How to recover the name of a non-system volume containing all user folders in Mac OS X Lion? I have done something stupid and need help:

I have 3 external drives attached to my Mac and in an attempt to make the partition names more meaningful, I renamed them using finder/get info. My user account was located on one of these drives, the other 2 are for TimeMachine. Now of course, I cannot access the user account because I forgot to change the path in System Preferences.

By starting in recovery mode I can see the disks, but Disk Utility does not appear to allow me to change the name. Worse still, I cannot remember what the name of my drive that contains the user account should be. I suspect it can be sorted out from the command line, but my skills do not extend that far.

Any chance someone can provide some guidance on how to rename the partition and how to ensure the user account path matches.

The fastest way to solve your problem is probably adjusting the path of your user directory in the yourusername.plist (assuming following current path of your user folder: "/VolumeNameContainingYourUserFolder/Users/yourusername"):

Boot to Recovery Mode.
Open Terminal.app in the menubar (Utilities -> Terminal)
Enter df to get the paths/names of your main system volume and the volume containing your user folder. You may have to move around with cd and check the content of folders with ls if you don't remember the full path of your user folder.
Change your working directory to the folder "users" deep inside /private:

cd /Volumes/NameOfYourMainSystemVolume/private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/

List the content of the folder:

ls

Locate your username.plist and convert it to xml:

plutil -convert xml1 yourusername.plist

Then modify the file with vim* (please consult online resources how to work with vim first!)

vim yourusername.plist

Modify the string

/Users/yourusername

or

/Volumes/WrongVolumeNameContainingYourUserFolder/Users/yourusername

to

/Volumes/VolumeNameContainingYourUserFolder/Users/yourusername

in the key "home" at line ~90.
Save the changes and quit vim.

Convert the plist to the original binary format:

plutil -convert binary1 yourusername.plist

enter exit and quit Terminal
Reboot to your main volume, log-in with your account.

Optional: Enable the root user temporarily. Log-out of your user account and log-in with root.
Make any necessary adjustments like renaming the volume containing your user folder (or other user folders) again and changing the path(s) to the user folder(s) of your main user (other users) in System Preferences accordingly.
Log-out and log-in with your common user again. Finally disable root.

*: It's much easier to use nano or pico instead of vim, which has two different modes: command mode and insert mode. While testing the solution in a Recovery HD of a virtual machine, i first tried nano yourusername.plist, then  pico yourusername.plist. Both commands gave me an error: Can't find nano/pico. So I decided to use vim, because I was too lazy to find out if nano or pico are present in the Recovery HD at all. You may try nano instead: Use it like an almost common text editor by moving around with the arrow keys and adding or deleting text as usual. After finishing your edit, hit ctrlo to write the changes to disk and ctrlx to exit nano.


iPhone 7 answers by itself after 1 ring My iPhone 7 rings once and answers by itself. I checked the settings and find nothing to help solve this issue. Does anyone have any suggestions or idea on what's going on besides it is possessed?

Possibly a feature called Auto Call Answers may have gotten turned on.

1) Head to Settings > General > Accessibility > Call Audio Routing

2) Next tap on the Auto-Answer Calls option and turn it off.

If Auto Answer calls is already turned off, then try the following troubleshooting techniques.

1) Restart iPhone

2) Hard Reset iPhone

Both troubleshooting techniques above, should solve your problem, however if they do not then unfortunately you will have to Factory Reset your iPhone.


Do Mac OS apps have access to MAC address? Do applications installed on Mac OS have access to the device's MAC address? I believe iOS disallowed apps from accessing the MAC address on iPhones with iOS 11, but I don't know if the same applied for Mac OS on MacBooks.

Yes, in general macOS applications can get to the MAC address of the network interfaces in your computer.


uTorrent remote asks to touch screen and move to login without success When I browse from my iphone 4 it takes me remote.utorrent.com/srp
The it asks me to

Touch screen and Move
Touch the screen and move your finger to fill the progress bar below...

This worked both on my PC and MacBook, but now does not work on the iPhone.

Can anyone reproduce?
What could the problem be?
Is there any way around this?

I have iOS 5.0

As soon as the question was ready I solved the problem.

I was on inPrivate mode and for whatever reason, it does not detect the moving.

As soon as you go to the normal browsing mode, it detects correctly the movement.

If anyone can figure out why that happens, it would be great to know.

Anyway, I hope this can help someone else in the future.


App Store notifications regarding price drops? I've placed a few apps on my Wish List in the (iOS) App Store.

Will I get some kind of automatic notification in case of a price drop? Or: Can I make it so, without using a third party app?

You can do it via the web site AppShopper. Sign up for a free account to get started.

While it can't read your Apple wish list, you can create a wish list on that site and it will notify you of price drops of your wish list items via email. It will also email you about updates for your wish list and your "My Apps" list. Personally I don't keep any apps in "My Apps" list, since Apple updates them for me every night on all of my devices.

I have no professional affiliation with this web site. I'm just a satisfied user.

Note: Checking "Notify me of price drops by E-mail" and unchecking "Share My Wishlist" on the Wish List page of AppShopper didn't seem to be "remembered" by the site (perhaps due to my browser settings), but it does work on the My Profile page.


How do I change the color of my Dock on Mac I am digging deep into my Mac's files to try and find how to change the color of my mac's dock. I have been able to change little things like the separator, indicator light, trash can, finder icon, etc. But I cannot find the file where the color of the actual Dock is.

I used this code to immediately go to the Dock folder

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources

If you want a picture please ask and I'll edit a good one so you get the idea.

As far as I know, there's no image that you can change to change the background of the Dock. However, you can give the image to DockMod which will let you change the background.


Change Local Admin passwords across the network Is there a way to change admin passwords for all my Macs connected to my network.

I know the local admin password for all PC's in my network and I need to just to change password for Username: admin

What I have to do is physically go to each Mac, login and change the password manually.  Remote Login is disabled.

How can I do it faster?

Based on the fact that Remote Management and Remote Login are disabled, you are limited to two pathways:

Installing remote screen sharing software like TeamViewer  to connect to the machine via the web which you can then administer.  The downside to this is that decent performing apps like this will cost money - and they're quite expensive
Going to each machine and not just enabling the password, but turning on remote login and/or management as well.

I prefer the latter option because it will ultimately give you much more control over your network connected nodes.  As for security, you can configure sshd on each machine to only allow logins from an SSH key.  See this answer on how to log in with keys rather than username/passwords.

You didn't mention how many Macs you have on your network and the project could be considerable. However, just chalk it up to experience as to why enabling (but securing) remote management tools is critical in networks.

You can change the password via the command line:

dscl . -passwd /Users/Lele


iphone sends log files to desktop Console app via wifi UPDATE #2

I've narrowed this down to the WiFi logs are definitely sent via the
lockdown process - not iPhone sync.
This occurs despite the "Connect via network" box in XCode being unchecked.

UPDATE

I believe the traffic is related to tcp\62078 - iphone-sync & lockdown.  As many of us know, one way this port is used is for an iOS device to sync to iTunes over WiFi however, I have never turned this on.  In addition, when I check this setting with the iPhone connected via USB, that feature is unchecked.

Otherwise, lockdown may be getting accessed somehow but I have yet to figure out how.

Exploit perhaps???

Original Post

As many probably know, it is possible to access\download iPhone logs to a Mac desktop by using XCode and connecting the device to the desktop via USB.  However, my iPhone is now sending this same data via Wifi and I am unable to (A) figure out why and (B) control it or get it to stop.

I have sniffed the connection at least a dozen times, scoured the Net, checked the plethora of Apple Discussion pages, etc...all to no avail. In addition, I have triple-verified that the "Connect via Network" checkbox in XCode is unchecked.

Has anyone (1) seen this and then (2) figured out how to control this and\or get it to stop?

Thanks in advance for any feedback or assistance you may provide.

I believe I have found the culprit...iMazing...or rather, iMazing's communicate-to-iOS-device-via-Wifi feature.

At some point over the last year or so, I had installed iMazing which, for those who are unaware, is an iOS device management and backup utility.  And as mentioned above, one of their features is communication with iOS devices via WiFi.  When this is enabled, it uses the same lockdown\usbmuxd application that XCode and others use.

SIDEBAR: "usbmuxd" is a daemon that allows communication to\from iOS devices via USB\WiFi and is the underlying transport control-plane for the "lockdown" service.

Anyway, after installing iMazing, I then at some point enabled the WiFi connection feature but later forgot I had done so.  However, when the feature is enabled in iMazing, it doesn't show as such in XCode nor does it always show as enabled in iMazing.  Therefore, it will not always be readily apparent that iMazing is the reason why the usbmuxd channel is open.

In any event, I was able to get the iMazing instance of usbmuxd closed and then everything began working as expected.

Last, a little insight as to why this wasn't readily apparent when digging into the OS.  The primary reason is because when looking at all of the elements that relate to usbmuxd & lockdown, there was literally no clue that a 3rd party application had opened up the usbmux channel to the device.  When looking at the IP connections to the device, everything looked exactly as it does when the connection is spawned by XCode's "Connect via network" feature.  But again, when checking that feature, it showed as disabled.

In the case of iMazing, the only OS level clue that it had opened the usbmuxd channel was an entry in the app's Devices.plist.  The entry in question is labeled "WiFiConnectionOn" and has a binary value of "YES \ NO".


How do I use web sharing in mac to allow access to files from machines outside of my local network? I want my web-service to be accessible from out side of my local network.

I am using MAMP and I have also started web-sharing on my local machine, but it is working only locally.

I want any file to be accessible from another machine which is not in network.

You'll have to try a dynamic DNS service (like DynDNS, http://dyn.com/dns/) to detect your machine's external (probably dynamic) IP address and keep it mapped to a specific DNS name.

The other option would be to get a shared hosting account and push your content up to a remote web server. I use A2hosting for that, but there are hundreds of similar hosting services.


Sharing between Macintosh and Windows I have a Mac Pro and a Windows computer. They are on the same internal network (my home network). The local IP address of this Windows computer is 10.0.0.9 and its name is blender (I use this computer to run blender jobs). When I run ipconfig on this Windows computer it is confirmed that the local IP address of this computer is 10.0.1.9

I use this Blender computer only for running Blender jobs. Therefore the Deadline application is used. I have a Deadline slave on the Mac Pro and a Deadline slave on the Blender machine. The Deadline repository and database is on the Blender machine. This used to be Deadline 8 and everything worked just fine. Recently I installed a lot of software updates and also updated to Deadline 10.

And now suddenly I have this problem that the Deadline Monitor on my Mac Pro cannot access the Deadline database on the Blender machine.

  An error occurred while trying to connect to the Database
  (Blender:27100,10.0.1.9:27100). It is possible that the Mongo Database
  server is incorrectly configured, currently offline, blocked by a
  firewall, or experiencing network issues.

Also when I try to ping this blender machine (10.0.1.9) using the command ping blender the terminal response is ping: cannot resolve blender: Unknown host and also ping 10.0.1.9 does not work.

The C: drive of this Windows computer is shared with my Mac Pro. On my Mac Pro the blender machine is in the "Shared" list and I can see all the folders and the files of the Windows C: drive on my Mac computer.

As you can see the Blender machine is shared to the Mac Pro and on the Mac Pro I can see and access the Deadline folders. This is important because I use this Blender computer only for running Blender jobs.

Somehow the sharing between the Windows machine and the Mac is not working, but I don't know why.

I did run brew install mongodb (I hope I installed everything correctly) and I got this when run mongo

By the way, when I submit a Blender on my Blender machine Deadline executes the job without a problem and also the Monitor has no problems. So it seems that somehow I have a connection problem between my Mac and Windows machine (and it used to work fine).

I hope this helps. I am not a very technical person and I hope you can give me some detailed instructions on how to solve this problem or how to analyse this problem.

Trying to follow up with this mongodb I did run mongo 10.0.19:27100

I also have set the firewall OFF and then had another run

Your error is pointing you correctly to look at firewall and networking.

This should be fairly easy to narrow down with some facts:

If you don't have DNS - use IP addresses for all testing - fix the Mac and PC to specific IP
Ping works from Mac very reliably - you can use the network utility to ping by IP or host name.
Network Utility will also be useful to port scan the PC. You should be able to tell if the windows firewall is blocking your access

My hunch since I run mongodb all the time on Mac and PC is your firewall would be likely blocking access. The only issues I never have is wrong IP, wrong port, firewall blocking, mongo configuration.

If you are comfortable on the command line - get mongodb on the Mac from https://brew.sh and then run brew install mongodb so you can connect from the command line and see explicit details on what errors happen.

$ mongo
MongoDB shell version v3.4.10
connecting to: mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017
2017-11-22T07:10:38.494-0600 W NETWORK  [thread1] Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1:27017, in(checking socket for error after poll), reason: Connection refused
2017-11-22T07:10:38.501-0600 E QUERY    [thread1] Error: couldn't connect to server 127.0.0.1:27017, connection attempt failed :
connect@src/mongo/shell/mongo.js:237:13
@(connect):1:6
exception: connect failed

So in your case, use the command line mongo to attempt a connection to your server at 10.0.1.9:27100


Custom solar 5v iPhone charger I have a solar panel that emits 5 volts, and I would like to try to charge my iPhone with it. Should I connect the I/O wires directly behind the lightning plug, or is the big transformer block important?

I guess the block is used to change the voltage to 5 volts so that the iPhone can handle it, but I'd like to be sure.

Note: this will require soldering, and I'm not 100% sure this will work.

First, take a lightning cable, and cut roughly 2 inches off of the cable on the usb male end. Strip the main wire down a bit, and you should probably be left with 4 mini wires. Take the red and black wires, and connect them to the I/O of the solar panel, via soldering.

Again, I'm not completely sure how a lightning cable works, but I believe this should work.

Here is an example how to get this done: How to make a Solar USB charger!


Photos disappeared from messages (iPhone 4s) My iPhone 4s has suddenly deleted all photos that were in my messages. Instead I see a blank space with what seems to be a file number which is underneath a question mark.

They have not gone into my photos that are in my album or anywhere else that I can see. I installed iOS 8 a couple of months ago. Could this be a part of the problem.? I would really appreciate any help I could get with this and because I am not that up on technology.

Possible fixes…

settings > messages > turn iMessage off - wait - turn back on.
settings > general > reset > reset network settings.
[More thorough]
If you are using any other device with iMessages, disable them all (sign out).
Then on your iPhone, go to Settings > Messages.
Turn Message “off”.
Wait 5 seconds, turn back “on” and below under Send & Receive, remove any other emails or numbers for Messaging other than your primary number.
So you just have one under that section.
Now you should be able to get pictures.
If so, now you can re-enable Messages on all your other devices.

Note: The above methods have shown varying degrees of success, works for some to regain their history, others merely get the functionality back for new photos, but don't get their old photos back.

Searching Google would indicate this is a known bug, with no real fix as yet. If you have an iCloud backup, the data should be in there - extracting it would need something like iPhone Backup Extractor but it would appear that the only way to get them back into the messages, if nothing worked so far, is wipe the phone & set up as new, then recover from the last backup.


How do I remove a shared photostream from only one device? I want to remove a photostream I'm subscribed to on one device to save space but I want to keep it on my other devices. How do I do that?

You don't have control to allow only a subset of the photo stream to come to a particular device.

Photostream takes photos from all devices that feed it, and as it's a store that Apple keeps online, if a particular device subscribes to the stream, it gets a cached copy of all messages.

You can take that device out of the stream temporarily or free up other space on the device to allow the stream contents to be cached locally.

In your specific case, you could exit that stream subscription to clear the space and then have the person that owns the stream re-send it to you once you've gotten space freed up on some or all devices that need to subscribe to your collective stream.


How do I export my iPhone's call logs? How can I get export the call log (incoming and outgoing calls) from my iPhone, preferably as a CSV file?

I found

MobileLog Jailbreak needed, $9.99
PhoneView $19.95
calLog Doesn't work with iOS 5, $9.99

but none is free and/or open source and none offers a command line interface to automate the process.

How about iPhone Call List?  (You can download a free copy in the link)

I haven't tried it myself yet (I'll as soon as I get home), but it seems the app you're looking for!

  iPhone call list to Mac Transfer fully support latest iOS 4.2, iPad,
  iPhone OS 3.1.3, iPod touch FW 3.1.3, iPod nano 5G FW 1.0 and iTunes
  10.1.


Facebook video calling problem in Safari I have a little issue with Safari. I can't make video calls with Facebook Messenger in Safari. I know that with Google Chrome or Firefox we can avoid this problem, but as you know Safari is optimized for macOS.

I've tried to use a user's agent but it doesn't work. Is there a way to use the Facebook video calling feature with Safari?

Facebook video calling is not supported on Safari (and hasn't been for years).

Apple hasn't indicated they will support this nor has Facebook indicated they would change their code to accommodate Safari.

Your options are to provide feedback to Apple or Facebook, telling them you'd like this feature supported.


I have to turn my Apple TV on to make it discoverable by laptops/phones Whenever I want to share my screen to my apple tv, I first need to find the apple tv remote and turn it on.  I used to be able to, at anytime, go to the displays dropdown and select my Apple TV to share to.  Now, my ATV only shows up when I turn it on first.

I see the setting "sleep after X" on my ATV but I don't think this setting is the solution.

Is there a setting I'm missing?

My macbooks and iphone are all running the latest software, and no programs see it at all until I turn it on. ( itunes, beamer, display port, popcorn time )

In my experience, the "sleep after X" is the solution. If I can't see on my apple tv the power diode on - the device is at sleep and I will not be able to use it as a target for airplay.

It should be said my apple tv is only connected through wifi. I wonder if connecting it through ethernet would make any difference (although I suspect it wouldn't).


“Warning: SUID file has been modified and will not be repaired” after repairing disk permissions Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent” has been modified and will not be repaired.

I keep getting this after running Disk Utility to repair permissions.
Will this cause problems?

It's simply telling you that the file has been modified, and because it's been modified Disk Utility can't fix the permissions on it.
ARDAgent.app is the Apple Remote Desktop agent, and the file shown in the path above is the binary file contained within the app package. It's normal for the file to be shown as an error here. Simply ignore it.
Apple KB article TS1448 details which error messages you can ignore in Disk Utility.
The error that you provided is shown in the list, so it can be safely ignored.

Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions messages that you can safely ignore

Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent" has been modified and will not be repaired.


Hide specific calendars from Notification Center I currently have five Calendar events displaying in Notification Center at a time. However, I have one specific calendar that I'd like to hide from it, as it has too many events for the Calendar-in-Notification-Center setup to be useful. As far as I've been able to surmise from my tinkering in settings, there's no way to do this. Has anyone else been able to find one?

You could use a 3rd party calendar app just for their notification functions as a bodgy workaround.

I recommend Calvetiva, Agenda, or Tempus.

The workflow would go something like this:

Choose a secondary calendar app.
Configure you secondary calendar app to only use the calendars you want alerts for (steps vary on choice of app). Some (like Calvetica) are clever, and extend the alerts function by allowing a snooze option etc.
Configure secondary calendar alerts and notifications via the normal settings> notifications app to show as you want them.  They will only trigger for the active calendars in the app.
Configure your normal calendar alerts to be off.  Remove from Notification Centre, set alert style to none, and also go onto Sounds > alerts and set the calendar alert to none.

Now your existing calendar app will still have access to all calendars but won't alert, the secondary app will do alerting only for the active ones.

Downsides:  You will need to periodically open and then shut the secondary calendar every so often in order for it to read the current alerts from the calendar data store and create it's own local notifications from them.

I hoped you could get round this by following the above steps but using the built in calendar as your selective alerting calendar (as it is always running and won't need to be opened to update), and using a replacement calendar app with all calendars shown but no alerts - sadly the normal Calendar app includes all calendars regardless of if you have turned a calendar off or not.


Opening an OS X disk image with a launchd agent while the display is sleeping I created a launchd agent which opens a non-password-protected sparse disk image (and mounts its solitary volume) daily at 2:45AM in preparation for backup software to write to the volume. The launchd agent's plist file is saved in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/. Here are the plist file's parameters:

Label: my.DiskImageOpener
KeepAlive: NO
RunAtLoad: NO
StartCalendar:
    Hour: 2
    Minute: 45
ProgramArguments:
    hdiutil
    attach
    /path/to/MyDiskImage.sparseimage

As long as the computer's display is awake, the agent works as advertised, opening the disk image and mounting its volume at the time specified in the launch agent. On the other hand, if the display is asleep at the time specified in the launch agent, the disk image fails to open until the display is awoken from sleep (even if that is several hours later), at which point the disk image immediately opens and mounts its volume. The same phenomenon happens if I replace the hdiutil attach /path/to/MyDiskImage.sparseimage command with open /path/to/MyDiskImage.sparseimage, or place the command in a separate executable shell script that the launch agent executes. Also, even though the display is asleep when the above-described problem occurs, the computer itself is awake. Also, I tested having the launch agent execute a dummy executable shell script (echo $(date)) instead of hdiutil, and it executes normally even when the display is asleep.

So it seems that the problem occurs specifically when trying to open a disk image from a launchd launch agent while the computer's display is asleep. Why does the display's sleep vs awake status have any effect on opening a disk image? How can I circumvent this problem?

I am grateful for any help with this puzzling problem. (I am using a MacBook Pro laptop running OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion.)

It is likely your MacBook is asleep when launchd is scheduled to run your disk mount command. launchd does not change its behaviour because of the state of the display.

Your launchd job will run so long as:

the Mac is awake
the launchd job is active
you are logged in (the job ticket is in ~/Library/)

Use pmset's debug logs to find out if your Mac was awake or asleep. The following command will print a log of everything pmset knows:

pmset -g everything

Be sure to check the system.log for messages related to your failed launchd job. If a problem is encountered launchd will log a message.

Applications > Utilities > Console.app > system.log

Mac OS X Energy Saver includes the ability to power on or wake your Mac at a predefined time. You might want to use this ability to wake your Mac a minute before your launchd job is scheduled.

System Preferences.app > Energy Saver > Schedule…


Since the newest Airport Extreme routers don't support SNMP, how can I monitor bandwidth usage on my network? I am currently using about 600gb a month and Comcast is about to start charging me for anything over 300gb. I need to find out which devices are using the most bandwidth so I can get it under control.

The newest airport extremes (the tower version that supports 802.11ac) do not support SNMP. Is there any other way to monitor bandwidth usage by device on my network?

PFSense, DD-WRT/Tomato, Peplink, or some other router in front of the Apple AirPort Extreme will likely be the best solution.  Don't think there's an easier way unless you're running on a single machine for your whole network (not likely).  All the routers I mentioned support realtime traffic monitoring.  NetGear Nighthawks have this capability too.


Is it possible to transfer an application bought under one Apple ID to another Apple ID? How to see apps from different accounts

Is it possible to see apps you got from a different account? I signed off one of my accounts where I had a paid app but I deleted it! The thing is, I forgot the password, so I have another account. The problem is that now I can't get back that app without paying again... U-U I don't mind so much about paying once more, but still, it's a bit frustrating! Help?!?

For those who find this unclear, I'll try my best to make it as clear as possible.
I have two accounts, one French account and the other Canadian
On my french account, I brought minecraft.
I signed off the french account, but made the unfortunate mistake of forgetting the password and switched to my Canadian account.
Since I was trying to make space for another app, thinking I would be able to get minecraft back, I deleted the app.
In the end, my iPad kept saying I had no space left, therefore not able to get minecraft back. I am still on my Canadian account, wishing to see the apps on my french account to try to get minecraft back for free.

No. All applications downloaded by one Apple ID (free or not) and non-transferrable. iTunes support will tell you the same. There is nothing that can be done outside of retrieving/ resetting your password to the original Apple ID associated with the purchase. Then you can download the application again. Contact iTunes support to reset your Apple ID password.


TV lagging when watching regular TV channels while Apple TV is on One of my friends is setting up a TV for another friend, and noticed something very odd. I don't know the specifics of the TV, but we're talking a 2014 Samsung Smart TV that hasn't been cheap at all.

First of all, I could've posted this somewhere else as it seems to be an HDMI problem but (and feel more than free to move if it I missed a more relevant stack exchange - I just wanted the information out there as Google revealed nothing);

Signal Processing seemed to be more for the signals themselves, and while I think it might be the TV decrypting (I'm guessing that an HDMI signal to a picture is an expensive operation?) the signal in the background, I wasn't sure, so it didn't seem right.
Movies & TV seemed to be more about shows and such rather than the electrical specifications for a TV.
Electrical Engineering seemed to be more about Arduinos and machine programming rather than TV support.

The problem is super simple and easy to replicate. Turn on any HDMI device, then turn the TV on a channel that isn't HDMI, and the channels will lag and show digital distortion (even though you're not using the HDMI channel at all). Turn the HDMI device off or take the cable out, and they'll be back to normal.

What could be the reason for this, and why does it only happen when the Apple TV (or possibly any other HDMI device) is on?

Apparently (as thought) the solution had nothing to do with the Apple TV but rather the TV itself being horribly built.

In short, the reason is interference. If the HDMI cable and the TV cable were too close to each other the power/throughput from the HDMI cable would destroy the data coming through the TV cable. Yeah - what a genius build quality from Samsung.

The solution? Pick the HDMI port the furthest away from the TV cable and bend them in opposite directions and you're good to go. "What if I have several HDMI devices" you may ask? Your only solution seems to be to turn them off when you don't use them.


How do I type a schwa character - ǝ (the upside-down e) on MacOS? I have tried following instructions that say its in the emojis and symbols but the upside down e is not in there for me.
Then there is a hot key about Option + Shift and then Option + A, that has not worked for me either.
What keys or input methods can make this easier than cut and paste?

In Emoji & Symbols, type schwa in the search box.
On the ABC Extended input source, type option shift semicolon, let go and then type e.     ǝ


How would I unlock an iPhone while out of the country? I gave an iPhone 3G to a friend who lives in Dubai. At the time, it was carrier locked to at&t. I have since submitted a request here in the U.S. to unlock it, and the request was approved by at&t. For some reason, he's having trouble getting it to unlock, and I think I know why.

Am I correct in assuming that he needs to have access to an at&t tower in order for the phone to talk to it and grab the updated carrier settings, which would then unlock the device?

If so, this is obviously an impossibility in Dubai. My workaround solution to get him an unlocked iPhone is to send him the one I just unlocked here in the States.

Would love to know if there's a way he can unlock remotely (perhaps drive near a partner/roaming tower?) if at all possible.

Meantime, I also performed the same procedure on an iPhone 3GS I had sitting around and found that the unlock occurred after it talked to the at&t tower. "Carrier settings updated" was the title of the message. Phone says "No Service" but I have to presume it's now unlocked since the carrier settings have been updated.

Any cell network pros out there know how this works?

Thanks.

iPhone unlock is a remote process done by your carrier directly with Apple.

From Apple Support:

After your carrier confirms that your iPhone unlock has been processed (…)

If you have a SIM card from a carrier other than your current carrier, follow these steps:

Remove your SIM card and insert the new SIM card.
Complete the setup process.

If you don't have another SIM card you can use, follow these steps to complete the process:

Back up your iPhone.
When you have a backup, erase your iPhone.
Restore your iPhone from the backup you just made.

It does not mention anything on having to be on an area covered by your original carrier, but the process apparently needs internet.

  (…) contacts the registration database (…) to determine the lock status and set the appropriate carrier settings file if needed.

See this question for additional information.


Wine on Mac via Homebrew I installed a Windows application on my Mac after successfully installing Wine via Homebrew. The application runs and seems to function correctly except that all of my data is missing. I get the following error when i run it:

Wine cannot find the ncurses library (libncurses.5.4.dylib).

I tried installing the following ncurses formula to no avail. Am i missing something?

I decided to install Wine from here and everything is now working when using this version of Wine. A little easier than setting it up myself.


Using keyboard to launch app from folder in Launchpad (Yosemite) I have a mid-2013 13" MacBook Air and I like to use the keyboard whenever possible as opposed to clicking.

In Mavericks I could open Launchpad (Fn-F4 in my case), navigate to a folder using the arrow keys, open that folder with the return key, navigate to an app icon using the arrow keys, and open that app with the return key. All good.

In Yosemite (OSX v. 10.10) I can open an app that way only if it's in the top level of Launchpad. If I'm inside a folder in Launchpad, I can navigate around using the keyboard but cannot open an app using the return key. Nor can I open an app with command-O or any other key that I can find. (Inside a folder, when I navigate around, the background of the selected app icon turns a light gray instead of a darker gray in the top level of Launchpad. I'm not sure if that is significant in some way.)

This is puzzling to me. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

[Update, Sept 18, 2016: Launchpad launches apps as expected with the return key in this situation as of OS X El Capitan, version 10.11.5. No more bug.]

LaunchPad was designed as a primarily non-keyboard UI for opening apps.

A drastically easier way to launch an app via the keyboard is to use Spotlight under Yosemite. A simple Command-Space, then the first few letters of the app name, then press return.


How to get photos back which weren't saved to my iCloud account? I had to repair my phone and forgot to save all of my photos to my iCloud account. Is there any way I can get them back?

If the phone was erased as part of the repair, no, there is no way to get them back.


How does a program modify /usr but I am unable to even with admin privileges? I have just installed latest Xquartz and FSL imaging software.  I noticed that there is a new symbolic link in /usr (i.e. /usr/X11R6) to /opt/X11. My understanding was that only Apple software could be certified/signed to modify /usr under the new SIP in El Capitan.  I am certainly unable to modify /usr directly with sudo so SIP is turned on.

It definitely is new - I had a previous xquartz install with a /usr/X11 symlink created prior to El Capitan upgrade which remained in place.  However, FSL needs a /usr/X11R6 symlink which I tried to create manually to no avail because of SIP.

After upgrading to latest Xquartz now I have both /usr/X11 and /usr/X11R6 symlinks.  It's not a 'problem' but I'm not clear how it got there.

Can someone explain how this works?

SIP disables everything (including the kernel) from modifying the specified directories. Disable it if you want to modify /usr.


What could be causing the user interface to freeze? Recently, the user interface of my Mac Mini started to freeze. I can move the mouse, but mouse clicks don't have any effect: I cannot select a different window, right-click on  the desktop doesn't open any contextual menu, and the menus on the top bar are not opened.

All I can do is clicking the shut-down button, but I have to press it twice: The first time I press it (and keep it pressed), I hear a "click!" noise I thought produced from the external hard disk; the second time I press it, the computer shuts down.

What could be causing this issue? How can I find the cause?

The first two times it happened, I thought it was Spotlight causing it, but the last time it happened, Spotlight was not indexing the hard disk's content.

Could be anything, unfortunately.  Is the mini in a well-ventilated area?  Could be overheating.  The hard drive could be dying.  Could just be a corrupted OS install.  You'll have to start trying things to eliminate possibilities.  (eg: install OS an external drive, boot from that drive, see if it still hangs.)


Admin can't select user to reset password This relates to a 2011 Macbook Pro running El Capitan.

I'm set up as the admin and my child has a standard account with parental controls enabled. My child forgot their password and I'm trying to reset it in System Preferences. I unlock the padlock with the admin password, but my child's account is still grayed out and I can't select it to reset the password.

This also happened about a month ago but one day suddenly I could select their user account and I successfully reset the password. I don't know why I suddenly could select it, and I don't know why I now suddenly can't select it. I tried locking and unlocking the padlock but it doesn't make a difference.

I know how else I can reset the password, but what I'm asking here is:

What circumstances could explain why I can't select the user account after unlocking the padlock with my admin password?

The system won’t let you reset the password if it detects that account is currently logged in.

Obvious cause is fast user switching and the other user is logged in.
Less obvious cause, things are messed up.

In case 2, try reboot and safe mode boot or disabling automatic log in to be sure the other account(s) are clear before going deeper.


Steam not installing in wine in 10.8 I have a problem with Wine and Steam on my Mac. I recently updated to 10.8. When I had Lion Wine and Steam worked perfectly, but because of some problems I had to re-install Wine. The thing is, now that Wine is re-installed, I can't install Steam. First off, when I run the installer the console shows:

fixme:storage:create_storagefile Storage share mode not implemented.

Then, after I start the installation and press the first next, the X11 window disappears and never re-opens (believe me, I left it for half an hour and nothing happens, not that it should take more than a few seconds, but still). X11 is still running, or rather XQuartz. What is wrong and what does fixme:storage:create_storagefile Storage share mode not implemented. mean?

How did you install Wine? When I installed Wine using Homebrew, it told me that it had problems with the new Apple llvm compiler, and said to use the old GCC compiler, and gave me a link to download and install it. I haven't tried to install Steam in Wine though, so I don't have experience with your specific problem.


How can I play a MIDI file on my MIDI keyboard? I have a MIDI file example.mid on my Mac OS X 10.6 laptop.

The laptop is connected to a MIDI keyboard (old Yamaha Clavinova, if it matters) via a Roland UM-One mk2 USB-MIDI interface. Using Apple's Audio MIDI Setup utility, I have configured the interface. Audio MIDI Setup's "Test Setup" feature will make my keyboard play notes. I can play notes on the keyboard, and have them appear in the MuseScore notation app. Thus, I think I have the laptop connected to the Clavinova correctly.

How can I make the notes in my MIDI file example.mid play on the MIDI keyboard, via the Mac OS X 10.6 laptop?  I don't want the Mac OS software to make sounds, I want the Clavinova to make the sounds. Quicktime Player and VLC generate sound themselves, so they don't seem to do what I want.  I suspect I want a different kind of utility, which relays the contents of the MIDI file to the MIDI interface, for the keyboard to receive and play.

I think part of the answer will be to explain what that MIDI-relay utility is called. I see references to "sequencers" and "DAWs" in articles like Wikipedia's List of MIDI editors and sequencers, but the article doesn't really explain whether a "sequencer" or "DAW" is supposed to do what I am looking for.

It seems like the wording I'm looking for is "plays MIDI files on an external device".

Most software I found which claimed to "play MIDI files" did so using QuickTime or their own code to make sounds.

I'll quote Tetsujin's helpful definition for 'sequencer' and 'digital audio workstation':

  A "sequencer" is the descriptive name of a piece of software originally designed specifically for the recording/playback of MIDI data [usually through an external device, such as your Clavinova] These days, you would expect that one could also deal with audio recordings, software instrument plugins [soft-synths] etc.

  A DAW is a 'digital audio workstation'... fancy name for a 'sequencer' ;-)

The specific software I found to play MIDI files on my external device was Aria Maestosa. This is a MIDI editor/sequencer which is GPL licensed. Starting with version 1.4, it  "Support[s] sending midi output to external devices".  The current newest version of Aria Maestosa, 1.4.10, requires Mac OS X 10.7 or above. I fell back to Aria Maestosa 1.4.9 for Mac OS X 10.6, dated 2013-10-27.

I ran Aria Maestosa, selected my MIDI interface via the "Output" menu, imported a MIDI file, then pressed the "play" buttons. The music came from my Clavinova, not from the computer. Achievement unlocked!


WiFi problem after 4.3.2 jailbreak I've just jailbroken my iPhone (3Gs, 5.13.04, iOS 4.3.2, Pwnage Tool 4.3.2).

Now I'm experiencing troubles with WiFi, so I can't do an unlock. I have an AirPort Express router, it works well with other devices, the iPhone does have connection with the router (in the Settings -> Wifi menu there is a checkmark in front of my network) but there is no indication of WiFi connection and none of my applications see this connection.

How can I solve this problem?

Thanks in advance.

I've found a solution, it is not pretty clear, but it works.

First, I've rebooted my router

Second, in Settings -> General -> Network I've set Cellular Data and Enable 3G to OFF. After that operation WiFi indicator appeared and everything went well.

Hope it helps to those who experience the same problem.


iPhone is broken, how can I still access my contacts? I broke my iPhone last weekend and the screen remains blank/black even if I connect it to a computer running iTunes. Is there a way I can still access my contacts?

If you synced them through iCloud, then the easiest way is to go to  iCloud. From there you can go to Contacts, select them all using the gear menu on the bottom left and export the vCards. You also can open iTunes and see if it has already been set to sync contacts to an app on the computer or if iTunes has a backup that you could restore onto any iPod, iPhone or iPad to access them / cloud sync them.

Otherwise if you were backing up the device on your computer you can recover the data with iPhone Backup Extractor.

Or, if the phone still boots up (e.g. you just broke the screen or something like that), you can also try using some utilities like PhoneView (I'm pretty sure there are others, but I've used only PhoneView so I don't know if/how they works).


Mavericks: Can I create a second screen with keyboard shortcut like spaces allowed? I upgrade some time ago but need spaces for the first time today.

At the moment I can use Ctrl+← to get to the widgets pane, but I find I can't  use either Ctrl+→ or Ctrl+[number] to get to another space (let alone create a new one).

I've checked my shortcuts and even under there I've only got the option for Switch to desktop 1.

Where am I going wrong?

Do you actually have other spaces created? Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→ will work if you have spaces. To make a new space bring up Mission Control and hover the mouse in the top right, a + button will appear.


How can I mass delete photos off my camera roll (iOS7) There are about 700 photos on my Camera Roll that I don't want.

1) I don't want to delete them one-by-one
2) usage > camera and photos > side swipe camera roll and delete does NOT work on iOS7.
3) I tried using Image Capture on my computer, and my device shows up on the left, but there are no image files.

I'm going crazy, there has to be an easy way to do this.

You can use an alternate way.

1)connect device to MAC.

2)import the photos that you don't want and after import it will ask to "Keep original or remove".

3)select remove from device.(this is what you want)

4)then you can remove from MAC also.


Correlation between Mac OS X GUI actions and Logs I am not sure if it is possible but I was trying to discover/view/analyze if there is any correlation between the actions that a regular user perform on the GUI side with some logs inside the system (logs, var, or console).

I would like to know if I can be able to see all the command line that are executed when the user interact with the Graphical Interface.

Let me give you an example.

In Mac OS X if you want to add a new user to the system, you use the System Preferences > Users and Groups > + add user > etc..

And more or less the same can be achieved with the usage of a command line:

sudo dscl . -create /Users/username
sudo dscl . -create /Users/username UserShell /bin/bash
sudo dscl . -create /Users/username RealName "John Smith"
sudo dscl . -create /Users/username UniqueID 1001
etc. etc.

My question is, there is any way for me to find the above code somewhere?  Above it is just an example.

Another example.

The user create a new folder on his/her by using the regular GUI. right click on his/her Desktop and create a new folder.

Can I see somewhere in the system something like:

mkdir /Users/username/Desktop/directory_name

I hope I was clear.

Thank you so much in advance for your help.

There isn't a general way to do this.

Most of the things you do in the GUI don't run command-line tools, they use thing like system calls to do things directly. For example, when you run mkdir from the command line, it uses the mkdir() function to actually create the directory. Finder doesn't bother using the mkdir command, it simply calls mkdir() (or something equivalent) itself.

This causes two problems for what you want. First, system calls aren't generally logged; and second, there isn't always an easy way to figure out what command would do the equivalent thing (if there even is such a command -- there isn't always).

There are ways to get some info about what's going on behind the scenes of GUI programs, but they're not particularly easy to use (or interpret the output from).

The fs_usage command will list file system events (including things like directory creation) as they happen... but a lot of file system events happen all the time, most of them completely irrelevant to what you're interested in. Filtering out what you care about tends to be tricky. And of course it's only useful if it's a file system event you care about.
DTrace can be used to trace things like system calls in detail, if you know what calls you're interested in tracing. Recent versions of macOS restrict the ability to trace most Apple programs (Finder, System Preferences, ...), so you'll need to at-least-partly disable System Integrity Protection to use it effectively.


MySQL connection via SSH tunnel I've been trying to set up a SSH tunnel with VPN on my macbook with Big Sur 11.2, but it doesn't seem to work.
On my linux machine, I can simply turn on the VPN and make a SSH-tunnel. Then I can just connect to the MySQL server via port 3307. If I do the same on my macbook, the SSH tunnel does connect, but I can't connect to the MySQL server on the given port.
My exact steps are:

Turn on VPN so I can access the server via SSH.
Run ssh -g -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 user@ip_address in the terminal.
Run mysql -u user -p -h [IP] -P 3307 to connect to the MySQL SSH tunnel.
Error: Can't connect to MySQL server on '[IP]'.

Above works fine on my linux system, but not on my mac. I am able to SSH to the server with the command, but the tunnel itself is not working.
Is there some reason this is happening, and how should I proceed?

It appears you have swapped the local address and the remote server address around. For example this site explains it should be:

Create an SSH tunnel from you client to the server:
ssh -g -L 3307:server-ip:3306 user@server-ip
Now port 3306 of the server is exposed on 3307 on the client.
On the client connect MySQL to the 3307 port:
mysql -u user -p -h 127.0.01 -P 3307
Note that you have to connect to the local loopback address 127.0.0.1 as the SSH tunnel already forwarded the connection to the client.


How to display a 'delete button' on the touchbar? I recently got a new MacbookPro with the Touch Bar, I would like to add a button to the control strip that acts like a typical delete key, AKA it removes the character in front of the cursor.

Is it possible to add a delete button without paid software?

I haven't tried this but in theory I think it could work.

You can try making the touchbar show function keys for that app so that you do not need to hold fn: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207240

Then download Karabiner-Elements (which is free) to change one of the function keys to a delete key.


sync mail folders between desktop and iphone I access two different gmail accounts using IMAP in Mail.  I organize those accounts into folders on my Mac (both gmail accounts go into the same folders).  As soon as I put an email into a folder, I can no longer access it on my iPhone.  Is there anyway to sync my folders with my iPhone as well?

The problem you are having is because the folders are on your Mac rather than in one of your Google accounts.

If you want to be able to read the emails on your iPhone they will have to be on the Google IMAP server.

Can I suggest you get one of the two Google accounts to forward its email to the other account. Then you could put the folders in that account and they would be on the Google servers and accessible from anywhere you want.

You can even set it up so that you can choose which of the two accounts is sending any email you send, even from the one account.


Mac App Store works like trying to open iTunes via browser Greets everyone.

I've updated to 10.6.6 but my Mac App Store doesn't behave well - see screen below:

It seems to be constantly trying to open iTunes for some reason. BTW, I'd logged in iTunes with my Apple ID, but this didn't help.

Any ideas?

Go to your home folder. (your user name under places on the left hand side)
click on Library
click on Preferences
delete "ByHost" which is a folder.
delete "com.apple.appstore.appstore.plist" which is a file.
delete "com.apple.storeagent.plist" which is also a file.
restart
empty trash
open Mac App Store and it should work.

If you're worried about deleting files then just make a copy somewhere else before you delete them.

From discussions.apple.com


Which devices and iOS versions do support iAP2? Is there any information available about; which devices and which versions of iOS do support iAP2? (iPod Accessory Protocol 2 - 7th Chapter)

Is this information available on the phone? Can you somehow look it up, if the phone supports iAP2?

I would like to test some of the features of this new version.

Thank you very much for any help.

The technical specification for iAP2 is only available to the members of the MFi licensing program

This information can't be found on the phone. Most of the devices with up-to-date iOS version should support the protocol, but the actual list and technical details are only available for the members of the MFi licensing program.


What is com.apple.bird? Why does it grow so big? When trying to clean up their hard disk, some users discover ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.bird is pretty big, sometimes in the order of many gigabytes. What is it?

Bird is part of iCloud and the files in the folder might be owned by any app using iCloud.  I wrote a simple Python script to try and find out who owns the files in the directory:

$ python blame-bird.py
4R6749AYRE.com.pixelmatorteam.pixelmator            0.00MB
com.apple.shoebox                                   0.00MB
com.apple.TextInput                                 0.00MB
iCloud.com.apple.iBooks                             0.00MB
57T9237FN3.net.whatsapp.WhatsApp                 6904.66MB

Accounted for: 6904MB.  Still unaccounted: 1879MB

So on my Mac WhatsApp is the biggest culprit.  I filed a bug report with them (although I am not sure if it's really their fault).


iPad mini 2 has encountered a problem while installing an update My 9-year-old started an update on her new iPad mini 2. In the middle of the update she turned it off.

Now it comes on and shows the Apple logo. Then it switches over to a screen that shows the power supply cord with an iTunes music symbol directly above the picture of the cord. Any suggestions as to what I need to do to fix this problem?

Your daughter's iPad mini isn't broken, but she will lose everything not stored in iCloud (contacts, documents, likely photos will all be alright).

In order to get the iPad back to normal you'll need to restore it with iTunes on your Mac or PC (it comes with OS X on a Mac, but will need to be downloaded from http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ if you don't already have it).

To paraphrase this Apple Support link:

Plug the iPad into your computer by using the Lightning-to-USB cable
included with it.
Open iTunes
Select the iPad in iTunes
Click "Restore" or "Restore from Backup" if you have one
The iPad will need to be set up as if it was just taken out of the box, but it will be running iOS 9.2, the newest update.


Where are default apps for file types listed? I would like to batch-remove all associations between XCode and any file type, because it is the default app for so many which I always have to manually set to MacVim.

So I'd like to do this once and for all. Is there some place where these Associations are stored in an editable format?

To be clear, I am looking for something more powerful than Cmd-I > Open With > Change All which would have to be done manually for each file type for which XCode installs itself as the default app.

I run 10.12.1.

Right click on a file with that file extension, click Get Info (or just select the file and Cmd+I). Now in the Open with section change to an app you want to open that file with, now there should be a button under the place where you set the app to open with that sets all file with this extension to open with that app. After clicking the button, you might need an admin password. Here is a screenshot of the app chooser and the change all button:


How to connect an iPad to a digital projector What do I need in order to connect an iPad to a digital projector?  I have tried nothing, because I have no idea what to try.

It is actually very simple.
You just need the right cable.

Depending on Projector type you might use the Lightning to VGA Adapter if your Projector is of that type. Note: it does not support Audio!.
Look at your Projector to see if the plug looks like this:

If your projector has HDMI plug use the Lightning Digital AV Adapter

Look at your projector if the plug looks like this:

The projectors normally have 16:9 = wide screen (for movies) and you iPad does not, so you will see a black stripe on both sides, that is normal.

PS: if it has both plugs pick the second one "Lightning Digital AV Adapter" since you can use it to plug in to your LCD TV :)


Durability of plastic screen on latest Retina Macbook Pro? I am in need of a new MBP. I do development (Ruby/Rails) on my mid 2009 13" MBP running Mavericks, and I find it is getting old enough that I'm getting some lag when I'm running DB and web server, Rubymine, browsers, etc. all at once. I would buy the latest 13" MBP today, as I don't need more than the 8GB/256GB setup. My issue is the screen itself. I LOVE the glossy screens, but I went to the Apple Store and touched the screen on a new RMBP. The LCD distorted as it flexed. Apparently these are plastic screens? A while back I was looking at a friend's MacBook Air. I didn't realize the screens were plastic, no glass like my older MBP. I get why they are using plastic, but it seemed like he had to use a screen protector on his MBA because oil from the tips of his fingers would collect on the keys, and the keys would touch the screen when it was closed. This happened on my old Pismo Powerbook and my 12" PowerBook. The oil actually attacks the plastic and mars it permanently.

My question is for current MBP owners, Have you experienced any transfer of dirt and oil from the keys to the screen? I noticed at the store that the screen is inset from the gasket around the edge, so it seems like it SHOULDN'T touch. But being plastic it is much more likely to flex. Also has anyone seen scratches even when cleaning carefully with microfiber and an approved cleaning liquid?

I would buy the Non-Retina 13" MBP in a heartbeat, and just replace the optical and HDD with a couple SSDs, if it was running the Haswell processor that the RBMP has. I don't care so much about the resolution, but more about the processor already being "previous gen". Can't seem to find any signs if they plan on updating the Non-retina models with the latest processors.

Thoughts and experiences?

From someone who has the 13 inch MBPr, I have some comments about the screen.

Pros:
-incredibly sharp
-Fantastic colors and contrast
-Very bright

Cons:
-The glass- let me explain. Initially I notice that the glass did not seem particularly durable but, decided to get in anyways seeing as I wanted something new and powerful. My suspicion was correct. My screen has a huge scape across the center due to what i can only assume is the keyboard. I also have tons of those small chips/divots/dents (whatever you want to call them) all over the top half of my screen. I am not the person to mistreat their electronics. I always handle them with care and constantly clean and disinfect them. So it was a bit of a surprise to me when all of this damage occurred to the screen. Apple definitely made a mistake with this one. I am yet to go and get it checked out but judging by other reports i have doubts they will be willing to replace it.


Reduce size of 'bottom corner' for seconday click Is there a way to reduce the size of the 'bottom' corner of the touchpad that responds as the secondary click?  It's way to big and I would like to make it the bottom corner, not bottom quadrant.

As such there is no way to reduce the size of the 'bottom' corner. What you can do is enable "Click or tap with two fingers" if clicking at bottom corner doesn't work out well for you. This option is available in Trackpad menu of system preferences.


Managing WiFi on IOS 8 As for testing purposes I'd like to get into WiFi settings much more deeper and want to use some WiFi managing app like Airport on OSX which I recently did use on OS X and wonder what's the counter part on iOS, if there's any.

Get an idea here:
https://superuser.com/questions/286457/connect-to-wifi-network-using-mac-terminal

Am keen on any feedback, as you can imagine.

There is Airport Utility by Apple which allows you to review and change the configuration of any Apple WiFi device in the current network.


How long do Apple retain notifications to be pushed to iOS devices until they expire? If an app attempts to send a notification to an iOS device that is either powered off or has no network connectivity push notifications need to be kept in queue.

For how long does Apple retain notifications to allow the device time to contact the APNS servers?

It depends on the service that sent the notification in the first place. The service (i.e. the backend system that supports an app such as Facebook or any other app) sends their notifications to Apple's push notification service over a HTTP/2-based API. In that API it sets a parameter known as "apns-expiration", which determines how long time Apple's push notification service will queue the notification to be delivered when the device is online again.
The "apns-expiration" parameter can be set to 0, which means that it won't be queued at all.
If set to a higher number than 0 that is the date and time (represented as the number of seconds since midnight on the 1st of January 1970 in UTC), the message will be removed from queued.
Finally, the service can choose not to send the parameter at all, or send it as -1 (negative). This means it should be queued for as long as possible.
The maximium queue time is not infinite, but is chosen by Apple - and seemingly not documented anywhere. However, PC World described in 2009 that the maximum at that time was 28 days:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/167652/the_limits_of_apples_push_notification_for_the_iphone.html


Does iOS report usage in megabytes or mebibytes? When looking at usage stats in iOS (data sent/received), are the megabytes/gigabytes in base-10 or base-2?

The docs are not entirely conclusive (since it doesn't address usage specifically) but suggests base-2 is used for iOS device capacities.

So which is it?

I wasn't able to find conclusive documentation on this so I tested it. I found that iOS uses the base-10 definition when showing usage.

That is, if you send a large file, say 10 mebibytes (10 × 220, or 10485760 bytes), it will report it in megabytes, counting a megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes (not 1,048,576 bytes).

So that 10 MB, shows up as 10.4 MB:

(I'm not suggesting that there's anything nefarious going on here related to billing or data limits.)


Does Apple Maps use Core Graphics internally? I'm curious to know if Core Graphics would be fast enough for the rendering of a map?
Or maybe Apple has some internal high performance 2D graphics engine they use for Maps.

Yes, Core Graphics – also known as Quartz 2D – is fast enough to render a map.
To prove the potential, find a vector representation of a map encoded as a PDF file. Using Preview.app, view the map. PDF rendering on Apple's operating systems uses Core Graphics.

Core Graphics
The Core Graphics framework is based on the Quartz advanced drawing engine. It provides low-level, lightweight 2D rendering with unmatched output fidelity. You use this framework to handle path-based drawing, transformations, color management, offscreen rendering, patterns, gradients and shadings, image data management, image creation, and image masking, as well as PDF document creation, display, and parsing.

You can prove Maps.app on macOS uses Core Graphics using the nm tool:
nm -m /Applications/Maps.app/Contents/MacOS/Maps | grep CG

The output shows numerous calls to Core Graphics:
(undefined) external _CGAffineTransformEqualToTransform (from CoreGraphics)
(undefined) external _CGAffineTransformIdentity (from CoreGraphics)
(undefined) external _CGAffineTransformInvert (from CoreGraphics)
(undefined) external _CGAffineTransformMakeRotation (from CoreGraphics)

You can see Maps.app is linked against the QuartzCore and CoreGraphics frameworks with otool:
otool -L /Applications/Maps.app/Contents/MacOS/Maps


OS X partition doesn't show up after dropping iMac, Windows still works I physically dropped an iMac tonight, shattering the protective screen. The computer was sleeping when it got dropped. The drop was from a couple feet high, and booting up looked promising until I realized that I am no longer able to boot into the OS X partition, only the side-by-side bootcamp Windows partition. On holding down alt during boot, only my Windows option is displayed for system to boot into.

This seems like a strange way for things to break due to physical damage given that the Windows partition is working perfectly and there is a single physical drive.

Where can I go from here? What information can I provide to help in diagnosis?

Additional info:
All data is backed up to a local Time Capsule.
This is an old (2007?) iMac running I believe ~10.6.5, though I'm not totally sure on exact version.
The bootable partition is Windows 7.

If you are running 10.6.5, try booting from the original installation disk, then open disk utility.

Run a "Repair Disk" both on the whole HDD to see if there is an issue with the partition table and on the boot volume that isn't working to see if there is an issue with the file system. If this disk is not repairable, you may have damaged the HDD with the drop, in which case not much can be done in terms of troubleshooting. You have a local backup, so your data is at least safe.

Alternatively, if you have another Mac running OS X, you can attempt to mount the disk using Target Disk Mode. This will essentially treat the internal drive on the iMac as an external drive on the other machine. Then you can run the troubleshooting steps above in a similar manner.


iphone showing strange dates in all apps This issue is being faced since quite a while on my iPhone 5c since iOS 9 upgrade. All the dates wherever applicable are getting displayed are something not-in-human understandable format. I tried complete restore, waited for updates till 9.3, also have asked for apple authorized service center. None helped. They said, its not a product fault.
Attaching screenshots. these screenshots are old, but the issue still presists.

A quick search into your issue shows you may have your Calendar set as "Buddhist".

You can check this and change that setting by going to the Settings app -> General -> Language & Region -> Scroll down to Region Formats -> Tap Calendar -> Make sure it's set to Gregorian.

Try that and see if that fixes it?

Answer found here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4679590?tstart=0


How to start an app in a particular Space (Desktop) in Mountain Lion? Space behaves differently in Mountain Lion. In Lion, I have four spaces and I can launch an app (say, Safari) in a particular Space (say, Space 3).

How can I do that in Mountain Lion?

Move the application to the correct space manually, then right click the icon in the dock, choose Options and Assign To This Desktop. It will then open automatically there the next time.


Use "startosinstall" to install macOS Catalina on External Drive I want to use "startosinstall" so that I can install macOS Catalina onto an external hard drive in order to preload MacOS onto multiple SSD's quickly.
I've researched into this and have found websites such as https://grahamrpugh.com/2018/03/26/reinstall-macos-from-system-volume.html which suggest using:
/Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall \

--applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app \

  --agreetolicense --nointeraction --volume /Volumes/External\ Macintosh\ HD

I've tried running the above but have had no success and always find that I get this returned:
Usage: startosinstall

Arguments
--applicationpath, a path to copy of the OS installer application to start the install with.
--license, prints the user license agreement only.
--agreetolicense, agree to license the license you printed with --license.
--rebootdelay, how long to delay the reboot at the end of preparing. This delay is in seconds and has a maximum of 300 (5 minutes).
--pidtosignal, Specify a PID to which to send SIGUSR1 upon completion of the prepare phase. To bypass "rebootdelay" send SIGUSR1 back to startosinstall.
--converttoapfs, specify either YES or NO on if you wish to convert to APFS.
--installpackage, the path of a package (built with productbuild(1)) to install after the OS installation is complete; this option can be specified multiple times.
--eraseinstall, Erase all volumes and install to a new one. Optionally specify the name of the new volume with --newvolumename.
--newvolumename, the name of the volume to be created with --eraseinstall.
--usage, prints this message.

Example: startosinstall --converttoapfs YES

but can't seem to actually get anything to run.
If anyone could provide me with some working code or show me how to solve this problem, I would be eternally grateful.
Thanks for your help

The Apple tool targets the current booted OS as far as I've been able to accomplish. Using asr is still valid, but can take some time to get the arguments correct. I think the tool you want for scripting installers is Mac Deploy Stick. You can use it without the hardware, but the hardware is quite amazing and a real time saver based on how many operations you need to handle.

https://twocanoes.com/products/mac/mac-deploy-stick/

This Sabrent gear also has served us well with push button cloning. There are many like it but this brand works for me. You can go bigger as well, based on how much time you save.

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Duplicator-Function-EC-HD2B/dp/

You might experiment with running the installer once and then when the system boots to the external drive, instead of running the assistant, shut down the system and try cloning the drive.


OSX Messages shows contact accounts as invalid I had Messages.app when I got my mac a year and a half ago and it worked great.

However, since a few weeks ago all my contacts in my previous conversations appear in red (as if they do not have an account).

What's even more curious is that I can see when people are actually typing (I see the 3 dots (dis)appearing), but I only get the message on my iDevices.

Solutions I have already tried :

Restarting messages
Signing out/in my account
Rebooting

I am now out of solutions, do you guy have any ideas what the problem might be?

NB : My OSX is up-to-date with 10.9.3

Edit : It also doesn't work on my iPad (iPhone is still OK, receiving iMessages as iMessages).
Edit2:  I hoped updating to Yosemite would help. But no :(

It's only a guess, but your scenario matches an issue I had with my iDevices and Message on the Mac too. See also the discussion here.

What resolved the issue was activating the iMessage Setting on my iPhone via Settings > Messages.

Strangely this does effect the Messages send/receive on the Mac as well!

Can you verify this?


Applescript: automated key press of spacebar/left click at defined intervals I'm new to apple scripts and was wondering if there is a way the program the computer to press spacebar or left-click at defined times upon running of the script.

For instance I will be able to same I want the system to press space bar then 2 after press it again and 1.4 seconds later press it again and so on.

The program I will have running will be Chrome. Also would it be possible that this script be executed upon the pressing on the first space bar?

Pretty easy!

To simulate a space bar click use tell application "System Events" to keystroke [key]. Clicking is a bit more difficult. If you want to click at a given point you can use tell application [process] to click at {x-cord,y-cord}. However, if you want to have it just click at whatever point it's at, you'll probably have to use a third party shell application like Cliclick.

Now combine that with the delay [seconds] command and you're good!


Why is twitter unreachable from Chrome but not Safari? I am using macOS 10.13.6. When I go to www.twitter.com in Google Chrome I get a

This site can't be reached.
https://www.twitter.com/ is unreachable.
ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE

On the same machine I can fire up Safari and I can get to the same url with no problem. On Chrome I tried using a guest and incognito account with no luck. I also used the settings feature to restore settings to their original default. Nothing seems to help. I am not having this problem with any other site, just twitter.

Egad. I run a network filter (which I thought I disabled when testing this problem) but it turns out I had a rule to deny outgoing connections to twitter.com, which maybe, just maybe, was causing the problem. Mark - thanks for the help and sorry for wasting the bandwidth.


How can I printscreen in X11 Environment? I use Wireshark and it runs under X11 environment I want take some screenshot from wireshark windows but
cmd + shift + 3  or cmd + shift + 4 or ... didn't work there is there any way that I could take some screen shot in X11 environment?

Click to the desktop or any other application, and then press ⌘ + ⇧ + 3.

With this method Wireshark will loose the focus and you can grab the whole screen.


Restoring the Keychain Access menu bar item Like others I have been mourning the loss of the Keychain Access menubar item. In the thread I linked to, the OP him-or-herself proposes a self-described “crude workaround” that involves copying the keychain.menu item from within /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app/Contents/Resources of a machine running macOS 10.12, copying it over, and running it. This, it is claimed, reinstates the menu bar item.

I held out trying this until the release of 10.13.1 in the hope that the disappearance of the Keychain Access menubar item was an oversight Apple would promptly rectify. Unfortunately that is not the case and as of yesterday's update the item is still missing, so I guess it's a deliberate decision on Apple's part.

Unfortunately, the method proposed, as stated in that thread, does not work.

When I read the proposed solution it was quite clear to me that it would entail disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP), as Keychain Access is rightly protected as it is is a key node on many paths of trust through the system. So this I did: I disabled SIP, copied over the menu item from an older system, and ran it, hoping for it to appear in the menu bar. Unfortunately this is not the case: it gets launched, but nothing else happens. I eventually tracked down this entry in the system log, despite SIP being disabled and reported as such by csrutil status:

Sandbox: mdwrite(507) System Policy: allow file-write-xattr/Applications/Utilities/KeychainAccess.app/Contents/Resources/Keychain.menu
Violation:       System Policy: allow file-write-xattr /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app/Contents/Resources/Keychain.menu
MetaData: {"build":"Mac OS X 10.13.1 (17B48)","action":"allow","target":["Applications","Utilities","Keychain Access.app","Contents","Resources","Keychain.menu"],"hardware":"Mac","platform_binary":"yes","profile":"unknown","process":"mdwrite","op":"file-write-xattr"}

At this point I'm a bit at a loss to why SIP is still preventing this executable from running despite it allegedly being disabled, and how I can actually cause it to run. I'm clearly a bit out of my depth.

I eventually tracked the issue down to an issue whereby the extended attributes (xattr) of the copied Keychain.menu item had were not identical to what they had originally been. Once I rectified that, the issue disappeared and the “crude method” does, indeed, work as advertised.


Is it possible to get via CLI the commercial name (Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, ...) At the moment I'm using both uname and sw_vers

darwin_version=`uname -r`
osx_version=`sw_vers -productVersion`

But if I want to display the commercial name (Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, ...) I have to manually maintain a list of osx version - commercial name pair.

I'd like to avoid that manual mapping and rely on system data. Is it possible ?

Well as you said it : it's a commercial name and it's barely present in the OS it self. It no real wonder, it has no meaning for devs (far less than a version or a build number).

AFAIK It's mentioned in some help pages, but that's almost all.

So until someone would prove me wrong, there is no CLI for that (excluding curl stuff, which would imho not be a suitable option here).


Mac Pro crashed and wants to recover files on hard drive I have a Mac Pro and the motherboard is damaged and I'm trying to retrieve the files from the hard disk on my Windows 7 desktop. Can anyone tell me what software i can use?

Windows 7 cannot read HFS+

There are a number of programs that do this, MacDrive and HFS-Windows spring to mind. Both are commercial software but not especially expensive.

there is a freeware solution but I have never used it: HFSExplorer:

http://www.catacombae.org/hfsx.html

Will allow you to read only from HFS drives.


How to reinstall a G4 iMac without CDs? I have got iMac power Mac G4 which I wanted to reinstall. I followed a Youtube video to do so, now my machine boots to a command prompt.

How can I proceed from here?
PS: I don't have any install CDs/DVDs.

Before you do anything, you need to obtain the install disks.  The latest version that was supported was OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard).
I don't recommend downloading them from a torrent site or from an unknown person off the Internet.  Your best bet would be to obtain the genuine installer disks from  eBay, Craigslist, GumTree, etc.  If you have the inclination, you can attempt to install FreeBSD on that G4 (I installed it on a G5 XServe)
Don't wipe your disk until you know you have a working installer. And even if you do have a working installer, make a backup, preferably an image using dd or another cloning tool, of that hard drive.  If things go sideways, you'll have a way to get back to a working machine.  Ideally, I would use a different drive and put the original away for safekeeping.


Calendar Crashes While Opening - NSPersistentStoreCoordinator has no persistent stores or NSInternalInconsistencyException The calendar crashes after 1s while opening. I already opened the temp dir open $TMPDIR..deleted the cache C folder, restarted the computer and deleted the trash. This was not successful. Even after the upgrade to sierra the calendar is still broken.

I created a guest user account, where I'm able to open the calendar. But I cannot open it on my main (admin) account.

I tried to open the calendar after I had booted from safe mode. I also tried to open the calendar in safe mode, which was also not possible. The error is the same.

main error

This NSPersistentStoreCoordinator has no persistent stores (unknown).  It cannot perform a save operation.

full error

I trimmed the error a bit otherwise I couldn't post it there.

Process:               Calendar [27732]
Path:                  /Applications/Calendar.app/Contents/MacOS/Calendar
Identifier:            com.apple.iCal
Version:               9.0 (2155)
Build Info:            iCal-2155000000000000~2
Code Type:             X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        ??? [1]
Responsible:           Calendar [27732]
User ID:               501

Date/Time:             2016-10-10 13:27:38.511 +0200
OS Version:            Mac OS X 10.12 (16A323)
Report Version:        12
Anonymous UUID:        DD7A2269-DAE5-C038-6F53-34D6AAA3EF21

Sleep/Wake UUID:       160FAB72-D6A8-4065-90C4-627329158025

Time Awake Since Boot: 250000 seconds
Time Since Wake:       50000 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread:        3  Dispatch queue: com.apple.NSXPCConnection.m-user.com.apple.CalendarAgent.proxy

Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes:       KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00003562149bbec0
Exception Note:        EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal:    Segmentation fault: 11
Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0xb
Terminating Process:   exc handler [0]

===========                     =======  =======
TOTAL                            583.7M      829

Model: MacBookAir6,2, BootROM MBA61.0099.B22, 2 processors, Intel Core i5, 1,4 GHz, 8 GB, SMC 2.13f15
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5000, Intel HD Graphics 5000, Built-In
Memory Module: BANK 0/DIMM0, 4 GB, DDR3, 1600 MHz, 0x80AD, 0x483943434E4E4E384A544D4C41522D4E544D
Memory Module: BANK 1/DIMM0, 4 GB, DDR3, 1600 MHz, 0x80AD, 0x483943434E4E4E384A544D4C41522D4E544D
AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0x117), Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (7.21.171.10.1a16)
Bluetooth: Version 5.0.0f18, 3 services, 27 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: Wi-Fi, AirPort, en0
Serial ATA Device: APPLE SSD SD0256F, 251 GB
USB Device: USB 3.0 Bus
USB Device: BRCM20702 Hub
USB Device: Bluetooth USB Host Controller
Thunderbolt Bus: MacBook Air, Apple Inc., 23.6

I had the same issue after updating to Sierra.  Saw in some other forums that it was linked to gmail calendar accounts.  Assuming you have a gmail calendar account linked, try disabling the gmail account from Settings and then opening calendar.  Once open you can re-enable the gmail calendar and it works fine (at least for me it does).

Not a solution to the problem, but a temporary fix to allow you to use calendar until Apple figures this out.


How to cycle through recently *used* tabs in Safari? I want to cycle through recently used tabs in Safari 7.1.3 (MacOS 10.9.5) like one can in in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. I predominantly run Opera 11.64, and it exhibits the best behavior for this recently-used-tab switching. Is there a way to do this in Safari, even if it requires an extension/plugin/addon of some kind?

Note: cycling/switching between tabs in most-recently-used (aka "visited") order is different than simply cycling through all the tabs as they are listed at the top of the browser; the latter seems more-commonly discussed.

From the tips on SnazzyLabs, ⇧-⌘-T  reopens last tab closed (N number of times) AND will restore the last session if all/Safari are closed.

In essence, it is going backwards through your recent history one step at a time.


Mail is showing me garbage for certain messages Certain incoming emails are showing up as nonsense.  Any idea what is causing this or how to fix it?  The strangest part is that I can copy/paste the garbage into a text editor and read what it says!  Here's what I'm seeing:

It looks like your fonts got borked somehow.  This is most likely to happen if you've recently installed an application that adds or changes fonts, which includes apps like Office, iWork, the Adobe suite, and many more.

I'd start out troubleshooting Font Book.  Apple's KB article about Font Book has information about how to address this.

For troubleshooting, I think that you should try them in this order:
1. In Font Book, go to File > Restore Default Fonts. This is the easiest and seems the most likely to resolve your issue, since fonts in email are highly likely to be a default font.
2. In Font Book, validate your fonts (it's under the File menu).
3. In Font Book, check for duplicated font (it's under the edit menu).

Between each of these steps, quit Mail and restart it to see if it works; font changes won't show if you haven't restarted Mail.


How to print duplex with Epson AL-MX200 printer? It can't print both sided as the duplex select on the print window is grayed. It works fine on Linux. How to tell the driver that the printer is an actual duplex printer? Thanks.

Here is a driver that may help. https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/epson_al_mx200.html


Which iCloud service runs in background in OS X? I wondered which service is acutally updating the MobileDocuments folder in OS X?

I looked through the Apple Developer pages, but nowhere is any information about background services in OS X.

  When i save a file with TextEdit in the iCloud,the file is created in
  the MobileDocuments folder. But how does it trigger the background
  service?

Is there any information about those things yet?

No it doesn't trigger to run any process.

Because the process is always running. The process for doing these kind of things is ubd.

Click here for more information.


Unable to update to Xcode6 from AppStore I am running my mac on OSX 10.9.5
I can see Xcode 6 in the app store and there is a button "Update".
But once I hit the update button, spinner pops up for a second and then dissappears and that's it.

No warning or dialog or anything...It just doesn't do anything.

Any idea what's going on and how to fix it ?

I've had this happen with other apps in the past and what works for me is to:

kick off a Time Machine backup (or equivalent)
delete the app using Launchpad (or deleting from from /Applications)
restart

The restart is probably not needed in the vast majority of cases, but it ensures that no files from the app are still open from any process still running.

At that point, the app store should have a good shot to install the app (Xcode in your case).


Contact name missing from text messages Contacts are saved but since the update, when I get a text no name appears only the telephone number? But I open the text, the name appears at the top, just when initial text notification comes through

Hard to say what your country is but we had a similar issue in mine. The cause was that number format inside the country is different from the international format that most operators use when sending messages or doing calls. For example, in the country we have 8-926-1234567 and international number is +7-926-1234567. In some old iOS versions iPhone could not recognize these numbers as the same.

The solution was simple: always use international number for all contacts. Try and see if it helps.


Repairing broken file associations on the Mac I installed a download manager (I think folx) on this mac book a few months ago, every time I would download a file folx would pick up and download it.

Long story short, this got confusing, so I deleted folx from the applications.

Now whenever I try to download a file it just does not work right (on either chrome or safari), the browsers complain about a broken plugin when I view a PDF and it seems safari attempts to download the file on the actual page as opposed to going to the download queue.

How do I fix this so file downloads work again in the browsers.

Folx does a fair bit of damage on a simple delete uninstall.

Instead, re-download folx and run the uninstaller app.

See: http://wiki.eltima.com/user-guides/downloader-macos/uninstall.html


`brew link unbound` returns `/usr/local/sbin is not writable` error I'm trying to install unbound using brew command.

Here's output for brew install unbound:

Warning: unbound 1.6.7 is already installed, it's just not linked.
You can use `brew link unbound` to link this version.

As you can see, I was asked to use brew link unbound to link to unbound 1.6.7.

But I failed to link to it because I got the following error:

Linking /usr/local/Cellar/unbound/1.6.7...
Error: Could not symlink sbin/unbound
/usr/local/sbin is not writable.

I've the other stackoverflow here.

And the answer sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local creates the following error:

chown: /usr/local: Operation not permitted

I'm using macOS High Sierra Version 10.13.2. And my homebrew version is 1.4.3.

How can I solve this problem?

By default /usr/local/sbin doesn't exist. The folder should be created by installing brew, the owner/permissions are set to $(whoami):admin/775. Most/all folders in /usr/local/ are owned by the user who installed brew - that's part of the default installation and configuration.

On the other hand some third-party tool may have been installed to this folder previously (e.g AFAIR procexp or Smartmontools have to be installed there).
Then the owner/permissions are probably set to root:wheel/755 or root:wheel/775

To solve your problem check whether /usr/local/sbin exists and its folder permissions.

The following command creates this folder if it doesn't exist and makes it world writable, but doesn't change owner:group:

if [ ! -d /usr/local/sbin ]; then sudo mkdir /usr/local/sbin; fi && sudo chmod 777 /usr/local/sbin

Now you can link unbound:

brew link unbound

You may undo the world writable step with:

sudo chmod 775 /usr/local/sbin

Don't forget to add the folder to your user's PATH in ~/.bash_profile or the system's PATH in /etc/paths.

If you get the error:

Error: Could not symlink sbin/unbound
/usr/local/sbin is not writable.

the user doesn't have permissions to write to the folder with the command actually executed.

The command sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local will change the owner of all subfolders and their content to $(whoami) despite the error chown: /usr/local: Operation not permitted. The only exception will be a SIP protected item in /usr/local/. By default none of the files and folder is protected though.

Thus the error message is erroneous and you probably already have been successful by entering your sudo chown -R ... command and you should have tried to simply linked unbound once more.

You can check the folder permissions by entering:

ls -lae /usr/local/sbin

You can get all a protected items in subdirectories of local by entering:

ls -lae -R /usr/local | grep restricted


Local DNS server access delays Access to a local DNS server is always delayed by ~1 second.

I enabled the DNS server on OS-X Lion and it does indeed work.  However when I query it using 'dig' (or nslookup) there is a delay of about 1 second before the reply is given. This delay is not reported by 'dig', which gives a response time of 0ms.

So for example a query using the OpenDNS servers completes sooner than one to the local server despite the name resolution taking 135ms longer:

$ time dig @208.67.220.220 ibm.com

;; Query time: 135 msec

real    0m0.172s
user    0m0.008s
sys 0m0.006s

$ time dig @localhost ibm.com

;; Query time: 0 msec

real    0m1.068s
user    0m0.009s
sys 0m0.007s

The delay does not seem to be in the named server, as when using named -g to view logs there is also a 1s delay before the request is printed.

FYI: my changes to enable DNS were:

rndc-confgen -b 256 > /etc/rndc.conf
head -n5 /etc/rndc.conf | tail -n4 > /etc/rndc.key
edit /etc/rndc.conf to correct port number
edit  /etc/named.conf to add this to the options:

forward first;
forwarders {
    208.67.222.222;
    208.67.220.220;
};

run named from the shell (/usr/sbin/named -g)

If you have 127.0.0.1 localhost in /etc/hosts you also need to add a ::1 localhost line.

You may find that the delay has something to do with resolving the name 'localhost'. If you use 127.0.0.1 instead, the delay should be reduced to milliseconds.

$ time dig @127.0.0.1  muc.de

;; Query time: 10 msec

real 0m0.029s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.005s

I don't know where the resolution of 'localhost' occurs or why it takes such a long time, but I guess it doesn't really matter...


Avoid showing hidden applications in the cmd+tab navigation menu I recently switched to OS X Mountain Lion. I have applications like Skype and Pidgin which start at login and are hidden, but when I have more applications running and I do ⌘ cmd + ⇥ Tab to switch between application these hidden applications also appear there.

How can I avoid showing them?

Here is a blog post from someone who managed to remove Finder from the Application Switcher by adding this entry:

 <key>NSUIElement</key>
  <string>1</string>

To the info.plist file of the specific app (in this case, Finder).


How do I remove all traces of my Apple ID from a borrowed MBA? My MacBook Pro logic board needed to be replaced, so I borrowed an MBA from a coworker.

I restored the MBA from Time Machine to get back to work. When I was done, I removed my user account tied to my iCloud account, and gave it back. They didn't have much of anything on it, so he didn't care if it was restored to previous state (so he didn't have a Time Machine backup for this MBA).

My MBP was Mavericks, but their laptop was Mountain Lion. I offered to do the OS X update for them (as it was free) when I restored, but now I'm wondering if that was a bad idea.

He said that they are getting an iCloud prompt for my account when the App Store is attempting to do updates. They've signed out of everything they can find (system preferences, app store, iTunes), but they can't change it.

Any quick fix for this or do I need to pick up the laptop from them and do some sort of factory reset?

Apps downloaded from the App Store are tied to the Apple ID they were purchased under, and can only be updated with that Apple ID. From what you're describing, you must've installed some apps (licensed to your Apple ID) on his Mac while you were using it.

The simplest solution is to figure out which apps are licensed to you, delete them from his Mac (you can simply use the Finder to drag them from the /Applications folder to the trash), and then (if appropriate) purchase/download them under his Apple ID.


What steps can be taken to recover from rm -rf ~ Asking for a friend.

Imagine that one has accidentally created a file named ~ and in the process of deleting it, foolishly types:

rm -rf ~

Luckily, I have active terminal windows open, so all is not entirely lost. I happened to have stopped this while it was deleting in the ~/. prefixed directories, too, so I somehow have all my work related content still as those directories didn't get hit with the rm (lucky, I know).

Is there any way to recover from this? What files do I need to recreate while I still have valid terminal sessions?

I'm under the assumption that all my configuration (mostly in ~/. named folders/directories) is permanently gone. I've recovered some of my .bash_profile by looking at env, alias, and typeset -f but I'm sure I'm missing parts of it.

rm is one of those dangerous commands where to "Err is human, but to really foul things up, you need a computer."  rm immediately deletes the files and bypasses the Trash...you don't pass "Go" and you don't "collect $200."

Your best bet is to....

Stop using the machine as in ASAP.  The more your use it, the more disk activity, the less of a chance of recovery.
Look at getting something like DiskDrill.  It's free to use but the actual recovery will cost around $100.  There are others, but I found this one works really well for me.
Start a Time Machine regimen and adhere to it.


Enable ear detection to pause music when using AirPods Pro on a MacBook Pro Is it possible to enable the "ear detection" function to play/pause the music when one of the AirPods Pro is removed? I know that this can be done with an iPhone, but is this valid also when using the AirPods Pro on a MacBook Pro? I am not currently able to do so.

Yes, this is possible. Once the AirPods are connected, go to Bluetooth Preferences. There should be an options button next to the device. There will be a checkbox with the option to enable Automatic Ear detection.


Iphone 6s, question about recovering photos from iCloud on to the new phone. Please help. I got a new phone and I have everything backed up on iCloud. Everything restored (apps, phone contacts, etc.) exceptfor the photos. How do I get them from iCloud on to my new phone? Thanks

If you did a restore from iCloud backup, your photos should appear.

If not, go to settings -> Your name -> iCloud -> Photos and turn on the following:

iCloud Photo Library & Keep and Download Originals

If the photos dont show, check your iCloud storage for photo backup size and iCloud backups. If you have an iCloud backup that has a favorable date, then restoring that could be in your favor.


How to delete an iOS app you can't find in Springboard? I have way too many apps on my iPhone, so many that I can't find any given app in the folders and pages of the Springboard Home screens any more.

If I can't find it, how do I delete it?

I don't want to use iTunes for this if there's any way at all to avoid it.

Oops, found it.

Settings / General / Usage / Manage Storage / app / Delete App.


iTunes on Windows Refuses to Upgrade I've been having a problem when trying to upgrade iTunes on Windows (7 x64). Every time I try to upgrade it, I get the error message:

  QuickTime was not found.

  QuickTime is required to run iTunes. Please uninstall iTunes, then install iTunes again.

Wanting to upgrade to 9.2 to get iOS4, I obliterated anything to do with Apple from my machine and reinstalled successfully, but this error comes back time and time again.

I recently found that I am not the only one suffering from this.

Is there a way to solve this issue or am I doomed to stay like this forever?

It seems like the installer expects Quicktime to be there but when it looks it can't find it.

Have you tried removing any registry entries to do with Quicktime and retrying the install?


MacBook Pro: Battery icon shows as charging even when not connected to power source I have a 13" 2017 MacBook Pro no Touch Bar model. It is not connected to a power source but it still shows as charging. While this is not affecting my Mac's performance or anything, but now I don't get that low battery warning when the charge reaches 5% or low, so it just shuts down at 0% without me realising it.

I tried starting it in Safe Mode, but the issue is present there as well.

Welcome to AskDifferent! Try to perform a SMC reset, and possibly also a NVRAM reset.

From https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295:

  The SMC is responsible for these and other low-level functions on Intel-based Mac computers:

  Responding to presses of the power button
  Responding to the display lid opening and closing on Mac notebooks
  Battery management
  Thermal management
  Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS)
  Ambient light sensing
  Keyboard backlighting
  Status indicator light (SIL) management
  Battery status indicator lights
  Selecting an external (instead of internal) video source for some iMac displays