MacBook Pro Retina 15" (Mid-2015) New battery has weird metering New battery installed.
Charges up to 100%, runs down to 50% then suddenly instantly drops to 7% and stays there for about 2 hours. Battery seems to continue to work but metering is wrong. Tried all the usual tricks (Battery conditioning, SMC, PRAM, NVRAM, Reboot, Reinstall MacOS...etc) with no solution in sight.
Any ideas? Just a crappy battery?
Apple asked for $700USD for a replacement so I bought an aftermarket one for 1/10th of the asking price.

It seems you have already tried all the things that can be recommended in your case. I would assume your battery is faulty.

For anyone else with this model reading the thread: if you do have a Mid 2015 MacBook Pro your battery might be eligible for free replacement unter a quality program: https://support.apple.com/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-recall

You could check for the QP as well Vaultnaemsae, but chances are Apple is going to decline coverage as you already performed unauthorized service on the machine (and your Apple battery is no longer a threat as you took it out, which would be the whole point of Apple replacing it free of charge.)


How can I change the default search engine in Safari? Safari for OS X only offers three search engines:

Google, Yahoo, Bing

I want to use https://startpage.com as a default search engine to search directly from the unified URL/search bar.

Is this possible?

The AnySearch extension allows you to set any search engine you want.

It achieves it by listening to the beforeSearch event, canceling the default behaviour and checking your settings for your chosen search engine. Then it puts your query into the specified search engine and displays the results.

You could, too, edit the host file, redirecting form any of the default search engines to the one you want, but that wont be so neat.


Homebrew won't link git I am trying to enable autocomplete for git on my mac (currently running El Capitan) but I am having troubles with Homebrew.

So far, I have installed bash-completion and added the lines in my bash_profile, as seen in this post The problem comes when doing brew install git (although there must be another git installed in my machine sin I have used it).

After reinstalling brew, I get that git is installed but it's not link:

Warning: git-2.7.3 already installed, it's just not linked

I try using the command brew link git and I get this:

Linking /usr/local/Cellar/git/2.7.3...
Error: Could not symlink share/git-core/contrib
/usr/local/share/git-core is not writable.

Have anybody faced this situation before? How can I link git and what's exactly the "linking" problem?

I used brew doctor to see what's was happening..  It seems like there were some broken links.

The solution: I unlinked them, then I was able to run brew link git successfully. And now auto-completion works fine


Highlight first Google result in Safari In Safari 8, after doing a Google search from the navbar, the focus stays on the navbar instead of focusing on the content like any other webpage.

This prevents the use of Google or DuckDuckGo keyboard shortcuts to open the first result quickly, for instance. You need to click on the page content first, and then you can use the keyboard navigation.

Is there a solution to make it easier? Extension, shortcut, setting, anything?

If I understand you correctly, try OptionTab then down-arrow to the result you want and press return. There will be a tiny arrow to left of the selected link.


iCloud storage and backups My icloud account kept telling me it was nearly full. I had only 1 back up listed on my iphone (i don't have a mac etc) and the same on the dashboard on my laptop. I deleted the 4.9gb backup (nothing important- full of photos and videos already saved elsewhere) and now i have the full free 5gb listed in my storage. Does this mean my iCloud storage is now completely empty?

By default, iCloud storage is 5GB large. So if you're saying under

Settings > iCloud > Storage

you're seeing 5GB available, then yes your iCloud storage's been emptied.


Accidentally turned on Siri using an iPhone 4 (not 4S) I was using the Facebook app when it decided to freeze. Out of frustration, I clicked the home button multiple times. I got back to the homescreen with VoiceOver turned on ('Triple-click Home' was not set) and a second later, Siri loaded. I tried to take a screenshot, but Siri closed just before the 'flash' took place.

Has anyone else experienced this? Non-jail broken, iOS 5.0 on Verizon.

Update:

I have restored my phone a couple of times since this happened, mainly due to this issue: Audio output and volume controls gone after updating to iOS 5.1

So, unfortunately, any useful information contained in the crash logs has been lost.

Was it Siri or was it Voice Control?  Voice Control has been on iPhone since iOS3.

Siri on the left,Voice Control on the right.

You activate Voice Control by holding the Home button for a few seconds, even while the phone is locked.


Easiest way to transfer files from iPhone to Linux? What's the easiest way to transfer files from an iPhone to a non-Apple computer such as one running Linux?

Install VLC (free, open-source). Share/copy files to the VLC folder. Then enable WiFi sharing in VLC. Navigate to the phone's URL.

This only works for video files, though.

courtesy Anshul Choudhary


Re-Agreeing to public WiFi through login screens On board a train whose WiFi has two screens (click "Join", click "I agree") I have no difficulty from macOS. I'm offered the two screens each time and I click to connect.

But iOS (11.2.6) appears to simplify the login by automating the clicks, after a past initial login. This in turn seems not to go well with this particular WiFi setup.

The WiFi icon indicates that there is a connection, but I can't ping outside.

Tinkering with the settings in the following ways to (re-)establish the connection does not work:

Turning WiFi off then on.
Forgetting then reselecting the WiFi network.
Turning off "auto-join" and "auto-login".
Clicking "Renew lease".

None of these make me go through the click-to-join-then-click-to-agree screens.

How do I connect through iOS to this (public, unsecured) network?

This sounds like your iOS device may have some sort of ban on the network. From experience, you can set suspicious devices to be auto-banned. This is especially common on public networks. I would imagine that iOS tried to Auto-Join too many times and the network may think it is a DDoS attack. I suggest you talk to the transport company on why you aren't connecting to the internet. Of course, this isn't something that just everyone will be looking to talk to a transport company and I understand it's inconvenient, but I've run a network in the past that's public and that's basically how it works.
EDIT: The image shows our set duration of invalid attempts. We have set our network to ban the device for 15 minutes, although there are options to ban the device permanently (strictly that only administrators can unblock the device). These systems may vary, but work similarly.


How do I script the forced logging out another desktop user from OS X? We're running tests that require multiple desktops on a Mac Mini.

We're successfully using an ssh TCP tunnel to localhost, 5900 to 6900, to make Screen Sharing let us log into other users on this same machine with vnc://user:password@localhost:6900 and some Applescript to press the resulting dialogue buttons. I can detect successful login via ssh running a program under Java 1.7 with export AWT_TOOLKIT=CToolkit that tries to open an AWT window as the secondary user, which fails if the desktop isn't started.

This is fairly reliable, although I'd happily hear of more reliable methods!

Where things are going wrong:

We're having problems logging those robot users out, to leave the machine fresh for other tests that object to all the memory wasted by stray processes the users leave running.

I'm currently using

for i in $users ; do
  ssh ${i}@localhost "osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\"'
                                  -e 'log out'
                                  -e 'delay 3'
                                  -e 'keystroke return'
                                -e end" &
done; wait

but sometimes System Events apparently isn't running and refuses to start:

33:40: execution error: System Events got an error: Application isn’t running. (-600)

I've recently added -e 'if it is not running then launch' -e 'delay 5' immediately before the -e 'log out' but that doesn't seem to do a whole lot to help.

I thought replacing all that Applescript stuff with some variant of ssh kill -KILL -1 would work - at least as a back-up for the hold-out users whose System Events are broken - but it leaves a good couple of dozens of CoreServices, PrivateFrameworks, and Frameworks GUI-looking things running most of which refuse to die even with kill -9 manually aimed at their PIDs. I tried quite hard with a two-stage script, catching the output of killall -s to a file and squirting it into a second ssh session.

Is there a more reliable way to log these users out and kill all their processes? I have admin rights on the box, but I'd prefer something on the Unix command-line to avoid writing further painful AppleScript to manipulate the GUI.

Thanks!

I found what looks like a workable route, but it's indelicate:

Kill the 'loginwindow' process for a user (as root - the user can't kill its own process(!)) (note, the [n] prevents the regex matching itself), then use kill -9 -1 to catch the remaining mess:

    $ for i in $users; do
       echo $pword |
       ssh $i@localhost '
         sudo -S kill -9 $(
           ps -axf | awk "/^ *$(id -u '$i') .*logi[n]window/{ print \$2 }"
         );
         kill -9 -1
       ';
      done

It leaves two processes around

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mdworker -s mdworker -c MDSImporterWorker -m com.apple.mdworker.shared
/usr/sbin/cfprefsd agent

...which various mac pages claim are normal OS X weirdness.

I don't particularly like this solution, because it's so abrupt and I'm concerned about leaving things like iOS phone simulators or other files in inconsistent states, but the the absence of another answer, it seems I have little other choice.

At least I can use this as an emergency back-up for when the Applescript route fails, and the kill -9 -1 tidies up what Apple's normal but shoddy logout process leaves hanging around anyway.

I'll also note that doing anything with multiple desktop users messes up network connectivity for me, apparently due to Apple not bothering to think through how authenticated networks should behave.


Time Machine wants to decrypt the backup volume I replaced the ssd in my mbp.  Rather than simply restore from time machine, I reformatted and did a fresh install of Mojave 10.14, I like to start from scratch every so often and this seemed like a good time.

The computer is backed up via an unencrypted TM backup on an encrypted backup volume, which is an HFS+ volume on a HDD connected via USB.

Now I want to preserve the old TM backup, and start a new TM backup on the same disk. I want the backup to not be encrypted, and the backup volume to remain encrypted.

So I went to TM preference pane, click "select disk", click the volume, uncheck "encrypt backups", click "use disk." The OS throws up a modal that says "The password for the disk "DiskName" is required to turn off encryption." When I fill in the text box, the button "Turn off Encryption" becomes avaialable.

Again, the existing TM backup is not encrypted.

What happens if I click Turn off Encryption? And how can I get from here to where I want to be, with a volume that IS encrypted, and a backup that IS NOT encrypted?

The thing you struggle with is that you have a misconception that the encryption of the backup is separate from the encryption of the volume - it's not.

I.e. when you do encrypted Time Machine backups, the volume is encrypted - and that's the only encryption that exists.

So either you have encrypted Time Machine backup via an encrypted volume, or you have a non-encrypted Time Machine backup on a non-encrypted volume.

All in all this means that if you click "Turn Off Encryption", you're removing the encryption on the volume, which is not what you want. You basically already have the setup you're looking for which is an encrypted volume.


Use incomplete file path in terminal In terminal is there a way for Terminal to guess a file based on an incomplete file path?  For example:
Instead of /Users/me/foo1/foo2/foo3/foo4/TargetFile, is there a way to just do /foo3/foo4/TargetFile?
I want to be able to access the file no matter where it is.  Thanks.

If the file's path is relative to the current working directory your could use:

find . -name targetfile

You could wrap this in a shell function:

mylocate () {
    find . -name "$1"
}

# Usage
mylocate targetfile

In zsh you can use the globstar feature:

printf '%s\n' **/targetfile

In ksh:

set -G
printf '%s\n' **/targetfile

In bash4:

shopt -s globstar
printf '%s\n' **/targetfile


Which Apps on my Mac need security updates? I have a lot of software installed from sources other than the Apple Store. Is there a service to check which app have security updates ready to be downloaded? Opening each one on Fridays for a routine check sounds inefficient. For MacPorts, there is a script but I have stuff that comes from other sources too. Is this an unreasonable expectation to have? It seems technically feasible just to maintain a DB and query it with a list of package/version, package/version... getting back a list of update/version/url, update/version/url...

Edit: Better Option

I found AppFresh, which seems to do exactly what you're looking for, using a bunch of different sources, including Apple Update, Sparkle (which a lot of 3rd party apps use to push updates), Microsoft Updates and more. It also has the option of installing the updates right from the app.

Original Answer

MacUpdate offers RSS feeds of updates to all the software it tracks. You could use that, with something to filter for items matching software you have installed (Yahoo Pipes) might be useful for that) to give you a list of updates to any of your apps.

It's probably not a comprehensive solution depending on the obscurity of some of your apps, but it's probably the closest you'll get to a single source.

The other alternative might be creating a script that periodically checks provided URLs for all your software for any changes, then notifies you in some way.


How do I disallow screen sharing for Messages? Apple's Messages app is not listed among the apps in Security settings for Screen Recording. This would be the normal place for most apps to disallow screen sharing, but the absence of Messages from the list seems to mean that there's no way to control this in the normal GUI.
How do I disallow screen sharing for Messages?

Not exactly an answer, but reading documentation: Share screens using Messages on Mac I noticed:

You can’t send a message to someone who’s restricted by communication
limits in Screen Time.

And:

Tip: Don’t want someone to send you screen-sharing invitations? When
you receive an invitation from them, hold the pointer over the Decline
button, click the down arrow, then click Block User.

It should be possible to restrict your child (or yourself) with communication limits (Set up communication limits in Screen Time on Mac) and this way disallow screen sharing. Whether cost of doing it is too high is another story.


Understanding Processor specifications I'm not sure what a CPU-specification like "3 GHz Intel Core i5" really means.

Does it mean that there are five cores with 3 GHz each? Or are there 3 GHz distributed between the five cores?

What would be the equivalent, if it would have only one single core?
I mean: One can not say, that it is equal a single core with fifteen GHz, I guess ...

Side note, Intel's i3, i5, i7, and i9 naming schemes don't tell how many cores there are (they used to, I believe, but they weren't 3, 5, or 7). Cores are also almost always distributed in even numbers.

  3 GHz

This means the speed at which the processor runs at. GHz is Gigahertz, or billions of hertz. Hertz is basically the number of times per second something is run. A 60Hz monitor refreshes its screen 60 times per second. In the case of CPUs, GHz is in reference to the number of clock cycles, which can contain one or more instructions per cycle. This also means that comparing GHz is a bad idea, as with each new generation of CPUs, clock cycles are used more efficiently, and in different ways (between Intel and AMD and especially ARM-based processors)

  Intel Core i5

The CPU is made from Intel, it's part of the "Core" lineup, more specifically the i5 lineup. i[number] used to mean it had a certain number of cores, whether it had hyperthreading, and I think few other things. It no longer means that. An i5 can have 2 cores with hyperthreading or 6 cores without, and anywhere in between. Without more info, such as the model number (i5-2500, for example), not much else is known about the CPU. With the model number, you can look up various information about the CPU. This includes information such as the number of cores it has, which means how many individual threads can be run at once.

Even comparing two CPUs with the same GHz, core count, and generation doesn't mean they're identical. There are different processors for mobile, desktop, high end desktop, etc. A 3.0GHz 4 core laptop CPU runs with significantly less power and heat (and thus has less computing power) than it's desktop counterpart

To answer your final question, no, you cannot multiply GHz by cores. If we assume two CPUs are identical in every aspect except for core count, say a 3.0GHz 4-core and a 3.0GHz 8-core, we can't say that the 8-core is twice as powerful. Let's say you have a factory, which produces blankets. Each blanket takes 3 hours to sew. With 4 workers, you can produce 4 blankets every 3 hours. With 8 workers, you can produce 8 blankets every 3 hours. However, even if you have 100 workers, you still can't produce a blanket in less than 3 hours, since that's the time it takes to produce a blanket. This holds true for CPUs. Depending on what you're doing, you may not get any benefit from multiple cores. Some tasks can be heavily multithreaded. In our example, this would mean each part of the blanket could be made different people, then stitched together at the end. Other tasks cannot, such as growing a crop. You can have 10,000 crop fields, but you won't be able to harvest any faster than if you only had 1 crop.


Is it possible to exchange the F1, F2 key functions for the F3, F4 key functions ? I was wondering if I can switch the functionality of the F1 and F2 keys (brightness down,up respectively) and pass it to the F3,F4 keys; subsequently switching the functionality of the F3,F4 keys to the F1, F2 keys.
I want to keep the functionality of all the keys but swap their locations.
Is that possible?
My operating system is High Sierra V10.13.6
Thank you! (and sorry if the answer to this question is obvious!)

If third-party software is acceptable, Karabiner-Elements allows you to do this quite easily. You can manually assign each key's function independently, either to emulate another key or to activate a certain action, such as controlling the brightness.

Here's what these settings would look like, if I understand your question correctly:


Garage band app-file recovery? I dropped my iphone4s in water and when I got a new phone and brought back the GarageBand app none of my songs were there. Is there ANYWAY I can recover these files?

iOS stores backups in two places:

iCloud - sign in to your account and see if a backup of the device is stored there. With the files app on iOS 11 and browsable iCloud storage on macOS this might be the easiest bet.
iTunes device backup or sync - check iTunes on each computer you may have connected it to recently, when you sync to a computer, it will make backups of your songs and other data
iCloud device backup - restoring an iCloud entire backup of the phone data might also get you the files back or so you can export them elsewhere.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4946


Apple wired mouse only scrolls up My Apple wired mouse will either just scroll up but not down, or the opposite. What can I do to solve the issue?

This is a common issue with Apple Wired Mice (a.k.a. Mighty Mouse) products. There is no permanent fix, the issue happens when the mouse gets dirt from your fingers building up in the mechanism, and eventually jams.

You can fix it temporarily by following these instructions. There is a section "Magic Trackpad, Magic Mouse, Wireless Mighty Mouse, and Apple Wireless Mouse, Wired Apple Mouse, Wired Mighty Mouse", the instructions are in the second paragraph:

  If the scroll ball on your Mighty Mouse has become discolored or
  dirty, use a clean, lint-free cloth lightly moistened with water to
  clean it. Wipe the ball and the surrounding area, making sure to
  rotate the ball itself to ensure complete coverage. If the scrolling
  feels rough or if the scroll ball isn't scrolling up, down, or
  side-to-side, hold the Mighty Mouse upside down and roll the ball
  vigorously while cleaning it to help dislodge any particles that might
  have collected on the internal hardware. Watch a QuickTime movie
  demonstration of this procedure. (The movie is approximately 600 KB.)


How do I notify a blocked caller that he has been blocked on my iPhone 5? I have an iPhone 5 with iOS 8 installed and have blocked a person who is harassing me via my txt messages.

I do not have a phone number for this person as he is texting me via iMessage with his email address. This person lives in Norway and I in the US.

I have researched and have found that when blocking a caller on an iPhone the caller will NOT be notified that he has been blocked. He will receive a "message sent" notification on his end. I do not want this caller to have the satisfaction of thinking that I have received his message.

I also do not want him to have the satisfaction of receiving a text from me telling him that he has been blocked.

I would like for him to receive a message notifying that he has been blocked immediately after he sends me a txt.

Is there any way to accomplish this task?

No, this is not possible. Blocking a user will still deliver the message to your account, it just won't be shown. You can't prevent a message from being sent to you, except by creating a new account.


Dual login Windows and OSX on an Apple computer (not dual boot) A couple years ago I was using the business center of an Embassy Suites hotel. They had Apple computers with a dual login screen where I could choose to login to Windows or OSX. This was not a dual boot setup. It was choose at login. I have not been able to find a system that does this.

Do you know of such a system that makes this possible? Again, this is for a dual login, not a dual boot configuration.

I suspect it was a dual boot set up. This can be done via refit and would show a screen like this

You then get taken to the Windows or OS X login - but for both of these you can make this auto login so the process does not stop here and you go in as a user. In OS X probably as the guest user and I think this can be done on windows as well


Why can't my MacBook Air (Late 2010) stay cool? I have a MacBook Air bought in early 2011. Lately it just can't seem to stay cool. With normal load, the CPU hovers between 80ºC and 100ºC, and if I use iStat / Fan Control to turn the fans up to full, completely idle my laptop will still only cool to 75ºC.

I've opened it up and taken a look, and there isn't an obscene amount of dust in there, though I did give it a good vacuum and dusted it with compressed air. In particular, the part of the heat sink where the fan blows through seemed a little clogged, but I took to it with a vacuum cleaner. This hasn't had any noticeable improvement.

I'm wondering if I need to look into the heatsink, since the fan seems to run correctly (there was some dust caked onto the fan blades, but nothing that stopped it spinning).

Here's a screenshot I took of iStat:

Obviously the cooling system on any computer needs to be free of dust and fluff for it to work effectively but you've checked that.

The next stage is to remove the radiator and heat-pipe assembly to check on the state of the thermal coupling between the CPU and heat-pipe. Clean off the old thermal paste and replace using a thin, even layer applied to the CPU. Apple have had a few issues over the years with hot-running CPUs caused by excessive thermal paste, so don't put too much on. The idea is simply to fill in imperfections between the CPU die and the heat-pipe that would otherwise be filled by air (air makes a better insulator than a conductor).

A cleaned and re-pasted cooler assembly should bring your temps back down again.


Why are my passwords copied to the "Local Objects" keychain after using AutoFill? What is "Local Objects" after all? I am thinking about using Keychain to store all my passwords, but am hesitant as I do not seem to fully understand how Keychain works.

I created a new keychain holding login credentials for some websites. Using Safari, I made use of the AutoFill feature, granting access to the keychain.

Now the credentials that have been used for AutoFill have been copied to a keychain called "Local Objects".

What is this Local Objects keychain and why are my passwords copied into it?
Why are they already entries in the keychain belonging to Apple (like com.apple.account.SMTP.asynchost) – is this related to Keychain being deeply integrated into macOS?
Does this have any negative security implications, or: Should I care about this behavior?

To my knowledge, this is to put anything that can be synced with iCloud Keychain in a separate keychain. It is still technically part of the login.keychain, but kind of "partitioned" away in case you turn on iCloud Keychain and start syncing these items.

A lot of computer specific things are kept separate in the main login.keychain because having those show up on another Mac/iOS Device would cause it to misbehave since it is a physically different machine.

This is just based on my observation of macOS keychain. It only only started doing this when iCloud Keychain was introduced, and all the items in this second keychain will appear on other Macs and iOS Devices if iCloud Keychain is turned on. This second keychain changes it's name to "iCloud" when iCloud Keychain is enabled.


Yosemite: Corrupt quick look images Ever since my transition to 10.10.5 Yosemite, quick look keeps corrupting the preview images every now and then. Sometimes is persists until reboot, other times it goes away after a while. The image files themselves are fine and open and display in any application.

Any ideas?

Example:

This may help : http://encase-forensic-blog.guidancesoftware.com/2014/05/examination-of-mac-os-x-quick-look.html or https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1289781?tstart=0

You should be able to rebuild the so called ThumbnailCache on your mac.
This should work. hope this helps :)


External GPU for MacBook Pro? I am using a MacBook Pro 13" (pre-Thunderbolt) and was wondering if there is such thing as an external GPU? Possibly over FireWire or so, something that I could plug a monitor (or two) into but ideally does some of the work that would normally all be lumped onto the laptop CPU/GPU.

Probably a far-fetched idea, but it would save me buying a desktop PC as well as my laptop. I am currently using a cheap USB to DVI adaptor, which works ok, but is noticeably slower and obviously adds a bit of load on to my laptop.

The answer is no (correctly answered by @JFW), this is not possible using Firewire because the protocol simply does not provide the required bandwidth. However, when the day comes you purchase a machine equipped with Thunderbolt, continue reading.

Sonnet recently announced the release of several "add-on" components that make use of a Mac's thunderbolt port. These include a RAID assembly, an ExpressCard, and even a PCIe expansion bay, that can accept any PCI Express 2.0 adapter card.

Sonnet's product listing: http://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/

Village Instruments one-upped them by committing themselves to manufacturing exactly what you're in the market for. However, before you jump for joy, you might want to head over and have a read. While the card will outperform integrated cards provided by the lower end MBPs, they still aren't up to snuff compared to some of the bigger cards available for PCs.

Head on over and have a gander: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/92160-external-thunderbolt-graphics-card-for-macs-will-not-blow-you-away

So even with Thunderbolt, it is possible, it may not give you the bang for your buck you're hoping for.


FAT16 disk refuses to mount in Mountain Lion I've recently resumed a small OS-from-scratch-in-Assembly project I started several months ago in Lion. Part of the project involves compiling a binary file with NASM (the one that is pre-included), then creating a disk image based on that binary. The important point comes from the fact that the binary is written to the first sector of the image to be bootable from other hardware (the binary is compiled with a FAT16 BPB), which I test with VirtualBox.

Unfortunately, whenever I compile and try to mount the image in Mountain Lion, I get a dialog box that says, "The following disk couldn't be opened: boot.img — no mountable filesystems". I figured this was some oddity in my code, so I made a blank FAT16 disk image with Disk Utility, then compared my disk with the one created in a hex editor, then modified my code accordingly. Unfortunately, while it did manage to mount afterwards, my code no longer worked after making said changes.

So, knowing that I managed to successfully compile the code before (and hadn't touched it since recently), I popped into Time Machine and pulled my old working directory out. I tested the image in VirtualBox, and it works. However, I get the same mounting error. I found this very peculiar, so I copied the disk image to a physical drive, plugged it in to an old Ubuntu box, and it did, in fact, mount. I even sent the disk image to a friend (who is still running the latest version of Lion), and he was able to mount the disk image.

TL;DR: Why does a FAT16 disk image I have properly mount in Lion, but not in Mountain Lion? I tried mounting by trying open boot.img, hdid boot.img, mount boot.img some_folder, and mount -t msdos boot.img some_folder, none of which worked. I've attached the disk image in question via Droplr.

I eventually got the disk to mount whilst retaining compatibility with my bootloader. For anyone wondering, the compatibility conflict was in the FAT BPB (BIOS parameter block). Basically, the BPB has a field for specifying how many sectors compose a FAT cluster, where I manually supplied a value of 1. However, changing this to 4 fixed the issue. For more information on the BPB, you can see this reference page (you want to look at byte 13).

For anyone stumbling upon this answer randomly, this basically means that some older disks (such as floppy disks copied by dd) may not be able to be mounted by OS X Mountain Lion any longer. This is just a hypothesis based on observations of my own project, but hopefully this helps someone else running into this far-fetched issue.


Which part of my iPhone 5 screen should I take off? I'm trying to replace my iPhone 5 battery, but first I have to take my screen off. My screen appears to be glued shut on the right side, but from what I can see of the inside of it, it looks very different than the tutorials. So I'm starting to think I'm not taking off the whole screen. In the picture below, should I continue to pry #1 out, or should I pop #2 out along with #1?

The glass sits in the plastic guide underneath, you should focus on lifting the plastic guide first.
Once propped slightly up, focus on the sides of the guide because there are metal clips connecting to the enclosure of the device.
If too much pressure is applied, the plastic will break!

In other words, #2 should be your focal point.


How can I keep iCal from stealing/short-circuiting email invitations? Almost all of my email calendar invites appear in my non-Apple email that eventually gets routed and delivered to Gmail and by me to my Google Calendar, however, for some individuals, none of their invitations come through email but instead show up in iCal as transient popup notifications, despite their inviting me with my email address.

I have a hypothesis that when they invite me using the same email address of my Apple ID and they are on some Apple device such as a laptop or iPhone, that Apple sees the email and matches it to my Apple ID and decides to short circuit the email invite (never sending it) and instead just populate directly to my iCal.  I haven't tested this hypothesis because I think it would involve asking one of the few people I have this difficulty with to take the action and did not want to impose upon them if I could avoid it.

Does this hypothesis make sense, or if not, what else could be going on here and how can I stop this from happening?  My end goal here is that I get an email invite in all cases and never have my iCal automatically pre-populate.  My reason for this desire is that I do not use iCal but instead use Google Calendar and I end up missing these invites all together.  Maybe it is as simple as just changing the email address for my Apple ID to be an address that I never get calendar invites for?

Your hypothesis is very close to reality: it seems (based on ArsTechnica article) that the default settings in Apple's iCloud calendar service automatically push calendar alerts to Apple iOS and macOS users and bypass e-mail entirely.

The same article describes how to change the settings.

  Visit your iCloud account via a Web browser. Log in to iCloud and go to the Calendar Web app, click on the Settings gear icon in the bottom left corner of the Calendar view, and click Preferences. Click the "Advanced" button in the Preferences pop-up window. At the bottom of the window, change the Invitations setting for "Receive event invitations as:" from "In-app notifications" to "Email to [your iCloud account address]."


Shrew Soft VPN on Mac not letting me SSH to servers inside the VPN I am trying to use a VPN from work so I can do my work on my MBP. I have installed Shrew Soft and set up the VPN, and I am able to connect to it receiving the messages below. However I am still unable to SSH to any of the servers on the VPN getting errors like the ones below…

SSH Error:

macbook-pro:~ andre$ ssh root@prismweb5
ssh: Could not resolve hostname prismweb5: nodename nor servname provided, or not known

VPN Messages:

config loaded for site 'andre test'
attached to key daemon ...
peer configured
iskamp proposal configured
esp proposal configured
client configured
local id configured
remote id configured
pre-shared key configured
bringing up tunnel ...
network device configured
tunnel enabled

I am assuming that my traffic isn't being routed through the VPN, but since I am using a third party client, I'm not sure how to make sure. Has anyone else had any issues like this with Shrew Soft on Mac? If so, what did you do to resolve it?

You're referencing the SSH server with the name "prismweb5" - that name will likely only work if you have "search domains" setup for the network interface that you're using. The search domain would be appended to the hostname that you're referencing above, so if your search domain is "example.com", the FQDN would be prismweb5.example.com.

It's also possible that the DNS name "prismweb5" cannot be resolved from outside of the network. This setup may be referred to as "split-DNS", and the private name "prismweb5" may not be something that can be looked up on your 'normal' DNS servers (those provided by your home ISP).

A workaround for this would potentially be to set the DNS server that is at the remote office as the primary DNS server for the network interface (Ethernet, Wi-Fi) that you're using to connect. This will allow your machine to perform lookups of 'internal' names. I'm not sure about Shrewsoft, but many VPN clients allow DNS server settings to be changed to specific servers when the VPN connects.

Alternately, you can avoid using DNS names to connect to the server, and simply use the IP address to connect. However, this would require that you know what the IP address of the server "prismweb5" is (or be able to perform a lookup to retrieve that address).

If you are still not able to connect to the server using the IP address, see if your machine can ping that IP address (assuming prismweb5's IP is 192.168.1.5):

ping 192.168.1.5

If the machine is responding to pings, you should be able to connect to it...However, if you're not seeing IMCP (ping) responses, it's possible that your machine doesn't know the route to that computer (i.e., the VPN interface.) See what 'route' reports for that IP:

route get 192.168.1.5

The route should report an interface that is being used to connect to that device. Often, you'll see something like "ppp0" or "gif0" (or some other interface, other than en0/en1)

If the route for that device is not showing the correct interface, it may help to show all routes on the machine using netstat:

netstat -nr

The output of netstat may include an IP range/Destination for your remote network (e.g., 192.168/16), and may show the interface that should be used (Netif) on the right.


Configurator Stalled: How to force it to continue or quit? I connected an iPad to the Mac and ran configurator as usual, updating from a back up, however it stalled out at the "Restoring Default Data" step. I tried clicking the Stop button, and now it says it's "Canceling..." but it's still not doing anything. The iPad has the apple logo and a progress bar that's at about 80%. I was able to restore one of our other iPad without trouble after I pressed start, but I can't seem to accomplish anything. Can I unplug the iPad safely and "factory reset" it or something and then update from a back up?


Metronome app that "listens" I'm looking for a metronome app for my iPhone with a BPM analyzer, so it should be able to recognize if I play too slow, too fast or just in tempo.

Rhythm Sight Reading Trainer seems to do the job.

It's able to use microphone as an input device and other apps like Beatly or CrossBeat offer tap input only.


⌘+Delete does not work in Firefox Firefox, for whatever reason, doesn't support the OS X-standard ⌘Delete shortcut for deleting the current line of text.

How do I get it back?

10.8 with FF22, but this behavior has been around for a while.

It doesn't work for me either. You can use control-U to delete a complete line, but it also deletes the part on the right side of the caret.

Or if you use KeyRemap4MacBook, add something like this to private.xml:

<item>
  <name>firefoxcmddelete</name>
  <identifier>firefoxcmddelete</identifier>
  <only>FIREFOX</only>
  <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::DELETE, VK_COMMAND | ModifierFlag::NONE, KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L | ModifierFlag::COMMAND_L, KeyCode::DELETE</autogen>
</item>


How to create a new identity in macOS? I've done likely stupid things in Keychain Access and now I don't have access to identities:

user@host:~$ security find-identity

Policy: X.509 Basic
  Matching identities
     0 identities found

  Valid identities only
     0 valid identities found

I've imported my certificates from developer.apple.com, but identities are still not shown. I think I'm missing private keys, but I don't know what to do.

I don't seem to have developer IDs in place:

user@host:~$ sudo certtool y | grep -i dev
   OrgUnit         : Apple Worldwide Developer Relations
   Common Name     : Apple Worldwide Developer Relations Certification Authority
   Common Name     : iPhone Developer: ...
   OrgUnit         : Apple Worldwide Developer Relations
   Common Name     : Apple Worldwide Developer Relations Certification Authority
   Common Name     : iPhone Developer: ...

How can I restore identities?

Adding the correct developer identity preferences is done in Xcode.

Open Xcode
Select Preferences in the Xcode menu.

Click "Accounts"
If your developer Apple ID is not listed click on the "+" on the left and add it.
Click on the Apple ID and then "Manage Certificates". This will allow you to create the various required signing certificates.


How do I block notifications from a specific person (or in general) in OSx on Skype? I have an office computer with Skype running on it, and some of the contacts are personal. I don't want the messages from them to appear on my screen or pop up on the top right, even when I am in Skype (talkign to someone else). Is that possible? I don't mind blocking it for all contacts, if necessary, though I would prefer to do it in a more refined way.

Go to System Preferences > Notifications. There, find Skype from the list of Applications and choose it. Now, you should be able to customize what kind of push notifications (the alerts in the upper right corner), sound notifications, or dock badges you'd like to see, if any.


Any easy way to search for & replace characters in JPG file names in a folder? Have a MacBook Pro 15 (Oct2009 vintage), and am running 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

Is there an easy way to search for and replace chars in JPG file names in a folder file list?

I'm working with over 70,000 JPG images, and close to 1000 duplicate names must be corrected. My preferred solution is to simply change the name prefix of each from 642 to 699. None of my 3 image browsers/editing programs can do this. I've already spent more time looking for an automation solution, than changing them 1 at a time would have taken, but would prefer an automation approach if there is one. The finder search function works great, sadly there doesn't seem to be a replace function to go with it. I'm not a programmer, so am hoping there is something built that might do the job.

Finder is not the tool for this job, but I've always done this sort of thing via Terminal.

To be safe, you should have a backup of your Mac since the mv command will rename everything it finds, and if more files match the "642*" pattern, they will get changed as well.

Here is a snippet of code to get to the folder, find the files starting with 642 and do the edit one by one in an automated fashion. (Obviously changing the path to the real location of your images):

cd "/path/to/your/images"
for i in 642*; do
    mv "$i" "${i/642/699}"
done

This will move all images matching the wildcard 642* (meaning it starts with 642 and the rest of the name can be anything), and moves them in order to rename the 642 to 699. It will overwrite any files that already have the destination file name, so be sure that they are files you don't want.
This assumes that you don't organize your images into subfolders too; change 642* to */642* if this isn't the case.


How can I disable multitasking in iOS4? I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS4 and although I love most of the new feaures, multitasking keeps me checking for open apps.

Is there a way to disable multitasking support in iOS4 or a "kill all apps" app/switch?

You may be worrying more than you need to be.  Apps can only use multitasking for certain functions:

Playing audio
Tracking your location
VOIP
Local notifications and alerts
Complete a lengthy operation

In all cases, rather than the app remaining running, the system keeps it suspended and awakens it at appropriate times, such as when it needs to fetch more audio.  If the app uses too much CPU while it's in the background, it gets terminated.  If the foreground app needs more memory, then the background apps will get terminated as necessary.

The apps in the multitasking menu aren't necessarily consuming any resources or battery life, it's more like a "most recently used" list.  Apps will still be listed there whether or not they are actually running.  You can help prove this to yourself by turning the phone off and on; the recent list will still be populated even though obviously all the apps are terminated.


Does disabling auto-correct in Lion also disable spell checking? I found auto-correct incredibly annoying and turned it off soon after installing Lion on July 20th. Auto-correct is fine on a small touchscreen and I can deal with it occasionally correcting to the wrong word, I could not stand it on my real physical keyboard with my Mac.

Since then, I noticed that I am always having to go to the application's Edit menu -> Spelling and Grammar and check the "Check Spelling while Typing" option to get spell check to work and underline misspelled words.

I know that in iOS, if you disable auto-correct, it also disables spell check. Did Apple really think this was a good idea with Lion too, or is it just something only affecting me?

Update:

Going to Sys Prefs -> Language & Text -> Text and changing spelling from "automatic" to "U.S. English" and restarting seems to have fixed this issue for me for all but one app.

Notational Velocity seems to still not want to check spelling automatically without me explicitly turning it on from the Edit menu (in that app's preferences, spell checking is set to on). I'm going to assume it's just an incompatibility between Lion and the app. I just installed the nvALT fork and that seems to be working fine.

Glad to see that Lion didn't actually adopt that "feature" from iOS. :)

The two settings are independent for me.

What app are you using, where you're continuously forced to turn on spell checking? Most likely it's a bug in that app.


I can't update my Mac software to the latest version - Error occurred (102) Every time I click the update button to update my Mac software, a pop up shows up - An error occurred while loading the update (102).

I don't know what to do; I can't update my software.  I hope you can help me.

Launch Terminal and type the following command if
 you are running macOS Sierra:

 open `getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR`/com.apple.appstore

Move all the files and folders out of com.apple.appstore. Then relaunch Mac App Store.

You can delete all the files and folders later if Mac App Store works well.


does there exist an app that can sync to iCloud notes? Is there any app,
That iCloud notes can sync to ?
I wanted to have a backup of my iCloud notes
I know iCloud is already supposed to be a backup, but I have heard of people having problems or notes being deleted out of nowhere, so that's why I wanted another kind of backup
That could sync to iCloud so I could keep my notes on iCloud, plus somewhere else
Does such a thing exist ?
Thank you.

Firstly iCloud is not a backup.  It is a synchronisation tool.  Hence the problems you have heard about with notes being accidentally deleted and then gone for ever.
So you need a backup.
But this is not so easy because the notes in Apple Notes are stored in a database and not as separate files.
One solution is to periodically export your notes out of Apple Notes into separate files in another format and store them somewhere included in your regular backups.  For this get the app Exporter from the Mac App Store.  But this is a one way operation - the only way to import into Apple Notes is by copy and paste of text.
The problem you have highlighted is in common with other popular note taking applications (e.g. Bear) which store notes in a database and synchronise with iCloud.  Backup is not straightforward.
For myself, I have given up using apple Notes for anything I want to keep.  I now use Typora and have learnt to use markdown for formatting.  Each note is a separate file and backups become easier to manage.  But I have lost Notes' ease of use and synchronisation to iPhone.
Edit:
It is possible to recover lost or accidentally deleted notes.
The Apple Notes database (and other stuff) is located in ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes.  This is part of the Time Machine backup.  So there is potential to recover lost notes by using the content of that folder from a Time Machine backup.
Here is a process which I tested and works:

Delete an unimportant note (to simulate the loss of an important note!),
Exit Notes,
Remove Notes from iCloud (in System Preferences - Internet Accounts),
Recover the folder from Time Machine using drag and drop in Finder,
Start Notes.

Notes shows all the notes that were present at the point in time when the TM backup was done.  But it is not connected to iCloud and so can't merge the recovered database with any differences in iCloud.
Now:

In Notes, move the recovered note from iCloud folder to the "On My Mac" folder,
Exit Notes,
Reconnect Apple Notes to iCloud (in System Preferences - Internet Accounts),
Start Notes.

Notes merges Notes' iCloud folder with the content on iCloud, but leaves alone the recovered note which is in "On My Mac".  If desired this can be moved back into one of Notes' iCloud folders.
This is not a straight forward process and is open to error and the risk of losing all notes.  But it is possible if you need to recover an important note.


Retrieve Memos off ipod I have recorded a memo and while I was recording it. The iPod died. When I turned it on it show I taped something by show 0 minutes. I try to share and it says file is 2.7mb but won't let me share and I can't hear it. How do I retrieve this?

I'm not 100% on this but I think you can use something like this software called iBrowse that will allow you to view files from your Mac or PC. Assuming the recording is not somewhere in the restricted portion of the file structure, you can get it from there. The file should be .AAC format.

Another way, again assuming you have access to where it was saved, is to use disk mode to browse the files. Apple has a nice support page on that so I won't elaborate: Disk Mode

Hope that helps!


File and folder not showing in HTDOCS folder In HTDOCS folder, when I created a folder using php script, folder has creating successfully but it's doesn't appear, the folder is exist but it's just not showing, i know it because if i used spotlight search, it's appear and i can open it in different finder window based on click on spotlight search result. It's also happen when i copy some file, i know it because if I double paste those file, window confirmation ask me to replace or keep the file both. And this happen only in HTDOCS folder.

what is going here, i tried to show all hidden file but doesn't work. Can anybody help me on this?

So sorry im not native english speaker. I used OSX El capitan.

Try going into the Terminal and using the following command to unhide the folder:

chflags nohidden PATH_TO_FOLDERNAME

For example:

chflags nohidden /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/testfolder


Apple iPhone Calendar issue Somehow the calendar on my phone is showing only the 2015 yearly calendar. How do I get back to seeing daily schedule?

normaly it would be like this:

Launch the Calendar app on your iPhone.
By default, you'll normally see a month view.

Tap on the list button in the top navigation to combine month view with a summary view underneath it.

Any day you tap on will then show all the events for that day underneath it.

Tap the month in the upper left to pan out to year view.

Alternately, from month view, you can also tap any day on the calendar to view a day view. Keep in mind that in order for day view to work, you need to have the list option turned off in month view.

Lastly, tap the list button in the top of day view in order to view a scrollable endless stream of all of your events.


How do I access workspaces by number on macOS Sierra? I'm running macOS Sierra 0.12.3 (16D32).

By exploding the desktop (four finger swipe up on trackpad) and then moving the mouse to the top bar I can create/update/destroy my workspaces.

With a four-finger swipe left/right or C-left/right I can move to the left and right.Also with a tool like BetterTouchTool I'm able to set shortcuts to move left/right.

I'd like to create a shortcut to access the workspaces by number. For example given the following workspaces Desktop 1-4:

I'd like to find a tool or system event where I could jump right to Desktop 3 perhaps with a keybinding like Cmd + 3.

Does such a tool, or system event exist on macOS where I can access my workspaces by number instead of only moving left or right?

You can access different spaces in Sierra with control + number keys. But first, you must enable it in the Keyboard shortcut settings:

Go to Keyboard Settings (System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts)
Select Mission Control from the left column of choices.
Check these boxes: Switch to Desktop 1, Switch to Desktop 1

You can now use switch between spaces using short keys.


How to get (logical) screen size from a shell script? Using system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType, I can retrieve the size of a Mac's display in pixels.
However, the command

tell application "System Events" to get the size of every window of every process

(which I execute from my bash script using osascript) apparently does NOT return window sizes in pixels. It seems to be some other units. According to my experiments, on my MacBook Pro Retina, for instance, a fullscreen app (e.g., Keynote presentation) has a window size of 1680 x 1050.

So, the question is: how can I determine the screen size of a Mac from my bash script in the same units like the tell application ... uses?
Or, how can I determine the factor by which I have to convert pixels into those other units?

You can get the screen size with this command

fullscreen_size=$( osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to get bounds of window of desktop' )

in the same units as tell application "System Events" ....


Sidebar items disappeared My finder sidebar items have all disappeared apart from Google Drive, network and my laptop disk...
Everything else has gone e.g. desktop, downloads, applications etc etc. I have been into Finder preferences and all items are checked and cannot work out what is going on...
Any help appreciated!

You most likely have collapsed all favorite items. Simply hover right next to favorites, until a small arrow appears. Click on it and all selected items in the settings should fold out.


How to use iSight webcam without activating the green light? Recently a the Dutch government advised to put a tape on your webcam to prevent hackers from taking pictures and video using your device (news article in Dutch).

The build in iSight camera in Apple laptops have a green light next to the camera, this light turns green when you use the camera.

Is it possible to use the camera without the activation of the green light? Personally I think the green light turns on when the sensor requires power and this is hardwired in the hardware. Am I wrong?

I have found similar questions on stackexchange, but I found non that answer this specific question.

"iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED" is a paper by Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway from the Johns Hopkins University. In this paper they explain on how to disable the LED when using the camera. In short: normally you use the CPU to access the camera and activate the LED, but you can also use the processing unit in on the camera board itself and this will not activate the green LED. The authors also provide software to protect you against these problems.

iFixit had the same question and their answer was also based on the same paper:

  according to the researchers, the vulnerability they discovered affects “Apple internal iSight webcams found in earlier-generation Apple products, including the iMac G5 and early Intel-based iMacs, MacBooks, and MacBook Pros until roughly 2008.” While the attack outlined in the paper is limited to these devices, researchers like Charlie Miller suggest that the attack could be applicable to newer systems as well. “There’s no reason you can’t do it -- it’s just a lot of work and resources but it depends on how well [Apple] secured the hardware,” Miller says.

In short: Yes, the iSight can be used without green light as it is not hardwired.


Are there less expensive alternatives to Apple-branded Mini DisplayPort adapters? I have a 2 years old 13" macbook pro, and I admit I can't use my 6 months old PC when I just surf and code, since it's quite noisy and hot in the summer.

I still have a nice 20" flat monitor, and it'd be nice to use it, but Apple sells their adaptor 30 euros, isn't that a little bit expensive ? I'm reading this connector is not patented or licensed, do you think I can find cheaper ones ?

I'm with you. I don't know why Apple has such a high mark-up for a simple adapter. But you can get them for substantially cheaper through aftermarket, 3rd party sellers.

I purchased a Mini DisplayPort to DVI through Monoprice for $6.65 USD while Apple wanted $99 USD for theirs (which strangely came with a USB "extender" I had no use for). I thought it was a typo!

Here's a full list of available Mini DisplayPort adapters from Monoprice.

They also provided free shipping and the while the quality of the adapter is not the same as apple's is it quite decent (reminiscent of a standard computer peripheral component from the 90's). But most importantly, it works just fine!


10.6.8 update caused ethernet outage After an update to 10.6.8 my ethernet stopped working. I understand this affected millions of mac users. Is there a way to revert in OSX? This is the newest MBP 13" 2.7 GHz i7.

A brute force way of dealing with this is to call Apple and open a ticket.  I've done this in the past on Macs w/o Applecare.

The upside is they are best positioned to help you and it puts you in the best position to get it resolved.

There's a fee if you don't have Applecare.  My suggestion is to agree to the fee and  after they've got you up and running, ask that they to waive the fee in light of whatever they had to do to fix the problem.


Battery Issue - Low level issue I have installed Xubunto instead of Machintosh on my MacBook Pro machine, when i close the screen the apple lamp on the back of my laptop doesn't goes off, and the laptop runs out of power. how can i control this back lamp to be on or off ??, is there away to disable it from my Linux ?

The Apple logo lights up when the screen is on, so what's happening is that your screen isn't turning itself off. This usually happens when the power management extensions aren't loaded in the operating system, and issues with sleep are one of the biggest indicator of this.

Have a look at this page : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro. It could be of help. The procedures should remain the same for Xubuntu as for Ubuntu, so don't worry about that.


How to escape password for smb mount I want to mount a SMB share with different user credentials. Therefore I want to use

mount -o nodev,nosuid -t smbfs //user:pass=<word@host/share /mnt/share

However, this command fails:

-bash: word@host/share: No such file or directory

When trying to pass the password via a variable, I get:

$ export PWD="pass=<word"
$ mount -o nodev,nosuid -t smbfs //user:$PWD@host/share /mnt/share
mount_smbfs: URL parsing failed, please correct the URL and try again: Invalid argument

mount on other systems seems to accept username and password as mount options, like:

$ mount -o nodev,nosuid,domain=mydomain,username=user,password="pass=<word" -t smbfs //host/share /mnt/share

or via a credentials file:

$ cat credentials.txt
username=user
password=pass=<word
domain=mydomain
$ mount -o nodev,nosuid,credentials=./credentials.txt -t smbfs //host/share /mnt/share

However, both ways are not available with macOS' mount:

mount_smbfs: -o credentials: option not supported
mount_smbfs: -o domain: option not supported
mount_smbfs: -o username: option not supported
mount_smbfs: -o password: option not supported

So the question is: How to provide the password to macOS' mount_smbfs? I'm aware that changing the password would solve the problem, but for reasons this is not an option.

Slightly offtopic, but maybe useful if you want to stick to putting credentials with special chars in a Shell variable.
Regarding your bash commands I will point you to several topics:

PWD is a always present ENV variable showing the current working
directory (Print Working Directory). Omit using that name for a PassWorD variable :-).
There is a significant difference in using double quotes and single
quotes. Double quotes embrace a string, which also can contain expandable variable names and is always subject to escape problems. Single quotes define a fix string and will be treated as such, e.g. no variable expansion will be done.

Example:

# fix string
tatooine-2257:~ mallert$ export P='<word'
tatooine-2257:~ mallert$ echo $P
<word
# no variable expansion
tatooine-2257:~ mallert$ export P='<word $PWD'
tatooine-2257:~ mallert$ echo $P
<word $PWD
tatooine-2257:tmp mallert$ echo $PWD
/tmp

Finally - treat variable names in expansion distinguishable from usual text like referring to ${variablename}. (Bourne Shell style)
Try open 'smb://username:password@server/share' - it creates the volume mount for you. If you omit the password, Finder will ask you for it.


Is the current version of Messages beta stable enough to use day to day? Is messages version 6.1 (11D1069) stable for someone that doesn't mind iChat and FaceTime currently?

I am happy with iChat and FaceTime on my mac and don't really need the iMessage integration presently. I back up with Time Machine regularly and know the general risks that beta software can have glitches or worse, lose data. I've researched all the features, so I'm not looking for why or why not the program is better - just the stability aspect of it in use.

Does anyone have specific recommendation for someone who prefers to run more stable software on their macs? I'm normally glad to help test beta software, but in this case the general buzz I'm hearing from the people that the program is still a little rough and new features are not compelling enough to run full time given the current bugs.

Would you share some specifics about why or why not the program is stable enough for use based on your actual experience with the App.

I am running Messages via Mountain Lion, but I believe that the application is functionaly identical to the Beta for Lion.

I have the following regular issues with it in day to day usage:

Badge counts are inconsistent, and it often says "1" regardless of reality
Icon Bounce - it bounces in the dock a lot as if something has happened, when nothing (that I can see) has
Slow syncing - when I have used iMessages on my phone, and then move to the desktop, it drip feeds the messages it needs to see to catch up really slowly, and you get a notification every 10 seconds or so for what can be a very long time if there is a lot to catch up on

Also, at least once (though this could have been a ML bug) it started using the wrong icon, showing a picture of a friend in place of my own avatar against my own messages.  Investigation showed the "me" card had been ammended in Contacts...


Using git on the iPhone I have a jailbroken iPhone 3GS running 4.0.1, and I recently installed git from Cydia just for fun. I've noticed in recent weeks that a number of developers have been throwing their theme/plugin source code up on GitHub, which is theoretically awesome because updating is a 2-command process (cd /private/var/stash/Themes/<theme>.theme/ and git pull) that can be done on the phone itself.

But when I try to clone a repo, this happens:

Dylan:/private/var/stash/Themes root# git clone "http://github.com/dcinzona/LockInfo-Status-Bar-Icons---Winterboard-Theme.git/GMT Statusbar Icons.theme"Initialize GMT Statusbar Icons.theme/.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /private/var/stash/Themes/GMT Statusbar Icons.theme/.git/
error: File 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (http://github.com/dcinzona/LockInfo-Status-Bar-Icons---Winterboard-Theme.git/GMT Statusbar Icons.theme/objects/00/00000000000000000000000000000000000000) corrupt
Getting pack list for http://github.com/dcinzona/LockInfo-Status-Bar-Icons---Winterboard-Theme.git/GMT Statusbar Icons.theme
Getting alternates list for http://github.com/dcinzona/LockInfo-Status-Bar-Icons---Winterboard-Theme.git/GMT Statusbar Icons.theme
Also look at   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitiona
Also look at <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lan
Also look at
Brought to you by GitHub</
Also look at
The GitHub Blog</
Also look at
Support</
Also look at
Contact Us</
Getting pack list for   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitiona
error: Protocol   "http not supported or disabled in libcurl
Getting pack list for <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lan
error: Couldn't resolve host '<html xmlns="http:'
Getting pack list for
Brought to you by GitHub</
error: Couldn't resolve host '
<a href="http:'
Getting pack list for
The GitHub Blog</
error: Couldn't resolve host '
<a href="http:'
Getting pack list for
Support</
error: Couldn't resolve host '
<a href="http:'
Getting pack list for
Contact Us</
error: Couldn't resolve host '
<a href="http:'
error: Unable to find 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 under http://github.com/dcinzona/LockInfo-Status-Bar-Icons---Winterboard-Theme.git/GMT Statusbar Icons.theme
Cannot obtain needed object 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
fatal: Fetch failed.

Can anyone tell me why? Am I missing something?

It looks like github is sending you back the 404 page because you're requesting it specifically over http. Try this url instead:

git://github.com/dcinzona/LockInfo-Status-Bar-Icons---Winterboard-Theme.git/GMT Statusbar Icons.theme


How to Set a Short User Password in macOS Mojave and Later (10.14+) I just installed macOS Mojave and put in my usual short desktop-only password I've been using for years (yes, you read that right). Now though, the operating system rejects setting a password less than 4 characters. It also does not allow having no password at all.

I am completely comfortable using the shell if need be.

How can I change the password policy to allow quite short passwords?

You can also use the much more straightforward command:

pwpolicy -clearaccountpolicies

to remove the 4-character requirement for all users.  The man page gives other useful examples if you want to change the policy on a per-user basis.


Windows aren't quite maximized when opened When I open window in a program, I typically want it to take up my entire screen (but not be in full screen mode, just maximally sized)

Instead, there is a thin gap at the left edge of the screen. It seems like the edge it is on follows the dock, as my dock is on the left edge, and if I move the dock to the right edge, the gap moves to the right edge. but whatever is causing this, I have to use a shortcut to remove that thin gap every time I open a window (I use a 3rd party app to make it quick but I'd still like it to "just work" when I open the window). Does anyone have any solutions to change this behaviour?

As a recent Mac convert, I completely feel the pain of unmaximized windows. I get why this works for some, especially long time Mac users and never-did-Windows folks. But for me, this was a serious pain, along with all the other nuances I've been suffering through during an incredibly busy work season as well.

I just discovered an app called GreenOrbmax, which basically reworks the green + button in a window to make it maximize, in the same manner in which I was accustomed to in Windows.

This might not be the solution you desire - if you find one, please post it, because I'm in. But this seems to be a reasonable solution for now, and since you didn't specify what 3rd party app you were using, I thought I'd share it with you.

Note: it does not seem to maximize Preview windows 100%.


Is my hard drive already dying? Although everything is working fine with my Macbook Air from Mid-2013, I have a few errors that bother me.

Here they are:

Onyx says this:

  The SMART status was not verified because it is not supported by this hard disk.

But the system report writes this:

disk0s2:
  Media Name:   APPLE SSD SD0256F Media
  Size: 250,14 GB (250 140 434 432 bytes)
  Medium Type:  SSD
  Protocol: PCI
  Internal: Yes
  Partition Map Type:   GPT (GUID Partition Table)
  Status:   Online
  S.M.A.R.T. Status:    Verified
  PV UUID:  4F6EBACC-CA60-4DE6-95BF-37F42D820284

After installing smartmontools:

smartctl disk1 -a
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

So SMART seems good, maybe onyx is in fault. But my cksum mismatch problem is still here

When I run disk utility and I perform a verification on my hard drive I always get this:

  Invalid Disk Label @ 250123653120: cksum mismatch

And sometimes if I wait enough time (a few days) after a repair (with the cmd+R on boot utility) I get this kind of error:
Incorrect block count for file (...)

This last problem seems to happen with files I downloaded and most likely which I didn't finish to download.

What I think:
When Yosemite came out I installed it, but since I found that even resizing a window wasn't as smooth as on Mavericks I decided to downgrade using my Time Machine backup.

Do you think upgrading back to Yosemite would fix all this? And would I still find this kind of performance?

Edit: If it is a good idea, I have no problem with doing a clean install of Yosemite.

Thanks in advance for your help. My Mac is still young and I don't want him to be sick.

You file system is corrupted, hardware is probably fine. Backup, wipe and restore.


Different UI for same version of YouTube official iOS app I have the same version (10.22.11614) of the official YouTube app in my iPhone 6 and iPhone 5, but the UI is not same in both of my phones.

My iPhone 5 has the new material design and my iPhone 6 has the old UI.

Why for the same version I'm having two different UIs?

iPhone  5

iPhone 6

According to this blog Google is testing the Material Design YouTube app.

One of my phone is part it the other one is not.


Items copied from CD as read only I have a CD that when the items are copied to the desktop (OS 10.6) the items are marked as read only. The CD is UDF formatted and I have read the following on another site:

  The Mac simply doesn't understand the UDF format which is widely used
  by many Windows and Linux computers, along with various consumer DVD
  burners, video cameras and other devices. OS X gets confused when
  reading files, thinking they have read-only privileges or locked files
  or different owners, depending on what software was used to write the
  disc. Other systems don't suffer from this problem because they fully
  implement the 13-year-old UDF standard, but OS X doesn't.

Is there any way to get copied items to inherit permission of the folder that they are being copied to? I don't want to have to modify permissions everytime files are copied.

One way would be to copy the files from the command line using rsync: It supports a flag --chmod, so you can say, e.g.,

rsync -a --chmod=u+w /Volumes/name-of-the-CD/ /wherever/

to turn on writable flag for the user (you). Beware, though, that rsync takes a while getting used to, especially when recursively copying directories. Whether or not you end the name of the source directory with a slash actually makes a difference …


Automatically press a key every 60 seconds Is it possible via Automator, an app, applescript, etc. to automatically press a key (i.e. "g") every 60 seconds?

You can do this in AppleScript, iff you've enabled access for assistive devices:

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "," using command down

This will (obviously) invoke cmd-,.

If, for some reason, you can't enable access for assistive devices, then it's pretty easy to do this in code (by creating a CGEventRef and then posting it to the system, essentially).  If you'd like help with that, then head over to stackoverflow.com, where that question has been asked a few times.

As for getting this to happen every 60 seconds, you could turn it into a launch agent and let launchd do it for you:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
 "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.stackexchange.apple.12692</string>
    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/usr/bin/osascript</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>osascript</string>
        <string>-e</string>
        <string>tell application "System Events" to keystroke "," using command down</string>
    </array>
    <key>ServiceDescription</key>
    <string>Auto Keypress</string>
    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Second</key>
        <integer>0</integer>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Toss that in ~/Library/LaunchAgents and you should be good to go (once you load the plist and/or log out and log back in).


itunes backup password I was trying to restore a backup from my computer to my iphone , however it's set to be password protected. I do not know the password, as I've never set one. I've tried all the passwords I know, which I've ever used to make sure I didn't set it. Nothing worked. any advises

If you never set one, it then should be the passcode you used to unlock your phone (the 4-6 digit PIN) when you performed the back up.

If that doesn't work, look in your Keychain Access app, in your Utilities folder. Launch it, search for "iphone backup", and chances are you'll get a match. Open the item, click "show password" and enter your Mac system password.


Handoff of completed Reminder items not working? I have a MBP running MacOS Sierra (10.12.1) and an iPhone 6 running iOS v10.1.1. Over the past few months or so, I've noticed that marking a Reminder as complete on either of those devices does not clear the notification on the other, nor does it mark the reminder as complete on the other. I'm not sure why.

Both devices are with me and using the same wifi (the vast majority of the time). Handoff is enabled on my iPhone. The Reminders app on both devices syncs to iCloud.

I can answer calls and texts on my Mac and when I open Safari on iOS, I can access the open tab on my Mac as expected. This makes me think that, generally speaking, Handoff is working as expected, but not for Reminders.

Is there something else I might be missing?

To clarify - Syncing reminders between apple devices is not part of handoff. It is based on iCloud sync only. Handoff is something that happens when your devices are on same WIFI and also use same apple id as primary iCloud account (Concept of primary iCloud account applies to macOS only as it supports multiple iCloud accounts). Calls and messages use Handoff.

Solution 1

Now to your problem, you might have multiple apple ids (accounts) on your devices and reminders might be using different apple ids in different devices.

To verify on your macOS -

Goto System Preferences -> Internet Accounts
Check the iCloud accounts and make sure the correct iCloud account has reminders enabled.
If you are using more than one iCloud accounts, then open Reminders app on macOS and check on lists on the left menu for the
iCloud account being used. It would of the format iCloud (<account name>). You could also migrate the reminders to correct iCloud
account by drag/drop and then uncheck the unwanted iCloud account
for reminders in settings as stated in (1) & (2) above.

To verify on your iPhone -

Goto settings -> iCloud
Make sure reminders is turned on and the account is correct and same as on macOS

Solution 2

Toggle reminders in iCloud settings on your devices one by one and see if the sync starts again. The steps to access the settings is same as above.

Hope this helps.

Update: Added second solution of toggling reminders


What cable to connect 13-inch Macbook Pro 2018 and 34-inch 3440x1440 monitor? I have a Macbook Pro 13-inch 2018 edition with four Thunderbolt 3 ports.
I've just bought an Iiyama 34-inch 3440x1440 monitor. It has two HDMI ports and one DisplayPort. What cable should I buy to connect the two?
I'm considering this DisplayPort-Thunderbolt cable, but it says the supported resolution depends on the device and I'm not sure how to check whether the Macbook will support it.

Your Mac can easily handle a 3440x1440 monitor (in terms of resolution), using Thunderbolt-C to DisplayPort as linked in your question.
For information about the specifications of your computer, see Apple's Website.
You can have one monitor at 5120x2880x60Hz (billions of colours), up to two monitors at 4096x2304x60Hz (millions of colours), or up to two displays at 3840x2160x60Hz (Billions of colours)
Also, the MacBook Pro is listed as a compatible device on the listing for that cable


Installed new SSD, but I have no Snow Leopard disk. Can I install Lion from Internet? I've just installed a 128GB SSD onto my 2009 MacBook Pro. I've run into an issue.

I was under the impression you can install Lion over the Internet on a fresh install. I've done this before on a family members MacBook. I can't replicate it though. I have purchased a copy of Lion, and I installed it on the old drive.

I do not have a copy of Snow Leopard as I gave it away by mistake when I sold my iMac. Gave the guy the wrong disk.

I no longer have the old HDD contents, and the only other computer I have in the house to download anything to is a computer without an optic disk drive - a Macbook Air.

What are my options for installing OSX on the MBP with the new SSD?

I am sure I was able to install Lion over the web on my stepdads MacBook on a fresh install as he has no Snow Leopard installation disk.

Any advice is much appreciated. At the moment I am seeing a folder with a question mark at boot, which I understand is usual behaviour as there is no OS.

Lion / Mountain Lion's recovery is only present on hard drives that have the system already installed.  Internet Recovery (likely what was used with your Dad's Mac) is only built in to newer systems that shipped with Lion or Mountain Lion. Apple support page documenting this

In your situation I think your best bet would be to download Mountain Lion using your MacBook Air, build a Mountain Lion installer disk using the application below, boot to the install disk/drive by holding option while powering on your Mac and selecting the disk and installing as usual from there.

Lion Disk Maker

Hope that helps!


Can I create a bootable DiskWarrior disk? I'm in trouble. My Mac won't boot (frozen on gray apple logo with spinning wheel), and it appears to be a disk problem. I ran disk utility from Lion's recovery disk, but it says it can't repair my disk and that I should erase it.

I want to try diskwarrior, but before buying it I want to know if I can create a bootable disk with the downloadable version. I can't wait for the DVD to ship -- it'd take at least two weeks if not more, and I need it right now.

I searched on alsoft's site and the web, but I don't understand if it's possible or not. I'm guessing it is, otherwise buying this program is useless in case of emergencies (I'd rather get a new Mac than wait for the DVD to ship).

So the question: has anyone managed to create a bootable diskwarrior disk?

you could try DasBoot and create a bootable disk with a USB thumb drive and a running OS, obviously not yours, maybe someone who has a similar OS. DasBoot allows you to install custom apps, and then you can boot from it and repair your disk.

I hope you have a backup. It could be a mechanical problem, which no software in the world can fix.

Do you hear strange noises coming from the HD? Is it a recent model? Maybe you could bring it to a genius bar so they can make sure it is not a mechanical failure or some other problem...


APFS: Snapshot is invalid Running fsck_apfs reports an error checking my main disk:

root@bix ~ # fsck_apfs -n -l /dev/disk1s1
** Checking the container superblock.
** Checking the EFI jumpstart record.
** Checking the space manager.
** Checking the space manager free queue trees.
** Checking the object map.
** Checking volume.
** Checking the APFS volume superblock.
** The volume Macintosh HD - Data was formatted by hfs_convert (748.1.46) and last modified by apfs_kext (1412.81.1).
** Checking the object map.
** Checking the snapshot metadata tree.
** Checking the snapshot metadata.
** Checking snapshot 1 of 2 (com.apple.apfs.purgatory.84779e)
error: sibling_map_val object (oid 0x2c6200000000168): invalid length (20)
   Snapshot is invalid.
** The volume /dev/disk1s1 could not be verified completely.

The output is the same in both Recovery Mode and Safe Mode (without the disk being mounted).

Searching online for "sibling_map_val object" only yields some Hopper disassembler code, which makes me think that this is an unusual error to have. However, lots of people mention the "Snapshot is invalid" output.

Is there any way to force-delete the snapshot? The system doesn't report that any exist:

root@bix ~ # tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
Snapshots for volume group containing disk /:

The root problem is that my main disk keeps filling up, despite my deleting hundreds of GBs of files. Daisy Disk reports that it is inaccessible hidden system files (even despite upgrading permissions via the non-App-Store version of the utility). I suspect that there is some corrupt local snapshot in the "com.apple.apfs.purgatory.84779e" mentioned in the fsck output, but I don't see any way to trash it.

I've tried disabling/enabling Time Machine backups and Spotlight indexing to no avail. Rebooting  always winds up recovering about 5GB, but then it quickly drops down to about 2GB of free space and hovers around there until the system starts complaining that there isn't enough system memory for my applications to remain open. And since I can't free up sufficient space, Time Machine complains that it doesn't have enough space to create a local snapshot, and so my disk isn't being backed up (and so I can't just wipe out the whole file system and restore from Time Machine). I'm stuck with a disk that keeps on filling itself up.

error: sibling_map_val

Let's break this down. First according to APFS spec (PDF):

Hard links that all refer to the same inode are called siblings. Each sibling has its own identifier thatʼs used instead of the shared inode number when siblings need to be distinguished. ... You use sibling links and sibling maps to convert between sibling identifiers and inode numbers. Sibling-link records let you find all the hard links whose target is a given inode. Sibling-map records let you find the target inode of a given hard link.

So the sibling_map is just like a spreadsheet with a couple of columns in it, a key that refers to an actual file on the file system, and a value that has the Object ID of a hard linked "file". In this case, the value for your ID is not the correct length, indicating it is corrupted.
Further, that corrupted data appears to be in an incomplete snapshot, so the solution is to delete that snapshot, which can be quite difficult.
Possible Solutions (Least to Most Destructive)
Delete Local Snapshot
Yes, you mentioned this, but it's an important first step. First, make sure you turn off TimeMachine.

Is there any way to force-delete the snapshot?

Yes, and you may as well make a script of it because it's a frequent problem. 99% of the time is the oldest snapshot or the one that says dateless
tmutil listlocalsnapshots / ... Output of that command looks like this:
Snapshots for volume group containing disk /:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2020-04-01-122516.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2020-04-01-132348.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2020-04-01-143800.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2020-04-01-153811.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2020-04-01-183757.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2020-04-01-193758.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2020-04-01-203828.local

You just need to copy the timestamp for each line you want to kill and paste it into the next command. Again, usually deleting just the oldest (top) one will resolve related issues.
sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2020-04-01-090758
If successful, you will get no response (exit 0) in terminal.
2. Delete the Offending Snapshot
WARNING: You should not proceed if you don't have a full backup of your drive. You could lose some data. You could lose all your data.
Boot into single user mode (reboot into recovery mode and enter commands in the terminal as root user) and try to find the location of the snapshot. Something like:
find / com.apple.apfs.purgatory.84779e  # Totally untested
Once you find it, rm that file. If you are unable to locate the file, on to step 3.
3. Do a Safe Reinstall
While still in recovery mode, exit terminal and perform a reinstall of the operating system. This is "safe" in that only the system files are recreated. Your $HOME folder will be left in place, so if all goes smoothly, you shouldn't have to recover your hard drive from a backup.
Once finished, run fsck_apfs again to verify the issue is resolved. If not...
4. Do a Full Reinstall
Still in recovery mode, open Disk Utility and delete the partition on which the OS is installed. Doing this will delete all of your information.  Recreate the partition (consider using HFS+ if you have frequent issues with APFS) just as it was before. Exit Disk Utility back into recovery mode.
Before doing a reinstall, use fsck_apfs on the new partition to verify that it doesn't come back with any errors containing the word physical. Any errors at this point likely indicate an issue with the hard drive itself, and it may need to be replaced. Examples of such errors include:

Unable to mark physical extent range
found physical extent corruption

Try repairing, of course, but if you aren't successful, consider replacing your drive.
Then proceed with an install just as you did in step 3, followed by running a recovery from your most recent backup.
Good luck.


How to sync bookmarks across i-devices and the web? I've never liked Evernote so much. Now (Mountain Lion) that Notes and ToDo lists are synched among devices via iCloud, I can finally leave it and just find a good application to manage my bookmarks.

I have tons of them, mostly in Delicious. I've tried a couple of desktop clients, like Delish and Delibar, but they don't really work well for me. Delibar, while cool-looking, is nothing about managing bookmarks, just consuming them. Delish is better, but why can't I select multiple bookmarks, drag them onto a tag to add them to it, just open the bookmark without having to right click on it...

How do you manage your bookmarks so that you can arrange and fully-organize them on the desktop while still being able to access them on the web and from your i-devices? Thanks

It seems to me like you're looking for the exact kind of solution that I am... and I have yet to find anything that exactly fits the bill. Safari can sync bookmarks through iCloud, of course, but it's severely lacking in other functionality. Yojimbo is a great Mac app for managing bookmarks (among other types of data) but doesn't have any great iOS companion (they have a buggy, read-only iPad app, and also the ability to create a read-only web-based version of your library). I'm hopeful that Yojimbo 4.0 (which should be coming very soon) will improve this, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I've found some of the web-based bookmark managing solutions to be the best. Both Pinboard and Kippt work great (I've been using both for different sorts of bookmarks). Pinboard charges a sign-up fee but is fantastic & very actively being developed. The biggest difference between the two is that in Pinboard you manage bookmarks via tags (much like Delicious) whereas in Kippt you create groups/folders of bookmarks. The cool thing, though, is that both of these services are supported by a fantastic Safari extension called Cloudmarks that will let you easily search through your bookmarks or add a new bookmark to either of these services. While not exactly a native Mac app, it does make it really fast to find the bookmark you're looking for. Also, on iOS, there are several apps that sync with Pinboard and at least one that works with Kippt (hopefully more soon since they only very recently opened up their API).


Understand iOS Low Battery logs Good morning everyone. I'm kinda new to this site but I see there are many expert opinions, so I would submit to you my question, hoping it will be helpful for someone else. Before proceeding, I beg your pardon if I make mistakes in my English (I'm italian). Anyway I will try to be as clear as possible. I'm trying to figure out what is the means of the Low Battery logs on iOS.

In particular, I wonder if I can tell if there is a problem on the device, (a process that drains the battery, say,) or if there's actually a problem with the battery itself. For example, let's take as an example this snippet of log, taken from an iPhone 5 from my cousin:

Hardware Model: N42AP
Awake Time: 02:41:19 (9679)
Standby Time: 11:26:34 (41194)
Partial Charge: 0
Capacity: 0
Voltage: 3647 mV

I know that the Awake Time and Standy Time refer to the time that the device has been operative and in standby from the last recharge.
But what is the meaning of Partial charge, Capacity and Voltage?

Your question is a great excuse to update and expand my previous answer on interpreting these diagnostic logs.

The partial charge field is a simple binary field. A zero means you didn't plug in your phone and these logs document how much usage you got out of a full charge. A one value means that you did plug your phone in after the last full charge and that the readings document more than one full charge - perhaps the phone was working for weeks and kept getting plugged in before finally running out of power.

The log only gets written when the device literally shuts itself off after all of the power warnings.

Voltage documents the voltage of the battery when the device shuts itself off. There usually is still some charge left to power the display briefly and show you that you need to plug it in. Eventually the voltage will decay so low that nothing will run until plugged in again.

Capacity Documents what the power management chip thinks should be left in the battery at the point the log is written. I've never seen a device where this isn't zero.

Here's one of the logs I've collected on my iPhone six:

Hardware Model: N61AP
Awake Time: 07:48:22 (28101)
Standby Time: 11:30:25 (41425)
Partial Charge: 0
Capacity: 0
Voltage: 3409 mV


High Sierra contacts disappear immediately after creation I add a contact (Firstname, Lastname, Phone, Email) and save it.

After a few seconds, presumably when macOS tries to sync it to Gmail and/or iCloud, it disappears.

I have a Gmail account and an iCloud account synced, when I add the contact via the Android app, it stays in the Gmail address book and it gets synced into macOS.

At first it seemed to work again, when I disabled the iCloud Account. But: I now try to add a new contact and while typing in the contact details, the editor window simply disappears.

What can I do do make macOS contacts work again?

macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 (17C88)

Solved

Someone in the Apple community gave solved my problem,
 many thanks (https://discussions.apple.com/message/32765319):

Might be a corrupt .plist.

Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.

Quit the application.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J.  When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder.  Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist.  Move the .plist to your desktop.

Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.

If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.


Where to find 3.5mm (male) to 3.5mm (male) cable that can control iPhone/iPod volume Bonus if it has a mic and can handle iPhone calls

Basically I have a snowboarding helmet that has speakers built into it and has a 3.5mm (female) connection to the speakers.

If you'd also want to skip the cable itself, I would suggest taking a look at the Jabra BT3030 Bluetooth "Headset", which you could connect with any male-to-male cable.


Upload content to Apple TV Is that possible to upload some videos from my macbook (itunes library) to apple tv? This way, I can watch that movies without use my macbook or any kind of streaming.

Depends on which AppleTV you have.

With the 1st generation you can select which videos from your media library to sync with and iTunes would copy them to the AppleTV.

Unfortunately the 2nd generation doesn't have any internal storage, so it can only stream videos.


Connecting wireless keyboard to non Apple monitor I have just purchased a MacBook Air. I have a non Apple monitor that I wish to use. I have connected the Air and the monitor correctly. My Apple keyboard ( had a previous owner) will not work with the monitor or the Air? How do I get these to work?

Your Apple (Bluetooth) Keyboard doesn't connect to your monitor, but to your Mac. Open System Preferences and go to bluetooth, there you can connect new devices. Make sure the keyboard is on (there's a power button on the side) - a green LED in the top right of the keyboard (front) should light up when you turn it on.

Link: Apple's Support document with Screenshots.


Reasons to prefer Little Snitch over the built-in firewall Every now and then I browse through software you must have on your mac type lists and more often than not somebody mentions Little Snitch as a must-have application.

Now what I think that many people ignore or aren’t aware of is that in fact OS X itself has an application firewall built-in (though hidden and the application layer inactivated).

I understand that Little Snitch maybe allows for a more fine-grained selection of ports and one may exclude only specific addresses from the traffic per application. However, I wonder if this is really needed for the average (and better-than-average) type of desktop user.

So my question would be in which cases is the built-in firewall not sufficient and when would one have to choose an external tool like Little Snitch.

(Note: I’m not speaking about controlling the traffic in a web or database server setup in which cases I thoroughly understand blocking certain connections whilst allowing only a small set.)

Little Snitch offers three features that aren't available in MacOS' built-in ipfw firewall. (It does this by loading a custom kernel module.)

Little Snitch allows you to block outgoing connections; the MacOS firewall only blocks incoming connections. Handy if you're running some untrusted program and aren't sure what it's going to do, or if you want to disable a program for updating itself, or if you want to prevent access to a specific resource. Also, I suspect many people use Little Snitch to block pirated software from checking their license.
Little Snitch lets you configure the firewall per application, not just address or port. Ie: you can configure it so one web browser can access a web site but not another.
Little Snitch also monitors network traffic on a per-application basis. It's easy on MacOS to see how much bandwidth you're using but much harder to see which program is using that bandwidth. The Little Snitch shows network usage for each application, albeit in a limited way.

That being said, I don't think Little Snitch is "must have" software; these features are fairly esoteric. There are also several alternatives: TCPBlock and glowworm for the firewall and Rubbernet (now defunct) for the monitoring.

2016 Update: MacOS now has the per-application monitoring built into Activity Monitor.


Tried to hide a dock icon but failed I tried to hide an app's icon on the dock but the app (Clock) could not be launched.

I googled and found some solutions to dock icon hiding.

I modified the app's Info.plist by adding the following two lines:

<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

I also tried this:

<key>LSUIElement</key>
<true/>

But, it didn't work. The app couldn't be launched.
The pop-up window says:

  Clock quit unexpectedly.
  Click Reopen to open the application again. Click Report to see more detailed information and send a report to Apple.

The app is "Clock" (like the desktop gadget in Win7) that I downloaded from App Store.
http://clock.projectworld.net/

I am wondering whether this app can be modified as an agent or not.

I suspect that the Clock application is code-signed, which is likely what is causing the crash.  I tried to do the same LSUIElement change in the plist file to Clock.app and it gave the same crash.  Some research told me the following:

  There's one more step to the process if the developer has signed the application with an Apple Developer Certificate — and that includes all Mac App Store applications. Without this step, you'll likely get a crash when opening the app. To prevent this, you'll need to re-sign the application using the following command in the Terminal:

  sudo codesign -f -s - /path_to_app/appname.app

  Replace "/path_to_app/appname.app" with the path and the application name that you just tweaked the Info.plist for. After doing this, press enter, and enter your password. The application will be re-codesigned and you should be able to launch the app without any issues.

source: http://www.maclife.com/article/columns/easy_mac_hacks_run_os_x_applications_without_their_dock_icon

I have downloaded Clock.app, Added the LSUIElement key to the plist file, and I resigned the application, and it seems to have had the desired result you are looking for.

There are some considerations though, the only way I could close the app without a dock icon was to use Activity Monitor and kill the process.  The link I pasted above also gives a few more warnings you should read before doing this.

Make a backup, try it out, and let me know if you have the same success I did?