxfiles & maxproc limit as you need it

Sourced from: http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/ops/tuning/open-files-limit/
Modifying the /etc/launchd.conf per a lot of google queries and SO suggestions didn't seem to work for me in Yosemite (10.10).  What did end up working, after numerous change/reboot/test combinations, was modifying (or creating if it doesn't exist) the /etc/sysctl.conf file.

This is what I had to put in to make it work

kern.maxfiles=65536
kern.maxfilesperproc=65536

I'm not sure if 'kern.maxfiles' needs to be in there, but when I had it in there by itself I still had the same issue, when I added the 'kern.maxfilesperproc' everything started working.

If one or both of those solutions work for you, please credit the original posters.


Is there a way to upload video from an iPhone to Google+? Is there a way to upload video from an iPhone to Google+?

It's exactly the same way you would upload a photo.

Within the Google+ app on your iPhone.

Tap the camera icon within the app.
Select your video from the Camera Roll.
Click the blue arrow in the top-right corner.
Select some particular Recipients and maybe add some text.
Click Share.


Being asked to log into a different account on Mac App Store? Just recently I'm being asked by the Mac App Store to log into a different account to update my apps. I've never had a second Apple ID and this computer has always belonged to me, meaning there's never been another account logged into this Mac. Screenshot of the message attached.

  You have updates available for other accounts

  To update this application, sign in to the account you used to purchase it.

I've tried signing out and logging back in, but to no avail. I had to remove Xcode and install it from scratch for it to work, but I don't want to do that with every app.

Any ideas? :(

To make the AppStore forget the old credentials with which an app was downloaded, remove the _MASReceipt directory in the app itself.

To do this:

Open Finder and navigate to Applications.
Ctrl+Click the application and choose "Show Package Contents".
Expand the Contents directory and click the _MASReceipt directory to select it.
Type Command+Delete to delete the directory permanently---you will be prompted for your credentials since this is a protected file.

Quit and restart AppStore, then find the application.  The button should now say "Free" or "Install" instead of "Update".  Clicking it will update your app to the latest version, doing so as the currently logged-in Apple user.

This can also be a temporary issue and it can clear up over time once the servers recover from some overload conditions.


Excel 2016. Automatically creating ranges based on cell contents then conditionally formatting the range I haven't gotten into macro's yet which is why I am asking on here. but I have a spreadsheet that I want to set gradients to a set of diagonal cells but it is very time consuming when you have 60+ columns. I have a template that has the cells numbered diagonally.Here is a small example of the template.

     this goes on currently to 60 both right and down. I can fill in the numbers easily but conditionally formatting them diagonally is going to take a long time. I want to know if there was a way to just select an area and say select all cells in this area that contain the same number and create a defined range named whatever number it is and if that range already exists then add that cell to that existing range.

Example would be take all cells that contain "1" inside range "main" then create range "_1" and add cells to it. then repeat until all 60 ranges are complete.

then I would also need a way to take ranges "_1" through "_60" and easily add conditionally formatting to them for 3 color gradients to highlight the larger numbers in each range once I remove the numbers and replace with a formula. I might have to do this part manually but it would be alot easier if there were already ranges defined for each diagonal so I don't have to go and select area find cell containing "5", define range "_5", then conditionally format for each number 1-60(only 60 currently but it may end up being larger)

example of what one line with gradient looks like. will have gradient on each diagonal. might end up being 3 different colors to easily differentiate between each diagonal so you can tell at a glance what you are looking for.

I can do the gradients manually after the ranges are made.

I know this is most likely impossible but I would like to see as I have a quite a few of these to do and don't enjoy spending hours just formatting hundreds of cells manually.

a simplistic overview of what I need is

for all cells inside range "Main"
read cell
if range "-[cell]" exists
    [
        add cell to range
    ]
    else
    [
        define range named "-[cell]"
        add cell to range
    ]

once all cells are in a range I would like something to do the gradients for me. something like "for each range -1 through -60, do 3 color conditional format"

I know there will be alot more to it than that but that is essentialy all I need.

Let me know if this is impossible. it probably is but there isn't any harm in asking.

This is pretty easy in Excel 2016 for Mac.

Set up your grid and select the range.

Define your three color conditional coloring to the range.

Enjoy


How to share my Snow Leopard Mac's connection to my HTC Desire running Android? I have an HTC Desire that currently cannot connect to the internet and a Mac that can. I want the HTC Desire to be able to connect to the internet.

My Mac (running Snow Leopard 10.6.6) is connected to the internet over Wi-Fi.
Now I want to share my Mac's internet connection with my HTC Desire (Android 2.2).

On my HTC Desire I don't have root access.
On my Mac I have super user access.

Can I share my internet connection?
If it doesn't work with a Mac can i get this to work with Windows?

I do have a jailbroken iPod touch 2g with iOS 4.0, if the helps with any of this.

OK so you need to connect to the internet via your MacBook to get around a MAC filter on your router.  You can share your MacBooks connection but it would need to be plugged into the router.

I don't think it's possible to do it like this:

HTC >> WiFi >> MacBook >> WiFi >> router

You need to do it like this instead:

HTC >> WiFi >> MacBook >> Ethernet >> router

So you plug the MacBook into the router and connect to that from your phone over WiFi.  You can do this as follows:

Choose Apple > System Preferences, and then click Sharing.
Select Internet Sharing.
Choose a network service from the “Share your connection from” pop-up menu, Ethernet for example in your case.
Select a networking service to share your Internet connection from the “To computers using” list, AirPort for example.
Click AirPort Options and give your network a name and password.
Connect to your MacBook over the WiFi network you just set up.


HP Photosmart 5520 OS X 10.5.8 driver My mom bought a HP Photosmart 5520. Unfortunately, this printer is not compatible with her OS X 10.5.8 system.

Is there a possibility we can get this working?

I had the same issue with a HP Photosmart 5520 install diskette requiring (the 64bit architecture) Mountain Lion, Lion, etc.  You can start the install with the install diskette, it will soon just finish as a 5520 with NO Functionality. While an older version photosmart driver is the best bet, be sure it has a wireless functionality (e.g older Photosmarts C4400 etc. did not work) You will need a WIRELESS supporting driver, viz the D100 driver. The D100 driver wireless access not only lets the Mactook running Leopard but as well an iBook running Tiger and a 3rd Gen iPod touch work excellently.  The color printing is better than I need. It copies and does what I generally need.

I use the HP 5520 in STANDALONE mode to provide printing service for all devices in wireless access.

To be sure here must be some functionality I do not get, given all the adverts about all the "wonderful" nuances in the product.  But most all straight forward printing and copying functionality I need for my iPod iOS4, MacBook Leopard and iBook G3 on Tiger, work excellently; they can see it as either a D100 or as a 5520.


How do I backup and restore my IPA app backups in iTunes 12.7? Today, Apple released iTunes 12.7. Surprisingly for a point-release this version removes the iOS App Store and iOS app management features: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/12/apple-itunes-12-7-no-app-store/

  Apps can now only be downloaded on an iOS device using an iOS device, and the same goes for ringtones.

I have diligently saved IPA backups of apps I have purchased from the iTunes / iOS App Store for the eventuality of when an app publisher removes an app from the App  Store - or if the developer of an app changes a feature in a way that I don't like. This happens regularly:

Electronic Arts has a poor reputation for removing its games from the App Store when they stop being notable, including apps that you needed to pay for to download.
And many non-game apps often add new features that users don't like, or remove features that are useful to many users (either for making things simpler for other users, or for a copyright or patent infringement reason).

Unfortunately, with iTunes 12.7 removing the ability to backup and restore IPA files I seem to be now SOL. Fortunately I still have iTunes 12.6 installed on my computer, but here's my question:

"If I have saved an IPA backup of an app that has since been removed from the iOS App Store, or if I have saved an older version of an app that has been upgraded such that I want to continue using the older version, how can I install that on my new iPhone 8?"

This looks reasonably promising - but I don't know how it will work for future releases...

  Manually add items from your computer

  If you have media on your computer that you can't redownload from the
  App Store or iTunes Store directly on your iOS device, such as
  custom ringtones or iOS apps, you can drag and drop the media from
  your computer to your iOS device using iTunes.

  Connect your device to your computer.
  Open iTunes. Make sure that you have the latest version.
  On your computer, find the item you want to add to your device. If you're looking for Apps, Tones, or Books (for Windows) that previously
  appeared in your iTunes library, you can find them in your iTunes
  media folder.
  Drag the item from your computer to your iOS device in the left sidebar of iTunes.


How to prevent Command-I/Command-Shift-I from opening Mac Mail when in browser? When in a browser (Chrome or Safari), the following keyboard shortcut will always bring up a window that says "Welcome To Mail":

Command+Shift+I

I would like to use this shortcut for another purpose.  Is there any way to disable this shortcut?

You can change the shortcuts from System Preferences:

If you want to disable the shortcuts, edit the NSUserKeyEquivalents dictionaries directly:

defaults write com.google.Chrome NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add 'Email Page Location' '\0'
defaults write com.google.Chrome.canary NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add 'Email Page Location' '\0'
defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add 'Email Link to This Page' '\0' 'Email This Page' '\0'

Then quit and reopen Chrome and Safari to apply the changes.


A faster way to move photos from one event to another existing event in iPhoto? When I drink a beer I enjoy I like to snap a photo of it with my iPhone. I keep an event in iPhoto called Beer and in to this event go all those photos I snap.

Over time the Beer event has started to get lost among all my other iPhoto events. The ones of the kids and wife, the relatives, the sunsets I'll never remember to look at again. So when I have a new picture of some beer I enjoyed to add to the all-important Beer event, finding that event and dragging the handful of photos in to it has gotten to be tedious.

I do try to keep the Beer event at the end of my event list. So it's nearest newly added events when I import photos from my phone. But that doesn't always work out and, of course, I'd rather not have to remember to reorder Beer to the end of my event list every single time I import photos.

I've tried cutting and pasting after import. But that still seems to require that find the Beer event by scrolling up and down through the Event view in iPhoto. Not something I enjoy.

I can use the search box to search for "beer" and I do see the photos from that event, but I can't do anything meaningful with the search results like paste a lone phone in to the found event named Beer. The way the search results are listed is really as individual photos. I don't see a way to limit the search to events by names that I can then click down in to like I normally would in the Event view.

I feel like I'm missing some fundamentally easy way to shuffle photos between random events in iPhoto. A click and 'move to event' type deal that would whisk away my favourite beverage photos to their safe home in my electronic memory.

Perhaps doesn't directly answer your question, but sounds like you ought to consider creating a Beer album, rather than using a Beer event.

iPhoto Events are really designed for arranging temporally-related photos, i.e. photos that were taken in a similar time period. Albums are better for storing contextually-related photos, i.e. photos of the same thing over any period of time.

Albums work like iTunes playlists, in that the same photo can appear in multiple albums, or in no albums at all. (But it has to appear in exactly one event.) Albums are always visible in your sidebar, so you can easily drag photos from any event (including your "Latest Import" event, for example) into any album at any time.

All that said, somebody here could probably quickly whip up a little AppleScript for you that automates your current process. But not me :)


How can I use Family Sharing for purchased apps? My girlfriend has just got an iPhone.  I've created a free apple account for her and added it to a family, with myself as the organiser, thinking that this would mean she could download my purchased apps.  But whenever she tries to download an app that I've purchased from the list of my purchases, she gets this message:

  This redownload is not available for this Apple ID either because it was bought by a different user or the item was refunded or cancelled.

If she tries do download it from the main store, she is prompted for payment info.  In either case, no app is downloaded.

We've tried:

Apps I've had for years
An app I downloaded today
Paid and fee apps
Everything at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201088
Everything at https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201454
Signing out of iTunes and back in (both of us)
Disabling and re-enabling purchase sharing
Enabling automatic downloads of apps

I'm not willing to try:

Adding a payment method for my girlfriend - with nothing else working, I don't trust them not to charge it
Erase and restore the phone - too much faff
Removing and re-adding her to the family - I've read there's a limit on how often you can do this

How can I use Family Sharing for purchased apps?  Does it even work?  It really feels at this point like the feature doesn't work at all and that Family Sharing is just a lie.

Contact Apple store support. You’ll want them to verify thing s before you try removing and re-adding after they sort out any issues with your or with her account.

I would add payment for her, it won’t get charged once you re-add her and it will help make her account verified in Apple’s eyesore a different account.


Upgrade or install Utility `stat` I tried to install GNU utility stat

    $ brew install stat
    Error: No formulae found in taps.

However,it succeeded to install GNU Bash

How to achieve such a task?

stat is part of the coreutils package.

brew install coreutils

This installs stat with a g prefix: gstat.

You can avoid the g prefix by following the Caveats section:

  All commands have been installed with the prefix 'g'.

  If you really need to use these commands with their normal names, you
  can add a "gnubin" directory to your PATH from your bashrc like:

PATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"


Why can carriers limit unlocked iPhone hotspot/tethering? The answers here and here explain that carriers can tell an iPhone whether to allow tethering or use as a hotspot.
My question is why, on an unlocked phone, can they do that?
Has Apple simply colluded with a cellular service consortium to respect their wishes?
Or are there a means by which a cellular data provider can detect that data are being served to and from a different device through the iPhone bearing its SIM card?  (While possible without any countermeasures, AFAIK it would be trivial for the iPhone to obscure the fact that it is tethering.)

The main reason for this is that Apple works together with cell providers. Both have an interest in having the right products available for their customers.
It is of course trivial to say that the iPhone knows that it is tethering, as this is part of the functionality implemented on the iPhone. However, as you state: the main reason that providers know that you're tethering is simply that the phone tells them this. Often this is done by having ordinary data traffic to/from the phone pass via one APN, and tethered traffic pass via a different APN.
This allows cell providers to offer different service levels, transfer maximums, pricing, QoS, etc. on the two types of date.
However, it is not so that any tethering is not detectable without the iPhone explicitly telling the provider that tethering occurs. Cell providers have ways of detecting tethering that works in different ways – some more foolproof than others.
For example data packets on an IP network have a TTL value in their headers. Whenever the packet is routed from one network to another (for example from a laptop to a home router to a USB connection to your phone and to the cell providers network) then the TTL value is decreased by one at each "hop". This is done to ensure that no packet can stay in the network indefinitely (i.e. due to loops, circular routing, or other problems) so when the TTL value reaches 0 it is discarded. A cell provider can use changes in this number as an indication of tethering happening.
Historically, tethering has been one of the reason why some have jailbroken their phones. Several types of add-ons exist that are intended for users to get tethering working (or bypass limits) where it previously wasn't possible. In some cases this could be breaking their agreements with their cell providers, in others not. This has been discussed for example here:
https://yalujailbreak.net/hotspot-tethering-app-iphone/
Additionally, some have created apps that allow for the same functionality without jailbreaks. For example take a look at this open source project:
https://github.com/rickyzhang82/tethering
Essentially they work by implementing a proxy server in an app on the phone. This allows other computers to connect to the proxy for data transfers (such as web browsing, downloading files, or whatever it might be) while the data transfers appear to have taken place on the phone itself.


Force Mac to use Power Adapter as Power Source I just bought a new MacBook Pro 2015 15" and I really want the battery to stay healthy.

Is there a way to force my Mac to use the Power adapter as power source, instead of using the battery as source and charging it at the same time? (The Mac already does this when the battery is at 100% to, well, have the battery stay healthy.)

I still don't understand your question.

You want to plug it in but not charge the battery? Why?

My vague understanding about batteries speaking with hardware repair shops, etc. is that it's no longer truly worth worrying about. You charge when you can, you use the battery when you must. While plugged in, the battery charges until full and then stops charging. Presumably, at that point, it's using the power cord and not the battery.

The other thing that I seem to recall is that it's all about the charge cycles. You want to keep that number down. So, if you work from home one day, it would be better to leave it plugged in all day because that would only be one cycle (assuming you plugged it in first thing in the morning). If you plugged it in until it was charged, then unplugged it and used it until it was low on battery, then repeated, that would be 2, 3, or 4 charges during the day depending on how you use the computer.

So, what I've heard from people much more knowledgeable than I, is that the potential gains you might experience doing "the right thing" are not worth the effort required to realize those gains.


Cursor movement to beginning/end of line in iOS - possible? Does iOS provide any kind of cursor movement commands.  For example:

You forward an email or a web page link and you're at the end of the Subject line in the mail app.  You want to jump to the beginning of the Subject line and type something
You enter a set of search terms and then when you see the results, you want to jump to the end of the list and add more

I know I can tap but in these cases, the beginning or end of line is off-screen.

Sure you can. On iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus in landscape you have  these controls. I have marked with red:

But if you want in portrait mode or you have iPhone earlier than 6, do steps:

Long press on text until it appears that magnifying glass and while pressing drag cursor to the beginning of subject and it will move.

This works on landscape and portrait


Is it possible to wirelessly debug iOS app on iPhone? I'm setting up my Xamarin development environment and there are issues with iOS debugging. I'd like to have a way to debug my app on iPhone, but it's not so easy. Here's the ways I know:

Install macOS virtual machine on Windows and connect iPhone physically over USB to Windows host. But it doesn't seem legal to install macOS as virtual machine on non-Apple branded hardware (see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1000131 and Using Mac in a virtual machine legality?)
Use Apple hardware. Not a cheap option, and I don't want to migrate to macOS only to debug iOS apps.
Use cloud Mac, e.g. https://www.macincloud.com. But I haven't found a way for wireless debugging iOS applications. As I see, iPhone must be physically attached to macOS hardware, which is not possible in this case.

The most convinient options would be #3. It would be great to debug iOS app on a real device using Mac in cloud. Is that possible?

It is possible to debug iOS apps on an iPhone wirelessly over WiFi, yes. This is a supported way of debugging in Xcode.

With Xamarin you can also debug over WiFi if you enable "Debug over WiFi" in the "iOS Debug" Build settings. However with Xamarin you need to launch the application over the USB cable. So you cannot do a fully wireless setup there.

Doing wireless debugging with a "cloud Mac" would probably require setting up a VPN connection or similar that makes it appear as though the cloud Mac is on your LAN. And it would only work with Xcode - not Xamarin.

A different approach would be to buy for example the Eltima USB Network Gate. Connect the iPhone to your local PC and use the software to connect that USB port over the network to your "cloud Mac" where it would appear as though the iPhone was physically connected. This should (at least in theory) allow you to launch and debug apps using Xamarin.