Connection to Wireless Network always breaks down I have a Netgear Wireless Modem Router which I have configured to not broadcast it's SSID and the security level is set to WPA2 with a MAC Adress Filter. When I manually connect to the wireless network through the Wireless settings then my Mac has a hard time to even find the network and just gives the message that the timeout was to long. When I manage to connect with the wireless network then my Mac will hold the wireless connection for sometime until some random time the mac will disconnect itself from the wireless Network and then I will have to repeat the same procedure with reaching the wireless Network.

Does Anyone know what is causing these troubles?

Could be one of many, many things.  Have you tried altering the security settings on the router?  Are you close to the router?  Strong signal strength?

Have you tried connecting other laptops?  Is the behaviour different?

Try opening your console (/Applications/Utilities/Console) and connecting.  Show the log list and switch to the system log.  Watch it, connect to your wireless network, and wait for it to disconnect.  Look through the log from the time you connected to the time it disconnected, and see if there are any messages which might indicate what's going on.

Your question is not specific enough, yet, for a proper answer.  Give us more to go on.


Emoticons built in to the iPhone keyboard? This Christmas, I got several text messages from my Mom on her new iPhone 3G.
Several of them included emoticons in the body of the text like so:

I know she hasn't jailbroken her phone or installed any apps from the App Store.
I do know that she has iOS 5.

What are the step-by-step instructions to enabling emoticons on an iPhone?

Click Settings > General > Keyboard
Click International Keyboards then select the Emoji keyboard.
Switch between the two keyboards using the little globe icon to the left of the spacebar.


Syncing iPod to computer 2 without erasing new music I have two computers with iTunes. All the music from Computer 1 has been downloaded to my iPod. I would like to download all that music onto Computer 2. However, Computer 2 has newer music on it that is not on my iPod/Computer 1. I can't figure out how to get the music from my iPod onto Computer 2 without erasing the new music. Suggestions? Thanks.

PS: Both of computers are on Mac OS.

senuti is the tool I usually recommend in these cases.

On the other hand, can't you just transfer the music from Computer 1 to Computer 2 directly?


Is it possible to find only apps which are compatible for my iOS version? I have read this question regarding App Store updates for older iPads, and I'm in a similar situation to MrDaniel regarding my hardware / software.

This is a different question though: how to find apps, via App Store or otherwise, which will have a version which is compatible?

In the App Store you can filter by iPhone or iPad, but not by iOS version.

If an app has a compatible version, you can buy it through iTunes on another device, and then on the iPad you can download a compatible version via updates. But how to tell which apps you can do this with?

I've found a great site on that. It shows a list of every app that is compatible with any given iOS version. Don't try to download the app from them, though, just get the name of it and find it on the App Store.


How to perform hard / cold reboot of iPhone or iPad? I understand that when I press and release the power button on the top of my iPhone or iPad, it stays on but turns off the screen.

Whereas if I press and hold the power button, a "slide to turn off" control appears on the screen.

Sliding this, as I was told, does turn the unit off, but it does so by suspending the RAM to disk (flash memory, actually.) So, when turning on the iPhone or iPad, it isn't so much rebooting the OS as it is resuming it from flash storage.

How to force the OS to completely reboot on these devices?

See Restart your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support:

iPhone 8 or earlier
Press and hold the Home and Power Button until your iPhone / iPad reboot (ignore the "Slide to turn off"), you can release both buttons when you see Apple logo.
iPhone X
Press and hold Volume up [or down] and Power Button until your iPhone reboots (ignore the "Slide to turn off"), you can release both buttons when you see Apple logo.

See If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch won‘t turn on or is frozen - Apple Support:

If your screen is black or frozen
If your screen is black or frozen, you might need to force restart your device. A force restart won't erase the content on your device. You can force restart your device even if the screen is black or the buttons aren't responding. Follow these steps:

On an iPhone X, iPhone 8, or iPhone 8 Plus: Press and quickly release the Volume Up button. Press and quickly release the Volume Down button. Then, press and hold the Side button until you see the Apple logo.

On an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus: Press and hold both the Side and Volume Down buttons for at least 10 seconds, until you see the Apple logo.

On an iPhone 6s and earlier, iPad, or iPod touch: Press and hold both the Home and the Top (or Side) buttons for at least 10 seconds, until you see the Apple logo.


Does taking live photos store a redundant MOV file? On my iPhone, when I backup my photos with photosync, I notice that I get two files for every live photo.  One HEIC and one MOV.  Eg:
Recents/IMG_0941.HEIC
Recents/IMG_0941.MOV
Recents/IMG_0942.HEIC
Recents/IMG_0942.Mov

What's not clear to me is if this is redundant or just a quirk of photosync.
Is this something the IPhone itself is doing (storing two files on the iphone) or is it likely that photo sync is extracting the MOV file itself?
Are the two files redundant (can I delete the MOV and get back to it from just the HEIC file?)

It is not redundant. Live Photos consist of an high-res image and a video (lower quality than the image).

The HEIC (High Efficiency Image Codec) format is only for images, and it's the one when you actually hit the exposure button.
The .MOV files are displayed when you long press the photo.

Therefore you can extract the single HEIC image from the MOV file (with lower quality though), while you can't turn the single image into a video. This also means, this is something the iPhone is doing and not photo sync. You would also get those files when using AirDrop for example.

Note: Since the video is lower quality than a single image, changing the key frame must change the quality. However, I could imagine (this is speculation though) that Apple might use some ML/smart algorithm to make the new key frame look better (similar to something like night mode, where a lot of processing happens).

Sources:

How does changing key photo in Live photo differ from burst mode?
Live Photos Called 'Best New Feature,' Composed of Separate JPG and MOV Files
Apple Live Photo file format on SO
Live Photo Quality Loss When Changing Key Frame on Apple forums


muting start-up sound on Lion How can I permanently mute the start-up sound on Lion?

StartupSound.prefPane isn't compatible with Lion. I found Psst, and I guess it's the best option, but it still looks like a hack. Any better ideas?

Before I start up my MacBook in the library, I plug in a headset or earbuds (from my phone or iPod).  Hardware mute.  Works with either OS.


Big boo boo on reinstalling OS X Lion. Help! I have OS X Lion and erased the hard drive to prepare and install Maverick. Can you hear the violin playing? Here are the issues:

My hardrive (Toshiba 750G) resized down to its branch hardrive (Macintosh HD) 16G. Why? I tried to reboot and recover from my USB drive but it failed to reboot and instead copied the storage size of my USB drive.
Tried Command R and Option and Command/Option R - all failed to reinstall.
Tried Reinstalling OS X Lion but Apple can't verify my macbook pro.

Guys please I need help. I just don't understand why it won't recognized or reboot from my USB drive. I also have another external hardrive as a backup to reboot but won't work either. And we I look at the Disk Utility image on both devices, I can see the Recovery HD.
What am I doing wrong?

Probably the best thing would be if you have access to another Mac. (if you don't...  well...)

If you do, download the Mavericks installer from the Apple Store but when it automatically launches QUIT out of the installer.

Download Lion Diskmaker (now Disk Maker X) from here:

http://liondiskmaker.com/

This will then make a bootable Mavericks installer to an 8GB or larger flash drive from that Mavericks installer application.

Then just boot from the flash drive and you can install Mavericks.


How to handle stuck updates? I've got a (current other than this latest update - edit macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Update) OS X which has stopped updating.  It lists the update, goes through the install, says to reboot.  However, after rebooting the same update is in the list.  Looking at the history it has "installed" probably a dozen times now...  Obviously it's not working, but whatever is failing is happening silently.  No error messages.  Looking for debugging suggestions if not outright solutions such as "yeah that latest update is just bad".  :-)

Try the combo updater instead - https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1970 for a direct download link which you run like any app.

You can always Google for "10.x.y combo update" & it will be the top hit.
It will apply all updates since 10.x.0 without needing any intermediate updates & is often used to fix odd update glitches.

Failing that, then try reinstalling the OS from Recovery.
This will not affect existing apps, docs etc - though of course, as with any operation like this having a current backup is always wise.


Dismiss MacOS Big Sur notifications with keyboard I have long used an Applescript triggered from a keyboard shortcut to dismiss notifications on MacOS. It worked by simulating a click of the "close" button of every open Notification Center window.
Since upgrading to Big Sur (currently 11.0.1), notifications no longer have a close button. Instead, when you hover over them with the mouse, an "X" button will appear. For a person who has difficulty clicking precisely (I have a slight hand tremor), using the mouse/trackpad is difficult.
Anyone have suggestions on how to restore that functionality so I can just keep my hands on the keyboard?
My Settings
I am using Automator to test this.
In System Preferences > Notifications, I selected Automator:

Allow Notifications is true.
Automator alert style: is Alerts.
Notification grouping is automatic.

Testing

I opened Automator and created a new workflow.
I added three instances of the Display Notification action.
I gave them Title: values of test 1, test 2, and test 3.
And Subtitle: values of subtitle 1, subtitle 2, and subtitle 3.
And Message: values of message 1, message 2, and message 3.
I ran the workflow using ⌘+R.
In the upper-right corner of my screen, I see a notification from Automator stacked over two others. Only notification test 3 is fully visible and it has the notation "2 more notifications" at the bottom.

@AndrewJanian 's Script

Again, thank you, Andrew for providing the script!
I added the line #!/usr/bin/osascript to the start of the script and saved it as andrew.applescript.
I made the file executable. (chmod 755 andrew.applescript).
I ran it in a terminal window (./andrew.applescript)
The result of running is:

the grouped notifications become ungrouped (so I see test 3, test 2, and test 1 stacked top to bottom in the notification area
the terminal displays the following error
./andrew.applescript:370:377: execution error: System Events got an error: Can’t get action "Name:Clear All
Target:0x60000116ff20
Selector:_internal_handleCustomActionWithUiAction:" of group 1 of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of window "Notification Center" of application process "NotificationCenter". (-1728)

I'll try messing around with it to see if I can make it work with modifications.
Note: If I run the script again, starting from the ungrouped state:

it dismisses the top-most notification (test 3)
and it displays the following in the terminal:
action Name:Close
Target:0x60000116ff20
Selector:_internal_handleCustomActionWithUiAction: of group 1 of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of window Notification Center of application process NotificationCenter

Update
I'm posting a most robust version that evolved from my initial post. This seems to do a reasonable job of closing all windows, but it's sometimes slow to execute. As I've stated in the comments, I don't know much about AppleScript, so perhaps someone who knows what they're doing can tell us how to improve the performance.
activate application "NotificationCenter"
tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Notification Center"
        repeat

            try
                set theWindow to group 1 of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of window "Notification Center"
            on error
                exit repeat
            end try

            try
                set theActions to actions of theWindow

                # Try to close the whole group first. If that fails, close individual windows.
                repeat with theAction in theActions
                    if description of theAction is "Clear All" then
                        set closed to true
                        tell theWindow
                            perform theAction
                        end tell
                        exit repeat
                    end if
                end repeat

                repeat with theAction in theActions
                    if description of theAction is "Close" then
                        set closed to true
                        tell theWindow
                            perform theAction
                        end tell
                        exit repeat
                    end if
                end repeat

            end try
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell

Original
Yes, thank you for posting the script, @AndrewJanian.
I received an error similar to @ColinFraizer's when using it as is. I think the issue is the inner repeat over the actions: it's trying to access actions in some cases after the window is closed. A minor tweak fixes this issue for me:
activate application "NotificationCenter"
tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Notification Center"
        set theWindow to group 1 of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of window "Notification Center"
        # click theWindow
        set theActions to actions of theWindow
        repeat with theAction in theActions
            if description of theAction is "Close" then
                tell theWindow
                    perform theAction
                end tell
                exit repeat
            end if
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell


Restoring my current Time Machine (Lion) with my DVD of Leopard? I have bought a new HD and I want to remplace the one I have in my MBP. In wonder if I will be able to restore my current backup made by Time Machine, since I've upgraded my OS to Lion (Using Apple Store). So the only DVD I have is the one I got with my laptop. I think it's Leopard.

Are those 2 versions of Time Machine compatible?

If you have a USB to SATA adapter or drive caddy, you can easily put your new HDD into this, use Disk Utility to partition it with a GUID partition table and format it Mac OS Extended Journaled.

Once that's done, restart your system and hold CMD + R to boot into the Lion recovery mode. From there you can choose to install Lion to your new drive. Once that's done you can migrate from the internal drive so that the new drive is now running Lion and has all of your data.

Now you can safely swap the drives over.

If you have no USB to SATA adapter, or drive caddy, you can create a USB Lion installer with Apple's own Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to install Lion on the new drive, and then restore your data from Time Machine.

You shouldn't need to touch the Leopard DVD this way.


Macbook Pro 2011 Heat Problems This is more a general enquiry into whether I should be concerned, but I have a 2011 Macbook Pro 13" and over the last week and a half I have noticed the left side of the case (power point, QWE keys down to wrist rest) is getting uncomfortably hot during normal operations. I listen to Spotify and work on Google Docs / Transmit / Textmate with 1password in the background, but that's about it.

I installed iStat Pro to see if I could see anything wrong, and I'm seeing the following numbers:
CPU: 64 deg,
Enclosure 1: 35deg
Enclosure 2: 35deg
Enclosure 3: 37deg

and the fan is running at 2000rpm. Is this cause for concern / something I should take into Apple for investigation? I can imagine it being difficult to reproduce because it requires about an hour and a half of use before it starts to heat up noticeably.

Thanks for your help!

Open the computer (have a look at Youtube for instructions) and blow away all dust that has gathered. I use compressed air you can buy in a hardware store for this. If you haven't done it on a computer that is a couple of years old it can make a huge difference.

Good to do it before the summer (if you are located on the northern hemisphere). The problem is that the more the fan blows, the more dust it suck into the computer which makes the fan go even faster etc.


How to comprehensively benchmark SSDs on OS X? I want to benchmark my SSD under different circumstances. Connected through USB3, Thunderbolt and internally (S-ATA).

Unfortunately I can only find benchmarks which concentrate on measuring read and write speeds. I am also (and mostly) interested in the latency.

I tried Xbench and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.

Is there a tool which can benchmark storage devices including their latency?

For the OP, look up fio, I think someone mentioned it somewhere on this. It's the best way to explore the limits of the SSD on your Mac. Just be sure to use the 'direct=0' argument, or you may bork your filesystem.

That said...

Some of the answers here are just absurd! I know the replies are years old at this point, but you absolutely can, and SHOULD, measure IO Latency of an SSD.

tl;dr: SSDs have IO latency like any other storage system, you can measure it.

There's a distinct difference between 'Seek Time', a mechanically-bound metric associated with spinning disk, and 'IO Service Time' which is an aggregate of the latency associated with each step of the I/O process. In environments with spinning disks (including home PCs and Macs), Seek Time is one such step, and can be quite significant in poorly designed/cached/maintained systems (which is probably the vast majority of business systems, and nearly every home system not run by someone skilled in the realm of storage performance tuning).

Generally, folks are referring to this IO Service Time when they say 'latency', and not 'Seek Time', as that metric has become increasingly irrelevant as:

Flash-based storage devices become the norm
Spinning disks inside and outside of the enterprise IT shop bump up against mechanical limitations which simply cannot be exceeded due to physics
Systems needing real performance rely on software optimizations (caching implementations, IO coalescing, maintenance of stripe sets and other tricks to ease the grip Newtonian physics has on the storage system's disks) or expectation management ("If you want faster, don't be cheap, buy flash, otherwise hush.") as most of the ultra-high-performance storage consumers have moved to Flash long ago, taking the pressure off of spinning disk manufacturers to push for that last quarter of a millisecond of seek time performance

When we are evaluating a storage system, we are talking in terms of microseconds most of the time. These days, if a storage system cannot provide consistently sub-5ms performance under any load (for general workloads), it can't hang. For the high performance consumers, we expect consistent sub-1ms response times for the critical workload profiles.

The fastest spinning disks you can get have seek times of over 2ms alone, and that's the best case scenario. Add in the fact that if you're in a RAID array scenario, every disk needs to seek to the desired stripe and they may be all over the place as far as head position, so it can get pretty ugly. (In a pure hardware RAID scenario without caching strategies to lessen this, see above.) Add in to that the time it actually takes to move the desired data, compute parity if necessary, update stripes where applicable... You can see, the benefits of SSDs become obvious immediately, in terms that aren't very hard to articulate, once you know what's up. Hope this rant helps googlers out there in their quest for the knowledges.


How do I change iTunes to new email address I had used an answer for changing my new email address back to my old, as was suggested in a prior recommendation.  Now, the system wants to send a code to my old address in order to make the change. The problem is that I no longer have access to my old email address. As it stands, I no longer can use iTunes as it shows my old address in grey and it doesn't allow me to change it to my new address. What can I do?

If you cannot gain access using the security questions, the only option you have is to contact Apple Support.


Mac Mini locked through Find My iPhone, can't unlock it So my friend locked his Mac with his iPhone using Find My iPhone.
Unfortunately there seems to be no way of unlocking it.

I have provided a picture of it below:

I really hope someone here knows what to do. I appreciate all the help!

When your computer gets locked this way, you need to hold down the option key while booting in order to get access to your computer.  You will select the drive it is on and then enter a password to unlock it.

In the case where that doesn't allow you to fix the issue, you may have an issue with your hard drive. When the folder picture appears in the way it does it can mean that the computer can't find the OS to boot.

This can be because of a few things:

It can't find the drive with the OS to boot

OS got corrupted
Part of the drive where the OS is stored has failed
The Hard Drive went bad or is failing
Worst case: The logic board is failing

You should have him hold down the option key while booting and see if it finds his hard drive, if it does, have him select it and see if it boots.  If that fixes it, great.

I would still have him see a Genius so that they can check his drive to see if it is failing.  If he is under warranty and it is failing, they pop a new drive in for him for free as long as the computer isn't physically damaged.

This has happened to me, the option key thing while booting got me around it until I could get my drive replaced at the Apple Store.

I hope this answer helps you out.


Apple music playlist gone empty after upgrading to Catalina After upgrading to catalina, all Apple music playlists are empty like the below screenshot. I have to right-click the item and choose "Show in Apple Music" to make it display songs like before.

I tried re-login and sync. Does not help. Anyone has similar issue?

This happened to me as well. I had to manually sync my Library:

On the top menu bar click

  Music -> Preferences -> Check the Sync Library Button


How to fix the mail sent (whoosh) sound when disappearing intermittently, especially after iTunes is opened? The "whoosh" sound continues to disappear intermittently, especially after iTunes is opened.

I've restarting my iMac restores the sound but usually not for long.
I've Googled and searched for solutions and have found similar
complaints but no lasting solutions.

How can I fix this?

I got my whoosh back. I lost my mail whoosh after updating to 10.7.2

I resolved it by going into mail preferences, general tab & changing the sounds to "none" and unchecking "play sounds for other mail actions".

Then I quit mail from the top menu bar. I restarted mail, went back into preferences did the opposite: changed sounds to "new messages sound" and checked "play sounds for other mail actions", I then quit mail again from the top menu and then reopened it. Magically, my whoosh was back.

I don't know why it went away after updating. And I don't know why this fixed it, but it did.


What is the Steam gaming platform? What is Steam?
Why should I buy the game on Steam instead from normal retailer?
Can a game bought via Steam played independently?

What is Steam?

According to them, they are  The Ultimate Online Game Platform. What this actually means is that they are a portal for you to buy, play and update games. With certain benefits. But “steam” is just that. They sell games (more on this later), they offer you a community where you can have Friends, Chat with them, unlock achievements, etc. If you’re a user of an iPhone/Pod/Pad that has GameCenter in it, think of Steam as a pseudo GameCenter.

Why Steam and not normal retailer?

The advantages of Steam are a few, and I couldn’t list them all because some things may not be better for everybody, but let’s just say that the strength of the platform and what makes it different from buying a boxed game could be summarized in a few bullets (in no particular order):

Very easy to buy a game (and discover new ones)
Instant buy, start downloading, no delivery costs.
Automatic updates without having to worry
If you buy a game on your Macintosh and one day decide to play it on your Windows computer, provided that the game is supported in that Platform, you can continue your game there, as if nothing has happened. You re-download the game in your Windows machine and voilá.
Friends, Achivements, Progress… Steam as a platform sports game achievements that you unlock by playing.
Discounts, sometimes you will get “cheaper” versions of the games or promos that you can take advantage of.
More, I’m sure there are other advantages but think of an AppStore for games with a plus.

Can games be played independently?

Yes and no. I don’t believe you can copy that game over another machine (tho you could probably install steam on that machine and copy the game… I haven’t tried this). But you can play offline if you don’t have Internet.

Bonus: Is it worth?

If you have a Mac and like gaming, it’s definitely a big plus, as a lot of games get ported and put into the Steam network. If you’re in Windows, I believe the ease of use and “point and click” nature of the service make it worth. And also the fact that you don’t have to pay to use it. Did I mention it’s a free service? ;)

But Does it have Cons?

Some invaluable readers pointed out a few cons, which I will update (and I encourage everybody to contribute):

When you start it, it automatically updates, giving you the sensation that the client is hang. Also if your network speed is not optimal, this process can demand a lot of time.
If your network connection is not good, downloading three gigabytes of game might not be the best idea, given that you usually can’t start playing until almost most (if not all) the content is downloaded.
In order to play offline, you have to log in, and tell steam “I’m going offline”, which kind of voids the possibility of an unexpected loss of connectivity or forgetting to do it before disconnecting for example.
I didn’t mention this, but it’s important to note that not all the Windows games are available on Steam and not all work on OS X. Although decent amount (and growing) catalog is available, not every title is there.

UPDATE: There’s a dedicating gaming community in Stack Exchange for that. Don’t hesitate asking gaming questions there too, those guys may seem like gamers, but they aren’t playing at all ;)


Macbook Pro running Sierra: When I try to log in, it brings me to macOS utilities. Cannot reinstall macOS My girlfriend handed me her Macbook Pro just a little bit ago, saying she cannot log in. Everytime she tries to log into her account, it brings her to the macOS Utilities window. I am not able to log in, and the only thing available to me is the macOS Utilities & terminal. Here is what I tried:

Restore From Time Machine Backup - The Macbook doesn't find and
backups.
Reinstall macOS - Tries to reinstall Sierra, eligibility check works,
I agree to the Terms and Conditions, select OS X Base System (249.79
GB total, 248.23 GB available is this the problem?), select
install, and I get the "An error occurred while preparing the application. Try running this application again." message.
Tried above steps again  after setting correct date using Terminal. Nothing.

I cannot do a clean install, because she has files and documents on the Macbook that she needs for school.

Does anybody know of a way to be able to get back in?

Without being certain it sounds as if you are ending up in Recovery mode, why is another question. It may be that you have a damaged hard drive.

If you have a Thunderbolt cable and another Mac then the easiest way to get the files off the Mac is to boot into Target Disk Mode. Do this by holding down T while the computer boots. You can then connect it to another Mac and read the hard disk as if it was an external drive.

Alternately, if you have an external drive with Mac OS you can attach it and hold down option at boot and then select the external drive as the boot device.


Terminal - Weird spaces included when typing fast Whenever I want to use the pipe operator in the terminal, I get a weird kind of "bug":

As is shown in the image above, I can type the exact same command twice and it will sometimes register it or sometimes include some spacing in the command, as can be seen in the error message. The only difference between the two commands was the speed I typed them, with fast typing the char sequence "| " (without the "") leading to the error.
I've checked in the terminal settings if this sequence somehow triggers a shortcut, but I did not find anything.

In case it matters, I'm using a swiss keyboard. The layout is as follows:

To produce the "|" character, I press "alt + 7". Does anybody know what the cause of this problem is?

You aren't releasing the Alt key (aka Option) quickly enough after typing the "|", so you're getting Option-Space, which is a non-breaking space. This looks like a normal space but gets treated as part of the command name rather than as a separator. See this SuperUser question for some options to disable the Option-Space key combo.


Different Apple ID for HomeSharing and iTunes Store on Apple TV Can I set up an AppleTV with:
- one Apple ID for home sharing
- a different Apple ID for iTunes Store purchases?

I mean: setting the Apple ID for the iTunes Store will change my Home Sharing config on AppleTV?

Thank you

Yes, you can set up iTunes to have an 1 Apple ID signed into the store and a second Apple ID used for Home sharing.

You can also do this on an Apple TV. You are able to have multiple Apple ID's saved on an Apple TV and switch between them to login to the store.


What does the arrow on the bottom left of the folder icon mean? As you see the mysql and mysql-5.7.17-macos10.12-x86_64 under the local path.
The mysql folder icon has a arrow on the bottom left.

Does the arrow mean shortcut to the mysql-5.7.17-macos10.12-x86_64? Or if not, if it is a other mysql entity folder?

The arrow means it is an alias or link, but it could lead anywhere. To find the destination, select the alias and press ⌘I (or right-click and choose Get Info), then look at the ‘Original’ path (or just open it and see where it leads).


Cannot find OSX El Capitan installer after installation I just downloaded and installed Mac OSX El Capitan via the App Store and want to install it on another machine via USB , but I can't find the downloaded installer. Where did it go? I have limited MB's on my internet connection , so I don't want to download it again!

You'll have to download it again because it's gone! The OS X Installer application bundle is automatically deleted when the install is finished, when it's executed from a running occurrence of the OS.  In other words, when doing an in-place upgrade, one needs to first make a copy of the installer if needed to be used again.

As an example, when the Install OS X El Capitan.app was downloaded, it's saved in the Applications folder and a copy of it needs to be made, preferably to another location, first before proceeding with the upgrade.

Note that if you've been using Time Machine, there may be a copy of the Installer application bundle in the backup, however, timing is everything. That is to say, because of the size of the installer and the time of the last backup in conjunction with when the installer was downloaded and used to preform the upgrade, there is the possibility that the copy of the Installer application bundle is not a complete copy.


2009 iMac as 2nd Monitor – Can't adjust brightness I am trying to use my 2009 iMac 27" as a second display for my 2013 MBPr 15" (both running El Capitan). I have connected the two with a thunderbolt cable and everything is working fine except one thing – once the iMac starts acting as a display for the MacBook, it switches to full brightness. When I open up display preferences, the brightness slider that is usually there is gone.

I have seen other people online who had this problem years ago, but was unable to find a solution. Is there any way to adjust the brightness on the iMac when using it as a second display?

Sadly this problem still exists. My work around is as follows

1) Apple F2 to share displays. The screen is usually quite dark.
2) Apple F2 to switch back to iMAC display.
3) I can now adjust the brightness on the iMac, I set it to my desired level.
4) I Apple F2 back to the shared display I initially wanted.

It is indeed quite annoying and generally a bad experience.


Is there a way to enable "Services" menu for an application? Almost every OSx Application has a service menú like this:

But I've found that my HipChat for MAC doesn't have. I don't know if there is a setting that will enable this menu or it is something related to the way the application was created.

It has to do with the way the application is created. More about Services in Apple Developer Documentation.

I suggest you direct HipChat Devs to this page.


How to add background images to front page of Pages doc? Want to add background images to the front page only of a Pages doc.

I can't understand how to do this—reading the Apple doc on this didn't help unfortunately. Can't get background images (Master Objects?) working at all.

Using Pages 6.2.

Also noting that Arrange > Section Masters > Move Object to Section Master is greyed out...

Make the front page its own section. From the Document Setup inspector, choose
Section → Create a new section.
Add your image to the front page and position it how you desire.
With the image still selected, choose
Arrange → Section Masters → Move Object to Section Master


iMovie only imports 4 seconds of a movie clip that is much longer than 4 seconds Intermittent… sometimes iMovie decides to only import 4 seconds of my movie clip even though it is much longer.

I am dragging it out of Photos and into iMovie

When I QUIT & RELAUNCH iMovie, the symptom still happens (no change).
However, the only way I can see to fix this is to do a FULL REBOOT on my machine, then the same clip correctly imports into iMovie

If you try to drag and drop a video from photos, for whatever reasons, it only takes it in as an image, and the image is displayed for only 4 seconds by default. If you would like to import into iMovie as a video, do the following steps:

In photos, select your photo, click on 'File' at the top menu, and click on 'Export'. You can export the video or the unmodified original version of it. Confirm video resolution settings. Once you click on export, select a destination to export to.
Once the export is complete, drag and drop from finder into iMovie.


Ipad 10.2 screen has deeper color than my other hardware I've just bought an iPad 10.2 with an Apple Pencil for the purpose of using it as a portable drawing tablet.  After finishing two pictures on it, I can say that it has some kind of a noticeable skew in its color/brightness/contrast for some reason.

Both my Android phone and my PC's flatscreen show that what looked like deep and crisp color.  However, the 10.2 screen looks way lighter, more blurry and with far more noticeable brush edges where there were none on the iPad.

I was drawing in Ibis Paint, but judging by the fact that opening the image in the tablet's gallery app gave me the same results, it looks like the problem is either with the hardware, or with the system settings.

How do I make it work without manually tweaking every picture on my PC afterwards?

Unless you have accurately calibrated all your screens with a hardware colorimeter, then the chances are the iPad is the most accurate "out of the box".

Most devices' screens tend to be 'punched up' by the manufacturers to look good on the shop floor. If uncorrected after purchase, this can lead to very misleading colour workflows. Apple tends to do this less and instead relies on the deep colour capabilities of the screen itself - which can handle P3 colour, not just the sRGB common to most devices.

There's a good blog on how this can be perceived visually on IconFactory - Looking at the Future with some good imagery to test & some hints as to how to manage colour across platforms - something about which entire books have been written.


what does an app do to satisfy the dock bounce? What does an application have to do that satisfies the dock system so it stops bouncing the app's icon?
I am writing an X11 app that runs via XQuartz. I can create an app bundle with an icon for the Desktop such that my app runs fine when I double-click it, but the icon in the dock bounces forever.
I am aware of the dock feature that allows turning off bouncing for all apps, that's not what I need.
Thanks for any info.

An application's icon will bounce in the macOS Dock until the application enters its main event loop and begins responding to user input.
See How do I make the dock icon stop bouncing after my app wrapper script starts?


Mac surface scan tool I've had an SDcard lose its partition table, so I want to run a surface scan of the sdcard to make sure it's physically okay. Can you suggest a disk surface scan tool that runs on the Mac? Free, preferably. Thanks.

One of my favorite Mac developers released just the tool for your task.

It's called stressdrive and writes the entire drive with data and reads it back to ensure every bit was readable and matches what was written.


Detecting that a script is run within ARD Does anyone know of a way to detect that a shell script is running within ARD (vs. running the same script locally on the machine)?

I looked at detecting that we are running in interactive mode - that fails, since both are noninteractive.

I'm looking at the $0 variable, which looks more promising - it returns -bash when run from the command line, returns the name of the script when running within a script run locally, and returns /bin/bash when run via ARD. However - I'm not certain whether those effects can be counted on.

Does anyone have any input on this?

Why not pass in an extraneous argument when you issue a command from ARD.

It's more a workflow than a system generated tag, but ARD likely sends the same command to launchd as the open -a command would so that level of indirection means that you can't depend on the typical ppid from ps -ef to find the process that forked a specific script.

Why not push a wrapper script to all your machines and use that wrapper script to log the arguments to console? Then ARD can call the wrapper script.

Something like a script stored in /usr/local/bin/remote would work well:

#!/bin/bash
echo "This script was called remotely and is about to run another script."
/bin/bash $*
echo "This script has just run another script."

You can get all fancy with parsing the arguments or using logger and/or date/time stamping or recording which computer did the sending, but this is a common way to track execution of other scripts.


Is there a difference between PC4-21333 and PC4-21000 RAM for iMac 5K 27' 2019 I am trying to upgrade my iMac 2019 5K 27' to 64GB.

Per Apple specs, the RAM should be PC4-21333, but the only one I seem to be able to find on Amazon or macsales.com seems to be PC4-21000.

Is there an actual difference, or is it just a rounding choice?

Crucial.com shows it being PC4-21300 so I would ignore Amazon.

See https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/compatible-upgrade-for/Apple/imac-%28retina-5k%2C-27-inch-3*0ghz-intel-core-i5%2C-2019%29#MEMORYFilters


How to get the "securely erase" function of Disk Utility on El Capitan & Sierra Up to Yosemite I regularly used Disk Utility with Erase > Security Options... > writes a single pass of zeros over the entire disk...
as a simple method to fully check that a disk is fully safe before installing a new system or backup on it.

For me it is a rule of thumb to fully verify a medium before starting production work on it.

Since El Capitan (and consequently on Sierra), this function isn't apparently accessible.

Is this function hidden somewhere else?

What are the other options to fully really erase a disk, whatever the technology used might be, the purpose being to verify that one can write everywhere on a disk without any bad surprise later?

Use diskutil from Terminal.  The following command

diskutil secureErase 0 /dev/diskX

Will erase your disk, identified by X, with a single pass of zeros.  You can get a list of the options available to you by issuing the command without any options:

$ diskutil secureErase

Usage:  diskutil secureErase [freespace] level MountPoint|DiskIdentifier|DeviceNode
Securely erases either a whole disk or a volume's freespace.
Level should be one of the following:
        0 - Single-pass zeros.
        1 - Single-pass random numbers.
        2 - US DoD 7-pass secure erase.
        3 - Gutmann algorithm 35-pass secure erase.
        4 - US DoE 3-pass secure erase.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.
Note: Level 2, 3, or 4 secure erases can take an extremely long time.

Secure Erase and SSDs

You don't need to do a secure erase of an SSD because a a standard erase is already more than enough to secure your data.  The reason you needed multiple passes or even the DoD 7 pass secure erase was because with traditional hard drives (HDDs) the data was stored on magnetic platters which left a residual magnetic imprint even when wiped.  This is how COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) utilities like Disk Drill  software is able to reconstruct a drive. This is not the case with an SSD; nothing is magnetized.

In fact, it is recommended (read that to mean highly advised) that you don't do a secure erase because you would be shortening the life expectancy of your SSD due to the increased write operations.

Per Apple:

  Note: With an SSD drive, Secure Erase and Erasing Free Space are not
  available in Disk Utility. These options are not needed for an SSD
  drive because a standard erase makes it difficult to recover data from
  an SSD. For more security, consider turning on FileVault encryption
  when you start using your SSD drive.

Now, if TRIM is enabled (and it should be if your Mac came with an SSD from the factory), it will handle the task of freeing up the blocks of data no longer in use making them available for immediate writing.

Regular HDDs didn't do this.  When you deleted a file, it only deleted the pointer to the data, not the data itself.


iPhone 3 Upgrading and other similar issues So the device in concern is the iPhone 3S. It has been jailbroken in the past and I haven't really used it since. And now I decided to upgrade it so I restore it to factory settings, except there is a critical issue. The device claims that there is no SIM card inserted into it. I tried with multiple SIM cards and bought a new one too, just in case, and the phone continues to give the same message. I am locked in the screen in which the iPhone is to be connected to iTunes. For Apple servicing, I need the index number, for which I need to start the phone and go to Settings, but this phone is completely locked. I tried re-inserting the SIM many times but there seems to be no change. So far I have done the following:

Determine the language
Country of usage
Choose a WiFi network/ connect to iTunes.
And that's all.

This question is similar to one asked before, but I have tried the tape as well and it lead nowhere. And I don't have an AT&T SIM.

iPhone stuck at "No SIM card installed"

No one has responded, and with the information you've given, it is difficult to know exactly. But I would guess that while jailbroken, the device was also unlocked, and when you restored factory settings, you lost the unlock, and now the iPhone is once again locked and expecting an AT&T SIM. If you can acquire an AT&T SIM, and it works, then this will be confirmed.

However, this is a rather common issue with a very simple solution, and perhaps my hypothesis is wrong.

Sorry it took so long for a suggested solution!

And Happy New Year!


ThunderBolt to Mini Display port Is it possible to connect a Macbook Air 2013 to Macbook Pro 2009 through a thunderbolt cable in order to transform the latter to a second Display ?

It's not possible for you to use either of your MacBook's as a second (external) display. Apple only allow the use of iMac's as secondary displays using a mode called "Target Display Mode".

No matter the use of ThunderBolt, Mini DisplayPort or any number of adapters you won't be able to achieve the result your looking for.

However there are several applications that do enable you to theoretically achieve this over the network (Air Display, AirParrot, MaxiVista, ScreenRecycler etc...) but none are a true replacement for a physical secondary display.

External link: Target Display Mode FAQ


Can I flag a time machine backup so it never gets overwritten I'm about to upgrade to lion and at some point in the future I might want to restore back to a snow leopard time machine backup.

However, recently my first time backups have been overwritten.

Is there any way I can preserve a backup so it won't get overwritten ?

No - Time Machine has set permissions on the drive and has full root access to delete any and all backups that the algorithm feels needs to be deleted.

You get warned after the deletion happens, so you will need to copy that snapshot to another drive or outside the Backups.backupdb folder on that drive to ensure Time Machine won't delete it if you leave it mounted and space fills up on the drive to the point where the estimated size of the next backup exceeds the free space on the volume.


Privacy: what personal data does Apple share with an app developer, when I buy an app? What personal data is shared with an app developer when I buy an app? I am interested in Mac App Store and also iOS App Store.

Do they see my real name, or location, or something different? I found, with a search engine, only what data an app developer can collect when running the app.

No personal data is shared with an app developer on app purchase.

The aggregate information available for app units in iTunes Connect App Analytics is:

Purchase date (no more granularity available than cumulative over 24h period)
Device type (e.g. "iPhone" or "iPad")
Platform version (e.g. "iOS 10.3", x.x is the most detail available)
Region (e.g. "Europe" or "Asia Pacific")
Territory (e.g. "United Kingdom")
Source type (e.g. "App Store Search", "App Store Browse")
App referrer (e.g. "Google Chrome", given where a third-party app linked to product page)
Web referrer (e.g. "georgegarside.com")
Campaign (custom string linked to by iTunes product link URL parameter)

When you run the app:

the app can ask you to agree to share your Contacts, which would allow the app to access your ‘me card’ for your name.
the app can ask you to enable Location Services for the app, so the app can obtain your location.

In both of these cases, the app will ask for permission at OS level and you can accept or reject the permission. These permissions are only asked for if the app requests it — it's uncommon to request such information unless the app needs it for your benefit.


Does it make sense to buy a compatible Mac external disk? What is the advantage of buying a compatible Mac external disk?
Using Tuxera NTFS I can have an external disk for both, the windows partition (or any windows machine) as well as for the Mac one.

Does it make sense to look for a compatible external disk nowadays?
What would be the best way to deal with the PC/Mac compatible problems in terms of disk formatting? Is using Tuxera a nice way to deal with it?

Actually you can format any hard disk to macos journaled if you like. So buy the hdd you want, partition it and format it as you like.

If you format it as FAT you can use it on both win and mac for read/write, but you cannot use it for time machine backups (time machine requires macos filesystem).


Upgrading 16 GB to a 4 GB iMac i5 2011 doesn't work with all modules loaded [SOLVED] I don't know if it is only my issue. I have a 2011 iMac i5 with 2x2GB RAM modules.

Recently I bought 2x8GB RAM modules. If I add the 2x8GB to the default 4GB RAM, the computer doesn't start. I hear only the sound of DVD slot but the screen remains blank.
If I remove the 2x2GB ram modules and I use only the 2x8GB RAM modules, everything is fine and the iMac shows correctly the 16GB. I have also tried to change the order, putting the 8GB modules as first, but same problem.

If I put 2x2GB with the 2x8GB together, iMac doesn't turn on.

Original RAM: 2x Elpida 2 GB PC3-10600s-9-10-f1
Upgraded RAM: 2x Hynix  8 GB DDR3 Dream 1333mhz SO-DIMM (sold as Apple iMac 2011 compatible)

The original RAM was mounted on top 2 slots.

I can't find an exact diagram for the iMac, but assuming the mapping is anything like my Mac Pro - which really surprised me when I first tried it, the top & bottom slots may not be as you expect.

I would certainly experiment with identical RAM first in top or bottom, but I would also try matching them top to bottom row

ie…

2  2        8  8
8  8   or   2  2

but also

2  8        8  2
2  8   or   8  2

I would also reset the SMC between each test.

Shut down the computer.
Unplug the computer's power cord.
Wait fifteen seconds.
Attach the computer's power cord.
Wait five seconds, then press the power button to turn on the computer.

This is the odd layout for mine - yours will not be the same, of course, as it has fewer slots, but might follow a pattern…
see how the config changes between 2 & 4 DIMMs, contra to what 'common sense' might make you think

Two DIMMs      One on the top memory card and one on the bottom card
Four DIMMs     One pair on the top memory card and one pair on the bottom card
Six DIMMs      Two pairs on the top memory card and one pair on the bottom card
Eight DIMMs    Two pairs on the top memory card and two pairs on the bottom card


Rules for from account in Apple Mail I happily use mail with several accounts. When I send a new email I often forget to choose the correct 'From' account. Is there a mail plugin that allows to set the default 'From' account using some rules.

One example could be: if the recipient ends in '@example.com' use the work account.

Or as an alternative is there a way to change the 'From' dropdown menu using a key combination? (this would not solve the case when I forget to set it but would at least speed up the process)

If you use the unified inbox then this can be a problem. If you expand the mailboxes and read them from those, then you can set-up Mail to send using the account for that mailbox.

I suppose this may require remembering to select the correct mailbox in a similar way to remembering to select the from account though.


My iCloud Drive in Preview is empty where are my files? When I open Finder and click the "iCloud Drive" on left side it doesn't show any files. There are files but I have lost the link.

So you're saying that there is no "iCloud Drive" in the sidebar, or that no files are showing up in it?
-If it's the first one, then you can re-add it by going to Finder > Preferences, clicking on "Sidebar," then clicking the checkmark next to "iCloud Drive."
-If it's the second, then you might have accidentally unchecked "iCloud Drive" in the "iCloud" icon on System Preferences. If you're on Catalina, you have to click "Apple ID" at the top of System Preferences instead, then "iCloud" on the left.


Macbook pro crashes occasionally on dual monitor I'm using a Macbook pro 13' mid 2010 running OS X Lion 10.7.5. I just got a Viewsonic 24' monitor (2450wm-LED), and I connect it to my mbp using a miniport to VGA adapter (this one on Amazon). However when I plug into my mbp, I got some occasional crashes which lead to hard reboots.

I'm using it as a second monitor, i.e. with my laptop lid open. For from 30min to many hours it works fine, then suddenly I got a grey screen (or white, yellow, blue screen) on both (my laptops and the extra) monitors.

The graphics is NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB graphics.

I tried to do a trouble shoot of my own but doesn't work. According to this my firmwares are updated. Using my friend's adapter leads to similar crash, using her monitor (Viewsonic 2431wm) and my adapter leads to similar crash too. Now I think it must be something wrong with my laptop, not the monitor or adapter.

Has anyone here experienced similar situation? What shall I do? Will using a DVI adapter instead of a VGA one help?

Upgrade your NVIDIA driver according to your OSX version: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/306535-nvidia-web-driver-updates-for-el-capitan-update-06232016/
After restart you'll see an NVIDIA icon on top right of your desktop
Chose 'OS X Default Graphics Driver'


Can iTunes ignore store credit and use a credit card instead? There are times when I've got some store credit from a gift card/certificate on iTunes, but I want to buy something without that.

I want to buy something with the credit card, regardless of what's prepaid on the account.

Is this possible?

According to Apple's page, it uses the following order for song purchases:

Song credits.
Gift certificate, prepaid card, or allowance credits.
Credit cards.

Thus, it would appear that you cannot charge a credit card without using up your credits or gift certificates first.

However, similar to what @Nick said, you could just open up another account, add the credit card to it, and then gift the items you want to your original account.

Update: Based on my own tests of self-gifting, these are my findings:

Gifts will deduct money from the credit card on your account; they will not use up song credits nor gift card credit. This means that you do not need to open another account, just add it as a credit card and gift it to yourself.
You cannot send a gift to the same email address as your iTunes account. This can easily be circumvented by sending it to one of your other email accounts.
The easiest method of gifting to yourself is to select the print option. It will show you a code which you then use to redeem the song. It will allow you to redeem the code on the same account.


How can I recover from a frozen fullscreen application / game? A few times now, Starcraft 2 has frozen up on my wife's Macbook Pro, but the mouse pointer still moves and the sound keeps playing.  I can also SSH in from a different machine.  The keyboard shortcut for force-quit doesn't work though, and nothing in-game is clickable.  Command-tab won't switch windows either.

If this were a straight-up Linux box, I'd find the application process and kill it from an SSH login.  If that failed, I might take out the X server.  Can I do anything like this in OSX?  Is there something on the "problem" machine I can do locally instead?

Search for the Starcraft 2 process in the process list. I don't know the name of the binary but something like ps aux | grep -i starcraft should get you there
The number in the second column is the PID
kill PID or (if this doesn't work) kill -9 PID (if you are not the owner of the process, you can use sudo kill ... instead)

Depending on the process structure of Starcraft 2 you may need to do this several times to hit the right one.


What is the difference between downloading and installing software from AppStore and Terminal For example, what is the difference between installing software (could be operating system update or any other software) from AppStore or from Terminal using softwareupdate command. Is there any difference in security, performance, reliability etc?

They command line tool only installs security patches and applications that ship and update only from the core macOS software update servers.

The App Store apps use a different system process to download apps from the App Store from different servers than the system update servers.

Both of the above can be cached locally from caching servers. The graphical Mac App Store app calls both of the processes in an attempt to let people see one interface when there are really several underlying and different processes at work.

storedownloadd (lives in /System/Library/ProvateFrameworks/CommerceKit)
storeinstalld (lives in /System/Library/ProvateFrameworks/CommerceKit)
softwareupdated (lives in /System/Library/CoreServices)
software update (lives in /usr/sbin)
installer (lives in /usr/sbin)
App Store.app (lives in /Applications)

For a quick overview the above programs / tools and daemons (programs that run in the background and are asked to do work from a queue periodically or on demand) are the main players that handle software updates and Mac App Store apps and updates.

A full treatment of how, caching, design, logs would take a nice chapter or two in a book, but hopefully this goes a few layers deeper so you understand why some updates can be scripted (system ones) and which need you to click a button or add a third party app (App Store ones) to be scripted or automated.


Screenshot go 'nowhere' after Dropbox installation I installed dropbox and now my screenshots go to dropbox, I tried disabling "Share screenshots using dropbox" but now screenshots don't go to the folder but also not to the clipboard

How can I store screenshots again?

To check where screenshots are currently assigned, in Terminal type

defaults read com.apple.screencapture location

By default that would actually return no answer, as the line should only be written if you ever change it - so I'm assuming Dropbox did change it at some point.

To reset it to the default desktop location, type

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop

followed by

killall SystemUIServer

This should cover for  Cmd ⌘   Shift ⇧   3  &  4  screenshots. Screenshots to clipboard should be unaffected, & still be activated by adding  Ctrl ⌃  to either of the above methods.


Volume control digital or analog to headphone jack? I am curious about how Apple's computer DACs are implemented, especially on computers like MacBooks and iMacs. I have been trying to figure out if the 3.5mm output on Apple devices (specifically a MacBook Pro, for me) is controlled by the system volume level through an analog section after the actual DAC, or is it reducing the volume digitally before the DAC?

I can't seem to find any good info about it. Does anyone know?

The volume control on a computer (specifically, your MacBook) is usually handled by your audio API, which on Mac OS X is CoreAudio. All computers these days will act like this, but I seem to recall one Toshiba laptop of my parents’ running Windows 98 with a physical dial on the side for audio. Obviously this is not practical today due to modern laptops getting thinner and digital audio outputs such as SPDIF and HDMI audio. I might be rambling a bit, but I hope this answers your question.


How to connect OS X Yosemite to a Windows based SSTP VPN? I am trying to connect to a Windows based SSTP VPN network. I am using OS X Yosemite, I was wondering if there is any solution that can allow me to connect to a SSTP based VPN.

For the record, I have already tried using EasyVPN, iSSTP, iSSTP2. all of which failed to connect, and they all seem to be not supported anymore.

The sstp-client works for me. It is a command-line program. I installed it using the homebrew command:

brew install sstp-client


MacBook's Wi-Fi stopped working after upgrading to macOS Mojave and uninstalling Parallels My 2017 MacBook Pro's Wi-Fi completely stopped working. It's an issue with the Mac because it used to connect to the Wi-Fi just fine, and my phone is still connected to it.

I upgraded from macOS High Sierra to macOS Mojave yesterday, but it still worked then. Today I un-installed Parallels, and immediately afterwards the Wi-Fi stopped working.

How do I reenable the Wi-Fi?

I found that the problem actually stems from the usb c dongle.
USB-C Dongles killing Wifi on 2016/2017 MacBooks – Who’s to blame?


Installation of OS X Snow Leopard on a new hard drive using a disk I am attempting to install OS X Snow Leopard on a new harddrive. I am using a Mac mini mid-2010 Unibody. I also have the original Snow Leopard disk.

I used a guide on iFixit to replace my harddrive. Now, upon starting up, my screen is white, and has a flashing folder with a ? inside it.

I have tried multiple key combinations:

Pressing C before and after chimes with boot disk inserted (original) and no boot disk, nothing
Pressing option before and after the chime with the original hard drive and no boot disk, occasionally am able to select and enter the password for my wifi network on a white screen with the wifi symbol and a lov/drop down box with nearby networks, after accepting the password nothing eventuates from that point, merely a white screen, a wifi symbol and the network name - is there anyway to progress from here? Seems like best chance to proceed...
Pressing shift results in nothing
Pressing command + R results in nothing
Pressing command + option + R results in nothing
Pressing T results in the FireWire symbol appearing. I do not have access to this cable anymore (I stopped using it in 2011 as I hadn't used it since about 10 years prior.
Pressing command + option + R + P to reset the PRAM results in the usual chimes. Then, the white screen appears, then a black screen, then another second chime, and then back to white screen, then repeated.

Are there any more key combinations that I can try?

Also, I am not interesting in reseating the hard drive or taking the hard drive out again.

This answer assumes you have access to another Mac and a way to connect your hard drive to it.

Take out the drive of your Mac using this iFixit guide.

Connect to the drive and boot into Recovery (CMD + R) on the other Mac. Then, follow these instructions from an Apple help article:

  Install from OS X Recovery

  To install OS X on an external drive using OS X Recovery, follow these steps.

  Start up your Mac. Immediately after you hear the startup sound,
  press and hold the Command+R on your keyboard.
  After you see an Apple logo or globe appear, you can release the
  keys. If you're prompted to select a Wi-Fi network, select a network
  that has a working Internet connection.
  When the Recovery screen appears, make sure you're connected to the
  Internet. If not, select a Wi-Fi network with a working Internet
  connection from the Wi-Fi menu.
  Select the option to Install OS X from the Recovery window.
  Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the installation. When
  you're asked to select a drive for installation, click the button
  "Show All Drives". Be sure you select the external storage device
  you've connected for this purpose, not your computer's built-in
  startup drive.

  Your Mac might restart one or more times during installation. After installation is finished, your Mac automatically starts up from the external drive.

  When you're done using your external disk, select a startup disk from System Preferences to have your Mac to start up from its built-in startup disk or another drive.

  Your computer's serial number is sent to Apple as part of this process to help authenticate your request to download and install OS X.

Once the installation of OS X on the Mac mini's disk is complete, insert it back into the Mac mini and follow the iFixit article's instructions in reverse order.


iOS - Lower volume before playing video Sometimes I want to play a video but I'm in a meeting or a place where I can't afford to wait for the video to start to then quickly press the volume buttons to make it softer.

Is there any way I can mute the audio for a video before playing it? It seems like a valid scenario.

You can lower volume without playing the video.

from another answer:

The control center works (swipe up from bottom of screen and slide volume slider as desired).
In iOS 9 at least, you can also go Settings -> Sounds and under the Ringer and Alerts section, turn off "Change with Buttons", then use the volume buttons on the side of the phone to adjust the media volume. You can leave this option off to always have media volume control with the hardware buttons if you are OK with the ringer volume being just off or on at a preset level using the silent toggle switch on the side of the phone.


Macbook Pro SSD Upgrade I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) (11,3) and I'm looking to change it's drive.

I've found 2 models that I think fits my model.

OWC 480GB Aura Pro X SSD For Mac Pro (Late 2013) with Envoy Pro Enclosure
Transcend 480GB JetDrive 820 PCIe Gen3 x2 Solid State Drive

Does anyone know if these 2 would work with my computer?  Are there any other SSDs that would work with this model MacBook Pro?

You should be fine with many SSD models on the market, among these you can find the ?amsung EVO 850 series, just as an example. If you replace the original HDD for an SSD, however, be aware that you will need to enable TRIM manually on your new SSD. Please check this page on trimforce.


Cannot update Microsoft Office 2011 I have tried numerous ways to fix this problem :

Clean uninstall and re-install of Office 2011
Download individual updates
Download older Office updates

I always stop at "Destination Select" step of installation, where a small yellow triangle with an exclamation mark appears on top of the harddisk image. Saying that  A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume.

I had Microsoft Office 2011 running perfectly before, but after deleting it and reinstalling it later, the whole problem started occuring.

I can install office 2011 14.0.0, 14.1.0 and 14.2.0 individually. However I cannot update them to any versions in between, including the full versions (14.0 to 14.1 or 14.1 to 14.2).

Oh and also, I sometimes get this error when I tried installing BUT word runs fine afterwards, although installation fails.

Would like to hear some advice. Thank you

I am not sure if this may cause it, but I have two-sided printing package installed :

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&softwareitem=mp-88750-2

The option is always there even after uninstalling and reinstalling, but I don't think this might be causing the error right ?

Quit all Office applications, and move com.microsoft.autoupdate and com.microsoft.office.plist from ~/Library/Preferences ... and any MicrosoftRegistrationDB .plists & the MicrosoftRegistrationDB.plist.lockfile from ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost to the desktop.

You may have to input your password for some of this. Start up an Office app again and see if this helps. The applications rebuild their preferences files. You may have to enter your registration code again.


All stills added to iMovie are blurry during playback I am desperately trying to finish this iMovie video for someone and I am having difficulty with the playback of my still images.  They look great/normal when scrolling through the storyboard, but as soon as I press play the images blur.  I am using iMovie 10.0.5 on a MacBook Pro from 2009.  Any help would be beyond greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Have you tried exporting your video? Sometimes iMovie downscales things while playing it back in the application.

If that doesn't work try copy and pasting your project timeline into a new project and re-insert the images you have.


Can't burn Mac OS X 10.7 Lion to a disc because it doesn't have enough space When I try to burn my downloaded Mac OS X 10.7 Lion install disc to a DVD, I get this error:

  The disc inserted does not have enough free space

The DMG disc image says it's "4.72 GB" and the physical label on the DVD says it's "4.7 GB". Disk Utility on Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, the installed OS, says the inserted DVD is 0 bytes.

There are guides available for how to burn Lion to a disc, so it must be possible, unless it isn't possible anymore?

Like @Mark Wilson mentioned in the comments, "use a dual-layer DVD."

A "standard" DVD only holds 4GB of data. Generally a little less than 4GB usually as the DVD's file system has a little overhead so it is usually 3.9GB or thereabouts.

Best Buy, Office Depot and Amazon all sell dual layer DVDs. Look for ones with 8.5GB capacity that say "DL"after the DVD-R or DVD+R on the packaging.


Planning to triple boot with macOS, Windows, and Linux. Do I use/do Bootcamp before or after installing Linux? Pretty much just the title. Does the order that you do it in matter?

Yes it does.As if you install Linux before using Bootcamp it will actually refuse to install and you will have to do it manually because you changed the partitioning scheme.

Bootcamp Windows
Install Linux
Install a bootmanager so you can get in all OSes as Linux won’t show up in the default GRUB(I advise refind)


Any Cycle Playing Option for QuickTime for videos I would like to play a video in cycle i.e. to start again after end.
How can you do this?
I did not find any setting in the program.

It should be simple using the QuickTime menu.

Go to View and select loop.

or use alt+cmd+l


Only small contact photos since iOS 6 facebook integration Before I've upgraded to iOS 6 I did my facebook contact synchronization with an app called "phone+". It synchronized all my contact pictures (and some other things as well). The photos were in large scale. So if somebody called me, his/her picture would be shown on the whole phone screen.

After upgrading to iOS 6 I switched to the integrated facebook synchronization. Now the newly synchronized pictures are in small scale. So if somebody is calling me, his/her picture will only appear in "thumbnail size" at the right-hand side of the name, but not on the whole iPhone screen anymore.

Does anybody know how to get the bigger pictures back using the integrated solution, or is synchronizing in "thumbnail size" actually the solution Apple designed?

(Additional: Maybe one with facebook integration turned on can tell me in a comment how his/her pictures are shown?)

Currently, no.
That is the way it works in iOS 6 (if you ask me, it's a better way).
But...
This month, there should be a massive redesign with iOS 7 - maybe this design will be improved/changed.


iPhone 7 — Antenna stripes change their color I've bought my iPhone 7 September 16th and noticed today a change in color of the antenna stripes - they are getting blueish:

I always wear it in my jeans pocket without any case or sleeve.
Is there something I can do to clean the stripes?

I haven't tried it on an iPhone, but I'd bet melamine foam would work.


Can't Turn Off Swipe Between Pages! I recently picked up the new Magic Mouse 2.  Since then, the 'Swipe Between Pages' has started working on it's own.  With the old mouse, I turned it off, as I was constantly flipping through web pages accidentally.

Even though the prefs say it is deactivated... it won't stop!  I tried turning it on and back off... no luck.

I have this same issue.  I'm on a Macbook Pro and changed the settings for the trackpad.  This changed the mouse behavior.  Not a true solution, but works for me.


Take screenshots without power button I have an iPhone 5s that I got from a friend & the power button is extremely hard, next to impossible to push is. Is there another way I can take screenshots?

You can use Assistive Touch. Enable it from Settings → General → Accessibility → Assistive Touch, then to take a screenshot you can tap the Assistive Touch button and choose Device → More → Screenshot. The menus can be customised in Settings to provide easier access to the function if you use it often.


Is it technically possible to install Android on an iPhone X? I was wondering if it was possible to install Android on an iPhone X ? I saw that it was possible on an iPhone 3GS.

No its not, iOS is locked to the iPhone software.


Print file from terminal via smb So UI printing fails with no reason as always.

I hope that I can get more details by printing from command line.

Tried

smbutil print //user@host/share file

got:

smbutil: unknown command print

Do I have to install something?

(I have OS X 10.10)

What you are really looking for is a smbclient alternative using smbutil but just like you, I couldn't make it work.
So what you can do is to install samba with homebrew  like this:

brew install samba

If brew link complains with:

  Error: The `brew link` step did not complete successfully
  The formula built, but is not symlinked into /usr/local
  Could not symlink lib/auth
  /usr/local/lib is not writable.

you can link smbclient manually:

cd /usr/local/bin
sudo ln -sfv ../Cellar/samba/3.6.25/bin/smbclient smbclient
sudo chown -R your_user /usr/local/bin/smbclient

Now you should be able to print like this:

smbclient "\\\\your.server.com\\YourSharedPrinter" -U "Domain\User" -c "print YouFileToPrint"


Change default behaviour of play/pause button On my Macbook, if I press the play/pause button (F8) with no other context, MacOS (Mojave) seems to default to opening up iTunes, and playing a particular track. (Maybe the first alphabetically in my entire collection, not sure). I really don't like this particular track :)
Is there anyway I could change this behaviour? For instance, opening Spotify and playing a certain playlist there?
(It's the newer generation bluetooth Apple keyboard, if that matters.)

This is a old post but the software recommend Beardedspice works fine on my Mac. Please read the full answer because it provides much more detail.


Is it possible to clean install mac os and backup on the same drive in a different partition Just wondering if it's possible to clean install mac os (mojave) while also backing up some files on a different volume/partition on the same drive or will I have to wipe the entire drive.

Yes, it is possible, but I wouldn’t consider it safe. There are too many things that could go wrong.

When you erase the old system, you’ll need to be very careful to erase the old volume, not the entire drive. Exactly how you’d do that depends on how you’re doing the reinstallation.
If something goes wrong during the reinstall, it might get wiped out anyway.

So, if you don’t want to lose those files, you really should have them backed up (and verified) somewhere else. Actually, that’s true anyway, but it’s especially important when you’re doing something dangerous like a reinstallation.


Use my 27" Thunderbolt monitor with a Macbook that has only DisplayPort output Somehow this doesn't work out of the box – is there an adapter I can buy that will allow me to connect the Displayport output of my Macbook to the Thunderbolt input of my 27" Thunderbolt monitor?

As @bmike, @djacobson, and @jaberg have stated in comments, that will not work. There is currently (as of March 2012) no adapter, nor do I expect there to be one to adapt mini-DisplayPort to Thunderbolt. (The standards were defined to be backward-compatible, not forward-compatible.)


How to make executable .py file (for non-programmer)? I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 and I've created a python script for my colleague - he has MacOS. Assume that he doesn't know anything about bash or python.

So I don't want to make him running this script from bash. I would like him just to double click on file to execute the script.

How would you do that?

Adding:

#!/usr/bin/env python

alongside

chmod +x filename

Doesn't work on my Ubuntu so I suppose it won't work on MacOS

This is a top of the script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# coding=utf-8
import os
try:
    import jinja2
except ImportError:
    import pip
    pip.main(['install','jinja2'])

EDIT: I can't access his Mac so either I have to give him clear instructions or create some executable.

You can simply rename the file and make it file extension "command" instead. Plus, you have to make it executable (like you do before with chmod +x). Simply name it "jinja.command", instead of "jinja.py" for example.

Then, you will see terminal window opened with text output (if you have one in your application), as far as the "program terminated" string.


How do I create a new user in Lion from the Terminal? The older method of:

dscl . -create /Users/username

doesn't work because /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist can't be found. From what I gather, OSX Lion doesn't use this method anymore.

How can I create a new user solely from the Terminal?

They renamed the Directory Services daemon in Lion:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.opendirectoryd.plist


Colors are different when SSHing onto a Linux machine from iTerm2. How can I standardize them? Currently, when I SSH onto a Linux machine, the ls output colors and syntax coloring in VIM are different from the colors on my local machine. The colors shown are not defined in my Profile...Colors...ANSI Colors, and include an ugly dark brown color for "yellow." How can I force the text from a remote session to match my ANSI colors, so the coloring is always consistent?

Here's an example of what I'm talking about: left is VIM session on my local computer, right is VIM session within an SSH session. Notice the hideous brown.

And here's an example of the ls problem -- the colors are different.

The VIM part of this question was answered here.

Turns out my local session had background set to dark in VIM, and my remote session had background set to light. I just added the line set background=dark in my .vimrc and the colors now look identical.


My dashboard widgets are “inactive” since Lion upgrade Since my upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, my dashboard widgets are inactive. I can enter the dashboard, move widgets around, add and remove them, but their content is not updated and I cannot interact with them (they do not respond to mouse clicks in their normal fashion).

I have looked through the Console, but there are no warnings there about the dashboard. How can I troubleshoot this?

I ended up deleting all com.apple.*dashboard* files in $HOME/Library, and then rebooting. That did the trick.


When I click the Appstore button in Passbook I receive the error: "Cannot connect to the iTunes store" When I click on App Store, which rests below all of the features that Apple touts for the service, I am given an error where a prompt tells me that my phone can’t access the App Store. The error looks like this:

Is there a fix for this problem?

Gotta Be Mobile provides a great article detailing the issue with Passbook and a fix. I've reposted the fix from the article below:

  First, head to the Settings in your iPhone.
  Click on General.
  Next, head to Date and Time which is down the list.
  Once you’re in there, you’ll want to change Set Automatically to Off.
  Go to Set Date & Time.
  Click on Today’s Date. Once you do that, you’ll be given the option to change the date.
  Move the year one year forward one year.
  This will prevent the error from happening. If you wish to change the date back to the real date, simply set Set Automatically to On and
  everything will return to normal.
  Head into Passbook and click the App Store button

Something about moving the date up might be expiring a certificate or just the adjustment of time back to correct seems to make passbook behave better.


APFS Encrypted vs APFS + FileVault? I upgraded the SSD in a Mac Mini and I'm reinstalling Mojave via internet recovery.

The disk is completely erased right now, and when creating a new partition it asks me if I want to choose APFS or APFS (Encrypted).

I want full encryption on the drive. Should I go with APFS then enable FileVault later on, or simply partition the disk with APFS (Encrypted)?

I tested both options on my own: on Mojave installing on a new disk with  APFS (Encrypted) results in a fully working system with FileVault already enabled.


Why are Safari and Chrome not throwing warnings after removing the root certificates Certificates issued by DigiNotar have been blacklisted today by Mozilla. Viewing websites with certificates issued by DigiNotar with a nightly build of Firefox will render warnings.

Instead of waiting for an update, for the certificates to be revoked on my own system, I removed the root certificates from my Keychain but Chrome still validates the website certificates and Safari isn't throwing any warnings.

Am i missing something?

Certificates removed:

DigiNotar Root CA
Staat der Nederlanden Root CA
Staat der Nederlanden
Root CA - G2

Website tested: https://as.digid.nl/

Here's an alternate test site that shows the problem in Chrome 13.0.782.218: http://auth.pass.nl

I have deleted the DigiNotar root CA from my Keychain. Chrome has been restarted. But Chrome still says this site is valid and lists the DigiNotar root CA as the authority on the SSL for the site.

Every site I check that I have manually set as untrusted shows a warning. Perhaps things are changing on the servers so rapidly, different people doing the same actions are seeing different results.

Let's set aside the concept of blacklisting in general and certificate revocation like (CRL) or online verification like OCSP and just pick apart the mechanism of SSL certificates in the browser. I will set aside Chrome/Firefox/other browsers and just focus on Safari and the Mac Keychain as that's trouble enough for this post.
The short answer is the site you list doesn't depend on the one certificate that was used in a way that has caused the press to run all the blacklist stories.
It was used to sign certificates that matched anything ending in google.com and they were spotted in use on sites that were certainly not google. This is a technological equivalent to someone constructing tunnels into a bank vault. Not plans to tunnel - but a working actual tunnel around a barrier everyone expected to be solid.

Now onto how to know why Safari didn't flag the site you listed as "bad".
I haven't deleted any certificates from the mac I'm on and just fired up the Keychain Assistant to use the Certificate Assistant (under the Keychain Access menu -> Certification Assistant -> Open...
In the small CA window, select continue, then View and Evaluate, then View and evaluate certificates, then continue.

As you can now see, https://as.digid.nl/ is serving up four certificates in the chain of trust:

cert name - type - SHA1 fingerprint - status
as.digid.nl - SSL - 2D F7 4E 54 00 90 80 08 01 0A 2F 3E 5A EE BE 36 5F EC 82 F3 - invalid due to host name mismatch (harmless error - the tool evaluates that cert for your mac and my mac isn't as.digid.nl)
DigiNotar PKIoverheid CA Overheid en Bedrijven - intermediate - 40 AA 38 73 1B D1 89 F9 CD B5 B9 DC 35 E2 13 6F 38 77 7A F4 - valid
Staat der Nederlanden Overheid CA - intermediate - 29 FC 35 D4 CD 2F 71 7C B7 32 7F 82 2A 56 0C C4 D2 E4 43 7C - valid
Staat der Nederlanden Root CA - root - 10 1D FA 3F D5 0B CB BB 9B B5 60 0C 19 55 A4 1A F4 73 3A 04 - valid

In your question you stated you deleted the root key - if so, your safari is either cacheing the old values or when you looked, that site had a SSL certificate different than the one I saw making this answer. You'll have to reproduce the steps I just took to see which was the case.
In my case,
I only had to mark the Staat der Nederlanden Root CA root certificate as untrusted to get Safari to balk and show this message when you load the site.

Since all the press is specific about only the DigiNotar Root CA as being bad, I am going to undo my change to not trust the Staat der Nederlanden Root CA.
I am going to mark the DigiNotar Root CA as never to be trusted and wait and see what Apple does. If you are interested in this sort of thing, do monitor the Apple Security page.


Sublime Text 2 input laggy I use Sublime Text 2 (ST2) both on Linux & OS X Lion. When entering text, interacting with menus etc, ST2 is very laggy - I can type a few sentences very quickly, then take my hands of the keyboard and watch ST2 catch up.

I've tried reverting ST2 by deleting the ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2 folder, but the issue persists.

Does anyone know what can cause this lagginess?

Update: Activity Monitor shows ST2 idles at around 5-16% CPU. When typing, it spikes to 80-100%.

This issue seems to have been solved in the latest development build:

http://www.sublimetext.com/dev


How do I list iTunes apps by the account that purchased it? I've got more than one person downloading apps to my iTunes, and so I'd like to list all apps purchased by one account (meaning the same email address). How can I separate apps like this? I can't seem to find any columns that I can add to the Apps tab to sort apps in this way.

You can try in Terminal.

$ for f in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Mobile\ Applications/*.ipa ; \
  do (echo "$f" ; unzip -p "$f" "iTunesMetadata.plist" | \
  plutil -p - | egrep -i "\"(itemName|artistName|AppleID)\"" ) | \
  perl -e 'while (<>) { if (m!^/!) { chop; $fqn=$_; } if (m/"(.+)" => (".+")/) { $e{lc($1)}=$2; } } print "\"${fqn}\",$e{\"itemname\"},$e{\"artistname\"},$e{\"appleid\"}\n";'; \
done

Here is a blogpost where this action is explained.


Finder shows stale directory listings from NFS server I have an Ubuntu 12.04 Linux server sharing files via NFSv4. I mount the share on my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.7.5. I have the NFS share set up to automount in Disk Utility with default mount options.

I find that when changes happen on the server in a directory that I have had open in the Finder recently, the Finder does not reflect the changes for a very long time. If I use the terminal to "ls" the same directory, I see the changes. It seems that the Finder is caching directory listings locally, and that this caching is very aggressive.

Closing and reopening the window doesn't help. Force quitting the Finder does not help. Unmounting and remounting the NFS share does not help. Rebooting works, but that's a very blunt instrument.

Has anyone experienced this, and does anyone know of any workarounds? I'm looking to eliminate the caching, so that the Finder does to the VFS layer on every access, or at least shorten the TTL of the cached data.

I've evaluated changing the share to SMB or AFP, but I cannot undertake that and am looking for a way to manually invalidate Finder's cache (or otherwise poke at it) if I can't change Finder's behavior outright.

ETA: This doesn't seem to be an issue any more in Mavericks.

I had the same problem and found a solution here that worked for me:

dscacheutil -flushcache
killall Finder

The man page of dscacheutil says that the -flushcache option should only be used in extreme cases, so there may be risks to this method that I'm not aware of.


How to add MySQL to $PATH variable to resolve "mysql: command not found"? I installed MySQL on my Mac, and now I would like to add it to my $PATH variable. I want to be able to type mysql anywhere.

I tried adding the following to my .profile file:

export PATH=${PATH}/usr/local/mysql/bin/

I have restarted my Terminal but it does not do the trick. It still says: -bash: mysql: command not found.

How can I add this properly to my $PATH?

I am using OS X Yosemite.

Here is why your current code is not working:
export PATH=${PATH}/usr/local/mysql/bin/

You forgot the colon and the trailing "/" is unnecessary.
export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/mysql/bin

is the correct code.


Can the Apple 10W USB charger be used with a 7-port USB hub to charge iPad 2, iPhone 4S, and other devices at the same time when traveling? When traveling, I probably will have the iPad 2, iPhone 4S, a USB backup charger, and some misc devices such as a Kindle Fire and a Sony digital camera that uses USB to charge its battery.

So instead of hooking them all up to the computer to charge them overnight, in the event that I actually need to charge every one of them that night, is it possible to use Apple's 10W USB charger that Apple makes (it is 100V to 240V compatible):

and then hook it up to any USB hub, such as this Belkin 7-port one:

and be able to charge all the devices listed above at the same time?  (by the way, it seems that the smaller Apple USB charger with the green dot is 5W, so probably that one is not very powerful to charge all devices at the same time).

You typically will need one high-powered (5W) USB port for each of such devices to charge efficiently. The iPad alone requires more to charge, hence the non-standard 10W adapter. In addition, the USB hub itself is not likely to provide the necessary wattage to any of the ports (these usually are low-powered ports), so chances are not even one device will efficiently charge when connected alone to such a hub.


How to check the battery level of devices connected via Bluetooth in OS X I have a set of Bluetooth headphones that I use with my iPhone and Macbook (OS X Yosemite).

On my iPhone, a little battery meter pops up next to the Bluetooth logo each time I'm connect the headphones.  I have found no such option on my Macbook (OS X ) and am wondering if anyone else has experienced the same issue.

The only potential solution I came across was the Battery Tracker on the Mac App Store. It is not clear whether it supports all Bluetooth devices (and not just standard peripherals), and I would rather not pay the $1.99 to find out.

I know that my headphones have the A2DP Bluetooth profile, so my gut is telling me that information about my battery level has to be accessible somewhere on my computer.

Here is a screenshot of the device profile from my mac's System Information. RSSI seems like the only thing that could have been a battery meter (everything else is booleans or id's), but from what I've read it seems to be a metric for signal strength.

I'm interested in finding a solution from a practical standpoint, but am equally as interested in understanding how it would be/is achieved from a technical standpoint.  Think I just need to figure out what the battery metric/param/variable is called, and where I can get it.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts/insights ! Thanks

I hate to have to answer in the negative but the answer is: you can't.

I've done a lot of searching the web, testing utilities, playing with ioreg on the commandline, scrutinizing System Profile reports, and it appears to me that OS X has no way of displaying battery level of connected devices that don't automatically display battery status in their Bluetooth menu Device submenu, even if iOS devices display detailed level info for the same Bluetooth device when connected to them. OS X just appears to completely ignore this capability in all but a few default (Apple-manufactured, it appears to me) devices.


How do I navigate around text fields on the iPad? From time to time I need to edit some text in a text box on my iPad. One example is adding a bookmarklet to Safari; many techniques suggest you add a bookmark then edit it afterward. Clumsy, but it works.

However, I often struggle to edit the text, and I wonder if I'm just missing something really basic. In the case I just had, I needed to remove a few characters from the beginning of a long bookmark. On my PC I would hit Home and then Delete a few times. I'm sure the Mac is similar.

I can't figure out a non-clumsy way to do this on my iPad. The only way to even navigate in a text field (I.e. move the cursor) seems to be to select text and then move the selection box left; that seems clumsy at best as the select point is often lost. This is especially difficult when there's a long block of text in a short edit box but even in a full-screen editor cursor placement often seems approximate at best.

Am I missing something?

Touch and hold your finger over the word in the spot after you want to delete.  A magnifying glass will show you the exact position of the cursor.  Once you have the cursor in the right place you can then backspace over the text you want to delete.


Opening files Error -36 I am trying to open files on Time Capsule (not backups) but files will not open in Finder.  I'm receiving error -36.  When I copy files to my MacBook Pro, files opened without any problems. Quick Look works fine on Time Capsule.

Can anyone please help?

I had this problem recently and it was due to a problem with the previous version of macOS Sierra supported by acknowledgement by Apple of many similar reported bug in version 10.12.2.

The most recent update to macOS Sierra 10.12.3 resolved the error -36 with previewing files on the Time Capsule for me, try updating.

Dot_clean did not work for me but connecting the TC via SMB was a simple workaround until Apple sorted the issue out.


My WD passport spins, lights up and connects but doesnt show as an available drive My external hard drive fell.  After that I plug it in and it lights up but doesnt blink, the HD spins then stops.  The WD icon in the top right of my screen shows it there as plugged in but it doesnt ever switch to showing data on it. It never shows as an available drive to use.

From your concise description of what happens when you plug it in, the drive mechanism has apparently been damaged - it has happened to me several times. There's not much you can do if there is physical damage. I hope you have a backup of the data on this drive!


Finder search doesn't work properly after Yosemite update Ever since I upgraded to Yosemite, search no longer works properly in Finder. Spotlight works fine but Finder search just gives me a blank window with a spinning ball.

I've tried reindexing and I've also tried deleting Spotlight's .plist file. I restart my MacBook Pro after doing either. Finder search will work for one or two queries and stop again. I don't know what else I can do.

Has your spotlight been botched? IN short, finder relies on spotlight to find things quickly.

This will take a while (5 or so mins) and make your Mac go into "jump-jet" mode with the fans, but:

Drop to terminal
type in sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100
then sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V200
then sudo mdutil -i off /
then sudo mdutil -i on /
finally sudo mdutil -E /

Basically in sport, it resets spotlight and tells it to reindex EVERYTHING it normally should do on your "Macintosh HD". (Everything unless you've previously added entries to the privacy list)

As I said before, it'll make your fans go crazy for a while, but this is expected.

After that, all should be great! :)


Suddenly got DNS problem with OSX 10.9.2 I have OSX 10.9.2. One day my internet started to stuck on loading.

No System updates detected before.

When I tried to send ping to http://stackoverflow.com/ I got:

64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=54 ttl=47 time=297.871 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 55
Request timeout for icmp_seq 56
Request timeout for icmp_seq 57
Request timeout for icmp_seq 58
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=59 ttl=47 time=149.727 ms
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=60 ttl=47 time=147.736 ms
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=61 ttl=47 time=160.763 ms
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=62 ttl=47 time=148.458 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 63
Request timeout for icmp_seq 64
Request timeout for icmp_seq 65
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=66 ttl=47 time=147.925 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 67
Request timeout for icmp_seq 68
Request timeout for icmp_seq 69
Request timeout for icmp_seq 70
Request timeout for icmp_seq 71
Request timeout for icmp_seq 72
Request timeout for icmp_seq 73
Request timeout for icmp_seq 74
Request timeout for icmp_seq 75
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=76 ttl=47 time=160.432 ms
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=77 ttl=47 time=168.872 ms
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=78 ttl=47 time=160.564 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 79
Request timeout for icmp_seq 80
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=81 ttl=47 time=169.759 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 82
Request timeout for icmp_seq 83
Request timeout for icmp_seq 84
Request timeout for icmp_seq 85
Request timeout for icmp_seq 86
Request timeout for icmp_seq 87
Request timeout for icmp_seq 88
Request timeout for icmp_seq 89
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=90 ttl=47 time=241.351 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 91
Request timeout for icmp_seq 92
64 bytes from 198.252.206.140: icmp_seq=93 ttl=47 time=156.303 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 94
Request timeout for icmp_seq 95

However ping to 8.8.8.8 works well (0.2% loss)

What I did so far:

restart MAC
restart Router
other PC Windows 7 works fine
created hotspot with iPhone and used cellular data - have the same losses

Sounds like OSX has problem with DNS.

Im nubby in OSX, please from where do I need to start investigate the issue?

[EDIT]

My DNS settings below:

Thanks,

If you're confident it's a DNS issue and not a NIC (network interface card, e.g. AirPort vs. Ethernet) issue, then try the following:

Flush DNS with sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder via http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5343.
Manually change your DNS server to something else, e.g. 8.8.8.8.  Do that using the "+" button next in the DNS pane you're showing in your post, the button next to "IPv4 or IPv6 addresses."


Simplest way to prevent iTunes from automatically launching when iPhone/iPad is connected When I connect my iPad or iPhone to my Mac iTunes automatically launches. What is the simplest way to prevent this from happening?

The simplest way is to un-tick the Automatically sync this... box* on the Summary Screen for the device in iTunes when the device is connected:

This is per device.

Alternatively you can just remove the iTunesHelper service under your Login Items which will disable it irrelevant of the tick box state.