SSD Writing and Memory Swapping Issues Recently I am recording the amount of data written in my SSD from kernel_task on my new M1 MacBook because that is the main source of memory swapping. I found that memory swapping is less when the MacBook is newly booted up, and more when I don't shut down for a few days.

However, I cannot find any relation why that is the case, or is that just a coincidence? I also got similar results when I use iStatMenus 6. Here is the recent 7 day results (white portion is when the computer is shutted down):

It seems like kernel_task is writing more the longer I leave it on, but I don't see any correlations between the two. I am using similar apps each day. Also, I am currently not worried about my SSD life because it is only writing 30GB per day max, and I have 100% SSD lifetime. Thanks for answering.

kernel_task is not an actual process like the others you see in Activity Monitor, it is a kind of “virtual process” that actually represents the kernel itself.
This means that it is not kernel_task itself that performs some job and in the process writes to disk, rather the kernel is continually (many, many times per second often) asked by your running programs to do stuff on their behalf.
You won’t find any “template” or “fixed model” for how kernel_task behaves, as that depends on whatever the rest of the programs on your computer is doing.
You also write about swapping. This is done when the amount of free RAM is not sufficient to cover the requests from running programs. These requests are dependent on whatever you’re doing with your computer. For example if you’re running a web browser, some sites might require almost no RAM to display - and others might require lots and lots of RAM.
As for why it tends to be more after running your computer for a long time - that is actually quite logical. Over time you have probably run more and more different programs, have more things loaded in (open documents, web site tabs, etc), and even more that contribute to your total RAM Usage than when you just booted the computer.
Some programs might also leak memory due to bugs This means that long running programs request some memory, and then forget about it, never giving it back to the operating system, even though they’re no longer using it. The longer you keep programs running, the more leaks you’ll eventually have. You can reclaim the leaked memory by closing the program - or by rebooting the computer.


Preview in Catalina doesn't allow automatic form filling? Prior to Catalina (10.15) (at least in 10.14), you could click on a checkbox and it'd tick it (even if the PDF wasn't a fillable PDF). You could also click near a line and Preview would identify that there was a line there and insert a text object automatically.
Am I missing something, or were these features removed?

I've confirmed that this feature was removed in Catalina.
For confirmation you can see on in the Preview User Guide from Apple.
If you check the Mojave (10.14) version, it says "Click a field or a line in the form. A text annotation box automatically appears.".
If you switch over to the Catalina (10.15) version, it now only says "Click a field in the form, then type your text.".


iPhone 5 can't connect to Exchange server I have ActiveSync enabled on my Exchange 2007 server, and it works just fine with all the other iPhones (4S and below) in the office. However, I have two users who have just gotten iPhone 5s, and neither of them can connect to the Exchange server.

ActiveSync is enabled on their accounts (I checked), and I've tried clearing the ActiveSyncAllowedDeviceIDs property on their accounts so any device should be able to connect, but no luck so far. I've tried rebooting the devices (universal patch, huh?) but that didn't work either. Oddly, the devices seem to authenticate just fine, the account gets added to Mail without issue.

I don't think it's an iOS 6 issue because I've upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS 6 and I can still get my mail. Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Follow up: Apple support couldn't provide a fix. They suggested importing the Exchange server's SSL cert, which I did to no avail. One user's account works on his iPhone 4S but not his iPhone 5 (yes, he is using two phones at once). The other two users don't have other devices using ActiveSync, and they have no other mobile device partnerships (I cleared the old ones when they upgraded their phones).

I had exactly the same problem and it turned out that i had used 10 devices do remotely get my corporate mail and thats the limit in exchange.  Had to open the outlook web access portal and delete the old devices and it worked straight after that.


Issue with broken display on MacBook Air while trying to reinstall OS X So I have this MacBook Air that I haven't used in a year and I forgot the password. Problem is, the display has been broken for a long time, so I have been using an external monitor with it, but I couldn't find a way to get Recovery Mode to display to the external monitor.

I managed to use the VoiceOver function to erase the hard drive, but because I didn't remember the shortcut to close the window, so I could immediately reinstall OS X, I restarted the computer.

Now it won't output to the external monitor, and VoiceOver doesn't do anything, so all I have is a blank screen.

Does anyone know what this screen looks like and can give some simple guidance so I can reinstall OS X using the keyboard?

Update: I remember it saying that it ran Mac OS X Lion while I was going through the options, and while I'm not sure exactly which type of MacBook Air it is, it is small and its model number is A1370.

Update 2: After leaving it alone for a while, we restarted it holding command+R again, and it worked. Not sure what changed, but it worked.

Shut down the computer, plug in the external monitor and keyboard and turn on the computer holding down command+R for a while. Then, close the lid of the laptop and it should display on the external monitor.


Messages in macOS Sierra incorrectly sends (back) to my account; works as intended in iOS 10 Config:

Me: Late-2013 rMBP running 10.12 (16A323)
Me: iPhone 5 running iOS 10.0.2
Me: iPad 2 running iOS 9.3.5
Wife: Mid-2013 MBA running 10.9.5 (criminy, I had no idea she was that far behind!)
Wife: iPhone 5 running iOS 10.0.2 (on same Sprint family account)
Wife: iPad Mini running iOS 8.2 (wow, she really doesn't like to update…)

Issue: When sending a(n i)Message to my wife in Sierra's Messages app, it actually sends it back to my account. When sending a(n i)Message to her in iOS's Messages app (on my iPhone or iPad), it sends correctly. I also do not appear to have any issues with using Sierra's Messages to send messages to anyone else.

What I've Tried: Searching (here, Google) pretty fruitlessly. (Would love it if Apple reconsiders naming apps after generalized terms)

This only started happening last night - to the best of my knowledge no related or tangential settings have been changed on any of our devices that would've prompted this.

If I do a new message, searching on my wife's name in (Sierra) Messages and select either to use her cell number or email address, everything looks good (her avatar shows as well as her contact info) - but once I send the message, the avatar in the left rail reverts back to me … and I get my own message (and she does not).
If I scroll back within my own messaging history to myself, I don't see any of our past exchanges before this started happening.
If when doing a new message by searching on my wife's name in (Sierra) Messages and her avatar comes up (as above), the messaging history is actually mine messaging with myself.
Quitting and restarting has no effect, as does rebooting.

It appears as though my messaging history with her is gone as far as Sierra's Messages is concerned, but doing a Spotlight search will find my chat transcripts with her.

Does anyone know any troubleshooting steps for Messages (such as analogous to rebuilding the iTunes DB)? I'm completely at a loss and given the app's name trying to search for anything meaningful is largely a fool's errand (unless someone has some serious Google-fu knowledge they can drop).

Thanks much in advance!

I had this issue and your solution didn't fix it for me. It drove me nuts. Deleting my Messages database is what eventually fixed it (note: your message history will be gone on your mac but still available on your iOS device):

In Messages.app , go to Preferences -> Accounts and sign out.
Quit Messages.
Kill the IMDPersistenceAgent process via Terminal with killall IMDPersistenceAgent^
In Finder, use the key combination Command-Shift-L to browse to the Library folder
Rename 'Messages' to 'OldMessages' (I didn't want to trash it but you can if you like).
Cleared the preferences cache by running killall cfprefsd in Terminal^
Restarted my mac
Opened Messages again. I sent a test message, and this time my wife received it (and I didn't).

^Commands came from this article

UPDATE
I had this issue again today (2017-08-09), and again the steps above cured it for me at the cost of losing access to my message history on my MacBook. Curiously the issue appeared after upgrading the iOS version on my iPad (whereas the issue occurs on my MacBook; my iPad has never exhibited any messages-related issues).

I tried @brian-m's suggestion of moving the OldMessages folder back (after steps 3 and 6 above); sure enough I can see my old messages just fine but the original problem is immediately reintroduced. So it's some sort of database issue. I had a bit more of a poke around and can see it's a SQLite database. There's a good discussion of the schema here. Unfortunately I don't have time to delve further.


Data transfered from old iPad to a new iPad and iPhone; will a reset of the old iPad, wipe the data from the new devices? Will factory reset of my old iPad2 remove my transferred data from the new iPad and iPhone? Everything's on the same account. Do I have to unsynch first?

If you factory reset your iPad, you won't wipe the data from your other devices.

To give you some perspective, it would be counter intuitive if you lost your phone and remotely wiped your device only to have all your other devices wiped as well.

That being said.... don't have the expectation that your other devices are back ups of your data.  While you will have access to your data in the case of losing a device, if you inadvertently delete your data (all your photos as an example) that change will propagate to all your other devices.


Navigating between the different areas in Xcode with a keyboard I’m looking to use VoiceOver with Xcode.

Using just the keyboard (and with VoiceOver running) how do I switch focus between Xcode's main editing area, the project navigator, the issues navigator, and the scroll bar overview?

The shortcuts you are looking for are the following

The project navigator is: ⌘+1 (Cmd-1)
The issues navigator is: ⌘+5 (Cmd-5)
Main Editing area is (once you have selected a file in the
issues or project navigator):

⌘+J (Cmd-J) and, after release, ↵ (Return) or
⌥+⌘+` (Opt-Cmd-`)

The Mini Map: ⌃+⌘+⇧+M (Ctrl-Cmd-Shft-M)

Hope that helps.


How may I move the pre-installed applications (such as Chess) into a sub-folder? The Applications folder is way too crowded to be useful. It could be nice if I could just get the pre-installed applications that I don't use swept into a sub-folder under the Applications, named as something like "Unused Built-ins".

Then again, I cannot move any of them, nor delete them. It just won't allow me to. Am I stuck with all those mess, like an advertisement that I cannot dismiss? I just want my space, inside that Applications folder of mine, or at least I thought it was mine...

How may I move, say the Applications/Chess.app/ to Applications/Unused/Chess.app/ with the purpose of having less items in the Applications folder? Alternative solutions are welcome as comments.

You can't. There are hacks that allow you to do this but really you are spending a lot of time and effort and compromising the stability and security of the Mac so your /Applications folder can be neat/tidy.

May I suggest you create a folder in which you place aliases of all applications that you want and need and use that in place of the /Applications folder and just stay out of that folder?


How to control AirPort wireless radio from the command line? I want to know how to control (specifically turn off) the networking (specifically AirPort - I want to turn off the radio) from the command line (specifically from bash in Terminal.app, being run by me) as a user (no sudo privileges or admin priviliges). You CAN turn off AirPort as a user, but I need to do this from the command line – as a user.

See OSX Daily - Enable and Disable AirPort Wireless from the Command Line in Mac OS X.  Quote:

  Turn Airport Off via Command Line
  networksetup -setairportpower airport off

  Turn Airport On via Command Line
  networksetup -setairportpower airport on

  You won’t see any confirmation in the Terminal that the command
  succeeded or failed, but if you watch the AirPort menu icon you will
  see the bars disappear indicating the wireless interface is turned
  off, or reappear indicating that wireless is activated again.

NOTE: In OS X Lion, use the hardware name above instead of airport,
e.g. networksetup -setairportpower en1 off.


How do I capture a screenshot of an iPad app that has a lot of HORIZONTAL scroll? I have an app that has a lot of product information that scrolls horizontally.

Note: I tried an app called Web Capture but it requires a URL and only scrolls vertically.

Take screenshots each page, then combine them together in an app like Photoshop where the extra UI can be removed from each intermediate image. There's no automated way of doing this on the device.


Mountain Lion on Intel Core 2 duo (2009 macbook pro) has anyone tested the new Mountain Lion on a 2008/2009 macbook?(aluminium) I've heard that with Lion some problems occured like mac becomes slow, battery life is halved etc. I'd like to know specific problems regarding updating from snow leopard to mountain lion on a 2008/2009 macbook pro with intel core 2 duo and 4GB ram, thanks!

I've installed Mountain Lion on a Macbook Pro 3,1 (2007). "Over the top", so no clean install.

Specs: 500 HDD, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 2.2 GHz C2D

This is the oldest MBP which supports Lion. And it runs fine. No hiccups so far. It boots as fast as before (~1 min). It sleeps reliably. But I can't comment on the battery life yet.


Does mounting a large disk image require a certain amount of free space on the internal drive? I've got a bunch of Mac disk images (.dmg files) that are 100 GB or larger. I'm currently on an iMac with a few hundred gigabytes of free space, but I'm going to be moving to a Mac laptop with 128 GB storage.

So, I'm wondering, would that be a problem when I have less than 100 GB of free space on my computer, but I'm opening a disk image larger than 100 GB? My guess would be no, but is ANY space on the internal drive used at all when mounting an image?

How exactly does mounting an image work, does it just change the way the operating system sees the files as one file (the disk image) rather than the actual files within the disk image, until it is mounted? Therefore, no internal space is necessary for the mount operation?

Follow-up question: Is it any slower to read from a DMG on an external drive than it is to read from any other files on the same external drive? Basically, is there any performance hit from having files in a DMG?

There certainly isn't the same amount necessary as the DMG, so you sure can mount a 100GB DMG into a file system that has less (there will be trivial consumptions, maybe a few kb, but nothting that you'll notice).

The whole thing works in the way, that the system attaches a file-system driver to the file with the DMG.  The driver will present the DMG file to the system like an "external" drive and perform file requests on behalf of the system on the contents of the file.

Essentially the driver will says to MacOS:  We have a new volume here. So MacOS will then ask the driver.  "Give me a list of content in it", and then the driver examines the inside of the file and presents the list of files organized inside the DMG.  Etc.


How do I change the path that is being searched for launching an application? I am trying to launch the D programming language compiler DMD, but the terminal is giving the following error:

dmd: failed to launch executable at /Library/Compilers/dmd2/osx/bin/dmd

But there's not folder called dmd2 under /Library/Compilers.

I can launch the dmd compiler from this path /usr/bin/dmd, but I don't want to type this path every time I need to compile a source code file.

This is my $PATH:

  /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/texbin

Is there a way that when I type dmd it launches /usr/bin/dmd, instead of trying to language a compiler under /Library/Compilers/dmd2/osx/bin/dmd?

To answer your question, your PATH has to be modified to:

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4/bin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/texbin

so that your shell will find
    /usr/bin/dmd
before any other one called from within one of the 2 Python library directories.

Please note: it is a dangerous practice to let any software not distributed by Apple to install anything within /usr/bin (or /bin, /sbin or /usr/sbin). This is a technic used by crapware to hide themself.


How many External Hard Drives can I plug to Airport Extreme? I need to backup all my computer data. I'm thinking of buying 3 External Hard Drives and connect them to Airport Extreme. Can I do this?

The constraint is be the number of ports available on your USB hub.

Any connected hard drives should appear in Mac OS X.
Use a self-powered usb hub and connect hard drives your hub. Only then will multiple external drives have enough power to run.

Also see store.apple.com for related questions.


how to use HomePod mini as a mic for Mac mini I have a HomePod mini.
I want to use it as a mic for my Mac mini.
How do I do this?
I want to use it for Siri and google meet.

It cannot be used as a microphone and DOES NOT show up under input in the sound settings.

https://reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/k1b271/limitations_of_using_a_homepod_or_homepod_mini_as/gdngtrm
It acts as an AirPlay receiver like Apple TV, not a Bluetooth device like AirPods.


Not able to Ping to MacBooks? Recently while troubleshooting some network issues, we figured out we are not able to ping any of our 85+ MacBook Pros. On further analysis we checked and confirmed firewall is not enabled on any of the machines.

Is there something very basic we're missing?

I have not seen this issue before. I unfortunately can not duplicate this issue at my office. Two MacBook Pros and a MacBook all respond to ping requests. All units are running Mac OS X Lion 10.7. I used Network Utility to preform the ping to the IP address and host name.

About how old are these computers and do you know the model name? What software is running on these computers? What software are you using to ping the computers? Are you pinging the IP or host name? If the Apple Firewall is off, do you have any other software running for security? What router are you using? Is there a firewall in the router or a feature such as 'wireless isolation' turned on? If more than one router or switch is involved, are the computers on the same subnet? Are these computers wirelessly joined or wired to the network?

I would think the answer to the problem would be found in one of the questions I have asked you.


Ping command works in Network utility but not in terminal I am on os x 10.9.4

If I ping google from the network utility I get 0% packet loss.

But if I try to ping google from the terminal with ping www.google.com I get 100% packet loss. System Preferences -> Firewall shows it is turned off.

What else might be happening?

What is the error message you get when you are pinging from the terminal?

try an nslookup www.google.com and make sure that your dns is resolving correctly


How do I remove a "missing" MP3 file from my iPhone? I have an MP3 file located on my iPhone that I want to delete but am unable to find in the Music app.

The track only appears when I connect my iPhone to my Mac and go to (Devices > iPhone > Music) in iTunes. There, it shows a list of all of my voice memos and songs in my music library. I have already deleted all of the songs from my music library using (Settings > General > Usage > Music...) on my iPhone, but it did not delete the file in question. I know absolutely for certain that it is not a voice memo.

There is now a circle with an exclamation mark next to the file in iTunes, but secondary clicking on it does not offer a remove or delete option. Does anyone have any suggestions on removing the file?

Do you or have you ever used iTunes to sync the phone?  If so, try another sync.


Automount SMB share at specific location Here's my problem, I want to automatically mount a network share at a specific location without the requirement of the user entering any details. The share must be mounted in a user specific folder. Why? I have a QNAP NAS which has a share called home and that share points to a different location depending on the credentials used to access it which means that I get issues if it mounts under /Volumes as every user is mounting a home share. First in best dressed in that case as subsequent user attempts will not mount.

The drag drive to login items with credentials in keychain is nice but doesn't allow me to choose the mount location. If I use mount_smbfs from the command line to set it up as desired and then drag the share into the login items it does nothing on login.

Using the mount volume applescript command seems of little use as it doesn't allow me to specify the mount point.

The only option I could see is to use the auto_smb file examples found on the internet but this involves hardcoding passwords which I am not keen on. In a non-LDAP/AD world is this the best I can hope for to solve this issue?
A non-boot alternative is to put the mount_smbfs command in a script and execute from the login items.

Ideas anyone?

I've had to do this as well, and I have an Applescript I wrote and cobbled together from working sources to request the user's password and then use mount_smbfs to mount to a specific location (with folders already set up).

This prevents stale passwords from quickly locking out the account, and also prevents passwords in the script body. I do hard-code the username in the script, that's safe enough I think.

I also do (list disks) to check which shares are already mounted, and then use the results to report back the mounted shares, and any failed mount attempts.


How can I expose the faces data from macOS Photos to iOS Photos? I've spent some time teaching Photos on my Mac to know which face belongs to what name and now have a nice set of groups. I'd like to be able to access that metadata on iOS - preferably through automation and the iCloud Photo Library.

Is there any way to see these groups/tags/keywords attached to photos in any usable way on iOS?

 macOS 10.12 - Photos app Version 2.0 (445.1.15)  iOS 10.0.2 + Photos

Kind of.  The metadata is there and can be read by Photos on the iOS - I'm just not sure that there's a good way of automatically doing it and grouping them as you want.

But try this: launch Photos on your phone, hit the search magnifying glass, and start typing someone's name.  It'll give you a menu list of all of the people, locations, albums, keywords etc that match your search.

My guess is that 'smart searches' will be coming soon, where you can then save that search and then later just pull it up as though it were an album.  You can do the same in Photos on OS X but it doesn't sync that album over to iOS ... yet.


Allow button in system preferences not present - macpro 5.1 macOS Sierra 10.13.6 - Line 6 pod 3 Live Driver Issue I m trying to install some drivers, (Line6 / Digidesign nd Zoom ) .
These drivers (all latest versions that works with Sierra) are not working and my devices (mainly audio units) are obviously not recognised .
I read everywhere that the solution is goin to System Preference then Security nd Privacy and then on General window click on Allow button .
The problem is that There isn't that button .
I attach the pic to show it .

The allow button dynamically appears when you try to install and use for example 3rd party kernel extensions.

Re-run the installer for the drivers for the hardware, and revisit Security & Privacy in System Preferences. It should show up then.


How to copy the current text line without highlighting it? I find it annoying that I have to highlight a given piece of text and then press CMD +C to copy it into the buffer.

I want to be able to copy text by simply pressing CMD +C, which would copy the whole line on which my cursor is placed.

How do I accomplish this?

The closest to what you are looking for is triple-click on the line and CMD+C that highlights and copy the whole line.

On certain code editors a piece of text is copied just by highlighting it.


Why can't I connect my Iphone 4 to our home Wifi? Umm, I need help about my Iphone 4... I recently bought it and was able to connect to our home wifi perfectly.. But one day, we don't know why, but me and my brother's iphone 4 was unable to connect to the home wifi. Although, we could connect to our school and other places's wifi network except our home wifi!!! :( Help please??? Thank you!

A few years back I had a particular wireless access point that would often exhibit this behaviour. One or two devices wouldn't connect after some time (a few days, maybe a week). Rebooting it let everyone back on.

Try rebooting the access point.
Check for driver/firmware updates (access point and devices).
If you can, borrow or swap access points temporarily to see if its any better.

It seemed, in our case, to be a bug in the router, but never really figured out if it was randomly 'breaking' for certain clients/chipsets/etc or if it was something more consistent like a bug in the 802.11n compliance... in the end we replaced it and all was fine.


Getting YouTube back on Apple TV As of the latest Apple TV software update, YouTube is no longer showing up on the home screen, apparently replaced by Vimeo (which I like, but which has a very limited video selection). Is there any way to get YouTube back on the Apple TV home screen?

You might have turned off YouTube under Settings -> General -> Privacy.  Check there, and then toggle it back to SHOW.  If this was the problem, please "Accept" the answer.


Is there a way to backup Evernote to Dropbox? I'd like to be able to use a little bit of the space in my Dropbox account to create a backup of Evernote.  This way if anything happens to Evernote cloud service I'd still have access to the Dropbox backup.  Any ideas?

My article at wn7ant.com explains how to do this using the App store version of Evernote:

Move ~/Library/Containers/com.evernote.Evernote/Data/Library/Application Support/Evernote to /Users/my_user_on_the_system/Dropbox.
Create an alias of /Users/my_user_on_the_system/Dropbox/Evernote.
Move the alias of /Evernote back to ~/Library/Containers/com.evernote.Evernote/Data/Library/Application Support/


iCloud keychain authorisation sends sms to old number I want to set up iCloud keychain on my apple devices. To do so I went to settings > iCloud > keychain and turned it on and a button 'Approve with security code' appeared. It asked my iCloud security code and after it asks for 6 digit verification code that has been sent to my old phone number that I no longer have access to. After trying to find where I can change my number. I already went to settings > phone > my number and entered my current number but the phone still has sends the verification code to the old number.
I am using an iPhone 6 with iOS 8.1

Also tried to set it up on the a macbook with Yosemite but it also send the verification code to the old number.

On your iPhone, go to Settings → iCloud → Keychain and switch Keychain off then on again.
Tap "Approve with Security Code", tap "Forgot Code" and then tap "Reset".
Follow the instructions to reset iCloud keychain and create a new passcode.

You will then be prompted to update to your new number.


Do cell carries have access to FaceTime information? On the newest iPhone, do cell phone carriers have access to FaceTime call data (such as which caller initiated and ended a FaceTime call)?

FaceTime only needs Internet connection for audio and video calls therefore the only data your carrier receives is what server you connected to, which I don't think is what you are looking for. You are the only one having access to the FaceTime logs.


iTunes U with non-Apple devices Is it possible to sync iTunes U feeds with non-Apple devices?

If you download classes from iTunes U, there are stored on your computer hard drive. Then You can handle those files to be sync with the device you think about, with the tool you uselaly use... There no big difference.


Avoid restarting macbook pro with bootcamp Is there a way to use bootcamp to switch between Windows and OSX without restarting the laptop. I don't really want to buy any virtual software like VMWare or Parallels.

Unfortunately, this is not possible. You can't run two operating systems at the same time without any extra software.

With that said, Parallels Desktop does exactly what you want to achieve, it runs the OS in a virtual mode, the only downside being it's shareware, therefore pricy. Using a third party software is however the only way to achieve what you're trying to do.


iPhone Photos storage error I have an iPhone 6 with 16GB of storage, and it has been saying there isn't enough space on my device (mainly because I had 6,000 photos in my album with was taking up 8GB). So went on my Mac and transferred all the photos on my iPhone to my Mac, and then deleted them off my phone. It has been 2 weeks now and my phone is still continuing to say I don't have enough space, and that photos is still taking up the 8GBs of storage.
I have tried turning my iPhone off and on trying to reset it, but nothing is working.

I would try the following:

Turn off iCloud Photo Library
Turn off iCloud Photo Sharing
Delete all those pictures
Delete the recently deleted folder
Make sure that you have no other photos in any other folder under the Albums tab
Force Reset your iPhone see instructions
Turn on your iPhone and verify step 5 again
Your storage space should be regained


Why are USB devices drawing power, but not being recognized by the OS? I have an issue with the USB ports on my Macbook Pro. When I plug a device in, the device draws the power, but nothing else happen. This is what I know about this problem:

1- USB Prober can see the connected devices and identify them
2- VMFusion it's able to connect the device into the guest OS but nothing happens
3- If I reboot in windows all works good (no HW fault)
4- I tried to reboot in safe mode, login, reboot
5- I tried to reset SMC, nothing.

Later on I realized that apparently this issue it's related only to the composite devices, a simple USB disk work. An iPhone, iPod or Broadband Modem will not work.

Any idea ?

Well - if the port works, and you can plug in multiple other devices into the port it sure looks like the problem lies in the composite device and not the mac.

The only way to know if that type of device is broken or is just not compatible (and the mac is shutting it off immediately on detection to protect itself) is to take that device to another mac of the similar hardware and test.

Experience would say just that device is broken - but you'll have to test to know for sure.


What app/notification is causing this sound on my MacBook Pro Early 2011 My MacBook Pro running macOS 10.13.6 sporadically makes the following sound (see here for .mp3 format). I'd really like to know where this is coming from. Sometimes it looks like the computer makes the sound when the Ethernet cable and/or the power cable are disconnected, but I haven't been able to reliably link the sound to any of these events as the sound is not played every time they happen. Even just being able to record the sound using my phone was lucky. Also, normally this sound is made a few times over the course of a few minutes and that has been happening once every day or two for the last week.
I have followed the suggestions in the answers here and here. As the sound is played infrequently, some of the solutions haven't yet turned up any results. Every time I restart the mac the first thing I do is start the following command on Terminal: sudo fs_usage -w | grep -i "\.mp3\|\.aif\|\.m4a\|\.wav\|\.caf". The sound has played multiple times while the command is running but no audio file with that sound is shown in the command line.
I have looked at the Notification Center notifications and, although I have some from around the time this sound was played, none of those programs make this sound. I have also looked at the Notifications preference pane in Settings and no app in that list makes this sound (that I'm aware).
I've also searched the following locations for any .wav, .aif[f], .mp3 and .m4a file:

/Library
/System
/Applications
~/Library

I played all the sounds I could find, but my search has come up empty. Naturally, the sound could be saved in another file format or be in another location...

Sound files are stored in ~Library/Sounds, Library/Sounds or in System/Library/Sounds folder. Look in these 3 folders and see if that particular sound file is there.


Can you tweak or customize Spotlight to find first specific files and folders? For example, I have two folders named Edit but the one I use most frequently, shows up second on Spotlight.
Can you anyhow influence the precedence and importance of found files in Spotlight?

No. At one point, Spotlight would learn from your choices, but that functionality seems to have been lost in the most recent version.

You could get the functionality you want with an App Launcher like Alfred, or Quicksilver.


How to create/write file under /usr in OS X 10.11 I was going to compile a php extension using phpize, but it reported some files not found. I googled and found some solutions,

  In OS X 10.9, we can make a symbol link from /XCODE_PATH/OS_X_SDK/usr/include to /usr/include

But it seems that OS X 10.11 has some system policy which deny this operation. I even tried to boot in single user mode, but I just got

$ sudo ln -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.11.sdk/usr/include /usr/include
Sandbox: ln(14) System policy: deny(1) file-write-create /usr/include

Anyone knows how to fix this problem? Your answers or comments will be highly appreciated.

You can fight SIP, but probably not for long.

Why not just do it the recommended way and put in /usr/local/include


Disable inactive memory swapping Background:
OSX keeps some information in RAM that is no longer used, but was recently used. This is called inactive memory, and is intended to improve user experience by speeding up some actions:

For example, if you've been using Mail and then quit it, the RAM that
Mail was using is marked as Inactive memory. Inactive memory is
available for use by another application, just like Free memory.
However, if you open Mail before its Inactive memory is used by a
different application, Mail will open quicker because its Inactive
memory is converted to Active memory, instead of loading it from the
slower drive.

Sounds questionable (just how much can you possibly speed up Mail on a quad-core machine?), but at least that couldn't possibly hurt since such memory can be treated like free memory! Actually, it can:

In OS X, when the number of pages in the free list dips below a
computed threshold, the kernel reclaims physical pages for the free
list by swapping inactive pages out of memory.

This makes me question whether OSX' memory handling is in fact superior; after all the same page mentions that

Paging of any kind... affects performance negatively because it
forces the system to spend a lot of time reading and writing to disk.
Reading a page in from the backing store takes a significant amount of
time and is much slower than reading directly from RAM. If the system
has to write a page to disk before it can read another page from disk,
the performance impact is even worse.

Issue:
This (paging out inactive memory and the subsequent severe performance degradation) is likely to occur even during trivial tasks such as multi-tab browsing, even if the number of simultaneously open tabs is kept within reasonable (both Safari and Chrome appear to be guilty of adding to inactive memory whenever a tab is closed).
The machine becomes hardly usable when this happens - even opening up Terminal and purging memory can take a few minutes.
Question:
Can swapping inactive memory be turned off? Or, with inactive memory not being essential, can it be disabled completely?
Alternatively, is there a daemon or a preferably Apple app available that monitors inactive memory usage (an OSX oxymoron) and when it goes over an arbitrary amount (half a gig?) a purge is performed?

I've been researching this very question for some time, and I've come to the conclusion that while there are several so-called "solutions" offered in various places, none of them really fixes the problem or makes the symptoms go away. The best I've found is techniques that change when inactive memory is swapped, such as the use of the purge command you referred to. I believe that MacLemon is correct that swapping can be disabled only in entirety and not selectively, and so disabling the swapping of inactive memory would in practice be equivalent to disabling virtual memory altogether—which could be a workable solution on a machine with really large amounts of RAM, but is impractical on machines with a low maximum RAM capacity, such as MacBooks or Minis.

The reason that none of the ad-hoc purging solutions make the situation significantly better is that there are really only two ways to force OS X to clear inactive memory: the purge command, or forcing allocation of all free memory (and since I'm not certain what method purge uses, these two may actually be more or less the same). purge, as you mentioned, takes a non-trivial amount of time to complete. Allocating all free memory simply accelerates the process by which the contents of inactive memory would be swapped out naturally, and so still takes up the same large amount of system resources. The only advantage of either of these solutions is that they allow you to choose when the swapping occurs, so it can be done before you would be normally trying to allocate that memory to something else. Whether that is actually useful to you depends on several factors, so the simplest way to find out is to just try it.

I've been testing a few of the memory-clearing utilities out there, and I've found that for me, manually forcing inactive swap requires more active monitoring of memory levels than is practical while I'm actually working, and using a utility that automatically forces the swap when free memory drops below a certain threshold is no better than letting the OS do it on its own, as I still have no control over when the swapping will occur and my apps will SPOD. So while there is an app that will do exactly what your alternative question asks for, that doesn't actually make the situation any less painful.

Until Apple's OS development team decides that the memory management system isn't working the way it's supposed to, and they figure out a way to make it work properly, the only real solution is to identify which apps are generating the most inactive memory and stop using them. In my situation, this has meant changing web browsers. I've been testing a variety of them, and Chrome is so far the one that seems to generate the least inactive memory, probably in part because every tab and every extension runs as a separate process, allowing the OS's native memory management to treat each one separately in terms of prioritizing swapping. Safari is the worst I've tried; starting with Safari 5.1, I could open a few tabs, do absolutely nothing, and watch the inactive memory rise rapidly in Activity Monitor—it would easily go from <1gb inactive to >3gb inactive within about five minutes, run the swap cycle, and then do the exact same thing. (Granted, memory that is doing nothing is exactly what makes it inactive in the first place, but it shouldn't create more inactive memory than was allocated active in the first place.) Safari 6 under Mountain Lion is a bit better, but not better enough to be worth switching back. Firefox, not being based on WebKit, ought to be better about this than either Safari or Chrome, but it has its own legacy of memory management problems, including a history of memory leaks, that make it no better in practice.

What would really fix the issue is if there was an option, likely a hidden option in the OS, telling the OS to simply dump the contents of inactive memory when needed instead of swapping its contents to disk. But I don't expect Apple to ever make such an option available.


Remove recent documents history? I recently got a MacBook Air and am getting used to the macOS interface... Liking it so far but still relearning how to do some basic stuff.

For example, right clicking on VLC, and all the porn I've been watching comes up! Don't want to risk that popping up if someone else is using my computer for a few moments.

I've tried setting the Number of recent items under system preferences to none, but vlc still remembers all my filthy video titles! What gives?

In windows I could clear my recent documents easily enough, or use a tool like ccleaner to clear system cache, browser histories, recent documents etc with one click.

Can you recommend something similar for Mac?

(I know the best solution for this is separate user accounts - but would like to be confident that I could pass my laptop quickly to someone at a moments notice without all my recent activity being two clicks away!

Thanks for any help.

It is generated by Spotlight

(see the second post on this link: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1071627?tstart=0)

You can make it so that nothing shows up (aka deactivating it) by doing the following.

System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > +
then select your Macintosh HD (or whatever your HD is called)
then click choose.

Now that should do it.


What Can I Connect To ExpressPort Slot? I have a mid-2010 MacBook Pro.  It has an ExpressPort Slot connection that seems to have no uses without something else to connect in there.

What are the possible things that I could use this port for?

SATA | Firewire | USB3 ports (usually for external HDDs;) Ethernet ports; Media Card readers; Thunderbolt ports; PCI bus extenders. Sonnettech has quite a few options.


App to see how my application are using my upload internet bandwith? Is there any app to see how my applications are using my upload internet bandwith?

I have an app called Arq which basically uploads data to amazon storage.

The problem is that it took me 10 days to upload 30GB of data. My provided upload speed is around 600KB, then there is problem with this.

I thought of checking if any other app is using my upload internet bandwith. Am I in the right way...?
What do you think, what else can I do?

At first I thought it was a problem related to the app Arq, then I posted this problem in its forum: post, but as you can see the developer of this app says that there is no problem with the app at all.

Is it 600KBps (600 kilobyte per second) or 600Kbps (600 kilobit per second)? For the latter it would take 5 days to upload 30GB with optimum upload speed. You say it took 10 days. I would say that is reasonable. You can use the System Monitor app to monitor network traffic. It doesn't make clear what app is using the network, but it does make clear if upload is only half of what you would expect.


How do I disable iMessage on every computer I installed with my email address? I have two multiple Macs. 2 Macbooks and an iMac. I installed El Capitan on all of them, with my one iTunes account.

The issue I am running into is that whenever I get a message on iMessage, it shows up on all computers and my iPad...not just my iPhone (and my Macbook) -- which is what I want.

How do I fix that?

Though I don't believe there's any way to do a broad-sweep method, you can disable it on a case-by-case basis on OS X and iOS.

OS X

Open the Messages app, then in the menu bar hit Messages -> Preferences. Click on the Accounts button, then your iMessage account in the sidebar. Uncheck the box labeled "Enable this account."

iOS

Go to Settings -> Messages and turn iMessage off.


Restarting speakers without rebooting? My MacBook Pro internal speaker has crashed, as it does every few months. I'm sure a reboot will fix it, but wondering if there's any way I could restore the speaker without rebooting? (Setting things back up again is time-consuming.)

UPDATE: It didn't actually work after reboot. I noticed the headphone slot is red, like in this picture, so it seems it's trying to serve optical out, since MBP uses the same slot as explained in that thread.

UPDATE 2: Best solution I've seen is here. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4220803?start=0&tstart=
Note that it's fiddly and you might need to reboot before re-trying the headphones.

Try restarting the daemon process that processes audio by typing in Terminal:

sudo killall coreaudiod

This should reinitialize the audio and perhaps reload drivers.


Finding Rosetta / PPC applications on disk I know how to determine if a program is an Intel or PPC application (with Cmd-I or in the Activity Monitor).

But how can I find all PPC applications that still lurk on my disk?

Before upgrading to Lion I'd rather know which (seldom used) applications on my disk won't work anymore (I'd be happy with GUI or terminal ways to do this).

Bring up System Profiler (System Information in OS X Lion) -OR- go to Apple, About This Mac and click on the More Info... button.  If in Lion, click on the File, Show System Report menu.  In the left sidebar choose Applications under the Software section and sort by the Kind column. Now just find the applications that are PowerPC.


My MacBook Pro isn't recognising my speakers I have recently bought a MacBook Pro 13" and want to use my old speakers to play music through, but the system can't recognise the speakers are there? They are connected through the headphone jack, to be played through the AUX setting on the speakers.

First, plug the speakers into something else to make sure they work as-is.

Next, check the headphone jack to see if there is a red light emanating from it. I have never personally experienced it, but I have seen reports of MacBooks being tricked into "thinking" that it should be in optical output mode and getting stuck that way. If so, sometimes removing and replacing the speaker cable a few times may help. See https://discussions.apple.com/message/22315967 for example.


Concern with location sevices on previously owned iPad I bought an iPad off of Craigslist, I wiped it clean and set it up as my own. Is there any way that the previous owner can view my location? Either with MobileMe or find my iPad?

No. Since you (presumably) set up your account on the device, they no longer have control over it via Find My iPad.


What does MD545FD/A model of iPad means? Usually there is a model number with AXXXX. What does MD545FD/A mean? At Identify your iPad model you can see there are avery of them with AXXX.

Looking on the box my MacBook Pro came in the Model No: is designated as e.g., A1398 and the Part Number: is in the form of AlphaNumeric/A as is with the part number you've shown.  So with an iPad I'd assume it's the same, a part number, as there would be no reason to have different inventory control systems.  If you Google "MD545FD/A", it shows as an Apple iPad mini Wi-Fi + Cellular 64GB.


The app Stack Exchange crashes on iPad I have an iPad 3 with iOS version 8.3 and the lastest version of the Stack Exchange app. It's very difficult to use the app because it crashes always, e.g. when I scraping the answers to a questions,when I go to my profile and so on. What is the reason and can be solved?

Crash logs are automatically reported to developers. So there is no need to do it manually.

To prevent crashing you could try any of Crash Recovery options from iOS system settings:

Another problem may be due to you using old iOS version. See Brian's answer for another question here.

Pulled from this post


How can Finder empty Trash more quickly than "rm -rf /Volumes/Foo/.Trashes/501/*"? The "Trash" of a 16-GB usb2 flash drive had 3.4-GB of data. I emptied it as such:

  $ cd /Volumes/FooDrive/.Trashes/501
  $ rm -rf *

This took over 5-seconds. That seemed pretty long. So, as a test I just decided to empty the Trash of all of my drives via Finder. Other drives:
2-TB usb3
500-GB usb2
16-GB usb2
250-GB ssd

I measured the size of the Trash as such:

  $ du -ch /Volumes/WhateverDrive/.Trashes

There was 15-GB in the Trash of the 500-GB drive, and 5-GB in the Trash of my other 16-GB flash drive. I didn't measure the other drives.

Finder appeared to take much less than 5-seconds to empty the Trash for all those drives.

Does Finder really empty the Trash so much more quickly than /bin/rm? How?
Does Finder just make the "clicking sound" (signaling the trash is empty) before the Trash on all the drives is really empty?

The time it takes to delete a file doesn't depend (much) on the size of the file. Thus, the number of files being deleted matters much more than the size of the files. My guess is that the trash on FooDrive had lots of small files, and that's what took so long.

I just ran a quick test on my HD, with 500,000 zero-length files scattered through 1,110 directories (10 top-level directories, each containing 10 subdirectories, each containing 10 subdirectories, each containing 50 empty files). du -ch gave their total size as 0B, but find /path/to/trash -mindepth 1 | wc -l counted 501110 items. Deleting them with rm -R took 75 seconds, while the Finder took 91 seconds. The difference was mostly that the Finder took 18 seconds "preparing" (i.e. counting the files) before actually deleting them.

Verdict: rm -R is slightly faster, but not enough to matter. Oh, and the Finder waited until all items were actually gone before playing its crinkle sound.

BTW, for some types of files (e.g. applications), the Finder will show them as single files, but they're actually a hidden folder structure that can contain a large number of files. Use find /path/to/folder -mindepth 1 | wc -l to get an accurate count of items.


On my MacBook Pro, how can I open a picture in Photoshop that is in my iPhoto library? I have imported a bunch of photos from my iPhone into iPhoto. I notice that it saves my full photo library as a single file (12 GB in my case) and when I open iPhoto it works fine.

I now want to open a particular picture in Photoshop (CS 5) on my Mac and I cannot figure out how to choose a specific photo (given my whole library is just a single file).

Is there some special way to do this? It seems like everyone who uses Photoshop and iPhoto would have this issue.

You can set Photoshop (or any image editor) as an external editor in iPhoto. (Preferences -> General -> Edit Photo: Choose from the Drop Down Menu.) This way, when you double click a pic to edit in iPhoto it will open automatically in Photoshop or your Image Editor, and when you save it it's sent back to iPhoto automatically.

This is the only way that edits made in another application will be displayed in iPhoto.


How can the macOS calendar show (1 more...) daily events in the month view? When there are too many events on one day, the macOS calendar does not show all events. I know that resizing the window helps but the problem is still the same for more daily events. I was expecting that there is a popup window, as in the year view, when I click on "2 more...". However, nothing happens.
Is there an easy way to see all events?
(Another workaround may be to use a different calendar app)

Two ways I can think of, if you don't want to (or can't) expand the window further…
Swap to Day or Week view - views are  Cmd ⌘   1  though  4
Shrink the font -  Cmd ⌘   -  ( Cmd ⌘   +  to enlarge)


Setting variables in environment.plist I've been trying to come to terms with how to set environment variables needed by launched applications in Sierra, but I'm puzzled.

Following various bits of advice found online, I created a file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/environment.plist.  It looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>my.startup</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>sh</string>
    <string>-c</string>
    <string>
      launchctl setenv FOO foo
      launchctl setenv BAR bar
      <!-- ... -->
      launchctl setenv PATH /usr/local/opt/scala210/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH
    </string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

From my experimenting, it appears that nothing less than a system reboot will make changes to this file take effect.  I did find mentions of this command that will supposedly do the trick:

$ launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/environment.plist

...but when I run it I get this response:

[my home dir]/Library/LaunchAgents/environment.plist: service already loaded

In the documentation for launchctl I see mention of a -F flag that seems relevant:

Force the loading or unloading of the plist. Ignore the Disabled key.

However, it makes no difference if I include this switch; I get the same output and the file is ignored.

So anyway, rebooting does make the changes take effect (maybe logging out and back in also would? I didn't check), but with one exception: the PATH variable.  That variable just stayed the same no matter how I changed it, and across reboots.  Eventually I stumbled across a Stack Exchange answer that offhandedly warned that changing PATH in this way would be ignored until the Dock was restarted with the killall Dock command.  So I did that, and rebooted, and finally I had my PATH set correctly.

So, anyway, I suppose my main question would be: Is there any more hassle-free way to update environment variables than the way I outline above?  And a subsidiary question might be: Does the special handling of PATH make any sense at all?

Unload the launch agent:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/environment.plist

Modify the plist/env settings
Load the launch agent again:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/environment.plist

You have to quit and relaunch Terminal to get the new value of the variable in the shell.

With the example of Kuldeep Yadav's comment the usr.aws.plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgent/ would look like this then:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>usr.aws</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/bin/launchctl</string>
                <string>setenv</string>
                <string>AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY</string>
                <string>loremipsum</string>
                <string>/bin/launchctl</string>
                <string>setenv</string>
                <string>AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID</string>
                <string>loremipsum2</string>
                <string>/bin/launchctl</string>
                <string>setenv</string>
                <string>AWS_ACCESS_KEY</string>
                <string>loremipsum3</string>
                <string>/bin/launchctl</string>
                <string>setenv</string>
                <string>AWS_SECRET_KEY</string>
                <string>loremipsum4</string>
        </array>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

This is only tested (& working) with bash & zsh.


How to restore the default values on a keyboard in terminal? I used the hidutil function to remap several keys on my keyboard:

hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":
    [{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x70000003e,
      "HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x70000004c},
     {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x70000004c,
      "HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x70000003e} ,
     {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x70000003f,
      "HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x70000002a},
     {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x70000002a,
      "HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x70000003f}]
}'

My problem is that I made some mistakes in it, and I don't find the way to restore it.

Passing empty string didn't work for me, i.e. it didn't deactivate existing remappings. However, passing an empty array did the trick.

hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[]}'


iPhone 4 Storage Disappearing I have a 16GB iPhone 4 running iOS 7. In Settings > Usage > Storage, it says I'm using 13.3 GB and have 240 MB left, but I added up all of the space the apps/their data take up and it comes to 9GB (and thats rounding up!).

I listen to and download a lot of podcasts and for the last few months I've been sitting at ~1GB of free space, with the podcast app having trouble downloading anything after there's less than 600MB free. Over the last day though, I've been downloading a bunch of podcasts that fail to download, but take up space. For example, I had ~400MB and tried to download a ~100MB podcast. It failed but in settings it says I now have ~300MB of free space.

I've looked around for answers online, but I couldn't find anything that seemed to relate. I've tried turning it on and off again a bunch but that didn't help.

Has anyone else had this problem? Is there an easy solution?

Thanks in advance.

The hard-reset and all that didn't work. I re-synched it to a different computer. It got rid of half of the Other storage, so I guess it worked. I'm not sure it's really a good solution, but whatever.


I've managed to break my terminal, (iTerm2(b17), ZSH, OSX10.6.6) I'm migrating to a shiny new laptop (yay) unfortunately I've manually set up my iTerm to match the old machine, but something is not right (not yay).

I'm experiencing

using xterm-256color doesn't give the full colour set for say, vim.
applications like vim dont clear out of the scrollback when exited.
my ↖ home and ↘ end keys are completely broken and I can't seem to Google a solution
my ⌫ backspace key doesn't delete backwards, it adds a 'space' and prevents further input until ^C.

Here is my .zshrc and my .profile. I dont have an .inputrc.

Here are my keyboard settings for iTerm2:

I'm fairly sure i've broken something between $TERM, iTerm2's keyboard settings and my .zshrc, but I'm simply not competent enough to debug it. As far as I can tell, my settings are identical to my old laptop, which works.

It turns out that xterm-256color does not work correctly unless you have xcode installed.


Jailbroken iPhone stuck on boot screen I tried to reload Cydia, which stopped working on my jailbroken iPhone 4. I downloaded "Redsnow" and "Ipsw 4.3.2", which worked, until I went to use and downloaded an app with Cydia.

I did not realize that this jailbreak version needed to be tethered to reboot!
So i put my iPhone back in sleep mode and boot from Redsnow only to have it get locked in the logo boot mode for 2 days now! Yesterday I panicked and downloaded the latest update from iTunes and did a factory instal with no avail - still in this boot logo loop

How can I fix this and use my phone?

You need to first put your phone into DFU Mode. Then, run Redsnow, go to "Extras" and select "Just Boot".


iMessage truncating messaging history A coworker of mine has recently noticed that for any person with whom he has a long SMS history, and with whom iMessage routing has started, the messaging logs with that person are now being truncated. He can only hit the "load more messages" button five times before  it hits the apparent end of the logs. Is anyone else noticing this? No one with whom I share that much history has upgraded to iMessage yet.

I'm a bit worried, because my girlfriend will be upgrading to iOS 5 soon, but we both like the fact that we can scroll all the way back to before we were dating, and sometimes do so just to laugh at the random conversations we've had. We're talking about thousands of texts over two years, and I really hope the default isn't to clear that.

Prior to iOS 5, I used PhoneView for this. You can also try iExplorer.

They probably still work, I just haven't tried recently.


Can Spaces be used on only one monitor (with another displaying just one desktop)? I like Spaces, and I like my two-monitor setup. However, I'd like to just use spaces on one monitor, while keeping the other one always showing the same desktop. For example,

Monitor 1 shows Desktops 1-4, changed with Spaces
Monitor 2 always shows Desktop 5

Is there any way to do this?

I don't think it can be done...  However, you can assign applications to be present in every space.  So, if you end goal is to be able to have your e-mail always showing, yet use spaces to manage other applications, you could do the following.

Set mail.app (or whatever mail program you are using) to be present in every space.  Then drag the windows to your second monitor.
Launch several other applications, each in their own space.

Now you can switch from space to space and have Mail available in all of them.

Not exactly what you asked for, but I suspect that it will serve your purposes.


How do I create user accounts from the Terminal in Mac OS X 10.11? I would like to be able to create new users in Mac OS X 10.11 remotely after ssh'ing into the machine. On Mountain Lion, these steps were listed.

Running

dscl . -create /Users/joeadmin
dscl . -create /Users/joeadmin UserShell /bin/bash
dscl . -create /Users/joeadmin RealName "Joe Admin"
dscl . -create /Users/joeadmin UniqueID "510"
dscl . -create /Users/joeadmin PrimaryGroupID 20
dscl . -create /Users/joeadmin NFSHomeDirectory /Users/joeadmin
dscl . -passwd /Users/joeadmin password

dscl . -append /Groups/admin GroupMembership joeadmin

After the above, the user doesn't become admin. What next?

If you are here and your system is running anything from 10.10 and newer, the sysadminctl command is your best friend. It does a lot of magic that DSCL can't do.

Here's the output for sysadminctl:

sysadminctl[21233:29122637] Usage: sysadminctl
    -deleteUser <user name> [-secure || -keepHome]
    -newPassword <new password> -oldPassword <old password> [-passwordHint <password hint>]
    -resetPasswordFor <local user name> -newPassword <new password> [-passwordHint <password hint>]
    -addUser <user name> [-fullName <full name>] [-UID <user ID>] [-password <user password>] [-hint <user hint>] [-home <full path to home>] [-admin] [-picture <full path to user image>]

Pass '-' instead of password in commands above to request prompt.

Then you'll want to do:

sudo createhomedir -c 2>&1 | grep -v "shell-init"

To add/remove users use dseditgroup:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a usernametoadd -t user admin
sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a usernametoadd -t user wheel


How to update iOS on iPad 4? My iPad isn't updating its iOS version (10.3.4). How do I fix this?
My iPad is the iPad 4 (doesn't show option to update).

The iPad 4 can only be upgraded up to iOS 10.3.4, it will not show an option to upgrade to iOS 11 or later.


This disk is your os x startup disk and appears to have been partitioned by another utility I had Windows 7 installed via Bootcamp but I messed things up when I tried to install Ubuntu as a third OS. Now my goal is to go back to OS X and Windows 7/8.1 dual boot. However, when I go to Boot Camp Assistant I get the following message when I select the disk where I need to install Windows.

  This disk is your os x startup disk and appears to have been
  partitioned by another utility.

How can I re-install Windows 7 via Boot Camp Assistant?

The following may be useful:

sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=120034123776; sectorsize=512; blocks=234441648
gpt show: disk0: PMBR at sector 0
gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1
gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 234441647
      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6
         40     409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
     409640  162535816      2  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  162945456    1269536      3  GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
  164214992       1840
  164216832    3817472      4  GPT part - 0657FD6D-A4AB-43C4-84E5-0933C84B4F4F
  168034304   66407311
  234441615         32         Sec GPT table
  234441647          1         Sec GPT header

sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0    geometry: 14593/255/63 [234441648 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: EE 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [         1 -  234441647] <Unknown ID>
 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

I have a mid 2010 13" MacBookPro running 10.9.2

Yah disk utility is bound and determined to not let you (or itself) potentially erase any more data, especially if it sees the signature of another disk partitioning utility. Welcome to the Wonderful World of Macintosh Computing... sigh.

Probably your best bet is to back up your Mac and Windows data (if not already) and boot the Mac from the COMMAND-R keyboard shortcut and wipe and reinstall from scratch. Your Ubuntu installer has gone and done some things to the partition table that Apple doesn't like and it is likely not going to be recoverable easily.

You could likely haunt the Ubuntu forums as I am sure this has been done and CAN be done. Heck there might even be someone around these parts with that experience.  But if you need the Mac back up and running ASAP the quickest way might just be to repartition and start from scratch.


El Capitan and old iPhoto backup Migration from time machine back up. OS of old and new El Capitan)
What will happen with all my photos in iPhoto of the back up? Will they be transferred with migration, or should I first install iphoto on the new macbook?

Photos will read the iPhoto database and tell you if the old system is too old. In that case, you'll need to download a tool to fix the library or upgrade iPhoto.

You certainly don't need iPhoto on the new mac unless you a) want it b) it helps you in upgrading an old library.

Basically, don't erase the old Mac or backups and jump in. We're here if you run into a specific error in the process.


Remap Left Spacebar key on MS Sculpt ergonomic keyboard I'm using the Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard with my Macbook Retina, on Yosemite. This ergonomic keyboard has a split Spacebar key, like so:

I want to remap the left Spacebar key to Backspace to simplify my typing. On Windows, a custom driver enables this remapping out of the box. However, this driver is not available on OS X.

I've already installed Karabiner and experimented with remapping keys. When I start up the EventViewer in Karabiner, both keys show up as KeyCode::SPACE. Is there a lower-level keycode I can access to differentiate between the left and right Spacebar keys?

Any alternate solutions are also welcome!

The best thing I've come up with so far is to use Right-Alt as backspace. Not quite as good, but it gets the job done.


Why does my path not get saved even after editing ~/.bashrc? I've added maven to my path, but it doesn't seem to be persisting to the path beyond the lifetime of the terminal application.  I've modified my ~/.bashrc, but it still isn't storing the modified path.

Here is my ~/.bashrc:

export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.7`
export PATH=$PATH:/Users/chris/Dev/Libraries/apache-maven-3.1.1/bin

And here is the result of echo $PATH:

chriss-macbook:~ chris$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin

Why isn't my modified path getting persisted between terminal sessions, and how can I solve that?

OS X Terminal does not source ~/.bashrc. Instead, it sources ~/.bash_profile. Either…

Put the lines that are in your ~/.bashrc in your ~/.bash_profile instead.
Source your ~/.bashrc in your ~/.bashprofile.

Add the following line to your ~/.bashprofile:

[[ -s ~/.bashrc ]] && source ~/.bashrc


Red pixels on Mojave and Catalina Dark Mode I purchased a new MacBook Pro 15 (2017) and immediately installed Mojave. I then started to see red pixels appearing on the same line as the top menubar. It happens very rarely, but has already occurred about 4 times per week. Pixels disappear if you move any window. I noticed this while using Firefox and iTerm.

Could it be an issue with hardware (dead pixels) or software (Mojave dark theme)?

Update:
This bug is potentially fixed in macOS 11 Big Sur. The bug report I filed is now marked as:

Potential fix identified - In macOS 11

One commenter, Curtis Hard, has stated the issue no longer happens for them with Big Sur.
It's unclear if the fix will be backported to 10.15 or 10.14.

It's definitely not a dead-pixel issue. I've determined it's probably a software bug introduced in Mojave and still present in Catalina. I'm not able to screenshot the glitch in most cases (the glitch will typically immediately disappear), but I have managed to capture it on a couple of videos and screenshots.
The fact that it can be captured in software and the fact that the cursor can cover over the glitched pixels indicates the issue is not in the screen but happening in software.
Examples:
Firefox
Here's a screenshot from a screen recording of Firefox, where you can see the grey pixels.

Interestingly, if we zoom in a bit, we can see the pixels are actually outside the window itself.

Finder
I've also captured similar glitches happening in Apple's own Finder on regular screenshots.

Notes:
Some interesting things to note about it.

I've only seen it happen against dark areas of a window.
It can happen in both light mode and dark mode (if the window is dark anyway).
It mostly happens at the edge of a window (where the shadow is), though I have seen it on the inside of some.
It often (but not always) disappears when window focus changes, among other things (window focus changing causes window shadows to change).

I've been able to change focus to and from an iTerm window with no shadow (when transparency is enabled), and the glitch outside the bottom edge of the window persisted.

It can be captured with QuickTime Player's Screen Recording feature.
Mysteriously, though it can be capture with QuickTime, it is invisible to Apple's developer tool Pixie, as seen in this screen recording. Likewise, the Digital Color Meter app does not see it either.
I've seen it mostly in grey and red, but also green, yellow, and more colors.
The glitch can happen even when Finder is not running, so it's not a part of Finder.
Running killall Dock while SSH'd into a machine displaying the glitch may cause it to stop, though this may just be a side-effect of shadow changes.
I tried suspending all the Firefox processes (firefox + plugin-container processes) over SSH with kill -SIGSTOP while the glitch was happening and the glitch continued to blink, further indicating the glitch is happening outside the Firefox processes.
Going further, I tried systematically suspending processes over SSH, to see which one might be responsible. The only one suspending causes the flashing to freeze with was WindowServer.
Using the Quartz Debug developer tool (one of the Xcode addition tools, mentioned here), I tested some of the options it had. When the "Disable 2D Acceleration" option was enabled, I was unable to reproduce the glitch like I could when it was disabled. The Autoflush drawing and Vertical Sync options had no effect.
It seems to only happen with the integrated graphics card. I have not been able to reproduce it while the discrete card is active.
So far I've only heard reports of it happening on recent MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models. I was unable to reproduce this issue on a previous generation MacBook Air running the same OS version.
I've not yet seen it happen in a Mojave VM using VMware Fusion, further indicating it only happens with certain hardware.
To remove all variables, I tried running a clean install of Mojave 10.14.1 on an external drive. With all default settings, I was quickly able to reproduce it Light Mode with Firefox 63.0.1 with the dark theme and dark developer tools theme enabled and the console open (screen recording).
Browser-like applications appear especially likely to trigger it (ie. Firefox and Electron-based apps).
Applications I've seen it with (I've probably forgotten some):

Firefox (especially versions < 70)

Top edge (requires dark Firefox theme)
Bottom edge (requires dark bottom of window from open search bar with dark theme, dev tools with dark theme, or dark web page content). Also done on a clean 10.14.1 install.

Atom (may require Settings > Core > Title Bar > custom)

Top edge
Bottom edge

Discord

Bottom edge
Inside window

iTerm (with a black, semi-transparent background; it does not seem to happen with an opaque background)

Top edge
Bottom edge
Inside window (at the bottom edge of one pane with split panes)

Finder

Top edge
Inside window (tab bar)

Activity Monitor

Top edge

Disk Utility

Top edge

Console

Inside window (over the transparent column headers)

Mail

Inside window (over the transparent column headers)

Archive Utility

Top edge

Hex Fiend

Top edge

Google Chrome (when using macOS dark mode)

Inside window at chrome://downloads/ under light grey horizontal line of top menu bar)

I've also seen it happen once at the bottom edge of the drop-down menus from the top menu bar.
The selection of apps and places I've seen it with make me suspicious it may in some way be window transparency related.

Things that have no impact on the glitch (tested with Firefox):

Doing a clean install of 10.14.1.
Resetting PRAM.
Resetting SMC.
Open the app in low resolution mode.
System Preferences:

Display resolution scaling.
Display color profile.
Night Shift.
System accent color.
Auto-hiding dock.
Accessibility > Display > Use grayscale
Accessibility > Display > Invert colors

Hardware:
I've only heard claims of it affecting different MacBook Pro models from 2016+ and the 2018+ MacBook Air (the models with USB Type-C). If you are seeing this issue on another Apple computer model, or don't have this issue on one of the affected models, I would be interested to hear about it.
Conclusion:
Unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to prevent this glitch at this point, aside from forcing the use of the discrete card if your computer has one (and you don't mind the reduced battery life), but hopefully it will be resolved in a future update.
Even more unfortunate, it still has not been fixed in any version from 10.14.0 through 10.14.6 or the second supplemental update since, and remains unfixed in the first supplemental update for 10.15.7. A comment from Curtis Hard confirms it was still present in the Big Sur betas at the time (it would be great if someone could confirm or deny it exists in newer builds).
I filed a bug report on bugreport.apple.com (not public, but 46079638), which has been marked as a duplicate of 45841204. I don't have access to that bug report, but thought I would mention it in case anyone wants to reference it.
On a side note, there's a good change Apple's future ARM-based computers won't have this issue since they won't have the Intel integrated GPU's. That won't fix the issue for existing Intel computers though.
Firefox 70+:
Since Firefox 70 it doesn't happen as often as it did before, though it still does happen. I suspect this is related to some improvements that reduce the amount of screen drawing.

Steps to reproduce:
I've had the best luck reproducing the bug with Firefox.

Open Firefox (63.0.1 in my case)
Set Firefox theme to Dark

View > Toolbars > Customize... > Themes > Dark

Navigate to a page like http://example.com/
Open developer tools

Tools > Web Developer > Inspector

Set developer tools theme to dark

In the top right, click ... > Settings > Themes > Dark

Click the Inspector tab
Open the console

In the top right, click ... > Show Split Console

Ensure the developer tools covers the bottom of the window

If it doesn't, in the top right, click ... > Dock to Bottom

Reload the page until the glitch happens

References:

Bugzilla: Colored Artifacts Appear Above Tab Bar with OS X Mojave in Dark Mode
MacRumors: Weird Issue Red pixels on Mojave Dark Mode
Reddit: Red dot blinking between the head bar and the firefox window on Mac.[...]
Reddit: Anyone else dealing with screen glitches on Mojave?
Reddit: MBP15 2018 Intel GPU artifact
Reddit: Flickering pixels above Firefox title bar — macOS
Reddit: Graphic Glitches when watch Netflix, anyone know about this?

Possibly loosely related: Avoid using a transparent surface by using CoreAnimation (if my suspicion that it is transparency related is correct, that change may eventually have an impact on this bug happening with Firefox, if only by avoiding the OS bug).
Note: If you have any info to share but don't have an account here, you can contact me here.


Change password for iCloud keychain / prevent it from being unlocked with computer password I use iCloud Keychain across iOS devices and my MacBook Pro. I recently discovered that on my Mac I can access the passwords stored in the iCloud keychain simply with my (admin) login credentials. Is there a way to give the iCloud Keychain a specific password?
I would like to prevent the iCloud Keychain from being unlockable with my computer login (password and Touch ID) and, ideally, on my iOS devices also with my online Apple ID.

Alternatively, if the above is not possible, can I use a different Keychain for syncing?  I know, on the Mac I can create personal Keychains that have their own unique passwords. Is there a way to sync these Keychains across devices? So far I was unable to get them to show up on my iPhone.

Thank you very much!

EDIT:
Following suggestions from bmike's answer below who refers to this question, there are possibilities how to specifically change either the login password (using passwd) or the password of a specific keychain (using security ... – follow the link for further information).  However, what I am trying to do is to change the iCloud keychain password.

The iCloud keychain shows up as a separate keychain in the sidebar of Keychain Access, but it doesn't seem to be stored in any accessible place (i.e., in a .keychain-db file) the password of which could be changed via the methods suggested.

If I get the info from any item in the iCloud keychain I can simply show the password by entering my login password.  It asks me for the "Local Items" keychain, which seems to be the same like my login keychain (at least it obeys the login password).

Even when I try to specify "Access Control" for an item, I'm not allowed. In regular items, I can click "Ask for Keychain password" under the "Access Control" tab. But in the items under iCloud Keychain it displays "Access for this item cannot be edited" there.

Any further help is much appreciated!

I’m afraid the cloud keychain is the only one you can not lock your account out of so you'll likely fail to do what you ask.

All other keychains are trivial to choose an different password - even the log in keychain is easy since you can change your log in password with the passwd command line tool. Then, each time you log in to your Mac - the keychain password will be what it was before you changed the log in password and have to enter the second password.

Most people hate that situation, but you could run that way intentionally if that suits you.

The iCloud Keychain is tied to secure tokens so that you can have different passwords on different devices and I believe it uses your iCloud password to generate the unlock tokens. If so, you’ll have to disable iCloud Keychain syncing in all likelihood to lock / change it via passwords.


Is the white MacBook suitable for software development? I'd like to know if you think the white MacBook (2.26ghz, 2gig ram) is sufficient for software development (using Xcode, Interface Builder etc...)

To elaborate on @Martín's answer, a MacBook is perfectly fine for development, I use one myself and never had issues.

But you could improve it. Switching to 4GB of RAM would be first thing on the list. Using a second screen could also vastly improve this setup. Another (bigger) investment would be to buy a SSD.


How to change my phone number on Facetime and iMessage? So I have already changed my number on my Apple ID and on my Gmail, but when I log in with my Apple ID on Facetime and iMessage it still has my old phone number.I restarted my phone but still the same.I look forward to your answers and I would really but really appreciate if you can help me!

Remove a phone number from an Apple ID, sign out of FaceTime and Messages on your iPhone:
1. Settings > Messages > Send & Receive. Tap your Apple ID, then tap Sign Out.
2. Settings > FaceTime. Tap your Apple ID, then tap Sign Out.


El Capitan: DNS cache won't flush I'm trying to get my El Capitan's (10.11.6) DNS cache to flush, to try and solve slow localhost domain name resolution, but nothing I do has any effect.  My computer name, hostname and hard disk names used to be as follows:

Santa's MacBook Pro
santas-macbook-pro-2.local
Santa's MacBook

(I didn't choose to put the "-2" at the end of the hostname; that's what the Mac had in the Sharing preference pane.)

I tried editing the etc/hosts file as follows:

127.0.0.1    localhost santas-macbook-pro-2.local
255.255.255.255    broadcasthost
::1             localhost santas-macbook-pro-2.local
fe80::1%lo0    localhost

but even after a restart the resolution was still as slow as ever.

Tried renaming the computer and hostname to trial and trial.local (updating etc/hosts accordingly) and the hard disk to tt.  Got OnyX to flush various caches including system and kernel extensions, restarted, still slow.

In running the little inetTester I get Santa's MacBook Pro.local returned.

I've tried flushing the DNS cache following the instructions here, restarted, and I still get Santa's MacBook Pro.local returned.

It seems discoveryutil doesn't exist any more (in any case it's not on my machine), so I can't even look at the contents of the cache.

What on earth do I have to do to get this machine to forget about being Santa's MacBook Pro?

You are mixing a lot of completely or partly different/unrelated things here.

To properly and quickly name resolve your hard disk/SSD, you also have to add its name to the hosts file:

127.0.0.1    localhost santas-macbook-pro-2.local tt-this_is_a_VM_volume_and_therefore_slower_than_a_real_disk

Now you can check the response time by pinging it:

ping tt-this_is_a_VM_disk_and_therefore_slower_than_a_real_disk
PING tt-this_is_a_VM_disk_and_therefore_slower_than_a_real_disk (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.054 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.089 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.071 ms

--- tt-this_is_a_VM_disk_and_therefore_slower_than_a_real_disk ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.054/0.071/0.089/0.014 ms

The average round-trip time is ~0.071 ms. So the time needed to resolve it is less than ~0.071/2 ms. With a real HDD/SSD you can expect even faster responses.

Please use the short tt (the name of your volume) instead of my long tt-this_.... name to get an even quicker response.

To check your DNS cache open Console.app (enter mDNSResponder in the Search field) and Terminal.app.

Check the time and enter in Terminal: sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder

Roughly the first half of the output in Console with the time stamp noted previously is the DNS cache. The cache part starts with ------------ Cache ------------- and ends with a summary like Cache currently contains 391 entities; 33 referenced by active questions.

To kill the cache use sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

Re-check the cache by entering  sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder again.
discoveryutil was introduced in OS X 10.10.0 and replaced by its predecessor mDNSResponder in OS X 10.10.4.
To modify your local hostname and computer name use scutil:

sudo scutil --set LocalHostName trial
sudo scutil --set ComputerName Trial

If you still get a Bonjour name (e.g. Santa's MacBook Pro.local) your hostname is probably set incorrectly. Either change the hostname by entering:

sudo scutil --set HostName trial

or remove it completely (recommended) by modifying the file preferences.list:

sudo  nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

and remove your current malformed HostName near the bottom of the file:

    <key>HostName</key>
    <string>Santa's MacBook Pro.local</string>

☛

    <key>HostName</key>
    <string></string>

You may also have to remove the preferences backup file preferences.plist.old. Reboot afterwards.
Name resolution is roughly done in this order:

  files (e.g. /etc/hosts) > mDNS > DNS)  \
   ↕                         (↓ )   (↓)   | rather remote hostnames
DNS cache (memory) (←-----------------)  /
   ↑                                       \
memory                                      | rather local hostnames (including hosts file)
   ↑                                        |
 file (preferences.plist)                  /

inetTester is a tool to quickly check the elapsed time spent from the Java layer to access the localhost domain name. This is not the time to get (resolve) the local hostname. The hostname is stored somewhere in memory and a system call takes nanoseconds to get it.
The name of your main volume (previously Santa's MacBook, now tt) is in no way related with the DNS cache or a slow local hostname resolution.

Regarding item 1 in the list. I wear Dark Vader's helmet party hat and got nasty temporarily.


Some problems after installing Windows 10 on iMac I installed windows 10 two days ago on my iMac 2011 21.5 inch with drivers from bootcamp. Unfortunately, I don't have sound and I don't have 1920x1080 screen resolution :(

My question is: What i need to do to repair this?
And if i need to install other bootcamp drivers, how do I delete the old bootcamp?

Sounds like you have a driver issue. I suggest reinstalling Bootcamp from Apple's website.

If you aren't currently in the Windows 10 partition, restart the computer and navigate into Windows 10.
Download this from Apple's website (https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1638?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US)

  This download is specific to your 2011 iMac but you can easily find
  downloads for other macs by navigating to support.apple.com/downloads
  and searching for "bootcamp". To determine if a bootcamp package is compatible, look under the "system requirements" link.

Extract the zip file to your directory of choice.
Navigate to BootCamp5.0.5033\BootCamp\setup.exe and run the setup.exe file
Close all other programs while this runs.
After the installer completes, restart the computer and reenter Windows 10
To ensure the latest drivers and software, run Apple Software update from within Windows 10.

Hope this helps you. Let me know what happens.


Tiered list paragraph in Pages 5 I have a document converted from pages 09 and I am trying to achieve with Pages 5 something that I was able to do easily with older version.

Basically I want a series of paragraphs structured like this, with no indentation, all aligned to left:

1.Title (h1)
text following...
1.1 title (h2)
text following...
1.1.1 title (h3)
text following...
1.1.2 title (h3)
text following...

I have three main header style header 1, header 2 and header 3, represented above as h1,2,3. I have assigned a numbered list to each of them, giving the correct checkbox option and the value from drop down selection that is translated from Italian: start from preceding.

However, I am not able to build such structure. Sometimes, I end up with this:

1.Title (h1)
text following...
1.1 title (h2)
text following...
2 title (h3)
text following...
3 title (h3)
text following...

Simiply select  Bullet & Numbering style to be Tiered Numbers and it should work fine in iWork '09.


Why are these corporate certificates pre-installed and is it safe to delete/"Never Trust" most/all of them? I was going through this macOS Security and Privacy Guide repo, step by step, and found some good privacy tips. However, when I arrived at the Certificate Authorities section I got a little confused. I don't understand certificates that much and it was a little shocking to find Amazon and GoDaddy certs in my Keychain System Roots.

The guide recommends that I "disable certificate authorities through Keychain Access by marking them as Never Trust and closing the window." So far I followed the advice and changed the Govt. Root Cert. Authority to "Never Trust." I'm still not sure if I should do the same on the rest.

I realize asking for an explanation of what certificates are is a huge question, so I want to simplify it: Why are these corporate certificates pre-installed in macOS and is it safe to delete/"Never Trust" most/all of them?

Basically certificates are used so that you can say "I got this information from an otherwise untrusted source, but because it has this associated certificate, I'm going to put some trust in it". This is possible because "someone" has done some sort of vetting of these sources.

In practice, a lot of times this means for example a company wanting to open a web shop goes to a certificate vendor (such as GoDaddy you mentioned) and buys a certificate. The certificate vendor will then do some kind of checking before they issue the certificate.

Depending on the type of certificate it might be that they check that the company controls the domain of their web site (such as my-web-shop.com), that they control e-mail addresses (such as postmaster@my-web-shop.com) - or even checking company registration papers, ensuring that the postal address is correct, etc.

This makes it possible for ordinary users to visit a web site and be somewhat sure that the data they received comes from the intended source.

You might notice that something is missing here - how are the vetters vetted?

This is done by operating system and browser vendors such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, etc. They basically keep a list of certificate vendors that their software will trust by default.

Apple will for example make changes to that list when you update macOS to ensure that it keeps being valid. In addition, you yourself can make your own decisions on adding or removing vendors from the list by changing the trust levels.

Whether it is "safe" or not to remove the trust is a matter of your preference. If you remove the trust of a specific vendor, you will be prompted when accessing web sites that bought certificates from that vendor - stating that the site is not secure. You can usually override that on a site per site basis, but not always.

Note: When I say "bought from a vendor" it doesn't necessarily mean that money was exchanged. Some certificate issuers do not charge (such as Let's Encrypt) and some service providers provide certificates for free with other services.


Proper group ID (gid) for Lion? If you create a brand new admin account in Lion, the following will be your id and group memberships (from $ id [new Lion account] | perl -lne 's/ /\n/g; s/,/\n\t/g; print;'):

uid=504(lt)
gid=20(staff)
groups=20(staff)
    402(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1)
    12(everyone)
    33(_appstore)
    61(localaccounts)
    79(_appserverusr)
    80(admin)
    81(_appserveradm)
    98(_lpadmin)
    100(_lpoperator)
    204(_developer)
    403(com.apple.sharepoint.group.2)
    401(com.apple.access_screensharing)

In contrast, an older OS X account will have these uid, gid, etc:

uid=501(andrew)
gid=501(andrew)
groups=501(andrew)
    403(com.apple.sharepoint.group.2)
    204(_developer)
    100(_lpoperator)
    98(_lpadmin)
    81(_appserveradm)
    80(admin)
    79(_appserverusr)
    61(localaccounts)
    12(everyone)
    401(com.apple.access_screensharing)
    402(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1)

Note that the gid=20(staff) on the newer account and the that user is a member of 20(staff).

When you upgrade an older account to Lion, the older user and group names are kept.

There have been issues reported with not having staff group membership on upgraded accounts:

Inability to install or upgrade Homebrew;
The display of 'Fetching' when pressing Cmd+I on files in your user folder
ACL and permission issues.

The current workaround seems to be this:

Add the user to staff (i.e.: $ sudo dscl . append /Groups/staff GroupMembership `whoami` or equivalent)
Use Lion Recovery to restore default home folder permissions (Click on the 'No Disc – Lion' tab).

So far, this has fixed a lot of the issues I had with the upgrade, and I seem to have longer battery life and lower CPU usage.

However, here are the questions I have:

1. Should I go through the trouble of changing the gid=501 to gid=20 on my account or is just being a member of the group staff good enough?

2. Is being a member of 20(staff) the same as having gid=20(staff)?

3. If I did change the gid= part of my account, how do I do that on Lion? I only know how to do it on Ubuntu...

I haven't seen any difference in how OS X treats the primary group vs. a user's other groups, so I don't think it makes any real difference.  I'd be inclined to "fix" it for neatness, though.  These commands should set the primary group to 20, and then add a "secondary" membership in the old andrew group:

sudo dscl . create /Users/andrew PrimaryGroupID 20
sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a andrew -t user andrew

(Note: using dscl to add secondary group memberships doesn't quite do it right -- use dseditgroup instead.)


'No such file' when running rm AppleSetupDone from single-user mode I'm in High Sierra (10.13.6) and recently I renamed my account in Users & Group. Now I lost access to my administrator (so I can't install apps or change settings in System Preferences).

I already tried to solve my problem by following I don't have administrator account on my mac but I can't make it past the

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

command, or maybe I'm doing something wrong there?

However, here's the single-user mode screenshot:

You need to enter the commands precisely, noting all spaces. If no message is shown, the command was successful, much like /sbin/mount -uw /. Enter precisely the following, followed by ⏎ Enter/Return:

/sbin/mount -uw /

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

With the first command, there's no need to keep re-running it, and no need to run it differently, it worked first try when you didn't receive an error.
With the second command, all three tries missed the space between rm and /var. Make sure the space is typed.

You should not receive a message for either command and will be returned to the prompt (#) after each is executed. Finally, run reboot.


How can I disable automatic scanning for WiFi networks? The objective is to strengthen the WiFi reception (at the moment without additional hardware).

I live in an area with a 100+ radio signals.

Majority is useless (to low signal) but still scanned and displayed. The one I get connection is so low it keeps lossing it if I sneeze.

Also I observed that my WiFi keeps scanning (looking for a Network) even tho I am connected.

Can I disable the continuos looking for a network? hoping to gain some signal strength on the one I am connected.

Additional information:
I have a MacBook Air with OSX 10.8.3, so no plugs for external antena that I know off. I live in Spain, and the routers are not meine nor accessible to me. Getting my private internet (ISP) is not a option.

AFAIK there is no way to disable wireless network scanning. You can only disable the alerts about new wifi networks being found.

More significantly, because of the way wi-fi works, the transmission rate is going to be very very low due to all the stations interfering with each other.

But reading into your question at a deeper level, "How can I get decent wifi"

Google "pringle can antenna" You will find a raft of recipes for high gain directional wifi antennas.  This can be used to select a given station out of the crowd.
This, by itself leaves you leashed to an ethernet cable to the external antenna, which you really don't want to move.
So you connect the pringles cantenna to your own wifi router, set it to broadcast on a seperate channel (ideally >3 channels away from the one the cantenna is listening to)

Finally, you may find that the easier way to get anything done is to use a wired conection.