OS X file permissions prevent me to delete files I installed easy_install on mac wityh the following command:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -o - | sudo python

After that I tried to install pip but couldn't.
After checking here is what I have in /usr/bin

$ ls -l easy*
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  925  7 Jan  2016 easy_install
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  454  7 Jan  2016 easy_install-2.6
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  461  7 Jan  2016 easy_install-2.7

Probably it does not work because I have 2 versions installed now. I am in the list of sudoers but even with sudo I cannot delete these files:

sudo rm -f easy_install-2.6
Password:
rm: easy_install-2.6: Operation not permitted

When I log in to this MacBook there is my username and also Administrator which I do not have access to now.

Is there a way to be able to delete these files without having to wait until the person that has the password for Administrator comes back from vacation?

Here is my MacBook info

  System Version: OS X 10.11.6 (15G31)
  Kernel Version: Darwin 15.6.0
  Boot Volume: Macintosh HD

That easy_install came with the system, it's not the one you tried to install.
The files coming with macOS are protected by system integrity protection.

On my machine this looks like:

$ ls -lO /usr/bin/easy*
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  restricted,compressed 925 31 Jul 04:27 /usr/bin/easy_install
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  restricted,compressed 454 31 Jul 04:27 /usr/bin/easy_install-2.6
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  restricted,compressed 458 31 Jul 04:27 /usr/bin/easy_install-2.7

"restricted" means "protected by SIP"

If you want to use PIP on the mac, create a virtualenv in your home directory and do everything there, then you'll be independent from the system libraries.


Log out after X minutes turning itself back on This is driving me insane. The checkbox in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General Tab > Advanced > Logout after X minutes of inactivity turns itself back on whenever I move away from the settings screen. I recorded a gif to illustrate this:

Anyone knows why this is happening? Is it some new antivirus setting? Some remote setting? Some MacOS setting? Btw I'm running latest El Capitan
EDIT
I tried using Automator to disable this again every 5 minutes. Didn't work haha.
I was also able to figure out the file where this particular pref is saved, running sudo fs_usage -w. It's here:
/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist
running defaults read shows me the preference is AutoLogOutDelay
If I run:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist com.apple.autologout.AutoLogOutDelay 0

The computer freezes for 5 minutes. I have no idea what's going on
Edit 2
Found a thread from Apple discussions. The last message in the thread points to Profile Manager, General > Login Window > Options I will try to check with the network manager.
No, it's off there too. Looking further into fs_usage I noticed something strange. A process VShieldScanner.3263 is editing the preferences, namely McAffee ...

It was a bug in McAffee

Updating to version 10.2 fixes the problem


Warranty on replacement phones having recently taking my phone into an Apple Store with what was a manufacturing fault,2 months before the warranty ran out they exchanged it without hesitation,
12 weeks on and now the new replacement phone has a number of faults now happening,
Did the warranty begin again on the new replacement phone or does it just transfer over meaning the warranty ended in January as it would have on the original phone?

The original devices warranty or 90 days, whichever is longer.

A replacement product or part, including a userinstallable part that has been installed in accordance with instructions provided by Apple, assumes the remaining warranty of the original product or ninety (90) days from the date of replacement or repair, whichever provides longer coverage for you.

http://store.apple.com/Catalog/Images/worldwidewarranty.html


How can I make iTerm2 hotkey window fill out the whole screen? I am using MacOS Catalina, and I use iTerm as my terminal. My problem is, that every time iTerm has been closed, and opened again, it only opens in half screen. I know I can drag it down to full screen with my cursor, but it's super annoying if I have to do that every time I open it.

Is there a way to make it full screen by default?

Yes, go to preferences under the iTerm menu item. When the panel opens, select the Profiles option at the top of the panel. Once that opens, click on the Hotkey Window option, and then click the window tab near the top right. In that window you can define the window size or on the right select instead of Normal, Full Screen. See the image below.


Profile Mountain Lion's startup Recently my Mac mini became quite slow without a real apparent cause. I'd really like to be able to trace down the cause of this slowness, and I'd like to do it myself, not using a program.

Is there a good Mac OS X resource website that could lead me to that?

Couple things to try:

Start in verbose mode (Command + V)

You'll see a narration of the start up processes.

Open Console and look at your logs.

There's lots of things that can lead to slow startups, but I'd be on the look out for permission and network timeout errors.


Does my 2015 MacBook 12" produce 4K on the LG UltraFine 4K Display Does my 2015 MacBook 12" work with the LG UltraFine 4K Display and does it actually produce 4k picture?

Hard to tell about your hardware since it could have issues, but that hardware in general supports 4K in general and in specific for the LG display that Apple sells directly.

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT207447
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206587

I’ve happily used that model Mac for almost 3 years now and my LG 4K display has been awesome first came out and I bought it.


Showing hidden files in specific directories? I use this command quite often to show hidden files on my machine:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Is there a way to show all hidden files only in specific directories. E.g. I want to be able to see stuff like .ssh

However I don't want my desktop and every folder to show this damn .DS_Store files. Is there a trick to so?

thank you

If you want to hide specific files/folders from Finder (and any Open/Save dialogs) there is always

chflags hidden FILENAME

If, on the other hand, you only want to make specific dot-files/directories (like .ssh or .bashrc) visible in Finder, you may be better of with creating non-dotted symlinks

ln -s .bashrc bashrc
ln -s .ssh ssh

and using them to access the files where needed.


How to check my MBP's logic board properties? A few days ago, my MBP had a lot of issues like multiple beeping sounds as well as black screen anomalies. The beeping issue goes away when I force a shutdown.

When I took it in for repair, they reported that there was an issue with the logic board and RAM. They replaced the logic board and the MBP was working fine.

How do I check the properties of the logic board, when it was manufactured and its condition. Again, I trust Apple support, but I just wanted to convince myself.

Is there any way to check the properties of the MBP hardware?

The only way to truly know if something is wrong with any replacement part installed by Apple is based on symptoms of the computer and symptoms alone. Apple does have diagnostic tests they run on each computer that is repaired. That is just a stop gap to find a bad part on the way out the door. Diagnostics will never catch every problem. In other words, if the computer is not exhibiting the symptoms you brought the computer in for to begin with,  the computer (and its logic board ) are fine.

You can always run the Apple Hardware Test to check for yourself.


Contention for M7 Motion Chip? What happens when multiple apps access the M7 motion chip? When one app reads a step count, does it zero the counter for other apps, or will other apps also be able to access the step count and double count the steps?

For example, I use MyFitnessPal and RunKeeper. At work today, while fairly sedentary, I enabled access to the M7 processor in MyFitnessPal. It tracked about 1500 steps. This evening, I went out for a walk and turned on RunKeeper. It logged my activity in MyFitnessPal when I was done, and the steps in MyFitnessPal dropped to zero. I lost the ~1500 steps from earlier in the day. What's going on?

There's no contention. Apple provides APIs for accessing the M7's data and all the APIs are thread-safe. This means that there can't be any problems caused by two apps accessing the data at the same time.

Furthermore, reading data from the M7 doesn't manipulate the data in any way. Other apps can still access the data and the data is not reset.

As for the cause of the specific problem in the question, I'd put it down to a bug in the app itself.


Duplicate Photo library for Photos & iPhoto Just came across this, seems as Photos created a duplicate of the iPhoto database instead of just using that one.

Now I'm stuck here with two 50+ GB libraries, eating up space on my HDD.
I think iPhoto uses the Photos database, so would it be safe to delete the iPhoto database?

I'm still going to use iPhoto (because it's easier than Photos).

I'd say stick to the iPhoto Library if that's the app you're going to continue using for now.

When you eventually swap to Photos, do the import again.

The Photos Library is greyed out if you attempt to open it from iPhoto. Any changes you make to the iPhoto Library will not be reflected in the Photos Library, meaning you'll gradually go out of sync until such time as iPhoto no longer works (OS X 10.11, who knows?) & you'll need to reimport at that time.

Photos Library Storage Space
The Photos Library is actually just a collection of hard links to the actual data on the disk & therefore is not taking up anything like the amount of space that Finder is reporting.

More on hard links from Ars Technica:

  A hard link is simply a reference to some data on disk. Think of a file as a combination of a name and a pointer to some data. Deleting a file really means deleting the name portion of that duo. When there are no more names pointing to a particular piece of data disk, then that disk space can be reused."

This means that so long as one of the pointers to the data still exists, the data is still in use. Only by deleting both will the data actually be deleted.

Ref: Apple KB - Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries


SMC Reset Won't Work on Macbook Pro Retina mid-2012 I have followed all the correct steps for carrying out an SMC Reset, however my Mac continues to boot normally.

The issues I currently am dealing with are:

Slow performance
Battery light on power cable not lighting
Loud fans when just browsing on Safari

I found the answer under this link
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

  1.Shut down the computer.

  2.Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.

  3.On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.

  4.Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.

  5.Press the power button to turn on the computer.

I have the same model and I tested it. So in my case I had full charged the macbook and the led light from MagSafe power adapter change from green to orange.

When I had the same problem with you (with the led in magsafe adaptor not lighting) I solve it just with a pram reset. You can get info about how to reset pram here: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379


Damaged or Incomplete apps on El Capitan I have updated to El Capitan as soon as it came. I faced a lot of issues with SIP enabled, but recently a new issue popped up. Every once in a while the apps installed without using App Store are getting damaged or incomplete.

The apps which are having issues are SourceTree and Fabric. I had to delete those apps and reinstall them to make them work again.

My question is, is it normal or is it a bug? If it's normal, how can I fix it?

I also experienced something similar for Voila, Omnifocus etc. I had to delete and re-download from Mac App Store. I guess it is pretty normal after El Capitan upgrade.


How to quickly launch a playlist from the home screen in ios? I want to have a "shortcut" on the home screen that launches
the music app and starts playing a specific playlist.
Can this be done?

I did some research and it seems like Launch Center Pro could do the trick, except the music app is not supported.
I also found an old blog post that mentions the use of URL schemes for ecoute (music player) but it seems outdated as well.

Slightly overkill for just this one task, but Workflow can certainly do this--there's already a workflow in its Gallery that does this, so you won't even have to write your own. And you'll probably find other cool stuff to do with it too ;)


Using someone else's iTunes account, even when you have your own My husband and I both have iTunes accounts.
Can I sign onto his account to download some of his music.

Yes, you can listen to any of your family member's music, but not in the way you suggested. In fact, you can even use any of their purchases. To do that you need to have Family Sharing.

Go to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201088 to setup Family Sharing.


How do I access hidden or specific directories/paths from the finder? I would like to be able to do something simple such as open up a finder and be able to select files that are in '~/' or '/' Is there a simple way to go about doing this?  For instance, sometimes I would just like to be able to point XCode towards a file that finder doesn't show me normally.  Is there a keystroke or something that lets me edit the path I want to view manually?

⇧shift+⌘cmd+G

Opens the Go to the folder: dialog in the Finder window:

This will let you open any folder for the directory you type.


How can I make 'rm' move files to the trash can? I use the terminal on a daily basis, I will often use rm DirectoryName. Sometimes I get a little impatient and do rm * without deliberating if it’s safe. As you can imagine, these shenanigans have sometimes come back and hit me in the face. Does anyone know how I create a mapping so rm whatever moves everything to the trashcan which I then delete manually.

Bad Idea
Using rm to move files to the trash is a dopamine hit. It is common and pleasuring but can be bad for you taken out of context.
You really need control yourself when using rm. Especially if your backups are not current or you don’t have the time to do an erase / install / restore.

Don't use rm
Imagine, you get used to rm moving to trash and make a habit of it. Sure, your system is safe but when you log into a friend's (or your wife's or your boss') notebook and have to delete something? You'll be actually using the real rm - deleting those files forever. Without lots of prep and qualifiers, it's a bad habit, and you need to know that.
So instead, install rmtrash and make a habit of using it:
# install rmtrash, (either from the macports or by the brew.)
$ alias trash="rmtrash"
$ alias   del="rmtrash"       # del / trash are shorter than rmtrash

Correcting bad habits
Here’s where the personal advice starts - changing one’s behavior is hard.
Another thing you can do to force yourself to use rmtrash instead of rm is alias it to a custom message in your .profile.
alias rm="echo Use 'del', or the full path i.e. '/bin/rm'"

So, whenever you use rm, you'll be prompted to either use rmtrash or /bin/rm. Remember, this is only temporary, after a while you should remove the alias.

Never ever, do something like this:
$ pwd
/
$ cd /tnp; rm -rf *
sh: cd: /tnp: No such file or directory

Pop Quiz: In what directory will the rmcommand run? :)


OS X install on SSD hangs every time I've got an early 2011 13" MBP with a 120GB SSD, formerly part of a DIY Fusion Drive, that I'm trying to install Yosemite on. Every time I try to install from my bootable drive, it hangs at the exact same point: ETA 11 minutes, last log entry "PackageKit: Extracting file:///System/Installation/Packages/BaseSystemResources.pkg (destination=/Volumes/SSD [that's my drive name]/.OSInstallSandboxPath/Root, uid=0)". That's happened even after I erased the disk, and also after I reformatted the drive. I left Internet Recovery to run a download/install overnight, but I woke up to a gray screen that I couldn't escape from. I tried remaking the bootable drive, but still no change. My latest attempt featured an install initiated from the HDD (that's now plugged in where the optical drive used to go), and that hung for literally two hours. What do I have yet to try, or how can I find out if there's a legitimate hardware problem? (A recent Verify Disk claims the SSD's okay.)

Install the OS on to each of the components of the "DIY Fusion Drive" if the system can install and boot from each, you have ruled out a hardware problem with either of the components.


Specify AppleScript bundle icon I'm trying to assign an icon to my AppleScript bundle, but without success.

Steps:

Added the icon (applet.icns) to the bundle's /Contents/Resources directory
Modified the bundle's  /Contents/Info.plist:

<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>applet.icns</string>

** edit **

I ran the 'Set Bundle Icon File' script in the Applet Bundle Tools.  It did not change the situation.

What am I missing?

Disclaimer: This may not work for an AppleScript bundle.

First I open the icon in preview.app.

I select the full picture and type Command-C

The way I typically change icons for files is that I select the file and type Command-I

In the info window that opens, I then select the current icon in the upper left.

Type Command-V and the icon (theoretically) will change to the picture in the clipboard


How to fix iTunes/Skype where fonts all show up as boxes after Mountain Lion upgrade? When I login to iTunes or Skype the fonts all show up as boxes.

No fonts were removed on installed; none are disabled and all the normal ones show up. Doesn't happen on any web site; only seems to be locally installed programs.

Uninstalled and reinstalled and programs still don't work.

Example Image

This usually happens when you have Fonts Caches (or actual Fonts) that are corrupt. I would do the following, to not only clear the caches, but also to verify your Fonts.

Clearing the font cache - you have a few options (Onyx is just easier).

Use a tool like Onyx, which can do this and many other maintenance tasks for you.
Manually remove the cache with the command line atsutil utility. You basically would do astutil databases -removeUser then sudo astutil databases -remove, then astutil server -shutdown, then astutil server -ping. I would recommend restarting after this.
Choose from various other utilities like Onyx that clear just the font cache.
Some people also recommend clearing out the /Library/Caches folder, but I am not sure how well this works. There also used to be some older ways to clear the cache but I cant find them (and I am pretty sure it was tools before Mac OS 10.5).

Verifying Fonts

Open up Font Book (in /Applications/)
Select All
Go to the File Menu and select Validate Fonts.
Resolve any issues this may present, but those may be specific to your machine.

Usually clearing the Font Cache works. I used to see a similar problem all the time with Microsoft Office 2004, and it had its own cache that we even cleared weekly. I haven't seen the Mac OS mess its cache up that often, but when it does, usually a quick fix. I have even seen a reboot sometimes clear it up (in very minor cases).


Command+Tab misbehaving for apps on multiple monitors I tend to keep a few Terminal windows open in one monitor, and another Terminal window and Chrome open in another monitor.

When I'm using a single monitor, pressing ⌘⇥ remembers which Terminal window was last selected, but when some of the Terminal windows are on one monitor and some on another, ⌘⇥ away from Chrome always goes to the Terminal on the same monitor, not the Terminal on the other monitor, which is the Terminal window I last selected.

TL;DR. Is there a setting I can tweak to get ⌘⇥ to work in multi-monitor mode as it does in single monitor mode, remembering the last selected window for each app?

System:

Terminal.app
Chrome.app (latest official stable)

(Though I could have listed any two apps.)
Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks

It seems that this is related to displays having separate spaces. This can be changed by unchecking System Preferences -> Mission Control -> Displays have separate Spaces. (requires logout+login)

Note that with this you'll get the old full screen with multiple monitors support (that isn't so nice usually)

Related also to other multi-monitor functionality things, see for example cmd-tab behavior on Mavericks with multiple displays.


Unable to resize/create partiion using gpt I have a Mac Server running 10.10. The sole purpose of it at the moment is to take time machine backups from multiple devices.

The server itself uses a Thecus NAS AFP share to store the time machine backups. Typically the process I've used in the past to increase storage space is the following

Extend the iSCSI size in the Thecus. This is now 8.8TB (from 6.6TB)

On the server -

Terminal - Sudo up

sh-3.2# df
Filesystem    512-blocks       Used Available Capacity   iused   ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2    83214256   40438952  42263304    49%   5118867 5282913   49%   /
devfs                362        362         0   100%       627       0  100%   /dev
map -hosts             0          0         0   100%         0       0  100%   /net
map auto_home          0          0         0   100%         0       0  100%   /home
map -fstab             0          0         0   100%         0       0  100%   /Network/Servers
/dev/disk1s2  4294295472 4242994728  51300744    99% 530374339 6412593   99%   /Volumes/Backups
sh-3.2#

Confirm in Disk Utility the disk size has increased

Eject/Unmount the partition

sh-3.2# gpt show /dev/disk1
       start        size  index  contents
           0           1         PMBR
           1           1         Pri GPT header
           2          32         Pri GPT table
          34           6
          40      409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
      409640  4294295472      2  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  4294705112  4295229447
  8589934559          32         Sec GPT table
  8589934591           1         Sec GPT header
sh-3.2#
sh-3.2#

sh-3.2#
sh-3.2# gpt destroy /dev/disk1
sh-3.2#
sh-3.2# gpt create -f /dev/disk1
sh-3.2#
sh-3.2# gpt add -b 409640 -s 4294295472 /dev/disk1
/dev/disk1s1 added
sh-3.2#

The problem this time is I don't have the original -b number.

I've tried the following

sh-3.2# gpt destroy /dev/disk1
sh-3.2# gpt create -f /dev/disk1
sh-3.2# gpt show /dev/disk1
        start         size  index  contents
            0            1         PMBR
            1            1         Pri GPT header
            2           32         Pri GPT table
           34  17179869117
  17179869151           32         Sec GPT table
  17179869183            1         Sec GPT header
sh-3.2# gpt add -b 409640 -s 17179869117
usage: gpt add [-b lba] [-i index] [-s lba] [-t uuid] device ...
sh-3.2# gpt add -b 409640 -s 17179869117 /dev/disk1
gpt add: /dev/disk1: error: no space available on device

I've tried a couple of different options when creating the partition and get 'no space available' each time.

If I try

gpt add -b 34 -s 17179869117

It will create the partition but be totally unreadable.

The current output of df is

macserver:~ tech$ df
Filesystem                               512-blocks        Used  Available Capacity    iused      ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2                               83214256    53119064   29583192    65%    6703881    3697899   64%   /
devfs                                           360         360          0   100%        625          0  100%   /dev
map -hosts                                        0           0          0   100%          0          0  100%   /net
map auto_home                                     0           0          0   100%          0          0  100%   /home
map -fstab                                        0           0          0   100%          0          0  100%   /Network/Servers
//Admin.@192.168.3.1/TimeMachineBackups 23241211968 14320040480 8921171488    62% 1790005058 1115146436   62%   /Volumes/TimeMachineBackups

The above 62% free share is what I am targeting.

Can someone please offer any assistance?

gpt is a tool to edit the GUID partition table of a disk. It only modifies the
primary and secondary GPT header and table and the MBR. Or with other words: it only modifies the first 34 blocks and the last 33 blocks of a device. This means: if you add a partition starting at block 40 and ending at block 409640 (these are the boundaries of a typical OS X EFI partition) it doesn't write anything to the blocks 40-409640 but only to the GPT headers/tables.

Adding a partition doesn't result in a file system and far less in a readable file system. To create a file system you have to format the partition with an appropriate tool like newfs_hfs! After formatting a partition the file system is essentially empty except the necessary parts which "represent" the file system like catalog file, allocation file etc.

If you remove a partition with a file system or remove the whole partition table containing several formatted partitions with gpt remove|destroy ... the file system(s) won't be touched. So after restoring a partition or a partition table with the same values they had previously the file system(s) with all content will "reappear".

One (rare) case exists where a partition might be enlarged: if some unallocated disk space is directly "behind" a partition. If you first remove a partition with gpt and then re-add the partition with the same start block but a larger size the previous file system is completely in the boundaries of the new partition. But at least the allocation file (~volume bitmap) is corrupted and the alternative volume header is at the wrong location. Usually such an "intentionally corrupted" file system can be repaired with diskutil repairVolume .... You are highly discouraged though to use this method to enlarge a partition.

Modifying disk partitions with gpt like in your question or as described below will delete any current partition (and its content) with a high probability. To resize (expand or shrink) a current partition while keeping the content use diskutil!

Starting using an empty disk with a default GPT partition table you get the following partition scheme:

sh-3.2# gpt show /dev/disk1
        start         size  index  contents
            0            1         PMBR
            1            1         Pri GPT header
            2           32         Pri GPT table
           34  17179869117
  17179869151           32         Sec GPT table
  17179869183            1         Sec GPT header

Though newer disks report a logical block size of 512 Bytes they usually have a physical block size of 4096 Bytes.

1st rule: start blocks and partition sizes should be dividable by 8 to align partitions to physical blocks
2nd rule: you can't assign more blocks than available (the max. available number of blocks is: 17179869117 (and aligning to physical blocks: 2147483639 x 8 = 17179869112 blocks)
3rd rule: try to specify a GUID type

One viable option is:

gpt add -b 40 -i 1 -s 17179869112 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk1

Or you might add an EFI partition and leave some space at the end of the disk (as Apple does):

gpt add -b 40 -i 1 -s 409600 -t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B /dev/disk1
gpt add -b 409640 -i 2 -s 17179197368 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk1

After adding the partitions you have to format the main partition:

newfs_hfs -J -v "Name" /dev/disk1s1

or if you chose the second partition table (with EFI partition)

newfs_hfs -J -v "Name" /dev/disk1s2


Compile NoBatteryNoProblem Can some one help me to compile NoBatteryNoProblem from this https://github.com/bernardowilson/NoBatteryNoProblem.kext to .kext file? I really don't understand how this command line Xcode compile should work. I am using Mac OS Mojave or Catalina.
Thank you very much.

The project README explains that it is compiled and loaded using make. While you need Xcode's Command Line Tools, it doesn't contain an xcodeproj so you don't open it with Xcode. The instructions require you to download the CLT package, then use make.

Xcode with Command Line Tools is required to compile this module.

xcode-select --install

make
make load to load and disable Turbo Boost (will ask for admin privileges)

 cd /path/to/NoBatteryNoProblem.kext-master
 make
 make load


Mini display port cable and Thunderbolt cable compatibility I need to run a Mini DisplayPort cable from a last generation Xserve to a circa late 2010 iMac so I can directly share the iMac's display while I set up the Xserve.

Apple no longer carries Mini DisplayPort cables at their stores here in NY.  No one at the store could tell me if I could use a Thunderbolt cable with the hardware I have.

So, a hopefully simple backwards compatibility question: Can I use a Thunderbolt cable to connect the Mini DisplayPort of the Xserve to the Mini DisplayPort of the iMac?

According to this source, you will not be able to use a Thunderbolt cable in this fashion.

You can, however, get a Mini DisplayPort to Mini DisplayPort cable from Monoprice for about $5 and that should work just fine.


How to open a URL with Terminal through applescript by using mpg123? I need to use mac terminal to open an audio stream from a URL through an applescript. I know that mac terminal is already equipped with afplay, but that only plays a file which is available on your computer. An alternative is mpg123 which can be installed in mac by means of brew. My question is how I can use this command in an apple script.

Command line programs can be run using the do shell script "..." command in AppleScript.  You can generally write a command as you would in Terminal, keeping in mind that double quotes need to be escaped with a preceding backslash \.  The do shell script command returns the last output to stdout.

So, for example:

do shell script "myvar=hello world; echo \"$myvar\""

will return hello world as a string.

These commands are run without a terminal, so can't interact with the user, e.g. to receive user input.  If you need a terminal, you can tell application "Terminal" to tell the front window to tell the front tab to do script "...".

But, do shell script "..." is perfect for most situations where bash commands need to be employed.

If it's useful to know, iTunes can also play audio streams from the internet.  You can do this from the command line like this:

open -a itunes "http://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/20160317/pronunciation--_us_1.mp3"

From within AppleScript, this might look like:

do shell script "open -a itunes \"http://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/20160317/pronunciation--_us_1.mp3\""

or, using iTunes scriptability:

tell application "iTunes" to open location "http://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/20160317/pronunciation--_us_1.mp3"


Using Safari to list all contents of a folder/path Is there a way I can use Safari to list the contents of a folder? More like of an "index" page where you get to see the files and sub-folders inside a path/folder. Like this one:

When I use Chrome, I just type the tilde "~" character on the address bar, which many of us know, represents the "home directory" of the OS. It's easy for me because Chrome just lists all the files under that directory in a list format inside the browser. I can just click the HTML files or any file/folder for that matter to view its content.

I know this can be done just by using Finder to navigate your directories and files, but it's much easier to just click around files where you know it will still end up displaying in the browser.

As I have tested, when typing the path or even "~" in the address bar, what it does is either do a web search or open that folder in Finder. Just not what I want.

I don't think this is possible. I looked at a list of Safari Extensions, and no extension I found has this ability.

NOTE: If you put the actual URL path description in the Safari address bar, ex: file:///Users/Panoy, Safari will open a Finder window to that path, not display the path in the browser window itself.


If a Wi-Fi and a USB-cable is connected at the same time, will my network be more stable and faster? I am trying to connect my Mac to a USB-cable and a WiFi at the same time. Will this make my network faster and more stable? Or will it just only pick one network to use?

MacOS can have multiple network connections, via WiFi, Ethernet, Thunderbolt and indeed USB.

Normally, one network takes preference over another: if the protocol can't be established on one network, it will look at another. In this way, it's possible to have Internet, file sharing, and other network devices like printers all on separate connections and networks.

Your internet connection will come from only one network. You can't combine two separate network connections and use both simultaneously.


Replacement for Hardware Growler? Having just made the leap to Sierra (10.12.2), I've discovered that one of my favorite add-ons is behaving funkily, and wonder if any of you have discovered an alternative.

I don't actually care that much about Growl itself, but Hardware Growler is a wonderful add-on to Growl that gives you all sorts of info about what's going on behind the scenes with the hardware you connect/disconnect from it. Everything from USB, Bluetooth & Firewire to Network, Power and Volume mounting/unmounting.

Since it's primarily just reporting things that system doing & noticing, I would imagine there might be something like an Automator workflow, integrated with some command line tools that could replace it?

I'm using version 2.1.3 of Growl, which is the latest, and what I was using in El Capitan. HardwareGrowler is at version 2.2, and again, that's what I have been using for quite some time.

I just upgraded to High Sierra and version 2.1.3 which is the latest, and you get get it from the App store, download it or build it yourself from Github.  Works very well, I had to add it to the startup items.  Other than that, still works.


How do I make a contact in Google Contacts show up on my phone? I have my Google Contacts synched with my phone. I see all my contacts except the one that I need. I can go to https://www.google.com/contacts/#contact/18f963d78b764fd6 and see the contact in my account, but it is not showing up in my phone! I killed the phone app, turned off Google Accounts then back on, changed from Fetch to Manual then back, searched by name (both first and last), but no luck.

I've needed to goto my Google Contacts and add the person to the built-in "My Contacts" group. I haven't found the "My Contacts" option in the preview of Google's updated (for 2015) Contacts preview.

Google Support: Sync contacts with your phone


How to figure out what is causing the ownership of /usr/local to change from my-username to root I use homebrew as a package manager for certain web development app. To keep brew up-to-date I run update brew every couple of days and also run brew doctor. Usually, this is fine and brew tells me I'm ready to brew.

Every now and then, however, I get the following error:

  Warning: /usr/local/etc isn't writable.

  This can happen if you "sudo make install" software that isn't managed by
  by Homebrew. If a formula tries to write a file to this directory, the
  install will fail during the link step.

  You should probably chown /usr/local/etc

  Warning: The /usr/local directory is not writable.
  Even if this directory was writable when you installed Homebrew, other
  software may change permissions on this directory. Some versions of the
  "InstantOn" component of Airfoil are known to do this.

  You should probably change the ownership and permissions of /usr/local
  back to your user account.

It's easy enough to reset the permissions back to my username. Afterwards brew seems to be fine.

But what is causing this to happen?

Is there a log that shows what is causing the permissions to change?

I had this exact same issue, and it turns out Sophos auto-update was to blame. I figured this out by running: sudo fs_usage | grep "usr/local"

It took a while, but eventually I saw Sophos's helpfully named "Installation" daemon messing with /usr/local's permissions.

I'm still trying to figure out an appropriate work around for this behavior.

EDIT: I believe Sophos has fixed this issue, see the link in the comments of this answer. It seems to be fixed for me at least!


How I can get OSX to recognize Canon MP560 Scanner again? I have a Cannon MP560 that kept having communications errors.  One of the suggestions I read was to remove the printer from the print & scan menu and re-add it.  Once I did that the scanner disappeared as well and I cannot get OSX 10.7 to recognize this device as a scanner again.

Does anybody know how I can get OSX to recognize this device as a scanner again?

Here are some screenshots of my print & scan screen and my add printer dialogue.  Bonjour does not show me any information about this device either.

Canon has updated most of their software (Easy-PhotoPrintEX, MP Navigator) and their drivers (printer, scanner) around the time when Lion came out. Make sure that you have the latest drivers installed.

You can download all the Canon software for your MP560 Scanner here.

Also, be sure to connect your printer via cable in order to use it as a scanner:


iOS / iPhones in Enterprise: Deployment of App Store apps in batch In my organization, we wish to install several App Store apps for a large number of our employees. The apps are Apple's Apps in the App store, such as KeyNote and Pages.

The current setup is to manually download the apps via the App Store in each device, which consumes lot's of internet bandwidth and time.

Is there a better alternative to deploy App Store apps to a large number of user's without having to download the apps again for each device?

P.S I do have the IMEI, Serial Number and each user's Apple IDs.

If the apps were purchased through the Volume Purchase Program, you can install them using Apple Configurator. Add the VPP codes, connect the devices and click install. Alternatively if the apps are free you can simply drag the app into the app list and install it that way.

For more information regarding this, see this Apple KB article:

Apple Configurator: Using Volume Purchase Program (VPP) Redemption Codes

Otherwise as you mentioned the Caching Server in OS X Server would cache a copy of the app so that downloads would come from your server instead of over the internet.


How to backup and access iOS Safari's reading list? I have an iPhone, with iOS 7. In Safari, I have a lot of pages saved in the reading list.

How can I backup the reading list to a computer and then access it ?

On a PC, I have a backup of my iPhone. I have explored the backup with iBackup Viewer, free version, on Windows. I have managed to access the open tabs of Safari. But I don't find the reading list.

Assuming you have your backup under $backup_dir, the reading list is stored in the sqlite database file $backup_dir/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.db, under the table bookmarks.

This table also contains favourites, which can be distinguished from reading list bookmarks by the fact they have no value for the column extra_attributes. Therefore, we can use the following query:

select url,title
from bookmarks
where url not like '' and extra_attributes not like '';

To import these in browsers, we can transform the entries into Netscape Bookmark File Format. You can use, for example, the following AWK script:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

BEGIN { print \
    "<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>\n" \
    "\n" \
    "<META HTTP-EQUIV=\"Content-Type\" CONTENT=\"text/html; charset=UTF-8\">\n" \
    "<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>\n" \
    "
Bookmarks
\n" \
    "

"
}
/^[[:space:]]*$/ { next }
{
    split($0, parts, "|")
    url = parts[1]
    title = separator = ""
    for (i=2; i in parts; i++) {
        title = title separator parts[i]
        separator = "|"
    }
    print "
" title ""
}
END { print "

" }

In sum, you can do all this with the following bash "one-liner":

echo "
select url,title
from bookmarks
where url not like '' and extra_attributes not like '';
" | \
sqlite "$backup_dir"/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.db | \
./"$awk_script" > bookmarks.html


Video editing application for Mac I'm interested in starting to edit videos and I'm looking for a good video editing application. It shouldn't be too complicated but one should be able to do advanced stuff with it too. I currently got iMovie but it's too simple for me.

Any tips?

I can recommend Final Cut Express and if you want it real pro - Final Cut Pro. Note that a major new Final Cut version is nearly out - probably with the MacOS X Lion. Also note that some price drop is expected for both products, probably you should wait a month.


Searching Contacts in iOS It seems that you can only search for a name or a company name in iOS's Contacts app. You can't search for an address, a zip, a note or any text outside of those fields. The same holds true for searching in iOS/Spotlight.

Besides the third party app for finding contacts via phone numbers mentioned before on this site, is there any way to search for an address, a city, a zip code, or a note in the Contacts list in iOS?

Not that I am aware of.  Contact searching on iOS is particularly limited, it will only match whole words in names too when used via Spotlight, although you do get on the fly as you type results when searching directly in the app.

No real reason why it works this way, other than every extra piece of data that you want to search requires indexing, which requires time and space.  The search function in the iPhone doesn't scan your data for matches, this would be far too slow. Instead as you create or update data (including contacts, calendar events, receive email etc) iOS indexes certain components of the data.  With contacts, it clearly decides not to index all fields, and just does names and numbers, skipping addresses, email addresses etc.  Just one of those decisions I suppose, there is limited storage available, and we already complain when a 16Gb iPhone only has 14Gb available out of the box etc.


Business-oriented calendar app for OS X I'm looking for a calendar app for OS X that shows available times for meeting attendees, and allows me to propose meetings and accept such proposals from others.

I've been trying Mac calendar and BusyCal, and neither of them meet my needs.

We're using Google app as our calendar server and although I can always use their web interface I prefer to use an installed application.

If you have an Exchange server, Outlook will do that. Calendar for OS X can do it too, provided your calendar server supports it.  OS X Server's Calendar server does.

In either use case the parties must be in the same organization or otherwise accessible due to federation.


How to sync EXIF data and date information from iPhoto to original files and flickr I've recently started a process of scanning old photo albums. I had settled into a nice workflow scanning a few images at a time and using iPhoto to add descriptions and change the dates, thinking that checking the "modify original files" box as I did so would in fact modify the original files. Not so.

I uploaded my first album to Flickr (using the iPhoto share feature, too) and was disappointed that the hundreds of photos from the 90s all have a date of July 30, 2014. Checking the files, there's no EXIF information at all, and the date created/modified are of course still July 30, 2014.

So I have three questions and I suppose I'd be satisfied with an answer to any of them:

Is there any way to copy iPhoto date information down to the original file? I don't really want to put tens of hours of work into something not usable outside of iPhoto. I'd prefer this because I'm used to iPhoto now and use it for my modern pictures too
Is there a way to at least preserve the iPhoto date when sharing to flickr? I was surprised that the built-in share function didn't do so
Has anyone had any success doing a similar project with software other than iPhoto?
Thank you!

ExifTool is a perl script that will give you great power in altering Exif data in images: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

It's also available through homebrew (http://brew.sh):

$ brew install exiftool

If you are at all okay with working in the terminal it is fairly easy to use (and very powerful if you are dealing with lots of images). There are instructions on the main exifTool page specifically for time/date shifting.


Will a crontab job wake OS X up from sleep? Since OS X has its own task scheduler, launchd, it appears that crontab is a relic.

Hence I'm wondering: Will a cron job (crontab) wake OS X up from sleep?

In case it matters, I'm on Yosemite 10.10.5.

Why I'm not switching to launchd? Laziness:

> man launchctl | wc
     463    2975   27730
> man crontab | wc
      72     433    3577

The man page is a lot larger, and crontab does everything I need.

cron doesn't execute while the computer is asleep. So cron can't wake your system.

See: https://superuser.com/a/14846/246895


Is it possible to set the JAVA_HOME env in El Captitan? I am unable to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable osx. I added the following line to my .bash_profile

export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home`

and sourced it afterwards; yet when I printenv or attempt to echo it, I see nothing in Terminal.

The only way I got this to work was by setting this environment variable in the .bashrc file, which incidentally, isn't created in the users home directory by default.
Thanks to patrix's comments on my question which led to this solution.


My keychain passwords gone after upgraded to High Sierra My keychain passwords disappeared after I upgraded to High Sierra. I have 130+ entries made in secure notes of Keychain Access. How do I restore them?
In detail: After upgrade to MacOS 10.13 from 10.11 my login keychain is out of sync and I lost all my 133 Password Entries I saved to secure notes. I can only temporarily restore them via Terminal commands. I see that my old key database was renamed to login_renamed_1.keychain-db. If I rename it to login.keychain-db and open /Applications/Utilities/Keychain\ Access.app and my Password Entries are there again, but everytime I log out of my User Account (both after restart or after logging out) a new file named login.keychain-db is created and my Passwords are gone again.
Here is what I do in Terminal:
bash$ security default-keychain
    "/Users/myself/Library/Keychains/login.keychain-db"
bash$ security set-keychain-password "/Users/myself/Library/Keychains/login.keychain-db"
Old Password:
New Password:
Retype New Password:

This puts my keychain back in sync (password is set), but I still miss my PW Entries in secure notes.
So I am also setting a Password for the old keychain database (lines beginning with '//' are comments, thus no Terminal input ):
bash$ security set-keychain-password login_renamed_1.keychain-db
Old Password:
New Password:
Retype New Password:
bash$ sudo mv login.keychain-db login.keychain-db-out
// renaming the current keychain-db to "*-out"
bash$ mv login_renamed_1.keychain-db login.keychain-db
// renaming the old keychain-db to the name of the default keychain

When I open Keychain Access.app after this my Password Entries have returned, but only for so long as I do not log out or restart my Mac. Upon login or startup a new login.keychain-db file is created and the old one is again renamed to login_renamed_1.keychain-db.
At this time the only way I can retrieve my Password Entries is to open each entry, copy the contents of the secure note in a Text file, which I would have to repeat 133 times. I would rather keep my old databes instead, as you easily may imagine.
Does anybody of you has a solution for this? Thank you in advance for your patience reading this and – hopefully – for your help.

I found the solution: I managed to restore my Password Entries permanently. It again involves tinkering with the Terminal, steps are as follows:

open the Keychain Access App
create new Keychain
save new Keychain as default keychain; quit Keychain Access.
// Hint: As soon as a keychain is not the default keychain anymore, you can change its Password again via Keychain Access (no more grayed-out menu commands there)
Continue inside Terminal:

bash$ security set-keychain-password login_renamed_1.keychain-db
// this is setting a new password for the old (corrupted) keychain-db.
// Important: you must know the old password for being able to do so.
// In the next step I am replacing the default keychain-db with 'login_renamed_1.keychain-db'
Old Password:
New Password:
Retype New Password:
bash$ sudo mv login.keychain-db login.keychain-db-out
// renaming the current keychain-db to "*-out"
bash$ mv login_renamed_1.keychain-db login.keychain-db
// renaming the old keychain-db to the name of the default keychain

Restart Keychain Access. The lost 'Secure Notes' are temporarily restored to the Default Keychain, but only until the next login.
Choose Default Keychain, in the Sidebar choose 'Secure Notes' (I hope this is correct, as my macOS runs with german language).
Select all Secure Notes of Standard Keychain and move them via drag and drop to 'Secure Notes' of the new Keychain you created in Step 2.
now to the tedious part: in the now opening Dialogue Window you have to type the Password of the Standard Keychain – For every single entry (which was 133 times in my case). Tip: you may copy the PW and paste it in the Dialogue field instead of re-typing it.
Quit Keychain Access, restart Computer
Upon the next login all Password Entries are restored – Eureka!

Now I can safely copy all my PW Entries to another app which is more useful to the task, e. g. 1Password,
which is very secure and has a GUI, but you'll have to pay $ 3.99 p. month. I will give the Unix Program 'pass' a try, which is command line and requires some knowledge about git and github, but is very configurable and free.
In the end I'd like to say: “Thaaaank you, Apple.” It costed me only my nerves and ~5 hours work to clean up after you.
But it was still worth it, I’m happy :)


How can I upgrade OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.0 to 10.6.6 I need install an older version of XCode. I tried a lot of thing, but the XCode aways show a message saying I can't install it.

Now I want to try another thing. I have the install DVD of OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard). If I use the Software Update program, it will update to 10.6.8. But the XCode needs only the version 10.6.6.

How can I upgrade from 10.6 to 10.6.6 but not to most newer 10.6.8? Is it possible?

You can download the 10.6.6 combo update from here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1349


Time Machine over SMB/CIFS share? As far as I understand there's no way to make Time Machine with SMB/CIFS; you have to connect using AFP.

Is that true ? Is there a way to make it work ?

I'm using OS X Lion.

You'll need to create a HFS+ .sparsebundle disk image and use the tmutil command line utility to tell Time Machine to use that drive as the backup destination. In turn, you can put that drive just about anywhere. Note that you need to give a permanent home (i.e. don't move it elsewhere) to the disk image first before targeting it with tmutil as a backup destination.

I've recently wrote a blog post how to use a network drive as a Time Machine destination. You can also use the same technique to use drives with other filesystems (like NTFS for example) as a Time Machine destination drive, as long as Lion can write to it (for NTFS, you'll need either NTFS-3G, Tuxera, or Paragon's drivers to write to them).


"Apply Rules" to Sent Mail folder in OS X 10.9 Mavericks does not work Any idea why in Mail 7.0 (part of OS X 10.9 Mavericks,) when I select a group of messages in the Sent Mail folder and do Message --> Apply Rules command, nothing happens?

(In prior versions of OS X back to 10.5, my extensive list of 70+ rules automatically moved messages from my Sent folder to various other sorted folders. I have several plain POP3 accounts set up in Mail.app, not leaving messages on the server.)

Try selecting all messages within your group folder instead, than Apply Rules command.


Time Machine server with rotated disks I'm setting up a Time Machine server on my Linux box using netatalk. To provide redundancy, I want to periodically swap out the disk netatalk is using.

AFAICT, from the perspective of the Macs, the identity of the server and volume won't change, but files will periodically appear and disappear. Will this confuse Time Machine on the client Macs?

In all likelihood, yes. I haven't tested this exactly, but if Time Machine detects missing files, it may run into some problems, or have to re-backup a significant portion. Part of Time Machine's versioning relies on hard linking lots of files, so when previous versions it expects to see around aren't there, bad things could happen. It's a bit of an opaque system, so it's hard to say for sure, but it's best not to muck around with your backups.

If you want some redundancy (which is certainly a good idea for your backup system), I'd suggest one of two options. The first one is to simply set up two netatalk shares as Time Machine destinations. OS X can handle multiple Time Machine disks just fine, so you may as well take advantage of that feature. Just periodically rotate which share is online.

The second option is to clone the backup disk on the server end. You'd probably want to do some sort of check to make sure it's not being actively written to, but you should be able to do a simple rsync of the data (making sure that the proper options are there to preserve resource forks, etc.) and have a second copy of your backup.


Is there any way to reliably get rid of the caches in com.apple.MediaLibrary safely? I found >10 GB of files inside a folder on my internal drive. It comprised of photos and videos which I recognized from my system photo library (which is synced with my iCloud Photo Library):

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.MediaLibraryService/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.iLifeMediaBrowser.ILPhotosTranscodeCache

Upon Googling why this was occurring, I came to the conclusion that this was likely due to there being HEIC/HEVC media in my iCloud Photo Library (from my iPhone). Apparently macOS High Sierra converts these media files and stores them in the aforementioned folder so that other apps can "select media from the Media Browser." Source 1, Source 2

In the interest of saving internal disk space I store the system library on an external drive. I don't want these caches to also take up space on my internal drive. I have no interest in being able to "select media from the Media Browser."

I additionally noticed that this huge folder is backed up by Time Machine, which is absolutely horrendous. Why would I need a large folder, full of cache files which I will never use, to be backed up?

There are a couple of ideas I came up with to fix this. Each idea has its cons. My main goal here is to get rid of these cache files once and for all (since I'll never actively use them) in a safe way. I am not sure which one would be the best idea:

Delete the files inside the com.apple.iLifeMediaBrowser.ILPhotosTranscodeCache. I realized that the media was simply converted and put into that folder again; this does not work.
Delete the folder completely. I'm not sure if this would cause the folder to be recreated, but I don't want this to mess something up; this probably will not work.
Change the permissions of the folder to prevent the process from writing to it – this seems like a very forceful way to prevent the process from dumping converted media into the folder; I'd prefer a cleaner method.
Downgrade to macOS Sierra. I do not want to go down this route.
Transfer the whole folder to the external drive, and then create a symbolic link on the internal drive pointing to it. This is probably the safest method, but could be unreliable – what if I disconnect the drive? What would the process do to handle this?

I don't think you should have to worry about the disk space being used by this. macOS should be treating that sort of thing as "Purgable", so if you are ever running low on space, macOS would automatically be able to remove that data to give you operational space back. So as far as space you can use on the disk, you should be able to consider the space currently used by that as free.

If it's a real bother though, your last option could be modified a little for reliability, which may solve the problem, depending on the Mac you have.

Basically, you could get a USB drive or SD Card of adequate size (also taking into consideration likely future needs, so say 32GB, or maybe 64GB, depends how many photos you take) and have it permanently connected. Instead of a Symlink, you could use macOS's fstab to cause the drive to use the com.apple.iLifeMediaBrowser.ILPhotosTranscodeCache folder as it's mount point, both on boot and automatically when reconnected if it is ever removed while your system is running

A caveat of course, is that if your Mac is a portable, and you do take it places with you, this will be less convenient, since you still have to reconnect that drive every time you boot up. A Nifty Drive or JetDrive would solve this if it is a MacBook model with a SD slot and you don't use the slot... You can also get USB drives quite small now-a-days, think the size of a Logitech "Unified" wireless keyboard/mouse adapter, so you could safely leave that connected with a notebook, and it wouldn't be in the way on the back of a desktop, aside from of course having one less USB port.

Rough How-To

To do this, you would want to format the external drive/card to match the format of your internal drive.

With the newly created partition selected in Disk Utility, click the Info button (letter i in a circle) on the top right of the window, and then find the FileSystem UUID. Click on it, copy it with Command-V, and onwards to the Terminal!

In Terminal, you'll need to run the vifs command as root, using sudo.

vifs uses the vi text editor to modify fstab, after locking it so nothing damages it. If you don't know how to use vi for text editing, type :h and then the return key to get to the help text. It explains editing much better than I can

In short, use the arrow keys to get to the bottom empty line below the warning text about being careful with fstab, then type :i to enter insert mode, and type:

UUID=<Your Filesystem UUID Here> /Users/<Your Home Folder Here>/Library/Containers/com.apple.MediaLibraryService/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.iLifeMediaBrowser.ILPhotosTranscodeCache hfs   rw

Replace HFS with whatever filesystem you formatted it as.

Exit Insert Mode with the ESC key, and type :wq to write your changes and quit. If you want to quit and discard your changes, type :q! instead.

After this, eject the drive/card, delete the contents of the cache folder and then insert the drive again. Should mount to that location and macOS will start dumping the cache data there again.

The Upsides

Frees up space on internal drive permanently, while keeping that cache accessible for apps that may use it (you never know, you might just start)
Fails gracefully if you remove the drive/card, as macOS will just act like when you deleted the contents and re-create the cache. When you re-attach the drive, it will mount back to the original location again, where-as with a symlink you may need to create the symlink all over again (depends if it was a clean unmount, and what happens when macOS tries to write through a broken symlink I guess, I'm not sure if it will destroy the symlink and change it back to a normal folder or just stop with an error
Will always be mounted during startup, so it will be there from Boot to Shutdown for macOS to send data to
One external drive could be used for multiple caches, if there are others you want a similar space saving from, but you would need a partition per cache. If you're using APFS on the external drive, this won't be a problem, as all APFS Partitions share the total storage of their drive (I do this with my Plex server's Transcode cache and Mobile Sync cache to spare partitions on my DAS, cause they just get so gorram big!)

The Downsides

Not likely to be great if you use a NoteBook, unless you invest in a tiny USB drive or a form-fitted SD Card such as Nifty Drive or JetDrive
Requires more hardware you may need to purchase
Not 100% sure how macOS will react if you have a partially rebuilt cache in the library folder after the drive is disconnected, and then re-connect the drive/card and it mounts as the cache folder. My Plex caches haven't had a problem with that happening before since they don't re-populate when cleared until next time I'm watching/syncing something, but the macOS one might be interesting since it would start rebuilding straight away. Hopefully it would just delete what's in the cache at that point, or move it to the external drive/card. You might want to test that early on to see what happens
You lose a USB port or a SD Slot, which may or may not be an issue, that depends on your needs

Again, macOS should dump those caches automatically if you ever actually need the cache, so you probably don't HAVE to do any of this, but if you really really want the space back, that is how I've done it on mine (Plex doesn't mark it's caches as pursuable for macOS, so it's this or manually clear them every now and then for me...)


Using external NTFS drive from windows on mac with bootcamp I am new to StackExchange so please pardon, if my request does not follow all best practices.

My dad uses Windows 10 on a MacBook pro 2015 via Bootcamp. His backup data is on an external NTFS hard drive. He is unable to access the data.

I am using NTFS with mac via paragon software. I.e. I am aware of the different file types.

What I am struggling with is that, since he is running bootcamp, he is probably not able to use a paragon NTFS driver for mac, is he?

Is this a know issue? Can somebody advise on how to approach this? Happy to buy a Software like the Paragon driver, if that solves the quest.

Windows 10 installed on a Mac does not need a third party driver in order to read an external NTFS hard drive (question was based on wrong perception). Thank you to David Anderson


Mount "Windows" part of hybrid ISO in OS X (10.9.5) I have an old hybrid ISO, WAR2BNE (Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition) in fact, that I am trying and failing to mount. The problem with the auto-mounting is that it uses the Mac portion and I need access to the Windows files.

A few web searches came up with various solutions, usually years old, that no longer work when attempted:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080708145453136
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-development-darwin/233131-mounting-windows-side-hybridized-cd.html
http://loonsoft.com/post/2762643736/mount-iso-images-in-osx

I'm not afraid of the Terminal, I'm just not sure where to start researching to solve this.

This worked for me to mount the Windows files in a hybrid CDROM. You should be able to do something similar for an ISO.

Run mount to list the currently mounted disks. Find the one for the disk you are interested in. E.g. /dev/disk2s1s2
Create a new directory under /Volumes, e.g. /Volumes/win
Mount to the new directory with sudo mount_cd9660 -er /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/win. 9660 is the windows CD format, ISO 9660. Pay close attention to the device name, it is not the same as what is listed for mount. There is only one s, you truncate the extra s. So instead of /dev/disk2s1s2, you just use /dev/disk2s1.
Now when you go to /Volumes/win, it should have the Windows files, not the Mac files.


Why will Text Edit and other apps prevent me from choosing text colors? I have had a Genius take a look at my MacBook, no one has offered ANY support that works. Forgive me if I'm learning how to describe the issue, but here is my problem with TextEdit, Apple Mail and other apps on my Mac that came from Apple:

Anywhere I enter text to change the color the normal process is to highlight that text go to format, font, choose color…

But the color Box (that has all the little squares filled with choices of colors... is completely empty.

Here is what I expect things to look like from Mail on Mountain Lion

My problem is on Snow Leopard (10.6.8) I don't get the same control for changing color of my text.

Can anyone help me? This is making me Crazy. :/

Do you save your files as .txt (i.e., plain text)? In this case you cannot change colors, because .txt cannot store them, only information that a .txt file can hold are ASCII/UTF-8 characters, no particular formatting.

But you can choose colors if you convert your text into "Rich text" (.rtf file).
To do so, click on Format in the Menubar of TextEdit, and select Make Rich Text. Alternatively, you could also press the shortcut shift+command+T in TextEdit.


Android emulator not starting up Starting an avd from the AVD Manager (Nexus5 API22 on OSX Yosemite 10.10.5)

Error trace:

  dyld: Library not loaded:
  /tmp/darwin-x86_64-clang-3.5/lib/libc++.1.dylib   Referenced from:
  /usr/local/Cellar/android-sdk/24.4.1_1/tools/emulator   Reason: image
  not found

This solution helped me, https://stackoverflow.com/a/49511666/641611

Modify the PATH was enough,

export ANDROID_SDK=$HOME/Library/Android/sdk
export PATH=$ANDROID_SDK/emulator:$ANDROID_SDK/tools:$PATH


Finding Where Alias Points Even With Deleted File Can I find where an alias was pointing to, if the file is deleted?

In the finder : Cmd+I or  Right click > Get Info


Sync Safari tabs but not history between devices How can I sync my Safari tabs between my iPhone 7 and my MacBook Pro without syncing the two browsers' history?

Please check out this article. It explains how to set up iCloud Tabs (So a way to access open tabs across all your Apple devices that have Handoff enabled. It's basically a way to open a tab on one Apple device that is currently open on an different Apple device)


Did they increase RAM in iPad 2? Since there was no hint about more RAM during the presentation yesterday, did anyone find out if they stay with 256 or (like iPhone 4) increased it at least up to 512?

Apple never releases information about memory. The current rumour is 512 MB. You should wait until some opens it up (e.g. iFixit).

And there you go . iPad-2-Wi-Fi-Teardown. 512 MB of Samsung manufactured RAM.


Remove a Cydia tweak that breaks iOS I've hidden Cydia and Poof! With the Poof! Cydia tweak. Now I cannot open either one of both of them.

Is there any way to undo this?
I've tried respringing and rebooting but that does not place them back.

If you have version 0.9.3997 or greater of MobileSubstrate…

Turn off your phone.
Turn it back on, then while the Apple logo is shown, hold the Volume Up button.

This enables Safe Mode, disabling all MobileSubstrate tweaks temporarily, allowing you to uninstall the tweak that's causing problems. If you still want the tweak, you can reinstall it, deleting the preference file for the tweak in question to reset it.

To exit Safe Mode, you can respring/reboot your device, or press Exit Safe Mode in the status bar, then press Restart.

If you have a tethered jailbreak, you'll need to hold volume up whilst pressing 'Just Boot' and continue holding even after the Apple logo since Substrate won't load immediately.


Once I cancel my apple Music subscription will it still make me pay a months worth or does it end straight away? I cancelled my Apple Music last month and deleted the account but Apple is still taking $12 out of my account for this month.  Is this normal or do I have to contact Apple Support again?

If you cancel the subscription 24 hours or less before the renewal date you may still be charged.

  Your subscription might renew if you don’t cancel more than 24 hours before your renewal date.

https://support.apple.com/HT204939

If you cancelled more than 24 hours contact Apple Support.


Magsafe's indicator light goes off, battery gets not charged further Yesterday, all of a sudden, my macbook pro (15 inch early-2016) started to forget how to charge its battery.

According to the battery icon, almost everything looks great but one thing. It doesn't charge the battery. (I made some pictures so you can get a visual about the issue)
Whats really interesting about this, is that my charger does work with other macbook pros. Some of my colleagues have the very same macbook as I do and the magsafe goes on, starts with green, then changes to amber; the battery status says says charging.
Another interesting habit is, that when the battery charge drops below a certain percentage, it starts to charge itself, but only with other dhargers. Yesterday I discharged the battery until the laptop didn't boot anymore but said there's no charge. I connected the charger of my MBA, nothing happened. I plugged it into my MBA the indicator light started with green, then I plugged it back into the MBP and it started charging. Im sitting now on a charge of 85% but after I disconnected at that point it didn't charge anymore.

The following pictures describe everything I could put into words.

What I tried so far:

I did an SMC/PRAM reset
battery discharge
plugging the power cord into another MB and then back

Happened to my brother with a brand new original Apple charger. What he did was to remove the charging extension (thicker cable) and plugged the square power box directly into the sliding plug, and it worked. See below:

This worked for him, but might not work for you, let us know! :)


How to eliminate Internet lapses on my MacBook Air 13? I have a MacBook Air 13 (mid 2012) running OS X El Capitan (10.11.3).  I connect to the Internet using a Virgin Mobile Netgear Mingle hotspot.  During Internet browsing sessions I will at times experience a browser session which appears to be frozen.  This is noticed when I try to go to a link exhibited on the page that I am viewing and the connection isn't successful.  The browser shows that it is trying to connect, but eventually the new connection fails.  During the time the browser is frozen like this, I can open a new tab and try to connect to www.google.com, and that connection will fail also.  If this happens while using Firefox, switching to Safari has the same experience (Safari also acts as if frozen).  Or vice versa.

I can successfully ping external servers (e.g. youtube.com) during the period when the browsers are not connecting (the ping is done via a Terminal window).  I can use my wife's MacBook Air 11 (mid 2012, OS X Yosemite) and on it, Safari can connect to www.google.com during the time that the browser on the MacBook Air 13 cannot make connections.  Her MacBook Air 11 is using the same Virgin Mobile Netgear Mingle hotspot.  Checking wifi channel on both MacBook Airs has shown the channel # to be the same, so that seems to rule out channel interference as the problem.  During a lapse on 2/15/16 I used the Mingle Hotspot Manager to change the channel from 6 to 11.  The lapse continued, unabated.

When the browsers are frozen, the "App Store" appears to be frozen as well.

I run Wireless Diagnostics during the freeze and look at its "Performance" graphs and detect nothing out of the ordinary.  The situation is self-correcting, it seems, if I wait long enough.  Or, I can restart the computer.  Toggling wifi off and on doesn't correct the freeze. Quitting the browser and restarting it doesn't correct the freeze.

I've researched this problem on the Internet, but I haven't found any suggested solution that corrects the freeze.

These freezes exhibited themselves with OS X Yosemite as well (10.10.5), prior to upgrading OS X to El Capitan.

I have noted a correlation of these freezes with the failure of an application to Quit properly (as noted by its appearance in the Force Quit list (Command + Option + Escape) after Quit has been used).

I attach an output from Wireless Diagnostics Info during one of these freezes.

I now believe that these lapses/freezes can be blamed on the network setup that I was using.  My brother visited and with his Dell laptop running a version of Microsoft Windows the same thing happened.  I've since switched to a different Internet provider and haven't had the problem again.  The first Internet provider is in the process of discontinuing its service.


Audio out of sync after exporting from iMovie I recorded a vlog on my iPhone 8+ and edited it in iMovie. When I play the video in iMovie, the audio is perfectly fine and in sync with the video. However, when I export it and upload it to YouTube, the audio is completely out of sync and always starts at a certain time. I’ve done everything I could find to fix this issue yet it persists. I’m extremely desperate and I’m looking for a solution that does not include re-editing the entire clip.

I think I have a solution to your problem. I too was seeing this in iMovie and it turns out that if your audio track was sampled at 44.1 KHz, the export will likely mess up the audio sync. Fixing is quick and easy. Just take your audio track and resample it at 48 KHz. You can do this in a free tool like VLC. Then, bring in the new audio file, export your iMovie and it will work correctly.


Is there a way to code sign ad-hoc iOS apps for longer than 7 days in Xcode? I know, on Xcode, you can create an iPhone app, and test it on your own phone via USB cable, but this expires after 7 days.

I want to create a swift app just for my iPhone and not have it expire so quickly. What are my options?

Free developer membership apps require resigning to be functional after 7 days.

Paid developer membership apps expire after 1 year. You can also submit an app for testing to TestFlight which signs apps for 90 days. You can purchase a developer membership at https://developer.apple.com

If your device is jailbroken, you can resign your apps with a free developer account for as long as you wish, on device with Extender: Reloaded, available from the repo http://repo.incendo.ws.


Cannot print period ('.') from simple AppleScript to VMware Fusion virtual machine So I have a simple AppleScript that I think should type a bunch of keys, but the period character doesn't print in VMware Fusion's virtual machines. This is odd because my period key (.) enters a period like normal in those VMs.

MCVE

Here is my latest version that I tried:

on run {input, parameters}

    set file_text to "this another test: ... hello ..."
    delay 0.3
    repeat with ch in file_text
        tell application "System Events" to keystroke ch
        delay 0.1
    end repeat

    return input
end run

I built this as a service in Automator. I run this by going to my application, then in the Title bar I select Services -> quicktype.

Expected Behavior

It should just type the text this another test: ... hello .... In many application, it does exactly that.

True Behavior

In a FreeBSD VM, pressing . renders a period at the shell (like normal). When the above script runs, however, the periods look like backspaces. End result:

In a Windows VM, . renders a period in Notepad (like normal). When the above script runs, however, the periods seem to be ignored completely. End result:

Questions

Is there a way to truly emulate pressing the keys from a string of characters in AppleScript? Because clearly the above way isn't doing that.

Does anyone know why the behavior I described above is happening? Why does this work in TextMate and Terminal, and other mac apps, but not in Fusion VMs?

I don't understand why this isn't working, however I do have a fix. I figured out that doing tell application "System Events" to key code 47 sends a period correctly.

So, I wrapped my read into a conditional like this:

on run {input, parameters}

    #set input_file to "/path/to/file"
    #set file_text to read input_file
    set file_text to "test: ... hello ..."
    delay 0.3
    repeat with ch in file_text
        if ch as string = "." then
            tell application "System Events" to key code 47
        else
            tell application "System Events" to keystroke ch
        end if
        delay 0.1
    end repeat

    return input
end run


How can I install large Apps from App Store on and external disk I can't download extremely large games, because App Store says there's "not enough space to install the product."

This is not unexpected, but I do have a USB-C 2TB SSD always connected and I'd like to install things there.

Is there a way to change where games get installed from App Store?

No. Move other files to the external drive to free up space. Then once you have installed the app, move it after it’s done downloading and installing.

You need free space on the system drive for many reasons and one is App Store and installing apps.


Can't access recovery mode because I deleted everything from HD My Macbook PRO 13 inch of 2011 is booting to a black screen, i was trying to recovery it but the original HD was failing to install the OS, so i installed in a pen drive, then i erased everything in the HD, and then i accidentally erased everything in the pen drive, so i don't have anything in the pen drive and anything in the HD. I also have a fresh SSD, but when i try to startup with this new SSD, i only see a black screen.

I already try things like:

Remove the battery cable
Press Command + Option + R + P
Press Command + OPtion + R
Press the power button 10 seconds
Press the power button 30 seconds

Also, before the black screen, i see this lines like old television, it is fast, but they always appear. Perhaps the problem could be the screen?

Thank you.

As mentioned by NoahL - use internet recovery mode.

  First, check this: Computers that can be upgraded to use OS X
  Internet Recovery. If you can use Network Recovery, then do the
  following:

  Install OS X Using Internet Recovery   Be sure you backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive because the
  following procedure will remove everything from the hard drive.

  Boot to the Internet Recovery HD:   Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND-OPTION- R keys until a globe
  appears on the screen. Wait patiently - 15-20 minutes - until the
  Recovery main menu appears.

  Partition and Format the hard drive:   Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button. After DU loads select
  your newly installed hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID
  and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the
  DU main window.

  Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the
  drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition
  scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac
  OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until
  the process has completed. Quit DU and return to the main menu.

  Reinstall OS X: Select Reinstall OS X and click on the Continue button. Be sure to select the SSD.   Note: You will need an active
  Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it
  is three times faster than wireless.

  This should restore the version
  of OS X originally pre-installed on the computer.


Terminal Ping, how to get simple integer i am wondering how exactly you would get a simple integer result instead of all the miscellaneous information such as the packet size, transmission number and target.

To elaborate:
I would prefer the output to look like:

117.85

A single integer response, similar to how the syntax: ping -c 1 google.com returns a single result, however i would prefer the method to omit the detailed ping report and only displays a single number.

Thanks in advance.

Try this:

ping -c 1 google.com | grep "time=" | sed -E "s/(.*)time=([.0-9]+) ms/\2/"

If you want to get an minimal value for some number of requests use:

ping -q -c 5 google.com | tail -1 | cut -d "=" -f 2 | cut -d "/" -f 1

Replace 1 in -f 1 with:

2 for average
3 for maximum


Apple iPhone 6 Plus display languages I want to buy an iPhone, and would like to ask whether the iPhone 6 Plus has either Persian or Farsi language support.

Apple eventually added the Persian keyboard and language to the list of the iPhone keyboards and preferred languages back in 2017. Now all iPhones with iOS 11+ can add Persian keyboard and or language in their iPhone Settings > General > Keyboards or .. > Language & Region.

Prior to iOS 11, Persian users could install the Arabic keyboard and long-press ک - ج - ب - ز - ي keys to input the Persian letters گ - چ - پ - ژ - ی.


Importing iPhoto over wireless I'd like to copy all photos from one iPhoto album (on machine A) onto a new iPhoto library (on machine B). I realise I could import the physical folder over a share but I'd like to keep the event folders etc and not import the original and modified duplicates within the source library.

The folder size is around 15GB and I was able to select import from within iPhoto and point it to the remote iPhoto location on machine B. It attempted to import all night and when I got up, it reported there wasn't enough disk space to do the import. Machine A had about 75GB so I suspect something else.

Anyway, my question is really to see if you have any tips about copying or otherwise sharing photos between machines. If you've got any insight in what went wrong for my scenario above, I'd love to hear that too!

Machine B is a Macbook Air and has no ethernet port, hence the wireless tag.

EDIT If I were to export then import, I'd lose the event groups wouldn't I? I want to keep what organisation I have between the machines.

Cheers

You need to export the images from Machine A to the Finder, then import that to machine B.

There's no other way to do it that won't get edited versions etc.


Could my iPhone 6's 4G possibly be "broken" while its 3G still works? The question sounds strange I know. For the last few days I have not seen 4G up at the top of the display of my iPhone 6; it's been demoted to 3G.

I'm in the same several locations where I have been, and the signal is always 3 or 4 bars out of 4.

I can't imagine that there are separate chips or antennas for 3G and 4G, so this may be related to my carrier in some way, but I thought I would just check here first in case I'm wrong.

Are there any tests I can do to check this myself? Stand under a tower and use the aluminum foil I normally wear under my hat as a reflector for example? ;-)

My iPhone 6's software is 12.4.3 and I have a notification that 12.4.4 is a recommended update.

Cropped iPhone screen shot (with carrier's name manually blocked out).

Go to settings > cellular data > cellular data options > turn off 4G and turn it back on.

Another way I use to get my phone on 4G is airplane mode on and off.


"cron" processes spawning and piling up, but no crontab EDIT: I solved this, so see below for my own answer. While the bounty asks for a fix to the problem, I'd like to award it to someone who can explain why a cron process that ran for 6 years over multiple MacOS versions suddenly became a problem in Catalina.

First note, this is not a duplicate of "cron" processes piling up because I don't have active crontabs on my computer. Cron processes spawn, but they never finish, so they just keep piling up. I'm running MacOS Catalina 10.15.1

Cron jobs are spawning every couple of minutes and never dying. The oldest cron process always has a parent process "launchd", and I've searched for populated crontabs and can't find any. If I let this go on long enough, eventually I run into a scenario where I have hundreds of running cron processes and everything on my computer grinds to a halt, and I can't even open new apps (I get cryptic messages like ".app cannot be opened" when I try to open an app). My only solution at this point has been to keep activity monitor open and periodically killing off all active cron processes.

I've been able to create a new user account that seems to be immune from this issue. However, as soon as I logged into my apple ID on that account to set up iCloud drive, the problem started with that account, too. I logged out of my Apple ID and attempted uninstall iCloud drive, but the problem persisted. Clean installs of Catalina don't clear up the problem, I've reset SMC and PRAM multiple times, and repairing permissions (via this https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538). I've also ensured that cron has full disk access (via this https://blog.bejarano.io/fixing-cron-jobs-in-mojave/). I'm at a dead end with trying to troubleshoot this problem.

I'm not sure it's related, but my "system.log" file seems to get spammed the following few lines:

<redacted> AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent[2132]: Entered:_AMMuxedDeviceDisconnected, mux-device:63
<redacted> AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent[2132]: Entered:__thr_AMMuxedDeviceDisconnected, mux-device:63
<redacted> AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent[2132]: tid:9a27 - Mux ID not found in mapping dictionary

ANY help is appreciated.

So I found a relevant answer here:

Cron job keeps running, not in any crontabs

I don't think this question should be removed because this seems to be relevant to Catalina, even though it seems to be user error.

Explanation:

The root crontab had been edited at some point, with cron jobs that I created 6 years ago on my computer (I may have done this before learning that was a bad idea). This crontab had two lines that each referenced a script that was supposed to run every minute. Neither one of these referenced existing locations on my drive, and for whatever reason cron wouldn't exit after attempting to run them.

This problem never manifested before upgrading to Catalina, but I don't know why that is - either cron was running every minute for the last 6 years and the Catalina update semi-broke cron, or something got copied to the root cron file. Probably the former problem, which would be a PIBCAK scenario combined with typical Catalina issues.

The solution was to edit the root-owned crontab to remove the two offending lines, and boom, the problem is gone!

I created a new user crontab for testing, and this leaves one persistent cron job (with parent = launchd), but the rest of the cron jobs that I run will exit predictably and not suck up resources. Cron itself doesn't seem to be broken, but root-run cron jobs may be problematic. (EDIT: I deleted the root crontab and now activity monitor doesn't show any cron processes running - I'm mystified as to why this happened with only certain user accounts, since none of this happened at the user level)


An error occurred while moving messages to mailbox “(null)” I just moved my IMAP email from one server to another and now while I'm trying to delete any emails, Mail produces the following error:

  An error occurred while moving messages to mailbox “(null)”.

I Google'd for it and found a lot of folks out there who are having the exact same issue but was not able to find solution.

Try selecting the Trash mailbox (folder) and then the menu item:

Mailbox → Use This Mailbox As → Trash Mailbox


Is there a faster way to copy time machine files from one disk to another? I'm trying to move my time machine backup files all under Backups.backupdb to another drive. I initiated a file copy overnight (b/c I saw that it took OSX forever to prepare for the copy...it basically was counting the files for hours). In the morning I saw that only certain backups(folders with dates) got copied over. I then tried to copy over the ones that didn't get copied...but the OS wouldn't allow me to do that. I got and error that "The operation can’t be completed because backup items can’t be modified." So my plan is to delete the incomplete copy on the new drive and then try to copy over the Backups.backupdb folder again.

Pretty frustrating. Is there a faster way to copy these files via a terminal command so that it doesn't perform all of that file counting prep?

I probably can tar up the entire folder and then do a copy, but will that interfere with any of the file permissions, etc.? The one thing with this approach is that I don't have any more space on my source volume for the tar.

UPDATE

I've tried some of the methods that people have suggested below, specifically using Disk Utility's restore function and it's giving me some error messages and unexpected results (at least to me).
I've tried to do the restore two ways:

With "Erase Destination" checked : Each time (I've tried twice), when the restore has finished I see a message "Could not restore - Invalid Operation" and "Could not restore - Invalid Argument". However, my destination disk does get a copy of my TM files. The weird thing is that my destination disk is EXACTLY like my source disk...even the size. My destination disk is actually 1 TB but after the restore, it shows as 200 GB when I get info from the finder. But in Disk Utility, it shows a 1 TB partition!

I then tried to verify/repair the disk and got:

    Invalid B-tree node size
    Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
    Invalid B-tree node size
    Volume repair complete.
    Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
    Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

Don't know if I'm even suppose to verify/repair a TM disk...

With "Erase Destination" UNchecked : The restore never starts and I get:

    Could not restore - Operation not permitted

A normal copy (or copy via rsync or ditto) will not replicate a Time Machine fully as it will convert two directories linked together (as occurs in successive TM backups with no change between) into two separate directories.

The best way is to copy the whole the disk using Disk Utility or the block copy part of Carbon Copy Cloner and probably similar on SuperDuper.


Is there any way to take a picture remotely on an ipod? My ipod was stolen, and using icloud I was able to track it.  I used the "Lock" function, but I'm wondering if it would have been possible to take a picture using the front camera.

No, that is not possible unless you had jailbroken the device and installed that capability beforehand.

Unfortunately, there are some limitations on what type of tracking can be done through iCloud services. If you see the general location, I could try to narrow it down as much as possible, or see if there's a movement pattern...possibly someone going to work.


How do I set an iCloud e-mail? When I first got my iPod I was given the option to set up an iCloud address. At the time I didn't want one; however, I want one now. So, how do I get one now?

If you go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account, then choose iCloud. At the bottom of the next screen you'll see Get a Free Apple ID.


How can I activate an iPhone 5s locked to another person's iCloud account? I bought a used iPhone 5s and unknowing to me it is locked to an iCloud account with a gmail address (p*****@gmail.com). I formatted the iPhone and upon activating it the iCloud prompt appears and frankly speaking I can't trace the old user of the phone. Please what can I do to activate it because i don't have a clue where the previous owner lives. Please help me because I used my savings to purchase the phone.

Sorry but there isn't a way to remove the previous activation without the previous owners iCloud details. That would defeat the purpose of these anti-theft measures.

Apple provide instructions here on how to remove the activation lock. You will need to contact the previous owner. Please speak to whoever you bought the iPhone from.


Attempting to downgrade from iOS 9.3.5 to iOS 8.4.1 will not work I attempted to follow this guide for Downgrading from iOS 9.3.5 to iOS 8.4.1.

I was able to complete every step in the list until these step(s):

I get stuck at step 20.

This is when you start the downgrade.

When the downgrade appears, I click Download and Install as usual.

But when I click it, it just stays on this screen forever:

The  Download and Install button will stay grayed out and will have a spinning wheel.

I am using an iPad mini (1st gen) and am running iOS 9.3.5

For other people, the downgrade will start immediately.

Am I missing anything?

I was successfully able to start the downgrade! It turns out that it.....

Drumroll, please! :)

WAS ICLOUD!

I was able to start the downgrade to 8.4.1 by signing out of iCloud, then initiating the downgrade!

I hope this helps some people


Is there a Safari shortcut that always works to reopen last-closed tab? Note: this is not a duplicate of How can I get Safari to reopen my last closed tab?

I am familiar with the shortcut ⌘+Z working when the tab was just closed. However, I often do something else that I don't want to undo.

For instance, I sometimes close a tab, write half and answer on Stack Exchange, realize I didn't want to close it, and am then stuck with accessing the history manually.

So, is there any Safari shortcut or menu item specifically for reopening my last closed tab?

Update: This isn't a fix, but if your only problem is not wanting to undo anything besides closed tabs (and you don't care about having something that'll always work), setting a shortcut for "Undo Close Tab" in Keyboard preferences will filter the shortcut to closed tabs only!

The answer is no, Safari does not provide any built-in functionality or shortcut (to the non-existing functionality) to restore the last closed tab.

The only functionality that Safari currently offers is:

Reopen last closed window
Undo Close Tab (as part of the Undo event chain)

The first does just that, re-opens the last closed window, including all the tabs that were open when it closed.

The second works as you already know, it only works if it's the last thing you did, or you have to undo other things which is the caveat you noted above.

Looking at Safari Extensions, there are a few Tab managers around, however none of them specifically note their support for Tab Undo's except SafariTabs and this functionality was removed from the product for Safari 5; as the developer notes that Safari 5 now provides this as part of the Undo chain

Developing a solution for this while it's not trivial, isn't something that is going to be impossible as Apple have done most of the hard work. :D

Safari provides event propagation to Safari Extensions, and the particular one you would be interested in is CloseEvent (SafariEvent).  Of course determining a method of distinguishing between the CloseEvent's for Windows (with each Tab receiving its own CloseEvent) and singular Tab CloseEvents... well there's the hard work.


Do three finger navigation gestures work in System Preferences? I've been playing around with a lot of different settings, and I'm not sure if one of the changes I made causes three finger gestures to not work in the System Preferences application, or if they never worked in the app to begin with.

When you navigate through the application and the forward or back buttons are enabled, does using the three finger swipe advance you forward or backward?

No, unfortunately three-finger swipes do not work in System Preferences.


Is it possible to maximize a Finder window without third-party software? How can I maximize a window in Finder without using third-party software? I read this post but none of these tricks seemed to work.

Move the mouse to the corner of the window where it becomes a resizing arrow and option double-click to fill the screen.
A double-click on any side or corner will move that side/corner to the edge of the screen. Adding option will affect the opposite side as well.


Last import in Address Book A little history: I had a old Nokia 5310. Lost it. I had the contacts backed up in a .vcf file. So imported them to a old Sony Ericsson W700i. Used the W700i for sometime, added some more contacts.
Not got a new Nokia C5. Wanted to import all the contacts to the Nokia and at the same time add them to Address Book so that I can manage all contacts from Address Book and sync with the new Nokia. (Address Book has some old contacts, that are not required to be on the phone but nevertheless necessary, my wife's contacts imported sometime before etc). (Thanks for reading)

I exported the contacts from the phone to a .vcf file and imported it in Address Book.
Wanted to move only these contacts to the Nokia. So thought will open Last Import and sync all of them with the new phone.
But looks like Last Import holds all of my imports, not just the most recent one.

I tried to select a group and then import, but the import does not happen to the group. They are imported to the "All Contacts".

Is there any way to get/select only the most recent imported contacts?

Are you comfortable with AppleScript? If so, you could write a script to export the contacts created after a date of your choosing.


Mavericks Server: Unable to use 3rd party SSL Certificates with Open Directory We have a Mac OS X Server (Mavericks) - Mac OS X: 10.9.2,  Server: 3.1

Our Open Directory Master is set up and running but we cannot for the life of us get it to accept our 3rd Party (DigiCert) SSL certificate. The certificate is active for all other services (Mail, Calendar, WWW, Messages) but whenever I select it for Open Directory and click OK the Server app just reverts back to "None".

I've tried destroying the OD Master and rebuilding it but this didn't help; problem persists.

This seems like a show stopper; anyone know how we can fix this?

I believe Apple fixed that bug in Server 4 but I can't reproduce it on Server 5. Have you checked the serveradmin command line tool to check your settings and status:

sudo serveradmin fullstatus dirserv
sudo serveradmin settings dirserv
sudo serveradmin -x settings certs

The -x argument instructs serveradmin to format the data as XML, which often shows more information (at least in the case of certs).

Sometimes you can set things there that the GUI balks at - but you also want to have the ability to call AppleCare for support or a great backup plan that's tested before mucking with sudo and serveradmin from my experience.