Mac Mini keeps trying to mount encrypted DMG at login I used to have an encrypted dmg image mounted at user login, but I didn't want it to be mounted anymore, thus I removed it from my user's "Login Items", but in spite of that the OS continued asking me the password to mount such dmg image in every single boot.

I have even tried changing its name, but this didn't work either. It keeps showing that annoying dialog for entering the password to mount such disk image that I don't want to mount.

Any ideas on how to avoid this once and for all?

TIA

Ok, finally I managed to solve it by myself. Probably there is a faster way to do this, but I didn't find it out, so I went the most obvious way:

Create a new encrypted disk image with Disk Utility, making sure of leaving the "Remember password in keychain" checkbox UNCHECKED (it seems to be checked by default), then I just copied everything from the old encrypted disk image to this new one and finally, I just deleted the old one.

That annoying dialog is not bothering me anymore.

I hope this is useful for someone else.


How to stop the screen from flashing? I recently upgraded to macOS Catalina. I use a setup with Karabiner Elements and Hammerspoon, so I can switch between apps using shortcuts like Caps-Lock+Letter.

My caps-lock is configured to act as a 'Hyper' key when held down, meaning its the same as pressing command + option + control + shift.

However after Catalina upgrade, whenever I press caps-lock + W, the screen flashes.

It also happens when I press the keys individually, so command + control + option + shift + W, so I believe it is some new shortcut introduced in Catalina that does this.

However I can't seem to find what it is and how to disable it, could anybody please help?

The flash is the same as the flash you see when you go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Audio > Test Screen Flash.

WiFi Diagnostics Keyboard Shortcut in macOS Catalina

It looks like cmd+ctrl+option+shift+w triggers a WiFi Diagnostics session.

Browse to /Private/var/tmp and you'll see 300MB+ files titled WiFiDiagnostics_YYYY-MM-DD_IP4-address_Mac OS X_MacModelName.tgz

I can't find any official documentation on this, and I believe this is new for Catalina.


Stop MacBook from installing applications for multiple user accounts I have multiple user accounts on my MacBook. At the moment all of my applications go to a root folder and then there are separate folders for my user accounts.

I'm having a problem with application becoming corrupt because they are being shared between users.

Is there any way to stop this functionality so user accounts have completely separate applications?

Applications should be installed in the root /Applications folder by default.  This would not cause the "executable" to become corrupt when used by mutliple users, .  However if you want to install an application so that only one user can use it, said application should be installed under /Users/myuser/Applications

Sometimes during install you can chose where an application will be installed, other times installers will default to the /Applications

Note that there will be some applications that require that they be installed in /Applications and will not function properly if they are moved into other folders or sub folders.

Apple mandates that ~/Applications and /Applications be equivalent for the function of apps, but not all of them obey the rules or potentially are aware of them. Same with user folders being stored on another volume than the OS - that's supposed to be fully supported, but sometimes it isn't.


Why does macOS Mojave change a group's name automatically? Created a user group called "Duo". When I add it to a directory, macOS Mojave (10.14.6) automatically changes the name to "Dev".

Even id says my user is group "Dev" (and not "Duo" as it was named):
$ id
uid=502(s) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),505(Dev) ...

What's actually happening here?

Figured it out. I had originally created a group called Dev and then immediately renamed it to Duo through Users & Groups in System Preferences. But appparently this only makes a cosmetic change in the gui. I don't know if this is an expected behaviour by design or a bug on macOS Mojave 10.14.6 ...
To reproduce it:

Open System Preferences > Users & Groups from the Apple menu.
Click the Lock icon and unlock as an administrator.
Click the + icon (below Login Options).
Select Group from the drop down menu of New Account.
Enter a name for the group in Full Name and click Create Group.
The new group will be immediately listed in the sidebar, under Groups.
Click on the newly created group name in the sidebar.
In the Name field, change the name of the group to something else.

Expected: macOS Mojave renames the group name.
What actually happens: macOS Mojave doesn't actually change the group name in the system and continues to use the original group name. But it shows the renamed group name in the macOS GUI (in Users & Groups).
Tip: To actually change the group name through Users & Groups, you have to right-click the group name in the sidebar, and click on Advanced Options and input the new name in Group name and click OK. (This introduces another weird behavior / bug for me - if you right-click and change the name through the Advanced Options, it won't be shown again to you in the same session - i.e. right-clicking the group name after renaming it won't show a right-click menu again.)


CentOS will not install on my Mac I am trying to install CentOS on another partition, and It will install, but every time, I get a GRUB HARD DISK ERROR.

Here are the steps I took:

•Resized Mac OSX disk and gave 20 gigabytes of free space (way overkill)

•Installed the net install on the a flash drive using unetbootin

•Booted off flash drive using rEFIt

•Selected HTTP installation, and plugged in the ethernet

•Entered the server

  Web site name mirror.centos.org

  CentOS directory/centos/5/os/i386

•Selected "Use Free space on Selected Drives" and selected the HD drive

•Selected the time zone and password

•Unchecked all of the features, don't want desktop GNOME

•Installation Completed, and Reboot

•rEFIt started up- boot linux from /boot

•Black Screen with GRUB HARD DISK ERROR

Any suggestions for fixing this?

Thanks

I have experience this before trying to install backtrack Linux on windows. There is many program that can fix this problem just with a CD burn with a .ISO image. Try a program called "Super GRUB disk", it works for me.


How can I fix '"HPDM.framework" will damage your computer' on macOS Big Sur? Since updating to macOS Big Sur, I can no longer print to my HP DeskJet 1010 printer. Each time that I start a print job, I get a dialog with error message that says '"HPDM.framework" will damage your computer'. There is no way to bypass the warning in 'System Preferences' -> 'Security & Privacy' as there might be with applications that have expired or invalid developer certificates.
N.B. I did find a workaround that involved removing the printer from 'System Preferences' -> 'Printers & Scanners' then adding it again with generic print drivers, but this blocked me from using some of the features I typically use, such as printing with just the black cartridge.

After much trial and error, I was finally able to get my HP DeskJet 1010 printer working again with the following steps:

Download and run the HP Uninstaller app
Download and install HP Printer Drivers v5.1 for macOS
Open 'System Preferences' -> 'Printers & Scanners', right-click the box labeled 'Printers' and select 'Reset printing system...' (if you have more than one printer, you may want to remove just the non-functioning profile by selecting it and clicking the '-' button).
Click the '+' button to add a new printer, select 'HP DeskJet Series', and follow the prompts.

It is my suspicion that this will work with other HP printers affected by their revoked developer certificate.


How can I write an AppleScript which when run will connect to a specific WIFI network if available? The title pretty much sums it up. I want to avoid having to use the trackpad to connect to certain networks. This comes up often when a new network becomes available but I'm already connected to another one.

You can also use ControlPlane:

Enable "Nearby WiFi Network" from the Evidence Sources tab.
Add a nearby WiFi network rule from the Rules tab.
Add a Network Location or Run Shell Script action from the Actions tab.


Reset/change Emoji color for human features I inadvertently hit the wrong color for a human emoji.  Holding it down does nothing and I really need this particular emoji to be correct.

You need to long press on the emoji for which you want to change the skin tone, this will show a skin tone picker.

You can do this on macOS in the Emoji &Symbols picker, and on iOS using the Emoji keyboard.

Skin tone settings are saved per-emoji.

If long press doesn't bring up the picker, you have a different problem.


Is there an easy way to get notified of updates for all of my non-Mac App Store apps? I like to keep my system up to date and the Mac App Store is great in that it automatically notifies you when updates are available for apps downloaded from it. However, I'm after an easy way to get notified of updates for all of my apps not downloaded from the Mac App Store. I'm talking about things like Skype, Spotify, Firefox etc. without having to go and start up each app first and let it do its own update check.

I've seen sites like OldVersion and OldApps which do have information about the latest versions of apps and their release dates, which could potentially be "scraped" to obtain this information, but they don't seem to be updated terribly regularly as far as I can tell.

AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes
  and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date.

http://metaquark.de/appfresh/mac

AppFresh for Mac license for $14.99


OS X takes long to boot after starting rEFInd once I have an SSD in my MacBook (Pro 9,2; encrypted), and until recently, the apple icon appeared almost immediately after pressing the power button. Soon after that I would be able to unlock the disk using my password and then boot in ~10 seconds.
A couple of days ago, I installed rEFInd on a flash drive and then booted from it  as a test (I need the stick to boot into Ubuntu on my second drive and was in the process of reinstalling it). I was then in the rEFInd menu and chose one of the tiles (I think it was "Boot Linux from 16GiB FAT volume" or something like that). Naturally, since no Linux was actually installed, I was met by the black screen with the blinking cursor and powered the computer off by long-pressing the power button.

Ever since then, it takes almost 20 seconds for the Apple logo to appear after power on, even though the rEFInd stick is not connected. This triples my boot time and I see no reason why it should be so, since I did not change anything on the SSD.

Edit: The process can be shortened by pressing ALT at boot, then manually selecting the SSD, after which booting will begin immediately.

Can anybody tell me a) how to diagnose the problem and b) how to fix it?

Turns out resetting PRAM and NVRAM via pressing ⌘+⌥+P+R at boot (before the gray screen appears; hold until computer restarts and the startup chime has been heard twice) fixes the problem.

I have since successfully booted both OSX and Ubuntu via rEFInd without any excessive waiting.


Adding iOS 11 devices to DEP using Apple Configurator Until now, only iOS devices purchased direct from an Apple sales channel could be added to the Device Enrollment Program (DEP). But at WWDC June 2017, Apple announced that any device running iOS 11 or tvOS 11 could be added to DEP. (The information is in this presentation - p25 of the PDF or around 05:20 in the video.) Although it wasn't stated explicitly, the slide implies that this requires Apple Configurator 2.5.

Is this functionality implemented yet in the beta releases of iOS 11/Apple Configurator 2.5? And if so, how do I use it?

What I've tried/found so far:

I've got a couple of devices (iPhone 5s, iPhone 6 Plus) running the current iOS 11 beta (build 15A5278f, 5 Jun 17) and a Mac running the current Apple Configurator 2.5 beta (build 3F12, 5 Jun 17) but I can't find a way to add either device to DEP.
If I connect an iOS 10 device to the Configurator I get exactly the same options (which indicates there's no special support for iOS 11 yet).
In the Prepare Devices screen there is an option Add to Device Enrollment Program which is disabled and can't be enabled:

In the new beta 2.5 it's active but when you are on the step where you need to login to your DEP account I get an authentication error. I'm 100% sure I entered the right credentials: even used 2 DEP accounts and still not working.


Stream movie on Apple TV 3 from iTunes on iMac G4 Is it possible to stream movies via old version of iTunes (iMac G4) on Apple TV 3 or is the latest version needed?

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4437 says iTunes 10.2 or later is required.

If your iMac G4 can run OS X 10.5 (Leopard) you should be able to run iTunes 10.3.1 (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1103) which qualifies.

If it can only run OS X 10.4 it appears that the latest version is iTunes 9.2.1 (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4108495?start=0&tstart=0) which does not qualify.

Note that I have not verified the above.  Also, based on personal experience, you want as good a network connection between the source and the AppleTV as possible.  Either cabled or 11n wireless.

Good luck.


my mag safe 2 not working I have Mac book pro 15 inch 2015 mid El Capitan OS with a Mag safe 2 85 W but i still not working no light no charging the problem I'm from morocco and there is no apple center and nearest seller is 1500 km away  so i try to fix it myself the pin intput is 230 V but when i check the connector i found 3 V i think it should be between 16-18 V , also the adapter make noise since it failed its like "tak tuk tuk" ....
I already tried:
rest SMC :shift ctrl option power for 10 second
I check electronic lines and all is Ok .
Sorry for my language .

I came across an apple forum when googling your problem in which a person had a same problem:

  Eric's right, these adapters do get a bit hot and can make some sound, yet that sounds much too hot for safety. An AppleCare man told me last month that they were concerned to "capture" adapters that were getting too hot, and promptly sent me a new one in a box in which I was to put the problem adapter and return to them (all paid by Apple of course.)
  My concern then was mostly with the strange sounds it was making, seeming to exactly mirror the CPU whine and activity sounds from my Macbook. Since the new one also did this, when I mentioned this at an Apple Store I was visiting the Genius offered to give me another new replacement. This one seemed silent at first, though on closer inspection in the quiet of home I found the mirroring effect was still present in the third adaptor, though a bit softer. As it happened I've ended up with a replacement Macbook because of another issue, making it four adaptors in my experience. All of them have gotten warm, and a bit hot sometimes, and all have produced the same subtle sounds of the CPU activity. I believe these sound effects result somehow as a result of the magnetic power cord connection, which sits very near the CPU. Unfortunately both my Macbooks have had the CPU whine (a high-pitched buzz) and this then gets reproduced by the adaptors.
  So, I'd also recommend you call Apple or take it to an Apple Store for a replacement adaptor, which should not get as hot as you describe, but may indeed make some strange-seeming sounds.

Hope this helps.


What is this iPad app? Saw an app during a Apple video, i was wondering what it was called.

Rockmate

From the description (Rockmate alone was too short to be an answer ...)

  Rockmate have been featured on Apple iPad TV ads. Rockmate turns your
  iPad into a complete music studio that is easy and super fun to use.


In Tiger's Activity Monitor, what is "% Nice" CPU? I installed OS X Tiger in an emulator, to learn more about how OS X's UI has evolved over the years.

I noticed that Activity Monitor measures the percentage of CPU that is "Nice", in addition to the percentages which come from system processes, which come from user processes, and which are idle.

What does "Nice" CPU usage represent? Are these system processes or user processes, and is there an equivalent in more modern OS X?

Nice and renice are Unix commands where one can change the priority level of a process.

I used them on workstations many years ago to prioritize my job over other processes.

Will be found on man pages and most Unix books.


Can I add "16 pt" option to font pulldown menus? Finder and all apps jump from 14pt to 18pt in dropdowns.  Can a 16pt be added?

It's a flaky problem, or at least the solutions are flaky. As such, some apps, e.g. Mail, go through the motions but don't actually add the new size. Additionally, it may vanish at some undetermined time in the future. But for the present….

From within the app (e.g. TextEdit) that you want to see 16 pts, pull up the font dialogue (Cmd-T). In the upper-left corner, you should see a dropdown button with a gear icon on it. Click that and near the bottom select 'Edit Sizes…'.

In the 'New Size' field, type '16' and then click the '+' button below it. Click done. Quit and re-launch the app.


Key stroking fn + f8 I need to make an applescript to press the keys fn + f8 at the same time. The only problem is those are both keys without names!

tell application "System Events"
    key code 63 -- Will press the fn key
    key code 100 -- Will press the f8 key
end tell

However, how can I get these two key strokes to happen simultaneously? I cant seem to do key code 63 with 100 down or any variation. Help?

Key code 100 is actually F8, If you want to press F8 key just send key code 100.
But a different media control command key. Unfortunately, it seems the only way to run the pause command in media players via applescript is to send the proper key directly to the application(i.e. iTunes and Spotify). please see:

https://gist.github.com/NoobsArePeople2/5121597

PS: If you want to check press Fn, you can run this script

delay (1.0)
tell application "System Events"
    key code 63 -- fn
    key code 63 -- fn
end tell

this press Fn key two times and trigger the dictation


How to allow someone to turn off my device the purpose of my question , I need someone to remotely turn off my device

because I wont be in front of my Laptop

I succeeded in giving him a terminal command to shutdown my PC

  osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to shut down'

but the issue here (the below image)

= there's opening apps which open a dialog (Terminate processes , would like to review) ?

and waiting for input/interaction from me

I wont be in front of my Laptop , so I need this solution to by force immediately shutdown the device without these dialogs - without depending on action by me

Easier, but sacrifices security

Create an admin account for him on the system.

Have him type

sudo -u his_short_user_name shutdown -h now

He then answers a password challenge with his password, and the system does a "somewhat hard" shutdown.  This means apps will not be asked about saving application data, so your half finished Illustrator drawing is gone.

Better security

At Terminal, you write a bit of perl to wait for his shutdown request.  You launch it after every reboot with sudo perl program_name.  When you do, it'll challenge you for your password, and then run as superuser.  When it comes time to shutdown, it's already authenticated so it just does it.

  my $signal_file = "/Users/(you)/Public/Drop Box/shutdown";
  unlink ($signal_file);

  while (1) {
    sleep(10);
    next if not -f $signal_file;
    system ”shutdown -h now";
  }

And your guest needs to simply touch '/Users/(you)/Public/Drop Box/shutdown' to trigger a shutdown.  He doesn't need any special rights to do this.  For instance you could publish your Public directory as a network share point, a perfectly reasonable thing to do from a security POV.

If you want to temporarily prevent a user from doing this, either kill the process (ctrl-C) or create a directory there called shutdown.   Note that perl is testing for -f (presence of file).


Show desktop shortcut in El Capitan? I can't find a shortcut that's working on my MacBook Air. In Windows you can either click the rightmost part of the task bar to show the desktop or hit Windows+D to show the desktop. How do I do this in El Capitan?

One way is to set a Hot Corner to show the Desktop.

This is done via: System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver > Hot Corners...

Then select Desktop in the pop-up list for the corner you'd like to show the Desktop when you move the mouse to that corner.


Send file using wifi to my MacBook while connected to wi-fi just a quick question.
I've got a MacBook Air and I'm a journalist, I need the SD Card slot.

I've to switch to the new MacBook Pro and I will lose the SD Card, so I'm trying to solve the issue.

I'm planning to use a wireless SD Card (Transcend) and a ruby script on my MacBook that looks for new files on the card and download them on a folder on my Mac.

Here is the issue: everything is ok if I connect to the wi-fi hotspot created by the transcend, but of course I must connect to the wifi of the event / venue so I cannot lose the wifi connection.

At this moment I'm using the iPhone as camera and AirDrop: I can send photos to my Mac without any issue to the wi-fi connection: my Macbook receive images while connected to the wi-fi.

Is there a way to create a virtual wi-fi interface that looks for the Transcend SSID, connect to the card and download images?

I can also use a EyeFi card that act as a server, and the server is another script that runs on my Mac. This doesn't solve the problem: is my MacBook is connected to the network I cannot use the access point mode so the EyeFi can't connect.

Any idea? AirDrop work in that wy, but I cannot understand how can I create a sort of "airdrop" tunnel to connect to my card

In my suggestion, instead of finding one virtual interface why not you add option in your script itself to associate with Transcend before transfer and when its done it comes back to your original network.

To do this, you just add below given commands to your script.

Whenever script finds a new file, it force to associate the Transcend's    SSID (I assume your Mac is already associated to Venue's Wi-Fi)

networksetup -setairportnetwork en0 Transcend_SSID PASSWORD
This command will force to associate with Transcend's SSID.
Check the association

networksetup -getairportnetwork en0
Once Transfer is done remove the Transcend SSID from the network and toggle the Wi-Fi power.

networksetup -removepreferredwirelessnetwork en0 Transcend_SSID

networksetup -setairportpower en0 off

networksetup -setairportpower en0 on
According to Wi-Fi property it will associate back to your venue's Wi-Fi.

I think it might be helpful to you. It will break your connectivity with Venue's Wi-Fi for very less time as script is always running in background. Please let me know your thoughts.


Is buying from the Apple website VS Apple Store any different? I am interested in buying the new Apple MacBook Pro 15''. I wanted a somewhat personalized version though (500 GB SSD / 16 GB ram) which is not the "basic" one.

My question is this: does the Apple Store have all kinds of combinations, hence buying from the website or from the physical store is identical, or the Apple Store has only the "basic"/default configurations and if you want more (e.g 500 GB SSD vs 128 default one) you have to buy online?

Nope, it is not different.

On apple store you can customize:

In you case it will come up as

Configure your 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display

2.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz
16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
512GB PCIe-based Flash Storage
Intel Iris Pro Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory
Backlit Keyboard (English) & User's Guide


Can't delete keychain items with UI, but command line works fine When using the Keychain Access app, I am often unable to delete an Web form password item. I have tried hitting the delete key and going to Edit > Delete. In both cases, nothing happens, there is no error message.

I can delete the item if I use the command line version of the tool:

$ security find-internet-password -a "foo@example.com"
keychain: "/Users/simon/Library/Keychains/woodside-mbp.keychain"
version: 256
class: "inet"
attributes:
    0x00000007 <blob>="daw.apple.com (foo@example.com)"
    0x00000008 <blob>=<NULL>
    "acct"<blob>="foo@example.com"
    "atyp"<blob>="form"
    ...
$ security delete-internet-password -a "foo@example.com"
keychain: "/Users/simon/Library/Keychains/woodside-mbp.keychain"
version: 256
class: "inet"
attributes:
    0x00000007 <blob>="daw.apple.com (foo@example.com)"
    0x00000008 <blob>=<NULL>
    "acct"<blob>="foo@example.com"
    "atyp"<blob>="form"
    ...
password has been deleted.

If I now redo the search in Keychain Access, the item is gone.

I am running El Capitan 10.11.4 (15E65), Keychain Access Version 9.0 (55171.20.2), and

I notice you say, "If I now redo the search in Keychain Access…" implying that you began by searching when you weren't able to delete the item. Find it in the list without searching and then delete. It's just a dumb bug. I have found I sometimes can delete a single item after searching, but not multiple, and sometimes there's no problem at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Can I check if the cooling system of my Macbook Pro 15" Early 2013 works as intended? I have this model:

MacBook Pro "Core i7" 2.7 15" Early 2013
2.7 GHz Core i7 (I7-3740QM)

Intro.  February 13, 2013   Disc.   October 22, 2013
Order   ME665LL/A   Model   A1398 (EMC 2673)

Recently it started shutting down randomly and I took it to a local repair shop. Tech guys told me the problem was with the power controller board (because of the constant overheating) and that they had fixed it. However, the cooling system (the radiator itself) was failing (probably out of gas inside due to them) and needed to be replaced. They failed to find a replacement part (since the laptop is old) and recommended me to restrain from overloading the system in the meantime.
The laptop is now running smoothly. I'm measuring the CPU temperature with Macs Fan Control and it is showing 103 Celcius degrees on the CPU cores under the heaviest load possible (which according to the tech guys is a way too high). However,  according to this answer:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/284437/330383

there is an Intel defined spec for my CPU:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/70847/intel-core-i7-3740qm-processor-6m-cache-up-to-3-70-ghz.html

The Tjunction value (value when the processor starts to slow down to avoid damage) is 105 Degrees.

I never measured the CPU temp before the incident but I feel it was always running this hot from the very beginning.

So, please help me understand - did the radiator really fail or it was just a random power controller problem?

One more thing: I was using a faulty power adaptor for some time which had an overheating connector - THAT could have possibly caused the damages to the power board. To my mind, it may never have been connected to the CPU overheating.

a faulty charging cable can cause all kinds of problems. That could have started your issue and it may have grown from there as it is what is sending power to all of your macbook, it is not limited to what it can break.

one question I have is what are the circumstances for the use of the laptop. meaning are you using the laptop on a desk? on your lap?

you can always get a laptop stand that has fans built in, and will help cool the system, and keep it from overheating due to being on your lap, or a blanket, something like that.

the temps you are seeing are pretty high, here's an article with some people discussing the temps in their MacBook of that year.

as far as finding parts, I would suggest talking with the best MacBook experts on the planet at Rossman Group as I'm sure they can find the part, and will be sure to diagnose any problems and where they stem from. I spend quite a bit of time on his youtube channel watching him repair boards, and other issues, he is one of the true original MacBook and apple product repair geniuses. Plus he's pretty funny with his rants.


What is the username of the macOS recovery? so I am trying to add a user to the admin group on my computer, but I don't have any admin powers. I do however, know the password that allows me to enter the macOS recovery mode, which I think must be in the admin group and I could use to give another user admin powers.

Does anyone know the username of this macOS recovery account?

macOS recovery doesn't really have users or passwords. Well, technically it does have one user account: root. But Recovery's root account doesn't have a password; when you start in Recovery mode you're automatically logged in as root.

If you need to enter a password to get into Recovery mode, that's probably a firmware password. If a firmware password is set, you need to enter it in order to invoke any alternate boot mode (such as Recovery). This password has nothing to do with any user name or account, and has no use after the computer has started up.


screenshot showing dimensions 2880x1800 but resolution 144x144 I am trying to take some high quality screenshots on my 13" MBP for a website - they need them to be as high resolution as possible (at least 1000px wide) - when I take the screenshot (command+shift+3) and look at the info in Finder it shows dimensions of 2880x1800 but a resolution of 144x144... what is the difference and can I take screenshots at a higher resolution somehow?

Dimension is the actual height and width of the image in pixels.

Resolution (or DPI) is the number of pixels in a square inch.


How can I search for an iTunes App Store app by SKU? I'm getting some strange results in my LinkShare affiliate report for sales made through the iTunes Store App Store: multiple sales of the same SKU but for different Sales amounts. I'm not aware of any sales on that item, so I'm wondering if someone else happened to pick the same SKU. (That's awfully coincidental b/c this SKU is 1/2 of the total items we've sold.)

So, I'm wondering how I can search for what products have that SKU.

I tried searching the iTunes store for the sku. I didn't get any hits (not surprisingly).

Simple,

Take your SKU (it should be something like..  id398157641 or 398157641)

Pop it in where the same number is.. and make sure there is the word id before it.. like so...

http://itunes.apple.com/app/app-name/id398157641


macOS - Is it possible to lock the time zone? I'm looking for a way of stopping myself changing which time zone my computer is in.

I would like to remain an admin with knowledge of the password so just making a non admin account would not work.

I think a lock on the GUI in system preferences would be sufficient. But if I could also stop myself from changing:

sudo systemsetup -settimezone timezone

That would be great too.

Thanks for the help - I'd be happy to clarify the problem if necessary.

A solution could be in the form of a bit of code that checks:

sudo systemsetup -gettimezone

every minute or so and changes it back if I have edited it.

Open Date & Time zone and tick the box, Set time zone automatically using current location.


Old MacPro (2,1) with Windows 7 runs extremely slow? I installed (native, so no vm) Windows 7 (64 bits) on my old MacPro2,1. With 10GB RAM I would have though it would run pretty decent. But no, its extremely slow and I have no clue what causes it. I'm guessing a setting or a wrong driver.

Just for slow indications, minutes pass for login screen. Also the HDD makes a ton of noise (seems reading/writing). I did checked the drive, appears to be fine (SMART status).

Anybody recognises this issue?, any fix?

Thanks!

I understand you have a 32 bit EFI. I do not think this has anything to do with the BIOS. Since you have already installed 64 bit Windows 7, I am guessing it does not.

In your comments, you say you modified the CD. So I can assume you have a working DVD drive. When you say you modified, I assume this involved oscdimg.

Apple does not officially support 64 bit Windows on your model Mac. Well, I have a 2007 iMac, which Apple does not officially support 64 bit Windows, yet I have run 64 bit Windows 7 and I am currently running 64 bit Windows 10.

I assume the Windows 7 installation DVD has Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later included. This is a requirement according to the Apple website Install Windows 7 on your Mac using Boot Camp.

You have to installed Windows for a BIOS boot. It not a question of whether you can install to use a EFI boot, but rather the restriction is in the drivers. The Boot Camp Support Software for your Mac assumes you are using a BIOS boot method. This software includes the drivers for your Mac.

You can download the Boot Camp Support Software for your Mac from the website Boot Camp Support Software 4.0.4033. Since you have a 64 bit install, you might have trouble installing this download. If so, refer to the website Using Boot Camp Support Software 4.0.4033 to install 64 bit Windows 7 or 8.

Finally, you might not be blessed. If not, then your Mac would be slow to boot. Click on this link for instructions on how to bless your Windows 7 install. The instruction assume you have already installed the Boot Camp Support Software.

  Note: Many people have assumed the latest release the the Boot Camp Support Software should always be used. This is completely wrong. You have to use the Boot Camp Support Software released for your model Mac. Windows is designed to accept older drivers and even 32 bit drivers when the current driver is not available. So, if you decide to install 64 bit Windows 10 on your Mac, you would still use the same Boot Camp Support Software as for a 32 bit Windows 7 install.


How to mount ufsd_NTFS partition I have a USB disk and when I try to mount get the following error mount: /dev/disk3s1: unknown special file or file system.

diskutil shows

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk3
   1:               Windows_NTFS Seagate Backup Plus ... 444.5 GB   disk3s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Binnie                  555.7 GB   disk3s2

/etc/fstab contains the following line:-
LABEL="Seagate Backup Plus Drive" none ufsd_NTFS rw,noauto

I must have put this in to stop auto mount, as I normally just use the HFS partition, but I want to be able to exchange files with a Windows user.

There is a Paragon NTFS for Mac driver, but I guess it is no longer working since I "upgraded" to El Capitan.

Can anyone advise the best way to mount.

I went to the Seagate site and found an updated driver (at least I assume it is updated - it is unclear).

The NTFS now mounts.


How to get routing table in terminal How can I get the routing tables in command line? On a normal unix machine I can use

[user@server ~]# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         10.0.0.1        0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 enp5s0
10.0.0.0        0.0.0.0         255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 enp5s0
169.254.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U     1002   0        0 enp5s0

On my macbook, this does not work

[user@macbook ~]# > route -n
usage: route [-dnqtv] command [[modifiers] args]

What be the equivilent command?

Try

netstat -r

Note that this will resolve the names of the gateways if possible. This takes some time. If you don't need this, run

netstat -rn


How to migrate an OS X guest VM to a physical machine? I am running OS X Yosemite, and Parallels 10.

I have a guest VM running OS X Yosemite. I would like to migrate the guest VM to a physical machine. Is this possible? The reason is that the guest vm is just too slow, and I would be better off running on a physical machine. I have a number of developer tools installed and configured perfectly on the VM that would take a long time to download them on the physical machine. Thats why I just want to "migrate" to a physical machine.

I tried connecting an external hard drive to the VM, and creating a time machine backup, but it fails to even make the initial backup. The error message is:

"An error occurred while copying files. The problem may be temporary. If the problem persists use disk utility to repair your backup disk"

Use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable image
to an external or internal disk. SuperDuper can also be used for free.


How to speed up Finder on Yosemite I have two MacBook Pros running Yosemite and both have an incredibly slow Finder. Finder was blazingly fast with Mavericks: as soon as I upgraded to Yosemite it became sluggish. When opening a folder, even a simple one, it takes seconds (from a few to some dozens) to display its content.

One MacBook Pro, 2011 non-retina, has a normal spinning hard drive: it takes ages for the Finder to display the files in a folder. Even if there are only a bunch of them, the spinning wheel stays spinning for too long. At the beginning I thought I had a faulty HD, but...

... the other MacBook Pro, even if a little dated (2008, the first unibody),  has an SSD hard drive. It was incredibly fast with Mavericks, overall slow on Yosemite. However, also on this computer the Finder spins the wheel for a very long time.

Both the computers were upgraded to Yosemite, none had a fresh installation of the OS. For me, Yosemite was like Vista for Windows users: perfectly usable computers became sluggish. I can live with a little slow MBP, but I cannot wait seconds each time I open a folder.

Is there anyone who had the same problem and could suggest a solution?

Speed Up New Finder Window Generation by Changing All My Files
All My Files is a smart folder that uses Spotlight to access any and all files owned by the current user. This can be great, but it can also slow down the generation of a new Finder window on some Macs. Changing the new Finder window to a static folder can help that speed:

Pull down the Finder menu and choose “Preferences”
Set the “New finder windows show” to “Desktop” or “Documents” or your
user home folder

Close Finder preferences as usual


AppleScript to repeat action in the next window I would like that if I press a certain keyboard shortcut (cmd + down arrow), the same will run on the next window in the same app.

Is an AppleScript the only want to get this functionality? I have never made an AppleScript before.

You can do this with the following Keyboard Maestro macro.


"Click restore to remove the Windows partition and restore the space back to MacOS" I made a Windows partition on Bigsur install to make Windows quicker and easier to install later. However, when I run bootcamp the only option I'm given is to get rid of that partition and get it back to OSX. I don't trust that since last time I tried something like this I couldn't even boot and lost everything.
Is there a safer way? For example, can't I burn Windows to a USB drive and then boot directly from that to reduce risk.... then install to the spare partition.
The only problem is that UUByte doesn't seem to work on Bigsur (greyed out drive selection) and Etcher can't get that Windows ISO into a bootable state.
Meanwhile, Parallels would need messing with ktexts and I don't like the potential instability of that.
What's the safest way to proceed? I have to run a Windows program to downgrade my phone via USB.

The safest way usually is to use the Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows 10. However, you can use a USB flash drive if you wish. Below outlines the procedure for creating the flash drive. You may have to tweak the procedure depending on your model Mac.
The macOS operating system includes all the applications necessary to create a Windows 10 USB flash drive installer. Below are the applications and their use.

The Disk Utility application can be used to erase a 16 GB or larger USB flash drive. The name, format and scheme should be BOOTCAMP, ExFAT and Master Boot Record, respectively. See the image below.

The Boot Camp Assistant application can be used to download the Window Support Software. This download will include the Windows 10 drivers.

The Safari application can be used to download the latest 64 bit Windows 10 ISO file.

The DiskImageMounter application can be used to mount the Windows 10 iso file. This application can launched automatically by using the Finder application to open the ISO file.

The Finder application can be used to copy the contents of the mounted ISO file and the Windows Support Software to the flash drive.

Since you have already created the partition for Windows, you can EFI boot from the flash drive and install Windows 10.


Customise Mac Terminal command: Control+w I am trying to find a way to customise Mac Terminal command:Control+w which can also consider delimiters like =, -. Currently Space is only way it considers. For example for the command

$foo --option=foos

If I use Control+w, it deletes --option=foos but I want it to delete firstly till =, then next delimiter identified, if I pass command once more

Not directly modifying ctrl + W, but the same behaviour can be achieved using ESC  + delete. Every time, escape key would have to be released and then pressed.

Mac Terminal: Delete a word at time


MacBook Pro 13” mid-2012 iSight cable port broken I accidentally ripped the iSight display port away from the motherboard on my MacBook Pro during a display replacement. I’m fine with working without a camera since the quality is bad anyway. The system boots up fine as far as I can tell.
However, I read somewhere that the later models require the iSight cable to regulate temperature, overheating if the iSight cable is not recognized. Is this also true for this MacBook Pro model? What problems would I run into during use if I didn’t fix this problem?

I know of no Mac that has a temperature sensor as part of the cable assembly nor a temperature sensor as part of the FaceTime camera.
However, I can tell you from direct first hand experience, there won’t t be any temperature related issues from a damaged FaceTime cable or camera.  If had the ripped off in the same manner to yours, cut and even purposely removed.  None caused any issues.


Can I wirelessy copy my videos from iPhone to Mac? Is there a way to wirelessy transfer the videos I made on iPhone or iPad to my Mac (to iPhoto or Logic Pro), or is the only option to use a cable?

Try Photo Transfer App

  Easily transfer photos and videos between iPhone, iPad, Android and Computer.
  No cables or extra software required.

$2.99 in the app store.


Any trick to use my 2008 iMac (mini-DVI) as a secondary monitor for my MacBook Pro? I have a 2008 iMac (with mini-DVI and NO Thunderbolt) and I want to use it as a secondary monitor for my MacBook Pro.

The FAQ for Target Display Mode says that it's possible to do it with an 2009 or later iMac but not with the 2008 version I have.

Are there any tricks to do it by adding any kind of software, hardware, cables or adapters?

Yes - add a Mini DisplayPort port to your iMac. Should only take an engineer and a machine shop to accomplish.

In all seriousness, the mini-DVI port on your iMac is an output-only port, whereas the Thunderbolt/Mini DisplayPort ports also accept input. No amount of software, cables or dongles will change that.


Is is possible to prevent OS X firmware password removal? The title pretty much says it all.

I have set a firmware password on my MacBook Pro just to make things a bit harder in case of theft. Still, by pulling the RAM and resetting the PRAM, it would be fairly simple to clear the firmware password and boot into single user mode.

Is there any way at all to prevent this?

In a word, no.  If you are concerned with the contents of your machine being compromised should the machine be stolen a better bet may be to encrypt your drive with FileVault (assuming you are or intend to upgrade to using Lion).  Even if the firmware passwords was irreversible, it would not stop someone simply taking your disk out and reading another way.  The only benefit I can see is preventing a theif from being able to ever use the mcahine he just stole, but frankly this won't help stop your laptop from being stolen in the first place, although it probably would result in it getting binned if it was, rather than re-used and potentially identified at a later date via it's serial number etc.


QuickLook generator for markdown only recognises *.markdown I have started using markdown for simple texts, writing in TextWrangler. I am quite happy to use Finder and QuickLook to preview the file and have installed the QLMarkdown.qlgenerator but it only works with files using the markdown extension. The Info.plist indicates that it should work with mdown, md, `text and more.

Does anyone know how to get QuickLook working?

The installation instructions say to run qlmanage -r in Terminal if it doesn't automatically start working. I just installed and didn't have to.


Create image links in PDF I have a Word document that has an image link (it has a URL associated with it).  I would like to create a PDF rendition of this document, preserving the image link.

When I save the document as PDF (File > Print... > PDF > Save as PDF...) the link is removed.  Text-based links (e.g. foo.com, http://apple.stackexchange.com) are preserved, however.

Is this a limitation of PDF or Word's PDF interface?  Is there a solution?

This looks to me like a shortcoming of the Word PDF export function.

You may try it with the PDFMaker macro (coming with Acrobat). If the PDFMaker macro does not get it through, there is little chance that it is recognized by any PDF exporter. In this case, the simplest way to get the link back in is to open the PDF in Acrobat, use the Link tool and add the link again.

FWIW, in Acrobat, you may also check whether the Word PDF export does really create a link over text links, or whether it is the PDF viewer recognizing some text looking like a link and make it an active link on the fly.


Is the "Cellar" folder only used for Homebrew? Is the "Cellar" folder only used for Homebrew? If I am not using Homebrew, I can safely remove it?

The script for uninstalling Homebrew removes it completely, so it's probably safe to remove it.
https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/FAQ

How do I uninstall Homebrew?
If you installed to /usr/local then you can use the script in this gist to uninstall — it will only remove Homebrew and the stuff Homebrew installed leaving anything else in /usr/local alone.
Provided you haven’t put anything else in Homebrew’s prefix (brew --prefix), you can generally just rm -rf that directory. This is because Homebrew won’t touch files outside its prefix.


MacBook Pro not detecting external monitor I have 2 MacBook Pros. A private (late-2013) and a work (mid-2012). My private MacBook Pro can detect the external monitors instantly without any issues. My work MacBook Pro can only detect one of the monitors.

The monitors are exactly the same (Fujitsu Thor) and I use a mini-DP -> DP cable.

I've tried resetting PRAM and SMC.

Turns out there seems to be something wrong with the cable.

I tried using the cable that I use to the monitor that was being detected and it works now... Is this a faulty cable or is the cable simply just not compatible or something?


no imessage over mobile data My iPhone was not receiving imessages over  mobile data. Accidently my wifi was off for two days. When I switched wifi on after a couple of days, I received imessages which my colleagues sent 2 days earlier. This is despite my mobile data was working well.

It's possibly the carrier.  Try restarting your iPhone and if it happens again check your cell strength.


In AppleScript can you create a window tab without using keystroke? In AppleScript you can create a finder window with:

tell application "Finder"
    activate
    set newWindow to make new Finder window
end tell

after setting the target if you want to create a new tab I'm aware of:

tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "t" using command down
end tell

per searching through older questions and from Google.  In AppleScript is there another way to create tabs without having to use:

keystroke "t" using command down

and if a window is created with four tabs is there a way to change what tab the window is active in?  For example:

tab 1
tab 2
tab 3
tab 4

Looping through the tabs with a repeat and keystroke final tab would be tab 4 but I'm not sure how to tell the finder window that the frontmost tab should be tab 2 and I dont want to change the sequence the tabs are created meaning, I dont want:

tab 1
tab 3
tab 4
tab 2

or is there an efficient way to parse what tabs are open in that particular tab? Can this be done?

I can say until 10.9 this isn't possible because the property of tab isn't implemented into applescript. After 10.9... I don't know but you can check it by yourself like this:
Open 1 Finder Window with two or more tabs, then:

tell application "Finder"
properties of Finder window 1
end tell

...now if you can find something in the result that speaks about tab, then you can use this property to work on tabs. Alternatively just open the Applescript Finder Library and search for tab. It would show you if there is a property.

Also...

tell application "System Events"
keystroke "t" using command down
end tell

wouldn't be necessary if property tabs would be implemented into Applescript.


Network Drive disconnect prompt on wake I'm investigating bringing OS X onto our windows network at the moment, which, despite a few hiccups, has been going pretty well! (A lot better than some of my colleagues suggested it would!).

I've got network drives mapping and functioning fine, however one of our corporate policies is that the machine goes to sleep/locks every 15 minutes.
I'm finding that on wake, the drives are still connected, however I have a prompt that the network connection was interrupted and to disconnect the drives:

I can click to disconnect the drives, or open finder and re-access the drive, which clears the message.
This is the state exactly after wake:
(You can see the drive is actively mapped, but there's still a prompt to disconnect)

It's no hassle for me to open finder, but in the context of end users, I'm hoping to be able to stop that disconnected drive message from appearing on wake.

Any suggestions?

Note: Using OS X 10.10.1

Confirming my above post. Seems to be if I give the network adapter 30 seconds to wake up, before logging in, the drives come across without error. Bit out of scope to go modifying anything here, so i'll just warn end users to allow for a minute or so on wake, unless we decide to implement significantly more than 5 OS X Machines on our network.


How to change keyboard shortcut for opening Character Viewer on OS X El Capitan I can open up the Character Viewer app using the Control-Command-Space keys combination.

I want to change this keyboard shortcut so I can use it for some other action.
How can this be done?

For some reason you can't just disable this shortcut, since it's not listed in the preferences by default.
You have to add a shortcut in System Prefs / Keyboard / Shortcuts named "Emoji & Symbols" and bind it to something else, and it will become available.


How can I change the language for dictation on the fly? With English not being my first language, I usually need support for at least two languages when using features like auto-correct and dictation.

Is it possible to toggle the language which is used for dictation via a shortcut?

As of now, I always have to manually navigate through the menus in the System Preferences which if far from convenient. I've tried to see if there are any pre-defined actions in Automator, but found none.

You could either edit property lists that store the setting and reopen the DictationIM process:

#!/bin/bash

k="com.apple.speech.recognition.AppleSpeechRecognition.prefs DictationIMLocaleIdentifier"
if [[ "$(defaults read $k)" == en-US ]]; then
  defaults write $k fr-FR
  defaults write com.apple.assistant "Session Language" fr-FR
else
  defaults write $k en-US
  defaults write com.apple.assistant "Session Language" en-US
fi
killall -HUP DictationIM

Or use UI scripting:

tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal anchor "Dictation" of pane "com.apple.preference.speech"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences"
    tell pop up button 1 of tab group 1 of window 1
        click
        if value is "English (United States)" then
            click menu item "French" of menu 1
        else
            click menu item "English (United States)" of menu 1
        end if
    end tell
end tell
quit application "System Preferences"

Both scripts are copied from my answer to How to use applescript to toggle the language setting of new dictation tool (10.8) - Stack Overflow.


How to scan an image (map) using only 256 colors? Is there a way to can an image on OSX using only 256 colors rather than millions or billions?

I am scanning maps which only use a few colors, so I think I want to keep the color depth low so there is clear separation between lines and background (kind of like B&W vs. Gray Scale). Note I want to do this at scan time to improve the scan.

I am on 10.7.4 with a HP C4599. HP Scan doesn't let change the color depth at all. Preview (or Image Capture) only let's me choose between millions and billions.

You can use ColorSync for this job. It still requires you to scan the document with lots of colors, but you can reduce the colors to 256 using ColorSync (and do much more) by following these steps:

Open ColorSync: Applications->Utilities->ColorSync Utility
Open your scanned image: File->Open
Below the image select: Apply Profile->Named Colors->Websafe Colors

I translated the names from german, thus they may be slightly different on an actual Mac OS X with english local setting.


All of my Adobe CS4 apps beachball in Lion and will not run at all I upgraded my laptop to Lion last night.  I decided to not upgrade my Mac Pro yet in case I ran into issues.  Turned out to be a wise move, because while things went smoothly for the most part, I did run into a problem that's kind of a show stopper for someone who works in web development.

I have CS4 Web Premium installed (Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc), and while they all start (splash screen, then application GUI appears), they all become unresponsive immediately and display the beachball.  The only way out is force quitting.

I ran Adobe Updater to make sure I had the latest versions, and I seem to be all up to date, but I just can't get any of the CS4 apps to run.  I did read on one forum that a clean install of Lion (Reformat drive, install from burned DVD/Thumb drive) fixed the problem for some users, but not all, and I don't have the time to spare on such a big operation.

Has anyone managed to get CS4 working on lion?  If so, how?

I upgraded to Lion as well last night, and I also have CS4 design premium (Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc) on a MacBook Pro, late 2008 model.

You must manually reinstall the Java runtime stuff in order for the programs to open (much software update automatically began installing them after I had restarted. Please see the link:

ADOBE CS4 SUPPORT FORUMS for LION

However, Adobe stated in that article that they probably won't release updates for Lion products in terms of fullscreen functionality, etc, but that those things will be included in newer versions of Adobe. CS5.6 anyone?


case insensitive `ls` for Catalina / APFS? I am trying to find a way to get either the stock macOS ls or (more likely) the GNU ls a.k.a. gls to show my files & folders in case insensitive order.

All of my efforts have resulted in lowercase letters being sorted after the uppercase letters.

⚠ There are lots of outdated answers which no longer work!

This same question was asked on this forum in October 2011 (and in August 2013 on Stack Overflow), but those answers no longer work on macOS in 2020.

What I've tried that does not work:

LC_COLLATE does not seem to have any effect. I have tried these variations:

LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"

LC_COLLATE="cs_CZ.ISO8859-2"

LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"

There was no noticeable effect at all.
Apparently ls -f or gls -U used to work for HFS+, although the output was supposed to be "unsorted", but apparently somehow in HFS+ "unsorted" was ¿accidentally? ¿coincidentally? case-insensitive? I guess? Whatever the reason, it no longer works, presumably because we’re using APFS now.
”Just pipe it through sort -f!” was never really an answer, but someone always seems to suggest it anyway. I want to be able to use all of the other features of ls/gls including color and -C which doesn’t work if we have to pipe through another command.

Is there some hidden method out there that I might have missed? Or does this functionality is actually not possible? The latter would seem extremely odd to me, but stranger things have happened, I guess.

P.S. - I use zsh as my default shell anyway, so if there’s a way to replicate this with zsh that would be OK too.

If done properly the LC_COLLATE method works:

Example:

user@host ~ % export LC_COLLATE="cs_CZ.ISO8859-2" && ls -la
total 56
-rw-r--r--   1 user      staff      0 Mar  1 20:39 bin
drwx------+  4 user      staff    128 Jan 30 10:51 Desktop
drwx------+  3 user      staff     96 Oct  9 04:40 Documents
drwx------+  4 user      staff    128 Jan  4 21:11 Downloads
drwx------+ 61 user      staff   1952 Nov  2 10:29 Library
drwx------+  4 user      staff    128 Oct  9 18:17 Movies
drwx------+  3 user      staff     96 Oct  9 04:40 Music
drwx------+  5 user      staff    160 Oct 10 03:22 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+  4 user      staff    128 Oct  9 04:40 Public
drwxr-xr-x+ 18 user      staff    576 Mar  1 20:40 .
-r--------   1 user      staff      7 Oct  9 04:43 .CFUserTextEncoding
drwxr-xr-x   3 user      staff     96 Oct 10 17:50 .config
-rw-r--r--@  1 user      staff  14340 Dec 26 22:14 .DS_Store
drwx------   6 user      staff    192 Nov 22 11:40 .ssh
drwx------   2 user      staff     64 Mar  1 20:35 .Trash
-rw-r--r--@  1 user      staff   2620 Nov 15 02:44 .zprofile
-rw-------@  1 user      staff   1544 Mar  1 20:40 .zsh_history
drwxr-xr-x   5 root      admin    160 Sep 29 22:22 ..

So simply add export LC_COLLATE="cs_CZ.ISO8859-2" to your .zprofile/.zshrc/... and restart Terminal.

If you use this locale you might experience some irregularities in shell outputs/history files etc.

Here (using mixed us_en/de_de locales im macOS) I got some irregular entries in the command history (i.e. .zsh_history) after entering German umlauts.

Probably the best idea then: create a new custom LC_COLLATE file.


How to load website from macOS as if using iOS for this particular website in safari? I tried to watch live stream from cbsnews, however installation flash is required. I don't want to install flash, so I set Develop -> User Agent -> Safari iOS 10 as usual try to deceive the website that I'm using iPhone. However it didn't work. How does it recognize the device I'm using?

Is there any way to watch this live stream without using flash?

I assume you have Google Chrome installed? Open the link in Google Chrome and click "enable flash." A "pop up blocked" message will appear at the right of the search box. Click on it and enable the website to use Shockwave Flash.

You do not need to have installed Adobe Flash using the Adobe Flash installer on your Mac for this to work.


Is there better third-party scanner software for OS X than Preview? I'm not overly happy with the UI for interfacing with the scanner on my Epson WF-3250 series scanner that's provided by the latest Preview that comes with OS X 10.10. It's clunky and awkward, crashes often. You have to reselect your options every time you use.

It's just, honestly, not very Apple-like.

Is there reliable third party scanning software that I could use in place of Preview for obtaining PDF scans of multi-page documents on the Epson's auto-feeder?

Edit: With OS X 10.9, Epson stopped shipping its own scanner utility. The ship a driver and instructions to use Preview for acquiring images on OS X.

You may also want to look into the excellent VueScan. I haven't had a need for it in several years but back in the day it was really one of the best there is. Looks like it is still updated regularly.


Removed Atom from Applications. How to remove `atom` command from terminal? Recently I started using Microsoft Visual Studio Code instead of Atom. So I deleted Atom from the Applications folder. However, I can still autocomplete the atom command in terminal. And searching for it with where atom doesn't give any results (command not found).

I tried looking for it in ~/.zshrc but nothing there points to atom either.

Any idea where I can remove that command?

Using iTerm2 and om-my-zsh.

Update

The output of type -a atom is atom not found.
This is after a reboot of my machine; the terminal has been refreshed.
The output of alias does not contain atom.
I misremembered the which command and used where instead. That was my issue. Accepted the answer stating this.

where atomwill result in command not found, true, but because the where command is not found; when using bash. A zsh error would have issued "atom not found"

Try which atom to get the result of /usr/local/bin/atom in bash.

That means you just need to rm /usr/local/bin/atom to get rid of that command.

(Atom.app install also apm, so be sure to remove that as well.)


How to uninstall Java 1.8 under OS X 10.10 Yosemite? There are a few answers on old questions about the same issue under Lion / Mountain Lion. Now with Java 1.8 and OS X 10.10 I wonder if anything has changed? Would be great to have exact removal steps.

It really is asked too much, for Oracle to provide a proper uninstaller?

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/install/mac_jre.html#A1096890 says

To uninstall the JRE, you must have Administrator privileges and execute the remove commands either as root or by using the sudo(8) tool.
Remove one directory and one file (a symlink), as follows:

Navigate to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and remove the JavaAppletPlugin.plugin directory.

Navigate to /Library/PreferencePanes and remove JavaControlPanel.prefpane.

Do not attempt to uninstall Java by removing the Java tools from /usr/bin. This directory is part of the system software and any changes will be reset by Apple the next time you perform an update of the OS

Done that. Looking good. I still think it's bad intentions behind not offering an uninstaller. Glad this is off my system.
Commands for the ‘Terminal’ly-inclined:
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/JavaControlPanel.prefPane


Is it possible to use Image Capture to scan over WiFi with an EPSON SX620FW, and how to set that up? I'm wondering whether it's possible to use Image Capture to scan over WiFi with my EPSON All-in-One SX620FW? If so, how can I set it up?

I've found instructions from someone claiming it works with their EPSON PX710W, but I haven't been able to replicate these. I can scan without problems over WiFi using the bundled EPSON Scan application, but am wondering if and how I could use Image Capture instead.

I've got an NX420, and I can use the scanner with Image Capture over WiFi. What did it for me was installing the drivers that came on the CD (the ones Apple included didn't do it, and neither did the ones on the Epson website).

You might try that.


How to invert colors of a picture on Mac? How do I invert the colors of an image?

I'm using macOS 10.13 and I wish to use built-in Apple software or freeware.

Open the image in Preview.app (macOS built in default image viewer).
Choose Tools → Adjust Colour ⌥⌘C.
Swap the left-most and right-most points on the graph.


Unable to force quit Chrome (Yosemite) OS X 10.10.4 I tried to force quit Google Chrome when it started to hang while the other applications (Safari) was working fine. However, it didn't shut cut as usual and just leaves me hanging. I tried to search this site and came across some solutions where someone recommended using the sudo command in the Terminal.

Tried the sudo command to force quit but it didn't work so I tried to uninstall the app using the sudo command. However, it did not uninstall the Chrome app instead, the Chrome icon flickers for a moment and changes into a blank document icon. Running out of ideas. Safari app is running fine along with the other apps.

Try with the -9 option:

killall -9 Google\ Chrome

You can also try killing all Chrome processes:

kill -9 $(pgrep Chrome)


"Couldn’t create temporary file." error when erasing free space on external disk I was trying to wipe the free space of an external USB 3.0 disk in OS X (Yosemite) disk utility. However, I receive the following error:

EDIT: The disk is formatted as GUID / Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and 1.1 of 2.0 TB are occupied.

Do you know what the cause / solution could be? Disk Repair returns no errors.
Do you know of a terminal command to wipe free space?

Thanks!

My first thought would be that it is a permissions error of some kind…

Either

the Drive is formatted as NTFS or ExtFS etc
The System doesn't have write permissions to the device itself

For the first, the simplest, if not cheapest solution would be something like Paragon NTFS or ExtFS or Tuxera NTFS

If it is a pure permissions/ownership issue, then for a removable drive the simplest fix would be to set it to 'Ignore Ownership' from the Get Info window. This should be sufficient to allow the system to write to the drive in order to securely erase.


How to set a new desktop image when creating a new desktop in Mission Control? When you make a new virtual desktop from Mission Control the background image is by default the same as your first desktop. Is it possible to have each new virtual desktop use a different (or at least random) image instead?

What I'm not looking for:

I understand I can select "Change picture: [time]" in System Preferences > Desktop & Screensaver, but that is not what I want. I want each virtual desktop to have a different image (when created, not manually) than Desktop 1 that does not change.

Edit: OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks

The only way that this would be possible would be if one of the options for delay between changing wallpapers to never. When you have multiple desktops and multiple wallpapers they will have different ones but they change. If there is no never option then you might just have to set it to the longest possible or whatever is convienent. Hope this helps!


Disable startup sound when turning on my Macbook M1 I am looking for a way to turn off that useless sound every time I open / turn on my Macbook.
This is a Macbook Air (M1, 2020) currently on Big Sur 11.0.1
I already tried something without success:

this script:  https://github.com/matteoacrossi/nobootsound
the simple command  "sudo nvram SystemAudioVolume=%80"

Someone can help ???
Thank you !

There is a checkbox for it in System preferences:
https://www.howtogeek.com/700255/how-to-enable-or-disable-the-startup-sound-on-mac/


Transfer MKV files to iPhone using Airdrop on iOS 13 & iOS 14 For some time I've beeing using PlayerXtreme in order to watch mkv videos on my iPhone 8 and I was able to drop them into it from my MBP using Airdrop.
But since iOS 13, my iPhone doesn't wants to save mkv anymore and claims that I need to download an app to read them:

Similar to this question : Transfer MKV files to VLC player on iPhone using Airdrop
How can I save mkv files on my app using Airdrop ?
Note: I'm still able to save them using USB. I tried with KMPlayer, Infuse, VLC and the issue is the same. I'm on iOS 14.3 & macOS 11.2.3
Since iOS 13.4 I manage to use Airdrop to share avi & mp4, but mkv still have the issue

It's odd that PlayerXtreme hasn't identified itself as a media player for mkv files.

I just tried it on my phone (iOS13) but I use VLC as my player.

Airdrop sent the file ok.
On the phone, the received file shows the VLC icon (showing that it recognises the file type).
It offers me the option "Open with Files" rather than "Save to iCloud Drive"

On selecting that, it opens the files app and I save the file to the VLC folder under the "On my phone" section of the Files app. The file then shows up in VLC.

"Save to iCloud Drive" is also (since iOS11) done via the Files App, so have you tried simply selecting that and then saving it to PlayerXtreme files location on your phone (if it has one, or a generic folder if not).

Obvious question, but did you update to the latest version of the player since the iOS13 upgrade?

Here's what my receive looks like, with saving to VLC folder in background:


Force keyboard re-identification in Catalina MacOS I switched from a Logitech keyboard to a Mac external keyboard on my macbook pro with Catalina MacOS. Every time I hit capitol M it types MZ. It could be the case that the keyboard is malfunctioning, but before I replace it I thought of trying to re-identify the keyboard and see if it helps.

MacOS user guide says this:

On your Mac, choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, then click
Keyboard.
Click Change Keyboard Type, then follow the onscreen
instructions.

However I could not find Change Keyboard Type in that interface - see screenshot below. I also tried this sudo command but it didn't work.

How I could force a keyboard re-identification?

I had the issue where I could not find Change Keyboard Type in that interface after migrating to new Mac with Big Sur and wanted to force keyboard re-identification.
Deleting /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist (as suggested above by JMY1000) and rebooting solved it. After the reboot the system ran the keyboard setup again and I could set the correct type.


Can the new 2019 16-inch Macbook Pro support 8K resolution? The Tech Specs site says the laptop simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and:

Up to two displays with 6016‑by‑3384 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors

Up to four displays with 4096‑by‑2304 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors

Since four 4K displays can be supported, I am assuming one 8K display can be supported. But I'm wondering if this can be done using one cable. The laptop supports two 6K displays, but this requires two cables, one for each display. Does this mean 8K resolution through one cable is impossible?

You cannot just assume that an 8K display can be supported just because it supports 4 x 4k displays - it doesn't work that way, I'm afraid.

As far as I know, no 8k monitors with a single cable solution exists today. That would require DisplayPort 2.0, which is coming with monitors next year.

So yes, at the moment 8k resolution through one cable is impossible.


Find information about host IP address? Is there anyway to ping a computer's IP and find out some basic information about it? Platform, OS, etc...

If so, how would that be done?

Using nmap from MacPorts you can run the following command to attempt to identify the OS of a remote machine:

sudo nmap ipaddress -O

e.g.:

$ sudo nmap localhost -O

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-08-07 17:58 CEST
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.000085s latency).
Not shown: 989 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
22/tcp   open  ssh
80/tcp   open  http
88/tcp   open  kerberos-sec
139/tcp  open  netbios-ssn
445/tcp  open  microsoft-ds
515/tcp  open  printer
631/tcp  open  ipp
3689/tcp open  rendezvous
5900/tcp open  vnc
8888/tcp open  sun-answerbook
9091/tcp open  xmltec-xmlmail
Device type: general purpose
Running: Apple Mac OS X 10.5.X|10.6.X
OS details: Apple Mac OS X 10.5 - 10.6.3 (Leopard - Snow Leopard) (Darwin 9.0.0 - 10.3.0)
Network Distance: 0 hops

OS detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 8.80 seconds]


How does Apple's Podcasts app's Auto-Download of podcasts work? 1) In the Apple Podcasts app, one of the subscription options is Keep Most Recent Episode.  Is this the most recent unplayed episode or the most recent episode in the feed? If the former, is there any way to get the latter behavior?

I subscribe to a couple daily news podcasts that I may not want to listen to every day. I just want the latest episode to be downloaded to my phone, so on the chance I want to listen, I'm listening to today's news and not last week's.

2) How often does it check for new episodes?  How do I ensure that it does check?  Sometimes I turn my phone off, and when I turn it back on again, the Podcasts app won't check for new ones until the next time I open it.  This seems weird; I would expect it to work more like the calendar which is running in the background syncing silently.

3) If 1 & 2 are not possible, is there an alternative app you can recommend?  Can I use the iTunes app without syncing to my computer, for example?

I'm not sure about your first question. I suspect that Keep Most Recent refers to the most recent in the feed, but I don't know for sure.

As for the second question, the Podcasts app adheres to Apple's rules about background/scheduled downloading. That is to say, it only checks for new episodes when the app is open. This is a power and performance optimization decision, and for better or worse, no third party apps are allowed to schedule background checks either (although in theory they could on a jailbroken device, but I don't know if there are any apps that do this). Apps can trigger background downloads using geofencing however (the same way Reminders can trigger an alert when you leave your office).

There are several other podcast apps on the App Store, which have finer grained controls for subscriptions, and so forth. Downcast and Instacast are likely the two most popular ones.


What are "Items" in OS X Photos? In my Photos library, there are some mysterious "items" that are not Photos/Videos. What are they?

My hunch is that they may be corrupted/unsupported video files, but I couldn't find a way to locate them and/or remove them :(

Turns out those are some .mp3 files- probably got carried-over from my Aperture library ¯_(ツ)_/¯


Deleting Local Backup Last Week I found that the local backup took about 20-30 GB free space on my MacBook Air and I deleted them using:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

I weekly backup my notebook using my external harddrive with Time Machine. Was it important to keep local backup on my Mac and spare 20-30 GB space or because I weekly backup to the external drive, it is not necessary to leave it open ?

Unless you are traveling and won't have access to your external backup drive, disabling the local backup is OK. I would backup your laptop with more frequency, however, unless all your data is stored in the cloud somewhere.

Lastly, if you take your laptop to work regularly, keep a second external HD in your desk and use Time Machine to create a second backup.


My available disk space does not make sense. Why? I have a 256 GB SSD installed in my Macbook Pro. Today I observed that Finder tells me that I have a free disk space of 247.51 GB, which is unquestionably wrong.

At the same time, in System → About this Mac, I can see I have 44.73 GB of available disk space. I think this number is more accurate, but it tells me that 202.78 GB of used space is backup, which is not right. I do not know the actual size of backup files, but my personal files take about 125 GB, so there cannot be 200+ GB of backup files.

I'm confused. What's happening to my computer?

Edit: This is the related snapshot, the size given by Mavericks are slightly different then yesterday, but it's still not making sense. I believe DaisyDisk's report is right.

The 256 GB SSD is the only hard drive that I have installed. I replaced the original HDD with it.

Edit 2:
Today the available disk space gone crazy. It shows that I have 265.06 GB available...

you are on a laptop using time machine. time machine uses local snapshots on portable computers. they are stored at /.MobileBackups if you want to have a look and verify how much space it is consuming.


macOS File Vault 2 full disk encryption does not seem to work I got a used MacBook Air 11 (2014) and the first thing I did was wiping the whole drive and re-adding partitions.

I picked OS X extended journaled encrypted which should be the same as File Vault 2

After reinstalling the OS (Mavericks) I've updated all the way to macOS Sierra 10.12.3 and added a second user non-admin user account.

Now the confusing part:

When cold starting my MacBook it would go straight to the login screen without asking for the disk password (how would that happen if it's supposed to be full disk encrypted ? I'm not talking about hibernation, I've properly shut down my MacBook)
The login screen would show the non-admin account and a Disk Password option, both work as expected, but it wouldn't show my admin account
a) After entering the Disk Password the admin account would show up
b) If I decide to NOT enter the Disk Password, I can still log into the non-admin account. More over, if I then log out, my admin account would mysteriously appear and I can log into it without ever using the my disk password.

I used the diskutil cs list command and it shows that my Logical Volume is properly wrapped in a AES-XTS encrypted Logical Volume Family

Now the question here is, is this really working ? According to some official (maybe outdated) Apple website it should ask for the disk password on boot up, before the login screen.

Output of sudo gpt -r show disk0:

    start       size  index  contents
        0          1         PMBR
        1          1         Pri GPT header
        2         32         Pri GPT table
       34          6
       40     409600      1  GPT part - XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
   409640  235298960      2  GPT part - XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
235708600    1269536      3  GPT part - XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
236978136          7
236978143         32         Sec GPT table
236978175          1         Sec GPT header

It looks like this is a misunderstanding. In the later versions of macOS it is difficult to distinguish the pre-boot unlock screen (where one unlocks the partition and is automatically logged in after the boot process) from the login screen (where the system partition is already unlocked and the user has to log into the system).

Furthermore, FileVault2 can grant multiple passwords the right to unlock the partition and grants this permission to individual accounts. You can manage what accounts can unlock the system disk in System Preferences>Security & Privacy>Enable Users.... That means your account password also becomes the password to unlock the partition. In any case you can use the recovery password, which is provided when encrypting the disk, to unlock the partition.

This answer provides a method to use a unlock key that differs from your account password.


Excluding /Library (sic, not ~/Library) from Time Machine Is there anything - at all - of value I will lose as a user, by excluding /Library?

Let's assume that rebuilding from the backup to a new machine is not important.

So, what is important is absolutely not losing any of my Notes notes, email,   perhaps Calendar materiel, etc., from Apple apps.

Specifically what will be lost if I exclude /Library?

(Perhaps some settings, or? Anything at all?)

Apple and third-party applications may have a variety of subsidiary files stored in /Library.
Much of it will be in /Library/Application Support.

Third-party fonts may be in the Fonts subfolder.

But there may also be Dictionaries, Color Profiles, LaunchAgents, Privileged Helper Tools, system-wide Preferences (including network settings), printer drivers, QuickLook and Spotlight plug-ins, AppleScript Scripting Additions, Frameworks, and so much more, depending on what you've installed. Anything for which there's a named folder!

My advice is that you probably won't save much space on a backup disk by excluding /Library, and if something goes wrong, it's easier to restore one file or one folder than have to re-install a whole load of applications and the OS just to be sure.


Wired memory in activity monitor Activity monitor shows me that I have 11Gb wired but only 5Gb used for 2 processes (others are neglible). Where are other 6GB? When I try to start new virtual machine with 500M RAM it says that I do not have enough so looks like this memory is indeed used.

Update: It turned out that Parallels was using 12Gb for windows by default. Still I don't know where to look for actual memory usage.

Difficult to find any hard and fast sources here but I think the problem you are seeing is because you are running two hypervisors at the same time.
There are various places online where you can find people discussing problems when people try to run various combinations of Parallels, Fusion and VirtualBox at the same time.
I thought this post from one of the VirtualBox developers was particularly interesting:

VT-x [the virtualisation tech inside Intel processors] is designed such that there can only be one entity using it at a time. That's why you can't use VT-x when it's already in use by, say, Hyper-V (and why Type 1 hypervisors suck :P ).
One relatively minor difference with OS X is that it's currently the only OS which has APIs to enable and disable VT-x. Windows/Linux/Solaris just don't care and everything is up to the hypervisor. But that is really a minor difference.
The short story is that VT-x is not designed to be shared (that's meant to be a security feature). Because operating systems typically do not offer VT-x management APIs, one and only one hypervisor "owns" VT-x on a given logical processor at any moment. The way to "share" VT-x is to initialize and un-initialize VT-x (aka enter/leave VMX root mode) around every execution of guest code. Hypervisor A comes in, enables VT-x, runs guest code, disables VT-x. Hypervisor B does the same. If both/all hypervisors do this, VT-x can be "shared".

So my guess is that the two hypervisors are trying to share the virtualisation features of the Intel chip in your machine, but one (or both) of them has caused the system to loss track of the resources on your machine.
I'd try closing one and then the other to see if the memory figures return to something normal. If closing both doesn't help, I'd reboot and start again.


Can Disk Utility Be Run Remotely? My daughter has a late 2014 MacBook Air, but lives 900 miles away.  I'd like to run a disk utility verify / repair, but I'm not sure I could talk her through it.  And since that's a lower level operation, we can't do it via screen share.  Is there any way for me to initiate / monitor a disk utility operation remotely?

the short answer is, yes you can..

first, you need to be able to remote into her machine using SSH and terminal.

If you're unfamiliar with terminal, just stop right here and hire someone - doing remote login disk repairs is not for the uninitiated. You're more likely to erase the drive (or totally corrupt it) than to repair it. you'd need to either do a screen share or do a remote SSH login, but this would be the most powerful/fastest method..

If you're capable in terminal, this is your ticket..

http://ss64.com/osx/diskutil.html
http://www.theinstructional.com/guides/disk-management-from-the-command-line-part-1


How to restart the Dock without using the command line? I know that I can restart the Dock using a killall Dock on the command line. I can also restart the Finder by Alt-right-clicking the Finder icon. Is there a similar way to restart the Dock without using the command line?

You can force-quit background processes using the Activity Monitor utility. Just find the Dock process (either sort the process list by name, or use the search field in the upper right), select it, then click the Quit button (the icon is an "X" in an octagon) in the upper left of the Activity Monitor window. It'll ask if you want to do a normal Quit or Force Quit.


Cannot remove item from Finder sidebar Note that there are other questions on Ask Different with similar issues, but this appears to be different to those - none of the solutions offered in the above questions solve the issue.

I'm using macOS Mojave version 10.14.1 (18B75). In the past few days, 'Desktop' has appeared in my Favourites sidebar in Finder.

'Remove from Sidebar' is an option if I right-click the item:

If I click this, the item disappears for a fraction of a second, and then reappears.

The same thing happens if I try to remove the item in the Finder Preferences:

And, unlike one solution offered on Ask Different, toggling my User folder in the Finder Preferences doesn't solve the issue.

How can I make Desktop disappear permanently?

Ok, I'm not going to pretend I know what's happening here but try deleting the file where that info is stored:

$HOME/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteItems.sfl2

I would bet that there's something corrupted in there.  Delete it, log out and log back in or reboot, and try to remove it again.  See if that helps.


My iPhone 4 running on 4.2.1 and I was wondering if I could restore the phone? My iPhone 4 running on 4.2.1 and I was wondering if I could restore the phone to the same firmware by dowloading the original firmware and holding SHIFT in iTunes and clicking restore???

You may restore your iPhone to 4.2.1, but you need the SHSHs for your device as Apple servers only allow 4.3 firmware at the moment, I think.


Monitor and MacBook Pro not on speaking terms anymore This one puzzles me.  I have this setup

[MBP]<----[HDMI]----[HDMI-DVI Adapter]---->[BenQ FP222W]

When I plug in the monitor, the MBP detects it and the screen flashes like normal.  Likewise the monitor detects "Input: DVI" and the backlight comes on. Then nothing.
I can move windows to and from the blank screen (they don't display, but they do move there), and as far as my computer seems to know, it's connected.

But here's the weird part, I've tested every component and everything works:

Monitor with new laptop and same cable -- WORKS
Monitor with my laptop and DVI cable (DVI to displayport) -- WORKS
Different monitor with original cable -- WORKS
Different monitor with just HDMI cable -- WORKS
Monitor with VGA cable (VGA to displayport) from different computer -- WORKS
Monitor with DVI cable to different laptop -- WORKS

What am I missing?  I've verified that all the outputs on my laptop work, all the inputs on the monitor work, and all the cables work.  I'm out of ideas (and also curious to see what other people think).

Just to cover a few bases, I tried holding the cable at different angles, I tried leaving the monitor off (in case the gremlins inside can be killed with a lack of electricity), and the monitor was working on Friday Jan 2 (then I was gone all week last week, and it started being picky yesterday morning).

Reboot the Mac with the monitor cable connected. That sometimes fixes it.


Inspect what a program is doing when it seems to hang Sometimes, programs (both GUI and CLI applications) will hang, and I don't really know what they are doing. The only thing I can do is to wait or kill them when I get impatient. Is there any way to inspect what these programs are doing, e.g. reading/writing files, system calls, waiting for something, etc.?

Why yes you can inspect running programs. It’s technical, but very doable.
Open up the Activity Monitor and look for the program you see hanging. Select it with the mouse / pointer. Then click the gear and rather than forcing it to quit, choose System Diagnosis...

https://support.apple.com/guide/activity-monitor/quit-a-process-actmntr1002/10.14/mac/10.15

You should be presented with a pretty lengthy Privacy Notice, which I recommend everyone read and make screen capture if you want to read later. Then let the process run. It first gathers all the time-sensitive information about that specific process - what it’s doing, what memory it has asked for, what files and network connections it may have, then this tool packages all manner of very detailed information about just about everything on the system. Logs, errors, file systems, network setup, etc...
The main items to look at are the samples - and if this is something you wish to do often, you can even get Xcode which has an “instruments” app that attaches to running processes to look in to them and determine why they hang.


When does encryption actually happen in MacOS/OS X encrypted volumes? I've noticed a sort-of lazy/post encryption strategy in MacOS/OS X with FileVault enabled and in encrypted Time Machine backups, and I'm curious when actual encryption happens.

When I copy videos from unencrypted external USB 3 volumes to my FileVault encrypted volume, my write speeds are 100+MB/s. However, I don't think my macbook (Intel Core i7-4980) is capable of encrypting that fast on-the-fly.
When I complete a time machine backup, a lengthy "encrypting..." step happens, but continues seamlessly after un-mounting/re-mounting. This is more obvious when encryption is happening, but is the data exposed until encryption is complete?

When does the actual encryption happen? Is there a period of time where my files are vulnerable unencrypted?

Actually your mac is capable of encrypting that fast (perhaps you're confusing it with encryption+compression).

Your processor has a special Intel AES-NI instruction set, specifically designed to optimize encryption speed. Looking at some performance benchmarks for that processor, the AES test performs at a whopping 8.87 GB/s multi-core and 2.94 GB/s single-core. No bottleneck there, but I can imagine some latency from processing thousands of small files instead of one big one like in the benchmark.

To address the confusion in your question:

While logged in, encryption happens on-the-fly whenever you read/write from anywhere on a FileVault2 encrypted disk.
Time machine transfers data unencrypted to the external disk, then encrypts after. My guess is they designed it this way to be more fault-tolerant with slower finicky external media.


Programmatically catch app opening / closing Is it possible, via an AppleScript, a background service or daemon, or any other programmatic way, to catch the following events:

a specific app (eg Aperture, Excel ...) being launched,
an app being closed or quitting,
an app going to the foreground or background ?

Purpose would to be change some system state/pref  (eg keyboard layout, screen profile etc) in an app-dependent manner.

Of course, suggestions of existing solutions are welcome.

You can obtain notifications of applications being launched and quit. Apple's TN2050: Observing Process Lifetimes Without Polling provides the detail.

The best method for general purpose tracking is with NSWorkspace and its NSWorkspaceDidLaunchApplicationNotification and NSWorkspaceDidTerminateApplicationNotification notifications.

I do not believe there is a trivial means to implement these TN2050's methods in AppleScript. You will likely need to write a small Objective-C/Cocoa application or use a third party tool.


Option + Z keystroke does not insert the ohm symbol/omega (Ω) Every article that I can find on web suggests the keystroke Option + z to insert that Ω symbol on a Mac. However, on my Mac, when I press that combination, I get the ˀ character. I followed the instructions in this article.

After changing my Input Source to U.S. (via System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Input Sources), the keystroke works as expected. Now pressing Option + z inserts the Ω character.


Connecting two macbook pros and a windows laptop device to external monitor I have a brand new Windows 10 laptop that I use for wok. I also have a macbook pro from 2012 and a new macbook pro with thunderbolt 3 ports.
I want to connect at least the windows laptop with the new macbook (and maybe the old one). My goal is to use my dell monitor, logitech bluetooth keyboard (which has a bluetooth receiver) and the logitech mosue (which also has a bluetooth receive that is plugged in).
What type of device(s) do I need to connect them? I would prefer something that makes it easy to switch between laptops.

Many modern Logitech keyboards, indeed many modern Bluetooth keyboards and mice include support for multiple pairings, you should check if yours do and use this, otherwise you will be limited in what swapping you can do because you'll need to disconnect and reconnect on each device and that will require trackpad/mouse input on both other devices.
The hardware solution to this is a KVM but that won't work with a Bluetooth keyboard, the software solution might work but will depend on one machine being consistently there is using something like Synergy Desktop app.


set different ringtone style like nokia? Is there a way to create styles like all nokie cell have?

I would like to create for example 3 styles:

Normal (normal rington with vibration)
Silence (another rington with vibration)
Reunion (no rington no vibration)

Is there a way to do this? Without having to go into settings and change manually it ?

iPhone 5 iOS 6.0.1

Using the settings already baked into iOS 6 you have three options of ringtone alerts. It is possible you could get more customization if you jailbroke it.

If you have the silence switch (on the side of the phone) off, then there will be a normal ringtone and vibration.
If you have the silence switch on (with the red showing), then there will be no ringtone, and only vibration.
If you enable Do Not Disturb, then there is no ringtone, and no vibration (see below).

You can enable Do Not Disturb by opening Settings, and switching on Do Not Disturb. You can customize it by going to Settings > Notifications > Do Not Disturb. By default, calls from your Favorites will not be silenced. This will need to be changed to "No One," in order for there to be no calls. Also you will need to switch off Repeated Calls.

Note that you can schedule Do Not Disturb also.

The only thing that isn't possible with iOS 6 (non-jailbroken) is substituting a different ringtone when it is on silent. The silence switch turns it off altogether.

Also keep in mind that this will not affect alarms. Alarms are quite stubborn and will go off pretty much no matter what.


iPad frozen after long pressing an app icon I have an iPad 2 with iOS 9. I wanted to uninstall / remove an app, so I long press the app icon. The icon started to wiggle, but the problem is the iPad no longer respond to any input. Tap, swipe, pressing the home button, pressing the power button, they don't change anything on the iPad. The iPad stayed on the same screen with the wiggling icons. After some time, the screen went black showing the apple logo, and then the lock screen showed and I can access the iPad.

Is there a workaround for deleting an app?

From Settings - General - Storage - Manage Storage find the app and delete from there.


How to choose which connection to use for SSH I have an ethernet connection which is restricted for a lot of ports (the most annyoing is port 22 -ssh- ).

I now have a Wifi connection which is unrestricted.

I want to tell to my mac, each time i use the port 22 via the terminal, to use the WIFI and in the other case, to use the Ethernet connexion.

Is there a way to do this ? (MBP Retina  end 2013, OSX 10.9.4)

The answer is :

ssh -b bind_address_of_wifi_ip ......


Apple Numbers SUMIF with multiple conditions I recently switched to Numbers from Mac Excel and a formula is not working. I am taking the sum of a range of cells where a SUMIF condition is met. The formula worked in Mac Excel but Apple Numbers returns an error "The formula contains a number outside the valid range." It's obvious that SUMIF condition syntax is not valid in Numbers, but I cannot find any documentation or example to correctly format it. I have looked at SUMIFS with the same result.
For example, this works in Numbers
SUM(SUMIF(A2:A114,{"Blue"},F2:F114))

but this does not
SUM(SUMIF(A2:A114,{"Blue","Green","Black"},F2:F114))

Please use a working formula example in your answer. Thanks.

This works.
SUM(SUMIF(A2:A114,"Blue",F2:F114),SUMIF(A2:A114,"Green",F2:F114),SUMIF(A2:A114,"Black",F2:F114))

Another example of why Numbers is inferior to Microsoft Excel!


improving wi-fi connection/reception no router or modem being used I believe my issue is different from all that I've read.  I live on a boat in a marina.  The marina has towers (transmitters) placed around in various spots.  The internet provider is Beacon wi-fi.  A big wi-fi provider for marinas around USA, Canada and Bahamas.

So I get my password from the marina and log in. I use a MacBook Pro laptop which has an internal wi-fi antenna.  So there is no router or modem on board my boat.  My problem is the connection is extremely poor. When I finally get connected the reception is weak. Streaming a hockey or football game is almost impossible. Loading a page of text can be fast as times but usually takes 15 to 90 seconds to load when it's at it's best.  A 2 minute utube video can take 30 minutes.

My boat is about 200 feet from the closest tower of transmitters or whatever they might be called. There are several to chose from on my drop down list.  I have to constantly keep selecting a different one to get reconnected. The PHY Mode is 802.11G The RSSI: is sometimes as good as -59  but usually around -80 when I'm actually getting as good a reception as possible.

I've tried this trick. I bought an external wi-fi (looks like a memory stick) and a USB extension cord plugged into one of my ports.  I then got a large kitchen strainer and poked a hole in it at the bottom and fastened the wi-fi gizmo to it.  Then pointed it towards the transmitters on the poles on the wharfs.  It did make an improvement but it was minimal and not consistent plus it cost $100 so I returned the USB extension cord and the external wi-fi. Anybody want a free strainer with a hole in it?

I contacted Beacon wi-fi in Dallas and they say everything is good at their end.  I've contacted the marina and they say everything is good at their end.  Does anyone have any tricks other than what I've tried to improve my internet?

I'd try one of these:

http://www.radiolabs.com/products/antennas/2.4gig/2.4-aluminum-parabolic.php

If you are not moving around, and can lock on to one of the towers visually, you could point this antenna at it and try to maximize the weak signal. Kind of like a shotgun microphone or a telephoto lens.