Not enough storage for emails! So my iCloud email told me I didn't have enough storage. I couldn't send or receive emails. Which I just realized I wasn't getting any new emails. I just added more gb. My question is will I never get those emails sent out during the time I didn't have enough storage?

In general - it depends on how long you missed emails.

A call to Apple Support would get you specific information about your account as well as an answer. You can also try sending yourself a message from another provider to see if you get a hard bounce error or if the message queues.

With iCloud - my experience is you get some leeway and Apple stores messages for a short amount of time (days to a week) for you to realize you are full and then clean up space. They block sending immediately so you notice the error condition and seek help.


What determines the width of the cone in the Maps app? I have noticed that the "direction cone" in the Maps app sometimes changes its acuteness: sometimes it will get wider or narrower. The cone seems to represent some sort of accuracy/confidence. I'm particularly interested in what factors (environmental?) alter it.

What causes this? (or am I just imagining that it changes at all?)

I believe it's related to the accuracy of the compass.  In my experience, the compass is quite inaccurate and maps do not align perfectly with real life, but usually the actual alignment is somewhere in the cone (I say usually because sometimes they're so inaccurate that it's outside even that, especially when I'm inside a big metal car).  This is similar to the blue circle around the dot that represents uncertainty in your location.

It probably changes its acuteness because the compass becomes more and less accurate over time.  The angle of the device may have something to do with this (based on the built-in compass app and personal experience, the compass seems to be more accurate when the device is laid down flat).


Using different Apple ID at App Store without transferring registration I have made some app purchases using my current Apple ID (say personal.email@example.com).

Can I use my current Apple ID (personal.email@example.com) at "Mac App Store" on MacBook Pro and iMac, which are registered to my family Apple ID (say family.id@example.com) without transferring registration ?

Yes, you can use any Apple ID on any Apple product, regardless of who it is registered to. Simply sign in with your Apple ID (e.g., personal.email@example.com) and purchase or download the app you wish from either the App Store or the Mac App Store.

Product registration helps Apple pull up your details quickly and easily should you (or your family) need warranty service. It's not at all required and the warranty of any Apple product is bound to the actual device, not the person. If you purchase an item from the Apple Store, you'll notice that your warranty already starts on your product purchase date. If you buy an item from a 3rd party retailer, you will have to bring in the original receipt to show date of purchase. We often lose or forget about receipts, so registering your product is often convenient for us as well as Apple.

If you purchase content using your own private Apple ID, that content is bound to your account. If your family ever wish to update an app, or redownload it, they will need access to your Apple ID account.

There is nothing that technically forbids you from using many Apple IDs on a single system, but often tracking who bought what gets to be a bit of a pain, especially when someone moves on. Just of note that it's often best to keep things simple and use a single Apple ID. It's important to remember that you can't transfer purchases from one Apple ID to another. You also can't ever close or delete an old Apple ID. When an Apple ID is created, it is quite permanent.


2017 Macbook pro 13 inch 3 monitors help I have done quite a bit of searching and haven't found a solution to my issue. I have a 2017 macbook pro 13 inch with touchbar. I want to be able to use 3 monitors 1080p via apple usb c digital av hub so usb to hdmi for all 3 monitors plugged each into their own port. I can only get two to work including in clamshell mode. Is there a way to get this to work while using laptop as intended or would I have to use bootcamp or something? Thanks

The 13" 2017 MacBook Pro only supports up to two external monitors:

  Video Support

  Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display
  at millions of colors and:

  One display with 5120-by-2880 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors
  Up to two displays with 4096-by-2304 resolution at 60Hz at millions of colors
  Up to two displays with 3840-by-2160 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors

If you want to get a third display going, you will need a USB to DVI/HDMI/VGA adapter.


iPhone 4S not syncing with my Google calendars I just purchased an iPhone 4S and I am using iOS 5.1.1. Only one of my Google calendars is syncing. I've searched the web and have tried every suggestion, nothing is solving the problem.

You'll need to make sure that your account is properly configured in Settings > Mail, Contacts, and Calendars.
Since you're using Gmail, make sure that Calendars are set to ON and then go to the Calendar app and make sure all the calendars are selected to be displayed by tapping "Calendars" in the top left corner and checking off all the calendars you want to see from your Gmail account.


Forcing macOS Sierra L2TP client to use specific interface I've got a WiFi (en0) and Ethernet (en8) connection on my machine. Each interface is on a separate network and en0 has priority over en8.

The gateway for en0 is 192.168.100.1 and for en8 it is 172.20.10.1

There are services I need to access that are only available on the en0 network, and the VPN is only available via en2 network.

I want to be able to force the macOS Sierra L2TP client to use en8. I have successfully added a static route to route the IP address that I want to connect to, to the gateway of en2 and have verified by running trace get <vpn address>

However the connection still fails and when I look at the logs in /var/ppp/ppp.log it looks like the L2TP client is still trying to go through the en0 gateway:

Wed Mar 22 13:53:10 2017 : l2tp_get_router_address 192.168.100.1 from dict 1

Routing Table below:

Having two default gateways in macOS will result in: the gateway of the interface with the higher priority will be the default one and the other one is disregarded.

To get the order enter in Terminal: networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder.

So remove the default gateway of interface en8 and either add a custom route to the VPN server:

sudo route add -host <VPN-server-ip-address> -interface en8

or

sudo route add -host <VPN-server-ip-address> -link <MAC-of-en8>

or to the network (here the example network: 10.0.0.0/16)

sudo route -n add -net 10.0.0.0/16  172.20.10.1

Depending on the network environment of the VPN-server a second inverted route pointing to your local 172.20.10.0/28 network has to be added there.


Prompt when sending text message as SMS instead of iMessage? Is there a way I can get Messages to prompt when it wants to send a message as SMS rather than an iMessage ?

I hate noticing that when a message fails to send, its sent as SMS instead of imessage, which I get charged for. This happens when I activate the SEND AS SMS option.

However I would still want to send a message as SMS if necessary (emergency etc). Is there an option/app/tweak that can help me accomplish that?

This is something I wish iOS5 had. Alas, it does not - however if it fails to send as iMessage with send as SMS disabled, it will allow you to tap / hold (I forget which) and specify to send as text.

The main caveat to this, though, is that it doesn't 'alert' you per-se.


How to download a web site with specific cookies set? I want to download a site with specific cookies set. I tried SiteSucker but found there are no options to set headers. So I could not set a cookie.

Are there other Mac tools or apps I can use?

You can use curl in Terminal for this. Besides man curl there is a tutorial available explaining the different usage scenarios. To set/use cookies you can use either

curl -b "sessionID=123456789" www.example.com

to set a cookie value directly, or use the --dump-headers, -c and -b options for more elaborate cases.


Can I prevent OS X 10.8 Mail.app smart mailbox configuration changes/corruption? I have an IMAP account with number of archive mailboxes structured like

 + Archive
 +-- 1996
 +-- 1997
 +-- ...
 +-- 2011

I have configured a smart mailbox including all of these mailboxes plus INBOX and Sent Mail from the same IMAP account:

  Contains that match ANY of the following conditions:
    Message is in mailbox Account (in fact, Inbox/Account)
    Message is in mailbox Account (in fact, Archive/Account)
    Message is in Mailbox 1996 (in fact, Archive/Account/1996)
    ...

It worked just fine since 10.6 I believe. However, starting 10.8 upgrade, Mail.app sometimes loses this configuration, so this smart mailbox starts looking like

  Contains that match ANY of the following conditions:
    Message is in mailbox Inbox (yes, aggregated inbox of all the accounts)
    Message is in mailbox Archive (yes, aggregated archive of all the accounts)
    Message is in Mailbox No mailbox selected
    ...

I guess this might be related to mail.app Smart mailbox synchronization over iCloud, since I have desktop iMac and Air, and I'm using both. However, I failed to make a synchronized configuration which would be the same on box mail.app instances.

Could you please advise how should I configure this smart mailbox to avoid irritating bug?

The problem indeed was with synchronisation: my iMac had this account configured as name@company.com, while MBA had this account configure as name.alias@company.com. Once I have deleted all IMAP accounts from both iMac and MBA and created it once again, problem disappeared.


Is there an alternative for TrueCrypt? TrueCrypt said it is not secure. What are alternatives?

Encrypted Disk Images

The TrueCrypt pages suggest using an encrypted disk image.

FileVault

Apple provides drive level encryption through FileVault.

  With FileVault 2 you can encrypt the contents of your entire drive to
  help keep your data secure.

  FileVault 2 uses full disk, XTS-AES 128 encryption to help keep your
  data secure. Using FileVault 2, you can encrypt the contents of your
  entire drive.

Alternatives

Other alternatives are discussed at:

Hacker News, True Goodbye: ‘Using TrueCrypt Is Not Secure’
Windows Encrypted Virtual Hard Drive but not Bitlocker or Truecrypt? Where cross platform alternatives may be suggested.
A Swiss based TrueCrypt group has recently formed; they may provide ongoing support.

Why not trust TrueCrypt?

TrueCrypt is warning its users that it may contain unfixed security issues.

  WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed
  security issues

The development of TrueCrypt has stopped and thus any newly found bugs may not be fixed:

  The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft
  terminated support of Windows XP. Windows 8/7/Vista and later offer
  integrated support for encrypted disks and virtual disk images. Such
  integrated support is also available on other platforms (click here
  for more information). You should migrate any data encrypted by
  TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images supported on your
  platform.


Chrome graphical glitches in Yosemite I have a 2009 Mac Pro (4,1) that has had the "unofficial" 5,1 firmware update applied (to enable additional CPU support), CPUs upgraded to dual 3.46 GHz 6-core Xeons and GPU replaced with an AMD Radeon R9 280x flashed for Mac. It's running Yosemite 10.10.3. The graphics card uses the AMD drivers that ship with OS X.

I am having graphical glitches - a couple of different ones, but this is the one that's bugging me the most right now. (Link is to a screen recording made with QuickTime Player.)

The system upgrades mentioned above happened in February, and I have only noticed this issue within the last month-ish, so I don't think they are related. I did notice this issue before upgrading OS X from 10.10.2 to .3, so I don't think that's related either.

It only appears to happen in Chrome, although oddly, one of the glitches that happens (not caught in the video, sadly) is a black rectangle appearing over the middle of the menu bar, outside of Chrome's window - but only when Chrome is in the foreground. Switching to any other application when that happens causes the black box to disappear instantly. Another manifestation places a gray rectangle over the middle of the tab bar. Clicking on a couple tabs usually makes it disappear, as does, again, switching applications.

I found what may be a related bug in the Chromium bug tracker, but I am not seeing the extensive corruption/glitches shown in the screenshot attached to the bug (maybe I'm lucky?!?), nor am I seeing any issues in webpages themselves, only the tab bar, address bar and bookmark bar. I did add comments on that bug though.

I was using Chrome beta (stable version + 1 basically) but have reverted to Chrome v42.0.2311.135 stable and am experiencing the same problems. I have disabled all extensions and Chrome hardware acceleration and the problem persists.

Any ideas?

After seeing it in Firefox too, I decided it must be hardware-related. To avoid having to open up the Mac and change out the graphics card (which required a bit of effort to get the new card in there in the first place, due to it not aligning precisely with the PCI slot opening in the back), I tried changing out the cord. (I recently switched from having it plugged in with a DVI output -> DVI cable -> DVI input on monitor to a Mini DisplayPort output -> MDP/VGA adapter -> VGA cable -> VGA input, and the cord has issues I guess.)

It seems to have resolved the issue.


Windows vs OS X temperature, Windows runs hotter I could see about 10 degrees celsius less when idle in OS X, compared to Windows 8.1, that's ~49 °C compared to ~38 °C.
I've seen that, according to Macs fan control, the fan is shut down in idle, but after googling, some people say macbook should always keep fan running at around 1200 rpm.

Should I leave it as is or would it be safer to use a custom fan management to keep it running at 1200 rpm?

Specs: MacBook Pro Retina 13" 2015

I would not recommend changing you fan-speed management if you are not sure about it. 38°C - 49°C won't harm your macbook.


Mount FAT32 partition (external drive) on Mac I have an external disk drive of 2TB with two partitions, one NTFS and another with FAT32 format.

The NTFS partition is automatically mounted when i plug the device using Paragon NTFS but I  don't know how to mount the FAT32 partition.

Can someone help me with this?

More info:
Here is what windows shows on Disk Management when i plug the external disk

mkdir /fat_mount
# create area to mount FAT partition
mount -t msdos /dev/diskXXX /fat_mount

^ Thats how to mount fat drives/partitions in Mac OS, also useful for single user mode recovery. Note I think some versions may ship with "mount_msdos" as opposed to using "mount -t msdos" but I haven't used enough to say for sure.


How to connect two non-Thunderbolt displays to the Macbook Pro 2011 via Thunderbolt? I have the VGA and HDMI adapters for my Macbook Pro 2011, but can only connect one display at a time - neither adapter has a female Thunderbolt connector to act as a passthrough.

My understanding is that I can use two Apple Thunderbolt displays by daisy chaining them and have three displays - the native notebook display, and two Thunderbolt displays - at once.

Is there a way to connect two non-Thunderbolt displays to the laptop, via a splitter, or some sort of Thunderbolt cable or adapter?
If I buy one Thunderbolt display, can I then use the VGA or HDMI Thunderbolt adapter daisy-chained off that display to drive a non-Thunderbolt display and have three monitors that way?

The Apple mini-DisplayPort to VGA or HDMI adapter terminates the Thunderbolt chain where it is connected, so until Apple released new MacBook Pro with two Thunderbolt ports (similar to the iMac that has two ports) then you will only get one video signal from the device through the Thunderbolt port.

You may find an inexpensive USB to VGA solution to get around this limitation. Initially they were slower, but the newer ones are getting much faster and the software much better. You can then put the most important content on the Thunderbolt port and have the secondary display served over USB.

Should a Thunderbolt adapter come about that drives two displays, I'll update the answer, but nothing has been released (or even rumored) even though it's clearly something the protocol could support.

I like this knowledge base article for the clear deprecation of which Macs support two Thunderbolt displays and which ones only support one.

Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-inch): Connection options for Thunderbolt Macs


Unable to format SD card I was using my SD card on my phone. One fine day it showed a message that it was corrupted. I put the card in an adapter and plugged it into my iMac.

I was able to read and copied all I need. I decided to format it anyway and used disk utility to do so.

It said that it had finished erasing, but all the files were still on it.

I tried deleting each folder. But when I ejected and put it back in, the files are still there. I can't format it via my phone either and I am too scared to use the terminal for erasing. Can anyone help me?

It's dead.
Smash it to prevent your data being stolen & throw it away.

If a write error occurs, the firmware controller will switch over to read-only mode to prevent further data loss. This is to all intents & purposes, irreversible.


Avoiding Spotlight to spin up external drive I have Mac Mini with an external hard drive. The external drive is indexed with Spotlight. Whenever I use Spotlight to start an app on the local machine, the external drive spins up, because obviously Spotlight wants to check the spotlight files on the external drive for search hits. The drive makes an audible noise, and stays running for some five minutes until it idles to a stop.

Is there any way around this, apart from disabling Spotlight or disconnecting the drive? Obviously, I understand that Spotlight must access the spotlight files to check for search hits, and can't tell the difference if I want to launch an app or find a file, when I just type "Sa" for Safari.

The only cure I could think of was if the entire spotlight database was cached in memory, or was placed on the local hard drive, or if I used a different hotkey for finding files and launching apps.

Yes, this is pretty annoying behavior, especially if you have multiple hard drives connected to your Mac, and to my knowledge there is no way to prevent Spotlight from doing it.

Fortunately, most app launchers such as LaunchBar, Alfred, Butler, Quicksilver, etc. maintain cached file databases, so they don't spin up all your drives whenever you use them to launch an app or to search for a file. They also have a ton of other useful features. I personally would recommend Alfred or LaunchBar.


"Cut the Rope" game and used space Just recently noticed that "Cut the Rope" free versions on my iPad Mini with latest iOS is taking up to 500MB of space. Is it really necessary for them to take up so much space? Maybe someone know to fix it.

The used space will likely be cached images, audio and video - there's not a lot you can do to clear the space with the exception of uninstalling it! Don't trust apps that claim they can save you space - they generally end up breaking things!


Mac USB Linux boot disk I have a 13" MacBook Pro early 2011 model. It will not boot from any Linux USB boot disks I have created. I know these disks are working on later models as I have tried with 2012 Retina 15" booting and working fine.

I have tried using rEFInd and various Linux distros but none will be detected on the 2011 model. I found this post:

Can I boot Linux (any distro?) from USB on a MacBook Air that has no hard drive?

However I am not sure where I can get the EFI drivers as the ones on the apple site are .pkg format and doesnt seem to be anything I can extract to copy to /efi/boot?

Try to use dd:

dd bs=4M if=path_to_iso of=path_to_usb && sync

Replace path_to_iso and path_to_usb with appropriate paths.


wrong icon of Unix symbolic link in Finder I am now on OS X 10.9, and I am not sure whether this issue also occurs on other versions.

So, I have many symlinks in my file system (created by ln -s). Today I modified one of them with ln -f -s (see detailed steps below). The symlink is working without problem, but the icon of the symlink in Finder changed from folder icon (with alias badge) to file icon (with alias badge). Namely, the icon should be

(since the symlink is pointing to a folder) but it is now

The steps I took to modify the link were as follows (say I had the symlink ~/links/folder linking to ~/folder before, and I want to move ~/folder to ~/renamed-folder while updating the symlink to ~/links/renamed-folder):

mv ~/links/folder ~/links/wrongly-renamed-folder, the link is active but renamed (happen to be wrongly renamed in my specific case, revealed by my zsh history).
mv ~/folder ~/renamed-folder, here the link became dead. After this step the link icon should be a file icon (that is the default behavior when link is dead).
mv ~/links/wrongly-renamed-folder ~/links/renamed-folder, I corrected the wrong link name (I don't whether this contributed to the final behavior, so I record it here faithfully).
ln -f -s ~/renamed-folder ~/renamed-folder, the link is working again, and ideally the icon of the symlink should be back to a folder icon. But in my case the icon is still a file icon.

I took some measures to fix this problem but failed. The things I've tried:

Remove the link completely and reconstruct a new one with ln -s. No use. The icon is still a file icon. Strangely enough, if I create another link with the same destination (but a different name), the icon will be a folder icon as expected. Only that one single name (~/links/renamed-folder in the above example) is "reserved."
Try to paste the correct icns file into the Info panel. No use. And I didn't expect this to work actually, since Unix symlinks do not have their own associated icons, unlike OS X aliases.
Relaunch finder, or even log out and log back in. I know this is dumb, but people do this when desperate. And it sometimes does work like a charm; but not this time, unfortunately.

Then I did an experiment that actually kind of revealed a bug in Finder. Steps:

ln -s ~/Downloads ~/tmp. The icon of tmp is the aliased download folder icon

as expected.
rm ~/tmp.
ln -s ~/other-folder ~/tmp. The icon of tmp, however, is still the aliased download folder icon, though the folder linked to is not the download folder anymore.

So there seems to be some kind of "cache" going on behind the scenes that controls the icons of symlinks, and Finder sometimes fails to update the cache when symlink is modified.

So, my question is, where is the "cache" that controls icons of symlinks? Thanks.

I had the same problem, and it seems the problem in LaunchService in OS X. To clear it "cache" try this command in terminal

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user ;

and then

killall Finder; killall Dock;

In Mavericks it should work without reboot or re-login.


How to unlock my mac remotely? So i want to know how to remotely unlock my mac via ssh so i don't have to put my password in front of people or having to make them look the other direction while i type my password. I have tried using the command on a post that is 7 months old but i get an error: "syntax error: Expected end of line but found class name. (-2741)". Any help will be appreciated, thank you in advance!

Set the time to require a password after sleep/screensaver in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General to "immediately".

To lock the screen enter in the ssh session:

open -a ScreenSaverEngine

To stop the screensaver (=show the login screen) and unlock your user enter

osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke return'
osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke "password"'
osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke return'

Under certain circumstances you may have to enter the password one by one or first one keystroke and then the rest:

osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke "p"'
osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke "a"'
...
osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke return'

or

osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke "p"'
osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke "assword"'
osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to keystroke return'


Ethernet not working on MacBook pro retina 13 My Ethernet connection is not working on my computer (mid 2015).

I already rebooted, deleting the files "NetworkInterfaces.plist" and "preferences.plist" into the folder "/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration".
I opened a terminal window, giving this command

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder; say DNS cache flushed

and then I rebooted again.

But nothing seems to work.

Any idea?

Here I give the system information screen, it is Italian, sorry for this. However it says no ethernet driver is installed (could the issue be with this?) and the Thunderbolt tab says "no device connected" also when the ethernet adapter is there.
I also tried to connect a VGA adaptor in order to connect a monitor and this works, so it is not the thunderbolt port.

If this is recent, you may be the victim of a bad malware protection update from Apple. They have posted a support article explaining how to check if this was the cause, and how to fix it.

  First, check your version number

  While pressing the Option key, choose System Information from the
  Apple menu.
  Expand the Software section and select Installations.
  Click the Software Name column header to sort the list
  alphabetically.
  Look for “Incompatible Kernel Extension
  Configuration Data.” If the most recent version installed is 3.28.1,
  follow the steps below.

  If you can connect to Wi-Fi, follow these steps to update to version 3.28.2

  Open the Terminal app.
  Enter this command to update to the current version of the “Incompatible Kernel Extension Configuration Data” kernel extension:
  sudo softwareupdate --background
  Quit Terminal and restart your Mac.

  If you can't connect to Wi-Fi, follow these steps to update to version 3.28.2

  Restart from OS X Recovery by holding down Command-R while your Mac starts up.
  Select Disk Utility from the list of OS X Utilities.
  Select your drive from the list of internal drives in the sidebar. The default name is “Macintosh HD.” Your drive might have a different name or location, if you renamed or moved it.
  If the drive name is dimmed, your drive might be protected by FileVault. Choose File > Unlock from the Disk Utility menu, then enter your FileVault password.
  Choose File > Mount in Disk Utility to mount your drive, if it's not already mounted.
  Quit Disk Utility.
  To make it easier to enter the command shown in step 9, you might want to copy it from Safari:

  Choose Get Help Online from the OS X Utilities list, then go to support.apple.com/kb/HT205956.
  Select the command in step 9, copy it, then quit Safari before you continue to the next step.

  Choose Utilities > Terminal to open the Terminal app.
  Type or paste the following command as one line in Terminal, then press Return. Replace Macintosh HD with the name of your hard drive, if different: rm -rf "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/Extensions/AppleKextExcludeList.kext"

  Now complete these steps to update to the current version of the “Incompatible Kernel Extension Configuration Data” kernel extension:

  Quit Terminal.
  Choose Restart from the Apple menu. After your Mac restarts, your Ethernet connection should work.
  Open Terminal and enter this command: sudo softwareupdate --background
  Quit Terminal
  Choose Restart from the Apple menu.

  Alternatively, if you confirmed that your Mac has Incompatible Kernel Extension Configuration Data version 3.28.1, you can also restart your Mac into OS X Recovery mode, then select Reinstall OS X. You can reinstall OS X on your drive without reformatting it.


Image to be shown on one tap on iOS? I took a photo of my bus timetable, and I want to have that image as an "application" on my iPhone's home screen.

Is there an app that, when clicked, goes directly to this one image? Is there another way?

There might be a better way to do this, but this should work.

Upload the image to imgur.com. Then get the direct link to the image (it will look something like http://i.imgur.com/ipB4C6r.png). Open that url in Safari on your phone, hit the Share button at the bottom of the screen (the box with the arrow pointing up) and hit "Add to Home Screen."


Startup Security Utility Admin Permission I have a company mac with admn privileges. There are also other hidden admin accounts installed. Wanted to boot windows from external disk to play some Indi coop games

To boot from external Disk I need to allow it in Startup Security Utility in Secure Boot with cmd + R

I can select my Admin user to authenticate. However my password is not accepted. There is no error message at all.

For example If go to terminal and type 'resetpassword' I can authenticate with this user and would be able to change others users passwords.

Is there some specific authorization policy for Startup Security Utility which needs to be granted ? Or is something broken for this user ?

You have a Mac with a T2 chip, which requires an Administrator account with both a signed certificate and a SecureToken linked to that account, and the account that tries to change any of those settings in Recovery has to have the same matching SecureToken, a copy of which is held by the BridgeOS running the T2 chip.

Your IT folk have (quite rightly) locked that kind of thing away good & proper. Sorry, but no coop today :)


Execute terminal command "rsync" from BetterTouchTool I have created a Bash command that will copy the contents of one folder into another, and it works as expected from inside Terminal.

rsync -r /Users/owendostie/Dropbox/Ohouse /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Ohouse

However, when I attempt to create a hotkey to execute this command using BetterTouchTool, nothing happens. I found another user who has encountered a similar problem, but I do not know enough about Terminal for his answer to be helpful. What do I need to change about my command to get it to run from inside BetterTouchTool?

According to the format of the answer to that question, you'd want to specify the full path to the rsync program. I looked around a bit and found my rsync executable inside the folder /usr/bin/.
If your rsync is in the same place (it should be), you should modify your command in BetterTouchTool to:

/usr/bin/rsync -r /Users/owendostie/Dropbox/Ohouse /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Ohouse

Unfortunately I don't use BTT so I can't test this, but that is how the other answer solved the issue.


Black rectangle appears on display Ever since I upgraded to macOS High Sierra, I’ve had a black rectangle on my screen:

My cursor started out inside it, and when I try to move my cursor outside of it, it follows my cursor:

I’ve tried restarting and quitting all of my other apps, it still shows up.

If I switch the “Zoom style” in System preferences → Accessibility → Zoom to “Picture-in-picture,” the box still shows up, but it stops following my cursor.

How can I get rid of this annoying box?

It turns out that this is actually a “feature.” There’s an option in System Preferences → Accessibility → Zoom → Options…:

Unchecking that should remove the rectangle.


Google Calendar set up failed I was trying to set up Google Calendar on my new Mac. After following the steps from this Google support article, I ran into this absolutely useless error message:

Any ideas how to fix it?

While setting up the Calendar, when my wifi was disconnected I got the same message. Then I used my 3G modem for fast and continuous connection. It resolved the issue.


Mount Windows smb shares on a Mac using Python I would like create a python script that mounts a Windows smb share on a Mac then copies data to it. I am falling at the first hurdle, having problems with mounting the share. It should be really easy but I can't get it to work. I have trawled the internet and have a few clues:

mount -t smbfs //user@server/sharename share

This doesn't work but I have seen another solution that uses the os module for the mount command:

import os
os.system("mount -t smbfs //user@server/sharename share")

But this doesn't work either.

I have also read about creating a local mount point for the remote share to mount to. Is this true? And how would I go about this?

Many thanks for any insights

All the best

John

I think, with the help of Tony Williams, I have figured it out. My mount a Windows smb share python script:

import os
directory = "/Users/user.name/foldername"
if not os.path.exists(directory): os.makedirs(directory)
os.system("mount_smbfs //user.name:password@server/servershare ~/foldername")

This will check whether a local folder called foldername exists and create it if doesn't. It will then mount the smb share into it using a defined username/password.


My Macbook pro retina screen is dead I own a macbook pro retina, mid 2012. I bought like 2 years and 2 months ago.

Yesterday, I was cleaning my macbook as usual with some alcohol(95% ethanol), between the keys and on the screen. I do it regularly and it's my first time.

After a bit, the screen started flickering in a barely visible way, you need to focus on the screen to see the flickering, I directly updated OSX and restarted. After the restart, the flickering increased and it became clear. I turned off my mac for about an hour and tried to boot. The flickering disappeared but after 10 minutes the flickering got back. I was shocked, so I turned it off till the next day. Once I woke up I turned it on and noticed that there were no flickering. I left it on for about an hour and when I came back to check the flickering was enormous, there were color changes,  it felt like the screen was going to blow. I turned it off and rebooted and the screen was dead.

Here's an image of what I currently get when I boot

I tried an external display with both vgas, and everything worked fine.

Is this a screen problem? or a mobo problem? any other explanation to the above image?

A $3k macbook with an LG screen (with ghosting, yes I managed those 2 years with it) and that's what I get? I live outside the US, I bought it from the US and the Apple official retail stores here in my country do not honor the Apple warranty, they have their own.

Apple says:

  Use only a soft, lint-free cloth. Abrasive cloths, towels, paper
  towels, and similar items may cause damage to the item.

  Disconnect your Apple product from any external power sources.

  Disconnect any external devices and other cabling from the product.

  Keep liquids away from the product.

  Don't get moisture into any openings, and don't use aerosol sprays,
  solvents, or abrasives.

  Do not spray cleaners directly onto the item.

You obviously managed to get liquid inside and on to your logic board.

Since it was mainly alcohol you might be lucky, by drying it for a while, but if the damage was done you are out of luck.


Can I get to iTunes Match library from more than one Mac? My home machine, where the bulk of my music library lives, is currently syncing itself up to iTunes Match. It's a big library and a long process, and the upstream on my cable modem is tragically slow, so it's taking it a couple days to fully do. I can see on my iPhone and my iPad the status of that, and can pull my music down to my devices from the cloud, and so far it's pretty great.

My Mac at work has a smaller subset of my full library on it (pulled out of my iPhone with Senuti). What I want is for it to share and download from my iTunes Match account, like my iOS devices do. When I turn on iTunes Match on my work computer, it does its "gathering information" step, and then when it goes to "match your music", it tells me another computer is syncing (which it is) and it can't do two at once.

So does that imply that when my home machine finally gets done (probably today), I can do the same process on my work machine, and the two accounts and libraries will be synched up with the cloud?

Yes, you can add the second Mac once the first has completed. While one is currently uploading, I think the others can only be linked and start viewing.


Is there an easier way to purchase commercial ringtones and use them on an iPhone 4? So I've only had my iPhone 4 (previous Droid user) for about 3 months or so now. Yes it has some great features that my Droid didn't, but one thing I really do not like is the ringtones. On the Droid, I could download an app, find a ringtone, download it and set it within a minute or 2, no problem at all! But with the iPhone, the only way to get a commercial ringtone is to sync it through iTunes? Which might be all fine and dandy if I always had my iPhone cord and my laptop on me 24/7. Another thing I ran into was finding the song name and artist have to be the same for the ringtone to sync? Does this also act the same for music?

So what it all comes down to is pretty much this, what is the easiest and non-confusing way to purchase and install ringtones on my iPhone 4?

The trick should lie in converting your file to the appropriate format and renaming it so that it appears to be a regular ringtone file. (e.g. create an M4A file and change its extension from .m4a to .m4r). The top three links on a Google search are good tutorials if you like step-by-step instructions: https://www.google.es/search?rls=en&q=%22ringtone%22+%22iphone%22+%22m4r%22

BTW, you can sync your iPhone over the air. Connect it to iTunes and look for the option "Sync with this iPhone over WiFi", first screen of the Summary/Info/Apps/Tones/Music/Movies/TV Shows/iTunes U/Books/Photos lineup.


How to fix iCloud Outlook calendar pasting? I have a client that has Outlook 2007 on Windows 7. He's unable to right click and paste into the notes section of an appointment (the contextual menu doesn't even appear). I've seen other people having this issue on the Apple support forums and the Microsoft support forums, but no one has posted a resolution. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Drag the appointment into the My Calendars folder, then edit it and add notes, etc.  Then drag it back to the icloud folder.  Additions will be there.


Behavior of login shell vs. Linux, 'sh -c' I have a seemingly-valid command that works fine on Linux boxes but fails on OSX, and I would like to know why.

sudo su - validusername sh -c 'whoami'

On Linux, this will echo 'validusername' on the console.  OSX however, shows an error:

/bin/sh: /bin/sh: cannot execute binary file

Is this an OSX particularity?  Or is it due to the fact that OSX uses bash 3.2, while our linux boxes are on bash 4.x?

EDIT: I figured out a workaround quickly (sudo -u), I am mainly interested in learning why this happened.  Thanks!

try

sudo -su validusername sh -c 'whoami'


Why is my MBP not detecting my HDD/Optical Drive? I've had a second hard drive in one of those optibay things in my MBP 5,1. It's been super awesome, until it stopped getting detected today.

The second hard drive is getting power and is spinning up, but is not being detected at all. I've made sure the SATA connector is on tight and even clean all the connectors with some compressed air. The second hard drive does not show up in Disk Utility or System Profile.

I swapped out the original second hard drive with another hard drive I had laying around and that one didn't get detected either. I even placed my optical drive inside and it won't get detected either.

I plugged the two hard drives into a USB enclosure and they both get detected.
I've also reset the PRAM and NVRAM.

When running the Snow Leopard DVD in the external enclosure, I wasn't able to detect the second hard drive in Disk Utility.

What can I do to fix this? Could Lion be doing something fishy? Is it the logic board?

A quick check I would suggest is to launch the terminal and check if the OS can see the HDD.

$ diskutil list

This will list the HDD's and their partitions. This should bypass any finder issues.


How to record soundflower from OS X? I want to record the build-in sound of my Mac computer without using speakers. I want to record directly the sound of my computer. Tutorials shows me that I must do it in System Preferences, but in system preferences, I cant select the sound of my computer in entry. I can only select a microphone. Any Ideas ? I have only 1 option: use speakers
How to use build-in sound to record sound from my mac ?
Also in audacity I have not "Soundflower" option ...

Tracking down the correct forks of this semi-dead project was indeed tricky.

I installed the Kernel Extension from here:
https://github.com/mattingalls/Soundflower/releases

I installed SoundFlowerBed from this fork:
https://github.com/mLupine/SoundflowerBed/releases

That puts an item in the menu that allows you to set SoundFlower (2ch) --> Built-In Output, which then makes "SoundFlower" available in QuickTime Player etc.


HD does not show up when attempting to reinstall OS X (El Capitan) I am attempting to do a fresh re-install of El Capitan on my girlfriend's MacBook. She called me the other night claiming the battery died and her macbook crashed, and when she restarted and went to login, her normal password stopped working at login. I confirmed this by coming over and trying myself. Restarting also occasionally yields a flashing folder with a question mark, or a prohibition symbol. But most times it goes to the login screen (with her profile picture), and entering her password does not work. She does not care about backing up local data and she does not have a time machine recovery.

Here are all the steps I have taken:

I made sure her keyboard layout isn't Dvorak or some other language, it is indeed U.S and her regular password does not work anymore on login (if it gets there without the prohibition sign/flashing folder)
I booted to recovery and checked out Disk Utility, where the only disk listed is the 2 GB OS X Base System underneath the Apple disk image. This raises some red flags, as her internal 256 GB hard drive is nowhere to be found in disk utility.
I booted into internet recovery and attempted to re-install OS X El Capitan, however going through the prompts I reach a dead end where it asks me to "Select the disk where you want to install OS X". There are no disks listed. Disk Utility in internet recovery also does not list any disks.
Clicking Startup Disk underneath the apple sign further confirms that there are no available startup disks.
I held the option key on booting, (not sure the name of this mode), pressed Macintosh HD and was greeted by the flashing question mark folder.
I held 'D' on booting, which I believe diagnoses any hardware issues. No issues were reported, however looking at the logs it was apparent it was only troubleshooting the 2GB OS X Base System disk. So again, it looks like the internal hard drive (256GB) is not visible.

And at this point, going through all the SO threads I feel like I am in a loop. Running diskutil list from terminal in internet recovery returns 14 disk images (disk0-->disk13), but the total size adds up to a little over 2 GB so that's not too promising. Disk0 is the only one with a name and it's OS X Base System.

Are there any terminal commands I may find useful? Should I get my screwdriver out and dig in to the laptop? Thank you in advance.

This happened to me too. It means your hard drive is unpartitioned. Go to Disk Utility and add a partition to the hard drive which you just formatted. You can use MacOS Journal File System while doing so. Once this is done, you will see the hard drive in the UI that asks you to choose where to install the OS when restoring the MacOS.


iBooks Author custom layout I'm looking to build an iBook with iBooks Author which would require a jQuery masonry-esque layout and I have scoured the web for documentation, help, tutorials, and articles that may help me embark on this project but to no avail. I know custom layouts are possible because the project uses this iBook as a reference. Would anyone be able to point me in the right direction that may help me in this quest? I must first say that I'm a front-end developer by trade and I've never created an iBook before.

Thank you in advance!

The layouts are all editable when using the graphical interface of iBooks Author. I don't see why you couldn't edit the files on the filesystem if you wanted to do advanced editing, but for most uses the GUI works well for my needs.

Start with a template you like and open it:

View menu -> Show Layouts
make your changes
File menu -> Save as Template...


com.apple.quarantine attribute does not cause any warnings I've read in several places I've found via search that quarantine flag results in a warning when app is tried to be run (and then flag is cleared):
https://superuser.com/questions/28384/what-should-i-do-about-com-apple-quarantine

  it can ask for user confirmation the first time the downloaded program
  is run, to help stop malware. Upon confirmation the attribute should
  be removed automatically, and then the program will run normally.

What causes OS X to mark a folder as Quarantined?

  When the Launch Services API is used to open a quarantined file and
  the file appears to be an application, script, or other executable
  file type, Launch Services will display an alert to confirm the user
  understands the file is some kind of application.

However on my MacBook (MacOS Mojave):

xattr -l /Applications/Docker.app/Contents/Resources/bin/docker
com.apple.quarantine: 01c1;5d958e46;Chrome;D01EADC9-90F1-4DAB-81A0-A96722A65A11

but I can run that app in command line with /Applications/Docker.app/Contents/Resources/bin/docker and it works w/out warning. I also start Docker.app via Command-Space without warning now, but

xattr -l /Applications/Docker.app
com.apple.quarantine: 01c1;5d958e46;Chrome;D01EADC9-90F1-4DAB-81A0-A96722A65A11

Why I have com.apple.quarantine attribute (not cleared already) but it has apparently no effect?

Special attributes cleared when I finished install of new version of docker desktop (I stumbled upon the @ in ls -l output when new version was being downloaded). Apparently during download and install some tech details were under the hood and I did not guess they effected main/active file attributes.


Update programs of BSD to latest The programs of BSD in MacOS are not upgrated to the latest

Take examples:

  man ls
  BSD              May 19, 2002              BSD

  V.S.

  FreeBSD   11.1    December    1, 2015           FreeBSD 11.1

And

  man find

  BSD                           September 28, 2011                           BSD

  V.S.

  FreeBSD    11.1               January 24, 2017           FreeBSD 11.1

and so on

How to update them all?

FreeBSD, BSD and macOS is not the same.

The updates for macOS system utilities come from Apple and are included in both major and minor system upgrades for macOS that you install using the App Store.

There's no need to update these utilities through other means.

If you want other programs than the Apple-supplied ones, you can install for example Homebrew that allows you to install alternatives. Keep in mind though that even though two utilities might have the same name across different operating systems, they are not necessarily the same program. That is "tar" is not the same on FreeBSD as on macOS as on Linux (etc).


Is it possible to boot backtrack from usb on a macbook pro? I would like to boot BackTrack on my MacBook Pro from a USB drive but it seems impossible. I'm holding the Alt key on boot, but the mac only displays "Macintosh HD", i.e. it doesn't recognize my USB. Anybody knows if booting a Linux distro from a usb possible?

Thanks.

Apparently your USB stick, to be bootable, must be setup for EFI/GPT.


Override and restore the normal functionality of Apple keyboard media keys in VLC? We're all used to the media keys in the top row of an Apple keyboard to command iTunes, even when some other application is frontmost.

If I have VLC frontmost, those media keys don't control iTunes but work as "next / previous" in VLC, which is a rather annoying exception because not does it only make iTunes controlling unreachable, it's plain unnecessary because to navigate within the frontmost application, the norm is to use arrow keys, or cmd+arrow.
How do I reserve the good old media keys for iTunes, always?

I'm on Yosemite.

You can use Karabiner-Elements to set the play/pause button (on my keyboard fn+F8) to always control iTunes from any App (I know Apps besides just VLC also commandeer the iTunes buttons sometimes).

Just add something like the following rule to ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json

{
   "description": "Play/pause button should only control iTunes.",
   "manipulators": [
      {
         "from": {
            "key_code": "f7",
            "modifiers": {
               "mandatory": [
                  "fn"
               ]
            }
         },
         "to": [
            {
               "shell_command": "osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to previous track'"
            }
         ],
         "type": "basic"
      },
      {
         "from": {
            "key_code": "f8",
            "modifiers": {
               "mandatory": [
                  "fn"
               ]
            }
         },
         "to": [
            {
               "shell_command": "osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to playpause'"
            }
         ],
         "type": "basic"
      },
      {
         "from": {
            "key_code": "f9",
            "modifiers": {
               "mandatory": [
                  "fn"
               ]
            }
         },
         "to": [
            {
               "shell_command": "osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to next track'"
            }
         ],
         "type": "basic"
      }
   ]
}

Get rid of the "modifiers" part if you normally press F8 without pressing fn to play/pause iTunes.

Then in Karabiner-Elements you'd add your new rule as a complex modification:


How many devices can be associated with an Apple ID for Find my iPhone? We're in a process right now to register 100+ company-issued iPhones. Right now the process of creating an Apple ID for each iPhone to be used for Find my iPhone is very time consuming, so my manager is assuming we can use just one account to manage it all. He wants to know if this is possible, or how many iPhones can be registered with Find my iPhone using only one account.

I don't think there is any enforced limit for using one account on lots of devices if all you care to do is use Find My Phone. You will run into the 10 device limit if you try to install apps using this ID, but just entering it into iCloud and only turning on FMP (FMi / FMiP ??!) should scale past the limits people normally reach when using one ID for multiple devices.

Even if you get away with this, your users might get confused or wish to use Find My.../iCloud themselves and find you have locked their device

You might want to reach out to your Apple account rep to avoid running into several anti-fraud efforts that prevent this sort of mass scale deployment if you try to use one Apple ID for say the App Store on so many devices. In addition to that specifically being against the licensing terms, you will face delays if and when this account gets locked, so plan to test things out with a small group (say 3-8 devices sharing one ID) as a pilot before you decide how to manage all 100 devices.

There are quite a few MDM packages available, but without knowing your specific situation, it will be hard for you to determine if automating some of the management will be a good investment or if you can just use the Apple Configurator to set up your deices and depend on the end users to manage their Apple ID/iCloud accounts and not mess with your one set up to track all the devices.


Automator: "Run Shell Script" throws error because of missing "on" command OSX 10.11.4 here.

I'm trying to create a workflow for use with a hotkey, to run a simple shell script.

Created via: Automator -> New Service -> Utilities -> Run Shell Script, then set to 'no input' in 'Finder', and shell set to "/bin/bash".

For a trivial script, say, one containing nothing but "ls", it works.

But I'm only getting errors so far for the script I actually want to run, which includes a call of "on run", which seems to cause problems. After debugging a bit, I can bring it down to this:

on run {input, parameters}

end run

results in error:

Run Shell script failed - 1 error
-: line 2: on: command not found

Might have something to do with a missing path I figured, so I already tried working on that, e.g. by adding:

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin export PATH

or:

PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin export PATH

as suggested here. Didn't help.

Note as well: I have Anaconda installed, which looks like it changed the path in .bash_profile. Then again, I'm not even sure if the bash environment invoked by automator looks at .bash_profile.

Any ideas what to try next?

on run {input, parameters} is AppleScript syntax, not a valid shell command. If you want to execute AppleScript in the service, use the Run AppleScript action instead of Run Shell Script.


Export iCloud items from Keychain to CSV I want to export all my accounts login/password from Keychain. But you have many categories like : login, iCloud, System... in the Keychain menu. In fact I want to export them to 1Password, so I follow this overflow answer.

But in ~/Library/Keychains/ I have only the login.keychain and not the hopefully iCloud.keychain...

I have 422 accounts in the iCloud category and only 5 on the login category...

So my question is, how can I save/export this iCloud category

into a keychain or .csv file ?

EDIT :

I have already a login.keychain file. But I don't know how I can make an iCloud.keychain file.

A late reply, as I found this post while searching for something related.

You have to create a new keychain, and copy your iCloud keychain items to the new local keychain.  Then you can use the security tool to dump them.

Since this is 1Password-related question, for others in the future, you can use MrC's conversion utility to directly convert the keychain dump into a 1Password consumable 1PIF file.  It is much better than CSV importing.

https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/30286/mrcs-convert-to-1password-utility/p1


How to rebind Go Back and Go Forward in Preview on Lion? It seems that in Lion, standard shortcuts were added for the Go menu items Back and Forward. The shortcuts (⌘+[ and ⌘+]) are unusable on Finnish keyboard, and I'd like to rebind them. By unusable I mean that e.g. [ is produced with Alt+8 on a Finnish keyboard, and pressing ⌘+Alt+8 does not do anything in Preview.

I have added Forward and Back shortcuts for Preview.app under System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Application Shortcuts, but Preview only shows the default shortcuts. In Snow Leopard I was able to (re?)bind the actions this way, but it seems that this doesn't work in Lion.

What to do? Navigating huge PDF files without back/forward is painful.

If the System Preferences way of doing that doesn't work, the only other way I can think of remapping the command would be to use something such as Keyboard Maestro or TextExpander. Barring that, though (as they're both paid, third-party apps), there are still two ways to do navigate pages easily:

Trackpad gestures

This only works with multi-touch trackpads, such as the Apple-sold Bluetooth ones or the built-in-to-MacBook ones. Go to System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures and tick the "Swipe between pages" option. Set it to taste, and use that setting in Preview to switch pages.
Page up/down keys

If you have a full-size keyboard, you have page up/page down keys. If not, something that will probably work is using Fn + ↑/↓. This will scroll down and up by approximately one screen's worth. (Tip: Fn + left/right arrows act as Home/End keys.) If all else fails, space and shift-space do the same thing.


What do I need to connect MacBook 13" mid-2010 to HDMI TV? From what I understand, the mid-2010 MB (MacBook7,1), unlike its predecessors, is able to send audio and video from its Mini-DisplayPort to an HDMI port with a simple Mini-DP-to-HDMI adapter, and does not require extra hardware to convey the audio signal.

Is this in fact true?  Are there any other dependencies, such as the make/model of the HDTV?  And are there 3rd-party, off-the-shelf adapters (from, say, Staples or Radio Shack) that will fill the bill?

One of our local authorized Apple dealers told us we'd need a separate audio cable!

Yes, it is true.

MacBook (Mid 2010), MacBook Air (Late 2010), MacBook Pro (Mid 2010), Mac mini (Mid 2010), iMac (Late 2009), Mac Pro (Mid 2010) and later models supply multichannel audio (up to 8 channels) and video signals over Mini DisplayPort.

There shouldn't be any dependencies for it to work other than an HDMI cable to use from your HDTV to your adapter. If you plan on purchasing a third party adapter make sure you confirm that it does both audio and video.

Mini DisplayPort | Thunderbolt to HDMI Adapter w/ Audio Support
About Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapters


Lock keyboard in lion Is there a way to lock the keyboard in Lion?  By "lock keyboard" I mean some way to make the computer ignore almost any keypresses, except some special "unlock" sequence.  Maybe an OS X feature or utility?  It's a laptop, so I can't just unplug the keyboard.

My desire stems from using my laptop to skype with my toddler's grandmother.  The kid bangs randomly on the keyboard and interrupts the call.  It's more fun if she can get up close to the screen, but then grandma disappears.

Any advice appreciated.

I use KeyboardCleanTool, which ignores all keyboard input. It was created so you can clean the keys without accidental key presses, but obviously would work for your situation too.

It's free!

To unlock, just use the mouse to click the unlock button.


What counts as data usage on the iPhone? I went from low usage of data on an average to over my limit and I do not know why. How can I tell? Does streaming music count? I have AT&T, so I think I have unlimited texting. Do photos on my phone count? Or just when you send them?

Everything that is not either a) texting or b) phone calls uses data. (That is to say, everything that sends or receives something.) Streaming music uses a lot of data (streaming video uses even more). Photos only count when you send them or receive them.

Also, note that the phone will use a WiFi network if available instead of the cell network, so that data doesn't count.

Your bill should give you some idea of how your data usage increased; if it doesn't a call to AT&T customer service (or visiting one of their stores) might be helpful.


Problem transferring files from old 2008 iMac to new 2015 iMac using Migration assistant Transferring files from old 2008 iMac to new 2015 iMac using Migration assistant and ethernet cable - work fine, albeit 3 hours, until says " About 12 minutes remaining" on the new iMac and About 16 minutes remaining on old iMac, seems to have frozen for last 2.5 hours, ideas?

Failed hard drive? Select your Apple Menu, hold down the alt/option key, and choose "System Information". Navigate to "Storage". Check the field reading "S.M.A.R.T. Status". It should read "Verified" if OS X thinks everything is OK.


Change what app the command "Open ." opens How can you open another file manager with the command Open .? I've tried the command, and it opens Finder. I'd like it to open another file manager, if this is possible.


Do I need to reinstall OS after macbook upgrade? My MBP mid-2009 is starting to slowly fall apart, so I figured I need a new one. I got an SSD for my current macbook, which has OS and apps installed, etc.

Can I just insert this system disk into a new macbook and boot from it? What are possible issues (with Windows I'd worry about drivers)?

Or do I need a migration process of some sort?

I am on latest Lion and I use Time Machine, if it matters.

This might help:

Does restoring from Time Machine also restore installed applications?

When you boot up on a fresh install you can run the OS X migration process to restore from Time Machine.

Unlike Windows you should be fine just restarting from the system disk though. All the necessary drivers are built in.

If your new disk has stuff on it, you can boot from it and run Migration Assistant from Utilities to copy your user directory from Time Machine.

Also, you should clarify, are you adding an SSD (e.g. into the optical slot) or are you replacing the existing drive? If you're replacing it you'll need a way to copy the data, i.e. from Time Machine.


I forgot a password for iPhone 5C, error 4013 if try to restore I was not using my iPhone 5C for a long time and forgot a password for it. How to use it now? I left it for some time without a power and the only thing it forgot was time, so now it writes that next attempt to enter a password will be in 49 years from now.

If I try to update my phone, it says

If I try to restore the phone, the following error occurs:

Where are these error codes documented?

Apple documents iTunes restore error codes online:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201444

So, your next step with that error would be to contact Apple Support.


Html file became a rtf file then a txt file I have been working on a html file on my mac os 10.10 via Texedit for about a week. When I started my computer today the file appeared on my machine as an rtf, and when I opened it I saw my page as rich text with no javascript of html tags. I then tried to restore it but all the versions were rtf. I then choose to view the page a plain text and restore again and now all the versions were plain text. Again no javascript or html tags. How can I restore my file as a html file?

I had the same problem and found this resource to help me:

Create your HTML document by writing the HTML codes in TextEdit. But when you try to save do not choose Web Page in the file formats drop-down. If you choose this, all of your HTML codes will appear on the page.
Go to the Format menu and choose “Make Plain Text.”
Save the file with a .html extension. Then you can edit the file in any other text editor as plain HTML.

But if you need to edit it in TextEdit later, you need to change TextEdit preferences. If you don't change the TextEdit preferences, it will open your HTML file as an RTF file, and you will lose all your HTML codes. To change the preferences

open TextEdit and choose “Preferences” from the TextEdit menu.
Switch to the “Open and Save” tab.
Make sure the checkbox is checked in front of “Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text.”
It also helps to have TextEdit default to text files (instead of Rich Text) if you use it to edit HTML a lot. To do this, switch back to the “New Document” tab and change the Format to “plain text.”


Installing stuff: brew vs. official installer - which one should be used? I wonder how programs should be installed on Mac? Via Homebrew or an official installer if there is one?
Let's say I want to install Node.js on my Mac.
The official macOS installation guide offers different alternatives to do so.
So first, I installed it via its official installer file.
I then switched to Homebrew and installed it via brew install node.
So now it seems that I have two installations of Node on my system. When I run the command which node it outputs /usr/local/bin. So clearly the official installation is in favour here (maybe because I installed it first? I don't know). The node installation from Homebrew is in /usr/local/Cellar.
So my questions are:

Should I use Homebrew or the official installer? Why? For me it seems like Homebrew has some advantages over an installer like an easier uninstalling process and a better possibility to update the installed software packages.
How can I switch my system from the usage of the /usr/local/bin Node installation to the /usr/local/Cellar one?

There's a similar question here on Ask Different - What are pros and cons for MacPorts, Fink and Homebrew? - that does a comparison of the different package managers.  It's an excellent read and I encourage you to review it.

Should I use Homebrew or the official installer? Why?

The main difference between using Homebrew and using the installer package is the build time dependencies.  Homebrew (and MacPorts) does an excellent job of managing all of this.  However, with the package, there's no build requirements and the software is ready to go.
Uninstalling is hardly an issue anymore.  Homebrew will manage the uninstall process and handle the run time dependencies trimming them if needed.  However, with free apps like AppCleaner, thoroughly removing an app is not an issue.
So, bottom line is it comes down to your workflow.  If you simply need a utility download the package.  If you utilize more than one and there are shared libraries that you want the ability to manage, go with Homebrew.

How can I switch my system from the usage of the /usr/local/bin Node installation to the /usr/local/Cellar one?

You change your path.
Depending on your shell (~/.bash_profile for Bash and ~/.zprofile for Zsh) you merely add the directory of new utility (see ZSH: .zprofile, .zshrc, .zlogin - What goes where? for more info).  To ensure that it gets selected before the other (native) application, you put it first in the path variable.  For example, the default path is (set by path_helper)
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

In your profile, simply add the line to where your binaries are.  Using your example, to add your path:
PATH=/usr/local/Cellar:$PATH

Your new path will have your Cellar directory prepended to the existing one. Because it's prepended (comes before) your existing path, it will look in that directory first.  See the Homebrew Documentation for full details. I personally use a combination of MacPorts and "official" installers so I use a different directory structure.  YMMV.


Free app asks for a payment to use it? I bought a free app for iPad at the apps store but when I went to use it the app required a99cent fee purchased Thru the app. Is my payment information secure under these circumstances?

Yes. In-app purchases are secure just as they are on the actual App Store. Apple provides developers the APIs needed for in-app purchases. My understanding is that one can do purchases in apps through the "official" in-app purchase system.

You should be able to easily tell the difference between a normal in-app purchase, and a third-party one (which should, but may not be secure). For the official in app purchase, it should prompt you (system type prompt) with the amount of payment and option to cancel. If you choose to pay, it should prompt you for your Apple ID password. You should not have to enter credit card information, or other personal information (if you already have that info tied to your Apple ID account.


Alternative activity monitors for OS X? I’m a bit intrigued by the new detailed activity monitors and progress indicators in Windows 8 (copying files, the task monitor, network activity, etc.) It got me thinking: surely there must be some better alternatives to the built-in Activity Monitor.app?

“Better” as in more detailed and nicer graphs. Specifically, it would be interested and see percentage disk I/O (out of disk capacity), memory usage, and CPU usage in the same nice way as Windows 8 presents it.

The Building windows blog has an article detailing the new Task Manager in Windows 8.

I just think that OS X’s task manager — which I have always found superior — just doesn’t cut it anymore compared to what is coming in Windows 8.

iStat Menus and its free Dashboard widget version iStat Pro can show you a good broad overview of your Mac's systems, but I'm afraid I don't know of any monitoring utilities that show individual application processes (ie Finder activity copying files) other than shell tools like lsof or top.

edit I had forgotten about good old fseventer - last updated in 2010 but still working on 10.6.8.


How can I get more information about my iPhone's Wi-Fi connection? Tapping the information icon in Settings → Wi-Fi → (current connection) shows me a small amount of network information (mostly IP bits) about my Wi-Fi connection.

I just enabled WPA3 on my network, though, and I want to confirm that my iPhone is using it.

On my MacBook, if I hold down option and click the Wi-Fi menu, I can see a lot of other information about my Wi-Fi connection, such as

Router address
Security (this is what I want!)
Channel and signal strength information

Is this information available in iOS and where?

Other than router address (just tap on the information icon - the blue "I" in the circle on the right), it doesn't display any of this other information because both of those are handled automatically.

If you need that info, you'll need a separate, 3rd party app.

Status Pro (Lite version definately doesn't have it)
WiFi Advisor (Free)

Those are just two of the options available.  Many commercial network manufacturers have much more robust utilities but, you have to have their products installed in order for them to work.

That said, channel and security (WPA/WPA2 Personal or Enterprise, Certificates, etc) weren't of any real use because unless doing in depth diagnosis because we set our WAPs to automatic channel switching meaning the channel we saw one moment would change the next and security wasn't important unless we were analyzing a customers network, but we easily got that info from Windows networking settings when we tried to connect.


How to create a password protected ad-hoc network on Yosemite when not connected to the internet This is a more precise reframing of questions No secure ad-hoc network with Yosemite? (my use case) and How to create a password protected ad-hoc network on Yosemite (not applicable here).

Background info: With Yosemite (Mac OS 10.10) Apple removed the option to setup a password protected ad-hoc network. However, Internet Sharing allows to setup a secure network to share an internet connection from another network interface.

Now, the problem is that the Internet Sharing network does not work for my use case, since it fails to start up when there is no internet connection to share. Peeking in the console reveals this message:

  configd[50]: no interface for external service id

This means, there seems to be no longer a possibility to quickly but securely connect two devices without bringing an external router, unless someone knows a trick or pointers how to configure the Software Base Station, or dive deep down into network config, maybe using ifconfig, natd, ipfw like here: https://blog.netnerds.net/2012/07/os-x-how-to-setup-nat-on-lion-and-mountain-lion/

I'd been looking a long time for this answer as well to be able to play games on a  local network.
Since awhile (for some annoying reason) Apple only allows an active network to be shared over wifi with a password.
To create your own "active" network, in terminal run the 2 following commands.
# Idk if this is necessary. if you lost your 127.0.0.1, creating this should fix it:
# sudo networksetup -createnetworkservice Loopback lo0
# sudo networksetup -setmanual Loopback 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255
##
sudo networksetup -createnetworkservice FakeNet lo0
sudo networksetup -setmanual FakeNet 192.168.1.56 255.255.255.255

This creates a new network conection that (although the preferences show it as inactive) can be shared from the internet sharing preference pane to Wifi with a password.
To share the connection,

go system preferences
Then sharing preferences
select FakeNet as the connection to share from
share to wifi
advanced settings allow a password to be set

Source: https://www.laszlopusztai.net/2016/02/14/creating-a-wi-fi-access-point-on-os-x/


How to retrieve notification once I cleared them? I swiped down from the top of my screen to view my notifications accidentally clicked on one that I didn’t get to see properly and then I clicked off it. I pulled down my notification screen again but the notification has gone as I accidentally “cleared” it.

Is there anyway to retrieve old notifications that have been cleared?

Notifications cleared from the notifications screen (swiping from the top down) cannot be retrieved.


Using Apple Remote Desktop to view External HD files Can I have my Macbook Pro offsite access my other Macbook Pro at home using the Apple Remote Desktop? (Or if you know of another better way to access, let me know.)

If so, can the Macbook Pro at home have an External Hard Drive connected which I can access those files remotely?

I can not advise regarding Apple Remote Desktop since I do no have access to this software and I do not wish to purchase said software.

However, Apple's Back to My Mac free software can provide remote access to your home computer files and screen sharing.

  Note: The instructions shown below were copied from this Apple website.

If you have an iCloud account, and you have several computers connected to the Internet, you can share the screen of one computer with other computers.

For example, if you have a Mac at home that’s connected to the Internet, you can share its screen with a Mac you use at work. You can control that Mac, move files and folders, open or close apps, and even restart it.

Set up Back to my Mac
Follow these steps for each computer whose screen you want to share.

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Sharing.
Select Screen Sharing or Remote Management.
Next to “Allow access for,” select “All users” or “Only these users.” If you permit only listed users to have access to the screen, click the Add button  and the Remove button  to edit the list.
Choose View > iCloud to open iCloud preferences.
If you aren’t already signed in to iCloud, enter the Apple ID you use with iCloud, then click Sign In.
In the list of iCloud features that appears on the right after you’re signed in, select Back to My Mac.

To stop sharing your screen using Back to My Mac, open iCloud preferences, then deselect Back to My Mac.

Connect to your remote Mac

To see your remote computers in the Finder sidebar, choose Finder > Preferences, click Sidebar, then select Back To My Mac in the Shared section.
Open a Finder window. If no shared computers appear in the Shared section of the sidebar, put the pointer on the word Shared and click Show.
Click the remote Mac, then click Share Screen.

If you don’t see the Mac you want, click All to see all the available computers, select the one whose screen you want to share, then click Share Screen. All computers that are signed in to iCloud using the same Apple ID as your computer and use Back to My Mac are shown at the top of the list.

Back to My Mac requires a router that supports NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) or Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) to share services. Check the documentation that came with your router to make sure it supports NAT-PMP or UPnP.

Some Additional Notes

To access files on the remote Mac from the local Mac, the remote Mac must have file sharing must turn on. To turn on file Sharing, apply the following steps to the remote Mac.

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Sharing.
Select File Sharing.

The external drives on the remote Mac are not automatically accessible from the local Mac. To make an external drive accessible from the local Mac, apply the following steps to the remote Mac.

From the Finder application, right click on the external drive icon.
Expand General to view the Shared Folder checkbox.
Make sure Shared Folder is checked off.

If a remote Mac computer, folder or drive does not appear in the local Mac's Finder application, try relaunching the Finder application by applying the steps shown below.

Press the ⌘+option+esc key combination to view the Force Quit Applications window.
Select Finder.
Click on the Relaunch button.

You do not have to be logged in on the remote Mac computer. You can also login while the Mac is logged into someone else's account.
The remove Mac computer can not be a sleep. You must disable sleep in the Energy Saver pane of the System Preferences application.
While Screen Sharing, the Finder application on the local Mac computer had access to drives on the remote Mac computer.
You can mount the drives of the remote machine without sharing the screen. This will require entering a user name and password.
If you mount the drives of the remote machine using someone else's user name and password, then select screen share, you will login to that person's account on the remote Mac.


The application "Terminal" can't be opened When I try to open the Terminal app in macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 I get the error:

The application "Terminal" can't be opened

I tried to restart the system and updated the OS to the last version but didnt't work. I also tried to find the preferences and cache files for the Terminal app in /Library folder but couldn't find any.

Is there any solution to this problem?

EDIT: I've also realised that happens the same when trying to open the console: the application "Console" can't be opened

Also, if I see the systemlog I can see this error:

  com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.Terminal.6980[3227]): Service
  could not initialize: 17G65: xpcproxy + 11476
  [1524][B5FFE99F-CD7F-3AD0-8C3B-A06EF069275A]: 0xd

Try reinstalling the OS from Recovery.

Hold  Cmd ⌘   R   at the chimes.
This will not affect your user account or files, but re-lay a new OS over the existing one.


Time machine backup on another mac in my network In my network I have:

a Macbook Pro (running Lion)
an iMac (running Lion)

and I want to use the internal drive of the iMac as a Time Machine "target" for my Macbook Pro.

What I did is

create a sparsebundle on the iMac and mount it
share the mounted volume
connect my MBP to the shared volume on the iMac (with AFP)
tell Time Machine to use that volume to backup

My questions are

is it the best way to achieve what I want to do ?
when backup up, the MBP mount another time machine volume, because apparently it backup on a sparsebundle created in the sparsebundle which is not the simplest solution apparently. I guess this is normal behavior, but is it possible to avoid the intermediate sparsebundle, while at the same time having a control on the backup size in the iMac ?

You can set up your iMac as a fully functioning time machine server by purchasing the OSX Lion Server from the Mac App Store.

This provides you with an official method free from hacks to allow you to backup individual machines such as macbooks etc to a single target machine.  I backup my Macbook Air to my iMac in this way.  For extra safety, I occassionally clone off this backup volume in the iMac to an external disk and store it out of the house.


Adding POP3/SMTP to iPod 8.1 My daughter was using my old iPod Version 6.1.3/Model MC54LL/A, and Santa just brought her her own iPod Version 8.1/ModelPD717LL/A.

I had her email going to my old iPod.  It is going through my own server which is a POP3 server type with POP3 incoming on port 110 and SMTP outgoing on port 25 or port 2525 (with SMTP-AUTH outgoing server authentication).

I added the email account settings to the new iPod, but it shows up as an IMAP account.

How do I change the settings to old school POP instead of IMAP?

When adding the account and you select the 'Other' option for the account type, at the top is a switch for IMAP and POP3. By default it is IMAP - you just need to change it to POP3.


Should I use my personal Apple ID for development or create a new one? I'm about ready to release my first iOS app. While I was going through the steps to register in the development program I became unsure.

Should I set up a new iTunes account to publish my app under, or do I just use my existing personal one that I use for my games, music, etc.?

I read somewhere that whatever account you use gets a bit of spam, how do users get your email address?

There isn't a hard and fast rule, or many convincing arguments in either direction. However, if you eventually want to make money or work with others, or in general grow in that direction, you may find that the ability to keep your personal and work stuff separate to be helpful.

A simple example may be that you have personal pictures on iCloud associated with your personal ID, and for whatever reason, you want to give someone complete access to your development account without access to iCloud. Yes, there are other ways to accomplish that, but having the option of two different Apple IDs might come in helpful down the road.


Can I update an existing Apple ID with a newly created MobileMe email address? I've had an Apple ID for a while now and have many iTunes purchases associated with the account. Yesterday, I created a MobileMe account. I tried updating the existing Apple ID account e-mail with my new MobileMe address, but get an error about the MobileMe address already being associated with an iTunes account (I'm guessing it's automatically created when you create a MobileMe account). Is there a way to update my existing Apple ID to use my new MobileMe address so that I don't have to repurchase all of the apps and things I've downloaded on my original account?

As I have attempted to do this myself, Im pretty sure you cant combine the two. You can try contacting Apple Support but they will probably tell you the same thing.

Apple doesn't allow you merge AppleIDs or in other words use a mobileme AppleID for an iTunes account AppleID ( AppleIDs are just the username/email address I think). This sounds reasonable though because mobileme is a  yearly paid service and in the instance you canceled the mobileme account, it might lead to account problems (ie if you needed to reset your password for your iTunes account but it still had the mobileme email address as the AppleID/email)

You should still be able to make iTunes purchases, app purchases, etc with the original iTunes account you had set up.


Not all pictures appear in apps Ever since I enabled iCloud Photo Library, only my most recent photos have been appearing in apps. For example, if I go to upload a picture to Twitter, only the last 70 out of 300 pictures are shown. This holds true for other apps like Instagram and Dropbox, but the numbers do vary slightly (anywhere from 70 go 66 photos).

When I change my profile picture on Instagram, I have access to Momements, which includes all the photos, but not when uploading a picture to post.

Is there an issue with my iPhone, or is this a bug?

I believe that imported pictures aren't displayed in the "Media Inspector" > "Photos" tab > "iCloud "sidebar item…

In "iPhoto.app" > "Preferences" cmd , check if in the "iCloud" tab the followings are ticked :

"My Photo Stream"
"Automatic Import"

If so you might consider creating a "Smart Album" cmd alt ⌥ N
For example "iCloud Stream" that will match "all" the following conditions :

"Keyword" > "is" > "Photo Stream" ;

get last month (as for iCloud)

"Date" > "is in the last" > "1" > "Months" ;

In a "Media Inspector" you may know select your newly created smart album "iCloud Stream" :


iTerm2 - zsh - keep history of commands when opening a new pane with zsh on MacOS Catalina, when I split my current window of iTerm2 by opening a new pane, I would like to be able to keep in this new pane the history of commands of previous pane (which is still opened).

Here my current config into ~/.zshrc :

# History
export HISTFILE="$HOME/.zsh_history"
HISTSIZE=10000000
export SAVEHIST=$HISTSIZE
# Avoid duplicates
#setopt HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS
# Remove duplicates in history
function remove_duplicates() {
   echo "$(history 0 | sort -k2 -k1nr | \
   uniq -f1 | sort -n | cut -c8-)" > $HISTFILE
}
remove_duplicates();
setopt inc_append_history

# When the shell exits, append to the history file instead of overwriting it
shopt -s histappend

What is missing or what did I do wrong in this config ?

and Just a question : when I open a new pane, did ~/.zshrc file is executed (I mean sourced like source ~/.zshrc) ?

To share history between sessions, you need to use the SHARE_HISTORY option.  Additionally, you will want to append, rather than overwrite your history file.

setopt SHARE_HISTORY
setopt APPEND_HISTORY

Per the ZSH documentation (Chap. 16 - Options) you should also disable INC_APPEND_HISTORY.

  This option both imports new commands from the history file, and also causes your typed commands to be appended to the history file (the latter is like specifying INC_APPEND_HISTORY, which should be turned off if this option is in effect). The history lines are also output with timestamps ala EXTENDED_HISTORY (which makes it easier to find the spot where we left off reading the file after it gets re-written).

There's also a few other commands that you may be interested in to deal with your dupes:

HIST_NO_STORE - removes the history command from history.
HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS - deletes an older version of added commmand
HIST_SAVE_NO_DUPS - when saving the history file, older commands that duplicate newer ones aren't saved


El Capitan WiFi Connection Drops Continuously I have MBP Late 2013 and El Capitan 10.11.4 installed. But i have got a serious WiFi Connection dropping problem for a while. It is quite irritating as you may guess.

I couldn't find any clue why this is happening. None of my other devices experience the same problem, only MacBook Pro.

Here is the console logs
http://pastebin.com/fY3J5PUW

Thanks in advance

This fixed it for me:

System Preferences – Energy Saver – Battery Power :
Uncheck “wake for network access”
System Preferences – Network – Advance – TCP/IP :
Configure IPv6 – Switch to “Link-Local only”

Found that above fix in the comments of this article http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/16/fix-wi-fi-problems-mac-os-x-el-capitan/


Where are the Mac OS X alert sound files located? Is there any way I can access the files that are used for the alert sounds found in system preferences? For example, in OS X 10.6.6, there are different sounds for Funk, Glass, Hero, etc. Where are these files located?

Any files located in the following locations will available to choose as alert sounds:

/System/Library/Sounds/
/Library/Sounds/
/Users/< username >/Library/Sounds/

(Note: By default the latter 2 folders may not exist, but if created and populated with files, you'll be able to choose them in the Sounds preference pane).


Auto Sync Photos App with local folder I have all my pictures locally stored on my Macbook in a folder called Pictures. I use the Photos.app to search and filter my pictures.

I don't use CLoud or anything else so disabled 'Copy pictures to picture library'. Then I imported all the pictures into Photos.app.

Now when I have new pictures I copy them into my Pictures folder but Photos.app does not add those new pictures. I have to import them every time manually.

Whats the best way to get new pictures automatically into photos.app?

Photos.app is not designed to "sync" its contents with folders in the way you described.  I don't believe it ever was, even with iPhoto.  However, it's fairly easy to automate the process of importing photos into Photos.app from a chosen watched folder.

A watched folder in MacOS is one that is monitored for changes to its contents or to the files themselves.  When such a change occurs, e.g. a new file is added, it triggers a Folder Action.

A Folder Action is typically an AppleScript or Automator workflow that performs a series of automated actions in response to being triggered by changes to the watched folder to which the folder action is attached.

So, simply put:

① A file is added to a specific folder ➔ ② An AppleScript is triggered to perform some actions

My suggestion would be to choose a folder you want monitored by the system, and use this folder to put your photos in to have them automatically imported into Photos.app.

I describe how to set up a folder action here (Steps 1 to 6).

This is the AppleScript that will do the importing, and to which the steps to create a folder action pertain:

    on adding folder items to ThisFolder after receiving MediaFiles

        set ListOfMediaExtensions to {"jpeg", "jpg", "tiff", "tif", "png", ¬
            "gif", "heic", "heif", "raw", "dng", "mov", "mp4", "mp4v", "m4v"}

        repeat with ThisFile in the MediaFiles
            tell application "Finder" to ¬
                if name extension of ThisFile is in the ListOfMediaExtensions then ¬
                    set the end of MediaFiles to ThisFile as alias
            set MediaFiles to the rest of MediaFiles
        end repeat

        tell application "Photos"
            run
            delay 2
            import the MediaFiles
            quit
        end tell

    end adding folder items to

It's a basic script, and folder actions and AppleScript are, of course, capable of doing a lot more (moving files, deleting files, adding photos to albums, tagging them with keywords, etc.)  But in the absence of those sorts of requests, I felt it best to keep things simple and focus on getting it working.

The script does, however, include a few lines of code that filter the files added to the folder by extension name, to ensure files such as text files are ignored, and only media files (photos and videos) get imported.

You'll know the script has been successful when Photos.app sends a notification to report that a number of photos were successfully imported.  But, as the script stands just now, you won't see the Photos.app appear on your screen at any point (this can be changed if you'd prefer to have it show you the imported photos).

A final couple of considerations: the way you've chosen to set up Photos.app to not copy the files into its library, but rather keep them available in Finder and merely referenced from inside the Photos.app is what's called a Referenced Library.  It is worth taking a moment to read this page here on the disadvantages of a referenced library in Photos.app.  Of course, you may decide that none of the drawbacks particularly affect you, and needn't concern yourself with changing your system.

Lastly, I would suggest that the folder you choose as your watched folder be different than the one you ultimately have your photos residing in.  If you use the same folder, you can accidentally trigger the folder action and import duplicates (although, Photos.app does check to see if duplicates are being imported and asks you what to do in those instances).  The folder action won't attempt to import files that are already in the folder, so that's not the concern; it will trigger and act upon new files added (good!), or any files that change (maybe less good!).  Therefore, renaming a file, editing a photo and re-saving it, or moving it out of the folder and then back in, will all cause the folder action to trigger and act upon that file which you might not want re-imported.

You can decide what is best given your habits, and using the same "Pictures" folder as both a watched folder and the base for storage could still be done if you bear those caveats I mentioned in mind.  You could always place the watched folder inside your "Pictures" folder so it's nearby to drop your new photos in.

If you use a separate folder as your "watched" folder, then you'll want to add one further line to the AppleScript that will move the files out of the watched folder so that are placed into your "Pictures" folder.

A line like this will do it:

    tell application "Finder" to move the MediaFiles to (POSIX file "/path/to/pictures/folder" as alias)

If you've any questions or need more help, leave a comment and I'l get back to you.


Set terminal window title in a script I would like to change the entire title of the terminal window for a particular bash script. I googled out but I couldn't find much more than this suggestion:

printf "\e]0;My Custom Title\a"

After running the line above, my terminal window's title becomes so:

ft1 — My Custom Title — bash — 80×24

But I would like it to become just like this:

My Custom Title

Any ideas?

Open the preferences for Terminal and untick the following flags

If this alone doesn't solve the problem

unset PROMPT_COMMAND
check whether PS1 (the prompt string) changes the window title as well


128GB SSD and 23GB of sleep image + swap file, what to do? So I've got a 13" Macbook Air with 128GB, and recently I got a message showing that I'm running out of space, so I did a quick check to see what was taking up all of space, and I found out that I have 4GB of sleep image (which is normal), but 20 swap files, each taking up from 60mb to 1gb.  With a small disk size, this is really unacceptable so I was wondering if it was safe to delete some of the swap files and let the system build them up.  Or would a restart help (Though I'd prefer not, had a bet with my friend to keep my uptime as long as possible :p) Any suggestions appreciated.

You can disable Hibernate to regain your size in RAM on your SSD/HD:
First disable it:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Then free up space:

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

... if you want to enable it again:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

Note: -a means on charger and on battery, -b means battery and -c means with charger.

Alternatively if you have more than one disk you can symlink sleepimage to an HD so it can physically locate there.

Swap

First disable Swap:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

Later delete the files:

sudo rm /private/var/vm/swapfile*

... if you want to enable it again do:

sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist


Change ownership of all files, from one owner to another I changed the shortname of my user account, but it seems to have caused an issue with some files (especially homebrew stuff), which are still owned by the old username. My old short name was cannyboy, and my new one is cannyman. How would I go thru the whole hard drive and change ownership of all cannyboy to cannyman, without changing any other attributes of the files?

As starter I would suggest you run the "repair permission" function in disk utility.

If the problem still persists you could run a command like:

find . -user old_user | while read file; do echo chown new_user  $file; done

note: this doesn't do anything as is now - you will need to adjust it to your needs - and make sure it does nothing bad.

update learnt some more and now I would run a command like this:

find . -user old_user -print0 | xargs -0  sudo echo chown new_user

again adjust the command before you run it!


Is it possible to use Linux USB drivers on Mac OS X? I have a USB device that I use on a daily basis and it has Linux and Windows drivers. I would like to use this device in Mac OS X (meaning not through a VM). Is it possible?

edit
System requirements from the read me:

Linux 2.4 or 2.6
System setup for kernel compilation.

No, because of completely different executable-architectures.

Only if you're willing to recompile them for OSX and they're Darwin based.


Can't assign some apps to a desktop .. what's wrong? Usually, when I right-click on an app in the dock, I can assign it to a specific desktop/space. However, there are some apps where I don't have this option. (I've noticed it for CrashPlan and Paintcode.)

What's wrong?

Is there some config option on my Mac for that or is it something that the App developers have to do to enable this?

It seems like a bug in Mountain Lion. Removing the app from dock and adding it again usually resolves the problem for me.


file not behaving as it should, permission problems I cannot delete or move a file owned by me which I have read write permissions. Could anybody help me figure out why? The file is owned by me in group staff and perms are set to 644. The file is located in my home directory it is a single jpg file, any help would be much appreciated.

fire up Terminal and check the file

 ls -leO  (that's a capital O not a zero)

and if the uappnd flag is set, try

 chflags nouappnd a.single.jpg


How to reset the terminal before command execution? I've been looking at spicing up my Terminal experience by among other things, adding some color. I used the tput command to build a nicely looking prompt. This is part of my .bash_profile:

BLACK=$(tput setaf 0)
RED=$(tput setaf 1)
GREEN=$(tput setaf 2)
YELLOW=$(tput setaf 3)
BLUE=$(tput setaf 4)
MAGENTA=$(tput setaf 5)
CYAN=$(tput setaf 6)
WHITE=$(tput setaf 7)
BOLD=$(tput bold)
REVERSE=$(tput rev)
RESET=$(tput sgr0)

export PS1="${WHITE}$(date "+%H:%M") ${MAGENTA}\u${WHITE}@${MAGENTA}$(scutil --get ComputerName)${WHITE}:${MAGENTA}\w\n${GREEN}\$ ${REVERSE}"

Notice the ${REVERSE} (or $(tput rev)) at the end of the prompt, which makes the commands I type stand out by adding a background color.

My problem however is, that when executing any command, the style is not automatically reset upon pressing enter, which in this case adds an undesired green background to the command's output as well. How can I reset the terminal right before command execution?

What you're looking for in BASH is equivalant to what is built-in precmd in ZSH. This built-in function would be executed prior to executing a command. A work around is mentioned in https://superuser.com/questions/175799/does-bash-have-a-hook-that-is-run-before-executing-a-command. I hope it gives you a hint of how to solve your problem. The reset has to be called within this function.