keyboard cover for iPad Mini 2019 (gen 5) I recently bought an iPad Mini 5. I'm now trying to find a keyboard cover/stand that I can use to more easily watch videos and play games without having to constantly support the screen. I know Logitech makes them but they haven't yet come out with a model that supports gen 5 (reference?), and I was told by a store clerk at a local retailer that the Gen 4 models aren't compatible since hardware buttons have moved (which buttons - the key caps?). Per this chat thread, here are my requirements.

The must have is connectivity and one standard USB charging connector

Nice to have are:

printed AZERTY keyboard layout (even better if it's Belgian AZERTY) so I don’t have to use software layouts or modify the keys
reliable bluetooth wireless connection to the iPad
reasonably long battery life
major brand that's known for quality and honoring warranty service without hassle
charging port is lightning, micro USB second preferred

What brand and model would you recommend if you have experience knowing one works. Better, how can I understand what requirements / features are needed to evaluate which keyboards will work at all so I can then shop for price on the nice to have?

Clearly, no one is making the cover you want in June 2019. You might need to get a cover and a keyboard if you don't want to wait.

Here are the keyboards I'd get if you need that first or can't wait:

Apple's actual keyboard nails your requirements for exact keyboard layout, bluetooth support, lightning charging, major brand known for quality keyboards (setting aside people’s love hate MacBook Butterfly keyboard issues)

https://www.apple.com/be-fr/shop/product/MLA22F/A/magic-keyboard-fran%C3%A7ais

Apple’s bluetooth magic keyboard comes with and without numeric keyboards and also in space grey if you want to spend a bit more. They are not the same size as the mini (feature and/or bug) and you’ll get the best support since Apple made both software, firmware and hardware. If that doesn’t work, Apple has no excuse they didn’t expect you to use these together.

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/ultrathin-keyboard-folio-for-ipad-mini

Logitech would by my next iPad mini specific recommendation. Solid, great warranty, sized right, support for iOS explicitly and you might even score a European model key layout.

I haven’t seen this yet in person, but am tempted to buy it sight-unseen knowing it’s featured at Apple Retail and from a trusted vendor.

Logitech Keys-to-Go Ultra Slim Keyboard with iPhone Stand


Macbook Pro won't connect to internet via Wi-Fi or ethernet Macbook Pro 2011 A1278 13"
OS X 10.9.5

I cannot connect to Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi symbol in the top right has a cross through it and when i click it says "Wi-Fi: No hardware installed". I've tried connecting to the internet via ethernet, when I plug in the ethernet cable it says connected under "network" but the internet doesn't work - pages won't load in safari, app store won't connect etc.

I've tried resetting the NVRAM and SMC.

Thanks.

Update: The wi-fi problem was fixed by replacing the cable between the airport card and the motherboard. The ethernet was fixed by deleting the connection under system preferences > network and adding it again.

The first thing I would try is removing your Wi-Fi service, restarting your MBP, and then adding your Wi-Fi service back.

Follow these steps:

Go to Apple > System Preferences > Network
Select the Wi-Fi service on the left-hand side
Click on the cog icon at bottom-left and select Make Service Inactive
Now delete the service by clicking on the minus sign (i.e. the - button) at left of the cog
Click on the Apply button
Exit Network preferences
Restart your MBP
Go to Apple > System Preferences > Network
Click on the plus sign (i.e. the + button) at left of the cog
In the pop-up window, ensure that Wi-Fi is selected from the drop-down menu
Click on the Create button
Make sure Wi-Fi is on and connected (it should remember your previous settings, but if not just re-add your Wi-Fi network again)

If this doesn't work you can test to see what happens in Safe Mode.

Boot into Safe Mode

Fully shut down your MBP
Restart your MBP
Immediately press the Shift key and keep it down
Let go of the Shift key when you see the login window (NOTE: If you
have FileVault enabled you may need to log in twice).
Test to see what happens (i.e. try connecting to Wi-Fi)
Exit Safe Mode by restarting your MBP as normal
Test again to see what happens

Note: Booting into Safe Mode will take longer than usual.

If you're still having problems during Safe Mode, then try testing your hardware.

Run Apple Hardware Test

Your model MBP uses Apple Hardware Test. To use this, follow these steps:

Shut down your MacBook Pro
Restart your MacBook Pro
Press and hold the D key before the gray startup screen appears.
After a while, Apple Hardware Test (AHT) will start.
When prompted, select your language and click the right arrow.
When the AHT console appears, you can choose to run Basic tests by clicking the Test button. However, I suggest you select the "Perform extended testing" checkbox before you click the Test button.
Your test results will appear in the window in the bottom-right of the console.

Note 1: The extended test will take some time. Take a note of the results and report back.

Note 2: If pressing and holding the D key at Step 3 doesn't work, start again at Step 1 and, at Step 3 press and hold both the OptionD keys instead. This will try and run diagnostics from the internet instead, so you will need to allow more time for it to complete.

Run these Terminal commands

Let's confirm what macOS believes the status of your Wi-Fi service is. To do this:

Launch Terminal (usually found in Applications > Utilities)
Enter the following command:

sudo networksetup -listallnetworkservices
Press Enter
Enter your password (note you will not see the cursor move, nor the characters appear on the screen)

Now, in the list that appears I assume you will see an asterisk (*) next to the Wi-Fi service. This denotes that it is currently disabled. Assuming this is what happens, let's try enabling it as follows:

Make sure you're still in Terminal
Enter the following command:

networksetup -setnetworkserviceenabled Wi-Fi on
A popup will prompt you for your password - enter it and click on the Modify Configuration button
Now enter this command:

networksetup -setairportpower en0 on
Restart your Mac
Now check System Preferences > Network again

Let me know how you go.


Sudo giving dyld problem. Help for a beginner I am new to using a macbook terminal. Initially when I used the terminal for working on Raspberry Pi everything was great. But now when I try to use the terminal and type
 sudo
 it keeps giving a dyld message. And also rejects my commands. The message is :

dyld: DYLD_ environment variables being ignored because main executable (/usr/bin/sudo) is setuid or setgid

Password:

what do I do? And why has this message started appearing all of a sudden?
Can anyone give a step by step guide on stopping this
Thanks a lot:)

On the short term,
within a Terminal enter:

unset DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH

and check that:

/usr/bin/sudo

is working.

Your description let think of an installer which modified your working
environment in closed relationship with the X11 environment.

To further analyze where this problem is coming, within a Terminal search which initialisation file might be working on this environment variable:

grep DYLD ${HOME}/.profile ${HOME}/.bash_profile ${HOME}/.bashrc

If you are using anything else than sh or bash as your working shell,
search inside the equivalent initialisation files.


ApplescriptObjC [Output Box] I would like to add a box to my applescriptobjc application. I would like to add a box that displays the output of

    do shell script ""

so I think I would do something like

    set a too (do shell script "")

But how would I show "a" in a box on the User Interface?

I believe this is what you want. Run the code in a Cocoa/AppleScript applet template in Script Editor and try it out.

set a to do shell script "echo monkey"
set window_rect to current application's NSMakeRect(40, 40, 500, 500)
set window_1 to current application's NSWindow's alloc's initWithContentRect:window_rect styleMask:15 backing:2 defer:false
set text_field to current application's NSTextField's new
text_field's setEditable:false
text_field's setDrawsBackground:false
text_field's setStringValue:a
window_1's setCollectionBehavior:(current application's NSWindowCollectionBehaviorFullScreenPrimary)
window_1's setContentView:text_field
window_1's setBackgroundColor:(current application's NSColor's blackColor)
window_1's makeKeyAndOrderFront:(current application's NSApp)


Copy a file's NSURL to clipboard I am trying to do a rather simple thing: in the context menu I want to have an action (e.g. with Automator) that gets and copies the file's NSURL to clipboard.

The solution seems simple, but it does not work (some unspecific error).
Here is what I have so far:

on run {input, parameters}

   set p to POSIX path of (input)
   set nsu to current application's |NSURL|'s fileURLWithPath:p

   return nsu

end run

I am looking to get the file reference URL, like so: file:///.file/id=6571367.2773272/

I am on El Capitan.

Any ideas?

Here is the solution to the issue (from: http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?pid=183164#p183164):

use framework "Foundation"

on run {input, parameters}

    set p to POSIX path of (input)
    set nsu to current application's |NSURL|'s fileURLWithPath:p

    set fru to nsu's fileReferenceURL()'s absoluteString() as text

    return fru

end run

I did not check jweak's answer. It may also work, after all.
The poster over at macscripter also mentioned something important: input may contain a list of items (multi-selected).

Hope this helps someone.


How do I save offline a PDF from the browser? Given a PDF available online, how in the world do I save it locally on the iPad? Why is this so counter-intuitive, if not downright impossible, when the iPad is a very nice e-reader?

load the PDF in Safari
tap once
tap on "Open in iBooks…" on top right

The PDF will be opened (and stored) in iBooks then


Safari doesn't load Kickstarter properly? When I go to Kickstarter.com, this is the site I see:

Now, I have tried trouble shooting this by myself. I have deleted the website information from the privacy tab, I have turned off / uninstalled all extensions 3rd party or otherwise.

None of these steps restores the website.

Interestingly even Google Chrome does not work:

Does anyone know what is going on?

The URL https://www.kickstarter.com is not broken for Safari Version 10.0.3 (12602.4.8) out of the box.

You are clearly getting bad web content to render and the suggestions in the comments are all spot on:

This can be caused by web filtering / MITM (man-in-the-middle) type network meddling. You can test for that by taking your Mac to another network (coffee shop, public library, another country (not China or North Korea for instance).
JavaScript blockers could cause this. Disabling JavaScript does change the rendering of Kickstarter for me, but the breakage is far less than what you report. Yours looks like the CSS isn't even loading.
Check for CSS changes/overrides you have made to your browser or system.
Web Privacy plug in (or network level controls) could cause this.
Bad settings on your user account could cause this. To test that, make a brand new user account.

From your testing on Chrome vs Safari - it's highly likely you have a hostile network and/or software on your Mac that's rewriting the web content being served to you and breaking it.


Will a Lion Fortran Binary work on Mountain Lion? I want to install a fortran binary from here GCC wiki GFortran binaries, but the binary for Mountain Lion is not yet available.  Would the binary for Lion work, or would it be a terrible mistake to install it?

It should run just fine on Mountain Lion, and it should not do any damage to the Mountain Lion machine.

There is only one way to know for sure if it will work - installing it. I didn't want to do this because I am not sure how to test it, but will say that it shouldn't be a terrible mistake to install.

It will either not run (due to various things like Gatekeeper, minor API changes between Lion and Mountain Lion, etc) or not even install. Otherwise, a Mountain Lion specific build either uses new APIs, etc.

Finally, quickly browsing around online it looks like depending on your install there may be an issue error trying to exec 'f951': execvp: No such file or directory". This site offers a fix, which looks like you need to uninstal the current Xcode, remove references to previous compilers like gcc, cpp, gfortran, and then reinstall Xcode, gfortran, and gcc.


On Mac, can one easily automatize repetitive work? Let's say I have some repetitive work on Mac which requires click menu A, then give some input, click button on and on.

Can anyone easily automatize these kind of tasks with Mac? What kinds of options do I have for it?

Automator on Mac is certainly one of the most underused apps. Using it doesn't require a long time of learning. All you have to do is to understand the way it works.
You'll find the answers to your questions in this tutorial.

By the way, in case you'd like to get the most out of your Mac, check this out also:
http://automator.us/leopard/index.html

Let me know if you managed to create your first Automator workflow ;)


Diagnosing a dead MacBook Pro Anyone got a good checklist for diagnosing the problem with a dead MacBook Pro ? I've a 15" MacBook Pro Core Two vintage machine that has suddenly stopped booting up. I can hear the Superdrive spin up, but then it stops with a black screen. Doesn't seem to want to boot from either the harddrive or the Superdrive (I've tried a Linux boot CD there).

I'd like to try to figure out if it's a problem with the display, with the logic board or something simple before I decide whether or not to scrap it.

I've tried booting with an external display attached to the displayport and still no joy (black screen).  It doesn't ever get to a grey screen, so I flunk out before ever getting to the checklist below. I tried resetting the PRAM just in case, but no joy there either.  When I power it down, I don't hear the "CHUNK" from the harddrive, but I've still got a boot CD in the Superdrive (any ideas on how to get THAT back out ?) so maybe it never gets to the HD.

Thanks for any advice.
Dane

I had the same issue when upgrading my RAM.
It turned out that the SO-DIMMs were not properly inserted.

Try the following:

take out both SO-DIMMs
re-insert the first one and make sure it goes fully into the lower socket
try rebooting

if it works, shut down again and insert the second SO-DIMM (again taking care to fully insert it into the upper socket.)

Good luck.


Is it safe to delete the contents of Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup if using iCloud? My /Users/{username}/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup is 5GB and I'd really like to reclaim that space if I can.

I back up my iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch to iCloud, so is there any reason not to simply delete the 9000+ legacy backups in this folder?

Yes, it is safe to delete it, if you are sure you want to lose those backups.

To do so, in a more elegant way, just:

Open iTunes Preferences
Click Devices
Locate the backup for the iOS device you want to delete, select it, and click Delete Backup.
Confirm you wish to remove the selected backup by clicking Delete Backup.
Click OK to close the iTunes Preferences Window.

Extracted from Apple's support document about iOs backups.

Confirmed: Deleting through iTunes will delete all the backUp files of the selected device.


My native mac apps are not connecting to the internet, but Google Chrome does and works correctly. Why is this? A few days ago all the native apps on my OSX 10.10.4 MacBook Pro stopped connecting to the internet.  This seemed to happen out of the blue, and I am not sure what caused this issue.  Strangely, Google Chrome seems to work just fine, when even Terminal cannot connect.  Here's a summary of what I've tried so far:

On the Terminal

ping google.com: ping: cannot resolve google.com: Unknown host
ping 8.8.8.8: 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
curl google.com: curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'google.com'
curl 8.8.8.8: curl: (7) Failed to connect to 8.8.8.8 port 80: Operation timed
ssh {servername} : ssh: Could not resolve hostname {servername}: nodename nor servname provided, or not known
nslookup google.com:  This works correctly, but the response is lengthy so I won't post it.
dig google.com:  This works correctly, but the response is lengthy so I won't post it.

So, to me, this seems like a DNS issue in that google.com is not resolved, but there is something else going on as well because curl 8.8.8.8 fails as well.  Strangely though both nslookup and dig are working as expected.

I have also tried running these commands to reset DNS

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

Other things

I have restarted in Safe Mode, but this gave the same results.
I have also made sure that there are no proxy setting active.
I have tried a number of different Wifi locations.  The wifi
connects, but native apps do not have internet access.
I performed these test on both Wifi and a wired connection and
observed the same results.
I removed and re-added the Wifi connection.
I restarted my computer many times.
There is no firewall.
I planned to install the newest OSX in hope that it would recover the
computer, but I cannot connect to the App Store.
I created a new user account and performed these same tests but observed the same results.

Does anyone have any idea what could be happening?  Any help is greatly appreciated!

EDIT

As requested by @willWorkForCookies, my resolv.conf file is actually a sym link.  The original is located here:  /private/var/run/resolv.conf

Here is my resolv.conf file:

$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
#
# Mac OS X Notice
#
# This file is not used by the host name and address resolution
# or the DNS query routing mechanisms used by most processes on
# this Mac OS X system.
#
# This file is automatically generated.
#
domain hsd1.mi.comcast.net.
nameserver 75.75.76.76
nameserver 75.75.75.75
nameserver 2001:558:feed::2
nameserver 2001:558:feed::1

Using the following command to flush DNS had no affect:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

For me, the issue was a missing library file:  "libgcc_s.1.dylib" which should have been located in "/usr/local/lib".  Specifically, when trying to run mDNSResponder from the terminal, it was throwing a file not found error and reported this file as missing.

For others who are facing this issue, I would suggest trying to start mDNSResponder from the terminal by typing "mDNSResponder" into the terminal.  It may report a missing library file.

I was not aware of how I could re-build this library, so I resorted to re-installing OSX from the recovery drive.  This took about 5 hours, but all my files remained in place, along with my applications and the majority of my OSX settings.

Everything appears to be working correctly now =)


How does one convert a dmg inside a DVD to individual videos or watch the dmg DVD file in an iphone? Since DVDs are essentially becoming obsolete or at least the macbook laptops do not have accessibility to them anymore, I thought it would be good to back a backup for them before I get rid of the DVD reader laptop and thus still be able to watch my videos.

The issue is that I don't know how to watch the DVD inside of my iphone even if I have access to the dmg file. One solution could be to have some app that access the DMG through dropbox/icloud and then open it with the app. Does that exist?

What I thought was more sensible was since some of these are lessons divided into separate videos, to convert the DMG to individual mp4 or .mov files which are easily watchable in the iphone. Is that possible?

DMG is a disk image file format.

Disk image files behave like a physical disk. In so doing, the operating system interprets them in the same way as if you had just inserted a CD-ROM, USB drive, etc into the computer.

So, to play DVDs you've converted to a disk image such as .DMG, you'll need to do two things:

Expand the disk image so that the 'DVD' becomes available
Open the DVD with some sort of 'DVD player' software (because what the operating system sees is a DVD)

In other words, an iOS devise like an iPhone is not going to be able to play a DVD. So, backing up your DVDs to a disk image file is a great way of preserving/backing up your DVDs for future access, but it's not a way to actually play your DVDs without the appropriate operating system and software. You could certainly expand the .dmg disk images and then use a DVD Player app on a Mac to view the DVD, or burn them to a DVD to make them available to a physical DVD player.

If your intention is to be able to play them on an iPhone or iPad (or any other smartphone/tablet) what you'll need to do is rip the DVDs to a video file format (e.g. .mp4, .mov, etc) and then transfer these files to your device. Depending on the file format you use, you may also need to install 3rd party app to be able to play them.

Some further reading:

For more info on DMG files you may want to read my answer here.
Possible to rip a DVD as an iTunes film?
Tiger DVD Ripper
How can I rip my DVD to play them on my TV?
Is it possible to connect an external CD/DVD drive to an iOS device?


SSD not working internally I recently bought a Corsair Force LE 240GB SSD and tried to do a net recovery on a macbook pro A1278 (MacBook Pro 13" Early 2011 with i5) to the latest El Capitan, but for some reason, this is only possible if it is connected via USB (as an external drive). As soon as it is connected internally instead of the standard HDD, it does not show up in disk utility and can't be used as startup disk or location to where the OS should be installed.
I cloned the working version of my HDD to the SSD, but when it is booting internally from the SSD (which now has a working version of Mac OS X on it), it freezes as soon as the progress bar reached 100%. It sits there for over an hour (I canceled it at that point always). Booting from the same drive externally boots into a clean working version of El capitan without any problems.

Judging from what I read online, a possible issue might be that the internal SATA cable doesn't support SATA III, which is used by this SSD. Before I go and buy a replacement cable, I would like to make sure there isn't another problem that could also cause this.

I have so far only tried net recoveries, and am currently downloading the OS image to burn it to a USB and try from there again. This is to eliminate errors that might come from a broken OS file (my Internet connection sometimes stops working).
Update: Also a recovery from USB with the internal SSD brings the same problems.

The drive itself works flawlessly on Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 10,  both as external and internal drive.

The problem was the internal SATA cable. After exchanging it - this is quite an easy operation, there are plenty of videos on Youtube that describe exactly how it's done - the drive booted flawlessly and is running at a negotiated link speed of 6 Gigabit.

To make sure an SSD will work with a Macbook, the Link Speed of the SATA controller should be checked in About This Mac > System Report > Hardware > SATA/SATA Express


Drive boots but isn't "located" The APFS drive I'm writing this text from cannot be located by macOS High Sierra. Everything that needs it misses whatever link is necessary to get to it. I can boot, I can use it, I cannot "find" it.

Finder shows it mounted and works fine with it.

What exactly is this error? How do I fix this?
diskutil list (it's /dev/disk1, and I've connected another drive since the images above)
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         1.9 TB     disk0s2
   3:         Microsoft Reserved                         16.8 MB    disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data                         100.0 GB   disk0s4

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +1.9 TB     disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume                         1.6 TB     disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume                         20.2 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume                         515.1 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume                         8.6 GB     disk1s4

/dev/disk2 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *4.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data Media                   4.0 TB     disk2s2

/dev/disk3 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *8.0 TB     disk3
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Media-1                 6.0 TB     disk3s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data Media-2                 2.0 TB     disk3s3

mount
/dev/disk1s1 on / (apfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s4 on /private/var/vm (apfs, local, noexec, journaled, noatime, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)

Fixed! Just as it came, it went. There is Paragon NTFS/Disk Utility background to this issue mentioned in a comment above, that might come into play here.
What little I did was figure out there were still Paragon NTFS files in the computer. This is well documented online, the command below should point you to the locations.
sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/Paragon Software/"
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.paragon-software.installer.plist
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.paragon-software.ntfs.loader.plist
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.paragon-software.ntfsd.plist
sudo rm /Library/LaunchAgents/com.paragon-software.ntfs.notification-agent.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/Filesystems/ufsd_NTFS.fs/
sudo rm -rf /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.paragon-software.installer
sudo rm -rf /Library/Extensions/ufsd_NTFS.kext/
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/ParagonNTFS.prefPane

I then left the computer running overnight copying files with Finder as an emergency preccaution to at least save the files.
Today, I restarted the computer (which I had already done once before without results), and after it took longer than usual to boot, everything was working again.
Guess you can add it to the long history of people having trouble using NTFS on macOS. Tuxera, Paragon, something always comes up sooner or later.

Alternatively, things I was gonna try today. I read someone saying that you can fix the Partition Table by booting to an external macOS drive and adding a new partition to the drive with problems, which "overwrites the partition map" back to normal. I also thought about booting into Safe Mode and seeing if it was recognized there, and physically reconnecting the SATA port of the drive.


I've broken my new MacBook Pro (with touchbar) like this, do I have to repair it? I am not sure whether this is a good question for this place. But I'd still like to have a try. It's anyway an "Apple question". If it's not a good place, I hope someone can let me know where should I go.

Here is my question:

I've broken my new MBP (the 2016 version with touchbar) like this:

Here is a high-quality photo:

Do I HAVE TO have it repaired?

I'm living in a place far away from Apple Store in the city so I'd like to get some online help before I make the decision to drive to downtown.

Thanks very much for any kind of tips.

You certainly don't need to repair it unless you can't use the device. It's a minor safety hazard until you contain any broken glass, but gravity or a toothpick to dislodge any fragments and then some clear tape should handle that. If you want to put a little black electrical tape over the aluminum inside and then use thin clear tape to make the surface smooth - that would be the advanced level patch I'd recommend.

Neither the one year warranty nor AppleCare extension / expansion of the warranty is intended to cover that sort of damage, but I would still call Apple's phone or web support if you aren't going to be in the area of a store in the next week. Ask Apple what your options are, but be prepared if they don't offer to pay to repair the damage.

Once you have a quote (assuming it's not covered), check with your form of payment. Many US credit cards come with accident protection for new purchases - you might be covered under some sort of protection / insurance to pay whatever cost Apple might charge to repair it.

At that point, you can revisit if you're OK with the tape covering it and know what your options are if the cracks spread or if the hinges were damaged when the pressure built up before the glass gave in and cracked. I don't think that's the case since your photos show that the glass had no backing right where your item was placed and there's no evidence of deformation on the aluminum - so this might be a oops you can live with if you don't want to pay the cost for a new display repair and everything else works properly. All indications are this is cosmetic damage and can be patched well enough to keep further dust from invading the display housing if there's even a path from that lower cover to the main display space.


How do I block OS X's auto detection of shared drives? I'm a little concerned that I have a bunch of drives from other people's computers showing up in Finder whenever I'm at a company site. I don't plan to access those at all.

I have sharing disabled, yet they still appear. How can I block their being detected?

And is there any security risk in their showing up? I ask because I noticed that one of these drives, without my asking at all, showed up in my Dock!

OS X uses Bonjour to allow you and your computer to discover services offered by compatible networked devices.

Amongst Finder's uses of Bonjour: show which other devices are able to share their volumes with you. Simply browsing the list of computers will not make any significant connection.

If you choose to access the shared data of a computer other than your own, there should be no risk to data on your own computer. If you choose to run a shared application, Finder should present an alert.

Without blocking detection, Finder preferences allow you to not view Bonjour computers in the sidebar:

Mac Help: Organize the sidebar
How to: prevent sidebar 'Shared' clutter in OS X | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

Whatever your preference for the sidebar, the main Finder view of the network (Command-Shift-K) will remain comprehensive.


Lost sender's name in my received emails. I recently uploaded IOS7 onto my iPhone 4S and now I can't see the name of the sender of any newly received emails in my inbox. Can anyone help?  Nothing too techy please - plain English needed. Thanks

Go to "Settings" -> "Mail, Contacts, Calendars"
scroll down to "CONTACTS" go to entry "Short Name" at the bottom of this page uncheck "Prefer Nicknames"


Zooming UI note-taking app I'm looking for an iPhone app with which users can use the zoom in and out to write down characters in all kinds of scales.

To be more specific, if the user zooms in, the whole canvas would become larger to the user, making it possible to write relatively small characters.

Prezi.com has an iPad app, not quite what your looking for but I imagine it is the closest that exists at the moment, you could always use any drawing program (adobe has a few) and I imagine it would have zoom capabilities.


Does performance degrade between iOS 3.1 and 4.1 for the iPod Touch 2nd gen? I noticed a considerable performance degradation when updating to iOS 4.0; enough to downgrade back to 3.1.x. Has that issue been completely resolved in 4.1? Having to downgrade again would be a pain.

I've made the updates, and I didn't notice anything about a performance degradation.


How do I make Terminal.app's scrollbars disappear in Lion? Once I upgraded to Lion, I found out that the vertical scrollbar is always plastered to the right side of the application window.

Because I run GNU Screen within Terminal.app, the right side of the screen session gets hidden partially underneath said scrollbar. Likewise for emacs sessions.

Is there a way to disable scrollbars in Terminal.app in Lion?

I assume you're not using a trackpad, and/or your Show scroll bars preference in System Preferences > General is set to either Automatically based on input device or Always (otherwise, you shouldn't be seeing persistent scrollbars).

Try changing this setting for Terminal only:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal AppleShowScrollBars -string WhenScrolling

Then close Terminal and reopen it for the change to take effect.


Are foreground applications allocated more system resources than others? Sometimes it seems like Time Machine backups, file transfers, and software updates speed up after focusing their windows.
Is this just psychological or an actual feature?

It's most probably not psychological as multiple things affect the allocation of system resources, and being a foreground window is one of them.
In general all processes (and even threads) running on a system has a priority, which is used to determine the amount of CPU resources made available to it. If you open a normal GUI program, it will start with a priority of 46. If it is the foreground window, the priority is increased by 1 to 47.
The actual range of priorities on a live system is much larger as other things factor into the process priority. They range from 0 (lowest priority) to usually 97 (queue in a real time process). For ordinary programs you run, you'll usually see priorities such as 20 (utility program), 31 (base priority), 46 (background) and 47 (foreground).
You might be experiencing the impact of a feature known as "App Nap". It essentially slows down applications that the system thinks the user is not actively using in order to speed save energy and/or improve performance of other apps.
Specially it targets apps that are:

not the foreground (selected) app
hasn't recently updated visible information on screen
isn't playing audio
isn't using OpenGL 3D graphics
isn't actively managing energy usage using IOKit/NSProcessInfo

When those conditions are in place, the application can be put into App Nap. If you look at Activity Monitor in the Energy tab, you'll see a column named "App Nap". If this says "Yes", the app is napping.
When an application is in App Nap it runs slower due to a reduction of its CPU priority, throttling of I/O and throtting of timers.
You can read more about App Nap in Apple's documentation here:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/power_efficiency_guidelines_osx/AppNap.html
As far as I recall, the priority of an App Nap'ed program is 4.


Applescript to change Wacom Driver settings Can an Applescript change the primary monitor option within the Wacom Driver, and do it near instantly?

The Wacom driver allows you to set things up for individual applications. Have a specific setup for Photoshop (which excludes the display toggle setting) and then another one for all other apps.


Can I change the carrier name in the iPhone Simulator 5.0? I found numerous instructions to set SBFakeCarrier in com.apple.springboard plist but this doesn't seem to work with iOS Simulator 5.0.

Is there any way to change the carrier name in the simulator?

For my part, I was able to change the carrier name for the iPhone 5.1 simulator by editing this file:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator5.1.sdk/System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/French.lproj/SpringBoard.strings

As the path suggests, I'm French. Switch to whichever localization you choose.

Inside this strings file (editable with XCode if it's a binary plist), you'll find a SIMULATOR_CARRIER_STRING key. Change its value, fire up your simulator, and there you go.


How to get lower resolution image in current clipboard after using macOS screen-capture shortcut? I have set Command + Shift + 4 to a keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot and save to clipboard, usually, I will paste this image for next usage.

But I want to lower the resolution of the image in the current clipboard because it's too big, how to do this?

With the image at Clipboard, you can open Preview.app, hit command+N.
Go to Tools menu > Adjust Size..., make modifications.
Using the selection, cover the whole image, liberally. Don't worry if you've got lot of padding around it.

Hit command+C and paste wherever you want.

"Export as..." also provides some options to downsize the image.


Scripting Terminal Command with Automator I am trying to automate a set of terminal commands. I was given the below instructions and manually doing it works just fine, but I wanted to know if there was a way to use the Mac "Automator" on my Mac to make a script/batch so all I have to do is click on it to apply all of these no matter what computer I want to run it on. Is that possible? (see below)

If the error persists, please try running these commands at the terminal to see if that corrects the issue:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>eicar</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/bin/launchctl</string>
        <string>limit</string>
        <string>maxfiles</string>
        <string>16384</string>
        <string>16384</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
    <key>ServiceIPC</key>
    <false/>
 </dict>
 </plist>

Launch Terminal
Type sudo su then enter your password to log in as root
Type vi /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.launchd.limit.plist
When in the vi editor, press i to enter insert mode then paste the exact code content above (Cmd-V). This will force the limit to 16384 files per process and 16384 files total
Save your file and quit using Esc followed by :wq
Reboot your system, and check that it is working using the command launchctl limit

Here is a Automator task that can help you with.

1. Action: Get text
To do: Copy and paste desired text content.

2. Action: New text file
To do: File format 'simple text'; save as 'automatortempfile.txt'; In Where is tricky, when you click will show a select folder location, press Cmd+Shift+g and type /var/tmp.

3. Action: Execute Applescript
To do: Copy and paste this content.

tell application "System Events"
    activate
    return text returned of (display dialog "Enter password" default answer "" with hidden answer)
end tell

This will open a dialog with a message "Enter password", that you must provide user password (this user must have admin rights, because this is required to write in /Library/* folder).

4. Action: Execute shell script
To do: Copy and paste this content.

sudo -S mkdir -p /Library/LaunchDaemons
sudo -S mv /var/tmp/automatortempfile.txt /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.launchd.limit.plist

First line: Create a folder LaunchDeamons if doesn't exist (just for ensure that folder exists).
Second Line: Move your created file automatortempfile.txt from /var/tmp folder to /Library/LaunchDaemons/ and rename it to com.apple.launchd.limit.plist.

sudo -S will read password from stdin.

Now, just save and use!


"at" symbol is not working in everyplace I have connected a Microsoft keyboard to my MacBook Pro 2019. Since doing this, the @ symbol is not appearing when pressed.
Case 1:

With the integrated keyboard, in Chrome, VSCode or another text editors, or even here typing:
Key combination: right option + q: nothing happens

Case 2:

With the external keyboard, in Chrome, VSCode or another text editors, or even here typing:
Key combination: right option + q: nothing happens

Case 3:

With the integrated keyboard, Slack, Notes:
Key combination: right option + q: @ <-- only that way works

Why I can't write at all the @ symbol with the external keyboard?
Why I just can write in some apps the @ symbol with the integrated keyboard?
This is the input source:

And this are the Modifier keys:
a) for integrated:

b) for external:

Note that I remapped the command/option in the USB keyboard, but with this keyboard there's no way I can write the @ symbol

If you look on your keyboard, you should see the @ above one the keys, probably the number 2. Try the combination Shift + that number and see if that works.


can't get HTML to display in Apple Mail signature I'm stumped.  I cannot get the HTML I wrote to display!  I followed all the steps properly with creating a webarchive file, renaming so that it shows up in Apple Mail. But then when I go back in and see the signature, it's there but it doesn't display the HTML ... it just displays the code!

I've tested the HTML code on a webpage, and it works just fine.  I have my message format as Rich Text.

The code is:

You don't specify the steps you used so in case you missed something, take a look at this page describing how to set up HTML mail signatures.


Removing directories from PATH I am trying to run rkhunter, but it is giving me this output:

stack/security/rkhunter-1.4.6
➜ sudo rkhunter --check
Password:
Invalid BINDIR configuration option: Invalid directory found: ~/.dotnet/tools
Invalid BINDIR configuration option: Invalid directory found:
Workbooks.app/Contents/SharedSupport/path-bin

How do I go into my PATH variable and remove these directories from all shell sessions? None of these directories are in my .bash_profile or .bashrc.

Check the contents of /etc/paths or /etc/paths.d/


Alternative to Windows Snipping Tool for Mac OSX Is there something like the Windows Snipping Tool for OSX?

For those, who don't know about the tool, it's an easy to use software to take snapshot of any portion of screen, and is really useful in various situations.

There is now a blog entry about Taking Screenshots in a Snap.

It's built into Mac OS.

⌘+⇧+3 captures the whole screen
⌘+⇧+4 captures a custom rectangle
(click and drag over the screen region you want to capture)
⌘+⇧+4 then space captures a specific window (move the mouse cursor over the desired window, then click)

Press esc to cancel.

Screenshots are saved onto your Desktop and timestamped.

Holding control in addition to any of the sequences above causes the image to be copied instead of saved to the desktop.

By default the image format is png. However, you can change the format by typing in the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format
killall SystemUIServer

Where image_format is one of jpg, tiff, pdf, png, bmp or pict (among others). If you omit the second line, you will need to log out and in again for the change to take effect.

The settings for the shortcuts in the system preferences are located at:
System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screen Shots

The MacOS X application that enables screenshots is called Grab. It is located at /Applications/Utilities/Grab.app


Will macOS Mojave 10.14 slow down an early 2011 13" MacBook Pro? I am currently running OS X El Capitan on my early 2011 13" MacBook Pro. I am thinking of upgrading to macOS Mojave, but would like to know if it would slow my MacBook Pro because of my specs?

Please see more info on the specs below:

I'm not using an SSD and my current available space is 140GB (total is 320GB), though I always make sure I don't go below 100GB available space.

As Nimesh already noted in his answer, that MacBook Pro is no longer supported.

But as chriszanf commented: "Machines outside of those spec can be upgraded using dosdude's app: dosdude1.com/mojave"

But apart from being unsupported that brings another caveat. Just installing that will work, but is no fine experience at all. For once, the installer will convert your magnetic drive HDD from HFSplus to APFS, and the new filesystem is a terrible performer in general and even much worse on rotational disks. That will slow you down.

Using APFS on hdds and why you might not want to

You also have to keep in mind that your graphics card is not exchangeable and does not supported Metal. That will slow you down.

The problems do not end there. And the list of hacks and workarounds you might have to hunt down is also long.

It is possible to install it. But probably not really worth it.

If you have some time on your hand, the following thread lists some experiences in attempting this:

macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread and it is very conveniently just 471 pages long by now.

Personal commentary: on that hardware 10.12 Sierra is the last "known good" performer for me. That is currently at least also updated with security patches.


Possible to create a Bash alias that enters a certain string into Terminal? Is it possible to create a Bash alias that upon running, enters a string of my prior choosing, into Terminal?

Let's pretend this is in my ~/.bash_profile:

alias start_youtube="cd ~/Video/Youtube; **[PASTE: youtube-dl URL]**"

Imagine that: the alias would change directory to Video/Youtube and then [PASTE] the string: youtube-dl URL. It could either do Return ⏎ or preferably just leave the string youtube-dl URL in the Terminal prompt so that I could swap the placeholder URL for a real URL.

If I try actually running the alias below;

alias start_youtube="cd ~/Video/Youtube; youtube-dl URL"

it will run the command as entered by which youtube-dl will return an error like "Could not parse URL" – which could've been fine. But pressing the ↑ key will not show the last input of the alias (youtube-dl URL) but rather shows the invoking of the alias (start_youtube) [which I'm sure is usually preferable].

So the requested solution is to paste a placeholder string into the Command Prompt, or somehow access the history of the alias command via the Shell.

Here's how I would approach it. Use this related question to write the function that would reside in your bashrc or bash_profile. Then add a line in the function that would delete the most recent line in your bash history using this


How do I see site blocked from Safari's Top Sites? Safari's Top Sites has two buttons, the X to remove and the pin to "pin" the item to the Top Sites.

The pin is easy to see (hover over the site images) and "undo" (you just click it again), but if you click the X you've essentially black-listed the website (or at least the specific URL) so it won't come appear in top sites to review or undo. The problem is, accidentally blocked sites, or sites I've changed my mind about, can't be reviewed easily.

For a specific site that I know is missing, its easy enough to manually add it to top sites (same as adding a regular bookmark), but I can't find any way of viewing the list of sites blocked from Top Sites.

Is there a way to see/edit the list of black-listed items from Top Sites?

Or even just a way to reset the Top Sites deletions (and pins if necessary) entirely, without losing all safari browsing history/etc? (This would make it simple to re-block and re-pin the few still-valid exceptions).

The list of blocked sites is in the BannedURLStrings array in ~/Library/Safari/TopSites.plist


Why /usr/local/bin is showing as a file in mac? I purchased a new mac and want to install some tools on it but when I try to install anything, I am getting error as bin is not a folder .
Well why /bin inside my path /usr/local/ is a file not folder, isn't it supposed to be a folder???
I tried moving current /bin which is as a file to another location and created a folder as /bin inside /usr/local/ path.
But this made my mac not working properly, so I had to reinstall Macos.
I am very confused over this and because of this problem I am unable to install anything in my mac, someone please help.
$ ls -dl /usr/local/bin
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 username  wheel  xxxxxxxx Sep 26 06:36 /usr/local/bin

Here is the output for " ls -ledO /usr/local/bin /usr/local "
drwxr-xr-x  16 root  wheel  sunlnk      512 Dec 27 20:57 /usr/local
-rwxr-xr-x@  1 bala  wheel  -      82560592 Sep 26 06:36 /usr/local/bin

my bin is showing as exec file like this

This is definitively not how it should be, but without a lot of additional analysis it's impossible to figure out what else is wrong. So to be on the safe said, I would

create two good, verified backups
do a clean install (not an upgrade)
restore Applications and user directories from Time Machine
install Homebrew from scratch.


Can an iPhone be used without iTunes? Can an iPhone (all current models) please be used without having to install iTunes on my home PC?

Would I need to have my local Apple store activate it for me?

What functionality (if any) would I lose by not having my own copy of iTunes?
(Such as; download music, install apps, OS security updates, subscribe to and download podcasts, update the sat-nav maps, backup files stored on the phone, etc)

If I would lose any functionality without iTunes, would joining iCloud effectively replace iTunes? If so, what limitations (if any) would I experience?

(I've seen contradictory answers to all these questions over the web and I hope a definative answer can be pinned down.)

Current iOS devices running iOS 5 (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad) are capable of being standalone devices.  You do not need a computer to use them.

The term "iTunes" can refer to two things...

The iTunes application, which you seem to take issue with, and the iTunes store, where you buy apps, music, movies, etc..

You do not need iTunes (the application), but you will find it difficult to avoid using iTunes (the store).

iTunes (the application), makes it possible to use iTunes (the store) on your computer.  This can provide some convenience, but is not necessary.

As long as an iOS device can connect to the Internet, you can activate it without a computer or iTunes (the application).

iCloud provides several features.  None of them really replace iTunes (application or store).

iTunes in the Cloud: You can let Apple store the music you've purchased from iTunes (the store) on their servers and download them on demand (actually, they just store references to which songs you own, they already have all the files stored for iTunes (the store)).  If you sign up for iTunes Match, they'll also store references to your music that is in your iTunes (application) library but wasn't purchased from Apple.  They'll also upload and store your music that they do not have in the iTunes store (within limits).
Photo Stream: Syncs your photos across all of your devices.  Additional features apply to users of iPhoto or Aperture.
Documents in the Cloud: store your docs on Apple's servers, access & sync them between devices (requires apps that have been written to take advantage of this feature).
Backups: Back up your device's data to the cloud
Sync Apps & Books: Apps and Books purchased through iTunes (store) and the iBookstore (an extension of the iTunes store) can be synced to multiple devices.
Sync calendar, mail, and contact data.  Comes with an @me.com email account.
Find my Friends and Find my iPhone: lets you GPS-stalk your friends and family and track your phone if you lose it.  Find my Friends can be useful at big gatherings, and it can be toggled on and off at will in case you don't want your mom to know you're hanging out in the seedy part of town.

I hope this is helpful.


Can't see a specific external hard drive I was trying to make an NTFS hard drive writable on my macbook. I tried the way mentioned in this link: https://www.maketecheasier.com/write-ntfs-partition-os-x-yosemite/

Now I can make changes on my hard drive. But there is another problem. After unmounting - mounting the hard drive, now I can see it only in Volumes folder. I can't bring it back to sidebar or desktop.

I tried other hard drives, they work normally.

Thanks in advance!

Note: I have 10.10.4 installed.

This is expected behavior.  You specifically told it to not show up in your fstab file, with the "nobrowse" parameter.  If you want it on the desktop to have a quick shortcut to it, create a symlink.

ln -s /Volumes/VOLUME_NAME ~/Desktop/VOLUME_NAME


iPhone 4 - is it possible to do a photo recovery for photos without a previous backup I have been using a new iPhone4 (replacement phone) for 2 months. Yesterday I connected it to my laptop to copy over photos. iPhoto said only 1 photo of 500 was imported. So I went to iTunes to import, selected "import all" hoping it would pick up everything. I chose the option "Keep Photos on iPhone" since I wanted to share a few recent photos yet with friends. No luck with the transfer of photos. So then I asked it to sync. Still nothing transfered to the laptop. After I unplugged my phone I noticed the photo library on the iPhone had changed. All the pictures I had taken were simply gone, and photos from prior to 2 months ago were in their place. It had restored a previous backup rather than transfer the new photos. I hadn't clicked "delete" photos but I think it just did it as part of restore sync. Is there any possible way to recover the pictures now — after a restore, without any previous backup?

Before a sync or restore, I believe that iTunes will create a backup of your phone's contents (unless you manually cancel this backup). The backup will contain the photos and videos that were on the phone.

You can check if a backup was created by doing the following:

Launch iTunes
iTunes > Preferences > Devices
See if there is an entry with the date of the restore.

If a backup exists, you can recover your data with one of two methods:

Restore your phone using that backup; or
Use an application such as iPhone Backup Extractor to extract the images out of the backup file.


How to retrieve windows that have moved 'off-screen' I have this problem sometimes with my dual-screen setup, especially when I'm juggling lots of things around.

Occasionally I seem to be able to move a window entirely off-screen (I'm not quite sure how) and I can't get it back. If I do a 'hide all' in the application's menu (usually it's Mail.app, so let's stick to that one for the example), everything disappears and Mail seems to think it's got an 'inbox' window in the Windows menu, but there's nothing visible. Closing and restarting the app doesn't seem to help (as the app is helpfully remembering where my window previously was) and all I end up doing is shutting down the Mac, unplugging the second monitor and restarting it, opening the application again and this seems to persuade the Mac to rethink the main window position, and all is well. I can then restart the second monitor, etc.

Is there a better way? Is there some way of marshalling windows back to a specific monitor, or a utility for moving 'open'/running windows? Am I actually doing something wrong? :-)

I'm not using Spaces, by the way - so I'm pretty sure this isn't some weird Spaces issue. :-)

Chealion answered this on SuperUser.

I won't copy and paste his answer here, as he got the credit not me.

But basically, what you could do is (quoted from Chealion's answer) :

  A second method of arranging the Windows so you can see them (if for some reason they're staying off screen) is to change to the
  application that owns the window in question, hold the Option key down
  and choose "Arrange in Front" from the Window menu. It will then
  arrange all the windows of that application in a cascade from the top
  left of the screen.


Unable to run 'display notification' using osascript in a tmux session If I run the following command in Apple Script Editor directly,

display notification "Hello, world"

I can see a  notification as expected

However if I tried to invoke it via command line:

 osascript  -e 'display notification "Hello, world"'

It turns out I am running it in a tmux session. If I just ran the command in my default shell, it works as expected.

How can I get it to work with tmux?

As @kopischke said, install or upgrade reattach-to-user-namespace may solve this problem.

If your reattach-to-user-namespace is old, notification works well after brew upgrade reattach-to-user-namespace.


Apple Developer forum - Not able to log in into Developer forum I am not able to login into apple developer forum every time it takes me to create a new user account page and the displays the error, I have successfully validated with multiple user name as below screen shot -

when i try to hit submit it gives me below error -

I have already reported it to apple using bug reporter with id 27240362  but there is no response from their side. I am hoping to get some help here.

Assuming you're a registered Developer, I would call the Apple Developer Program Support number for your country, rather than submitting a bug.

You can find your local number here.


iOS Wifi Connections - Search Domains In iOS Wifi settings, each Wifi connection has a Search Domains section, usually blank.

What is this used for?

A Search Domain is simply a convenience that allows the system to convert host names to Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN).  Anyplace you might use a FQDN, such as in the location bar of Safari or as an argument to ssh, you can use a simple host name.  If the system can resolve that host name to an IP address (e.g. localhost -> 127.0.0.1) then it will use that.  If that doesn't work, then the system will try appending the search domain to the host name and try again. If you specified more than one search domain, it will try them each in order.

If you are typically connecting to other Mac's on your LAN, then setting the search domain to local will make it easier to use just the other computer's names everywhere.  If you are in a corporate environment and all your servers are available at name.example.com, then setting a search domain of example.com will allow you to access them by just using name.

Those are the two most typical use cases.  When using a public Wi-Fi network, you should leave the Search Domain blank/empty to avoid accidentally connecting to some computer you didn't mean to connect to.


Messed up my /private folder! I had a folder named private in one of my projects and had to change the permissions of it via chmod, however, instead of "private" I did "/private"!

I am an idiot and can't figure out how to get it back. My shell is all messed up now and I am trying to restore the /private folder via time machine and no luck! It starts but then says "Security agent may only be invoked by apple software"

I know this a HUGE mistake and any help would be appreciated. I am on el capitan

If you have a backup and want to learn how to finesse this, try booting in macOS Recovery. Then:

From the Utilities menu, select Terminal.

Run:
  chmod u=rwx,go=rx "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/private"

Reboot.

This will set the permissions to read-write-execute for root and read-execute for anyone else.

Alternatively, try this or see the answer linked by @grgarside (this).
If you don't have a backup or don't want to make things worse — from macOS Recovery, a quick reinstall of the OS will re-write everything that's critical for the system to run without erasing any programs or user data. Don't mess with anything but a clean reinstall unless you are sure exactly how you messed things up and are confident you won't do more damage trying to fix it by hand.


hdiutil: compact failed – Function not implemented When compacting a sparse image with the hdiutil compact command, it fails with the message hdiutil: compact failed – Function not implemented.

The error message is pretty unclear, but one reason might be that you are not connected to the power outlet. Compacting a disk image might be a long and intensive task, and sometimes the OS denies it when you are running on battery to avoid any risk of data loss.

If you are positive that you have enough battery power to complete the task, you may overrun the limitation by adding the -batteryallowed flag:

hdiutil compact my.sparseimage -batteryallowed


Dead characters on iMac Mojave, NOT keyboard-related 2002 iMac running Mojave with Apple wireless keyboard

Today, a cluster of characters on the right side of the keyboard (7 8 9 u i o j k l m .) quit working, both caps and lowercase.

To narrow down the problem, I replaced the keyboard with a spare and re-booted. The issue remained, leading me to believe it's not a keyboard problem.

I enabled the keyboard viewer and all keys work when clicked.

SOLVED — The problem was inadvertently enabling Mouse Keys.

Sounds like you have accidentally activated Mouse Keys.  Turn it off

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18381


How to change the escape style when dropping paths into Terminal If I drop a file from Finder (or another file source) into the Terminal, the system helpfully escapes characters like spaces: Dropping a file named /Lorem Ipsum.txt yields /Lorem\ Ipsum.txt.
I would like to change this behavior to use quotation marks instead, so that /Lorem Ipsum.txt would yield '/Lorem Ipsum.txt' instead (note the single quotation marks and the missing backslash).
Is there a way to do this using the standard Terminal.app? If not, is it maybe possible with iTerm or something else?
Edit
The reason why I want to do this is that I am using xonsh that parses the backslash as a literal character, echo /Lorem\ Ipsum.txt prints /Lorem\ Ipsum.txt.
Most of the time I will just manually delete the backslashes, and sometimes I use the following workaround:

Enter @(r"
Drop the file – this will fill a string literal with the path using backslash-escapes
Enter ".replace("\\",""))

I can confirm that iTerm2 does exactly what you want in regards to enclosing long file names and directories with single quotes instead of escaping the spaces when dragging and dropping.  It does this by default.
There are many additional reasons and benefits to switch to iTerm2 from the default Terminal on macOS.  Far too many to list here.
Update for iTerm 3.4
iTerm 3.4 changed the escaping behavior to use backslash escaping as well. However, there is an advanced experimental feature Escape file names with single quotes instead of backslashes. that reverts the escaping back. The comment even specifies my very use case: This is intended for users of xonsh, which does not accept backslash escaping.


iPadOS is corrupting files when copying from/to an external drive I am a photographer and recently switched to a full iPad Pro 2020 setup, so I can edit my pictures on the go. Since SD cards tend to fail, I would also like to use my iPad Pro to backup the cards to an external SSD drive. A simple copy/paste from one drive (SD) to another (SSD) via the iPad.
However, I noticed that after importing RAW and JPEG files from the SD card to the iPad internal memory, some of the files seemed corrupted: RAW files couldn't be read by Lightroom, and JPEG files were half black or grey.
A couple of days ago, the same thing happened in the other way round. I processed RAW files in Lightroom for iPad, and when copying the processed JPEG to the external SSD, and viewing them on my PC, about 10% of them were completely trashed:

So I made a test, that I hope can be reproduced by someone. I'd love to have some feedback or even a solution to this issue. It's really disappointing that the iPad can't handle a copy/paste without corrupting the files...
First, I took a sample picture and made 500 copies on the external SSD. To be sure they're all exact copies, I used PowerShell on Windows to check the file hash. As expected, they're all the same:

Then, I transferred the 500 copies to the iPad's internal storage, using the "Copy" and "Paste" function in the app Files.
I renamed the folder in which the pictures are, copied it and pasted it back to the external SSD.
Finally, with the SSD plugged to my PC, I checked the file hash of the 500 files copied from the iPad, and indeed, some of them are corrupted, as you can see below (take Test (613).png for instance):

I am using an iPad Pro 2020 12.9", with the latest iPadOS 14, and the native app Files to do the transfer. My external SSD is formatted in exFat. My PC is the latest Windows 10.
I also tried with other kinds of devices: SD cards, cameras, USB thumb sticks, external SSD, SD card readers, USB-C hubs, even changed the cables, that all work perfectly with my PC, and never failed me. It's really coming from the iPad.
After some research, I saw a lot of complaints (slow transfer speed, mainly) that seem to be linked to the format of the external drive, and the fact that iPadOS seems to prefer APFS file format. But APFS isn't an option for people like me, who are using a desktop PC. Plus, the format of my SD cards are set by my camera, in that case, exFAT.
Finally, though I can understand speed may vary depending on the format of the drive -- corrupting the files is something that shouldn't happen, no matter what format I'm using. Especially for something as basic as importing photographs from an SD card...
At this point I don't know what to do, every time I try to copy/paste something, some files get corrupted. I would be grateful if somebody could give me some pointers, perhaps a solution, or simply confirm the issue by reproducing my test somehow.

So, I have same issue. Turns out it’s fault of files app. I have corrupted files only when I try to copy from iPad.
But there is a way, you can try FileBrowserGO app. Just drag folder from files and land it on disk in FileBrowserGO app. It works without any issues for me, and it’s way faster to!


Mounting iPad filesystem in Linux? Is it possible to mount the core filesystem used on the iPad on to my linux box? There is an application named DiskAid which does this for Windows and Mac, so it is accessible, just a matter of how.

I'm looking for the same sort of functionality as iFile (on jailbroken devices).

Looks like you want an app that can use the libmobiledevice library. Some possible suggestions in the News section of that page.


How to remove something I have downloaded via curl I have followed this article: link and ran the following command:

  curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.6

How do I remove this, since I upgraded to Sierra and I already have php 5.6 version? If you include what happened when I executed this command, I'd be more than happy!

Edit for clarification:

I googled how to update php that comes with osx.
I opened this link I put above. And ran the command I mentioned.
And it told me it created a folder /usr/local/php5-5.6.27-20161101-100213 and 'symlink'(?).
I updated to Sierra and the default php (that I was trying to "update") is now version 5.6.

I want to remove the php I installed from this article. I thought of deleting the folder I mentioned above, but I'm not sure that would do the thing. What about that symlink it made during the "installation"?

I wrote a shell script, crater (determine the impact crater of an install on a Unix filesystem) to deal with such poorly documented installation process:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/253217/31707


Is there a way to access the menubar icons using the keyboard? I know how to use the menu items using only the keyboard. Is there anyway I can access the icons in the top right as well?

If you have "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" checked in System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard tab

Ctrl + F8 moves the keyboard focus to the icons in the menubar

If you have "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" unchecked in System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard tab

Ctrl + Fn + F8 moves the keyboard focus to the icons in the menubar

Although the leftmost user-installed ones on my computer cannot be accessed, you can then use the cursor keys to move ← → and ↓ to bring up the menu associated with the icon.

In addition, Ctrl + F2 (or Ctrl + Fn +F2) moves keyboard focus to the menubar items.


Mac Mini won't open Startup Manager I have recently obtained a Mac Mini second-hand from an organisation. When I power on the device it boots Windows 7, however, I'm unable to boot from a USB due to the Mac Mini not opening it's Startup Manager/BIOS/Boot Menu/Open Firmware... whatever it's called.
I've tried Alt, F8-12 and even tried Shift for safe mode but every time it boots Windows 7.
If the organisation has blocked the boot menu from loading is there a way to unblock it (and possibly boot from a USB).
Edit: I only own a Windows QWERTY keyboard... is that the issue?
Cheers.

It’s possible that your Windows-specific keyboard isn’t sending the correct keycode for the Option (Alt) key. To rule out hardware damage, have you confirmed that the Alt key works when booted into Windows or plugged into a different computer?
A workaround is to open the Mac Mini, disconnect the hard drive, and attach a USB flash drive containing a macOS installer (How to create a bootable installer for macOS). You’d still need a way to install onto the hard drive, which means buying an external USB enclosure for the internal drive... I think it’s just easier to try an Apple keyboard.


Wiped my keyboard with a damp cloth and now my macbook pro 2017 keyboard cannot type on the login screen My macbook pro 2017 was working fine and I decided to wipe it with a damp cloth and now it wont work on the login screen. But I went to recovery mode terminal and all the keys work fine there. I must have turned on some setting that disabled my keyboard while wiping it. What could I have done wrong?

For my issue it was due to a speck of dust that got stuck in the command key. This was the reason why it wouldn't type in the login box but in the terminal.


How to turn off iPhone 5 without having to use the screen or buttons My buttons are broken and my phone is locked how do I turn it off and turn it back on again?

Let the battery die, that will shut down the phone. Once dead and off, plugging the phone in to charge will turn it back on. This is assuming both the power and home buttons do not work.


Deploy Studio Error - Network Unreachable I am deploying some laptops for the users in our company but there is an error which occurs every time.

When I enter the recovery mode, the device tries to connect to the deploy server to retrieve an IP address. Indeed, this fails and shows a message which says

  "Network is unreachable".

You should check to see if the network is available before entering Deploy Studio.

From the Recovery Boot Menu (CMD-R boot method) open the Get Help option (it has the Safari logo) and try to navigate to a webpage. If that is unsuccessful, you don't have network access at all.

In that case, one issue might be that you need to register your device/MAC address with your company's network infra before getting access. I worked at a University and this was the case there. If you need help getting the MAC let us know.

Additionally, you could try connecting via ethernet.

Best of luck.


Enable screen zoom via terminal There are two accessibility settings (indicated by the red rectangle in the screenshot below) that allow for zooming into the screen by holding ctrl and scrolling the mouse.

Is there a way to enable those settings from the terminal?

On my system, there are four .plist files in ~/Library/Preferences/that get modified when those two checkboxes are checked/unchecked:

com.apple.AppleMultitouchTrackpad.plist
com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.trackpad.plist
com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist
com.apple.universalaccess.plist

While one could take the steps to see which keys get added/modified/deleted and could write a script to using defaults1 to change the appropriate keys in these files nonetheless, it would just be easier to use AppleScript to do it in System Preferences, if automating it is what you want.

In Terminal, use the following compound command to create the file and open it:

touch togzoom; open togzoom

Copy and paste the example AppleScript code, shown further below, into the opened togzoom file.
Save and close the file.
Make the file executable:

chmod u+x togzoom

I used togzoom for: [tog]gle zoom

NOTE: This will also require giving Terminal accessibility privileges for this to work properly.

You can now use it from the directory it's in using ./togzoom otherwise /path/to/togzoom; however, it's best if you place in into a directory that's within your PATH statement. Then it can be used from anywhere by just togzoom, (or whatever you actually named the executable).

The following example AppleScript code was tested and works for me, as coded, on macOS High Sierra and macOS Mojave; however, a minor change is needed for macOS Mojave and is noted in the paragraph after the code.

Example AppleScript code:

#!/usr/bin/osascript

if running of application "System Preferences" then
    try
        quit application "System Preferences"
    on error
        do shell script "killall 'System Preferences'"
    end try
end if

repeat while running of application "System Preferences" is true
    delay 0.1
end repeat

tell application "System Preferences" to ¬
    reveal anchor "Seeing_Zoom" of ¬
        pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"

tell application "System Events" to tell ¬
    application process "System Preferences" to tell ¬
    window "Accessibility"

    repeat until exists checkbox "Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom"
        delay 0.1
    end repeat

    set UKSTZ to (value of checkbox "Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom" as boolean)
    set USGWMKTZ to (value of checkbox "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom:" as boolean)

    if UKSTZ and USGWMKTZ then
        click checkbox "Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom"
        click checkbox "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom:"
        set theMessage to "   The target Zoom checkboxes are now not checked."
    else if not UKSTZ and not USGWMKTZ then
        click checkbox "Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom"
        click checkbox "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom:"
        set theMessage to "   The target Zoom checkboxes are now checked."
    else if UKSTZ and not USGWMKTZ then
        click checkbox "Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom"
        set theMessage to "   The target Zoom checkboxes were out of sync and are now not checked." & ¬
            linefeed & "   Run again to check the target Zoom checkboxes..."
    else if not UKSTZ and USGWMKTZ then
        click checkbox "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom:"
        set theMessage to "   The target Zoom checkboxes were out of sync and are now not checked." & ¬
            linefeed & "   Run again to check the target Zoom checkboxes..."
    end if

    delay 0.1

end tell

quit application "System Preferences"

return theMessage

To use the example AppleScript code in macOS Mojave, make the following change to the code shown above:

Change:

window "Accessibility"

To:

group 1 of window "Accessibility"

What this script does:

It toggles the state of the two target checkboxes.
If the target checkboxes are out of sync, it un-checks the one checked and returns a message.

The following shows the command run three times in Terminal to show its output. For demonstration purposes, in System Preferences > Accessibility > Zoom, one of the target checkboxes is checked and the other is not checked.

$ ./togzoom
   The target Zoom checkboxes were out of sync and are now not checked.
   Run again to check the target Zoom checkboxes...
$ ./togzoom
   The target Zoom checkboxes are now checked.
$ ./togzoom
   The target Zoom checkboxes are now not checked.
$

Note: The example AppleScript code used herein is just that and does not contain any additional error handling as may be appropriate. The onus is upon the user to add any error handling as may be appropriate, needed or wanted. Have a look at the try statement and error statement in the AppleScript Language Guide. See also, Working with Errors.

1 While the defaults command can be used to modify .plist files nonetheless, in this particular case com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist can be difficult and getting the changes in this and aforementioned files requires programmatically killing the users cfprefsd daemon in an attempt to have the changes take effect. In some cases this process will fail and why scripting with AppleScript was chosen.


sharing iPhone apps - tell a friend If I have an app on my iPhone and I want to recommend it to someone else who might be interested in downloading and using the app on his/her iPhone - what's the easiest way to do this?

Is there a native way of doing this? Through another app?

From iTunes Store on your computer…

Right click the app in 'your device' > My Apps

Right click & select 'Show in iTunes Store'

Click the right of the Downloaded button & choose your 'share' method

or
From your phone…

Go to App Store > Updates > My Purchases > All

Tap the app you want to share [not the Open or Cloud button]

Top right is the share button

No affiliation to the app used to demonstrate - I just liked the colours ;)


Shared iCloud Account and Photo Stream, but no longer want to share iCloud accounts My husband and I share an iCloud account.  With Family sharing now available, we want our own iCloud accounts, but don't want to loose the photo stream we both have of our shared pictures.  We also both need to back-up our phones to the same Mac.  What is the best way to split this and maintain back-ups and photos?  Is there a way to set-up automatic sharing of photos once our accounts are split or both import our images into the same iCloud Photo Library?

There doesn't seem to be a way to retain the Photo Stream functionality –automatic sharing of every photo taken or saved in both your devices– once you stop sharing the same Apple ID.

You can enable Family Sharing and iCloud Photo Sharing, then manually share the pictures you choose to the "Family" album, which is created in the process.

You can achieve the same functionality –just the pictures being shared– with iCloud Photo Sharing alone and a shared album.

This question and answers may be of help: How can I share Photos across multiple users on Apple Photos, without paying for iCloud?

Backing up to the same computer it's a little more convoluted, and it's described in extenso in this article at the support site on Apple; the routes described are:

Create multiple user accounts on the computer that will hold the backups.
Sync different playlists to different devices (not sure this is helpful in this situation).
Create a separate iTunes library for each device.

You will want to exercise extra caution on choosing what to sync, to avoid mixing or overwriting each other information (I'm thinking on the options to sync contacts, calendars, email, etc.).

After separating the two accounts, you can regain access to bought music and apps if you set up Family Sharing.


rMBP 2015 doesn't recognise Dell P2715Q over DisplayPort I recently purchased both a Dell P2715Q 27" 4K monitor and a 13" 2015 rMBP. The monitor is not recognized when I plug the laptop into the monitor via the monitor's provided DP cable (into either Thunderbolt port). When I plug in the laptop using the Monitor's HDMI cable, it shows up and can render at 4K, but only at 30Hz. I also tried plugging the laptop into another display with HDMI and that one also worked fine. Unfortunately, I don't have access to another display that has a DP port. My research prior to purchasing the laptop and monitor suggested that I should be able to connect them easy-peasy and get 4K at 60hz using either MST or SST signalling. However, I am very new to Macs, so my question is whether or not I need to do something special to get this to work? A Thunderbolt to DP cable perhaps? The monitor also has a miniDP port as well, do I have to use that? Did I somehow end up with a broken DP cable?

Any ideas?

So oddly enough, 10.10.3 didn't seem to make any difference, but the supplemental update that came up yesterday (14D130a) on Software Update (http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/16/apple-releases-os-x-10-10-3-supplemental-update-to-fix-startup-issue/) fixed it right up. Now when I connect the display via Thunderbolt, it comes up at the native 4K resolution at 60hz running in SST mode. Thanks everybody for your help!


How can one user be faster than the other? On our 10.6.8 Mac Mini Late 2009 Edition, we have 4 users, 3 of which are in regular use. One is mine, let's call it 'a'. The second one is someone else's, let's call it 'b'. The third one we both use, let's call it 'c'. a and c have administrator rights. The unused is the owner.

So, the 'a' account is kind of slow sometimes, but it's what you'd expect after almost 5 years of usage. But here's the deal. 'b' and 'c' often behave much slower than that (takes 2-5 minutes to complete login). Sometimes they're as fast as 'a', but that's seldom.

So yeah, whaddya think about this? Why does this happen? And if you know why, how can I fix it?

Check your login items. Have a look in System Preferences->Users & Groups->Login Items, and delete anything you don't need starting at login. Also try cleaning up your Desktop, so the computer doesn't have to load all those little tiny images when it's busy trying to do other things. Also check if there are any launch agents running at login. (Look in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ for launch agents specific to your user. To find this folder, press Shift-Command-G, and enter the above path.) You'll see things like com.skype.c2c_service.plist. You should be able to work out whether they belong to apps that you want starting at login. (If not, delete the files.)


How can I boot Windows bootable USB for Mac book pro 2018 mojave? I want to install Windows in memory stick or USB SSD Drive (I have both)

At first I made USB bootable memory stick by Windows OS.

My memory stick is like this.

Then I boot my mac with [option] key ,then there appears EFI BOOT (orange disk mark).

However when I click memory stick, windows installer doesn't launch, but mac os recovery mode starts.

My memory stick is like this ( sorry there is two byte character).

How can I boot windows installer in memory stick on mac??

A 2018 MacBook Pro should have the T2 chip. You will need to set Secure Boot and External Boot, as shown below. For instruction on how to configure a Mac with the T2 chip, see the Apple website About Secure Boot.

The steps given below can be used to create the USB flash drive (memory stick) Windows 10 installer. However, if you are trying to install Windows 10 to an external SSD, then I would think you would what to use a procedure such as this.

Download the latest Windows 10 ISO file from the Microsoft website Download Windows 10 Disc Image (ISO File). Currently this would be 1909 (September 2019) update.
Download Window Support Software. Open the Boot Camp Assistant application. From the menu bar, select Action->Download Windows Support Software. By Default, the files should download to WindowsSupport folder in your home folder. When the popup shown below appears, enter your password then click on the Unlock button.

When finished, quit the Boot Camp Assistant.
Plug in the external drive. Open the Disk Utility application. In the pulldown menu in the upper left corner of the Disk Utility application, make sure Hide Sidebar is not checked off and Show All Devices is check off, as shown below.

Highlight the external drive and select the Erase button. Enter the following in the popup window, then click on the Erase button.

When finished erasing, click on the Done button. Quit the Disk Utility.
Using the Finder application, mount the Window 10 ISO file and copy the contents to the WINSTALL volume. Next copy the contents of the WindowsSupport folder to the WINSTALL volume. In your case, the result should appear as shown below.

Open a Terminal Application window and enter the following command. This command creates a label that will appear below the Mac Startup Manager external drive icon.

bless --folder /Volumes/WINSTALL/efi/boot --label "Install Windows"

When finished, quit the Terminal application.
Restart the Mac and immediately hold down the option key until the Startup Manager icons appear. Boot from the external drive by selecting the external drive icon labeled Install Windows.
The first window to appear should be similar to the one shown below.

Proceed as one would for a GUI installation of Windows.