Wifi drops intermittently on Macbook Air I have read the other articles with a similar issue but they don't have the exact same issue as I do, hence this post. The Wi-Fi on my macbook air keeps dropping intermittently but works perfectly fine on my Windows laptop and Android phones at the same time. I have been having this issue for over 4 months now.

Note: The Wi-Fi bars at the top right corner remain the same but the internet stops working.

Here are the details of my Macbook and router:

2011 Macbook Air with OS X El Capitan v 10.11.6
Router: D-Link model DIR 600M

I have tried the below options but nothing worked:

Formatting the system
Upgrading from Yosemite to El Capitan
Changing the Wi-Fi router from Linksys to Dlink
Deleting the folder /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration and restarting the computer
Adding 8.8.4.4 to the DNS tab of the Advanced settings in Network Preferences
Gave the Macbook to the authorized Apple service center in India. They monitored the connectivity on their Wi-Fi network for 48 hours and found no issues
Contacted my local Wi-Fi network provider but they have no idea either. They only configure the router.

The only thing that works is this:

Click on the wifi bar icon(at top right corner)
Click on 'Turn Wi-Fi Off'
Click on the same wifi bar icon
Click on 'Turn Wi-Fi On'

Can somebody please help?

You've done a good amount of troubleshooting and at this point, you can probably assume the Mac hardware is probably fine make two conclusions:

your home router being different than the service router
your other devices re-connecting or reacting to your wifi differently

When the internet breaks on your Mac - you'll want to run the wireless diagnostics tool to determine what part of the chain is broken between the Mac and the internet.

Also - log in to the router and see if it still sees the Mac as connected (if your router can do that).

Look for the following:

Is the radio connected between mac and router
Does the Mac have a proper DHCP address from the router
Can the Mac ping the router
Can the router ping the Mac (or another device on the network ping the Mac)

If all of those are up - it's not your network and just a configuration issue on the Mac.

You'll probably need about three times of data collection and then a follow on question for someone to assist with diagnosis.


installing a SSD as main drive I have iMac (27-inch, Mid 2011) 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 and I have installed a 128GB SSD into the system. Formatted it for mac and it is sitting empty right now. I have the main 1TB drive still installed and working right now with the OS on it. I would like to install the  OS on it and put all my other files on the 1TB drive that has everything on it including the OS Yosemite 10.10.1 . I have tried to set this up myself but have had to start over and ask for help from you fine people here.
 I got as far as installing the OS on the SSD and it worked fine, did not know how to remove the os from the original HHD  without killing everything on the old HHD so I stopped pretending that I know more then I do. So as it sites right now  128GB SSD and 1TB HHD installed on this computer  I have a time machine backup for the main HHD now.

If you've got a functioning OS on the SSD then you should be able to set this as the boot drive in System Prefs. Boot off it and then use Disk Utility to unmount the 1tb drive. Test everything with the 1tb drive unavailable. If everything works fine without it then you can remove what you want from the 1tb drive.


What's a good graphical SFTP utility for OS X? I need a small graphical utility, using which I can ssh to a server and see all the files and copy and paste (drag and drop) into my local machine.

I am running Snow Leopard.

Cyberduck (Free)
A great free FTP client. This is my go-to application. Anytime I need FTP access, I use Cyberduck. It's not quite as lightweight as Fugu, but it adds a lot more functionality than Fugu. I also really like the Growl integration with Cyberduck.

Fugu (Free)
Awesome little FTP client. As I noted above, this is a lightweight FTP client. It is great for simple FTP transfers and browsing. I do like the dual panel navigation.

EDIT: I forgot to add these.
Filezilla (Free)
I haven't actually used Filezilla extensively, but from what I've seen of it, I really like it. I downloaded it and played with it for a bit and I really like the tabbed connections. I also like the ability to jump to a path easily.

RBrowser (Free, $29 Upgrade)
A free FTP/FTP-SSL client. I don't usually use RBrowser because a $29 upgrade is necessary to unlock other protocols (Local, FTP/SSL/TLS, SFTP-SSH). I do like the Site Manager. It's a handy little thing to have.

I searched and came up with some other free FTP clients:
FireFTP (Free) - Firefox extension
The one downside I see is that this is for Firefox. The website doesn't make it clear how it works with Firefox, so I assume it is an extension.
Macfusion (Free)
This one relies on Google's MacFUSE. Since I don't know anything about MacFUSE, I don't know if this is good or bad.
Transmit ($34) By Panic
I have never used Transmit before, but I have used Coda and I definitely would recommend anything from Panic. The only reason I haven't used this because of the $34 price tag.

ForkLift2 ($30)
Never used it, just found it when searching.
Fetch ($24 per user)
An amazing program with a long, long, long mac heritage. It's way up there with Transmit by Panic and Interarchy as a file transfer program loved by long time Mac power users.
Flow ($30)
Never used it, but looks good from the screenshots. I really like the fact that it looks like Finder. I may have to give this one a try.

OneButton FTP (Free)
Just searching around and found yet another one...It looks pretty nice, except it's no longer supported. However, you can still download it.


Junk mail filter for iPhone via imap I have:

Mac Book Pro running OS X 10.10.2
iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 8.1.3

On my computer I run Mail, which checks the email every 1 min.  On my iPhone it runs every 15 mins.  So most of the time, my computer receives the email first and filters the message so my phone never gets the junk mail.  However when my computer is sleeping my iphone normally gets the email first and does not perform the filter for the junk mail.

Options:

Force the computer not to sleep
Write a script to run while sleeping asking mail query the server (I'm not sure how hard this would be)
Ask here and see if someone has a better idea.

The best idea is to pay for (or set up) server side junk mail filtering. That allows all the clients to only spend time downloading non-junk.

Have a look at Mail Route (10 percent off link from the podcast where I heard about it sponsoring most recently) - http://mailroute.net/thetalkshow.html

You probably will spend more on the service than the cost to run your Mac all the time, but the filters will likely be much better on the hosted site than OS X mail client.


Is there any reason to buy the iWork bundle instead of the apps separately from the App Store? Keynote is $19, Pages is $19, Numbers is $19. iWork bundle is $79.

Why would anyone want to buy the bundle?

I guess it's mostly here for people on Leopard and older version of Mac OS X. Since the Mac App Store only works in Snow Leopard and later.

It could also be for people who don't want to depend on an internet connection when they need to (re)install, and want to have the app physically at all time.


MacBook Pro battery and speed issues My sister's MacBook Pro often shuts down at ~20% battery.  It won't turn on again until it has been plugged in for about 10 minutes.

Your battery is in very bad condition. In those cases it's not uncommon that the remaining time is not calculated properly, and your computer will turn off (ungracefully) as soon as the battery can't provide the necessary power levels.

You should have your battery looked at and replaced. Depending on the battery age and reason of defect, this might be replaced under warranty. However, if the battery died of age, it likely isn't.

Check the battery replacement conditions here:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/replacements.html


echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile by using this command getting permission denied? I tried to follow the instructions in How to add MySQL to $PATH variable to resolve "mysql: command not found"?
$ echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
zsh: permission denied: /Users/naveenkumarp/.bash_profile

Can any one help me to solve this issue?

I would use the nano editor to edit the correct file for your shell, which is zsh, not bash.
nano ~/.zshrc

Put this line in at the top of the file
typeset -U path PATH

Put this line towards the bottom and save:
path+=/usr/local/mysql/bin

Press the control key and the X key to exit (see the bottom of the nano window for more commands). If you then quit your terminal app, you can test for mysql being in your path.
You can tell your shell with echo $SHELL and if you want bash since all your instructions are in it, you can go back to that if needed with chsh /bin/bash in which case you would nano the file ~/.bash_profile since each shell reads different start up files. I recommend learning zsh and finding guides that work there, though.


How can I run a script or app as sudo with a click? I have a certain program that doesn't work right unless I run it as sudo.  I don't mind having to type in my password, but I'd like to get out of the whole process of opening command line and typing "sudo ./"+script name.  If you create a script that runs as sudo and click it, it just fails due to permissions.  Is there a way to do this more quickly?

Run sudo visudo (or EDITOR=nano sudo visudo) and add a line like this:

%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/myscript

Then create a .command file that runs /usr/bin/myscript:

echo sudo myscript>~/Desktop/test.command
chmod +x ~/Desktop/test.command
echo $'#!/bin/sh\nls /var/root'|sudo tee /usr/bin/myscript;sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/myscript

Or if for example you want to run sudo purge without having to enter a password, add

 %admin ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/purge

to sudoers.


Why does spotlight search system files? Most of my spotlight search results are files in ~/Library (application data) and /usr/include (header files)

I already tried to rebuild the index.

Any thoughts?

You can remove directories from the Spotlight Index under the Privacy tab in System Preferences > Spotlight

(Described in this other question)


Apple mail and a POP3-only mail account I have set up a mail account with Apple Mail. What I realized only when it was "too late", the mail server does not provide IMAP (only for a fee), and thus roundabout 100 E-Mails were downloaded and removed from the server.

Can I somehow upload those emails back up to the server?

With a POP account you can't "send" (upload) email to the server.
As "Buscar 웃" told you, if you have another email account (with IMAP of course), you can upload emails from the first account (POP account) to a folder on the second account (IMAP account).
To do that, first you create a new folder on the IMAP account, then you select all the emails you want to "transfer", then do a right-click on the selection and select "Copy To > the folder previously created". I recommend you to copy (Copy To) emails instead of move (Move To) them, to prevent any emails’ loss if an error occurs during the transfer.


Reminders App Hangs after Mavericks Upgrade A couple of people on twitter share this issue, but I cannot find any discussions of it nor solutions.

Since moving to OS X 10.9, Reminders app keeps pinwheeling, and won't respond. It doesn't crash, so I have to force-quit it. This happens on both my 2008 iMac and my 2013 Air. On my Air, I can tell something weird is happening because upon launching Reminders the fans kick on loud.

The data seems to be syncing fine from iCloud, so it doesn't look like a sync issue is causing this.

Any ideas about what could be causing this issue and how to fix it?

I started to do the same as mentioned above -removing all location-based reminders including completed ones... (had to go directly to iCloud.com)

As I was going through, I found one that had "location: null", deleted it (or just removed the location part of it) and then, before deleting any more, tried my reminder app on my Mac computer (running Mavericks that wouldn't open/crashed). AND IT WORKED

So to be clear, you don't have to delete ALL location based reminders -just any that happen to have "null" in the location which, of course, messes with it's head! (I must've bumped it on/not done it right).


iTerm2 preferences keep resetting after reboot My changes to the preferences in iTerm2 are always reset after a reboot. They will survive a logout, but after a reboot everything is back to the previous state. I checked ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist and my user is file owner and also has write access. Does anybody know how to fix this?

I remember reading that Yosemite is protecting plist files somehow. Could this be the cause? I'm on 10.10.4.

Well. I did not find the cause for the issue (although it was quite obviously some file permissions problem). But this is how I fixed it:

Quit iterm2
Move ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist to the Desktop
Reboot (because plist files are protected)
Launch iterm2 and quit it again to create a new plist file
Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist in an editor
Paste the contents of the plist file on the Desktop into the new one
Reboot


Identify iPad generation by box pictures I found an auction, where someone put a new unpacked device in iPad 1st generation section for corresponding price of iPad 1, while its clear that it is not iPad 1 just by looking at 1st photo included.
The person selling the device didn't write any other informations beside that it has 16GB HDD and is brand new.
I have tried to contact the seller to confirm if this is 4th generation iPad or not, but did't receive any answer from him/her so far.

Unfortunately seller didn't include photo of box back.(2nd photo shows "layout" of labels on it, but text itself cannot be read)
Now lets become Sherlock Holmes :)

1st photo shows front of the box, which may belong to any Apple
tablets, besides 1st generation which were packed in different boxes
with Ipad picture on top, in almost 1:1 scale

2nd photo shows us, that this is Ipad, not Ipad Air or Ipad mini.

On 4th photo we can see Apple logo. 3rd generation has ICloud logo
instead. So we now know this is either 2nd or 4th generation :)

There is also one more detail on 4th photo. Apple logo is silver. If am not wrong 2nd gen box has black apple logo instead.
For 90% this is 4th generation, but not sure. Can you help me decide if this actually ipad 4th by looking at photos above?:)

That's an iPad 4 box. You can tell it by the ios5 wallapaper. The ipad 2 has a iOS 4 wallpaper.

Your 3rd point is true : Only the iPad 3 have the iCloud logo.
Your 4th point if false. iPad 2 have also a silver Apple logo on their boxes.


Search a phrase using Spotlight I find Spotlight very very useful, however I would like to be able to search for documents that contain a given phrase, i.e. words appearing together, instead of anywhere in a document. Do you know of any way or plugin to perform such a search?

From the Mac OS X 10.5 Help

  Use quotation marks around text to
  search for exact phrases — the same
  way you do with most Internet
  searches. For example, enter “trip to
  France” in the search field to find
  items on your computer that contain
  that exact phrase. If you didn't use
  quotes, the search results would
  include items that contain any of
  those words.


MacBook going into blank screen after Apple Logo I’ve been trying to turn on my MacBook Pro. It goes into a black screen while it’s trying to boot ( as the progress bar reaches 50% on the Apple Logo Screen).

I am able to boot into the recovery mode and I've run the FirstAid test for my hard disk. It didn’t find any issues with the device.

Tried to login into safe mode, after the Apple logo progress screen. It goes into a spinning circle screen and it gets stuck in a loop. I waited for 15 minutes but the screen kept going blank and into spinning circle.

I have a MacBook Pro 2015 Retina running 10.14

Update - I have even tried using "Reinstall OSX" option from the recovery menu. I went through with the whole downloading and installation process. But I still end up with the same issue after booting my MacBook. I am only able to access the recovery menu.

It's possible that something in the OS got corrupted. Boot into recovery mode (hold ⌘-R on boot for those who don't know) and select the option to Reinstall OSX. It won't touch your user files or applications; it just lays down a new copy of the OS, which will likely fix your issue. You may need to explicitly connect it to your wifi/ethernet to do this. Good luck!
Cheers,
-j


How does windowing system work on MacOS? I'm really interested in computer graphics and I would like to know how windowing and graphics systems work on MacOS.
I've started to learn how to create a window in objective-c but then I told myself that it doesn't explain what does objective-c "ask" to the hardware exactly. So I've read about X11 but I still had to install another program 'XQuartz'.

Do you have any suggestions to learn how to create a window from scratch without using any framework or library on MacOS, if it is even possible? And if it's not possible on MacOS, do you know what makes it impossible (or complicated) on MacOS?

Macs have their own windowing system called AppKit which is not based on X11. You can certainly install X11 and use it but it's not how most Mac apps work. Creating a window from the ground up with no frameworks is going to take some work, and is maybe better suited for Stack Overflow. Even there though, this is such a rare need that you might have trouble getting an answer.

If you want to get into the real low-level details of making things work, resources exist, though you can no doubt Google as well as me. One good starting point might be the New OSX Book site.

A simple example with minimal framework code might look like this:

import Foundation
import AppKit

let aWindow = NSWindow(
    contentRect: NSMakeRect(0, 0, 400, 210),
    styleMask: [.titled, .closable],
    backing: .buffered,
    defer: false)
aWindow.makeKeyAndOrderFront(nil)

RunLoop.current.run()


Why is AirDrop so slow? I am trying different solutions to transfer some 1 GB size files between two Macs on my local wireless network (typically between me and a guest, both being physically in the living room). Here are the solutions I have come up with:

Through SSH (scp command): I get a transfer speed between 3 and 4 MB/s.
Through Skype, the rate fluctuates a lot, but can reach up to 2 MB/s.
Through AirDrop, I only get about 150 kB/s!

Obviously, AirDrop on recent computers is easier: it doesn't require the other person to have an SSH port open, or to have a Skype account. But it's so very slow…

Why is AirDrop so slow? Is it a typical transfer rate? Is there something I can do to improve it?

It could be interfering with existing wifi network, you can use the Airport command line tool to disconnect from other networks:

Begin by linking it to a another location:

ln -s \
  /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport \
  /usr/local/bin/airport

Then, disconnect from the current network:

sudo airport -z

You should be running at about 10 Mbps !


Software to organize library? Im looking for a program that let me organize my itunes library (So that the CD's that I export instead of saving it like "Track 1",etc, be saved with all the sing info, such as artist, album, etc).

How to mass-organize iTunes library?

I taked a look into that question but Im looking for something more complete, It does not matter if it cotst.

Thanks.

I think Jaikoz might be a good choice for you. This article also has a pretty detailed list of other options: http://lifehacker.com/the-best-apps-for-automatically-cleaning-up-your-music-1561265062


Why are the same characters displayed differently in the same sentence? In some text views on OS X, e.g. in the application QQ, the character →(U+2192) is displayed differently after a Chinese character or Latin character:

Also affected are the other arrows, and the box ■(U+25A0):

How is it so?

It's probably because the app continues to use the Chinese font for that character, and different fonts will often have slightly different glyphs for such symbols.


OSX loud siren that starts every 1-5 minutes? This one is very odd. My 2010 Macbook Air running latest Mavericks was working very well just yesterday and today it started to play a "siren sound" (sounds a bit like warning/alarm/police siren), the sound is very long (2-4 secs.) and it starts every 1-5 minutes. Of course when it happens it unmutes all system sounds :S It's worth noting I don't have any other software that I had yesterday, it just happened like that, overnight.

What I've done to prevent it and find what's causing it:

My system sounds are off (Preferences/Sound > "Play user interface sound effects" unchecked).

All the sound notifications are off. I also turned on "Do not disturb mode".

I ran Apple Hardware Test (for now the basic one, I will run the long one this evening as I'm at work right now) and it returned no problems.

Also I've installed SoundBunny to see what's the source of the sound - it doesn't show anything when the siren starts, like it's not software-related (by the way do I really need a software for this task in OSX? it's been in Windows for ages :/)

I've been restarting my Macbook all morning and once the siren started BEFORE I even log in to my account (woot?).

I've checked all the Apple beep codes, but none of them seems to be what I'm hearing (by the way are they recorded somewhere? I'd love to hear them all out and see if I can recognise the one I'm hearing).

HELP ME PLEASE, I can't work :(

Does anyone else have access to your iCloud account?  If they do, they can play a loud noise using Find My Mac.  If you've recently received an email notifying you that someone has signed into your iCloud account using a web browser, that would be an excellent sign that the Find My Mac siren is what you're hearing.

Another possibility: Did you install Prey Project on your Mac? It's a piece of software similar to Find My Mac, and it can produce a very loud siren noise.  Check your Prey account settings; if someone else has access to the account, they can play a siren noise.


MacPorts vs. Fink vs. Homebrew I always used MacPorts to install and maintain my GCC compilers and other programs. Now I've heard about Fink and Homebrew. It seems these two utilities are gaining ground in the Mac community, but I don't understand the difference between them.

What is the main difference between MacPorts, Fink, and Homebrew? Is there any difference in quality or performance?

Fink has been around since at least 2001. Fink and MacPorts are package managers that want to be "orthogonal" to the system, that is, they install their own version of python, perl, libraries, compilers, etc. in own trees (/sw for Fink, /opt/local for MacPorts). The reason for this is that they have no control what Apple does with its software, and it occasionally broke things when Apple updated their own stuff.

From what I understand, Homebrew wants to be more "integrated" with the system, uses the libraries that Apple provides, and installs its stuff in /usr/local/bin and other standard folders. I guess that means that the software choice is more limited with Homebrew, I can't imagine that one could install KDE with it, but I've not tried that.

One point for Fink vs. MacPorts: a few years back, the Fink project provided binary packages; that is you could download and install the packages without compiling them yourself. Its package manager still has that ability, only there have been no binaries available for a long time. I do not know if that has changed in the meantime.

So in short: without the binary stuff, Fink and MacPorts are very similar. They should have more packages available than Homebrew, while Homebrew should take less disk space for the reasons I stated above. Concerning the quality: I've never installed Homebrew, and between Fink and MacPorts I usually prefer the one that I'm not currently using.

So if you are satisfied with MacPorts, just stay with it.

P.S. The reason I never tried Homebrew is that I use some precompiled packages. These usually also install themselves into /usr/local/bin and the like, which just cries for trouble.


possible to enable "gumdrop" buttons (close/minimize/zoom) in all windows (disable auto-hide of these buttons for non active window)? I often want to use these on non-active windows and of course they're not visible until you hover over them or activate the window, which prevents instant tracking of their location. I don't think they would be distracting if they were visible on all windows, and I have a feeling there is some tweak somewhere that would disable the auto-hide feature. Has anyone ever done this?

No, what you're asking for is not possible.  There's no "tweak" to remove the "auto hide feature" because it's not a feature; it's a design element of macOS.
Apple provides very specific guidance when working with the Title Bar within the Frame in their guidelines in Window Anatomy of their Human Interface Guidelines for macOS:

This is how users interact with the system and specifically, this is how they know what window is active or not.  Apple goes out of their way to document how users should interact with every element; their not going to supply a way to circumvent it.  For context, this can't be done in any OS GUI that I can think of ranging from Windows to GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc.  There's no reason for Apple to deviate from this standard.


Creating mountable snapshot view in macOS I'm used to backup my user's home using rsync. However, I now have data (eg, running database) that shouldn't be backed up while being changed, and I'd like to keep the applications changing them running during the backup.

I know file system snapshot views exist to deal with this problem: Linux has the LVM approach and Apple has Time Machine. However, apparently only the former allows one to mount a snapshot as a virtual file system, so that it's possible to use tools like rsync, tar, or, for what matters, cp, against a view of the files frozen at a given time.

I cannot find any such feature for macOS, tmutil/Time Machine don't look to be the same thing, they must be leveraging the snapshot functionality of their APFS file system, but I can't find any way to see a snapshot as a set of files. Is that possible for APFS?

Note that I'm not interested at all in using Time Machine for my backups: I'm an advanced user and TM is too stupid to suit me fine (it doesn't work over SSH, it doesn't allow me to select a folder on a destination device, it doesn't seem to support multiple backup profiles, each with a different set of sources/destinations and different schedules), nor I'm so interested in spending money on things like SuperDuper!, just to do what that my scripts have done very well for years.

Yes, it is definitely possible to view an APFS snapshot as a "set of files" - i.e. a file system. This is done simply by mounting the snapshot - exactly like you would do with LVM on Linux.

The syntax is:

  mount_apfs -s <snapshot name> <mounted base volume> <mount folder>

So for example create a snapshot with:

  tmutil snapshot /

It will say that the new snapshot is named for example: 2019-01-01-180510.

Then later you can create a folder "MyBackup" and mount the snapshot like this:

  mount_apfs -s com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-01-01-180510 / MyBackup

If you then browse MyBackup you'll see the files like they were at the time the snapshot was taken.

Note: You don't have to use snapshots created by TimeMachine. Any APFS snapshots will be mountable with the same command.


Where and how I find the songs in iphone 5 which were downloaded into itunes Can someone help me with this. As I am new to iPhone and itunes. I have couple of songe (audio format) downloaded from internet and added into "My Music" in itunes. I have synced my iphone 5 with itunes in my PC. But on iPhone where these songs would have been downloaded?? When I go to the itunes tab on iphone 5 it takes me straight to it main page and if I go the downloaded ones then that one is empty.

The iTunes app on the iPhone is for browsing the iTunes store. The Downloads tab there only shows you songs that are currently being downloaded from the store. If I understand correctly, you're tapping this:

Check the Music app on the phone instead - synced music should show up there:


How to move app window when app is trying to use second monitor that's not present I have OS X10.8.5 (fully patched). I'm using Office for Mac 2011 (fully patched).

Earlier in the week, I was working on a PowerPoint presentation. During the earlier work, I had a second monitor plugged in, and the presentation was displayed on it. Now I'm working at home with no second monitor. I checked under Settings → Monitors, and its clearly not present or detected.

PowerPoint starts, but it does not show the presentation's window. When I right click the PowerPoint icon on the task bar and select Show All Windows, the presentation's window is flung in from the second monitor. When I click on the presentation's window, it whizzes back to the second monitor that's not present.

How do I move the presentation window to the primary display that's present?

There are a couple of approaches. The first works across all applications. The second is specific to Microsoft PowerPoint.

Gather Windows

Launch System Preferences > Displays and use the Gather Windows button:

Arrange All

Use the Arrange All or Cascade menu items to have Microsoft PowerPoint reveal and reposition the hidden window:

Window (menu) > Cascade


Under 10.8 which file stores the environment variables? This has been this way since 10.6. There is no .bashrc file in the home dictionary but the environment variable PATH indeed exists as the result of this command shows:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin

Anyone know how/where OS X stores environment variables?

The system-wide default path is in /etc/paths. The default on a 10.8 system contains the following:

/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
/usr/local/bin

To add additional system-wide PATH entries, you could change that file, but a better option would be to add a file with the additional path entries to directory /etc/paths.d. That user-created file will be protected during any upgrades/patches, which may replace a customised /etc/paths with an Apple-distributed version.
Alternatively, you could put the appropriate PATH modifying statements in /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc (in the case of bash, it will only use the latter if the former doesn't exist). Any other system-wide environment changes can be done using those files as well.
User-specific configuration can be put in $HOME/.bashrc or $HOME/.bash_profile.
Note: In the above, I've assumed you're using bash - if you're using csh or zsh, you'll need to adjust their configuration files (the information about /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d remains valid, however).


sshd: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /Users/Foo I am trying to setup SSH Pubkey authentication. I've created a key on my client and copied the key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server. However, I still can't connect. I enabled logging as per
https://stackoverflow.com/q/43382825/7886229
and got
2021-04-13 09:40:33.045786-0400 0x3429629  Info        0x0                  3821   sshd: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /Users/Foo

How can I fix this permission issue?

I was able to fix the issue by resetting user permissions via the following command:
 diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`


How to change photoshop JPEG output header format? We are using Adobe Photoshop on a Mac to output JPEG image files. These image files need to be rendered on an embedded output device that we have no control over.  It seems that the files output by Photoshop use the Exif header format, whereas the embedded device only understands the JFIF header format.

According to Wikipedia:

Strictly speaking, the JFIF and Exif standards are incompatible because they each
  specify that their marker segment (APP0 or APP1, respectively) appears first. In
  practice, most JPEG files contain a JFIF marker segment that precedes the Exif
  header. This allows older readers to correctly handle the older format JFIF segment,
  while newer readers also decode the following Exif segment, being less strict about
  requiring it to appear first.

As an example, here is the Mac-rendered JPEG:

whereas the PC-rendered JPEG (which works on the embedded device) has:

You can also see the Exif header coming after the JFIF one in the PC image above.

Is there a setting in Photoshop that allows us to export JPEGs with the JFIF preamble in the header?

EDIT: After using JPEG Snoop, the header information it decoded is as below.

The PC-generated image has an APP0 (JFIF) header:

*** Marker: APP0 (xFFE0) ***
OFFSET: 0x00000002
length     = 16
identifier = [JFIF]
version    = [1.1]
density    = 96 x 96 DPI (dots per inch)
thumbnail  = 0 x 0

The Mac-generated image has an APP1 (Exif) header:

*** Marker: APP1 (xFFE1) ***
OFFSET: 0x00000002
length          = 24
Identifier      = [Exif]
Identifier TIFF = 0x[49492A00 08000000]
Endian          = Intel (little)
TAG Mark x002A  = 0x002A
EXIF IFD0 @ Absolute 0x00000014
Dir Length = 0x0000
Offset to Next IFD = 0x00000000

Then, after running the suggested XnView, the Mac header looks like:

*** Marker: APP0 (xFFE0) ***
OFFSET: 0x00000002
length     = 16
identifier = [JFIF]
version    = [1.1]
density    = 72 x 72 DPI (dots per inch)
thumbnail  = 0 x 0

And the embedded device can now read this Mac-generated JPEG.

What version of Photoshop are you using? Apparently Adobe dropped support for exporting with JFIF at some point, and replaced it with EXIF.

You can try an app like XnView to strip out meta data:

http://newsgroup.xnview.com/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=24056

I just tried this with an EXIF jpeg on my computer, opened it in XnView, and then selected:

Tools > Export > [√] remove all metadata > Save…

The resulting file remained a jpeg, but had a JFIF header.


“System Information” profiles tab I was interested in what the “profiles” tab found in “system information” displays. Is it the same thing as “profiles” in “system preferences”?

Yes, System Information's Profiles page is a textual report of the profiles installed on the system and/or user, comparable to Profiles.prefpane but read-only and textual. You can view the textual report on Profiles using

system_profiler SPConfigurationProfileDataType


How to exit full screen mode in textedit FORMAT WINDOW mac 10.13.3 can't exit full screen in the FORMAT WINDOW for textedit  mac 10.13.3
Have tried restoring default settings.  The top left buttons: red closes window as it should, orange is not active (the regularly orange button is just gray) and green button does nothing.

Try pressing the Escape key. I know in Finder hitting Esc will get you out of full screen mode. But not every app supports Escape as a way to get out of full screen mode so you can try this keyboard stroke:

"Command+Control+F" to exit or enter Full Screen Mode.


OS X Lion - Finder: Difference of "Sort by", "Clean Up By" and "Arrange by" There is an option in the Finder.
Right click in the background of a finder window, the new toolbar icon or
cmd+j. To change the view of the sorting/arranging I can choose between
"Sort by"
"Clean Up By"
"Arrange by"

It seems they do the same.
Anyone knows the difference of them?

Clean Up By is only available in icon view. If Arrange By is not set to None, it doesn't seem to do anything until you change Arrange By to None. If Arrange By is set to None and Sort By is set to Snap to Grid, it arranges icons so that they are aligned on a grid. If Arrange By is set to None and Sort By is set to anything else, it sorts icons and changes Sort By to None.

The Arrange By modes were added in Lion. They group items under sections like this in different view modes:

List views cannot be sorted by clicking the headings when items are arranged by some attribute.

When items are arranged by some attribute, Sort By affects the way items are sorted inside the categories in some cases, but in other cases it's disabled.

Sort By doesn't group items under sections. The Sort by mode is changed when for example clicking the list headings in list view. The Arrange By menus change to Sort By when holding option:


MacBook gets heated up I am running on macbook pro 2015. Since, few days, I have noticed a significant degradation in it's performance. Here is the screen shot of the activity Monitor. Can someone please help me on, how can I get rid of this issue

If your Mac isn't a corporate managed machine I'd go for uninstalling the Tenable Security Nessus software.

Others might have a different feeling about this but you don't need additional security software on OSX.  We run a Mac-only office for years and the only additional security thing we stick with is the 'Little Snitch' firewall app.

I wouldn't have a clue whether the Nessus software has an uninstall app available but if not, try to get rid of these folders:

/Library/Nessus
/Applications/Nessus
/Library/Receipts/Nessus*


Can I update from Lion Server to Mountain Lion Server through Remote Desktop? I currently have a Lion Server providing DHCP for my network, and access that server exclusively through screen sharing over Apple Remote Desktop. I would like to upgrade from Lion Server to Mountain Lion Server, but am concerned that at some point during the process — especially since the server provides the DHCP service for my network, including the machine from which I access the server — I will be unable to access the server using ARD.

Can I perform the upgrade process entirely over ARD, or do I need to dig up a keyboard and monitor and connect them to the server box?

Basically, I think the answer is Yes if your server has an static IP, and your client is on the same network.

But that's in theory of course. For example, if both your computers are in a network without DHCP, they will assign themselves with an IP starting with 169.254., link-local IPs. Now, the computers know that each other exists, and can still connect to each other with that IP.

Now, the question is simple, you need to know what your server's IP is when the DHCP is gone, and no one can assign IP address to them. And since you won't know, put a static IP on, and it would work.

That's in theory again. But I've had situation like these, and it did work for me.

Anyway, good luck!


How can I use a 3rd party font on an iPad? My Requirement:
I am trying to use Orkney light font in HTML email signature in a iPad

What I have got:
Have configured email sign, no issues except the font used in my design is missing.

What I want:
How to install this Orkney light font in iPad

You should be able to do this by following these steps:
- send to your iPhone the signature text styled the way you want it (including font)
- copy the signature
- paste it as is in your signature settings

Voilà!

FYI, the steps are illustrated here (despite the older iOS version)


Is it possible to disable the game center completely and permanently in iOS 6? I am trying hard to avoid signing in to Game Center, but the interruptions and pop ups make this hard to do.

My impression is that after the third time I don't sign into Game Center, a pop-up asks if I want to disable game center. The text implies I want to be really sure as disabling GC means I'll lose so many wonderful features. It also tells me I can always enable it later in Settings. Each time I'm offered to opt out, I say yes intending to disable GC.

If this worked, I'd think it great, but the next time I launch a game, the now allegedly disabled and definitely signed-out-of Game Center (into which, by the way, I've never signed in) is back asking me to sign in.

What can I do to avoid this?

I'm concluding the answer is no until someone proves otherwise.


Why does it take so long when I click on the filename in the window title? When I click on the filename of e.g. TextEdit, to change the file name and select where it is saved, it always take 1-2 seconds until the selector thingy pops up.

That has always been like that for me. It's a bit annoying. I don't think it's a bug on my system. Maybe I'm wrong.

Why is that interaction slow or how would I profile things to measure or benchmark this?

Here's a video of the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_jqkMe9Ljw

By comparison, I don't experience anything like that delay on my 15" 2014 MacBook Pro. It's not instant, but certainly less than half a second.

Your video shows some circle appearing when you click. Is that from the screen recording software, or is it something else? Perhaps it's relevant.

Are you experiencing any lag in any other aspect of the computer? I'd be tempted to check that I had a good amount of disk space, and that the storage was performing well.

Check Activity Monitor, and see what's using CPU and memory at the time that you click.

Another thing to do is to test the behaviour in a brand new user account. If the problems persists, then it's at the system level. If it is absent, then you know that the cause is something in your original user account. This could be corrupt preference files or caches, or some third-party software running in the background that is causing problems. You'll need to go back to the original account and start troubleshooting.


the application google chrome is not open anymore on yosemite i now get chrome error when clicking link from skype or using alfred to open customized urls. the links and custom urls fail to open and instead I am presented with a dialog that says 'The application google chrome is not open anymore', even though the application is open.

any ideas what may be causing this issue?

After restarting I can no longer reproduce the issue and chrome operates as normal.


How to hide recent files in iPad OS and iOS I have images/files that I look at time to time inside the native Files app that I would prefer not to show up in the “Recents” area.

How do I hide files from showing up in the “Recents” area inside the files app?

Natively: iPad OS and iOS does not allow you to remove/hide files from the “Recents” section in the native file app.

1st work around (any file)

For when you are trying to prevent files from showing up in the recents section.

Create a folder in the “On my [device here]“ tab
Move all the files that you want to remove from “Recents” into the folder you’ve created.
Long press the folder, and select compress.

This will create a duplicate of the original folder with all the files that you’ve placed inside as a .zip file.

Delete the original folder that was not compressed

This will not immediately delete the folder and will instead be moved into “Recently Deleted” in case you want to recover your file. (This also removes the folder and its contents from the recents section, so technically you could view the files from “recently deleted” without anything appearing into Recents even after you restore it after viewing the contents).

Tap on the compressed file and it will export a duplicate of the original compressed folder. None of the files inside the exported folder will be listed in the “Recents” section until viewed again.
After viewing the contents, assuming no files were added or modified (if files were added, start from step 1), delete the uncompressed folder, and uncompress the zip file. Rinse and repeat as needed.

2nd work around (images, GIF’s, videos only):

This work around is for images, GIF’s, and videos specifically.

Separate all the files into a folder as you would in work around 1.
Select all the sorted images
Tap “share” and press “Save Image(s)”
Delete the folder containing all the images/videos

Again this will not immediately delete the files/folder and you can recover them if you so please.

Open the native Photos app
Select all the images that you would like to hide
Press Share, and tap the “Hide” option
Go into the “Albums” section and go into the “Hidden” album.

This will remove all the images from being viewable in the photos app or any other application. Unless unhidden, all images will be restricted to just the “Hidden” album.


Where is the Replace/With list stored? This list, the one accessed by System Preferences/Keyboard/Text, vanished when I updated to 10.9.2 (it survived the initial update to Mavericks). I do a lot of writing for the sciences, and I've spent years building that list. (recent MacBook Pro, 10.9.2).

Some sites say I should get the /Users/username/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist file from a backup, but I've searched the HD of my other computer (same specs but running 10.9.1, Replace/With list intact), and I can find no such file.

Other sites say it's in the "NSUserDictionaryReplacementItems array" in 10.9, but unfortunately I don't know what that means. (I'm a user, not a programmer.)

I've heard that it may be linked to Mavericks' new ability to sync this list to iOS devices, but that still doesn't explain why I can't find it on my 10.9.1 machine, which has been syncing to my phone (iPhone 4, iOS 5.x) for years.

In 10.9 the text replacements are also stored in ~/Library/Dictionaries/CoreDataUbiquitySupport/$USER~*/UserDictionary/local/store/UserDictionary.db. UserDictionary.db is used even if iCloud is disabled and it has precedence over .GlobalPreferences.plist.

If you for example run defaults write -g NSUserDictionaryReplacementItems '({on=1;replace=aa;with=bb;})' and quit and reopen TextEdit, aa is replaced with bb in TextEdit, but the changes are reverted if you open the Text tab of the Keyboard preference pane.

You can change both UserDictionary.db and .GlobalPreferences.plist by using a script like this:

date=$(date +%s)
while read -r replace with; do
  plist+="{on=1;replace=\"$replace\";with=\"$with\";},"
  sql+="INSERT INTO 'ZUSERDICTIONARYENTRY' VALUES($((++i)),1,1,0,0,0,0,$date,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,\"$with\",\"$replace\",NULL);"
done < <(sed 's/\\/\\\\/g;s/"/\\"/g' ~/replacements.txt)
sqlite3 ~/Library/Dictionaries/CoreDataUbiquitySupport/$USER~*/UserDictionary/local/store/UserDictionary.db "delete from ZUSERDICTIONARYENTRY;$sql"
defaults write -g NSUserDictionaryReplacementItems "(${plist%?})"

In 10.8 and earlier versions of OS X the text replacements are stored in the NSUserReplacementItems array (not NSUserDictionaryReplacementItems) in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist.


Cannot add gmail account on iOS I am trying to add a gmail account to my iPad in order to have contacts, email, and calendar sync.  I go to Settings -> Mail -> Accounts -> Add Account and enter my gmail credentials.  It accepts the credentials and then goes to this screen:

The spinner to the left of Gmail will spin for about 20 seconds then it just takes me back to this screen:

The account never gets added.  I get an email on my phone that says "new sign in from iPad" so I know the authentication is working.

I am using iOS 10.2.

The same problem existed in 10.0.2.

Some users have reported that doing this process over 4g rather than WiFi works, but this is a WiFi only device.

The gmail app is installed and logs me in just fine.

The same thing happens on both my 2 factor authentication account and my account without 2FA.

I had this problem too.

When I checked on google if there was a security issue (https://myaccount.google.com/device-activity) I noticed that my iphone location was overseas.

I then realised that iPhone was connected to my company wifi and was routed via their overseas hub.

So I disabled the wifi so that only the local mobile data was being used.

After that the add mail > google then worked.


Remove _specific_ items from Finder Open With menu Is there any way to purge specific applications from the Finder's "Open With" menu? Mine is cluttered with all sorts of applications I'd never choose to open HTML files with (Word, Calibre, all sorts of undesirables; see image). I know there're various tricks to remove duplicates or uninstalled applications, but I'd just like to prune.

Failing that, is there a way to move an app higher in the list (I'd like Sublime Text 2 higher up the list), or simply to bypass the menu and open the file in the two applications I'm actually interested in opening it with (Sublime and Chrome, essentially).

Running 10.7 Lion, if applicable.

You can for example open /Applications/calibre.app/Contents/Info.plist and remove entries from the CFBundleDocumentTypes array. To apply the changes, run sudo touch /Applications/calibre.app/ or /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -f /Applications/calibre.app/ and relaunch Finder.

If the application is signed, it invalidates the code signature. And since 10.8 some applications like TextEdit and Chess have crashed on launch if the Info.plist has been modified.


How do you get terminal to echo / print all key strokes? Looking to see what the terminal gets when you press keystrokes such as alt+a or whatever.

I remember there was a really simple way to do this with a one line command and without installing any extra software, but I can't seem to find it again.

Any one know?

Found it

sed -n l

Really useful for debugging problems with terminal programs that benefit from complex bindings like vim.

Or just use cat or sed


How to write in Georgian on your iPhone? I'm looking to write using the Georgian language script Mkhedruli on my iPhone. I can't find Georgian Mkhedruli on the keyboard options anywhere. Just in case you don't know what Mkhedruli is, it's the script which looks like this:

მე და სჰენ. ქართველი ენა ლამაზი.

Do you know how I can write this on my phone?

If you do a search for "Georgian" in the App Store you will find any number of apps, both free and paid, for adding a Mkhreduli keyboard to your iPhone.

Only having a passing familiarity with the script I couldn't give you any expert recommendation. Try a couple of the free ones.


Sync Google Tasks with iOS Reminders? Is there anyway of syncing my Google/Gmail tasks with iOS reminders?

I've created a service called Tasket which Syncs iOS Reminders with Gmail Tasks.  I do this by emulating a Microsoft Exchange server - iOS supports syncing Reminders with Exchange.

Tasket is currently in beta.  I'm just waiting on Google to increase their API quota so I can add more users.  Hopefully people find it helpful.  I like the native Reminders app.


iPod in recovery mode, how do I make it stop? Why is my iPod Nano 6th generation playing in recovery mode? How do I take it off of recovery mode?

If an iPod is in recovery mode, something is wrong with the iPod that needs to recover. Thus, it needs to be plugged into iTunes so it can be restored before it can play again.

This is caused by a problem with the software, and iTunes is the way to fix it.


6TB drive in Macpro 2008/2010 The 6TB drives have changed their mounting hole configuration.
Has any vendor introduced a bracket for the 2008-2010 Macpro (I know these are different from each other, I own both) to handle this? On sites such as OWC, I see warnings, but no solution offered.

For what it's worth this article discusses - 6TB HDDs Causing Problems for System Vendors - But Not the Way You Think

Older drive and sled up top, and the new (in this case, 8TB Toshiba) below. The side holes match, top, not so much.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MPRODBKTLG6/

NB - OWC Hard Drive Sled / Bracket for Mac Pro 2009, 2010-2012 'Westmere' & 'Nehalem' Models ONLY, (not for Mac Pro 2006-2008 Models)

  OWC Hard Drive Bracket

  for Mac Pro (2009-2012)

  Updated for 2015, the OWC Hard Drive Bracket is the new universal standard to install any SATA hard drive in a Mac Pro tower, including the latest 6.0TB SATA hard drives which feature the new industry-standard mounting screw pattern. With screw mounting holes for all SATA drives, it's the drive sled built for compatibility, flexibility, and ease of use.

  Update your trays or use a spare

  Rotate backups
  Separate storage for individual clients or large projects
  Simple, inexpensive way to transfer large files between two Mac Pro models
  Utilize all 3.5" SATA and SAS drives including newer models of 6.0TB and larger capacities utilizing the new screw hole mounting pattern.

  NOTE: These are compatible with the two standards of drive mounting and the screws are shorter than the stock tray so they are also compatible with drives with shorter screw hole depths, such as the Western Digital RE and RED.

& apologies for the advertising, no afilliation ;-)


Why does an uninstalled Canon LBP 5050 printer keep reappearing? I used to have a Canon LBP 5050. It is no longer connected to the network or the Mac. I removed the printer from: "System Preferences → Printers" and even removed the ppd from /Library/Printers, using Terminal, but for some reason it constantly reinstalls itself every time I reboot my machine.

As far as I can tell there is no special Canon software installed or gets "called up" as a logon item.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Somewhat of a hidden feature, you might want to try resetting the printing system.

Go to the Print and Scan preference pane.
Right click in the list of available printers (mine's empty).
Select "Reset printing system...".


MacBook Pro Factory reset started installing OS X El Capitan but now OS X Mavericks installer appears I tried to reset my MacBook Pro to the factory settings so I booted with CMD+R and erased the disk then I proceed to reinstall OS X El Capitan, but I was at my friend's house and the Internet was super slow, so I canceled and turned off the machine to do it at home. Now at home, I booted with CMD+R but instead of going to the OS X El Capitan installer like last time it contacted Apple through the Internet and presented me the OS X Mavericks installer. What to do?

Install Mavericks and upgrade it to El Capitan. When your do so it should create a proper recovery partition. Reboot into that and erase the disk and re-install El Capitan.


Distributing an app for all company iPads If I build an iPad app for a company (for internal use), do I need to commit it to the App Store to install it on all company devices ?

Please see the following links from stackoverflow.com:

iOS installing apps without app store
iPhone app without AppStore
Private iPhone App, without App Store?


Add spacing before and after paragraph in iOS Pages? I don't see a way to edit this style property in the iOS version of Pages. (I'm using 4.0, March 2018). Am I missing it, or do I need to open the document on my macOS system to set this property?

Unfortunately, as of the current version (Pages iOS 4.0) it is not possible.

Line height is supported but not spacing between paragraphs.

However, in addition to the macOS version, iCloud Pages can do it too.

  Adjust the paragraph spacing:
  You can control how much space appears before or after one or more paragraphs.

  Click to place the insertion point in the paragraph you want to adjust, or drag to select multiple paragraphs.

  In the Format sidebar on the right, below Spacing, click the up or down arrows, or enter a point value in the adjacent fields.

From the iOS documentation:

  You can adjust the margins for specific paragraphs to indent them from the document margins, and change the indentation of the first line of each paragraph.

  You can also increase or decrease the spacing between lines in a paragraph.


find command just hangs on /dev/fd/* Using sudo find has randomly stopped working for me. It used to work as expected but now just hangs forever and just says:

  find: /dev/fd/3: Not a directory
  find: /dev/fd/4: Not a directory

ls -lOeR /dev/fd/* says that /dev/fd/0, /dev/fd/1, and /dev/fd/2 are character special files and that 3 and 4 are directories, all owned by root.

It then says:

  /dev/fd//3:
  ls: 3: Not a directory
  ls: 4: directory causes a cycle

/dev/fd//3 has two slashes before the three which I don't understand either. Does anyone know what is going on with find and why this randomly started. I'm not able to use find anymore and had previously never even heard of /dev/fd.

Find has not randomly stopped working, but is functioning as it should. The problem is that you're running a command that you do not fully understand. It sounds likely that you do not at all want to have find looking through your /dev directory.

The reason you get different results with find and ls is that the /dev/fd directory does not represent a physical directory on disk. Instead it is a virtual file system that contains the file descriptors that the process looking at /dev/fd have obtained.

This means that ls sees one /dev/fd while find sees another (and similar for all other running processes).

In essence you want to take a look at your find command and make sure it is constructed correctly for the task you want to perform. If you want to ask about that on SO, please remember to include the full command you're trying to run as well as what you're expecting that command to do for you.


How to make a scatter plot using Apple Numbers? I'm trying to make a scatter plot in Numbers but can't get it to work. If I select column A & B and have it make a scatter plot it uses column A for both axes.  If I click on the plot and go to  Series, it shows the values used for x and y, See the image below.

The above image is what I get when I select columns A and B to try and plot. If I go into that setting box and manually change the y-axis to column B it changes it back to A when I click plot. I tried this several times changing either the x-axis or the y-axis and the same thing happens. It keeps plotting the same values for both x and y.

I can't use a line plot because a line plot assumes the points on the x-axis are evenly spaced and distorts your plot.

An example of the numbers I am trying to plot is given below.

X-values  1,2,5,7,8,9

Y-values  43,56,103,156,215,300

I just want a simple x,y plot...  Can anyone do this in numbers?

I've looked at previous questions but none of those answers help me.

tia

Yes, it is possible to create a scatter chart in Numbers as you described.

However, sometimes creating a chart in Numbers turns out to be cumbersome for some reason in my experience as well, but, in this case, I could not replicate the problem you are describing. So I am unable to tell you what possibly the problem is in your case.

In addition, I tried a few slightly different procedures, including the one described in this Apple support page, to create a scatter chart using the numbers you have given as an example and all turned out to be successful. I am attaching below the outcome of one of these trials.


Photos.app not responding Photo.app does not open when clicked on in the dock or in the list of apps. Message comes up "The application "Photos.app" is not open anymore". How can I re-open it?

I'd try clearing the saved state files.

From Finder:

 Cmd ⌘   N
 Cmd ⌘   Shift ⇧     G
Copy/paste ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Photos/Data/Library/Saved Application State

Find the folder com.apple.Photos.savedState and delete it.
That should give Photos a fresh start.


Top menubar has disappeared across all apps - not just full screen I believe that I typed some keyboard combination in a fullscreen app to hide the top menu bar.  Methinks it were Adobe Reader, but uncertain at this point

Actually even that did not do what was intended:  it just put blank space where the menu bar had been - it did not reclaim that space for anything useful.

Now the menubar is gone for all apps.

Any way to unhide it?

move the mouse pointer as high as possible on the left upper corner os the display screen, this will make the top bar of the application visible, click the round green dot and the application will be smaller, so that you have the top menubar visible again.


How can I temporarily disable hot corners when playing games (or other such full-screen apps) on Mavericks? I use hot corners to lock my screen/start the screensaver.  I've also recently started playing some games on Steam that run in fullscreen on Mavericks.

Unfortunately, since the mouse cursor is used to control movement, use of hot corners basically makes the games unplayable.

Is there an easy way to toggle hot corners on and off before and after playing games in fullscreen?

I used to use this script but it doesn't work on Mavericks.

This is a quite old question, but I stumbled on it looking for the same thing (although on ML). The script looks interesting, but it's a bit far-fetched for me, I was looking for something simpler and preferably without add-ons.

This is what I found and works for me: in the hot corner's pref pane, hold Command, Option, Control and/or Shift after clicking a drop down list of a hot corner and you can add one or any combination of the modifier keys to a hot corner trigger. This way, they only work if and when you hold that(those) key(s) which you probably won't during a game, or any full screen app.

I'm pretty sure this works on all OS X versions.


Why does Cmd-I in Preview do something other than advertised? Somewhere after Lion (from which I upgraded to 10.10), Apple has changed the shortcut to show/hide the toolbar in Preview from ⌘-B to ⌘-I, at least it says so in the menu entries.
 But when actually using the shortcut, what pops up is (as one would expect), the info window.

Can someone explain why they would change it (probably not a constructive question), or whether this is a bug and how to rectify this and get the old behaviour back? Can this be done with assigning custom keyboard shortcuts?

This is not a bug, although I can certainly see why it looks like one. That little symbol is a pipe ( | ), not the letter I. The pipe is the upper character on the backslash ( \ ) key.

So to type ⌘-|, the physical keys you need to press are: ⌘-Shift-\.

The difference between "|" and "I" was more pronounced back when Lucida Grande was the system font (in fact, this very post is set in Lucida Grande; you can see how the pipe is taller and thinner than the uppercase I). But OS X Yosemite switched the system font to Helvetica, and unfortunately the "|" and "I" now look basically identical.


Is it possible to use the integrated gpu on MBP retina with Bootcamp? I came across this page which demonstrates that simply two lines need to be changed in order for Windows to detect the integrated gpu and use it: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Enabling-Intel-Iris-Graphics-For-Bootcamp-Users/td-p/2535800

Does the above work and if so is it possible to manually control whether the integrated or discrete gpu is in use? Also, would it automatically switch over from discrete to integrated and vis-a-versa when the load requirements change?

No, sorry. Apple disabled switching between the (integrated) IGPU and GPU.

I haven't tested what you posted, and I doubt it will work. (Still 1.3 years left on my warranty)


Why are there no hubs for the new USB Type-C Port? I'm assuming there is some sort of technical limitation. Why is it that all the usb-c hubs are passthrough single usb ports instead of a USB Type-C multiple port hub?

It's a question that is very unpopular.  You're right, but you're not supposed to say it.

Yes, the hub someone wrote about has two USB-C ports out of it, but they will be compromised.

What the problems is - how the USB-C lines within a cable are used is determined at plug-in time, depending on what you plug in downstream of the port.  For example, you can't have full speed USB 3.1 and full video at the same time.  So the USB-C makes a choice for you.  If you plug in both a high-res monitior and USB 3, then you can't have both at once.

So it will be interesting to see how the various hub supplies will handle this problem.

People think that a hub will be much like a USB 3.1 hub, where the function of USB doesn't change when you plug things into it.

But if you plug a high-res monitor into a USB-C hub, your USB regular data will suddenly drop down in speed to what two interior wires can handle, instead of four.  The bandwidth just isn't there.  Today's USB-C is USB-C on training wheels.


No sound via HDMI except in Kodi application Everything was working fine weeks ago and now I've started to experience the problem of having no sound. I'll give some background.

I don't have sound anywhere except for when I use Kodi. This means than when I play Spotify, Youtube, system sounds, the command say in terminal - no sound!

My output device in Preferences and in the upper menu and also in Audio Midi Setup is my receiver. It actually shows the correct device name and type as HDMI.

My setup is a Mac Mini, running Sierra 10.12.1 that is connected via HDMI to my receiver. The receiver has a HDMI connection to my TV and analog audio connection to my speakers. Video and sound have all been working but now I only get the video. So to reiterate, there is video in the TV but no sound from any of the speakers.

The weird thing here is that when I start up Kodi and play a movie I have sound.

The make it even more weird is that when I fire up Spotify and play a song I get no sound. If I now, while Spotify is playing startup Kodi and start playing a movie then the Spotify sound will also appear overlaid by the sounds/music from the movie. Once I quit Kodi I don't have Spotify sound anymore. I can see from the interface that the song is still playing.

If I change my output to Built-in internal speakers all sounds appear. Once I switch back to HDMI I have no sound.

Any ideas what is causing this? Any ideas how to debug this issue? I don't see any audio references in Console nor dmesg. Not sure how to continue debugging this situation.

Some things to note:

The volume bar is greyed out in the menu. Even when I run Kodi and I have sound and I cmd-tab and check the volume bar it is still at 0 and greyed out
Changing the volume from the commandline like recommended in this article has no effect.

Here are my Kodi settings

Try changing you output configuration to: "FIXED"


Local backup of iCloud Photo Library I'm using iCloud Photo Library to store all my full size photos and keep everything synced between my laptop and iPhone. The laptop has a small SSD, so I use the optimize space feature to keep only low-res photos locally.
This all works great, but I want to have a backup of the full-res photos on an external disk, in case the iCloud servers fail. Time Machine will only backup the low-res photos in the local library. I want to continue using the local Photo Library without having the external backup disk connected all the time.

One possibility is to create a second macOS user account, set it up with the same iCloud credentials, disable optimized storage, set its Photo Library location to the external disk, and login to this account weekly to do a backup. But this seems sort of clunky. What is the preferred "Apple way" of doing this?

@Elliott: Do you have the option of creating regular backups of your external disks? If so, you could symlink your photo library to the external source, backup that source however often you like, all the while using your full res photos instead of the low res versions. The photos would not be stored on your Mac hard drive (thus freeing up that space), but would be stored on backed-up external drives instead.

I've successfully done this before using both iPhoto and iTunes (among other things), and now regularly move all my important things to external drives for safe keeping. Backups of your backups is key, but drive space is cheap!

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.


Is there any keyboard short cut to input mac key symbols like shift, cmd, ctrl Possible Duplicate:
  How do I type a command character (⌘) in Mac OS X?

Do I have to copy paste those ⌘ stuff from online sources?

EDIT: I found another way to do this, and is much easier and less complicated.
Go to the Language and Text preference pane and select the Text section.

From there, you can substitute typed-in text with the symbols that you want. For example, I set commandkey to be replaced with ⌘. This makes it much easier to type in the symbols.

No, you do not need to.

Go to System Preferences, and open the Language and Text Preference Pane. Select Input Sources, and select Unicode Hex Input:

After doing this, select Unicode Hex Input as your language input (as shown below), and you can enter the characters using the unicode hex of the character, by holding ⌥+ABCD, where ABCD is the unicode hex.

The unicode hexes are (the ones you requested and a few others):

Shift Key (⇧) - 21E7
Command Key (⌘) - 2318
Control Key (⌃) - 2303
Option Key (⌥) - 2325
Backward Delete (⌫) - 232B
Caps Lock (⇪) - 21EA


How can I use a specific keyboard layout from Windows 10? For my job, I am forced to use a Mac. The interface is quite nice, but the keyboard is unbearable. I am used to the Canadian French (CAFR) keyboard layout from Windows. However, it is not available in MacOS.
I was wondering if there was a way to important the keyboard easily without having to map all the letters manually (with Karabiner or Ukulele).
Do you have an idea on how to import a keyboard layout from Windows to Mac?

I think you can find this layout for MacOS here.
There is definitely no way to import Windows keyboard layouts to Mac, or vice versa.


How do I diagnose my Python program being killed due to an out-of-memory error? I've been building a Neural Network that analyzes large amounts of data (40G), and my iMac kills the process after it's been running for about a day.

In the past, on Linux, I've created a large swap file to get around memory limitations.

I see:

$ python processor.py
[...maybe some std out messages, specific to what I'm doing...]
Killed.

I've come to know this as the "you've used up too much memory, good bye" message. Again, I've been able to solve it using a large swap file on linux.
How can I increase the swap limit on my mac so my processes that use large amounts of memory don't get killed?

Not sure how I could get more information about why it got killed.

Here are some ways to check for issues but I fear they may not be a complete or even the correct solution without more peeking or poking:

In another shell after you start your python process (or if you screen / tmux it):

df /
top -l 1 -S | head -12
vm_stat and vm_stat 600
sudo du -sm /var/vm/*

Once you have a good baseline, you can watch things over time to see how the neural net is behaving each hour for a while. If you think things are about stop, you can run sysdiagnose python (or use the process # if you have more than one python process running). Also, if you don't want to wait the day for things to bulk up, you can inflict memory_pressure on the system before or after starting the neural net in python. See this answer for how to monitor the Activity Monitor when you run this process:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/107181/5472


Shove installed a launch daemon or agent popup window, what is it? Please check the following screenshot:

Today, I suddenly have this popup window warning. I have no idea what it is.
Basically I have three questions.

(1) Is this BlockBlock app warning? I have no idea how to find which app triggers this warning. Is there a way to find out which app triggers a popup window?

(2) What is this warning about? Does it mean the app fpsaud auto installs something?

(3) Should I Block or Allow?

Thanks a lot.

To answer your questions in order....

This does appear to be a BlockBlock dialog box.  A quick look at their webpage shows a similar dialog to the one you've posted.

This warning is telling you that Adobe is attempting to install/update Adobe Flash Player
Do you use Flash Player?  If you do, then yes.  If not, you should investigate what is attempting to install Flash Player (what did you download and open up?)

*On a side note, a more pragmatic question you should be asking yourself is "Why, in 2018, are you still using Adobe Flash?"


Is it possible to customize invitation email? I'm a newbie with OS X Server and specially with Profile Manager.

I have already managed to make enrollment work, but I'm wondering if it is possible to change the template of the invitation email since it is pretty awful and leaves no space for branding or anything else.

Go to your HD > Applications > Server.app

Right Click > Show Package Contents

Go to Contents > ServerRoot > usr > share > devicemgr > backend > app > views > emailer

Open the email_profile-multipart.erb file in your IDE of choice, and make your style edits to the HTML email.


Apple Magic Keyboard 2 native function keys don't work I purchased an Apple Magic Keyboard 2 (the US layout model). I own a Macbook Pro 15" (Late 2012), updated to El Capitan (if relevant, this computer was running the El Capitan Beta prior to its release).

I turned on my keyboard for the first time and connected it using the lighting cable. A notification showed up telling me that the Magic Keyboard is ready to use.

When pressing the function keys, they don't perform the function they're labelled for (for example it's impossible to change the volume or brightness). All of the information I found on the internet so far didn't seem to reflect in my current situation.

These keys work correctly with the Macbook's built-in keyboard.

I am using the default US keyboard layout from OS X. When opening the keyboard viewer, the keyboard seems to be recognised as a non-Apple keyboard.

Another situation I've encountered is that when unplugging the keyboard after the initial set up, I get a window called "Keyboard Setup Assistant" which makes me press specific keys on the keyboard in order to recognise it, and ends up determining it is an ANSI keyboard. This seems like a strange behaviour.

EDIT: I also tried toggling the setting to use the F keys as standard function keys on and off, but to no avail.

EDIT 2: before using this new keybaord, I was using the old Apple Magic Keyboard, with the Italian layout, but OS X was configured to use a tweaked US layout (modified using Ukelele). For a while they were both connected to the system. I then unpaired the old keyboard.

It turns out that my problem was rare because the circumstances of it were rare too. I solved my problem successfully by upgrading from El Capitan Beta to the Stable release 10.11.4. I did this by downloading the installer from the App Store application (can be found in the Purchases tab), and running it on my PC. After selecting the drive on which the current OS X was installed, I waited around 30 minutes for the installation to complete. It was completed and I didn't lose any of my data.

Once I logged back in, I clicked on the Bluetooth icon while holding alt and shift, clicked on Debug and Remove all devices. After that, I reconnected my keyboard and it worked fine.


Command-delete shortcut is not working for me How do you delete a file you have selected in a Finder window, without using the mouse?

delete doesn't do it.
When I looked it up, I was said that command-delete is supposed to do it, but it doesn't work for me.

It should work in Finder by default, but did you press the right delete key?

Delete (⌫) is the key that is called backspace on other platforms
Forward delete (⌦) is the key that is called delete on other platforms


macOS Catalina: Install Slows and Errors on MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012) For around 6 months I had intermittent issues with my MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012) where it was randomly ending up on the folder with a question mark icon, or the no-entry icon.
It used a 250GB Samsung 840 SSD - which I had installed in 2014 - and I figured it must have finally been at its end-of-life.
I've replaced it with a 1TB Crucial MX500 SSD; the swap went smoothly and as expected.
Now, I'm having problems installing macOS Catalina at all.
After installing the new drive I did the following steps:

Downloaded the latest macOS Catalina from the App Store on my iMac
Created a new Catalina Install drive using Terminal createinstallmedia
Booted from the USB on the MacBook Pro
Formatted the drive to APFS in DiskUtility
Used the macOS install button, accepting terms etc..

The installer gets to around 50% normally (in around 5 minutes), but then it slows down dramatically, with the estimated time floating around 5-7 minutes constantly. The loading bar continues to move incredibly slowly (using the ol' cursor on the boundary of the loaded section to track progress).
This goes on for well over an hour, and at around 70% it fails with the error:

An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again.

I've taken the following troubleshooting steps so far:

Reset SMC
Reset NVRAM, PRAM
Recreated the install USB pendrive
Re-recreated the install usb on another USB pendrive
Used different USB ports
Online-recovery (defaults to Mountain Lion, which got all the way through the progress bar then loads to a folder with a question mark at mid-install auto-reboot)
Cloning the old Samsung SSD to the new Crucial SSD in DiskUtility
Numerous power-cycles, and letting the machine sit for a bit etc.
Run health-checks on the old and new SSDs, both return no issues

The machine had otherwise been running great. Fast as always with no known issues with RAM, or battery life, etc.. I can't think of what else to try at this point.
The machine's also in near-new condition, it's been very well looked after. All the ports etc are clean and in good working order, as are the charge cables.
There are no Apple stores or authorised repair centres where I live (boat/flight required for the closest, which isn't an option due to Covid lockdown).
Any ideas on what to try next would be greatly appreciated, I'd very much like to see this MacBook working again.
Many Thanks
Craig

A rather brief answer…
A bad SATA cable could quite easily be responsible for all of the above aberrant behaviour - however I know of no way to test for that, short of replacing it & seeing if things improve.


Window size of VirtualBox on mac I'm trying to install Windows by using VirtualBox on mac, but the size of VirtualBox don't fit the size of my mac.

The window size is too small, how can I make it fit my computer?

By the way, I'm using Retina macbook pro.

You simply need to install the "Guest Additions". See the instructions on VirtualBox web site.

Once installed, reboot the VM and you will be able to resize the "window".


Minimum volume size to enable versioning I have certain documents stored on a password protected disk image stored on Dropbox. Since the documents are small text documents, I made the image small (100 MB). But now I'm getting the following message when I save a document:

  The document “foo.tex” is on a volume that is too small to support
  permanent version storage.

  You will not be able to access older versions of this document once
  you close it.

I have another 2 GB image which doesn't give rise to this warning.  So my question is, what's the minimum volume size I should use to avoid this warning?

For others looking for an answer, it's 600 MB or larger (599 fails, 600 succeeds). Using a sparse disk helps save space from using a "too large" volume, FWIW.


Trying to Find Photos on Harddrive from Photos App Our hard drive died and we had to get a new one - I have my old hard drive in one of those NexStar things (bear with me as I am not that good at computers!).  I am looking for my photos from the Photo App and I can't seem to find them anywhere on the old hard drive to import onto our new hard drive.  Any ideas?

Finding the Library

Pictures from photos are usually in a single big archive called Photos Library found in a user's Pictures folder. Go to the root of your hard drive (the root is what you see when you open it, before opening any folders inside it), and then open the following directories:

Users > (your user name) > Pictures

The library should be there.

Opening the Library

To open it, open Photos. The icon usually bounces into its place the Dock while Photos is loading the pictures, and then the window shows up. You will want to hold the option key before the window shows up (I usually do this by holding the option key when I click on the Photos icon). This will tell Photos you want to open another library, so instead of showing you the usual Photos window, it will open something like this:

Click on that Open Library... button and find your old library as described above.


How to Export Google Calendar Events That Have Not Synced and are Stored Only on iPhone My wife has been using the Calendar app on her iPhone to store many important events under a calendar in her Google account. That Google account stopped syncing with her phone months ago, but she has continued to add events under that Google account on her phone. Now she has many events that only appear on the phone. They are not visible on calendar.google.com.

Here's the calendar on her phone that I'm trying to get events from:

I'm trying to restore the syncing of her phone's calendar events with Google Calendar.

I've tried restarting the phone and adding a test event and forcing a refresh, but that didn't work.

My next step is to delete the Google account from her phone and re-add it, but how can I first back up the locally stored calendar events so that we don't lose them?

I tried syncing calendars with iTunes, but iTunes doesn't let me choose calendars from the Google account - it only shows some default calendars like Home and Work and Calendar that she doesn't use. I synced and verified in the Calendar app on her Mac that it did not sync the calendars from her Google account.

Here are the calendars from her phone that are available to sync with iTunes

iOS 10.11.1, MacOS 10.12.6, iTunes 12.7.5.9

What you're looking for is iMazing, which can do exactly what you want, and a whole lot more. The calendar export feature does require a paid license, and it is a pretty expensive program, but it's also available as part of Setapp, a subscription service that gives you access to more than a hundred otherwise expensive applications for $10/mo, but they also have a 7-day free trial.

Here's what I'd do:

Update your phone and your Mac! There have been many calendar sync issues fixed with updates to macOS 10.13; the phone should be at 10.4.1.
On your Mac, sign in to the Google account.
Sign up for and download/install Setapp.
Download/install iMazing through Setapp.
Connect the iPhone to your mac and perform a full backup of the phone using iMazing (just in case).
Log into the Google account.
Make sure all calendars you want to sync are checked, here.
On the phone, under Settings > Calendar > Sync, make sure "All Events" is selected.
In iMazing, follow the instructions here to export each full calendar as an ICS file.
In Google Calendar, import the data from each of these ICS files.
Check that all your events, etc., are now available at calendar.google.com.
On the phone, delete any and all versions of this same Google Account under Settings > Accounts & Passwords.
On the phone, open the Calendars app, tap Calendars at the bottom, and delete any and all remaining/duplicate calendars, particularly if there is one under "On My iPhone", and/or superfluous iCloud calendars.
On the phone, open the Calendars app, tap Calendars at the bottom, and delete any and all unused calendars, particularly if there is one under "On My iPhone".
Then you have two options:

A. Switch to using the Google Calendar app from the App Store for iPhone.
   I recommend this.

B. If you wish to continue syncing Google Calendar with the Apple Calendar app:

On the phone, re-add your Google Account in Settings > Accounts & Passwords, making sure to select "Google" as the type, not "Other" or "CalDAV". Once added, check the account, and make sure calendar slider option is enabled.
On the phone, go to Settings > Calendar. Make sure "Default Calendar" is set under "Gmail" to the correct account.
On the phone, open the Calendar app. Under calendars, make sure only the calendar(s) you want are checked. At the top, under Gmail, should be the Google Calendar.
Give it a few minutes to sync up; you may need to quit the Calendar app and re-open it.

That should do it!

If anything goes wrong
you can restore from the backup from step 5.


Change a printer driver of an already configured printer Is there a way that you can set the printer driver for a printer that is already installed (other than deleting it an reinstalling). When you install a new printer you get an option to set which print driver it uses (see image below). But i cant seem to edit this once created.

This feature was removed in OS X 10.8. You have to use the CUPS interface by running cupsctl WebInterface=yes from Terminal and then pointing a Web browser to http://localhost:631. From there:

Open the Printers tab.
Select your printer and select Modify Printer from the second drop-down menu. (You’ll have to provide your OS credentials.)
Select your printer and click Continue twice.
Select a different driver or choose an appropriate PPD file.
Click Modify Printer.


Producing a standard tilde while using OS X (U.S. International - PC) keyboard layout The tilde, ~, generated by the U.S. International - PC layout and the tilde, ~, produced by the U.S. layout are allegedly different characters.

How can I produce the U.S. tilde while using the International keyboard?

To produce the standard tilde (U+007E) with US International PC you just type tilde and then space.  It will be exactly the same as what you get by typing tilde with the US layout.


How long does a contact show as "Recent"? If I send an e-mail to a contact, how long will it show as "recent"?

I wonder because when I look at one of my contacts, it has an option at the bottom of the screen that says "Remove from Recents", but I don't recall having contacted this person in over a month. This is an iPhone 6 and I also use an iPad.

I think "recents" stay in the "recents" menu until it gets pushed out by more "recents".


Why do I get a "This photo is not editable" message in iOS 8? I have photos in my iPhone that were added using iTunes sync with a Photos library. I do not see a way to delete them (no trash can icon) and when I tap "Edit" while viewing them I get the following message:

This photo is not editable
Do you want to duplicate it and edit a copy?

I understand that I can make a copy and edit that, but then the original will still appear on my phone and there is no way to delete it.

How can I edit these photos so that only the edited version appears on my phone?

If you mistakenly try to edit a photo in your Photo Stream album, you will get this message.  Edit the same photo in your Camera Roll album and it should be editable with no problems,


Wanting help creating an applescript that is run when the contents of a folder changes I would greatly appreciate some assistance with the following.

My scenario:

I have a Mac app that generates RTF files.
I have an Android app that deals with MultiMarkdown/Markdown files.

The Mac app works with projects, and these have any number of files in them. It can automatically synchronise the files in a given project to a folder. Essentially, it will place into the folder a bunch of files whenever it syncs (on opening and closing, and manually). Any changes to that folder are automatically synced to my Android device.

However, I need them to be converted to .mmd files before that happens, and converted back to RTF when the files come in changed (or new) from the Android device.

So here is what I have in mind. What I would like is to set things up in such a way that when files are synchronised from the Mac app to their target folder, those files are automatically converted from RTF to MMD. I already have the scripts that will do the the actual conversion. AND when the MMD files change, they will be automatically converted to RTF files. I also have a script for this.

The questions I have are these:

How can I automatically monitor a folder for changes to its content, and run a script if files change in that folder?
How could I make this work two-ways, without throwing everything into an endless loop? At first I thought I could do the following:

Two-way conversion:

Create two folders on the Mac. One is for RTF files, the other is for MMD files.
Set up the Mac app to sync its data out and in from the RTF folder
Set the the Mac to Android sync system (Dropbox, Bittorrent Sync, etc.) to sync content of MMD folder with a folder on Android device.
When content of RTF folders changes, convert the files to MMD and put output into the MMD folder. AND vice versa.

But, obviously, this will create an endless loop, because each action will trigger the reverse action, endlessly.

One possible way around this endless loop might be this:

RTF folder has script R assigned to it. When content changes, script R executes.
MMD folder has script M assigned to it. When content changes, script M executes.
When a change is detected in RTF folder, the first thing script R does is disable script M from triggering. The last thing script R does before exiting is enable script M again. That way M won't 'notice' that the folder contents were changing whilst R was updating its content with freshly converted files.
The same would apply in reverse.

But maybe there's a better way?

I am keen to learn more about scripting, and in the process resolve this problem.

Are there any people with feasible ideas on how to achieve what I am hoping to work out here?

I would create one script that monitors both folders. My language of choice for this is Python. AppleScript is not terribly well-suited to this kind of operation. The basic idea is to listen for FSEvents on the two folders in question, and when one occurs, quickly unschedule the event stream for the other folder, do some conversion and sync operation, then reschedule the previously unscheduled event stream.

The completed script, downloaded here, with modified versions of those scripts you showed me. The MacFSEvents installation is now automatic:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oylvewk90ezwb3s/File%20Sync.app.zip?dl=1

Here are the steps to use it:

Extract the applet, right click on it and select "Show Package Contents", open Contents, and Resources, then edit the plist inside with your RTF and MMD folder pairings. You will be able to specify as many pairs as you need to keep synchronized with each other, just stick to the same format as what I used in the plist: One array per pair, each containing two items, the first item being the path to the RTF folder, the second being the path to the MMD folder. You'll see this when you open the plist.

This should work without any issues. The folders will now be watched for any sort of modification, and will have the files converted and transferred to the other folder.


Unable to visit websites after deleting SelfControl app I downloaded the self-control app, blacklisted some websites, then changed my mind. I deleted the app and modified etc/hosts.

I still can't visit the websites. I've tried refreshing the browser but the problem still persists.

How do I fix this?

You shouldn't have done that… it won't end well :\

From the Self Control FAQ

  Q: How do I disable SelfControl once it has started?

  You can't. That's the idea. Just wait.

  "But, but but..." you say.

  Seriously, chill out. It's not the end of the world.

  The timer will run out and the internet will come back again. In the
  meantime, you may find comfort in curling up in a ball under your desk
  and rocking back and forth for a while.

  Q: I deleted the application, will that do anything?

  No. (Except maybe cause problems with the block disappearing at the
  proper time. Don't do it!)

  Q: I did some stuff with the terminal that I read on a cool tech site, but it didn't work, what do I do now?

  We don't know what you did or why you would follow instructions found
  on the internet before reading this FAQ. Lesson learned right? Good
  luck!

I would imagine your solution will be to reinstall it & hope the timer runs out correctly.


How should I restore a backup of my user account from a .dmg? I have on my external hard drive a .dmg which is a backup from when my internal hardrive was breaking.

Fixing the (internal) hard drive I then went on to erase it. And reinstall OSX in the process it asked me if I had any time machine backups. Which I do (on the same external) hard drive but it was very out of date.

What I want to know is; How can I get all the data back from the .dmg that I backed up (and have now fixed using DiskWarrior)?

Should I just drag and drop the User folder? What would you reccomend?

Copy the user folder into /Users
Make a user with the same short name as the user that you copied in using the Users & Groups preference pane. This should prompt you to link the new user to the home folder that you copied in.

Note: Don't log in as that user yet.
Reset the new user's ACLs using the ACL tool on the Recovery HD.

Boot into the Recovery HD using ⌘R.
Run resetpassword in Terminal (available from Utilities → Terminal).
Select your account from the drop-down list.
Click the Reset button for Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs.


Is it normal to have a hidden ".pdf" file in my "Downloads" folder? Is it normal that there is "invisible" file (because I made all files visible) ".pdf" in my "Downloads" folder?

Everything what I have in my downloads folder is:

  170  6 Sep 22:40 .

  1088  5 Sep 12:09 ..

  24580  6 Sep 22:41 .DS_Store

  0  1 Jun 16:06 .localized

  145000 11 Jul 15:52 .pdf

Thank you in advance.

Yes, the downloads folder comes default with a PDF explaining what that folder is there for. But there should be no "invisible" file.

If you'd like to investigate the matter more, fire up Terminal (Applications/Utilities) and type the following commands (or copy paste them). If you are new to the commandline, it is one per line and hit ENTER after each:

cd ~/Downloads
ls -la

The first will navigate to your Downloads folder. The second will list all the files in it, hidden or not.

The following is a print-out of my Downloads folder:

drwx------+  9 cksum  staff     306  6 Sep 08:16 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 25 cksum  staff     850  6 Sep 09:11 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 cksum  staff   21508  6 Sep 08:16 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r--   1 cksum  staff       0  3 Aug 13:25 .localized
-rw-r--r--@  1 cksum  staff  130035  3 Sep 19:37 1297608696_001.jpg
-rw-r--r--@  1 cksum  staff  157957  3 Sep 21:55 Radioactive_Man_Number_One_v_1024.jpg
-rw-r--r--@  1 cksum  staff   87189  5 Sep 19:51 Screen Shot 2011-09-05 at 7.51.40 PM.png

The "d" in front of all those other letters (rw-r--r, etc.) denotes a directory (or a folder). If there is none, that means it's a file (or a document of some kind). You can see the size of the file/folder in the column after "staff" (this is the group you belong too). And lastly, the date the file was created and the file name.

There are no relevant or important system files that are placed in Downloads. This is simply files the user downloads. I can't speak why it's there, but I can assure you that deleting it will not cause any harm to your system.


Cannot see or delete photos from "Synced from iTunes Library" I have an iPhone 6S and Windows PCs. I do not sync photos between the iPhone and PCs. I have about 716MB of space occupied by photos "Synced from iTunes Library" that I cannot see on the iPhone, or have any way to delete them. These photos cannot be found in iCloud either. So this post did not resolve my issue: Some photos aren't displayed when iPhone connected to PC

I already deleted all of the photos in the Photos app, but I still have the 716MB occupied and have no way to get rid of it. What do I do?

Only 1 photo left in Photos app:

Still 716MB "Synced from iTunes Library":

Are you able to turn on photo syncing in iTunes? We could try syncing a photo, and then turning off syncing again to see if it deletes the old synced files.


How can I display Quicktime's "New Movie Recording" function in ASCII I wonder if anyone could master this one?

So Quicktime can play movies in ASCII mode as per the link below:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample/Introduction/Intro.html

But is it possible to view, through the webcam in Quicktime, the webcam video as ASCII art?

Try ASCII Projektor

  … computer’s camera as well as from QuickTime files. …


node wants to use the "Local Items" keychain Every so often when I open my computer, that message appears. Can anyone tell me what node is?

I got this too, and I ran "ps aux | grep node" from the terminal. I've seen a couple of different programs show up. One was Videostream. Another was actually Adobe Creative Cloud:

kenlu              693   0.0  0.2  5996836  27612   ??  S    11Dec18  23:09.26 /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Creative Cloud Experience/CCXProcess/CCXProcess.app/Contents/MacOS/../libs/node /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Creative Cloud Experience/CCXProcess/CCXProcess.app/Contents/MacOS/../js/main.js

So it looks like this is just part of Adobe Creative Cloud, which is probably fine.


New Apple nfc door opener as seen on iPhone 12 keynote video? Anyone has info about this technology? Looks like we can scan nfc or emulate keys on the embarked nfc chip? or is it only for apple internal use?

NFC detection is available to app developers on iPhone for some years since iOS 11.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc

I use it for hardware authorization with yubikeys and 1Password app.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1password-password-manager/id568903335
https://www.yubico.com/us/store

Apple hardware can scan for NFC and then take whatever action the developers code up for the apps.