How to get data on HW RAID 5 without initializing disk? RocketRAID eSATA connection died but USB3 works and shows RAID5 OK? What the pluck moment with my hardware RAID:
eSATA connection to my SansDigital external 5-bay tower stopped working, not sure why, card definitely warm.
Shut everything down, disconnected the eSATA cable, connected via USB3.
My hardware RAID 5 status shows good in SansDigital HW RAID utility when connected via USB3.0; however, the OS does now say
"The disk you inserted is not readable by this computer".

This is on a Mac Pro Server Quad Xeon 3.2GHz (MacPro5,1) mid 2012 running OS X 10.7.5 (Lion) and a HighPoint RocketRAID RR622SD eSATA/USB3 card. SansDigital 5-bay external drive enclosure.

Is it a legitimate error when a hardware RAID 5 reports as OK on the remaining USB3 interface but the the OS says "The disk you inserted is not readable by this computer" (since the eSATA connection is the dead connection)? Or is my hardware RAID 5 borked and does not interpret it that way?

Is it possible to get to the data on the drive again without initializing the disk?

What does the drive initialization process do differently when a hardware level 5 RAID is involved (versus a regular drive initialization) - - is there a way to get to the data outside of the RAID 5 array (if absolutely necessary)?

Is there anything I can look at in the console that will point me in the right direction?
  Thanks,
    Claire

Here is a dead RAID post-mortem (hopefully this will help my fellow AskDifferent friends)...

I provide my experience here to help you move on from a bad hardware dependency and to confirm that eSATA is not for serious business critical applications.

Hardware RAID is like the Honey Badger - - it don't give a shit - - bad data is bad data.

First, if your RAID dies, focus on preserving the data.  Clone the RAID drives ASAP.  Use a separate system for recovery.
   In the meantime, replace all of the hardware involved rather than trying to piecemeal troubleshooting the internal card, the eSATA cable, and the external RAID enclosure.  New problems popped up for me as I went along because I drank the Kool-Aid of "it will be ok, my RAID hardware says my RAID is normal and intact".
   I learned that the term "Initialize" in the Highpoint hardware RAID utilities does not mean the same as Mac hard drive initialize.  The enclosure I was relying on had hardware RAID inside, but because the internal eSATA card was intermittently working a while before it completely failed, a majority of my drive data was corrupted.
   Do not try to change the RAID settings with any utilities, including the Highpoint utilities, just clone the drives, recover the data, and come back to the problem system later.
   My internal eSATA card had failed, but my enclosure had hardware RAID, so if you are in the same situation, do not treat it the same as a RAID pass-through card or a card-based RAID.  Do not take apart the RAID logically with utilities.  Do not pull even one drive out of the Sans Digital box or you will lose the RAID, period. Do not use DiskWarrior on the volume, it will break the file and folder structure beyond recovery in this situation.
   Highpoint driver support for Mac is absolutely horrible for anything before Mac OS X 10.10, so let me save you the days of frustration and hours of your life from being wasted in dealing with Highpoint as I have. The Highpoint driver did not fail gracefully - - it dismounted my volume, froze my system for about twenty minutes, then when it came back, all of my launch services were trashed, and the keychain corrupted - - unreal.  I could not find any RAID settings within the settings files as they were before. I never backed up the external enclosure settings or the settings for the RAID card as I should have.  Other things were broken in my admin and my root accounts, so this became a complete OS recovery / reload as well.
   Never throw away and driver CD or DVD for any piece of hardware you own.  I replaced the dead card with an exact replacement from Highpoint online, but the CD had changed, and the Highpoint Mac installer on the DVD did not work for Lion!  Yes, you heard me, the original card, same exact version, came with a CD that was different in that Highpoint had abandoned any version of Mac prior to OS X 10.8 - - all of the GUI for the web interface was there, but the HWRaidManager utility was not, and nothing worked as before.
   Some more process monitoring on startup and comparison with data from the original drive content allowed me to trace the issue back to a couple of kext files.  Found some replacements online (even though the Highpoint tech support could not), and modified one of their newer installers to work with Lion.
   Do not expect the drivers for the Highpoint RAID cards to work consistently on Lion.  Highpoint rebrands their hardware RAID utility for other vendors in the RAID market, and is so lazy they did not bother to make a different interface for Mac users.
   The good news is Highpoint started reworking their drivers and Mac installer packages when they started having Mac OS X 10.8 permission issues.
   Third, I started data recovery with third-party software.  I monitored how pathetic the external hardware was behaving by this point in the recovery process.
   As I confirmed the last bits of data from the RAID volume were recovered, I promised myself that I will never buy another Highpoint product or any product which bundles a Highpoint card with it (such as the Sans Digital product line) again.
   Going with a $5K setup in a 2U rackmount solution in a mini-SAS combo from ATTO and OWC instead.


How do I do a right click on a 'magic mouse'? We’ve just won a brand new iMac. It came with an Apple keyboard, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. The keyboard works well, although it's weird not having a numeric keypad. The trackpad also works well.

But while the mouse seems to connect fine and I can scroll and click ok, for the life of me I cannot figure out how to do right-clicking on the mouse?

I did try looking for a Control Panel to try and fix this, but there isn’t one.

There is no Control Panel like in Windows or the old Classic Mac OS systems of years ago. Instead, what macOS has are System Preferences. You can access this from the Apple Menu and selecting the System Preferences… option.

Once you do you’ll see a list of Preferences Panes you can access by using a single mouse click. There are two you can utilise to address your issue, because both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad can be set up to do what you’re calling a right-click.

Below are screenshots of both the Mouse and Trackpad preference panes:

Note that when you look at both these preference panes you will see options for a Secondary click.  This is the setting that will enable the right-click you’re looking for.

I suggest while you’re in System Preferences you also have a play with what else is available.

Finally, you may find the Mac tips for Windows switchers site of great interest to you.


Uninstalling OS Lion, and transferring photos to MacBook if full restore needed I have, stupidly, upgraded to OS Lion on both my desktop and laptop.
I've now done a hard restore on my laptop, back to Snow Leopard, and reinstalled my photo software, which wouldn't work with Lion.
Now I need to remove Lion from my desktop, but must save 19,000 photos first, either by transferring onto my laptop (preferred) or onto my WD 2Tb hard drive, so I can reinstall after downgrade to Snow Leopard.

Crazy, I know, but I've never needed to do this before, so please be gentle with an upgrade novice.

Use Time Machine to backup your entire system to your WD drive.

Once finished, clean restore your machine back to Snow Leopard, re-install your applications and then perform a manual drag-and-drop restore from your Time Machine drive back to your clean machine.

This will avoid restoring any upgraded system files, preferences or other content Lion would have upgraded at point of upgrade.

I've recently had to perform the steps above for a family member after a misbehaving Lion upgrade (bad kernel extensions or preferences causing random shutdowns).


How to configure outlook to send me Tracking report for my emails - Office 2011 for mac I want to configure my outlook 2011 for Mac to send me a tracking report for my sent emails.

Note: My Email Hosted by: Office 365.

Any idea?

Here are some instructions on how you can do that. You may also consider using a plugin called sidekick by hubspot. It's a chrome extension that allows you to track emails (not through a program) but I use it with gmail. I don't think it requires permission from the person, which makes it a little less conspicuous.

Let me know if this helps.


Why won't El Capitan run Homebrew after it has been successfully installed? I am very much new with all of this. I installed Homebrew from the Terminal and I am now stuck on figuring out why the terminal commands from brew that installs UPX is outputting errors, albeit, they derive from the first error. I am feeling that this might be a parameter or some sort of setting error. I matched the finished installation code from the site I used to get the brew download/install code with my successfully completed report from Terminal and everything lined up to a T.

This is the code I used:

mac$ brew install upx $ upx -d /Applications/Ableton Live 9 Suite.app/Contents/MacOS/Ableton Live 9 Suite ; exit;

Error ouput:

/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/brew.rb (Formulary::FormulaLoader): loading /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core/Formula/upx.rb

Error: No available formula with the name "$"
//main error which obviously makes no sense to me, almost like an oxymoron. But again, it is probably the tidiest answer to solve and likely the easiest I will come across.

==> Searching for a previously deleted formula...
Error: No previously deleted formula found.

==> Searching for similarly named formuclae...
==> Searching local taps...
Error: No similarly named formulae found.

==> Searching taps...
==> Searching taps on GitHub...
Error: No formulae found in taps.
logout
Saving session...
...copying shared history...
...saving history...truncating history files...
...completed.

  Was I supposed to restart Terminal? Mac? before trying to install UPX?
  Shell//Edit/New Window//Copy Special --> Choose Homebrew before UPX?

I have never done this live (other than suggested programs to write and compile code for school), let alone on a Mac; however, I am not sure any of that is relevant in the scope of learning.

Albeit, I am not anymore familiar with the rest of the parameters than I am confident about trying to accomplish this which obviously, is not the end goal I have. I am not even sure it will work because of 3.92 beta. It is possible, if I find that it is no longer a beta but actually their 4th or most recent version, I will be able to decompress an exe file. As I understand, El Capitan and Sierra set up strange but mostly irrelevant security diagnostics.

I think I will give myself a reboot, breathe and start over.

Any guidance is greatly appreciated! Thanks :)

It's not clear to me what commands you actually entered into the Terminal, but based on the output, it looks like they were not entered correctly.

brew install upx

This is one command.  It instructs brew to install the command-line program upx.  It needs to be entered on its own line, after which you press enter.

upx -d "/Applications/Ableton Live 9 Suite.app/Contents/MacOS/Ableton Live 9 Suite"

This is the second command.  It tells the program upx to do something to the file at the path specified, with the -d option switch.  It assumes your Ableton installation exists on that exact path /Applications/Ableton Live 9 Suite.app/Contents/MacOS/Ableton Live 9 Suite with that exact name.  I'm not familiar with upx, so I assume that you're using the correct syntax for that program's execution.

The $ in the command you copied are shell prompts, and not part of the actual commands.


How To Use '`launchctl print`' as a Replacement for '`launchctl bslist`?' man launchctl' remarks that:
LEGACY SUBCOMMANDS
     Subcommands from the previous implementation of launchd are generally available,
     though some may be unimplemented. Unimplemented subcommands are documented
     as such.

⋮

     bslist [PID | ..] [-j]
         This subcommand is not implemented and has been superseded by the print
         subcommand, which provides much richer information.

at least as of OS X v10.11.x 'El Capitan.'  (Presumably, this was also the case in v10.10.x 'Yosemite,' as that was the OS release that first included 'launchd 2.0,' if I'm reading/recalling my history correctly.)  What arguments, then, would one pass to 'launchctl print' to get output like what the 'bslist' sub-command used to provide?  Would you need to filter it any (using grep, sed, awk, etc.) to get the desired result(s)?
('launchctl print system' spews a bunch of data out, but I'm not clear on whether that includes the same information the 'bslist' sub-command would have output in the past or, if so, where in the former's output said information might be.  Its 'endpoints' key contains a list similar to the example provided in Listing 1 in the 'Mach Bootstrap Basics' section of this old, outdated Apple documentation on 'Daemons and Agents,' but I'm uncertain if that's what I'm looking for, particularly since it contains a couple extra columns.)

Short answer
Use:
bash -c "if [ \$(id -u) -eq 0 ]; then domain=system; else domain=\"user/\$(id -u)\"; fi; launchctl print \$domain | sed -e '1,/endpoints = {/d' -e '/}/,\$d' -e 's/.* \([A|D]\)\(  *\)\(.*\)/\1  \3/'"

If you prefer a script, create a file, for example /usr/local/bin/bslist, with these contents:
#!/bin/bash

if [ $(id -u) -eq 0 ]; then
    domain=system
else
    domain="user/$(id -u)"
fi
launchctl print $domain | sed -e '1,/endpoints = {/d' -e '/}/,$d' -e 's/.* \([A|D]\)\(  *\)\(.*\)/\1  \3/';

and make it executable: chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/bslist. (See the end of this post for an explanation of how the script works.)
Note that both the command and script above fully support sudo:

To the get the output equivalent to running sudo launchctl bslist, simply prepend sudo:
sudo bash -c "if [ \$(id -u) -eq 0 ]; then domain=system; else domain=\"user/\$(id -u)\"; fi; launchctl print \$domain | sed -e '1,/endpoints = {/d' -e '/}/,\$d' -e 's/.* \([A|D]\)\(  *\)\(.*\)/\1  \3/'"
sudo /user/local/bin/bslist.

To get the output for a different user <user>, that is, the output sudo -u <user> launchctl bslist would produce, prepend sudo -u <user> instead.

(Tested in macOS 10.15 "Catalina" and OS X 10.10 "Yosemite".)
Long answer
The long gone bslist
bslist was removed with OS X 10.10 "Yosemite". According to OS X 10.9 Mavericks' man page of launchctl, bslist

(...) prints out Mach bootstrap services and their respective states. While the namespace appears flat, it is in fact hierarchical, thus allowing for certain services to be only available to a subset of processes. The three states a service can be in are active ("A"), inactive ("I") and on-demand ("D").

Typical output is:
A  com.apple.finder.ServiceProvider
D  com.apple.udb.system-push
D  com.apple.systemprofiler
A  com.apple.systemuiserver.ServiceProvider
A  com.apple.dock.server
[...]

where:

the first column is the bootstrap service state (A for "Active" and D "On-demand")
the second column is the name of the bootstrap service

print, the new kid in town
Apple replaced bslist with an enhanced subcommand: print.
Why enhanced? As nicely explained here, bootstrap services are arraged in a hierarchical namespace. While bslist hides this complexity from the user by making the following assumptions:

When run as root (whether it is via a root shell or sudo), bslist outputs the system-wide domain.
When run from as a non-privileged user, the target is assumed to be the per-user domain for that current user.

print takes another approach: it gives the user a finer control on the output by accepting the desired domain as an argument (see the man page of launchctl for details).
Making print behave like bslist
Luckily, after running bslist in OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" and print in OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" multiple times and comparing the output, I can confirm that all information provided by bslist is contained in print:

The system-wide domain printed by bslist when run as root can is provided by the system option in the endpoints array.
The per-user domain is provided by print with the user/<UID> option, also in the endpoints array.

The exact commands are provided above in the short answer section of this post, here I revisit the script (with comments) for a better understanding of what it does:
#!/bin/bash

# Compare the user UID (from command "id -u") with 0
if [ $(id -u) -eq 0 ]; then
    # If the user is root (that is, the user UID is 0), request
    # the "system" domain
    domain=system
else
    # Otherwise request the user domain
    domain="user/$(id -u)"
fi
# Run launchctl
launchctl print $domain |\
# Remove the output before "endpoints = {"
 sed -e '1,/endpoints = {/d' \
# Remove the output after "}"
-e '/}/,$d' \
# Remove the port information and format the output as bslist
-e 's/.* \([A|D]\)\(  *\)\(.*\)/\1  \3/';

A few words on bootstrap services
This answer deals with bootstrap services, but, what are they?
macOS uses a hybrid kernel, called XNU, that combines the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with components from FreeBSD and a C++ API for writing drivers called IOKit.
Interprocess communication (IPC) plays a large role in the Mach component of the kernel. The Mach implementation of IPC relies on the notion of "ports".
In Mach IPC, ports are somewhat similar to TCP and UDP ports: in the same way that a process requires the TCP/UDP port of a resource on the network to be able to communicate with it, processes communicating over Mach IPC need to know the port of the desired service. This information is provided by the bootstrap server, which is one of the functions of the launchd process.
So, in this oversimplified analogy, the bootstrap server plays a role roughly equivalent to /etc/services.
As with the /etc/services file, the bootstrap server maintains a list of ports and names. You can get a list of them with launchctl print, just look for the endpoint array section, for example:

port: 0x3e607
name: com.apple.dock.server

Stretching the analogy, the difference between the services file and Mach IPC is that, while /etc/services is static, the list of ports and names the bootstrap server maintains is dynamic, as services can request to be added to it.
And that brings us back to the original question: Bootstrap services are simply services registered with the bootstrap server.
References
If you are interested in the macOS launch process, Mach IPC, launchd and its internals, you may find these references useful:
See Mach Bootstrap Basics and Mach Messaging and Mach Interprocess Communication (IPC) for more information on bootstrap basics and IPC.
See Kernel Architecture Overview for more information on the architecture of the macOS kernel.
See Mach Overview for an overview of the Mach component of the macOS kernel.
See Mac OS X For Unix Geeks and The Alpha and the Omega - launchd for an overview of the startup process in macOS.
See LAUNCHCTL 2.0 SYNTAX for a discussion about changes in the launchctl syntax.
See Mach Message and Bootstrap Server on OS X for an overview of Mach messaging and the bootstrap server.
See the source code of the bslist subcommand (look for bslist_cmd) for an insight on launchctl. You can download launchd tarballs from here.
See macOS IPC Man in the Middle for a presentation on implementation flaws in Mach IPC.


Can you boot a MacBook Air from a USB 3 external hard drive? Macs have long been able to boot from external FireWire hard drives. I don’t think they’ve been able to boot from external USB 2 drives though.

The new MacBook Air (2012) has USB 3.0. Can it boot from an external USB 3 hard drive?

(I know it also has Thunderbolt, and I assume it could boot from an external Thunderbolt hard drive, but you can get a 500 GB USB 3 external drive for £50: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Elements-500GB-Portable/dp/B005A97A86).

Yes, I just got a new Mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13" and did this very thing over USB 3.0. I know of no reason why it would not work on a MacBook Air.

When booting from an external spinning hard drive over USB 3.0 on my new MacBook Pro, the external hard drive sends data back and forth to the Mac about as fast as it would if it were installed internally. I have not specifically measured drive speeds in this scenario; I'm just saying that it performs quite well.

As far as I know, all Macs with USB have been capable of booting from an external drive connected via USB--all the way back to the first iMac circa 1998, which only made use of USB 1.0. Booting from an external USB 2.0 drive, whether a flash/thumb drive or a spinning hard drive, is, however, quite slow.

When you boot your Mac, immediately after the startup chime, hold down the Option key. Your Mac will show you a row of icons of each volume or partition currently connected to the Mac (internally or externally) that holds a Mac OS X installation that you can successfully boot from. Use the arrow keys to select which one you want to boot from, and hit the Return key to boot from that volume.


OSX Mavericks Trash Question why does an item remain in trash after I drag it out onto the desktop. It does indeed go to the desktop, but it still remains in the trash (OSX Mavericks). lion,etc once dragged out, it immediately left the trash.

I am really not sure what your setup is, so my answer is pure guessing.

So it happened before when I was using ParagonNTFS to delete some files from NTFS filesystem. What you need to do is boot into your Windows (BootCamp), use its built-in partition repair tool to repair the partition. Then uninstall ParagonNTFS because it will damage your NTFS partition!


Permanently disable time machine prompting for external disks Is it possible to disable time machine prompting when inserting external disks?

I use an appliance with SATA disks that regularly formats the disks.  Whenever I plug such a disk in I get prompted again for time-machine - since the time-machine opt-out file is deleted.

This can happen 10s of times per hour and is rather frustrating.

I'd be happy for total disable of prompting, but better would probably to make it per interface (ie USB - i use a USB->SATA device) or per device (ie just the SATA dock I'm using)

From Turn Off Requests To Use New Disks for Time Machine [OS X Tips]...

You can stop this request dialog box from appearing by opening a Terminal window (Finder -> Applications -> Utilities – > Terminal) and typing the following:

defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool TRUE

Then log out and back in again for the changes to take effect.

If you’d like to restore the request dialog at a later date, again open Terminal then type the following (log out and back in again after for the changes to take effect):

defaults delete com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup


Is it possible to use Time Machine with iCloud? I have a MacBook Pro (early 2011) with a 320 GB hard disk, and I have a 200 GB storage plan on iCloud. The problem is that I cannot simply copy the Applications folder to iCloud Drive and restore it later in the event that I lose all of the disk storage. I would like to save all the operating system files, the applications and almost everything on the disk (I need about 150 GB for that).

The problem is that Time Machine asks me for a disk to save the data on. If I have a fast connection I think it's not totally worthless to save the entire disk to iCloud, but does Time Machine support this and if yes, how?

Unfortunately, Time Machine doesn't support this feature and there are a couple of reasons why.

Time Machine makes physical backups of all your files, not just links to them. If it backed up to iCloud Drive (which syncs to your Mac), it would duplicate 150GB on to your HDD. It would then try to back all of that up too (unless you exclude that location from the backup) so it would try to add another 150GB to the backup, and so on.
Time Machine makes incremental backups. Sure, your backup is just 150GB now. But you change a few files and it backs up an additional 25MB. You install a new app and it adds another 2GB. While you may keep your actual drive below 320GB, your Time Machine backup could end up over 1TB in size! In my case, I use about 400GB of storage on my Mac, but my Time Machine backup is over 1.3TB due to deleted files.

Having said all that, sure, theoretically it is possible. If you created a link to a folder on your iCloud Drive in /Volumes/ it should show up as a disk to back up to, and if you excluded backing up iCloud Drive through Time Machine it wouldn't double in size every backup. Your hard drive would fill up very very quickly though, and your performance would suffer. To me, at least, this seems a lot more effort than it is worth.


Recovery HD tries to delete itself My configuration of Mavericks-Ubuntu-Windows has gone nuts, so I deleted the windows partition and rebooted to Recovery HD to try and reformat the whole HD. Recovery HD at first appeared in disk utility, so I've done this trick -asr adjust --target /dev/disk0s3 -settype "Apple_Boot" but I still suspect its trying to delete itself because when I try to repartition the HD to 1 partition there's an error of "Couldn't unmount disk".How can I trace this error? Or how can I get Recovery HD to not try and delete itself?Thanks!

Did a full format and install from internet recovery (⌘+R)- worked perfectly!


Changed my PATH to have /usr/local/bin ahead of /usr/bin and now pip isn't found I was following this guide to get Python 3 setup, which recommended changing the PATH variable such that "# If you still see 2.7 ensure in PATH /usr/local/bin/ takes pecedence over /usr/bin/". I put the following in my .profile:

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

This sets my PATH to /usr/local/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

This fixed my python --version issue, but now when I type pip --version I get

-bash: pip: command not found

in my terminal.

Can anyone please help?!

PS: I'm running Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.3

Ok... so after a bit more digging I think I found the answer to my own question. While running pip --version doesn't work, running pip3 --version gives me pip 9.0.1 from /usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages (python 3.6).

What I think is happening is that pip is located in the same location as python2 that comes with the Mac OS, while pip3 sits in the homebrew location.


Why won't Migration Assistant recognize my old Time Machine backup? When I attempt to run Migration Assistant, it searches and searches but can't find the backups. When I open Finder, I can clearly see the backups and navigate around in the backups for the different dates.

It's on an external drive (attached via USB, both during backups and now for Migration Assistant). The drive is formatted as case-sensitive, journaled HFS+. The backups were made from a case-sensitive MacBook. I recently replaced the HD (the old one failed) and I'm attempting to restore my files to the new drive, which is formatted as case-insensitive.

The laptop is a late-2008 MacBook (unibody). I just upgraded the stock HD to a 7200 RPM Wester Digital w/ 750 GB. The external drive is a 1TB LaCie w/ 2 partitions (a FAT32 for wife's Windows box, and the case-sensitive, journaled HFS+ partition I'm using for Time Machine). I'm running the latest Mountain Lion (both before and after the HD crash).

Seems that many people have difficulty restoring from a backup of a case-sensitive installation to a case-insensitive one.  Please see comments for some discussion and various ideas.

A work-around which seemed to be successful in this case: copy the data you need manually from the backups, using the Finder. (I wouldn't expect to be able to recreate the entire machine with all settings etc this way, but documents should be easy to restore this way, and perhaps even your entire home directory.)


How can the colors of a single window be inverted in OS X? How can the colors of a single window be inverted in OS X?

You can use Command ⌘+Option ⌥+Control ⌃+8 to invert the video colours of the whole screen.

There's no way to just invert the colours of a single window.


How to seamlessly switch between spelling languages in Mail? I write my emails in two languages. So system-wide spelling language setting is not very useful for me, since in span of working day I usually write half of my emails in one language and half in another. Now the current spelling language switching mechanism is not very good. First of all I need to invoke spelling window with CMD + : then change the language, then close the window, refocus my mail window and then continue writing. Also the spelling with the new language is applied only to the text I am entering after changing the language. Previous text is not spelled, unless I click each word individually.

So I have the following questions:

Does there exist a quick method to change the language? Keyboard shortcut? List of the languages appearing after right click the way it is organised in Google Chrome?  Maybe there is a possibility to associate spelling language to keyboard layout? I use different layout for different languages, so this would be very natural.
How to automatically apply spelling to the text which was entered before the change of the language?

I use Mac OS X 10.6.6.

I have just spent some time with Mountain Lion after I added a custom dictionary (Afrikaans) to the ~/Library/Spelling folder (.dic and .aff).

Findings:
- If I set the "Spelling" in "System Preferences -> Language and text -> Text" to Afrikaans, the Afrikaans spell check works great.
- If I set the "Spelling" to "Automatic by language" detection between English and Afrikaans it does not work correctly. It never recognises Afrikaans, checks everything as English.

So in mail.app the only workable option seems to be to set it up to check email upon sending, and to select the language at the bottom of the pop-up box.

Alternatively buy Postbox, where you can install a Thunderbird dictionary and select the language manually. But Postbox is not doing retina displays (yet) - it looks awful at the moment on retina.


In iOS: Can my app launch another app and get a response/acknowledgement back? In iOS, is there anyway i can launch another app to do something and then get a response back saying that it’s done.

For example: My iOS app APP A launches another app APP B (e.g. Google Pay) to make a payment and then after the payment is made, I would like APP A to receive a response/callback/acknowledgement saying its done.

By the way, I'm having zero trouble getting APP A to launch APP B via UIApplication.Shared.Open(…)

** In android we use Android Intent to launch APP B and get a response back to APP A using OnActivityResult(…)**.

PS: My App is actually built in React Native using NativeModules.

Thanks

Custom URL Schemes
You can define and use a custom URL scheme to interact with other apps on iOS:
Defining a Custom URL Scheme for Your App

Custom URL schemes provide a way to reference resources inside your app. Users tapping a custom URL in an email, for example, launch your app in a specified context. Other apps can also trigger your app to launch with specific context data; for example, a photo library app might display a specified image.


Voice memos not being deleted from iTunes I have iTunes (10.0.1) syncing with my iPhone (4.1) with the Voice Memos option enabled.

I created a single voice memo. I synced the phone and the voice memo transferred correctly. I then deleted it on the iPhone and synced again. iTunes still has the voice memo in the "Voice Memos" playlist. Additionally, when I click the iPhone's "Voice Memo" playlist in iTunes, I see the one file there, but it has an exclamation mark near the number.

I have 2 questions:

What does this exclamation mark mean? There seems to be no way to get more info about it.
How can I get iTunes to delete the voice memos when I delete the on the phone?

A workaround that I found, is to go to iTunes Music library, find the voice memo, and then manually delete it from there. After you sync, the Voice Memo playlist will be deleted from underneath your iPhone (in iTunes), so you won't see that file that had an exclamation mark anymore.


Would this loophole for stolen MacBook Pro Retina work, or can macOS detect this and stop it? Imagine a Late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro. It's got FileVault 2 enabled, it's been shut down (so the disk is encrypted) and the EFI Password is set, so they can't boot from another disk or reinstall macOS. I've also locked the Mac, but we'll imagine Find My Mac hasn't been able to phone home yet.

They can't Command-R or Option-Power their way past, and they can't access the copy of Catalina installed on the drive. My question is this: could they install a copy of macOS onto another compatible SSD and then replace my Mac's internal SSD with said other SSD, bypassing EFI Lock because it's classified as the internal drive? Or can Apple's EFI detect that the drive is different and refuse it, asking for a password?

As someone who carries my MacBook Pro Retina on me at all times, and plans on a somewhat pricey upgrade to a newer model sometime in the future, I'd like to ensure I can make this thing a glorious paperweight for any would-be thief.

No.  The firmware lock prevents even this.  Firmware doesn’t reside on the drive, it resides in a protected “memory” (not RAM) area that holds the boot, encryption, management, etc. software.

In fact, if you want to test it, set an EFI lock and remove the drive.  Then try to boot.  You’ll notice that the password is still there

  As someone who carries my MacBook Pro Retina on me at all times, and plans on a somewhat pricey upgrade to a newer model sometime in the future, I'd like to ensure I can make this thing a glorious paperweight for any would-be thief.

You’re in luck because the new Mac computers with the T2 chip take security much further with Secure Boot and whole disk encryption.  Once these features are enabled, would  be thieves would end up with great looking paper weights.


What can cause a (software) keyboard failure on a unibody macbook? I've got a macbook on which the keyboard has suddenly failed.

The trackpad works, the power button first, but pressing any other key on the keyboard has NO effect.

On the other hand. During boot I can do CMD-opt-P-R to reset the EPRAM (this has no effect), but does show me that at least those keys are working during boot.

What might be happening here?

Are you able to boot into Recovery Mode and test the keyboard there?

  To start your computer from Recovery, restart your Mac and hold down the Command and R keys at startup.

If that works, consider re-installing OS X or at least booting into Safe Mode to disable errant extensions and plugins.


How can I safely backup and remove Photos from MacBook (El Capitan)? Sub question: Can this be done without a great deal of manual nonsense?

I have over 100GB of Photos / Videos in my library after a couple years of imports from my iPhone. While I know that most of these have been backed up to Dropbox automagically, I really want to make sure that I have a true backup and then reclaim this space on my machine.

Apart from the fact that these things are apparently stored in more than one 'library' since the migration of iPhotos to Photos, and there's nothing that I have found that sounds a clear 'happy path' to accomplishing this goal short of manually exporting through what seems to be a rather laborious process.

Perhaps I am seeing / making this more complicated than it needs to be, so if someone can recommend the best way to do this without having to spend hours and hours manually exporting things.

Ideally I would like to simply connect an external drive and export everything in its original quality to said drive and then easily wipe them from my MacBook's SSD. Can this be done without fear of losing anything in the process?

My thanks to the community for any help that can be offered!

I have a simple solution for that:
Make sure to hold option key while clicking on Photos before lauching it.
Choose the folder where your different libraries are stored (if you want to create different libraries check this out
 Then, make sure to be in the Photos stack and select Command + A to select all the pictures.
Head to File > Export (or click on Command + Option + E).
Don't forget to specify your external files format and videos definition.

Then you can choose to export your original or modified pics on your external hard drive.

Hope it helps ;)


Audio from Lightning dock? Is Apple the only company that makes an iPhone dock with an audio out jack (3.5mm) that gets the audio straight from the Lightning port... as opposed to a separate audio plug? See example below:

I'm looking for something that won't bend my cable as I intend to thread it and undo it several times.

I can only find one other manufacturer, but I guess that's sufficient to say Apple are not the only company to make a dock with audio out from the Lightning port.

Henge Docks Gravitas can do this.

It's not completely clear from the web page that there is no separate audio plug going into the phone, but the user guide is clearer.
This structure enables you to have the phone connected to both computer/charger & external speakers, simultaneously.


Programmatically 'auto hide menubar' in El capitan I really love the 'auto hide menubar' option in El Capitan, but sometimes I like it (private) sometimes I don't (work). Is there a way to show/hide it programmatically by changed it's value in a plist file? If so, in which plist file is that setting found? Any help is appreciated.

Update

A bit more details about the circumstances: I use applescripts or bash scripts a lot to automate certain mundane tasks, like opening all my professional applications when I arrive at work. Usually I even export an applescript as an application so I can run it with spotlight, thus by entering one simple command in spotlight, all the relevant apps open. I'd love to do be able to toggle the auto-hide feature like this. It doesn't matter that much to me if this is done via editing a plist file with bash commands or automating it in some way via applescript.

Here's how you can set the menubar to be hidden and unhidden using defaults:

To hide:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain _HIHideMenuBar -bool true

To show:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain _HIHideMenuBar -bool false

Once run, logout and log back in. Alternatively, you can run the following command as the logged-in user to restart Finder and show the changes:

killall Finder


Display not working with Mac mini I recently bought a new LG Ultrawide display.

I connected it to my Mac mini with a Display Port to HDMI cable.

But nothing is showing up on it. But it is working with HDMI cable over HDMI port.

What is wrong?

Some Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapters won't support HDMI at higher resolutions, it is possible this adapter won't work at the higher resolution of your new monitor.

At work myself and my colleagues have found this is the case with a lot of cheaper adapters I used to buy, such as this one:

https://www.startech.com/AV/Displayport-Converters/Mini-DisplayPort-to-HDMI-Cable-Adapter-Converter~MDP2HDMI

You could try a new adapter, these are the ones we buy at work and they seem to work well:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Griffin-GC17096-Video-Display-Converter/dp/B003CK8TZ8


launchd is not passing arguments to my PHP script I'm having a weird problem. I use launchd to run a bunch of shell scripts that update content on my site. It was working fine when it was just calling scripts normally. But now I made the script a little more complicated, and the launchd plist needs to send an argument when it calls the script. No problem, launchd has ProgramArguments just for that. Problem is, it's just not working. Here is the important part of my launchd.plist:

<key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/scripts/content.php</string>
        <string>update</string>
    </array>

I've omitted just a Label key and a StarCalendarInterval key. As you can see, the path to the script is the first element in the array. That seems to be the most common cause of this problem.

So to be clear, this DOES launch my script. But it does NOT pass any arguments. I had the script output print_r($argv) to an error log and it outputs this:

Array ( [0] => /scripts/content.php )

Most important here, is that if I run the following from the command line, my script runs perfectly and as expected:
./content.php update

It seems like I'm doing everything right, I'm not sure what's going on with this?

If you edit a .plist you need to run launchctl unload ... and launchctl load ..., otherwise the system will keep using the previous (cached) version.


What are some tactile iPad apps to show to a graphic designer? I'm looking for apps that have faux materials in them like leather, wood, paper, etc. (Apple stresses "tactile" apps when guiding developers.) I'm trying to guide a graphic designer. What are some apps that I can show that get the point across?

Your question didn't specify free apps so here are a few paid apps:

Manage - currently $2.99 in AUD. Has a faux leather look.
Corkulous - currently $4.99 in AUD. Simulates a corkboard complete with sticky-taped labels and sticky notes.
Ruler 2 - currently $0.99 in AUD. Looks like a wooden ruler.
ABC News - this one is free. It's not tactile, but the lead stories are presented wrapped around a globe.

There is a free app called Stylapps that is a showcase for stylish apps, though not specifically for apps that look like tactile materials.


Do I have a virus, a back door? Am I hacked? Recently my MacBook has slowed down a lot, though I haven't downloaded any large files or installed new applications, I've mainly used the web.

Yesterday I was doing some work in Photoshop and noticed I had a terminal window open. So I open it to find it continuously pinging 25.212.254.172, as if it was trying a DDoS attack or something. That's when it freaked me out.

I've deleted a whole lot of unnecessary files and applications taht have been on my laptop for the longest but I'm still unsure what to do. A lot of people argue Macs don't get viruses and I think that's a load of crap.

How do I protect my MacBook, manage outgoing connections, remove viruses or figure out what's going on?

Oh and I had this weird thing happen...

I was traveling to Las Vegas two weeks ago and my MacBook looked like it was opened from the bottom and tape was hanging out of it - after retrieving my luggage from the airport. I'm thinking of opening it up but what would I look for if I'm being monitored through hardware? Any tips here too?

Yea I know I'm a bit paranoid but you can't blame me with the NSA revelations.

I don't know who you are, but chances are, you're aren't relevant enough to warrant hardware tapping.
Macs don't really get viruses. There are some trojans (malware in disguise as user software), but they require the user to manually input their administrative password. If you're suspect your infected, try a virus scanner like ClamXAV, but I doubt you'll find anything. Apple does a really good job at keep up to date against malware. DO NOT install any sort of on demand virus software. Generally Mac anti-virus programs don't actually protect from Mac viruses; they're meant to prevent Macs for being a vector for Windows viruses. As a Mac user, it's very easy to download a file infected with a Windows virus, and unknowingly pass it on to a Windows user.
A much more likely explanation is some sort of system related issue. Can you please keep Activity monitor open, and enable its dock icon CPU viewer from this menu:

Keep an eye on the CPU levels, perhaps you'll find a runaway process that's using your system resources.


Macbook Air 2020  Acer-ET322QR Audio not integrating Situation
Just picked up a Macbook Air 2020 from Bestbuy. I looked around for a good monitor that supports USB Type-C but nothing available in my area at the moment. I then picked up a Acer-ET322QR monitor until I upgrade later.
I picked up a USB Type-C/HDMI chord so I could connect the two products. All worked well except for when I tried to get the audio coming through the monitor. This monitor does have two speakers, I tried the following:

First checked to see if audio would go through the HDMI port but no luck. When in the audio settings it says that "The selected device has no output controls".

Second I followed the manual which says connect the provided audio chord into the Audio In port and connect the other to the mac. I connected this through the headphone jack but still not luck.

Suspected Issue
I am guessing the audio must come from USB Type-C port and then use an adaptor to connect this into the audio jack on the monitor
Question
Before I go through the hassle of ordering this online, could someone confirm my suspicions that this is the problem or is there something I am overlooking?

The issue that you’re running into is that you’re going from DisplayPort to HDMI (signal conversion).  Now DisplayPort as an industry standard has support for audio as does HDMI.  However, DisplayPort and HDMI are very different signals.

What makes this confusing is that we bring the term “USB-C” into the mix.  USB-C is just the physical connector type.  That port on the MBA is several signals, including DisplayPort, in one port.

The first thing I would look at is going with an Active Adapter, not a passive one (cable) that just re-orders the pinouts to match what you need.

As for your audio, I’ve never been a fan of integrated audio speakers in monitors and definitely not a fan of HDMI video connections in my compute environment - it’s a consumer grade AV spec that I’ve found very flaky.  I would go with a USB audio adapter (DAC) that can connect to a much better set of speakers or even audio amplifier.


Not able to select a disk to reinstall OS in safe mode I have iMac A1418 with High Sierra on it. I had to erase entire Macintosh HD disk hoping to reinstall OS on a ‘clean’ drive.

Unfortunately I’m not able to accomplish this as when I select “Reinstall macOS” in macOS utilities window and when it comes to selecting a disk on which I want to install OS, I can’t select a disk (Macintosh HD is displayed) and I can’t press “Install” button since it is greyed out.

It looks like window is waiting for me to click on desired disk - but I’m not able to do this because mouse is not functional and don’t see how I can select disk with keyboard.

I would appreciate any suggestions

UPD: eventually I resolved my issue by installing High Sierra on external SDD drive and booting iMac from it - this however doesn’t answer the question raised in this post.

When the drive isn't selectable, you almost always will want to choose Disk Utility and erase that volume.

Once it's totally erased, then run a repair operation to be sure the basic structure is good. Of course, you lose all data to do this erase, so be certain your backup isn't connected and is verified.

If the installer continues to fail, then you either have:

Wrong disk format entirely - post what diskutil list or disk utility shows for all the specifics of the volume format (APM/GPT) and the filesystem details (HFS / APFS / which flavor of the previous or some other like ext/fat)
A faulty installer
Some faulty hardware


C++ code navigation on OS X I'm an OS X newbie. Other than setting up Emacs / Vim with ctags or cscope or both, are there alternatives to C++ code navigation of an existing code base? I used to use Source Insight on Windows and it worked for me fairly well. I know I can setup ctags or cscope but I was wondering if there is anything even better out there. The main functionality I am looking for is quickly find definition of variables and functions and places a function is being called.

Is Xcode not what you're looking for ? It's the Mac OS X IDE. It'sn't installed by default, but is present on your Mac OS X DVD.


Is there a way to view all Spaces in macOS (using a shortcut) I'm looking for a way to view all desktops (spaces) at once with a single shortcut (like CMD + Up for Mission control) . If i could archive the same effect you get when you use mission control and go up with your mouse. as explained in: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/work-in-multiple-spaces-mh14112/11.0/mac/11.0
I noticed that when you have at least 1 fullscreen app open (and it is focused) mission control wil always show the spaces preview but in all other circumstances it will only list other spaces in at the top as Desktop 1, Desktop 2, Desktop 3 etc.
This is the effect I want to achieve (when activating mission control, show a preview of the spaces)

Any 3rd party options would also be acceptable.

Totalspaces does this. Currently it's available for intel macs, and needs a system tweak to run on macOS 10.11 or higher.


Apple thinks I'm my father My mac thinks I'm my father. When in automator I do this:
[get value of variable: name] --> [new text file. Save as 'name.txt'. Location: desktop]

it should put my name in a text file and put it on the desktop. But instead it puts my fathers name in there.
Why?
My Apple ID, iCloud account and all info on my mac and connected social media is on my name. But it still thinks I'm my father.
Could you please help?

Check on the address book if your father's contact has myself: me assigned.

If it does, remove it and assign it in your contact.


Change input source on OSX 10.11 Currently I have an issue of changing input source on my iMac, OSX 10.11
The option in the Keyboard setting is:
Select the previous input source  control+Space.
There is no other option available.
What I want is Command+Space. (This hotkey was bind to Spotlight search. But I have already disabled it.

The other iMac I have runs the same OSX version but does not have such issue. Anyone could help?

System Prefs > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Input Sources > [√] Select next source in Input menu > [double click on far right side and press Cmd ⌘ Space. It should be as simple as that. If it's still not binding, check all the other shortcuts and make sure nothing else has been bound to it. If it still does not work, it might help to use an external application to unbind the key and rebind it. I use Spark 3personally because it's free and it works for the few rebinds I need.


Making directories list first in terminal with `ls` Is it possible to make the default of Terminal such that when I use the ls command it lists the directories first and then the files?

I figured out that this can be done by using coreutils and the command gls --group-directories-first, but I was wondering if there was an OS X native way to do this without coreutils.

The short answer is no. The ls shipped with OSX is not the GNU ls therefore it doesn't have the same options.

But you can get a similar result with :

ls -al | sort -k1 -r

Ps: I agree that it's far from perfect :)


how to use new apple id? I have created the Apple ID. Now when I try to download anything from the App Store and I log in with my ID and password, I see the message "this ID has not been yet used". What should I do? I have no more knowledge about these procedures.

If you are planning to use a new Apple ID with your MacBook Pro you will have to do the following:

  Pull down the  Apple menu and go to “System Preferences”
  Choose “iCloud”
  Click the “Sign Out” button to log out of the existing Apple ID on that user account – note the message that logging out of that Apple ID may impact iCloud Drive documents and data, if you don’t want to do that, don’t log out, and instead use a different user account in OS X

When iCloud finishes logging out of the Apple ID, the iCloud preference panel changes to a simple login screen
Log into the other Apple ID you wish to change to on the active Mac user account
Log in to a new Apple ID on Mac OS X>


Signed and notarized Go app not launching after Gatekeeper dialog I have an app written in Go that is properly code-signed and notarized.

When I download it and launch it for the first time, Gatekeeper will show the usual dialog telling that this application has been downloaded from the web and asking for confirmation to launch it.

I press the Open button, nothing happens.

If I double click on the app a second time, it launches successfully.

The same problem happen when authorizing from the Security & Privacy panel, the app has to be launched a second time in order to show.

I would like to understand what causes this issue and fix it.

My code is there: https://github.com/libretro/ludo

The codesigning and notarization is automated here: https://github.com/libretro/ludo/blob/master/.travis.yml#L76-L88 (and I've double checked that it is working)

The build log is here: https://travis-ci.org/libretro/ludo/jobs/606966338?utm_medium=notification&utm_source=github_status

And the binary is here https://github.com/libretro/ludo/releases/download/v0.9.10/Ludo-OSX-x86_64-0.9.10.dmg

As explained by James Turner, Gatekeeper adds some weird arguments that cause, in my case, the argument parsing lib to exit with error.

Here is a possible fix for your Go programs:

flag.CommandLine = flag.NewFlagSet(os.Args[0], flag.ContinueOnError)


iMovie on Macbook download fail: "We could not complete your purchase." What could I do? This MacBook Air 2017 has been freshly installed with Mojave. I wiped the disk before doing so.

After that, I went on to the App Store to download iMovie... but it won't download! The error message displayed above, and "cancelled" inside the popup box, was all the info given. What could this be? I tried deleting App Store preferences, cookies, restarting the computer, changing DNS to 8.8.8.8, changing wi-fi, but none worked.

Also, the download button was a cloud with an arrow, not the usual "GET" button.

I have signed in with the same Apple ID as last time- both for my iCloud and App Store.

Please help!

EDIT: Even other apps won't download. This problem is not specific to iMovie.

Appears to be an issue with the Mac App Store. See this Apple Discussions link: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251378763


Chrome seems to tank my Air's performance. Any solutions? I have a 2011 MacBook Air with 4gb RAM, 128 SD hardrive and Intel Core i5.

For years it ran great. I code for web so never needed anything super powerful, other than the ability to keep several Chrome tabs open.

However, 2 years ago it started to become so slow when using Chrome I gave up on the laptop and shelved it. There would be massive delays in text inputs, scrolling, images loading, switching between tabs or desktops, etc. Not just with Chrome but with the OS (Lion) as well.

Recently I decided I needed a laptop again and dug the Air out of storage (I thought about getting a new Air, but they new ones are virtually the same but with 8GB ram. Thought I would at least try to resurrect my old Air first). I took the Air to the Apple Store and wiped the HD and updated to the latest version of High Sierra (10.13.4).

First thing I did after the install was install Chrome... and exactly the same issues started again.

Anyone know what I could do to fix this? Is it a lost cause? Hardware issue?

Any advice is appreciated. Cheers!

Based on your question, I assume you're not experiencing problems when using Safari or Firefox (although you don't specify whether you use them or not).

Assuming that's the case, the first thing I'd try is turning off hardware acceleration in Google Chrome. To do this, follow these steps:

Launch Google Chrome
Go to Chrome > Preferences (or just press the command, keyboard shortcut
At the bottom of the page, click on Show advanced settings...
Look for the System subheading in the new settings that appear
Uncheck the Use hardware acceleration when available option
Restart Google Chrome


Win7-damaged Mac GPT partition map on 4TB external HDD I recently did a not-so-intelligent thing: I was installing Win 7 64bit on a new PC and I took my old Mac-formatted 4TB external HDD and mounted it internally on the PC.

What I did not realize was that Win 7 cannot recognize HDD's with more than 3TB capacity. While I was installing Win 7, it destroyed the original GPT partition map of the 4TB drive and replaced it with a MBR. Now I am left with an unrecognizable disk, both by Windows and by my MacBook Pro with Mavericks on.

Here is some of the info that I got from Terminal:

Rians-MacBook-Pro:~ RVL$ sudo gpt -r -vvv show -l /dev/disk1
gpt show: /dev/disk1: mediasize=4000787025920; sectorsize=4096; blocks=976754645
gpt show: /dev/disk1: MBR at sector 0
gpt show: /dev/disk1: Pri GPT at sector 1
gpt show: /dev/disk1: GPT partition: type=48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC,
start=6, size=51200
gpt show: /dev/disk1: GPT partition: type=48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC,
start=51206, size=976670666
gpt show: /dev/disk1: Sec GPT at sector 976754644
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         MBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2          4         Pri GPT table
          6      51200      1  GPT part - "EFI System Partition"
      51206  976670666      2  GPT part - "Mac Ext 6"
  976721872      32768
  976754640          4         Sec GPT table
  976754644          1         Sec GPT header

Is there any way that I can restore the original GPT map and of course the data on the disk? What was particularly troubling was the following:

Rians-MacBook-Pro:~ RVL$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk1
Password:
Disk: /dev/disk1    geometry: 60800/255/63 [976754645 sectors]
Sector size: 4096 bytes
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 2: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused

Does the above mean all the data is destroyed or is there a ray of hope. Is there anybody out there who can help?
Thanks!

There is hope if Windows didn't write anything to disk (except the MBR). The steps below overwrite the bogus MBR and replaces it by a proper PMBR and a GUID partition table. All previous entries will be restored.

Attach the external drive to a Mac
Open Terminal and enter diskutil list and sudo gpt -r show /dev/diskX with X the disk identifier of the 4 TB drive (e.g. if you find that the disk identifier is disk1, replace in the commands above and below diskX by disk1).
Unmount the disk with diskutil umountDisk /dev/diskX
Enter sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/diskX count=1 bs=512 to overwrite the MBR
Unmount the disk again with diskutil umountDisk /dev/diskX
Enter sudo gpt destroy /dev/diskX #just in case, this might fail
Then enter sudo gpt create /dev/diskX
if the last command fails you may overwrite the MBR again with  sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/diskX count=1 bs=4096 and reenter the last command:  sudo gpt create /dev/diskX
Enter sudo gpt -r show /dev/diskX and check if PMBR and GUID partition header/table occupy the first six blocks (block0-block5). This is the case if the disk controller reports a block size of 4096 Bytes instead of 512 bytes.*

In case of a 4096 logical block size the GUID partition table should look like this now:

gpt show: /dev/diskX: Sec GPT at sector 976754644
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         MBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2          4         Pri GPT table
          6  976754634
  976754640          4         Sec GPT table
  976754644          1         Sec GPT header

Then re-populate the GUID partition table with the above data (the type of the EFI partition is different though):

sudo gpt add -b 6 -i 1 -s 51200 -t C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B /dev/diskX
sudo gpt add -b 51206 -i 2 -s 976670666 -t 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/diskX

Check the disk and the volume with

diskutil verifyDisk /dev/diskX
diskutil verifyVolume /dev/diskXs2

* Add a comment if you get a different list after the steps sudo gpt create /dev/diskX -> sudo gpt -r show /dev/diskX e.g the PMBR and the GUID partition table occupy the first 34 blocks (block0-block33). Then the disk controller reports a block size of 512 Bytes.


How to create ISO from Application Bundle I have Mac OS X Mountain Lion as Application Bundle file. Burning the application to a disk is just like a data disk compilation on Nero.

How do I convert this application bundle into ISO image so that I can burn it on a disk and boot it from there?

Right-click your "Install OS X Mountain Lion.app" file and select "Show Package Contents".
Open Contents/SharedSupport and then you will find InstallESD.dmg.

Copy this file to your Desktop. This is the file that you need to burn OS X to a DVD. You need a Dual Layer DVD to burn OS X/or just use a USB flash drive.

It isn't an ISO, but you can convert to a 'cdr' from Disk Utility. A 'cdr' file is the same as an 'iso' AFAIK, and you can rename the extension so that it is an ISO.


Why does my iPod Touch automatically turn the volume all the way down? I have an 8GB iPod Touch, 4th generation.  Recently it has been automatically turning the volume all the way down, and it often won't let me turn it back up again.  This happens both when I'm using headphones and when I'm not.  It has also been restarting itself automatically.  It hasn't always done this--I've had it since December 2010, and it started doing it in May 2011.  Any suggestions?

Three things can cause this:

The down button is now physically pressed (or the electrical contact has shorted/failed)
The headphone jack is sensing a volume button press (much less likely)
software is corrupt (very very unlikely, but still possible)
bluetooth remote (also very very unlikely)

You can restore the device to rule out #3. Turning off bluetooth nixes #4. You might be able to rule out #2 by trying some different headphones, but I've seen that fail in ways that headphones in or out won't help. You'll need a repair / exchange to fix the first two issues if it's not caused by a temporary piece of debris or light cleaning with clean, dry lightly compressed air.


Adding gmail contacts in ichat for me.com account I have a @me.com account and I created an Ichat account using it. I am trying to add my gmail contacts from the address book/ adding just the gmail addresses. Noone seems to get my invitations. Why so? Is @me.com account only for adding @me.com accounts?

If you create a me.com account in iChat, this will serve as an AIM account. If you want to add your Google Talk/Google+ friends with Gmail addresses, then you will have to add a Google account in iChat. This is very simple to do in Lion, simply go to iChat>Preferences, click on Accounts, and hit the small + button in the bottom left. Then you will be prompted to add new account information and just select the option from the popup box called Google Talk. Then all you need to do is enter your Google account information and you will now have all your Google friends in iChat.


What are all the dictation commands in iOS? (iOS 10) iOS (10) has a speech-recognition-based dictation feature. You press a little microphone button, start talking, and it transcribes your speech into text. Commands I currently know:

"new paragraph"
"comma"
"period"
"hyphen"
"dash"
"colon"
"semicolon"
"open/closed bracket"
"open/closed curly brace"
"open/closed parenthesis"

However, I do not know voice commands for:

backspace/delete
undo/redo
cycle between alternate options for a word

Please help.

Also, if possible, please let me know how to:

prevent dictation mode from automatically turning off
convert pre-recorded audio to text using speech recognition

One command that isn't on the list yet:

• "quote" will give you a space then "
• "end quote" will give you a " then space

In other words, say quote at the beginning of a quote and the following text will follow the "like this with no space, and saying end quote will put the quote marks right after the word like this" with no space before the quote. Saying quote again at the end will put a space before it like "this and put it in the wrong spot.


Backup disk suddenly won't work Here's the error message I get: "An error occurred while copying files. The problem may be temporary. If the problem persists, use Disk Utility to repair your backup disk." When I try to follow that instruction, I'm informed that Disk Utility is unable to unmount the backup drive. This happens whether I have Time Machine turned on or off, and following ejecting and reconnecting the drive. Selecting Time Machine from System Preferences doesn't make any difference.

I'm running Yosemite 10.10.5 on a MacBook Pro 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7. My backup drive is a one-month-old My Passport for Mac, 1TB, which has been working perfectly up till now. Backups are using less than 1/10th of its capacity. It doesn't respond to my attempts to "get info," but I'm able to enter Time Machine OK.

Grateful for any help you can offer.

I've had this problem before. I think it is because the data is corrupt. What you need to do is restore the drive and create a new one. The easy way is to get a different computer and reformat it there, but if not, don't worry. Just go into Disk Utility and attempt to restore/reformat the drive. If it gives you an error like "Can't unmount the disk", follow this guide to forcefully unmounting a Time Machine backup disk. Then, you will have to setup a new backup.

Note: If your drive still gives problems after this, it may be broken and you may need to purchase a new one.


"suggestd quit unexpectedly" means what? What does the alert box statement "suggestd quit unexpectedly" mean?  It turned up on my iMac , OS Sierra 10.12.  I have attached a screenshot.

Try deleting the ~/Library/Suggestions and restarting your Mac.

Using terminal:

mv ~/Library/Suggestion ~/.Trash

This will move it to the trash incase you want to revert back.

Reboot your Mac and it should begin working.


Add an IP printer with command line In Printer and Scanner settings, i click on plus sign, select IP and fill the following:

Address: 10.242.1.xx:80
Protocol: IPP
Queue: ipp/2299xxxxx9342/xxxxxxx
Name: PRINTER-1

I searched on Google but did not give any useful infomation about it
How can i add IP printer in command line?

You can use lpadmin

lpadmin -E -p "PrinterName" -v "PrinterURL" -P "PPD" -o printer-is-shared=false

-E Enables the printer
"PrinterName" can be anything that describes your printer
"PrinterURL" is the URL or IP address of the printer
-P "PPD" is the PPD file you wish to use  (including the path)
-o printer-is-shared=false turns off printer sharing

The PPD files are usually located in the /etc/cups/ppd directory.  If the printer you want to use is not listed, you can download the PPD from the OpenPrinting site.


My iPhone 4S won't text my friend's Android, my phone thinks she still has an iphone with iOS5 My friend used to have an iPhone 3GS with iOS version 5. Our text messages showed up blue being that we were on the same software. She now has updated her phone to a Galaxy S II and my phone still thinks that her phone number is operating on iOS 5 software. Her phone cannot receive messages from my phone, but my phone receives messages with no problem. No matter what I do (even restarting my phone and deleting her and reading her) her text messages are still in blue instead of green. When I send a message, it shows that it's sent but her phone never receives it. It's extremely aggravating.

This is a known issue with iMessage. In your case, what has happened is that the SIM was registered on Apple's servers as capable of accepting iMessages. When your friend swapped phones, they likely kept the same SIM card. So now their old iPhone (bound to Apple's servers by its UUID) and the SIM card (bound by its own ID) are both registered with Apple to receive iMessages.

This article talks of possible fixes, and the possibility that Apple has something cooking (after all they should provide some capacity to remove the devices, perhaps from your Apple ID account). You can also head over to this article for additional reading and perhaps more solutions.

I wish I had a simple solution for you, but it may require calling Apple and discussing the matter with them. I would say you should also ask them to cover the cost of a new SIM should your friend require one.


Terminal command to move a number of files containing brackets to another folder or trash Last night I consolidated a music collection into one place and each song is separated by an Artist folder and the track. The problem is that there are a high number of duplicates within these folders. There are over 3,000 artist folders and in each artist folder there are a couple of duplicates, so I wouldn't like to guess how many duplicates there are in total.

The software I used to consolidate the music has taken each duplicate track and renamed the subsequent file with an (1).mp3, or if it has more than one duplicate, it has been renamed (2).mp3, (3).mp3 and so on until it renames the last number of duplicates found for that particular track.

So i felt the best way to delete these was to do a simple "(1).mp3" search in spotlight but for some reason it does not give me the right results no matter what I try. (I read somewhere it has something to do with how linux/mac os is setup). So I then looked into using terminal to search the directory using the appropriate command. But this does not seem to work either. The path of the directory is:

  /Volumes/AUDIO\ DRIVE/Music\ Database

So I used the command…

find /Volumes/AUDIO\ DRIVE/Music\ Database “(1).mp3"

…which does return results, but not in the way I expected, i.e. it returns many files, only some of which have the (1).mp3 at the end of them. Most of them don't have this and are just normal tracks with .mp3 at the end. e.g. The Beatles - Ticket to Ride.mp3

So I then looked into a command that would allow me to search for these files and move the results into another location. So I created a folder called "Moved Files" which has a directory of:

  /Volumes/AUDIO\ DRIVE/Moved\ Files

So I used the following command I found online...

find /Volumes/AUDIO\ DRIVE/Music\ Database “(1).mp3" -exec mv {} ~/Volumes/AUDIO\ DRIVE/Moved\ Files \;

…which does one of two things depending on what humour Terminal is in. It either moves the wrong files to the specified directory (maybe due to the inaccurate search results I had at the beginning) or it gives me the following error:

  -bash: syntax error near unexpected token `)'

If anyone out there can help me I would really appreciate it. It's really frustrating to know that if this was a windows machine, all I would need to do is type *(1).mp3 in the search bar and block delete all of the results, but I honestly cannot find a way around this on a mac. And "NO" I cannot use a windows machine as it is an apple G Drive that has all the audio stored on it.

Simply use Spotlight in Finder to search for files with *(1).mp3 etc. Begin a new Spotlight search, add a Raw Query rule and use the following, then select all and delete.

kMDItemDisplayName=='*(1).mp3'


MacPorts-installed packages not working after updating to Lion I recently upgraded OS X from 10.6 to 10.7. Since doing this, certain command line tools I installed via MacPorts, such as ImageMagick, stopped working. For example when I run $ convert Jobs.png -resample 72 Jobs.png I get:

dyld: Library not loaded: /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenCL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries/libclparser.dylib
Referenced from: /opt/local/bin/convert
Reason: image not found

How can I fix this?

What I've tried:

I've tried the following commands, to no avail:

$ sudo port selfupdate
$ sudo port upgrade outdated
$ sudo port upgrade imagemagick

The last gives:

--->  Activating perl5 @5.12.3_1+perl5_12
Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /opt/local/share/man/man3p/App::Prove.3pm already exists and does not belong to a registered port.  Unable to activate port perl5. Use 'port -f activate perl5' to force the activation.
Error: Failed to install perl5
Log for perl5 is at: /opt/local/var/macports/logs/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_lang_perl5/perl5/main.log
Error: The following dependencies were not installed: perl5
Error: Problem while installing glib2
To report a bug, see <http://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets>

Following the suggestion there I ran $ sudo port -f activate perl5 but this yielded:

--->  The following versions of perl5 are currently installed:
--->      perl5 @5.8.9_0
--->      perl5 @5.12.3_1+perl5_12
Error: port activate failed: Registry error: Please specify the full version as recorded in the port registry.

At this point I'm at my wits' end, so any help is much appreciated!

Their migration page should cure all of your ills.


Harddrive capacity error I initially had my Mac partitioned for Boot Camp. I re-image my computer once every year and did so today, of course knowing that my partitions will disappear.

However this time, the maximum capacity of my hard drive seems to have shrunk (see picture), and I'm not sure what's happening.

Additional symptoms, don't know if this matters, but my computer uses 4 GB RAM running couple windows of Firefox, browsing web, but overheats really fast.
Total RAM is 8 GB and I just had it reimaged.

It seems there are hidden partitions on your drive. When you install OS X, it creates Recovery Partitions, which seem to be taking the rest of your available disk space.

You could try running Disk Utility from the OS X install DVD/USB and try to erase ALL partitions. If you don't have the installer disk, you can boot into Internet Recovery mode by holding Command + Option + R at boot chime.

Alternatively, if you have a Windows install DVD/USB, you could boot into Windows installation, press shift+F10 and use DiskPart to format the entire drive. Type the following commands into Command Prompt:

diskpart
list disk
select disk n (n=the number of to be formatted drive)
clean
create partition primary
format fs=fat32 quick
exit
exit

If fat32 doesn't work, redo above steps and try 'format fs=ntfs quick' at last step.


High Sierra AddressBook broken Ok, so I've come across a (seemingly) common problem in High Sierra: annoying problems using Contacts.app/AddressBook (not sure why they don't just call it AddressBook.app, but that's irrelevant at this point).

For a while, I thought the problem was on my end. To isolate this, I deleted my AddressBook folder in it's entirety and restarted. Now, with a fresh (empty) AddressBook, I still am having the same problems: the app hangs and I can't add/search/edit/delete etc... Nothing. Unfortunately, I am unable to decode the .hang file - I don't have a ton experience in this area. That is to say, it's not giving me any relevant information that I can discern.

Lastly, I did the exact same thing (fresh, empty AddressBook) and then rebooted in Safe Mode. This did not resolve the problem.

I've poured over the logs within Console, to no avail. I can't seem to get a consistent error message of any kind, so not sure what path to pursue at this point. I've not tried Sysdiagnose, yet.

P.S. iCloud sync has been OFF for this whole process.

EDIT: Here are the three errors I get

1. AEGetDescData of non-desc type 'reco' not a good idea

2. Exception caught during decoding of received reply to message 'synchronousDonatedMeCard:', dropping incoming message and calling failure block.

    Exception: Exception while decoding argument 0 (#1 of invocation):
    <NSInvocation: 0x60800026db40>
    return value: {v} void
    target: {@?} 0x0 (block)
    argument 1: {@} 0x0

    Exception: value for key 'right' was of unexpected class 'NSError'. Allowed classes are '{(
        CNMutableContact,
        CNEither,
        CNContact
    )}'.

3. Error retrieving contacts from daemon: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4101 "connection to service named com.apple.contacts.donation.agent" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=connection to service named com.apple.contacts.donation.agent}

Apparently this has been a bug in High Sierra since it's release. A few days ago, the issue was closed and it is believed to have been fixed in OS 10.13.4 (beta).

High Sierra Contacts Not Working


iCloud photo mismatch, debug options? I use iCloud photos, on a new Catalina MBP and on iOS 13.6.
on both of those devices I see 7201 photos.
yet, on iCloud.com I see 7200.
there is always a one photo difference.
Adding and removing photos made no difference, iCloud and the Apple devices just gain and lose photos normally. Yet the difference is always there.
Any ideas how to debug?

On your Mac, create a Smart Group with the filter:
Photo | is | unable to upload to iCloud Photo Library

This should hopefully display the problematic photo, which you can try to delete and re-add.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/01/26/apple-photos-unable-to-upload


Why does finder report my applications are in the trash when I use Open With? When I attempt to open a a file with Preview (and some other applications) via the Open With open I get the following error:

  You can't open the application "Preview" because it's in the Trash. To
  open this application, move it from the Trash.

If I open Preview from the applications menu or Spotlight it opens fine.

This may be related, but there are some duplicate applications in my Open With menu, and some that I have deleted. How do I manage these?

As Lri suggested in a comment, rebuilding my Launch Services seems to have fixed the issue.

To rebuild launch services run the following from a Terminal:

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

Took just a second and cleaned up the duplicates too.


how to remove "/"s from my text in a variable Okay so I have a code that grabs text from somewhere and stores it in the variable "answer" but it has / symbols mixed in with the text... how do I get rid of them...This is the code

tell application "Safari"
    quit
end tell

set defaultAnswer to ""
set cancelButton to "Cancel"
set buttonResearch to "ReSearch"

display dialog "Query: " default answer defaultAnswer buttons {cancelButton, buttonResearch} default button buttonResearch cancel button cancelButton with icon 1
copy the result as list to {button_pressed, text_returned}

tell application "Dragon Dictate"
    set listening to false
end tell

if (button_pressed is buttonResearch) and (text_returned is not "") then
    set a to "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i="
    set b to encode_text(text_returned, true, false)
    set c to a & b

    tell application "Safari"
        activate
        open
    end tell
    repeat
        if application "Safari" is running then exit repeat
    end repeat
    delay 1
    tell application "System Events" to tell process "Safari" to set visible to false
    tell application "Safari"
        tell window 1
            set current tab to (make new tab with properties {URL:c})
        end tell
    end tell
end if

say "let me look that up for you now"
delay 6

tell application "Safari" to set theString to (source of document 1)

(* Strip the text and only return the last line*)
set input to do shell script "echo " & (quoted form of theString) & "|sed -n \"/stringified/,/mInput/p\" | sed '$!N;$!D'"

global answer

set offSet1 to "\"stringified\": \""
set offSet2 to "\",\"mInput\""

my strip(offSet1, offSet2, input)

set mywordcount to count of words of answer

if mywordcount is greater than 50 then
    display dialog x
else

end if

tell application "Safari"
    quit
end tell

tell application "Dragon Dictate"
    set listening to true
end tell

on strip(offSet1, offSet2, thedata)
    (* Use the offsets of the pattens to match the text # thru # *)
    set textNumber1 to (offset of offSet1 in thedata)
    set theData1 to text -1 thru (textNumber1 + (count of offSet1)) of thedata
    set textNumber2 to (offset of offSet2 in theData1)
    set textString2 to text from word 1 to (textNumber2 - 1) of theData1
    set thedata to theData1
    set answer to textString2
end strip

-- encoding high-ASCII characters:
on encode_char(this_char)
    set the ASCII_num to (the ASCII number this_char)
    set the hex_list to {"0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F"}
    set x to item ((ASCII_num div 16) + 1) of the hex_list
    set y to item ((ASCII_num mod 16) + 1) of the hex_list
    return ("%" & x & y) as string
end encode_char

-- TEXT ENCODING: encode spaces and high-level ASCII characters (those above 127)
-- encode_URL_A = encode most of the special characters reserved for use by URLs.
on encode_text(this_text, encode_URL_A, encode_URL_B)
    set the standard_characters to "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"
    set the URL_A_chars to "$+!'/?;&@=#%><{}[]\"~`^\\|*"
    set the URL_B_chars to ".-_:"
    set the acceptable_characters to the standard_characters
    if encode_URL_A is false then set the acceptable_characters to the acceptable_characters & the URL_A_chars
    if encode_URL_B is false then set the acceptable_characters to the acceptable_characters & the URL_B_chars
    set the encoded_text to ""
    repeat with this_char in this_text
        if this_char is in the acceptable_characters then
            set the encoded_text to (the encoded_text & this_char)
        else
            set the encoded_text to (the encoded_text & encode_char(this_char)) as string
        end if
    end repeat
    return the encoded_text
end encode_text

This code should do it. Adapt it for your needs:

set x to "/1/2/3/4/5/6"
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
set y to (words of x)
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
get y as string


Now that El Capitan is "rootless", is there any way to get dtrace working? I've found dtrace to be an invaluable tool for debugging and troubleshooting all sorts of issues, not to mention the two dozen dtrace toolkit scripts shipped by Apple as part of El Capitan.

On El Cap though, running dtrace usually results in an endless spew of errors making dtrace all but useless.

System Integrity Protection in 10.11 can be disabled, though it's not something you should do lightly.

You can disable SIP entirely by doing the following:

Reboot your mac
Hold ⌘R during reboot
From the Utilities menu, run Terminal
Enter the following command

csrutil disable

Alternatively you can re-enable SIP while still allowing dtrace to work by also running the following:

csrutil enable --without dtrace

Note, that when doing so you'll get the following warning:

  This is an unsupported configuration, likely to break in the future and leave your machine in an unknown state.

Once you reboot, dtrace will work as it did in Yosemite.


iMovie - freeing up space I'd like to free up some iMovie space but not sure how to do it.

Here are a few files I have associated with iMovie:

389MB: /Users/snowcrash/Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Pads/IMG_0760.mov

and

1.81GB: /Users/snowcrash/Movies/iMovie Library.imovielibrary

Is there anything I can to do save some space?

E.g. for the first, can I delete this? Is this a scratch file or a master?

for the second, can I examine (and potentially delete) what's taking up the 1.8GB of space?

Please do not delete or move iMovie projects or events within the Finder. If you do you'll probably end up with a mess by breaking the links between your media and iMovie projects.

Your best approach is to delete any media you're not using from within iMovie itself.

Using iMovie to delete media is the safest way to preserve your projects as you can visually see if what you're deleting is being used in your project. In fact, if what you’re trying to delete is being used in a project, iMovie will prompt you to remove the clip from the project before deleting it. This safeguard obviously isn't available if you try to delete media manually from within the Finder.

The process for deleting media within iMovie will depend on the version of iMovie you're using. In some versions you have a Move to Trash option, while in others it's labeled as Delete Media from Event.

You may find iMovie for Mac: Organize media and events of interest. Alternatively, you can access the iMovie for Mac guide.

If the above links aren't useful because you're using a different version of iMovie, post a comment to advise what version of iMovie you're using and I can provide some steps for you to follow. Alternatively, now that you know it's best to delete your media directly from within iMovie, you can just use your search engine of choice to find the info you need.


Do you need OS X Server to do SUS updating? I have 5 Macs and want to use one as the source for updates.

Do this have to be OS X Server or can I use 10.6?

See http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/apple-in-the-enterprise/apple-os-x-server-caching-and-software-update-services/

I understand how to redirect the clients but don't know how to get a "host" machine. Is this a server only thing?

The "host" machine has to be a Mac OS X Server machine (depending on the systems of your other Macs 10.6 Server/OS X Server 1.0 - OS X Server 4.0) which stores all the update packages and the SoftwareUpdate catalog(s) and provides the Software Update service.

So one of those Server OSs has to be installed on at least one Mac to serve as a SoftwareUpdate server.

Once a method without installing a server OS existed (sorry german only). I don't know if it still works and can't prove it now. Here is a link to Software Update Enabler mentioned in the appletalk.de tutorial.


Will iPhone download all photos from iCloud in optimise storage mode? I am uploading my whole photo library from a MacBook to iCloud. Synchronized devices (iPad & iPhone) are set to optimise storage.

Are all photos on iCloud being downloaded to each device? What if photo Library's size exceeds the device memory?

In Optimise storage mode, low quality thumbnails of all photos and videos will be synced to iPhone and iPad. Full library will be there on Mac (if it is set to store full version) and iCloud only.

When you try to open(or edit) a photo on iPhone from its thumbnail, only then it  downloads the full size file. So if you repeat the same for a lot of photos, there can be conflicts between which files to keep and which to erase to save space on iPhone. Then you'll see warnings for storage.


I can't see Google Calendar on macOS Calendar app I have had some sync issue with my Google calendars and my iPhone / iPad / macOS calendar app, so I have decided to try to fix it.

I removed / added my Google Account from my iPhone and now I can see the calendar without issue. The problem is with Calendar desktop application (on macOS).

I followed all the instructions but while I can see Google listed on iCal, I can't see my Google calendars (check the picture).

I've tried all the instructions on Google's support pages but without success.

What else can I do to fix this issue?

You need to tick the calendar in your synchronization settings.


How to get the password hashes for a user in Mac OS X 10.10+, in recovery/single user mode? I would like to view the hashes on my Mac, in either single user mode, or the terminal in recovery mode.

I tried to follow the steps described in OS X 10.9: where are password hashes stored. But I do not see my users plist file in the /var/db... folder, but I see root, nobody, daemon, and other .plist files. How can I find these files in recovery/single user mode?

Note: The OS I would be using is either OS X Yosemite or OS X El Capitan; both would be great to know.

When booting into recovery mode, the main hard drive is mounted under /Volumes/NameOfMainVolume/ (usually /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD or "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"). So if you need to access files residing on the main drive, include that part into your access path.


How do I confirm that each of two attached Time Capsules is indeed keeping a backup? I am using the following layout for two Airport Time Capsules.

The second augments (wirelessly) the network of the first. The objective is to have backup redundancy, while still not bothering with managing disks and scheduling backups.

I can "Enter Time Machine" and see the history, but it's unclear which history this is. Is it the first Time Machine? Is it the second? Is it a merge of both?

I can also run from the Terminal sudo emacs -nw and view /Volumes/mybackup[1,2]/MyMacBook Pro.sparsebundle/bands, but even then I can't see inside bands (or I'm losing patience before the contents of a large directory listing appear). Neither can I run a simple

sudo ls -l "/Volumes/mybackup1/My MacBook Pro.sparsebundle/bands/"

How do I confirm that a backup is being made on each disk?

I am hoping there is a better answer than to turn one or the other off and do a singleton setup.

I love having two destinations and the best way to check is to force two backups, rotating between them each. You’ll know if the file system are clean, the metadata correct and be able to see the actual timing needed to back up to each.

tmutil startbackup --rotation --block && tmutil startbackup --rotation --block

You will get timing on the backup and can monitor the status in another shell

tmutil status

An alternate method would be to get a tool designed to parse the backup manifest like BackupLoupe

Focusing on the bands which are a binary representation of the file system seems like a lot of work when you can just mount the file system and look at the files stored. Each backup interval has a plist file showing what happened on that backup interval.

Side answers to side questions:

no the format for sparse bundles isn’t changing - when they fail to mount, you are likely going to either lose the data or wait a very long time and find out you can't write data to that destination again. By long time, I mean a week or more in some cases to repair or check a sparse disk on TimeCapsule due to the slow processor and massive IO count to perform filesystem checks of Time Machine hard links.
When you have multiple destinations, the default behavior is to try for round robin, so with two connected destinations, odd hours would go to one destination and even hours to the other. So if you never sleep, instead of 24 intervals going to one destination (default case when you have only one drive) - you would get 12 backups to each of the two. If the machine sleeps, it should track roughly odd/even and the only imbalance happens when one of the two isn’t connected, the system prefers the “correct” destination, but will back up sequential intervals to the remaining destination if it’s the only one that mounts when requested.


Attempting to send video on WhatsApp causes crash I've tried a bunch of different things but whenever I try to send a video on WhatsApp the app crashes. It works fine in safe mode though.

Any ideas?

http://pastebin.com/brjzVrBS

PS: I jailbroke the phone

Looking through your log I noticed a library called Unflod.dylib.

This is malware. You might want to remove it ASAP.

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/04/21/new-ios-malware-with-a-funky-name-unflod-baby-panda/

Users on Reddit are suggesting it grabs your Apple ID and password and sends it to a server in China. So you might want to reset the password for your Apple ID too.

http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/23bdwr/beware_unfloddylib_sends_apple_id_and_password_to/

BTW At least one user on Reddit says it made their WhatsApp crash too. So removing this might stop the WhatsApp crashes.
http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/23b7qs/what_is_unflod_its_a_mobile_substrate_addon_that/cgve5aq


Unsaved Files in OS X Lion Where do unsaved files go in Lion?

I quit TextEdit without saving since I had no intention of saving, but with autosave the file still got save somewhere since when I reopen TextEdit the file I was working on is there (even tough I disabled resume >.<). So I was wondering were did that file get saved?

~/Library/Containers

This directory serves multiple purposes, some of which may be not yet documented by Apple.

Untitled, Unsaved documents for supporting applications

Applications such as Preview and TextEdit.

Example

Copy an image to your clipboard. Open Preview, close all windows, use the New from Clipboard command, quit.

Open TextEdit, close all windows, type something in a new window, quit.

In Terminal, run two commands:

ls -@l ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Autosave\ Information

ls -@l ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit/Data/Library/Autosave\ Information

Unsaved… files will be listed.

System-saved versions of user-saved files, where the file system or volume does not support permanent version storage

File systems such as MS-DOS (FAT); volumes mounted using AFP 3.3 or SMB; and so on.

Example

Make an AFP or SMB connection to a file server. Use Preview to open an image on that server, edit that image, quit without saving a version, disconnect from the server.

In Terminal, run a command:

ls -lrt ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Autosave\ Information

At the foot of the list will be a directory that contains the version automatically saved by the System.

In the same network environment: if you re-open Preview, the system may reconnect to the file server. Then in a version browser view of the remote file, the timeline will include a local file.

(I could go into greater detail, but it would be off-topic from the opening question.)

Other purposes

Beyond the two purposes noted above, ~/Library/Containers may have other purposes.

Hint

Allow the System to manage files in these areas.

Avoid dataloss; do not attempt unnecessary changes to ~/Library or its subdirectories.


My iMessage froze up on my iPod 4th generation So I was texting one of my friends and I sent him about 700 emojis characters and now whenever I try to open the app, it just freezes for 15 seconds and then crashes out. What can I do to make iMessage work again?

You can double tap the home button till the app switcher comes up at the bottom of the screen, then press and hold the messages app until the little red minus button appears at the top left of the app button. Press that to shut it down, then open it again.

You could also hard reset the iPod by holding down the home and sleep button at the same time for about 15 seconds.


Macbook Air - same in Australia as UK? I am looking at buying a Macbook Air in Australia whilst I am here on holiday. When I get back to the UK will it work?

You will need an adapter for your charger as Australia uses type I plug/socket but UK uses type G


How to search for a character in the special characters window? Am I missing something or is the search function in the special characters window not very helpful?  For example, I'm editing text and I want to insert the character for π (pi), so I select "Special Characters..." from the menu and get the window.  Then I type "pi" in the search field and get the following, which is not helpful.

Next I try "greek pi".  The search results are still surprisingly useless, but it did find a character with name "greek pi symbol".  It failed to find the characters I really wanted because they have names like "greek small letter pi"

So to find the character you need to know it's exact unicode name? That doesn't seem right. Is there a better way to search for a character?

This is OS X Mavericks.

Ctrl+Option+Space in 10.9.x brings up a quick access to special characters in line where you're typing —throughout most every app.

The search algorithm is the same of course, which it seems relies on how the charicter is tagged rather than a smart search throughout.

Still, in general, I have found the quick access shortcut and search to work well for most things. If you start typing while the special char fly out is open it will run a search.

Interestingly, While it seems that some older special characters like π have names that need to be entered exactly to search for them  "small greek letter pi = π", emoji will display if just part of the name is searched. "Person with blond hair=" can be searched just by typing in blond.


iPhoto on Yosemite will not open On my new Mac book pro, I have aperture on yosemite. I can no longer open iPhoto. The necessary upgrade is not available on the UK App store.. How do I restore iPhoto.

If you've "purchased" iPhoto before, trash the old version and download the current version (9.6.1) from your Purchases tab in the App Store.
Edit: updating won't work any more (Apple wants you to use Photos).

PS.  I have Photos, Aperture and iPhoto 9.6.1, the latter I can download any time from the 'Purchases' page in (UK) App Store and launch/use it.