Is it possible to install both Xcode 3 and 4 side-by-side, alternate use either one or the other I've got a handle on how to install Xcode 3 and 4 on the same machine (running OS X < 10.7), so I'm looking more how to manage this environment.

Rather: is it possible to enter some shell command to "point" to the Xcode version you would like to use for a certain task?

For example, some packages in Homebrew seem to have issues with Xcode 4 compilers (multiple -arch flags not supported any longer etc.). So, when I want to brew install something, I would like to use the old Xcode 3 gcc suite. But when doing actual Cocoa development, I  would rather like to use Xcode 4.

RVM also does a nice job of managing work in multiple environments. I think, newer Linux distributions offer a tool called update-alternatives to achieve such a goal. Just to give you more of an idea of what I am talking about.

Similar to running both simultaneously except I'm looking to use them sequentially.

I believe you can only have one version of the command-line tools installed at the same time, and I believe it says this during the installation process, so you won't really be able to switch between them.


How do I prevent my MacBook Air from forgetting my Remapped Caps Lock Key? As someone who doesn't like to shout, I have Caps Lock remapped to Control on all of my computers. A second control key is far more useful to a guy who spends most of his time in Terminal.app. This was set up in System Preferences under Keyboard and Modifier Keys.

My MacBook Air (MacBookAir3,2) keeps 'forgetting' this setting every couple of days and reverting to SHOUTY CAPS LOCK. I haven't yet pinpointed when it is reverting. It happens more frequently than me rebooting the Air but less frequently than me closing and opening the lid.

I don't have this problem on my MacBook Pro, Mac Mini or iMac. All four Macs are running Mac OS X 10.6.6.

I've searched the web but to no avail; I've never connected an external keyboard, mouse or trackpad.

Help me, StackExchange Users, you're my only hope.

Try doing a 'repair permissions' in Disk Utility. A permissions error could be causing the preference to get overwritten by the default.


Mail search not finding messages but Spotlight does When I search for a particular message in Mail.app, using the search field, even when I have the message in sight, Mail cannot find it. But, frustratingly, when I use Spotlight, it is able to find the message.

For example, I'll open a folder with a variety of recipes. I can see all the subjects and I see an email with the subject: "Smoothies". Typing in "Smoothies" into the search field brings up 0 results. But typing in "Smoothies" into Spotlight shows the desired message.

How can I get Mail.app to search correctly?

I'm running Mac OS X 10.11.3.

Rebuilding Mail.app's mailboxes fixed this for me. This ComputerWorld article is a great reference for rebuilding and reindexing your mailboxes:

Rebuild: Select a mailbox (or several by shift-clicking) and then use "Mailbox > Rebuild"
Reindex: Quit Mail, navigate to ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData (on Mac OS 10.12 - Sierra, ~/Library/Mail/V4/MailData) and delete any files where the name begins with Envelope Index. Mail will rebuild the indexes on the next start (which may take a long time depending on the size of your mailboxes)


iPhone / iPod music problem How can I delete the music from my iPhone WITHOUT deleting it from my iPod??
Also, how to prevent it from just automatically loading them all back on when I sync my phone/computer. This is what happened last time, and why I don't have enough space on my phone! AGAIN.

Connect your iPhone to your computer. Once you open iTunes, you will see a check mark on Sync only checked songs in the main window for the device. This will only sync the songs checked in your library for that device (iPhone) and will delete the ones you don't want.

Make sure that check mark is selected.

In your iTunes music library, deselect the songs you don't want on your iPhone.

For your iPod, you can leave it unchecked and all your songs will sync.

This should solve both problems you are having.


I can't see usb-drives and archives in the sidebar of the finder anymore When I plugin a usb-drive or open dmg-archives they don't appear under the 'Devices' section in the sidebar of the Finder anymore.

The drives are there when I check with 'Disk Utility', they appear on the Desktop and I can browse the files if I go to /Volumes.

I have 'Hard disks' and 'External disks' checked in the Finder preferences -> Sidebar tab.

Any ideas on how to get them to show up in the sidebar?

I'm using MacOS Lion 10.7.5.

In your Finder sidebar, can you see your internal hard drive listed under Devices? If you hover over Devices you should see either Show or Hide just to the right of it, perhaps it's set to hidden?


What is the purpose of the §/± key on a UK Mac keyboard? This question is just for curiosity.
My UK Macbook Pro's keyboard has a key in the very top left with the symbols § and ±. (On a US keyboard the ~/` key is in this position.) From looking at pictures of the newest Macbook Pros, it seems this key has finally been phased out, but I'm still curious about the reason for its existence up to now.
Let me say at the outset, I'm looking for answers based on specific known facts about the reason for the key's inclusion, which probably means either some insider insight into Apple's decision making, or at least some knowledge of the history behind it. A lot of answers so far are based on opinions or speculations, and it would be greatly appreciated if that could be avoided.
The symbols on the key, § and ±, seem quite obscure and rarely used. § is an old-fashioned symbol for a section heading in a document, and is still used in the printing industry, while ± is used to quantify errors in scientific and engineering documents, as well as in high-school maths (i.e. the quadratic formula). But even in those specialised contexts the choice seems odd: why include a special key for the section marker § but not the much more common paragraph marker ¶? Similarly, why ± and not ≈, Δ or √?
It seems odd to have a dedicated key for these relatively obscure symbols, especially since it doesn't appear on the Apple US keyboard layout, or on a non-Apple UK keyboard.
So basically I'm just curious about the reason for this key's existence. It seems unlikely that British Mac users have a special reason to use these symbols often, so I would guess the reasons for including it were either historical or technical in nature, or possibly they had to do with one particular Apple employee's personal preference. But what, specifically, were those reasons?
As noted above, I'm looking for answers with specific insight or evidence about the decision-making at Apple regarding the existence of this particular key.

I think only Apple knows the answer to this.

The § and ± characters are available on the US keyboard at option 6 and option-shift =.

I believe a historical antecedent for the ± key can be found in the IBM Selectric 3 keyboard.

Other Apple hardware keyboards with the same key in the same place are Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English International, Greek, Hebrew, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Turkish.  I suspect their users also wonder why Apple gave these two characters such status.

A much bigger mystery in my view is why the Apple British keyboard puts the " and @ characters at different places than any normal British keyboard does.  Apple eventually had to provide a "British PC" option in system preferences/keyboard/input sources to accommodate all the folks who are used to the British standard.


Best way to archive personal data at home I'm looking for home archival of personal data, photos, work documents, etc. I am an independent freelancer and work from home mostly so it's not only private data but also work related.
I'm aware of the difference between backup and archiving. I work on Apple devices so I have all my work data synced through iCloud (documents folder is steadily synced with Apple iCloud).
What I'm looking for is a solution for data archiving for data which I don't want to have on my local machine but only on the archive media. It's data starting at about year 2000 and consists mostly of private family photos and other personal stuff. Currently about 500GB of data.
Currently I have it all spread over three HDD harddisks. I've also put it all together into one big archive on a new LaCie USB-C HDD. I'm afraid one of these HDDs might fail someday so I'm looking for a solution.
I don't have a network at home (only use iPhone 4G hotspot for internet) so I have no Ethernet connectivity for a NAS or similar. I was thinking of a NAS with RAID 1 although I know it's rather meant for data availability than archiving since it can fail as a whole too.
What do you recommend for my case? I have a feeling there is no "best practice" here and I'm a bit lost. I've tried pCloud (similar to Dropbox but better server availability in EU) but I hate their web UI, I think it's really outdated and ugly and that is something that keeps me from a product. I'd really like to have the data on my site too.

There exists many time-proven solutions for data archival - so there's lots of best practice advice around.
You indicate that you have no existing local network, you have a slow internet connection using a phone hot-spot and you have only about 500 GB of data collected over 20 years that you wish to archive.
In this case, I wouldn't have cloud services or NAS devices with old style hard drives in a RAID setup at the top of my list of technologies to use. Those come with recurring operating costs and other drawbacks.
Instead I would look to storing the data on optical disks or tape. Depending on the product used you have plenty of space, it is relatively cheap to make extra copies and it is local only technology. I.e. for example today you can optical disk recorders that store multiple terabytes of data on a single disk - however, I would advise you to start with one of the cheaper options ofcourse.
The advantage of being able to make multiple copies is that:
a) any copy will eventually deteriorate over time and needs to be replaced (this is also the case with RAID-volumes, where hard drives will eventually fail and need to be replaced)
b) you risk theft of the device, house catching on fire, water damage, etc. - so better to have multiple (encrypted) copies that you can store in other locations
For optical disc storage you can start with a simple BluRay. A good quality, archival grade disk probably lasts 20 years without you having to do anything except keeping scratches away. It is ofcourse best to keep them out of light, heat, vibrations, etc. as well.
I would say that with a budget of 300-400$ you can get a BluRay BDXL burner and a big pack of 100 GB archival discs so you can get all your data stored.
Another contender would be using the commonly available, very small sized, SD-cards. These are available at cheap in the capacities you seek, and it is easy to make multiple copies that can be stored in various locations (in the car, at a friends house, etc). They typically last longer than hard drives that have a life-span on average of about 5 years or similar.


Syncing contacts between devices How people sync contacts between devices on PC, Tablet, Phone?

When i use same apple account on my ipad and iphone it is ok but it is not possible to sync with my Android Tablet (google account) and my PC (Microsoft Account)

How to achieve that?

Don't use an Apple account. You can sync contacts from Google or Microsoft accounts with iOS devices, so use one of those accounts to store your contacts.


Two older Macs (G3 / Intel) need their drives erased. No install discs I have two older Macs in which I want to erase the hard drive. Secure-erase is a plus, but not a show-stopper at this point. I don't have any Mac OS X discs so I can't use disc utility.

What I'd really like to do is download or buy and download a utility that can create bootable discs so I can boot each computer and erase the hard drives.

Any suggestions on utilities?

Do you have a current Mac with a Firewire port? You can attach the old Macs1 to the new one via Firewire, and boot them using Target Disk Mode, and use Disk Utility on the new Mac to wipe the drives (they'll appear as external drives).

1 Note that the earliest G3 iMacs didn't have Firewire, and thus can't use this feature. The G3 with slot loading drive (released in Octoboer 1999) and later will work.


I got my iPhone back from service with a sticker on "WMI Fail" or "VMI Fail". What is "WMI"/"VMI"? I just got my iPhone back from service with a sticker on "WMI Fail".

What is "WMI"?

Googling doesn't return any sensible Apple related explanation, neither does asking @AppleSupport on Twitter (they didn't know).

By coincidence I met someone who works with this and he told that WMI was an acronym for Warranty Mechanical Inspection. He was "pretty" sure about this although but not completely sure (first he misunderstood me and thought I said VMI which he explained as Visual Mechanical Inspection - I guess "Mechanical Inspection" for MI is a safe bet at least).

If someone could confirm/refute this it would be great.


Slow HEIC Viewing on Mac When viewing HEIC images with QuickLook from Finder on my MacBook Pro (2019) there is always a slight delay of almost a second. Other formats (jpg/png) work just fine.
When viewing the images in Photos they show up instantly.
Can this be fixed?

Since I found no fix I wrote a small app that uses macOS components to display the HEIC instantly.


Is there a way to automatically sync iTunes to my music folder (which is on a different hd)? I'd like iTunes to automatically add any music that I add to my music folder to its library. I don't want to have my music on the same hard-drive as Itunes, though, so I can't just copy it into any of the Itunes music folders. Is there a way to do this?

No, iTunes will not "listen" for music in a given folder (like the popular BT program Transmission, which will load torrent files once they've been downloaded to a given directory).

You have to manually add music by dragging it in the iTunes window or going through the file menu (CMD + O).

However, you could achieve what you are after perhaps with some voodoo in Apple Script. Or simply sort the contents of your music folder by "date added" (provided you are using Lion) and manually add the songs as they arrive.

But then if you are going through all this trouble of manually managing files, you may wish to ask yourself, "why"? It might be less of a burden to just let iTunes do its thing (like it was mentioned before, you can tell iTunes to copy the music anywhere you like, on any drive connected to your system, even on a network) than micro-manage a bunch of files.


How to switch between different Chrome windows with keyboard shortcuts? Switching between applications is easy with command-tab.

Switching between tabs is easy with command-} or control-tab.

Switching between separate windows within an application is easy with command-`.

However, that last one doesn't seem to work with Google Chrome (Version 27.0.1453.110) on OS X 10.8.4. Is there a leopard shortcut specific for Chrome to switch between different windows?

⌘ Cmd+` works for me with the same versions of Chrome and OS X, so it might be something specific to your installation.

You could try temporarily resetting Chrome's preferences or disabling extensions. Or change the shortcut from System Preferences or test if it works on a different account.


iOS 6 displaying update badge, no update available My app store is displaying an update as badge. When I click the App Store, it claims I have all updates.

What did Apple do?

Update: The apps now appear to be available to download. Anyone else seeing this now too?

I am seeing this behaviour too and am 98% sure the updates are for for apps on your phone which require iOS7 or later.

I am not aware of a fix at this stage.


How can I create a live updating slideshow? I have a need to create a short slideshow style presentation (doesn't have to be a slideshow particularly if something else is more appropriate) which updates it's contents on the fly.

The content is fairly straightforward; number of laps done, distance covered - integers that slowly increase over a period of time but not at predictable intervals, interspersed with some static information that doesn't change.

My preference was to create a Keynote presentation, but other than stopping the presentation to update the slides, I don't know of a way in which is can be kept informed of updates.

Is there a way for Keynote to pull updates (bit like the old the object linking and embedding thing Windows had once), for example can I include a Numbers file on particular slides which will get reloaded each time it hits that slide?  That way I can use a 2nd machine to keep updating the data, and have Keynote simply load it in?

Here is how you can do that in Power Point. I do not use Keynote.

There are two ways to insert content objects into a PowerPoint presentation:

Linked objects    A linked object is updated if its source file is changed. For example, a linked chart built from data in Microsoft Excel is changed if the source Excel data changes. The source file must be available on your computer or network to maintain the link between the inserted object and the source data. Inserting a linked object is recommended if the source data set is large or complex.

Embedded objects    The source data is embedded in the presentation. You can view the embedded object on another computer, because the source data is part of the presentation file. Embedded objects typically require more disk space than linked objects.


Restrict Access to wifi for certain devices I have high school students and they stay up late at night streaming movies.  I don't want to restrict access for our college student who needs to stay up late to finish papers. Can I select devices that I wish to deny access to?

I have an Airport Extreme hooked through my main computer. I have found where to see the devices that are using the Airport, but I can't identify which computer is which. Anyway, the most important question is can I turn of access to individual devices when I wish to? (Right now I just unplug the wifi.)

You might easily manage this using Timed Access Control settings with a default rule that prohibits wireless internet during off hours.

Then you could set up devices that have exceptions to the rules (or the opposite - block certain devices while letting most clients unfettered access).

To get to the screen above, run Airport Utility and then choose Network and enable Timed Access at the bottom of the visible window.


What is the difference between various VM solutions? I'm new to the Mac platform and need to figure out which virtualization platform is best for me.

Is there a comparison list of features (and missing features) for each of the major virtualization platforms?  (VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop, Microsoft VirtualPC, or VMware ESX?

I have a license for each and am running on a retina MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM.  I need to run a number of Microsoft operating systems in 64-bit mode.

As you've pointed out, there is plenty of virtualisation software. However, the most famous are Parallels and VMware Fusion (the other ones I haven't used, so I can't give you an opinion about them).

In my opinion, Parallels is the more robust one and gives me the best performance. There are a lot of online battles going one between both camps and there both apps have their (dis)advantages. For me, Parallels is the best way to go, because it has the most functions.

For most people it's a close race and they let the price decide. Both companies often hold special sales, so you should look for those kind of things.


Bypass unresolvable error when cleaning packages with package manager? Using MacPorts, when I run

sudo port -f clean --all all

Then I get an error. Snippet of output below:

--->  Cleaning ml
--->  Cleaning mldonkey
--->  Cleaning mlpack
--->  Cleaning mlt
Error: Unable to open port: Package Qt5Core was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `Qt5Core.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable

I don't know which one is causing the problem (I tried uninstalling/installing mlt but that doesn't do it). This may not be specific to MacPorts, but I see the same error with homebrew posted so maybe it is more general.

I searched in /opt/local/ which is the installation directory of MacPorts but I don't have Qt5Core.pc.

Is there a way to make this MacPorts command continue running (kind of like with exception handling) and continue cleaning other packages after the error is encountered?

The error has been reported at https://trac.macports.org/ticket/54861. A workaround patch has been provided.

diff --git a/multimedia/mlt/Portfile b/multimedia/mlt/Portfile
--- a/multimedia/mlt/Portfile
+++ b/multimedia/mlt/Portfile
@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ if {${subport} eq "${name}"} {
     if {[info procs qt5.active_version] eq ""} {
         proc qt5.active_version {} {
             global prefix
-            if {[file exists ${prefix}/bin/pkg-config]} {
+            if {[file exists ${prefix}/bin/pkg-config/Qt5Core.pc]} {
                 set av [exec ${prefix}/bin/pkg-config --modversion Qt5Core]
                 return ${av}
             } else {
@@ -53,10 +53,15 @@ if {${subport} eq "${name}"} {

     qt5.depends_component \
                     qtsvg
-    if {[vercmp [qt5.active_version] 5.7.0] >= 0} {
-        configure.cxxflags-append \
-                    -stdlib=libc++ \
-                    -std=c++11
+    pre-configure {
+        # qt5.active_version only works if Qt is installed; we can
+        # be certain that is the case in the pre-configure phase.
+        if {[vercmp [qt5.active_version] 5.7.0] >= 0} {
+            ui_debug "Qt 5.7.0 and up require at least C++11"
+            configure.cxxflags-append \
+                        -stdlib=libc++ \
+                        -std=c++11
+        }
     }
 }


Using mosh with Back to my Mac How can I use mosh via iClouds Back to my Mac, like I can do it with ssh?

I got it working.

It requires a bit of messing with mosh, so try it first with the current version before hacking with your installation of mosh. Leave a new answer or a comment if this starts working with the latest versions of mosh please.

First, on both the client and the server, install the latest version of mosh: brew install --HEAD mosh.

Then edit the mosh file ($EDITOR 'which mosh' (use backticks instead of single ticks)) as specified here: https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/81#issuecomment-57074800
I made the change on both the client and the server.

Then execute mosh -6 your_server if you followed Rnhmjoj's suggestion, or mosh -6 your_server.you_magic_number.members.btmm.icloud.com


iPhone 4 having trouble connecting with dock My iPhone 4 has trouble connnecting to a Sony speaker dock, it will continuously charge.

Sometimes it will play music through the speakers; sometimes it will not.

If it is not playing music it acts exactly as it would if it were to play music (the play/skip area drops down over the volume) but nothing comes through the speakers.

If it DOES play music at all it often seems to come disconnected from the dock every 30 seconds or so only to reconnect itself and have to be pressed play again.

I believe that is just a problem with my iPhone 4's connecting area... any suggestions at all would be so helpful!

Have you tried looking inside your iPhone side of the connector?  I've noticed that a lot of pocket lint tends to build up in there over time and I just took a toothpick and dug all of it out.  My wife's iPhone wasn't syncing when connected to my laptop and this turned out to be the issue.


Assign a key to switch to fullscreen instance of MacVim I have MacVim running full screen in Mac OS X Lion, and I want to switch to the MacVim screen when I hit e.g. F15.

Is there a way to accomplish this?

I can't think of any way to do it with AppleScript. It doesn't really support full screen windows or Mission Control.

One workaround would be to disable Lion's full screen in MacVim's preferences and assign it to for example the second space in the Dock. Then ⌃2 would usually select the space it's on.

A similar question at Super User: https://superuser.com/questions/423240/shortcut-to-full-screen-app-in-lion


How do I enable "mouse trails" in OSX? I have a lot of screen real estate, and am constantly "losing" my mouse.

I'd like to have a simple way of easily finding the mouse that doesn't have to be reconfigured when I undock from my 28 inch monitor and rely on my retina display.

Windows has a feature that allows for "mouse trails" so I can easily find the pointer wherever it is.  How can I get similar functionality on the Mac?

I looked under the "accessibility" tab but found nothing.

There's no built-in option for that. You could try HotMouse for $0.99 in the App Store, or OmniDazzle (free) if you're really feeling crazy.


How do I display long list of client on a page using keynote In keynote each page has a fixed size. Just to impress people I am developing a page which will list around 40 clients.

I want the list of client names to appear one after another and the list will scroll down.  Sort of like the reverse of a credits scroll at the end of a movie. How do I do that with Keynote?

For simplicity you can also imagine as having a single page that lists from 1 to 100 vertically.

I hope I unterstood what you want...

I tried to create an example: scroll_example.zip

Follow these steps:

Create all your client names
Group them all to one object (if they're all in one textbox, skip this step)
Create an action for that object -> Move
Set the action from bottom to top and specify the duration
Place your object outside your slide and end position of the move action is of course in your slide (see the example)


Macbook Air short Battery Life I purchased Macbook Air 13 in late 2012. It is advertised as having 7 hour battery life. After a few months of use, with maximum charge it gives me only 2 hours.

Is this normal?

If you're not using a lot of power, this isn't normal. On http://www.apple.com/macbookair/features.html#battery it says up to 7 hours, clearly implying that you could get less. The footnote as text as follows:

  The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25
  popular websites with display brightness set to 50%. The standby test
  measures battery life by allowing a system, connected to a wireless
  network, to enter standby mode with Safari and Mail applications
  launched and all system settings left at default. Battery life varies
  by use and configuration.

So, if you had all of the the brightness on max, CPU topped out, GPU working and storage downloading, I would expect the battery to last between 2 and 3 hours, so you may have a perfectly normal battery or there may be an issue. This sort of thing is exactly what the Genius bar and AppleCare exist to answer on a case by case basis if the online tips don't work or you want to seek a professional opinion and possible repair.


App for File store and viewer I am looking at an ipad app which can be used to store files locally as well as supports multiple types for viewing. E.g. Doc, xls, ppt, etc

I heard Goodreader is one such app, but was looking for something free..

What about Documents 2 Free. I use it and I like it.

http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/documents-2-free-spreadsheet/id314894105?mt=8

Although it's not an ipad only app.


How do I remove everything Parallels? Background: Mac Pro 4.1 circa 2009, specs:

OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.3 (just updated last weekend)
SN - H09440CK20H
2 - 2.93 GHz Quad-core Intel Xenon processors
32 GB RAM
2 - 1 TB HD
1 - MacPro Raid Card

The last user of the machine had Parallels 3 running on it and it may be messing up the machine.  I don't need or want Parallels and want to completely remove it and its partition.  It looks like someone has tried to remove Parallels in the past, reset the partition size, and deleted some files - kind of messy.

I ran Disk Utility - First Aid to see what it showed:

You can see that Parallels has some problems.

Commenters have noted the images look too small, but I think the main take-away is that First Aid on the Parallels volume fails.

Additionally, the following screen shot shows what remains in the Parallels partition:

Which just shows an empty Backup folder and some inaccessible virtual machines from the time of Snow Leopard.

How can I get rid of Parallels, its partition, and everything previously associated with it (hopefully, short of a complete wipe of the machine, but I'll do that if necessary)?

Additional things I've tried...  I've tried to use Disk Utility to Erase the Parallels volume.  Doing so gives me an error:

  Unmounting disk

  Couldn't unmount disk.

  Operation failed...

Doing the same thing at the APPLE RAID Card Media that has Parallels under it gives me the same error.

Clicking the Unmount button in Disk Utility doesn't seem to do anything, no message at all.

Right clicking on the Parallels "disk" that shows on my desktop and selecting Eject "Parallels produces the following error message:

  "The disk "Parallels wasn't ejected because one or more programs may
  be using it.

  You can try to eject the disk again or click Force Eject to eject it
  immediately.

I have not tried to Force Eject the Parallels "disk" that shows on my desktop, yet.  Thoughts?

(Optional:) backup the content of the volume "Backup". If the volume is empty don't backup anything.
Boot to Recovery Mode by pressing cmdR.
Open Terminal from the menubar -> Utilities
Enter diskutil list to get an overview.
Determine the sequence of the partitions on the RAID.
Quit Terminal and open Disk Utility

If the sequence is (1: EFI) - 2: Parallels - 3: Untitled - 4: Backup either choose the superior Apple RAID device, "Erase" and repartition the RAID disk if you don't want to preserve "Backup" or choose the superior Apple RAID device, click "Partition", choose the "Untitled" partition in the new overlay and click the "-" button to combine "Parallels" and "Untitled" if you want to preserve "Backup". In the latter case choose the enlarged partition "Parallels" and click "Erase" to create a new HFS+ file system and rename the volume.

If the sequence is different consider the following rule: If you choose a partition x (with x ≠ 1 or 2) and click the "-" button the partition will be combined with partition (x-1) and only the content of partition (x-1) will be preserved.
Quit Disk Utility and reboot to your main system.
Remove any remains of Parallels 3.0 as indicated in user3439894's comment: How to remove Parallels Desktop 3 Completely?.


Strange tick mark in Preview When I tick a checkbox in a fillable PDF in Preview, there is a strange double tick symbol. It's like a tick with a cross on it. How can I have a correct tick/check symbol ?

I'm on El Capitan 10.11.5 with Preview 8.1 and the problem came with any fillable PDF with a checkbox

Someone else asked this here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6754677?start=0&tstart=0

The answer given was "It seem [sic] Preview in OS X has a capability of making a normal PDF (non-editable) editable and I'm guessing that it's doubling up on top of the editable symbol that's already in your editable PDF. I had the same problem and I was making my PDF editable with Adobe Acrobat Pro. I fixed the issue by changing the appearance setting in properties for the checkbox."


Make application "active" while on another desktop Is there a way I can change the current menubar to an active application while on another desktop ?

Example :

Safari running on desktop 1
While on desktop 2, activate safari so that the menubar changes from "Finder" to "Safari" WITHOUT switching back to desktop 1

Is there an automator code that can help achieve this too ?

In System Preferences select > Mission Control, then un-check "When switching to an application, switch to a space with the open windows for the application".

Use ⌘ + tab to the switch to an application on another desktop.

You'll notice the menu bar will show up for that application on the current desktop.

The default key combination to switch between desktops is Control + ← or →.

You can customize the behavior in which desktops are activated via System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.


Automatically Load LaunchDaemon? I wrote a little script to automatically update my Network Location based on a couple of conditions, and have coupled that with a launchd plist to have it run every couple of minutes.

However, I've noticed that my launchd plist doesn't seem to get loaded when my computer reboots.  My plist is in ~/Library/LaunchDaemons and is fairly simple:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.davedelong.location-updater</string>
    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/path/to/my/location_updater.rb</string>
    <key>StartInterval</key>
    <integer>180</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

My LaunchDaemons folder has the expected 700 permissions, and running launchctl load with my plist makes things work just fine.  It's just that when I reboot, it's not getting loaded.

I was under the impression that everything in ~/Library/LaunchDaemons and ~/Library/LaunchAgents got loaded automatically by launchd.  Is this not the case?  If this is the case (and I think it is), then why isn't my plist getting loaded?

~/Library/LaunchDaemons isn't a valid location for either launch agents or launch daemons. You are misunderstanding the terminology. LaunchDaemons are system-wide processes, while LaunchAgents are run per-user. From the launchd man page:

~/Library/LaunchAgents         Per-user agents provided by the user.
/Library/LaunchAgents          Per-user agents provided by the administrator.
/Library/LaunchDaemons         System-wide daemons provided by the administrator.
/System/Library/LaunchAgents   Per-user agents provided by Mac OS X.
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons  System-wide daemons provided by Mac OS X.

Move your plist to ~/Library/LaunchAgents, and it should just work.


What can be done when Finder crashes constantly? Finder has started to crash constantly such that I can't click the icon in Dock. I can't click Apple in top-left corner of the screan (Finder also crash), I don't have any menubar icons from Apple like a Time Machine, Spotlight and the system is unstable. Safari crashes but what is confusing Google Chrome, Sparrow and other 3rd party apps works as normal. Only Apple menubar app that is working is Notification Center.

I tryied to start with safe mode but it failed to launch. I have turned verbose launch screen on before (it look more cool) so now I can see few error messages on start and after that information that my Mac passes some tests for a brief moment. Login in looks and works normal.

What is possible source of problem and how do I can fix that?

I have MacBook Pro Late 2011 with Mac OS Mountain Lion 10.8.2.

Only solution was complete clean reinstall of the system.


impact and removal of XcodeGhost Unfortunately, I installed some of the apps mentioned on this list, and confirmed that the versions I have are still compromised by XcodeGhost: http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2015/09/malware-xcodeghost-infects-39-ios-apps-including-wechat-affecting-hundreds-of-millions-of-users/

Of course, I have immediately removed them. But what I am concerned about is whether they have managed to hide the virus anywhere else in the system? The article doesn't explicitly address this, but did the virus manage to break out of iOS sandboxing?

Also, relatedly, does anyone know if the infected apps collected anything else besides those already reported by Palto Alto Networks?, e.g. texts, contact info, etc?

  Current time Current infected app’s name The app’s bundle identifier
  Current device’s name and type Current system’s language and country
  Current device’s UUID Network type

It's already been reported here that the malware phishes for iCloud passwords: http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2015/09/update-xcodeghost-attacker-can-phish-passwords-and-open-urls-though-infected-apps/

Since you aren't asking about OSX (that should be a separate question), I'll focus on the iOS ramifications. The apps created by the malicious Xcode installer can be cleaned up by deleting the apps.
The iOS sandbox wasn't compromised, just that the app review team didn't notice the bad behavior of the app.
What you did by running an "infected iOS app" was let the villains know your device UDID and probably the IP address your device had when it ran the app and self-reported.
There's no reporting to say that the iOS sandbox was compromised, so no emails, no texts, no passwords were compromised.
Apple has released confirmation that the code could not compromise iCloud and didn't leak anything except for the most general "an anonymous phone ran this app ping" which would needs lots of corroborating information to be a risk to anyone unless there were many extenuating circumstances.

How does this affect me? How do I know if my device has been compromised?
We have no information to suggest that the malware has been used to do anything malicious or that this exploit would have delivered any personally identifiable information had it been used.
We’re not aware of personally identifiable customer data being impacted and the code also did not have the ability to request customer credentials to gain iCloud and other service passwords.
As soon as we recognized these apps were using potentially malicious code we took them down. Developers are quickly updating their apps for users.
Malicious code could only have been able to deliver some general information such as the apps and general system information.

See https://archive.is/PWqMV (Archived copy of dead link https://www.apple.com/cn/xcodeghost/#english) for the full statement from Apple that includes a list of the affected apps.
(Well, a list of 25 of > 4000 affected apps, and the obviously false statement, given that the link is now dead, "We will update this page with more information as it becomes available.")


How to check the location of installed files when using Installer on Mac 10.6.7 I am installing a C++ library using the Installer application(its a .mpkg file)  The installation is successful, but I cannot find the location of the library to set an environmental variable. I have checked the /private/var/log/install.log, but the destination folder is not listed.  Is there another log I can check, or a way to determine the installation destination through the .mpkg?
Thank you very much for your time,
Adam

Use pkgutil --pkg-info packageid and look for the listed "location" to see where the installation root was; then pkgutil --files packageid will show the installed files relative to that root location.


How to remove the spacing next to the last icon at the right of the menu bar that appeared after upgrading to Bartender 2 A spacing next to the last icon at the right of the menu bar appeared after upgrading to Bartender 2 (see the screenshot below). It was not there before. How can I remove it?

I already tried:

restarting Bartender 2 and my Macbook as advised on the support page
reinstalling Bartender 2 (curious: after the uninstall it still displayed the spacing!)
command-dragging the icon to the right (when letting go it reverts
to it's original position)
checking the .plist of Bartender 1/2 if something is wrong or different (couldn't tell)
contacted Bartender support (no answer yet)
upgrading from OS X Yosemite to OS X El Capitan (no change)

Bartender 2 2.0.1 fixes this, adding a preference in Preferences → Appearance:

  Right most menu bar gap
  Bartender 2 added a gap to the right of the menu bar when Notification Center was hidden, this is to maintain the default gap at the screen edge, a lot of users liked not having this gap, so this is now a preference under Appearance.


Is there a name for the common ground between Lion and iOS 5? While working on the wording for another question, I wanted to refer to the parts of the Apple environment which are, by design, the same in Lion and in iOS 5.

For example, it is reasonable to expect that the available relationship types will be the same for iOS 5 Contacts and Lion Address Book.  It is surprising that Siri understands son, but that iOS 5 Contacts knows only child; this is attributable to Siri's beta status.

For items that sync in iCloud, Lion and iOS 5 probably use a single canonical structure specification or separate structure specifications which are kept conformant by engineering discipline.

What is the name of the set to which these item's structures belong?  Would one write "the iCloud address book entry format", "the Mac address book entry format", "the Winesap1 address book entry format", or what?

1speculative

I happen to be writing a book on iCloud now, and I've had to deal with some of these issues. It's instructive to note that although the respective applications on Lion, iOS 5, and the iCloud Web site are Address Book, Contacts, and Contacts, respectively. They all are containers for one thing, which they use the same terminology: Contacts.

I do not plan to use the terms you suggest above; rather, I am saying things like "entering contacts in Address Book," "entering contacts in Contacts," "changing contacts on the iCloud Web site." It's the context that matters, since the set of data is the same, and enforced by syncing.


How much free disk space do I need to install Lion, and how much will I lose by upgrading? My hard disk is starting to get a bit cramped, with only 30GB available. I'm about download Lion and I'd like to know if I'll need to free up some space before I install it.

Also, I've read that Lion creates a hidden partition with a bare-bones copy of OS X for emergency system recovery. How large is it? How much space will I lose after installing Lion?

According to http://www.apple.com/support/lion/installrecovery/ you only need 7G of free space.

Amazingly small amount of space considering the download is 3.6G itself.

Many are reporting gaining back between 5 and 10 GB of space as Lion is more compact than Snow Leopard.


Finding out if upgrading to a newer macOS version will cause issues? I'm going to be upgrading my Macbook Pro (mid-2012 model) from its original OS X Lion 10.7 installation to a newer version of macOS. It looks like Apple will allow me to upgrade from Lion directly to OS X El Capitan 10.11 and macOS Sierra 10.12, and from there all the way to macOS Mojave 10.14.

I have heard that upgrading to a newer OS can cause performance issues, especially on older hardware. How can I find out about these issues, so I can determine the best version of macOS to upgrade to?

The biggest consideration is the software you run, not just in terms of compatibility with macOS generally, but also in terms of identifying if they're 32-bit or 64-bit apps (which will be a crucial consideration moving forward if macOS Catalina interests you, since it will be compatible with your MacBook Pro hardware).

As a starting point you can use the RoaringApps website to check software compatibility. You can search by specific application if you have key software you need to work with. You can also actually download a Roaring Apps app for macOS, but I've always found the Application Compatibility Table (see below) on their website to meet my needs.

My advice would be to check your software against the Application Compatibility Table for compatibility with El Capitan. If all good, then upgrade to that first and use the system for long enough to be satisfied everything is okay, and long enough to have a full working backup of your El Capitan setup.

Once you've done that, check the Application Compatibility Table again for compatibility with macOS Sierra etc before upgrading again.

To identify which applications you have installed are still 32-bit, you can follow one of the answers at: How can I find out which Mac apps are 32-bit?


Move videos from photo seems downsizing it or compressing When I watch video using Photos  it looks good. But when I simple move video file from Photos to Desktop and watch it then it looks like it was downsized or kind of. How to export/move to desktop video as is?

Ok I found an option File>Export>Original


iTunes cannot locate missing files after I've moved them to a USB I've been using iTunes on Mac for a while, but my startup disk recently got pretty close to being full so I figured I'd move all my music I had there from the iTunes Media folder to my USB drive. However, after I've gone through and set the folder location to my USB's music folder, about 2,000 of my more recently downloaded songs have gone missing. Choosing to use a song's location to determine the location of other songs just tells me it can't locate any of the missing songs, even though all albums are in their own folder with all the files either named "1-01 song name, 1-02 song name etc." or "1 song name, 2 song name etc.".

I could go through and manually locate all of them, but I just can't do that when there are almost 2,000 songs missing. So I ask, is there a way I can somehow get all the files back into iTunes without having to manually locate every one?

do a search for your files, and in a finder window, drag them to the following directory where your iTunes file is located:

iTunes/iTunes Media/Automatically Add to iTunes

This will process them and put them back in your iTunes library.
You can move directories containing files as well, you do not need to sort your folders before, but if you don't like the way that iTunes automatically organize your files on import, you would have to reorganize.


Problems upgrading my iphone from iOS6 to iOS7 I have problems when I attempt to upgrade my iPhone from iOS6 to iOS7. I went so many time to general and software update but it will run checking for hours and nothing and I need to have iOS 7 or up.

You can check apple signing status and download the correct firmware and software from ipsw rocks if you need any help then contact me via this site.


Is the "Battery Is Not Charging" state harmful? I have an Early 2015 Retina MacBook Pro. Sometimes I forget my charger and end up using my girlfriend's charger, which is for a 2011 MacBook Air, with a MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adapter.

When I do so, the Battery status menu reads "Battery Is Not Charging", but the charge level in Activity Monitor appears to stay constant, so I can keep using my computer.

Does this harm my battery in any way?

The MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) comes with a 60W MagSafe 2 Power Adapter and the MacBook Air (11 and 13-inch, Mid 2011) comes with a 45W MagSafe Power Adapter and according Find the right power adapter and cord for your Mac notebook "You can use a compatible higher wattage adapter without issue, but it won't make your computer charge faster or operate differently. Lower wattage adapters will not provide enough power."  So since the MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) is designed for a 60W adapter the 45W adapter you're using isn't providing enough power to charge the battery is why you get the "Battery Is Not Charging" message however because its drawing enough to keep running without lowering the percentage of charge I don't see an issue although I personally would not make a habit of it.


connect speaker and guitar to macbook with only one 3.5 mm jack I want to connect eletro acoustic guitar and a speaker too to my Macbook.

My Macbook has only one 3.5 mm jack and for connecting 2 devices simultaneously I need to have two 3.5 mm jacks. Is there any way to connect both devices?

Try this from Griffin Technology.  I've never used it myself.


Firewall setup for Python.app incoming connection I am running a Python programme on my MacBook Pro (Catalina), but everytime it prompts the following information

However, in the pane of Security & Privacy preferences, I have set it,

How can I fix it?

Create a self-signed certificate.

Open Keychain Access. Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access.
Keychain Access menu > Certificate Assistant > Create a Certificate...
Enter a name like "My Certificate".
Select Identity Type: Self Signed Root
Select Certificate Type: Code Signing
Check the Let me override defaults box
Click Continue
Enter a unique Serial Number
Enter 7300 for the Validity Period.
Click Continue
Click Continue for the rest of the dialogs

Now sign your application

codesign -s "My Certificate" -f $(which python)

In the dialog that appears, click "Allow".

With the OS X firewall enabled, you can remove the "Do you want the application "python" to accept incoming network connections?" message.


Send audio from my laptop to my iPhone over Bluetooth I have an iPhone 4, and Philips dock speakers which I use with the phone.

The dock doesn't have any aux input, and I would like to use the dock as a speaker for my laptop.

I know I can achieve it through Wi-Fi, but my laptop doesn't have one. Is there any Bluetooth alternative to send laptop audio to my iPhone?

According to your comment, you would be happy with a Ubuntu solution where WiFi works. Therefore, follow this thread at askubuntu.com.

What they basically suggest, is:

  Create a webserver with IceCast under Ubuntu und stream your audio from there (Here is a Howto)
  Connect your iPhone via an IceCast compatible app.
  Now you can connect your iPhone to your IceCast server and stream audio

If this doesn't work for you because of complexity, follow the lead of:

  creating your own local streaming server on Ubuntu, or just create a "normal server"
  and then access the files from there on your iPhone with a app which
  can connect to that server.

A Bluetooth solution for a Windows environment is over here.


Rename iOS device without needing to restore I have just restored my iPad but for some reason (most likely because I pressed space bar on that text field but do you not remember) my newly restored iPad is called "iPad" rather than "my name's iPad". Is there a way to rename your iPad without having to go though the restore process again?

Note: Jailbreaking is not of the question.

Thanks

Connect your device and open iTunes.
In the source list (the left-hand column of iTunes), double-click on the name of the device.
Type the new name for your device and press Return on the keyboard.
Sync the device (press Sync in the bottom right corner of the screen).


BigSur Click on Dock App does not change to Space with App On catalina and earlier osx, I used to click on the app on dock to switch between spaces. This seems not to be working on BigSur.
Strangely, I couldn't find anything about this on the internet... I would expect more people to be complaining about it. If this is an isolated behaviour, please let me know.
Otherwise, anyone has any hints on how to get back to the previous behaviour?

This behaviour is toggled on a pref…
System Preferences > Mission Control > 'When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application'
This needs to be on for the behaviour you desire.
It will fail if you have any app spread to more than one Space… but that always would. Spaces cannot handle multiple Spaces for a single app, that's not within design spec.


MacOS equivalent for /etc/environ I am at a new institute and to use the Wi-Fi they had to configure some proxies settings on my personal laptop. Now I cant access the internet from my home.

A friend who has a Linux laptop said he just has to comment out the settings in his /etc/environ/ file at home.

Is there an equivalent file where I would find the proxy settings?

There is a similar file in macOS (/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist), but it's not intended to edit the file manually.

Instead the prefpane System Preferences > Network is used to set-up several "locations". A "location" provides a custom network set-up including activated or deactivated network interfaces or IP and proxy settings. The default location is "Automatic".

An example set-up is shown here:

In the left pane the interfaces are listed. By choosing an interface its configuration is shown in the right pane.

By hitting the Advanced button you are redirected to some special settings including the proxy settings.

By hitting the drop-down "Locations" and the gear you can edit the name or duplicate a locations profile:

In your case do the following:

Rename the "Automatic" profile to "Lab" (or "Work"/"Institute") hit Done and hit Apply.

Then duplicate the Lab profile, rename the copy to "Home" and hit Done.

Choose the profile "Home" in the Location drop-down and hit Apply. Configure the IP-settings for your home network: DHCP or manually.
Click the "Advanced..." button > Proxy and deselect all proxy settings - if any exist, hit OK and hit Apply.

Now at work/university choose the "Lab" profile and at home the "Home" profile in the Apple menu > Locations.


Synchronizing iBooks with iPad/iPhone does not synchronize collections When I synchronize iBooks from my MacBook to my iPhone/iPad via iTunes it synchronizes all my books, but it doesn't synchronize the collections (they are all just dumped into one single collection).

How do I synchronize the collections?

EDIT: the `Settings -> Synchronize bookmarks, highlights, and collections across devices" option is enabled.

Go to Settings/Ibooks and turn on "Sync Collections" (also sync bookmarks and comments if you want that too).


Will i benefit from important features of Lion with a trackpad/MacBook? I am an avid iMac user and have no intention of buying a MacBook/MacBook Air or a trackpad.

I have just installed Lion and have seen Launchpad and Mission Control in my Dock. I could see myself using these lots, but I am concerned that it's not going to be quite as natural as finger-gestures. Will I have to learn keyboard shortcuts or is there something I'm missing?

Will I gain the full Lion experience without a MacBook or a trackpad?

These answers are going to vary from person to person. Additionally, I have a Magic Mouse, which only supports a subset of the total gestures.

I think the the "Natural" scrolling really make sense on a touch-sensitive controller like the Magic Mouse or the Trackpad.

The two gestures that I've found most useful are:

Move backwards and forwards in Safari. I know this technically existed before Lion, but as I've previously said, the feedback of the animation makes it far more useful.
Two-finger swiping between spaces is wonderfully fluid.

On the contrary the two-finger double tap for Mission Control has been used a handful of times. I'm finding the ctrl + up far more useful, plus ctrl + down gets you to Exposé.

I think there are plenty of things to like about Lion without any gesture support. I can certainly recommend the Magic Mouse, something I would've hesitated to do before Lion.


Change ssh connection info for Remote Login I've been setting up an array of Mac Minis running Sierra, and I'm trying to be consistent about naming them.

However, for some reason, some of their ssh name@hostnames are different.

For example, the Computer Name and account names are all consistent, eg: Mini Kiosk 02 "mini-kiosk-02".

But their ssh info is sometimes different.

Some are "ssh mini-kiosk-02@mini-kiosk-02" while others are "ssh mini-kiosk-04@mac-mini".

I'm not seeing how I can change, eg, the part after the @ sign.

I thought scutil --set HostName etc might do the trick, but that doesn't seem to change anything.

Update

As you can see from the screenshot, hostname does not seem to correspond to what is after the @ in the Remote Connection settings.

Your command should work:

sudo scutil --set HostName YourHostName

Since OSX 10.9 Maverick, it's possible to change it with hostname command. Without -s it will be a temporary change, adding the -s will set it up permanently:

sudo hostname -s YourHostName

To verify it, you may type hostname and observe the return.

Update

OSX uses different variables to name the machine. You may need to reset them as well.

scutil --set HostName YourHostName
scutil --set ComputerName $(hostname -s)
scutil --set LocalHostName $(hostname -s)
defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server NetBIOSName -string $(hostname -s)


Mac will not boot into OSX after installing windows 10 Please help me I'm completely desparate. I have tried to install Windows 10 and it completely messed up my macbook pro system, I cannot boot into my mac, and it's full with things I desperately need.

My OSX doesn't show up in the Macs start up when pressing "option". Also, Pressing "boot into os x" from windows doesn't work either but just boots into windows OS all over again.

Using internet recovery mode, I see in diskutility all the drives except the boot camp drive are unmounted and grey, and their names changed from "macintosh hd" etc that they were to default names, and they are impossible to mount.

Attached the screenshot of my disk utility, and of diskutil list, diskutil cs list (nothing) and -r show /dev/disk0

The mac system should be installed on the one labeled disk0s2.. I have no idea what's going on and how it happend

The GUID types for partitions 2 and 3 are wrong. The both current values are DE94BBA4-06D1-4D40-A16A-BFD50179D6AC, which indicates two "Windows Recovery Environment" partitions. The procedure given below can correct type partition types, but there is no guarantee the data (OS X) did not get overwritten while installing Windows.

Boot using Internet Recovery.
Enter the command given below to get the GPT partition data.

gpt -r show /dev/disk0

Below is an example of from my computer. Your output will be very
different.

gpt show: /dev/disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
       start        size  index  contents
           0           1         MBR
           1           1         Pri GPT header
           2          32         Pri GPT table
          34           6
          40      409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
      409640        2008
      411648   394530816      2  GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
   394942464   394530816      3  GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
   789473280    97654784      4  GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
   887128064      262144      4
   887390208   478769528      5  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  1366159736     1269536      6  GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  1367429272   195995208
  1563424480   388568960      7  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  1951993440     1269544      8  GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  1953262984      262144      9  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
  1953525128           7
  1953525135          32         Sec GPT table
  1953525167           1         Sec GPT header

From your output, you will need to record the start and size
integer values for the rows with the index of 2 and 3.
Enter the following commands. Replace the values of start and
size with the integer values you recorded for row with the index
of 2.

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk0
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt add -i 2 -b start -s size -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0

Again, enter the following commands. Replace the values of start
and size with the integer values you recorded for row with the index of
3.

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt remove -i 3 /dev/disk0
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0
gpt add -i 3 -b start -s size -t 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk0

Try to boot to OS X.


Is there a UNIX-style triple click to select path in Terminal.app? In Red Hat, if there is a path somewhere on my terminal window and I triple click it, the whole path is selected. I can then easily copy it using middle-click or a regular copy-paste.

This doesn't seem to work in Terminal.app, i.e. triple click selects the whole line which is most of the time useless.

Is there a way to change this behavior? Should I look into other terminal apps like iTerm?

The shortcut for Terminal.app is ⌘+⇧+doubleclick.

You might also be interested in the following shortcuts:

⌘+K to clear the screen
ctrl+U to delete everything to the left of the cursor
ctrl+K to delete everything to the right of the cursor
ctrl+A to jump to the left end
ctrl+E to jump to the right end


How can I retrieve a deleted iMessage if using iMessage in iCloud? I realize too late that I deleted a very important iMessage conversation and I need to retrieve it.

I have iMessage in iCloud.

To attempt a restore, of course I had to reset my phone and did a restore from a back up and the message did not appear. I have chatted with Apple gone to the Apple store and had numerous conversations with techs but I get a different answer each time I speak to a new rep.

What options might I have at this point?

There is no web interface to view or undelete or recover data for messages. Some data sources do have this at https://www.icloud.com/settings/ so you might check that periodically in case it gets added in the future.

Any device backup to iCloud or to a computer (iTunes / macOS / Apple Configurator) would be your best bet if you don't want to pay a forensic data recovery specialist or general data recovery company to try and recover artifacts from the storage on iOS.


ios Mail app shows Welcome to Mail screen even though I have already set up and have been using my account I have an iPhone 4S currently running ios7.0.4.  I have been using the built in Mail app since I bought my phone years ago and it has always worked fine.  I have two accounts set up in the app.  Recently (within the past month, maybe two) when I open the app, I am met with the Welcome/set-up screen that lists the different account types that you can set up (iCloud, Exchange, Google, etc.) even though I already have my accounts set up and they were working that morning.  If I double-tap the home button and swipe up to close the app, and tap the app again to re-open it, it loads both accounts like normal.

This wouldn't really be too big of an issue because it has a quick fix, however because it doesn't recognize that a mail account is set up, it also does not alert me when I receive a new email.  So I have to manually check my emails every hour to make sure I don't miss anything.

While the mail app is being weird and showing me the welcome screen, I can open up the mail settings and still see both accounts that I have, and notification settings are all as they should be.

Either I don't know how to phrase the questions properly to get hits on Google, or no one else has ever had this issue. Has anyone heard of this, or have any suggestions?

Thanks for the suggestions, tried both with no luck, then I actually went in and made sure every setting was set the way I expected them to be set.

Somehow, without my doing, the settings had been changed. I noticed this once before, my phone crashed and all of my custom ringtones/vibrations were unset for my contacts. Not lost, just unset.

In case someone reads this and is still wondering what settings you've missed, the particular settings that I had to fix were:

Notification Center > Mail > (Account) >
1. Alert Style [Alerts]
2. Show on Lock Screen [Yes]

I'm sure we all have those moments when the most obvious solution just can't be it and there's no point in checking because you're SURE there's NO WAY it could be it... oops :)


Terminal not beeping on bell character I'm running a nearly vanilla installation of OS X Yosemite 10.10.1 with the usual Homebrew, MacPorts, and Fink.  I have barely anything installed with these utilities.  For some reason, my Terminal.app is not producing an audible bell, even with the preference enabled.  I have since enabled the visual bell, and at first it didn't produce a result either until I disabled the "Only when sound is muted" option.  I do not have my system's default audio device muted; it is in fact at 100% volume and fully functional.  It seems like Terminal.app is under the impression that my system audio is muted for some reason.  How can I get my Terminal.app to beep like it did in past versions of OS X?

There are several ways to do this on Terminal, but first make sure that in Terminal preferences > Advanced you have ticked the Audible bell option, otherwise you won't hear anything.  Now you can do any of the following to get the bell:

$ echo ^G (hold down the ctrl key followed by V and then G to get ^G)
$ printf "\a" or $ printf \\a
$ echo -e "\a" or $ echo -e \\a
$ tput bel

FYI: the way you installed Yosemite, whether via Homebrew, Macports etc., shouldn't affect this issue.


Selling macbook, best/fastest way to delete data? I need help to erase all of my data from my computer...
Selling 2009 Macbook pro w. Lion.
I don't have the startup disks.

So I've created another admin account and am trying to delete mine from there.
But of course, it has been saying "deleting account" for hours.

Faster suggestions?

I don't know if I can necessarily help you out with the "fastest" way, but I think I can help with "best".

Most of your data will indeed be in your account, but there's also the chance that other personal items may be scattered about your hard drive.  I would not personally sell a computer after just removing my own account, particularly if my account was not securely deleted, either by overwriting the unused disk space or by discarding the encryption key.  (Of course, there's always the chance a computer could be lost or stolen, too, so I use FileVault 2 to encrypt my system's disk in case I'm not given the opportunity to securely erase it.)

You say you don't have a startup disk, but since you have Lion, you should be able to use OS X Recovery:

Hold command-R on startup.
Use Disk Utility to erase the disk securely using Security Options on the Erase tab.
Start the installer to install a fresh copy of Lion.  (This may involve downloading the installer from the Internet… note this can be a very large download.  If you're feeling nice, you could take this opportunity to grab a copy of the installer for your MacBook's new owner.)


Is there a way to see what permissions an ios app store app asks for, except manually opening it? I am looking for a way to see what permissions an app asks for without opening it.
For Android you can view it in the store as seen below. Is is maybe possible to get the info.plist file for an app store app and see it there?

If the app is installed go to Settings -> AppName and the list of permissions will be there


simplest way to open all images in a directory in Finder When I have (and browse with Finder) a directory with a bunch of photos and videos (from e.g. my camera), I often want to open all the pictures in it.

How can I do that?

Right now, I select all (Apple+A), open (Apple+O) and then quit QuickTime/MPlayer/VLC. But that is a bit annoying.

If Preview is in the dock, you can drag and drop the folder onto the Preview icon to open only the pictures.  I just tried this with a folder of images, wmv, mp4, and mov files and only the images opened in Preview.


popout a mac mail window from full screen / split view I run my mac mail in split view with other programs on a side monitor. Sometimes it would be nice to pop out reply windows and individual emails from full screen / split view so I can bring them to my main monitor.

Is there anyway to do this without undocking the mail program all together?

I asked Apple support about this one. The representative didn't seem to think that this was a supported feature in current OS X (El Capitan) and passed it along as a feature request.

The only other workaround I can think of is right-clicking Mail in the Dock to open a new viewer or new message on your primary display. This works for me when I have Mail in full-screen in an off-screen space. I haven't tried it on a dual-monitor setup yet.


Mac won't boot: Way to mount drive and delete one file? My macbook is currently a brick. I added a /etc/launchctl.conf file that must be malformed. The OS now crashes even when attempting to start in safe mode:

"launchd System bootstrapper has crashed: Seg fault"

I tried booting from a 10.6 boot CD but it just spun and spun. I have been able to boot an Ubuntu Live CD and mount the mac partition, but the hfsplus partition is always mounted read-only.

There must be an Apple utility I can use to get to a live terminal and delete this single file that is preventing my laptop from booting? If I can get the OSX install CD to boot will there be a utility that can help me?

You can boot into single user mode by holding Command + s at startup.

Single user mode starts you directly at the console, bypassing core Mac OS X startup processes. You should be able to remove or alter the offending file from there.


Password Hash - External drive encrypted with Disk Utility don't laugh, but I have encrypted my external drive and cannot remember the password.

The good thing is, the password was really bad (only four digits), so I could get it with brute force. You don't have to tell me that it is ridiculous to encrypt a drive with such a weak password. I do know this. I just don't know anymore why I encrypted the drive. Probably just because I could

For the brute force I already downloaded John the Ripper. My problem is that I don't know where to get the password hash from the drive. With google I only could find tutorials how to get the hash for Windows or Mac user accounts. But this was not helpful.

Can anyone tell me where to get the hash?

I am working with OS X High Sierra 10.13.3 and the drive is a WD Elements external drive.

thanks in advance

Sebastian

The disk encryption employed by Disk Utility does not store your password as a hash. Thus is there no hash to get, and John the Ripper is not the right program for brute forcing this type of encryption.

For File Vault encrypted disks, you could look at a program such as VileFault to try brute forcing the passphrase.


Disk became full, had to force shutdown, now it doesn't boot Don't know why I didn't get a warning about disk being almost full... It came down to zero free space and I couldn't do anything except force-shutdown it. I booted into Windows, deleted some files from OSX drive, but now on boot there is a progress bar every time and when it reaches the end (in 15 min), the computer shuts down.

I went into the recovery mode and tried to repair the disk, but it says "The Disk Utility cannot repair the drive... backup files and reinstall the OS" -- something like that.

I have a time machine backup but I'm currently not at home - going home in 3 weeks.

Is it "normal" that system gets borked like this because of full disk + force shutdown? Seems too fragile to me. I have Mavericks 10.9.4 on this system.

Is there anything I can do?

The problem is that the system goes into a fail-safe mode when the directory structure cannot be presumed to be safe for a new write.

You did the correct triage step by booting into recovery mode and attempting to repair the volume with Disk Utility.

At this point, you should back up any files you need. Test that your backup is complete and run Disk Utility against it to make sure it's in a good state.

Then you can boot to recovery and erase the volume or perhaps use another tool to repair the volume. If the drive erases and takes a format - the problem was a directory (data) corruption and not a hardware issue. If the disk can't be erased, then you need to repair the machine before restoring your backup onto a clean install of the OS.

In your case, you could possibly back up the changed files since 3 weeks or just get a new external drive and use Disk Utility to clone the volume or terminal to copy what you can using rsync or another tool.


Where is the swipe-right iOS 9 Spotlight screen on my iPod Touch? I have an iPod Touch (5th generation) with iOS 9 installed (currently 9.0.2, but I don't think the minor revision matters). From the home screen, I can reach the quick Spotlight search by swiping down. However, the new Spotlight screen reached by swiping right does not appear to be available.

I have checked an iPhone 6 with iOS 9 and of course the screen appears. For clarity, the screen I'm talking about is this one:

Is this screen not available on the iPod Touch for some reason? Or is this a consequence of my device only having a 32-bit CPU? (I know that some features such as the new ad blockers are not available for 32-bit devices.) Does this screen appear on an iPod Touch 6th generation (which has a 64-bit CPU)?

That screen is not supported on any iDevice powered by the A5 SoC (so it's not on the iPad 2, iPhone 4S, or iPod Touch (5th-Generation)). Apple's older product support is great, I'd like to see someone even using an Android phone from 2011, let alone see that phone running the latest version of Android. Given that, this is likely not an example of planned obsolescence, but a result of the fact that the newer hardware found in the 6th-Gen iPod Touch is much more powerful than that found in the 5th-Gen, not just graphics processing, but more RAM (1 GB vs 512 MB), a faster CPU, and better power efficiency.


Screenshots for iPhone 4/5/6/6+/iPad I must attend to edit screenshots for an application, available on iPhone and iPad in 14 different languages.
Each screenshot contains a text explaining the screen in all 14 languages.
As each iPhone requires a different image size on iTunes Connect, so I have to edit: 14 x 5 x 5 screenshots different resolutions. This makes a total of 350 screenshots for iTunes Connect, just for one app.

My question is: there's there a simpler solution, less tedious than having to edit each screen in each size in Photoshop?
Thank You

There are solutions to automating editing and generation of App Store screenshots. Whether you find them 'simpler' depends a bit on what tools you're comfortable using:

Editing existing screenshots?
If you're adding frames and title texts, you can automate this with FrameIt (if you are comfortable working in the command line).
Other generic image editing problems: Use Adobe Photoshop and make friends with the Actions palette.

Generating new screenshots?
Automate generating new screenshots across devices and languages with Snapshot, this relies on learning a bit of the Instruments app and specifically UI Automation, and some command line fiddling.

If I were to recommend, I would work through automating generating new screenshots rather than fiddle with editing existing screenshots. This might have a harder learning curve, but once done you should save a lot of time when preparing screenshots for future versions of the app.

Snapshot and FrameIt are both part of Fastlane toolset for automating the App Store submission process.


2012 macbook pro 13" sound drops out I am a dj playing live in a club.  after playing live music with traktor software for a couple of hours sound gets muddy and starts getting muffled then fades out/drop out.I am using a s4 mk2 traktor controller which has a sound card.  When i closed the program the let the system's quick player run it did the same time, but it was still running through usb controller.

The solution I found was to hook up my traktor 2 audio interface, which not only corrected the problem but gave me a bigger better sound.


bridgeOS not updating? I just updated my Mojave machine to Security Update 2020-006 but my bridgeOS has not updated, it remains on 18P50347c which I got when I tried Big Sur DP4/PB1 on 7 August 2020?
I don't have any other Macs so "downgrading (from beta to release) bridgeOS using Apple Configurator 2" isn't an option.
How can I get the latest bridgeOS on my Mojave Mac mini?

Due to the fact that you have previously installed a beta release, it looks like the bridgeOS update is skipped. Try to install the latest macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 (20B29) release on a external drive.


Is my apple ID compromised after receiving notification of Facetime from unknown computer? Hello I received this notification, I would like to know what to do next if I do not know the MacBook Pro the notification is referring to?  I have checked my icloud and do not see this device in the list.  I have since changed the password to the icloud and my email.  Any direction would be helpful.

Thank you

That alert will popup every time someone link your Apple ID to a new device.

Short answer: if it's not your Mac, yes your account is compromised.

When you try to activate FaceTime or other Apple service on devices you have to log in using you Apple ID and password. So basically someone just entered this info.

First thing to do is to change your password, secret question and answer. Now double check your recovery email address and password associated to it.

After that every devices log off and prompt for the new Apple ID credentials.
Now your account is safe.


Firefox won't access my webcam in Google Meet; will access it for other sites I have two webcams: One built into my laptop, and an external one attached over USB. When I go to meet.google.com, Firefox only allows me to access the internal webcam. When I go to other sites, Firefox gives me the choice of both cameras. How can I use my external webcam with meet.google.com?

My external webcam used to work with meet.google.com. It stopped working about a week ago —- I'm not sure if Firefox updated around that time.

This is the permissions box I get on meet.google.com. Only the internal camera is listed.

But on onlinemictest.com, Firefox lists both cameras:

Here are the things I've tried:

Cleared cookies and site data
Went to Preferences -> Privacy and Security -> Permissions -> Camera, and removed meet.google.com, to force it to ask for permission again.
Rebooted
Checked the Security and Privacy system preferences

I'm running macOS 10.14.6 and Firefox 76.0.1

It seems that Google Meet is choosing camera using it's own form, unlike the other websites (i.e. mentioned onlinemictest.com).
To access this form from the lobby:

click on the "three dots button" (⋮)
choose "Settings"
select "Video" tab
you should be able to select different WebCam, i.e. your Logitech USB WebCam


What's wrong with my launchctl config? I'm trying to auto-run SickBeard on login

python /Applications/Sick-Beard/Sickbeard.py

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd >
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.sickbeard.sickbeard</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
       <string>/usr/bin/python</string>
       <string>/Applications/Sick-Beard/SickBeard.py</string>
       <string>-q</string>
       <string>-d</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

When I run launchctl com.sickbeard.sickbeard.plist it gives me the message:

  launchctl load com.sickbeard.sickbeard.plist  launchctl: no plist was
  returned for: com.sickbeard.sickbeard.plist launchctl: no plist was
  returned for: com.sickbeard.sickbeard.plist nothing found to load

I'm assuming the paths to the python script and its parameters are valid, otherwise you'd most likely be seeing errors in the Console instead.

The last time I saw that error was because there were spurious characters in the plist, e.g. extra spaces, causing syntax errors and therefore making it fail to load. If you run plutil -lint on your plist, this will check the syntax for you and also handily report back the line on which the error occurred.

plutil -lint com.sickbeard.sickbeard.plist

If that doesn't help, the (OSX) How To Start SickBeard at Login or boot on OSX thread on the sickbeard forums has a slightly different plist to yours (sickbeard running from /usr/local as opposed to /Applications - so it could be a permissions thing) and also some people with seemingly the same problem as you


backupd using massive CPU Machine info - macOS Mojave, Mac Pro 4,1 with 5,1 firmware. Dual 6-core Xeons, 64GB RAM, 5 internal drives, 1 SSD, 4 HD.

I don't want to prevent Time Machine backups, but I'd be happy enough if backupd didn't do local backups. My TM drive is a permanently connected, internal drive.

Periodically, backupd will take up so much CPU that the entire Mac halts - even the clock in the menu bar stops [I have it showing seconds]. I also have Activity Monitor open permanently in a corner of one screen where i can easily see it without having to switch to it.
This morning I got a halt that lasted 40 seconds & when it finally kicked back into action I briefly saw backupd reading over 1,000% CPU. A second spike ocurred shortly after.

Checking the timestamp on the snapshot I got just after & comparing to Time Machine in the menu bar puts these right in the middle of Time Machine's last backup [which I'd already long-suspected.]
At these times when backupd is badly slowing the machine down, I see fairly high launchd too, though maybe at around 100% not the 10-core-eating 1000% that backupd managed.

I recycled the Time Machine drive about 6 weeks ago in an attempt to streamline things, but the behaviour seems unchanged. Drive is a 3TB Toshiba HD [one of several similar Toshibas in the Mac which all seem to be in good condition] mounted internally.

Is there any way to see what's making backupd literally grind the Mac to a halt every time Time Machine runs?

Screenshot grabbed just after a couple of big spikes this morning. I was too slow to actually catch backupd at 1000%

I recommend The Time Machine Mechanic as a check of your Time Machine backups. It extracts TM related data from the system logs and presents it in a friendly manner.


Is there a way to bring this disk to life? I have a USB disk from which the USB interface, inside the case, failed.

I removed the disk from the case and connected it to another case that is working.

Now, when I connect the disk to my Mac I see the message: this disk is unreadable.

Typing on terminal

diskutil list

gives me

/dev/disk12 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *801.6 GB   disk12
   1:                       0xEE                         375.1 GB   disk12s1

disk utility gives

is there a way to bring this disk to life in anyway or at least read its files before throwing it away?

Try to use ddrescue, which should do a block-to-block copy of your hard drive. Then mount the copy with hdiutil and you might be able to find your files.

Basically:

ddrescue /dev/rdisk12 /path/to/save/the/copy ddrescue.log

Note: you can interrupt the process whenever you want. The progress will be saved to the map file, ddrescue.log.

And then

hdiutil attach -nomount -noverify /path/to/save/the/copy

And you should see a new disk in 'diskutil list'

You can then try to mount the partitions or do data recovery on that image. One tool you can try for data recovery is testdisk.


iPhone: once unlocked, always unlocked? I got an iPhone from a telco carrier two years ago, as at that time, I didn't really know whether I bought the phone unlocked or was it locked to that specific carrier.

All I knew was, I change my telco afterwards, and I could use the new telco's data plan and voice and SMS service without trouble.

As I want to travel to overseas soon, I am looking forward to buy local 3G SimCards to satisfy my appetite for Internet surfing. I wonder whether I can do so without performing extra steps on my iPhone?

I think when I managed to change from one carrier to another previously, it indicated the phone was unlocked, at least among local carrier, but I am unsure whether this phone will remain unlocked when I travel overseas? Or is there a possibility that although you can change local carrier, but for you to change to an oversea carrier you would need to do some other steps?

SIM Unlocked means SIM unlocked. There is no lock, so you're free to go.


Disable Haptic Touch on IOS 13 (keeping 3D Touch) I recently upgraded my iPhone 6s+ to iOS13.

Haptic Touch is getting in the way of how I use the phone.  It's slower than 3D Touch, pops up and distracts me when my finger rests on the screen and provides no functionality I didn't already have.

Is the only way to get rid of Haptic Touch to restore from backup to iOS12?

Am I missing something about Haptic Touch?  It seemed like a UI hack to allow 3D Touch features on budget iPhones, but for some reason was forced on everything?

For those searching on this:

"3D Touch" is used by pressing hard on the screen, e.g., in text areas, you can press hard on the keyboard and move a cursor around, pressing hard again to select words, sentences or dragging out a precise selection with only your thumb.

"Haptic Touch" is used by resting your finger on the screen and waiting until there's a vibration.  E.g., the keyboard cursor can be activated by resting your thumb on the space bar then dragged around the text.  You select by touching the screen with a second finger (without removing your first finger from the screen... you'll need two hands) then dragging one of your fingers to expand the selection.

Update: Tried 13.2, it's still not possible to disable only Haptic Touch in the settings menu.

I've submitted a feature request here, if you're in the same boat, please do the same: https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Apple discontinued 3D Touch in iOS devices starting with iOS 13.  3D Touch relied on special screen hardware to determine the amount of pressure being applied.  Newer iPhones (anything after the iPhone XS and its variants)  do not have that type of screen.

The only way to return to 3D Touch on older devices with pressure-sensitive screens is to revert back to an older iOS version.

There's no way turn off Haptic Touch on iOS 13 (the latest iOS version as of now).  You can adjust the sensitivity and duration by going to Settings -> Accessibility -> Touch -> 3D & Haptic Touch.  You can turn 3D Touch on and off here.

From here you can adjust the "Touch Duration" to see if that helps you.


Connect to network says "Connection failed" but it actually isn't On most occasions, when I try to connect to a new wi-fi network, after I enter the password and click "Connect" the connection dialog says "Connection failed" after a little pause, but in fact the connection is established, the menubar widget displays the network and everything works normally.

Except the network is never saved to the list of known networks, so every time I have to enter the password again.

What may be the issue here?

OS X 10.7.3, Macbook Air 13" late-2011

I had the same problem. I could connect although it said "connection failed."  I observed that my network was also not in the preferred networks list.
I resolved the problem in two steps.
I manually entered my network's name and my networks password to keychain list. After that, in the system preferences advanced window, I manually added my network to the list of preferred networks by clicking on add button (+) and dragged it to the first line of the list.
I hope this helps.


How can I reinstall "Installer.app"? When I double-click "Installer.app" in Macintosh HD ▸ System ▸ Library ▸ CoreServices, a dialog pops up that says "You can’t open the application “Installer.app” because it may be damaged or incomplete."

Also, the icon for "Installer.app" has a white circle over it.

I have no idea how this happened.

OS X Yosemite version 10.10.2

This happened to me, too. I do not know the reason exactly, but I think it has something to do with the upgrade to the 10.10.3 beta.

My Installer.app (located in: /System/Library/CoreServices/ file had a circle on it at the file size was just 52 KB.

Luckily I had another Mac (running plain 10.10.2) around and could just copy the file over with a USB stick.


Tilde character on Mavericks/Macbook air with Norwegian keyboard turns into > After upgrading my MB Air & upgrading to Mavericks, I can't get my beloved tilde character to turn up. I got a Norwegian keyboard, so there is no dedicated tilde character.

Answers from Google and search here has so far not solved the problem for me.

I tried using KeyRemap4MacBook with option Shift+Escape to tilde, which gives me the > character.

This fits what has been mentioned elsewhere: That the tilde on the international keyboard is between left Shift and the Z key - which on mine is >

Is there something obvious i'm missing?

On the Apple Norwegian layout, tilde should be at option plus ¨, then space.

On the Apple Norwegian Extended layout, tilde should be at option plus k, then space.


Windows-PowerPoint presentations on an iPad with great typography distortion I have a PowerPoint presentation created on Microsoft Windows. When I play it on an iPad there are great typography distortions. There are a lot of fonts not found on the by iPad. Could I install my own fonts on an iPad, or solve this in another way?

Unfortunately, the iPad does not support the installation of fonts by the user, and microsoft office documents do not allow font embedding. If you wish to maintain consistent typography you'll have to use a document that supports font embedding such as a PDF.


Unicode character U+273F rendered as a cherry blossom in browser but not in applications I would like to copy/paste the unicode character U+273F (black florette).

Whenever I see it in my browser it looks like a cherry blossom:

However, whenever I copy/paste it into an app, I get a daisy shape instead of the cherryblossom shape like so:

How can I get unicode character U+273F to be rendered as a cherry blossom shape in various applications (such as Pages, Notes, TextEdit, etc) on my mac?

I've tried using various fonts already installed on my mac, and they don't render the cherry blossom shape. When looking online at the other fonts available to me, they render it in the daisy form. Do I have to shell out money for a special proprietary font just to render this character the way I want?

You need to switch to a font used for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean to get that form of the 273F character.  Check the Font Variation pane in Character Viewer for that unicode value to see which ones on your machine will do it.


On iPhone, can I tell if group text messages were delivered? The question is in the subject.  Iphone 6 plus - ios 8.  I know I can tell for individuals, but not for groups - or at least not obviously.

Can I?

You are correct, there are no delivery or read receipts for group messages (regardless of the size). Even when all participants are using iMessage, it will not display either receipt.

Note: Whatsapp does provide for this. Tap and hold a message. Tap "info". At the bottom, it will show who read the message.


How to remove shared devices from my iMac? My Sidebar is showing that there is a shared device on my network. I am not on any network whatsoever, this is my home computer used by me only. It says "not connected" but makes me nervous.

Is this a hack of some kind? How do I get rid of it? I tried dragging it to the trash and it didn't work.

Firstly, shared devices that appear in the Sidebar are:

other devices you have at home that are connected to the same network as your Mac.
other computers signed into your iCloud account.

And a network doesn't mean you have to have multiple computers or that you're somewhere other than home.

For example, most times users come across an unknown shared device in their Sidebar it's because it belongs to a printer that is also connected to the same Wi-Fi network as their Mac is. That is, if you have a single Mac at home connected to Wi-Fi, then that Mac is connected to a network.

Without knowing your setup at home I can't comment on what the shared device is, but it could be any device that's connected to the same Wi-Fi network (assuming you're using Wi-Fi), or any device connected to the same internet connection at home. So it could be a printer, a smart TV, a weather station, etc.

So, if you're concerned that there's some sort of dodgy device trying to connect to your Mac, that's almost certainly not the case.

If your main concern is that you just don't want to see Shared items, then you can hid these as follows:

Open Finder
Go to Finder > Preferences...
Select the Sidebar icon in the toolbar
Modify your settings under the Shared section
Exit Preferences

Removing 'shared' section in Finder programmatically


Keyboard shortcut to show/hide keyboard visualizer? Is there a keyboard shortcut to show/hide the keyboard visualizer?

I usually access it using the input-method icon in the top-right corner then select "show keyboard visualizer" but I don't know how to do it without the mouse

It's not a single-stroke shortcut, but a "non-mousing" solution is Fn+Ctrl+F8 to set focus on the "Status menu" icons on the right side of the menu bar.  (Section 4)

Arrows will navigate you to the Keyboard Preferences icon and the Show/Hide options. When you enter Fn+Ctrl+F8 the icon to the furthest left side of the "Status menu" icons which are on the right half of the menu bar will get highlighted. Once it is selected, then use the Right Arrow → to navigate to the one you want.  Use the Down Arrow ↓ to open the menu and select the option you want. Note that the Option key will make different menu options available in some of the "status menus".

Of note, Fn+Ctrl+F2 will activate the Apple menu icon  on the left hand side. From there the Right Arrow → will give you access to the Application menu. These options are available in System Preferences >> Keyboard >> Shortcuts::Keyboard:

Depending on how you have your Function keys configured, the Fn is optional.

In macOS Sierra you can also use Siri to help with this. Invoke Siri with whichever keyboard shortcut you choose from System Preferences >> Siri::Keyboard Shortcut, for example Option+Spacebar

...then say "Turn on the Keyboard Viewer"

...and voila:

Unfortunately, Siri will not close the Keyboard Viewer, nor will Command⌘+w


Single quote replaced to á When I type single quote with symbol a and ' replaced to symbol á. How can I solve this problem?

Go to system preferences > keyboard > input sources
Remove the item called us international pc, leaving only us or abc on the list


How to decrease logging level reported in Console? I think my macOS works in some debug mode, but I'm not sure, because when I open Console, I see a lot of log entries every second, despite not doing much. If I enabled that mode, I don't remember how it was enabled. There are some entries regarding memory allocation,  and some other.

Before I didn't see so much logs, unless it's a Sierra thing.

I don't have any extras in boot-args section when running: nvram -p.

Here is the example:

How do I lower the verbosity of my logs? Or such thing is expected?

I'm aware that I can filter the logs by choosing Errors and Faults, but this is not what I'm looking for.

No, reducing verboseness of the macOS logs is not a standard option.

While there may be a Terminal command/flag or a mod GUI app that lets you change the error levels recorded, I'd advise against doing so because if and when you need support/help, the console logs will be one of the places a tech person would review, and if they're truncated then there's less clues for the person investigating an issue.