Allow access to www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies, but not www.bbc.co.uk I'm using OS X Parental Controls to limit what my son can do on our Mac.

He has his own user account, managed by the Parental Controls.

Under Website Restrictions, I've chosen "Allow access to only these websites".  The list of websites we've set up contains http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/, which contains child-friendly content.

Unfortunately, Parental Controls ignores the /cbeebies/ path in the URL, and it allows access to any web page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/.  This is a large site including news which I'd rather my son didn't have access to.

Apple have documented this behaviour in support article HT2900 (and although the article title refers to 10.5 and 10.6, this still seems to be the case in 10.8 and 10.9):

  For most websites, the Internet content filter considers the domain name and not the path. For example, if http://www.example.com is added to the list, then http://pictures.example.com will be allowed, as will http://www.example.com/movies.

How can I set up my son's user account to block access to the BBC website generally, but still allow access to CBeebies?

My son uses Safari and the Simple Finder
We are currently using 10.8 but could upgrade to 10.9 (however, I've just tested and the issue persists there)
We are already using OpenDNS and could apply some blocking there, but I want the blocking to apply only to my son's account on this Mac, not other accounts or other machines on our network
I'm fairly experienced with UNIX, Apache etc.  I'm wondering about setting up a local web server (eg http://localhost/cbeebies/) which would act as a proxy for the CBeebies site only, and add that URL to the Parental Controls whitelist... but before I spend the time to puzzle that out, can anyone share any relevant experience?

This seems resolved in 10.11 El Capitan (and perhaps also 10.10 Yosemite... haven't tested there).

Specifically, the following now works (and is what I wanted):

set "Allow access to only these websites"
visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ in Safari
grant access
access is now granted when visiting http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ and pages with the same URL prefix, eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/topics
access is denied to pages on the same domain with a different URL prefix, eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/, or http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer.


Is there an equivalent to the Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder on macOS? Is there an equivalent to the Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder on macOS and or iOS?

If you do not wish to use video recording, I often press Command+Shift+4 and take a screenshot of every step. The screenshot names will reflect the time they were taken so they maintain order of execution.


What is writing all these files and folders to my Documents? Inside my Documents folder there are a bunch of folders named with what appear to be hexidecimal numbers, eg. 01, 1b, 84, aa, etc. Often they're empty, but some have one or two files named with a hash: 5aaebbb6c171adb2159c17cd1c8e629fc774f1be.file I assume the files are binaries because when I open them in a text editor they consist of rows of eight two digit hex values, 00eb babf 314c 00eb babf 3130 d3aa 0109.
I deleted the folders a few weeks ago, but they slowly grew back.

My question is twofold:

What is writing these files/folders?
And because I doubt it can be diagnosed from my description, how
do I monitor and figure out what is writing them?

I'm on 10.11, El Capitan.

I sometimes run a Windows VM in VirtualBox, I run Vagrant from the command line, and Docker as well. I run phpstorm, Spotify, uTorrent, Steam, Slack, Skitch, Xcode, Tunnel Bear. The list goes on. I guess what I'm looking for is a strategy or technique to figure out which application is writing.

A few things for you to try:

Per this SO link, do lsof path-to-filename to list all processes accessing that file. There's also a frontend to lsof called Sloth. The problem with this is if the programme doing the writes only edits the file momentarily (like if it did touch foldername) then you probably wouldn't see it, since lsof only lists current processes' access to the file.

Alternatively, get FSeventer (direct download link from archive.org - in my (klanomath's) opinion the only reliable source), which graphically monitors filesystem IO events. You could probably set it to run on your documents folder and then wait for one of those writes to happen, although based on your description that may take a while. The website for FSeventer seems to be down right now :(, but if/when it goes back up it may be able to solve your problem. FSeventer isn't really ElCap ready and often fails to work after the first launch - usually it works after launching it a second time.


Can I print to PDF with my iPad? The missing print to PDF feature on iPad (like that of Mac OS X) has been written about in a couple places on the web, but they all reference iPad apps that are no longer present in the App Store.

Is there a way to get PDF generation in the iPad print dialog?

Has Apple decided to pull such products from the App Store?

Those products didn't currently (and don't today) follow the accepted API that Apple provides for apps submitted to the App Store. Basically, Apple provides the print code and apps can't modify or extend the print function that iOS provides.

Until this changes, you will be bound to workarounds:

Jailbreak the device and look for something that enables this function.
Print to a device that will render the job as PDF. I know of Printopia that will do explicitly this. You can even control which folder on the mac gets the PDF and have it uploaded back to the phone or to a private cloud so you can get at the PDF again systematically from iOS.
Use apps that can save to PDF like Pages and many others, but this is an app feature, not built into the main print settings.


How to select Target mode with only one monitor I have hooked a new Mac Mini up to my monitor but want to migrate data from my old Mac Mini to the new one but only have one monitor and Migration Assistant requires that I start the old one up in target mode. With only one monitor. How can I start that old one up in Target mode so the new one can recognize it?

You don't need to plug a monitor into your old Mac Mini.  Just power it on while holding down the T key and it will go into target disk mode.


How do I run a jar when I double-click it? So, I double click on my jar file and it just blinks a window with white screen then it disappears. After that, I right-click and select "Open with jar launcher" it is the same. too. I opened up Terminal and type java -jar "System FRONT.jar" then it opened up perfectly.

I want it to be opened directly when double clicking it! How do I do that?

You can prepend a short script to the .jar to make it executable via double click. In Terminal do the following:

$ cat > header-template <<"EOF"
#!/bin/sh

exec java -jar $0 "$@" > /dev/null

EOF
$ cat header-template "System FRONT.jar" > executable_app
$ chmod +x executable_app

Double-clicking executable_app should now launch the application.

Why does this work in the first place? Well, a .jar is just a .zip archive which gets unpacked and executed by java. And the zip format allows to prepend additional stuff in front of the actual archive. Any zip unarchiver skips this part until it finds the start of the archive (indicated by PK...).


Screen flickers intermittently / regular interval Macbook pro 2019 touchbar I upgraded my Mac book pro 2019 touchbar model to Mojave macOs. after upgrading i observed that my screen is flickering with a strip like formation. it will start and stop randomly. i tried all the fixes available around the internet but none of them worked.

Luckily few days back i got an upgrade toCatalina. without wasting my time i upgraded the OS and now its been almost a week since that screen flickering has gone.

Ps. For all the software engineer folks. Even big giants like Apple also ships buggy software. so dont hesitate in writing buggy code ;-)


Automator "Add to Album" error This Automator workflow worked in Sierra, but it fails in High Sierra with the error, "The chosen receiving album does not exist in the Photos library: ".  The album does exist, and the dropdown list shows all my existing albums.  In the error message, there is no text after the colon, so it seems to be trying to add to blank-named album.

This is actually a use case for the "Import Files into Photos" action if the images are coming from outside of Photos.


Weird behavior of spotlight & program icons My spotlight is acting a bit scatchy, it shows every program as a rar? archive.

Did a rebuild of the index file.
Did a repair permissions.

Who can Help me?

Thread about this problem at Apple forum

This is open bug known by Apple, as mentioned by rei_vilo Mar 28, 2014

Temporary solutions might be:

Permission Repair with Disk Utility
Rebuild Launch Services Database sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed
Restart the SystemUIServer killall -HUP SystemUIServer
Rebuild Spotlight index sudo mdutil -E /
If installed Parallel Desktop turn off "Share Windows applications with Mac"


How to get rid of "The disk you inserted was not readable" and auto ignore it? (without installing apps) whenever I plug in an ext4 partition type external USB drive, this message will pop up. and then I need to press "Ignore" to ignore it. This is very annoying. How can I auto ignore it?

I did google this for hours and can not find a proper solution. I don't want to install any non open source apps for doing such a simple task. I think it should be doable by changing some config files.

PS: If you are curious why I want to plug in ext4 drive, because I will later use it with a linux VM (virtualbox+vagrant).

Thanks a lot for your help.

Edited: I don't want to disable automount for all types of drives. I just want to ignore ext4 popup or that specific drive. Cheers.

Due to no answer yet, I did find a workaround and want to share here.

(1) Resize the external drive and create a small 100MB Apple_HFS typed partition on it. (label the partition with the name dummy).

Explanation: Since there is a recognized readable partition in the external drive now, there will be no warning popup at all and will auto mount it as /Volumes/dummy/.

(2) Create a shell script in the PATH with the name vagrant-up.sh which has the following content:

diskutil umount /Volumes/dummy/ && cd ~/vagrant/myVM/ && vagrant up

So to run my vm, simply execute vagrant-up.sh.

That's all. It works well so far.


iPhone 5c SIM card switch and have data on new one? I have an iPhone 5C, and my grandpa pays my bill. If I buy at new iPhone 5s and put my SIM card from the 5c in, would I still have data and service? From just switching the SIM?

A SIM may be removed from one device and inserted into another and the phone number and attendant account will then be associated with the new device.


Drag and drop items as attachment in Entourage I find it little tedious to drop items in new email and make it an attachment. I need to resize both, source and destination window, so that I can pick and drop the item. This takes time. Yes few seconds more, but it matters.

Is it possible to drag an item from source window and then press command+~ (or command+tab) to chose a destination window and then drop it there? Any other easier solution available?

For most Macintosh applications that accept drag and drop, you can drag and drop files to their Dock icon. So your "flow" might be:

Open the finder window with the file you want to send
Drag it to your dock
Drop it on the Entourage icon
Entourage will launch and should give you a new message, with that file attached

Hope this helps.


VMware fusion's Windows 7 takes long time to shut down (sometimes hang) I'm using Mac OS X 10.6.7 and VMware Fusion 3.1.3. I have Windows 7 on my VMware Fusion.

Sometimes it takes a very long time (30+ minutes) to shut down and sometimes forever (hang with the spinning curser saying it's shutting down..).  If I force quite VMware (and Win 7), the next time I start Windows 7 on VMware fusion it will take a very long time to start (15+ minutes), although it doesn't hang.

What is wrong? I think there's something I need to clean up but don't know where.

Upgrading to Fusion 4 will help some, but whether you upgrade or not, read VMware support article 1022625 to learn about the things that could be causing slowdowns and what you can do about them.

In particular, I recommend you follow the instructions labeled "Edit the virtual machine settings to reduce I/O usage by using more host memory":

  Add the following lines to the virtual machine's settings ( .vmx) file:

MemTrimRate = "0"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"

In short, Fusion's code base derives from a server environment where one server is running many, many virtual machines which all are using the same OS. That code base implements several strategies to allocate less host memory to an individual VM than the VM thinks it needs.  These settings turn those strategies off, which is a good thing for Fusion where you're typically running only one VM at a time.  In particular,  sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE" turns off sharing pages of memory using copy-on-write, which does not work well the way Fusion uses it on MacOS and causes insane delays shutting down VMs which use large amounts of memory.

I also recommend adding this to your VMX file at the same time:

# Do not allow VM memory to be swapped
Prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"

I've asked VMware to make these settings the defaults for Fusion, but I'm not holding my breath.  Until then, I manually add them to every VM I create, because, unfortunately, putting these changes in user- or system-wide config files seems not to have any effect.


Delete Wi-Fi network from mac How do I delete a network from my Mac?

I removed it from network preferences in the advanced pane but it still appears connected in my list.

I also tried looking for it in Keychain Access but it's not there and I'm still connected.

Disconnect from your current network:

sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/V*/A/R*/airport -z

Go to System Preferences → Network → Wi-Fi → Advanced… and remove the network from the list of preferred networks.


Font Installs, But Not in FontBook I've tried to install two TTF fonts, but they don't show up in FontBook.

Message in Console is:

Sandbox: FontValidator(897) deny(1) file-read-metadata /

The files were already present in ~/Library/Fonts but they had different permissions than the other files. By changing permissions -- using sudo chmod 755 blah.ttf -- and then running FontBook, everything worked.


How to replace Yosemite icons with those from Mavericks? Before upgrading to Yosemite, I'd like to backup app icons from Mavericks, as the new icons are so ugly.

What's the best way to keep a full copy of old system icons from Mavericks?

UPDATE:

Finally, I do it one by one using Yuki Yamashina's method.

Following @ohho's answer, I wrote a quick script that will save you the effort of adjusting the colour of each icon. This script handles Dropbox folder icons too. You will need imagemagick and xcode command line utilities installed. The best way to get both is to install homebrew and then run

brew install imagemagick

Here is the script. I chose to reduce saturation by -20% and adjust the hue to make the colour less green and more blue.

#!/bin/bash

# List of system icons which need to be changed
sys_icons="ApplicationsFolderIcon.icns BurnableFolderIcon.icns \
DesktopFolderIcon.icns DeveloperFolderIcon.icns DocumentsFolderIcon.icns \
DownloadsFolder.icns GenericFolderIcon.icns GenericSharepoint.icns \
GroupFolder.icns LibraryFolderIcon.icns MovieFolderIcon.icns \
MusicFolderIcon.icns OpenFolderIcon.icns PicturesFolderIcon.icns \
PublicFolderIcon.icns ServerApplicationsFolderIcon.icns \
SitesFolderIcon.icns SystemFolderIcon.icns UsersFolderIcon.icns \
UtilitiesFolder.icns"

# Back up CoreTypes.bundle just in case and copy the icons to ~/folder_icons
cp -r /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle ~/CoreTypes_BACKUP.bundle
mkdir ~/folder_icons
cd /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources
cp $sys_icons ~/folder_icons

# List of dropbox icons which need to be changed
dropbox_icons="DropboxFolderIconYosemite.icns DropboxAppFolderIconYosemite.icns \
DropboxPublicFolderIconYosemite.icns DropboxReadOnlySharedFolderIconYosemite.icns"

# Check if yosemite-ready dropbox is installed and copy the dropbox icons to ~/folder_icons
if [ -f "/Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/DropboxFolderIconYosemite.icns" ]; then
    cd /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources
    cp $dropbox_icons ~/folder_icons
fi

cd ~/folder_icons

# Change ownership of icns files to user
sudo chown `whoami` $sys_icons $dropbox_icons &> /dev/null

# Convert icns files to "iconset" folders containing png files
for icon in *.icns; do iconutil -c iconset "$icon"; done

# Use imagemagick to adjust saturation (-20%) and hue (+2%)
for icon in ./**/*.png; do mogrify -modulate 100,80,102 "$icon"; done

# Convert "iconset" folders back to icns files
for icon in *.iconset; do iconutil -c icns "$icon"; done

# Copy the modified system and dropbox icons back to their original bundles
sudo cp $sys_icons /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources
if [ -f "DropboxFolderIconYosemite.icns" ]; then
    cp $dropbox_icons /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources
fi

# Set owner/group to root/wheel and delete extended attributes
cd /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources
sudo chown root $sys_icons
sudo chgrp wheel $sys_icons
sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine $sys_icons &> /dev/null

# Delete icon cache (restart necessary)
sudo find /private/var/folders/ -name com.apple.dock.iconcache -exec rm {} \; &> /dev/null
sudo find /private/var/folders/ -name com.apple.iconservices -exec rm -rf {} \; &> /dev/null

# Remove working directory
rm -rf ~/folder_icons

Save this as say '~/folder_colour_adjuster.sh' and then run

sudo sh ~/folder_colour_adjuster.sh

Restart your mac and enjoy:


Minimizing process's memory usage After upgrade to Lion OS X I've noticed new "Safari Web Content" process which is separate from the Safari.app itself. And after some time it starts using huge amounts of memory (so far, 1.2G real memory logged). Is there a way to limit process's real memory usage to, say, 500M?

There's been a couple of threads about this issue on SuperUser. I was just looking mostly for information on the ulimit command but that apparently doesn't work, it seems like there may be some solutions on that link though.


MacBook Pro not loading although power adapter is connected I own a new MacBook Pro (bought three weeks ago).

Since I don't want to exhaust the 1000 expected full charge cycles this battery is rated at, I connect the MacBook with the power adapter when I'm working at home so I don't draw down the charge when AC power is available.

I connected my MacBook when it had almost 100 percent and since then it says that the power adapter is connected but the battery is not charging.
Now I have 80 percent left and the battery is still not charging.
I disconnected and connected the power, now it's charging.

I'm still worried if everything is okay. Are there are situations where the MacBook does not charge for good reasons or to explain why I didn't get the charge before 80% capacity?

Yes - the system management controller polls the battery infrequently, so when the first plug it in, sometimes the cable has some lint or just that the battery doesn't need charge. I wouldn't worry at all and I wouldn't keep the battery always full. In my experience, that causes them to fail far more often than ones that get exhausted due to 1000 cycles (or less) and then the battery being flagged as faulty.

Apple certainly doesn't initiate a charge when the battery is nearly full, so we would need to see the detailed power status to know if you're expected to charge.

Here's what that command shows when you have a fully charged MacBook and disconnect the power and reconnect the power - no charge happens, just a back on AC power message:

me@mac ~> pmset -g pslog
Logging IORegisterForSystemPower sleep/wake messages
pmset is in logging mode now. Hit ctrl-c to exit.
2019-01-26 11:03:35 -0600 IOPSNotificationCreateRunLoopSource
Now drawing from 'AC Power'
 -InternalBattery-0 (id=4194403)    100%; charged; 0:00 remaining present: true
2019-01-26 11:09:19 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources.timeremaining
2019-01-26 11:09:19 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources.percent
2019-01-26 11:09:19 -0600 IOPSNotificationCreateRunLoopSource
Now drawing from 'Battery Power'
 -InternalBattery-0 (id=4194403)    100%; discharging; (no estimate) present: true
2019-01-26 11:09:19 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources.source
2019-01-26 11:09:19 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources
2019-01-26 11:09:19 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources
2019-01-26 11:09:43 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources
2019-01-26 11:09:43 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources.timeremaining
2019-01-26 11:09:43 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources.percent
2019-01-26 11:09:43 -0600 IOPSNotificationCreateRunLoopSource
Now drawing from 'AC Power'
 -InternalBattery-0 (id=4194403)    100%; charged; 0:00 remaining present: true
2019-01-26 11:09:43 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources.source
2019-01-26 11:09:43 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources
2019-01-26 11:09:43 -0600 com.apple.system.powersources

Feel free to ask a follow on question if you want to post your power stats or have a question about system information and reporting battery health and full charge cycles. Just @ me in the comments with a link to the new question and I'll see it.


MacBook 7,1 internal optical drive not doing anything I have a MacBook 7,1 (mid 2010) and it has an internal optical drive. However, when I try to put a CD into it, I can just move it around and the drive does not do anything. It doesn't block the CD, but also doesn't try to pull it in or make any noise.
It also seems like my Mac doesn't recognize the optical drive at all; it isn't listed anywhere and system info -> burn disks says it couldn't find any drive for it.
Any solutions for this? Is it a software problem, or will a replacement drive work? Or is it something with the logic board?
Resetting the SMC doesn't help.

The DVD Drive has died.

It doesn't block the CD, but also doesn't try to pull it in or make any noise.

You can insert media before the system has even booted.  When you turn a Mac on, it will do a scan of all attached devices (disk drives, CD/DVD drives, USB, etc.) to look for all the potential bootable media.  Macs with these optical drives will make that tell-tale noise of the optical heads moving back and forth looking to see if there's media installed.  If you're not hearing that - the drive is dead.

It also seems like my Mac doesn't recognize the optical drive at all; it isn't listed anywhere and system info -> burn disks says it couldn't find any drive for it.

This is another sign that it's dead.  The optical drive is attached to the SATA bus, so if the system can see it, it's not working.
Could it be the logic board?
Not likely.  As long as it gets power, the drive will "make noise."  It's possible that the cable/connector to the logic board went bad, but very, very unlikely.  Since the drive is mechanical, odds favor that the drive itself is the problem.
So, you need to replace it (or simply remove it).  I'm assuming it's a 2010 MacBook Pro  since there was no MacBook made in 2010 and the MacBook Air doesn't have an optical drive.  iFixit has a guide for replacing the optical drive - it's fairly simple. Personally, I would just remove it and be done.  Optical disks are becoming rare and if you really need one, just use USB DVD drive.


How do I get my iPad running iOS 6.0.1 to connect to my MS Exchange mail server? I've gone through the adding procedure and it all verifies and looks good there.  However, it will not receive or send any mail (nor sync up contacts/tasks, etc).  It's just throwing the terribly uninformative "An error has ocurred" message.  I'm running the latest iOS - 6.0.1 - on this iPad 2.

Thus far, I've tried deleting and re-adding Exchange on the iPad multiple times.  I've gone into OWA to delete it from the mobile phones list there, but it's not in the list.

There are other people successfully connecting to the same Exchange server with their iPads.

What else should I be checking?

You've got a 50 / 50 chance it's the device or the server at this point.

If you have access to the server logs, you could know exactly what is wrong. Alternatively, you could set up a different exchange account on your iOS device and use that to rule in or out the device and/or the account+server.

As there is so little you enter on iOS, apart from the date/time zone being wrong, or making a typo in the password or server settings, the problem is most likely on the server and of things with that account.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2480

I have also had luck choosing one item only to sync initially - so if your Mail is hanging, the next time you attempt, do not enable Mail and instead just try contact or calendar data.


Limit iOS's app access to sound output I am a new iPhone user, because Apple has formed an amazing partnership with Cochlear Corp (hearing-implant devices), so I can directly pair my cochlear implant with my iPhone. The app for this is called Nucleus Smart, but it has pretty limited functionality.

One issue is that when I open any app that can access sound, it switches automatically to my hearing aid. For example, even my solitaire app, with the sound option turned off, will still automatically turn on my hearing aid, and essentially mask all regular environmental sounds with the muted audio.

The developers of the app aren't particularly responsive, so I'm wondering if there is another app that can block app access to any sound output.

There is no way to do this in the Settings and I am sure this is no app to do this without a jailbreak. Some apps offer an option to turn off sounds in Settings, but if there aren’t any options there is no way to go around it.


Is it possible to arrange the order of movies in iTunes? See the two images below:

Is there a way (with meta data somehow) to arrange the movies so they show in the order of their sequal (example: X-Men, X2, Last Stand), instead of arranging them alphabetically by title?

Unfortunately, I don't have enough videos to test this.

Using The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for example:

Open the movie's Get Info:
Go to the Video tab and set, for example:

  Show: The Lord of the Rings
  Episode Number: 1

Go to the Sorting tab and set:

  Name: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
  Sort Name: Lord of the Rings


Will iPhone change its timezone automatically if I fly on an airplane? Let's say, I have time settings set to automatic update.

With airplane mode on and off (both cases), would my phone update timezone automatically?

If your iPhone finds your location and you're in a new time zone, it'll change the time.

With Airplane Mode off:
Your iPhone will be silently using location services and will update the time based on your location change.

With Airplane Mode on:
GPS and Cellular (two of the three methods an iPhone uses to determine your location) are disabled, but you can enable wifi still. Even without connecting to in-flight wifi, but as long as there is in-flight wifi, your iPhone can determine a time zone change based on location info provided by that wifi network (which Gogo inflight does but I'm not sure about ViaSat).


Organize iOS App Icons, Sort, Rearrange Is there a faster way to sort hundreds of iOS app icons on app pages than to use iTunes?

I like to use "MultiIcon Mover"

You hold your finger down - like usual - but then instead of having to drag each one individually...  you just tap on the ones you want to move... even if they're on separate pages.  they get "highlighted with a checkmark... and then you navigate to the "page" that you want to put them on. Hit the home button and they'll all plop onto that page. (space permitting)

You can sort hundreds of icons in just a few minutes.  No more ridiculous dragging around.

Jailbreak only.  Find it on Cydia.


time machine - replace backup disk My backup drive (named seagate) kept getting the error- not enough space - although the size of the backup is the same as the HD. I am at 60% capacity on my HD.

The error continued even though I erased my backup to restart the process (as well as deleting unnecessary files from my HD, and limiting what was being backed up)

In setting up Time Machine again, it's asking if I want to replace the back up disk "Macintosh HD" or back up to both disks. I just want to use seagate, but am now concerned somehow it will erase my HD. Is that concern invalid? It would certainly be counterproductive to lose what I'm trying to save

From your description, it sounds like you have an external hard drive (Seagate brand), which you have been using for your Time Machine backup. You're also saying that the capacity of the external hard drive is the same as your Mac.

As a general guideline, you want the Time Machine's hard drive to be about 1.5x the capacity of the Mac's hard drive. The reason being is that Time Machine stores progressive changes to files, such that you could literally restore one version of a file from a week ago, even though the file had been backed up several times over the week.

With respect to setting up Time Machine again, it sounds like you have a Time Machine backup on the external hard drive, and you're being prompted to restore. If this is confusing to you, then you could simply format the external hard drive, and then designate it for your Time Machine backup.

For all things related to Time Machine backups, and troubleshooting issues related to that, take a look at Pondini's Guides and Tips for Time Machine.


Change Default Photo Aspect Ratio in iOS Is there a way to set the default photo aspect ratio to 3:2 (from 4:3) in the default camera app in iOs?  I know it can be done using different photo apps, and I know that photos can be cropped to a variety of aspect ratios after they’ve been taken. But I’m looking for a way to set it before taking photos, using the default camera app.

Unfortunately, with iOS where it is right now, this is not possible. We have watched progressive improvements over time with the default camera app but there are still quite a number of limitations regarding "defaults" in the camera app.


How to force macOS Music.app to sync to cloud? I'm running Catalina 10.15.1 Beta and Music.app 10.1.33, and I have a large library of music from CDs. I can see but can't play this music from my iPhone since it's not available in the cloud.

In the Music -> Preferences I have Library: Sync ticked. In list view I see songs with a cloud with dashed outline. I've left the Music.app running for 24 hours and Activity Monitor shows 2.8MB of Sent Bytes.

How do I make Music.app wake up and send music to the cloud?

In Music: File -> Library -> Update Cloud Library


Trim filenames in automator w. shell or applescript Why doesn't this work?

(The automator is in swedish but the parts are:
get selected finder objects -
get folder contents -
run shell script)

I want to trim the first three characters of the filenames in a folder as part of an automator folder action.
I don’t know shell scripting myself, but I’ve read around quite a bit and think this should do the trick.

I've also tried this with applescript:

It works better but only with the first 8 files for some reason.

Does someone know how to sort this out?
/Daniel

The reason your shell script isn't doing what you want is because Automator passes the full path of the files as arguments.

If the full path to one of the files is /Users/foo/Temp/file1.txt, then your script attempts to rename it to ers/foo/Temp/file1.txt, which isn't what you want.

Try this instead:

for f in "$@"; do
  FILENAME=$(basename "$f")
  DIRNAME=$(dirname "$f")
  mv "$f" "${DIRNAME}/${FILENAME:3}"
done

Better still (handles relative filenames correctly):

for f in "$@"; do
  FILENAME=$(basename "$f")
  DIRNAME=$(dirname "$f")
  if [ -z "$DIRNAME" ]; then
    DIRNAME="."
  fi
  mv "$f" "${DIRNAME}/${FILENAME:3}"
done


Cannot convert m4a files to m4b with AppleScript I use Make Bookmarkable to convert some audio files to the m4b bookmarkable format. However, since macOS High Sierra, there is a problem when running the script with a batch of files.

tell (add loc) raises --> error number -1700 that number -1700 can't be converted to item

The conversion does happen but then stops executing, meaning files have to be converted one by one. I'm not not familiar with AppleScript but suspect that the problem maybe because of changes in iTunes.

mp4, m4a, and m4b are alternative filename extensions for the MPEG-4 Part 14 container format. To "convert" an m4a file to m4b, just rename the file. That's what the script you linked to also does.

The option to remember the previous playback position in iTunes is enabled by default for files with an m4b extension but not for files with an m4a extension, but it can just as well be enabled for files with an m4a extension, so they are not any less "bookmarkable". Just check the "Remember playback position" checkbox from the "Options" tab in the information window. (I think old versions of iTunes didn't have that checkbox, which is probably why the script you linked to was originally created.)

iTunes also displays m4b files under audiobooks by default, but an m4a file can be listed as an audiobook by setting "media kind" to "Audiobook" in the "Options" tab of an information window.

Edit: the script below renames the files of the tracks selected in iTunes and changes the bookmarkable and media kind properties.

tell application "iTunes"
    repeat with t in (get selection)
        set bookmarkable of t to true
        set media kind of t to audiobook
        set l to location of t
        tell application "Finder"
            set f to file l
            set name of f to (text 1 thru -2 of (get name of f)) & "b"
        end tell
    end repeat
end tell


iTunes: Why do some internet radio streams show up in my main music list and some do not? I'm setting up a fresh iTunes library, and I'd like to have a playlist with some internet radio stations.  However, I'm seeing inconsistent behavior with how these are being handled in iTunes 10.  When I add The Current MP3 stream to a playlist, it does not show up in my main music list, however, when I add the BBC Radio 6 it does show up in the music list, not matter how I add it (dragging from the radio list directly, or adding the URL via Advanced > Open Stream).

Why are these streams treated differently?  How can I prevent the BBC stream from showing up in the main music list (like The Current stream currently does)?

I'm using iTunes 10.5.2 (11) 64-bit on Lion

The Current MP3 stream url (Added via Advanced > Open Stream):
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/tools/play/streams/the_current.pls

BBC Radio 6 stream url (got the URL from the iTunes radio list):
http://bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcmedia_lc1_6music_p?s=1326827601&e=1326842001&h=81a3810c662b7c85a3d24d7aa24ac120

I tried both streams like you did and at first I received the same results you did. BBC Radio 6 showed up in the music but The Current didn't appear to.

Then, I tried typing "The Current" into the iTunes search box while Music was selected in the sidebar. The result: The Current from Minnesota Public Radio pops up as the first and only search result in the iTunes main menu.

What I believe it that because this radio listing contains a blank album and artist field, iTunes gets a bit confused but ends up placing them "somewhere" amongst your other entries with blank album and/or artists fields. It can appear to be lost there because there doesn't appear to be any particular order those entries are sorted by-default. (I am almost certain you can do something about that if you really wanted.)

IF you are still interested in seeing your music with those streams, I would recommend just creating a smart playlist that excludes them. Try this a the rule to use in the smart playlist (Cmd-Opt-N to bring up its dialog, btw):

"(Kind) (is not) (Internet audio stream)"

Hope this was helpful.

-b


Deleting photos from an iPhone Is there a tweak that lets me delete any photos from my iPhone - including the ones uploaded with iTunes?

You can definitely do it on the phone, but if you have a lot of photos, that could take a while.

Assuming you are on a Mac...

Connect your iPhone to your Mac and open Image Capture (in your Applications folder). Click on the iPhone in the device list and it will start building a list of all of your photos. Once it's done, you can select the photos you want to delete (Cmd-A to select all) and then click the delete button at the bottom of the window (looks like a red circle with a slash through it).


Can't access apple.com webservers, App Store, nor Software Update I have a MacBook Pro Early 2011 running Lion 10.7.4 (11E53)

I have installed an SSD instead of the optical drive, and encrypted both hard drives with FileVault2.

For some time now I noticed I can't access the apple.com servers, not even in Safari/Chrome/Firefox.

If I try to ping www.apple.com it doesn't find the host, but when I do a dig apple.com I get the informations.

It's very very strange, any ideas?

In the meantime I booted to recovery with cmd-R and reinstalled Lion but to no avail. Strangely though, in recovery there are no problems accessing the apple servers, because the Lion image was downloaded on the fly..

Later edit, results from dig apple.com any and ping www.apple.com

➜  ~  dig apple.com any
;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode.

; <<>> DiG 9.7.3-P3 <<>> apple.com any
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 53874
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 24, AUTHORITY: 6, ADDITIONAL: 6

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;apple.com.         IN  ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
apple.com.      3542    IN  TXT "v=spf1 ip4:17.0.0.0/8 ~all"
apple.com.      86342   IN  SOA gridmaster-ib.apple.com. hostmaster.apple.com. 2010076647 1800 900 2016000 86500
apple.com.      86342   IN  NAPTR   50 50 "se" "SIPS+D2T" "" _sips._tcp.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NAPTR   90 50 "se" "SIP+D2T" "" _sip._tcp.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NAPTR   100 50 "se" "SIP+D2U" "" _sip._udp.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  10 mail-in11.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  10 mail-in12.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  10 mail-in13.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  10 mail-in14.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  10 mail-in15.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  20 mail-in21.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  20 mail-in22.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  20 mail-in23.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  20 mail-in24.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  20 mail-in25.apple.com.
apple.com.      3542    IN  MX  100 mail-in3.apple.com.
apple.com.      1731    IN  A   17.149.160.49
apple.com.      1731    IN  A   17.172.224.47
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver.asia.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver.euro.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver3.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver2.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver4.apple.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver3.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver2.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver.asia.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver.euro.apple.com.
apple.com.      86342   IN  NS  nserver4.apple.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
nserver.asia.apple.com. 85475   IN  A   17.82.254.3
nserver.euro.apple.com. 85475   IN  A   17.72.133.64
nserver.apple.com.  85475   IN  A   17.254.0.50
nserver2.apple.com. 85475   IN  A   17.254.0.59
nserver3.apple.com. 85475   IN  A   17.112.144.50
nserver4.apple.com. 85475   IN  A   17.112.144.59

;; Query time: 5 msec
;; SERVER: 213.154.124.221#53(213.154.124.221)
;; WHEN: Tue Jun 19 08:08:40 2012
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 918

And the ping:

➜  ~  ping -c 1 www.apple.com
ping: cannot resolve www.apple.com: Unknown host

➜  ~  ping -c 1 apple.com
ping: cannot resolve apple.com: Unknown host

There are two things I would try in this situation:

Flush the DNS cache. This can be accomplished by running the command dscacheutil -flushcache. After running this command, attempt to run the dig and ping commands again. If they return the expected results, you should be good to go.
Verify valid and responding DNS servers are responding to DNS queries. Open System Preferences -> Network. Unlock the lock icon in the lower left corner if it is locked. Select the network interface you are currently using from the left column and click the Advanced button. Click the DNS tab.

Typically in the DNS tab, you will want to go with what ever is recommended by your ISP. If everything appears OK, consider swapping out the server addresses with one or more of the addresses from the list below:

Google DNS

8.8.8.8

8.8.4.4

OpenDNS (Not recommended if the device hosts an email Server)

208.67.222.222

208.67.220.220

Edit to add the following:

Another possible solution: Have you power cycled the networking equipment between your computer and your network connection? I have encountered inconsistent DNS lookups couple times with my Airport. Power cycling has resolved the troubles in at least one of those situations.


How do iphone backup extraction programs work? There are a plethora of applications (usually expensive ones) that can extract a backup file of an iphone's data.
(examples: drfone,  anytrans)

How are these apps actually accessing the iphone's file system, allowing them to extract a backup database file?

No matter how hard I look for the answer, I'm just pointed to these apps. How can any user extract a backup file from a usb-connected iphone?

The apps usually just initiate a backup themselves first, having their own implementation of the iOS backup protocol (or using libimobiledevice libraries). So, they're not really directly accessing the iOS filesystem via USB, they're making a backup in their own app data folder, and then accessing that. (I work on iOS backup tools - not the ones you mentioned - and this slight of hand from other tools bugs me ;))

  How can any user extract a backup file from a usb-connected iphone?

Are you asking about how to get to one of the files in your backup, or how to download the files from the iPhone (aka acting like a backup client)? If you want to take your own backups without iTunes, libimobiledevice is your best bet. https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice


How to disable the "locate" command in Mac OS? According to this article, I can use this command:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

To enable "locate" command to find files. However, recently I find this command not useful anymore and want to shutdown the background service/daemon. Does anyone have ideas about how to disable it or shutdown it? Thanks!

You can disable it like this:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

Keep in mind, this process only runs periodically to make the database that caches the results, so your locate results will be static and not change from the time you unload the "refresh task".


What setup is needed to stay backed up and online after retiring the TimeCapsule? My friend has the following kit in the house (although not all at the same time):

His MacBook Pro 15" with 500gb HD
Her MacBook Air 13" with 256gb SSD
Daughter's MacBook white with 500gb HD
His and Hers iPad 3
His and Hers iPhone 5
Son's iPod Mini
Nanny's iPhone 4S
Grandpa has an iPhone 3GS
AirportExpress for the bathroom speakers (niiiice)
Apple TV in the lounge
XBox 360 in the lounge
Samsung Smart TV in the lounge
TimeCapsule 1TB
Western Digital dual-drive 4TB USB drive (formatted as mirrored 2TB), connected to the TimeCapsule.

The Apple TimeCapsule has recently become unreliable either failing to do TimeMachine backups or losing it's internet connection (even though it is wired to the broadband modem). Even before this, the performance of wifi TimeMachine backups was poor - 300MB of changes would not complete backup before battery ran out. I have to admit, mine is exhibiting the same behaviour.

So, he'd probably like to move away from a TimeCapsule network.

What's an alternative setup to allow all the same (or similar enough) features and functions? Does he have to buy a Mac Mini Server?

UPDATE

The internet connection works fine when we plug a Mac into the modem directly, but the TimeCapsule would not allow WiFi clients to connect, so pretty sure the TimeCapsule is at fault.

You could certainly try backing up to a computer running a server version of the OS which allows for networked TM backups to it much like your Time Capsule.

You could also just get an Airport Extreme and roll your own Time Capsule equivalent.

You could try to nail the performance issues of you TC by attaching wired to see if things improve, and it may then prove simplest to just improve your Wireless capabilities by wiring a couple of cheap Airport Expresses to it, you could then even though a cheap switch on the end of one for faster backups if you have a large one.


Help on setting path right I'm following these instructions to install CUDA on my Mac and need some help concerning path variables.

I already installed the package but need to set up the required environment variables:

export PATH=/Developer/NVIDIA/CUDA-6.0/bin:$PATH
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Developer/NVIDIA/CUDA-6.0/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

I just followed the instructions from this site to set the environment variables but seemingly it doesn't work that way.

I mean does the folder containing my environment.plist file need to be in a specific directory? I just installed it to my home directory. Also I put in my plist file in the ROOT column the name of the variable (f.ex. PATH) and in the Value column I typed in the exact string which is specified above behind the "="-sign (f.ex. /Developer/NVIDIA/CUDA-6.0/bin:$PATH).

This is how it worked for me:
1. Render invisible files visible.
2. Then open the bash_profile in your home directory with any text editor and write down whatever you need to, f.ex.:
'export PATH = /this/is/some/complete/path/name:$PATH'
Adding ':$PATH' lets the system search for other pathnames stored somewhere else (so do that only when editing system variables).
':' in general enables you to ad multiple paths.
3. Don't forget to reload the affected files by typing into the bash 'source /filename', for the changes to take effect.

Other problems you might encounter:
When defining multiple variables be aware that it parses in order, so if you use f.ex.
'export PATH = $ANOTHERPATH/some/directory'
make sure to define ANOTHERPATH before defining PATH.

And make sure you really know your OS's file system.


Need to get rid of disk image after Bootcamp So, I was using Bootcamp, but during the point where it asked me to create the partition size, I decided that I no longer wanted to do it anymore and I used the quit option. However, after quitting Boot Camp, it left me with those two disk images and I don't know how to get rid of them. The erase option in disc utility would give me an error. What should I do?

Quit Disk Utility. View the disk images in the Finder. Grab them with the cursor, and drag them to the Trash. Empty the Trash.


Does MacBook Air laptop is enough for Automation Testing I'm wanna use Xcode and Android Studio with Appium to do a Mobile Automation Testing. Then for Websites I'm gonna use selenium stuffs. Additionally pycharm & IntelliJ for some test scripts.
For these above, which Mac (Spec) is good to buy.
I'm actually planning to buy MacBook Air.

Sure. It’s a fabulous CPU, blazing fast storage and faster than most Macs a year old in terms of all the benchmarks you’ll need for getting started developing.

Great value and it holds resale value much better than more pricey Macs. Unless you have a great value used Mac, get this and work the heck out of it. Assuming you ever find it’s slowing you down, you’ll know what you need and can sell this and roll the resale into whatever new tool you chose.

I do what you mention on a 2105 MacBook with 1.1 GHz m3 CPU. The Air won’t be the reason you’re held back from getting real work done.


How is the tab chosen when opening a link from an external location? I have Safari open with 111 tabs open.
I clicked on a URL that a friend sent me on Skype.
Safari opened the link in a random tab that wasn't selected, and was neither the first or the last one on the left or right.
The URL that I clicked replaced this tab's content, it was not a new tab.

How was this random tab selected out of the 111 tabs, to be the recipient of the URL I clicked?

It's usually not a random tab but the current active tab. But with 111 tabs open, I'm surprised the app's memory is not hosed so much that it's making mistakes now. That count seems a bit high. Try to reduce the tab count--after restarting Safari--and check the behavior then.


XCode debug error Thread 1 Ok so I'm trying to work with swift on XCode but every time I start to run my code I get this

Thread 1 Queue: com.apple.main-thread(serial)

What does this mean?, and how do I fix it? Also i've started a new project with the same code to make sure theres no unnecessary code mistakes. However I still get the same error.

What you describe as an error, it's not. That is the main queue where the program runs. You will see that queue every time you run a program.


Why does only Safari have (nearly) perfect inertial scrolling in OS X? I'm quite amazed that Safari is the only browser in OS X that manages to get (nearly) perfect inertial scrolling.

Even with lots of flash content on a website, Safari's scrolling is smooth.
There are websites with lots of content to load and Safari will continue to scroll smoothly while the content is being loaded and rendered.
Installing several extensions does not have an effect on the scrolling performance.

The major competitors to the Safari browser on OS X are Chrome and Firefox. Both don't manage to deliver the same smooth scrolling like one is used to in Safari:

Enabling flags like GPU compositing on all pages in Google Chrome (chrome://flags) or ...
smooth scrolling in Firefox (Options > Advanced) don't deliver the scrolling performance that Safari delivers per default.

Question
Is Safari using private API to deliver smooth scrolling that the Chrome/Firefox developers's can't access? How come Safari's scrolling is so much better and competitors don't manage to deliver non-broken scrolling.
I'm wondering especially about Chrome because it usually adapts to new OS X features really fast.

The difference is likely to do with the architecture and interprocess communication choices of each browser.

Modern web browsers render pages in separate processes. Apple has a framework called IOSurface that provides a streamlined way for one process to pass an image to another process. This framework was introduced in Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, for the latest iteration of QuickTime.

QuickTime uses IOSurface to offload movie decoding to separate processes. With no decoding to do, the QuickTime Player application is left dealing solely with the user interface and showing images provided by the decoding processes.

I suspect Safari has learned from QuickTime and is using the same techniques. Web pages are offloaded to other processes, rendered, and passed back.

Could Chrome and Firefox do the same thing, absolutely. The challenge is ensuring the thread dealing with the user responds quickly and is not delayed waiting for the rendering to update.

Chrome does use separate processes and appears to use IOSurface on the Mac; this bug talks about improving Chrome's use of IOSurface.

IOSurface is a public framework available to any Mac OS X 10.6+ application. However there is little documentation and it is Mac specific.

This is all conjecture.


How do i disable launchpad animation on mac? I want to disable the animation when I open Launchpad on a Mac.

Is there any way?

I somehow lag out when using Launchpad, is there any fix to it?

Disable Launchpad Open Animation

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-show-duration -float 0

Disable Launchpad Close Animation

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-hide-duration -float 0

Disable Launchpad Scrolling Animation

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-page-duration -float 0


My Mac crashes and shuts down when charger is unplugged, not immediately Hey so my Macbook Pro (Retina 15" 2014 i7 2.6GHz, High Sierra (institute doesn't allow me to update)) is turning itself off randomly, and as far as I've figured out this will only occur when the power is unplugged. At first I found it being more common when my laptop was feeling quite hot, and perhaps even my laptop seems to start overheating when I unplug it? This is very possibly not the case though, I'm trying to find a pattern where there might not be one.

I reset the SMC and did all the other stuff listed on the apple website of "what to do if your mac keeps shutting off".

The screen seems to go off with a backlight still on for some time, and then either it gets stuck and I have to hold down power to shut it down, or it fully shuts down itself. This can occur after 3 hours of no problems using battery, or it can happen within 5 mins and then every 5 mins thereafter for the next 30-45 mins.

I have no sudo privileges fwiw, if there's no solution I can do myself, I'll take it to my institute whose laptop it is, but given current situation I'm trying to avoid making that journey.

Thanks!

Unfortunately, you have to make that journey as there’s really nothing you can do.

if it’s the battery or hardware, which I suspect, it’s got to go in for service
if it’s an update or macOS issue, your IT department will have to address since it’s locked down as you describe
even some of the diagnostic procedures will require sudo access which you stated you don’t have means you have to take it in

When an IT department locks down an asset like yours, it’s best to let them handle things. They should have loaners and/or replacements at the ready.  Make sure when you communicate to them, emphasize that it stops your work (just some lingo to use to prioritize you in the  queue).


Where do these Terminal commands come from? I don't know any specific term for these Terminal commands, so i want to give an example:

  defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE

With this command, you can enable an iTunes Notifcation in the Dock.
There are a lot of those one line TRUE/FALSE commands around, but i don't know where they are come from.
Is there a list of commands in a manual, or where can i find those things?

Well, these commands edit .plist files in your /Users/xyz/Library/Preferences folder.  So, if you look at these files, you can look at these files and base your Terminal commands after these.

These are XML-based files, so you can view them in a more readable format if you open them in Xcode, which is available in the Mac App Store.

In the Terminal, the format for these is "defaults write PLIST_FILE KEY -TYPE VALUE"
where the PLIST_FILE is the name of the file in the Preferences folder without the .plist, KEY is the key that you can see in Xcode, -TYPE is the type of key that you can find Xcode (and you can find if there is an abbreviation for that type by typing "defaults" into the terminal), and value is the value you wish to set the key at.

Here are some of the string types from the Terminal:

-string <string_value>
-data <hex_digits>
-int[eger] <integer_value>
-float  <floating-point_value>
-bool[ean] (true | false | yes | no)
-date <date_rep>
-array <value1> <value2> ...
-array-add <value1> <value2> ...
-dict <key1> <value1> <key2> <value2> ...
-dict-add <key1> <value1> ...


Detect the TV Show, Season and Episode from a mp4 file in applescript Assuming I have an MP4/M4V file of a TV show. The file has the necessary metadata so it can be imported into iTunes and you'll see the all the relevant information.  Using AppleScript, one can extract that information using iTunes.

How would one obtain the show name, season and episode of that file using AppleScript without having to import it into iTunes first?

In essence, I have an incoming folder where I can "drop" my movies and tv shows and I'd like to use the script to organize the files without human intervention so that files will follow a naming convention so they are easier to find in the future.

Exiftool is a great tool to extract metadata.
http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
This script should point you in the right direction.

set thePath to POSIX path of (path to documents folder) & "exifdata"
do shell script "mkdir -p " & quoted form of POSIX path of thePath

tell application "Finder" to set theSelection to selection
repeat with anItem in theSelection
    set theLocation to POSIX path of (anItem as text)
    set {name:fileName, name extension:nameExtension} to anItem
    set baseName to text 1 thru ((get offset of "." & nameExtension in fileName) - 1) of fileName
    set destLocation to quoted form of (thePath & "/" & baseName & ".txt")
    do shell script "exiftool -a " & quoted form of theLocation & " >" & destLocation
    do shell script "open " & destLocation
end repeat

Or another approach is :

set myFile to quoted form of (POSIX path of (path to desktop as text) & "movie.mp4")

set xxx to every paragraph of (do shell script "mdls " & myFile)


How to create ~/.bash_profile and ~/.profile So, I don't have .bash_profile neither .profile in my home folder. How do I create them? After that, what should I do so every time I open the terminal these files get read?

You can use the touch command.

For instance,

cd ~

to go to the home directory.

Now we will create a file called .bash_profile (the dot means that it will be hidden).

Then use nano or vi in the Terminal. Unless you know what vi is, just use nano. To open up these files, you would use:

sudo nano .bash_profile

sudo makes sure that you will be able to save these files. Here, you can add aliases. nano or vi will automatically create a new file if it does not exist in your current directory in Terminal.

After you are finished, press Ctrl + O, Enter, and Ctrl + X to save and quit. Finally, use

source ~/.bash_profile

to reload the Terminal and it will read what you put in those files.

Of course, you can alias that too if you want. :)

To answer your final question,
these files will automatically be read every time you open the Terminal. However, if there is an error (For instance, don't put spaces between aliases), it will tell you.

More Information

As George pointed out, .bash_profile will run only on login shells. For non-login shells, you would need to create a .bashrc file with:

    sudo nano .bashrc

Links

.bash_profile vs .bashrc

Importance of .bashrc


iPhone 4S lock button My lock button doesn't work and a couple of days ago my screen stopped working as well. I can't slide my lock screen or anything now; do I send it to service?

Reset your phone by holding down on the off button slide the red button to the right and your device should shut off wait for a few seconds take and hold down on your off button again until an Apple appears wait for a few more seconds and you should be able to work your phone. Good luck


How can I clone my Lion-pre-installed drive to a new smaller hard drive? I got a new MBP with Lion installed (as detailed here: How can I install an SSD on my new Lion MBP w/out install disks?), and I want to clone the drive (including the Lion install partition) to my new SSD drive? (Note: I don't care about the OS or user files since this is a brand new machine).

Edit I have a solution, so mainly just created this question to share my result. However, I know others may have different ways to have done this, so please share

It didn't take long - there is now an official assistant to roll your own external recovery HD. You need a USB drive with 1Gb of space and a free download.
The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant and OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will walk you through making an external bootable Recovery HD.
As the cloning software I like won't handle the Recovery HD yet, I've gotten good results by installing Lion onto the smaller hard drive and letting it make the Recovery HD.
It's easy to migrate the apps and data in post install rather than do it all in one step.


Cycle through spaces in Mavericks On Snow Leopard you could "jump" from the last space to the first space by hitting cmd+right arrow.

How to do this in Mavericks?

I haven't tried it, but the app TotalSpaces2 seems to provide this feature:

https://totalspaces.binaryage.com/navigation2

Caveat:

In newer versions of macOS they require you to disable SIP when installing.


El Capitan Finder shows 10 GB more disk space I'm running 10.11.2 on a MBP 15". Since a few weeks ago I am observing a strange phenomenon: all disks show roughly 10GB more free space than they really have.

E.g. I plug a USB drive in that has 32 GB. Finder shows me 42 GB.

Other example: Finder shows that I have 11GB free. I pull a 2 GB file to the Finder and get the message: not enough disk space.

What could be the reason?

I tried out the usual Apple voodoo things (PRAM reset etc), and one behaved strange: when I started the Macbook with pressed Shift-key (safe start), it took very, very long. Usually this takes like 5 minutes, this time it took more than 40 Minutes (huh!).

After that I just restarted again and everything was fine. So it looks like safe start fixed the problem


How can I run Flash applications on iOS? How can I run Flash applications on iPad?

On a non jailbroken iDevice, your best options are either the SkyFire browser or the iSwifter app. SkyFire works only for video and iSwifter does work for some Flash content, but neither is a perfect solution, in my opinion. (iSwifter tends to have some funny browser behavior when it comes to touch input.)

Alternatively, you can install "Frash" on to a jailbroken iDevice. I've had varied success with this, however. Some flash apps work fine, most work to some degree, and then some don't work at all. There's no real guarantee what will or won't work with it (just as there isn't a guarantee of what will or won't work with iSwifter or SkyFire).


Mac OS X Terminal - Basic commands not found by shell I've had some problems recently with terminal.
The shell isn't able to execute basic commands, since they are not being found.

Here's an example :

-bash: ls: command not found

I've been doing some research and I suspect that it's the PATH, but I have no idea how to fix it or even look at it.

Any help would be much appreciated, I'm not the most knowledgable when it comes to this stuff, just fyi.

To see if your $PATH variable is set:

echo $PATH

If you've set something to override it, it's likely in the files .bashrc or .bash_profile

You'll need to edit those to remove any entries overriding your $PATH variable.

Start with just mv them out the way (use /bin/mv to hit mv directly), and starting a new session to see if that fixes things.


Can promo code users update a 'custom app for business' I've made a small app for the company I work at and I'm looking to distribute it. It isn't going to very many people, less than 100. I don't want to use it as a B2B app as then I'd need to setup a server and setup device management. It seems I'm able to distribute promo codes and users can install the app through the app store that way, even though the app is a  'custom app for business'.

Is this a reliable method of distribution?

Will users be able to update?

Is this a reliable method of distribution?

No. It won't work at all -- an application that is not useful for the general public will not be approved for distribution through the App Store.

You will need to distribute this app through the Enterprise program.


My computer has no admin user In system preferences, under users, standard is written under my name and there is no admin.

When i try to change preferences it asks for admin name and password to unlock it but my login password doesn't work as I'm not an admin.

Boot into single user mode.

Delete the file /var/db/.AppleSetupDone and then type exit and press return

At that point, the system will boot back to the normal setup process (keeping your old users intact) You will be guided through the steps to create a new admin user so pick a short name that doesn't exist on the Mac and you can then re-grant your normal user admin rights if you wish.


how to turn off my keyboard on my macbook? the "a" button is busted and behaves as if it's constantly being pressed down. I have a wired keyboard ready to use but I can't figure out how to turn off the keyboard here. I tried Control + F1 after enabling "Use all F1, F2, etc keys as standard function keys" but that's not doing anything.

This "a" problem is making it incredibly difficult to code.

I would recommend Karabiner Elements. It's the successor to Karabiner, and works on macOS Sierra. There's an option under the devices menu to disable the build-in keyboard while another keyboard is selected, which should do exactly what you want.


Audio issue when HDMI drawing tablet is connected? I'm running a 13" Macbook pro 2017 with operating system Mojave 10.14.4.

I have an HDMI connected tablet (Huion Gt-220). When I connect my drawing tablet to my computer, it locks out my sound for the computer.

I've tried going into System Preferences and changing the output to internal speakers. I've gone into the Audio MIDI setup and tried to configure it from there as well.

In the audio MIDI setup I've also tried making a multi output and an aggregated device.

I've tried it with and without headphones. I can't get it to work for the life of me. Does anyone else have any ideas on how to fix this? I'm dying here because I'll need to watch/listen to classes at the same time as I work and I can't seem to set it up.

1. Facebook Huion Thread

I found a thread with your issue on the Huion facebook page. They suggested there trying to re-install the drivers for this particular device there. The thread.

This was the verbatim from the support person in the thread:

  Huion Cerine Oshiro

  Please try to reinstall the driver from our website to see if it
  helps: https://www.huiontablet.com/support/ Here's a step by step to
  reinstall, please try and see if it works:

  (If you are using Mac system, please skip 3-4 steps）

  Log out the Huion driver, close all drawing programs you are running, close your anti virus software.
  Uninstall the Huion driver from control panel.
  Find the TabletDriver folder from C:\Program files\ and delete it. (If you are not able to find this folder, that means you have
  deleted it already, and you may skip this step.)
  Go to C:\windows\system32 or C:\windows\system64, find wintab32.dll and delete it.
  Unplug the USB cable.
  Download driver from Huion website and install it as an Administrator.
  Reboot the computer and wait until it finishes rebooting.
  Plug the tablet back in. If the problem still persists, please send your problem to:service@huiontablet.com to get instant technical
  support, thank you!

2. DeviantArt Thread

I also found another thread mentioning a prior version of a Huion device, Huion GT-185 HD. This is a tablet monitor which I assume is the same type of item as your Huion Gt-220.  The thread was on DeviantArt page for the GT-185 HD device.

In the thread a Huion support staff made the point that these tablet monitors do not include audio.

  huion Oct 20, 2017
  Hello,

  Kindly note that there is no audio device in the monitor, so it can
  not give off any audio.

They then went on to suggest that the ordering of the displays mattered because of this fact.

  huion Oct 23, 2017  Hello,

  Yes, it supports extended mode. Kindly inform you that if you want to
  use the monitor in extend mode and then use the pen on the HUION
  monitor, you need to go to control panel to identify Huion monitor is
  recognized by which monitor in your system. For instance, if GT-185HD
  is monitor 2 in your system, please select Monitor 2 in the driver. If
  you have selected Monitor 2, but you still couldn't use the pen on it,
  please try to select "all desktop area".


How can I stop macOS re-installing default apps and data I've previously deleted when I update the OS? I normally tweak my iMac to the extremest way possible, including normally deleting useless system apps and certain processes and services. I did the same when I was running macOS High Sierra (10.13.0) and as soon as I updated to (10.13.1) all those system apps came back but only with greyed out icons and when being clicked they don't open because I have deleted supporting files and processes so now that these apps have come back, I am suspecting that the processes which I have deleted in the past might have also come back.
So how can I prevent apps and processes getting reinstalled every time a new version of macOS comes out?

When removing "parts of the operating system" any update you get through the software update mechanism (AppStore) will re-install these apps and processes. Well, at least partially. Even so called ComboUpdaters were in fact delta updates relying on some previously installed base for many of the components supposedly contained in the ComboUpdater in full.

This results in a problem for those wishing to customise their installation: after removing parts Apple assumes are present some parts will only look like they are fully re-installed when in fact they are now 'present' but broken. This is what was experienced in the question when supposedly re-installed apps are now greyed out.

That leaves the customiser a couple of options:

Leave the system in an Apple authorised state. This has to be decided on from the start, though. ComboUpdaters are no longer a reliable way to 'repair' such a state back into working condition and most backups from an extremist-customised system will be tainted. A re-installation might be in order to get back into that state.
Download the standalone updaters from Apple, while that's still possible. This is the usage/how-to request in the question. But it is a tough choice: In case of the macOS High Sierra 10.13.1 update that would be here. You might then use a  manual installation of individual parts of the updater package(s). This might be done with a programme like Pacifist. But this process is very time consuming, and error prone, at least. If there are firmware updates or some undocumented non-obvious scripts to be applied in this update this procedure reaches quickly its limits and it might even be almost impossible to replicate what the updater did. Errors will very likely accumulate along the way.
Re-delete or re-disable everything you previously disabled (that means you should prepare at least a script for that). This is clearly the best option if you start updating from a non-Apple approved state of system manipulation. If Chess and iCloud were useless before they are useless now, in their (half or cmpleely) broken state. Note that this answer does not discuss any SIP related issues, since that has be a non issue in the scenario given anyway. This adds just one additional step of after update maintenance.


Can an iPad become damaged by leaving it in a bathroom during and after a shower? I leave my iPad Mini 3 in my bathroom most of the time. If you must know, I enjoy reading my iPad while using the toilet.

I take daily showers in this bathroom. Showering produces steam and increases the humidity in the bathroom. I run the bathroom fan after showering for about 10 minutes, like one should, to remove much of the humidity.

The bathroom is very small. While I never actually spill water on my iPad, I'm sure that it is exposed to the moist air.

Can this moist air damage the iPad?

Can the moist air find its way inside of the iPad, resulting in the formation of condensation inside of the iPad? I'm sure that the iPad was not designed to have water inside of it.

The bottom line: Is it necessary to remove the iPad from the bathroom every time that I shower?

I take shower while my electronics are in the bathroom, and I've never had a problem. I also don't do any what I've said below.

There's not an verifiable easy way (for me at least) to answer this question with proof. If you'd like to minimize the likelihood of moisture damage and you don't want to remove the iPad from the bathroom (or you can't) there are a three things I can think of that might help:

Plug something into the headphone jack. Tt's what's most likely to cause a failure in the iPad from moisture.
Placing the iPad close (but not on) to the floor. The warm, moist air from the shower will collect at near the ceiling first.
Avoid rapid temperature shifts when leaving the bathroom. If the iPad does have some moist air trapped, the shift to a cooler area will cause the moisture in the air to condense into liquid water.


how can I configure a mac to modify parent directory timestamps when programs touch files I would prefer to have all parent directories timestamps modified when a file is modified by any program.  Is this possible on a mac?

Basically, for huge build systems with 100 directories, we would only have to scan 100 directories and dig down recursively into a very small subset of changes to create a very fast efficient build.  This could bring build times from 10 minutes down to 2 minutes.

Is something like this even possible?

thanks,
Dean

You should be able to use git-hooks with a post-commit trigger to read the push logs and then execute a shell script to touch your parent directory (or directories, if you wish to work up the tree). The push logs should contain all the modified files, so you can parse that information and touch the dirs accordingly.

This article may shed further light:

https://superuser.com/questions/740026/how-to-run-a-shell-script-on-git-commit

I hope it helps you to arrive at an efficient solution.


How do I add a user to Print Administrator group but not full administrator? He unplugged the printer and plugged it back in. OS X (10.6) asked for the print administrator password. I would like to add the user to that group but not the full administrators group. How do I do that?

This is for a stand-alone home Mac. By stand-alone I mean not part of a corporate login or administration.

Run this Terminal command (as an administrator), replacing "usersaccountname" with the user's actual account name:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -a usersaccountname -t user _lpadmin

When it prompts you, enter your password (it won't echo).  That user should now be able to administer printers.


How can I remove a PDF in iTunes? There are several PDF files which I imported into iTunes to read using iBooks.

However, I cannot manage to remove them. By default, iTunes handles the its media library automatically. The PDFs and iBooks are stored in:

~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Books/

When I remove the PDF files here, they will still show up in iTunes.

How I remove their entries in iTunes?

Can you not select the book and use Command ⌘ + Delete ⌫?
You'll be presented with a choice to delete the book from the library, or move it to the trash:

You'll probably want to move it to the trash, unless it's a PDF that you don't have somewhere else. Also, make sure that you are going to the books tab on your computer, not managing the books on your device.
Here:

Not here:


Change filename in Preview I end up with lots of screen shots that look like this:

Obviously after a while I do not know what they are.

So I open them in Preview to see, and would like now to change the file name to something meaningful.

How do I change screenshot name while viewing in Preview.

Or is there a way to name the screen shot at the time it was taken (without auto assigning the file name). Basically, take the screenshot- pause + popup asking to name the file before it is saved, while it is still fresh in my memory what it was.

Right now I have to exit Preview while trying to remember the

  "§$%&/()?*☂☠

and rename it in Finder.

I can skip the Preview and use Finders Icon or Clover view but that is not the point of my question.

Edit: My Preview must be broken since I do not have the Pull down popup

Preview Version 7.0 (826.4)

MBA 10.9.5

I am using Yosemite (10.10) but I believe this feature has existed for a long while...

Simply open the file in preview and click on its name at the top of the preview window.

See screenshot:


Transferring Clash of Clans I originally started playing Clash of Clans on a first-generation iPad and connected it to my GameCenter.
I then got a third generation iPad, linked it to the first iPad's GameCenter account, and continued playing Clash of Clans on the new iPad 3.
My friend is giving me his GameCenter account, which is linked to HIS Clash of Clans village- is there any way I can transfer his village to my Game Center ?

If I understand your question correctly you can:

sign into your our Game Center on your iPad 3
delete the app from the original iPad (making a backup first)
sign into your friend's Game Center on your iPad
reload the game and verify the correct village loaded

Once that is done, you should have both villages intact.


Is there any way to make the confirmation dialog stop appearing when clearing history in Safari? Every time I clear my history I am presented with a small alert window. Is there any way to avoid/disable this?

You could try the "Reset Safari" under Safari settings. Its right below Private Browsing (at least on my computer). you can uncheck everything but clear history. I tried it, and wasn't asked if i was sure I want to clear history.
My source


Is there a (non-jailbroken) iPhone app that works like Android Lock? Is there an app which works like Andriod Lock on IPhone. I had read cydia offers
but on jailbreak. Is there an official one for this.

No, there's no official, Apple-approved replacement for the lock screen. If you really want to use Android Lock, you must jailbreak and then install it via Cydia.

Un-jailbroken phones can only do what Apple allows, which is to run one app at a time. Android Lock is different because what it does is to modify the basic system of the phone, which Apple doesn't allow. And that is the reason why such apps or modifications are only available on jailbroken phones (through Cydia, the jailbroken appstore).


Open up iPhone 5s to turn it off My iPhone 5s screen is blacked out and I can't turn it off by using the screen and buttons.  How do I open the phone so I can remove the battery to turn it off?

Do not open your iPhone unless you are an experienced with phone repair person . Better take it to an Apple Store or any cellphone repair shop. Otherwise, use iFix guideline.
https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iPhone_5s


Unable to figure out required (to be deleted) Documents as information is not consistent I am trying to free up some space (around 20GB) in order to install Big Sur on my 2019 Air, 128GB.
Under Storage Management, I select Documents that are shown to occupy 36GB of space. However, there are no Large Files, Downloads, or Unsupported Apps. When I click the File Browser option, the files and folders listed don't sum up to the size mentioned in the Recommendations.
The pic below showcases my situation:

This file size discrepancy most likely occurs due to hidden files in the user/library folder.
To show hidden files, open a Finder window and hit shift cmd .. You will immediately see that these files are shown with grey text in finder.

However, be careful with deleting these, you can harm the system or programs by doing so.


Is News.app a resource hog for anybody else? I am on a 2017 MBP using macOS Catalina. I have noticed the News.app is taking up 8xx MB of memory whereas a similar app like Stocks.app takes up only a tenth (~80 MB) of memory.
Any ideas on how to reduce it's footprint?

In essence, it's a 'multimedia' app, like a browser with many tabs open.
Every new page/report you open will load new content. That will stay in RAM until you quit.
They only way to keep its footprint down would be to only read the headlines, or quit after every report you open - which is hardly practical.
The Mac will handle memory usage quite well on its own. If the app really does start to use up too much RAM, then earlier pages will be released back to the memory pool, so the it can be used for something else.


Figuring out what Photo Stream is uploading exactly Even though I have unchecked the Automatic Upload of Photo Stream on Aperture (same on iPhoto), I can see through Little Snitch that it is hogging my upload bandwith constantly.
When I wait (hours, days..) to see what was uploaded, nothing is added to my photo stream.

Is there any way to figure out live what is being uploaded?

Here is what the Console returns when I block Photo Stream's outgoing connections:

MSPublisher - 1307885906 Encountered temporary network issues during upload. Will try again later...

Thank you!

If Aperture's activity window isn't showing you the file name of what is being uploaded then my suggestion is a bit terminal intensive (you've been warned).

$ sudo fs_usage | grep 'DSC_'

you can replace what's in the ' ' with the beginning of your image names or even the suffix of .jpeg or .nef or what have you. You should even be able to write 'Aperture' just make sure that Aperture isn't in the foreground because that will give you automatic outputs from window server displaying the application being drawn.

This will output a list updated every millisecond of what files are being touched. So close all other programs you don't need and let Aperture try to do it's thing and terminal print it out. Fingers crossed!


Restart download Mac OS X (macOS) Sierra, Developer Preview version My download of macOS Sierra (Developer Preview, see press release) began downloading, appearing in the Launchpad app. But then got interrupted. It failed to restart, so I deleted the icon in Launchpad by holding down Option key and clicking the "X" icon that appears.

Now when I try the download again, the link on the Developer page takes me to the App Store app. There I get page with a Redeem button and an error message saying “This code has already been redeemed.”.

How can I restart the download?

If you have already successfully redeemed your code:

Go to the Purchased Tab of the Mac App Store.
Click the Download button on the 10.12 Developer Preview listing.

It is the same process as re-downloading anything from the Mac App Store.


MacBook Pro Yosemite hangs during boot My MacBook Pro froze earlier whilst using it, so I did a hard reboot. Ever since it won't boot up. It gets to the Apple logo with the white progress bar but the progress bar won't move past 20%, I've tried leaving it for 30 minutes but nothing happens.

I am able to boot into Safe Mode and single user mode without any issues.

I booted into recovery mode and did a disk permission repair and disk repair. I also tried resetting the NVRAM and SMC but nothing has made any difference.

I don't know what else to try, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Safe Mode working means that it is likely that something you installed is preventing the OS from booting. Specifically programs you have added to start at login in your user account or other things you may have installed that adds kexts to the system.

Look in System Preferences > Users &Groups > Login Items

Remove them all and reboot. If it boots one of them is the problem, add them back till you find which one it was.

Look in /Library/StartupItems

Drag everything out of there (desktop or a folder somewhere) and reboot. As above if it boots fine one of those was the problem.

It is also possible that something went wrong with the OS and something OS related was damaged. you could try applying the latest combo updater for your current OS to see if that helps.

If nothing there helps, either I missed a location for startup items or you may need to reinstall the base OS. But before you do that, boot in safe mode and backup your drive.


Changing text applied when duplicating file in Finder When duplicating files in the finder, OS X attaches a space followed by 'copy' to the file name. This can lead to some file alphabetizing problems and the copies may appear out of order (not directly subsequent to the original). Is there a way to change the appended text? I would prefer that it says '_1' or _copy. Thanks.

Open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/

Use Show Package Contents to browse the package in Finder, or open using Terminal, etc.
Open Localizable.strings in BBEdit or other editor capable of editing .strings files.
N4 contains the string that is used to name the duplicate file.

^0 copy

^0 is the previous file's name. Make sure to keep this to retain the name of the previous file.
Edit the string how you wish. For example, to duplicate test as test_copy instead of test copy, use…

^0_copy

Save and relaunch Finder.

killall -HUP Finder


How do I require password prompt EVERY time I close my MacBook's lid? This doesn't seem to always work.

Also (perhaps related?): when I close the lid of the laptop when it's connected to the Thunderbolt display, how do I make the display go black?

Basically, I am trying to increase security on my setup overall, if I leave my desk.

If you want to make sure the external display goes to sleep when you close your macbook, make sure you don't have a power adapter, external keyboard, or mouse connected, then close the lid.

Reference:  http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3131

If you want the machine to require password after you sleep it:


Disable ESC key yielding list of word suggestions when pressed in Preview in OSX 10.11.2 In preview (and apparently also in other Apple apps like Keynote, although I cannot reproduce), I get the unexpected behavior of getting a list of words when pressing the escape key in an empty search dialog.

If I type something in the search box, select it and then press the ESC key, the search dialog is closed (as desired). With text in a newly created text box, behavior is similar only that I get these suggestions also when pressing ESC on a selected text.
I don't know why I'm getting these things and my attempts to turn this behavior off have been in vain so far. (like "system preferences - keyboard - text - automatic correction -> off" didn't seem to have something to do with it)

Anybody an idea 1. why this could ever be desired (cause to me it doesn't seem like a kind of spelling correction, it just gives me high frequency German (in my case) words.) and 2. how I can turn this off?

It's the auto completion from the built in spell checker and after a lengthy search I found the solution in Apples Discussion Forums:

defaults write -g NSUseSpellCheckerForCompletions -bool false

Afterwards restart affected programs and Esc just cancels searches again.


Offsite Backup Strategy for Multiple Macs I have 4 Macs in my household that have a decent local backup strategy.  I am preparing an offsite backup disk and wondering about the best strategy for structuring the offsite backup disk.

I want to protect:

4 Macs with a total of 3.75 TB of internal storage.  Approx. 80% usage of capacity
2 external drives connected to two of those Macs

5 TB capacity, 50% used
4 TB capacity, 25% used

Potential capacity to be backed up is 12.75 TB, but current data size is 6.5 TB.  I have purchased a single 8TB external drive to be taken offsite.  Yes 12.75 TB cannot fit in 8 TB, but 6.5 TB can.  I don't foresee the external drive usage to increase more than 1 TB in the next year.

Caveats

Backing up to the cloud is out of the question, as I am working with a 100 GB per month data budget.

Requirements

All of the data on the external drives is vital data and large, such as my photography.  That alone comprises 2.2 TB
Everyone in the household makes their living from their Macs.  If a big disaster happens, I need to purchase new Macs and get them back to fully functioning in the shortest time possible

Backup format

Each Mac is currently backed up locally by both Time Machine and a bootable backup via Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to separate disks.  Since I have these set up already, I'd prefer to stick with these options, but am open to suggestions.

CCC would require partitioning the backup drive into 6 partitions, locking in the amount of data I can backup up for each source.  Time Machine (TM) on a single 8 TB partition would allow the free space to "float" to where it is needed as the external drive usage increases. Because of this, I am leaning towards TM vs. CCC simply because of the amount of data to back up.

Backup Procedure

I would be storing this 8TB disk offsite and bringing it to my house occasionally.  I would then connect the drive to each computer, let TM do its job, then take the disk off-site again.  I may put a second disk in rotation so that there is never a time when all disks are on-site.  See my answer to a similar question https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/381886/146721 for the details of how the rotation works.

Encryption

Encryption is a must since I cannot guarantee the physical security of the offsite drive.  If I go with the TM route for backup, I can encrypt the entire drive with a single password or allow each machine's backup to be encrypted with a separate password.  Since these are family backups, I am not terribly concerned with intra-user security, so I am leaning towards a single encryption password.

Restoration Scenario

My existing in-house backup strategy (TM + CCC) should take care of most mundane restoration situations.  The scenario I am attempting to cover here is complete disaster, such as the house burning to the ground.  In this case, all computers and on-site backups are assumed to be destroyed.  In this scenario, new hardware would have to be purchased and restored from the TM backups

Does this seem like a reasonable strategy?

I think you're making this too complex.
The very first thing you need to do is decide what's more important - an image of your entire system or your data.  For all of the clients I've worked for, data was the most important factor.
Your settings and applications are important, don't get me wrong, but I'm sure you're much more concerned about your tax documents than you are about your custom shortcuts you've created.
Given that your Internet connection is metered, you can still use the cloud, you're just going to use it differently.  Here's what I suggest:

Time Machine
Cloud Service
NAS (with USB based backup)

Time Machine.
Use Time Machine for your whole system backup.  You can rotate disks if you like, but I've found this unnecessary over the last decade.
Cloud Service
I personally use OneDrive, but this will work well with DropBox or other similar services.  In my Documents folder, I put symlinks to various folders in my OneDrive folder (it's the one that gets synced).  I don't copy over Pictures (they're automatically uploaded from the phone) or Downloads, but you can if you want.
NAS or Network Attached Storage
I personally use a Synology NAS with a several USB drives attached to back up the NAS - one for music, another for documents, and one that backs up the whole NAS.  The beauty with a NAS is that all of your Macs can attach the NAS and benefit from it's features.
Now, here's where the magic happens...  The Synology NAS syncs with OneDrive.  The NAS backs up to at least two places (i.e. Documents and whole system).
So, what does this accomplish?  Let's look at that tax document...
Document
  → Backed up via Time Machine
  → Sync to One Drive
    → Sync to NAS
    → Backed up to USB (Documents)
         → Backed up to USB (Whole NAS)

With a setup like this, you have your data in 6 different places including off site.  By not backing up your entire system to the cloud, you're minimizing the data transfer as it will only sync the changes not the entire data directory and certainly not the entire drive.
You said you had a 100GB data cap on your Internet connection.  Once this is setup, I highly doubt you will transfer 10GB of documents and data per month.  I work from home with three other people in the house and don't hit that level.
Here's a similar answer where I didn't use OneDrive in the equation.  I backup my VMs to my NAS, but I don't sync them to OneDrive.  What this allowed me to do when my Mac crashed was to bring up my dev servers on an inexpensive Dell running FreeBSD (it could have been Windows) and VirtualBox and get back to work immediately.
Finally, the NAS setup allows you to centralize all of your backups for Macs because it acts as a Time Machine server, you'll just need to size it appropriately.


Yosemite won't uncompress .zip files when I double-click on them I recently upgraded to Yosemite (10.10.1). Today I tried to unzip a .zip file for the first time since upgrading.

I already had 4 or so unzipping apps that worked just fine on my previous OS X, so I just double-clicked on the .zip, and Yosemite tried to open the .zip with the default unzip app.

Unfortunately, I then discovered that the default unzip app and all of my other ones were not compatible with 10.10.

I checked online and found that according to Apple, in 10.10, to unzip a .zip, you just double-click on the file and Yosemite would unzip it for you.

However, whenever I double-clicked on the .zip, Yosemite would only try to open it with the incompatible default unzip app.

So I deleted all my unzip apps and rebooted.

When I then checked my .zip files, I noticed they all were defaulting to open with TextEdit. When I double-clicked one .zip file, I got this message:

When I double-clicked another .zip file, I got this message:

So the question is does anyone know how to get Yosemite to open a .zip given this situation?

I just had the same problem - usually the double click works but for some reason it didn't work on a zipped mp4 video.

What worked was to right-click and choose 'open with' > 'archive utility'.


How to automatically refresh external data in Excel 2011 on OS X? I have an Excel spreadsheet that is pulling in data from an external CSV. I want it to refresh every time I open it, because eventually it's going to be pulling data in from 20 different files. At the moment it says

  security warning "data connections have been disabled"

And then when I override it, it prompts me to reselect the file in Finder.

It sounds like this is pretty easy in Windows Excel, you pretty much just need to enable a setting in the 'Trust Center'. Only, Excel 2011 has no trust center, and as far as I can tell, no way to actually do this automatically.

Refreshing a data table in your Excel workbook

If your query table is linked to a data source, you can update the data in your workbook on demand so that it reflects the current state of the data source. On the Ribbon’s Data tab, go to the External Data Sources group and click Refresh button’s triangle to display a pop-up menu, where you can choose from the options.


Page down in terminal How can I "page down" in the terminal?

There are two answers to this question.

The first is globally useable. I'll assume you're on a narrow/laptop keyboard. In those instances, Fn+Down ▼ acts as Page Down, and just to expand that thought out entirely:

Fn+Up ▲ = Page Up
Fn+Left ◀ = Home
Fn+Right ▶ = End

This will not work properly in some applications. Those that come to mind are things like vim, less, screen, and other "full screen/ncurses menued" programs. The above keystrokes scroll the terminal window, but if the terminal window has not been paged, then scrolling won't accomplish anything.

The second half of the answer is one that I can't answer without more detail.

Example:

In less, the spacebar or ctrl ^+f will page down one screen full.
In vim, ctrl ^+f will page down one screen full.
In screen, you will probably never have to Page Down, but if you scrolled back in copy mode, ctrl ^+f works there too.

If I haven't answered your question, you will need to elaborate on it, heavily.


Mail freezes when saving message as draft Ever since upgrading to Mountain Lion, I noticed Mail often freezes up for a good 5-10 seconds at a time in the middle of typing. This happens constantly, and every time I notice it says "Saving Message". Unfortunately, it chooses to do this every time I start typing, and I often stop typing when I don't see the text appearing, so it takes me forever to compose a message of decent length. How do I fix this?

Apparently this has to do with the draft email being saved to server. As a workaround, try disabling "Store draft messages on the server" in Mail.app Accounts settings.


Running GUI application from Console Login What I'm trying to do is after logging into the >console on my mac mini run safari. Its on
10.6.8 if that matters, I've tried a 10.8.3 machine. Once logged in, I login as root. From here is it possible to run a browser like Safari or Firefox?

I've tried open /Applications/Safari.app This gives LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file /Applications/Safari.app.

And I've also tried startx and open /Applications/Utilities/X11.app This throws a lot of errors on the 10.6.8 machine.

On the 10.8.3 machine with XQuartz installed i get the following:

font_cache: Scanning user font directories to generate X11 font caches
font_cache: Updating FC cache
font_cache: Done
xauth:  file /var/root/.serverauth.5451 does not exist

/opt/X11/bin/xinit: giving up
/opt/X11/bin/xinit: unable to connect to X server: Connection refused
/opt/X11/bin/xinit: server error

Is this possible? Essentially my end goal is to, without buying Kiosk software, open GUI applications without finder or the dock.

Safari won't run under Xquartz/X11 which themselves need a non-console session to run.

You could select a web browser that runs under X11 exclusively and boot to a unix OS other than OS X and accomplish your needs.

Alternatively, you could set up a managed user on the Mac and have it launch Safari. Depending on what you need, parental controls or simple finder and dock hiding might be able to accomplish your goals - but the kiosk software is sold since they've engineered a solution where the OS doesn't have a setting to simply enable equivalent functionality.