Can I transfer purchased content from an iPhone to an authorised PC Ok so on computer 1, I have setup my iPhone, authorised computer 1 and downloaded some content from iTunes, and put this onto my iPhone.

I have just authorised computer 2, can I transfer the data on my iPhone to computer 2 or do I need to re-download everything?

It seems a bit of a waste having to re-download everything (a couple of gigabytes) when all of the content is already sitting right there on my iPhone.

I'm not trying to do anything dodgy, just trying to transfer some purchased apps/music from a non-jailbroken iPhone to a properly authorised computer, why does Apple make this so difficult?

This is my first apple device so I am new to the whole apple ecosystem, can somebody help me carry out this simple task?

Thanks

You can transfer purchases from your device to your computer.

Assure that you are signed into the AppleStore on the Computer
With the device plugged in via USB, Context-click (right-click) on the device and select "Transfer Purchases".

For more information and guided steps, please refer to this AppleSupport Article


Are all Snow Leopard apps resume-enabled when run in Lion? I see this in iWork 08, is it the case for everything else?

Yes, safari restores tabs/windows, Preview.app does the same with last viewed documents, Xcode 4.1 does that too.

I think all Apple apps support resume. Not sure what should be done for 3rd party applications to support this.


OS X El Capitan Downloading problem I've downloaded OS X El Capitan from the AppStore. If I go AppStore --> Store --> Purchased it says "Downloaded" but I can't seem to prompt the install. I've tried restarting the Download but nothing happens.

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks

Solved, If you go into Applications there should be an App called "Install OS X El Capitan". Launch from there.


Multi threaded CPU intensive task throttles CPU way before temperatures limits I have written a very CPU intensive threaded task that works as expected on my 2012 MacBook Pro quad core. I turn it loose with 20 threads and the temperatures get up to about 100 °C as measured with Intel Power Gadget with minimal throttling.

Take the same program and data files home to my 2016 13" MacBook Pro with a dual core machine and start it up, I would expect that it would also keep up the 3.3-3.4 GHz until the temperature gets near the 100 °C mark. Top command shows the task at 350% (2 cores each dual threaded), but the CPU frequency gets cut to 1.6-1-8 GHz with the temperature only at 60 °C or so with the fans dead quiet.  If I start 4 separate single threaded CPU tasks, the machine behaves as expected with it keeping up the 3.3-3.4 GHz until it hits the 100 °C and the fans get cranking.  The question is why is my CPU being throttled?

Both machines are up to date and running the same versions of gcc. If I even take the binary from the working machine and put it on the 2016 Mac, it has the same problem.

If I run 3 or 4 CPU single threads so the machine is going at full speed, then start the threaded program, it slows the frequency down also.

Both machines have 16 GB of RAM.

Edit

After playing around with code, I suspect that it is getting throttled when a task creates too many threads. In this program, I take each record I read and create a thread for it. I only let 20 or so threads go at a time so at no time is there more than 21 threads, but there are 14,400,000 records to be processed so over the 30 minutes or so each of those records will be processed by a separate thread.

I created a trivial pthread program that sucked CPU time and set 10 of them running. The problem laptop ran that and warmed up to 95C without issues.

I guess I will rewrite my code to reuse the same thread instead of destroying them and starting them up again.

Update 5/13/17

After several hours of work, it now only creates n threads and just reuses them, that didn't help.  Other than CPU temperature, what will cause this machine to throttle down?

This may be a longshot, but perhaps the difference in single-core performance and/or cache performance between the 2012 and 2016 cpu packages are large enough that the cores are data-starved and throttling down until they are able to work again?

I'm making that guess because you indicate enough single-thread processes can run full speed on all cores, and a simple multi-thread program can run full speed on all cores.

That makes me think there is something in the program design of your real workload vs the test multi-thread workload that isn't letting the CPUs work all the time


install git without admin/sudo or make I have a MacBook Pro without admin or sudo access, but I need git. XCode is not installed, so I don't have access to make, so I cannot build from source. /usr/local is locked down, so I cannot use MacPorts or Homebrew either.

How do I get a working git binary?

Download the Git installer from https://git-scm.com/download/mac
Open the installer package with Pacifist
Copy the required binaries into ~/bin and update your PATH


Compose an email with an inline image Some time ago I managed to force Mail to always put attachments at the end of the email. Now I would like to revert this setting.

As I don't find anything in the GUI (preferences) I suppose that I changed some preferences with the terminal.

I see that I have AttachAtEnd=1 in my preferences

> defaults read com.apple.mail  | grep AttachAtEnd
AttachAtEnd = 1;

But it seems that I am not able to change it

> defaults write com.apple.com AttachAtEnd -bool No
> defaults read com.apple.mail  | grep AttachAtEnd
AttachAtEnd = 1;

or

> defaults delete com.apple.com AttachAtEnd
> defaults read com.apple.mail  | grep AttachAtEnd
AttachAtEnd = 1;

How can I remove it?

Looks like you're using com.apple.com rather than com.apple.mail in your defaults write or defaults delete commands.

defaults delete com.apple.mail AttachAtEnd should do the trick.


ICMP packet with a negative round trip time? I often keep a ping running in my Terminal so that I can pop it up to keep an eye on any network issues in our office. Recently, I ended a long-running ping session and noticed in the summary statistics that the minimum round trip time was -520ms.

Does anyone have any explanations for this bug?

There are several possible explanations for negative ping times:

You are running OS X on a PC with a AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor which has a bug in the power management which may not only effect Windows but also OS X installations.
Google is tired of getting pinged 38325 times and is sending erroneous timestamps in the ICMP echo replies - simulating a relativistic twin paradox. The -520.236 ms echo reply packet pretends to come from the fast moving  "younger" twin server and the 7219027.621 ms echo reply is the silver-haired "grandpa" twin server standing still - both behind a misconfigured Einstein-Rosen voodoo load balancer!
ntpd did its work and adjusted the time while a ping was sent. This explains the negative time as well as the two-hour-ping: 7219027.621 ms are two hours and 19 seconds - the most prolonged ping I have ever seen!

You can reproduce it yourself by adjusting the time manually like in this ping listing:

64 bytes from 185.62.237.118: icmp_seq=17 ttl=55 time=290.491 ms
64 bytes from 185.62.237.118: icmp_seq=18 ttl=55 time=310.241 ms
64 bytes from 185.62.237.118: icmp_seq=19 ttl=55 time=-11797.674 ms
64 bytes from 185.62.237.118: icmp_seq=20 ttl=55 time=303.643 ms
64 bytes from 185.62.237.118: icmp_seq=21 ttl=55 time=326.527 ms

I turned the time back for several seconds while ping 19 was sent.


How do I play my music library on a Chromecast TV? How do I play the music in my Music app on a Chromecast TV? In the YouTube app, I can select to play a video to Chromecast. In Pandora, I can select to play a channel to Chromecast. In the music app, I can select a connected Bluetooth device as the output channel. But there is not an option to play music in the Music app to Chromecast. How can I play music from the Music app to Chromecast? Does it require a separate Google music app or something?

iOS 10.3.3.

Casting to a Chromecast generally does not involve your device streaming to the Chromecast - you need to run some sort of server to stream from a local computer (or the Chrome extension that mirrors a computer screen to the Chromecast.)

When you use apps on iOS to cast, it just tells the Chromecast where on the internet to stream from - and the internet service must support Chromecast.

So what you want to do with your music app can’t be done. Depending on where you keep your music there may be some solutions. For example, if you have a computer with your music on it, you could install Plex as a server, and the Plex app on your iOS device.


iPod doesnt show songs, iTunes and Explorer does I have a black iPod Classic 160GB. I use iTunes on Windows 7 to sync songs. I can see the songs that are synced with the iPod, iniTunes. However, after ejecting, the iPod shows 0 songs. Going to settings show the decreased free space. Opening up My Computer, and I can see the songs in the ipod_control\Music folder. I have also set the songs to not be a part of a compilation, as suggested in this question. However, I have been unsuccessful in getting the iPod to show the songs. I am tired after fiddling with it since 2 days now. What gives?

First, remove all songs from the device (from within iTunes) and then try re-adding them. If that fails to have any effect, remove all songs, unplug the iPod, re-plug, and add a few back. (Don't bother checking for songs in Explorer; that's not going to help.)

If that doesn't work, back up any data that has made it to your iPod and restore the firmware in iTunes. Then try to add a single song and see if that works. (Add a playlist with one song, then try dragging one over manually, if you prefer that setting.)

Comment on what worked or didn't: if nothing works, I'll come up with more things to try.


Why won't the Control Center module let me turn on Airdrop on my iphone 8? This has worked before in the past but I don't know why it doesn't work now.

I used to be able to turn Airdrop on/off on my iphone by:

Swiping up from the bottom of my phone
Pressing and holding the module that has options for Airplane mode, WiFi, etc. (image of what I'm talking about here on google)

For some reason, now when I press and hold that module, it doesn't open up to let me turn Airdrop on/off or turn on my personal hotspot.

I've tried powering off/on my phone, and closing all apps but nothing is working.  I don't know what else to try.  Is there some app that I installed that might have prevented this from working as usual?  What can I do to make this simple function work again?

What version of iOS are you running? If it’s a version that supports screen time I would try disabling and reenabling airdrop from screen time menu within the settings app


Strange networking issue: good software/hardware troubleshooting tools? I'm posting this question with the hope of getting some guidance from others because at this point I'm completely stumped.

I'm trying to troubleshoot a mid 2011 iMac (11,2) running Mavericks that is unable to ping or communicate with any other host, despite appearing to connect to my home router without issue (it associates and gets an IP address from DHCP).  The router is an Asus RT-N65U with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios.  Wireless clients mostly connect to the 2.4GHz radio since it has better range, WPA2 authentication is used on both.  There are numerous other devices on the LAN - both wired and wireless - that all work fine.  Furthermore, the iMac in question seems to only have developed problems within the last couple of days though nothing has changed on the router and nothing has changed on the machine either...or so I'm told.

After some initial troubleshooting I went ahead and reinstalled Mavericks from a USB stick I had on-hand, figuring that would eliminate any software related issues that might have otherwise been hard to track down.  However the problem persisted even after the re-install, which made me think the wireless card was flaking out.  I'm skeptical of this however because

The machine doesn't have any problem establishing a network connection
The signal strength is what I'd expect to see
I ran a packet sniffer and that showed link layer packets going back and forth, but IP packets of any kind are ignored (as far as I can tell).
I set up an ad-hoc network with the iMac and joined it with my MBP, both machines could ping each other.

The only thing I've seen that seems sort of suspect is an error message from the kernel in the wifi log: Unsupported ioctl 181 but I haven't been able to determine what this means beyond the kernel asking the wireless driver to do something it can't, so it may or may not be significant.  The other potentially significant thing is that at one point this machine was restored from a time machine backup of a completely different computer (a MBP).  It's my understanding that time machine backs up the entire drive, so restoring a backup from a different hardware configuration seems like it could break things, but nothing that a clean install of OSX couldn't fix.  I've tried to do the built in hardware test but it doesn't work for some reason, maybe because this machine has an after-market hard drive upgrade (the original failed).

So this brings me back to wondering whether it's a software issue, particularly something to do with the router but that seems strange since nothing has changed on the router and I'm the only one who could change anything to begin with.

This all brings me to my question: what else could I look into that could provide more info to work with so I narrow down what's going on here?

UPDATE

Some more info and clarification of some things:  When I say the machine "connects" to the router, I meant associate.  It associates to the wireless network, but will not ping the router's IP address.

I have not tried a wired connection but I did try one of these and it works flawlessly, so this is specific to the built in wireless.  Are there any other tools for testing the hardware besides the Apple diagnostics?

Apple ships with some pretty good tools to check wifi network.

Look in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications for

Network Utility.app
Wireless Diagnostics.app

You can also access them by holding Opt/Alt while clicking on the WiFi icon in the menu bar.

Then there is lots of Terminal commands to do that as well, if you prefer the Terminal.


How can I start postgres automatically on startup? I can start postgres with:

# Start Postgres
/usr/local/bin/pg_ctl -D /usr/local/pgsql/data -l logfile start

Where can I put that to start up when I start the machine up?

I can put it in my .bash_login file but then I get a new instance of postgres each time I do a new window which is not good.

I only want it to happen when I initially log in to the machine.

This is for OS-X Lion, Macbook Air bought Nov 2011

In general for Apple systems you should add a .plist to your Launchd configuration.

Exactly how to do this varies a little from Mac OS X release to Mac OS X release. You haven't specified yours so I can't give a more specific answer.

The main thing to be aware of is that your postgresql plist should make sure to run PostgreSQL as the correct user.

If you use the EnterpriseDB installers for PostgreSQL they should take care of this task for you.


Power reserve mode - lightning bolt I cant get the watch out of power mode.  It has a lightning bolt on the screen.

What does this mean?

Apple Watch - Power Reserve

Power Reserve allows you to continue to see the time on your Apple Watch while preserving your battery life.

Your Apple Watch will automatically enter Power Reserve if the battery gets too low, and you might see  next to the time. In Power Reserve, press the side button to show the current time in a 24-hour format. The time will display for six seconds.

While your Apple Watch is in Power Reserve, your Apple Watch and iPhone won't communicate, and you can't access other watch features.

Turn off Power Reserve
To turn your device back on, press and hold the side button until you see the Apple logo and wait for your Apple Watch to restart. You might need to charge your Apple Watch first.

Turn on Power Reserve
If you need to, you can turn on Power Reserve. Press and hold the side button until you see the Power Off, Power Reserve, and Lock Device options. Then drag the slider to turn on Power Reserve.

You can also turn on Power Reserve using Glances. Swipe up on the watch face to open Glances, then swipe left or right to find the Battery Glance. Tap Power Reserve, then tap Proceed.

Source: Apple KB - Using Power Reserve


What is this History menu option in the menu bar and how do I clear it? Between the menu options Edit and View and sometimes between View and Go appears, when you open a web browser, another menu option named History that show all the recent browsing history.

How do I clear it when it appears? How do I delete the items that appear or, even better, only a selection of them?

I presume you are referring to Safari. The option appears when Safari is the front application.

You can clear Safari's history by going to History → Clear History….

To clear a certain section of history rather than the entire history, press ⌥⌘2, select the rows you wish to delete and press ⌫.


What does it mean when the Mac shows a shared folder (named a PC) in the Finder sidebar? I just noticed that in the Finder sidebar, I can see a PC under the shared section. Does it mean someone has access to the files on my laptop?

I saw online that I can remove it by unchecking certain things from Finder preferences. Does this remove the shared computer altogether or only remove the name from sidebar so I can't see it?

No - Finder shows you other servers / file shares so think of this like a directory of other computers to knock on their doors to ask if any files are being shared.

Your Mac controls sharing from the system preferences pane. By default, file sharing is off and if you turn it on, your password and user account is needed on the remote computer to look at any of your shared files.

Yes - you are correct that the preferences just hides those other computers from your view - that computer is still on the network and still "advertising" that it might be sharing files.

The PC above is actually a HP printer/scanner that has a slot for a SD card to be read. The rest are Apple computers with file sharing or screen sharing enabled. Those wouldn't show up if the sharing system preference was turned off for all the potential items to be shared.

Technically - the PC icon indicates SMB sharing of a printer or file share and/or possibly VNC screen sharing. Mac computers sharing a screen or file share shows up with Mac specific icons.


skype wants to export "Apple ID Authentication" from the keychain Today, I came back from having a coffee, unlock my Macbook (12" 2017, running Skype version 8.39.0.175 in Mojave 10.14.3 and I see this:

Does anyone have any idea what is this and why would Skype want to export it? I haven't even restarted it, unless it autoupdated and restarted itself

Update:
I allowed it eventually and nothing happened as far as I can see, all the keys are still where they are supposed to be, contrary to some comments.

I seem to have fixed this... unfortunately I don't know what part of what I tried was the actual key to the fix.

I spoke to Skype support, live chat. They hadn't heard of the issue - though tbh, 1st line support are always going to be 'last to know'.
The best I could get was 'Have you tried reinstalling it?" I said, it's a Mac, reinstalling isn't going to make any difference.
We tried it - it didn't. No surprise there.
I did it again, this time using CleanMyMac to get all the prefs & hidden stuff, kexts etc; rebooted & tried again. It still remembered my login details so I'm not sure how successful that was.

I looked in keychain to see what was in there. I was surprised at how many bits & pieces there were.
Having made sure I knew my login details, I deleted the whole lot; everything that came up when I searched 'skype' - maybe 10 or 12 keys - & rebooted again.
Skype had lost my auto-login... good.
I could then see which new keys it added as I completed a manual login.
There were only two keys - Skype for Desktop & Skype for Desktop MSA. After several days there are still only two.
No functionality seems to have been lost. Conversation histories etc appear to be stored at Skype, not on the local Mac.

It hasn't asked me to export anything since.

It would probably be useful if someone else with this issue could try deleting only the Keychain entries, or only doing the 'clean' reinstall; reboot & see how that goes. See if we can figure whether it's the 'clean' reinstall or the keychain deletion that actually fixes it.

Note: This machine has a complete line-of-sight migration path back to my first OS X Mac in 2005 & some data from before that, when I migrated from OS 9. Skype has been on it since it was invented, so I may have a whole lot more historic cruft than most people.


Open an IPA file from the command line I am using an OSX box to run a bash script to extract an iOS IPA file so that I can use otool and nm to extract details about the app for vulnerability analysis. The ipa files are already decrypted, because I am doing grey box analysis as part of scheduled testing.

The command line has no problem with the ipa file itself, using unzip, but then inside the Payload folder there is a compressed archive witht he same name as the ipa file without the extension that Windows and Linux can extrace with the unzip command, but OSX cannot. You can, in Finder, right click and show contents, but I do not want to perform this step. I am writing a script, so I want to do it from a Unix command.

How does one open this archive in iOS? I can script the extraction in Windows or Linux, but cannot run otool or nm there.

I have tried:

Directly addressing the archive as a folder, where I get a "this is not a directory" error.
Using unzip, where I get a "cannot find this archive" error.
Using the open -R command, which opens it successfully in Finder, but that doesn't allow the rest of the script to  open

Never mind. The internal folder in question has a .ipa extension that I missed.


Change Command+Period Keyboard Shortcut I would like to change the Terminal interrupt keyboard shortcut to ideally Command+Shift+C.  Just this shortcut solely.

Is there a feasible way to do this?

The following was created, tested and works for me in macOS High Sierra.

Create the Automator service...

In Automator:

File > New, or press: ⌘N
Select Service and click the Choose button.
Configure the settings as shown in the first image below.
Add a Run AppleScript action.
Replace the default code with the example AppleScript code.
Save as e.g.: My Terminal Interrupt

Example AppleScript code:

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "c" using control down

Assigning the keyboard shortcut...

In System Preferences...

System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services add ⇧⌘C (press Shift-Command-C) to the My Terminal Interrupt service, as shown in the image below.

Note: A word about the shortcut you assign... ⇧⌘C is offered as a suggestion however, you'll need to select one that doesn't conflict with Terminal (or any other app that has focus if setting the service to any application) when pressed. This may require a strange combination or a four character combo. ⇧⌘C worked fo me in Terminal after changing the default for the Show Colors command, shown further below.

Terminal already uses ⇧⌘C for the Edit menu > Show Colors command, so you'll need to change that to e.g. ^⇧⌘C (Control-Shift-Command-C).

Changing the default keyboard shortcut...

System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts

Click the [+] button
Change Application: from All Applications to: Terminal
For Menu Title: type: Show Colors
For Keyboard Shortcut: type, e.g.: ^⇧⌘C
Click the Add button.

Now when in Terminal and I need to interrupt a running command, I press ⇧⌘C instead of ^C  (or ⌘.) to stop the process.


New Seagate hard drive freezes MacBook Pro I have a mid-2009 MacBook Pro 2.53ghz Core 2 Due with 8 Gigs of ram running Mountain Lion.

I am attempting to upgrade the hard drive due to running out of space. I picked up a Seagate Momentus 750gb 7200rpm drive. This is not the hybrid XT drive that seems to cause problems for everybody.

I installed the new drive, put the old one in a USB enclosure and booted from it. I then attempted to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone to the new internal drive. After cloning a few gigs though, the internal drive would disappear. I finally reinstalled the old drive and put the new one in the enclose and was able to clone that way. I reinstalled the new drive and the computer booted up fine, but would randomly freeze after a few minutes necessitating a hard shut down. I pulled out the new drive, put it in the enclosure and booted from it. The computer ran fine this way and I used it all day via USB with no problems. This lead me to believe the internal SATA cable was faulty as the drive worked fine externally but not internally.

I replaced the SATA cable today and thought the problem was fixed. The computer booted fine and ran for an hour. I used disk utility to verify the drive and repair permissions, but then the computer froze again. I restarted and it ran fine for a few minutes than froze. After each restart the computer will run for a while and then freeze. Any ideas why the drive boots and works fine externally but not internally? The old drive works perfectly fine internally as well. I don't see a problem with the new drive since it works great externally when I boot from it.

Try resetting both the NV-RAM (P-RAM) but more importantly, the SMC Power Manager for your model, which can be looked up on Apple Support to be certain. It's usually: remove battery, unplug, hold down Power key for 10 seconds.

Also try a Safe Boot. And repairing the hard disk from an external startup, so that Disk Utilities can fully repair. But the problem you describe usually indicates some kind of electrical glitch, which needs to be solved.


Where does homebrew download software from? I love how homebrew makes my life easier! Though, I just realized that I don't really know who is "signing off" the stuff I get installed through it. So, I ask:

Is there a central repo (like Linux distro PPAs)?
Or is it all decentralized (ie. code gets downloaded simultaneously from Github, Source Forge, etc)?
What mechanisms are in place to prevent trojan horses from being
installed through brew?

If you look at the details of a homebrew package (e.g. on http://braumeister.org), you'll find the address of the source code in the ruby script. So it is not stored in a centralized manner but directly on GitHub etc.
Anyone can submit a package to be installed and the maintainers either accept / modify / reject hosting the software in the main directory.
However, it’s easy to set up your own directory and tap that and then install anything you want using the homebrew scripts and tools. It’s pretty open to change if you want to add to it.


How can I get photos in iPhone by wire? I need to get photos from my Mac to my iPhone, but best way I found was by AirDrop, but it is too slow (I need to transfer lot of photos).
I would think that it would be faster by wire, but I didn't find any way...

Let iTunes do that for you, check how to do it here in the apple documentation

Here's what the overall steps are as described in the link in case it dies:

Make sure that you have the latest version of iTunes.
Open iTunes on your computer.
Use the included USB cable to connect your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to your computer.
Click on the device icon in iTunes.
Click Photos in the sidebar.
Click the box next to "Sync Photos." If instead you see "iCloud Photos is On," all your photos and videos are already on all of your devices that use iCloud Photo Library. You don't need to sync them through iTunes.
In the drop-down menu, choose the app or folder that you want to sync from.
Choose to sync all photos or selected albums.
Select "Include videos" to sync the videos from your app or folder too.
Click Apply.

There are also 3rd party apps like RollIt that does that job too without iTunes, however it's paid


MacOS Mojave and Dark Theme - Preview for .png file with transparent background not white Not surprisingly at all, with MacOS Mojave and Dark Theme OS Mode, Preview displays transparent background with gray. How can I set it to be white only for preview but keeping MacOS Dark Mode ?

File opened with Safari which is perfect:

The is to change the default coulor scheme for your dark mode in preview.
MacOS Mojave and Dark Theme - Preview for .png file with transparent background not white


How to Screen Capture while in Cmd+Tab I ran into a rare situation - I want to snag a picture of my screen while using cmd+tab to show people how I navigate around in this how-to post.

The regular cmd+shift+3 or 4 didn't do anything. Thoughts on getting around it?

I run lion 10.8.3 on a MBA.

Open Grab, go to Capture -> Timed Screen, then make sure the cmd+tab module is up on the screen when the timer runs out. Then open in Preview and crop as desired.


F4 will not show Dashboard I just got a brand new Apple space grey wireless keyboard. Everything is great except that F4 stopped working to launch Dashboard. Instead, F4 launches Launchpad, something I don't use at all.

I have all the proper settings set:

Special keys are enabled, not standard F keys
Open Dashboard as Overlay is selected
Changed the keyboard shortcut for Launchpad to something obscure
Checked the keyboard shortcut for Dashboard is set to F4

Unfortunately, the Apple Wireless Keyboard manufactured from 2011 onwards swaps the special Dashboard key for a special Launchpad key. I don't believe this special key function can be changed.

If you have assigned the keyboard shortcut for F4 to Dashboard, you will need to press the function(fn) key while pressing F4 to open Dashboard. Additionally, you need to make sure Dashboard is enabled in System Preferences > Mission Control as either a space or an overlay.


Is there an iOS lifecycle policy - i.e. which older devices a new iOS release supports? This question gives useful information on iOS 4.3 support. However is there a publicly available policy for future iOS versions on which devices they will support? For example, do they always support two previous generations of hardware, or does it vary according to each release?

If there is no official policy, what does the trend seem to be?

I'm unaware of official policy but in my experience (opinion?) Apple supports older devices with new OSs as long as it is technically reasonable to do.

There are those that hold that Apple will use an OS or feature update to push the sale of new devices (i.e. Siri only available on iPhone 4S) but I have yet to see conclusive proof of this. Apple seems able to sell boatloads of phones (pads, pods and computers) without forcing the market and, in all cases that I've seen, there are equally plausible, and less "evil", explanations for Apple's decision.


command not found for shell script I created the following bash script in OS X 10.7.5:

$ cd ~/Documents/github/scripts
$ vim hello_world.sh

#!/bin/bash

clear

echo "The script starts now."

echo "Hi, $USER!"

echo "I will now fetch you a list of connected users:"
echo
w
echo

echo "I'm setting two variables now."
COLOUR="black"
VALUE="9"
echo "This is a string: $COLOUR"
echo "AND this is a number: $VALUE"
echo

echo "I'm giving you back your prompt now."
echo

Then I make sure it is executable:

$ chmod ugo+rwx hello_world.sh
$ ls -l
-rwxrwxrwx  1 GuardDog_02  staff  325 Mar 13 18:51 hello_world.sh

Then I add the directory to the contents of the PATH variable:

$ vim ~/.profile
export PATH=/Users/GuardDog_02/QtSDK/Desktop/Qt/474/gcc/bin/:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin
PATH=$PATH:/Users/GuardDog_02/Documents/github/scripts
export PATH

I then run the following to have the effect applied:

$ . ~/.profile

Then I open a new controlling terminal window, and I run hello_world.sh, but get command not found:

$ hello_world.sh
-bash: hello_world.sh: command not found

Why isn't the shell script recognized from the interactive bash shell in the controlling terminal? I tried the same thing in Ubuntu and it worked just fine.

Do you have a ~/.bash_profile? If so, then that will be preferred over the ~/.profile startup script. Next, verify the setting of your path (echo $PATH). Also (and this may be a dumb question) are you actually logged in as GuardDog_02? In other words, is ~ identical to /Users/GuardDog_02?


Can I delete all the iOS apps on my Mac and still do full phone backups? My hard drive is starting to reach its limit, and on inspection it appears one of the primary culprits is files listed in the System Information storage manager as "iTunes":

These are almost all iOS apps.

Is there any reason to have these on my Mac? Can I just delete them? If so is there a preferred method (e.g. from within iTunes vs Finder)? And, how did they get there in the first place? Critically, I assume they are not part of (or necessary for) the secured full backup ("This computer" > "Encrypt iPhone backup" in iTunes) of my phone (which appears to be under "iOS Files"); is that right?

Can I delete all the iOS apps on my Mac and still do full phone backups and restores?

You're correct. Since iOS 9, the "usual" way that iOS apps are reinstalled after restoring an iTunes backup is by downloading them again from the App Store after you finish the setup process signing in with your Apple ID.

Note: Having the apps stored in iTunes is a must if there's an app you want to keep installing on devices, but isn't on the app store anymore (think Flappy Bird). The library in iTunes is the only way to get it then. I don't worry about this personally, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention it.

The "by the book" way to delete them is in iTunes Library > Apps. You can select multiple with Shift + click or  Command + click, and then right-click and select Delete from Library. Then select to Move Files to Trash.

You can definitely delete all of the apps in the iTunes Library and still do full backups and restores.

The apps themselves are not in the backup, only notes about what apps were installed (so it can be re-downloaded from the App Store), and the data stored for those apps.


What could cause contact syncing errors on iPhone? I deleted a contact about two years ago and it now appears under another person's contact. I have deleted all numbers for the contact I no longer need, but when I sync to computer Gmail the number appears with a different name on the number.

For example:
"Brad's" number is (743) 222-2222 but I deleted this contact out of my iPhone. However it now appears under "Ted's" name.

So now "Ted's" number is listed as (743) 222-2222, and Ted's real number is gone - "Brad's" number (which was deleted) actually replaced "Ted's" real number?

Any ideas of why this would happen? It has done it with three other contacts as well.

From your question, I think your setup involves syncing contacts with Google, a computer (Mac?), and an iPhone. Syncing with Google has been a pile of poo since Mountain Lion. For me, it kept duplicating contacts, bringing back deleted ones, and as you mentioned, swapping the contact information between contacts.

Since neither Apple nor Google seem to care about fixing it, my solution is to use iCloud to sync contacts between the Mac and iPhone. (This seems to be Apple's preferred method, so it's the one in which bugs will likely be fixed the fastest.) I periodically upload a vCard of my contacts to Google. This is a lot less work than hunting down all the contacts that syncing with Google messes up.


Free or cheap software to boost volume of Macbook? Possible Duplicate:
  Do you know a simple sound booster app for Mac?

What software can I use to artificially increase the volume of my Macbook? I know Boom and Audio Hijack Pro are solutions but they are pricey. Any other recommendations?

I've done some research for you, and I didn't seem to find anything except paid applications, and one that is a half solution. I only found these three (paid) options:
Audio Hijack Pro (free trial, $32 for the full version)

Audio Hijack Pro will allow you to boost your sound pretty easily. Upon opening the application, click "System Audio" in the list on the side:

Then at the top, click "Hijack":  Once Audio Hijack Pro is hijacking your audio, go to the Effects tab and where it says "Click here to insert effect", click and under the 4FX Effect, click Gain.

You'll then have two dials to control the gain. Use these dials to boost the volume.

In my use of Audio Hijack Pro for boosting volume, this seems like a viable solution.

Boom (free trial, $6.99, on sale right now for $4.99)

Boom lives in your menu bar and has a simple slider to boost the volume.

If you click on the  button, you will be presented with an equalizer and numerous other nifty controls:

Hear (free trial, $19.99 for a license)

Hear is a little more complex than the other applications. It is jam packed with features, as you can see from this screenshot:

VLC (free and open source)

I'm not including VLC as a complete solution as it may not work in your specific case. However, it is a half solution.

You may be wondering why I include VLC as a solution. Here's why: VLC boosts the volume of movie and audio files up to 400%. If you open an audio/video file, adjust the volume slider and it will boost the file's volume:


Messages AIM account regularly stops working I have set up iChat with different accounts: Facebook Jabber, Google Jabber, iCloud and an AIM account coming from MobileMe.

My AIM account regularly stops working where Messages will indefinitely get stuck at "Connecting...". I only experience this with my AIM account, the other accounts work fine. I also only started experiencing these problems since Mountain Lion.

Toggling the account back and forth to offline or quitting and relaunching Messages does not solve the problem, I need to completely remove the AIM account and reconfigure it.

Is there any way to solve my problem?

I too have the same problem? MY fix? I use message with MSN, FB chat, Gtalk. I have installed Adium for AIM alone.


How can I set up Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection for Mac to work with the Portuguese keyboard layout? Can you help me to configure the Apple keyboard in Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection for Mac so it works correctly with the Portuguese keyboard layout when connecting to a Windows 7 computer? I want to configure it to work the same way that the Apple keyboard is configured when using Windows 7 through Boot Camp.

All you need to do is to select the Portuguese keyboard layout in software on Mac OS X and also select the Portuguese keyboard layout on the Windows 7 computer to which you are connecting.

You can customize the keyboard behavior in the Preferences of Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection for Mac.


Mountain Lion clean install I've lost my HDD which is unrecoverable on my MacBookPro 5,5. I don't have any Mountain Lion installer or disk. How can I install Mountain Lion after i put brand new disk?

If the disk is unreadable then recovery disk will not work - and when you put in a new blank disk it won't be on that one either, so the recovery procedure outlined will not work here.

You need another boot disk. (This is where you should wish you had backups with SuperDuper! which creates fully bootable clones of your hard disk).

Assuming that you don't, you need to use your other Mac (note that the installation disks from another Mac will not work in yours - only purchased OS X disks can be used in any machine).

If you have a firewire cable the easiest solution would be to cable the two Macs together. Set one of them to TargetDisk mode, boot the other one off the good disk (I don't think it matters which is used here?).

Because your other Mac has 10.5 Leopard you don't have App Store and so can't easily get Mountain Lion (even assuming the failed machine is compatible). Instead I recommend you just clone the hard disk from machine to machine.

Download SuperDuper! (free license is sufficient, but recommend you pay for full license, it is a wise investment).
Clone the disk on the good mac to the new hard disk.
Disconnect and reboot.

You now have two working Macs with identical files on them - from there it is up to you.


Apple Developer Forum links broken after WWDC 2020 forum upgrade At WWDC 2020, Apple updated their Developer Forums.
This has broken links to the old developer forum, such as:   https://developer.apple.com/forums/message/335101
The forum link now says:

Error - Page Not Found
The page you’re looking for can’t be found

I linked that topic on Ask Different here. The link in that Question is now broken.

Were the old Apple Developer Forum topics moved to the new Forum? Was that content deleted?
The URLs were evidently changed. Is there a way to get a new URL if you have only the old URL?
Are the old topics archived anywhere? Or has all that content been deleted?
Knowing only the old URL, how can I find the migrated topic?

Same discussion on Ask Different Meta, here, for fixing these links SE-wide:
Apple Developer Forum links broken after WWDC 2020 forum upgrade

I logged in to the new Apple Developer Forum.  Under my profile, I still have links to my old topics. They do still exist in the new Forum.
The URLs have changed. They now use /thread/ rather than /message/ and the thread/message ID has changed:
OLD: https://developer.apple.com/forums/message/335101
NEW: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/109652

and the same question posted to Ask Different: Why can I not set Safari keyboard shortcuts?
That's the details of the change. I don't know if there's a way to link the old and new IDs.


Why is java always running? I have a MacBook Air running 10.8.3. I have Java running almost all the time and it is consuming ~500 MB of RAM. I didn't start Java, and—as far as I can tell—nothing that uses Java is still running. Surely something in the background is using Java, but I don't know what. I would like to kill it (if I can) because I'd like to have my RAM back.

I noticed this happening a few months ago, but never could figure out how to solve the problem. I can kill Java itself, but it restarts immediately and eventually consumes too much RAM.

Does anyone know what is going on?

Try typing this into terminal:

ps axv | grep java

This should output details about which jar file is open in the runtime.

Alternatively, to find out which applications are using the Java Runtime select java in the activity monitor and clicking on the blue i icon.

Click 'Open Files and Ports' and see if it gives you a clue which application launched the java environment. You'd be surprised which applications depend on Java!

You could also try going into the Java System Preference, clicking the Java Tab and choosing View.... You'll see a list of registered Java applications that might help you find the culprit.


MacBook Pro does not switch to battery I have a MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010, MacBookPro6,2) which does not switch to battery power when the power adaptor is removed. It simply goes off. However the battery is reported as 100% charged. I can only use the MacBook with the power adaptor plugged in.

When plugging in, the LED shows orange for a few seconds, then switches to green. When I remove the power adaptor for more than a few seconds, the clock resets to Jan, 1 on the next reboot.

The battery is two or three years old but it is not the original one. It is possible that it has degraded over time but even then I would expect it to deliver power for at least a few minutes, so I think the problem is something different. Also the battery worked as usual a few days before.

I tried a SMC reset (shift-ctrl-option-power) which did not fix the problem. Is there a way to find out whether the SMC reset was in fact executed?

Anything else I can do?

Here is the battery info:

Battery Information:

Model Information:
  Serial Number:    W01107AW7D3BA
  Manufacturer:     LMP
  Device Name:      A1321
  Pack Lot Code:    3230
  PCB Lot Code:     30db
  Firmware Version: ddae
  Hardware Version: dac2
  Cell Revision:    2b39
Charge Information:
  Charge Remaining (mAh):     6996
  Fully Charged:              Yes
  Charging:                   No
  Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 7033
Health Information:
  Cycle Count: 163
  Condition:   Normal
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA):     0
Voltage (mV):      12508

Okay, the steps for resetting the SMC on a MacBook Pro with a built-in battery are as follows:

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

Is that what you did?

Resetting your PRAM/NVRAM

Older Macs had what's called Parameter RAM (PRAM), newer Macs use Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM). It may be worth you resetting your PRAM/NVRAM, using these steps:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then press the commandoptionpr keys. You have to make sure you press these keys before the gray screen appears or it won’t work.
Hold those keys down until your Mac reboots again and you here the startup chime.
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. mouse speed, time and date/timezone, etc).

Let us know how you go.


Can I automatically show keyboard viewer on certain layouts? I work with non-ASCII alphabets like Hebrew and Greek just a little bit, so I have the appropriate keyboard layouts available in the language and text menu in the top panel. However, I don't quite know all the characters yet, so I have to bring up the keyboard viewer when I want to type in those languages so that I can hunt for the characters I want. Is there a way to automatically bring up the keyboard viewer when certain keyboard layouts are selected and then make it go away when I switch back to normal?

OK, building off of a post on SuperUser, here goes:

You can create AppleScripts to change to the various languages. If you make Services that take no input and just call this one script, they'll all live happily in the Services menu when you want them. Otherwise, use your AppleScript trigger method of choice.

To switch to, say, Greek, and bring up the keyboard viewer when you do, run this script:

 tell application "System Events"
     if exists process "Keyboard Viewer" then
         display alert "running"
         try
             tell application "KeyboardViewer" to quit
         end try
     end if
 end tell
 tell application "Finder"
     open item "System:Library:Input Methods:KeyboardViewer.app" of the startup disk
 end tell
 changeKeyboardLayout("Greek")

 on changeKeyboardLayout(layoutName)
     tell application "System Events" to tell process "SystemUIServer"
         tell (1st menu bar item of menu bar 1 whose description is "text input") to {click, click (menu 1's menu item layoutName)}
     end tell
 end changeKeyboardLayout

To switch back to the U.S. layout, killing the viewer when you do, use this:

 tell application "System Events"
     if exists process "Keyboard Viewer" then
         display alert "running"
         try
             tell application "KeyboardViewer" to quit
         end try
     end if
 end tell
 changeKeyboardLayout("U.S.")

 on changeKeyboardLayout(layoutName)
     tell application "System Events" to tell process "SystemUIServer"
         tell (1st menu bar item of menu bar 1 whose description is "text input") to {click, click (menu 1's menu item layoutName)}
     end tell
 end changeKeyboardLayout

Substitute the names of whatever keyboard layouts you want in the changeKeyboardLayout("layout name") command.


Is there a plugin to block ads in Mobile Safari? Is there any plugin to block ads in iPhone, iPad's Safari like Ad Block Plus is available for Firefox (Desktop)?

Without jailbreaking.

Currently there is no way to block ads in mobile safari without a jailbreak or the use of an alternative browser from the app store.


Dangers of limiting fan-speed The situation:

I work in a very quiet office using MBP Spring 2011 with an i7.
The problem is that when I put an intense but short workload for a few seconds on the CPU the fans spin up heavily, disturbing me and especially my office mates.

I elevated the MAC to get some air flowing under the body but that was not sufficient.

So I found a solution to limit the fan speed, currently limiting it to 3500 by using:

cd /Applications/smcFanControl.app/Contents/Resources
./smc -k F0Mx -w 36b0
./smc -k F1Mx -w 36b0

The question:

How dangerous is doing this?

My current line of thinking is: the cooling is now insufficient for intense long workloads. But if the CPU gets too hot it will just throttle or at worst the MBP might shut down, but nothing worse should happen. Many Laptops have dusty or broken fans and they don't burn out their CPUs either.

Is this a reasonable assumption or am I risking real damage here?

Some quick research says that the i7 processor starts to throttle itself if the temperature range gets too high (around 91C) so you shouldn't have to worry about it provided your CPU temp stays less than that.  Mostly the fan speed is trying to keep it comfortable on your lap as best it can - monitor your temperature during one of these "intense sessions" and see if it approaches that threshold - if it doesnt, and stays more on the order of 60C, you're fine as far as short term CPU viability

Research:
https://superuser.com/questions/239230/what-is-a-normal-safe-temperature-for-an-i7-2600k-cpu
http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=136130


Better to migrate before upgrade to Lion, or upgrade before migrating? I'm getting a new MacBook Pro, and I am wondering about the relative merits of:

installing Mountain Lion on the new laptop before migrating my account from my old MBP; or
migrating my account and then upgrading to Mountain Lion

Or are the two methods functionally equivalent?

It is best to upgrade and then migrate. Usually problems occur while upgrading, and it is best to upgrade or install from scratch, as opposed to upgrade on a system which might have something incompatible already installed.


Hotkey to switch to Google Chrome and go to the omnibox (location bar) I would like to setup a keyboard shortcut/hotkey that would switch to Google Chrome and go to the omnibox (address bar).  I intend to use it invoke various custom search engines.
I found a couple of related questions but not quite there:

hotkey to switch application -- TotalSpaces -- requires a trackpad, which I don't use -- my daily driver is the keyboard.
Script to raise a single window to the front -- I don't know how bind an AppleScript script to a hotkey (I'm new to the Mac).

I had done something like this with AutoHotKey on Windows.  What's the right tool on the Mac?
I am already using Karabiner-Elements and Alfred.

I think your task is ill-defined & what you have found so far overkill - (that this is because you are new to Mac means that's nothing to be ashamed of, we all start somewhere;) If all you need is to bring an app to the front & enable the location area you can do it in Applescript in 2 lines.
tell application "Google Chrome" to activate
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "l" using command down

perhaps with an optional delay 0.5 in between those lines in case it's a bit slow to come to the front.
The only difficulty is to make this key-commandable.
If you set this up as a Script event in Automator, then in previous OSes [I think up to Mojave, I haven't used anything newer] you could just define it as a Service. Once defined & saved, you can then call the Service using
System Prefs > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services
I think this has changed since Catalina, but someone else would need to detail precisely how.
So long as you give it a shortcut that doesn't conflict with anything else, then simply hitting that shortcut will bring Chrome to the front [or launch it if it's not already running] & set the cursor into the search/location bar. It will do this on the current tab if one is already open, or make a new window if nothing was open.


Delete folder/album from Photos How do I delete a folder or an album from Photos?  Have searched internet for answer and tried using control, option and command keys.

Right-click on the folder/album and select Delete.
Select the folder/album and press ⌘⌫


Java and Mac retina support Does Java support the retina display with high definition rendering of, for example, text? Or is it treated as an unmodified application, and therefore subject to scaling?

Apple's Java 6 JRE will support HiDPI, however it is not currently supported by Oracle's Java 7 JRE. It also doesn't work under the latest dev builds of Java 8. Swing and JavaFX apps are blurry on a Retinia MacBook. This is why IntelliJ still runs under Java 6. Eclipse applications will require the PList mode that Jurriaan Mous mentioned. The milestone builds of Eclipse 4.3 don't require the edit.


How to merge two users in Mac OS - Catalina? I'm pretty new to Mac Os.
At start I've created a new user, the one that is second in the below picture.
After talking to a co-worker, he told me I probably didn't configure the Mac as company's standard.
So, I decided to change the name to be consistent, and I found this tutorial : https://support.apple.com/el-gr/HT201548.

After changing the name, and restarting my computer I  found out my files are not the same and I thought everything is erased, but it's not.
see the picture below :

I would like to import all my files and configurations from the second user in the picture to the third. is it possible?
(i.e. section 8 in the tutorial didn't go as it should of)

Thanks

So, what I did actually was to open a 2nd user (also admin), login to the new account and from that account perform the changes.

I changed my account name, my full name but also the home directory. When the OS saw there is no home directory with that name it created a new one.
At the beginning I that all of my data on my user was deleted.
Suddenly I saw the data in home directory and connected what happened.
I accessed the 2nd admin user, changed the name of the home directory to the old one in the pic below, and thats it.


What do I need to do to get my Mac to sleep properly? My 2008 iMac/10.10.5 has recently refused to sleep... either automatically or with a menu command.

The internal HD failed some time ago, since which it's been running fine on an external usb hd.

No 'sharing' options are enabled.
'Wake for network access' is not enabled.
'Allow Bluetooth devices to wake...' is not enabled.
The issue also happens with a 'test' account.

SMC and NVRAM have been reset.

'pmset sleepnow', 'osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to sleep'' and 'osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to sleep'' immediately sleep the display but not the system.

The 'energy pane' of Activity Monitor doesn't show any apps preventing sleep.

I'd had an issue with 'addressbooksourcesync' preventing sleep, but think that's now sorted.

'pmset -g assertions' shows '0' for 'PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep' and 'PreventUserIdleSystemSleep'.

Assertion status system-wide:
   BackgroundTask                 0
   ApplePushServiceTask           0
   UserIsActive                   1
   PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep    0
   PreventSystemSleep             0
   ExternalMedia                  1
   PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     0
   NetworkClientActive            1
Listed by owning process:
   pid 195(cupsd): [0x0000004600110135] 00:10:00 NetworkClientActive named: "org.cups.cupsd"
   pid 49(powerd): [0x0000003c0008012c] 00:10:11 ExternalMedia named: "com.apple.powermanagement.externalmediamounted"
   pid 95(hidd): [0x000000a500090183] 00:08:25 UserIsActive named: "com.apple.iohideventsystem.queue.tickle"
    Timeout will fire in 218 secs Action=TimeoutActionRelease
Kernel Assertions: 0xc=USB,BT-HID
   id=500  level=255 0x4=USB mod=21/12/2016 12:46 description=EHC2 owner=AppleUSBEHCI
   id=501  level=255 0x4=USB mod=21/12/2016 12:46 description=EHC1 owner=AppleUSBEHCI
   id=503  level=255 0x4=USB mod=21/12/2016 12:52 description=UHC4 owner=AppleUSBUHCI
   id=506  level=255 0x4=USB mod=21/12/2016 12:55 description=UHC3 owner=AppleUSBUHCI
   id=507  level=255 0x8=BT-HID mod=01/01/1970 01:00 description=com.apple.driver.IOBluetoothHIDDriver owner=BNBMouseDevice

This is the key to the entire issue:

  The internal HD failed some time ago, since which it's been running
  fine on an external usb hd.

It can't go to sleep when your USB is your boot drive.  If it did put the port to sleep, it would unmount the boot device which would cause OS X to crash.  You can confirm this with the line in your pmset output:

ExternalMedia                  1

(The USB drive is, by definition, "external media")

If you replace your failed drive with a new internal drive or SSD, the problem will go away.

I had a failed drive in my iMac and I can understand why you have not yet changed out your drive.  It's much easier than you think to replace it, it just takes some time.  Even though ifixit rates it as "difficult",  it's not difficult per se; it's time consuming and detail oriented.  You have to do this very carefully.

Before you undertake this fix, make you you have all the parts you need like the drive and the adhesive strips. (Get quality ones and not generic double sided tape - I have seen people that went cheap here and had displays fall out - quality tape is much cheaper than a replacement display)

Have a look at ifixit.com for step by step instructions


Yosemite 10.10.3 - New Files and Directories Not Showing in Finder When I create a new file or directory, it does not dynamically appear in Finder. I need to manually relaunch the Finder.

Any tips on how to fix this? I know I can create an AppleScript to add a "relaunch" button to the Finder, but that's not really a solution.

I know this is not a proper fix but it might help with finding one! If you disable "Show icon preview" in View Options, the problem disappears. You have to click on any other folder and then again on the original one for it to update.


Upgrading to Catalina from Mojave stuck at "Estimating time remaining" for days! I was upgrading my 2015 Macbook Pro running Mojave to Catalina. It is stuck at a black screen with the Apple logo and "Estimating time remaining" for several days now.
During that time, I hard rebooted several times out of frustration after hours of waiting, each time I got a normal-looking login window and I then input my username and password and got logged in, after which it resumed to the same black screen with the Apple logo and "Estimating time remaining". But the progress indicator kept at approximately the same location which is about 1/6 of the entire length. There were also a few times when the machine shut down itself and when I found out about it I pressed the power button to start it manually. After that the normal-looking login window showed up again and I then input my username and password to log in. And the same black screen with the Apple logo and "Estimating time remaining" show up again but the progress indicator stayed at approximately the same place. It is the third day it has been doing that now. What should I do?

One thing you can try is to start up to your previous system and try the upgrade again. Press the option key on start and choose macOS Mojave or whatever your root volume is called. This will get you out of the recurring upgrade process.
Regarding the login window, do you have FileVault enabled?


How to sync Downloads folder to iCloud? I need to sync the Downloads folder to iCloud and then all the downloads should automatically sync with iCloud.

I tried to:

Create a new Downloads folder in the terminal of MacBook in the Documents directory.
Tried to move the default Download folder to the newly created folder.

When I tried to use the mv command to move the default Downloads folder to the newly created Downloads folder in Documents in the terminal, it gives permission denied error.

I am trying to achieve what was suggested by user PhillipHolmes in the below thread, please. Thank you:

How to sync an additional folder to iCloud Drive similar to how macOS Sierra does it?

Thank you

Set your Download location as Desktop or Documents in Safari Preferences → General

Then turn on iCloud for Documents and Desktop in System Preferences → iCloud → iCloud Drive Options.

You might need to move existing content  in your new download location somewhere else.

For your later edit, just set the Download location in Safari Preferences → General as Documents/downloads_folder_you_made and the turn on the sync. You might need to move the existing content in the default Downloads folder to the newly made one.


Time Machine wants to backup all files after permission change — how to avoid? I have been using Time Machine on 10.9.5 for a long time now, and it was working flawlessly until today.

This morning a friend of mine tried to access a freshly set up NFS share of my Music folder, but couldn't read any files due to their permissions.

So I went ahead and ran chmod -R 755 ./* on the whole Music folder, which is roughly 600 GB in size.

And so, now it wouldn't backup at all, telling me this:

The error message keeps on appearing, altering across my two backup disks, none of which obviously have the required 600 GB of space.

Is there any way I could tell it to ignore permissions on that specific folder, or somehow retrieve the permissions without restoring the whole folder from the last backup?

Many thanks in advance.

In the end I just had to erase my time machine disks and start from scratch.
It seems to work fine now, but this is not how it should have worked.

So I would be looking into moving from Time Machine in favor of something more reliable and avoiding TM further at all costs.


Screen flickering with 2009 Mac Mini: overheating issue? Just moved to a new place and so I reinstalled my HTMacMini (2009 nVidia 9400M model) in a slightly different configuration. My wife wanted it more out of sight so I put it in a drawer which had some ventilation but maybe not enough. After a week, tonight, it became impossible to wake up the display with the keyboard. I connected to the Mini via screen sharing and everything seemed fine. I rebooted the Mini and while I got a signal on TV, the picture was now flickering pretty regulary (as much as once per second). Again, connecting to it via VNC/screen sharing works fine. Did I screw it all up by not allowing enough ventilation in the new setup? Any way I can diagnose exactly what's going on? Could it just be the miniDP connector? Could I replace this?

If indeed the display output is fried, how could I still put my Mini to good use? Would airplay to a new Apple TV be a solution (my TV is 1080p)? I know it can replace my Mini to watch netflix but I have a pretty large collection of mp4 and mkv videos. Could these be streamed by the Apple TV if a HD is attached to the Airport Base? I guess these extra questions might be asked separately...

I have the same model Mini and have found it to be extremely sensitive to temperature.  You're lucky you didn't permanently damage yours by keeping it in a drawer.  It needs to be out in the air with good clearance around it so that the fan can draw air through.


MacBook Pro (mid-2012) SSD Problems Ok a few months ago I bought a Macbook Pro 2012 and shortly afterwards I installed a Adata 512GB SSD.  I cloned my existing Mechanical drive to the new internal SSD and everything went fine for a few months.  My Mackbook Pro was booting up in about 11 secs and running like a pro.  Well a few weeks ago I started having problems.  Here are the following problems:

When I close the laptop and put it to sleep it freezes when I wake it up and it becomes unresponsive to the point that I have to completely turn it off.
Sometimes when I have to power it on it has trouble finding the internal SSD and after a few minutes I get the blinking folder with the question mark.  This tells me it's having problems finding my SSD.  Sometimes I have to turn it off and back on a few times or do the clear NVRAM key combination inorder to get it booted up.  Once it's booted up it works just perfect.  but if I let it go to sleep then its back to problem 1 above.

This has become increasingly frustrating as my Macbook it used for editing pictures from my photography sessions and also editing videos.   And I have tried all the different solutions from the internet/google/forums.  Well the other night I decided to open it up and install my old mechanical drive back in it.  When I turned it on the it found the drive and booted right up.  I put it to sleep and it woke back up with no problem and it didn't freeze.  I also powered it off and back on a few times and it booted with no problem.

Is it safe to assume that my Adata SSD is dying or could it be something else that's causing this problem?  I also did a erase and restore from a time machine backup and had the same results.

I used to work at an Apple certified repair center and would definitely suspect the SSD. Things you could check:

Reseat the sata connector on the logic board side
Try a different sata cable
Try a different ssd
Put the ssd in a diffent machine and see what happens

Unfortunately not everyone has multiple ssd, parts and machines to test with. Can you try and claim warranty on the ssd?


No sound after upgrading to Lion, despite hardware working fine After upgrading to Lion, I have no sound at all under OS X.  It doesn't come through my speakers or through my headphone jack.  I've checked in the Sound preferences, and it's set properly.  I've tried killing coreaudiod, which does nothing.  I've triple-checked that I'm not muted (I'm not) and the volume is up (it is), and I've made sure I'm upgraded to 10.7.1, since that was supposed to resolve some sound issues.  There's just nothing.

The good news is that I know that the hardware's not broken, since my Widows BootCamp partition works just fine.  The bad news is that I don't want to boot into Windows to listen to iTunes.

What am I missing?

Odd though it may seem, try launching Garage Band (if you have it) and creating/saving a new project. It seems that Garage Band does some low-level tests on your audio system when it runs, and clears up weird states like you're encountering.

This doesn't answer the question of what's wrong, but hopefully will fix it anyhow.


How to remove extra iPhone calendars? I'm using my university's exchange server to sync my calendar, contacts and todos with my iPhone (iOS 5), and this is working perfectly.

However, there are (besides the "Birthdays" calendar) two other calendars "from my PC". At least they say they are - I have no idea where they would be on my PC, and why there are two of them (I've only ever synced my iPhone on one Win7 PC under one single user account).

They also appear to be completely empty, but I'm not sure how to actually make sure that they are.

What's more important, I'd like to remove them (not just hide them), but I don't know how. iTunes on Windows isn't a big help here. But perhaps I'm overlooking something.

Can I remove those calendars? Or at least one of them?

When the device is plugged into iTunes, look under the info tab, you will see an option to sync calendars, you can turn this off by unchecking the sync calendars box.


iMac won't shut down per schedule Wife's 2007 24" 2.8 ghz 6GB RAM running SL, and now Lion.

For the past month or so, It won't automatically shut down at night per the schedule in System Prefs/Energy Saver pane.  My wife may not use the iMac for several days at a time, and then use it daily for a week or more - very random.

I've changed the settings by minutes, by hours.  I've Safe booted.

I will try logging her out and logging into my account tonight to see if it performs  there.

I do have a current clone and TM backups on an external drive.

Other than a complete reinstall of SL then Lion, what prefs are there and where are they that I could delete and re-establish to fix this problem?

Try an SMC reset and see if that helps.

You could also try using the pmset command in a shell (Terminal).


mDNSResponder not logging man mDNSResponder suggests that sudo killall -USR1 mDNSResponder will enable warning and notice logging, and that sudo syslog -c mDNSResponder -d will enable log levels Emergency to Debug. Additionally sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder should dump current state to /var/log/system.log.

None of these have any effect on macOS Sierra. None of the commands fail, but they don't actually log anything in /var/log/system.log either.

In my opinion parts of the log system of macOS 10.12.0 are flawed.

The output (dump) of sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder is visible in the Devices > $hostname  "log" though.

First launch Console and choose your host device in the left pane. Enter a filter like mDNS in the search field at the top.

Then enter  sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder in Terminal and watch the results fly past in Console.


What is the source of air pollution data in the Weather app? I'm in Mexico, and today I looked at my phone and saw this:

It's the Weather app that came with iOS 13. Is there any way to find out what the specific pollutant is? If there is no way within the app, does anyone know where the data is from, so I can go find details?

There is an icon for the Weather Channel down in the bottom, so I went to that web site (weather.com) and searched for the city. I don't see any pollution data.

I searched the web and found this: https://aqicn.org/. But they have no data for this particular city, so that's probably not the source either.

When I press the "The Weather Channel" logo a the bottom it takes me to a weather.com page that lists the air quality:

Then pressing on the "See Details" link shows the details about the air quality:


Mac OS update has an invalid signature I am trying to update my Mac OS Mojave which is currently running 10.14.3. Now the latest update is 10.14.6. I tried updating via system preferences but it gave me an error "This volume doesn't meet the requirements". I tried downloading and installing combo update from here: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2010?locale=en_US It gives me error "The package has an invalid signature" on installation while installing after restart. I tried downloading and installing 10.14.4, but it gives the same error "The package has an invalid signature" during installation.

I have been stuck here for days. I really want to update my mac. Please help.

-- diskutil list output --

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         121.1 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +121.1 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            97.9 GB    disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 42.0 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.1 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      1.1 GB     disk1s4

My security and privacy pane is also not loading. Can the update installation have something to do with it?

It sounds like it could be a corrupt plist file or something else entirely. You didn't happen to remove any certificates from Keychain did you (accidentally)? Apple uses those for verifying code signatures.

One simple idea to try is to create a new admin account on your computer. Login and see if you're able to update the OS from that account. You can delete that account after the system if updated, or at least, you've now isolated the problem to a single account.

If that fails, I might try just re-installing macOS from the recovery partition. This will overwrite the system files but shouldn't affect anything else.


How can I force-update HP printer drivers? After updating to Big Sur, one of my three Mac Minis doen't recognize my HP6980 LAN-printer (neither on WiFi nor ethernet). It thinks it is a PCL-laser printer. Duplex recognized but it only prints black/white (status color cartridges not shown). The other 2 Mac Minis have no issues.
How do I try to fix this?
Edit 20 dec 2020: The Mac giving the issue has a driver version 2.3
The Macs without issues have driver version 4.0.5. Even after "forcing" BS to choose the correct deskjet instead of the PCL-laser the wrong driver persists.

First tnx for the reactions.
I've found a different driver on the Mac mini with the printer-problem. HP update didn't work (Big Sur has issue, developer has to update). Trying to manually replace/update driver (maybe thru the terminal). Have to find out where drivers can be found in the system. Until then using printer share (tnx @David Anderson). Will be back when issue resolved but it isn't a showstopper (anymore) because I seldom print. Tnx guys, appreciate the help and directions.


The display contrast on my new iMac (the Retina 4k 21.5" model) is too high. Can it be lowered past the lowest setting? Just looking at my new iMac was giving me a headache: the "Retina" display was so high-contrast, even at the lowest contrast setting, that it was searing my retinas.

Is there a way to reduce the contrast past the lowest keyboard setting?

Yes - by using display profiles, you can alter what absolute values the relative 100% and 0% contrast settings are. You don’t even need calibration hardware, but sometimes that helps you dial this in precisely.

Go to the "Color" tab of the "Display" panel of System Preferences
Select the display profiles, one by one to see which you prefer.

When I got to "SMPTE RP 431-2-2007-DCI (P3)," I hit PAYDIRT: contrast and saturation were down to something I could easily live with.


Can't add Google Account to OSX I can't set up my Google Accounts on my MacBook Pro. When adding my work (one step) or private (two-step) Google account in the internet accounts panel in system preferences, it doesn't go past this screen. When I select the apps to sync, I can click Done and then Done get's greyed out. I see the grey spinning wheel very shortly.

For the calendar, I tried this but without succes:
Can't enable Gmail calendar syncing

I've had this issue on Yosemite as well, but now also for el Capitan. Other sites suggest going on a different network would solve the issue. I tried wired, WiFi and a mobile hotspot I created with my phone without succes.

It seems that in the process I'm going one step further than this guy Internet Accounts - Login Issue with Google and iCloud. I'm running out of options and frustration is growing strongly. Thinking about doing a clean install.

This issue was plaguing me for a long-time and was really annoying.

I initially thought it was an issue with a random plist or other file hanging out in the Library/ folder and I tried deleting many of them to try and get to the bottom of this.

Eventually, I was tipped off to a Keychain issue by looking in Console, which with some Google'ing, led me to this post on Apple's forums.

Ultimately, I removed all of the following items in Keychain Access, retried adding the account in Internet Accounts, and everything worked well!

It sounds like it was only the com.apple.account.Google.oauth* tokens that had to be removed, but your mileage may vary.


Do MacOS Mojave or Catalina have crontab equivalent? I am looking for folders that act like cron jobs folders.

More specifically, I'm looking for all the different folders that run every file that exists under them and any user can write into them (like ~/Library/LaunchAgent, for example).

No, by default, there are no folders on macOS that allow any user to write into them, and then have the content executed automatically. This would be deemed a security risk by Apple.

cron and launchd

crontab exists on macOS. The use of cron is deprecated; Apple recommend launchd where possible.

With launchd each user has their own folder, ~/Library/LaunchAgents. Processes started through this mechanism are limited to the scope of the associated user's graphical user session.

launchd also provides locations for computer wide folders, see the manual page Files section on /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons.

Watched Folders

macOS includes support for watched folders. These are likely the closest built-in solution to your description:

  The ability to watch folders and take action on incoming items is a powerful automation technique that enables the creation of fully unattended workflows. A watched folder might be used, for example, to watermark incoming photos, convert them to PDF, and email them to clients for review. Many companies set up script servers—dedicated robot machines that watch folders and process detected items, allowing employees to offload tedious and repetitious work in order to focus on other important tasks.

  In OS X, there are two primary ways to set up scripting-based watched folders: folder actions and stay open script apps.


Work computer shows "This connection is not private" warning on almost all sites My workplace allows me to use a Mac, but doesn't have much experience with them; their support is minimal if well intentioned, and generally as much harm as help. This includes installing antivirus software etc.

Recently, both Safari and Chrome have started showing the "This connection is not private" error with most off-site URLs. This is a recent change, and includes web sites I was able to access last week. I'm running MacOS 10.14.6 (18G87) with all updates.

This isn't a question of our IT deliberately blocking sites, as I can access them from my Windows computer (and in any case it includes sites that are clearly work-related).

In some cases, but not all, I'm able to bypass the warning by following the accepted answer for How do I bypass "this connection is not private" warnings in safari? (i.e. clicking through the "show details" buttons and entering my password), but this doesn't always work, and is pretty inconvenient besides.

I've also tried the other answers from that question, but these do not work. This is perhaps not surprising as that question refers to development work which involves self-generated SSL certificates, and my situation doesn't involve these.

I've also tried turning off antivirus software (insert scare quotes as you like), and that didn't help.

Note: When I look at the certificates on the problematic sites, I see the site's certificate but it's underneath a certificate issued by my workplace, and the browser shows my workplace's certificate as "Untrusted". I don't know how certificates work, but I'm guessing this is the problem and what I need to do is somehow make my browsers trust my workplace's certificates.

Any suggestions for working around this problem?

This is not a purely Apple-related question, but it's worth to reply.

TL;DR: You should go to your company's IT Security Department immediately because the certificates that encrypt your web traffic can be compromised.

Long story, your company uses a kind of proxy called "Transparent proxy" for SSL traffic. This consists of a proxy that the user doesn't have to authenticate or configure him/herself, with the addition of a SSL certificate issued by your company that replaces all the HTTPS certificates of the servers you are trying to connect to.

This is, effectively, considered as a Self-Signed certificate by your browser, and is actually making your company able to decrypt and inspect all your web traffic (TIP: stop facebooking at work =) ) . As "out-of-the-box" web browsers do not distinguish between these IT configurations from proper, evil man in the middle attacks, they present you such a warning.

In order to get rid of the warning, the companies' IT Departments install their Certification Authority Certificate, or "certificate issuer's" Certificate, in the computers' KeyChain. Secondly, they mark the CA certificates as ultimately trusted system-wide, so that the browsers recongise that situation as expected when they validate the SSL proxy certificate.

So, if you got back that warning it is because that trust chain of certificate validation initially set up by your company is, somehow, broken. From best to worst scenario, it can be because:

Your company's proxy certificate has expired and they have to replace it
Your computer has lost the CA certificate of your company, or it has expired, and they have to install a new one. Or a maintenance task just lost the trust settings for the certificate.

For these two above, better to check with IT for them to review all the settings. Do not take the risk of changing that trust yourself, as it would make you accountable if something further breaks... and you don't want to be accountable for a security breach.

Worse scenarios:

Your company proxy has been hacked and the certificate has been replaced by an adversary's certificate.
Your company traffic is proxied through another (an adversary's) proxy, that is to say, you are suffering a (very clumsy) Man in The Middle Attack

Normally, in these kind of attacks, the computers have to be malware-infected for that malware to install the adversary CA into the KeyChain; otherwise all the computers would issue such a warning.


Recover iPhone backup manually from iCloud I had the misfortune of a stolen iPhone 4 a few months ago. In the interim I've decided not to get a new iPhone.

I can view my iCloud storage page and see there is a 1GB file there. There are random photos and two years worth of message history, amongst other odd bits and bobs I'm sure. I do not have a local backup.

Problem: How do I recover my iPhone backup sitting in iCloud?

I've looked all over and find no way of doing this without an iPhone. Surely there must be a way though, it is my data after all.

Any ideas?

Unfortunately, you are very limited in what you can do with that backup. In fact, there is literally nothing you can do with an iCloud backup unless you restore the backup. This can be done, however, on any iOS device (as in iPhone, iPod, or iPad), that is at least the iOS version that the stolen device was on. For example, if the iPhone 4 was running iOS 6, you will only be able to restore to a iOS 6, or 6.1 device.

If you are on a Mac, you should have easy access to Calendars, Contacts, Notes, Reminders, and such data. If you are on a PC, you can access most of that by going to iCloud.com. This isn't really the data that you've backed up, though, and it's really data that is just "synced" through iCloud. Either way, Contacts, are typically pretty important.

If you own a Mac, you should be able to get your Photostream pictures by installing and opening Photostream. This doesn't capture videos, though.

If you do have an eligible iOS device that you can do a restore on, be sure to back up that device locally before wiping. It might also be advisable to make sure that device doesn't do a backup of the newly erased setup to iCloud. If you keep that iCloud account disabled on that device, you should have an easy restore from iCloud, and a backup in iTunes should something go wrong.


Actual stereo sound with bluetooth headset I have a bluetooth headset (Logitech UE9000), I always found the sound quality on OSX to be less than when connected to my android phone.

Further investigation leads me to believe that there is no stereo sound being outputted. A simple youtube stereo test (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAOQWSmkofA) has the result of left or right channel to be outputted simultaneously to both earspeakers.

This is not an quality issue, the sound is clear, as such, the advise which is littered everywhere on the web to up the quality by doing some command line magic is not helping:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Min (editable)" 200

By alt-clicking on the bluetooth icon I can see that my active codec is "AptX" which should be the correct codec for high quality.

Do others have successfully connected their headsets with real stereo/separate channel audio?

Are you still having this issue? I found this set of changes fixes the output, though I'm still having tinny input quality over bluetooth:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Max (editable)" 120
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Min (editable)" 80
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Initial Bitpool (editable)" 120
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Initial Bitpool Min (editable)" 80
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool" 100
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool Max" 120
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool Min" 80
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Stream - Flush Ring on Packet Drop (editable)" 30
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Stream - Max Outstanding Packets (editable)" 15
defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Stream Resume Delay" 0.75


Dragging an email with attachment to another mailbox looses attachment I was dragging an email message in Mail.app and intended to drag it to another folder.  I accidentally went too far and then I was dragging an icon around the Dashboard.  when I went back to Mail.app, the message was still there but missing the attachment.  Where did it go?

It happened to me a second time, but this time the Dashboard wasn't involved.  Is this a bug in Mail.app?  The attachments were photos that were being displayed in-line.

I am using IMAP.  So I can access the photo on my iPhone but it is not accessible on mail.app.  I guess I need to file a RDAR.

The file may be in /Users/uname/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads

(This is where Mail stores unsaved attachments)


"Reopen the Java Control Panel" doesn't do anything From System Preferences, I open the Java icon and it shows:

And that's all. The "Reopen the Java Control Panel" button doesn't do anything. There isn't any separate window anywhere.

macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G65).

I'm getting the same thing. And when I try to reinstall it, the Java installer just bounces a few times and never opens a window. Never starts, unable to reinstall it.

I created another profile/account and used it after switching - and the apps that had been failing to start - never use any CPU - would work like they were supposed to.

By now it's pretty obvious something is not right in my home directory, but it's not being intuitive.


Arbitrary Editor for Mac I need a text editor on mac that could open arbitrary file and show its content.

Edit: I dont want to "decode" the files, I just want to read them byte by byte, as they are sitting on the filesystem, just like fopen() in c. (No parsing!) Is there any editor that can do that?

For example, I want to open "test.pages" file, because I am curious. Textedit denied to open it, textWrangler opened it in disk browser. TextMate did open it , showing first 2 characters as PK, (which i understand as a packed file), but it showed lots of special characters as white spaces, which is not acceptable.

Notepad (or any XYZ editor on windows) could open arbitrary files, without ever complaining about "format".

This seems to be the job for a hex viewer/editor rather than a text editor. An easy way to do this would be just to use Terminal emacs with hex mode.

If you prefer a GUI application Hex Fiend looks promising

  A fast and clever open source hex editor for Mac OS X.
  Insert, delete, rearrange.  Hex Fiend does not limit you to in-place changes like some hex editors.
  Work with huge files.  Hex Fiend can handle as big a file as you’re able to create.  It’s been tested on files as large as 118 GB.
  Small footprint.  Hex Fiend does not keep your files in memory.  You won’t dread launching or working with Hex Fiend even on low-RAM machines.
  Binary diff.  Hex Fiend can show the differences between files, taking into account insertions or deletions.
  Data inspector.  Interpret data as integer or floating point, signed or unsigned, big or little endian...


connect AirPods to MacBook Air (Early 2014) with Sierra - Bluetooth pairing doesn't work I followed the steps in Connect AirPods to MacBook / Macbook Pro with Mac OS Sierra (warning, Youtube video).

I tried and tried and never see AirPods.

I have a Early 2014 MacBook Air with Sierra. Does this only works with new MacBooks? Is there a technical reason?

After installing the update macOS Sierra 10.12.4 the connection to AirPods working fine.

In release notes About the macOS Sierra 10.12.4 Update nothing about AirPods written.


Is upgrading an iMac to an SSD over USB 2/FireWire an upgrade? I bought the smallest 21" iMac model of the 2011 update cycle. I was planning on having the HDD replaced with an SSD later on. Turned out this would not be an option.

So I'm either stuck with the 7200 RPM internal disk or switching to a much more expensive iMac model with an SSD. As this would be the only part of this better-configured iMac, the 256 GB SSD would cost me a whooping 800€ (~$1150 or the price of a new small line iMac). I just don't want to spend this kind of money.

The iMac comes equipped with a Thunderbolt, a FireWire 800 and a couple of USB 2.0 ports.

Thunderbolt should be the fastest, but there's no hardware for it yet (right?)
FireWire 800 should be the second fastest with 800Mbit or ~100MB/s which is faster than what the internal drive produces
USB 2 still has 480Mbit or 60MB/s which still should outperform the internal drive

So my question is: would I get a good speed bump by buying an SSD and one of those storage enclosures (this one looks really nice)? Would that benefit the overall system performance or is there no bump to expect?

I'd love to put a 128GB SDD in that thing and put the system and applications on that while keeping the data on my internal drive.

There would be a major speed bump. Not as fast as having the drive on an internal SATA interface but noticably fast all the same.

I ran a four and a half year old iMac 24 inch on a Crucial M4 SSD via a Firewire 800 enclosure for about 5 months to get a major boost over the internal SATA HD.

You'll notice an immediate improvement to random read/write speeds, day-to-day things like app launch and system boot times. Sustained rates will only be as fast as the interface you pick and may not be any better than your internal drive. However since most OS and app disk activity is random this isn't too important.

With Thunderbolt available on your system a future SATA 6Gbps enclosure to Thunderbolt interface will remove the sustained transfer rate  limitation.

Avoid USB 2 as you will never reach the theoretical 60 MB/s due to USB protocol overheads. I have only ever seen a maximum of 35-40 MB/s over USB 2 hence my choice of a Firewire 800 enclosure.


Installing iOS 11 on iPhone 5c? I have an iPhone 5c that is not eligible for iOS 11. I don't want to have to buy a new phone if this one will still work, so is there a way to jailbreak the phone and install iOS 11? Or does it not work like that? Thanks for any help, I'd like to understand how this works.

It’s not possible. The iPhone 5c has a 32-bit CPU, and iOS 11 has dropped 32-bit support and will only run on 64-bit CPUs. Apple will let you install it on any phone that can run it at all, which is the iPhone 5s or newer.


Can iOS display the current audio input device? Is there any way to tell whether an attached external mic is making contact with an iOS device?

I am trying to attach an external microphone (Sennheiser MKE-400) to an iPhone 5. The mic has a 3.5mm jack which fits into the iPhone's headphone port. I know that the port is capable of audio input. However, I also know that there are different formats for 3.5 mm jacks and ports, and that there are adapters available, one of which may be required to make this connection, though I am not sure.

I can make a recording with the mic attached, but from listening to it, it is not clear whether the mic is in use or whether the iPhone is using its own, built-in mic.

You would need an adapter to make that mic work with an iPhone.  Such as this one.


Can I use the same bootable drive for all models? I currently have a Late 2010 MacBook Air and looking to get the new Air when it comes out later this year.

My question is, I have just made a bootable USB installer (by using createinstallmedia through downloading Yosemite from the App Store). However, I am not sure if I can use this to install Yosemite on the MacBook Air 2015 without losing some features i.e. Hand-off, which are not available on the 2010 version.

So could I use a OS X 10.10.3 installer from a MacBook Air 2010 and use it to install Yosemite on the MacBook Air 2015 with all the features enabled?

The general rule is that you cannot boot a device using an OS older than the device itself.

So the chances are small.

The trick would be to recreate that drive as the latest OS update is announced, concurrently with that product release.

Alternatively, use the Apple Migration Assistant

Extract:

  Before you transfer information from a Mac, connect the two computers with a cable (Ethernet, FireWire, or Thunderbolt).

  Note:   If you’re transferring from a Mac with OS X v10.8 Mountain Lion or earlier using a Thunderbolt cable, follow the steps for transferring from a Time Machine backup or other disk.
  You can also transfer information over a wired or wireless network, as long as your computers are connected to the same network.

  Open Migration Assistant, click Continue, then follow the onscreen instructions to transfer info from a Mac.

  Open Migration Assistant on the other Mac, then follow the onscreen instructions to transfer info to a Mac.
  Select what to transfer.

  Apps: Select the Applications checkbox.
  Incompatible apps or apps with newer versions already installed may not be transferred or may not be usable.
  Computer settings: Select the Computer & Network Settings checkbox.
  Your desktop picture, network settings, and more will be transferred.

  To begin the transfer, click Continue.


Is compressed air effective to clean a 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard which displays repeated keypresses? My 2018, 15" MacBook Pro is starting to display the dreaded keyboard defects. Specifically, the A key started to register double keypresses. Initially this was very infrequent, but it appears to be getting worse. I would estimate that, in the last few minutes, about 5-10% of the time, a repeat keypress is happening.

Although I could take the computer to an authorized repair shop as it's still under warranty (and I bought AppleCare for it), I know the turnaround time is fairly long, and this is the only computer I can realistically use without immensely disrupting my workflow. Also, there is no Apple Store within 500 Km of my location. Therefore, I set out to look for DIY fixes.

I found this support document on Apple's site recommending the use of compressed air as a possible fix to the issue. I have an oil-free air compressor that I could use to apply compressed air to the keyboard.

However, I'm somewhat afraid of doing this. Although this is an Apple recommended procedure, I can't help but think this is aggressive procedure applied to a very delicate mechanism. In particular, I'm afraid my compressed air source may have a small rate of dust contamination which may actually worsen the problem. Has anyone actually used this procedure on a 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard, with the new silicone membrane, to see whether this recommendation is actually effective? I intend to postpone doing this until I see a success report.

The 'Butterfly' keyboard Apple uses is known to be faulty and many users experience problems with it. A quick google search for 'Butterfly Keyboard Problems' will show you the scale of this issue. The solution you found may work, but I would strongly suggest taking it back to Apple, since its still under warranty it should be free and it will likely prolong the lifespan of your Macbook.


Strain relief of MagSafe cord and safety My MagSafe adapter has suffered from strain relief and the insulation is completely frayed off near the tip (it is the newer L-shaped adapter rather than the old T-shaped adapter). It still seems to charge the computer. Is there any risk to my physical safety from continuing to use it?

Frayed jacketing represents a potential fire hazard if the wires themselves become exposed and overheat, short, and/or arc. Provided only the jacketing is frayed, you could use electrical tape to provide protection to the internal wires or you could add a sleeve or heat shrink tubing.

A safe answer is to order a replacement from Apple in order to protect yourself, your device, and your property.


Set preview.app to default to "content only" view Is there any way to make (Mountain Lion) Preview's default view 'content only'?

I was looking for something that would seem to be the opposite of what you wanted (i.e. to have all PDFs open and show the "Thumbnails" of each page, as is an option in the "View" menu.

As such, I found, on the Apple Support community the following:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4582012

It would seem you have to go to Preferences> PDF> un-tick the "Always Show Sidebar" option beside "Opening for the first time" option.

Hope that helps a bit! (?)


Remove Quicklook Syntax Highlighting with TextMate2? TextMate2 Alpha comes with a Syntax Highlighting plugin for macOS QuickLook.

How can it be disabled without removing TextMate?

You can run

rm -r /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/TextMateQL.qlgenerator

but you'll have to do that again every time TextMate is updated.