How to set ⌘ + H to enable show hidden files I want my Mac to show hidden files when i hit ⌘ + H (like ubuntu). I can see hidden files by putting this defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES command in terminal but i want to get a keyboard shortcut for it. Also, if ⌘ + H is already used by some other process please let me know what might be the closest and most related shortcut for this new process and how to assign it to the respective, show hidden files process.

Edit at Nov 2018
This is all now moot since High Sierra. In Finder,  Cmd ⌘   Shift ⇧   .  [period, full stop] will toggle invisible files on the fly, nothing else needed.

 Cmd ⌘   H  is the system-wide shortcut for "Hide frontmost app"

To try tie a new shortcut to that, you could maybe use Automator to add a Service - but I still don't know how you would persuade it to override the existing System default.

This works as a Service if you use a non-system key, but not with  Cmd ⌘   H

on run {input, parameters}

    set newHiddenVisiblesState to "YES"
    try
        set oldHiddenVisiblesState to do shell script "defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles"
        if oldHiddenVisiblesState is in {"1", "YES"} then
            set newHiddenVisiblesState to "NO"
        end if
    end try
    do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles " & newHiddenVisiblesState

    tell application "Finder"
        set theWindows to every Finder window
        repeat with i from 1 to number of items in theWindows
            set this_item to item i of theWindows
            set theView to current view of this_item
            if theView is list view then
                set current view of this_item to icon view
            else
                set current view of this_item to list view

            end if
            set current view of this_item to theView
        end repeat
    end tell

    return input
end run

Edit for El Capitan…
I've noticed that the Finder window refresh no longer works in El Capitan, so this is a modified version, quitting the Finder instead.

on run {input, parameters}
    --Toggle Invisibles, El Capitan Version
set newHiddenVisiblesState to "YES"
try
    set oldHiddenVisiblesState to do shell script "defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles"
    if oldHiddenVisiblesState is in {"1", "YES"} then
        set newHiddenVisiblesState to "NO"
    end if
end try
do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles " & newHiddenVisiblesState & "; killall Finder"
end run

I guess you could make it work for the Finder only, if you specified some other key command for Hide Finder - as it is visible as a Menu item it would be possible to override for that app alone [by putting something 'useless' as an alternative], leaving you free to then use  Cmd ⌘   H  to toggle invisibles from the Finder only.

Tested - does work this way


Contact's numbers not formatted correctly on my Verizon iPhone 4S I setup my Verizon iPhone 4S by restoring from a backup of my 3GS.

Now my contact's phone numbers aren't formatted at all. They now look like 5555551234 whereas they used to be formatted like (555) 555-1234.

In the Messages app, most conversations are no longer linked to a contact's name, only phone numbers are shown.

Creating a new contact exhibits the same problem.

Adding +1 to the beginning of each contact's phone number(s) seems to help, but I'd rather not have to manually edit all of my contacts.

My Verizon iPhone 4S appears to have been in some sort of international mode by default.

The fix is to 'Program' the phone via Verizon's system:

Open Phone and dial *228. This is the Verizon over-the-air
programming number.
When the system answers, press 1 for "Program or activate your phone"
Wait through the music for the call to disconnect. You should get a prompt stating something like, "Service Update Complete"
Open the Task Manager and kill the Phone, Message, and Contacts Applications
Wait a few minutes (I waited 3 just to be extra safe)
Open the Message App to verify the fix.

Source

Edit: I had to do this again on December 2nd (perhaps because my carrier profile was updated?).


Privacy policy URL for app I've read through Apple's policies of whether or not to include a privacy policy URL for my app and i'm still unsure.

If you're currently NOT signed into GameCenter App or in Game Center in Settings App and you open my game app there will be a Game Center sign in pop up. If the user signs in, since they can sign in using my App, do I need a privacy policy URL for this?

I have Facebook/Twitter share buttons in my app. If the user is not is NOT signed into Twitter/Facebook App and when they go to my app and click on Facebook/Twitter buttons they can not sign in via my button in my app. They must sign in the facebook/twitter app. However, once they sign in the Facebook/Twitter app and now go into my app and click the Facebook/Twitter button. They can post whatever information they want inside the button and click POST/SHARE then that information will be posted on their Facebook/Twitter accounts. Do I need a privacy policy URL for this?

According to https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#privacy you only need a privacy policy if your app has account sign in capabilities.

  17.5 Apps that include account registration or access a user’s existing account must include a privacy policy or they will be rejected

If your app just links to other apps and they handle the sign in, you should be clear without needing a privacy policy. You could also rely on iOS to handle the account log in - same release from the requirement is met in that case.


What is the best way to create a slideshow in iphoto across multiple events? I want to put together a slideshow but i want to use pictures across multiple events.  I see you can click on Slideshow on a particular event.  Do I have to copy these picture all into a new "event" just to do a slideshow on it ?

Even easier: Make an Album of the photos you want to use in the Slideshow, and base it on that. This has a couple of advantages:

It simply references the photos in the Events, and uses no ezra disk space, while keeping your Events intact
You can sort the photos manually, into any order you like, which you can't do with Events.

To make a new Album: select a couple of the pics and go Command-n; then drag the rest of the photos to that

Or, shift-command-n to make a new empty album


Pending Transaction doesn't disappear out of Apple Wallet I made a purchase through the Apple Store app using Apple Pay and my Apple Card. After 45 days the pending transaction still appears along with the final charge. All of my reports in Apple Wallet show the total of both charges even though I only made one purchase.
How do I remove this duplicate pending transaction?

To remove the duplicate transaction you need to refresh your Apple Wallet transactions by removing your Apple Card and re-adding it.
Go to Apple Wallet, select your Apple Card, click the 3 dots on the top right, scroll to the bottom, and click on Remove This Card.
You can then add your card back by clicking the + on the top right of the main Apple Wallet screen. Once it's added back, your transactions should be refreshed and the pending transaction should be gone.


Move Notification Center to the left Is there a way to move the OS X notification center, or at least the notification alerts, to the left side of the screen?

Simple answer: No. The UI clearly states there is only one location:

and there appear to be no preferences one can set through the UI, or anywhere else, for that matter, to move it elsewhere.


/private/var/db/uuidtext/dsc directory huge size I have /private/var/db/uuidtext/dsc directory full of files. Directory size is >100GB and constantly growing. I've deleted all the files and also tried to reboot my mac, but it doesn't help.
I've found little info about this directory, but it looks like that these files are log files, but I'm not able to figure out which process causes such a logging.

Is there any way to figure out what causes this heavy logging?

Sure - the fsusage tool can show all filesystem operations live and you can sort on that path to determine what is doing the writing and back into the details.

sudo fs_usage -w | grep uuidtext

As you mention, the system can self fix by restart and updates. I’d guess OnyX didn’t help, but we’ll need to wait to get it to recur to know for sure.

Also, that directory is where the unified logs are stored, so you could also just inspect your normal logs in console app - if you have a high volume of logs, then your growth is normal and you’d uninstall / fix / suppress whatever is generating all the volume in the logging system.

log stream --info --debug

Also, most people are stunned and shocked to see how many thousands of info and debug messages get logged each and every second on a perfectly healthy mac, so don’t worry if you feel the volume is high without comparing to other computers. Maybe getting stats would be a better indicator:

me@dev ~> log stats --overview
== archive =============================================================
size:               461,012,272 bytes
                    1,141,374,160 bytes (uncompressed)
start:              Fri Jul 19 06:37:25 2019
end:                Sun Aug 18 17:56:08 2019
statedump:          725

events:             [       total        log      trace   signpost       loss ]
                    [  26,036,074 18,105,986         26    234,083          5 ]

activity:           [      create transition     action ]
                    [   7,694,844          0         10 ]

log messages:       [     default       info      debug      error      fault ]
                    [  17,799,660    219,169    105,002    215,663        601 ]

ttl:                [        1day      3days      7days     14days     30days ]
                    [           0     11,021     10,620     94,679     68,285 ]

processes:
          [        events (%total),  decomp. bytes (%total),                           image UUID, image ]
          [     4,728,900 ( 18.2%),    137,984,377 ( 12.1%), 6848C8B5-B410-3D5E-B1F5-6A289006E83F, Activity Monitor ]
          [       800,052 (  3.1%),    100,277,357 (  8.8%), 9C895392-8753-316E-80F0-802610ED6A2C, AssetCache ]
          [     6,498,211 ( 25.0%),     90,979,241 (  8.0%), 26E8D205-980A-3139-B41A-BA2D40EE6294, diskarbitrationd ]
          [        12,103 (  0.0%),     82,909,480 (  7.3%), DF2BBC3F-1663-395D-BEA3-85172E5D5654, sandboxd ]
          [         9,827 (  0.0%),     79,484,156 (  7.0%), 03F25350-02B7-34AD-AF61-5001FCD85D39, sandboxd ]

senders:
          [        events (%total),  decomp. bytes (%total),                           image UUID, image ]
          [     6,498,207 ( 25.0%),     90,979,122 (  8.0%), 26E8D205-980A-3139-B41A-BA2D40EE6294, diskarbitrationd ]
          [       682,424 (  2.6%),     86,726,296 (  7.6%), 74A0A926-957A-3803-9837-CF24592E46D3, libboringssl.dylib ]
          [       145,587 (  0.6%),     82,984,590 (  7.3%), 6993BD8C-C535-3AD7-B511-94EABF989658, GPUWrangler ]
          [        12,027 (  0.0%),     82,908,562 (  7.3%), DF2BBC3F-1663-395D-BEA3-85172E5D5654, sandboxd ]
          [         9,567 (  0.0%),     79,480,144 (  7.0%), 03F25350-02B7-34AD-AF61-5001FCD85D39, sandboxd ]

So 26 million events logged on a computer over a month and it was powered off for 2 weeks this month and lightly used the other couple weeks. On a busy computer I’d see this volume every week and not worry.


MacBook M1 Big Sur crashes every time when I open "About This Mac -> Storage -> Manage" Background: I'm using a MacBook Pro with M1 chip and Big Sur V11.1 (got it last month). One thing really annoys me is that when I connect my iphone, sync starts automatically and it takes up 20GB to when all iphone files are backed up.
Issue: So I wanted to delete the sync files using "Reduce Clutter" in "About This Mac -> Storage". It worked fine for two weeks after I purchased the MacBook, but recently it starts to crash every time when I open "About This Mac -> Storage -> Manage" and I wasn't even able to get the time to click "Review Files" under "Manage". I tried to restart the system but had no luck at all. See screenshots below for crash report.

Help: Does anyone else encounter the same issue? How to resolve it? Is there a way (say, command line) to delete synced iphone files without clicking "About This Mac -> Storage"?
"Manage-> Review Files" is a really convenient way to view and remove redundant files to save storage. It would be great if there is a way to revive that functionality if possible.
Thanks in advance!

iOS installer are located in
~/Library/iTunes

and you need to find your device's folder
iOS backups are located in
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

or you can select iOS device via side bar, select General tab and then Manage backups


Monitor and automatically restart a process I have a Mac Pro running OS X 10.9 with FileMaker Server (FMS) installed. One of the processes running is fmsased (script execution daemon). Periodically this crashes and I have to log into and restart it from the command line (fmsadmin restart fmse -y).

Is there a way of monitoring that process and if it fails automatically issuing the command line instruction?

I've looked at Lingon but couldn't figure out how to do this with it.

Thanks in advance.

Lingon is a GUI to launchd command line utility that manages OS X processes that run in the background.

Basically,  to have launchd manage your FileMaker server, all you need to do is to create a special XML file called a property list (.plist) and place it an appropriate place.

Here is a nice (and easy) explanation of how it works and how to configure it.


Importing Photos from Lion to Yosemite Photo Library to External Storage Device I recently upgraded to Yosemite.  Before that, I used to have my library stored on my external hard drive.

Now I am panicking because while I was able to move my Yosemite Photo library to my external storage device, I do not know how to merge the old and the new library.  It's simply not importing.

Please help! and let me know what other information I need to provide you with.

I have a MacBook Air 10.104 OS X Yosemite.

From Apple Support:

  To migrate another photo library manually:

  Quit Photos.
  Hold down the Option key and open Photos.
  Select the library you want to open.
  If the library you want isn’t listed, click Other Library. Navigate to the library you want and click Open.

  You can also drag the library you’d like to open to the Photos icon in the Dock. Or you can click Create New to create an all-new, empty library.

  Photos can use libraries from iPhoto 8.0 or later and any version of Aperture. If you’d like to migrate a library from iPhoto 7 or earlier, use Apple’s free iPhoto Library Upgrader tool to prepare your library first.


New messages getting delievered to two phones after restoring a backup I took a backup of my data on my iPhone 6s and then restored it on an iPhone 7.
Now there is another SIM in the 6s, but all messages coming in on the 6s are also coming on the 7.

You probably used the same Apple-ID for the new phone, and then all the iMessages get forewarded.

If you want to have a closer look, here is a good explanation of how it works:
selfsolve.apple.com

in short, you can do the following steps, to separate the messages on the two devices:

Transfer your SIM card to your old iPhone.
Go to Settings
Tap Messages
Turn iMessage off
Go back to Settings
Tap FaceTime
Turn FaceTime off


I can't delete folder com.apple.TCC The folder "com.apple.TCC" was created in /Library/Application Support at exactly the same time as a virus alert from ClamXAV. I had downloaded "GoToWebinar" as per the instructions in an e-mail sent from our known travel-agent. I've managed to delete all other files created at that time but, even with sudo from the command line, I can't do anything with the aforementioned folder - not even an"ls" command, "chmod". The folder is showing as having zero bytes but I'm concerned there may be something nasty lurking in there.

This is a legitimate folder required for macOS privacy settings.
Am I supposed to have access to "com.apple.TCC"?
Randomly deleting system files and folders is never a good idea. Leave well alone.


Slow Keys at log-in screen means I can't access laptop! I have a Macbook Air that's less than a year old and woke up today to an issue.

When logging in, I have to hold each key down for 3 seconds before it'll recognise that I'm pressing it - so it'll end up writing four of the same letter in my password and I have to strategically hold down the backspace for 3 seconds to delete the three extra letters. As you can imagine, it took me about 15 minutes to get it right and actually get in to my laptop.

I followed all the advice on other blogs - the issue is completely gone when I boot in safe mode so it's not a hardware issue as far as I can tell. I did a clean install of OS and problem persisted.

The Slow Keys checkbox is unticked so I just have no idea why this is happening.

I should not that once logged in, the keyboard works perfectly fine!

Any and all advice greatly appreciated!

If you did a clean install, that would suggest a hardware issue. It's possible you've got a corrupt install media, too. This can happen if you've created a USB flash drive installer and the USB drive you have doesn't like the block size you've specified (or the default) when using the dd command.

Don't forget to reset the PRAM, as well as the SMC. Apple's instructions:

Shut down your Mac.
Find Command (⌘), Option, P, and R on your keyboard.
Turn on your Mac.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys immediately after you
hear the startup sound.
Hold these keys until the computer restarts and you hear the startup
sound for a second time.
Release the keys.


Syncing the documents and files from two accounts on one mac via iCloud I have two accounts on my mac. One for fun, one for work, but there is overlap in some of the files I use between the two, so I want to have all files in my Documents folder accessible to both accounts.

For this I figured that if I synced the two mac accounts with the same iCloud account, Documents and Desktop would also be synced. It seems like that is not the case. Does anyone know a way to achieve this?

Looks like the approach does work. It just needed a little extra time to get started :)


MacOS, export email folder with each message to its own file Is there a good way to export a Mac email folder so that each email message goes into a separate file?  The only way I can think of is to export the folder using the "Export Mailbox" menu item, and then write a script (shell script for example) which will parse the email file and split it when it finds a new mail header.  It seems a new message starts with every line which starts with "From " (including the space).   Is this the best way?

Procmail is a possibility, but a) it's no longer maintained, and b) it may or may not run under macos. There are some other programs listed on procmail's Wikipedia page that may be useful.

But, just as a guess, I think you might have to "roll your own". If you know Python, you can use the mailbox library.


How can I best use an SSD? I have a Mac Pro, and I've added an Intel 80GB SSD to improve performance in LightRoom and Photoshop. So far so good.

But after moving all of my current work, catalogs, etc. to the SSD, I still have a good 65GB free currently.

How can I creatively use this new SSD drive for performance? I don't want to boot from this drive, but I do want to make good use of the investment.

Ideas I've already looked into and abandoned:

Moving the swap file. Looks like a pain in the butt, and opinions vary on how much this would shorten the lifespan of this older-generation SSD.
Moving Spotlight indexes. Apparently OS X forces you to index to the same volume that stores the data.
Moving Google Chrome's cache. Can't seem to find good instructions for this.

Any ideas? I have a hammer, need more nails...

If your main goal is to improve the performance of Photoshop and Lightroom I would focus on these specific applications. Put Photoshop files and the Lightroom lib, Photoshop and Lightroom swap/temp/history files and the Photoshop & Lightroom apps themselves on the SSD.

Moving the system swap file to the SSD will only help if memory used by Photoshop or Lightroom is overflowed to the swap file. But if this is the case extra RAM would improve their performance a lot more.

Moving anything else then the files directly used by Photoshop & Lightroom might result in a faster overall system, but will likely only marginally help improve the Photoshop & Lightroom experience.


How does Messages determine whether the SEND button should be green or blue? When you send an SMS message to a turned off iPhone then check say an hour later and the SEND button is blue, does that mean the user at some point has switched on to check messages? Cause I tried to resend as iMessage and it went green again?

If the recipient's iMessage is unavailable, or yours, for that matter, the Send button will be turned to Green, showing that you'll send a SMS. When the iMessage service is available again, the button will be turned Blue, showing that you'll be sending iMessages instead of SMS.

So, if you want to make sure you'll always be sending an iMessage, although the service is unavailable, meaning that the recipient will receive the text whenever it's possible, just switch off the Send as SMS under Settings / Messages.


When saving Open Office files they used to stay Open Office files, now they change to Terminal files It used to be that when I saved Open Office files they would stay Open Office files. Now, they change to Terminal files, as it keeps opening in my dock.

How can I remove or stop Terminal opening (I'm running a Macbook Air '11)?

I'm so used to seeing my writing in Open Office files!

Select any one of those Open Office files in a Finder window. Hit Command+i to open up the information window for that file. Near the bottom of that window you should see a pane that says "Open with:".

If it says "Terminal," then click on the dialogue to bring up a drop-down menu, which will present you with a list of applications usually associated with that type of file. Find "Open Office" in the list and select it. You may have to scroll to the bottom to select "other..." if Open Office isn't listed.

After you've selected "Open Office," the Change All... button should be active. Hit "Change All..." and you will be asked to confirm if you want to open all file types with that application. Confirm the choice and you should be good to go.


Black rectangles in menu bar that randomly appear I recently purchased a MacBook Air M1 and it runs the latest OS version. I noticed that sometimes there is a black rectangle in the menu bar. I have attached two screen shots. I am now worried if this is a known software bug or if my device has a defect. I have not been able to find the problem on the internet. Should I replace my device? The size of the rectangle is changing in size.

To start with I would boot your Mac into Safe Mode and determine if the rectangles still appear.
Booting into Safe Mode on an M1 Mac
Follow these steps to boot your Mac into Safe Mode:

Fully shut down your Mac
Press the power button to start your Mac, but continue holding it down as your Mac starts up until you see the startup options window:

Select your startup disk, press and hold the shift key and click the Continue in Safe option
Let go of the shift key
Log into your Mac (Note: you may need to do this twice)
Take a note of what happens (i.e. do the rectangles still appear while in Safe Mode?)
Exit Safe Mode by restarting your Mac as normal
Test again to see if the rectangles still appear when booted normally

Once you've followed the above steps, let me know how you went and we'll go from there.


iMac 2008 vertical lines I have an issue with my iMac 2008 (8.1) (vertical lines).

And I don't know where is the problem GPU/LCD.

Someone said I must buy mini DVI to test if the the screen is defective using a external screen?

How do I test if my LCD screen or GPU is defective.

The other commenters are correct. With an iMac you need to try an external monitor to determine if it is the screen or the GPU.

An Apple Genius appointment would cost you nothing and they could test it for you if you don't have access to another monitor and/or the right cables.


Can I revert a new MacOS X installation using a Time Machine backup? I regularly use Time Machine to create backups of my current macbook.
I am trying to upgrade to MacOS X Big Sur, but I was wondering what happens if I don't like it?
Is it possible to downgrade back to my current version of MacOS X using a Time Machine backup from just before upgrading the system?
I do not use any specialty boot up situation. I do not boot up from external drives.
It's just my laptop with its SSD. I keep larger files in external drives but OS X doesn't get installed to those drives.

The simple answer is yes.
If you have a complete Time Machine Backup of your system, wiping the disk and restoring the computer will install the macOS version of your TM Backup. You can read more about the full procedure on Macworld or on this blog or here.
The general procedure of downgrading macOS with a TM backup is the following:

Make a TM Backup
Shut down your machine and boot into recovery mode (press cmd + r right after boot chime)
Connect your external TM Backup drive and select Restore From Time Machine Backup
Continue and select your latest Backup to restore your machine

Edit: As Tetsujin mentioned in the comments, it is very important to unplug your TM drive before upgrading to the new OS and not reconnect afterwards. Ideally you get a second drive to start new Backups for the macOS version and not let the new Mac version touch the old Backup hard drive!

It is actually even possible to downgrade your macOS version without a TM Backup. You can read more about where to get the installers and more over here: How can I download an older version of macOS/OS X?


Why are the emails from Apple Mail in this numbered directory structure? I was looking into my users' Library/Mail folder at some emails and was wondering why they are organised the way they are. In ~/Library/Mail/V3/Mailboxes/Friends.mbox/5EF13EFE-AB95-43A9-93BB-E01CAE8DA511/Data/ there are a number of directories numbered 0 to 9. In each of these I have a number of further numbered directories, e.g. in folder 0 there are 3, 4 and 5. Each of these has a Message folder, which in turn has the individual emails.

Is there are reason why these are not all in the same directory under the Friends.mbox directory? Is that for indexing reasons?
What is the hashed directory (5EF13EFE-AB95-43A9-93BB-E01CAE8DA511) for?

I'm using El Capitan.

It looks like an Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems.

Anyone can create a UUID and use it to identify something with near certainty that the identifier does not duplicate one that has already been created to identify something else, and will not be duplicated in the future. Information labeled with UUIDs by independent parties can therefore be later combined into a single database, or transmitted on the same channel, without needing to resolve conflicts between identifiers.

In its canonical string representation, the sixteen octets of a UUID are represented as 32 lowercase hexadecimal (base 16) digits, displayed in five groups separated by hyphens, in the form 8-4-4-4-12 for a total of 36 characters (32 alphanumeric characters and four hyphens). For example:

123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000


Can I disable video iCloud backups in Camera Roll? My default iCloud backup is almost full at 4 out of 5 GB, and I strongly suspect it's not the photos (I don't take that many) but a few giant videos in the Camera Roll:

Is there any way to disable backing up videos only to iCloud? I can only find a way to turn the entire camera roll backup on or off, which I don't want. I definitely want the photos to be backed up to iCloud, just not giant oversize videos.

Yes, I can copy the videos off and delete them from my phone, but I still want the videos on the phone, I just don't want them backed up to iCloud at all.

No - there is no easy way to just tell iCloud to omit part of the camera roll. I suppose a jailbreak could theoretically work in this functionality but I'm not up on what is possible in that realm.

Two workarounds seem practical today:

Manage those videos in another app (Vimeo/iMovie seem clunky and undesirable for this but perhaps something like DropBox would work if you didn't mind the extra steps of migrating and then deleting video assets from the roll).
Give up iCloud backup of the camera roll contents and depend on iCloud Photo Stream for eventual backup to a computer.

I've seen the second option work for people once they were acquainted with how the archival process works on a computer pulling from Photo Stream. Since iCloud backup is usually a half day behind in backing up, the stream is generally faster at getting a still photo off your device than the backup mechanism.

If you are OK with a computer regularly importing the photos from the stream before the 1000 image / 30 day limit starts deleting them from the stream, you could turn off the Camera Roll from your iPhone's backup options:

Selecting Turn Off & Delete will reclaim your space in a minute or so. Just be sure your current camera roll has been totally imported before selecting the red delete option.

Since videos do not go to the photo stream, you will need to transfer them off your device to make a backup copy of them going forward when needed.


Touch pad on remote control for AppleTV 4K getting slower to react Our AppleTV 4K remote control is getting clunkier, getting slower to react to touches and swipes on the remote control.
When choosing an app, I make a swipe-swipe-swipe to select the third adjacent app icon. And I wait. Sometimes the wait is half a second, sometimes more.
Inside apps, selecting a program from a list of icons is similarly slow. YouTube may be the worst, but other apps show slowness too. The selection of an app might take around a second. This is aggravating, as the user thinks the pad did not register any swipe at all. So you swipe again, and suddenly the selection ring jumps two icons over rather than the intended one icon.
Oddly, using the remote while plugged into a USB charger seems to restore some speed, at least for a while. But of course using a corded remote is annoying. And a weak battery charge is not the issue, as the slowness occurs whether the battery level is at 46, 60, or 100% charge.
We routinely restart the AppleTV as a desperate attempt to avoid this problem. Each user does a restart before and after usage, and often does it while using the AppleTV. This seems to help for a short while.
The AppleTV has the latest version of tvOS, with regular updates occurring.
When originally purchased, the remote control was instantaneous.
During this Covid season, we have been wiping the remote control routinely with 70% isopropyl alcohol as recommended by Apple. This definitely makes the remote control go crazy with wrong inputs, but a restart of the AppleTV always straightens it out.
➥ Is there anything to be done about the AppleTV remote getting slower to react to touch?

➥ Re-pair the remote with the Apple TV device.
I did this inadvertently. After getting even worse behavior, the remote became unusable, even after restarting the Apple TV. So I purchased another Siri Remote.
I paired the new Siri Remote by simply pressing a button, and holding the remote physically close to the Apple TV device. New remote worked well. So out of curiosity, I re-paired the old remote simply by pushing any button and then holding close to Apple TV. Two things happened:

The old Siri Remote works well again! After being re-paired with the Apple TV device, the old remote works just like new. The pairing process seems to have fixed the problem.
The new remote was no longer paired. Pushing any button starts the pairing process. So you cannot have more than one Siri Remote connected at a time. Bummer.

If anyone else is having this problem with their Siri Remote getting cranky and slow, try re-pairing. I do not know how to un-pair an existing remote unfortunately, except by buying the new remote. Rather than buy, perhaps borrow a friend's Siri Remote to pair and then re-pair the old one.


Sync only favorite songs from iTunes to iPhone I want to synch my iTunes library favorites only to my iPhone 5s. That's about 550 songs. The complete library is too large to synch to my iPhone so I only want to synch favorites.
How do I do this?

Create a playlist with your favourites.
Connect your device to your computer and click the device button near the top left of the iTunes window.

Select the type of content you want to sync (for example, Music or Apps) in the sidebar on the left.

Select the Sync checkbox, then select the items you want to sync automatically each time you connect your device.

Chose Selected paylists, artist, albums and genres.
Select only the playlist created on point 1 and apply.

iTunes 12 for Mac: Sync iPod, iPhone, or iPad


Highly abnormal graphic glitch on yosemite / retina: all white backgrounds appear pink Suddenly, all white and transparent image backgrounds appear pink for me (but only on images, not on anything else that's renderered).

For example, the SE searchbar looks like this:

Or the latest email from amazon:

Or the tag:

The problem does only occur on HiDPI resolutions. If i launch Display Menu and switch to a normal resolution, the problem disappears.

This started after i had the decency to run Quartz Debug Tool to read the FPS of the OS X GUI. I clicked "Disable 2D Acceleration", but it froze my system and forced me to reboot.

Something must have gotten messed up. Anyone know how i can remedy this?

I tried a PRAM reset and deleting windowserver plist files. To no avail.

MBP Mid 2014 | 1TB | 2.8 GHz | 16 GB | Intel Iris Pro / NVidia GeForce GT 750M

After a night's sleep and some clear-headed research, i found the solution by running:

defaults delete -g CGContextHighlight2xScaledImages

... which is a debugging feature that comes with Quartz Debug and which i had set there (and forgotten) by checking the "Color 1x artwork" option.


Calendar backup while away from time machine I am occasionally away from my time machine disk. During these periods I would still like to backup my calendar in case the hard disk (MacBook's) crashes.

Which file or directory should I copy to backup iCal's entries?

Edit

I am looking for a maintenance-free backup method (i.e. one that does not require me to think about it until something bad happens).

Might it be possible to sync iCal with a cloud-based (perhaps Google's) calendar? Is it possible afterwards to sync back into iCal?

If you are running Lion, iCloud, launching in October 2011, will soon provide cloud-based back up for calendar information.

To manually backup iCal entries, Apple recommends that you either

Save an iCal Archive on your hard drive (File » Export » iCal Archive...)
or
Export an individual calendar to a file on your hard drive (use this method for any CalDAV calendars) (File » Export » Export...)

To protect against hard drive failure, copy the resulting files onto external media.

If you wanted to sidestep the Apple recommended process, and simply back up a single folder, it appears your calendar data files are stored in ~/Library/Calendars

Additionally, Google provides instructions for how to sync iCal with Google Calendar.


Iphone 6 Plus lock screen I just got my Iphone 6 plus and there is no option to click on for auto lock.
How do I set my time for auto lock?

You can find the Auto-Lock option by following these steps:

Settings
Display & Brightness
Auto-Lock

Here you'll have the option to change your phone to Auto-Lock from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. You can also choose Never to stop Auto-Lock from happening. If you use Low Power Mode, Auto-Lock will be automatically set to 30 seconds.


How do i pass variables' values between subsequent applescript runs? (persistent value between script executions) I have an applescript that I run like a cron job. Within this applescript, i have variables that act like boolean switches (i.e. on/off values). With subsequent runs, depending on whether the boolean variables' values are on/off i need to take certain actions.

Q) What are the different ways this can be done? (would appreciate sample code).

Cheers.

Answer) plist or property files seem to be the way to go.

credit to daviesgeek for pointing me in the right direction. for those interested i've written helper sub-routines as follows:

-- read the plist file
tell application "System Events"
   tell property list file plistfile_path
      tell contents
         set someLocalVariable to value of property list item "someLocalVariable"
      end tell
   end tell
end tell

on create_plist_file(file_path)
    -- create the plist file
    tell application "System Events"
         -- create an empty property list dictionary item
        set the parent_dictionary to make new property list item with properties {kind:record}

        -- create new property list file using the empty dictionary list item as contents
        set this_plistfile to ¬
            make new property list file with properties {contents:parent_dictionary, name:file_path}
            -- add new property list items of each of the supported types
            make new property list item at end of property list items of contents of this_plistfile ¬
                with properties {kind:boolean, name:"someLocalVariable", value:false}
            -- make new property list item at end of property list items of contents of this_plistfile ¬
            --     with properties {kind:string, name:"stringKey", value:"string value"}
    end tell
end create_plist_file

on set_someLocalVariable(bool_val)
    tell application "System Events"
        tell property list file plistfile_path
            tell contents
                set value of property list item "someLocalVariable" to bool_val
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
end set_wasAllTransfersStarted

You can write to a .plist file as such:

--Empty preference file
set theEmptyPListData to "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC \"-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN\" \"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd\">
<plist version=\"1.0\">
<dict/>
</plist>"

--set preference list path and open with write permissions
set theOutputFolder to path to preferences folder from user domain as string
set thePListPath to theOutputFolder & "AppleScript.plist"
set thePListFile to open for access thePListPath with write permission

--check to see if the plist variable is set
try
    tell application "System Events"
        tell property list file thePListPath
            tell contents
                value of property list item "browser"
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
on error
    tell application "System Events"
        if not (exists file thePListFile) then
            set webBrowser to the button returned of (display dialog "What web browser to you want to use?
(Choose carefully, as this will not appear again)" buttons {"Safari", "Firefox", "Google Chrome"})

            set eof of thePListFile to 0
            write theEmptyPListData to thePListFile starting at eof

            tell property list file thePListPath
                tell contents
                    set value to {|browser|:webBrowser}
                end tell
            end tell
        end if
    end tell
end try

This script will ask for the user's browser and it will save it across runs of the script.


Spotlight Massive (out of control at 100GB+) Macbook Pro, 500GB SSD, Yosemite 10.10.3

Is there a way to determine what folder(s) are giving Spotlight grief? Or some other recommendations to fix spotlight?

Spotlight is killing my drive space at 100GB+. I can reset it, but after a day or so I'm right back to zero space free. The actual size jumps up and down, but trends to expand (+2,-1,+2, etc) until the drive is full.

Spotlight, as per

 du -h -d 1 ./.Spotlight*

Yields:

110G  ./.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2

Resetting with

 sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/[DriveName]

Starts over as expected frees up the 110GB, but after number of hours, it's back to a full HD.

It turns out that a driver (DisplayLink in this case) was generating gigs and gigs of rotating logs, and this was being indexed which was generating many more gigs. Finding the offending driver was the hard part.

Remove driver (& ditch the port replicator), re-index, all is well.


Empty AssetsV2 folder in Finder I was doing some snooping around in the Finder on my mac and found that there is an empty folder titled "AssetsV2"(https://i.imgur.com/ohxkTp6.png).
Im unsure of the direct path but it's found by selecting the following.
Macintosh HD->System->Library

The folder is completely empty when compared to the regular Assets folder next to it. Im unsure as to why i have a seconds assets folder if there's nothing inside of it. I did create both a volume partition and secondary volume from the Disk Utility app a few months ago and both were deleted since then.
Is "AssetsV2" just a ghost folder from either the partition or secondary volume i created?
Does anyone else have a secondary(or more) Assets folder as well?

Danger Will Robinson!

Not sure why it matters that you have an empty folder in /System/Library but I have found from past experience that you NEVER touch anything in the /System folder. Doing so can lead to problems with your Mac up to and including making it non-bootable.

I completely ignore all folders outside of my home folder. Sure it is interesting to go exploring but honestly if it ain't broke don't fix it. And an empty folder takes up so little space on disk it's not worth deleting.


environment variable not showing after set I am trying to set permanent environmental variable in my mac machine
I have tried following steps till now -

vi ~/.bash_profile
adding my variable

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/adoptopenjdk-8.jdk/Contents/Home
export ANDROID_HOME=/usr/local/share/android-sdk
export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=/usr/local/share/android-sdk

restarted the bash

source ~/.bash_profile

For current terminal its loaded the variable, but if I open another terminal
its not showing newly added variable if I check with printenv.

How can I make bash set the variables?

For newly created accounts Catalina uses zsh instead of bash, so you need to add the lines to the appropriate file (probably ~/.zshenv to make sure it's read in all cases).


How do i fix left click mouse behavior for Logitech M720 Bluetooth mouse? I'm seeing the following symptoms on OS X Sierra:

After a duration of time, my Logitech M720 Triathlon Mouse will register all left clicks as a left-ctrl click. This results in web links being downloaded instead of opened - etc etc.

Turning off the mouse does nothing.

Turning off Bluetooth seems to reset to default behavior.

How do i determine whats causing this issue?

I occasionally experience this behavior with my G700s. I think it's a problem with the Logitech driver/utility (if you happen to use it). I suggest you update to the latest version; it was released just a few weeks ago.

Now that I think of it, I haven't had that problem in quite some time, now…


Is it possible to disable the volume drop when a notification comes in (without jailbreak)? I'm looking for a way to prevent notifications from lowering the volume of music when they come in, as I feel this really distracts from the listening experience.

I would rather not have to turn on Do Not Disturb, but I couldn't find any other setting for this in the Settings app. Is there a way to disable this volume drop without jailbreaking my iPhone?

Put your phone into silent mode.

When your phone is set to ‘silent,’ notifications will no longer disrupt your listening experience, and will still come in as banners and vibrate your phone.
If you also want to stop vibrations, open Settings → Sounds & Haptics and disable Vibrate on Silent.
Note that on older phones (iPhone 6 and older, including SE) have a preference area labelled Sounds instead of Sound and Haptics.


adb got stuck. not starting in terminal command When I start the adb deamon using the terminal, it got stuck somewhere. Any idea why ?

PS: I am using OSX Mavericks.

Try it with:

sudo adb start-server

Use your own password.

Opening port 5037 doesn't require privileged access, but there are some other flaky things with adb such as file/device permissions, etc. to which your own user account might not have access.


How to fix iTunes corrupting music during transfer? I have an iPhone 5s on 9.3.5 and every time I add music to the device, the files play with artifacts(glitches) on the device itself. Meanwhile the files on the computer play perfectly fine. Any solution ?

Two possibilities I can think of...

One is that the phone needs re-booting or resetting & restoring from a backup. If you keep encrypted backups in iTunes this wouldn't be too disruptive to test.

The other is that the bit-rate of the tunes is too high for it to keep up.
You may benefit from reducing the bit-rate of tunes transferred to the phone, which you can do from iTunes prefs.

The first sync after you set this will be a lot slower than normal, as it converts all the tunes to be transferred. Subsequent syncs should be back up to speed.
You are unlikely to be able to perceive much sonic difference from a phone if you down-sample to 128k AAC.


How to record a FaceTime call on OS X? How can I record a FaceTime call and save the video on my Mac?

I am using a MacBook Air 11" with OS X 10.8.

There's finally an app for this! Call Recorder for FaceTime is a Mac app that was just released today:

https://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorderft/

This product is a plug-in that adds recording controls to the FaceTime app. Recording can be started manually, or it can be configured to record automatically. It creates internet-ready QuickTime movies.
Another great use is recording phone calls that come through the Mac via Yosemite's new Handoff feature.

(full disclosure: I work on this product!)


What URL does Recovery HD connect to in order to download OS X? My college Wi-Fi Network doesn't support OS X reinstalls through Recovery HD. If I were to ask the people in charge of our Network to manually enable access to Apple's Servers so that I could do reinstalls over Wi-Fi, what would I need to tell them to allow?

Have a look at: OS X: Ports and hosts used by OS X Recovery

  In order to reinstall OS X using the OS X Recovery or Lion Internet
  Recovery, you must be able to connect to the Internet. If your
  computer is behind an external proxy server or firewall, your network
  administrator will need to ensure that you can resolve DNS for the
  following hosts and contact them on ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS):

  osrecovery.apple.com
  oscdn.apple.com

  Note: Each hostname may resolve to a different IP address each time it
  is used.


iMessage speech (applescript) timing out after upgrade to yosemite When I receive an iMessage, chat or Message on my desktop (iMac), it is read out loud.

After the upgrade to Yosemite it does not work. I continue to receive the message that "AppleScript timed out." I click on "wait" and it will read it. This occurs when I SEND as well as when I RECEIVE messages, although reading aloud is only on receive. - I would love if someone might address this issue! It still works great on my previous OS version on my laptop.

I originally wrote:

This bug appears to be resolved in 10.10.2

****I was wrong ****

For me, the bogus timeout alerts seem to take longer to start after enabling a handler script than they did in 10.10.1, but they still happen and make the AppleScript handler feature unusable. By loading up my handler script with debugging code (logging everything) and tracing Messages with DTrace, I've nailed down beyond a doubt that the timeout alert is triggered for every event passed to the script within milliseconds of the event before the script itself is in control, blocking its execution.


Can not boot into Windows 10 with Boot Camp after partitioning more space to Windows in Disk Utility I wanted to allocate more space to the Windows side by using Disk utility in macOS. So I partitioned a new part. I would then jump to windows and allocate that new untitled partition to Windows, but I can't get back to Windows. Is there a solution to this? I'm fine with reinstalling windows if thats an option. However, I would like my windows key, if that is possible. I followed this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhkdOLXT6Eg.

Operating System: Sierra 10.12.6

I also looked at this post, but I can not figure out what to do.

Mac won't boot Windows partition after using disk utility

Thanks

You will need to boot into Windows to access the recovery key. Do you have the T2 security chip? If so, try disabling Secure Boot. Apple doesn't recommend resizing the Bootcamp partition so that might be the issue.


Admin rights for a standard user in OS X I want to create a user with OS X restrictions (Parental Control), which would still be allowed to install applications in the standard Applications folder using its password.

Is it possible? How should I do it?

I wouldn't recommend that you try to put in such a scheme. If you wish to use restrictions, you would generally not want the restricted user to install any application either (for security reasons).

Normally, a non-admin user cannot install applications in the system applications folder at /Applications since it's owned by user root and group admin. However, a non-admin user can install applications under the home directories (~/Applications), but those applications would be available only to that specific user (certain applications that are designed to be in /Applications or those using installer packages to write into system locations may not work well in such a case).

If you wish to allow a non-admin user to install applications into /Applications, then you can add that user to the admin group from Terminal.app (instead of going to System Preferences and allowing the user to be an administrator). Keep in mind that a user who can install applications into /Applications can also remove applications from there (intentionally or unintentionally).


iPhone 5 shuts down at 25% on iOS 7.0.4 My iPhone 5 has been shutting down earlier than normal at lower battery levels.

First, it started to shut down around 10%, then it increased to 15%, 20%, and finally 25%. I used to be able to run it down to 1%.

The battery indicator also jumps down sometimes by around 10-15%.

I have only had this problem ever since updating to iOS 7.0.4 (from 7.0.3). I have done multiple iTunes restores since I updated, but the problem still has not been fixed.

Is there a fix for it?

I called Apple about this and they said 2 things:

the numbers provided are approximate
certain apps in background can be battery hogs. She specifically said that the camera app native to iOS7 continues full battery use in background and they were aware of this. She suggested being careful NOT to keep camera in background (i.e. double tap iOS button and slide camera up to remove from background active list)

This must have been the problem for me because battery life immediately improved. It still shuts down soon after going below 20% but it had been at 25% when I called.


Making a program use a specific network interface I would like my IRC client to only use a WiFi connection and all other programs to use WiFi or wired connections. This is because every time I plug in my Ethernet cable my IRC client automatically reconnects over wired, and then when I disconnect the cable it reconnects me on wireless.

So now I have multiple users logged into IRC.

Can I force an app to use a certain connection over the others? I like having the wired connection as the primary connection over wireless, because I do a lot of uploading and downloading and the NIC card gets hot sometimes. I guess I should of stated I'm using a MacBook Pro.

Add a static route for your irc server. For example I have 2 interfaces: wired (en0) and WiFi (en1) of which the wired one is the default. So if I get a route to a server, it will go through the default interface (see interface line in output) :

MacMini:~ root# netstat -rn | grep -i default
default            10.0.0.1           UGSc          198       10     en0
default            172.20.10.1        UGScI           0        0     en1

MacMini:~ root# route get tyr.be
   route to: squarespace.com
destination: squarespace.com
    gateway: 10.0.0.1
  interface: en0
      flags: <UP,GATEWAY,HOST,DONE,WASCLONED,IFSCOPE,IFREF>
 recvpipe  sendpipe  ssthresh  rtt,msec    rttvar  hopcount      mtu     expire
       0         0         0         0         0         0      1500         0

But if I add a static route through the WiFi interface en1 however :

MacMini:~ root# route add 65.39.205.54/32 172.20.10.1
add net 65.39.205.54: gateway 172.20.10.1

MacMini:~ root# netstat -rn | grep -i 65.39.205.54
65.39.205.54/32    172.20.10.1        UGSc            1        0     en1

MacMini:~ root# route get tyr.be
   route to: squarespace.com
destination: squarespace.com
  interface: en1
      flags: <UP,HOST,DONE,LLINFO,STATIC>
 recvpipe  sendpipe  ssthresh  rtt,msec    rttvar  hopcount      mtu     expire
       0         0         0         0         0         0      1500         0

The route will disappear every time you reboot. To make it permanent you would have to create a script launched as a startup item or a custom launchd script.


Time Machine backup of legacy filevault encrypted homedir? I have recently upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion. Given that I don't have a lot of space left on disk, it was not feasible to migrate from Filevault to Filevault 2.
I have just noticed today that Time Machine seems to ignore my homedir sparsebundle in its backups. On Snow Leopard, it would back it up when I logged out. Now it does not do that anymore, and so I don't have any backup of my homedir since the migration to Mountain Lion. Does anyone have any ideas on how this can be fixed or worked around?

I haven't tested this on 10.8.4, but here's how I used to work around this.

Make a second account that exists only for you to be able to log out completely of your main account.
Log into the second account only.
Start a backup so that the legacy file vault files can be backed up.

Basically, Time Machine doesn't run unless someone is logged in.


Floating Pop-up video window in iPhone X On my last Samsung Galaxy phone (which I still use; I believe it’s an S5?), when you’re watching a video that is downloaded onto the phone, there is an option to shrink the video playback screen so that it is in the corner of the phone’s screen. From here you are able to watch a smaller version of the video while going about your routine on a fully functional phone. You can also drag the smaller video screen around the phone’s screen to move it to a more convenient area (without stopping play).

Additionally, due to one of the more recent updates to the device, you can now do the same thing while watching a YouTube video - i.e. make the viewing screen small, move it around, and watch it while you do whatever you like on your phone.

I recently got an iPhone X, and it is my first iPhone. Does iPhone have any such feature? If so, how do I employ it?

Picture in Picture on iOS is only available on iPad currently.

  You can use Picture in Picture with iPad Pro, iPad (5th generation and later), iPad Air and later, or iPad mini 2 and later.


Which app distribution method I must use for this app? Im making an app for my enterprise but we dont know yet which ditribution method to use. The app is for employees, <-- This is not a problem, we can use Enterprise Membership, the problem is that the app is also going to be used by the family of the employees, so Enterprise is not an option because we wanted to upload the an into the intranet but that way the families couldnt have access to the app.

So my question is: With enterprise account, we can upload the app into the public enterprise page? Or for this situation, is better to use a normal Developer Account and publish the app into the App Store?

Thanks.

The iOS Enterprise agreement has the following clause:

  Distribute Provisioning Profiles only to Your Employees and only in conjunction with Your
  Internal Use Applications for the purpose of developing and testing Your Internal Use
  Applications;

In addition it states:

  Allow Your Customers to use Your Internal Use Applications
  on Deployme
  nt Devices
  , but only
  (i) on Your physical premises and/or on Your Permitted Entity’s physical premises, or (ii) in other
  locations, provided all such use is under the direct supervision and physical control of Your
  Employees or Permitted Users (e.g., a sal
  es presentation to a Customer)

Hence for your user base, it would would not be right to distribute apps with enterprise license. Distribute the app through the app store with some kind of authentication mechanism.

You have also host some kind of registration mechanism on your intranet, where the employees would generate user IDs and passwords for themselves and their families.


Changing wind speed in weather app to kmph Is there any way I can change the wind speed from miles per hour to kilometers per hour?

The wind speed unit is determined by your region settings. Depending on your original region you have to change from your region to a similar region using km/h instead of mi/h.

Example: changing the region from UK to Ireland will change the unit from miles per hour to kilometers per hour in Weather.app.

Changing the region settings is not restricted to Weather.app but will change things in all apps!

I will refrain from making jokes about proud Britons forced to use the Irish region settings to get a metric unit!

Edit: found a reasonable solution for the UK: English > Gibraltar apparently also uses km/h instead of mi/h (at least in iOS7) ;-)


How can I use Atom as the default editor for "open"? I would like to set Atom as my default editor for open.

In order to do this, I set in my .bashrc:

export EDITOR="atom -nw"

and reload the file with source .bashrc. Anyway, when I try to open a text file through open filename, it always opens it with TextEdit.

I also tried variations of the above, such as export EDITOR=atom, or exporting VISUAL.

I am sure that .bashrc gets loaded on login.

What am I missing/doing wrong?

The open command is part of OS X and uses Finder's default “Open With…” application to open the file, just like double-clicking it in Finder. $EDITOR is used for things like fc where it is used as the default command-line editor (a replacement for vim or emacs).

To use Atom with the open command, you can select a file of the type you want in Finder, press ⌘ command+I for “Get Info”, and then change “Open With:” to Atom, and click “Change All…”.

Alternatively you can define an alias like

alias e="atom -nw"

in your .bashrc and then run e file-to-edit.txt whenever you want to edit a file in Atom.


How does the quality of the LED-backlit screen of a MacBook or a 27" Cinema Display degrade over time? The quality of my PowerBook and 20" Cinema Display screens has degraded over time, they became noticeably yellowish and darker due to the wear of the backlight (I assume). Neither of those screens is LED-backlit. I'm wondering, how do the LED-backlit screens used in current Apple products degrade over time? Do they similarly become yellowish, give less light, ...? How long does it take for the effect to become obvious, or what's the expected life time of these screens?

This Engadget article shows photos of a direct comparison:

  Standing in front of the white-LED backlight on the new MBP, it's immediately apparent how crisp the whites are -- it's very noticeable after staring into CCFL LCDs all day long. But even though the whites were whiter, the screen didn't necessarily seem a lot brighter, which is probably where some amount of CCFL dimming on our test MBP came into play in creating the dramatic difference we saw. Viewing angles were very similar on both machines, but as you'll notice, at half brightness it's the LED backlit MBP that's dimmer, and the CCFL display that's actually brighter. Interesting stuff.

Also interesting could be the Advantages and Disadvantages sections of the Wikipedia article on LEDs (link):

  Slow failure: LEDs mostly fail by dimming over time, rather than the abrupt failure of incandescent bulbs.
  Lifetime: LEDs can have a relatively long useful life. One report estimates 35,000 to 50,000 hours of useful life, though time to complete failure may be longer. Fluorescent tubes typically are rated at about 10,000 to 15,000 hours, depending partly on the conditions of use, and incandescent light bulbs at 1,000–2,000 hours.


Can't open file Excel for Mac first query here. I'm being driven crazy by not being able to open one file from thousands. I'm using MacOS Catalina 10.15.6 & Excel for Mac 16.4.
When upgrading from Office 2011 every time I opened a .xls file I saved as .xlsx. Over the past three months I've saved thousands of files like this. Today, one refused to open. Dialogue boxes when attempting to open queried validity or extension name. The file was created in Excel six weeks ago and has been opened since with no problems. I opened similar, created at same time, both before and after attempting to open this one with no problem.
Then there's a message saying it may be read-only or encrypted. It's neither. I have permission to read and write (it's my own fil after all) and it hasn't been encrypted
I make a copy to see if that helps. Dialogue box says again it may be corrupted or read only and then laughably it might be on a server that isn't responding.
I've done everything I can think of. Zipped the file and tried to open unzipped. Changed file extension to .xls, changed application to open to first Numbers then OpenOffice. All without success.
Crazily, Excel's 'quick look' function works and I can see the file with all tabs and all data intact but can't do anything else from this option like a save as or export.
The get info box says the file was most recently opened today when of course it didn't open. But Excel's recently opened option doesn't show it at all.
One file. From literally thousands.
I've been using Excel since Office 2001 and I've never come across a version as bad as this current one. There are other issues but they're trifling compared to not being able to open an important file.
I've tried every help option possible but the only advice I can find is either something I've already tried or related to previous versions of Excel and aren't applicable here.
Any advice greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance

Google Sheets can also open Excel files. Create a new sheet and once it loads go to File>Import. You can then Export, File>Download, as .xlsx. Might be worth a try...
https://www.google.com/sheets/about/


How to find folder in MacOS Mail I have a large number of message folders in MacOS Mail (v. 9.3, El Capitan 10.11.6), with a pretty deep hierarchy in places--I have folders in folders four or five deep in some places.  (I am talking about folders in the Mail GUI at this point, not operating system folders/directories on a drive.)

Sometimes a folder just disappears, and what's happened is that it's become a subfolder of some other folder.  (It's possible that I do this by accident with uncautious use of the mouse, but I don't think that's it.  I think Mail just gets confused and does stupid things sometimes.)

I know that the folder and its messages still exist, because if I open the message search box, I can find messages, and they are listed as being in a folder with that name.  I want to drag the folder back to where it belongs, but sometimes I can't find out where that folder is.  Since I have so many folders and subfolders, poking through every folder in Mail to find out where Mail decided to move the folder in question is time consuming.

Is there any way to find a folder, by its name, for example, in the Mail folder hierarchy?

Even if there's no tool in Mail to do this, maybe there's a kludgey way to do it by searching through Mail's data files on disk using ls, grep, Unix find, etc.  Maybe there's some graphical utility that I don't know about that will help.

Thanks.

If you want to search in Finder for the same, and then do the equivalent in Mail, you should go to /Users/you/Library/Mail/V* * varies for MacOS. Do either of these 2:

In the question, you mentioned that you can search for specific messages inside mail app. So just pick a rare keyword from one of them and search for the same string in the directory. Press CMD + up to reach its parent folders and then open Mail app and navigate to that folder and fix it.
Since you know the folder name of the misplaced, search for name.mbox and it will give you that folder itself.

Another possibly easy method can be to select a mail, right click, "Move To"-> you should see a lot of folders. I just hope that they're expanded. If you move something by mistake, CMD + Z brings it back.


AirPods sound is quieter on the right side My right AirPod connected to my Macbook Pro 2015 plays quieter than left.
But if AirPods are connected to the iPhone everything works fine and both of them sounds good.

Any ideas or Solutions?

Check your System Preferences -> Sound -> Output (tab) -> Balance. Is it in the middle?


How can I prevent an exFAT volume from mounting on OS X? I have two partitions, one is HFS+ and the other is exFAT.

I'm used to opening the /etc/fstab file, and inserting this line:

UUID=NUMBER none hfs rw,noauto

Note: The "hfs" stands for HFS+.

Now I want to automatically unmount the exFAT volume. I tried this:

UUID=NUMBER none msdos rw,noauto

So, my question is; which keyword should I use for unmounting an
exFAT volume/partition?

As a test, I formatted and external USB drive as exFAT (wrongly shown as ExFAT in Disk Utility) and then ascertained its UUID. Then ejected and unplugged the disk.

I then added the following to my /etc/fstab file:

UUID=402894E4-03EE-3CF7-80D2-A4EC74048C2F none exfat rw,noauto

Note: Use the UUID assigned to the exFAT partition on your device.

These methods also work:

LABEL=VolumeName none exfat rw,noauto

If the volume name has space characters, then in place of any space put: \040

LABEL=Volume\040Name none exfat rw,noauto

When I plugged the USB drive back in it did not mount, as expected, and was available in Disk Utility to mount when wanted.

This should also work with an exFAT partition on an internal disk as well.


How can I set a preferred contact method in Messages I have a contact with iMessage, AIM and Google Talk accounts. When using Messages to open a new chat with her, I'd like it to always default to Google Talk if she's online -- instead, it seems to pick a contact method at random. How can I make it use Google Talk by preference (without deleting the other accounts, since I want them to be available as well)?

As of 10.8.2 the only way to do that is to keep that particular conversation open all the time.

Another workaround is to copy the preferred google talk info to another contact name with just that. "Jane googletalk" so you know which is which.

On a conceptual level i don't think they will fix it. It's the same with multiple phone numbers... you have to select which one each time you call... you can't have a preferred number, UNLESS you Favorite that number.

Alas there there is no favorite option in messages for mac.


How does an iOS device (iPad or iPhone) receive “push” notifications? An iOS device (iPad or iPhone) receives notifications, even when the device is sleeping. Apple calls these “push notifications”.

How does the device receive these notifications? Are there any periodic (recurring) actions involved? If so, what actions are they and how often do they occur?

From the Apple Push Notification Service documentation:

  Each device establishes an accredited and encrypted IP connection
  with APNs and receives notifications over this persistent connection.

This means it uses some sort of socket-based persistent connection. It could be its own proprietary protocol, or WebSocket, etc. The "periodic actions" you're asking about are usually implemented in these protocols at the lowest level possible using TCP/IP sockets and are being constantly polled for new data on the socket. When the data is finished being read off the socket, an event is fired off to go perform some action such as display a notification on the device.

To further explain, the way sockets work is your device makes a connection to a remote server, the remote server pushes data to your device and gets put into the socket's buffer, then your device reads the socket's buffer and does something with the data. The moment the data gets pushed to your device, your device will process it. This is because your device is checking for new data on the socket's buffer all the time. It tries to read data, and if it gets data, it sends it off to get processed and then tries to read data again; if it ever doesn't get data, it just tries to read data again - forever. If the connection to the remote server ever gets disconnected, it just tries to connect again until it succeeds.

The code documentation I linked earlier is taken from Boost's ASIO library which is widely used for sockets in C++. It's implementation and usage can be simplified as follows:

01 start program
02 try to connect to server by using a socket
03 if not connected to server, goto 02
04 try to read data on socket
05 if data was read, process data
06 goto 03

In step 03 above, the device knows when you're offline and won't attempt to connect again until you get back online (the device sends out an event when you connect to the internet, so it will all happen instantly).

When no data was read in step 04 above, it immediately tries to read it again without waiting (assuming you're still connected to the server). It takes a very small amount of processing power to repeatedly try to read data on the socket, so there's no need to worry about battery or wasted resources (see @malhal's answer here for a better explanation on this and also how it works when the device is sleeping).


TextEditor with Overview of Search Tool's Result? I am trying to find a texteditor which can give an overview of Search Tool's Result. I find the current situation of TextMate problematic

You cannot see the section of one search result without losing your position in the document. The current one-line overview is not enough.
Therefore, I have to look some other editor, since the search tool is an essential tool in studying.

I am also open for Linux editors because I can compile them for OS X if necessary.

Is there any TextEditor with Overview of Search Tool's Result?

The engineer responded very fast and submitted a change in the Textmate 2 beta 9. It solves the problem. Now, clicking the find-window, the location of the document is also changed correspondingly.


Photos.app not downloading image contents Photos.app has been working fine for me since its release, but more recently, photos taken on my iPhone and added to my Photo Stream were not appearing. An empty rectangle would show up for each new photo, and the rectangle would be sized appropriately (portrait/landscape/pano), and they appear grouped by location, but there isn't actually any image content. No thumbnail, and clicking on the image opens up a blank screen. The settings dialog says its trying to download, but the progress bar never moves.

In trying to fix this, I deleted ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary entirely and created a new system library. Now all of my photos are in this state, not just the new ones. This persists across restarts of the application and the entire system.

I trust they're still up in the cloud someplace... they're on my iPhone ok. But I'd love to figure out why they won't show up on the desktop.

See screenshot for the current situation.


How can I tell if my Macbook Pro has had its SSD replaced or not? I was having issues with my work laptop so I gave it to our IT guy who sent it to Apple for repairs. When it came back he told me they had to replace the logic board (which made sense based on the problems I was having) and also the SSD (which surprised me because when I was trying to figure out what was wrong it seemed okay).

The more I think about it the more I doubt that the drive needed to be replaced. Is there any way to tell if a drive has been replaced?

My laptop is a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013). The SSD it currently has is: APPLE SSD SM0512G.

If you happened to have written down your hard drives serial number before handing it in for repairs, you could detect replacement by comparing the serial numbers.

You probably haven't written down the serial number. Then you could try looking at the drive physically to determine the production year, if written on it. If that is newer than the year your MacBook Pro was bought - it has been replaced.

You do not mention which model of MacBook Pro you have, but it must be one of the older models to have a hard drive. It could be possible to check if the disk you have is not one of the models that Apple installed from factory on your specific MacBook Pro model.

Also you could consider asking your IT guy how he knows the hard drive was replaced. Perhaps he has paper work to document it.


Changing keyboard symbols used throughout macOS? I'm new to macOS after a decade using of using Windows, and whenever I view shortcut keys anywhere in macOS I get confused.

Is there a way to somehow replace these symbols across macOS, for example, by changing themes or system fonts, so that I might end up with something like below?

Desired symbols shown on right

The said symbols are deeply integrated into the Operating System. Some of them like  ⌘  (Command) and  ⌥  (Option) are exclusive to the Apple platform.

It is in no way possible neither is it recommended to replace them in a system wide manner.

What is recommend to a Mac newbie, is to print a keyboard shortcuts cheat-sheet and pin it close to the desk. A few days in, and it will become second nature. A good one can be downloaded here courtesy of MacMost.

You can print a large version of just the symbol guide and pin it until it is memorized.

Update: I got inclined to update this answer after reading Krystian's nicely written comment on the question. Quoting it below:

  Some people (like myself) have switched to mac after far longer than a decade of using Windows. Better yet, a lot of us didn't switch completely and use both of the systems. Get used to it and soon enough you will be ok. You will visit sites (like SO) which will use the macos specific symbols and nobody will translate them for you. Other, non-system apps, will use those symbols and will ignore your system changes. You will save yourself a lot of time, grief and confusion by learning those.


Apple Music listening history Is there a way find a history of listened to music through Apple Music. The way I'm using it right now is:

Search for a given album/artist on the search bar on iTunes
The "New" tab is selected? (I can't understand why, most of the music I'm searching for were released decades ago)
I click on the big play button on the top - albums starts playing
I continue searching for more music, seeing related artists, etc

If I ever want to go back to the album view, I need to keep pressing the 'Back' button until the album appears. If I ever quit iTunes, I probably won't be able to find the album, unless I added it to my library.

I might just go back using last.fm.

Its available to me off the menu in the header.  click the menu icon, then click the clock icon in the pop-up.


MacBook Pro 2008 stuck in OS X Mavericks installation I want to make a clean OS X Mavericks install on a MacBook Pro 2008 (A1278). I don't have the installation disc anymore.

Because the OS is already wiped out, I can only try (a) Recovery, (b) internet recovery or (c) bootable USB stick.

(a) and (b) throw an error message  ("This is not a supported method of installing the operating system; please run install OS X Mavericks app....").

Because the OS is already wiped out I could not download Mavericks app from the app store. Therefore I got an bootable install image from the web (whick seems to be clean and official). When preparing the intallation it stucks for hours with "one second left" (until reboot) and the throws an error message "during preparation of the installation an error occured" (roughly translated). The same problem occured with 3 other bootable install images (all looking clean, from different internet sources). Here is the last installation log.

Can someone help me?

The installer fails to bless the system folder (EG make the drive bootable). This could be an issue with boot sectors or other parts of the disk having a problem of some sort.

Thorbjørn's idea for formatting the HD might indeed work as that will rewrite parts of the disk structure and (hopefully) the part that is failing. Zapping PRAM (COMMANDOPTIONPR at startup) might also help.

Failing that you may have a disk error that is beyond the capability of Apple's Disk Utility to fix. Diskwarrior or other disk repair tool might be something to try next.


FileVault alternative Re. this question on Super user, I can't use iPad + Luna as primary monitor and FileVault simultaneously. My question is then, is there another way to conveniently encrypt the Document folder on the Mac? In other words, a way to replace FileVault as seamlessly as possible, targeting only the normal user documents?

Depending on your definition of "conveniently." You could make an encrypted .DMG and store your sensitive docs in the disk image.

Once mounted macOS sees the mounted image as just another volume, the only part requiring a password is when mounting the image.

If you created it as a .sparseimage it should expand as you need it to without having to create a large image that would take into account future usage.


Is there a way to add Touch bar controls when using spotlight search? I never found spotlight useful before, but now I'm thinking if I'd add calculator's controls like the ones in the picture, it'd make spotlight way more useful.

I use Spotlight as a calculator all the time, without specifically pressing buttons, but simply typing my equation into Spotlight:

It's smart enough to realise what you're doing, and pressing {Enter} will load the Calculator app with your results, so you can continue / copy&paste.


iCloud documents gone following update I'm on macOS 10.15 Dev Beta 8. iPad is running iOS 13 Dev Beta 8.

My documents folders (Keynote, Pages, iMovie, etc) in the root iCloud Drive folder are all missing. Usually I'd pencil it in as a delayed sync post-update, but I've checked my iPad and they're missing there too. iCloud.com shows the files being there, in the correct place.

Why would both my iPad and my Mac be missing the folders if iCloud.com seems to think they're there?

Does anyone have an experience like this?

That is normal and documented by Apple. (yes it is a known bug, but you didn't lost anything. They were all moved to your iCloud under Documents and/or Desktop folders.

You have to download them from iCloud again

If you want to change settings:

Change this setting under System Preferences -> iCloud (save "Documents and Desktop" on iCloud.

but this "problem" of missing just happens on Upgrade. If you like you can continuing syncing Documents and Desktop to iCloud. It is just that you will have to download them at least once, now.


How can I stream files to my iPad? I have loads of videos and music on my computer, which I want to watch on my iPad.

However, I want to stream it to it, so I can grab what I feel like watching rather than having to preload everything.

I would like to stream these over wifi and they should be Windows 7 compatible

I'm very happy with Air Video(*). Lifehacker have a feature on it.

(*) Have only used it on an iPhone, no iPads in Sweden yet :-(


Enable 3-finger swipe for home and end in Chrome 3-finger left and right swipes on my trackpad work in Chrome.  They take me back one page in my history or right one page.  However, 3-finger up and down swipes does not appear to be implemented.

In Firefox and many other applications, an up or down swipe works the same way as hitting the home or end keys, respectively.

Is there any extension, application, or tweak that will enable this functionality in Google Chrome?

BetterTouchTool is the answer!
You can get it from here. It helps you configure all gestures globally or for a specific application. It also includes some special gestures not embedded by default on Mac OS.
With gestures, I can scroll through tabs, reload page, close tab, go up and down.

It works for the macbook trackpad, the Magic Mouse and the magic Trackpad.

A bliss ;)


How to change keyboard layout via keyboard shortcut? I like to use both US and German keyboard layout but I find the process of switching between them via mouse tiresome. I want a keyboard-only solution.

Is there a predefined shortcut to change between multiple keyboard layouts, or if not, how could I define such a shortcut?

See this:

Pref panel => Keyboard => shortcuts => Input Sources then set your shortcut

If you have conflict a small yellow triangle will appear guiding you to the conflict shortcut. (disable or change it)

If the Spotlight appears, disable its shortcut.


Which background processes can I disable to speed up my Mac If I'm on an old Mac and I just want the basics (web browsing, text editing, multitasking) to run a lot faster and I don't mind losing out on bells and whistles or temporarily disabling unneeded background processes, what processes would this be and how could I enable/disable them with a simple shell script?

I suspect there is not much you can do here. This is because most background processes only run when they are needed (see "On Demand")

Best to look at Activity Monitor to see if there is anything taking up CPU.

My guess is for text editing and multitasking you will have no speed issues.

For web browsing the browser and especially add ins will take up CPU and memory thus requiring swapping.


Use Screencapture command to record screen -- How to get the audio source id? I want to write a scheduled script to use the screencapture command to record the screen automatically in the background, just like this:

$ screencapture -v -V 60 output.mov -A xxxx

'xxxx' is the id of the audio source. I have to specify this parameter to record macos internal audio, using a virtual audio device like Soundflower, and without the specified audio source id, the captured videos are always muted.

How could I get all the audio devices' IDs in the simplest way? I tried many apps and scripts but still could not find the solution.

The -A <id> option has been replaced by the -G <id> option. Regarding the ID, it might be SoundflowerEngine:1 or something like that. You can get all audio device IDs by running the following Swift code (requires Xcode to be installed):
import Cocoa
import AVFoundation

let session = AVCaptureDevice.DiscoverySession.init(deviceTypes: [.builtInMicrophone, .externalUnknown], mediaType: nil, position: .unspecified)

for device in session.devices {
    print("device=\(device.localizedName), id=\(device.uniqueID)")
}

# Save it as ids.swift, and
$ swift ids.swift
device=MacBook Pro Microphone, id=BuiltInMicrophoneDevice
device=Soundflower (64ch), id=SoundflowerEngine:1

$ screencapture -v -V 60 -G SoundflowerEngine:1 output.mov

Alternatively, you can use the command line tool I made without installing Xcode:
$ list-av-capture-devices
[
  {
    "deviceType" : "AVCaptureDeviceTypeBuiltInMicrophone",
    "isConnected" : true,
    "localizedName" : "MacBook Pro Microphone",
    "manufacturer" : "Apple Inc.",
    "modelID" : "Digital Mic",
    "uniqueID" : "BuiltInMicrophoneDevice"
  },
  ...
]


Impossible to connect to shared folders from Windows XP to Mac OS X 10.10 I am trying to set up a Macbook running Yosemite 10.10.5 and a PC running Windows XP in order to share some folders on my home network. Briefly summarizing, I have defined a constant IP they will use to connect themselves to the network. Then, the shared folders have been set up: on Mac OS, using the Preferences > Sharing board and on Windows through the Properties > Sharing > Advanced Sharing menu. All works fine when I request a connection from the Macbook to the PC: I use Finder > Connect to a Server, filling the blank line with smb://IP_OF_THE_PC and then inserting the username and the password of the account that is sharing these data. On the contrary, doing the inverse procedure, I mean requesting a connection from the PC to the Macbook - launching the command \\IP_OF_THE_MAC from the Start menu, the configuration seems to not work. Sincerely, I am a bit surprised because the same configuration was fine when I was running Mavericks 10.9 and so I suppose that all this is due to some modification introduced by Yosemite itself. In the end, can someone suggest me other parameters I should check and/or edit to allow the right functioning of all this?

Releasing Mac OS X Yosemite, Apple has updated the SMB protocol to version 3, as documented here. Windows XP, on his side, works almost certainly with the SMB 1 protocol, because the upgrade to version 2 has been done on Windows Vista, as mentioned here. The backward compatibility allows SMB 3 to connect to previous versions, but not viceversa.
This issue can be solved using Samba, a free and open source implementation of the SMB protocol that assures full compatibility between different operative systems.
It is possible to install and manage Samba on Mac OS installing SMBUp.


Accessibility: How could I kill menu transparency improving legibility How could I get rid of transparency on big sur?


How to set a key to mimic clicking an app in the dock I have multiple desktops on High Sierra. Given an app window (like Safari) on each desktop, I can click on the app icon on the dock, and it will cycle through the desktops with this app.

⌘-` will cycle app windows on this desktop

Can I set a key to cycle app-desktops?

This is the kind of task QuicKeys used to be very good at.

Press a button, return cursor to its start point.

It's still available [will run in nag-free demo mode for a month, then go to nagware unless you buy it] & has instructions to install under more recent macOSes, but idk whether it's still up to the task.


Retrieving Old Mag Issues from Newstand iPad On my ancient iPad (original, 32GB), I had a subscription to PSM3 with all the issues I "own" downloaded to my device. I'd love to do a format of this device and free up some space -- as it is getting rather slow -- but I don't want to lose these issues I've paid for. Once I format the device, or delete the issues, there's no way I can get them back because the magazine is no longer in print.

Is there a way to look through the iPad's data/root folder, retrieve the files for that specific issue I've download onto the device, and transfer it to another machine, preferably my Windows 7 PC? I've looked around but have found no answer. Any ideas?

(Note: I also have access to a Mac laptop, the model I don't know, from work if that would make things easier.)

EDIT: I've also tried browsing through the system files on my PC but could not find any indication of the files I needed. A simple browse through the device does not appear to work (unless there is a specific folder I'm not looking in).

As someone says above, iExplorer is a good way to view the data files on the device, but my question is this - don't you have access to your purchased periodicals even if you delete them?

Here's my test case. I bought a new device, and reinstalled a few apps from scratch, including all of my subscriptions. I checked each of them, logged in with my Apple ID, and every one that I have bought has a Download icon beside it. I even have some magazines with non-consecutive subscriptions, and the editions from each subscription are available for download. (i.e., AUG-NOV 2011 and SEP-DEC 2012).


Ways to access Apple Pay What are the possible ways to access Apple Pay as quickly and easily as possible on an iPhone SE in a shop? I am using iOS 12.

Some ways are:

From the lock screen - Go to Settings -> Wallet & Apple Pay and enable Double-Click Home Button. Now when you double-click on the lock screen your cards will appear. Then select your card and use Touch ID or hold it next to the reader. One of the quickest and easiest ways.

Siri - You can access Apple Pay by saying "Apple Pay" to Siri.

Wallet App - Go to the wallet.app, click on your card at the top. Then when you rest your finger on the home button, it will authenticate it and search for a nearby reader.

Holding it near the reader - When you hold your iPhone near a card reader it will automatically bring up your list of cards.

You might also want to check out Apple Pay.


How to query a particular field of brew cask/ formula info? Homebrew version on my Mac:
Homebrew 2.5.0-84-g9e697bd
Take github (Cask for GitHub Desktop) for example, this is the cask file located in /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-cask/Casks/github.rb:
cask "github" do
  version "2.5.5-f57dc10d"
  sha256 "fe39c280c746b66d13dbcc5acfeb946f77b680954ecda2bf29a560a98a9d2638"

  # githubusercontent.com/ was verified as official when first introduced to the cask
  url "https://desktop.githubusercontent.com/releases/#{version}/GitHubDesktop.zip"
  appcast "https://github.com/desktop/desktop/releases.atom"
  name "GitHub Desktop"
  desc "Desktop client for GitHub repositories"
  homepage "https://desktop.github.com/"

  auto_updates true

  app "GitHub Desktop.app"
  binary "#{appdir}/GitHub Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/app/static/github.sh", target: "github"

  zap trash: [
    "~/Library/Application Support/GitHub Desktop",
    "~/Library/Application Support/com.github.GitHubClient",
    "~/Library/Application Support/com.github.GitHubClient.ShipIt",
    "~/Library/Application Support/ShipIt_stderr.log",
    "~/Library/Application Support/ShipIt_stdout.log",
    "~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.ApplicationRecentDocuments/com.github.GitHubClient.sfl*",
    "~/Library/Caches/com.github.GitHubClient",
    "~/Library/Caches/com.github.GitHubClient.ShipIt",
    "~/Library/Preferences/com.github.GitHubClient.helper.plist",
    "~/Library/Preferences/com.github.GitHubClient.plist",
    "~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.github.GitHubClient.ShipIt.*.plist",
    "~/Library/Logs/GitHub Desktop",
  ],
      rmdir: "~/.config/git"
end

The Cask file has a desc field, and it's value is Desktop client for GitHub repositories.
However, when I do brew search --desc github or brew search --cask --desc github, I only get github: GitHub Desktop, the desc field isn't included.
Sometimes the desc field provides valuable information about a cask. So I wonder if there's a way to make desc included when doing brew search --desc for casks? Thanks!

https://docs.brew.sh/Manpage#cask-command-options-cask
brew cask info github

should work.
--desc is not listed as a valid option for cask.

To specifically check a field in the JSON file /api/cask/github.json (JSON API), use the info command with --json flag and use jq to get the values of a particular field.
While you may find a better way to do it by reading the manual, here's what will work, at least.
brew info --json=v1 github | jq "map(.|.desc)"

https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/#Basicfilters
https://docs.brew.sh/Querying-Brew#brew-info---json


Can I use memory taken from a Macbook Pro in a Mac Pro? My Macbook Pro from around 2008 finally died. It has two 1 GB memory chips. (Specifically, two of this Samsung chip.) My question is: can I use these chips in my 2011 Mac Pro?

No, not directly.

The Mac Pro uses full-sized desktop DIMM modules, whereas the Macbook pro uses laptop-sized SO-DIMM modules. These cannot be directly swapped without a passive adapter, which I honestly wouldn't think makes much sense to bother with given how inexpensive 2 GB of RAM is these days for a Mac Pro.


Run AppleScript as login item but only if it meets specific time criterion I have this AppleScript as a "login item" (it runs every time I login), but I really just need it to run the code if I login between 5:00 AM and 11:00 pm.
I would appreciate your help to achieve this result.
delay 60
tell application "System Events" to keystroke " " using {option down}
delay 1
tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "start"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to key code 36

You can wrap your code in an if statement block that checks the seconds since midnight:
Example AppleScript code:
set secondsSinceMidnight to time of (current date)

if secondsSinceMidnight ≥ 18000 and secondsSinceMidnight ≤ 82800 then

    --  # Your code goes here.

end if

Notes:
I assume the code you show in your question is either just part of it, as keystroke with System Events is sent to the front most window,  or you are manually bring the target window front most before the code is run.
If you place your code within the example if statement block, as coded, only the code within it will be run if it's between 5:00 AM and 11:00 PM.
Have a look at current date and the date class in the AppleScript Language Guide .


Pages 5 - Bullets and numbering are not being copied I have a Pages 5 document that contains a bullets list. When I try to copy the content of the document into Mac Mail the text is copied without the bullets. That behavioral is reproduced with numbering list.

Is there a way to copy that list with the bullets?

This is currently not possible. You can notify Apple that you would like this feature implemented using their Pages feedback page:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html

By the way, in case you didn't know, copy-pasting to other iWork apps works fine - bullets and other formatting is preserved correctly.


What should I do with my original RAM after an upgrade? I just upgraded my 13" MacBook Pro (mid-2009) from 2 GB of memory to 8 GB of RAM.  What a difference!

I'm wondering what I can/should do with the old sticks.

Several threads on MacRumors say to keep it for troubleshooting and/or if you need to send it in for warranty service:

Upgraded from 2gb to 4gb - what to do with old Memory?
"2x1GB is worth so little so you're better off keeping it for troubleshooting purposes."
What to do with the old memory on the macbook
"I would hold on to the memory; if you ever need to take it in for service, it's better to have the original memory in it."
"Keep them for warranty"
what can i do with old ram?
"Apple guidelines are that if you do have 3rd party hardware installed, they won't service it."


Lost 3 GB memory from iPhone 4s after update to iTunes 11.4.018 My storage on the iPhone, which I had cleared to 6 GB of free space (I have NOT downloaded 8.0.2) suddenly, after iTunes software update, went down to 3 GB of free space!
This happened just with iTunes software update on my computer, followed by a sync.

iPhone 4s with 16 GB capacity. iOS 7.0. I downloaded latest iTunes version to my computer 11.4.018.

For my phone - the space was being taken up by the download and unpacked iOS 8, which was waiting to be installed. Once I installed the software - the "missing" space appeared again, and the bar displaying my drive capacity was reflecting correctly.

I would check that first - to see if it already downloaded the update.  The link will say "Install Now" on the Settings > General > Software Update page in iOS.

Regards,

Ed


Could not uninstall Confer application on my mac Today, somehow the application "Confer" got installed in my mac. I am not able to delete that application as moving it to trash says "The item “Confer” can’t be moved to the Trash because it’s open." I tried following the instructions given here
, but still no luck. Could someone please help me get rid of this application? I tried to kill using activity monitor and kill -9 command as well, but nothing is getting rid of this application. I am not sure if this will have an impact to my device, would really like to get rid of this one.

PS:  Mac OS version - 10.13.6

Rebooting mac in safe mode let the confer app be moved to trash.


Copying printer preset .plist files (Mavericks) I am trying to copy a custom print preset from one computer to another.  My understanding is that the presets are stored in ~/Library/Preferences with the name com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.<name>.plist.  I have copied the preset into my preferences folder, yet the presets for that printer (a Canon ImageRunner 5075) have not changed.

In my preferences folder there is only the new file, and when I inspect it with the Property List Editor, the correct presets seem to be there, but when I choose Print, they don't appear in the Print dialog for that printer; instead the previous presets still show up.  Are the preferences cached somewhere?

(The purely obvious answer "Just make a new preset" won't work for me, since Canon, in its infinite wisdom has removed print dialog access to the functionality encoded in the old preset, even though the printer is still able to use it.)

Any suggestions on how to get this working are greatly appreciated.

It turns out that preferences are cached in Mavericks (and presumably Yosemite), and therefore copying preference files will not make them immediately available.

A generic cache cleaning tool such as Onyx can be used to clear the caches or if you're happy using the command line the following command will reload the cached preferences:

killall -u <yourusername> cfprefsd

Thanks to the MacOS Hints Forums for this useful gem.