Synchronizing iPhone and Mail.app inboxes I have IMAP configured on both my iPhone 3G and MacBook and I have push enabled on my iPhone.

When I receive an email and read it on my MacBook, shouldn't it mark it as unread on the iPhone too?

I didn't really notice it before, but recently, it has been annoying me that once I have viewed them on my MacBook I have to view them on my iPhone to mark then as read.
Just checking for new mail in the iPhone doesn't suffice.

Is there a way to make sure the changes on the Mail.app inbox are applied immediately to the iPhone?

I have my own email servers on my own domain(maquib.com hosted on dreamhost). My brother who also has an account and configured the same way has also noticed this.

Here are some screenshots of how my iPhone and Mac are configured:

I don't think it's an iPhone configuration problem.

Maybe a Mail.app problem, it seems it's no syncing back the changes correctly. Except I don't think there's a preference to change that.

It's most likely a server configuration problem.
To be sure, we'll need more information about your mail servers. Do you have access to the configuration? What is maquib.com? From the look of it, it looks like your personal server (with a project to make a Mac OS Tiger app!)

Can you try to download Sparrow? (there's a free version)
Add your account on it and see if the problem is still there. That way we'll know if the problem is on the server or on the software side.


Find-my-iphone without internet connection Will "Find My Iphone" work without wifi connection?
For instance, if someone were to steal my iPod they wouldn't be able to connect it without my passcode on the lock screen. And if they can figure out my passcode, what if they don't connect it to the internet? Would the app still work?

Nope.  Find My iPhone feature requires internet connectivity to be activated.  If your iDevice is stolen, you can flag it as stolen and set up a remote wipe from icloud.com.  Next time it is connected to a WiFi or to iTunes, it will check icould and be disabled/wiped.

If it never connects or they wipe it before connecting, there is no way to track it.


Can I create a Windows VirtualBox image on a Linux computer and then use it on my OS X Mac? I want to try Windows 7 under VirtualBox on my Macbook Air, but I have no optical drive. Rather than going out and buying one, can bypass the optical drive installation by making a Windows 7 VirtualBox image on my Linux tower and then copy that image over to my Mac via rsync?

And are there any VirtualBox configuration settings I may need to use to accomplish what I have in mind?

Yes, you can easily copy virtual machines between systems.

The easiest way would be to just create the virtual machine on your linux machine, and when you are ready to copy it over, you can export it as an appliance.  This will give you a single file to copy over to you Macbook Air.

Once you have the file copied over to your Air, you can then import it there, and you will be all set to try it out.


What is the difference between FileVault 2 and Disk Utility Encryption? What is the difference between FileVault 2 and Disk Utility Encryption?

Also, what is the better/safer option encrypt disk when reformatting then install mac OS or install mac OS without encryption and setup encryption with FileVault 2?

Both, do the same thing, that is to encrypt your hard drive. However, the difference is in the approach and can be disastrous if you’re not careful with it.

Point 1:

When you use the Disc Utility to create an HD with Mac OS Extended (journaled, encrypted) - it will “Format” the drive (any data that you have on it will be lost, forever), it will then ask you set up a password. Once you’ve provided the info, and click Ok. It will format the hard drive within minutes (depending on the disk size of course). This is faster, but a destructive process.

When you use FileVault - it encrypts the hard drive while maintaining the data within it. This is a slow and reversible (i.e. You can turn FileVault ON/OFF as you choose) process, often takes a few hours. But, if you need to preserve the data on the HD, then this is the way to go.

Point 2:

FileVault can be enabled in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > FileVault to encrypt the existing data on the internal HDD on a Mac.

Disk Utility > Erase can be used to format an existing or new partition and encrypt the volume as Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted).

Conclusion:

If you’re concerned about the privacy of your files and user data, and your computer contains information that shouldn’t be seen without authorized access, you should absolutely use FileVault disk encryption.


Can a MBP 15'' early 2011 run DDR3L ram? I have an early-2011 MBP 15' with an Intel I7 2,2 GHZ core. I'm thinking in upping the RAM to 16GB with 2x8 DDR3L sticks.

I've read that using DDR3L with this core is not recommended, is this correct? Can I safely use these sticks?

Thanks.

Yes, you can. Please take a look at this link from Crucial, which states that the MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011) can run:

Memory Type: DDR3 PC3-10600, DDR3 (non-ECC)
Maximum Memory: 16GB
Slots: 2

The website even provides you with the recommended RAM for your computer. Look at the picture below.


Why some iCloud folders do not show up in Finder? The following screenshots both show my iCloud, viewing from Finder and from web. Why some of the folders from web are not there in Finder? May be I deleted them, I'm not sure. Anyway, is it possible to see the missing folders (Keynote/Numbers/Pages/Preview) in Finder?

Go to System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive Options... and check the boxes for Keynote/Numbers/Pages/Preview makes the corresponding folders appear.


Taking screenshots with the command line, but of specific regions I want to capture a screenshot of a specific region, say 10x, 10y, 200width, 200height using the command line

I am aware of the command "screencapture," so I do

  screencapture -h

and I see this:

  -R < x,y,w,h > capture screen rect

So I try

  screencapture  -R 0 0 34 20 test1.png

and does not work. It returns a file named 0 that is a capture of the entire screen. I do

  screencapture Test.png  -R 0 0 34 20

and returns a file named Test.png that is also a capture of the entire screen.

Honorable mention to doing "man screencapture" and see that "-r" does something totally different

Thanks

If you do this:

  screencapture -R0,0,34,20 test1.png

you will get test1.png which has 34 pixels width and 20 pixels height.


Emoji keyboard suddenly changed? All of the sudden, I am not getting the nice and quick emoji keyboard (see 1) popup, but instead a big window of all type faces, which is not gaining focus for easy emoji insertion without moving my hands from the keyboard (2).

How do I get the old one back?

Click on the top right icon to get the previous keyboard


NAS Mounted as AFP mounts an SMB connection by itself I've been running into trouble recently with a NAS device, Seagate 5TB storage system with a Linux back-end. Whenever I connect to the device with an AFP connection, the drive connects with no issues, and I can browse files and folders with ease. After a while though, Yosemite decides to mount another version of the NAS using SMB. This SMB connection is riddled with issues; folder names show off an old 8.3 NTFS name, and sometimes they cannot be changed.

How can I stop my Mac from connecting an additional SMB connection the NAS?

Clear your login credentials out of your keychain.

For instance, on my Synology Diskstation NAS, I have the following saved for SMB:

Once you delete it, OS X will no longer try to connect to the share.


Issue with iSight on MacBook updated to 10.11 El Capitan I updated my MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009) to OS X 10.11 El Capitan.  Then I found that the built-in iSight camera wouldn't work in any application I tried.  What can I do to resolve this?

Turn off the computer. Press shift, control, option, and the power button at the same time for 15 seconds. Then turn on your computer. This resets the hardware.


Connect Macbook Air to Macbook Pro in target disk mode Is there anyway to connect a Macbook Air (11-Inch, Late 2010) to a Macbook Pro in target disk mode?

The Macbook Air does not support Thunderbolt and also does not have a FireWire port.  It just has two USB ports and a mini display port.

There is no way to use the target disk mode without Thunderbolt or FireWire cable. It wont work on USB or mini display ports.


I chose the wrong partition to install Windows. How do I reinstall Mountain Lion? I've had my new Mac for less than a week, and screwed it up.  In trying to create a dual boot, I made noob mistake in choosing the wrong partition to format to NTFS for Windows (the partition with boot camp).

The good news is that looks like Mountian Lion is available in the AppStore for download.  The bad new is I don't have a Mac OSX to download.   I'm pretty sure the recovery partition still exists, but I don't know how to access it at this point.  What can I do?

You can boot into Recovery Mode by following the instructions outlined in HT4718 and re-install OS X from there:

  OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion includes a built in set of utilities in the Recovery System. Restart your Mac and hold down the Command key and the R key (Command-R), and keep holding them until the Apple icon appears, indicating that your Mac is starting up. After the Recovery System is finished starting up, you should see a desktop with a OS X menu bar and a "Mac OS X Utilities" application window. Note: If you see a login window or your own desktop and icons, it is possible that you didn't hold Command-R early enough. Restart and try again.


Copying files to the clipboard using applescript Often I find myself at the command line wanting to copy files to the clipboard, so that I can paste them as attachments in Mail.  If I have an image file, image1.png, I can accomplish this with

osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to set the clipboard to ( POSIX file "image1.png" )'

If I execute the above command and then open a new message in Mail and press command V, the image file is pasted as an attachment.  Note that pbcopy is apparently not a solution here, because this would copy the contents of the file and result in junk when pasted with command V.

My question is how can I do the same thing with multiple files?  Suppose I want to paste both image1.png and image2.png.  This is trivial from Finder (select them both, command C, then switch to Mail and command V; voila, both files show up as attachments)… but how can I do this from the command line?

This isn't quite perfect for what you want, but I think it might get you closer. Quicksilver has a command line tool. When installed, you can pipe files from the command line to Quicksilver app, and from there send them as attachments in Mail.

To install Quicksilver command line tool, activate Quicksilver. Then navigate to Quicksilver > Preferences to open preferences window. Click on Preferences on top right of window. On the left, click on Command Line Tool and install.

In Terminal, you'll be able to type

qs path/to/file1 path/to/file2 path/to/file3 path/to/file4

Pressing enter will send those files to Quicksilver's first pane. Press tab to move to the action pane and choose the Mail/New Email With Attachment action. Press enter, and a new email with your selected files attached should appear.

Note that you will also have to install the Mail and Command Line plugins in Quicksilver (Quicksilver > Preferences > Plug Ins).


macOS cannot boot. How can I add trailing loader space? I am running El Capitain on a MacBook Pro and I decided to add a Ubuntu dual boot to the system. To do this I installed rEFInd, partitioned 100GB for the linux file system, partitioned 2GB for the Linux OS (as Mac is very funny about booting from USB) and partitioned ~20GB swap space for linux.

The install went successful and even though I had to fiddle about with the boot order to ensure rEFInd was shown instead of going straight to ubuntu everything worked fine. My issue was the extra Linux OS partition still existed and I wanted to get rid of it.

To do this I used this command eraseVolume deleteme JFS+ /dev/…, which renamed the partition as 'deleteme'. Stupidly, I assumed the Recovery OS partition which seemed to have appeared was part of this process and so I ran that command on that partition too. From this point onwards I could no longer boot into Mac OS.

When booting into Internet Recovery and looking at diskutil I found the partition type of my main partition had become FFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFF. To fix this I used the instructions detailed here: OS volume shows as type 'FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFF' after attempting to delete some Linux partitions—cannot log in, which seemed to work. But after this rEFInd still wouldn't load and macOS wouldn't show on startup disk or when holding Option on boot, in fact nothing shows in these menus.

When trying to fix the partition via diskutil I obtained these error messages:

Specifically diskutil firstaid says:

  Volume on disk1s2 has 0 bytes of trailing loader space and it needs X bytes. Problems were found with the partition map which might prevent booting.

And diskutil repairDisk says:

  Partition map repair failed file system check when creating loader space for the partition. You should repair that specific partition and then try repairing the partition map again.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to restore the macOS partition?

I nearly had this nightmare after installing MacOS Mojave, then playing around with the partitions with Paragon (the only good disk editor left for MacOS).
Unfortunately it shows the trailing partition as “free” approx 180M.
So not knowing that this was the other GPT partition table reference I cleared it out.

Every time I came to run first aid on the whole disk I got the same error.
Also it says run first aid from recovery which I didn’t have...

So stumbled on the MBR patch from these guys:
https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/files/file/944-mojave-mbr-hfs-firmware-check-patch/

This was brilliant and allows one to install easily to USB without having to use the APFS.
Then you need to disable SIP
So boot the Recovery on the USB
Then choose terminal.
Issue the following command:

csrutil disable
[see https://amp.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/3hv3kk/update_on_rootless_the_configuration_mechanism/#ampf=undefined
For more details]

Then type:

reboot

Hold down Alt key and then boot back into OS on main disk.
Then using Paragon Hard disk Manager (well worth it!)

https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-mac/

Check your recovery partition (you can use diskutil list),
Delete it (make sure you back it up in case!)

I had to add another “empty” or “free space” after my main os (800MB)

I.e :
EFI:
Macintosh HD:
Free Space:
Other MacOS:

Then Copy the Recovery Volume from your USBstick using Diskutil or Paragon.

Now even if you select the Apple_Boot GUID in Paragon you still need to issue the following command: (replace TargetVolume with the volume you have (or have just created at the end of the main OS, ie I my case /dev/disk0s3)

[See the following website for more info on this command.
https://www.lifewire.com/create-os-x-recovery-hd-on-any-drive-2260909]
sudo asr adjust --target /dev/TargetVolume -settype Apple_Boot

Then this makes the volume dissapear from disk Utility (but not from Paragon HDM).

Then reboot into the recovery volume and run the following:

Diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk0
[allows disk to be verified]

DiskUtil verifyDisk /dev/disk0
[verify main disk]

Diskutil repairDisk /dev/disk0
[repair Disk0]

Then issue the final command to restore SIP back to normal

Issue the following command:

csrutil enable

Then type:

reboot

Hold down Alt key and then boot back into OS on main disk.

You can now run the first aid on the main disk as well as the volumes and it should be fine.

Also CMD -R should now now bring up the Recovery HD.

Good luck to anyone else, just glad I have Paragon and Carbon Copy Cloner, but cmd line options are still needed.


Can't prevent Preview from permitting copying content with Adobe Acrobat document security I create educational products and sell at an online marketplace.  I buy clipart and use this.

I create using Pages on my Mac, I then press Print, PDF, open in Preview, grab the thumbnail and combine each page to form a document.  On completion, I export the document to PDF.

I am currently trialling Adobe Acrobat Pro and have followed the steps to secure the document. I have included a screenshot of security options I have set.  I do save the settings and the PDF says by the file name SECURE. I then zip this with another secure file as I need to create my products in US letter and A4 so I zip together and then I upload to the website.

However when I have downloaded I can still lift the clipart.  I have tried this on 3 different Macs and it still can be lifted.  Does Adobe not work with Pages, does zipping affect the security issues or is it that I open on macs and they can override the security settings?

I have read somewhere that the Preview application overrides adobe security settings.  I have not bought Adobe is there another PDF application for Macs that includes security settings I must lock the clipart or I am liable for copyright.

Preview on macOS, like many PDF readers, don't care about these kinds of obscure restrictions on what you can and can't do with PDFs. If you're displaying content to the user, they can copy it, it's as simple as that.

Password protecting the entire file encrypts its contents, and password protecting printing can be followed by PDF readers including Preview, but apart from that all the other restriction types are worthless outside of Adobe Reader.


Safari 12 compatible versions of ad blockers fail to block many ads Since installing Safari 12 and switching to the compatible version of my adblocker(s), many ads that were once successfully blocked by each of those adblockers are now visible, with the result that many frequently visited sites are (to this ad-allergic user) unusable.

Is this likely to be a temporary situation as the features for the compatible adblockers are (quickly!) improved and stabilized, and capabilities of my old adblockers are restored? Or is this the result of limitations imposed by the new Safari 12 architecture, and thus likely to persist (or improve glacially)?

The situation is likely to persist.

Content blockers that are offered by Safari are limited to 50000 entries. uBlockOrigin  needs many more for example. 1Blocker for iOS circumvents that with a trick, using many of these and combining them. This is another builtin technical limitation, making 1Blocker inherently less effective.

In any case, these are different from the concept used in the traditional blockers – requiring a rewrite. Apple says these would be "faster and safer". Maybe. All we see is that our tried and tested favourite extensions do not work anymore, and if there are any successors even ready, they are apparently not up to the task on the level many were accustomed to.

Coupled with the newly enforced restrictions for devs requiring App Store distribution, this disincentivises independent developers. The latter are artificial policy enforcements. This raises the cost for the devs and will likely result in the withdrawal of most useful plugins altogether.

TamperMonkey and uBlockOrigin or JSBlocker devs are not happy. And for those three at least, it seems they have dropped the ball, citing the need for App Store distribution and certification as too costly, too much hassle, not worth it, bad on some fundamental principles:

  Safari/iOS: Unfortunately, after legal review, the EFF found Apple's developer agreement unacceptable. Furthermore, Safari seems to lack certain extension capabilities required by Privacy Badger to function properly.

And in its current iteration, the technology of content blockers as too limited in principle for blocking all that needs to be blocked. uBlockorigin cites the same reasons as JSBlocker:

  Safari has a feature called "Content Blockers" that allows for extremely efficient resource blocking on both the desktop and iOS version of Safari. As much as I'd like to incorporate this into JS Blocker, it is not feasible to do so. Using a content blocker will prevent JS Blocker from showing you exactly what's going on on a website (i.e. you won't see what's allowed or blocked.) It will also break all of JS Blocker's "other" features, such as showing alerts within the webpage and canvas fingerprinting protection. Besides the loss of features, content blockers are limited to 50,000 rules. While this seems like a high number, it isn't enough for efficient protection and a lot of rules would need to be cut out to even run a content blocker. Until Apple eases the restrictions (or at least raises the number of rules that can be in a content blocker), JS Blocker will not be using this API.

And:

  Safari App Extension

  I have no experience creating native mac apps; it will therefore be impossible for me to re-create JSB as one.

  Users who downloaded JS Blocker from the Safari Extension Gallery will probably not be able to update beyond 5.2.2. Apple is not responding to my requests for updates despite them saying they will accept submissions until the end of 2018.

We all need to complain to Apple directly and massively. It's a pity we haven't done so during the shocking beta phase.

Use Product Feedback - Apple, email, chat, your blog, or even better yet a developer feedback channel, file bugs.

Zotero connector is going to circumvent the stupidity enforced by switching to bookmarklets, other things break left and right and in the middle. This is just much too strict:

  Enable Your App Extension in Safari
  If you’re not part of the Apple Development Program, or if you haven’t yet configured a developer identity for your existing Xcode project, your Safari App Extension won’t be signed with a development certificate. For security purposes, Safari, by default, ignores unsigned extensions, so your extension won’t show up in Safari Extensions preferences.
  To develop without a certificate, each time Safari is launched, you must tell it to load unsigned extensions using the Develop menu:

Many might think it's about money, but for some, it's indeed more the technical parting of the ways:

  Safari Support
  As of RES v5.2.2, Safari is no longer a supported browser and will not receive updates or support from the development team. We want to support Safari and provide a good user experience for all, however we need Apple's support with this by improving extension development and publishing experiences.

  Apple have announced that as of Safari 12, support for this style of extension will be deprecated and will no longer work.

  Why did we do it?

  It ultimately came down to the direction development of Safari extensions was heading. Major browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox were all adopting a standard commonly known as "WebExtensions". This provides a single API across all browsers. This is hugely beneficial as you can develop for all major browsers from a single code base. Safari is not adopting this standard and instead moving to their own format, with a strong reliance on Xcode. This would require significant investment from the development team to support the browser, as well as core developers having access to Xcode. Supporting this change would mean the codebase for RES would not be unified.

  Dropping Safari support was never solely about money as many think it is, we do not have a vendetta against Apple. The discussion lasted many weeks and it was not something we took lightly.

Complain, complain, …or switch to another browser.

After you have rightfully complained to Apple, workarounds:

go back to host based blocking (example) [do that anyway?]
use a local proxy, like https://privoxy.og (alternative upto Sierra (discontinued)) [do that anyway?]
combine both options with what is now available as extensions
re-enable uBlockorigin (incomplete solution and development has apparently stopped. Seems to need the gallery version, not the developer version)
switch to ka-block (not as effective as older methods, but efficient and free of charge, probably trustworthy?)

For the time being, you may want to stay with/downgrade to Safari 11.1.2 (not for very long though.) Or re-enable uBlockorigin in the preferences ignoring the misleading warnings about slow down or security. (This is cumbersome and I always lose all my custom settings on application relaunch. You will need the extensions-gallery version)

Not recommended, only listed to illustrate the dire situation!

The shady non-'origin' version of ublock seems to be back in the game, although with the 50000 limit mentioned above.
Plus: Use with caution, not sanctioned by upstream uBlockorigin
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock :

ublock.org says:

  But that’s in the process of changing. If you’ve noticed recent updates to the product, that’s because uBlock has been acquired by the team responsible for AdBlock. We will be investing heavily into uBlock to help it deliver on the promise of being one of the best ad blockers available.

Equally shady Adblockplus is also back. Be informed that the owner company sells your data and sells ads ("only acceptable ones of course"). And limitations are still big. From the comments on that release:

  The sense of Adblock Plus is totally lost without filter Lists.
  Button “Uninstall” is missing in Safari! How to remove your AdBlock-extension manually?


Encrypt password with security command I want to deploy smb password with ARD, or create a small script.

With the command security I have the possibility to add a password in keychain without share the password.

security add-internet-password -a "user" -s "192.168.1.104" -w "password" -l "192.168.1.103" -D "network password" -r "smb " -T /System/Library/CoreServices/NetAuthAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/NetAuthSysAgent

But I like to encrypt the password as does if sharing wifi password (https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/01/11/ios-11-how-to-share-wi-fi-passwords) and the user doesn't see it.

But in the man I don't see how to do it!

The “encryption” used for WiFi passwords is really just a part of the WiFi security protocol. I.e. it is a kind of precalculation of what would otherwise happen when you attach to a WiFi network. This is very specific to WiFi.

If you did the same “precalculation” for a SMB password, it wouldn’t work anymore and it can’t be used for logging on to SMB shares.


How do I reset to default window sizes in MacOS Safari's Responsive Design Mode? I use MacOS Safari's Responsive Design Mode for web development (Command-Option-R or 'Develop' > 'Enter Responsive Design Mode' in the menu.
I have "accidentally" changed the largest window size to a random size (should be 1920 x 1080) by adjusting the horizontal and vertical handles. I would like to reset to 1920 x 1080, but it is very difficult to do by adjusting the handles because of the responsiveness of the controls; it's hard to stop on a specific dimension. Unfortunately, that is the only way I can see to do it, as I can't find a reset control or option anywhere?
I have searched the menu options and the almighty Google and can't seem to find an answer? I suspect there is .plist I can remove? Could someone point me in the right direction?

.This setting is written to Safari's preferences, that are located in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist in dictionary by ResponsiveDesignCustomPresetConfigurations key. So if you need to reset all responsive mode settings - just close Safari and delete that dictionary from prefs .plist file with following terminal command:

defaults delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist ResponsiveDesignCustomPresetConfigurations


Program, or workflow to update a single file and update all instances of it everywhere else Is there a program, or a workflow that is best for working with a single file, and when saving to update all instances of the file on the computer, whether it be in different projects folders?

Edit (Response to Comments):
Well, I have javascript and css files that are shared between multiple projects. When I update or amend a file, I find myself having to manually copy and paste to replace the same files in all the other projects that rely on the same file(s).

What you are describing might be accomplished with a hard link.

Hard links mean that one file on the drive is seen as a file in multiple folders.

So, if you had a file recipe.doc and stored in your ~/Documents folder, you could hard link it elsewhere - perhaps /Users/Shared and ~/Projects/Cooking/Pasta/recipe.doc

So, the link count would be 3 for that file and only one recipe would take space on the disk. If you deleted the file in /Users/Shared - rather than deleting the file, it just removes that one link and decrements the file counter to 2. When the last link goes away, you have a link count of 1 and the file remains, but no copies in other folders.

If you want to learn more, the link command is a terminal command written as ln.

Also, you could check that file into some sort of code control system like git and script the checkout in the folders of your liking. It really depends on how much time you'll save or if you just want to write a quick and dirty shell script to push the changed file elsewhere (or use rsync to copy just the changed bits and be über efficient).


Is there an iPad app that will 'play' a large PDF file as a slideshow? I'm looking for an iPad app that will 'play' a large PDF file as a slideshow.

I've tried the major popular PDF apps, including GoodReader and ReaddleDocs, but none seem to have a 'slideshow' function.

I've also looked into a few Music Notation viewers, but they all seem to require a screen tap to advance to the next page.

Ideally, I want to be able to view a large, graphic-intensive PDF file and then hit 'PLAY' and have it auto advance it's pages.  Bonus points if you can zoom, or flip back/forward a page and then after preset interval, the slide show resumes.

Presentations are meant to be presentations. If you're going to do the process that 3rdparty suggested, I highly advise that you convert the PDF into a presentation friendly format (jpgs are fine if you want to "fudge" it), but invest in Keynote for the iPad and use it!

Keynote iPad's presentation skills are really astounding. Digital Laser Pointer, private presenter's notes on the iPad and the external display you connect to displays the full screen presentation (requires the VGA video out cable or some equivalent products, the composite/component video cables might work too). Transitions, animations, rich media, everything.

It sucks that you already have it in a PDF, but if you do the work to convert it, the iPad will help you present it wonderfully.


How can I get rid of MacKeeper Helper on my mac's activity monitor I have tried to quit, force quit and so many more things in Terminal and all over the place but it's still there.

There is an article on deleting MacKeeper in the Feb issue of MacWorld.

This suggests starting from Applications, Quit, then move MacKeeper.app to Trash.

There was more if it persists.


Change iTerm2 profile depending on current directory Using my .bash_profile, I used to change my iTerm2 profile per machine with the following command:

echo -e "\033]50;SetProfile=ssh\a"

Now, I want to change it depending on my current working directory.

Ideally must work something like this:

Once I enter /mnt/production or any subfolder inside, iTerm should change to production profile.
Once I leave that directory, should change to bash profile.

Is there any way of doing that?

Finally I found a solution using bash-preexec.

That utility have the following function:

precmd Executed just before each prompt. Equivalent to PROMPT_COMMAND, but more flexible and resilient.

To install bash-preexec:

brew install bash-preexec

Then I have to add the following to my .bash_profile:

if [ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/profile.d/bash-preexec.sh ]; then
    . $(brew --prefix)/etc/profile.d/bash-preexec.sh
    precmd() {
        if [[ $PWD == /mi/prod/path/produccion* ]]; then
            if [ -z $shouldChangeProfile ]; then
                echo -e "\033]50;SetProfile=production\a"
            fi
            shouldChangeProfile=1
        elif [ "$shouldChangeProfile" == "1" ]; then
            echo -e "\033]50;SetProfile=bash\a"
            unset shouldChangeProfile
        fi
    }
fi

Inside the precmd function is where I change the profile according to my needs.

shouldChangeProfile prevents unnecessary profile changes.


How to extract photos from iPhone backup files I used iTunes to back up an iPhone. Now I want to get all the photos that were on the phone when it was backed up. Is there a way to do this without restoring the backup to a phone?

Yes, there is, but all solutions are specific software products, which we are not allowed to recommend according to the rules of this site. Thus, I recommend that you Google “How to extract files from an iTunes backup” and you will find what you want. Some caveats, though, you should be aware of:
1. Apple has protected a lot of personal data folders in Mojave, preventing many applications from accessing certain folders. Thus, you should pay attention to what macOS you are using and the compatibility of the software you want to use.
2. You need also to check whether the software can extract a backup from iCloud if you need that. Some of them cannot do that, including the most used free option.


How can I prevent my old iPhone from getting Facebook messages? I have an iPhone 5 and now my husband has my old iPhone 4S. For some reason everytime I have a message on Facebook, he's also getting them on his phone under the "Facebook Messenger". How can I fix this, so he doesn't get them?

It sounds like your account is still linked to your old phone.

Make sure you are signed out of Facebook on that phone. If this doesn't work, try deleting and reinstalling the app. (This should clear any settings associated with the app.)


Tell if running process is running under Rosetta or is M1-native by Command Line If you have an M1-based Macbook you can tell if a process running on the machine is Apple/M1 or Intel/Rosetta in Activity Monitor, but is there a way to get this information on the command line?
I'd like to be able to quickly show a count of how many Intel processes are currently running on my machine under Rosetta.

You can definitely rule out some things (go to the terminal).
e.g.
# ps -ef | grep -i firefox$
  502 56288     1   0 11Mar21 ??       207:43.89 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox

USE the executable name and pass to file command.
# file /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

So if that gives you x86_64 it has to be running under Rosetta - it's got only x86_64 architecture (the pre-M1 one).
On a M1 machine some things ship with universal binaries - for instance do the same thing for Safari and I get something like this (sorry machine is air-gapped .. this is TCP-over-ME so may not be 100% correct :-)
# file /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari:Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach_o 64 bit executable x86_64][arm64e:Mach-o 64-bit executable arm64e]

.. and then proceeds to give output that is for each architecture ... According to Apple it will "prefer" arm64e.


Enable force touch lookup in Chrome I would like to enable Force Touch Lookup in Chrome (like on Safari, when you force touch a link it loads a preview). I've read somewhere that Chromium was working on it but when I checked the project's page, it was written that it's available, so I guess it's something to turn on.

My question is, how do you enable it?

As far as I can tell, Force Touch capability hasn't been added to Chrome.

This article from April 2017 details what has been released with version 58 (current at the time of this answer).  It also goes on to say:

  Although beta versions of the browser on the Canary channel included
  support for Touch Bar shortcuts on the new MacBook Pro, Google pulled
  it from subsequent betas as well as from the stable release as it
  wasn’t ready for prime time yet.

It's important to note that there is a huge distinction between Chrome, Chromium, and Canary.

From the Canary page:

  Google Chrome Canary has the newest of the new Chrome features. Be
  forewarned: it's designed for developers and early adopters, and can
  sometimes break down completely.

From the Chromium page:

  Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer,
  faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. This
  site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing
  information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the
  Chromium source code.

Chrome is the "production ready" browser from Google.  Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome and Canary is the bleeding edge "beta software". It very similar to the relationship of RedHat Linux, CentOS and Fedora.

If you want this functionality, you need to download the respective project and run that browser; it's not something you can enable in the production version.


Why is Options button for Photos app missing in iCloud settings? I've turned on family sharing and want to share photos. There should be a shared album in Photos called "Family" but it's not there. I've found instructions that say I have to use the Options button in the iCloud settings for Photos, but that button doesn't show up for me.

How can I get that Options button to show up?

You can manage these settings by opening the Photos app, and opening Photos > Preferences. Select the iCloud tab.
Here is a screenshot of the settings in Mojave – it's similar in later versions of macOS:


6S Plus iOS 9.3.4 no dictionary The iPhone 6S plus has no dictionary. No matter which app I'm in. If I highlight a word and ask to define it it shows no results. I click manage to try add dictionary and nothing shows up. There is no list just an empty page. This happens in EVERY app. How can this be rectified?

I have tried resetting keyboard dictionary, reset all settings, restoring the phone. All to no avail.

Change region or language or both. (I solved the same problem by updating of the iOS to 9.3.4 and then changing region or language or both (i change both and get references to download all dictionaries)


Is there a keyboard shortcut for "Show Hidden Files" in the Finder in El Cap? Related: Hotkey to show hidden files and folders in File Open dialog?

Looks like there was a keyboard shortcut for it. But in 10.11.6 all I get when I press Cmd Shift . is the bonk sound.

Is that keyboard shortcut gone? What's an easy way to get it back?

Note that the shortcut works in file dialogs but not the standard Finder window.

Not a duplicate: the top ranked question on Hotkey to show hidden files and folders in File Open dialog? does not work in El Cap.

There's no shortcut.
You could make one, but it would require a Automator action, containing a script, and set up as a Service, & will re-launch the Finder each time it's used. [Mavericks could do it without relaunch but no other OS]

For the number of times I actually use it, I just keep the script accessible instead.

--Toggle Invisibles
set newHiddenVisiblesState to "YES"
try
    set oldHiddenVisiblesState to do shell script "defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles"
    if oldHiddenVisiblesState is in {"1", "YES"} then
        set newHiddenVisiblesState to "NO"
    end if
end try
do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles " & newHiddenVisiblesState & "; killall Finder"

Copy paste to Script Editor & save as an App.
It will toggle visible state each time it's launched.


Pages for iOS won't let me insert or replace pictures (images) When i click on the "insert stuff" button, the window pops up with the tabs that let me pick pictures, shapes, tables, etc.

If I select a table, shape, or anything but a picture, I can pick a specific one, and it appears in the doc, as it should.  But if i pick pictures, I get to pick from my albums, images, etc, but when I select one, nothing happens - the thumbnail gets darker to reflect that I clicked it, but the app just hangs - no image appears in the doc.

The same thing occurs if I use a pre-made template with a pic in it - I can click on the embedded image icon, and get to my images to pick one to select the generic one, but nothing happens when I pick one.

Any ideas?   I already tried a reset.

Either Pages can't read the type of image file you are trying to use, or there will be a bug fix in later update. Try holding your'e finger over the screen and moving it about, the image might be there just pulling a little trick on you.


iPhone 5s starting up takes a lot of time I have an iPhone 5s and when the battery goes dead it takes a long time for it to become useful again after I plug it in. I timed this today and it took 15 minutes to become useful again. All my other phones (Android-based) never had this problem.

My question now is, can I somehow shorten this time for it to start up?

Note: The iPhone is the property of my company, so jailbreaking it is not an option.

You can't short the time to use the device. It's normal you can't use your iPhone for at least 5 to 10 minutes untill it's 5%. It will auto startup the system and you can start using it again.


Restore Macintosh HD to its original partition configuration I seem to have badly botched a Boot Camp installation of Windows 8.1.  I used Boot Camp Assistant to create a 200 GB BOOTCAMP partition on my 1 TB Fusion Drive.  I then rebooted and failed to install Windows because I did not know at the time that having my external backup drive plugged in would cause the Windows installer to not work.  From the Windows setup partition tool, I tried formatting the BOOTCAMP partition.  That did not help, so I tried deleting it and creating a new partition in its place.  That did not work either, which leads me to where I am now.

I have a ~800 GB Macintosh HD partition and a 200 GB Free Space partition I need to get rid of to be able to give Boot Camp another go.  These are depicted below.

Notice in the above screenshots, there seems to be no way to change the sizes of those partitions.

When I try to use Boot Camp Assistant now, I get the following error message:

The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition.
The startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume or already partitioned by Boot Camp Assistant for installing Windows.

Note:  I have attempted (twice) to reboot and use the Disk Utility from the recovery menu, but I get the same results.

There is no need to delete the CoreStorage Logical Volume Group. Just resize it:

Have a backup!
Reboot into Internet Recovery Mode (hold Option-Command-R) as the machine is restarting).  You'll eventually be presented with a Max OS X Utilities window.

In the menu bar along the top of the screen, click Utilities -> Terminal.

At the prompt, enter diskutil cs list and you should get output similar to the following.

CoreStorage logical volume groups (1 found)
|
+-- Logical Volume Group 9B4FB14F-DA7D-46EF-BBB9-FD99166C1E2F
    =========================================================
    Name:         Macintosh HD
    Status:       Online
    Size:         920186970112 B (920.2 GB)
    Free Space:   49152 B (49.2 KB)
|
+-< Physical Volume DE3C1DD4-3EA5-4484-AE40-C8BD60AD5F75
|   ----------------------------------------------------
|   Index:    0
|   Disk:     disk0s2
|   Status:   Online
|   Size:     120988852224 B (121.0 GB)
|
+-< Physical Volume E1C56E99-3ED2-437F-AED0-A454FCC4E983
|   ----------------------------------------------------
|   Index:    1
|   Disk:     disk1s2
|   Status:   Online
|   Size:     799198117888 B (799.2 GB)
|
+-> Logical Volume Family D824D426-8315-405A-A7CD-5B62E549FBAE
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Encryption Status:       Unlocked
    Encryption Type:         None
    Conversion Status:       NoConversion
    Conversion Direction:    -none-
    Has Encrypted Extents:   No
    Fully Secure:            No
    Passphrase Required:     No
    |
    +-> Logical Volume AC1A071B-63D0-488F-AFFF-D296E446FE6B
        ---------------------------------------------------
        Disk:                  disk2
        Status:                Online
        Size (Total):          914000052224 B (914.0 GB)
        Conversion Progress:   -none-
        Revertible:            No
        LV Name:               Macintosh HD
        Volume Name:           Macintosh HD
        Content Hint:          Apple_HFS`

Copy the Logical Volume (LV) alphanumeric UUID of your CoreStorage volume. The LVUUID should be the fourth (the fifth if you have a Fusion Drive) listed. In the above example the alphanumeric is:
AC1A071B-63D0-488F-AFFF-D296E446FE6B
Run the following command:

diskutil cs resizeStack LVUUID partsize

According to the number found above it would be:

diskutil cs resizeStack AC1A071B-63D0-488F-AFFF-D296E446FE6B 0g

This will expand your CoreStorage volume to full 1.24 TB
Quit Terminal.app and start Disk Utility and verify the expanded volume.


Why does the Terminal app icon show an unread message? For the first time in roughly three years, the Terminal app icon in the dock shows that red new message overlay.

To the right, the same happens with Thunderbird which I am used to as I do have three new emails. But what does that new message overlay in Terminal app mean?

I have no new mail in /var/mail/$USER nor does Terminal show any message when started.

That badge indicates a "beep" that happened while the terminal was not in the foreground.

To see it, you can send a beep command to your terminal. Type this command, hit return, then click to another window that is not a terminal window:

sleep 5 && tput bel

Are you saying that it went away (as it should) if you view all open Terminal windows or tabs? Or is it stuck on? Or you were just wondering where it came from?


This movie requires Quicktime, which is not supported by this version of iTunes Running Yosemite 10.10.3 on a late 2009 iMac. I've tried switching iTunes to run in 32-bit mode but to no avail. I was wondering if anyone else had this problem or solution? (This happens when I want to watch iTunes University courses)

Shouldn't all versions of iTunes support QT MOV video? Or you can try to save the QuickTime movie to MP4 and then add into itunes, that works for me.


`find` finds nfs server? I had to run find / -name foo > found.txt and stumbled over the following output:

...
find: /Volumes/MobileBackups/Backups.backupdb/mac/2014-12-17-162004/MacRoot/.DocumentRevisions-V100: Permission denied
nfs server localhost:/FjbUHyS_WAWZQyX9SZ1Wx9: not responding
nfs server localhost:/FjbUHyS_WAWZQyX9SZ1Wx9: is alive again
nfs server localhost:/FjbUHyS_WAWZQyX9SZ1Wx9: not responding
nfs server localhost:/FjbUHyS_WAWZQyX9SZ1Wx9: is alive again
nfs server localhost:/FjbUHyS_WAWZQyX9SZ1Wx9: not responding
nfs server localhost:/FjbUHyS_WAWZQyX9SZ1Wx9: is alive again
nfs server localhost:/FjbUHyS_WAWZQyX9SZ1Wx9: not responding
nfs server localhost:/FjbUHyS_WAWZQyX9SZ1Wx9: is alive again
find: /Volumes/MobileBackups/Backups.backupdb/mac/2014-12-17-162004/MacRoot/System/Library/DirectoryServices/DefaultLocalDB/Default: Permission denied
...

I'm not using NFS nor have I ever mounted a NFS volume. Where is this coming from?

Mac OS is runnning Time Machine backups for you, even if your Time Machine disk is not connected. The backup directory is automatically created and mounted as a network share via NFS at the /Volumes/Mobilebackups directory.
This is not a backup in the disaster recovery sense, but it will allow you to restore older versions of your files, if you by accident delete a file or regret an edit you did.
Supposedly it will consume a lot of disk space, but only as long as there's at least 20 % free space.

Disable the service with this terminal command if you dont like it:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

To see the NFS path, run the mount command. Optionally "mount -a" to show all volumes.

I believe the physical location of the backups is i /.Mobilebackups but I'm not quite sure.

And according to Apple docs, the find command should take an option "-fstype" with the special value "local" to stay within the same file system, thus avoiding mounted network shares etc. (Not tested - have no access to a Mac system right now).

find / -fstype local -name foo

*)https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/find.1.html


How to change the default gateway of a Mac OSX machine I am familiar with the route add default gw command in Linux to add a default gateway, but this doesnt work on Mac OS. I cant find any appropriate example in the route manual. Can anyone help me the command.

$ route delete default
$ route add default 192.168.0.1

or

$ route change default -interface $INTF
$ route change 192.168.0.0/16 -interface $INTF


Inbox by Google doesn't update unless opened Despite being setup to allow background refresh, Inbox does not notify of new emails unless I manually open the app. How can I fix this?

Go to Settings > Inbox and check that it is allowed to access Background App Refresh and  Cellular Data


Is it possible to open Chrome's databases.db in another MacBook? This is in response to another question I found interesting. Is it possible for an attacker to copy Chrome passwords found in /Users/$USER/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/databases/Databases.db and view them on another MacBook?

@Buscar웃

They certainly can but they need your keychain password from the originating MacBook.

On Windows the password store is encrypted using your system password.
 Regardless, any system ought to be encrypted and should never share your keychain password with anyone.


Using iCloud at work and privacy What is the best way of using iCloud at work, and retaining privacy?

I have work computer, an iMac. Management requires the login password to be known, so that others can use the computer when I am away. That's fair, they bought it. But I want to use my personal iCloud account.

What's the best way of doing this while retaining privacy? Once I have logged in to iCloud, in System Preferences, it seems like anyone could turn on Bookmarks, Photo Stream etc without even asking for my iCloud login.

Is there anything stopping you from creating a separate user account for others to use in the office?

By explaining that the Mac might expose personal information due to the Apple ID on your user account, they should accept that there's a security risk to you if you allow everyone access on that account.

Alternatively, you could try to remember to sign out of iCloud each time you leave, however that wouldn't delete content stored locally already.


How can I stop my computer time to reset to my local time-zone time? Sometimes I want my Mac OS time to be different from my local time zone. In order to do that I uncheck the box "set time and date automatically" and set the time to whatever I want. This works beautifully for quite some time (days) until randomly something resets the time back to the local timezone. The box with the settings is still unchecked, but clearly some process has set the time automatically to the local one. What is this process & how can I stop it from happening?

I am currently running Mac OS 10.14, but I think this issue also occurred on previous versions of Mac OS. My computer is a Macbook Air in case it matters.

[I also have the box "set time zone automatically using current location" unchecked, but I have manually selected the time-zone I am in.]

You can try blocking outgoing connections to UDP port 123 (NTP) with a PF firewall rule such as:

block drop out quick proto udp from any to any port 123

I'm no PF expert, YMMV.

See here for details on how to apply the rule: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/230556/134740


Is the iPhone SE compatible with iPhone 5 cases? Are the dimensions and the placements of the ports and buttons identical on the iPhone SE and iPhone 5 (which is physically compatible with the iPhone 5S)?

Yes the cases are compatible and apple has confirmed it.

Source: http://9to5mac.com/2016/03/21/expanded-iphone-case-lineup/


< and ^ keys are swapped I'm using a German Keyboard (Lioncast LK20) with OS X 10.11.5. I set the keymap to German and it is displayed correctly in the settings screen. Unfortunately the following two keys are swapped when I type on the keyboard:

< Key (right of SHIFT)
^ Key (left of 1)

Are there any advanced settings to fix this issue?

You can use Karabiner to swap the keys using the following private.xml.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <item>
    <name>Swap Keys</name>
    <identifier>private.swapkeys</identifier>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::one, KeyCode::two</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::two, KeyCode::one</autogen>
  </item>
</root>

You'll need to find the KeyCode for the keys you want to swap as I don't have a German keyboard to check. You can use EventViewer accessible from Karabiner → Misc to find the KeyCodes. Replace one with one KeyCode and two with the other KeyCode in the above private.xml.


One Odd-Sized page in Pages Document for PDF Need to embed a Numbers spreadsheet in a Pages doc that will “live” as a PDF. Generating a scaled image that I then embed results in mediocre resolution.

If there's no way to scale your numbers doc small enough to fit on a pages sized page, you'll have to use a larger paper size (e.g. legal).

If you only want your numbers doc to be a different size, you'll need to handle them separately. I'm not aware of any way to change the dimensions of a single page in pages directly but...

If the document will "live" as a PDF, why not export the pages doc to PDF in standard Letter or A4 size without your spreadsheet.

Then create a custom page size in your Numbers doc to fit the spreadsheet as a whole and export that to pdf.

Finally, use preview to combine the two documents.


Problem installing Mac OS X Lion on Mac Mini I am installing Mac OS X Lion on a Mac Mini (c2d, 2GB RAM). The installation goes fine, until it rebooted. After rebooting, it shows the following screen for almost 3 hours. The  progress bar does not indicate any remaining time.

Should I continue this or cancel the setup?

If you don't have anything important on the box. I would reboot into Recovery Mode try installing Lion again.

If that fails then erase the hard-drive (back up any stuff you need to), and try to install Lion again on a clean drive. It should not hang for 3 hours plus on the install.


Good/inspiring uses of automation on Mac OS X I have been a mac user for quite a while now (about 5-6 years) and I would consider myself rather tech-savvy. That being said I have very little insight to the automation capabilities that have been introduced to OSX a couple of years ago. There are smart folders, folder actions, and other applescripts, as far as I know.

As I haven't come across a good tutorial, or some other resource for these new capabilities within OSX, I was wondering if people could give a couple real-life examples of how they are using these.

Smart Folders are 'virtual folders'. They're useful for automatically adding or removing items that fit certain criteria.

For example, I have a Smart Folder called 'Wallpapers'. I've made the criteria for entrance to this Smart Folder:

.png filetype
2560x1600 pixels

As such files appear (or are removed) anywhere on my system, so they'll be added to or removed from the Smart Folder.

When I'm done I can just delete the Smart Folder without deleting the files that reside inside it.

NB: The default behaviour is to add Smart Folders to the Sidebar. You can uncheck that option when you create the Smart Folder or you can simply drag the Smart Folder out of the sidebar to anywhere you wish. I've chosen the Desktop.

This link has a good overview of how they work.


Mac Mini Invisible File Problem I've got an issue where after moving a file from the desktop a shared location (mac mini) the file doesn't appear.

After duplicating the file, both the copy and the original file appear so it's not a permissions issue. Is there anything that could be causing it to ghost like that?

Both Mac and the mac mini are Mavericks 10.9.5

When you are dragging the file, do you see a small green plus sign? If you don't see this, it means that you are going to cut and paste the file, but if you can see the green plus sign it means you are going to duplicate the file into another location. By holding the option key, you can force duplication, and you can see the green plus sign appears.


Using the space bar as a shortcut in finder to preview audio files I recently was given an old MacBook (Late 2007) running 10.4 from a family member. I'm using it basically as a backup for my studio computer. It's going to contain only the apps included in 10.7 and 1 additional NI audio product. My question is, my other mac and all I've ever worked on (and it's a few) have been able to use the space bar to preview a highlighted audio file in Finder. Is there a way to cut this off/on? I really like this feature and it saves me probably 30-60 minutes a day because I go through thousands of audio files a day.

Looks like Quick View is only available for Mac OS X 10.5 and later.

Bottom line, download 10.5 and the spacebar Quick Look will work.

As a side note, if you're looking for other shortcuts that might be missing from OS 10.4, there's a shortcut creator (on steroids) that's free, and it's called BetterTouchTool. Go here to download it (http://www.bettertouchtool.net). Just remember you have to have 10.8 or later for it work.

You won't regret it.


How to clear all notifications with 1 click in Catalina? This question offers an AppleScript to clear all notifications within the Notification Center, but all of the answers seem to be pre-Catalina:

How do I clear All OS X notifications with 1 click?

Post-Catalina, with the same script I get an error (reported via Keyboard Maestro) that the Notification Centre cannot access the "close" property of its windows. Looking through some of the AppleScript dictionaries it seems like Notification Center has no windows at all (anymore?).

What would be the way to accomplish this in Catalina?

When scripting the user interface, for things like windows and menus the object hierarchy usually doesn't exist until it is shown, so the object needs to be shown before trying to get its properties.  Once the window or menu is shown, you can use the Accessibility Inspector tool (included in the Xcode bundle) or manually spelunk the various UI elements to find the ones you are looking for.  Interestingly, the Automator "Watch Me Do" action is also very handy for identifying specific UI elements (probably its best use), as the events it records can be copy/pasted into the Script Editor.

For the Notification Center window, the layout can vary, as individual notifications each have close/dismiss buttons, and there can also be an overall close/dismiss button for notifications grouped by application, although they aren't labeled as such.  Since the topmost button is conveniently located in the same place, to just close/dismiss everything a script can be used to click on that element until there are no more (tested in Mojave and Catalina):

tell application "System Events"
    # show notification window
    tell application process "SystemUIServer" to click menu bar item "Notification Center" of menu bar 1

    # loop through the app close buttons
    tell process "Notification Center" to try
        repeat -- forever (at least until there are no more)
            delay 0.25
            click UI element 2 of UI element 1 of row 2 of table 1 of scroll area 1 of window "Notification Center" -- the topmost close button
        end repeat
    on error errmess -- no more
        log errmess
    end try

    # close the window
    # tell application process "SystemUIServer" to click menu bar item "Notification Center" of menu bar 1
end tell


How to add podcasts manually to the new Podcasts.app on macOS Catalina I'm on macOS Catalina (10.15 Beta (19A471t)), and I'm trying to add manually downloaded podcasts that I copied from an iTunes library to the new Podcasts.app.

I tried to simply drag the files into the ~/Library/GroupContainers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts folder (- location of all the downloaded podcasts), but after that, the files still aren't appearing in the app.

I can see that the downloaded files in the mentioned podcasts folder have special file names (e.g. 7BE50452-8412-4232-B384-D9E1B94813ED.mp3).

Downloading again the files within the Podcasts.app, is not always a solution, As @Dillon pointed out in the comments.

Is there any solution for this issue?

From what I found there is no way to add an audio file into Podcast application: as of macOS Catalina, it supports only subscribing to RSS feeds. The only way built-in way to listen to the separate podcast episode is to find it via application search and add it separately.

However, I found out that you can listen to any audio files including MP3 the same way you did in Podcasts in Books application by adding them there via File -> Add to Library... and then syncing them to iPhone.


Multi-monitor virtualisation with Parallels Is it possible to make a Windows 8.1 VM running on Parallels think it has two monitors but in reality these monitors are just two separate "desktops" as far as OSX is concerned running on a single real monitor?

I don't think so - even in Coherence mode, which would allow you to place different Windows apps on different spaces, they have a tendency to overlap each other, depending on which was actually last in front.

I think you might have to try using Sysinternals (Microsoft) own Desktops v2 tool - which I haven't tested in Parallels - but this guide may help - Unlock Virtual Desktops on Windows 7 or 8 With This Microsoft Tool


How do I wipe my MB Air's drive and start fresh? I want to return my Air to the original factory settings, to the way it was before I added all kinds of  junk to the solid state drive.

I'm running Snow Leopard. So after I wipe it clean, I plan to go to the App Store and buy Lion.

If you bought a pre-Lion Macbook Air, it should have shipped with a system restore USB drive. This is exactly the scenario for which it exists: restoring your system to factory condition. Back up all your data, so you can keep what you want. Then, plug in the restore drive, and hold down the option key (⌥) when you boot. Select the restore drive, and follow the instructions to install a clean install of Snow Leopard.


How to disable Password Prompt for select apps How can I disable administrator password requirement for select apps, for example the app "Mac DaddyX" will not require a password to be entered to operate the desired function (in my case... changing MAC address).

Just to note that the password prompt is popping up because of macOS and NOT the app itself.

It is not possible to bypass the requirement for administrator password unless the application in question supports remembering the password.

This is because the password is required in order to achieve what you are trying to do and macOS doesn't support bypassing security. Potentially it would be possible to run the application as the root (administrator) user and this might help, but this isn't advisable, and it seems likely that the app would still require your password.

You could do this by running the application from Terminal and prefixing the command with sudo.


'Find My Mac' says that it is already in use, how to fully remove previous configuration? I posted a question earlier about using Find My Mac while my computer was sleeping, and after doing some research I noticed that I had 'Wake for network access' already enabled. So when I went to check iCloud again, I noticed it saying this (Find My Mac already in use):

If I check the box, I then get this alert message:

The only thing I can think of, is that I may have signed in with another iCloud account on this computer (I have an old iTunes account, plus a mobile me converted account that I actually use).

bmike mentioned he had see registration issues with Lion updates, and not sure if this was related to something similar, or to possibly linking this computer with another iCloud account originally. I want that original one gone, and only my new one to go.

My question is: Is there any where else I should look for remnants of this 'other' iCloud account, to not cause other issues? I know this was working at some point, even recently, so it confuses me on what happened here.

Update: So I went ahead and checked this, clicked Continue below, and it appears to work fine. I would still like to find what ID or anything else that would cause this though to help understand it if it happens again.

I had this happen to me a couple of months ago.  I was perplexed, as you were, about what could be causing it.  I figured out the following, but as there's no information for this online it could be incorrect:

Find My Mac is tied to the serial number of your Mac
Find My Mac was partially enabled before iCloud was released
Since it was partially enabled, a previous MobileMe account could cause conflicts.

Again, I have no definitive proof for this.  But I got this notice on a fresh install of the operating system, only after upgrading my MobileMe account to an iCloud account.

So if I were you I wouldn't worry about it.  Most likely it's just a MobileMe bug that never got quite resolved.


How to manage tunnels as background processes from a shell script? I need to set up a couple of ssh-tunnels from a shell script. I've tried running them as bg tasks using:

#!/bin/sh
ssh -L 3000:server1:5029 me@server2 &
ssh -L 3001:server3:3306 me@server2 &

but the tunnels don't seem to work correctly when I launch them that way.

They work fine when I manually set them up in their own tabs, so my next idea is to have the script open new tabs in Terminal and run the commands in there as foreground processes.

Note: this question was originally "How do I launch a new terminal tab from the shell and then run a command in it?", but I got two answers about dealing with the tunnels. For the "opening a shell" question, I found this on SuperUser, which will work , though new tabs in the background would be preferable to the foreground windows that it opens.

This is technically not an answer to the question asked, but rather an answer to your problem as described.  The ssh command has two switches that may be useful to you:

ssh -f -N -L 3000:server1:5029 me@server2

tells ssh to hang around in the foreground just long enough to ask for any necessary passwords, and then put itself in the background, not executing any remote command but just handling the tunnel.

If you really want this to appear in a tab then you may want a different solution.


How do I rename an app in MacOS properly? I am trying to rename an app in MacOS. I tried it using Finder, navigating to Applications, right clicking on the app to rename, moving to "information" and renaming it there.

This works in most places where the app name appears, but if I have the app opened in fullscreen and I swipe up with 3 fingers I still see the old app name in the menu at the top of the screen.

How can I change the app name also there?

Renaming the .app package in Finder only changes the name there, it doesn't change the name shown in the menu. To do so edit YOUR.app/Contents/Resources/XY.lproj/InfoPlist.strings (with XY being the language you are using) and change CFBundleName there.

For applications without localization files you can also edit YOUR.app/Contents/Info.plist and set a new value for CFBundleName there.


Can an iPhone be used after a Find My iPhone erasure? My sister in law's iPhone 5 just showed up as online in Pakistan 4 months after it was stolen from Australia.

We have locked the iPhone remotely from the Find My iPhone function on icloud.com

If we choose to erase the iPhone remotely, will the person with the stolen phone then be able to use the phone, but with all her personal data gone?

Ultimately  she just wants her personal photos and whatnot gone from the phone. But it would be nice if we could do that and stop the person with the stolen phone from just re-activating it with their own iCloud account.

It seems like Activation Lock does make erasing harder starting with iOS 7.

Find My iPhone includes a new feature called Activation Lock, which is designed to prevent anyone else from using your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch if you ever lose it. It starts working the moment you turn on Find My iPhone in iOS 7
Even if you erase your device remotely, Activation Lock can continue to deter anyone from reactivating your device without your permission.

However there several methods that enable you to bypass this activation lock. Simply google for bypass activation lock iphone.


Copy SSH Public Key to clipboard WITHOUT newline appended Every Google search for copying a Mac's SSH Public Key to clipboard yields the following command, which results in a newline appended:

pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

This is undesirable as I need to paste a Public Key into a variable in an application I'm developing.  In the hopes of saving folks the trouble of solving the same problem, I'll post my solution to this question in the answers section-

To copy your SSH Public Key cleanly to clipboard WITHOUT a trailing newline use

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy

or (without cat)

tr -d '\n' < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy


Navigating on the internet sometimes I get this webpage "mackeeperapp2" Is mackeeperapp2 a safe website? Does that mean I have some security problems? I am in possession of a Mac OS X v.10.9.4, which actually is not mine at all, and I wouldn't like to risk or imperil it. As you can notice, I have not so much experience with Mac OS X.

These are pop-up ads, usually opened in new tabs or windows, by aggressive sites that are paid by the makers of MacKeeper to advertise for them. The appearance of these advertisements has nothing to do with the state of your Mac -- your computer is good, safe and fine.

The MacKeeper application itself is not well regarded:

  MacKeeper has been described by various sources as highly invasive malware that can de-stablize your operating system, adding that it is unethically marketed, with a history of making false advertising claims, by a company called Zeobit, and a rip-off.


Missing icons in apps menu Today I found out that something strange is happening to my Mac OS apps. For example - Disk Utility.

The same is with my Finder.

What kind of sorcery is this and what should I do now?

The same thing kept happening to me in an earlier version of 10.8, but it stopped after I reinstalled OS X from the recovery partition.

The UI doesn't make it very clear, but the Reinstall Mac OS X option just does an upgrade install or repairs the current installation. I have done it twice so far and it fixed multiple issues both times. Just upgrading to 10.9 might also have the same effect.


Can we capture a screenshot of vim window using Terminal? Let's say I have a file called hello.py.

# File: ~/hello.py
print('Hello')
print('Stack Exchange')

I would like to get a screencapture of hello.py when opened in vim editor as the ~/hello.png.

Need
Needed is a script called highlighter.sh which can do this.

bash highlighter.sh hello.py # should give hello.png with
                             # syntax highlight
# For example when we open hello.py in vim
# It gives syntax-highlighted code, I need
# screencapture of this tab or window.
# In the end of command these tab or window should be closed.

Usage

We will have syntax highlighted png files for all the scripts which we can quickview in Mac.

Updates so far

Open the terminal # or, cd ~
vi hello.py
cmd t # opens new tab
screencapture -l$(osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal" to id of window 1') hello1.png  # this captures this command, not the screen of vim tab.

Related links:
https://github.com/thismachinechills/pyscreencapture
https://github.com/vorgos/QuickGrab
https://github.com/smokris/GetWindowID
Take a screenshot of the top-most window

By combining the built-in screencapture with osascript -e you should be able to perform the following:

screencapture -l$(osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal" to id of window 1') hello1.png

If you have more than one Terminal window currently open you'll need to adjust the windowID value.


WiFly/Mikrotik Captive portal page doesn't close on iOS, but works on Android When connecting an Apple device to a guest hotspot, the authorization page of the Apple Captive Network Assistant does not close after authenticating. On Android it works like it should.

My setup:

Provider: Rostelecom
Captive Portal Service Provider: WiFly
Router: Mikrotik
Transport: UniFi

The instructions from these vendors did not help in solving the problem.

The automatic handling of captive portals on works by iOS automatically downloading various Apple URLs when connecting to a new network, such as these URLs:

http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html
  https://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html
  (and others)

If the download contains the word "Success", iOS is satisfied that the user has direct access to the Internet.

If the download contains something else, it is most probably a captive portal page, which requires the user to authenticate in some manner. This triggers the Apple Captive Network Assistant to display the downloaded page on screen.

The user then authenticates in some manner with this page. Afterwards iOS periodically checks those URLs mentioned before to see if it now contains the word "Success". As soon as it does, the CNA window is closed.

This method of detectiing captive portals and authenticating conforms to the WISPr 2.0 specification and allows the so called "Universal Access Method" for authentication. This specification is followed by iOS and Android devices alike.

As this doesn't happen for you, it means that your setup somehow prevents the iOS device from downloading the correct page. This could be due to incorrect cache settings on your proxy server (if you have one), incorrect DNS settings, incorrect authentication checks, etc. Especially it's important that you never block any of the apple.com pages used for captive portal detection.

In some cases you can also have problems, if your captive portal page presents an outdated or otherwise invalid TLS certificate.

Another source of errors is when your system redirects the user to another page when successfully authenticated. This could be to an internal page or an external page. Depending on how your system is setup, one of the two might be failing - so you could switch to the other type, or fix the configuration errors (such as firewall or authentication checks) that prevent the user from accesssing the redirect page.

A good way to check is to use Wireshark to make a packet capture of the WiFi interface when trying to connect. You'll be able to see exactly what you're redirected to, and which request fails.


Time machine backup hangs I do backups of Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.6 with Time Machine to USB external HDD's and at some point I couldn't wait for any backup to complete.
For example it can be like this for maybe over 6 hours, until I just press "Skip This Backup"

If I check sudo fs_usage backupd, it's just lots of these lines

09:55:49.515864    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x3e5fe8a8  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.016663 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.533957    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x3cafd768  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.018043 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.565517    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x3af3e360  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.031517 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.575010    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x2c4e29b8  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.009424 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.591100    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x399f9a78  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.016015 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.610730    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x399a8458  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.019583 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.634997    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x366a0e50  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.024226 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.675542    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x2fd33260  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.040490 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.696395    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x2d39c3d0  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.020778 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.704406    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x2c560448  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.007943 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.722183    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x2a9fa720  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.017714 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.752376    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x00847a20  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.030050 W backupd.824910
09:55:49.794376    RdMeta[ST3]     D=0x417a1b50  B=0x2000   /dev/disk3s1                                                                                0.041950 W backupd.824910

occasionally interrupted by

09:55:42.201947  getattrlistbulk                                                                                7.885756   backupd.824910

UPD:
tmutil listbackups doesn't show any .inProgress entries, so deleting them couldn't work for me

My current backup session is frozen on 919.2Mb. tmutil status output is:

Backup session status:
{
    BackupPhase = Copying;
    ClientID = "com.apple.backupd";
    DateOfStateChange = "2019-04-13 21:47:32 +0000";
    DestinationID = "80DD4AE0-6BD5-4E91-9A67-2C3346B95A68";
    DestinationMountPoint = "/Volumes/yellow backups";
    Percent = "0.01760709905511998";
    Progress =     {
        TimeRemaining = 143771;
        "_raw_totalBytes" = 46987386344;
        bytes = 919235073;
        files = 548346;
        totalBytes = 51686124978;
        totalFiles = 1048225;
    };
    Running = 1;
    Stopping = 0;
    "_raw_Percent" = "0.01956344339457776";
}

The output doesn't seem to update over time

UPD2: after approx 18 hours of hangup, backup has completed and now it's on Cleaning up... phase.
I'm still wondering what's causing this behavior and if I can somehow avoid it.

In my case, I confirmed the drive was working fine and could easily do almost 100MB/s, yet backups were happening in KB /s.  I had backups going back 4 years and it seems it is the layering of backups that slowed things down.

A few possible solutions:

Many users report that booting into "Safe mode" will reset some data and then restarting back into "Normal mode" may solve such issues.
Try to repair the external disk using "Disk Utility" (may take a very long time).
Can try updating the drive firmware.
If you have enough space on the external drive, partition it into 2 separate disks. (May also take a day or so)

Then setup Time Machine to use the new partition. This will require a complete "Initial" backup, but in my case, 300GB initial backup was still faster than the 4GB incrimental backup on the old drive.

As a final resort, wipe the drive and backup from scratch or buy a new drive to use in parallel.

I'm still experimenting, but there may be a bug causing Time Machine to slow down significantly as new backups are added. I'm using an HFS+j external USB3 drive from WD. Hope that helps.


How to restores files lost from application during upgrade of app I had a lot of important files on my iPhone in an app called Documents Mobile Office.
During upgrade of the application, the upgrade failed & the application does not reload. Hence I can't access the files in the application (.doc, .csv etc).

As I thought all files would be auto uploaded to the "cloud" I did not back it up in iTunes.

I have a few of these files on my Google Dashboard which I have recovered, the rest I can't. How do I recover these lost files?

Please help.

Your data should be recoverable!

Download and install iExplorer on your PC or Mac.
Connect your iPhone to your computer.
Open iExplorer.
Your iPhone should appear on the sidebar on the left; double-click on "Apps".
Find Documents Mobile in the list that opens.  Double-click on it.
You should see a folder inside Documents Mobile called "Documents".  Drag and drop it to your Desktop and iExplorer should copy the documents in Mobile Documents to your computer.


How to re-install my macbook pro? I have a Mid 2011 MacBook Pro. (Lion 10.7 - without the EFI Upgrade )

The OS partition was deleted (when I couldn't boot my mac).

I have a recovery HD.

When I try to Use internet recovery, I get an error, that the data is temporary not available.

I only have access to another windows PC.
I managed to get a lion 10.6.3 install DVD, but my MAC beeps 3 times, (repeatedly) when trying to boot of it.

How do I save my Mac?

How do I reinstall (any OS)

A 3-times beep normally means that something is wrong with your Random Access Memory (RAM).

You will need to replace it before you can use the mac. When you have access to another mac or iOS device you can download mactracker to see what kind of RAM memory your mac needs.

I think is 1067mHz or 1333mHz, but i'm not sure and don't know if there is a command to check the memory frequency.

After your RAM is fixed, you can reinstall os x.
When you get the error message that the service is currently not availble, you can try another time are try to get a bootable device. I'm not sure if it is possible to make a bootable usb for mac on a windows.

If you can fix the problem by your own, you need to bring your mac to an authorised apple service provider. You can also go there to verify what kind of RAM you need, so maybe they can fix the os x problem when the reinstall your RAM if you don't want to do it yourself.


How to activate Recoverit when 'csrutil' doesn't *on macbk pro 10.13.6 Terminal messaged 'failed to modify system integrity configuration. This tool needs to be executed from the Recovery OS.' Where is Recovery OS.Objective to recover data from Emptied Trash...precious family videos in mp.4.

To disable SIP, you need to run csrutil from the Recovery OS, which you can boot into by holding cmd-r while turning Mac on until the Apple logo shows (Terminal can be accessed in the Utilities menu).


how can I create wifi hotspot on windows 7 that can be shared with my macbook? My USB modem has issues so my Mac doesn't recognize it. I created an ad hoc wifi hotspot  on my Windows 7 laptop with WPA2 encryption and shared the internet. My Macbook Pro sees the wireless network but when I enter the password I get a connection failed warning. I tried connecting also with my iPhone and before I entered the password I got a messag/e that "MyWirelessNetwork" is not connected to the internet. How can I solve this issue

The first step is to run the Wireless Diagnostic from the Mac since it's easy. There are iOS diagnostics, but you'll have the best luck determining why OS X won't connect to the network. From there, the iPhone issue will likely be solved, but if not you'll have a smaller problem to solve.

Option click your WiFi icon in the menu bar (place it there in network settings if it's absent) and then select Wireless Diagnostics.


MacBook Pro 13'' (2020) with Dell TB16 I'm currently able to use an external monitor via HDMI connection thanks to Thunderbolt3Unblocker but very often after unplugging the dock my laptop restarts due to an error: this seems related to a problem in windows resizing, is there any solution to that?
Also, some other strange things are happening from time to time: twice or thrice in my 2 weeks of usage it happened that after unplugging and then reconnecting to the dock, the two USB-C ports of the side of the laptop where the dock was previously plugged in stopped sending any signal to the monitor, while the other two on the other side were still working fine (this seemed to happen after, when unplugged, I left the laptop go to sleep mode); display port connection is apparently not working at all, while mini display port works with a suboptimal resolution (but this is covered in this conversation: https://github.com/rgov/Thunderbolt3Unblocker/issues/28).
I'm using MacOs 10.15.7

From GitHubs description:

Many people file bugs here about their Dell TB16 dock.
The USB, Thunderbolt 3, and audio out ports should regain
functionality after installing Thunderbolt 3 Unblocker.
However, video output does not work. Unfortunately, this is out of
scope for this project.

It clearly states that video output (e.g. HDMI) is not supported by this project.
They further clarify:

For whatever reason, an update to macOS High Sierra broke support for the displays attached to the TB16.

and also mention to upgrade the firmware of the dock:

You could try performing a firmware upgrade on the TB16, which has been reported to restore video (HDMI output). However, the firmware upgrade must be performed from Windows.

There is also a Thread about this issue on Apples own forums, suggesting to try this GitHub project, yet it is older and untested on newer hardware/software (i.e. make backups of your system and know how to revert these changes!).
You could try to reset SMC, NVRAM/PRAM and boot into safe mode.
You could try a clean install, but it looks like this specific Dell dock is finicky with Apple hardware.


Why can't I connect to my Kodi server from my Ipad? i’m trying to connect to Kodi (running on LibreElec) from my iOS (iPad) device.
In Kodi, I have settings>services>samba enabled. No login & password.
In iOS, I went to Files app > menu > connect to server.
I did try with smb://192.168.1.7; or smb://LIBREELEC; both as a guest or with credentials, but it does not work. Sometimes it shows a popup notice (an unexpected error occured), other times it seems to work; but there is no files list + it says it is read only.
Note that I CAN connect to Libreelec from my (linux) laptop.
Any ideas of what it might be ? Thanks !

Make sure that UPnP is turned on in settings in Kodi, then download Ark Mc lite from the iTunes store and look if it can see your Rpi. Mine does, but I am using an old version of the app on a 1st gen iPad. Or jailbreak the iPad and install Kodi, which will then see anything else running Kodi on your network.


Getting Bluetooth to Work After Moving Boot Camp Partition to New Mac I had a Boot Camp partition with Windows 7 on my 2008-era MacBook Pro, and everything worked fine.

I have a new MacBook Pro. I partitioned it using the Boot Camp Assistant, and then I copied my old Boot Camp partition using Winclone.  After booting into Windows on the new Mac, I ran the Boot Camp Windows Support stuff, which supposedly installed current drivers.  Almost everything works fine: I have the hi-res display, trackpad works fine, sound works fine, etc.

However, Bluetooth isn't working at all.  When I try to add a device, no Bluetooth devices appear in the list.  In Device Manager, the "Apple Broadcom Built-in Bluetooth" icon has a yellow warning triangle on it.

I tried uninstalling that driver and then re-running the Boot Camp Windows Support setup, but I'm back to the same situation.

Any suggestions?  (Other than reinstalling Windows and all my Windows applications from scratch.)

Apparently the problem is that the "Apple Broadcom Built-in Bluetooth" driver is not the right one for the new hardware.  Here's what I did to fix it:

Open Device Manager, open the Bluetooth Radios subtree, right-click the "Apple Broadcom Built-in Bluetooth" icon, and choose the "Update Driver Software..." menu item.
Choose "Browse my computer for driver software"
Choose "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"
Select "Apple Inc." for Manufacturer, and "Apple Built-in Bluetooth" for Model, and click Next.

After the driver installed, "Apple Broadcom Built-in Bluetooth" had been replaced by "Apple Built-in Bluetooth" and "Microsoft Bluetooth Enumerator" in the Bluetooth Radios subtree of Device Manager, and I was then able to use the Add a device wizard to set up my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.


I deleted songs right off my iPod, why are they again in my iPod after syncing? I have 887 songs in my iTunes library, and last night I deleted some of them right off my iPod touch, 4th generation. At the end I got 769, and in the morning I connected my iPod to iTunes, I did some changes that had nothing to do with my music, because they were fine, but then I clicked sync and again, the songs I deleted from my Ipod were again in my iPod! how do I sync my iPod to actually "update" my iTunes library, I don't want to delete the music again or do I need to delete the same songs from my iTunes library too?

You need to tell iTunes not to sync those songs.

Uncheck the songs you do not want to sync in the iTunes "Music" list.
Check "Sync only checked songs and Videos" in the options for the device.


How to debug "too many open files"? I have a program that quits after a time with "too many open files". How can I trace which files are opened and closed? I know I can set this limit a higher value, but that would only defer the problem.

I remember using a program like dtruss or dtrace for that purpose but I can't remember how I invoked it and --help gave to much confusion.

I run that program with a wrapper script based on nodejs, so I need to follow the child processes.

Question: what is the best strategy to find out which files (descriptors) are opened and which are closed?

lsof will show you the open file handles.

If you know the PID use the -p flag.

Eg, on my zsh shell at the moment I see:

alex@smiley:~|⇒  lsof -p 82946
COMMAND   PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE  SIZE/OFF     NODE NAME
zsh     82946 alex  cwd    DIR  14,12      2414   186278 /Users/alex
zsh     82946 alex  txt    REG  14,12   1103984       73 /bin/zsh
zsh     82946 alex  txt    REG  14,12    474672   787843 /usr/lib/zsh/4.3.11/zsh/zle.so
zsh     82946 alex  txt    REG  14,12    258672   787864 /usr/lib/zsh/4.3.11/zsh/complete.so
zsh     82946 alex  txt    REG  14,12    120576   787863 /usr/lib/zsh/4.3.11/zsh/complist.so
zsh     82946 alex  txt    REG  14,12     71264   787838 /usr/lib/zsh/4.3.11/zsh/zutil.so
zsh     82946 alex  txt    REG  14,12     79968   787852 /usr/lib/zsh/4.3.11/zsh/parameter.so
zsh     82946 alex  txt    REG  14,12    599280  7719861 /usr/lib/dyld
zsh     82946 alex  txt    REG  14,12 296980480 12427083 /private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64
zsh     82946 alex    0u   CHR   16,0   0t26354     6285 /dev/ttys000
zsh     82946 alex    1u   CHR   16,0   0t26354     6285 /dev/ttys000
zsh     82946 alex    2u   CHR   16,0   0t26354     6285 /dev/ttys000
zsh     82946 alex   10u   CHR   16,0    0t3432     6285 /dev/ttys000

The Type column shows the various file or pseudo file types that might be open, sockets, pipes, etc.

ulimit or limit, depending on system and shell lets you change the number of open files.


Why does iCloud use storage even when i have deleted all my backups? I had 3 devices but now I have removed all. There are no photos synced, no keynotes or any documents saved.. but if you see the screenshot my iCloud drive says i am using 1.09GB ++ of data.

No idea what is using that and how do I clean my iCloud drive?

Also if I go to iCloud.com it says it has 1.09GB of backup. What backup is it talking about?

Please help.

Update: So i did manage storage in my icloud setting in mac and this is what it shows..

Seems like the same problem I've encountered. What helped me was:

  Create a backup again
  Wait until the storage space is updated
  Delete the backup

The solution for me was to update the "cache". Somehow when you are deleting to many things at the same time, iCloud isn't updating the storage.


bash process stays 20% CPU usage after boot I migrated from a 2011 MBP to a 2012 MBP via Migration Assistent and Time Machine.

Now, when I boot the bash process goes to ~20% and stays there forever, with it launchd for root and my user. I also notice, that the trackpad really gets unusual responsive. If I force quit the bash process, it restarts and does nothing and the system gets back to normal.

What can I do?

I already checked the permissions.

Select that bash process in Activity Monitor and click Inspect, then switch to Open Files and Ports tab. This should give you some clue on how that process was started and what it is doing. Otherwise update your question with that info, someone surely will help you here


Emulating associative arrays in AppleScript A problem that would be trivial to solve with key=>value pairs.
For each item in list_a, find the matching item in list_b and compare a single attribute (calculate scale ratio for two sets of images).

The AppleScript lists look something like this:

listA = {{filename:"filename X.tif",width:"500"},{filename:"filename Z.tif",width:"200"}, ...}
listB = {{filename:"filename Z.tif",width:"400"},{filename:"filename v.tif",width:"222"}, ...}

Both lists may contain a different number of items/order, making it impossible to relay on nth item of list for selecting pairs

While it would be possible to iterate over every object in listA and compare its filename property with every object of listB, this is horribly inefficient, even with just a few hundred items.

Is it possible to solve this using AppleScript or must I serialize the objects and pass the evaluation task to an external script that support assoc. arrays?

Although AppleScript does have associative arrays, they are called "records".  I tried using AppleScript records to give you a solution. In the code below, I was unable to use a string as a key.  I did manage to use something that resembles a file name, an identifier, but this isn't really working.  It's an idea of how to use an associate array in AppleScript though:

set theAssociativeArray to {|file name 3.jpg|:{width:400}, |file name 1.jpg|:{width:222}}

-- looking things up by key in an AppleScript record, which is really a dictionary, is fast
try
    get |file name3.jpg| of theAssociativeArray
    say "file name 3 is on list"
on error
    say "file name 3 is not on list"
end try
try
    get |file name 1.jpg| of theAssociativeArray
    say "file name 1 is on list"
on error
    say "file name 1 is not on list"
end try

I saw that in your example code, you defined lists of records.  What I tried to do is to define records of records.

I think that the main thing to keep in mind about the strengths and weaknesses of AppleScript is that is a language designed for Interapplication Communication (IAC), revolving a round the "tell command" to tell different apps to get data, set data, and to control the apps by telling them commands.

Here is a link to an answer that I believe is relevant to an AppleScript solution for you:

Finding the Intersection of Two Lists

The ultimate solution using AppleScript would be to use AppleScriptObjC which would allow you to use Objective-C classes such as NSDictionary that are very much like associative arrays.


launchctl list doesn't show StartInterval The following is part of my .plist file:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>org.myorg.foo</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <!-- ... -->
  </array>
  <key>StartInterval</key>
  <integer>300</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

Yet when I do a sudo launchctl list org.myorg.foo it prints:

{
    "LimitLoadToSessionType" = "System";
    "Label" = "org.myorg.foo";
    "OnDemand" = true;
    "LastExitStatus" = 0;
    "Program" = "...";
    "ProgramArguments" = (
        ...
    );
};

Where did the StartInterval go?

StartInterval won't get printed with (sudo) launchctl list [label].

Use sudo launchctl print system/[service-name] instead. It will be printed as run interval.

Depending on the domain/service target use

user/<uid>/[service-name]
login/<asid>/[service-name]
gui/<uid>/[service-name]

instead of system/[service-name]

Examples:

host:~ user$ sudo launchctl print system/com.apple.collabd.expire | grep interval
    run interval = 600 seconds
host:~ user$ launchctl print gui/501/usr.homebrew.mxcl.autoupdate | grep interval
    run interval = 7200 seconds


What is the need of the Facetime app in the MAS? Looking through the Mac App Store I stumbled across a result that really confused me. There I saw the FaceTime App made by Apple. It costs £0.99, with minimum requirements of OS X 10.6.8.

I was confused because all new Apple Macs above 10.7 already have FaceTime, so why is it available to be BOUGHT?

Also, as I already have the FaceTime app why did the Mac App Store not tick it off and instead show Open? What app will I get if I was to buy what I already have? Is this a listing that Apple has forgotten to take out?

As you said, FaceTime for Mac only started shipping built-in with macOS Lion 10.7, whereas the FaceTime app on the Mac App Store runs on macOS Snow Leopard 10.6.8 (which does not have it built-in).

The Mac App Store download allows customers unable/unwilling to upgrade past Snow Leopard to FaceTime with Mac users on 10.7 or newer, or those on iOS.

As to why Apple does not tick it off for you, it’s simply that this isn’t exactly the same app that ships with 10.7 and above. Case in point, you can’t easily uninstall the FaceTime app that ships built-in, but you could uninstall the one from the App Store, just as easily as you’d uninstall any other app. The version from the App Store also hasn’t been updated in years, as evidenced in your screenshot.