Suspicious Calendar Events, Spam Phone Calls, and Outgoing Messages—Has my iPhone been hacked? Has my iPhone been hacked?

Part I: The FaceTime Call

Yesterday evening, after turning on Do Not Disturb mode for the night, my phone begin to ring (an incoming FaceTime call) with a ringtone I have never used. The caller was not on my favorites list (so the call should not have made noise since I was on DND). That caller is my co-worker at the office, and claims to have not called me (and indeed his phone has no record of the outgoing call).

Part II: The Outgoing Text Messages

Today, I noticed an unsent text to several phone numbers I do not know (and a few I do know, some of my friends) with a political message I do not support. This wasn't me sending it, so what happened?

Part III: The Suspicious Calendar Events

As detailed in this Ask Different thread, I'm having spam calendar events appear as invitations.

Conclusion

I have no idea what is going on with my iPhone! Have I been hacked? What can I do to resolve this problem with my iPhone?

Most likely, your Apple ID was hacked.

Any device signed in to your Apple ID can send texts, change notification sounds for specific contacts, change contacts phone numbers and more.

Go to appleid.apple.com to change your password, and change passwords on any sites that you use the same password on, as those are at risk as well.

If your password has been changed by the perpetrator, you will most likely have to contact Apple support, as well.

To prevent this from happening in the future, I recommend adding two-step verification to your account, so every log in has to be approved via a code on one of your devices or phone numbers.


Change preset settings in OS X print dialog (Canon iR-ADV 2030i) I'm using OS X 10.9. I need to change some of the advanced printer settings in the presets dialog (the printer is Canon ImageRunner Advance 2030i). In this case I'd like to change the 'print style' setting under 'finishing' but I have no clue what to do to make the actual change happen. I tried clicking in combination with various keys but the setting still seems to be displayed as read-only (see screenshot). What should I do?

I have no idea how to do this via the UI but you can go to ~/Library/Preferences and look for com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.*.plist (where * stands for your printer name). The file only exists if you created a custom preset.

You can open the plist with Xcode and edit all printer settings.


How to use my Apple Remote Control with Windows 10 I want to use my Apple Remote Control 2G (aluminum with black buttons) in presentations on my work computer (MSI GL62M 7RD-429XES Intel Core i7-7700HQ/8GB/1TB+256SSD/GTX1050/15.6")

I have installed Bootcamp driver called AppleRemoteInstaller64in my PC (Windows 10), but I can not make it work. I can't connect the device to my computer.

Do you have any idea about this?

Thank in advance

PD: Yes, I know that I should do my presentations on my Mac :P

UPDATE: MSI GL62M 7RD-429XES Intel Core i7-7700HQ/8GB/1TB+256SSD/GTX1050/15.6"

UPDATE 2: I can't use yet my Apple Remote Contol 2G in Windows 10. Other suggestions?

Thanks

You can use http://www.eventghost.org/ to map the infrared receiver to forward the Apple Remote's buttons to keyboard presses within Windows.

See also https://superuser.com/questions/278951/my-keyboard-has-no-media-keys-can-i-control-media-without-them

Quoted from http://gegensystem.blogspot.de/2013/11/using-apple-remote-for-power-point-on.html :

  Download: http://www.eventghost.org/

  Don´t forget to support this project if you are satisfied with it.

  First klick on configuration (Konfiguration) - then add an PlugIn -
  choose Generic HID for your Apple remote.

  By clicking some of the keys of the remote, eventghost now shows the
  keyentries of them.

  Build a new macro belonging to emulated keyboard entry (Emulierte
  Tastatureingabe) and choose (for example) LEFT. Now drag and drop the
  Keyentry of your remote to the new macro and the key on the remote is
  now connected to this new event.

  I connected the LEFT key and the RIGHT key to the LEFT arrow and the
  RIGHT arrow of apples remote. Now it is possible to use the remote to
  control the power point presentation. Be aware that you have to start
  eventghost manually or drop it into yout autostart directory. Without
  it running in the background, the system can only work with the
  predifined remote actions!


Cannot change Finder's "New Finder windows open" preference; it's grayed out Why am I not allowed to change any of the preferences in Finder's General preference pane, except for Spring-loaded folders? I am allowed to change any of Finder's Labels, Sidebar, or Advanced preferences, except for Show all filename extensions and Show warning before emptying the Trash.

I've tried deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist then restarting Finder, which recreates com.apple.finder.plist, but the problem persists.

I'm running OS X 10.6.8.

I assume your user are assigned administrator rights on the machine?
Have you tried booting up in Safe Mode? Do the problem persist inside there?

To boot in safe mode:

Shut down you mac completely.
Press the power button.
After you hear the startup tone, hold Shift key.
Release Shift once you see the gray Apple icon and progress bar.

Also, try to create a new user. Check if the problem appears on your new user as well.

Edit:

Found this to be a solution:

Move (dont delete in case something goes wrong) theese four files to your desktop from <~/Library/Preferences> and make a full reboot. Not necessary to do safe mode for this operation. Just Cut and paste the files directly.

com.apple.desktop.plist
com.apple.desktopservices.plist
com.apple.finder.plist
com.apple.preference.desktopscreeneffect.plist
com.apple.sidebarlists.plist

The files should appear after a reboot, and hopefully fix your problem.


Downgrade itunes in high sierra So I need to downgrade itunes to 12.0.1 for a jailbreak (6.1.6 on ipod 4g). Currently, you can't just delete itunes. What would I have to do?

My idea is:

Disable SIP (boot into recovery mode and disable)
Delete the Itunes Application
Install the 12.0.1 Itunes

Is it that simple? Anything else I need to remove? I'm trying to get either redsn0w or p0sixspawn to work.

So if you are reading this, this may not be how to downgrade itunes, but this is how I used a different version.

Install VirtualBox
Obtain a .iso version of windows, and Boot it in VirtualBox
download itunes version needed from here within VirtualBox
Do what you need


Where can I find my crash logs? Console prints:

  default  17:16:18.554342 -0700   ReportCrash Saved crash report for APP_NAME[50432] version 1.2.3 (4) to APP_NAME_2020-03-17-171618_MacBook-Pro.crash

I would like to ask you, where could I find my crash logs?

Open the Console app from the Application -> Utilities, you will see the log files.


iPad stuck with "iCloud Backup" message -- can't use it! Yesterday I opened my iPad to discover a weird message I'd never seen before on my screen, that I cannot get rid of:

It prevents me from interacting with anything else on the screen!

So I plugged it in, made sure it had a good WiFi signal, and left it to charge overnight. Unfortunately this morning, the same message was still there. And I still couldn't get rid of it.

Next I tried connecting it to iTunes and as you can see, despite the message I can't get rid of, my attempt at backing it up DID work!

Unfortunately I still have this message I cannot get rid of! I've tried "Backup Now", and it appears to function correctly, but the message is still there!

I can interact with the "OK" button on the message, but nothing else. I press it and (aside from changing colour) it does nothing. The message stays where it is. The buttons on the iPad's body still have all the same functionality as before... but I cannot interact with anything on the screen. My iPad is essentially useless!

What do I do?

Ah!!! Resetting the iPad by holding down the button on the top and on the front did.

Phew!


Is there some way to specify memory limits on specific apps in MacOS? I bought a 32GB MacBook Pro because I teach a software boot camp and need to run several memory intensive apps (video conferencing, ide, chat, browser w/ many tabs, etc...) and my 8GB MBA couldn't keep up.

I soon found that certain apps will use all available space which doesn't solve my problem. I still run into memory issues because certain apps are memory hogs.

Is there some way to specify memory limits on specific apps in MacOS?

Even though you can limit memory for specific apps on macOS, you will not achieve the result you're looking for:

The problem is that when you limit the amount of memory an application can have, this means in practical sense that programs are going to crash when they reach that limit.

So you essentially have the option of having crashing programs or pausing them when they reach the limit. Pausing them is something you have to implement a program to do yourself (not very complex, but you would need some scripting experience or programming experience).

In simple terms, memory limits are not going to help you any more than simply quitting one or two of those hogs when you need to do something else.

UPDATE: In the comments you wrote that you wouldn't mind crashing applications, and that you are an accomplished software engineer, so you would be able to do scripting/programming yourself.

In that case you can implement a memory limit in a variety of ways:

Simplest version

The simplest would be to create a small script that periodically runs ps x -o rss -p $PID | tail -n1 to observe the memory usage of the indicated process ID. This grabs the resident set size, but you might for some odd reason want to use vsz instead of rss to get the vsize instead.

If the observed memory usage is above a threshold you specify, you can then terminate the process. The best way to do this would be to run a command like kill -15 $PID and then after a time run kill -9 $PID. The first is SIGTERM, which tells the process to start closing down by itself. The latter is SIGKILL, which kills the process if it refuses to close down by itself.

Advanced version

A slightly more advanced version is to create a small wrapper program that calls setrlimit() to set a limit on the process, such as for example RLIMIT_DATA (maximum data segment size) or RLIMIT_RSS (maximum resident set size). Afterwards it needs to call execl() or similar to start the application for which you want to limit memory usage.

Note that there's also a possibility of using ulimit instead of rlimit, however my experience is that these limits are not observed on current macOS.


How do I change which characters OS X considers ‘a word’, for ⌥-arrow-key skipping? When I type ⌥→, I'd like my cursor to stop at periods, and perhaps other characters.

Does anybody know of a defaults configuration, or System Preferences setting, that changes which characters are considered to be ‘word characters’ by OS X?

The Word Break option has been removed in Mavericks.
Instead:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleTextBreakLocale en_US_POSIX

Sources: https://twitter.com/jaydisc/status/393157866812502016 and http://lri.me/osx.txt


Can a Mac's part number be determined with a Terminal Command? I need to determine the Apple Part Number 'MXXXXXLL/A' and do not have the original packaging.  Is there a way to do this from command line?

I don't need model #, I specifically need the part #.  Thanks.

Apple Order Numbers -- which also are referred to as Model Numbers, Part Numbers, or Marketing Numbers.

Unfortunately, Order Numbers cannot be found on the hardware itself nor can they be found in the "About This Mac" section of OS X, and this is the primary limitation of the identifier.

Nor can it be determined using Terminal.

Open About this Mac  and copy the serial number from there.

Paste that number in the search box on the Look up web page

It will show you the "Order Number"  as example  Order     MQXXXLL/A


Behavior for dragging multiple mail items in OSX is different than dragging single. I'm using OSX, and I have an email in the inbox, and a Finder folder nearby.

If I drag the email into the window I get a nice file in the folder with the subject I'd expect and so on.
dragging....

and now in the file.

My problem is this, if I select more than one mail message in mail, I'd like all the mail messages to be put in the folder - but unfortunatley, I get a red mark and the action is proibited.  What am I doing wrong?

As some users have commented, there just isn't an implementation in the Apple Mail application to do this, for some reason. An alternative is to make a new mailbox in Mail (Menu -> Mailbox -> New), copying/moving the emails over there and right clicking on the mailbox, choosing Export. This will make a mbox-file with the emails that can be opened with most email applications.

You can also mark all the emails you want to save, choose Save As from the File menu, and save them. This will save them as a single rtf-file.

It's strange that Apple hasn't implemented this, they definitely should. I looked into an Automator-solution as well, but the mail-actions are very limited, unfortunately.


What's the best way to update Homebrew when upgrading macOS? I'm just about to finally update my MacBook Pro to macOS Mojave, hoping that the issues have all been resolved. But when I got this new machine I changed from using MacPorts to using Homebrew.

When I used MacPorts, I had a (semi-successful) recipe for handling an OS upgrade: save a list of the ports, remove the MacPorts installation, install the new OS, install the new developer tools, install MacPorts, and then slog through the saved port list and update (since inevitably the set of ports would have changed).

What's the corresponding recipe for Homebrew? I have searched for "brew update Mojave" and found nothing.

Homebrew manages all updating/upgrading by itself. Run brew update && brew upgrade every once in a while (and you can do it after upgrading macOS). brew update will update the list of available formulae, and brew upgrade will upgrade any outdated packages.
If you like, everything can be scripted as well:

Run the macOS installer: startosinstall
Run all macOS updates for Xcode, etc..: softwareupdate -ai
Update homebrew itself and the package lists: brew update
Upgrade all software installed with homebrew: brew upgrade
Remove old versions of installed software: brew cleanup

You don't need to remove/uninstall anything before upgrading macOS. Just download the macOS installer from the App Store (or from System Preferences), and follow the instructions to install the new OS like normal.


Viewing VGA to USB input on a MacBook Pro I want to use my MacBook as a monitor and keyboard and mouse for my Windows PC. Basically I want to use my laptop as a remote control for a headless Windows 7 PC without lag. I want to play some Steam game that is very graphic card intensive. I do not want to use a slow Wi-Fi connection to do this.

One option would be to just display the GUI of the PC on my laptop via a VGA to USB adapter. Another option would be to use an Ethernet connection from my PC to my Mac laptop using VNC however I do not know about the speeds.

Easy enough to do with Microsoft Remote Desktop, available for free on the app store.

If you plug an Ethernet cable between the two computers they should negotiate a network connection and you will get gigabit speeds.

Note that this is different for what you can do with an iMac where you plug a Display Port video cable into the iMac and use the iMac as just a display. To the best of my knowledge Apple does not support this on its portables, only the iMacs so you are limited to whatever Microsoft Remote Desktop will support using RDP.

It is possible that there are other apps that might do a better job. VNC is a 3rd party open source remote control app, similar to Microsoft Remote Desktop except you will have to install it on both machines. There might be others that give you better performance but the MS app and a VLC app would be the place to start.


What does Shift-Command-Space keyboard shortcut do? Apple's macOS Human Interface Guidelines shows that action for the Shift-Command-Space keyboard shortcut is: Varies. Apple Reserved.

Does that mean that Apple is reserving it for future use?

On my iMac, running macOS High Sierra, it does nothing. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts tab. This will list all the system defined and custom keyboard shortcuts. If there is something that you want Shift-Command-Space to do, you can define it here.

I just set Shift-Command-Space to Show Launchpad, and it works fine. So it appears that the key combination is currently unassigned.-

The image below shows where I defined Shift-Command-Space:


Is there a technical reason that new (Apple Silicon) Macs need less RAM? I typically don't upgrade my MacBook Pro until I can buy a machine with at least twice the RAM. (I rarely find the CPU to be the primary limitation of any machine I use.)  When Apple released a MacBook Pro with 64 GB I was interested in getting it, but it would have totaled close to $4000, so I held off and kept using my 16 GB MBP from 2015.   Now my current machine is having issues that I've been unable to resolve, so I'm in a hurry to replace it.  However if I want to buy anything with the new "Apple Silicon" M1 chip, it will max out at 16 GB, and anything more will require buying a legacy CPU, which seems ridiculous at this point.
Is there some reason that the newer machines can do more with the same amount of RAM?  Are they somehow more efficient with memory?  Or is this simply part of rolling out low-end machines first, with no particular technical justification?

The 'technical justification' is that the RAM in the Apple Silicon chips is part of the chip itself, it is not a separate entity like all other processors before.
Presumably, they'll perfect how to enlarge this with successive generations.
The broad strokes of how they do this are on the announcement page - https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/
You could probably consider this first generation to be a more than adequate 'proof of concept'.


Macbook restarts when logging in My Macbook Pro (Mid-2015, Mojave) restarts after I type my password to log in.
The progress bar fills to about three-quarters before this happens.

I have tried:

Resetting PRAM
Resetting SMC
Running Diagnostics (holding 'd' on startup) [only says battery not at peak capacity]
Running fsck in single-user mode (cmd-s on startup) [all ok]
Booting into recovery mode (cmd-r on startup) - causes macbook to go into infinite boot loop. Mac logo appears, then immediately reboots.
Booting into safe mode - login bar fills all the way, then macbook restarts.

Does anyone have any further ideas of what I could try? Thanks!!

Try discharging the battery (plug in an iPhone or iPad or whatever and drain the battery by charging it). Then reset the PRAM and SMC. Finally start up in verbose mode (hold V while booting) and try to capture what gets displayed (iPhone or iPad video works well).

After the battery has been effectively dead for a day (it should be dead enough that when you hit the power button it only shows a "plug in charger" pictogram, give it a little charge and there's a good chance your Mac will act properly. If not, the verbose console log will be useful.


/usr/local doesn't exist in fresh install Yosemite I am trying to install ssh-copy-id, and it wants to be placed in

/usr/local/bin/

but when I do

cd /usr/local/

it responds with

-bash: cd: /usr/local/: No such file or directory

Is this because I have a fresh install of Yosemite and the changed the location of /usr/local/?

/usr/local does not exist on a standard plain OS X install

You need to create it by

sudo mkdir /usr/local

In some odd cases e.g. for Homebrew you need to change permissions


Test if application has windows on current space Scripting different desktops in recent macOS versions is difficult, but one scenario I wanted to accomplish is to open a document in Safari in a specific window:

If a Safari window is open in the current space, open a new tab in that window.
Otherwise, make a new window in the current space and open it there.

How can this be accomplished?

For some strange reason, in System Events, the windows of a process only include windows on the active space. Using this tidbit, I was able to cobble together a solution to this.

on count_windows_on_current_space(process_name)
    tell application "System Events"
        tell process process_name
            return count of windows
        end tell
    end tell
end count_windows_on_current_space

tell application "Safari"
    if my count_windows_on_current_space("Safari") = 0 then
        make new document
    end if
    open location "https://cgamesplay.com/"
end tell


Where did my Finder Filter go? Normally I'm able to filter my search by file size as shown in this tutorial. However, for some reason this morning I can't find the filter anymore, where did it go?

This is what I'm expecting to see:

Thanks :)

Edit:
See the end of Tetsujin answer. Essentially the Filter won't show up when searching from "All My Files", which is at minimum, not a sensible design decision because launching Finder takes one to "All My Files" by default

So if that bothers you, it's possible to change this senseless default

Just go into preferences and change to a different "New Finder window" and then cmd+F will behave as expected

That's not a search window, that's just a regular Finder window.

Hit  Cmd ⌘   F  (which will open a new Search window), or start typing something in the Search box, top right, & your filters will appear.

If you still don't see it, click the + top right - highlighted in green below...

You can also use it to add more filter criteria...
(Note that "no query should be required" only applies if you start from  Cmd ⌘   F  not from a regular Finder window, as your first example.

Late discovery
It doesn't work if you start from "All My Files"
I have no idea why.


Blinking question mark on folder on boot I am attempting to boot up my 2009 MacBook Pro, but when it starts it immediately shows a white screen with a 'question mark folder' — it keeps blinking until the computer shuts down (unless I keep it in the charger, then it just goes on).

I have tried to do the start up whilst holding down the option/alt button, and only the arrow comes up. I don't have the startup system disk (or any other) but the system has been updated to OS X Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store.

Before this, there had been other problems: when I deleted things they didn't go in the Trash but instead it looked like it just deleted it completely. After some time it wouldn't save or download, saying there wasn't enough space (even though I deleted items).

If only the arrow comes up when you hold down option it most likely means there's some kind of hardware issue.  You may be able to repair it using the Disk Utility in Internet Recovery (Hold down ⌘ command+⌥ option/⌥ option+R while booting) , but I'd advise in to looking to getting this thing serviced or repaired.  Sounds like you've got a bad HD.

If all else fails, run fsck and see what happens.  Information on how to do that is located also in the provided article.


How to insert a vector notation in Keynote/Pages? This is different from an overbar. A vector can be any letter topped by a small arrow like so:

Is there a way to do this in Mac Keynote/Pages?

You can hunt for things like this in the [badly renamed] Emoji & Symbols [Character] viewer.
System Prefs > Keyboard > Keyboard & enable it in the Menu Bar; it will then be more easily accessible.

This type of mark is always going to be under 'Combining Diacriticals' though in this case it's even further down, in 'Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols'

The trick to being able to see the whole list is to enable Unicode, which is less obvious than you'd think.
Top left there is a Settings button, which looks to be permanently greyed out. Click it, it works.

Unicode is way down the bottom, in Code Tables.
Once enabled, you can see it added to the list on the left.
Enabling it also then displays Unicode information under any selected character on the right.

You can also use the search, top right, for 'combining' which will find them.

In your case, the one you need is Unicode U+20D7
This, on it's own  ⃗

Entered after any letter it will combine above, as in A⃗ B⃗ C⃗ etc

Entering it as a one-off is simply done by double clicking the symbol in the Characters pane.

If it's something you're going to be using frequently, I'd be inclined to add it to your text replacements in System Prefs > Keyboard > Text,

I just tested it as a replacement for _> so typing A_> will generate A⃗
Italics/Bold can be done before or after the fact, same as any other text.

A⃗


Do i need the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Mysql for use with php 5.5 First time Mac user, I am just about to download MySQL for Mac, which version do I need for use with PHP 5.5? Apologies if this is a really simple question.

Thanks

If your Mac is 64 bit, the 64-bit version would be preferred. If you are on a 32-bit system, you'll have no choice but to go with the 32-bit version. See the How to tell if your Intel-based Mac has a 32-bit or 64-bit processor to determine what you are running.


How can I make my 27" iMac and my 27" Thunderbolt display the same height? I'm using an external 27" Thunderbolt display with my 27" iMac and I want the iMac and display to have the same height. By default, the Thunderbolt display is about an inch shorter than the iMac, which is quite annoying.

I'm sure this problem comes up all the time. Is there any solution for evening out the heights? I'm open to something as hacky as "this book is the right height – put it under the display."

I'd recommend buying this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Thunderbolt-Kid-Memoir/dp/0767919378/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1330596630&sr=8-7

It's exactly 1" thick, put it under the monitor.


iPhone "disabled" when trying to enter recovery mode I forgot my iPhone's lock code. I don't believe I have an iCloud/Find my iPhone configured on there. I never synced with iTunes. I'm fine with deleting all the content on the device.

I tried following the directions on Apple's website to enter recovery mode:

Tap Volume up button.
Tap Volume down button.
Press and hold the side button.
This shows me the "slide to power off" slider and a "cancel" button.
Continuing to hold it restarts the iPhone.
The Apple Logo appears.
I continue holding the side button because it states:

  don't release the buttons when you see the Apple logo, wait until the connect to iTunes screen appears

After the phone is done rebooting, I see a screen that says:

  iPhone is disabled. try again in 15 minutes.

It does not enter recovery mode.

Note: I did try entering the passcode several times a day before and it got disabled for 15 minutes at the longest setting. However, I waited over 12 hours before I tried again, so the 15 minutes should not be a problem. To be sure, I waited another 15 minutes and repeated the whole process to no avail.

I even tried holding all 3 buttons to perform a restart, but this just entered Diagnostics mode, didn't show up in iTunes, and had no option to enter recovery mode.

No matter what I do, I can't get iTunes to recognize the device to start the recovery process.

I tried on another computer to no avail.

Any ideas how to enter recovery mode or wipe a phone if you forgot its password and it went into "disabled" mode?

Looks like the way to resolve this is:

Tap volume up
Tap volume down
Hold side button
When the "slide to power off" screen appears, let go of the side button.
Slide to power off the phone completely.
Once the phone is shut off, make sure it's plugged into iTunes.
Hold the side button to power on and continue holding it until the recovery screen shows up.

Therefore, the key is to shut it down completely instead of using the restart method as Apple recommends.


still unable to find google drive on the sidebar of mac I still cannot find locate Google drive on my mac sidebar. I cannot find the google drive folder to drag and drop. When I click  next to my user, the drive does not appear.

Click the Google Drive icon in your menu bar.

Select "Open Google Drive folder"

Drag the icon from the top of that new window to your Sidebar.

Done.


Making Time Machine Backups while Mac is in Sleep Mode I'd like my Mac to be able to save a Time Machine backup even when I have it in sleep mode. Is there a way I can have my Mac wake up at a certain time automatically in order for Time Machine to run?

You can schedule your Mac to wake from sleep or boot at a specific time. Go to System Preferences, then the Energy Saver pane. In there, at the bottom-right, is a "Schedule…" button. Pressing it brings up a sheet where you can set a day and time to wake up and another to go to sleep. If you leave a half-hour or so between the wake up and sleep times, it should have enough time to back up.

I must say, there's not much point in running a Time Machine backup when you haven't been using the computer: if you're not using it, nothing has changed, so there's nothing new to back up. I should also note that if the computer is shut down (like if you're on vacation) it'll boot and then go to sleep if you don't turn the schedule off before you leave.


How do I copy files from macbook to external harddrive using single user mode? My MacBook pro shut down due to an error, and now I can't log in again. I've tried creating an image using Disk Utility but it fails every time. I have my hard drive connected to my MacBook but when I type "ls Volumes" into the command line using single user mode. Nothing but the "Macintosh HD" is available. I thought this was odd due the fact that I am capable of accessing my hard drive when using the Disk Utility tool. Any suggestions on how I could access my files and copy them over to an external hard drive before I reset my computer.

On newer OS it's far better to boot to Recovery HD or Internet Recovery and then open terminal to validate that things are mounted and running properly.

From there, you can use Disk Utility and / or Terminal to copy files off a non-bootable OS.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

The benefit here is the system boots more fully on new Mac, avoids needing to know if you have T2 chip / FileVault and also mounts the attached drives when you start Terminal from the utilities menu.

Old school single user mode is still valid for non-T2 machines and if you can get past FileVault full disk encryption with a known admin / unlock account and password.


I just bought an iMac with Mavericks pre-installed, can i go back to Mountain Lion? Just bought an iMac with Mavericks pre-installed and some of my software isn't working. After looking into it Mavericks is causing quite a few problems.
Is there any way of reverting it back to Mountain Lion?

Older OS X versions might not include all drivers/kernel extensions required on current hardware so the general answer is No.

Apple has a nice article elaborating why this is a bad idea in general, but if you want to learn and have a backup of all your data, you could always try and see how far you get.

Also, just because your Mac shipped with Mavericks, doesn't necessarily mean that model isn't fully supported on an earlier version. You could check your exact model and determine whether your intended OS + Hardware combination is an exception to the general rule.

Assuming your iMac is the one marketed by Apple as Late 2013 - they yes, it will support installation of OS X 10.8.4 - Build 12E4022.

Having said that, an easy way out would be to run Mountain Lion in a VM (both VMware and Parallels will do).


Turn Wifi off/on with a single key? Is there a way to assign the WiFi on/off function to one of the function keys like F4 that I otherwise never use? I assume Applescript would be required. However I may want to use a BASH script instead.

Thanks to budakpisang for this:
In Terminal, run
networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder | sed -n '/Wi-Fi/s|.*Device: \(.*\)).*|\1|p'

to get your WiFi network device (usually it's en0 or en1, depending on the Mac model you have). Substitute it for en1 in the following steps
You can turn wifi off and on with these commands
networksetup -setairportpower en1 off
networksetup -setairportpower en1 on

Here's a one-liner to toggle between on and off
networksetup -getairportpower en1 | grep "On" && networksetup -setairportpower en1 off || networksetup -setairportpower en1 on

Create a keyboard shortcut that runs a shell command

Start Automator, and create a new Service.

Set "Service receives selected: to "no input" in "any application".

Add an action named "Run Shell Script". It's in the Utilities section of the Actions Library.

Insert the bash command you want into the text box and test run it using the Run button (top right). It should do whatever the script does (off, on or toggle), and there should be green ticks below the Action.

Save it, giving it a service name you can remember.

Go to System Preferences -> Keyboard, and go to the Shortcuts tab

Go to the Services section, and scroll down to General - you should find your service there. If you select the line, you can click "add shortcut" and give it a keyboard shortcut.


How to prevent storing the WiFi password on the recovery partition? I always wondered how my Mac could connect to the internet when the recovery partition is booted and my main system partition is locked (filevault2).

Some googling revealed today (e.g. here, here,
and also on askdifferent) that the WiFi password is apparently stored in NVRAM and that needs to be reset to remove the password. As a security conscious person this is unacceptable to me. When using Full Disk Encryption (i. e. Filevault2) I expect the system to be safe, also against my network.

So is there a way to prevent OS X from making the password available in the recovery partition? I am not sure how or when it gets into NVRAM in the first place.

UPDATE1:
The NVRAM contains the following keys: (nvram -p) :

BootCampHD
SystemAudioVolume
SystemAudioVolumeDB
aht-results
backlight-level
bluetoothActiveControllerInfo
bluetoothInternalControllerInfo
boot-gamma
efi-apple-recovery
efi-boot-device
efi-boot-device-data
fmm-computer-name
good-samaritan-message
gpu-policy
prev-lang:kbd

The keys efi-apple-recovery and efi-boot-device look like they could contain encrypted data.

I've always wondered the same thing: how to keep OS X from storing the WPA passphrase (or PSK) in NVRAM.

Using 'nvram' I could never find the variable that I thought held these credentials. Today, I tried booting to a USB live image of Linux and running Chipsec. Its command to list EFI variables has many more results than I was getting by running nvram within OS X. Among the variables in my MacBook Pro (mid-2010) were:

current-network
preferred-networks
security-password

The current-network variable's data includes the SSID of my home router, in plaintext. Then it is padded with 0-bytes up until the end, which is 32 bytes, and represents the 64 hex digits of the Pre-Shared Key (PSK).

The preferred-networks variable looks like the same contents as current-network.

The security-password variable holds exactly the same number of bytes as the EFI password I set, so I assume this is the Firmware Lock password. I suspect it uses some kind of masking/encoding. One theory I had is that these passwords are stored as keyboard scan codes or something, but I don't have enough info yet.

Perhaps using Chipsec or another EFI tool, you can zero out these EFI variables and set an access control / permissions flag on them so that they cannot be rewritten. Perhaps even just zeroing them out will be a workaround for you (if you just need to resell the laptop or something). It's unknown to me whether OS X rewrites them regularly or just when you change your WPA credentials.

EDIT:
I just learned of a command for retrieving wifi passwords from NVRAM:
    /usr/libexec/airportd readNVRAM

Also, by attaching the GUID, nvram can actually read these values:

nvram 36C28AB5-6566-4C50-9EBD-CBB920F83843:current-network
nvram 36C28AB5-6566-4C50-9EBD-CBB920F83843:preferred-networks
nvram 36C28AB5-6566-4C50-9EBD-CBB920F83843:preferred-count

So, maybe you can blow those variables away and see how it goes.

EDIT 2: as mentioned by an earlier comment, the method to delete an EFI variable is as follows (sudo required to delete): sudo nvram -d 36C28AB5-6566-4C50-9EBD-CBB920F83843:current-network

It's unclear as of yet whether the variable will return.


How to keep data from an old Mac to restore later I have a new Mac, and I want to selectively move files over from an old Mac.
I've sold the old Mac and need to ship it today, so what I really want to do is simply take a complete copy of the HD in the old Mac before I erase and reinstall for the new owner.

I have a 500gb usb 3 disk I was going to use for this, I don't want to create a bootable clone, instead just want a complete copy of the old disk maybe as a dmg etc, any ideas?

Not thinking CCC, or restore using dskutil as it's overkill.

There is a app on your drive already.

The Migration Assistant.app

in /Applications/Utilities

Try it.


Capture audio correctly while capturing video calls on MacBook with earbuds I'd like to capture video calls on my MacBook Pro, while I have my Bluetooth Earbuds connected. I use Zoom, Google Meet and Skype on different calls, so would like to use osX's native screen video capture capabilities. I can't seem to configure it in a way that captures both the video call audio and my microphone. Note I set settings/audio/input to the laptop's mic rather than the earhbuds' because it works better.
Searching online, it seems I should use either Aggregate Device or Multi-Output Device or both, but I'm not sure how to configure them correctly, especially as I can't install 3rd party drivers, as demonstrated in the video, because I'm using a work computer.
How do I perform this magic?

You're going to have to install something, macOS can't do this on its own - in fact, as far as I'm aware, no OS can do this on its own; they all need some kind of routing utility.
I haven't used all of these, so I can't list them in any kind of 'best' order.
My personal favourite & the only one I really use these days is…
Loopback - expensive for a one-trick pony, but like all things from Rogue Amoeba, it "just works".
Later edit
To make this list more comprehensive, Rogue Amoeba make several routing apps for slightly different purposes. Also check out Audio Hijack and SoundSource
All below are ones I'm aware of but haven't used. They're mainly freeware/shareware/donationware
iShowU  Audio Capture

iShowU Audio Capture is an extension to OS X used by iShowU Studio and iShowU Instant to record audio from your computer. This new-and-improved audio driver replaces Soundflower and provides a bunch of new features and improvements in order to make recording audio more stable and easy to do.

Jack Audio Connection Kit
Open source routing.
VB-CABLE Virtual Audio Device
New to macOS, has been around a while on Windows.

VB-CABLE is a virtual audio device working as virtual audio cable. All audio coming in the CABLE input is simply forwarded to the CABLE output.

Blackhole
New kid on the block.

BlackHole is an open source virtual audio driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency.

Sound Siphon Paid.
Seems to be a straight copy of Loopback.
Soundflower
The original… updated for Catalina.

MacOS system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other >applications. Soundflower works on macOS Catalina.

Soundflower used to be the go-to routing app for OS X but got less reliable over time. It was passed around between new owners for some time - initially Cycling '74, then Rogue Amoeba took a caretaker role for a while. It's now back in the hands of its original creator, Matt Ingalls. One essential part is missing compared to early versions, Soundflowerbed, which was the vital routing component. I haven't used it since the early days, when it was tough to set up but easy to work with once you had. Many people seem to struggle with the setup.


OS X Cmd+G starts searching for same text in different programs I've noticed the following behavior, but cannot find a reason or a bug report on why this may be happening. Maybe this is normal on OSX?

The situation:

With the terminal open, I search for some text, say "hello", which exists in the terminal. I get a few matches and Cmd+G even searches for more occurrences.

I then switch to Chrome which has some web page open, and search for some text, say "world".

Here is the kicker: when I switch back to the terminal and press Cmd+G, the terminal is now searching for "world" instead of the original "hello" I searched for in ther Terminal.

Is there some option to fix this or is this a bug/designed behavior in OSX?

Version: OS X Yosemite 10.10.4

It's a 'feature' - though its use in a Find dialog may have been almost accidental initially, it is actually an intentional usage.

OS X, in common with several other flavours of unix, has two copy buffers.

The one you know & love, cut/copy/paste itself on  Cmd ⌘   X ,  Cmd ⌘   C  &  Cmd ⌘   V
& another, known as Kill & Yank, which can be called from  Ctrl ⌃   K  &  Ctrl ⌃   Y
though incidentally in Stack Exchange's markdown language,  Ctrl ⌃   K  will format as code instead.
Kill is the equivalent of Cut, rather than Copy, but Yank is equivalent to Paste.

It is actually this kill/yank buffer that most Find/replace dialogs use.
There is no way to avoid that, I'm afraid.


Where do I learn to manage a Mac OS Server network? I inherited a network with 2 Mac OS Servers and 20+ Macbook Pros. My background is all Windows server so I get the concept of Open Directory, Server Admin, and Workgroup Manager, but the nuts and bolts are more difficult to pick up.

Can someone recommend a starting point to learn all of this? So much of the resources I found out there are for home users and not necessarily for a work environment.

Ifskills has a great tutorial of Mac OS X Server. I'm still going through it myself. It is massively helpful.


How to convert JSON to AppleScript properties How can I get AppleScript to run this query and save each value (country, city, etc.) as an AppleScript variable?

http://ip-api.com/json/8.8.8.8?fields=country,city,isp,org,as,mobile,proxy,message

I'm trying to get information about IP and domain and set the value of some variables.

I was not sure how to even run the query from AppleScript so I used do shell script to call curl:

set IPAddress to "8.8.8.8"
set link to "http://ip-api.com/json/" & IPAddress & "?fields=country,city,isp,org,as,mobile,proxy,message"
set curl_command to "curl " & link

do shell script curl_command

The result is JSON formatted text. Is AppleScript's text delimiter the only option for parsing the result?

The easiest way is to use JSON Helper app available on the AppStore. Then you simply do something like this:

tell application "JSON Helper"
    set json to fetch JSON from "http://ip-api.com/json/8.8.8.8?fields=country,city,isp,org,as,mobile,proxy,message"
    set countryName to |country| of json
end tell

Result: "United States"


How can you wipe and reinstall OSX on a Mac Mini (which has no optical drive)? If you are a new disk and wiping them to setup a DIY Fusion disk, how does the Mini carry on working afterwards... haven't you just wiped the OS? Without an optical drive, how can you clean the disks and still be able to reinstall an OS?

Without an optical drive, how can you clean the disks and still be
  able to reinstall an OS?

Simplest and cheapest way: create a bootable volume from the OS X Installer on a USB Stick.

2 days ago I used the (free) DiskMakerX to clone the 10.10.3 OS X Installer (it works also with older OS X versions) from AppStore to a USB Stick and used that bootable clone to start from it and install OS X on another volume. Everything worked fine.


Ho can I put my custom made emoji designs into keyboard on phone? I have created custom emoji's and need to set them us as keyboard in my iPhone.
What should I save the files as
and
how do I export them to a keyboard and upload it to my phone?

To have your custom emoji's appear on your phone, you will need to create a custom font that includes them, and install that font on your phone.  But since these emoji's are not part of the Unicode standard, nobody else will ever be able to see them (unless they also install your font), and you will not find them on any normal keyboard.  To input them and see them on your own phone you would have to also create a custom keyboard which accesses the codepoints of the custom font where they are placed.

Perhaps a better approach would be to create graphics which you could place in emails or messages.


How can I have a custom Pages page size? I'm trying to select, in the Documents tab, an A2 paper size so that it represents better the information that I will be printing out. However, there is no A2 paper size. I am also aware that under the Printing dialog (Paper Handling), there are more document types, but still no A2 size.

Therefore, is there a way to make Pages visualise a custom paper size inside a document, and if yes, what is it?

Specs for reference: MacBook Pro (Retina, Early 2015) running OS X El Capitan v10.11.4 and Pages v5.6.2.

Using custom paper sizes actually falls to the printer driver, via the Page Setup window.

In Pages, select "Page Setup" from the File menu.
Click the "Paper Size" menu, and way at the bottom, select "Manage Custom Sizes".
This will present a window where you can define your page dimensions, give it a name, and save it for future use in the Page Setup window. (see screenshot)

Once you've defined your paper size, it will always appear in the Page Setup window in the Paper Size dropdown menu, and Pages will use that size once selected.


Scroll button on Logitech mouse won't left/right "click" I just got a Mac and couldn't stand the Mighty Mouse it came with, so I got a nice little Logitech wireless USB mouse (Model M325).

It's much nicer, but when I have Finder in column views and go to back up or go forward directories with the middle mouse button (tilting the scroll button  left and right until it clicks), it doesn't work.

I'd understand if Apple just didn't support 3rd party mice, but I have another (much older) USB mouse (Logitech RX 650), and it works as expected out of the box...

Any ideas? Seems like the new Logitech mouse should work fine. Am I missing something?

Apple offers basic mouse support out of the box for just about any USB or Bluetooth mouse. However, the center button's right/left clicks are not considered standard mouse functionality. Therefore in order to utilize these buttons, a driver or special piece of software is required. Unfortunately Logitech does not provide any special software compatible with both the Mac and the mouse model you have. This support thread on Logitech's site includes a comment from a Logitech employee confirming this.

I have seen reports that Better Touch Tool supports certain Logitech models, to fill in the gaps that Logitech left in designing this mouse. It's worth a download, as it's free.


Apple Numbers IF rules with checkboxes I have a column A with checkboxes
and a column G with Currency

can I do a formula to get the total of G only when the checkbox is not tick?

in the same idea, I have some dates in column B, and I like to get also the total of G (doesn't mater the checkbox this time) when in the current month (or the idea between a 30days period, I suppose something to do with DATEIF) but this I suppose I can do with something like :

SUMIF(B,MONTH(6),G)
however this is not working

A look at SUMIFS and SUMIF in the help files will point you in the right direction.

First case:

Total all currency in column when checkbox is not ticked.  A checkbox not ticked returns false, whereas ticked is true.  The column headers are named in the example table so the formula in the screenshot reflects those names in the place of the column letter designations.

Formula: =SUMIF(A, false, G)

Second case:

Total by month.  The trick is to get a valid date value.  The formula below is a starting point.
Formula for June in the example below: =SUMIFS($Currency,$Date,">=2018/"&MONTH(D7)&"/01",$Date,"<=2018/"&MONTH(D7)&"/30")

For details on the SUMIFS function, see the help documents.

NOTE: the Month 'June' is actually a date 2018/6/1 formatted as month name in this example.  One could substitute the current month this way: MONTH(NOW) but note that the formula will change each time the file is opened.  So if opened in July, that will be reflected in the formula. See the This month total in the example below.

Sample Table


Can I safely delete iPhoto from my MacBook Pro if I have the Photos app? For about a year now I've been using the Photos app my MacBook Pro (OS X El Capitan 10.11.5). Before Photos, I used iPhoto for a couple of years. I only started using Photos once it shipped with newer OS X installations.

I'm out of space and, looking at my disk usage, I see that iPhoto is consuming almost 80 while Photos is consuming 15 gigs. The Optimize Mac Storage setting is enabled in Photos. That could mean it is only downloading 15 gigs worth of media, and that would explain the usage difference between iPhoto and Photos. It could also be that not all photos from iPhoto have made it to the cloud. Is that likely? I think all media should be imported entirely once I installed Photos, but I don't want to risk it.

Can I safely remove iPhoto from my computer or its library at least?

I was just on the phone with Apple tier-two support, and I asked the same question.

The agent's response was yes, both the iPhoto app and the iPhoto library can be safely deleted, if you're confident you've migrated all media to the newer Photos app.

I've done so, and I've seen no trouble on my Mac nor iPhone.


Can iCloud's Documents and Data be configured to sync on a per-app basis? I'm considering buying DayOne, a journaling app for iOS and Mac that syncs through iCloud's Documents and Data feature. I already own the iWork app suite on iOS and Mac, and I do not want to use iCloud syncing for the iWork apps. Is there a way I can turn on the Documents and Data syncing on iCloud for use with DayOne without having the iWork apps sync through iCloud?

edit: Thanks for the iOS portion of the answer, Jonathan. I still would like an explicit answer about the iWork apps on my Mac, though. Has iWork '09 been updated for iCloud? If so, does each app have a setting to turn on/off iCloud storage? I read somewhere that there's a ~/Library/Mobile Documents folder where your files are stored if you are using iCloud, and I want to be sure that I do what is necessary to prevent the iWork apps from doing this once I enable Documents & Settings on my Mac. Please reference the source of your information. I'd rather not have to learn by trial & error. Has anyone already tried this?

edit 2: Sorry I didn't specify earlier, I thought it was an obvious assumption, but I'm using iOS version 5.1 on my iPhone and OS X Lion on my Mac (the latest released versions of both operating systems).

You can disable iCloud on iWork by going to the Settings app, and scroll down to the install apps settings, you will find each iWork app has it's own section, Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

In each iWork app's settings there is an option "Use iCloud". Turn this to off, and keep the Documents and Data in the iCloud menu on.

For Mac, the iWork apps do not support iCloud Document Sync. (If you enable sync on iOS, the files created on iOS will download into your library, you can't open them however, and you are unable to upload to iCloud in iWork)

In Mountain Lion they will, but it appears that iCloud Doc sync integration will be at the OS Level, rather than iWork app level. Instead being more like DropBox* where you have an area (I say area, because it's not a folder, but it's quite similar to one) for iCloud.

*Although this area only seems to appear in Open/Save Dialogs, and will only show files that are registered to the App.


removed /etc/hosts on a mac and now can't sudo I think I made a mistake by editing /etc/hosts within sublime text, because immediately afterward I was unable to run "sudo xxx".  It would ask for a password, and then never resolve once I'd typed it in.

I tried to edit /etc/hosts, but it always required sudo, which never resolved, so that didn't work.  In the end I just deleted the file, but I'm stuck now with not being able to recreate it without access to sudo.  Any ideas?

The file /etc/hosts is in no way related to the ability to run sudo. You probably hosed your sudoers file in a previous step.

To solve your problem boot to Recovery Mode and open Terminal in the menubar > Utilities.

Run df to get the name of your main system volume.
Change your working directory to /Volumes//etc:

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/etc #"Macintosh HD" is just an example name here

Copy the spare files hosts~orig and sudoers~orig (or with similar names which may exist as "backup" in /etc by default - check this with ls!):

cp hosts~orig hosts
cp -i sudoers~orig sudoers #enter yes here

If they don't exist create the hosts file and and check your sudoers file:

/Volumes/<name_of_main_volume>/usr/bin/nano /Volumes/<name_of_main_volume>/etc/hosts

The content of the default hosts file is.

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1   localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost

The POSIX permissions are root:wheel 644. Modify this with chown and chmod if necessary.

/Volumes//usr/bin/nano /Volumes//etc/sudoers

A minimal (to type less!) working sudoers file looks like this:

Defaults    env_reset
Defaults    env_keep += "BLOCKSIZE"
Defaults    env_keep += "COLORFGBG COLORTERM"
Defaults    env_keep += "__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING"
Defaults    env_keep += "CHARSET LANG LANGUAGE LC_ALL LC_COLLATE LC_CTYPE"
Defaults    env_keep += "LC_MESSAGES LC_MONETARY LC_NUMERIC LC_TIME"
Defaults    env_keep += "LINES COLUMNS"
Defaults    env_keep += "LSCOLORS"
Defaults    env_keep += "SSH_AUTH_SOCK"
Defaults    env_keep += "TZ"
Defaults    env_keep += "DISPLAY XAUTHORIZATION XAUTHORITY"
Defaults    env_keep += "EDITOR VISUAL"
Defaults    env_keep += "HOME MAIL"

Defaults    lecture_file = "/etc/sudo_lecture"

root        ALL = (ALL) ALL
%admin      ALL = (ALL) ALL

The POSIX permissions are root:wheel 440. Modify this with chown and chmod if necessary.
Reboot your Mac by entering:

reboot

This can also be done in single-user-mode after mounting the root volume rw.

After regaining the ability to run sudo, either extract it from the macOS installer app with Pacifist or from a backup or modify it yourself with visuso. The default content is:

#
# Sample /etc/sudoers file.
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# See the sudoers man page for the details on how to write a sudoers file.

##
# Override built-in defaults
##
Defaults    env_reset
Defaults    env_keep += "BLOCKSIZE"
Defaults    env_keep += "COLORFGBG COLORTERM"
Defaults    env_keep += "__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING"
Defaults    env_keep += "CHARSET LANG LANGUAGE LC_ALL LC_COLLATE LC_CTYPE"
Defaults    env_keep += "LC_MESSAGES LC_MONETARY LC_NUMERIC LC_TIME"
Defaults    env_keep += "LINES COLUMNS"
Defaults    env_keep += "LSCOLORS"
Defaults    env_keep += "SSH_AUTH_SOCK"
Defaults    env_keep += "TZ"
Defaults    env_keep += "DISPLAY XAUTHORIZATION XAUTHORITY"
Defaults    env_keep += "EDITOR VISUAL"
Defaults    env_keep += "HOME MAIL"

Defaults    lecture_file = "/etc/sudo_lecture"

##
# User alias specification
##
# User_Alias    FULLTIMERS = millert, mikef, dowdy

##
# Runas alias specification
##
# Runas_Alias   OP = root, operator

##
# Host alias specification
##
# Host_Alias    CUNETS = 128.138.0.0/255.255.0.0
# Host_Alias    CSNETS = 128.138.243.0, 128.138.204.0/24, 128.138.242.0
# Host_Alias    SERVERS = master, mail, www, ns
# Host_Alias    CDROM = orion, perseus, hercules

##
# Cmnd alias specification
##
# Cmnd_Alias    PAGERS = /usr/bin/more, /usr/bin/pg, /usr/bin/less

##
# User specification
##

# root and users in group wheel can run anything on any machine as any user
root        ALL = (ALL) ALL
%admin      ALL = (ALL) ALL

## Read drop-in files from /private/etc/sudoers.d
## (the '#' here does not indicate a comment)
#includedir /private/etc/sudoers.d


Is there a known issue where USB audio sounds for a few seconds then stops? Update: the problem occurs using two different USB audio devices on two different ports with two different cables.

I plug an audio device into a USB port on my 2014 MacBook Pro running High Sierra 10.13.3.  If I play a song in iTunes hosted locally on my hard drive, I hear audio for up to about 20 seconds.  Then iTunes continues playing, but no audio comes out of the device (the device is active and powered on and makes just enough background hiss that I know it's on).  If I play a video on YouTube in Chrome, I get up to a minute or so of audio, and then the video freezes (!).  In all of these cases the internal speakers work fine.

If I pull down the menu bar audio icon and select internal speakers and then re-select the USB audio device, the song comes through the USB audio device again.  I can't replay the frozen YouTube video.

Where can I begin to troubleshoot this?

Original question:

I have a Jabra 9470 Pro headset that I've had connected to my MacBook Pro for months if not years now.  Everything has been working fine up until a few days ago.

The base is plugged into the computer via its USB jack.  A few days ago, if I select the headset as the default audio device, audio sounds in it just fine for about six or seven seconds.  Then it goes silent.

The Mac continues to think that the Jabra base is the USB audio device and clearly thinks that it is successfully sending audio to it.

Another USB audio device works fine, so the problem is clearly somewhere in the macOS-to-Jabra-specifically path.

I know that High Sierra has had some issues with USB audio in the past, but I can't understand what might have happened here.  Are there any ideas?

The problem cropped up after my Mac took delivery of the High Sierra 10.13.3 update, and solved itself today when my Mac took delivery of the High Sierra 10.13.4 update.


How can I get the "Look Up" option to find results? How can I get the "Look Up" option to find results. In Terminal, if I select a  command word then right click on it I want to use the Look Up option in the drop down menu. It is not grayed out. It just never is able to find results. Ever.
Is the Look Up option going to tell me the meaning of the word or is it looking for it if it is in use on my computer?
I would like a way to quickly see the definition attached to the command word.

The lookup option is finding the selected word in a dictionary. The reason why you got nothing is probably because it can’t find definitions of command words.

To find a definition of a command word your best shot is to google it.


Is the boot time of an iOS device affected by the apps that are running at shutdown? I suspect that apps that use system services might take time to register each app in the appropriate places at startup.

Is the boot time of an iOS device affected by the apps that are running at the previous shutdown or the number of apps installed?

My experience is no one, ten or even 50 apps can slow down your boot in any measurable manner. Even an old iPhone 3 with 11 pages of apps booted in visually the same time as a freshly restored iPhone 3.

The reason for this is a number of design choices that provide real benefits to the running system and also are good at isolating boot times from application influences. Specifically, nothing auto-launches, there are not multiple user accounts to prepare, and the OS systems that display and interact with apps work from databases that update when apps are deleted or installed - not at boot time.


Installing OS X on new SSD with 10.8 found online Since I had lost the CDs that came with my MacBook Pro (late 2010/11 model – 10.6 OS X CDs) I couldn't continue with my OS X installation. I asked Apple about purchasing the CDs but it would take over 2 months for them to arrive :/ (I can't wait that long as I use it for work.)

I have found a version of "Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (Final Retail)" online but it's only 3.5 GB. Is it a logical size of the OS files to be that "little"? I remember OS 10.6 was like 6 GB+.

If I went on and burned that dmg file to a disk would I be able to install Mac OS X or is "Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (Final Retail) - 3.5 GB" a patch file and I would need the operating system to be already installed?

What I am worried about is the reliability of the uploader of this file and if he has tampered with it.

Use the checksum to validate the integrity of the file.

Sometimes when you download large files, the host will provide an MD5 checksum, which is a hash of the raw file data that you can use to compare and see if any of the data was corrupted, changed, or lost during the download process.

To verify the MD5SUM in OS X, simply open the Terminal and type “md5″ followed by one space, and then drag and drop the downloaded file from the finder into the terminal window.

Hit return on your keyboard and wait a few moments (The larger the file, the longer it will take).

The terminal will spit out the MD5 hash for the file, which you can then compare to the once provided by the download originator!


apple 10.9.1 MS office two screens simultaneously working on MS word on one screen and PPT on the other I cant have the two applications visible at the same time, one on each screen. The full double screens switches every time I switch application, it is very inconvenient, any idea  on how to avoid that? thanks

If you activate "Displays have separate Spaces" in the "Mission Control" Preference Pane in the System Preferences (logout is required), you can use booth screens with an fullscreen applications (CTRL-CMD-F).

I tested this under OS X 10.9.1 with MS Word 2011 v.14.3.8 and MS PowerPoint 2011 v.14.3.8.


How can I recover files from an iPod classic (when using as a hard disk) after reformatting? Recently, my 120 GB iPod classic was not being recognised by my MacBook and kept prompting to reformat. I have done this many times before but make it a conscious effort to back up my files before I do so. I genuinely forgot about the folder I had saved on my iPod classic (when using it as a hard disk) and went ahead to reformat it. A week later I realised I forgot to back up my files but it was too late. I want to retrieve the files really badly as they were pictures/memories!

Is it possible to retrieve without paying for those softwares?

If you are comfortable with the command line, try TestDisk

It's fairly intuitive for a command line program.

The basic steps are as follows:

Download from above link.
Extract download.
Navigate to extracted folder in Terminal.
Run ./testdisk
Follow the onscreen instructions.

Note: You may want to read the documentation before you do anything. The documentation links are about halfway down the page I linked previously. The instructions are for NTFS, but I imagine it will be a similar process for HFS.


Is it possible to change the from address on Mac OS X server email alerts? I have enabled email notifications in Server.app (2.2.4) on Mac OS X server (10.8.5)

If port 25 is not being blocked at the local firewall or the ISP, this generally works ok.

I've found that if it is being blocked by the ISP, you can go the mail settings within server.app, and set mail to route all mail traffic through ISP and specify your ISP's SMTP gateway, even if you don't actually have the mail server enabled and/or use the mail server.

The problem that I've run into is that I have a client who uses an email hosting provider that requires a valid MX record for the domain that an email is coming from.

Their admin@companyname.com where they want to receive their Mac OS X server alerts cannot receive the alerts because the messages are seen as coming from an invalid domain with no MX record.

The Mac OS X server is called macminiserver01.local or macminiserver01.private and when the email alerts are sent out from server.app, the from address becomes root@macminiserver01.local or root@macminiserver01.private.

Is there a way to manually change the from address so that it is valid?

I know this question is a few years old, but I had the same issue some up today. I resolved it with help from this post:

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-postfix-masquerade-change-email-mail-address.html

This was on a Mac server that did not have mail enabled. Apparently even with postfix disabled, the alerts function fires it up just long enough to send the alert email and then closes it again. Running nettop while sending the test alert email lets you see sendmail kick off, followed by postdrop, master, pickup and qmgr.

I found five different locations for the main.cf file file, but the one that seemed to be active was located in:

/Library/Server/Mail/Config/postfix

Edit that file to append this line:

smtp_generic_maps = hash:/Library/Server/Mail/Config/postfix/generic

Then edit generic by appending the mapping you want:

alerts@server.local alerts@validdomain.com
Then run:

postmap /Library/Server/Mail/Config/postfix/generic


Stop Safari asking for my password when autofilling my password When using Safari, it will attempt to autofill passwords and credit card numbers for me. However sometimes (more than once per login) it will ask me for me computer login password.

Previously it would autofill the password without asking for my macOS login password. This changed when I enable two-factor authentication on my Apple ID. (I cannot disable two-factor because I am registered with Apple Developers.)

How can I make autofill actually autofill my password like it used to, without asking for my password?

Please do not recommend TouchID as a workaround for this issue.

I just ran into this problem as well, I found that it was only happening on my MacBook with the Touch ID fingerprint scanner.

If this is true for you as well then you can turn the password prompt off by going to System Preferences > Touch ID and unchecking the box next to Password Autofill.


Specify the resource a virtual machine has I am using a Mac having this:

I have installed VMware Fusion, in one virtual machine Ubuntu has been installed with this ressource:

And here is what is displayed in System Monitor of Ubuntu:

I need to do some experiments under Ubuntu... I am not sure how to specify well the resource used. May I say "The experiments are run under a virtual machine configured to use 2 processor cores among 8 processor cores and 3GB RAM on a PC of 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7 and 8GB RAM? Is there a correct and compact way to express this?

Just mention the specifications that Ubuntu is reporting, and mention that it was ran in a virtual machine. VMs are designed to allocate the resources they need, so it shouldn't matter what the host machine is.


Is it mandatory to upload screenshots for all screensizes when submitting to the app Store? I am preparing a new application, and iOS requires screenshots of the application. They ask for screenshots in the following sizes:

Is it necessary to upload screenshots for all resolutions?

What will be the ramifications if I only upload screenshots for 5.5-Inch and iPad?

From what I understand if you only upload 5.5inch and iPad, they'll just reject you outright. Currently, it looks like they require at least 4 and 3.5. If you indicate it's optimized for iPhone 6, it also requires a 4.7.

It looks like if it indicates that it runs on iPad you need both an iPad an iPad Pro.

Check out the requirements for yourself here: iTunes Connect Dev Guide

Remember, required/requirements means it's mandatory.


Is there a way to turn off BeamSync of the mouse cursor in Mac OS X? The mouse cursor in Mac OS X has a lag to it that drives me crazy. I love everything else about the OS though so I'd like to solve this.

In an earlier attempt to get rid the lag, I used a couple of programs that changed the acceleration curve of the cursor movement. They sort of worked, but were really just masking the problem a bit. I then tried disabling BeamSync using Quartz Debug. It disabled BeamSync on every EXCEPT the mouse cursor. I know this because when I would drag a window around, the window move move ahead of the cursor. The window edges would tear, indicating they were in fact not waiting for the vertical sync. The fact that the mouse cursor lagged behind the dragged window means the cursor is still waiting for the vertical sync.

Does anyone know how to disable BeamSyncing of the mouse cursor?

This blog post helps confirm the problem: http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mouse-annoyances/

The experimental tool to fix the lag issue is here (also linked from the blog post)
http://smoothmouse.com/


Application Desktop assignment does not last I've got 4 desktops in Mission Control. I've assigned CMD+1,2,3,4 to switch between them.
I've also assigned particular application to particular desktops, eg.Chrome to desktop 2, Atom to desktop 3. iterm2 to desktop 1.
I've done it by opening the apps in the respective desktops and going to Options => assign to this desktop.

Now I switch a lot between those desktops and I don't know what I do but after half an hour I've usually got Chrome and Atom swapped in terms of desktops. Also, when I check the Options it says that apparently Chrome is now assigned to Desktop 3 (as opposed to desktop 2).

I know it might be hard to trouble shoot but what am I clicking to reassign them? Any suggestions?
Is there any way to really lock the assignments.

I rely a lot on keyboard and the idea of 4 desktops/workspaces and switching between them like that has always worked for me. I'm new to mac os so I was glad to find that I can do it here as well. The problem is that I do something to reassign them and have no idea what...

Make sure
System Prefs > Mission Control > Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use
is off

You can then reassign them back to what you wanted by invoking Mission Control & dragging the thumbnails at the top of your screen back into the correct order.


Why does iCloud ask for my iPhone's passcode when signing in on OS X Due to some iCloud struggles, I had recently occasion to sign into and out of iCloud on OS X a few times recently.  Interestingly, when I have 2FA enabled on my iCloud account, OS X asked for the screen lock passcode to my iPhone when signing in to iCloud, and would not sign in without it (no .  After the initial sign in succeeds, it prompts for the iCloud password again, and this time asks for the 2FA code.

This was a surprising and unexpected part of the authentication flow.  Does anyone know why iCloud / OS X / iOS interact in this way?

It just seems to be an extra security measure, so that somebody who steals your iphone in an unlocked state can not quickly use the 2FA to change your iCloud account.


Can Time Machine be setup to back up only one folder? I am beginning to make a project on my Mac, let's call it MyProject, and it's the only thing on this computer that is worth backing up.

Therefore, I will only need Time Machine to back up just the folder of my project (and everything that is on that folder including any subfolders).

(as an irrelevant note, back up devices will include encrypted thumb drives)

tl;dr:
So here goes my question, let's say that I need Time Machine to backup everything on /users/MyName/MyProject and nothing else, how can I get it to do that?

Unfortunately not. However, you can exclude individual folders from Time Machine.

HT1427 Mac Basics: Time Machine:

  Selecting items to exclude from the backup

  In Time Machine preferences you can click the Options button to adjust settings. A sheet similar to this appears when you click Options:

It may be possible using the command line utility tmutil however


Deleting old accounts from Mail I have two accounts in Mail (v. 10.3), on a MacBook Air 13" running macOS 10.12.6. One is a work-related account with a POP configuration and the second one is from a hobby-group with an IMAP configuration. The work account has changed servers several times in the last few years. When the work account changed servers, I would add the new account, and leave the old inactive accounts on the mail app.

Today, I tried unsuccessfully to modify an existing account with the new servers addresses. I looked up analogous situations here and on other Mac forums to find out how to deal with my old accounts. I am worried that if I remove them completely, I will lose old emails.

Can I continue adding accounts with very similar information to old accounts without running into trouble? If not, how can I keep all my old messages under the most recent work account?

I would remove the old accounts for the sake of organization, especially if their details, or even addresses are the same (it sounds like they might be, just with different mail server configurations). You can archive old emails on your mac using the mail app. With the mail app open, go to the menu, click Mailbox -> New Mailbox. This will allow you to create a local mailbox:

Click OK, and the mailbox will be created. Copy all emails you want into this mailbox. It may help to create multiple local mailbox for organization purposes. Once all of your old emails are moved to local storage, you can remove the old accounts while keeping all of your old emails safely on your Mac.


OSX Calendar not showing Exchange Account So because the mail app from Apple is far from perfect and never showed me the date and time of calendar invites from MS Exchange environments (after the Yosemite update) I was adviced to re-add the exchange account in Preferences -> Internet Accounts.

After doing that, the calendar app just won't show the exchange account anymore. It's right there in the settings, but not in the panel:

Can anyone tell me how I get my exchange calendar back to the calendar app?

Thanks in advance for any help.

PS.: the bug in mail (no date&time for cal invites) wasn't fixed by this btw.

I feel stupid for answering this myself because the "fix" is idiotic.

Remove the exchange account
Restart the mac
add the account back -> everything works.

I hope another answer gets two upvotes if they help someone so they're assigned the bounty I put out on this question.
Thanks for the answers!


Permanently grant right to control another app to Apple Script App I am using an AppleScript app (i.e., an AppleScript exported to an OS X app) to copy the message ID of an e-mail currently selected in Mail.app to the clipboard.

Whenever I run the AppleScript app, I have to confirm that it is allowed to read the message ID from Mail.app. That is, I get a popup asking:

  “Get-E-Mail-Message-ID.app“ wants access to control “Mail.app“. Allowing control will provide access to documents and data in “Mail.app“, and to perform actions within that app.
  This script needs to control other applications to run.

With two buttons, [Don't Allow] and [OK]. So I always have to click [OK].

Is it possible to permanently grant my app to read data from Mail.app?

I have already found System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Privacy, and checked the box under "Allow the apps below to control other apps.", but still get the popup whenever I run the AppleScript app.

A regular AppleScript saves properties and global variables (including variables in either run handler) in the script itself (the script file is modified).  This is how persistent properties have been implemented, but now this can run into accessibility permissions issues, since modifying an application will cause the system to see it as a different one - one that hasn't been given permission.

The solution is to code sign your application (you can use a self-issued certificate) or make the scripts in the bundle run-only.  You will lose persistent properties, but you can use some AppleScriptObjC to implement preferences via NSUserDefaults if you need to keep stuff between runs.


See/read Mac mini hard drive from MacBook Air? My Mac mini crashed during an OS upgrade and my display simply looks a bit like my opening screen but is refreshing (jumping around?) rapidly with no way to make any keyboard input.  I'd rather not do a reset as I have some   files I want to keep.

Is there a way I can use my MacBook Air via USB or any other method to access/transfer the files so that I might retain them?

Allan’s response makes sense to me. I have been pretty successful retrieving files from Mac Minis using a USB to SATA adaptor. I use a Newer Technology USB 3.0 Universal Drive Adapter https://www.newertech.com/storage/

For guides to extracting the drive from the Mini, I rely on iFixIt. https://www.ifixit.com/Search?query=Mac+mini+drive

Denny


How to convert a pdf file into a text file? Is there an easy way to extract plain text from a pdf file?

On *nix systems I used to have a command ps2ascii that would do the job, but it seems that this command is not installed by default on my Mac.

What would be the easiest way to extract text from a pdf file or, alternatively, how to get ps2ascii on my system?

ps2ascii is a part of Ghostscript, which can be installed on Mac OS X (and it might already be by default from the factory).


Unkillable Google Chrome main process On my 13" MBP 2015 I'm often getting strange error – Google Chrome tabs all become clean white pages, after several seconds it stops responding and can't be killed via process pid through terminal. When I close Google Chrome window and open it – it doesn't reopen tabs and open white page instead. Other apps get some strange behaviour too – for example I can't open ssh sessions in terminal.

Soft system restart doesn't work – I think it is because of that unkillable process. I'm doing hard restart via on/off button – the black screen stucks and doesn't show an Apple sign, the second restart most of the time launches the os normally.

How can I start to debug this problem?

Whenever I kill Chrome via Force Quit under the Apple symbol on the left corner, it does reopen the chrome pages for me. Although you have to ensure to select the option under Chrome preferences:

Now for the unresponsive Chrome, I would suggest

first trying to check under Google Chrome's own Task Manager as to what processes are still running and which one's are taking in more memory. Trying killing any memory hogging processes from there initially

Also checkout the list of Extensions to ensure none of those are causing Chrome to fail. Would be better to run chrome in Incognito mode for a while to troubleshoot this as most extensions should not be running in Incognito mode unless that option is explicitly enabled.
Finally, my personal learning for Chrome browser is that I am better off not keeping them open across days of personal session on laptops. It's better to use fewer tabs and close them as you are done with it, then trying to keep those tabs open for longer. I found the laptop is more responsive and my work happens faster that way rather than trying to fight with an open tab that's been in process for days on end and is starting to hog more RAM.


How many MB can I send on iMessage? I was wondering if anyone could tell me how many MB I can send over iMessage? And when and why messages get compressed sometimes seemingly by random. I find it very awkward that Apple made this very important information secret and nowhere to be found on the net.

iPhone 6, iOS 9.x

This is from the iPhone user guide:

  Share photos, videos, your location, and more
  With iMessage or MMS,
  you can send and receive photos and videos, and send locations,
  contact info, and voice memos. The size limit of attachments is
  determined by your service provider— iPhone may compress photo and
  video attachments when necessary.

You didn't indicate if you needed an answer for wifi or cellular.


Smart Mailbox is suddenly empty I created a Smart Mailbox this morning. I programmed it to hold all mail relating to my property purchase. This was successful. i checked it several times and it was full of all the relevant mail.

This evening I went into the mailbox to find a back-dated mail, and it was empty. There is no mail at all. There is a message reading 'No Messages Selected'.

I am seriously freaking out! Help me!

You may have disabled Spotlight index searching which also affects Mail.

To enable index search again, go to Settings > Spotlight > Privacy tab > Remove your hard disk from the list.


Is it possible to know which apps are installed on other's iPhone? So, it happened that one of my known associates Mr.X installed a certain app on his iPhone. In a few days, one of his family friends somehow came to know that Mr.X installed that app. How could someone possibly know which apps are installed on other's iPhone?

If it were Apple ID information, it would contain only purchases and their dates, not whether the app is currently installed or not. That doesn't seem to be updated in Apple ID information realtime.

Easy way to see a list of all the apps I have installed on my iPhone

So direct interaction of the two parties on the app, or in real life can be a possible reason IMO.


iPhone dropped not responding to touch Dropped my iPhone 5 now screen comes on but also has horizontal lines on half the screen and won't respond to my touch . Is it fixable?

Fixable? Yes, but will obviously need a new screen which can cost a pretty penny.


Airplay Yamaha CRX-N560d speakers working on iPad Air 2 but not on Macbook Pro 2017 Good morning everyone.

I own a Yamaha Net HI-FI, a CRX-N560D that has airplay capabilities.
I couldn't get my new Macbook Pro 2017 - High Sierra 10.13.3 installed - to stream audio to airplay speakers.
The Hi-fi is connected correctly to the router and then to Internet, as it streams Spotify flawlessly.
I had the same problem with my old Macbook Air late 2010 with every OSX i had installed on it, from Snow Leopard till High Sierra.
The odd thing is that i could connect easily iPad Air 2 since iOS 10...

The firewall is deactivated; no LittleSnitch or similar. There are no strange software installed, as i bought the Macbook Pro just yesterday.

Any advice or suggestion?

Thanks in advance!

Yamaha did release a firmware update in December 2017 and since you've been having problems with this for a while it'd be worth checking whether you actually have the latest firmware for your Yamaha CRX-N560D.

If your firmware is version 1.17 (or above) then you're up-to-date. If not then go to the CRX-N560D Firmware Update Version 1.17 page.


iCloud and OS X Server: Limits for Contacts, Calendars, Reminders? iCloud and OS X Server: Limits for Contacts, Calendars, Reminders?

For iCloud, there are some limits detailed here: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202158

However there is no mention of such limits when running your own OS X Server.

Does anyone know the limits of OS X Server Calendar (CalDAV) and Contacts (CardDAV), if there are any?

The data repository for Calendar service is located at /Library/Server. Inside that directory is a folder containing data specific to the Calendar service at /Library/Server/Calendar and Contacts.  Within that folder is a Config folder that has the main configuration file for the caldav daemon called caldavd-system.plist.

The limits are based on your configuration and physical capacity.  Outside of that users can have as big a Calendar and Contacts as they want/you want them to have.  Apples limits are arbitrary for use of their service.

EDIT There is a difference between limits and compatibilities.

BONUS If you want to learn how to set up your own limits try here.


Should I enable TRIM in Crucial M500 SSD over Mavericks? I'm wondering what should I do with my Crucial M500 over my Macbook Pro with the last version of Mavericks.

I've read that enabling TRIM also slow down a bit the writting/reading speed of the hard drive, but that it is also needed in order to avoid problems when the drive is 80% used.

Some other people talk about the garbage collection saying that it should be enough.

I've been checking some topics such as this one but I don't have it very clear yet... it seems enabling TRIM can be a bit risky.

What would you guys suggest me to do?
Thanks!

I'm not sure you are going to find a definitive answer. I have a MBP 2012 with with a Samsung 840 500GB that I keep pretty full. Testing with Black Magic, drive performance had cratered (around 150/50MB/sec R/W). I installed Trim Enabler, filled the drive by creating an encrypted disk volume, deleted the volume, and waited a couple of minutes. Black Magic was back to normal. That was a couple of months ago. However, I just ran BM and the numbers are back to ugly (150/50 R/W). I'm running Filevault. So clearly TRIM and GC isn't enough to maintain performance over time in some configurations.

I also have 2009 MBP with an OWC 512GB w/o Trim enabled that is run with even less free space and the numbers today are as good as they were after initial install. So clearly GC is sufficient with some drives.

On the other hand, I didn't even notice that my notebook performance had regressed so unless you have an odd workload, maybe the answer doesn't make any practical difference in most cases.


With Mojave (macOS 10.14), why does the Message app close itself? I've noticed an annoying behavior with Mojave (macOS 10.14). I use the Messages app all the time. Previously I would just hit the red X to close it when I was done messaging for the moment. The program however would remain open, just hidden. Now, after I hit the red X, within a few to perhaps 30 seconds, the Messages app closes completely (I can tell because the indicator dot on the Dock goes away). As a result, when I relaunch it, it takes an extra second or two (this can add up), and it sometimes opens in a different location than where it was before. Is there any way to turn off this behavior?

This is a feature introduced in macOS Lion 10.7 in 2011. If you're only noticing this since Mojave, that's a bug or the following setting you changed previously has been reset to default.

By default, since Lion, apps which support automatic termination with no open windows and not activated will quit after an idle period.

To disable this for all apps, override NSSupportsAutomaticTermination:

defaults write -g NSSupportsAutomaticTermination -bool false

To find apps which support automatic termination in your /Applications folder, you can use

grep -nl NSSupportsAutomaticTermination /Applications/*/Contents/Info.plist

Note that automatic termination is distinct to functionality more commonly used by third-party apps: applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed(_:).


How do I change $PATH and set it to the default directory? For some reason when I run echo $PATHI get the following directory: /Users/<home>/Library/Applications/.

How do I set it back to its default location so that I don't have to run this command, export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin each time I want to run commands in Terminal?

Thanks for the consideration

First, check the contents of your ~/.profile and ~/.bash_profile for any lines involving writing paths to $PATH.

If this doesn't help, check the contents of /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d/ for any path that you don't want to be included in your $PATH.

Furthermore, you can show what code is being run by bash by adding the following to the top of /etc/profile:

set -x

Save the file, then open a new Terminal window. This should show when and how the $PATH variable is being overwritten.


Does MagSafe 2 T Connector get really hot when charging? I've a Macbook Pro Retina 15" Late 2013. My MagSafe 2 connector (T connector) gets really hot when charging.

Is it normal ??

Yes. In my case, my new MacBook Pro Retina 13" MagSafe connector gets insanely hot but once the charge level reaches above 50% or so, it starts to cool down and then stays lukewarm.

The best solution is to not let the Mac's battery discharge too much. It also doesn't make much of a difference to the heat level if your Mac is on or sleeping as the heat level in both cases are similarly high.


Launch AppleScript when bluetooth device is disconnected Spotify continues playing on my Mac when my bluetooth headphones are disconnected (when they go out of range or lose battery for example). I have an AppleScript to pause Spotify, and I want it to be run upon the bluetooth device disconnecting. How can I detect when the bluetooth headphones are disconnected?

system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType can check you bluetooth status.

There will be connection parameters  Connected: Yes  or No


How to sign in to iCloud without verification code sent to other device? I just formatted my Macbook Pro and reinstalled MacOS. When I try to sign in to iCloud, I am getting this message: "Enter the verification code sent to your other devices.". I don't however have any other Apple devices, which makes it impossible for me to sign in. Is there an alternative way to sign in (e.g. getting verification code by SMS)?

I found a workaround using SMS. In a web browser, sign in to the Apple Store and when it asks for a verification code, click the "I didn't receive a verification code" link. Select to receive the code by SMS. Now, instead of using the code you receive by SMS to sign in on the Apple Store, you can use it to sign in on your Macbook.


Can I receive money as a gift on iTunes from a different country? Someone in US is sending 25 dollars as a gift to me in Ireland, how would I know when I recieve it? And can it be done in the first place?

Apple Store Gift Cards can only be redeemed in the country of purchase.

To make iTunes purchases, you must use the store for the country you are physically located in. (You might be able to use a different Country store front, however it is a TOS violation you you can eventually have problems with your account);
To make iTunes purchases, you must have an iTunes account for that country store.
To make an account for that country store,
- you must have an iTunes Gift Card specific to that country and and a mailing address in that country.
- Or you must have a credit card issued from a bank in that country and a billing address in that country.

http://store.apple.com/ie/help/gifting

I hope that it helps a litlle.


How to crash an application to produce Crash Report I want to crash an application in order to produce the crash report and view it in Console.app. However, running sudo kill <pid> or sudo kill -9 <pid> closes the application but does not produce the Crash Report. The same with Force Quit.
I also googled for any "malware" application that can temper with program memory, "like WinDbg" can for Windows, but I could not find anything. All Google searches containing "mac", "app", and "crash" are about solutions to preventing apps from crashing.

It turns out that sending SIGKILL (kill -9) to an application is a bit too abrupt, the same goes for SIGTERM (kill -15). Instead, sending SIGQUIT (kill -3) worked, and SIGABRT (kill -6). The application I killed was Activity Monitor, but it should work with other macOS applications as well (The real macOS ones, that ship with OS, Console works and Safari as well). You just need to wait a couple of seconds if the application killed had big memory footprint, because it takes some time to produce the Crash Report.


MacBookPro Desktop Screen Display Action I need to know how to keep open windows from disappearing while working with one or more programs.  It seems like they vanish when I linger the cursor too long on one or the other but I can't seem to figure out how to fix this in preferences.  For instance - I'm needing to keep my browser open for reference while I'm typing something in Pages.  Even if I minimize the browser, it will still disappear in some cases.  Of course clicking on the icon in the desktop bar will reopen the browser where it was, but then the Pages window disappears, etc.  I need them to stay open simultaneously.  What to do?  MacBookPro is Retina, 15 inch, mid 2014 with Mojave 10.14.4.  Thanks.

I think that you need to change a setting of your Dock!
Or do you maybe have an app to organise your desktops or not?

I just remember this: click on the green circle top left corner (button to go full screen) but you hold the command key down while clicking and dragging the window to the left or right and normaly, it will set the window of your app to go from the left/right of your screen to the middle of your screen.
Do the same for another app but got the other direction. :-)
I don't know if this is understandable? :-(


MacBook Air 2013 screen issues after sleep I'm having some issues with my MacBook Air (2013). Whenever the system enters hibernation, as it does after a couple of hours of sleep, the screen gets distorted when it comes back from sleep.
When resuming from sleep the screen gets distorted like this:

A reboot fixes that but the menu bar icons as well as some toolbar icons disappear, like in the following screen shots:
Menu bar:

Finder:

Mail:

These issues go away with a reboot into safe mode and then reboot (a tip which I found in a different thread here), however it all comes back after the next hibernation.
It seems to be power related, as it only happens if the power cord is plugged in when the computer first goes into deep sleep and then gets plugged out while in sleep. I've tested this thoroughly using the DeepSleep widget and found how to reproduce it.
I've tried resetting the PRAM but no luck there. Also, the return from pmset -g | grep hibernatemode is 0 - is that normal on the Air? It used to be 7 on my previous MacBook.
Another thing that might be worth noting is that this started happening after I ran out of battery while the computer was on, however it happens every time it sleeps without power cord since then, even though it doesn't run out of power.
Update:
I thought that changing the hibernatemode to 7 worked, since my test to reproduce the issue didn't cause it anymore. However after having had the computer sleep over night it wouldn't wake up, it just showed a blank screen. This is the console output I got: http://pastebin.com/EB4SAtfe
The logs at 01:52 is when I put the computer to sleep and went to bed. It then wakes up 3 hours later and is then supposed to sleep again I guess. Not quite sure why it does this, it also says:
2013-09-16 04:52:53,008 com.apple.time[13]: Next maintenance wake [Backup Interval]: <date: 0x7fb250608870> Mon Sep 16 02:03:30 2013 CEST (approx)

Although that time has already past (It's 04:52 CEST when it schedules that). Also, there is no console output from when I wake the computer, even though I waited a good couple of minutes at the black screen before forcing a reboot as well as closed and reopened the lid.

So here's what happened:

I took the computer to the AppleStore, seeing it was only about three weeks old, and got them to take a look at it. Since it's a company computer I had some company benefits granting me a temporary replacement while they were fixing mine. I took my TimeMachine copy and restored it on to the borrowed Mac. I was surprised to find that the issue still appeared, which was quite annoying. So I restored the Mac again, messed around with the pmsetsettings and tried to reproduce the issue but it was impossible.

I then remembered that the issue started appearing a few days ago when I did a battery calibration (Drained the Mac completely) so I restored to a TimeMachine backup from before that and Boom, the issue was gone. At about the same time they called from the store and said that they couldn't reproduce the issue, so I told them what I had found, came in and got my computer back.

All in all, a really weird story but apparently something related to draining the battery while the computer was still on got corrupted and was then included in the TimeMachine backup.


Alias of app not showing up in launchpad I downloaded this application (code composer studio from TI) and installed it and two applications showed up inside a folder called "TI (other)", one application called eclipse and another called "ti_distpack". But if i navigate to /Applications i see the TI folder which contains an alias to an app "Code Composer Studio." This is the application i want, the alias links to an app inside a folder inside that TI directory inside /Applications. I copied the alias and pasted the alias into /Applications to make the icon show up in my launchpad but no dice. I tried to manually created a symbolic link to the real app by doing
ln -s /Applications/ti/ccsv6/eclipse/Ccstudio.app /Applications/ and it created the alias but still won't show up in the launchpad.

I tried "killall Dock" in terminal as well as "rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db ; killall Dock" but neither worked. I tried restarting but it didn't work. I tried pasting the alias inside my users applications folder but it wont work. I tried restarting and it doesn't work.

How do i get the alias to show up in launchpad?

Here is a set of images that show off my problem, titles below each image describe what you're looking at.

You can drag the real application to the Launchpad icon on the dock. It will add it regardless of what directory it's in.