Cannot save changes made to Parental Controls profile I have Parental Controls for one of the users on my Mac. It only allows web access to a list of websites and blocks all others. Recently, however, it has been switched to "Try to limit access to adult websites". When I switch this back to "Allow access to only these websites" and then close the preference pane, when I go back to it, the changes I've made are not saved. No changes that I make to the Parental Controls profile are saved upon simply exiting the pane and going back to it.

I figured it was a permissions error but fixing permissions did not solve the problem. I've removed the com.apple.mcx.plist file from the user folder, removed the user folder from the Library/Managed Preferences folder and neither of these things has changed anything. I'm at a loss here on how to fix it. Thank you for your time.

The following steps seem to have resolved this issue for me.  (Sadly I don't know if this will help anyone else, since the whole Parental controls system seems very complex and buggy, and I don't really understand what is happening here.  But I thought I'd note it here anyway.)

Delete all unnecessary user accounts (created during testing).
On all remaining accounts, tick "Allow user to administer this computer".  (Here, I'm trying to ensure Parental Controls is disabled on all accounts and hopefully cause some kind of reset, since I'd noticed that a new managed account I'd created had the same issue - and so the issue wasn't with the individual accounts, it was with the entire machine.)
Reboot.
On the account that needs to managed, untick "Allow user to administer this computer".  (I found it immediately turned back on again: some Mac wrestling may be required.)
Quit System Preferences.
Reopen System Preferences and check the "administer this computer" change has stuck.
Press the Show All button in System Preferences.
Cross fingers, wave a chicken in the air, etc.
Open the Parental Controls preference pane.
Set up Parental Controls again.  For me, the settings then stuck and worked.


What happens at a low level when a directory from Finder is dragged to an app icon, such as TextMate? The directory that was dragged will then open in the application it was dragged to (if the app accepts the path). What happens at the low level?

How does the application know it can open that path?
How does Finder provide the application with the path to open?

At a low level, everything on the disk is a file. So a folder is a special file that contains directory information pointing to more files.

The application is told that the file should be opened - and it's up to the program to determine what type of file was passed and decide whether to recursively handle that file by reading the files contained in that folder or take some other action.

Similarly, you can select many items in Finder and drop them on an icon and the same sort of file open event is posted to the application so that it can process the files and do what needs to be done.


How to save password for Cisco IPSec in Mac native VPN client? Everytime I connect to the Cisco VPN using the built-in VPN client, it asks me for the password. I am wondering is there a way we can auto save the password, like using the keychain?

This looks like a very annoying and longstanding bug in Mac OS X/macOS.
10.6: Save Cisco IPSec password in the Keychain:

Mac OS X Snow Leopard added the support for Cisco IPSec VPN
connections – that is, plain IPSec with XAuth authentication and
mode_cfg.
That makes it two layers of authentication: first, Machine
Authentication with a password (Shared Secret) or an X509 certificate.
Then a traditional username-password pair for XAuth, both of which you
can enter and save in the Account Name and Password fields
respectively when you set up the connection. Trouble is, even though
you entered your password and it is apparently saved in the keychain
properly, Mac OS X keeps nagging you to manually enter the password
every time you connect. Turns out this is a just bug with a simple
fix.
Open the Keychain Access Application, select the System keychain and
find your saved XAuth password entry in the list. Its Kind field will
say IPSec XAuth Password. Open it, then on the Access Control tab
click the Plus button to add another application. The file we need to
select, /usr/libexec/configd, resides in a hidden folder. To navigate
there, press Command+Shift+G, enter /usr/libexec, then pick configd in
the dialog. Save your changes and that's it – your saved password
should now work.

Another guide using pretty pictures:
https://anders.com/guides/native-cisco-vpn-on-mac-os-x/
Apparently the same manual fix of adding configd to the Keychain-allowed applications has to be applied for using the built-in ipsec-vpn tools.
VPN ipsec Prompting Saved Password:

Symptoms:
On Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.x) you are prompted to enter your VPN
password even though you’ve previously saved it in the keychain You
are using IPSec on the built in VPN client on Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Explanation:
This is caused by a problem with the Keychain Access item for the VPN IPSec   connection.  A two minute fix will sort it out
for you.
Solution:

Launch Keychain Access by clicking Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access
On the left upper pane, under Keychains select System
On the left lower, under Category select All Items
On the right side of the screen scroll to the bottom and locate the two items called VPN(IPSec)
Double-click the VPN(IPSec) whos kind is IPSec XAuth Password
Click the Access Control button/tab.  The applications permitted to use this keychain item will be displayed below.  If you’re prompted
for your password, enter it.
Click the plus (+) sign
When the Finder window appears, press Cmd + Shift + G on your keyboard
When the Go To Folder dialog appears, enter /usr/libexec
Click Go
When the /usr/libexec folder appears scroll to configd, select it and click Add
Click Save Changes
Close Keychain Access and try connecting to your VPN again


What are the software for translation on Mac? I want to translate a long text and I am looking for a software that shows the text and the translation I write at the same time, in two windows and with possibly a synchronization. Does it exist? Otherwise, what are the existing softwares and what do they do ?

PS: I want to translate a 250 page book... I am not looking for a software that does the translation, but for an nice interface where I can do the translation.

If you are asking about professional translation tools (rather than machine transation sites), there is a useful survey that includes some for Mac at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation

Also can ask on the list devoted to Mac pro translators

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/MacLingua/info

(Relying on machine translation inevitably involves substantial risks of potentially embarassing errors, I recommend that the results should always be edited by a pro or native speaker)


How to determine which process is creating a file? Two files have suddenly appeared in my home directory, called "aa" and "err". They are empty. I'm wondering how they got there. I deleted the files and they are created again after some seconds.

Is there a way to monitor the home directory for the creation of files to find out where they came from?

I mention that lsof couldn't help in this case (I got an empty result using lsof aa)

fs_usage is your tool for this.

The file system usage tool is ideal since it taps in to the real time file system events and dumps activity to a file or the screen. Since you know the exact path of the file, you can filter out all the thousands of irrelevant (to this case)  filesystem changes and see what reads / writes to that file pretty quickly.

If your home directory is /Users/me then you can filter for /Users/me/aa

mac:~ me$ sudo fs_usage | grep /Users/me/aa
09:35:21  stat64            /Users/me/aa      0.000033   touch
09:35:21  utimes            /Users/me/aa      0.000104   touch
09:35:21  fsgetpath         /Users/me/aa      0.000119   Finder
09:35:22  lstat64           /Users/me/aa      0.000039   fseventsd
09:35:22  fsgetpath         /Users/me/aa      0.000027   mds
09:35:22  getattrlist       /Users/me/aa      0.000064   mds
09:35:22  listxattr         /Users/me/aa      0.000012   mds
09:35:22  getattrlist       /Users/me/aa      0.000130   mds
09:35:22  getattrlist       /Users/me/aa      0.000033   mds
09:35:22  open              /Users/me/aa      0.000071   mdworker_sha
09:35:22    RdData[AT2]     /Users/me/aa      0.000331 W mdworker_sha
09:35:22  getattrlist       /Users/me/aa      0.000042   mds
09:35:24  lstat64           /Users/me/aa      0.000114   rm
09:35:24  access            /Users/me/aa      0.000209   rm
09:35:24  unlink            /Users/me/aa      0.000909   rm
09:35:25  lstat64           /Users/me/aa      0.000042   fseventsd
09:35:25  lstat64           /Users/me/aa      0.000006   rm

(note: I deleted a lot of white space above - the fs_usage command outputs a wide amount of empty space so you can't easily see the touch command on the far right if I copy/paste the exact output.)

Here I use the touch command to create the file, append a string to it and then rm it from the command line.

mac:~ me$ touch ~/aa
mac:~ me$ echo foo >> ~/aa
mac:~ me$ rm ~/aa

There will be tons of other apps that read, so you can filter on the stat64 and lstat74 operations if there are too many attribute reads and spotlight activity around the file once it's created.

http://toddsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/02/use-fsusage-to-monitor-file-system.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/FileSystem/Articles/FileSystemCalls.html

The manual page for this command is quite dense (and not a "how-to") which is typical but better than no documentation from Apple on how to use it.


Fink installation: After installation (I believe): -bash: fink: command not found I want to install "fink"to my new MacBookpro,
when

The core packages have been updated. You should now update the other packages
using commands like 'fink update-all'.

I assumed that fink has been successfully installed, but when I tried to follow the instruction call the command:

fink update-all

-bash: fink: command not found

Is this expected?
Or did I do something wrong?
Any information is needed to do the trouble shooting, please let me know.

Check that this line

. /sw/bin/init.sh

has been added in either .bash_profile, .bash_login, or .profile. If the search comes up empty, then add the line to one of these files. If you are not sure which file you should use, then add it to .bash_profile. Open a new terminal session and init.sh will modify your PATH variable.


How To Remove iMessage Icon On Toolbar (MacBook Pro) How would i remove this icon in my toolbar on my MacBook Pro?
I have never really used it and would like to remove it from the toolbar.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

You can do this by opening iMessage or Messages on your MBP. Then going to Messages->Preferences

There is an option in here to remove it from your menu bar

Hope this helps :)


How can I select files in Midnight Commander on a MacBook Pro? I find really annoying to use Midnight Commander under OS X when using the non-extended keyboard (laptop).

I found no way of simulating an INSERT key press (select file) and I would like to find a solution that does not require me to reconfigure MC, specially because I cannot do this with each machine I'm connecting to from my MacBook.

I will give extra bonus ;) for and extended solution what will solve the problem not only for the INSERT (select file) but also for switch selection and add/substract selection (NumMultiply,NumMinus,NumPlus).

Remember that Numlock area *, + and - are not the same as the ones from the standard keyboard.

Ctrl-T is standard hotkey for file selection — http://linux.die.net/man/1/mc.

As for switch/add/substract, just type shift-8 for *, shift-= for + and - for minus.

All this works in MC out of the box.


Can 3rd Party Keyboards Access Data from Other Keyboards? It's known that granting 3rd party keyboards "Full Access" allows them to record all your keystrokes while using the keyboard. But will the keystrokes you enter into Apple's main keyboard be accessible to a 3rd party keyboard with full access? I would think the answer to be "no, of course not," but I'd like if there was some kind of official documentation to that effect.

This user answer on Apple's website says the answer is no, but they don't provide a source. Is there some way to be relatively certain that this is in fact the case?

3rd party keyboards can't access data entered into the stock iOS keyboard, that's just the way Apple developed the API's.  Without understanding the Text API's it will be difficult to explain why this is.

If you're concerned about keyboard security, however, you should be more concerned with what info 3rd-party keyboards send to their servers.  These keyboards can send keystrokes, words, and phrases to their developers via the internet.  Granted, not all keyboards do this but every popular keyboard I've seen includes in their ToS that they can send this info if they want.

The "full access" warning message you see when installing 3rd-party keyboards is about doing just that: sending your info to their servers.

This reason is why Apple prevents these keyboards from entering sensitive text.  That would include passwords.  Take a look at this article about keyboard security.  It's a few years old but generally accurate.


Changed Time Machine hard drives Wonder if anyone can help.

I changed over hard drives to use for my Time Machine backups of my mac and have completed a new backup on my new external hard drive.

On the old external drive that i want to use for a different purpose now, there is a folder called "Backups.backupdb".

Can i delete this folder now that i have a complete backup of my computer on a new drive?

Thanks in advance

Use Disk Utility to reformat the old drive. It will be much quicker than forcing the Finder to delete hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of files by throwing it in the trash.

If you have other files on this old disk you want to keep on this drive, you can:

copy them to another disk; reformat the old disk; copy them back to old disk

or

use Terminal to delete Backups.backupdb using the rm -d -r command. Using Terminal removes a lot of overhead imposed by a Finder delete and works much faster.


Special Character in Application Shortcut on Danish keyboard? My MacBook Pro has a Danish keyboard.

The character [ doesn't have its own key. I have to press ⌥+8 to get the left bracket character [.

How do you use a shortcut like ⌘+⌥+[?

This doesn't directly answer your question, but if all you're trying to do is trigger a certain menu item with a keyboard shortcut, you can simply remap the shortcut in Keyboard preferences.

Go to  > System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, click App Shortcuts in the left-hand list, and click the + icon at the bottom left corner. Type the name of the menu item you'd like to trigger and how widely accessible you want the shortcut to be (in one app or the whole system), and assign a shortcut which can be natively typed.


Drive Genius 3 Demo does not have a menu. How do I uninstall it on my iMac? I have the Drive Genius 3 demo and it does not have a menu or an Uninstall. How do I delete the demo version of Drive Genius 3?

Try using "AppCleaner" it is free and will delete all associated files with an application.


Mac OS install drive not being recognized by computer I recently installed Mac OS 10.10 (Yosemite) onto an external USB drive. It has been working fine for the past few days. When I need to switch OS installs, I shut down the computer and then pull out the drive. However I think I just pulled out the drive a little too early, while it was still being written to, and now the drive is not being recognized at all by the computer. I get the following message.

Is there any way I can still save the drive without losing all my work on it? Thanks.

You could plug it in, hit "Ignore", open "Disk Utility", and attempt to "Repair" the disk. Otherwise, try to initialize the disk and copy the folder contents.

P.S. Just as a side note, I would recommend using an external hard drive(SSD or HDD) to run OS X, since it would operate a little faster.


Boot Camp and Windows 8 I had a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8 already installed. I can boot from it without problems, and all the drivers Apple provided for Windows 7 works perfectly for me except one thing.

I am not able to use Target Display Mode with a Thunderbolt iMac. I understand that Boot Camp doesn't currently support Windows 8, but I am hoping someone has encountered this problem and solved it.

Also, I am able to connect to an HDMI or Mini Display Port-equipped display under Windows, and Target Display Mode works under OS X.

Target Display mode is not supported under Boot Camp for any version of Windows, the best way to get that working is under a VM client suh as Parallels or VMWare


Are there adapters for MiniDisplay port screens to HDMI video cards I am wondering if I can connect an Apple Cinema Display with a MiniDisplay port to an HDMI video card.

The short answer is yes.

It's not a common conversion (normally it's a DisplayPort to HDMI), but it can be done.  To do so, you need an active adapter to go from HDMI to DispayPort because the signaling is completely different and needs to be recreated so it will work.


AppleScript: How to add m4a meta-data using Sound Studio? I'd like to automate the adding of metadata to various .m4a files using Sound Studio.  I have a Python script that will run thru all the files I care about and pass along useful data to an AppleScript that can actually manipulate the metadata.  But I'm not sure what the best way is to actually do the metadata manipulation in AppleScript.

I can get all the metadata into the AppleScript script by passing the items into the script via arguments, but I don't know how to open the file and set the metadata items I want to set.  Seems like it should be easy but all the attempts I've made so far have failed.  I'm sure I'm not understanding the correct way to approach the problem.  I have this so far:

on run argv
    -- Arguments:
    --  1   music_file_path   full path to the file to open
    --  2   artist               name of artist
    --   3   album_name    name of the album
    --    4   track_name         just the name of the track
    --    5   disc_number        which disc (1, 2 ...)
    --    6   track_number      which track on the disc
    --    7   release_year       the year when the track was released

    if (count of argv's items) ≠ 7 then
        display dialog "Wrong number of arguments!" with title "Add Meta Data To Sound Studio File" buttons {"Bummer"} giving up after 1
        return
    end if

    set music_file_path to item 1 of argv
    set artist_name to item 2 of argv
    set album_name to item 3 of argv
    set track_name to item 4 of argv
    set disc_number to item 5 of argv
    set track_number to item 6 of argv
    set release_year to item 7 of argv

    tell application "Finder"
        launch "/Applications/Sound Studio/Sound Studio.app"
    end tell -- Finder

    tell application "Sound Studio"
        activate
        set mfp to (a reference to POSIX file music_file_path)
        open mfp
        -- Set open'ed file's meta data to what we want
        save
        close
    end tell -- Sound Studio.app
end run

Any ideas on how to get this to work?

I downloaded a trial version of the latest Sound Studio and had a go.  The AppleScript dictionary was all that was required.  With the exception of the open command, all other information needed to compose the script came from the documentation within Script Editor.

The absence of an entry for the open command is a bit mysterious and I have emailed them about it.  I also did notice a "bug"(?) in the software in the manner in which it responds to open, although it technically can't be classified as a bug given that it's not documented as being a command that's supported.  However, the only other command that would be used for opening files and creating new documents would be the make command, but, having played around with that, I'm fairly confident that open is the correct command to use, and they just failed to document it properly, whilst also overlooking its occasionally erratic behaviour.

Anyway, here's the script, with my test file data taking the place of what will be sent through to the script from your Python script:

    # Script:   Add Metadata To Sound Studio File.applescript
    # Author:   CJK
    # Date:     2018-03-20
    #-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    # @arguments:
    #       %argv%      an indexed list containing 7 items:
    #
    #           1) full path to the file to open
    #           2) name of artist
    #           3) name of the album
    #           4) just the name of the track
    #           5) which disc (1, 2 ...)
    #           6) which track on the disc
    #           7) the year when the track was released
    #-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    set argv to [¬
        "/Users/CK/Music/Nelly Furtado/Folklore/04 Try.m4a", ¬
        "Nelly Furtado", ¬
        "Folklore", ¬
        "Try", ¬
        "1", ¬
        "4", ¬
        "2003"] -- remove this variable declaration

    # on run argv -- uncomment this handler

        if (count argv) is not 7 then return display dialog ¬
            "Wrong number of arguments!" with title ¬
            "Add Metadata To Sound Studio File" buttons ¬
            {"Bummer"} giving up after 1

        tell application "Sound Studio"
            activate

            set music_file_path to the first item of argv

            set D to open (music_file_path as POSIX file)

            tell the metadata of D to set [¬
                artist, ¬
                album, ¬
                title, ¬
                disc number, ¬
                track number, ¬
                year] to the rest of argv

            save D
            close D

            --quit
        end tell

    # end run -- uncomment this line
    #----------------------------------------------------------------------------END

There's not a huge amount to say about the script: it opens Sound Studio, opens an audio file, assigns some values to the metadata properties, saves the file, then closes the file.  Optionally, you can quit the application at this point as well.

Regarding the opening of the audio file, Sound Studio seems content to be given a POSIX file reference rather than having to coerce it into alias class.  However, I did notice a couple of oddities:

❶・When I tried to define the variable music_file_path outside of the tell block, it behaved as you mentioned and simply didn't open the file, but also didn't return an error.  The script stalled until it timed out.

❷・It also didn't like me expressing the file reference as POSIX file music_file_path, so I had to write it as music_file_path as POSIX file.  Again, it would stall the script, rather than complaining that the file reference was wrong.

❸・If I corrected both of these issues and tried to run the script straight after a previous run had stalled it, the script would stall once again.  So I had to kill the Sound Studio process from Terminal by issuing a killall "Sound Studio".  Then when I ran the script, it worked quite happily, and continued to work happily with each successive run after run.  When I went to screw with the script again to purposely cause a stall, it wasn't surprising that I once again had to go back into Terminal to do a killall.

So I think it's fairly safe to say that this is an issue with Sound Studio and not with the script.  I've emailed them about it, but I think you wouldn't be wrong to email them as well: the more reports they receive from disgruntled customers who want AppleScripting technology to be properly implemented and supported, the more incentive they'll have to do so.

I did consider putting a clause in the AppleScript for it to issue its own shell command when it detects that the application had stalled trying to open a file.  The AppleScript could do a killall, but that didn't sit very well with me for some reason.  The Sound Studio application itself didn't stall, and continued to be operational during testing.

If you do want me to put some sort of block in the script to handle any instances where it might stall, let me know and I can add an edit.  But it wouldn't be what I would call "clean cut code", and as long as you don't try and change how and where the file reference is declared in the script, it should run fine.


What actions are performed by Install OS X Mountain Lion.app that are not performed by InstallESD.dmg without the app? Recommended

Apple provides and recommends use of Install OS X Mountain Lion.app

that is, "the app" – in its entirety.

For Build 12A269 for OS X 10.8, the version of the app is 1.3.12 (351).

Known

Ignoring parts of the app – with InstallESD.dmg alone:

installation may succeed.

(The same is true for Lion when parts of Install Mac OS X Lion.app are not used for installation.)

Unknown for Mountain Lion

The full list of:

things that do not occur, things that may not succeed, when installation is attempted or performed with something other than the app.

My initial plan is to accept an answer that provides either:

the fullest list; or
the best set of evidence for a partial list.

Starting points

com.apple.Boot.plist(5) OS X Manual Page – page dated March 17, 2011 for 10.7.4, the same date appears on the page within 10.8.

For Mountain Lion on some types of hardware, there may be a unique distribution (ESD).

Food for thought, just part of the Lion experience: June 2012 discussion of Downloading Hardware Specific Lion Installers (cache)(copy).

My working theory is that there are no meaningful differences in actions performed under the app as opposed to the DMG.

One could argue at a low level that the difference is that invoking the Install OS X Mountain Lion.app bundle loads app and UI frameworks that simply mounting a DMG does not, but that's not exactly the intent of your question I'm sure.

Any meaningful installer-level actions should be identical in either medium, since the majority of the resources are in the DMG, and the DMG is in the app. The app must mount the disk image in order to get at the necessary assets.


How to write ExifTool keywords which Spotlight can see? I try to write keywords to PNG images using ExifTool but OS X's Spotlight cannot see these keywords at all.

The developer of ExifTool does not know about Spotlight, so he cannot help:

  "I wouldn't be surprised if spotlight doesn't parse metadata in PNG images.  But I'm not the one to ask about this.  I don't know much about how spotlight works."

I have tried many different variations of this but Spotlight don't see my keywords:

/usr/local/bin/exiftool -api PNGEarlyXMP 1 -api IgnoreMinorErrors 1 -Keywords+="my keyword" -overwrite_original_in_place -P path_is_here.png

Limitations in Spotlight, Preview, and Photoshop

Apple Spotlight and Preview (OS X 10.8.5) and Adobe Photoshop CC (version 14.0) ignore XMP in PNG images if it comes after the image data, which is where ExifTool adds new XMP. This should be considered as a bug in the Apple and Adobe software since XMP is allowed to exist after the image data according to the XMP and PNG specifications. [ExifTool 9.40 provides the PNGEarlyXMP API option to allow writing XMP before the IDAT chunk, but there are caveats associated with its use]

PNGEarlyXMP

ExifTool's Flag to write XMP in PNG images before the IDAT (image data) chunk. By default, ExifTool adds new XMP to the end of a PNG file (just before IEND). This is allowed by the PNG and XMP specifications, but some utilities seem to ignore XMP if it comes after the image data. The PNGEarlyXMP option causes ExifTool to instead add new XMP before the PNG IDAT chunk. However, since ExifTool uses a single-pass writing algorithm, it has no way to tell if XMP already exists later in the file before writing the new XMP in this location. If this happens, a minor error is issued when the extra XMP is encountered, and the file is not written. Adding the IgnoreMinorErrors option causes the XMP after IDAT to be deleted, thus resolving the conflict (at the expense of possible metadata loss), and allowing the file to be written. The PNGEarlyXMP option is applied automatically when deleting all XMP and writing new XMP back in one step. When reading, this option causes a warning to be issued if standard XMP is found after the IDAT chunk.

IgnoreMinorErrors

Flag to ignore minor errors. Causes minor errors to be downgraded to warnings, and minor warnings to be ignored. This option is provided mainly to allow writing of files when minor errors occur, but by ignoring some minor warnings the behaviour of ExifTool may be changed to allow some questionable operations to proceed (such as extracting thumbnail and preview images even if they don't have a recognizable header). Minor errors/warnings are denoted by "[minor]" at the start of the message, or "[Minor]" (with a capital "M") for warnings that affect processing when ignored.

As of OS X 10.11, this appears not to be possible.

JPEG but not PNG

That you can not find a working example suggests the Spotlight indexer does not extract the meta-data from Portable Network Graphics, png, files.

According to Searching EXIF data with Mac OS X Spotlight, it does work for jpeg files.

File an Enhancement Bug

Report an enhancement bug through Apple's Bug Reporting web site – and through general OS X feedback. This is the best way to directly tell Apple what you want.


How do I select/move multiple albums or events in the Photos sidebar? I like the new sidebar in Yosemite Photos. But after upgrading to Photos from iPhoto on my iMac, I have literally dozens of "Events" that need to be moved into "Albums."

With other sidebar windows (like Finder), I can hold down "command" or "shift" and select multiple folders at once; that does not seem to work in Photos. I do not want to move each event separately. Every time I try to drag or select more than one event/album, it defaults to one selection.

How can I select more than one event/album at once?
Any help greatly appreciated!

You can utilise album view as prior suggested and then drag albums into the sidebar to achieve the desired result, but you are absolutely correct in noting the failure of this desired behaviour to operate, purely within the sidebar itself.
yup the OSX HCI / UX toolbox in terms of standardisation of elements with predictable results is something that apple has debased since leaving OS9, selectable text OS wide - has similar issues.


What version of iOS will I get on new iPad 4 Mini I would like to jailbreak my soon to be new iPad 4 Mini. Should I assume that it would still have iOS 9 installed when I get it out of the box?

There is no way for anyone here to give you a definitive answer to that question. Although the iPad mini 4 originally shipped with iOS 9.0 (13A340), it also fully supports the latest iterations of iOS 11.

In a nutshell, you should not assume that the one you buy will have iOS 9 as the version of iOS it has pre-installed will depend on when it was manufactured. Because of this, if it is new, it's likely to have a version of either iOS 10 or iOS 11.


Why does Time Machine estimate a 109GB backup size, but then need 235 GB? I'm running Time Machine on a new NAS. Until today, I used to run it on an USB drive. I am reusing the old job using the new 10.8 feature that allows me to add new backup targets.

When I configure the backup job in the system settings - there are some things like VMs that I want to exclude - Time Machine estimates the backup size to be 109 GB.

When I start the backup, however, it talks about 235 GB. I don't like this, as I don't want to litter the NAS with unnecessary data.

Is it normal that Time Machine shows such a huge difference between the System dialog, and the actual backup?

This discrepancy is odd - most of the time when people see more than a 25 GB error, it's with Time Machine over-estimating the space that will be used rather than under-estimating. You might be on to something where there is abug in calculating things with multiple backup targets - I've not seen that configuration start to misbehave yet - so you might be one of the lucky few to see how things break under that setup.

If you can make this happen repeatedly, I'd submit a bug (or at least poke around) by running the tmdiagnose tool to collect data on the estimates and actualities.

Also, the Backuploupe tool is amazing at getting at space usage and estimate oddities when you use Time Machine. It's not able to catalog both destinations simultaneously yet - but seems to work well enough on Mountain Lion that I still use it regularly.


Apache virtualhost - Mac OSX 10.7.3 After upgrading to Lion, all my virtualhosts stopped working. They redirect to "It works" main apache page on my device for some weird reason.

Example:

/etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1  myhost.com

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents/testproj/"
    ServerName myhost.com

    <Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents/testproj/">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/testproj-error_log"
    CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/testproj-access_log" common
</VirtualHost>

Did anyone else face the same issue? How can I fix this?

There could be multiple causes to this issue.

First, have you tried restarting Apache?
You can do so by typing sudo apachectl graceful in the Terminal.

If that doesn't work out, try to create a folder in the predestined folder (Sites), and see if it works. Alsoo, make sure you've enabled the proper settings:

And just for the record, my httpd-vhosts.conf file (on a Windows though) looks like this:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName dev.test.be
    ErrorLog "logs/test.log"
    CustomLog "logs/test.log" common
    DocumentRoot "C:\Users\me\workspace\test\drupal"
</VirtualHost>


External hard drive very slow to load after dropping it and can't be repaired with Disk Utility Today as I was using my WD HDD, it fell off my corner. After I fixed the thing, I plugged it into the Mac and it loads the HDD but it's very very very very slow. It also does not work sometimes. The entire laptop just hangs

Tried running Disk Utility First Aid but it won't work.  It says some error and hangs

Can someone advise me on what I can do in this case?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that external hard disk drive is most likely damaged beyond repair.

  I was using my WD HDD, it fell off my corner.

This is physical damage. No software can fix this.  This is like totaling your car and then trying to fix it by  changing your oil or using better gas.

  I fixed the thing, I plugged it into the Mac and it loads the HDD but
  it's very very very very slow.

It sounds like there was actual damage that you had to repair, but aside from that, there are two components to an external USB drive:

USB controller which is the bridge between the USB bus and the SATA disk drive
The SATA disk drive

From what you describe, the Mac is "seeing" the controller, but when it tries to access it, things go "wrong."  This would be consistent with a damaged hard drive.

The only thing you can realistically do now is hope that you have backups/copies of what was on that drive.


Where does a copy go on my iPad? On my iPad Air 2 there is a copy choice under the share button. When I use this button, I can't find the copy. It's not in my photos, and if try the paste function nothing is there. Where is the copy?

It’s in the clipboard, so you can paste it using the normal paste action in any app.


Length of an email list in sent mail I want to send an email to a large list, using Mac Mail. How many email addresses can I have in To: or cc: or bcc:? I recall there is a limit.

I'm not sure if there is a hard limit in Mail for the number of recipients in any of the particular fields. The larger obstacle may be your mail service blocking the message because of the number of recipients: their spam filters tend to flag messages as spam when the number of recipients goes over a certain number.

What you can try - and I have had this work - is to use an Address Group. Put the contacts you are sending to in a Group in your Address Book, then enter then name of the Group in the To: field. It masquerades the email addresses to the recipients and may get it past the spam filters.


Official way to obtain an OS X ISO file I'm trying to install OS X Mavericks in VirtualBox on Windows 8.1. I have VirtualBox installed and the VM set up, but I need an ISO file to install the operating system.

I've searched around and found one result one a website I hadn't heard of, but Google Chrome flagged it as malware. I found a file on CNet, but it's an upgrade file for machines that are running an earlier version of OS X.

Is there an official source for downloading OS X ISO files? If not, is it possible to get the required ISO file without already having access to OS X?

Does not work on Mavericks and Yosemite
There is no way to legitimately get the file without having access to a Mac, and a licensed copy of the OS via a purchase (unless you are a member of the Developer Program, for which you can expect to pay far more than the cost of the OS, what with it being free).
But if you can blag some access time on a Mac, then you can download the OS from the Mac App Store (You may need to Option+Click the Purchased section to force it to reshow them if you have downloaded them at least once already).  Once you have the installer downloaded and sat in your dock, you can simply pick it apart and get to  the image file that is inside it.
This is the official way to get the file direct from Apple, but there is still work to do to make it into an ISO:

Once you’ve downloaded Mavericks, find the installer on your Mac. It’s called Install OS X Mavericks.app and it should have been downloaded to your main Applications folder or be sat in your Dock.

Right-click (or Control+click) the installer, and choose Show Package Contents from the resulting contextual menu.

In the folder that appears, open Contents > Shared Support; you’ll see a disk image file called InstallESD.dmg
This dmg file is in essence an ISO file in s slightly different format.  We'll need to convert it.  Open up Disk Utility and:

From the menu bar, select Images > Convert and point it to your .dmg file

In the Save As dialog that follows, select DVD/CD master. Disk Utility will insist on saving the new ISO as a .cdr file, but it is really an ISO.

When complete, you can rename it to .iso in Finder.

Use an external HD or thumb drive which is in ExFAT format (Compared to FAT format, this allows for single files larger than 4GB). Copy the .iso file and access it on the other system.

For clarity, you can do the above on any version of OS X from 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) onwards, so you can use an old image to get hold of a new image for example, if you have access to a different OS version than Mavericks.


Fixed region screen capture on Mac OS X? I use both Windows and Mac OS X on my work/home computers, and on Windows I love SnagIt, because it allows me to capture fixed regions of the screen: I select a resolution (for example, 500x400), and then when I click on the capture button a rectangle with that fixed dimensions appears on the screen. I only have to move it to the exact location of the screen where I want to make the capture and it's done.

The capture utilities that I've used on Mac OS X (native, or Jing, for example) doesn't have this feature afaik.

Is there some way to have this kind of feature in Mac OS X? Any utility that could add this to my day-to-day?

The free screen capture tools built into QuickTime and the OS will allow you to take full screen video capture as well as partial captures. You can then edit these down using preview and iMovie to crop and adjust them. This takes time, so there is room for some inexpensive apps that help you by pre-defining the capture area so you don't have to edit down a larger file or worry about being pixel perfect each time you make another capture using the mouse/trackpad.

I use Skitch for static images and used Screeny for video images until Mavericks came out. It doesn't work now, so ScreenFlow is my tool of choice if QuickTime doesn't cut it.

I'm hoping Screeny gets updated since it's lighter and simpler. Nothing will replace ScreenFlow for big projects due to it's post production workflow tools, but you might be well served by a less expensive option or even prefer simplicity over complexity if that's more important than a one time cost.

Skitch is currently free, Screeny is $15 and ScreenFlow $99 - all are available on the Mac App Store.


Why is Home Sharing not working with iPhone? I have a Mac Mini with iTunes 10.2.1 installed, I enabled home sharing in the preferences and the Advanced menu. I also have an iPhone 4 on iOS 4.3, which I enabled home sharing on using the same username and password that my desktop uses.

Both computers are connected to the same home network. When I open up the iPhone's iPod app, however, I don't see any of the songs that are only on the Mac. I only see those that have been synced with the iPhone (i.e. I use this Mac to sync my iPhone).

Launch the iPod App on your iPhone. At the bottom of the screen, you should see a More button with 3 blue dots.

As you can see here, there is a Shared list item at the bottom of the page. Click that, which should bring you to a screen like:

Click the name of the computer that you see in your list and then all of the videos, movies, tv shows, etc, will appear in your lists for those items.

In other words, the iPod App won't keep the home-shared content separate. You will see the Home Sharing content as if it was integrated with the device.


Ghost-Imaging the BOOTCAMP partition for later restore? I have a MacBook and I plan to upgrade to Windows 10 but want to be able to roll-back to the original Windows 7 in case Windows 10 is not good for me.

I have used Symantec Ghost to do a Hot-image (i.e. create image when Windows 7 is running instead of booting from a CD), I also imaged the "System" partitions.

However, I still haven't gone ahead for the upgrade, as I am new in doing the ghost imaging, and I'm not confident that the image I created can restore the MacBook's Windows 7 to the original. Since it is running in Boot Camp I fear the imaging might have to be done different than ordinary Windows 7 installations. Also I'm not sure if the partitioning data (partition table, MBR, GPT, VBR, boot loader, or whatever it is), or any other vital data that I am not aware of, is really successfully preserved in the image I created.

Am I on the right track?

I would say you're not on the right track doing an update before you test if your backup works on Windows 7 to Windows 7 first.

Without knowing what version of OS X and Boot Camp, people might hesitate to report success or failure, but since Apple doesn't "support" Boot Camp you might check with Symantec to make sure you are able to use their support if you need it.

Are you locked into Boot Camp? It seems you would benefit from having virtual machines you could snapshot and test and co-exist so you don't need to depend on a restore to bare metal scenario.


Base64 strings in URL I'm having a problem with Base64 strings in URLs in El Capitan.

I'm sending notifications from a web platform to its users. Those emails are plain text and contain links to messages.

I have tried the following links

http://localhost#VGhpcyBpcyBhIGJvcmluZyBleGFtcGxlIHRlc3Qu

http://localhost?e=VGhpcyBpcyBhIGJvcmluZyBleGFtcGxlIHRlc3Qu

However when someone clicks on a link in Apple Mail then Safari opens the links with the Base64 code converted to lowercase. I don't get why this is happening. It seams like a big bug to me. Has anyone found an easy workouround?

The only solution I found so far was to use Base32 but that just increases the length of the URLs. Another possible might be to use HTML emails but that would mean quite a bit of extra work which I'd like to avoid.

You should explicitly put a slash "/" after the host name, ie

http://localhost/?e=VGhpcyBpcyBhIGJvcmluZyBleGFtcGxlIHRlc3Qu

Without the trailing / character after localhost, Mail treats the entire url as a hostname, which is case-insensitive.


Where can I find and download of old Garageband loops online? I had an old macbook for a while and that thing crashed, along with some of my music. I got a cheap toshiba for a couple years, saved up for a Macbook Pro. I bought the Pro in 2013, didn't much of the missing loops, but i'm trying to remake an old beat (the vocals sucked). The horns I chopped up are not available on the new GB, and I don't have any backups or versions of the horns without other instruments. Try as I might, i can't replicate this sound using music software or even live brass. Anyone know where I can find these old GB loops that were around from maybe 2006-2011?

try icompositions.com and macjams.com they both had some of the previous loops and other loops for free. If the loops were part of GB or logic or final cut pro then you can retrieve them from that software. Old versions of final cut studio 1 and 2 included the jam packs. As did logic among others. You can also try apple through a google search as they did have multiple free loops. eBay is another source or local stores.Local mac user clubs amy also be able to help. Since you owned the content you might try torrents or macserialjunkie.com


Can I connect two Mac Pro to one monitor? I am using an apple thunderbolt display and two mac pro's.  I would like to connect the two processors to the one display.  is this possible?

No, you cannot physically connect both Mac Pro's to the same Apple Thunderbolt Display. However, you might look in to a KVM switch which lets one display connect to multiple computers.

However, you could connect one Mac Pro to the display, and use Remote Desktop software on that Mac Pro to display the screen from the other Mac Pro.


Installing *.dmg via CLI How are *.dmg packages installed via the command line?
I noticed that they can be mounted with:

me@MacBook-Pro:~$ open /Users/me/Downloads/installer.dmg

What's next?

Assuming that the diskimage contains a package or packages, you would list the packages on the mounted filesystem and then use /usr/sbin/installer


What happened to jabber / hangouts options in messages? Messages (on Mac OS X) used to let you add a gmail account for jabber -- it appears this is gone now? Is there a way to re-enable it?

Jabber and Google Hangouts was removed from Messages in Mojave. You might consider using Adium.


I have lots of lock icons -- how can I get rid of them? The top bar of my screen looks like this:

What's with all the locks? Can I get rid of some of them?

The icon is for Keychain Access. You can enable and disable the icon (usually there's only one) from the Keychain Access app's preferences. Try toggling this checkbox and seeing what happens.

Multiple icons is sometimes a rare glitch where other menu bar items appear with the wrong icon, taking on the appearance of a different item. This can usually be fixed by killing SystemUIServer (killall -HUP SystemUIServer).

If it really is multiple menu bar items, you can remove them by ⌘-dragging them away from the menu bar.


Cannot add an Exchange account to Outlook 2016 on OS X El Capitan I recently installed Office 2016 on my MacBook Pro Late 2011, OS X El Capitan. I'd like to add my Exchange account to Outlook. My domain is @ofsl.ie.

I added the email and password and I clicked on add account. I got an error message error saying:

  Outlook for Mac cannot add this type of account; to open your account please open your browser and open an Office 365 session and then use the Outlook web app.

I believe that Outlook 2016 will not connect to anything earlier than an Exchange 2010 server and it sounds like that is likely an Exchange 2007 (or earlier) server.

If this is the case than you are outta luck until that mail server is upgraded to Exchange 2010, 2013 or 2016. Either that or downgrade to the previous version of Office for the mac.


Is there an app other than Witch that allows windows switching (not app switching) with cmd+tab? I found the Witch app (http://manytricks.com/witch/). Are there any other solutions?

Contexts looks nice, but I've never used it personally.  It seems to be similar in functionality with Witch, but it has a more modern (iOS 7-style) design.

It does have the ability to map itself to Command+Tab.

It costs $9.


SNES Graphics Editor for Mac? Does anyone know of an editor than can open/read SNES 4BPP graphics files? Or at least one that can convert to/from this format?

SNESTile is a Java-based cross-platform tool for editing SNES graphics.

Links:

GitHub Project
Mac Binary Download

Most such tools are DOS-based though. You could certainly download DOSBox and some of the tools listed here.


Default as "no alert" when create event from email I love creating events in my calendar from emails.

But I recently missed an event because, when created from an email, the event default alert is "None", and I did not change it manually.

Is it possible to change the default event alert for event created from the calendar to "10 minutes before the event"?

In your calendar application, under Calendar -> Preferences -> Alerts you should be able to set the default alerts for Events. Changing this should apply to events created from within mail too.


Transfering a Bluetooth keyboard & mouse from one iMac to an iMac that has never used Bluetooth Is there any way to do this? I tried putting iMac 1 to sleep and waiting for the 2nd one to pick up the keyboard and mouse, but still "No keyboards have been found."

The 2nd one is, of course, the one I need to use with a few hours. I tried downloading certain programs listed in other answers, but they did not pick up iMac 2.

You'll also likely need to turn your keyboard off/back on and make it discoverable.

See:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1809

for a complete walk-through, but to be safe, turn off first mac, off keyboard, then back on while searching on the second Mac (using bluetooth control panel)

Alternately, instead of fully turning off the first Mac, you could just turn off its Bluetooth, which is much faster. But make sure you have a way to turn Bluetooth back on again—if you only have Bluetooth peripherals, this could be problematic.


SecurtiyAgent process offload work to SecurityAgentHelper Projects like Nomad-login (or nowadays Jamf-connect) use to modify the mechanism list in system.login.console authorizationRight.
I see that non-privileged mechanisms runs by SecurityAgent process, but it can sometimes delegate another process called SecurityAgentHelper which is an xpc service.
I wonder if the role of process SecurityAgentHelper is to serve as fallback to SecurityAgent and under what conditions does it offload task for the helper process.
Thanks !

Stability and Privilege Separation
XPC services are used to isolate sections of a process that require specific security considerations. SecurityAgent will pass SecurityAgentHelper work that needs to be isolated. It will not act as a fallback; this is not the intention of XPC services.
See Apple's Creating XPC Services for a detailed explanation of XPC Service's role and design:

The XPC Services API, part of libSystem, provides a lightweight mechanism for basic interprocess communication integrated with Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) and launchd. The XPC Services API allows you to create lightweight helper tools, called XPC services, that perform work on behalf of your application.
There are two main reasons to use XPC services: privilege separation and stability.


Using TextFree with a Google Voice account that uses Google Apps account Is there any way to get TextFree working with a Google Voice account belonging to a Google Apps account?

I have been able to get it working with a Gmail account by simply adding the user@textfree.us address to the forwarding text message option in Google Voice. The problem with a Google Apps account is that it doesn't let you add additional email addresses to that list.

It won't let me forward to the phone number that TextFree gave me, since I must verify the phone with audio (as opposed to a text message), and TextFree doesn't let me answer phone calls.

Is there any other way to get the three services to work together?

The way I solved this was by waiting to be invited to the TextFree beta which has voice. It will allow you to accept voice calls, which is what is required by Google Voice to verify a phone number.


Beats One turns off Airplay? Anyone experiences the problem when swapping to the Radio (iTunes OSX), the Airplay function is switched off? Any fix?

  You can use Airplay when you set your "Output Device" to Airplay. But its a bit cumbersome.

It seems to be either a bug or a rights issue with Beats One. There is no fix at the moment.

A workaround is to choose your Airplay device as the system output. Option + click the sound icon in the taskbar and choose your Airplay device, or select it in Sound settings.

Source: http://www.mcelhearn.com/you-cant-play-beats-1-radio-over-airplay-from-itunes/


Partition Type: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF Macbook Pro I was trying to install Kali linux in a dual boot fashion when I accidentally ended up install a terminal only version of Debian as a second partition. So I decided to retry, which meant I needed to delete the Debian partition. When I tried to in Disk Utility, it gave me errors, so I booted into internet recovery mode and removed the partitions there. I then proceeded in clicking the Apple Logo and selecting the choose boot partition thing. It showed nothing. At first I panicked, thinking I had somehow deleted all of my data. I tried creating a second partition, so I could install Mac OS there and then fix my mac from there. I clicked on the create partition, waited 3ish hours while I went out, came back and it said preparing to partition. So I rebooted and saw that the partition type was: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFF. So I installed Mac OS X onto a painfully slow flash drive (15-20MB/s) and then looked up my problem. I found other solution people had created only they were specific to the exact case. I do not know what the partition type is supposed to be so here is my info: /dev/disk1 is the USB flash drive that is running MAC OS X so I can use my laptop.

sh-3.2# diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI NO NAME                 209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF               450.1 GB   disk0s2
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *31.4 GB    disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Fixer OS                30.5 GB    disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk1s3

And here is some more:

sh-3.2# gpt -r show /dev/disk0
    start       size  index  contents
        0          1         PMBR
        1          1         Pri GPT header
        2         32         Pri GPT table
       34          6
       40     409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
   409640  879039128      2  GPT part - FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF
879448768   97656259
977105027         32         Sec GPT table
977105059          1         Sec GPT header

How can I mount this partition again?
Which command should I use?

To add an answer exactly fitting to your case I slightly modified my answer in the linked "duplicate" and posted it here again.

The second partition of your internal disk got the wrong partition type, your data probably won't be lost.

A bootable OS X partition (except the Recovery HD) either has the GUID 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC for a standard OS X partition or the GUID 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC for a CoreStorage partition. The FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF is an unknown partition type (but not no partition like the 000000-0000-0000.... one).

The first block of a standard OS X partition doesn't contain non-zeros, the first block of a CoreStorage partition contains some non-zeros. To get the first 3 blocks of a partition enter sudo dd if=/dev/diskXsY count=3 | hexdump.

The GUID can be modified with gpt.

Boot to "Fixer OS"
Open Terminal
Get an overview with diskutil list
Get an overview of your internal disk with the disk identifier found in the previous command. Below I assume the disk identifier of your internal disk is disk0 (replace it with the one you have found in your environment)

sudo gpt -r show disk0

Unmount disk0 with diskutil umountDisk disk0
hexdump the first 3 blocks of the FFFF... partition:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk0s2 count=3 | hexdump

The following result identfies it as a normal OS X partition:

0000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000400 48 2b 00 04 80 00 21 00 48 46 53 4a 00 00 01 ff
0000410 d3 8c 77 d3 d4 33 3c b0 00 00 00 00 d3 8c 5b b3
0000420 00 00 02 a8 00 00 00 25 00 00 10 00 00 fe b7 f6
0000430 00 fe 1e fa 00 ed 80 00 00 01 00 00 00 01 00 00
0000440 00 00 10 f2 00 00 5a 9d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01
0000450 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000460 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 7d 9d b0 3a 02 31 62 f0
0000470 00 00 00 00 00 1f e0 00 00 1f e0 00 00 00 01 fe
0000480 00 00 00 01 00 00 01 fe 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000490 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
00004c0 00 00 00 00 00 60 00 00 00 60 00 00 00 00 06 00
00004d0 00 00 0a 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00004e0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000510 00 00 00 00 03 10 00 00 03 10 00 00 00 00 31 00
0000520 00 03 ac 00 00 00 31 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000530 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000560 00 00 00 00 05 40 00 00 05 40 00 00 00 00 54 00
0000570 00 00 10 00 00 00 54 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000580 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000600

The first number is the byte count in hex: 0000000: 0; 0000600: 1536. The * denotes identical lines. This means: the first two blocks (0x000-0x3ff) are all zeros.

A CoreStorage partition shows some non-zeros in the first block (0x000-0x1ff):

0000000 0c 73 a1 a9 ff ff ff ff 01 00 10 00 07 14 d7 01
0000010 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000020 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000030 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000040 00 20 c1 cc 0f 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000050 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 43 53 01 00 00 00 04 00
0000060 00 10 00 00 00 00 40 00 11 bc fc 00 00 00 00 00
0000070 11 c0 fc 00 00 00 00 00 11 c4 fc 00 00 00 00 00
0000080 11 c8 fc 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000090 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00000a0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 02 00 00 00
00000b0 62 02 98 59 ee a9 ab 51 9b 49 23 90 2e f8 8b 43
00000c0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000130 e4 6e f8 f2 63 99 45 c1 b2 13 86 28 a5 18 46 6d
0000140 c4 51 c0 f6 32 f9 43 ab 8e 59 42 d2 1a ef f6 50
0000150 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000400 48 2b 00 04 80 00 21 00 48 46 53 4a 00 00 01 ff
0000410 d1 98 a4 93 d4 33 8b d5 00 00 00 00 d1 98 88 73
0000420 00 06 07 53 00 01 82 39 00 00 10 00 00 fb 6a 00
0000430 00 c5 1c 55 00 25 73 c7 00 01 00 00 00 01 00 00
0000440 00 0d e2 65 00 3e a2 fb 00 00 00 00 02 20 00 fb
0000450 00 00 00 31 00 06 b9 ef 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000460 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 31 fb 48 1e a0 6c 47 a2 9f
0000470 00 00 00 00 00 1f e0 00 00 1f e0 00 00 00 01 fe
0000480 00 00 00 01 00 00 01 fe 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000490 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
00004c0 00 00 00 00 00 60 00 00 00 60 00 00 00 00 06 00
00004d0 00 00 0a 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00004e0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000510 00 00 00 00 0e 40 00 00 01 30 00 00 00 00 e4 00
0000520 00 00 10 00 00 00 e4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000530 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000560 00 00 00 00 11 d0 00 00 01 30 00 00 00 01 1d 00
0000570 00 02 80 00 00 00 72 00 00 13 30 97 00 00 13 00
0000580 00 15 c5 aa 00 00 13 00 00 18 2d 23 00 00 13 00
0000590 00 19 d8 fb 00 00 13 00 00 1b 76 cb 00 00 13 00
00005a0 00 1c 34 70 00 00 13 00 00 1d 0e 4d 00 00 13 00
00005b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000600

The line starting with byte 0x130 shows the UUID of the Physical Volume, the line starting with byte 0x140 shows the UUID of the Logical Volume Group.

The string 48 46 53 4a (= "HFSJ") in the first 16 bytes of the third blocks identifies a Journaled HFS+ volume on both partition types.
Now remove the second partition:

diskutil umountDisk disk0
sudo gpt remove -i 2 disk0

re-add the partition with the proper type
either a normal OS X partition

sudo gpt add -i 2 -b 409640 -s 879039128 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0

or (if you have found a CoreStorage partition)

sudo gpt add -i 2 -b 409640 -s 879039128 -t 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC disk0

Finally verify/repair the disk with diskutil verifyDisk disk0 and/or diskutil verifyVolume disk0s2. If a repair is needed use repair (instead of verify) as prefix in the above commands but contact me before repairing it and send me the error message.


launchtl: any way to disable a daemon after removing the plist file? I was trying to permanently disable a 3rd party daemon, so I deleted its plist file from /Library/LaunchDaemons-- and then I realized that I hadn't done a launchctl unload on it first; trying after the fact yields "No such file or directory/nothing found to unload".  And, of course the daemon is restartable, so when I kill it, it gets recreated.

I tried doing launchctl list in hopes of getting a label to use for launchctl remove but the daemon is no longer listed.

Short of rebooting, is there any way to get launchd to forget about the daemon and/or re-scan the configuration files?

To see ALL the daemons currently running, you need to type:
sudo launchctl list

Or sort them to nicely separate com.apple ones:
sudo launchctl list | sort

And then you can remove it, for example:
sudo launchctl remove com.sassafras.KeyAccess.daemon


What am I doing that causes zsh to silently change to vi mode? I'm a software developer, and as such I frequently use Terminal.app. I've been using it for years. At some point in the last week or two, I started encountering this problem somewhat frequently; I've never seen it prior.

I use zsh as my default shell. I'll be typing out a complex command. I hit return, the command executes, and I see that it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I hit the up arrow, then arrow left to the part I want to change, and I use delete/backspace to clear out the part I want to change, but nothing happens. I also cannot type any characters.

Today, I found out that when this happens, zsh has changed to vi mode. I can hit i to switch to insert mode, x to delete a character, etc. Further, I can restore something resembling normalcy by typing set -o emacs. Prior to this discovery, I had just been abandoning the Terminal window in question and starting anew. Frustrating!

I am not sure what I might be doing to kick zsh into vi mode. I am definitely not typing set -o vi! It has to be either a bug or a very simple hotkey combination that I could be hitting by accident.

This only seems to happen to the local zsh on my Mac. If I'm ssh'd into a remote Linux machine, using bash or zsh on the remote machine (I've changed my default shell on some but not all of our servers), it doesn't seem to happen.

Furthermore, I've discovered that when I open a new Terminal window, it doesn't appear to be in vi or emacs mode. It behaves in a vaguely emacs-y way, but control+A doesn't jump to the beginning of the line, and the small handful of other emacs-specific keystrokes I'm familiar with also don't work. If I run set -o emacs, then those things start working.

If I run set -o | egrep "on$" (which lists the currently enabled zsh options) in a fresh terminal, neither emacs nor vi appears in the results.

I looked through my update/install history in the App Store, and I think this might have started when I installed Xcode. (I mostly develop Java stuff, and didn't have it installed previously, although I did have the developer tools installed.) It does not appear to correlate with the installation of any system-level software updates.

I did some googling and found no evidence of anyone else encountering this problem.

If it matters, I'm using:

Late 2013 27" iMac.
32GB, 1TB SSD, 3.5-3.9GHz i7.
MacOS High Sierra 10.13.4
zsh 5.3 (x86_64-apple-darwin17.0)
Xcode 9.3.1 (installed, but I'm not using it when any of this happened)

So, my questions:

does anybody know what I might be doing to cause the silent switch to vi mode?
is there a setting I can change so that this stops happening?
is there some logging or other diagnostic output I can enable to make it more obvious when this happens?
what is this non-emacs, non-vi input mode I'm seeing in a fresh Terminal window / zsh process called?

Sigh. Exploring my own situation further, I think I was hitting escape. I think zsh was in vi mode all along, but more specifically, it was in vi's insert mode! If I go to a brand new editor and hit escape, I find myself in vi's command mode.

If that's the case, I'm still interested to know why set -o | egrep "on$" doesn't indicate that we're in vi mode.

EDIT: double-sigh. I originally wrote my question with all references to bash, having completely forgotten that years ago I changed my default shell to zsh, which is mostly the same. I went back and edited the question to be more clear, and then googled again, replacing bash with zsh. I quickly found this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/197839/why-does-exporting-vim-as-editor-in-zsh-disable-keyboard-shortcuts

Lo and behold, my .profile has EDITOR=vi, which I put there about two weeks ago. I removed that line, and hitting escape no longer puts me in vi command mode.

Better yet, I followed the instructions given on that answer and was able to restore my EDITOR setting without borking up zsh. Yay! :)


Does iTunes Match renewals use Gift Card credit? My iTunes Match account is due for renewal, and I have some money credited to my account. I would prefer to have iTunes just credit my card versus using this gift card. When I look this up online, a lot of people reference that it does charge the card, but requires you to have another payment option.

This is always a confusing space. For example, I know you can't gift an app to someone with GC credit.

My question is, if I have any credit in my account, is it going to take that first, or can I have it just use the CC?

Yes, you can!

According to http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht4914:

"You can use store credit to pay for your iTunes Match subscription; however, you must have a valid payment method on file at the time of sign up."


How can I execute AppleScript from Textedit? I have the following AppleScript code in a Textedit file:

set the clipboard to (do shell script "date +%d/%m/%y")
tell application "System Events"
    keystroke tab using command down
    keystroke "v" using command down
end tell

How can I execute this code?

You can't execute AppleScript directly from TextEdit. Apple provides an AppleScript editor though in /Applications/Utilities/Script\ Editor.app which makes it easy to create and run AppleScript code.

Just navigate to /Applications/Utilities in Finder, run Script Editor and copy/paste your code into it.


Play iTunes play next I have several songs in the Play Next queue.

I am not playing anything at the moment. How do I play the queue. Clicking play prompts me with a dialog asking if I want to overwrite the plainest queue or play the song selected in iTunes, but I just want the play next queue

Open the up next queue and double-click on the title of the first song in the queue.

(In iTunes 12) the up next queue button looks like this:

It is in the top right corner of the playing now area of iTunes.


What program should I use to transfer 20TB data across the network? I need to copy 20TB of data onto a thunderbolt array. The box where the data exists does not have a thunderbolt connection, so I will need to utilize the local 1GB network for this. (Yes, it will take forever).

I tried to use Filezilla/sftp, but it crashed when the queue grew super large. Is rsync or scp the way to go?

rsync is a good way to go (scp is pretty much the same with fewer features). You may want to use the -Z option, which will enable zlib compression. Depending on how fast your drives/computer are, it may be faster than sending uncompressed, i.e. if your network link is saturated. You may also want the archive mode option, -a which will preserve symlinks, permissions, and creation/modification times, as well as copy directories recursively. Depending on what you're copying you might want -E which preserves extended attributes and mac resource forks. Finally, --progress will show you progress information.


Can iMessage send a video as-is, without converting it first? If I share a video file via iMessage, the recipient doesn't get the exact file I've shared, but a converted version of the video, which has a lower resolution and lower quality (e.g. when I share a 1080p H.265 video, iMessage actually sends a 300p H.264 blurry mess.)
Is there a way to make iMessage share a video without re-encoding it? What are the technical criteria that video files have to meet in order to be spared re-encoding? (codecs, profiles, resolution, file size)
I know I could share a URL to a file hosted elsewhere, but I want to have end-to-end encryption, and I don't want to require the recipient to perform any unusual steps or leave iMessage to view the video.

I don’t think we get to directly influence this.
For my threat model, I’m not super concerned if iCloud and Apple can decrypt the attachments stored in iCloud, so I typically save the video to iCloud shared photo album and share a link. If you’re sharing copyright content or something you don’t wish the government to get at via a cell carrier I understand not wanting to upload that to a server.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204042
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/imessage-overview-secd9764312f/web

Also, be sure your carrier settings are updated, some carriers influenced sending quality in the past, but I haven’t seen that happen lately in the US.
The function of iCloud and Messages/FaceTime varies greatly based on what region your device was sold and what region you associate your AppleID. Even in the US, Apple may upload the content of your messages to their servers, E2E encryption may not be compromised substantially when you are sending large attachments.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209110

If you need end-to-end encryption, letting the video be compressed might be the lesser of two evils.


MBP15: 45W works only right after unplugging 85W My MBP15 (8,2, Late 2012) doesn't normally charge or draw power from a 45W adapter (from a 2008 MBA), with one exception:

First, plug in the 85W power adapter;
Second, switch the adapters quickly.

Following this procedure the MBP15 draws power form a 45W without any glitch for light usage.

Q1: Why is this procedure necessary and how does it work?

Q2: Is there a way to skip step (1)?

As far as I know, the 15-inch MacBook Pro is not supposed to use the 45W power adapter.  Therefore, when you plug in the 85W and quickly swap in the 45W, you are essentially tricking the MacBook into thinking that it is still charging from the 85W power source.

I don't believe this to be dangerous to your MacBook in any way, but it is definitely a hack and it is unlikely that this can be done without using an 85W adapter.


Files on a Computer seem to have decreases in quality Do files on a PC computer decrease in size/resolution as new files are added - to conserve space?

No, this would not occur automatically. You would have to manually compress the photos to achieve this.


iPhone, so many wifi points, mine won't appear in the list! I have a wireless USB drive that I sometimes need to connect to, but most of the time it is disabled.  When I turn it on and try to connect my iPhone to it, it won't even show up in the list of available networks because my neighborhood has so many (dozens) access points!  iOS seems to list a maximum of 6 at any one time.

There appears to be no way to completely ignore certain networks and force iOS to skip past them, and also no way to "whitelist" certain networks so that they always appear in the list of available networks.  I know I can choose "Other" and manually connect to it every time, but I have a very long, strong password and typing it in every time on the phone is a huge pain.

Is there any way to make my iPhone find this network when it is turned on?  It does show up occasionally, but it's basically dumb luck.

If you can see the connection OK from your Mac, then try elevating its priority - which you can't do from the phone, but is simple on the Mac.

System Prefs > Network > WiFi > Advanced...

You can drag access points into a preferred order. If you move your WiFi to the top of the list, this should then sync to your iPhone & it ought to then choose that as its preferred connection.


How to turn off the screen without sleep on a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar? Is there any shortcut for it?

I tried Control + Shift + Touch ID, which didn't work.

There are two methods I will explain.
1. Use the 'Lock display' touch bar shortcut
In System Preferences -> Keyboard settings, click 'Customise Touch Bar'. There is a shortcut 'Screen Lock' which you can use to lock the display, as well as 'Sleep' and 'Screen Saver' shortcuts which have their own respective functions.
2. Leave computer open, but screen turned off
If you need to turn off the display, without actually sending the computer to sleep, simply turn the brightness down to the minimum.On an MacBook Pro (Touch Bar) leave brightness at lowest (with slider as left as it can go)
If you're comfortable with the terminal, try $ caffeinate -dimsu -p <process-id> for leaving a long process running without sleeping computer, where <process-id> is the PID for the process (you can look this up in Activity Monitor)


How to start automatically issue a command in one tab of terminal console When I use terminal on OSX, I normally have console terminal open with a number of different tabs. In one of those tabs I have a localhost server and in another tab I have a different localhost server. I have saved this window configuration as a windows group that is reopened when I restart terminal, say upon rebooting.

When I restart terminal, I want the two tabs with servers in them to restart the servers.

How do I do this?

This may help you. Go to Preferences under the Terminal menu and a panel opens. Click on the Profiles icon on the top left of the panel. This opens a new panel as shown below.

Click on the shell tab at the top of the new panel. The first item, as shown in the image, is where you can define a command or commands to run when the tab is opened.


How do I delete a new Admin account and its data without knowing the old admin password? I used my friend's Mac by creating a new admin account.  Now I need to return it and want to delete the new Admin account I created without knowing his password.  In other words, can I delete my own Admin account?

First, create a new Admin user account as your account allows to make it.
Login with the new admin account.
Delete your original account and select the "Delete home folder" option.

Easy way to delete your account with settings, not so easy to delete the new second account but your friend can do that with their admin account (hopefully)


How to trap ssh breakin attempts on El Capitan Previous to El Capitan one could use pfctl and  /etc/pf.conf to "trap" the ip addresses of sites attempting to break into a server using brute force attacks producing 100's of attempts per second. The rules one created would put the offending ip addresses into an "attackers" table and then reject any connection attempts from that ip address.

With El Capitan, all port connections appear to be handled first by launchd and now the pfctl method has no effect.

Does anyone know how to adapt the pfctl approach to this new  connection logic?  The automatic detection rules were really effective.

I don't believe pfctl was enabled by default in either Yosemite or El Capitan. You can still edit the /etc/pf.conf file, add rules, tables, etc., and then load and enable pfctl and you'll be up and running:

sudo pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf -e

See http://128bitstudios.com/2010/06/13/stopping-ssh-brute-force-attacks-with-pf-on-freebsd for a really simple but effective way to get an SSH rule to prevent bruteforce attacks.

Also see http://krypted.com/mac-security/a-cheat-sheet-for-using-pf-in-os-x-lion-and-up

If you want pfctl to load at boot you'll need to roll your own launchd script.

Another option is a GUI app like Murus. You can then examine the launchd file it creates and the PF files in /etc/murus and understand better how to make this work for you.


Can not text message most people with iPhones since iOS 8 We do not use iMessage in our house (we have our reasons). My son updated to iOS 8 and now he can not text most people with iPhones. His phone keeps telling him he has to use iMessage.

Settings => Messages => Toggle off "iMessage". Works just fine (just tested it).


Mac book doesn't boot My Mac book pro 13.3 inch retina display August 2014, did not boot after a normal shut down. It gave sound on power on but after stays grey. I tried all options available on net CMD+C, C, SHIFT+CMD+V but no success.

Here is the set of Start up keys that you can try.

I would try the Safe mode first, followed by Apple Hardware Test.

If it does not boot in Safe mode and passes the Apple Hardware Test, use the OS X recovery "cmd+r" to restore your OS X installation.


Is there a currently available way to connect firewire to a 2011 MacBook Air besides the Apple Thunderbolt monitor? If one wanted to connect a firewire peripheral to a 2011 MacBook Air, one could buy Apple's Thunderbolt monitor, connect the monitor to the Air and the peripheral to the monitor. That's kind of overkill, however, for simply connecting a Firewire music keyboard. Does any other method currently exist?

Nothing shipping immediately, however Sonnet did announce a Thunderbolt ExpressCard adapter  that you could pair with a Firewire ExpressCard to give yourself some Firewire capabilities. Their site claims it will start to ship by December 14, 2011. At one point a   direct Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter was announced, but I can't find any concrete info on it, so I wouldn't count on it appearing any time soon.

Overall Thunderbolt support from anyone other than Apple has been pretty slow to take off. There have been some suggestions that Intel was slow releasing final specs for manufacturers and/or getting production hardware out the door. I've also read that some manufacturers may be waiting for the 2nd generation of cheaper Thunderbolt chips to ship sometime in 2012. Lots of promise in the technology, and I think it will take off sooner or later, but it's still in the early stages unfortunately.


My phone number has been “ghosted”. Is there anything I can do about that? I’m now receiving phone calls from my own number. This ghosting of numbers has gotten completely out of hand! Is there any way to fix this?

If your carrier won't block these, I suppose you could add your own number to a contact called "Telemarket Spam" and then block that caller.

There are apps that let you make rules like "block all calls from the same 212-335-xxxx" area and then you would need to change your number to be in an area you're OK not ever getting a call from (if you're not already in that situation).

This is kind of like spam email - there's nothing from preventing anyone from sending mail as you - same as no one will police a phone scammer that sets your number as their "caller id". Unless the laws change in your area or your carrier decides to crack down, you have to block these or just not answer calls from anyone not in your address book by turning on "do not disturb".

To summarize, on iOS:

use do not disturb and white list callers you don't mind ringing through
use a third party call screening app to set up rules and maintain a database of scammy numbers. These are all on the App Store and most are paid or they sell your number/call history to more scammers (or possibly both)
use the blocking feature for specific black listed numbers

In your case, blocking your number seems the easiest fix for that specific malfeasance.


How do I create a Mac OS install thumb drive from InstallESD.dmg file using Windows 7? I have completely messed up my Mac OS X Lion 10.7 on my 2011 Macbook Air (Refer thread : Is there an alternative to downloading Lion from the net?)

Recovery Parition attempts to install from the internet. This is not an option since I have attempted atleast 6 times, It takes 18-20 hours for each iteration and fails somewhere in between because my net connection is not reliable.

What I need to do :

Install Mac OS 10.7 Lion on my MacBook Air

Here is what I have :

InstallESD.dmg file for MAC OS Lion 10.7.4
A PC with Windows 7 32-Bit
2011 Macbook Air (Without CD Rom Drive)
Disk Utility in the Macbook Air Recovery partition
USB CD-ROM
16 GB USB Thumb Drive

How do I accomplish this ?

I found this page but the author claims the tutorial is not valid. So how do I burn a Lion DVD / Thumb drive from Windows 7 ?

Assuming that the InstallESD.dmg is on the windows 7 computer:

Copy the InstallESD.dmg file onto the USB drive (just copy, not burning etc)
Boot into the MacBook's Recovery Partition.
Plug in the USB drive and open disk utility.
Restore the USB drive using the InstallESD.dmg on the USB drive *
Restart and boot from the USB Drive.

*You might not be able to restore from an image that on the drive being restored. In which case use 2 USB drives (one to copy the InstallESD.dmg from the PC and one to restore it to and boot from) or:

open terminal from the Utilities menu in the recovery partition (on the homescreen).
Use ls /Volumes to find the location of your hard drive and USB drive
Use cp to copy the InstallESD.dmg to you hard drive. (e.g. cp /Volumes/USBDrive/InstallESD.dmg /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/, where you replace the paths with the ones found in step 2)
Open Disk Utility and restore the USB drive using the InstallESD.dmg on your hard drive, if you can't find your hard drive in the Open dialog, press cmd+shift+g and you can enter the path manually.

Or if your USB CD drive can burn DVDs and you have a DVD, you could use the USB drive to copy from windows and then use the Macbook's Disk Utility to burn the image to the DVD. (or use the DVD to copy from the PC and use the USB drive to boot)


Remove preinstalled apps on Big Sur MacBook Pro M1 Sorry for my English, I'm French and I've given up trying to remove preinstalled apps like Tv.app and FaceTime. app.
I have  tried a lot (even with SIP disabled) but nothing works. I'm kind very desperate since I’m not sure how I would set up screen time to limit my children’s usage of the Pre-installed apps.
The reason why I need to do so, is that my kid waste time in stead of studying. Is there a guide how to set this up?

The fastest path forward would be to make your account the administrator and grant each child their own managed AppleID and their own sign in and force them to abide by Screen Time limits.
You are correct that uninstalling the core parts of the system is a bit like the task of sysiphus.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210387 (Guide on app restrictions)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201084 (Guide on Family accounts)

You likely won’t even need to resort to stricter measures like a free / hosted MDM like https://app.jamfnow.com/devices
I have not had success messing with the Sealed System Volume (SSV) in Big Sur, but people are starting to document how this works publicly.


Magic Keyboard on Windows - How to get Media keys to work I'd like to purchase a magic apple keyboard for my windows pc. Do media keys like playing music, volume controls, and so on work on windows?
Is there a way to map keys correctly on windows for all media/functions to work?

I would assume the media keys on the Magic Keyboard would work with Windows 10, if the following were true.

The Boot Camp Assistant was used to install Windows 10.

The model Mac is listed under Compatibility at the Apple Magic Keyboard website.

Under Windows settings, the Apple keyboard is chosen as the current input method. See image below.


Offline HTML5 iPad: Gmail and Docs There was some recent news about the release of an HTML5-powered offline Gmail and Docs.  But it looks like these won't work on the iPad. Is this true? If so, is there a way that I can use these tools on my iPad?

Safari can handle HTML5.

What makes you think they won't work anyway?


Unable to Change Apple ID and password I have tried repeatedly to change my Apple ID and password without success. I have followed all of the directions trying both my emails and asked for new passwords----no luck whatsoever.

If you've followed all the correct processes for changing your Apple ID, including verifying your email address is correct and looking in your spam/junk folder, then your only option is to contact Apple directly.

Go to Apple's Support page and click on Talk to us.  Initiate a chat session, that's the fastest way to get this resolved.


How can I get an unreadable Flash Drive to work? I got this pretty cool flash drive as a gift and I can't seem to use it. Every time I plug it in, a pop up comes up that says: The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

I opened up Disk Utility and tried to erase it, in the hope of making it readable. It shows the loading bar and after a couple minutes, a pop-up appears and says: Disk Erase failed with the error: Unable to write to the last block of the device. So I remove it, and try again with no avail. I even tried using terminal and the diskutil eraseVolume command and I get:

newfs_hfs: write (sector 0): Invalid argument

Mounting disk

Could not mount disk2 with name (null) after erase

Error: -69832: File system formatter failed

So I tookit out, and tried again with diskutil randomDisk just to see if I couldeven write on it. and then I got this:

Started erase on disk2
Error: -69879: Couldn't open disk
Underlying error: 2: POSIX reports: No such file or directory

Does anyone have any idea how I can make this drive readable?

Can you get the disk identifier? In Disk Utility, select the drive and choose "Info" – it should read something like disk1 or disk2 or so. (But NOT disk0; that's your internal HD!)

Then open a terminal, and type in

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskX

(where diskX is of course the disk identifier you got earlier.)

Type in your admin password, and it should overwrite every block of the disk with 0x00 (i.e. erase it).

Then, you can format your drive.

[Please be cautious when doing this; I'm not responsible for anything if anything goes wrong ;-)]


Creating an app with applescript I'm trying to make an app that when opened will play an audio file that is contained in the app, but i have no idea how to do it. I know this is really vague and I apologize but any help would be awesome.

This other question covers high level how to make an app, but I can't figure how to actually make the shell.

How to make a simple app from an applescript!

Is there a guide or sample code to show how to take an actual file and actually play it in AppleScript framework?

Here is an example of one way to achieve your goal:

In Script Editor, I used the following three lines of code and saved it as an application, as Hello World.app:

set resourceName to "Hello World.aiff"

set filePathName to quoted form of POSIX path of (path to resource resourceName) as text

do shell script "afplay " & filePathName

Then inside the application bundle in the Resources folder, I placed the audio file Hello World.aiff, which is a file of someone saying "hello world".

Here is a tree view of the hierarchal structure of the application bundle:

Hello World.app
└── Contents
    ├── Info.plist
    ├── MacOS
    │   └── applet
    ├── PkgInfo
    └── Resources
        ├── Hello World.aiff
        ├── Scripts
        │   └── main.scpt
        ├── applet.icns
        ├── applet.rsrc
        └── description.rtfd
            └── TXT.rtf

Now when I double-click on the Hello World.app is plays the Hello World.aiff audio file.

Notes:

After you create the application bundle, then in Finder you right-click on it selecting Show Package Contents and then navigate to the Resources folder where you'll place your audio file.

Change the name of the resourceName from "Hello World.aiff", to whatever your audio file name is, in the example code so it will work for your filename.


Using AppleScript to Send Email from Mail.app to Multiple Addresses I am able to successfully send out an email with an attachment to a single email address using the code below:

on run argv
    set theSubject to (item 1 of argv)
    set theAttachmentFile to (item 2 of argv)

    tell application "Mail"

        set theAddress to "recipient1@domain.com" -- the receiver
        set theSignatureName to "Sig" -- the signature name

        set msg to make new outgoing message with properties {subject:theSubject, visible:true}

        tell msg to make new to recipient at end of every to recipient with properties {address:theAddress}
        tell msg to make new attachment with properties {file name:theAttachmentFile as alias}

        set message signature of msg to signature theSignatureName

        send msg
    end tell
end run

However, I can't figure out how to change this code to send the email to both recipient1@domain.com and recipient2@domain.com. Does anyone know how I would go about doing so? I'm very new to AppleScript, so I'd greatly appreciate the help!

I was able to tweak the set theAddress line and the tell msg to make new to recipient line to make the following code run as intended:

on run argv
    set theSubject to (item 1 of argv)
    set theAttachmentFile to (item 2 of argv)

    tell application "Mail"

        set theAddress to {"recipient1@domain.com","recipient2@domain.com"}
        set theSignatureName to "Sig" -- the signature name

        set msg to make new outgoing message with properties {subject:theSubject, visible:true}

        tell msg
            repeat with i from 1 to count theAddress
                make new to recipient at end of every to recipient with properties {address:item i of theAddress}
            end repeat
        end tell
        tell msg to make new attachment with properties {file name:theAttachmentFile as alias}

        set message signature of msg to signature theSignatureName

        send msg
    end tell
end run


Installing Windows 7 Updates on Boot Camp partition through VMWare Fusion? I'm using VMWare Fusion with my Boot Camp partition. Are there any problems with installing Windows 7 Updates through VMWare Fusion, or should I boot up into Boot Camp in order to install these updates?

It's been a while since I've used Windows, but I seem to recall that Microsoft does provide driver updates with the Windows Update, and whether or not you get the update may depend on the hardware that Windows detects you're running. To be on the safe side, I'd suggest running Windows Update both virtually and natively.


How does my phone tell me my elevation even though I'm nowhere near a cell tower? I have the compass app (Comes with the phone) on my iPhone 6 and it can still tell me my elevation even though I have no service, why is this? Is there a magnet or something similar in the phone?

It updates when I touch the screen so I know it's connecting to something somehow.
Also, roaming is off and I am nowhere near a cell tower when that was taken.

This is determined by satellites in the horizon mapping out where your phone is (according to multiple posts on Stack Overflow, including https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13329714/how-does-my-iphone-get-its-altitude). Note that the accuracy from this method is not usually precise, but it is a rough estimate of your elevation.


How to clean install of MacOS on 2018 MBP I have a 13" 2018 MacBook Pro. My System Integrity Protection is off, and T2 security is set to None. After an update to MacOS Catalina 10.15.3, my mac would stay at the bootup screen with an apple logo. I salvaged all my data in recovery mode and tried to reinstall MacOS from there. I ended up getting A software update is required to use this startup disk error in recovery. I then completely wiped the internal SSD, and using another mac and disk drill made a bootable USB with MacOS 10.15.3. I booted that and got the same A software update is required to use this startup disk error in recovery. I tried to reset the mac to its original OS after that with Shift+Option+Command+R, but after loading with a rotating earth for a few minutes I get an exclamation mark sign over that earth with the following below it:

apple.com/support
-1008F

Regarding the inability to boot the MacOS USB stick, I've read that the newer macs can only boot from APFS drives. However, I do not know how to do that. After using disk drill to flash MacOS to a USB, I tried using a  disk utility option Convert to APFS..., but that threw an error.

I have no idea what to do anymore, and would rather not go to an apple store to fix this. Is it even possible for a genius bar person to fix the software? How could I fix this myself?
I do have access to a few decently sized USB drives and a tri boot Windows/Linux/MacOS computer, but no professional tools.

I would like to add I have not been able to install linux either onto my Mac, and not even rEFInd.

According to everymac.com, your 2018 Mac should be able to run macOS 10.13.6. You could try using the 2014 Mac to download High Sierra from this website.  This download should be the latest High Sierra macOS 10.13.6. You can the use the instructions from this website to transfer High Sierra to a flash drive. After booting from the flash drive, use the Disk Utility to erase and APFS format the internal drive. Finally, try installing High Sierra. If successful, then you can try upgrading to Catalina.


How to change width of last column in Finder Near the bottom of each divider between columns in Finder there are two little horizontal bars that when clicked and dragged resizes the column to the left. This is great, but since the last column doesn't have a divider to the right of it, how can it be resized?

The last column isn't actually a column, strictly speaking, it's a preview.

The only way to resize it is to enlarge the overall window, which can be a bit irritating if you are a lot of levels deep…

You can try Alt/dragging one of the columns smaller, which will change all of them. Then, allowing for a bit of a screen bug which means you need to change the window size slightly, you can gain as much room as possible for the final column/preview

Graphics glitch/screen bug …


Can't see list of screen resolutions anymore when Option-Clicking the Scaled button on macOS 10.15.4 I used to be able to Option-Click on Scaled button in the Display Preferences window to see a full list of resolutions, e.g., 1920x1080, 1280x720, etc.

But recently (started with 10.15.4, I think) this action does NOT reveal resolutions.  Instead, it gives me an option to select the different refresh rates.

How can I get the full list of resolutions again?

This behavior was restored after the latest macOS update (10.15.6).  Maybe it was accidentally disabled in the previous version.


Best offline maps for iOS 4.2.1 (iPod 2G) I have a jailbroken iPod touch 2G running iOS 4.2.1. I tried City Maps to go and oMaps. First on did not work, second one did not offer much functionality. Is there any other app that I can try?

EDIT: Lower version of City Maps to Go works on iOS 4.2.1!!!

There are multiple apps you can try:

OpenMaps
OfflineMaps
MapsWithMe
CityMaps 2 Go (not sure if this is the one you've mentioned in your opening post)

And there is a big discussion about saving Google Maps for offline use. So maybe there's a solution for you too?


Change from Windows Import to Picasa Whenever my iPhone is plugged in, my Windows7 laptop imports the pictures and videos from it. I want to change this to using Picasa because the Windows importer creates a folder based on the date and time pictures are imported vs. the date and time pictures are actually taken!

How do I change my iPhone default importer to Picasa?
Are there any issues using Picasa for the picture and video import?

When you plug the device into Win 7, you should be prompted with an AutoPlay box.  Click the "View more AutoPlay options in Control Panel".  This will give you the ability to change the defaults for the device (you'll see iPhone at the bottom).  Next to Apple iPhone is a list of applications that windows will auto load when the device is plugged into the USB.  Good luck.