Exchanged HDD in MacBook Pro - OS X installation disk shows prohibitory sign I exchanged the HDD in my 2007 MacBook Pro and removed the DVD drive because it was making a terrible noise every time I booted the MacBook.

The new HDD is a Corsair Force F120 SATA SSD. I formated it as HFS+.

Every time I try to launch an OS X Lion installation disk or USB stick I get the grey prohibitory sign and the machine shuts down after a while.

When I connect the old harddrive (with OSX still on it) I'm able to boot it up successfully.

Any ideas what is wrong?

it is greyed out because it is in the wrong file format => ntfs

you should use disk utility via the usb stick to format the drive to HFS+ and then you will be able to install on it


OpenGL versions on Lion, Mountain Lion It looks like Lion supported OpenGL 3.2 (see https://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/GLInfo_1070_Core.html)

Does anyone know what version of OpenGL Mountain Lion will support?

After searching for weeks, and getting nowhere, and then finally posting to stackexchange a friend of mine has told me what the solution is! The OS X app store has an "OpenGL Extensions Viewer" published by "Developer Tools, and it is free.

Install it and click the OpenGL tab and it shows you the versions of OpenGL and the compliancy. Right now (July 26, Mountain Lion) 3.2 is 70% supported on my Mac Mini Server with Intel HD Graphics 3000 card.


Change the default keyboard input when logging into macOS Big Sur Since upgrading to Big Sur, my default keyboard input during the login screen is always 'U.S.'. I need to manually switch it to 'French'.
Is there a way for me to set 'French' as defaut?
In fact, I do not even know where this 'U.S.' input comes from.
Here are my Big Sur regional configurations. They are as I want them and work fine once I am logged in.

The primary language is 'English (UK)'. All menus and system messages
are in English.

The region is set to 'France (custom)'.

The keyboard primary input source is 'French'. I have other input sources, such as 'Russian - Phonetic', that I switch to occasionally.
I do NOT have any English language input source, including 'US'.

To sum up:
all my regional, keyboard and input settings in Big Sur works fine EXCEPT during log in, when the default layout is wrong.
Thanks in advance in helping solve this problem.
PS:
The following link suggests a solution for the very same problem but it dates from 01/2014 and it's solution does not work with Big Sur.
https://vkritis.blogspot.com/2014/01/change-default-keyboard-of-osx-login.html

If you have FileVault activated and are struggling to set your desired language on the login screen try the following:

Turn off FileVault
In terminal execute this to copy your keyboard settings to the login screen sudo cp ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist /Library/Preferences/
Turn on FileVault again
Reboot

Tested on Big Sur


Is it possible to convert Blurays to my iPad? Following on from my previous question, I was wondering if anyone could help me. I have a new iPad, so technically capable of displaying HD movies. And I own plenty of Bluray discs.

So I was wondering if it was possible to convert Blurays I own in order to watch them on it?

(Note: Let's set aside the legality discussion since a) laws vary based on jurisdiction and b) the Internet isn't a good place to get legal advice.)

Absolutely!  You'll need a program to rip the Blu-Rays to your computer, then you'll need a program to convert them to a format that your iPad can understand (like HandBrake).

Lifehacker has a good guide that works with both Mac and PC for ripping Blu-Ray discs.


Is there a Mac equivalent to Windows 7's library feature? Having several related files in different folders, I was looking for a way to combine them in the same view,  like the "Libraries" of Windows Explorer in Win7.

While Finder has great smart folder capabilities, I don't see any way to do this? Third-party tools are welcome.

Easiest way I can think of to do it is if you bring up the file info window by pressing ⌘ + i keys, and then add something into the Spotlight Comments field that you keep the same through the files you want. Rinse and repeat for the files. Create a new Smart Folder, for the search option go to Other... and it'll bring up the full list, which will include Spotlight Comments.


GarageBand, iPhoto re-install? I had to have my 2011 MacBook Pro wiped out and re-installed because of malware. I noticed that my previous package--iMovie, GarageBand, and iPhoto--is not longer installed. I checked online forums and Q&A, and I was able to find iMovie under my purchases in the Apple account. However, GarageBand and iPhoto are not there/ available. I don't understand why one would be associated with my account, and the rest would not. That's odd. I'd like to see what possibility is there to have GarageBand, and iPhoto reinstalled.

Once you do a reinstallation wipe of a Mac all data, including apps (even Apple ones) are deleted. So, unfortunately it seems like you'll have to buy GarageBand (it came with your Mac the first time, right? You didn't buy it separately, did you?). It sounds like you can redownload iMovie, and iPhoto was replaced by Photos (free from Mac App Store).


How to change the focus of buttons displayed in prompt dialogs? When a file is deleted through Command + Option + Backspace combination, the dialog like the image below is prompted to validate the operation with having two buttons which are Cancel, and Delete while the latter is focused by default. So, how can I change the focus to the other button through keyboard as I want to complete this operation without using trackpad?

p.s. OS: macOS Catalina 10.15.1

p.s. I have tried Tab, Space, Option but did not work for me.

You could modify Tab key behaviour from System Preferences:


Mavericks: createinstallmedia not found I'm having trouble with this. It seems the standard way is to have the OS X install file in your Applications folder and then run the following in Terminal

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app --nointeraction

But when I do that, all I get is the error

  command not found

I can't see how it could be the file path because this is the line of text given in various online tutorials for people to copy and paste?

On a different note, I then tried to create a bootable USB the more 'old school' way purely through Disk Utility, but then found that my USB drive doesn't show up when I hold down the Option key when booting up my Mac... all I see is 'Macintosh HD' or 'Recovery HD' (or whatever they're called).

Might that be related to my problem?

Managed to fix it by running the following command:

sudo chmod +x /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia


Built-in iSight not working after migrating OS X from Mac Mini to MacBook Pro Used Migration Assistant to migrate from Mac Mini (which is without iSight) to MacBook Pro (which has iSight). MacBook Pro was installed with OS X 10.6, then Software Update(d) to 10.6.8, before downloading Lion installer from Mac App Store.

What I've checked so far
 - iSight camera is not detected by iChat, Photo Booth, Skype.
 - System Profiler does not detect Camera under list of USB device
 - There are AppleUSBDevices framework installed at the default location
   with proper file permissions

I've also read through Google search results dating from 2006 to 2011.

[Adding update for posterity and closing this question]

Pleased to report my iSight was working in my MBP with a new logic board.


How do I upgrade to iOS 9.3 without enabling iCloud Drive? I am (or rather, my brother-in-law is) trying to update the OS on an older iPad, and he's adamant that we need to do this without signing up/enabling/whatever it is that you do with iCloud Drive. So now we're presented with the following question:

  Are you sure you don't want to upgrade to iCloud Drive?
  iOS 9 requires upgrading to iCloud Drive to update documents in iCloud. Until you upgrade, changes made to documents on this iPad will not be available to other devices using iCloud.
  Cancel   Continue

Uh... mu? Neither of those is a valid answer to the question. What does "Continue" mean? Why is "Cancel" highlighted? Besides forwarding this to the Interface Hall of Shame, what the heck am I supposed to do here? How do I answer this question in such a way that I will not get iCloud Drive foisted on me?

The brother-in-law resorted to a chat session with Apple support, and after wading through a lot of boilerplate, he was advised to choose "Continue". It seems to have worked. He did not, however, get any answer to how such a textbook example of how not to write a dialog box got past Apple's UI designers.


App to transfer the files by shaking the iPhone? Is there any iPhone app that allows me to transfer music to another iPhone by shaking the iPhone nearby?

http://bu.mp/ does the job.

Simply get the app on both iPhones, open the apps and "bump" them together to share the files.


Dock is not showing up on my iMac For some reason, the Dock with all the app icons has disappeared from my Mac. How do I get it to display again?

Apparently you have accidentally set the Dock to automatically hide by invoking the keyboard shortcut Command + Option + D. Re-invoke the same keyboard shortcut to toggle the setting and turn off auto hide.

You can also effect the same change by going to Apple Menu → System Preferences → Dock and uncheck Automatically hide and show the Dock setting.

If you wish to keep the Dock hidden, the same can also be shown as desired by moving the cursor to the edge of screen (by default Bottom) where the Dock is positioned (as seen in the Position on screen setting in the screenshot above).


Install softwares on other partitions I have partitioned my HD in three parts, system, work and private.
I was trying to install R in work volume but it failed because it could find OS?

So is it necessary to install all SWs on system, or there is a way to allow me install in that volume 'work'.

In general, OS X applications can run from anywhere. Depending on which R distribution you install it might run just fine from an Application bundle or you will just have to adjust your $PATH variable to place the executable files where they can be found.

You probably have a more specific install error that's causing your issues. Perhaps listing the exact version of R and where you got it / what steps you are following would allow us to help you better. (Ideally you would list the OS on Mac and the exact error message or what you are seeing that makes you think the installation failed.)


What is consuming a large amount of space on my Mac regarded as Applications in Storage? I opened the Storage tab in About This Mac and it says that 61.57 GB of my 121 GB Flash storage is used on Applications.

I opened the Applications folder, highlighted all the apps, opened the Inspector and it told me that it only took up 9.34 GB altogether.

I've only had this Mac for less than a week and I don't understand where all my memory is going!

MacBook Air 13″ early-2014 121 GB Flash storage

Try an app called DaisyDisk, it breaks down your storage usage folder by folder.


Prevent disk image automount when clicking Finder sidebar I have been playing around with the View → View Options in Finder and I must have touched something crtitcal because now whenever I click on a folder in Finder it automounts a disk image located on my external hard drive. The image is located in /Volumes/elements/App/myapp.dmg.

If I unplug the external hard drive, everything is back to normal. But when the external  hard drive is connected, it happens again.

I could remove the file, but I want to find a better solution.

Edit: It does not matter if I move the dmg to another location (i.e: I move it to /Users/charasoverride/app.dmg), it gets automounted as well.

Update: It does not happen for every folder but it does for sidebar items. (Favourites, Devices, etc.)

I would suggest trying two things. As a disclaimer, I have no idea what could be causing this because it makes no sense. These are just some basic Finder troubleshooting steps:

Suggestion 1:

Open Terminal from /Applications/Utilities
Run the command killall Finder
Log out of your user account and log back in
Try again

Suggestion 2:

Open Finder
Navigate to ~/Library/Preferences
Move the files com.apple.finder.plist and com.apple.finder.plist.lockfile to the Desktop
Log out of your user account and log back in
Try again

If neither of these suggestions work, I don't know what else you could try. Other StackExchangers?


Will iTunes Match replace iTunes Plus? The current iTunes Plus feature will replace selected purchased iTunes tracks with a 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free version. The soon to be released iTunes Match (for iCloud users) will store all tracks (including ripped tracks that Apple can match) in the cloud as 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free versions. Does that mean that Match replaces Plus?

Specifically, if I'm planning to sign up for Match once it launches, is there any reason do any Plus upgrades now, or should I simply wait for Match.

iTunes Match, when turned on, actually suppresses the Store link for iTunes Plus in the iTunes app on a Mac or PC.  The option to upgrade no longer appears to Match subscribers.  There is no reason to upgrade.  My personal old-school drm-sullied iTunes songs are now available to me without DRM through Match now that I've subscribed and synced my library.


How to change the default application for WEBLOC files? On macOS Sierra, I am encountering a strange behaviour of WEBLOC files. In the Open with: section of the Info window, the drop down list for choosing the default application is greyed out. It is set to Safari even though I have chosen a different default web browser in the System Preferences. I would like to change it to the browser of my choice, but it appears I am stuck with Safari.

When I select more than one WEBLOC file at once, the drop down list stops being greyed out. But when I try selecting a different browser, I get the following error message:

  You can’t change the item “Ask Different.webloc” to always open in the selected application.

  The item is either locked or damaged, or in a folder you don’t have permission to modify (error code -10823).

Needless to say that this particular WEBLOC file is neither locked nor damaged and that I have all the required permissions for the containing folder and the file.

How can I change the default application for WEBLOC files so they open with the browser of my choice?

I have found a solution:

Make sure that the Finder is set to show all filename extensions (Finder Preferences → Advanced).
Edit the file name by deleting the “.webloc” filename extension.
Show Info: Lo and behold – the application drop down list is no longer greyed out.

Select the browser of your choice and press the Change All… button.
The default application for opening any WEBLOC file has been changed, whether or not it has the explicit “.webloc” filename extension.


How do I move an app? I have several apps on my iPod touch (5th generation) that I would like to move from their current place on screen to a different place on screen. Is there any way to do this? If so, how?

Put your finger on the app and hold there. The app will start wobbling and have a cross in a circle at the top left.

Then drag it to where you want. If you hit the cross it will delete the app.


Batch update Apple Keychain passwords using terminal I have 41 webform password items stored in Keychain.  Each item has the same password (since each of them is a different wifi router in our building).

Every few months, I need to update all of these items to reflect the new password set up our sys admin.  Is there a quick terminal script that I can use to batch update the password of any item whose name contains "10.18.124." from "oldpw" to "newpw"?

This should be possible with security(1).

The command should like something like this:

security add-generic-password -a 10.18.124.1 -w "newpw" -j "Password Updated 2017-05-17 12:04" -U

-a Specify account name (required)
-w Specify password to be added
-j Specify comment string (optional)
-U Update item if it already exists

I don't think there is a "contains" feature so you maybe have to loop this.


delete all backups of all machines and reset time machine drive Delete all backups of all machines and reset time machine drive.

As you can see I just want to start over. There are some great discussions on deleting one backup at a time. I have 30 or so. I am changing mac and I would like to just reset time machine.

Please note the drive I have is external. So I can do it through disk utility by directly plugging in but I remember reading somewhere that it's not a good idea.

Just wipe the drive clean using Disk Utility and then have Time Machine start it all over again. I'm not sure what kind of issues you are going to run into because I've done that probably 50 times in my life and never had an issue besides falling asleep while I wait for an entire Time Machine backup to finish.


Mirroring display in Recovery Mode with faulty lid sensor and LCD? Today I bought a 2017 Macbook that has a water damaged LCD and a faulty closed-lid sensor. My intention is to factory reset it and use it as a build system (i.e. develop my app on my desktop, then remotely connect into the machine to compile / distribute).
When in MacOS, I can ⌘ Command+F1 to mirror to an external display, but obviously that doesn't work in recovery mode. One suggestion was to boot to recovery, then simply close the lid to make the external display the primary display, but with a faulty "lid closed" sensor, I can't do that.
Another suggestion was to close the lid, then run a fridge magnet over the corner of the unit to activate the closed-lid sensor. I tried this, but it just puts the unit to sleep, and I need to open the lid to start it back up.
Someone else suggested attempting to drag the window over from one screen to another, but I tried a bunch of times and had no luck because it's a bit of a stab in the dark to hit something that thin.
I have a dock at work that I intend to try (so I can close the lid, do the magnet, then use an external keyboard to try and wake the device), but until I can get to it, I'm wondering if there's a way to mirror the display, or at least move the window so I can proceed with reinstallation of MacOS?

The solution that worked for me, and was suggested to me by someone over on Reddit, is to remove the bottom of the Macbook and unhook the LCD cable. Once I did that, the external screen acted just like the internal screen. I could see the Apple logo, the recovery mode welcome screen and all that jazz.
There's teardown instructions over on iFixit, but I didn't need to follow all the steps. I just needed to undo the screws (steps 1-8) and unhook the trackpad cable (steps 9-11) to get the case open far enough to unhook the LCD cable (steps 19-23)


Lost Dropbox context menu entries, file and folder status indicators in Finder after updating to Yosemite I've lost all the Dropbox context menu options in Finder after updating to Yosemite. All indications of sync status on the files in my Dropbox location are also gone. The odd thing is, those context menu options are visible, along with the sync status for each file and folder, from save and open dialogs in applications. They've only gone away from Finder windows.

How can I get sync status and Dropbox context menu items back in the main Finder window?

It turns out Dropbox' self-updating wasn't functioning. The program was several versions behind current.

I was able to restore Finder context menus and sync status by going to the Dropbox download page, downloading and re-installing Dropbox. After getting version 2.10.41 the sync status indicators and context menus were returned to the main Finder windows when browsing under my Dropbox folder.

I did not have to uninstall or even stop the currently-running Dropbox service instance. The installer took care of all of that.

The latest Dropbox version that run properly with Yosemite is 2.11. Go to : https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=121399 and click on "offline installer" link for Mac OS X. Don't forget to restart your Mac after installation.


Alternative to iTunes for Podcasts I listen to podcasts using iTunes (my only reason to use it), and I am growing to hate it. Can someone suggest an alternative that:

Will not download the podcast unless I specifically do so.
Will play a podcast to the end, and then stop.  What happens next is for me to decide, not the app (this is why I cannot stand iTunes anymore).
Make it reasonably easy to find the podcasts I listen to and add them to a list.
List all available episodes for a podcast, ideally with the summery if that is available.

BTW, I use my laptop to listen to podcasts.

Alternatively, if there is a way of stopping iTunes from autoplaying podcasts once one is finished, that would be an option too.

Downcast is a 3rd party podcast player you should try out.

Downcast has native apps for macOS, iOS, watchOS and also include CarPlay support. It include support for host of features along with iCloud syncing across various platforms.


Backup for downgrade from Mavericks to Snow Leopard on smaller Hard Drive? This Problem might be very specific.

After having been very happy with Snow Leopard for quite a while I am now seriously considering upgrading to Mavericks with my 2010 iMac.
I would however like to save a copy of the old system to be able to downgrade and get back to it without having trouble and without losing any data.

My system hard drive is 1 TB (460 GB used) and I have a Time Machine backup on an external hard drive. Of course I don't want to touch this backup device.

I have another 200 GB hard drive and I was thinking about creating a bootable clone of my system on this device that I could use to get back to Snow Leopard.
Of course 200 GB isn't enough space for a complete clone copy. But since I have the Time Machine backup I wouldn't necessarily need to backup my user data, and then I have only like 150 GB to backup. So in principle my system without the user data should fit on the smaller device.

Is there any (not too complicated) way to do such a backup? Can Carbon Copy Cloner do that?

It can be done but involves a lot of juggling.

Your best option would be to shrink your existing partition, create a new partition then install Mavericks into the new partition.
You need to boot into recovery mode (or from the Snow Leopard CD) to shrink the partition (using Disk Utility) as you cannot resize the active partition. You can copy existing data from the original partition during installation.


Looking for a GTD tool with synchronisation capability There are a lot of Getting Things Done (GTD) tools out there I can use to manage my tasks. Additionally, most of them include synchronisation capabilities I can use to synchronize my iPad, MacBook etc. There is only one problem: they all use the Amazon Cloud/a Cloud located not in Europe... But I'm only allowed to use a Cloud that is located in Europe (data privacy aspects etc... this is a constraint of my employer). Does anybody know a GTD tool that is hosted on an "European Cloud" or that can be installed on my private cloud?

OmniFocus is able to sync between instances (OS X and iOS)

locally via Bonjour
via a shared directory
via any WebDAV server


Will video and photo editing wear out a 2015 macbook pro's SSD significantly? I plan on buying the latest 2015 13" Macbook pro while travelling for video and photo editing (among other activities such as programming). The SSD size will probably be 256 or 512gb along with a 2TB WD passport external I own.

Will transferring a large amount of video clips to the SSD and deleting after completion regularly wear out my Macbook pro's lifetime significantly or only by an unnoticeable time?

SSD's have been found to be quite durable. That article goes into depth with respect to SSD issues, and they performed hardware tests upon several manufacture of SSD.


How to fix Private Internet Access' kill switch? When you enable Private Internet Access' kill switch, you can only have internet when you are connected to the VPN. When you disable it, you should have internet even if the VPN is not enabled.

The problem

Although I disabled the kill switch, I only have internet access when I am connected to the VPN. This seems like a bug on PIA's side, but how can I make my internet work again on my Mac (without needing to be connected to VPN)?

When you enable the Kill Switch, PIA changes some config which apparently wasn't reverted when disabling the Kill Switch. PIA also warns you for this:

What you can do is manually revert the changes made by PIA. Running the following commands in your terminal should work:

Check the status

sudo pfctl -a com.privateinternetaccess -s rules

  No ALTQ support in kernel
  ALTQ related functions disabled
  pass in quick on ! utun2 inet from 10.0.0.0/8 to any no state
  pass in quick on ! utun2 inet from 172.16.0.0/12 to any no state
  pass in quick on ! utun2 inet from 192.168.0.0/16 to any no state
  pass in quick on lo0 all no state
  block drop in on ! utun2 inet from ! 46.166.137.225 to any

Flush/revert change by PIA

sudo pfctl -a com.privateinternetaccess -s rules

  No ALTQ support in kernel
  ALTQ related functions disabled

And also reset your DNS (Open Network Preferences > Wi-Fi > Advanced... > DNS). It should work without restarting your Mac or anything else.


What is the best way to view Wikipedia offline on the iPad? I'd like to view most articles of Wikipedia while I'm offline. I understand that it doesn't have to be or probably could be all articles, but a good subset would be nice.

I use the Wikipanion free version on my iPad and there's a Wikipanion Plus available that supports offline viewing.  I'm happy with Wikipanion on my iPad and iPhone.  Hope that helps!


Opening Notes of another user account in OS X EI Captain I recently replaced my macbook's user account by changing account name from name1 to name2. Now I have to recover some very important notes that I had saved in default Notes app but unfortunately didn't sync with cloud.

I have found a folder with old user account name i.e. name1 at /Users/name1/ but didn't find any relevant data. Can anybody please recommend me the possible ways of recovering the required data?

Create a new user with the exact same name in system preferences as the old one. When given the option, choose to use the old folder as their home folder. Then log in with this user and open the Notes app as that user.


Can I plug in an iPhone 5s with no screen? I have an iPhone 5s I am repairing,

I want to back it up,

but it has no screen.

Or home button.

I know how to get the pictures off, but can I boot up the iPhone and plug it into my iMac even if it has no screen?

Yes, you can. As long as the iPhone itself you know is working, you can plug it in.

The iPhone is now listed in Image Capture, even though I now have to find out how to unlock the phone...

Either way, never fear, the iPhone will respond even if it has missing parts :-)


iPod Touch 2G broken screen A friend broke her iPod Touch 2G. Additionally, some water got inside. Now the iPod sometimes doesn't start at all, or just freezes and doesn't react to finger touches.

There isn't any background light anymore (or at least, I don't remember there was or if there wasn't)

Because there's no explicit digitizer included in some offers, my question is, is it even possible to seperate the front glass and the digitizer?

My position is that, if there's a cable attached to it, there must be a digitizer too but the owner of the device disagrees with my opinion, so I am asking here for a definitive answer.

I haven't seen them sold separately. I imagine it is possible, but good luck finding one or the other by itself.

You can get the "front panel" assembly here ($70), which includes: touchscreen glass, integrated digitizer, metal frame and home button. Install directions here.

The front glass and digitizer should fix the touchscreen problems, but you probably will need a new display to fix the backlight (I haven't seen the light sold separate from the display). You can get that here ($60), with install directions here.

Hope this helps.


What is the purpose of "paste newlines as carriage returns" in the Terminal app? In the settings of the Terminal app, in the advanced tab, there is an option to "Paste newlines as carriage returns" which is enabled by default.

What is this good for?

What is it good for?

Sometimes you want to paste exactly what you've copied into something...say a document you're editing in nano or vi and want to preserve it exactly as it is.

Or, you could want to past the CR so it executes the command.

Perhaps the default action to pastes exactly what was copied makes more sense than altering a paste buffer before the application processes the clipboard.


Time Machine Changed My External Hard Drive's to MBR and now I can't access it! On Yosemite, I was using Bootcamp to install Windows on a part of my internal hard drive. When, bootcamp was finished (before booting into Windows), Time Machine popped up and asked me if I wanted to use the 500GB USB external drive as a Time Machine backup disk... I told it I did NOT... Despite my answer, I'm now receiving "The disk you inserted is not readable by this computer". I have the following per terminal:

    Kelleys-Mac-mini:~ kelley$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *250.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS MBP                     215.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                34.0 GB    disk0s4
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk2
   1:                       0xEE                         500.1 GB   disk2s1
Kelleys-Mac-mini:~ kelley$

It's disk2 that I'm panicking about. That had ALLLLLLLLLL of my backed up client data as well as purchased software installers.  Is my data lost?  Or is there a solution someone  can PLEASE provide?  I'm absolutely scared to death this can't be fixed...

Thank you for your reply. That said, I did get it fixed. I opened the seemingly faulty drive with MacDrive in Winblows on my bootcamp partition. All the sudden, we were good! The drive opened and could be read and written to. Not sure how that happened but it’s fixed and honestly, that’s all I care about! ;)


MS Remote Desktop - drives not mapping - broken by Sierra update 10.12.2? MacOS Sierra running the Microsoft Remote Desktop version 8.0.36 application connecting to various different MS Windows servers.

Was working fine,  but following the Sierra update 10.12.2 the drives are not mapping,  regardless of the target OS.

Current workaround is to use remote desktop in a VM,  but this is really inconvenient.

Edit: Feb 2017

Another Sierra update,  another broken RDP client.  Microsoft finally updated their RDP client in early January to fix this problem.  Now the Sierra 10.12.3 update's come along and broken it.  So no drive mappings again.

The beta RDP client has too many problems -- I just need a working RDP client -- so have to resort to using a VM running Windosw and it's RDP client.

Edit: Jan 2018

Seems that the High Sierra update on my Mac has broken the remote directory sharing again.  "Microsoft Remote Desktop" version 8.0.43

Updating the "beta" to version 8.2.41 enables me to connect and the drives are mapped.

Checking the Mac Application Store and they've released a new version of "Remote Desktop" (obligatory skipping of version 9 - why do they hate number nine?);  now version 10.1.1.   This works

It's always got to be worth trying the new v8.2 version, currently in beta. I've been using it myself for quite some time & it's a lot better than the current release v8.0 in many respects.

MS Technet blog: Remote Desktop Client Preview for Mac supports multiple monitors and more

Download: https://rink.hockeyapp.net/apps/5e0c144289a51fca2d3bfa39ce7f2b06/

Highlights -

  Multiple monitor support

  The preview app now supports the ability to use multiple monitors in
  your remote session. You can enable multiple monitors for a desktop
  connection from the additional options.

  Copy and Paste files

  In addition to supporting copy/paste of text and images, the preview
  app now supports copy/paste of files so that you can transfer files
  into and out of the remote session using both Command X/C/V and CTRL
  X/C/V.

  Updates to the keyboard

  We’ve changed how the Beta app keyboard works to behave exactly like
  the Remote Desktop client store app. The Beta app initially used a new
  implementation of the keyboard; however, many of you reported that
  this new keyboard introduced several issues with typing into apps like
  the Hyper-v console and typing certain language characters. The Beta
  app will continue to support both Command X/C/V and Ctrl X/C/V to copy
  and paste between the local desktop and remote session. Use the Beta
  app Help->Report an issue option to share your feedback about the
  keyboard. Learn more about how the keyboard works in a remote session.


How do I change Spotlight search engine? when I use Spotlight, it offers to "Search web for: " (something like that, my system is german). When I use this feature, Chrome pops up and searches with the Yahoo search engine.

Chrome is the right choice, but I want so search with Google. My Browser Settings state that Google is my default search engine.

Does anybody know where this might be configured?

Fire up Safari and check the settings for the default search engine. For me that is google and searching the way you described it for me opens safari (currently my default browser) with a google search.

The option is right there on the first settings tab. I included an image detailing where to find it (sorry for the german):


Full virtual desktop on iPad with sound Is there an iPad app that allows me to use a desktop game with an important audio component? I'm looking for a pleasurable music-like experience on the iPad.

Splashtop supports audio redirection (from the desktop to the iPad), however it requires running the Splashtop Streamer on your Mac.

Disclaimer: no affiliation with the company/product, just a satisfied user.


Features : Apple TV -vs- Apple TV app on Samsung Smart TVs Is the Apple TV app on Samsung Smart TVs the same as a separate Apple TV ?

Can the Apple TV app on Samsung Smart TVs run other Apple TV apps, such as Netflix, Amazon Video etc.. or does the Apple TV app on Samsung Smart TVs just run iTunes pay per view movies / TV, and Apple TV+ subscription content. Whilst leaving Netflix, Amazon Video etc as standard "Samsung Apps" ?

No, the Apple TV app on the Samsung Smart TV does not allow you to run other Apple TV apps such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc.

The Apple TV app on the Samsung Smart TV allows you to buy and rent movies from Apple, subscribe to the Apple TV+ service and Apple TV-channels.

Here's Apple's instructions on getting it setup:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT209440

If you want to use services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, then they must be installed as "Samsung Apps" independently.


Add all songs from Top Charts to a playlist How to add all songs from 'Top charts' to my playlist at once (not one by one song)?
There is no options exist for this playlist to do it.

This would be a neat feature, but there is no way to do this.

And, to be honest, I think it'd be tricky to implement without also providing the user a number of options they need to select.

The problem is that songs in the top charts are constantly changing, so the user would need a way of choosing how this is managed?

For example, let's say it's a Top 50 chart:

Once the songs are downloaded, do they remain downloaded when they are no longer in the Top 50?
Should the playlist auto update when the Top 50 changes?
If not, how long should the playlist exist before it does check the Top 50 again?
What about the ordering of songs? Should they remain in Chart order? If so, should the playlist reflect the current order at any given point of time?

The list goes on...

However, the idea does have merit. I suggest you send Apple feedback about this. I know they're focusing quite strongly on Apple Music etc and something like this is certainly worthy of consideration. I'd make sure your feedback covers the fact that you've considered some of the issues of implementing this and, if possible, suggest how you'd deal with those.


IPhone app to block callers at specific times? Is there an app or any other way on an iPhone 5 to block a given caller at specified times?

Specifically, work keeps calling at all times of the day, every day. Is there a way to send their calls (and not everyone else's) to voicemail on evenings and weekends, but ring normally during working hours?

Do Not Disturb can do that, no 3rd party app needed.

You might have to juggle a new contacts group, because it only allows to receive calls from one group at a time, or favourites - so to exclude 'work' you might need to create a new group containing 'everyone else'

You can also toggle it manually from the Lock Screen


Cannot write to SMB Share with Terminal OS X 10.8 I am trying to copy some files from my local drive to a SMB share I have set up on my home network using Terminal, but I keep getting this error:

fchmod failed: Permission denied

The share is set up on a Freenas server and the folder permissions is set to 777. I can copy the files ok with Finder so I don't know why its not working in Terminal.

The problem here is that terminal is trying to write Unix style permissions to the CIFS share during the copy operation.

When you perform "cp" via terminal the data will transfer but the fchmod command will fail as the "core CIFS protocol does not provide unix ownership information or mode for files and directories".

A few solutions:

Mount the share via command line and engage the noperm option to ignore permission errors.

mount_smbfs -o noperm "//DOMAIN;username@myshare.com/blah" /Volumes/blah

Alternatively you can use rsync to copy files (without the -a flag)

rsync -rl source destination.

Source: https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/mount.cifs.8.html


How to find items located in subfolders? I have files that I link images to regularly and now when I go to the main folder location, the finder does not search in the subfolders.

I get the “Name matches” line but it does not find anything.

This is on a Mac Pro using 10.9.5

If the folder is excluded from Spotlight, search function in Finder would not work there.


iPhone won't ring, only vibrates I have my iPhone5 set on "Vibrate on Ring"  and the volume is not on mute, but when someone calls, it only vibrates. I've included it in Notifications Center, but that doesn't seem to do anything. Do Not Disturb has also been turned off.
How do I fix this?

I assume that you have checked that the hardware switch on the side of the phone isn't set to silent?

Right near the volume buttons is a switch, if it shows red then your phone is on silent, flick it up and the phone is no longer on silent.


Soldered RAM in macbook air 2015 This question is just to fulfil my curiosity about how my mac works.

I have a macbook air (2015) with 8GB of soldered RAM.
And for what I know 2 RAM modules of 4GB are faster than 1 module of 8GB because they work in parallel and each has it's own bus, but as it is soldered there are no modules, so, are they more like 2x4GB, 1x8GB, 4x2GB, ...?

From the images at iFixit.com, you can see that the RAM, soldered directly onto the MBA logic board (4GB of RAM in orange outline,) is not soldered onto a RAM carrier as you would find in a computer with removable RAM. I have no absolute proof, without diving into arcane documentation, but I'm sure Apple has designed the RAM to be interleaved if that is the technology they are using.


iPhone 5 and 5s lock screen flashing Apple logo We have three iPhones in my house: two 5's and one 5s. Over the past 6 months every few weeks they glitch. What happens is that at exactly midnight eastern time all three phones start showing the lock screen for two seconds, followed by a second of a black screen, followed by five seconds of the Apple logo on a white background. During this time the phone is running. When on the lock screen you can actually swipe left and start entering your unlock code, but you will get interrupted. This usually goes on for at least 6 hours. Hard resetting the phone does not fix it: you just boot to the same state. Restoring from a backup does fix it and seems to be the recommended solution on the Apple forums.

If I do not do a restore from backup, the problem resolves itself usually by around 10am.

This happened with all iOS 7 updates including the 7.0.4.

This is a huge problem. First, it lights up the whole room and drains the battery. If not on the charger, the phone will die and our alarms will not go off. If on the charger, the phone will keep buzzing like you just plugged it in. BTW, we use standard Apple cables and chargers. Restoring from backup takes a long time and I do not wish to do that for three phones in the middle of the night. There are of course other inconveniences, like not being able to dial 911.

Someone please tell me I am not alone in having this issue. It seems like a huge bug in iOS and in just a bit I am going to try to call Apple to see if I can figure out how to report it. In the meantime, I'd just like to see if the three iPhones in my house are the only ones that are experiencing this or if this is widespread.

Edit: Turns out an iPad Air we have also had the same problem. The only iOS device that did not is a third generation iPad.

Edit 2: Just called Apple. Their senior support person has never heard of this issue, so they are escalating to the development team. We'll see what they say...

Edit 3: Have not experienced the same issue but never heard back from Apple. Seems like the 7.1 update helped. If anyone else is still experiencing this issue, please respond.

I had this exact same problem. It has to do with recurring calendar events. This mainly occurs when the phone is syncing with Microsoft Exchange, but may occur in other circumstances. You need to find any recurring calendar events and simply delete them. Adding an end date will not fix the problem. It took me about a month of looking through device logs to figure this out.


AppleScript to record webcam video I am new to AppleScript and trying to write a script to record from webcam for say X seconds.

The script below gives an error that I do not have permission to save this file to Desktop. How can I avoid this error?

Secondly how can I save the file with Date and Time stamp appended in the name of the file?

tellapplication "QuickTime Player"
  set newMovieRecording to new movie recording

  tell newMovieRecording
  start
  delay 5
  pause
  save newMovieRecording in "/users/rohitbhutani/desktop/movie.mov"
  stop
  close newMovieRecording
  end tell

Someone at Apple communities helped me resolve the issue. Posting an answer if someone faces the same issue.

 set theCurrentDate to current date
set dateTime to short date string of theCurrentDate & space & time string of theCurrentDate
set P to offset of "/" in dateTime
set dateTime to text 1 through (P - 1) of dateTime & "-" & text (P + 1) through -1 of dateTime
set P to offset of "/" in dateTime
set dateTime to text 1 through (P - 1) of dateTime & "-" & text (P + 1) through -1 of dateTime
set theFilePath to "/Users/rohitbhutani/Desktop/movie " & dateTime & ".mov"

tell application "QuickTime Player"
     set newMovieRecording to new movie recording
     tell newMovieRecording
           start
           delay 5
           pause
           save newMovieRecording in POSIX file theFilePath
           stop
           close newMovieRecording
     end tell
end tell


Can I sync the to do list in Microsoft Entourage to an iPod touch? Is it possible to sync the to do list in Entourage to an iPod touch. My Dad has his whole to do list in Entourage and would like to sync it with his iPod touch. How do I go about doing this?

It should be possible. The to-do list would be considered 'tasks', which falls under the category of Calendar Events.

in Entourage, choose Entourage > Preferences and click Sync Services under General Preferences:

More information: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1670


camera roll "usage" number does not match photos in the app I have completely deleted all photos in all categories from my iPad 3 (16G iOS 7) but my settings continue to state that I still have 3.5G "used" (camera roll) in the Photos/camera app. I have no idea where/what these photos are and how to get rid of them. The  management tool in i tunes when sync'ed with my iPad gives the following data. Apps: 2.45G  Documents/data 1.25G  Other 5.05G  and 4.47G free.

Go to Settings > General > Date & Time
Untoggle "Set Automatically"
Manually set the date a year or two in the past
Open "Photos"
Select "Albums"
If, like me, you had already cleared out everything from the Camera Roll and "Recently Deleted" folder, you'll smile to see that your "Recently Deleted" folder now has thousands of images back. Those are your phantom photos
Open it, "Select" and start deleting
Return to "Date & Time" and fix your clock
Now, go back into Settings > General > Usage > Storage > Manage Storage. You'll notice your Photo & Camera is empty if you deleted everything

Via the official Apple forums.


Where is the "Computer Name" screensaver stored in Mac OS X? I've looked in:

System/Library/Screen Savers
Library/Screen Savers
~/Library/Screen Savers

I wish to explore the package contents for a personal project I'm working on. I've done iOS apps in the past, but recently got the urge to make my own screensaver.

The "Computer Name" screensaver is stored in /System/Library/Screen\ Savers/FloatingMessage.saver.

Displaying the computer name is just the default text for this screen saver, you can enter other texts in the Screen Saver Preferences.


Can't get rid of incomplete download bar underneath dock icon My Downloads folder in my dock has been showing a download/progress bar at 50% since yesterday. There aren't any half-complete files in my Download folder, Google Chrome isn't awaiting any action to accept or discard an upcoming download nor am I copying anything into that folder.

Here's a screenshot of my dock:

The only files in my Downloads folder are OS X generated dotfiles:

➜  ~ ls -A Downloads
.DS_Store  .localized

A few things that I tried to fix the problem (unsuccessfully):

killall Dock
repairing permissions
rebooting
removing the icon from the dock and putting it back in
downloading something to see if the new progress would overwrite the problem

How do I get rid of this progress bar that seemingly does nothing but exist?

I'm using Mac OS X 10.8.1 on a MacBook Pro 9,1.

you don't need to remove/delete the Downloads folder from the dock and re add it, just move it in a new position and the re position it to the old one


How to stop finder copying files to a second hard disk Is there any way to to tell Finder to default to moving rather than copying files from my main system disk to another disk?

My main system disk is too small and I have a secondary 'main' disk which I use for media, larger files and the like. I know I can hold down Command to change the behaviour transfer by transfer, but sometimes I forget or hit the wrong key or Finder just decides it'll do a copy anyway. Move, rather than copy, is almost always what I want when transferring files between these two disks so that would be a better default for me.

As far as I am concerned, there is no way to change the default behaviour.

Keyboard
Make your selection in Finder and hit CMD+C.
Open the target folder and hit CMD+Alt+V and Finder will move the files to your desired location.

Mouse
Hold CMD while you drop your selection to the target folder. Mac OSX will then move the files instead of copying.

Personally, I prefer using the keyboard when moving around large selections.


Can't connect iPhone as an audio input to my Mac I've been trying to get my iPhone audio to channel through my Mac, and what I read was that if I plug my iPhone into my Mac, I can open Audio MIDI setup and click "Enable" under the iPhone, and then it will be as I want it.

However, if I click enable, the word "iPhone" and a USB icon appear in the menu, with everything greyed out.
If I click the [name]'s iPhone with the iPhone next to it, It just says
" Press the Enable button to place your iOS device in Inter-device Audio and MIDI Mode. In this mode, your iPhone or iPad will appear as an audio input device on your Mac, enabling the recording of non-telephony audio via the Lightning to USB cable. This setting also permits sending and receiving MIDI messages through the Lightning to USB cable using your favourite music applications"

There is no issue with USB lockdown or anything, because I can go into iTunes and sync my music, Podcasts, etc.
I have tried playing music through the Apple Music app to check, but it plays through the iPhone speakers.
Anyone know what the problem is here?

You just overlooked ther fact that by the time your iPhone button says "Disable",
it is already connected!

Go to your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)/Preferences/Audio and point to your iPhone as an Input Device.

In Ableton:

and in Logic Pro X for example:

Hope this helps!


How I was able to play Apple Music in the car with disabled cellular data? I'm travelling outsude my home country and my data roaming is turned off on my iPhone, the car is rented Mini Cooper Countryman 2017. I usually connect the iphone via USB or Bluetooth and the car multimedia is paired with it. I don't use Apple Car Play (the multimedia screen looks like native Mini Cooper multimedia).  The strange behaviour that I figured out is that I have no music downloaded on my iPhone (doublechecked it, i have big library though) but while connected to the car multimedia I'm able to navigate the music library from car display and listen arbitrary music from the library. This music is not downloaded nor the mobile internet icon is showing up on the iphone status bar. How can the car multimedia play music?

You were likely able to play music that had been cached locally on your device. Apple Music caches songs as you play them so that, if you play them again, they play locally from your device.

In the future, if you're inclined to test out this theory, you can clear your Apple Music cache prior to a trip and then observe whether you're able to play any music.


Intermittent Active Directory login issues on Lion We bought a 27" iMac for our CEO. And we brought in some consultants to hook it up to our windows Active Directory using ADmitMac. Back when we were on 10.6.x things were hunky dory. But then our CEO upgraded to 10.7 and the fun started.

The fun I'm referring to is a horribly maddening and difficult to reproduce issue where sometimes when the mac comes out of sleep mode it refuses to accept his active directory credentials until we reboot the system. Typically this happens at a critical juncture resulting in a very angry CEO. Angry CEOs are not good for stable employment.

Any idea how to isolate and fix this issue, short of just rebuilding the iMac and praying?

UPDATE: apparently clicking switch users also allows him to login.

I think we ran down the culpert -- said CEO upgraded himself to Lion without our knowledge and consent. And turned on the wifi to an AP that can't resolve our domain controllers. Sometimes, when logging back in, he reached out on the wrong connection and it got a bit confused.


Can Library folder on iMac be moved to iCloud Drive? My disk in my iMac, High Sierra is about full. The biggest culprit by far is the /User/myname/Library folder which is taking up 96 GB. Since I have over 100 GB of icloud storage could I move the Library folder to the icloud drive and create a link? How do I do that so iMac still can access the Library.  If this is a stupid question I apologize.

OmniDiskSweeper says ~/Library is 73.9 GB. Don't know where the other 22 GB went.  From OmniDisksweeper the storage hogs in ~/Library are:

Application Support - 20 GB with MobileSync being the major player
Containers - 18 GB  with com.apple.mail being the major player
Mobile Documents - 18 GB with com~apple~CloudDocs being the hog.

No.

Firstly, relying on an internet connection to access preferences, caches, and other system/user 'working' files is likely to be problematic. As mentioned in the comments, iCloud is handled locally by a folder in the user Library, so having this itself in iCloud might be confusingly recursive.

It's worth checking whether all of that 96 Gb is necessary: it may include iPhone or iPad backups, which are frequent culprits for taking up space. Use an app like OmniDiskSweeper to search the library, sorted by size. That will show you what is taking the space, and you can then make a decision about whether it can be moved or deleted.


What to ask when buying a used iPhone 4 I'm in the process of procuring a used iPhone 4. What are things I should ask and know about prior to closing the deal?

Someone mentioned to me that I should ask:
- If it's still under warranty
- If it's new, replaced (for $200), or refurbished

What else?

Make sure at the least you know all of the above.
There are no hard and fast rules about buying second hand products, but mostly common sense and getting the greatest idea possible about what you're buying before committing.
If its from a friend or someone you know, you're immediately in a better position as its easy to see the phone and hopefully you can trust them.
If it at any point however seems too good to be true, it probably is.

The price on the site for a new iPhone 4 is currently £429 for 8GB so the question to ask is why are they selling it for half of that. It may be because they just have no need of it and aren't looking for lots of money and want a quick sale, or they may have got water damage, been unable to charge it, and are trying to get rid of it for as much as possible. (I had a water damaged 3GS and if someone had offered me £200 for it I would have laughed at them!)

I would ask for a serial number so you can use the support section of Apple's website to check about warranty, etc.

Perhaps a picture of all surfaces to show any scuffs or marks.

And ask if it is locked to a network. Its very easy to unlock if you are techno-minded but you can be charged to do it at a lot of places. (This is not a huge issue for the most part.)

Other than that it's mostly common sense, if you want to go as far as ask for a video showing it working fine, then that could work. ButI would say, if it doesn't feel right at any point, just don't bother, save for a little longe,r and buy a newer one from a reputable source. Not to say this person isn't completely honest at all. But it's better to be safe and wait a little than get a broken phone and be down £200. I hope that helped, maybe at least to confirm what you might have thought.

Also, it's important to know if the phone is GSM or CDMA (which will affect what plans you can buy), and which carrier it's locked to -- if any. This is especially important with iOS6, which can only be factory unlocked.


WiFi + LAN network bridging issue I'm trying to bridge a wifi network to some devices that are network connected directly to my MacPro but am running into problems.
Both networks work fine on their own but when bridged both go inactive, and I also lose WiFi controls i.e. what network to choose in my available area.
Is there something i'm doing wrong? I couldn't find any meaningful Apple documentation on the feature.

go to System Preferences > Sharing and check "Internet Sharing" and choose WiFi in the first drop down and Thunderbolt in the second.


Weird Wireless Issue - Looks like lost connection, but not really Well, this is really hard to explain.

I have two macs at home, a late 2012 macbook pro and a early 2012 macbook air. I also have some other gadgets with android and firefox OS. My wife had, before the macbook air, a hp notebook with windows 7, and I had a dell with arch linux.

When I had that old dell with arch linux, sometimes, the internet just stop to work. I never minded because my wife laptop with windows 7 didn't had that bug, so, I taught it was a hardware issue, since it was a pretty old machine.

Anyways, now, both of us have macs, and that same problem happens with both of us. Sometimes with Androids too, but, in macs, it happens very often. Sometimes I just have to turn wireless on and off again several times in a minute...

I investigate the system.log and found nothing interesting. At network.log, i found this:

Wed Sep 25 00:05:32.095 <airportd[80]> _handleLinkEvent: Unable to process link event, op mode request returned -3903 (Operation not supported)

But it doesn't happens every time I have connection problems. I pretty new to OSX and can't found any other log files with useful information...

What happen is that the internet stops working, but the network icon still "darker", i.e., it still connected, but I can't access even my home network.

Do anyone have any idea about that? The router is a ISP-provided tecnicolor td5130, seems like it only exists in brazil.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

I just bought another router and aparently the issue disapear.


How can I activate Mac speech without pressing a key? I just bought a microphone to test built in mac speech. On the speech preference, I can choose which keyboard key to make mac to listen to my voice.

Is it possible to make my mac to listen continuously without pressing a key?

I know that I can make mac listen to me without a voice command (ex: mac, [command]), but i don't like it..

This is quoted directly from the Speech Recognition Settings preferences:

Listen only while key is pressed:

  With Speakable Items turned on, you can also select this method by
  speaking the command “Turn on push-to-talk.”

Listen continuously with keyword:

  Use the “Keyword is” pop-up menu to change when you need to speak the
  keyword. Use the Keyword field to specify what the keyword is.


Dual boot Kali with Mac I want to dual my Macbook with Mavericks 10.9.4 and Kali 1.0.8. I have downloaded the Kali .iso and "burnt" it to a USB stick using the dd command from in Terminal. I have partitioned my hard drive and left 50GB for Kali. I want to boot from the USB to install Kali (I'm pretty sure this is the way you are supposed to do it). However, when I hold down the option key at boot time and select the USB, my MacBook freezes. I have read stuff on google about grub. I am supposed to use that to make it boot? What do I need to do to have a dual boot Mac/Kali system?

Honestly I'd suggest running it in a virtual machine (VM). I used to dual boot, however, at every update it would wipe the Kali install.


Why can macOS have two files with same name? I found there are two files with same names but one with extended attribute while the other not (Actually I used sed command to do in-place operation with one file before):
-rw-r--r--  1 nanxiao  staff   351K Sep 28 12:29 db_chunks.csv
-rw-r--r--@ 1 nanxiao  staff   351K Sep 28 09:55 db_chunks.csv

So when I open db_chunks.csv, which file is actually operated? What is the relationship with these two files?
P.S., my macOS is Catalina.
Edit:
The following is the output of ls -lb:
-rw-r--r--  1 nanxiao  staff  538150 Sep 28 12:29 pcap_chunks.csv
-rw-r--r--@ 1 nanxiao  staff  538658 Sep 28 12:25 pcap_chunks.csv

And although both are csv files, they are classified as different file formats in Finder:

The "Get info" of both files:

You cannot have two files with the same name in the same folder.
If you look closely at the "Get Info" screenshots you've posted - there seems to be a much larger gap between the filename and "Info" on the left-most screenshot compared to the right-most screenshot.
This seems to indicate that you've probably have a space at the end of the name of one of the files. You can just rename the file in Finder to give it a separate name and remove the space.


Mavericks setup fails: "the recovery system can't be created" I've been trying to upgrade from OS X Mountain Lion to OS X Mavericks, but the setup fails after a few minutes with the message that it can not create the recovery system. The relevant installer log items are listed here:

Oct 24 11:47:44 192.168.2.1 OSInstaller[379]: Recovery system creation failed with error -69866 (Couldn't complete copy)
Oct 24 11:47:45 192.168.2.1 OSInstaller[379]: Install failed: OS X can’t be installed on the disk Athena, because a recovery system can’t be created. Visit www.apple.com/support/no-recovery to learn more.
Oct 24 11:47:46 192.168.2.1 OSInstaller[379]: Reverted bless to disk Athena

The complete log is uploaded as a Gist.

When I try to boot in to the existing Recovery environment, by holding Cmd+R on boot, I get booted in to the Internet Recovery. Also, I have checked if the Recovery partition is missing, which it isn't. This is the output of diskutil list:

/dev/disk0
  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
  0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
  1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
  2:                  Apple_HFS Athena                  119.5 GB   disk0s2
  3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

When holding Opt at boot, the Recovery HD does not appear as an option.

What can I do to fix this problem and to upgrade to Mavericks? Thanks!

Apple recommends that you backup, erase and reinstall the original OS X, then try updating again, as per the instructions below. However, it is feasible to merge steps 3 and 4, installing Mavericks in step 3, then restoring your data to that OS.

  Make a full backup of your hard disk and all of its data (including your Boot Camp partition, which is not normally backed up by Time Machine).
  Erase your hard disk and create a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition.
  Reinstall your original copy of OS X.
  Re-download the OS X upgrade from the Mac App Store and retry your upgrade install.

Source: Apple KB Article HT4649

Alternatively, you could use an app such as iPartition to delete the Recovery HD then extend the startup disk to fill the free space. Since there is now no Recovery HD, the installer should have no problem creating one from scratch.


iMac 27", Mid 2010 (11,3 model) I have an iMac 27", Mid 2010 (11,3 model), "Core i7" 2.93 GHz. 4*2GB installed RAM..Plan to upgrade.
Any thoughts, experience if 4 * 8 GB would work if upgraded to or is 16GB with 4*4GB max I can reach?
Thank you

According to everymac.com, the answer is a maximum of 4x8GB=32GB.

Crucial will sell you 2x8GB for $103.99.

OWC will sell you 1x8GB for $39.99 or 4x8GB for $159.99.


Why does the version of Java verified by Oracle differ from the version shown at the command line? Questions

Why do versions differ?

Should we trust Oracle's verification routine?

In some cases, the version verified by Oracle is different from the version shown at the command line.

Example

That example, in detail

According to Oracle in the browser:

Java 7 Update 9

According to the Java Console:

Java Plug-in 10.9.2.05
Using JRE version 1.7.0_09-b05 Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM

According to the java command:

sh-3.2$ java -version
java version "1.8.0-ea"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0-ea-b58)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.0-b02, mixed mode)

Problematic uses of terminology

Where Oracle describes first Java for "your operating system" then "for your computer", the download is more accurately only for things that use the Internet plug-in:

jre-7u13-macosx-x64.dmg installs what's required for that plug-in, but for things that use Java without the plug-in, this installer from Oracle does nothing.

Hint

On OS X: if you want a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) from Oracle to be like the JRE in the diagram below for both (a) things that use the Internet plug-in and (b) things that use Java without that plug-in:

at Java SE Downloads, ignore the JRE; download and install the JDK
and – if you require a greater version – at JDK 8 Early Access Releases — Java.net, ignore the JRE; download and install the JDK.

Additional explanation

Apple's distribution of Java is more than an Internet plug-in.

The Oracle routine pictured above leads to nothing more than a plug-in. Other parts of Apple's distribution are unaffected by Oracle's installer.

Installation of a JDK from Oracle will place a folder at the following path, overriding (not removing) the JDK from Apple:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines

Within each JDK there is a JRE. Please see the diagram below.

Oracle do actually document this (although it has taken 3 1/2 years to find it) See Oracle's page on OSX command line

  The Java Runtime (JRE) that you download from java.com or oracle.com contains a plugin to run Java content from your browser. In order to use the command line tools, you will need to download the Java Development Kit (JDK). The JRE and JDK are separate and can coexist on your system. Only one JRE can be installed on Mac OS X. There can be multiple JDKs installed on a system, as many as you wish.

Thoughts

The huge red button "Download Java Now" is too simplistic. Too many users, including some technical experts, are ultimately puzzled by the end result.

Where a Mac browser is detected by Oracle's server, one of the following phrases might be less misleading:

Download Java for your browser
Download the Internet-plug-in

Critically

Oracle should offer some explanation in its Mac FAQ (Information and system requirements for installing and using Mac Java 7). The current undated edition of that page lacks an explanation.

Positively

Some users desire or require the JRE of the Internet plug-in to differ from the JRE used elsewhere. For these users, Oracle's effective separation of things may be welcomed.

An example:

in Safari and other browsers I use the most recent Java 7 Update 13
for Wuala.app and for other things that do not use the Internet plug-in I use early access, developer preview release Java 8 (Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment build 1.8.0-ea-b75).

YMMV.

Reference items

Java Help Center

under Terminology, see Versions.

Java Platform Standard Edition 7 Documentation

In the diagram below, from that page, focus on:

to the left, the vertical span of the JRE
the orange uppermost layer of the JRE – Java Web Start and Apple/Java Plug-in

Related

How can I switch between the two Java versions in Mountain Lion now that Java Preferences is gone?


Using terminal, how can I install a DMG file without sudo rights? All of the answers to this question Is there a command to install a dmg work for me in installing a DMG file from the command line.

But I don't want to have users need to enter the sudo password, it is inconvenient.

How can I extract a DMG file to a executable directory without sudo? Or is there no way to do that?

DMG is a disk image, not an installer. You can't see from the outside how a piece of software is installed just by it being distributed as a DMG.

That said, if the DMG contains an .app, your user might be able to "install" (copy) it to their ~/Applications/ folder. The software will be only available to this specific user.


a bug in "pbcopy" using "system()" call am losing my hair over this. when using the"pbcopy" in c++ using the system call it doesn't work with foreign languages unless its run in admin using sudo ???

system("echo привиет как дела") - works output : привиет как дела
system("echo test123 | pbcopy") - works, output to clipboard: test123
system("echo привиет как дела | pbcopy") - does not work, output to clipboard: –ø—Ä–∏–≤–∏–µ—Ç –∫–∞–∫ –¥–µ–ª–∞
system("echo привиет как дела | pbcopy") - using sudo to run the c++ app works, output to clipboard: привиет как дела

please help me out i don't want to use objective C NSPasteboard

Essentially what happens is that when you run that echo command without sudo, your locale settings are set to the wrong language and character set (because of your environment variables) - and when you run it with sudo, this is corrected because it then evaluates the environment of the sudo'ed user so that the character is set correct (probably to UTF-8).

This is exactly similar to what happens if you used a computer with macOS set to an English locale and input settings, and then tried to run such a command (for example from a downloaded script). Because the character set is different it would work differently.

I see the same thing often here in Denmark with conflicts over ISO-8859-1 versus UTF-8 (although UTF-8 is becoming more and more ubiquitous). If the character sets do not match, the local characters (i.e. åæø ÅÆØ) becomes garbled after piping into commands such as pbcopy.

In order to avoid this, tweak your command like this when you run it in Terminal or from a program:

echo привиет как дела | LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pbcopy

Setting the character set to UTF-8 means that a very wide range of characters are supported, and it matches the character set you've probably set Terminal.app to.


Certificate signed by an unknown authority in keychain after upgrading to El Capitan I've found a random certificate in my keychain after upgrading to El Capitan on both my Macs. It's called "ENTIDAD PUBLICA EMPRESARIAL RED.ES". It's showing a warning that it was signed by an unknown authority.

Does anyone know what this is used for?

You may check the validity of the certificate including the certificate chain  here:

DigiCert® SSL Installation Diagnostics Tool

or here:

Check your web servers encryption

Both checks show the same chain with different results though:

The certificate ENTIDAD PUBLICA EMPRESARIAL RED.ES as well as the intermediate certificate AC Componentes Informáticos seem to be ok.
SSL-Tools and OS X El Capitan can't properly detect the validity of the root certificate though.


Is it possible to install Tor Browser on iPad? I recently brought an 10.5" iPad Pro that runs mainly on cellular data. I bought this device to travel with my husband over the road in his semi truck.

I have not been able to choose the right Tor browser to download. I tried the version for iOS/macOS which it did download; however I was not able to open the downloaded file no matter what I did.
Is it even possible to run Tor Browser on my iPad with Cellular Data?

What is going wrong and how do I resolve it?

If I am understanding you correctly you are trying to download the macOS version of TorBrowser on your iPad?

If that is correct, that will never work. The only place to download/install/buy applications for iOS devices is the App Store which is itself an app on your iPad.

If you want a good Tor Browser on your iPad I use one called "Onion Browser" that seems to do the trick. Just search the App Store for that name and it will pop up. There are likely others that will doo a decent job too, but that is a good place to start.


Suddenly unable to screenshot- Do not have permission to save files in the location where screenshots are stored Recieved the error:
 'Your screenshot could not be saved. You don't have permission to save files in the location where screenshots are stored.' with OS X Yosemite.

I opened terminal and tried directing the screenshots to save on my desktop:

Brigittes-Air:~ eggsalad$ defaults read com.apple.screencapture location
2017-01-06 03:04:47.765 defaults[17729:1947540]
The domain/default pair of (com.apple.screencapture, location) does not exist

So I tried writing and:

Brigittes-Air:~ eggsalad$ defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop
2017-01-06 03:05:08.652 defaults[17742:1948451] Could not write domain com.apple.screencapture; exiting

I'm not sure where the screenshots are being stored if the location does not exist. Ideas?

EDIT

I ran something else and got a different response, but defaults are still unchanged.

Brigittes-Air:~ eggsalad$ defaults write com.apple.screencapture location/Users/eggsalad/Desktop killall SystemUIServer

2017-01-06 03:22:35.444 defaults[18265:2001767] Unexpected argument SystemUIServer; leaving defaults unchanged.

2nd EDIT
Result of:
ls -l ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.screencapture.plist

was:

ls: /Users/eggsalad/Library/Preferences/com.apple.screencapture.plist: No such file or directory

You may have just gotten the commands wrong. Try

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/eggsalad/Desktop

make sure to press Return, then

killall SystemUIServer

and press Return again.

Then run

defaults read com.apple.screencapture location

As a last resort, just reset all the settings for your user:

 defaults delete com.apple.screencapture


Can the macOS Notification Center be made wider? When the text of a notification gets cut off, I keep wanting to make it wider so I can read more.

I don't think this is possible on macOS. I looked for how developers deal with notification lengths and I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6307748/what-is-the-maximum-length-of-a-push-notification-alert-text

The discussion mostly seems to imply that developers don't have any control over how the notifications are displayed, but rather just standards they have to conform to. Hope that helps!


How can I change spell check to Turkish in Pages? I started to use Pages. I want to change spell check language. But I don't find Turkish in the language menu (inspector of Pages). How can I add Turkish into the language menu? Thanks.

Normally, for a language not included in OS X, you can try adding a dictionary from the OpenOffice app, as explained at

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2011/06/extra-spell-checking-dictionaries-for.html

Unfortunately, Turkish is not there.  Here is a a site with some .dic and .aff files which I have not tested myself.

http://code.google.com/p/tr-spell/downloads/list


How to visualize calendar dates (in Keynote? Or Numbers?) I am having trouble visualizing dates in a presentation. This image is a good example of what I'm hoping to have, but I would like a way to make the slide from a table of dates (rather than making each box by hand, which is what happened here).

Any suggestions? I can use Numbers, Keynote, or Excel or PowerPoint for Mac. Also open to other software options that would do this.

You might want to try the Office "gantt chart" feature to present your data.

  Options for making a Gantt chart

  Although it is not a graphical tool by design, it is possible, with
  quite a bit of formatting, to make a Gantt chart in Excel. You can do
  this by turning your project tables into an Excel Gantt chart using
  Excel's bar graph functionality. It is also possible and significantly
  easier to create much more graphical and more manageable Gantt charts
  in PowerPoint, such as the one above. You can do this by simply
  pasting your Excel project tables into a PowerPoint add-in called
  Office Timeline.

There are many templates available here.


Is it possible to upload files to a website from Safari on iPhone? I'm trying to upload a photo from my iPhone 4 to a website. However, the browse button to display the select file dialog is disabled. Normally this works fine on my Windows PC. Should I be able to select image files to upload from Safari on iPhone?

As of iOS 6, Mobile Safari now supports file (image) uploads, from the Camera Roll, albums, and photostreams. Note that iOS 6 is only available for the iPhone 3GS and newer.


How to search installed apps Do a one finger downward stroke to bring up the search menu.  Type an app name "twitter".  I expect to see the installed application "twitter" because this is the behavior that occurred in iOS 8.  Instead, I see podcasts, mail, messages, notes, websites and bing searches.   I have to manually click through my 100+ installed apps to open them or ask siri to do it.  This behavior began immediately after upgrading to iOS 9.0.

How do I enable search for installed apps in ios 9?

Spotlight can be slow and only returns partial results in some cases.

Solutions include:

Examining free space on the phone and deleting things so that there is about 1 GB of usable storage space.
Power down the iPhone and start it back up. Sometimes keeping a low CPU program running like stopwatch or count down timer can let the background process that updates spotlight get enough CPU time with the device awake to complete the indexing.
Uninstall the app and reinstall it.
Open a support request and they can gather diagnostic logs to determine why your spotlight database isn't updating.


How to change the color of text highlighting in Preview using a shortcut? I need to highlight/underline a lot of text and tend to use specific colors for different things. Accessing via the dropdown menu in Preview is very slow, does any one know a way to change the color of highlighting/underlining by pressing a shortcut?

I'm using Mavericks.

As you probably know the Preview does not have the short cut for that function.

Here is the list of shortcuts that Preview does has.

And many other OS applications shortcuts.


Remove old iMac from network? Every time I boot up my iMac this message appears: 'cannot connect to [the name of my old iMac] server.' The old iMac was finally laid to rest several months ago. How can I remove it from the network preferences in my iMac?

I'm using MacOSX 10.12.6.

I'll hazard a guess that the connection to your old iMac is one you set up on your new iMac. Here are some places to look, if this isn't it, please let us know:

Look in Control Panel, the Users & Groups item, the tab labeled Login items. Is there a reference in there to a folder or anything to do with the old iMac?
In Control Panel, the Sharing item. Open this, and look for anything shared with your old iMac.

Hopefully, it will be one of these, but if not, perhaps edit your question to provide a bit more information. It's difficult to say what information exactly, but an example would be if you used the old iMac as a network connection, used VNC to connect to it, etc.


Cannot detect bootable USB I have a problem with installing windows:

USB Details:

Before I created a (what I classify as) bootable disk properly, I have went through the USB being corrupted because of me killing the dd process when running: sudo dd if=/path/to/windows.iso of=/dev/rdisk1. I forgot the bs=1m, so I killed the process. I used Internet Recovery to reset my disk because normal Recovery HD showed the error "Could not open device". The USB is a 16GB Kingston DataTraveler 100 G3.

Internet recovery deleted my Recovery HD partition and rEFInd.

After resetting the USB with Internet recovery, I ran the dd command again. It did not detect as a Bootable USB in Opt ⌥ menu, nor in rEFInd. I tried to boot "Legacy OS" which led me to a black screen saying "No bootable device found - Insert device and press any key". So I re-plugged my USB and tried pressing a key, without any success. How do I properly (and preferably manually) create a bootable USB that boots Windows on mac, or how do I make the USB I made detectable?

I am running Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

The solution was to plug it into a different USB port. That made it detectable and I could proceed. I set it up with Boot Camp (including the partition), and it reset into the windows setup


How can I ground this charger This charger came with my MacBbook Pro which I bought from India.

The other end is connected to the magsafe adapter's ground pin. What do I need to insert here?

You need an international travel adaptor, from the European plug type, specifically plug types E & F, to an Indian plug, type D.

See WorldStandards - Plug & socket types for further information.

If you are a competent electrician, you could snip off the existing 'foreign' plug & change it for a domestic… I would weigh that against not recognising the plug type & solution & say "Don't do that yourself!"

You can get travel adaptors in any airport & usually at stores that cater to travellers, e.g. luggage stores, or generally in tourist areas.

Note: Apple power supplies are multi-voltage, so you don't need to make any allowances for a potential supply difference between the two. [India & the EU are both 240v anyway, but just for sake of completeness.]


Vanishing images in Notes browser app What I like about Apple's note app is that it supports pictures. However, when I use the browser interface, the pictures disappear after I inserted them and switch to another note. Also, they are not downloaded to the Notes desktop app.

Is there something I could do about it?

I don't think the web interface (iCloud) supports adding pictures (yet). The only way to add pictures to a note is using notes.app from the Applications folder, but you figured that out already.


Fuzzy fonts in external monitor (Dell) I recently switched to using Macbook Pro  MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) and it is running MacOS High Sierra verison 10.13.6 .
When I connect it to an external monitor (DELL U2414H) I notice that font display is grainy and fuzzy, as shown in this screenshot:

I am connecting to the external monitor via HDMI. I see similar display when I connect to the external monitor using Displayport.

I searched through the forums and I tried below approaches:

forcing to RGB mode as explained here: https://www.mathewinkson.com/2013/03/force-rgb-mode-in-mac-os-x-to-fix-the-picture-quality-of-an-external-monitor.
enabling/disabling _LCD Font Smoothing
Setting various values to AppleFontSmoothing
(i.e. running the command defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing 2)
Restart the machine multiple times, resetting NVRAM and SMC settings
Open the app in low resolution mode

But none of these steps helped, and fonts on my external display still appear fuzzy. I understand that in the external monitor the fonts can't appear as crisp they are on built in display. But I didn't expect the fonts to appear fuzzy on the external monitor. FWIW I was using a Macbook with out retina display prior to switching to this model, and didn't had any issues with display of fonts in the external monitor as I am currently facing.

Is there a solution to make the fonts to appear without any fuzziness apart from buying a new external monitor ?

This is the solution, It really worked for my 1920x1200 old monitor

Just follow the steps I made, because original receipt has some inaccuracies


Open menù on fullscreen app I'm using this arrangement for my notebook + 24inch monitor.
I primarily work on my notebook and the big screen is used just for secondary stuff.

The problem is that i cannot use full-screen application on the lower screen because there is no way to open the menù. Usually you have to put your mouse on the top of the screen, but in this arrangement when you move the mouse to the top, it simply jumps to the other screen.

Any advices?

You can use keyboard shortcut to get focus on menubar with ⌃ CTRL+F2. This will show menubar also in fullscreen apps.

Note: when You use Your F2 key for brightness control, You need to add fn to this shortcut to work properly.


Error installing Nvidia driver for Mac Pro I am fairly competent with computers, but I've run into a problem that has me completely stumped. I have an Nvidia Quadro K1200 graphics card in my Mac Pro tower. I have used the Nvidia drivers with no problems, up until a few weeks ago, when Apple released the security update for OS X 10.11. When I tried installing the new driver, it gave me an error. I have now gotten this error in both OS X 10.11 and macOS 10.12, with both driver versions 346.03.15f03 and 367.15.10.05f01. The error appears after running through the whole install dialogue:

Now, I looked at the logs in the Console and it appears to be some kind of SandboxViolation or System Policy error. Here is the list of errors that occurred during the installation:

I can add the full text of the errors if that would be helpful, but I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas of what the problem is and how to fix it.

I will answer my own question. Thanks to the help of the fabulous commenters, I managed to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) and install the driver. However, because I couldn't see the screen I had a bit of trouble. I booted the Mac Pro into target disk mode, then took an Apple laptop and used a FireWire -> thunderbolt cable to connect the two. I booted the laptop holding down the alt key. I selected the Mac Pro's recovery partition and booted into that. I disabled SIP in there. However because SIP is hardware specific, I had to change the laptop's startup disk to the one from the Mac Pro. I let it reboot, then installed the driver and shut off both computers. I booted both the laptop and Mac Pro up. The Mac Pro had installed the driver and still had SIP enabled. The laptop rebooted from its internal SSD. I hope this helps someone else!


2nd hand iMac with no OS I have just got a second hand iMac (Core 2 Duo 2.4 20" Mid 2007) Which has been fully wiped. I have connected it to wifi and am trying to install OS X by using the reinstall option but when I log in to the App Store it just says item temporarily unavailable. It seems to have decided that El Capitan 10.11 is what its looking for but cannot access it to download it.

Any suggestions so that I can get an OS on to this computer and actually use it?!

Thanks.

I have a 2007 iMac. A while back, I replaced the internal drive with a 1 TB hard disk. The Mac still has a working optical drive. Currently, the mac has 64 bit Windows 10 Pro, Ubuntu Linux, Yosemite and El Capitan installed. I am fortunate, in that I have a 2011 iMac running High Sierra and a Snow Leopard DVD.

One path to reinstall would be to install Snow Leopard from a DVD. Apple still sells the DVD for 20 USD. If necessary, you should upgrade to OS X 10.6.8. One way to accomplish this would be to download the Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1. Finally, the current instructions for upgrading to El Capitan can be found here. This site has a this link to the Apps Store where El Capitan can be downloaded.

Another path would be find someone who has purchased (for free) El Capitan. If this person has access to a Mac running High Sierra or earlier, then they can download El Capitan to this Mac. El Capitan can be transferred to a bootable USB flash drive installer. The instruction are given here. Basically, the command below needs to be executed on a flash drive formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with the label (Name) MyVolume.

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app

  Note: I also have a 2013 iMac running Mojave. When accessing the Apps Store, the Yosemite and El Capitan operating systems do not appear. So accessing previous purchases now depend on the version of macOS your are using.

Update: How to Get and Verify a Snow Leopard ISO File from the Internet

Mac User posted in an answer which states a Snow Leopard ISO file can be download from this website. This site shows an image of a DVD. I happen to have that very DVD. This is OS X version 10.6. So I decided to conduct some research using an iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011) running macOS High Sierra Version 10.13.6. Here is the work and results.

First, I downloaded the ISO file from the website. This was named snow leopard install.iso.

Next, I used the Disk Utility to create a DVD/CD master image of the Snow Leopard DVD named SnowLeopardDVD.cdr. I used the command shasum -a 256 snow\ leopard\ install.iso to get a SHA256 checksum, as shown below.

cbeeb2378c40b20a9b06236f567de593e9030a0a865515b50cf6d35833e25cd5  snow leopard install.iso

The command ls -l SnowLeopardDVD.cdr snow\ leopard\ install.iso produced the following output.

-rw-r--r--@ 1 davidanderson  staff  7771496448 Mar 19 01:11 SnowLeopardDVD.cdr
-rw-r--r--@ 1 davidanderson  staff  7771521024 Mar 18 18:34 snow leopard install.iso

This shows the download to be 24576 bytes larger. I used the hexdump -C -s 7771496448 snow\ leopard\ install.iso to display these extra bytes. The output shown below. This output shows all these extra bytes are zero.

1cf37a000  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
1cf380000

Next, I used the Finder application to mount both files. The snow leopard install.iso file mounted as disk1 and the SnowLeopardDVD.cdr file mounted as disk3. Neither of the next two commands produced any output. This means the disk1 and disk3 are identical to the files that were mounted.

  Note: In some instances, I needed to unmount one or more volumes before using certain commands.

cmp /dev/disk1 snow\ leopard\ install.iso
cmp /dev/disk3 SnowLeopardDVD.cdr

The output from diskutil list disk1 and diskutil list disk3 is shown below. The output shows the partitions are the same type and size.

/dev/disk1 (disk image):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        +7.8 GB     disk1
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         30.7 KB    disk1s1
   2:         Apple_Driver_ATAPI                         1.0 GB     disk1s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Mac OS X Install DVD    6.7 GB     disk1s3

/dev/disk3 (disk image):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        +7.8 GB     disk3
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         30.7 KB    disk3s1
   2:         Apple_Driver_ATAPI                         1.0 GB     disk3s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Mac OS X Install DVD    6.7 GB     disk3s3

None of the commands shown below produced any output. This means the partitions are identical.

cmp /dev/disk1s1 /dev/disk3s1
cmp /dev/disk1s2 /dev/disk3s2
cmp /dev/disk1s3 /dev/disk3s3

Next, I execute the command cmp -l SnowLeopardDVD.cdr snow\ leopard\ install.iso. Only the first and last 2 lines of the output is shown below.

1034487809 343   0
1034489856  65   0
cmp: EOF on SnowLeopardDVD.cdr

Since I now know both files are using the Apple_partition_scheme, I can post the output from the commands pdisk -lr /dev/disk1 and pdisk -lr /dev/disk3, as shown below. Again the partitions appear to be the same type and size.

Partition map (with 2048 byte blocks) on '/dev/disk1'
 #:                type name       length   base    ( size )
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple          15 @ 1
 2:  Apple_Driver_ATAPI Macintosh  505105 @ 16      (986.5M)
 3:           Apple_HFS Mac_OS_X  3289554 @ 505122  (  6.3G)
 4:          Apple_Free                 3 @ 3794676

Device block size=2048, Number of Blocks=3794679 (7.2G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

Partition map (with 2048 byte blocks) on '/dev/disk3'
 #:                type name       length   base    ( size )
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple          15 @ 1
 2:  Apple_Driver_ATAPI Macintosh  505105 @ 16      (986.5M)
 3:           Apple_HFS Mac_OS_X  3289554 @ 505122  (  6.3G)
 4:          Apple_Free                 3 @ 3794676

Device block size=2048, Number of Blocks=3794679 (7.2G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

Since I now know the block size is 2048 bytes, I can convert the byte counts given as output from the last cmp command to blocks, as shown below.

1034487809 bytes = 505,121 blocks * 2048 bytes/block + 1 byte
1034489856 bytes = 505,122 blocks * 2048 bytes/block + 0 bytes

The above conversion shows all the differences occur in the one unused 2048 byte block between the Apple_Driver_ATAPI and Apple_HFS partitions.

The next commands extend the SnowLeopardDVD.cdr file by 24576 bytes of zeros. The following command zeros the 2048 byte block between the Apple_Driver_ATAPI and Apple_HFS partitions in then SnowLeopardDVD.cdr file.

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1 count=24576 seek=7771496448 of=SnowLeopardDVD.cdr
dd if=/dev/zero bs=2048 count=1 seek=505121 conv=notrunc of=SnowLeopardDVD.cdr

The command given below produces no output, thus confirming the SnowLeopardDVD.cdr and snow leopard install.iso files are now the same.

cmp SnowLeopardDVD.cdr snow\ leopard\ install.iso

The result of this research is outlined below.

The ISO I download is authentic. The differences that occur outside the partitions are not used and are zero in the ISO file.
If another website promotes the download of an ISO file of this same DVD, you can use the information in this answer to verify if the download is authentic. This is why I included the SHA256 checksum of the ISO file I downloaded.


How do I unhide columns in Numbers using AppleScript? How do I unhide columns in Numbers using AppleScript? I created a custom shortcut so that ⌘+U unhides all columns, so I have tried this so far:

tell application "Numbers"
    open POSIX file "/path/to/file"
    tell document "file"
        set active sheet to sheet "sheet"
        tell table "table" of sheet "sheet"
            set selection range to range "A1"
            tell application "System Events" to keystroke "U" using command down
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

I get no error message, but the columns are still hidden.

I am using the latest version of MacOS, AppleScript, and Numbers.

I figured it out. As user3439894 said, there was a conflict between the shortcuts for underlining and unhiding columns. I changed it to ⌃+U.

I needed to activate the window before shortcuts could be used on it.

tell application "Numbers"
    activate
    open POSIX file "/path/to/file"
    tell document "file"
        set active sheet to sheet "sheet"
        tell table "table" of sheet "sheet"
            set selection range to range "A1"
            tell application "System Events" to keystroke "u" using command down
        end tell
    end tell
end tell


Keychain Access Webform Passwords Greyed Out Trying to export Keychain Access webform passwords. When I select one, the export option is greyed out. It doesn't matter which one I select, they are all greyed out and cannot be exported. How can I move these to a new laptop?

When using the Keychain Access application, only Certificates and Private Keys can be exported. It is not possible to to export Passwords or Notes using Keychain Access.

Migrating to a new Mac

If you're migrating to a new Mac, this is easy. Just connect your Apple ID and enable Keychain syncing with iCloud. Then when you log into your new Mac and connect the same Apple ID, your keychain contents will automatically download and sync across.

Exporting from the command line

If you really want to export your passwords, perhaps because your new laptop isn't a Mac or because you want to use a different password manager, there are ways to do that on the command-line. There's a method using security dump-keychain but that prompts for your password for every single item. To avoid typing your password many times, you can automate this with AppleScript. Or if you're using a version of macOS prior to Mojave, you might be able to use a third-party tool called keychaindump.