How do I unarchive an email? I right clicked an important email, and accidentally clicked "archive". I am not even sure what that's supposed to do, archiving sounds like it should keep it but the opposite happened. I was able to find it in ~/Library/Mail/.../Archive.mbox, but it doesn't appear in the Mail Application. Is it possible to get it "listed" again?

There should be an Archive mailbox in the sidebar on the right side of Mail.  Anything you archive should be there.  If you don't see it, close Mail and restart your machine.


Is it possible to dual-boot Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion? I want to try out the new version of OS X (Mountain Lion), but since I'm so comfortable with my current installation of Lion, I do not want to do a normal upgrade and install/customize all my programs from scratch. Instead, I'd like to be able configure my MBP to a dual-boot system, so that I can switch to whichever OS I want to use at the moment.

Whats the best way to proceed, without screwing up my installation of Lion?

take a full backup to an external usb drive using a tool like Superduper or CarbonCopyCloner and boot it to make sure it's good (select disk using "Startup Disk" in System Preferences.) You need a good backup before messing with the partitions.
Using Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app) select your internal drive in the left-hand column and select the "Partition" tab in the right-hand column. Hit the "+" button under partition layout to create an additional partition. You can use the slider in the partition layout or the "Size" textbox to change the partition sizes. Hit "Apply" to confirm changes and write to disk.

All partitions will be dynamically resized, presuming they pass a fsck (filesystem check test.)

Launch the Install OS X Mountain Lion.app (no need to bother with usb install disk creation) and accept the license agreement. When you get to the screen showing the install disk click the "Show All Disks..." button and select the partition you just created.
Proceed with the installation as normal (this being Apple you will not be asked for a lot of input.) As part of the installation the installer will boot into the second partition for you. If you want you can use the Migration Assistant in the final stages of the installation to import all users and settings from your Lion partition.

That's all there is to it! I've done this on an iMac and a Macbook Pro so far this week with minimal problems. Only the Macbook Pro couldn't pass the fsck and I needed to boot to the recovery partition to repair the root fs before I was able to shrink and create another partition.

Addendum: repairing the system partition

The system partition cannot be resized if it does not pass a filesystem check and you cannot repair the system partition while you are booted into that system so you will need to boot from an alternate one. Apple has made this very easy by automatically creating a Recovery Partition in OSX Lion and later.

Reboot the system. While booting press and hold down the "option" (aka "alt") key until you are presented with a list of boot devices and choose the "Recovery HD" disk. (Alternatively press and hold [CMD]+[R] during boot to boot directly to Recovery)
You are presented with a list of utilities, choose Disk utility

Now you have the familiar Disk Utility interface but on a linen background. Select your system partition from the left-hand column and select the "First Aid" tab in the right-hand column, finally click the "Repair Disk" button located at the lower right-hand side of the text box.

A lot of text will scroll by in the text box. If all goes well you should end with a message telling you that "Volume repair is complete."

Now reboot ("Apple Menu" > Restart) and let the system boot as normal.


Safe key combinations for global shortcuts Is there any combination of modifier keys that could be considered 'safe' for setting global shortcuts with a third-party app? For example, I do window snapping with cmdoptJ|L, but cmdoptI would conflict with Chrome's dev tools shortcut.

I'd like a set of modifiers I can use for virtually any global shortcut I want without conflict.

For personal macros, I usually simply use the control key—practically nothing uses just the control key as a modifier; it's always paired with command. (e.g. ⌃J/L)

If you're asking so you can include it in software you're developing to widely distribute, though, I wouldn't recommend this for exactly the reason that it's a good idea for personal use: it's pretty non-standard.


How to determine if all items in a list are the same I'm currently in the works of an AppleScript calculator that extrapolates arithmetic linear sequences (sounds fancy but it really isn't). One of the processes it must go through is finding the common difference between each item. Plugging this difference (d) into the equation for arithmetic progression, along with the term you want to know (n) will predict the nth term in any sequence.
To determine the common difference, you must first find the local difference between each pair of numbers in the sequence. Then, compare every difference; if they're all the same, the sequence is linear and the common difference is equal to the local difference. If not, the sequence is nonlinear and there is no common difference. I've figured out how to find the local differences of each number, but the latter seems to be a bigger challenge. The code I've made to determine the local differences spits out a list of numbers. My theoretical process would just compare the first item to every other, and if every comparison returns as true, then set the common difference to the same as the local difference. Below is my way of finding the local difference of a list of numbers:
set sequence to {1, 2, 3, 4, 4}
set x to 0
set dif_check to {}
repeat ((number of items of sequence) - 1) times
   set x to (x + 1)
   set selected_item to (item x of sequence)
   set local_dif to ((item (x + 1) of sequence) - selected_item)
   set dif_check to dif_check & {local_dif}
end repeat
return dif_check
--> result: {1, 1, 1, 0}
(* Since every item in the resulting list isn't equal, it would be nonlinear and the common difference would just be n/a. *)

How would I determine if every item in a list is the same? I've tried numerous times, including this script I experimented with, but I realized it didn't get me anywhere closer to the resolution:
set dif_check to {1, 1, 1, 0}
set first_term to (first item of dif_check)
set x to 1
set common_dif_check to {}
repeat ((number of items of dif_check) - 1) times
   set x to (x + 1)
   (item x of dif_check) = first_term
   set common_dif_check to common_dif_check & {result}
end repeat
return common_dif_check
--> result: {true, true, false}
(* This takes the first item of the list and compares it with every item after, returning a true or false and adding the result to another list. I thought this would have solved it, but instead just turns out as the same situation as before. *)

To reiterate, how would I determine if every item in a list is the same? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I’m not sure if this will help but this following code will remove duplicate items from a list and create a new list from the results. It will then count the items of the new list and if the items in that new list is greater than 1 … that means all of the items of the original list were not the same
property difCheck : {1, 1, 1, 0}
property allItemsAreTheSame : missing value

set itemCount to count of removeDuplicates(difCheck)

if itemCount is greater than 1 then
    set allItemsAreTheSame to false
else
    set allItemsAreTheSame to true
end if

on removeDuplicates(theList)
    script k
        property |List| : theList
        property tmpList : {}
    end script
    repeat with itemRef in k's |List|
        set theItem to itemRef's contents
        if k's tmpList does not contain theItem then ¬
            set k's tmpList's end to theItem
    end repeat
    return k's tmpList
end removeDuplicates


Screen-saver resizes my windows I have an iMac(27" from 2010) and while running Lion I tried to HiDPI modes that gives me 1280x720 and larger text. I did change back to 2560x1440 long before upgrading my system to Mountain Lion.

If I use the screen saver, or switch to the "select user to login" main screen, and then back to my user account, my windows are resized to fit inside a rectangle that looks like 1280x720. This behavior happened in Lion too and the upgrade didn't change that.

Any idea on how I can get rid of this behavior? I haven't found any .plist file to delete that seemed relevant.

I changed the resolution to 1024x768, logged out, rebooted, logged in. Changed to 2560x1440 and logged out and rebooted. That seemed to have fixed it.

EDIT: No, it didn't fix anything.


Power adapter extender for iPhone Imagine the disappointment when trying to pair a Monster iCar Play 800 FM Transmitter with a new iPhone comfortably wrapped in a Speck CandyShell.  In short, the business end of one does not fit into the business end of the other.

I've looked at the SendStation Dock Extender, but is there really any guarantee that this will fit into my case.

Does anyone have any experience with this or another dock extender, or is my best option to be more careful when buying a replacement case?

Edit:

I ended up buying an adapter by Cable Jive.  It fits the case and works just fine.

Just eyeballing it, it looks like the extender would fit. If not, maybe take a Dremel to that case and widen the slot?


Menu option "Select startup disk on desktop" greyed out when Finder window is active Previous OS X versions allowed one to select the startup disk using Cmd-Shift-Up when on the Desktop, or "from" any Finder window. In 10.9.4 this works only from the Desktop. When a Finder window is active, the menu item does appear when holding down Shift, but is greyed out.
The startup disk is visible on the Desktop, per Finder preferences.
Any ideas? I can make a workaround using Keyboard Maestro or the likes, but..

I created a workaround using KeyboardMaestro: only in Finder, on hotkey (⌘⇧↑), execute AppleScript:

tell application "Finder"
    select window of desktop
    set selection to item 1 of desktop
end tell

Weirdly enough it doesn't show that it is selected, but Cmd-down opens its window.


Mac App Store not working on macOS Mojave 10.14 Beta 1 (18A293u) Does anyone else have issues while trying to use new App Store on macOS? I can log in but I can't download or update any app.

Sometimes it asks me to change App Store country to one linked with logged in Apple ID (Croatia) and when I try to change it App Store gives me error ‘Cannot connect’.

Restarting Mac didn't helped.

How to solve this issue?

With latest beta 2 update 10.14 Beta (18A314h) issue is resolved.

Update macOS to latest 10.14 Beta (18A314h)
Open App Store
Click on Store -> Sign Out in menu
Quit App Store
Open App Store again
Sign in

After this I could update apps and initiate new downloads.


MacBook Air screen turns off randomly I had my MacBook Air 13" 2011 for almost 2 years now. And right from the start I kept having this weird issue: sometimes while I'm working on it, the screen (and the monitor attached via displayport aswell) randomly shuts off (or goes to sleep). The computer is still active and everything is still running normally, so If I hit a key it goes back on normally... It happens even if my power cord is plugged in.
It's not a big deal, but it sometimes gets very annoying when it happens while I am typing.
Any clues?
Thanks!

Assuming it only happens sometimes and only when you are actively using the computer (key board & Mouse)

Lets find out if it is you doing it.

Check your settings for Display Sleep in:

System preferences> Desktop and Screen saver> Hot Corners!

In here look if you have a setting to put display to sleep.


How to set VirtualBox in order to access external hard drives in guest Win7? I have installed VirtualBox in order to use Windows 7 as guest on a Macbook Air running Mavericks (mainly to be able to use a printer that has no drivers for Mac). Also, I have installed the Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack and the Guest Additions, so that now the video settings as well as the support for USB are available. Except that, while the flash drives as well as the printer work, the external HDD drives connected by USB do not.

After un-mounting the external HDDs in Finder they appear only greyed out in VirtualBox system tray.

Adding them as filters in the Settings of the Virtual Machine makes them look selected as they should (no longer greyed out), but they are still not available in the guest Windows.

I am talking about two external HDD drives, both 500 GB, one ntfs and one fat32.

I expected the USB connections to work fully after installing the Extension_Pack and the Guest Additions, but it looks like there's something more to be done.

What?

Once I ejected the hard drive from mac os, it was instantly recognized by the guest windows virtual machine.


How do I make Chrome the default browser in the OSX Guest Account? I'd like to make Chrome the default browser in the OSX. I've managed to get Chrome added to the guest account but there are several issues

Everytime the guest account is launched after reboot Chrome needs root permission to check for updates. How do I turn this off or set up the guest account so that Chrome doesn't ask (as in it thinks it has already asked)

Every time the guess account is launched the user is ask if they want to make Chrome the default. How can I get this not to happen?

When Chrome finally starts it asks the user to login. I'd like it to start just on the Google home page. How can I do that?

I'm guessing all 3 of these might be related to some how running Chrome once in guest mode and copying some configuration files out of guest mode into the correct place so that next time guest mode is run those files already exist and chrome thinks it's already been set up.

The crucial point to realize with the Guest account is that the User homefolder it creates, with preferences set in its /Library/Preferences folder, are wiped upon logout.

To effect changes, you need to make the changes (add the specific preference files) in the /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj folder. This folder contains the generic template User Homefolder structure used when creating a new user or the Guest User.

This page has details about how it is done in Snow Leopard, but it is applicable to Mavericks.


Do you see video artefacts on your MacBook Pro when opening the Java control panel? Calling all MacBook Pro 15" 2018 owners, particularly owners of the 2.6 GHz model. Would you be willing to test something on your 2018 MBP? (15”?). Install the latest Java JRE (https://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u192-b12/750e1c8617c5452694857ad95c3ee230/jre-8u192-macosx-x64.dmg).
I see weird video artefacts every time when I do this:

The test needs to be performed without an external display attached as it appears to involve the discrete GPU.

I need to figure out whether my MBP 2018 needs a repair before I leave the country on Tuesday … The issue isn’t permanent, by the way! If you relaunch the Finder, it goes away.

I'm running OSX Mojave 10.14.2.

It turns out that the integrated GPU was defective.


MacBook Pro 15" Retina mid 2014 random shutdowns My MacBook Pro (15-inch, Retina, Mid 2014, macOS 10.13.1) shuts down randomly.

It shuts down suddenly when on battery
It shuts down a little more rare when connected to AC
It works almost fine when in safe mode
It works perfectly while I install macOS
It works fine when I have an external screen connected and a YouTube video is playing there (it is my last solution to make work on this comp) but…
It shuts down with external screen connected but no video playing. It happens in the moment of going to sleep mode. Or while it is in sleep mode, I don't know exactly. So maybe video playing helps in that it doesn't go sleep because of video.

Not working possible solutions, I tried:

reset SMC
reset PRAM
login with newly created user
reinstall OS X over old OS X
reinstall OS X entirely
replace thermal paste. I found that one screw "hole" was unlinked from board. So my heat sink is fixed with 3 screws. But it touches bottom plate when it fixed. So it is kind of tight to CPU anyway. It can be a problem though. But why stress tests passing then?! Read next.
monitor temperature (no overheating)
monitor battery (no problems)
run Apple Hardware Test (no issues)
look at Console App. Logs are not saying anything important or like. On old OSX and newly installed. Logs just cut on time of shutdown and then line BOOT_TIME.
Stress test CPU. 8 times yes > /dev/null & in Terminal. And all cores are 100% loaded. Temperature raises, fans in turbo mode. No shutdown, no problems.
Stress test GPU. Open Webgl demo page in browser with 10000 fishes in awuarium. No problems.

Some lasting ideas:

Replace battery (not easy and fast as I need. A lot of work pending)
Go to Apple and leave my only computer for unknown period of time. And I have no warranty of course. And I Googled a lot of stories when Apple couldn't find a issue and people had to replace main board for big money and time. Very bad.
Buy new computer. A bit difficult for me now.
I have read in some places, that this problem doesn't appear in Windows in Boot Camp! I even downloaded Windows 10 to try, but not yet. Anyway I need my favourite macOS, not Windows.
Somewhere I read that it is some problem because of low voltage mode on CPU. It causes some 'unstable' regime in CPU and so system halts. It was only little info about that. It seems like real path to solution. But I don't know how to investigate this more.

A little History

2 months ago: I changed battery with one from aliexpress (china market). It was described as OEM Apple. It is quite the same and it detects with coconutBattery as Simplo manufacturer. I Googled and they say it is like OEM.
1 month ago: I have replaced my charger cord with one from fault charger. With MagSafe 2 connector.

The beginning

I took my MacBook to the bed and it shut down unexpectedly. It was like screen gone black, but backlight on. Then fans went full throttle slowly. And then it shut down completely. I pressed power btn and it started as usual. No messages. No warnings.

Then it worked for some time (maybe half an hour) and story repeated.

I decided that it is overheating because of bed. Took it to the desk. And problem repeated in some time. I began to google this hard. And play with problem to nail it down.

In the process I found that it works fine in Safe Mode (almost, but I had couple of crashes even in safe mode) It works fine when I reinstall macOS. All long 2 hours of downloading and 1 of installing it worked. After long google I found that it works better with external screen connected.

Current situation

So to recap. MacBook is failing almost always, except when I have external screen and video on it.

https://outluch.wixsite.com/rmbp-crash

Disable SIP (csrutil disable from Recovery)
Move AppleThunderboltNHI.kext

sudo mv /System/Library/Extensions/AppleThunderboltNHI.kext \
/System/Library/Extensions/AppleThunderboltNHI.kext.BAK

Reenable SIP (csrutil enable from Recovery)


Highlight the groups a contact is in? There is a keyboard shortcut for "Contacts.app" which does not appear to be documented anywhere (correct me if I'm wrong) which allows you to highlight the groups that the selected contact is part of, assuming the Groups pane is visible.

You just hold down the "Option" key.

However, there is another mode that I have only ever activated by accident, where these highlights stay on.  You can click or arrow-key from one contact to another, and the highlights will change accordingly without holding down the "Option" key.

This is a really useful way to view Contacts.  Unfortunately, all my efforts to either (a) find the documentation for this, or (b) activate this mode on purpose have failed.

I am using El Capitan, but I recall seeing the same behavior all the way back in Snow Leopard, and I couldn't figure out how to make the highlighting stay on then, either.

How can I make this highlighting mode stay on, to quickly and at-a-glance show which groups a particular contact belongs to?

I think you found a bug.
Within All Contacts,
if you select one contact entry,
hold down ⌥⇧, maintain them, and select a second contact entry
then the highlighted group will stay on.

From there, if you use the keyboard arrows, this highlighting will remain on, but won't be correct.

My analysis is that in this sequence of events the ⌥ key up
isn't managed correctly.


Bluetooth mouse stops working almost everytime I wake my mac from sleep I use my mac (yosemite 10.10) at work with bluetooth mouse and at home with just the trackpad. Whenever I bring my mac back to work and start it up, >90% of the times it can't find the mouse. Turning bluetooth on/off, trying trickery with turning mouse on and off and all that doesn't work. Restarting blued didn't work. Removing mouse from bluetooth settings and trying to re-pair didn't work (could not find the mouse). Changing the batteries didn't help. The only thing that works, is rebooting the mac. After this everything works as it should.

I find this not to be the correct solution. I mean this can't be a hardware fault, can it? And if not, resetting/restarting some piece of software should do the same trick as rebooting the mac.

My mouse is apple magic mouse. I have no bluetooth keyboard.

I've had issues reconnecting my bluetooth keyboard & trackpad since upgrading to Yosimite.
I run this script via custom Automator Application:

Search for (Spotlight search) and run Automator
Click "New
Document" at bottom
Choose "Application" for new file type
Click on "Utilities" from list
Double-Click "Run AppleScript"
Replace (* Your script goes here *) with:

do shell script "kextunload -b com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport;
kextload -b com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport" with administrator privileges

Press play to test (will prompt for password)
File->Save to desktop or wherever

Run the automator app whenever bluetooth devices won't connect


How to bring to front or order layers in Preview? I do a lot of selecting, copying, pasting, and moving around on a single image in Preview for Mac. But I'm having trouble ordering the layers of an image so that the layer I want visible is on top.

Is there any way to define layer order in Preview?

If understand you right, here is how I change the order of layers in Preview app.

Select an object like an arrow or rectangle for example.
Right click on selected object.
Select an action from: "Bring Forward", "Bring to Front", "Send Backward", "Send to Back".


Get alerted whenever someone uses your Mac? I have a dedicated Mac Mini in a colocation that I access via Remote Desktop. I trust the colocation provider, but I don't trust my password is secure enough. Without resorting to a more secure password, is there an app that alerts me via E-mail or Push Notification via OS X server whenever the mouse moves on the Mac?

I found an article on Macworld that suggested two apps:
Hidden
Undercover

Their pricing is quite different. Undercover charges $49 for unlimited use on 1 device, while Hidden charges $2.50/month for 3 devices. If you want a free option, I think Mackeeper's Anti-Theft feature is free, but I don't trust them.

Update: I found a free app called Prey which looks much more legit than Mackeeper.


Gmail tab in Safari Consumes high band width I have figured a process called 'Safari networking' (I think it's the process of safari browser) consumes lots of bandwidth. It's about 1 GB in 1 hour, but I didn't download anything. I have also found that it eats bandwidth only when gmail is opened in a safari tab. If you close gmail tab, bandwidth usage  is normal.Any idea why this is happening ?

OSX Yosmite 10.10.2
Safari 8.0.3

I have a similar problem. Last month, on one particular day, 80GB was downloaded (and another day, almost 40GB). This was definitely not something I was downloading - I don't even have 40GB of spare disk on any computer at home!

After resetting router passwords (in case someone was hacking my wifi), and monitoring all my home computers, I also narrowed it down to gmail, but only on my wife's and daughters accounts. One particular email from Pintrest caused 1GB to download in a few minutes before I switched tabs and it stopped. I reopened the email, but it didn't happen a second time. Also forwarded the email to my account but the problem didn't reoccur, so I'm not sure it was related to that particular email.

It's happened about 3 times in the last month, every time in Safari (I think, but I'm not 100% sure).

Has anyone else seen this, or does anyone have any ideas as to its cause?

(All my home computers are Macs, with the latest updates applied.)


No sound from mac, how to find the problem? Good day, I have Macbook Pro 2012 with el Capitan 10.11.3.

The problem - no sound from my mac.

I have listen the music, after that I decide to insert headphones, when I'm taking out the headphones sound from Mac disappeared and there is red light from audio jack. Between that I have made an update from 10.11 to 10.11.3, maybe the problem is with that?

There was not any sound from my mac on startup, but when I have use disk utility repair the sound on startup appears..

How can I diagnose myself where is the problem and fix it ?

Your MacBook believes you've plugged in an optical audio cable when you haven't.

Turns out, that headphone jack is actually a combo jack that has both optical audio and analog audio. There's a little lever in there that detects when you've put a cable in there that's probably stuck. Try fiddling with a toothpick or repeatedly plugging and unplugging.


With FileVault on, is secure trash emptying needed? I'm running Mavericks and have FileVault set for the whole disk. Is there any value then, in emptying the Trash securely? Given the whole disk is encrypted.

I'm not certain on how these two methods interact/ overlap.

Thanks.

Secure Empty Trash and FileVault are two different methods for protecting data. FileVault encrypts everything on the hard drive. Only someone with an admin password can decrypt them. This includes anything in your Trash. So by default, the files you delete when FileVault is on are safe via encryption. Even if someone recovered them, they'd still need your password to decrypt.

Secure Empty Trash has nothing to do with encryption. The default Empty Trash just deletes pointers to old files and marks the space they were using on the hard drive as free to use in the future. However, the files are still there if someone ran a data recovery tool or until the OS decides to put a new file over them. Secure Empty Trash prevents recovering deleted files by writing data (zeros) over the space the files you're deleting were using. Meaning the files are completely destroyed.

Here's how it breaks down:

FileVault On | Empty Trash (non-secure) | Someone can still recover those files, but they will recover files that are encrypted per FileVault

FileVault On | Secure Empty Trash | No one can recover the files, so it doesn't matter whether they were encrypted or not to begin with.

Do you need to use Secure Empty Trash with FileVault on? I think it's overkill unless you're afraid that someone will recover files and have your password ready for decryption.


Decrypt Keychain with Password outside of Keychain-App so here is my problem:

we all know that the osx keychain is located in ~/Library/Keychains/something.keychain

now i've got this file and i know the master password for this keychain. is there a way to browse the keys in there using a external software or something? I don't want to import this keychain into my current one (if its possible).

Any ideas?

I use the following script to extract a password from the Keyring:

$ cat get_password_from_keyring
#!/bin/bash
security find-generic-password -a $1 -g 2>&1 | grep password | cut -d \" -f 2


Wacom tablet. Endless error messages in OS X systemlog I am running a Wacom intuos tablet with the latest software driver v6.3.16-12 on OS X El Capitan. I have noticed endless error messages in the OS X console e.g

27.07.16 16:00:59,520 WacomTabletDriver[416]: handleNotification:Wacom ToolID Message
27.07.16 16:01:04,596 WacomTabletDriver[416]: handleNotification:Wacom ToolID Message
27.07.16 16:01:04,684 WacomTabletDriver[416]: handleNotification:Wacom ToolID Message
27.07.16 16:01:22,624 WacomTabletDriver[416]: handleNotification:Wacom ToolID Message
27.07.16 16:01:51,127 WacomTabletDriver[416]: handleNotification:Wacom ToolID Message
27.07.16 16:02:22,511 WacomTabletDriver[416]: handleNotification:Wacom ToolID Message

Here’s what I tried

I’ve reinstalled the Wacom Driver 2 times.
Repaired OS X system permissions
It also happening on another Mac running OS X Yosemite

The tablet seems to be working correctly. Who else is seeing these messages? What else can I do?

Solution: I have completely uninstalled Wacom's tablet software 6.3.16-12 and switched back to 6.3.15-3. Also, be sure to remove all preferences files including the following leftovers:

/Volumes/MacBook/Library/Internet/Plug-Ins/WacomTabletPlugin.plugin
/Volumes/MacBook/Library/PreferencePanes/WacomTablet.prefpane
/Volumes/MacBook/Library/Frameworks/WacomMultiTouch.framework
/Volumes/MacBook/System/Library/Extensions/Wacom/Tablet.kext
/Volumes/MacBook/Library/Receipts/Wacom/Tablet/Docs.txt
/Volumes/MacBook/Users/yourusername/Desktop/Preferences.wacomprefs
/Volumes/MacBook/Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/com.wacom.wacomtouch.prefs
/Volumes/MacBook/Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/com.wacom.wacomtablet.prefs
/Volumes/MacBook/Library/LaunchAgents/com.wacom.wacomtablet.plist
/Volumes/MacBook/private/var/db/receipts/com.wacom.TabletInstaller.plist
/Volumes/MacBook/private/var/db/receipts/com.wacom.TabletInstaller.bom
/Volumes/MacBook/Users/yourusername/Library/Application/Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.ApplicationRecentDocuments/com.wacom.removewacomtablet.sfl
/Volumes/MacBook/Users/yourusername/Library/Saved/Application/State/com.wacom.RemoveWacomTablet.savedState
/Volumes/MacBook/Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/com.wacom.RemoveWacomTablet.plist

I have spent hours on debugging. These error messages are definitely related to the Wacom Tablet Software update 6.3.16-12. Morever it’s related to random system crashes and strange command click behaviors!


What does an X in the upper-left of a folder icon mean? I created this at the volume root per instructions to install MongoDB. I haven't seen this before. Is it invalid for me to create a top-level folder like this?

The X is actually a button.

It appears for example when you download a file or when you copy a folder/file.
It allows you to cancel the download/copy process.


iCloud Music Library and external HDD here's a issue – since I moved my iTunes Library to external HDD, every time I launch iTunes it asks Apple ID password.

When I enter the login/password – all works almost perfectly after that, e.g. I can use iTunes Store, download my recent purchases.

“Almost” because except iCloud Music Library:

And the same issue repeats if I close and re-open iTunes, it asks Apple ID password again. Any ideas how to solve this problem?

I just had the same problem after moving my iTunes library to my home NAS. Deauthorising and then reauthorising worked for me.


Can't connect to TCP/IP printer with undescore "_" in the IP I have a wireless printer that's connected to our private LAN in our workplace. There is a weird configuration for the printer that it requires two printers to be added. For color - 192.168.51.xxx and one for grayscale - 192.168.51.xxx_1 <---
There's a problem on MacOS that says it cannot connect to a printer with that IP but on windows it runs completely fine. The company previously worked with another IT company and they got it set up on one macbook in the entire workplace, but I cannot replicate the steps that they've taken. Maybe there's other ways to add a printer, besides the regular control panel?

I've only seen posts about ports, but not with this kind of IP as it's unusual.

The printer model is - Konica Minolta INEO+ 220

underscore “_” in the IP

IP address does not contain an underscore.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Addressing

192.168.51.xxx_1 is the Port Name, not the IP address of your printer, port name is auto-generated and "_#" is added to avoid duplicates names. So if you are using 192.168.51.xxx_1 to connect to the printer it will not work as this is not the IP address of your printer.


Timestamp display in macOS Finder I noticed some very odd behaviour in macOS High Sierra's (10.13.1) Finder.

For filenames that contain timestamps Finder changes the timestamp format, the two screenshots below illustrate the issue.

Any idea how to stop Finder from changing the time stamp?

Explanation
That's because the file you created through the terminal using the touch command was named that way by you (not the system) upon creation. What happens is that upon creation, the system interprets your chosen filename and checks whether it contains any "illegal characters".

In macOS, the only "illegal" filename character is colon symbol (:). This is because macOS use these in path names e.g. Macintosh HD:Applications:Safari.app. Additionally, file and folder names may be up to 255 characters in length.

The replacement of : into / is an automatic function built-in to macOS to prevent file path corruption through inadvertently placing a colon in the middle of a file name - which would change the entire path. You will not be able to adjust this behavior.

What about Screenshots?
As for the screenshots, their file names do not contain any so-called "illegal;" characters and are hence valid.

Additionally, changing the screenshot file name is also very easy in macOS. In Terminal, run defaults write com.apple.screencapture name "Some Name" - replacing Some Name with your own text.


Ethernet adapters conversion from MacBook Air (Mid 2012, 13") to MacBook Pro (Late 2019, 16") So I've just bought the latest MacBook Pro (late 2019, 16") and bumped into the common issue of not finding 1 piece of Ethernet adapter. I want to use only Apple made adapters, so I'm left with the option of buying Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Ethernet adapter AND the Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter and daisy chain them.
So, since I've been using MacBook Air (mid 2012, 13"), I already own an Ethernet to Thunderbolt adapter (Apple made).
The only thing that I'm still not certain about is - does the adapter I already have use Thunderbolt 1 or Thunderbolt 2?
According to Apple's spec, MacBook Air (mid 2012, 13") has Thunderbolt 1, but I have a feeling it's actually Thunderbolt 2, because when I look at system's preference, I see that the thunderbolt connection throughput is 10GB/s * 2 (written exactly like that - * 2!) So.. 10*2 is 20, and 20GB/s is equivalent to Thunderbolt 2, right?
I also tried to read the specs of the Ethernet to TB adapter I have, but it doesn't mention which TB it is!
Bottom line: can I simply purchase the TB2 to TB3 adapter and chain it to the current Ethernet to TBx (x=1/2, I don't know!) I already have?
Thanks!

The Belkin USB-C to gigabit adapter that Apple sells online is the best bet for you.

Belkin USB-C to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

Much better than chaining Apple gear in performance, reliability, price and power usage. The Apple thunderbolt 2 model works fine with the Apple adapter - just you have overkill and two joints to manage.


Mac OS Sierra - Weather widget doesn't remember my city I'm running macOS Sierra 10.12.5 and the weather widget in the notifications drawer (that thing which you can toggle on the right side of the screen, which has "Today" and "Notifications" tabs) has a little but a bit annoying issue - it doesn't remember my city. When I add a city I have weather for it displayed, but after a system restart the widget doesn't contain any data and suggests me to add a city again. Nothing critical, but annoying. How can I make it remember cities I add and keep weather for them shown even after I restart my mac?

NB: I have location services disabled. Are they required for this functionality?

If your Mac is logged in to your iCloud account and you have an iPhone also connected to iCloud, try adding the location into the Weather app on your iPhone.

Weather data is synchronized via iCloud between your Apple devices, and I’ve found that entering it on my Mac does not always push it to iCloud/the iPhone. Then when the Mac reboots, it tries to synchronize with iCloud and deletes the location.


Clean install Mac, restore backup without command line tools So, I'm a developer with brew installed along with several other programs installed from source(openCV, boost etc.). I want to do a clean install of OSX(to get rid of some other issues as well), then restore from a time machine backup(I have important apps and files I need to restore). Is there any way I can exclude my user installed command line tools from the restore? (effectively, starting afresh there?)

EDIT: I've just discovered you can exclude the system folder. This should do the trick, right?

So, in totality, deselecting "System" worked. I now have a clean slate, while the rest of my apps still work.


How do you manually reposition faces in Mac OS X Yosemite's Photos App? I'm not sure if this is a bug or just me missing something out, but when I try to manually add faces in my Photos app (go to photo, 'Get info', 'Add face'), a circle appears where I can name/tag the face.

When I go to drag it, however, it will not let me.

I have tried right-clicking and using all of my Ctrl, alt, cmd and shift keys. It will not let me drag the circle. The only thing I can do is name it, rename it or click the cross to delete it.

Again, I'm not sure if this is an actual bug or if I'm doing something wrong. But like this, all I can do is add circles that will pop up in random places of the photo.

No clue how to fix this, please help. Thanks in advance!

This answer in the Apple Discussions/Communities suggests that this behavior (inability to move the naming circle) is a bug in Photos; to remedy it requires restarting the Photos app (which may not be as easy as just quitting and then double-clicking the app icon, perhaps requiring a system reboot).

After just experiencing this problem with Photos version 1.5 running on El Capitan (MacOS 10.11.6), rebooting worked to clear it for me.


Missing space on Fusion Drive (partition problem) I know this or similar problems have been discussed, but (to be honest) I can't see the trees for the wood.
I tried to create a partition on my fusion drive (1TB Hd + 240 MB SSD). No partition was created but afterwards the capacity of my (1.2 TB) drive had been reduced to 617 GB. With 414 GB in use, approximately 400 GB of disk space is missing.

Terminal diskutil list says:

diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage myLogicalVolGroup       999.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *240.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage myLogicalVolGroup       239.7 GB   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk1s3
/dev/disk2 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS HD IMac 1              +616.6 GB   disk2
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2, disk1s2
                                 7EE2FE6D-3D37-46AA-B948-52243490F324
                                 Unencrypted Fusion Drive

and:

diskutil cs list
CoreStorage logical volume groups (1 found)
|
+-- Logical Volume Group 53DFB831-BFCA-4552-A8F5-387F3905003A
    =========================================================
    Name:         myLogicalVolGroup
    Status:       Online
    Size:         1239058563072 B (1.2 TB)
    Free Space:   615951769600 B (616.0 GB)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume A1418DDB-CB43-493F-9341-F23AE2FA7150
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    0
    |   Disk:     disk0s2
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     999345127424 B (999.3 GB)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume 2E45A45F-D1C1-4B62-97FA-5223DD9C965E
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    1
    |   Disk:     disk1s2
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     239713435648 B (239.7 GB)
    |
    +-> Logical Volume Family E3B8F7DC-C327-44A7-8BE2-2BFD2AE646EB
        ----------------------------------------------------------
        Encryption Type:         None
        |
        +-> Logical Volume 7EE2FE6D-3D37-46AA-B948-52243490F324
            ---------------------------------------------------
            Disk:                  disk2
            Status:                Online
            Size (Total):          616601616384 B (616.6 GB)
            Revertible:            No
            LV Name:               HD IMac 1
            Volume Name:           HD IMac 1
            Content Hint:          Apple_HFS
            LVG Type:              Fusion, Sparse

Would this simply be a matter of:

diskutil cs resizeStack 7EE2FE6D-3D37-46AA-B948-52243490F324 0g  (?)

Hope some-one can help me with this.

Starting with OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) you'd have to enter a distinctive (> 0) size to execute the resizeStack command. The magical ... 0g doesn't work anymore.

But in your case the resizeStack option is the wrong one because your Logical Volume Group already occupies almost all available space on the Fusion Drive:

Total disk space: 1240 GB
LVG size:             1239 GB
PV1 + PV2 size:   1239 GB
LV size:                  616 GB

The resizeStack option is appropriate if you want to resize the LVG and all subsequent Core Storage items (like the LV, PV and LVF).

Here you just have to expand your Logical Volume to completely fill the LVG with the following command:

diskutil cs resizeVolume lvUUID size

In your case that is:

diskutil cs resizeVolume 7EE2FE6D-3D37-46AA-B948-52243490F324 1239g

If you get an error (not enough space...) choose a slightly smaller size like 1238g.

After further investigations one have to state that the Fusion Drive is corrupted:

Boot to Internet Recovery Mode, destroy the LVG, rebuild the Fusion Drive and restore your Time Machine backup: here is a how-to. Start with 'Rebuild Fusion Drive' (recommended if you have a Time Machine backup).


Bottom of bookmark covered by dock after macbook is upgraded to Mojave On my macbook, the dock is always standing at the bottom, since I never want to use the option "automatically hide and show".  On High Sierra, the dock's presence would not interfere the display of the bookmark. Even if there are a long list of entries in the bookmark, it would not be blocked by the dock. However, after my macbook was upgraded to Mojave last night, the dock would block the bottom entries of the long bookmark list. Wondering if there is any fix for this...

Screenshot with dock "auto hide and show" disabled:

Screenshot with dock "auto hide and show" enabled

Update:
After a few days, without anything being done, suddenly the problem disappeared. Please look at the following screenshot. I don't know why, but it is good to see the bottom of the bookmarks no longer being blocked by the dock.

You might try moving the dock to either the left or right sides of the screen, rather than the bottom: System Preferences > Dock > Position on screen.

In the same Preference Pane, the size of the Dock can also be adjusted with the topmost "Size" slider.

(This is in macOS Mojave; might be different in other versions)


Have battery status only show in menu bar when running on battery power I use my MacBook Pro plugged in to power and an external monitor 90% of the time, and thus the little charged battery indicator in the menubar is useless. However when I'm not on wall power, is there a way to have it show up? When I have that menu item disabled, my MacBook doesn't give me any low battery warnings, and just shuts down (it's happened several times).

I use SlimBatteryMonitor (free, donations accepted, not nagware) instead of the default menu item for the battery status.

SBM can be configured to almost disappear from the menu bar when fully charged.

If that isn't enough for you, you could run a launchd script every few minutes to check the status of the battery, to see whether or not it is fully charged, and act accordingly:

If the battery is fully charged, quit SlimBatteryMonitor (if it is running)
If the battery is NOT fully charged, run SlimBatteryMonitor (if it isn't already running)

I am actually doing something like this already. I just uploaded the necessary files to
https://github.com/tjluoma/slimbatterymonitor


Determine when OS X was installed? I am going to be reinstalling OS X and I was wondering if there was a method for determining when the base (OS X 10.6) Operating System was installed?

You can use the pkgutil command to get info on the packages installed on your Mac; pkgutil --pkg-info com.apple.pkg.BaseSystem should list the installation time for the base system. But it'll be in the form of seconds since the unix epoch, so you need to use date -r to convert that into a human-readable format. Here's an example:

$ pkgutil --pkg-info com.apple.pkg.BaseSystem
package-id: com.apple.pkg.BaseSystem
version: 10.6.0.1.1.1249367152
volume: /
location: /
install-time: 1306707387
groups: com.apple.snowleopard-repair-permissions.pkg-group com.apple.FindSystemFiles.pkg-group
$ date -r 1306707387
Sun May 29 15:16:27 PDT 2011

EDIT: I misunderstood the question a bit -- I didn't realize the OS had been updated since 10.6. Unfortunately, the receipts system doesn't generally records for more than one version of a specific installer package (as defined by the package ID), so if you've installed more than one version of "com.apple.pkg.BaseSystem" it'll only have records from one of them. But you can find the oldest package you have records of, and there's a good chance it's a holdover from the initial system installation:

pkgutil --pkgs | while read pkgname; do
    installtime="$(pkgutil --pkg-info "$pkgname" | awk '/^install-time:/ { print $2 }')"
    echo "$installtime $pkgname"
done | sort -g | head

(Then use date -r to convert to the timestamp to a readable form, as before.)


How do I update Safari on the Macintosh? How do I upgrade Safari on the Mac?

Is there one web page to always get the current version?
Or are there instructions somewhere for how to manually update Safari (assuming auto update is not enabled)

I assume that you would go to the apple menu and click Software Update.  This will launch the App Store and search for updates for all your software.  If there is new software out there, it will show up.

Or, alternatively, you can go here: http://www.apple.com/support/safari/ and click the update link.

dp


Why is my MacBook Pro constantly losing the wifi connection with my WRT150N router? My Macbook is constantly losing its wifi connection. Sometimes it has trouble connecting, other times it connects, but I obtain a server not found error. It seems to work reasonably well at work, but it can't obtain a connection at home even when I am extremely close to the router. Until recently, I used to only have wifi connection problems occasionally. My android phone seems to be able to connect to wifi without problem.

If you are certain that your Wi-Fi connection works fine when you are somewhere else, there might be signal or compatibility problems between your router and your Macbook Pro. Contrary to popular belief, wi-fi connections are not a voodoo thing, and they just involve radio waves, just like a cellphone and any other wireless device.

Reasons for a Wi-Fi connection being lost could be quite a lot, but usually interference and signal noise are the two primary factors. Where some devices are able to “maintain” the connection (despite the possible errors), others simply fail and drop it more often.

Wi-Fi is designed to continue working despite “small interruptions” (albeit with a decrease in performance due to ‘retries’), but sometimes this is not possible and connections get dropped.

Sometimes the problem relies in the encryption. When the network is not open and it’s traffic is encrypted, this “overhead” causes more drops than the usual.

Possible solutions are resetting the router to factory settings and reconfiguring it, changing the channel from Auto to something allowed in your country, making sure your Operating system / Computer has the latest drivers/patches/etc. and there isn’t really much else you can do.

You can try moving your router to another physical position.

I’ve read a few posts about that specific router model and Macbooks having problems, so also assume there might be a problem with that model (or some revision of the router) and OS X.

You can always try to see if the Console has some relevant error messages (/Applications/Utilities/Console.app).


iMac as video server for iPad How can I use an iPad to view video files that are stored on an iMac in the same local network?

The only idea I have so far, is to set up a HTTP server on the iMac, and browse the video files with Safari on the iPad.

Does OS X provide a more elegant way to do this?

You can use iTunes Home Sharing.

For it to work, you need two thing:

All your movies in mp4 for iTunes (Ideally with Metadata and Images, looks cleaner and is easier to search on the iPad)
An iTunes Store Account

You then put all the movies in iTunes, leave it open and activate "Home Sharing" in iTunes->Preferences->Sharing

Check "Share my library on my local network"

Then, go on your iPad, make sure you are connected with the same iTunes ID and go in the standard Video app. You shall see you library that can be shared. Tap it, let it load and there you go, you have access to movies from your iPad! (it also include TV Series)


I upgraded my 5GB iCloud storage to 50GB storage and its not showing and not only is it not showing but 1.98€ was deducted from my account and not 99¢ as advertised.  I am loath to click again as they may deduct MORE money!? Anyone out there know why my iCloud storage isn't appearing?

The easy way to make sure Apple has provisioned your storage is to sign in to iCloud on a computer with a somewhat modern browser:

https://www.icloud.com/#settings

If the cloud doesn't see your storage, you have a billing and/or support question.

https://support.apple.com/itunes

If the cloud does show your storage, you can get free support using the paid storage as an exception from AppleCare at:

https://support.apple.com/ - choose your device that's not able to get the paid storage.


Magic mouse 2 scrolling not working after installing windows 10 I have installed windows 10 via boot camp. Now when i start up with windows , i can move magic mouse 2 on the screen but scrolling with mouse not working.
 When i start up with Osx 10.11.4 magic mouse 2 does not have problem.

I would recommend updating the Bootcamp application and drivers through Windows by using Apple Software Update. It is likely an outdated driver being on your system which does not have the proper information to handle the newer Magic Mouse 2.


Update Unavailable with This Apple ID I've searched but cannot find the exact situation I have with Apple ID and App Store.

On my work iMac I have signed into App Store and downloaded software (El Capitan, Microsoft Remote Desktop to name a couple) with my personal Apple ID, but now I want to use a work Apple ID I have created. I cannot perform updates with my work account (as it didn't download the apps originally), is there a way of transferring these downloads from my personal account to my work account?

You can delete the Software in question, start the App-Store, logout the Work-id, login the Personal ID (in the App-Store) and Download the Software again.

If you want to make sure all settings and files of the Software in question are gone, use the Freeware 'AppCleaner' (https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/)


Zip file extraction corruption/issues - no unzipping into sub-folders Something weird I've noticed with Zip files and OSX recently (both on 10.7 and 10.6.*).

Situation: a .zip file with sub-folder and long file names within it. When it's extracted on Windows it extracts all items within their sub-folders properly. When extracted on OSX it does not extract them into sub-folders but puts them all in one folder and then takes the subfolder names and adds it to the file name so you have a super long file name like this:

folder/sub-folder/itemname.extension

But it's not in subfolders.

that make sense? Anyone figure out why this happens? I'm not sure what the character length is that triggers this because other files extract fine, just certain ones that exceed a character limit in the name...

This isn't answering your question, but might I suggest you try The Unarchiver - I find it much better than Archive Utility.app. I've used it for years and never seen the problem you've experienced with Apple's utility.


Does letting services like PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB and Mysql run all the time eat up battery life and system resources? I'm a web developer and so I tend to run a lot of server applications on my machine to make local development easier.  Right now I use foreman to start the up as needed per project.  I do this in the belief that having them run all the time is just eating up resources since I don't always need them.  However I'm wondering if that is really the case or am I just being paranoid. Because having them run all the time would make things slightly easier.

I've switched to running the services all the time instead of using foreman and I haven't really had any problems with battery life.

I've also installed LaunchRocket which makes it easier to actually manage those services from the Settings.app.  I'm very comfortable in the command line however this just makes it super easy to start or stop the services.

I'm also toying with the idea of using ControlPlane to have start or stop some of the services depending on if I'm at work or not.


Convert ALAC to aac 128k with all metadata intact I have about 300 gigs of ALAC files (m4a container) with well groomed metadata, album art, etc. (Original source: CD rips with dbPowerAmp). I want to convert my music library to 128kbps AAC (still m4a) to save on hard drive space on a small server.

The solution I'm hoping for is a command line based option using ffmpeg or the like. There's nothing Mac-specific about doing it that way but given it's all Apple codecs and I'm doing the conversion on a Mountain Lion box I thought I'd ask here. I can manage most of the shell scripting myself but I don't know ffmpeg well enough to be sure that it retains metadata and album art.

I've done a conversion in the past with iTunes 10; there's a trick where you manipulate "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC". But the conversion quality is not sufficient. iTunes rewrites filenames in various circumstances, particularly when any non-ASCII is involved. Also it takes more than 20 hours to do the conversion and there's no clean way in iTunes to keep track of what's converted if the batch is interrupted.

I realise this is not a command line solution, but I use Max to convert FLAC and ALAC to AAC and MP3 files, and it keeps the metadata intact.

http://sbooth.org/Max/

Its a very lightweight app.

There are also download links and instructions on the site for how to build the app from the source, so maybe the moving parts of the ALAC-to-AAC with metadata conversion could be discerned from there.

Also, before compressing lossless rips to save space, maybe give TuneSpan a try, and put your lossless audio on external storage?

http://tunespan.com/#show_demo


How many writes do I have on my 250GB SSD hard drive on my Macbook Pro High Sierra I would like to know how many writes I have on my Mac's SSD hard drive?

I would also like to know if there is a terminal command I can run to find out this information and how many writes I have left so I can check the status of it?

You cannot in general track how many writes exactly have been performed on the drive. You would have had to keep track of that statistics yourself somehow.

Similarly you cannot in general say how many writes are left, as there's no "guarantee" that a drive will fail at a certain point. Nor is there a guarantee that a drive won't fail up until a certain point.

The best way to get an approximation of what you want is to look at the SMART attributes on the drive. You can do that with the program "smartctl" from "smartmontools". If you have homebrew installed, you can install smartmontools with this command:

brew install smartmontools

Then afterwards run it like this:

smartctl -a disk0

(replace disk0 with the actual physical disk you want to examine - you can find the device names in Disk Utility)

In the output from smartctl, you'll want to look at the so called "Wear Leveling Count". The raw value at the right tells you how many erase/program cycles each block on the SSD in average has undergone. The erase/program cycles are what wears out the drive eventually.

In addition, the number in the column "value" will tell you in basically how large a part that number of erase/program cycles is compared to the expected number of cycles that you drive can sustain. Basically this number starts at 100% for a new drive, and counts down to 0% where you would expect the drive to start failing. As mentioned before, drives can and will fail before that point - and they might not fail at that point. However, it is one of the better indicators you have of drive health.


What is Swiftly on mac? I upgraded to Mavericks a few days ago and since then I keep getting a pop up floating search box randomly. I do not know what triggered it and I do not know where it is from. It is driving me crazy. Can anyone tell me?

I have Alfred and ShiftIt installed.

Do you have QQ Instant Messenger installed?
On my computer, this was the cause for this strange popup window.


Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 for Mac? I'm having trouble editing a PowerPoint deck on my MacBook Pro. A colleague suggested I get the latest Microsoft Office for Mac.

I priced it on Amazon, and I came across Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 for Mac | Mac Key Card. However, the listing does not discuss the terms or explain the Mac Key Card.

I visited Microsoft's site and found Office Home & Business 2016 for Mac. It does not list the terms or explain the Mac Key Card.

So my questions are:

Is this an expiring copy of Office?
What is the Mac Key Card?

I don't use third party clouds, like Microsoft or Apple clouds. I'm happy to use my local OpenStack installation, but Microsoft and Apple don't allow me to do it.

According to the FAQ under What's the difference between Office 365 plans and Office 2016 suites?, it looks like Office 365 uses the cloud, but Office 2016 suite does not.

So this question is:

Does Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 for Mac use an external cloud, like Azure and OneDrive?
Can I use my internal OpenStack cloud with Office 2016 suite?

My apologies for asking basic questions. I want to ensure I understand what I am getting into. I got burned in the past with Microsoft, their marketing literature that omits important limitations and details, and their expiring trials.

My understanding is that the only difference in the MS Office 2016 apps is the licensing key.

They will all want to phone home to microsoft's cloud services - so no matter how you buy/install it - you'll have to deal with that on a firewall / configuration basis after installing the apps.

The key card just provides you a license so you don't need to log in to authenticate that you're an Office 365 subscriber. Think of it like logging into iTunes or the various app stores. Microsoft gives you an account to verify if you have subscribed to their software.

The key card is the license to avoid that online payment / check.

Apple's web site is actually quite nice for sussing out how the various options are priced and licensed:

http://www.apple.com/us/search/office?src=globalnav

Office 365 is a subscription that expires. The rest are not.


Issue with my launchpad on MBP Retina 13" I've got one annoying problem with my launchpad icon. Today i was downloading xcode and i stopped it over the time, because it was already installed in the finder.

Can I reset the launchpad over my console ? It is still on the point of stopped, but i can't klick on it to download it again.

sudo killall -SIGKILL cfprefsd && killall Dock && killall Finder
 will not work for reset, another way, the reboot isn't working too.

Hope you can help me and sorry for my bad english, i hope you'll understand me (;

Best regards,

Jonas

A simple Google search gave this article on OS X Daily, which is interestingly based on this Stack Exchange answer. Here are the relevant bits:

  Open the Terminal application and enter the following defaults write command string:
  defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad -bool true; killall Dock
  Hit return and wait for the Dock to relaunch and Launchpad to reset

  When you open Launchpad again, the layout will have returned to the
  default, placing all bundled apps onto the first screen of Launchpad,
  and third party apps onto the secondary (and third, if applicable)
  screens.


How to remove an icon from launchpad that does not appear in the Finder? I have moved an installer into the launchpad (uTorrent-Installer). The problem is that I would like to remove it now but as it is an installer it doesn't appear in "Applications" in the Finder. I can't right-click the icon to remove it nor can I drag and drop it into the trash.

Can I delete apps from launchpad?

If you are using Yosemite here is the surgical approach to remove only what you want to, instead of wiping out all of Launchpad.

Open up your Terminal app of choice, then use the following command:

sqlite3 $(find /private/var/folders \( -name com.apple.dock.launchpad -a -user $USER \) 2> /dev/null)/db/db "DELETE FROM apps WHERE title='APP_NAME_CASE_SENSITIVE';" && killall Dock

to remove an application from the Launchpad.


Shortcut to multiple commands for cleanup To clean up cache and log files, I prefer to run following commands via terminal on daily basis (once a day, mostly in morning).

rm -rf ~/Library/Logs/* ~/Library/Caches/*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Logs/* /Library/Caches/*

I want to make a shortcut for above commands. I was thinking of putting them into a file (say, cleanup) where above and other similar commands are listed on seperate lines. Wheneven, I want to run above commands, it should be simpler command like run cleanup.

Is this possible? Also, can I put something like this when system starts (post booting)?

You have a couple of options to do this....
Create a bash script.
#!/bin/bash
rm -rf ~/Library/Logs/* ~/Library/Caches/
sudo rm -rf /Library/Logs/* /Library/Caches/*

Assuming you've named it "cleanup" first make sure you set it to be executable:  chmod +x cleanup.
Then put it in one of the directories in your PATH by copying it or symlinking it:  cp cleanup /usr/local/bin or ln -s ./cleanup /usr/local/bin/cleanup
Make an alias
alias cleanup="rm -rf ~/Library/Logs/* ~/Library/Caches/; sudo rm -rf /Library/Logs/* /Library/Caches/*"

Put that alias in your ~/.bash_profile so it's set every time you start a Terminal session.
Now that it's an alias, you can execute the command cleanup from Terminal and it will run those two commands.


Macbook Pro WiFi hardware sporadically malfunctioning I dropped my MacBook Pro (15" mid 2012) last week, which appeared to just give a bit of cosmetic damage near the Ethernet port. But over the last few days, my Mac has repeatedly automatically set WiFi to off in the toolbar and won't let me turn it back on. Sometimes the toolbar displays "no WiFi hardware installed".

As many sources online recommended, I did NVRAM and SMC resets, and this occasionally works, but is only a temporary solution, eventually it will tell me there's no hardware again. My thinking is that the cable connecting to the airport card was damaged when I dropped the laptop.

Does this seem likely? Obviously I don't want to replace the cable, unless I'm pretty sure that's the issue.

My thinking is that the cable connecting to the airport card was
  damaged when I dropped the laptop. Does this seem likely?

You need to diagnose the issue and without actually putting "hands on" the unit itself, everything's just a guess at this point.   That said,  there's nothing in NVRAM or in power management (SMC) that resetting both/either will solve.

The "No WiFi hardware installed" means the hardware isn't being detected by macOS.

There are three possibilities:

It's has a loose connection.
The airport card is failing (possibly coincidental with your drop).
The connector is broken

The first one is easy to diagnose/solve; simply disconnect, ensure that connections are clean, and then reconnect.

If the airport card has failed, you need to replace it with new Airport Adapter.

Finally, if the connectors are broken, you can either replace the cable as you initially thought or if it's on the logic board side, you will need to have the logic board repaired/replaced.


macOS equivalent to Ubuntu mouse middle button on window title bar to lower window? On Ubuntu it's extremely handy to lower a given window by clicking mouse middle button on title bar

... is there a macOS equivalent ?

PS.  to lower a window is simply to keep an open window at current location on desktop and push it to the bottom of all overlapping windows ... the opposite of clicking on title bar of partially shown window to raise it to top most window ... given window may very well be occluded by neighbor windows so not necessarily the top most window holding the window focus ... very different from minimizing a window

I believe what you are referencing is the setting in Ubuntu that can be configured called 'Raise window if covered, otherwise lower it.'

Unfortunately there is no equivalent for this action built into the Mac OS. We have plenty of shortcuts, but not that one.

There has been plenty of discussion about this missing feature in past questions like this one, which is broken down a little better for readers in this answer. I'm not marking your question as a duplicate because it's not exactly the same, and we're now dealing with a different OS than they would have been 5 years ago.

Here are our options:

'command + tab' - for cycling through open applications
'command + `' - for cycling through multiple windows of the active
application
'command + H' - to hide an application (all windows) without minimizing it; handy when you still want to be able to access the window from the application switcher without having to de-minimize it first

If the built in shortcuts of the Mac OS just don't work for what you're trying to accomplish, I suggest looking into a 3rd party solution. I have heard good things about a program called 'Witch' (although I don't use it myself). BetterTouchTool is another that I've seen recommended by many, but there are many on the market that have the ability to program shortcuts (and gestures) for the purpose of cycling through, activating, and handling open applications and/or windows.


In System 6.0.8 with MacWrite 1.0 how do I open a plain text file? I'm using Mini vMac which emulates a Mac Plus (I don't even think I have a Mac Plus anymore, and the SE/30's in the closet probably with leaking caps).

I've managed to get a copy of MacWrite 1.0, and I've got it emulating a 20 meg hard drive (swapping virtual floppies is somehow worse than swapping the real ones).

I'd like to open a plain text/ascii file I've imported into the emulator. It shows in the Finder window, but has the plain document icon. If I save a plain-text file with MacWrite, it shows as a document with little black horizontal lines on it.

If I ever knew what the difference was, I've since forgotten it. Something to do with resource forks or lord knows what. Is it possible to convert my imported text file such that MacWrite can open it? While it is small, I can't simply type out its contents (nor can I script it inside the Mac emulator as I did outside of it... no scripting environment).

The relevant metadata isn't actually stored in the resource fork (per Gordon Davisson). The type and creator codes need to be "TEXT" and "MACA" respectively. When importing into Mini vMac with its file importer tool, these will be set to "BINA" and "SITx" which aren't going to let you do anything with it (unless it's an actual Stuffit archive).
Try the Finder Info tool made for this purpose. It opens with a simple window that has text fields for these two pieces of metadata. Change them. There's no need to click a save button, as soon as you have changed them, they take effect (as with most modern Mac app preferences).
The icon for the file should change as well, and it will be openable with MacWrite.


First MacBook - am stuck I've unboxed a MacBook Pro and am stuck at the very beginning. These are the two screens that loop - I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing now.

Just visited the Apple Store for the exact same issue with the same images.

They saw the images and told that the trackpad is dead and I should contact the online shop that I bought the Macbook from.


Stylus for Multitouch (Laptop) Trackpad? I remember seeing a stylus that was available for the multitouch (laptop) trackpad. I'm learning a new language right now so it would be rather useful to be able to use a stylus to 'write' instead of using my fingers.

Take a look at the oStylus Capacitive Drawing Stylus:

http://ostylus.com/

Engadget's review specifically mentions and shows the stylus being used with Apple's Magic Trackpad.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/01/ostylus-capacitive-pen-review/


How do you use Greek letters in pages, 5.5.2? Need to use some Greek letters using pages, 5.5.2?

Open the Character Viewer and drag the letters from there in to your document.

If you have to use it more frequently you can set it up bit automated, in the syst pref- Keyboard- Text. Then assign a Greek letter to some word like when you type Beta it would be replaced with Greek β.


Upgrade PHP, not install additional PHP My new work has just given me a MacBook Pro running macOS Sierra 10.12.6 to use as a development machine. It has PHP 5.6 installed and when I ran curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 7.1 (as recommended by many online guides), it installed PHP 7.1 in a separate directory while leaving PHP 5.6 intact.

I have a few issues:

PHP 7.1 will not run by default
The Non Thread Safe version was installed
When I run PHP 7.1 directly, it takes 5 seconds to start (I timed it), while PHP 5.6 starts instantly

One site recommended adding the new PHP directory to the start of the PATH environment variable, but that seems like a band-aid solution.

How can I update the existing PHP 5.6 version to PHP 7.1 (Thread Safe), and have it respond instantly when run?

I know you don't want to install a different PHP, but I've found using the Homebrew install method quite painless and robust.  Maybe give it a try.

brew install php


Missing iOS iMessage showing in OSX Messages This is the second time this has happened to me in the past couple of days so it starts to bother me: somebody sends me an iMessage, that I never get on my iPhone (4S iOS 8.2) but I do get on my Macbook's (OS 10.10.2 Yosemite) Messages application (v8.0). Even days later the messages are not appearing on my iPhone.

Do you have any idea why this is happening and how I could manually force a synchronization?

It can happen if your phone is outside good reception area for iMessage - carrier signal dropped to GPRS/Edge etc.

The Mac picks it up, the system considers it delivered.
There is no further attempt to send it to your phone.

It used to happen to me a lot when I was working in a low-reception area.

It won't re-synchronise.

See How to tell Messages "I'm not at home"? for a similar experience.

It doesn't happen if your phone is set to airplane mode, or off altogether. For some reason, that will trigger a delivery of missed messages when you switch back on again.

[All of this may be mobile-operator influenced - I've never been able to figure that part out - whether it happens to everyone or just certain carriers.]


How to change margin width of iBooks in macOS Is it possible to change the margin width in iBooks in macOS? I'm attaching a screenshot wherre I've marked the width with red arrow. My question is can  I shorten or widen the left/right margins?

Is it possible to change the margin width in iBooks in macOS

The margin width is not user customizable in iBooks for macOS.

  My question is can I shorten or widen the left/right margins?

The margin width is dynamically adjusted (while keeping both left and right margin equal) based on the window and the font size. You can play around with it to suit your preference.

The window size is preserved on per book basis. (Different books can have different window size, which is restored when opening the book)


Will using Airplay with local files sent to AppleTV (2nd Gen) count towards data allowance from ISP? I am considering getting a cheap AppleTV 2 just to stream local music and video files but have not found a clear answer if Airplay will use my monthly ISP data allowance. Thanks

AirPlay is a peer to peer networking protocol, so it works even if you have no internet connection. In most cases, you don't even need WiFi for AirPlay to work so if you're really concerned, you could shut down WiFi or unplug it from the router entirely and check that things work.

AirPlay doesn't disable any background downloads or connections, so you could still use data while you AirPlay, but it's not because of AirPlay

Good discussion of AirPlay and LTE/Cellular data is on this thread, but your question is different in that it's more about WAN/LAN than a cellular link:

Can I use 4G LTE (Cellular Data) and Airplay using Wifi w/ No Internet connection at the same time?

It does reinforce the "downloads can happen" aspect as well, but hopefully makes it clear the AirPlay is purely peer to peer and not routed traffic out a gateway be it WiFi or LTE.


Can't create new directory in home folder: What are "default" permissions/ownership? I do know how to set permissions. But what is the default OS X permission and ownership for one's home directory. I can't create a dir. How is mine different?  (See snippet):

jbenniMac:~ jbenni$ pwd
/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/jbenni
jbenniMac:~ jbenni$ ls -l ..
total 0
drwxrwx---@ 101 jbenni  staff  3434 May 14 17:15 jbenni
jbenniMac:~ jbenni$ mkdir test
mkdir: test: Permission denied
jbenniMac:~ jbenni$

Also:

jbenniMac:~ jbenni$ ls -ledO@ /Users/jbenni
drwxr-xr-x+ 13 jbenni  staff  - 442 Mar  9 15:52 /Users/jbenni
 0: group:everyone deny delete

Note: 1) There are other miscellaneous symptoms. E.g., Bash complains about not being able to create  a sessions folder, and I get a spurious "StartupItems" has wrong permissions at login (even though it doesn't).  I suspect all these are related.

Note: 2) Long ago, and several versions of OS X ago, I installed an SSD for my system and applications.  I relocated my Home directory (using the Users and Groups, "Advanced Options...", then browsing to a location on the builtin hard disk for my home directory).  That's been working fine, and life is good in the Finder.  I don't use Terminal often enough to know for sure when this prob. started - but Terminal has worked subsequent to the SSD/HDD separation.

The answer was provided by fd0 who posted it on SuperUser.
The problem turns out to be caused by conflicting ACLs, and was solved by removing them all. (Apparently resetpassword as suggested above did not clear these ACLs.  I don't know why.) The terminal command that revealed the conflicting ACLs was:

ls -ledO@ "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/jbenni"

The terminal command that fixed the conflict (by removing all) was:

chmod -N "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/jbenni"

I hope this helps someone else. I was chmod aware, but didn't have a working knowledge of ACLs - so I never would have found this on my own. Stackexchange rocks!


Can I view history of recently connected USB devices in OS X? Is it possible via the Terminal in OS X to show a history of recently connected USB devices. For example I want to know the specified ID of the MP3 Sony Walkman which I plugged into my MacBook Pro two weeks ago. Is that possible?

It's not likely you will have that information from weeks ago. The likely place, system.log is deleted after a week, so you'd need to have Time Machine or another backup mechanism to look at that file.

You could test this easily opening the console.app and filtering system.log for USB messages (or even look in all messages) and see what is logged when you connect the affected / intended to track device.

Since MP3 players look like storage, there's a good chance you will get some log messages to track that from OS X without needing special software as long as the event is within a week.


macOS Sierra Administrator Account Missing My Mac used to have 2 Admin accounts:

Admin1 which is the original one and has full access and
Admin2 which is managed.

Admin1 is now missing. How can I recover Admin1? Admin2 doesn't have the rights to create another account. Guest account is also turned off.

This happens all the time. Upgrades don't intentionally delete any user data, but when you have corruption, upgrade time is when major changes cause you to rewrite data on disk and loss is checked or noticed.

You can restore from a backup or make a backup of what is now on the disk and then try an erase install. If you are missing something as large as a user account, who knows what else is missing and unstable. Best to wipe and start cleanly after making a backup.

Also, I wouldn't try to fix anything - trying to make a new admin account could lose you even more data. Shut down that Mac and see about your options for making a backup to another computer or at least get a quote from someone that has the skills to help you back up your Mac.

The first skill to master if you want to try this is booting to target disk mode:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201462

In your case, target disk works when your OS isn't able to give you admin rights. You can skip that if you have a good backup and just erase install your Mac.


Is there a way to hide/remove the drop box folder (not dropbox.com) that is inside of public folder? Inside Public folder there is a folder called "Drop Box" (I'm not talking about dropbox.com) which is used for network/sharing purpose. Since I only use the machine locally, I would like to delete that folder, but doesn't matter how many time you delete or hide it, it keeps appear again.

Any tip?

You can hide it from from Finder by setting the hidden flag with Terminal

chflags hidden /path/to/folder/

and if you want to remove the flag

chflags nohidden /path/to/folder/


Button icons lost after updating to Mavericks Since updating to Mavericks, the buttons on the Apple apps have all lost thier icons:

Can anybody advise how I can restore them?

Macbook Pro
13-inch, Early 2011
Processor  2.7 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory  8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics  Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB
Software  OS X 10.9 (13A603)

Given that the issue is limited to your user account, I would assume the problem lies within your home directory. Per this MacRumors thread, have you tried deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist? I can't replicate your issue, but I have deleted this file seemingly without untoward effect on my 10.9 system.

By way of further diagnostics, you might also try Safe Booting by holding the Shift key on startup and see if the problem still occurs.


Is there a way to monitor what data is displayed on iPad/iPhone My company has an iPad/iPhone app which shows news, blogs, videos and various articles. This data is obtained from a rss feed. Additionally it also shows a lot of stock market data. My question is, is there a way to check if my application is displaying the information which matches exactly with the rss feed data?

The only way i can think of doing it, is to monitor all http calls going out from my iPad and garbing the response using tools such as Wireshark or charles, and then subsequently compare the http response with the rss feed. But this approach still does not handle the scenario "what exactly is being displayed to the end user situations"?

If i use the http monitoring approach, how would i go about comparing results on charles or Wireshark.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Rather than wireshark, try using a http proxy, like fiddler2.  Then save the Rss content to a file, and load it into a browser, like firefox.  Then you'll have to visually diff the two views of the RSS feed.


iMac runs from external SSD. How do I use Time Machine to back up the external SSD to the internal HDD? I am using an external SSD as my iMac boot drive, and that is terrific. I want to back that up using Time Machine and have the back up on my old internal HDD in the iMac.

How do I do it?

If the internal hard drive is empty, then you just need to select it in Time Machine settings as the target. There should be no other setup necessary.

If it is not empty, and you cannot empty it, you should partition it first. However, if it is the wrong format, Time Machine will need to wipe it. It needs to be MacOS Extended (Journaled) for Time Machine to use it. I strongly recommend only using it for Time Machine if you don't need the data on it. You can use Disk Utility to wipe it (select the drive and click Erase, set it up with MacOS Extended (Journaled)).


Which Power Adapter is the correct one for Powerbook G4 15inch FW800 - 45watts or 65watts I have a Powerbook G4 15inch FW800 with a 45watts Apple style power adapter. Recently it would not boot up. I removed the battery and it did. However after a shutdown, later on it did not boot up without battery. Only after I reinserted the battery and after waiting for a few minutes did it boot up again. I heard that I should use a 65watts Power Adapter and not a 45watts. However, when I search for a power adapter based on my Powerbook's Apple Order number: M8981LL/A and/or the Model Number: A1046 - I sometimes get a match with a 45watt adapter and other times with a 65watts adapter. So, which adapter should I use with my Powerbook?

In practice, I've never seen a properly working 45 watt adapter not be able to boot a properly working PowerBook when you remove the battery.

The 45 watt adapter was intended for smaller devices and would often not be enough to both charge and run a 15 inch PowerBook in all situations even when everything was working properly.

At this point, with ten year old equipment, it's possible you will need a 65 watt adapter or have some power management issues with the adapter or the Mac.

That Mac should have a 65 watt adapter for best results, power on and charging since the G4 and battery do need that much power to work as designed.


Why to I need to keep putting in my passwords after my Mac sleeps? I have several email accounts, and I keep having to put in the email passwords, my login details and my system passwords! I think it happens when my Mac has slept - overnight etc? Help!!?

Sounds like a keychain issue.

First port of call is to open 'keychain access' Then in Keychain Access Menu run keychain first aid.


Lion - customize toolbar In Snow Leopard you could right click an application toolbar icon and select "Remove item", this is no longer possible in Lion. If I select "Customize toolbar" I get the customization panel, but it's not possible to do any changes.

Anyone know if this is a bug or intentional?

Any way around it?

⌘CMD-drag to get the item out of the toolbar.


What are the downsides to using Apple Git? In other questions, such as "How to properly update git on mac?" it is implied that Apple Git isn't as good as using separately installed versions of Git. What are the downsides to using Apple Git?

There are currently no downsides but there have been times when the Apple release was behind and missed useful changes.

The only downside is that it is not the latest version and so missing new features and bug fixes (and probably some regressions).

Xcode 8 includes git version 2.10.1 (Apple Git-78).

Latest source release on git home page is 2.11.1 but latest maintained build is 2.10.1


Bookmarks syncing between 2 machines in Google Chrome after Time Machine Migration I migrated from one Mac to another via Time Machine. So, I get a full copy of my system.

Now I'm using both of this Mac's. In Chrome logged-in by Google account and set up bookmarks synchronisation.

But in bookmarks bar I see all devices except my second mac. Probably Chrome somehow not recognise, that it the other Mac.

I tried delete app, but it doesn't help.

Who knows how to get around this problem?

UPD:

At first time both computers have the same name.
But after renaming problems remained.

Then my only thought remaining is that by doing a direct transfer of all files that there is a special chrome ID/profile that gets created when the app opens the first time. If that file gets copied then both computer have the same profile. You might have to export the bookmarks in chrome on one computer an then delete the ~/Library/Application Support/Chrome folder and then ~/Library/Preferences/com.google.Chrome.plist file in Preferences. Relaunch Chrome and that should force an ID/profile creation and then you could sync again.


Late 2009 MBP 15" battery drain on sleep after putting SSD and ram upgrade I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (macbook pro 5.4) with Core 2 duo 2.53ghz 4GB RAM with 256 HDD.
I upgraded the RAM and switched to SSD. Here are the specs:

Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD2 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Laptop Memory Model CT2KIT51264BC1067

My problem is that after upgrading my laptop drains significantly more battery while on sleep. Like 15% per day, before upgrade it drained like 1-2% per day on sleep.

I'm on Mavericks but with upgrades, so not a fresh install, I also enabled the trim support for the SSD with a third party app. I tried SMC reset at some point as well. I have the latest firmware update.

You probably have one of the following enabled that could explain the power drain.

Power Nap or Wake on WiFi, disable them,

or read the small print that says what it will do in sleep :)

Also as said earlier, open the Console and type "Wake" in the search window of the Console.

Now look who and what is waking it up and what is it  for what reason and what is it doing about it.

As for your question why is it consuming more power, well you added more lights to the Christmas tree.

For example when HDD sleeps it does not consumes any power. The cussing SSD does consume power since it reshuffle it self from time to time, that is normal for SSD to refresh its memory cells.

UPDATE:

according to apple, you computer does not support the Power Nap mode settings thus enable/disable activity during the sleep.

So back to the Console reports:

Type "Wake" and look what is waking it up or keeping it awake based on time stamps.

Going on a limb, I would say it is your Trim support for the SSD, that you will find in the Console.

The TRIM command is an important disk command for SSDs that keeps your flash memory appropriately cycled so that you can achieve faster read and write speeds, as well as a longer lifespan for your SSD.


Adding calendar events on iPhone The calendar new event page which you say should have a "Done"  only has cancel or add buttons. Press either and what you have written disappears. No way to save calendar event that I can see

The "Add" button is the one you want.

Your phone likely has multiple calendars. It seems like you are currently adding new events to a calendar that is not visible.

First open the calendars app and note the word "calendars" on the bottom center (directly above the home button).  Tap the word to configure which calendars are "visible".  The calendar that you are currently adding events to is not visible.  You can make all calendars visible simultaneously and you should find the events that "disappeared" as you created them.

The second setting to be aware of is "Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > default calendar"  (currently the last entry on that screen).  This determines which calendar new events are added.


macOS Calendar pushes, doesn't pull? iCloud & iPhone push & pull My iCloud Calendar appears to be working (from any web browser). My iOS Calendar appears to be working (from my iPhone). My macOS Calendar appears to be pushing changes to iCloud, but not pulling changes from iCloud:

If I create, edit, or delete an event on iCloud.com, it immediately appears on my iPhone, but not on my Mac.
If I create, edit, or delete an event on my iPhone, it immediately appears on iCloud.com, but not on my Mac.
If I create, edit, or delete an event on my Mac, it immediately appears on iCloud.com, and on my iPhone.

Also:

If I click Menubar / View / Refresh Calendars, changes still aren't pulled to my Mac.
If I change Menubar / Preference / Accounts, Refresh Calendars from "Push" to "Every minute", and wait a minute, changes still aren't pulled to my Mac.
Waiting overnight and over days doesn't fix the issue.
Only if I quit macOS Calendar app and relaunch the app, then changes are pulled to my Mac.

This problem only appeared after replacing a 2011 "High Sierra" MacBook Pro with a 2018 "Mojave" Macbook Air. I've tried signing in/out of iCloud everywhere. I've wiped and rebuilt the machine. I've spent hours on the phone with Apple, to no avail. Any help, please?

macOS 10.14.2 Mojave
iOS 12.1.1

Sometimes it takes a couple of minutes to sync.

Can you try what you see here:
Open the Calendar app, choose Calendar > Preferences, On the General tab, make sure that one of your iCloud calendars is the default.


macOS Sierra on external drive – Mac do not go to sleep anymore Since two days I am using an external SSD as system disk (to work with my system on my iMac or on my new arriving MacBook Pro – on demand – without any synchronization process). Just attach the disk and boot my system.

On my iMac this work pretty good. I have tested my Thunderbold 2 case – wich was faster on boot as the USB 3.0 case. But the Thunderbold case need external power – so thats not perfect.

Now I am using the USB 3.0 case just connected via USB. And this morning I noticed, that my iMac didn't went to sleep – just the dispay turned off. So the system will not go to sleep automatically. After 5 minutes with turned off display I can still see some flashing LED on the SSD case – once a minute or something.

What can I do to get my system automatically to sleep again?

Update:

Running pmset -g in Terminal, I get the following

Currently in use:
standby               1
Sleep On Power Button 1
womp                  0
halfdim               1
hibernatefile         /var/vm/sleepimage
powernap              0
autorestart           0
networkoversleep      0
disksleep             0
sleep                 1 (sleep prevented by backupd, backupd, UserEventAgent)
autopoweroffdelay     28800
hibernatemode         0
autopoweroff          1
ttyskeepawake         1
displaysleep          1
standbydelay          10800

Maybe you have "Prevent computer from sleeping..." activated in Energy Saver preferences.


How to enable fast user switching when Login Options are disabled? I'm not sure how this machine was setup, but I do have control over it now as a local admin.

I need to enable fast user switching, but the option is greyed out along with some others. This is after unlocking the changes padlock.

Is there anything I can do to reenable these options?

This isn't a real fix, but I finally found a workaround. Even when fast user switching is disabled, you can still invoke this feature from the command line by running:

"/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession" -suspend

This leaves your session running and goes back to the login screen.

I created an alias for this in my .bashrc, good enough for now.


How to disable individual USB ports by script? I am looking for a script which will allow me to disable one specific USB port on my Mac mini. It would only serve a purpose if it works in real-time and didn't require a reboot. I've found scripts for various Linux distros that seemed to do something similar - however most required a reboot.

I've got ambient lighting behind my monitor which is powered by USB and it doesn't turn off when the system sleeps. So my office is constantly lit up, it would be nice if I could write a script that would disable that specific USB port.

How to disable individual USB ports by script?

Have you seen this thread and the code here? Maybe shell could be used to "manually" rename the device ID or port to something odd that won't work, upon a specified event, then renames it to what it's supposed to be later.


Resolution of pictures hopping from iphoto to imovie to idvd So, I've got this pretty big (12 minutes, 3sec/slide) slide show. I may be done with it. I may not.

The show is composed of ten iPhoto-11 slideshows. Each one was set up 4:3, then exported, with the kind advice of Nathan in another question to specify H.264, 2048 bit rate, and the second-highest resolution (my pick on the theory that I was not going to be driving an HDTV, just a relatively ordinary projector).

Imported into iMovie-11 at 30fps, arranged, decorated with music, exported to via the share menu iDVD. Didn't touch anything in iDVD. just pushed the burn button.

Inserted resulting disk into nice new-ish dvd player with 30" LCD TV, 720 resolution. The pictures have a very visible structure of being built of little squares.

I dont' see artifacts in full-screen preview in iPhoto, or in full-screen imovie preview on my macbook pro. (On my mini, it warns me that full resolution will be degradated, so the presence of them there is not a surprise). But the DVD has this problem.

edit

I discovered an option in iDVD to vary the 'encoding quality'. Moving that up to professional looked to me to make a notable improvement.

Ideas?

This issue may have been caused by a variety of issues:

The resolution was only at 720p.
iMovie compressed the movies.
The "encoding quality" may not have been up to par.

These programs have been updated significantly now, however. iPhoto has been replaced with Photos, and iDVD isn't supported now.


Possible to access/restore past versions of Notes in iCloud? If I mistakenly delete or otherwise mess up a Note that is stored in iCloud, is there a way to restore a past version of the Note?

Assuming you have 2 devices, let's say an iPhone and iPad, there is only one thing you can do:

delete something on your iPhone
as soon as you notice, enable airplane mode on your iPad
unlock iPad & open notes
copy note to somewhere else
turn off airplane mode
copy note back to notes

Other than that, there unfortunately doesn't seem to be anything you can do.


What are some interesting uses for an iPod touch 1G with broken wifi? I have a 1st generation iPod touch in which wifi does not seem to work. Fixing it would cost too much and I don't want to just throw it away. It is jailbroken at the moment, but this does not help as it seems you can only install apps from cydia or rock store when connected via wifi. You can install apps from Apple's App store when you are connected to iTunes on your computer, but I would like this ipod to be more than just an "app runner".

I am a programmer so what I have in mind is trying to write some software that could run on this iphone and possibly convert it into a completely different device. I know this is very vague but maybe together we will manage to come up with some interesting ideas...

EDIT: Let's concentrate on the "what cool things can be done with this ipod" instead of "how to fix the wifi". That is what my inner nerd asked me to write :)

Maybe Linux on the iPhone, or since your question asked for "interesting" and not for "useful", Windows 95 on iPhone:

  Give a guy an iPhone, a jailbreak, and
  an open-source, cross-platform x86
  emulator, and it's just a matter of
  time before hilarity ensues.