Troubleshoot launchd/launchctl issue where application won't load I'm trying to load a LaunchAgent in ~/Library/LaunchAgents and although, from command line, it "appears" to load. However, if I try to load it again it says it's "already loaded".

But a process for the application isn't running. ps -e | grep mongo shows nothing (well it shows this grep command).

Anyone know how to troubleshoot these kinds of problems?

Only thing I can find is in /var/log/system.log:

Feb  9 13:15:26 imac com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[130] (homebrew.mxcl.mongodb): Ignored this key: UserName

I'm assuming it's ignoring the UserName because it's being launched from my User directory: ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mongodb.plist. And as per docs this is to be expected.

I can launch the application just fine from Terminal:

/usr/local/bin/mongod

Here's the LaunchAgent plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>homebrew.mxcl.mongodb</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/usr/local/bin/mongod</string>
    <string>run</string>
    <string>--config</string>
    <string>/usr/local/etc/mongod.conf</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
  <key>KeepAlive</key>
  <false/>
  <key>UserName</key>
  <string>meltemi</string>
  <key>WorkingDirectory</key>
  <string>/usr/local</string>
  <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
  <string>/usr/local/var/log/mongodb/output.log</string>
  <key>StandardOutPath</key>
  <string>/usr/local/var/log/mongodb/output.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Got it solved. Will leave this question here…in case someone else has similar issue…and in hopes that someone can offer some good ideas for troubleshooting launchd/launchctl in the future.

My problem was I didn't have my mongod.conf file in the right place. As per plist directive launchctl (or is it launchd?) was looking for /usr/local/etc/mongod.conf but couldn't find it, so, it "loaded" mongod but the app never actually started...and there were no errors to that effect…that I could find.


To get newer man pages in OSX? I noticed that my manuals are very old in my system although all updates done.
Etc man cmp tells about the flag -l

-l  --verbose
          Output byte numbers and values of all differing bytes.

while Wikipedia is about more fully

  Output the (decimal) byte numbers and (octal) values of all differing
  bytes, instead of the default standard output. Also, output the EOF
  message if one file is shorter than the other.

The last sentence was critical in my understanding of the output.
I would like get more fully manuals to my system.

Possible ways to get better manuals

cabal
homebrew
...?

How can you install better manuals to your terminal commands in OSX?

The best manual is the manual that is supplied with the command you are using whether that manual is old or new. Assuming that you have not hard coded MANPATH then man would determine the manual with your PATH and man.conf. If you are installing your own tools then possibly man.conf may need to be configured with your installation prefix.

If you have duplicate tools installed then the manual for the command first in your PATH is presented. You can read another manual by pointing man to the directory in which that man page resides.

    man -M /path/to/share/man COMMAND

You can read all the manuals of a particular command.

    man -a COMMAND


User in Permission "Loading..." has become "_spotlight"? I have a user I've been trying to help that had used Time Machine to restore some folders and files from an older Mac onto MacOS Sierra.  When I initially saw this user's system, he had the classic issue of a privilege for a user that was just saying "Loading..."

But then, a week later, after Apple ran some diagnostics, I took a look and NOW that user showed up as _spotlight, set to Read Only.  For example, the image below shows the privileges for a folder our application creates in the user's Documents folder:

I've never seen _spotlight, but I assume this must have the same user ID as whatever user he tried to restore from his other Mac's Time Machine backup?

I realize in this particular case, the older "repair permissions" would;t have affected our app's folder, but since Apple's removed Repair Permissions from Disk Utility, I'm guessing they believe there's no longer any likelihood of permissions issues?

Has anyone ever seen _spotlight show up like this?  Seems benign, but removing it would also seem harmless, too.

Check the folder with ls -le /Users/<user_name>/Documents/<folder_name> and you will see that _spotlight just indicates an ACL. The real owner:group is root:staff. Adding an ACL for the user _spotlight is sometimes necessary to allow (or disallow) the indexing of a folder for the Spotlight search database.

Depending on your system version you may get a similar result checking the /Applications folder:

ls -dle /Applications
drwxrwxr-x+ 84 root  admin  - 2856 23 Jan 20:34 /Applications
 0: group:everyone deny delete
 1: user:_spotlight inherited allow list,search,file_inherit,directory_inherit


How to cancel Finder search via keyboard? I'm having a difficult time understanding how to exit via keyboard a search I initiate in Finder ⌘F. I can search and see the results yet other that pressing the x with the mouse

which exits the search i cant figure out how to do the same with a keyboard.

It depends on your locale and how you started the search:

If you started the search with no window open, it's simply ⌘W (which closes the window)
If you started the search in an open window, it's ⌘[ (US)(or e.g. ⌘Ö (German)) which goes one step back to the previous window. The shortcut is usually visible in the menubar of the Finder > Go > Back.


One unforgettable bluetooth device! Strangely, I can't find any references to anyone else having this problem. This question is close, but that OP is using a work phone with security profiles that prevent any bluetooth settings changes. My problem is that one—only one—bluetooth device is missing the (i) button, which means I can't forget that device. An unforgettable bluetooth pairing! Has anyone seen anything like this before?

The reason I care, of course, is because I'm having very bad connectivity issues with that one device. The only troubleshooting instructions are to forget and then pair again, but I can't forget!

I don't know the Phillips Sonicare product, but there's at least one thing that could potentially explain the lacking (i) indicator: If you have installed a specific Phillips app for use with the product, it could have offered to pair with the device directly from within the app. In that case you can use that specific app to unpair the device again - or you might have to resort to deleting the app if that is possible for you.


Keyboard adjustment keys have black box around them I recently did a fresh reformat and install of Yosemite on my macbook pro, it was working as expected until today when i noticed that whenever i use the top keyboard row keys to change something like screen brightness, volume, backlight level, there is a black box around the rounded box that normally pops up. Is this a common problem with yosemite and is there a fix?

This effect occurs when "Reduce Transparency" is enabled (System Preferences > Accessibility).

(Very odd that this is how the effect would degrade, instead of just make it a solid colored square.)


Is this Time Machine behavior normal? I plugged the Time Machine Hard Drive on the iMac and clicked "Back Up now" in the menu bar, after making sure that nothing was excluded from the process in the Preferences panel.
After I used recovery mode to erase, install the os and restore my data from Time Machine to a new computer.
Once this process completed, I noticed a few odd things:

A lot of the items in the "Downloads" folder were not present
When I reopened Safari, the application state of Safari was not restored

Obviously this is very frustrating.
Are my results normal to expect a mirrored Mac with everything perfect?

There are several ways to clone your drive. One way is to use the app Super Duper. The app is not free but has a free trial version that you can download from the link above.
You'll need to start with a clean drive and you can make a clone of your internal drive. It is a simple procedure and the complete instructions are given here. This link is dated 3/2020 so it is recent. The instructions will tell you how to make a bootable clone.
After making a bootable clone, the linked article has a section telling you how to restore your Mac from a clone if necessary. And there are other features given in the article as well.


Can I play Warcraft 3 (DotA) on a Mac? I owned a MacBook Pro. I want to play a PC game called WarCraft 3 (with the DotA mod). I have Google and done some research on how to play DotA on the Mac. I can think of three possibilities:

Possibility 1: Buy Warcraft 3 for Mac (it does exist). However, I already own the PC version, and I dont want to waste another $60++ bucks to buy the Mac version (it's an old game).

Thus, I come across some forums suggesting using a VM or using Boot Camp to install Windows and play. This leads to

Possibility 2: Using Boot Camp and install Windows. Well, it sounds good for me, but I've never doen it before and I'm afraid I'll crash or need to reformat my Mac when partitioning, and Apple also recommends keeping a backup for your Mac when using Boot Camp. I do not want to go through all these troublesome things, thus I do not prefer this method.

Possiblility 3: Finally, using a virtual machine. I use VirtualBox, and already have a Windows XP install, running, that works perfectly fine. Now, I am wondering, if I install Warcraft into this virtual machine, and play the game ~5 hours a day, will it crash my Mac?

I have a few general questions about running Warcraft 3 in a VirtualBox VM Windows XP on a MacBook Pro:

1) Will the game lag, the video rendering, etc.?

2) Most importantly, will it damage my Mac?

If you have other methods of playing DotA (Warcraft 3) on Mac other than what I mentioned above, please do share them.

You can create an account at www.battle.net and then tie your Warcraft 3 CD to your account.

Once you have done this, you are free to download the client on Windows or Mac at any time.

There's no need to buy different copies :)


Which is original MacBook Pro 15" Charger i have MacbookPro with retina display, model A1398

MacBook Pro "Core i7" 2.3 15" Retina 2012   2.3 GHz Core i7 (I7-3615QM)

I have to buy a new charger and I'm not sure which to buy (EU - Bosnia)? :/

On the Internet I found that the original chargers manufactured by a Delta Electronics.

A friend has Air -Mid2012. It looks like the image 2 (LITEON TECHNOLOGY). He bought a Macbook Air 2013. at the Apple authorised reseller..

The above picture should be the correct one to buy. Do ensure that when purchasing on the internet, you purchase the correct one for your country's port (EU in this case) and that it is genuine. (Delta Electronics is the manufacturer for the charger, yes)

Source (see under Computers that use the 85W MagSafe 2 Adapter)


Exclude a mailbox from "All Inboxes" or compose a custom multiple inbox view I have recently added my work mailbox to my iphone.

I have several other mailboxes that I use for non work purposes. I like to look at the mail from my non work mailboxes as though they were a single mailbox, so I use the "All Inboxes" option in the mail app.

I would like to exclude work emails from the "All Inboxes" view, is this possible? Failing that is there a way to create a view of my own that only includes my non work mailboxes?

I've had a look at Exclude mails from specific Inbox in “Inbox” view but nothing there fits my situation, and that's for mail.app anyway.

I can't see any way to create a multi inbox entry, is there a way?

Simple answer: no you cannot. But if you want, you could download other mail apps like "Mailbox" or "Mail Pilot".


How do I change the time format used by ls command line on osx? I want to make ls display time in ISO format (military format). How can I change this behavior?

On Linux I knew that I could force ls to display time in long format by usin --full-time but this doesn't work on OS X.

Update: I know that the format used by the command is based on the locale settings. The problem is that on OS X I was not able to use the trick of setting LC_TIME=en_DK.

If you install gnu coreutils then gnu ls is available, which will do as required. If you use brew as a package manager, it's as simple as:

brew install coreutils
gls -l --time-style=full-iso


The dot icon on the dock stays despite I have closed the app As the title clearly describes, the dot icon stays on dock for some apps such as VS Code, Terminal, Safari, and Finder despite I have closed the app. I am using Catalina 10.15.1. I have to manually right click those apps and select Quit in order to remove the dots on the dock.

The presence of a dot below an app icon in Dock indicates that the app is still running.

Clicking on the red  traffic light button in the app window title bar, doesn't quit every macOS app. The default behavior of a macOS is to not quit upon clicking the button.

Some apps are programmed to quit upon clicking the red  traffic light button, but most keep running unless you explicitly quit them by running the App Name → Quit App Name command in the menu bar, or using the keyboard shortcut Command + Q, or right clicking on the app icon in the Dock and selecting Quit.


Is it safe to exclude Outlook 16.x data from Time Machine backups? Every hourly Time Machine backup is quite large for me, but I don't change that many files so rapidly. I've determined that the main culprits are under ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile. I'm hoping I can exclude something under here from Time Machine backups that will safely reduce the size of every hourly backup.

I believe MS Outlook 16.x downloads email messages and attachments
from the Outlook server under here, just for indexing and speed reasons. If I ever had data loss, those email messages and attachments would be downloadable again from the Outlook server. Therefore, excluding these from hourly backups seems reasonable to me.

However, searching the internet for files to exclude from Time Machine backups never mentions this path. I can't tell whether that is because excluding these files is unsafe, or because MS Outlook 16.x is too new for people to have discovered these files. I find the latter hard to believe, especially since the path contains "Outlook 15".

Is there something under this path that I can safely exclude from my Time Machine backups?

Don't have a real answer, just data to share.  After losing a decade's worth of archived Outlook emails, to a drive failure, I tried restoring from TM.  These were emails from previous jobs, to which I no longer had access, so my local cache was my record.

I had only mixed success - my user environment must have been corrupted by the drive failure, and even 1 year old backups would not get me my state back.  Outlook kept wanting to "rebuild" my mailboxes, which required two or three times the original mbox size (~500G at the time of loss).

I didn't have terabytes worth of space for this, so I started picking and choosing what to restore.  That's when I found that, indeed, the bulk of archived/cached local mail, lives in the ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9* path.

But Outlook also has SQLite data files elsewhere, and perhaps other metadata too, and no combination of restores would yield a working Outlook state - i.e. no rebuilds, just my mailboxes/folders as they were.

So my conclusion is that although it's probably safe to exclude this path from TM backups, if things ever do go south, and you also lose access to the mail server, then you risk losing everything, with no way to restore.

Sounds like in your use case, that's probably not a concern.

Anyways, just one guy's Outlook & Time Machine story.


How can you sync videos from Youtube to your iPad for offline viewing automatically? I'd like an application like Readability for iPad, that will download and cache videos on the iPad for offline viewing whenever it syncs with the Internet.

A qualifying application would let you do the following:

Flag a video for later viewing with a Google Chrome extension
Avoid having to use iTunes at all
Automatically download all new videos wirelessly to the iPad whenever the iPad app syncs (just like Readability)

Is there anything out there that's close?

It could be desktop software or a web application, it doesn't matter.

Watchlater does just that. Click a bookmarklet to add a video to the queue, and when you open the app, it will cache the videos in the queue.


When would the US apple store provide Unlocked iPhone 5S? The iPhone 5S won't be released where I live until maybe a month or two. I would like to get my hands on one from the US (better prices than UK) but I want it to be unlocked.

Apparently only the iPhone 5C is available unlocked from the US online Apple Store. I was wondering when would the 5S be sold unlocked as well ?

By the time an unlocked iPhone 5S becomes available in the US Store, it will be also available in the UK.

If you are in a hurry, you can grab an unlocked iPhone 5S from the Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Hong Kong and many other stores around the globe.


Lowering volume on iphone 4 when button is broken My iphone 4 volume button is broken.  Is there another way to lower the volume of streaming music and/ or videos?

Double-click the home button (to show recently used applications) and swipe the bottom toolbar to the right twice. The first swipe will show you playback controls, the second one volume controls.


Why OS X doesn't have graphic editor? Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iMovie but no app like Photoshop?

While Preview isn't the best graphic editor per se, it does the job. You can draw smart objects (which are movable after plotting/saving), resize and crop images, create textboxes and perform some basic adjustments like editing the brightness, contrast, color levels, etc.


"XXX can't be opened. You should move it to trash." for flash projector applications on mac os sierra We are experiencing a problem with flash projector .app executables that we build. When the app is downloaded from the internet on OSX sierra the message "XXX can't be opened. You should move it to trash." is thrown.

Clicking on the help icon next to it additionally displays the info:

  The app’s authorization has been revoked There may be a problem with
  this app. Although the app was signed by an identified developer, the
  certificate for the app has been revoked, and it cannot be opened.

The same app copied through a pen drive works fine. The same app downloaded over internet in other OSX versions runs fine.

We have tried options like Settings>Security > allow apps downloaded from: Anywhere in the OSX Gatekeeper settings. The application being a app published by Flash CS6 is not something that we sign ourselves. I have also read elsewhere that the Flash Player certificate was revoked by apple earlier due to a breach. But updating the Flash software with latest patches has not made a difference.

Has anyone else experienced this issue. Any workarounds/advise?
Thanks!

This is actually a macOS Gatekeeper issue try these steps:

To resolute Gatekeeper issues on macOS Sierra you might have to partially or completely disable Gatekeeper checks.

Option I
For a certain application run in Terminal:

sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/[LockedApp].app

Option II
To disable checks globally run in Terminal:

sudo spctl --master-disable


Can I manually limit the %CPU used by a process? I would like to limit the amount of CPU time dedicated to certain processes (e.g. Firefox, Safari, ...).
I can't understand why such programs, even when not used (nothing loading, no animations, running in the background, ...), are so resource hungry. Why must a browser eat 50% or more of my CPU? Can I limit it to 10%?

cputhrottle is the tool you need. You can install it with Homebrew.

You can monitor a series of processes by name by running the Bash script below. I'm not quite sure how to turn this into a login item since cputhrottle requires superuser permissions. Run it as a script, in an Automator workflow, whatever:

# Get the Process/App names from Activity Monitor and put them here
apps=("AppOne" "AppTwo" "AppThree")
# Set the respective limits here
limits={30 40 50)

while true; do
  for app in ${apps}; do
    for limit in ${limits}; do
      for pid in $(pgrep ${app}); do
        sudo /path/to/cputhrottle ${pid} ${limit}
      done
    done
  done
done

[Edited]

I've added a different version for this script (a bash script), which might be useful for people looking for limiting the CPU for multiple applications.

This new script also allows you to specify a list containing the application name and the CPU limit for it.

The main difference is that you can add cpu limit per application, and it will run only once per application. I've also added the option for killing all cputhrottle processes.

The script assumes that both cputhrottle and pidof are installed before running it.

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $EUID > 0 ]]; then
  echo "Please run this script as root/sudo"
  exit 1
fi

# Pass --kill as argument to kill all running cputhrottles
if [ $1 = "--kill" ]; then
  echo "Looking for running cputhrottles..."
  pids=`pidof cputhrottle`
  for pid in ${pids}; do
    echo "> Killing PID ${pid}"
    sudo kill ${pid}
  done
  echo "Done!"
  exit 0
fi

declare -a applications

# Syntax='application;max-cpu'
applications[0]='Chrome;40'
applications[1]='Firefox;50'
applications[2]='pycharm;40'
applications[3]='webstorm;40'
applications[4]='Safari;35'

for i in "${applications[@]}"; do
  app=(${i//;/ })
  app_name=${app[0]}
  cpu_limit=${app[1]}

  printf "\nLooking for ${app_name}...\n"
  pids=`pidof ${app}`
  for pid in ${pids}; do
    echo "> PID=${pid}, CPU=${cpu_limit}"
    sudo cputhrottle ${pid} ${cpu_limit} &
  done
done

printf "\nDone!\n"
echo "Run this script passing '--kill' as argument to remove all cputhrottles."

Source:

https://gist.github.com/golimpio/692145a19666582f84e0e66bb5dd2b2b


How to delete unwanted Sender (me) addresses in OS X Mail I have a few email addresses in the dropdown list of Senders (i.e., my own email addresses that I send mail From) which are obsolete. One of them includes the string "4Q2delist@mac.com" which I never had as part of any email address.

Anyway, I want to delete these outdated email addresses from this list. NOTE: the list I am referring to is not the "recent recipients" list - it's the list of my own email addresses.

Does anyone know how to do this, or know what "4Q2delist" means, or where this file (presumably a property list) is located?

I'm on OS X Yosemite 10.10.4, Mail 8.2. Removing aliases in iCloud didn't do anything.

In Mail.app go to Preferences → Accounts → Alias

Then select Edit Aliases in the drop down list:

It should take you to icloud.com mail settings where you can edit them all:


How to make Bluetooth headphones appear in Sound Output I have a new pair of Cowin bluetooth headphones that work just fine with my iPhone but when I connect to my Macbook running Catalina Beta they don't appear as an option to choose for Sound output/input. Is there a way to force them to appear?

Basic solutions:

Try restarting your device ;
Try disabling and enabling Bluetooth back ;
Try resetting your Mac Bluetooth cache ;
Check this answer from this question.

Hope I helped you.
Léo


Whenever I watch videos, my screen gets flashes of snow I'm using a 15 inch mid 2010 macbook with 10.8.4. It happens both on my cinema display and laptop display. It happens sporadically and had me questioning whether I was actually seeing it for a while. I notice mostly on youtube videos, but I think it's occurring from other sources as well.

Somebody could be playing a prank on me (as my buddies are likely to do), but nobody has confessed and I can't really find anything about the issue.

Any Ideas?

Depending what kind of flashes you have it is unknown, but there is one we can take care off.

Go to your system preference and click on Accessibility.

Check if the Flash the screen on error is enabled.

If yes, disable it.


How to delete an app stuck in update mode? Several months ago the Groupon app had an update which I selected, but it never completed the update. It always shows up on the update list and when you tap it, it shows "Updating". The progress bar never moves. I can't stop the update and can't delete the app!

I've connected it to my PC and when I pull it up in iTunes, I'm able to move it from page to page, but it never shows the X in the upper left corner for deletion. I could do a reset of the iPod and probably get rid of it, but then I would lose the music I've transferred to it.

It's on an iPod Touch 4th generation, iOS 6.1.3.

Any other suggestions?

Have you tried deleting Groupon, or any other problematic app, directly from your device?

Hold your finger down on the app icon.  When it wiggles, tap the delete button.  After confirming and deleting the app, download it again from the App Store on your device.

I've had this same problem before.  I'm not sure what causes the problem but this has always solved the problem for me.

I'm not sure why iTunes won't let you delete the application.  Maybe this is because it first poles your device to see if it is updating.  In such a case, it may prevent the deletion from occurring.

I hope this helps.  If it doesn't, I'd like to know how the device responds when you try to delete the app from the hardware.


Time Machine extremely slow and writing a lot of log entries I am using a MacBook Pro with macOS Sierra 10.12.1
I have to say my backup using Time Machine is extremely slow. I am using an external SSD as backup device. Doing some simple benchmarks writing to this disk could be much faster than Time Machine is doing it. I followed a lot of hints here in this forum and others but not really with success.

More or less by chance I figured out that Time Machine is generating a lot of log entries.

$ sudo log show --style syslog --info | grep 2016-11-26 | grep backup | wc
402026 4892227 71866594

I am not wondering now that it is so slow. It generates for each file a log entry and generating almost 70 MB of data.

And below that's one line of almost 400000 identical lines:

2016-11-26 16:32:54.557384+0100  localhost com.apple.prefs.backup.remoteservice[1345]: (com.apple.prefs.backup.remoteservice) Created Activity ID: 0x8000000000013d1e, Description: Loading Preferences From User CFPrefsD For Search List

It doesn't sound like a misbehaviour.

But is there a way to switch off this intensive logging ?

I assume TS would be much faster.

Information update:

In the meantime I have macOS version 10.12.2
Now there are only some few ( less than 100 ) lines of syslog entries.

But the situation is unchanged. It took 124 minutes to write 495 Mbyte of data to write. Which is about 68 kbyte/second.


Positioning desktop icons on the left instead of right Any way to automatically make alias or icons to show up on the left side of apple desktop. By default they go to the right.

There is no way to force icons to go to the left automatically (and stay arranged by the criterion you choose).

As a workaround, you can change the View Options in Finder to not arrange items by any criterion and place icons manually on the left.

Click on an empty space on the desktop.
Press Cmd+J or use the mouse to go to the Finder's View > Show View Options menu.
In the Sort by: dropdown in the dialog, choose either None or Snap to Grid.
You'll be able to drop files anywhere on your desktop and they'll stay there.

See Mac Basics: Modify your windows for more information.

Also go through the Mac Basics pages to learn more about using a Mac.


My Ipad 2 does not want to charge: how should i fix it? My Ipad is very old but still works well, the only thing it does not work is charging issue. The original charger was damaged, and I have replaced it with a accessory for it. Later on, when I want to charge, instead of charging it does the opposite of charging while having plugged in. And this is really weird, because before it did not happebed this.

So, how should I deal with charging mal function? I have tried to reboot, but it did not worked. I have tried to look for the answer but its unclear, because it is not the answer I was looking for..

Your question is a little vague but we can make a few suggestions based on what it could be.

Replace the charger and cable with a new charger and cable. If the charger went bad (and a cable could masquerade as a bad charger) replacing it (or testing it) with a new one of each should narrow down the problem.
I don't know what "the opposite of charging" means. But if the iPad powers off when you unplug it I would think item one above isn't gonna help as the charger/cable are providing power to the iPad. That might indicate a bad/worn out battery.

Note that the indication that it might be other than the battery (replace the lightning port or logic board) is possible.

Honestly I would take it to a trusted independent service center and see what they say.


Bootcamp Not enough space but nothing helps! So, I have kind of the same problem as some other people on here, but then different. I also want to install windows on my Mac. I also get the problem where it says I do not have the required 40 GB of free space. But any solution I can try on the internet doesn't work. "The sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999" doesn't work, nothing works, and it frustrates me to the max. Apple support does not really help either because they just keep telling me to clear out mor space. I am currently at almost 50 GB of free space, but now they want me to go get 55 while I read that even people with 100GB free have this problem. Any suggestions?

Also: Mac info:
MacOS High Sierra version 10.13.6
Macbook Air 13 inch 2017
1,8 GHz Intel Core i5

Edit: just after I posted all of this the report thing went from saying you need 40 GB of free space to you need to have 39 GB of free space

Edit 2:

Diskutil list output:
diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         121.1 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE   IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +121.1 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            77.9 GB    disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 22.0 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                519.1 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk1s4

Edit 3:
Also, I just open my console while trying it. It gave the same message, BUT, I saw something pop up in my console at the moment I pressed the button. I don't know if if helps, but here is that out put:

16:54:56.751775 -0400   kernel  containerGetMinimalSize:2027: Called on Physical Store, tier-0

16:54:56.751799 -0400   kernel  spaceman_get_max_allowed_shrink:5928: max_available_space 9881477 currently_allocated 19689516 currently_allocated_in_fixed_fs 0

16:54:56.751806 -0400   kernel  spaceman_get_max_allowed_shrink:5930: sm_free_count: [MAIN]=9881546, [TIER2]=0    sm_reserved_space: [MAIN]=159, [TIER2]=0

16:54:56.751811 -0400   kernel  spaceman_get_max_allowed_shrink:5932: sm_fs_reserve_block_count 0, sm_fs_reserve_alloc_count 0

16:54:56.751817 -0400   kernel  spaceman_get_max_allowed_shrink:5942: Used space move overhead is 615297, setting max_allowed_shrink to 9266180

16:54:56.751822 -0400   kernel  spaceman_get_max_allowed_shrink:5958: Minimal free space threshold_blocks is 2000, updating max_allowed_shrink to 9264180

Edit 4:
Output of the diskutil apfs resize container disk0s2 limits:

Resize limits for APFS Physical Store partition disk0s2:
  Current Physical Store partition size on map:   121.1 GB (121123069952 Bytes)

Minimum (constrained by files/snapshots):       84.9 GB (84860887040 Bytes)

Recommended minimum (if used with macOS):       95.6 GB (95598305280 Bytes)

Maximum (constrained by partition map space):   121.1 GB (121123069952 Bytes)

....

This answer is in respond to you post comment which I have repeated below.

  In that case I will go and look for other ways to install windows, I have seen some stuff about installing it without bootcamp.

The basic steps needed for your 2017 Mac have been post as the accepted answer to this question: How to install Windows 10 into a 2013 iMac without using the Boot Camp Assistant, USB flash drive or third party tools?

If you edit your question and include the output from diskutil list, I could post the steps for your particular situation.

The numbers do not look good. If you shrink your macOS partition to the minimum recommended size of 95.6 GB, then you can create 25.5 GB of free space for Windows 10. (In other words: 121.1 GB - 95.6 GB = 25.5 GB) This Microsoft website states you will need 20 GB to install Windows 10, but the Boot Camp Assistant creates a temporary partition to hold the Windows installation files. This additional space is larger than the difference between 25.5 GB and 20 GB. The Boot Camp Assistant will not install Windows because there really is not enough free space.

One possible solution would be to use a 16 GB or larger flash drive to hold the Windows installation files. Once the files are transferred to the flash drive, you could delete them from the macOS volume and thus create more free space.

One possible procedure to install Windows 10.

Use the the Boot Camp Assistant to download the latest Windows Support Software for your Mac. Look for the "Action" pulldown on the Boot Camp Assistant menu bar. On my Mac, these files were downloaded to the ~/WindowsSupport directory.
Create a FAT32 formatted volume labeled "BOOTCAMP" on the 3rd partition of the primary disk. Basically, enter the command below in a Terminal application window.

diskutil apfs resizecontainer disk0s2 96G FAT32 BOOTCAMP 0

Use the Disk Utility application to erase a 16 GB or larger flash drive. Choose the parameters shown in the image below.

Mount the Windows iso file and copy the contents to the "WINSTALL" volume. In my case, the label "ESD-ISO" was used to identify the Windows iso. To perform the copy operation, you will need the enter the cp command from a Terminal application window. Below are the commands I usually enter. If necessary, make the appropriate modifications.

cd  /Volumes/WINSTALL
cp  -Rv  /Volumes/ESD-ISO/  $PWD

  Note: This command will take a while to complete. Be patient!

Copy the Windows Support Software to the "BOOTCAMP" volume. Below is the command I usually enter. If necessary, make the appropriate modifications.

cp  -Rv  ~/Downloads/BootCamp5/  $PWD

Next, you need to boot from the flash drive. Hold down the option key immediately after restarting your Mac. Release the option key when the Startup Manager window appears. Select the icon labeled "EFI boot". Next, select the arrow below the "EFI boot" label.
Install Windows. When asked: "Where do you want to install Windows?", proceed as follows. First select the "BOOTCAMP" partition. Next, click on the "Format" button. Finally, click on the "Next" button.
If the Mac boots back to macOS, goto the Startup Disk pane of the System Preferences application, unlock, select Windows and click on Restart button. Windows will continue installing.
When Windows finishing installing, make sure the Windows Support Software is installed.


How to read old Apple ][ 5.25" floppy disks It's like Apple is a different company than it was when it produced the computer I'm talking about, so I'm not sure this is the intended topic of discussion here, but this is a question about Apple hardware, so here I go.

I have an old Franklin Ace 2100 Apple-compatible computer that I'm about to send off to a museum, but I also have a bunch of homemade software that they're not interested in and can't help me recover. Before I send this off I'd like to know that someday I might be able to get at that software again myself. I thought I once saw 5.25" USB floppy drives on Thinkgeek that might have been useful in such a data recovery process, but I can't find them any more. And even if I did, I know Apple 5.25" drives are incompatible with IBM/PC drives possibly at a hardware level, so I don't know if it would have been useful.

Can anyone help me figure out if there's a cost effective device for extracting the data from these old Apple ][ disks from the 1980s (they're almost all still functional - I just tried them yesterday again!)? I could elect to rely on a data recovery service, but then I would have to hold on to my system long enough to sort out what disks I want to recover data from before I send it away, so ideally, I'd like to be able to perform this recovery myself. My current system, BTW, is not from Apple (it's a "PC", and not an Apple-based one -- the term "PC" has always bothered me -- Apples were personal computers too).

I've never done this myself, but I did a little searching to see what might solve your problem.  Stumbled across this:

http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/

If you can connect to your modern computer using a serial cable (though even that's troublesome in this day and age…) this just might be your ticket.


can I upload photos through mobile safari? Possible Duplicate:
  Is it possible to upload files to a website from Safari on iPhone?

I am designing a website. I want users to be able to upload photos from their iPhone to my website, as such I need to know:

Can users upload from their phone gallery through Mobile Safari to my site?

Currently not, if the phone is not jailbroken.


How can I fix a Macbook Pro when the Touch Bar doesn't work? I have a 13" 2016 Macbook Pro with touchbar and the touchbar is completely disabled.

The Touch Bar settings in the keyboard settings are gone

The touch bar agent in activity monitor is missing.

The system is running in macOS Mojave 10.14.6

Here's a list of everything I tried:

I've tried running this in terminal:

pkill "Touch Bar agent";
killall "ControlStrip";

and

sudo pkill "Touch Bar agent"; sudo killall "ControlStrip";

Starting in Safe Mode
SMC reset
NVRAM reset
Apple Hardware Test (booting while holding D), resulting in "No problems found"

However, nothing seems to work.

I don't know what else to do besides a factory reset.

Does anyone know what could be the issue?

Please put this into the terminal

sudo pkill "TouchBarServer"

it will ask for a password type  it and hit enter it won't show that you are typing the password but it did


iPad 2 vs iPad 3 stylus sensitivity My iPad 3 is noticibly less sensitive to my stylus than my iPad 2. (For instance, on my iPad 2, barely brushing my stylus against the screen, even in the slightest, has an effect; on my iPad 3, I must apply enough pressure to visibly deform the tip of the stylus.)

My question is: is there a setting to change this sensitivity?

There is no way to adjust the pressure sensitivity unfortunately. However, there are several pressure sensitive styluses (styli? I've never had to pluralise stylus before) on  the market or at least in development.

Check out the Jot-Touch.

The Pressure Pen and Ten One's Blue Tiger are still in development.

Wacom's Bamboo Pen isn't pressure sensitive, but it does improve pressure sensitivity.


See date/time of most recent WLAN sync in iTunes When syncing via WLAN, the most recent sync date/time is displayed on the iOS device but not on iTunes (where only the time of the last backup is shown which seems to be the time of the most recent cable-based sync). Is there a way to show the most recent WLAN sync as well?

On iTunes select your iDevice from left menu and Summary tab on the right pane, under Backup section you'll see a sentence like last backed up to this computer: Today 06:30 this date shows you the most recent sync, whether it was over WiFi or USB.

Here is mine:


Recovering data from factory-reset iPad I updated my iPad to iOS 8.3 and something or other failed, leading to a factory reset. I'd like to recover my files.

I found a couple Windows tools that apparently can do that, but either they can't install on the only Windows computer I have available at work (no admin privileges) or they're free trials that don't actually recover the files, just show that it can but want you to pay.

I have not found anything promising so far, besides using PhotoRec per this link: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Recover_data_from_an_iPhone, which requires the iDevice to be jailbroken, which mine cannot be since it's 8.3 plus I want to keep overwriting to a minimum.

I'm running TahrPup, which is a Puppy "built from ubuntu 14.04 LTS trusty tahr packages" and can install from ubuntu's repositories/etc.

Number one, the more you use your iPad, the more chance that your missing data that might be recoverable will become overwritten so I have to mention that... it sounds like you already know.

Which generation of iPad is this? If it is an iPad 1, it should mostly be recoverable (either by a data recovery firm, or maybe some do-it-yourself recovery software such as Dr. Fone).

However, since you mention iOS 8.3, it must be a later generation iPad. Unfortunately for your situation, these are all hardware encrypted by default (whether or not you set a passcode), and once factory reset, to my knowledge it's impossible to decrypt the old data. Encryption like this is a security feature, but it also can kill the chances of data recovery like in your situation.

Your best bet would be to work from a backup of course (iTunes or iCloud), but I guess you don't have that option. I have heard that 3rd party app data (but not data from native apps) might be recoverable somehow but I'll have to check on that.

I know this isn't the answer you're looking for and I really hope you can scrounge up a backup from somewhere. We are seeing the always-on encryption of some devices now becoming a major problem for data recovery. It's better for security, but that necessarily also severely reduces chances for people to recover their lost data. We have seen some manufacturers backstep a little on this recently, but it seems like the overall trend is for more encryption.

You can still send this to a professional data recovery firm that can work on mobile devices as a last ditch effort, and if there is any chance, maybe if something slightly different from what we're discussing occurred, then they would have the best chance at recovering it. Most do not charge if they cannot recover the needed data.


Where can I see Cisco IPSec VPN logs? I'm running Sierra and trying to connect to VPN network using a certificate. When I press the Connect button I get an error:

  An unexpected error occurred. Try reconnecting. If the problem continues, verify your settings and contact your Administrator.

I wonder where I can see the logs of connection attempt because the error message is not clear at all. I saw some advices on the internet about checking /var/log/system.log, but there is nothing related to VPN on my machine. Maybe I should somehow enable DEBUG logging?

This information is available in the Console application. The logging for Cisco IPSec VPN type is associated with the "racoon" service heading (note: only one c in racoon); the logging for IKEv2 is associated with the nesessionmanager service. It is unclear to me whether these messages are captured in a persistent log, but they do at least show up when Console is open and a VPN connection is created/initiated.


Max Heart Rate during Workout Apple Watch I am wondering if it's possible to set a max heart rate during a workout in the new Apple Watch 6. It's the only feature that I need in a new watch. If it doesn't have it I'm buying a garmin watch.
Kr,
V.

You don't need any third party apps to have your heart rate sampled all the time and displayed on the watch. You can customize each workout type to include or exclude a dozen metrics for the Outdoor Run type. Indoor run is the same and I don't use it, but the treadmill integration is amazing from what I hear when you sync your watch to equipment that will visually show you what telemetry the watch is broadcasting (with your opt in permission, of course).

Here is what the phone interface looks like for you to alter what is shown during the workout image above.

So if you didn’t care so much about pace, you could edit out both pace items and see this instead during your run:

Garmin makes some great product, so I would choose based on where you want your data in the end - which app ecosystem is better for you. Heart Rate zones are going to be easy to set / manage / report on both platforms as it's so obvious and easy to measure.


How should I schedule a one off job? Context: I want to schedule various servers I look after to install various updates (both through SU and not) and restart as and when necessary but remotely and out of office hours. Not on a regular basis (daily/weekly/monthly etc) but as and when we're sure the update isn't going to break stuff...

My question is a little more general than that: how should I schedule one off jobs like this? Presumably more than one way of going about it, interested to hear what people think, whether it's scripting it or 3rd party utilities, whatever.

There are 3 options I can think of, all of which rely on your setup/tools you have. For this, I am also assuming you are working with Mac servers.

Apple Remote Desktop and Scheduled Tasks
iCal and alarms
the bash 'at' command.

Apple Remote Desktop

ARD will allow you to run tasks on remote machines, and they can be either done instantly or at a scheduled future time. You could create your task that you need to run, click on the machine you want to run it on, select the task, then schedule it for when needed. This queues up the task for that time. More details on how to use ARD to do this are available on Apple's website under RemoteDesktop 3.0 help. I no longer have ARD to verify, but I think the remote task is queued on that machine, and therefore ARD does not need to be running on your machine to run the update.

iCal and Alarms

iCal will allow you to add an event that can execute a script at a defined time.

You do this by adding an event in iCal, and where the Alarm option is for the event, you can select Run Script, and then pull up the AppleScript you would like to run.

There are pitfalls with this. The local computer you are on (that had iCal) would need to be able to connect to the remote machine, and most likely be awake (I have not tested if this will wake the machine to run). This is also much less reliable than the ARD or 'at' option (I assume this was made for users to simply automate something on their machine, versus a sysadmin tool).

The 'at' command

The bash 'at' command will allow you to run a task at a specified time. You will need to make a bash shell script for your task, and then save it, as well as set the correct execution/permission settings. Once that is done, you can use the 'at' command to schedule it, using something like:

at -f updatesoftware.sh -v 10:30

The script should then execute and send you feedback if mail is set up correctly. According to this site, you need to make sure you enable 'at' on the Mac though, using the following command:

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

I would review the man page (using man at) to determine the exact configuration you prefer. Using this option though, you can schedule the task on the particular machine you want to run on, therefore taking extra machines (like the previous two examples) out of the equation.


Do I need Hibernate option ON for my Retina Macbook Pro? I have a Retina MBP and have the following settings using pmset -g

As you can see below, standby is 1 and hibernationmode is 3, meaning that I have DEEP SLEEP turned on, after 7200 seconds.

Do I need to have hibernation on ? or off ? I read somewhere the SSD don't need hibernation option, and can save memory (which is saved in /var/vm/sleepimage I'm assuming). Is this true ?

If I don't need it, how can I turn it off ? Because the settings I currently have using pmset -g is confusing, and not sure if they should look this way, can you inform me if I have weird values there ?

On power :

Active Profiles:
Battery Power       -1
AC Power        -1*
Currently in use:
 standbydelay         7200
 standby              1
 womp                 1
 halfdim              1
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
 darkwakes            1
 gpuswitch            2
 networkoversleep     0
 disksleep            0
 sleep                0
 autopoweroffdelay    14400
 hibernatemode        3
 autopoweroff         1
 ttyskeepawake        1
 displaysleep         60
 acwake               0
 lidwake              1

and on battery :

Battery Power       -1*
AC Power        -1
Currently in use:
 standbydelay         7200
 standby              1
 halfdim              1
 hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
 darkwakes            0
 gpuswitch            2
 disksleep            0
 sleep                180
 autopoweroffdelay    14400
 hibernatemode        3
 autopoweroff         1
 ttyskeepawake        1
 displaysleep         5
 acwake               0
 lidwake              1

Thanks !

No - almost no one is so starved for battery power that full on Hibernation mode makes sense for them. So for any Mac with a battery - keep with mode 3 and avoid modes 0 and 25.

I never change Apple's default settings unless I have a reason that I can write down in a sentence as to why I want it changed. In this case, there's no real benefit to me for the alternate modes (and certainly not for any further unsupported combination that the full man page and pmset allows)

Here is the manual page for pmset which has very excellent help and documentation on hibernate mode (I wish all man pages were this awesome):

 We do not recommend modifying hibernation settings. Any changes you make
 are not supported. If you choose to do so anyway, we recommend using one
 of these three settings. For your sake and mine, please don't use any-
 thing other 0, 3, or 25.

 hibernatemode = 0 (binary 0000) by default on supported desktops. The
 system will not back memory up to persistent storage. The system must
 wake from the contents of memory; the system will lose context on power
 loss. This is, historically, plain old sleep.

 hibernatemode = 3 (binary 0011) by default on supported portables. The
 system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and
 will power memory during sleep. The system will wake from memory, unless
 a power loss forces it to restore from disk image.

 hibernatemode = 25 (binary 0001 1001) is only settable via pmset. The
 system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and
 will remove power to memory. The system will restore from disk image. If
 you want "hibernation" - slower sleeps, slower wakes, and better battery
 life, you should use this setting.

So, as you can see - Mode 0 (binary 0000) is not really helpful for a retina MBP and doesn't save any battery. Mode 3 (binary 0011) is the default and what I recommend. If you didn't mind a slower sleep and higher amount of data written to the drive each time you enter sleep (as opposed to the write happening once sleep has drained the power to a low warning level around 5% reserve) you might try using Mode 25 to see if your slower sleep/wake is worth the extra battery life preservation since the Mac won't sleep but instead hibernates all the time with power off when the normal sleep time comes.


Can ffmpeg merge multiple m4a files into one ~chapterized~ file? Given a folder full of 'm4a' files, I can merge them all into one big m4a file using ffmpeg like so:

ffmpeg -f concat -i <(for f in ./*.m4a; do echo "file '$PWD/$f'"; done) \
-c copy ../OUTPUT.m4a

However, what I would like to do is have OUTPUT.m4a contain chapters for each one of the original input files (each chapter just needs a number, not a name).

I have tried googling for this, but everything I have found seems to be about merging video files and MKVs, not m4a files.

Ideally, I would like to be able to do this via the command line, as I have 60+ folders, and would like to be able to script this rather than loading it into an app of some sort.

Any help would be appreciated.

I use mp4v2 in my open-source app to join together iTunes tracks. You can install mp4v2 using Homebrew.

To add chapters, create a text file in the following format:

00:00:00.000 Name of first chapter
00:00:23.500 Name of second chapter
00:02:40.700 Third chapter, etc

You might be able to automate the creation of the chapter file by using ffprobe (see example written in AppleScript and shell script).

For an output file called "OUTPUT.m4a", save the chapters file as "OUTPUT.chapters.txt". Then run mp4chaps -i OUTPUT.m4a in the same directory as the output file to add the chapters to it.


Will this app damage my computer? I've downloaded an application but when I want to open this application it shows an error message saying that it will damage my computer.

I tried to download the application from multiple sources but it continues to give me the same message. When I try to open the application with my right mouse button it still gives me the same message.

I have the last open beta of OS X El Capitan if that matters. If anyone knows how I can still open it, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

I believe this is GateKeeper doing its thing.

Try slackening off the security a little bit; go to Security & Privacy prefpane, and change Allow apps downloaded from: to a more lax setting (you may need to choose Anywhere, I'm not sure if Atlassian qualify under "identified developers").


How can I open MTS video files to iPhone's photostream so applications can use them? My goal is to have the MTS files in PhotoStream so that all of my iPhone applications such as video collage creator apps can use them. MTS video files are files created by Sony Nex 3N camera that are downloaded to MacOS X and Dropbox.

I am using iMovie 10.0.6 in MacOS X.

How can I open MTS video files in iPhone in a way that video editing apps are able to use them?

You need to convert them first.

I recommend using Handbrake application for this. It is free and solid.


Shared Screen and DVD movies I use a new Mac Mini in my stereo system. It has a monitor but does not have Keyboard or mouse. It is controlled with screen sharing from a Mac Book.  My question is related to viewing DVD movies, the store bought kind. With screen sharing active a DVD is inserted into the drive and movie window appears and the sound starts but the playback window is grey.  To get the picture to appear I have to turn off screen sharing. Only then can we watch the movie.

How can I continue to use screen sharing and view DVD's.

This is a silly copy protection measure. If you use VLC rather than Apple's DVD Player you get no problem at all.

First, go to System Preferences > CDs & DVDs and change the setting for When You Insert a Video DVD from DVD Player to Ignore or choose other and select VLC 2 in your Applications folder.

Now when you insert a DVD VLC 2 will run and should autostart. No grey boxes.


How to open numbers spreadsheet in 2 separate windows I often find it useful to have two tabs of one spreadsheet open in separate windows. In Excel this is easy (Windows/New Window).

Is there any way to achieve this in Numbers (as of Version 3.5)?

For the record, I've tried searching for an answer to this, but needless to say, searches including "Numbers" and "Windows" doesn't lead to anything useful.

Thinking about this some more, I have figured out a workaround. Though it's not altogether satisfactory, it could be useful in some cases. The workaround is iCloud.

Save the Numbers spreadsheet to iCloud drive, and then open it from a web browser. Open a new browser window and again open the spreadsheet from iCloud drive and you now have the spreadsheet open in 2 windows.

You could also have a local copy open in Numbers, with additional windows provided by iCloud browser windows, though there would be some lag between local changes appearing in iCloud and visa versa.


How do I make Evernote always paste in the matching font? When I paste text from another application into Evernote it always uses some random strange font from the source.

How do I change Evernote so that it keeps the font the same as the font in the note I am pasting the text. It seems fairly logical to me but I cannot fathom why it does anything else!

What you want can be achieved using Paste and Match Style

Edit > Paste and Match Style

Keyboard shortcut shift+⌘+V

This will paste in your clipboard content matching the current style of text in your note.


Deleting iMessages on iPad My iPhone is synced with my daughter's iPad. My iMessage texts are appearing on her iPad.  We thought we had deleted them from the iPad but they appear to be still there in some sort of "history" section. The screen they are appearing in has no ability to delete; they are just sitting there. I would really like to delete these totally off my daughter's iPad. Any suggestions?

Without seeing a screenshot of what, exactly, you're talking about, it's hard to give any really good advice.

That said, try this:

Go to Settings
Scroll down to Messages; set iMessage to OFF
Back in Messages, go to the root screen (where you see all the different conversations listed); either click Edit and then swipe each conversation to delete as needed

This should get rid of all your messages, as well as prevent any further iMessages from being delivered to that device.


Can the iPad detect the shape of a contact on its screen? For example, could the iPad or iPhone accurately detect the difference between conductive pieces of plastic in the following shapes?

A multitouch gesture recognizer can see when it's been touched in more than one discrete spot, and can understand the position of each of those touches. So that's "shape-ish". But no, there's no way to know a square versus an octagon is touching it.


Apple Keyboard with numeric keypad problems I have a very strange issue with my wired Apple Keyboard with numeric keypad. When I try to type the large letter Q by pressing the left Shift key, it doesn't work. However, when I use the right Shift key, it works. The left Shift key works with most letters, but not all. The option key works in some shortcuts and in others it doesn't. The next (F9) and the mute (F10) button don't work. Typing some diacritics works, but not in all cases. It's seems totally random.

First I thought something's badly configured in macOS (newest Sierra release), but the keyboard has these same issues with every other computer. How is it possible, that some key combinations work and others don't? I do understand that keys stop working, but key combinations?

All this happened after a routine cleaning of the keyboard with a moist cloth. It happened to me once, a few months ago. One button stopped working temporarily, but a month later it started working again.

Is it possible to fix this somehow or do I have to buy a new keyboard now (the warranty is up)?

Sounds like you got water inside.

It might be cleanable, professionally; or some of the tracks may be corroded.
Your call - get a quote for a fix, or just get a new one & don't get it wet again :/

See this answer to a not really related question for a 'cruel but fair' analysis of how bad water is for electronics.


Full-Screen Auto-Location Change in OS X 10.10 I'm using a MacBook Pro with Retina, currently at OS X 10.10.3.
I use it for both personal and work related matters, more often than not, at the same time. As such, I have 6 desktops ready to go at any given time.

I have the "Auto-Arrange" option switched off, so I don't lose my mind going through the desktops.

My problem lies in switching an app into full screen. The default behavior of course is for the space to go to the far right of all the desktops, and in cases where I'm only using 2 or 3 desktops, I end up having to swipe into mission control and either manually rearranging for every app I switch into full-screen, or when I'm in "auto-mode", I just end up swiping 4 times or so to get to the space...

Any behavior can be changed, just a matter of finding a way.
Anyone know how to change it so that full-screen apps show up on the left of the other desktops/spaces (same as where the dashboard is), instead of being added to the right of them?

I've never found any way to get full-screen apps to go to the left. At least they don't drop randomly in the middle of other Desktops like they used to, so at least you now know where they're going to be.

My workaround has been to use the default ctrl/number key commands in System Prefs > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Mission Control, as below, which in my case makes the first full-screen app accessible by  Ctrl ⌃   6  then  Ctrl ⌃   →  or one swipe.


Access photos from Google Photos/Drive with iPad Air 2 I'm currently storing all my photos on Google Drive/Photos (auto-upload from Android, but also manual uploads of photos taken with various cameras). While I can sync Google Drive with my MBP and add the synced folder to the OSX Photos.app, this is not an option for my iPad Air 2, as disk space is much more limited there.

Is there any way to point the photos.app to Google Drive?

You can install the Google Photos App and access your photos from there. It works in a similar fashion as the Photos app on iOS, you see device sized photos and download only the photos you wish to copy to the Camera Roll. You can even sync your photos with drive if you like to.


How to change Text-related keyboard shortcuts I've recently got a mac for some software development (I am been doing windows dev for 15 years) but I keep stumbling on the keyboard shortcuts. I've been using DoubleCommand to switch ctrl and ⌘, which works much better now, but my major problem is with the keyboard shortcuts to navigate text:

⌥+←+→ navigates to the previous/next word. My fingers are quite used to do ctrl+←/→ instead. Is there a way to change those shortcuts? I checked under System Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts, but they are not listed there. Also, there is no menu item for which I could create an overwrite of the default behaviour by adding a new shortcut.

It is quite difficult to teach a new trick to an old dog, so I appreciate any help that would point me in the right direction. By the way, I am using Lion.

According to this blog post, you can create a file called ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.Dict (you might have to create the KeyBindings folder in your Library folder).

In that file, you need the following content:

{
   "@\UF702"  = "moveWordBackward:";
   "@\UF703"  = "moveWordForward:";
}

(see the linked blog post for other Windows features you might want to recreate)

Not all programs that use text fields will use the default keybindings, but this will help with many programs.


How to support 32-bit windows installation on boot camp I'm attempting to make my USB a bootable windows 7 installation. I have the Windows 7 installation ISO image and related files. When I attempt to format my USB with the files, I receive the error: Boot Camp only supports 64-bit Windows installation on this platform. Please use a ISO file for 64-bit Windows installation.

My ultimate goal is to make the USB bootable with a new Windows 7 install from within my mac, and then booting my old Windows Vista computer with the fresh install.

How might I get this to work?

Basically, you can use your Mac to create a USB flash drive installer for use on a PC. The steps are given below.

Install Virtual Box. This is free software.
Install Virtual Box Extension Pack. This will give virtual machines access to the USB ports.
Create a Windows virtual machine. Do not activate.
Download the flash drive creation tool. This download website is very slow. Be patient.
Put the Windows iso file and the flash drive creation tool on the flash drive.
Copy the iso and creation tool from the flash drive to the Windows virtual machine main drive.
Use the creation tool to transfer the iso to the flash drive.

If you need a better explanation of any step, let me know.

Advice on VirtualBox and Flash Drives

Try these steps.

Click on the image of a USB flash drive on the bottom of the virtual machine window. Note the devices.
Insert the flash drive in a USB port.
Repeat step 1. The flash drive is the new item in the list. Usually something cryptic. The item may be grayed out.
If the item is grayed out, then you must unmount the flash drive. You can do this from the Disk Utility application, but sometimes this fails to work. If you use the Terminal application, you can enter the command diskutil list before and after inserting the flash drive in the USB port. The added disk is the one that must be unmounted. Here, I will assume this is disk1. The command to unmount the flash drive would then be as shown below.

diskutil  unmountdisk  disk1

  Note:  Sometimes you have to wait a few seconds before the status of a flash drive changes. For example, you can unmount a flash drive, but the item may remain grayed out in the VirtualBox list for several seconds.

Click on the image of a USB flash drive on the bottom of the virtual machine window. Select the flash drive. If it is still grayed out, then you must repeat step 4.

  Note: I would not mess with the VM "Ports" settings or USB device filters In fact, I have never figured out what the device filters are for.


Automator: Service to move files into new subfolders based on file extension *within any selected folder* I've been searching for quite a while now but can't seem to find relevant instruction for this particular task. I'm brand new at this so apologies if I'm missing something basic.

Like many photographers I come back from a shoot with a card containing RAW (CR2), JPG, and MOV files all in a single folder. Once I copy this folder to my hard drive, I have to do the following actions, for which I would like to create a single service, so that I can run this same process for any folder I choose.

So here's what I'd like to automate:

Create separate folders for Raw, JPG, and Video within selected folder.
Identify files of each type and move them into the folders created in the first step.

I thought this would be simple, but the problem seems to lie in my need for this to be a generic service, not tied to any specific folder path. I need it to be repeatable for other folders, but I can't seem to figure out that essential versatility aspect.

I've already found and adapted an Apple Script (see below) which creates the subfolders I need. That part works fine as a service on its own. But I can't seem to perform the second step which would do the actual file-moving.

I know how to move files of a certain type to a specific folder but that's not what I need. I need all the JPGs in a certain folder to be moved to a new subfolder called JPG within the selected folder and likewise for the other file types. I understand how to filter those file types, but so far I can't figure out how to move them to a folder without having to specify a path, I don't know how to point to folders that don't yet exist. Even if I could, those paths will be different for each folder I need to work on.

Can any one give advice or point me to a relevant discussion?

Many, many thanks.

///

Here's the Apple Script for my subfolder creation service:

Script text:

on run {input, parameters}
    set output to {}
    tell application "Finder"
        set {source_folder, source_name} to {it, name} of first item of input
        repeat with prefix in {"JPG - ", "RAW - ", "Edits - ", "Video - "}
            make new folder at source_folder with properties {name:contents of prefix & source_name}
            set end of output to result as alias
        end repeat

Note: The file-moving part of the automation won't involve my the "Edits - " folder. This is just a container for future files.

I've worked off the assumption that you will be selecting the actual folders in order to pass them to your Automator service workflow via, for example, the contextual right-click services menu.

Given this, here's what your service workflow would look like:

Here's the script that goes in the Run AppleScript action:

on run input
    set [input] to the input

    repeat with directory in the input
        organiseFilesOfFolder_(POSIX path of the directory)
    end repeat

end run

to organiseFilesOfFolder:f
    local f

    script SourceFolder
        use sys : application "System Events"

        property location : a reference to folder f of sys
        property name : (a reference to name of my location)

        script JPGs
            property folder : missing value
            property name extension : "jpg"
            property list : {}
            property id : "JPG"
        end script

        script RAWfiles
            property folder : missing value
            property name extension : "cr2"
            property list : {}
            property id : "RAW"
        end script

        script Videos
            property folder : missing value
            property name extension : "mov"
            property list : {}
            property id : "Video"
        end script

        script Edits
            property folder : missing value
            property id : "Edits"
        end script

        to make new "folder" given type:fileType
            [fileType's id, " - ", my name's contents]

            make new folder at my location ¬
                with properties {name:¬
                contents of result as text}

            set the folder of the fileType to the result
        end make

        on listOf:fileItems
            set the list of fileItems to (every file ¬
                of my location where its name extension ¬
                is the name extension of the fileItems)
        end listOf:
    end script

    tell the SourceFolder
        repeat with fileType in its [JPGs, RAWfiles, Videos, Edits]
            make new "folder" given type class:fileType
            if the contents of the fileType = its Edits then ¬
                exit repeat

            if (its listOf:fileType) is not {} then ¬
                tell application "System Events" to move ¬
                    list of fileType to the ¬
                    folder of the fileType
        end repeat
    end tell
end organiseFilesOfFolder:


change permission /etc/hosts? I'm getting into Vagrant and I installed a plugin that update my Mac's /etc/hosts to add a domain and map the IP address to the domain. The only problem that in order to change the file, it needs admin access.

Is it safe to set the permissions of /etc/hosts to 664, where the owner and group has read and write access and everyone else can read?

Or should I use 644 where the owner has read and write and everyone else has read access?

Thanks,

Is it safe to set the permissions of /etc/hosts to 664, where the owner and group has read and write access and everyone else can read?

It depends on how well you maintain the system. Basically it shouldn't be a problem, especially as you are free to change the file group-membership to a single-user-group for your account only (if there were processes reading the file using default 4 permission for group, they would access now using the same permission for others).
Nevertheless, if you use Vagrant Hostmanager plugin, there are clear instructions how to remove the necessity to provide password at run-time, by adding some configuration to sudoers file:

Add the following snippet to the sudoers file (e.g. /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant_hostmanager):
Cmnd_Alias VAGRANT_HOSTMANAGER_UPDATE = /bin/cp <home-directory>/.vagrant.d/tmp/hosts.local /etc/hosts
%<admin-group> ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: VAGRANT_HOSTMANAGER_UPDATE

Replace <home-directory> with your actual home directory (e.g. /home/joe) and <admin-group> with the group that is used by the system for sudo access (usually sudo on Debian/Ubuntu systems and wheel on Fedora/Red Hat systems).
If necessary, add yourself to the <admin-group>:
usermod -aG <admin-group> <user-name>

Replace <admin-group> with the group that is used by the system for sudo access (see above) and <user-name> with you user name.


Apple Treats Transparent Images as a Black Background I use Skype and I'm trying to upload a profile image from an iOS device that has a transparent background. Every time I save the image to any iOS device, the transparent background turns black :-/ I have the exact image I want on OSX Skype but it doesn't sync the profile picture across iOS devices. I've re downloaded the app but so far nothing's worked. Is anyone else experiencing this issue or knows how to solve it?

Simply put, iOS uses the JPEG format when saving images to the Camera Roll, and JPEG does not have an alpha channel for transparency. When converting a PNG image to JPEG, all transparency data is lost. What is happening is the color 0x00000000 (RGBA - four octets) is being changed to 0x000000 (RGB - three octets).


Is it possible to use a single Time Machine backup so that two Macs are always in sync? I have a Time Machine and two Macs.  I want both computers to be the same, not back them up separately.

Is it possible to use one as a primary (always backing up from one) and then "downloading" the latest changes onto another?

Time Machine is not designed to do this. It will not make bootable backups, so you can't use a Mac as a destination for backup (and have this backup be "functional").

There are other solutions for synchronizing multiple machines. If iCloud/Dropbox/Google Drive type solutions are not sufficient for your needs, there are other tools that can sync - Chronosync is one solution.


External HDD with encrypted mac partitions is no longer recognized I have an external disk which I use for data and a TimeMachine backup. For some reason the partition table appears to be broken and I may already have worsened the problem by trying to fix it with testdisk, where I went through EFI/GTP -> analyze -> quick search and tried to restore all partitions, which tells me the structure is bad, so I restored the first two. I'm not sure what EFI System is good for, if activated it is mounted, but that wasn't the case before the problems started.

The 4TB disk is split into two parts around 2TB each, both standard encrypted macOS partitions.

I already tried to follow HFS+ Partition of Mac OSX is not recognized in Windows 10 Bootcamp but when I try to add the second partition, it says GPT partition #2 does not exist or is too big; skipping.

The same happened on another external disk. Both worked fine earlier today/a few days ago. The only change I see is that I used a different cable for one of the disks but not for the other.

So now that I have restarted my macbook, the second disk works again, whereas the first does not (presumably because I messed it up).

I would appreciate if someone can point me to a solution for this. Also I would be interested how this can happen at all.

Ok, let us step back for a second here. What OS are you running these commands from, and when was the volume originally partitioned? Although you've not mentioned it, its clear from the screenshots you've posted that (at least, as some point, depending on what you mean by "restoring" the first two), your volume was formatted into a Core Storage "Logical Volume Group", with at least one Core Storage "Logical Volume".

CoreStorage is a pretty well deprecated technology at this point. It was only really actively used for a brief window by Apple.

This more or less necessarily means that "the 4TB disk is split into two parts around 2TB each, both standard encrypted macOS partitions" isn't quite true, as there's not really such a thing as a "standard" "encrypted" macOS partition. There are [J]HFS[+] logical volumes which are encrypted via CoreStorage, although today they're quite rare (10.12+, APFS is preferred, and Time Machine on JHFS+ uses a whole different mechanism using disk images/sparse bundles). None of these, are, unfortunately, close to "standard".

My first recommendation (and its difficult to say what to do after this, without more information) at this point would to be would be to try to revert the Core Storage LVG into standard JHFS+ partitions, so they're individually recognized on in the GPT partition table. You may have to decrypt the Logical Volumes first. That would be diskutil cs revert [disk5s2 or the LVG UUID], possibly after one or more diskutil cs decryptVolume [diskXsX or LV UUID]  commands.

As for restoring disks and volumes, if you wish to retain their structure, your best bet is to use asr — although of course occasionally with dd in combination with /dev/r[diskX] there can still be some milage to be had, I really don't recommend it.


RSS reader and archiver application? I am looking for a decent RSS reader app that would double up as an archiver. It would let me flag any posts that I find valuable for PERMANENT storage in a database. Even when the blog is no longer online, this application would let me browse and read the articles I've saved, for YEARS to come.

So I am really looking for the ability to backup RSS posts. Reading offline is only a side effect. I want to be able to flag some of my feeds for permanent storage too, so I don't need to flag each post individually.

Some of the blogs I have been following on personal development topics have a distinct voice and just won't be replaced. Unfortunately, as I have found out blogs (and forums) do disappear. And with them, a treasure trove of information that would have continued to be useful to me for years to come.

Does a solution exist on OS X or iOS?

Newsfire archives entries as long as you want it to.


How do I run Octave from a different directory? I have recently installed Octave, a MATLAB clone, onto the following directory:

/Applications/Octave.app/Contents/Resources/bin/octave

I want to run it from a shell command prompt from a different directory, say, from my home directory ~.  I know that I can type the full path to the octave executable, but that is very cumbersome.  I know that on linux computers you can edit your .bashrc file to include paths to special directories with executables.  How do I accomplish that here in Mac OS?

Edit your .bashrc (or .bash_profile, .login, etc.) on a Mac, and add the line

alias octave='/Applications/Octave.app/Contents/Resources/bin/octave'


How to disable finder folder metadata persistence? Is there a way to tell finder not to save any metadata about folders?

I would love to get Finder to forget how it displayed any folder the last time I viewed it.
So when expanding a folder it does not expand the whole subtree I opened last time.

Have a look at Death to DS_Store.

The source code is available on GitHub and the binary is available as well.


How does the iPhone know it's not using an Apple cable? Sometimes when I plug a cable in to charge, the iPhone says it may not work with this device. How does it know it's not an Apple cable?

Apple has a program called MFi and detects if the cable has a certified chip inside. The chip just says that it's been officially 'Made For iOS.'


Folders in Finder not showing This may be a total noob question, but this is my first apple product, please bear with me.
I'm not seeing certain folders, like "movies", "music", and "pictures" in finder.
Is there a way to activate these folders?

I'm running osx mavericks on a late 2013 mbp.

Pull down the Finder menu and select Preferences...

In the Preferences dialog, along the top row, click on the Sidebar tab.
Check the boxes next to the items you want to see in the sidebar of every Finder window.

Close the Finder Preferences window and you are good to go.


How to connect a Mac Book Pro to a LaserWriter II NT I have an Apple LaserWriter II NT from the late 80's. Is there a way how I can print to it from my MacBook Pro?

That machine has an AppleTalk interface - I doubt you'll find anything made in the last 20 years that can connect to it, much less drivers for it that would run under OS X.

12MHz processor & 2MB RAM - I think it's also PostScript only, but I'm not certain.

The Asanté Bridge used to be the thing to connect Ethernet to AppleTalk - but idk if the $60 asking price would be worth it these days - I did find one on Amazon, though - http://www.amazon.com/Asante-Talk-Ethernet-LocalTalk-Bridge/dp/B00004VUFW

See also - http://lowendmac.com/network/bridge.shtml

See if a museum would be interested.


OSX Lion AFP multiple requests to NAS I've got 8 TB of NAS shared with a network of mostly MacOSX Lion iMacs via AFP.

Right after opening the share, the computer starts to send an enormous amount of FPEnumerateExt2 requests, trying to get the sizes of the shared files and calculate sizes of folders.

Multiply it by several computers, and network and NAS quickly gets flooded by the requests rendering it borderline unusable. Is there any way to stop it?

This is how you can disable the calculation of folders:

In Finder.app press CMD+J.
uncheck "calculate folder sizes"
Click the button on the bottom to set it as the default behavior
Press CMD+J again to hide the panel.


iCloud use as storage and not "reflective" like dropbox I hope this hasn't been asked exactly like this before. I tried to do a search.

I am referring to my MacBook (but I think the same is at least partially true for other devices as well).

I checked "optimise storage" so that it will leave some space on my Mac.

I need more storage on my Mac because some apps like Xcode cannot be updated with just 25GB left on the SSD.

So - please let me know if this is true: ONLY desktop and "document" and their subdirectories are reflected back to my MacBook. Is this true. If so this implies that if I make another folder on iCloud like "Documents2" and push a lot of stuff that I don't daily need or want into that folder - this will NOT be copied over to my Mac, even if there is enough space?

Is this correct?

Thanks,
Jeff

iCloud is not 'storage' it is 'data distribution'.

It isn't designed to 'keep things on', it's designed so that whichever device you pick up, you have access to the same files.

The closest it comes to being 'storage' is if you have a small, overloaded drive it will start to offload such as full-size images, leaving smaller versions locally.

Purely personal opinion:
Many people were sold laptops with far too little drive space on them & are now paying the price for economising/marketing strategy.
256GB is absolute bare minimum, imnsho, & 128GB is simply not enough for much more than the OS.


How can I run a partially referenced iTunes library? I have a large number of MP4 videos (non-iTunes purchases) in my iTunes library, which is growing daily. Due to the space it's taking up, I plan to unload these files to an external HDD. Home Sharing is the main reason why I use iTunes for my movie library to begin with (including streaming to my Apple TV, not just only iOS devices connected to my local network).

Here is my dilemma: I cannot, to my knowledge, run a partially referenced iTunes library- where Music is automatically copied to the iTunes Media folder, but Videos are not (but rather referenced on the external hard drive).

I know I can uncheck "Automatically Copy to iTunes" within iTunes' preferences and drag Music into the "Automatically add to iTunes" folder, but I'm hoping a simpler solution exists, either within iTunes or using third party software. Thank you in advance.

By the way, I'm running OSX Mavericks 10.9.3 and iTunes 11.2.1

Have you look into Tune Span?  http://tunespan.com/


Insert dots at the end of a phrase I need some help with a table of contents.
I'm trying to automatically add dots (take a look at red rectangles) at the end of a phrase with the number of the page, as shown in this example image I have found in the internet:

To add the dots to your table of contents, select the table, choose the Text inspector, then select the leader as dots.

If you don't have a table of contents, place the cursor where you wish to insert the table of contents, then Insert → Table of Contents and choose the scope.


Resetting PRAM through Terminal For some reason, my Mac won't let me reset my PRAM in the usual way (by holding the relevant keys down when restarting), simply nothing happens when I try it and my Mac just boots up normally every time.

I'm suspecting this may be due to the fact I'm using a PC keyboard after I broke my Apple one a while back.

I read that I can reset my PRAM through Terminal with the following command:

sudo nvram boot-args=”-p -r”

But all I get is this error:

  nvram: Error setting variable - 'boot-args': (iokit/common) general error

I'm running High Sierra on a late 2009 iMac if that helps

According to an Apple Support page called "Prepare your institution for iOS 10 and macOS Sierra":

  ...you must use the nvram command to properly set boot-args NVRAM variable. Starting with macOS Sierra, you must be booted to the recovery partition to run this command.

But now you can clear the NVRAM with

sudo nvram -c

Then restart for the reset to take effect.

I also have a PC keyboard that doesn't seem able to reset the NVRAM on startup, but I think the real problem is that it's wireless. But this command is easier and more reliable anyway.


Why do apps which are not installed run from an external bootable drive? After a disk crash in my MacBook Pro running Lion, I replaced the drive, installed Mountain Lion, and am rebuilding my system. I used Migration Assistant to transfer from an external bootable clone drive (with the old Lion system)  'users' and possibly 'settings', but not 'applications' or 'other files.' I wanted a clean, new system, but Migration Assistant sure is helpful for not having to re-enter user id info, passwords, network settings & passwords, etc! Half my apps are reinstalled so far.

In the Dock, apps which used to be, but are not yet installed show as a question mark: [OOPS, can't post the pic:"as a spam prevention mechanism, new users aren't allowed to post images"] I guess this means the Migration Assistant transferred info like "apps which are in the dock." An earlier question:
Is there a complete and detailed description of what Migration Assistant copies over?
failed to enumerate precisely what Migration Assistant transfers. I could not find any SystemMigration.log file on my new system.

Now the weird part: When I have the external bootable Lion disk attached, all the missing apps show up in my dock and are executable! Is this is normal? not supposed to happen? It was particularly disconcerting and confusing--I am a pretty novice OS X user!--when the new system had Pathfinder 6 installed and running--and from the backup drive Pathfinder 5 showed up in the dock and got started somehow. Suddenly the drive and other icons on the desktop were showing up twice, with the duplicates often overlapping each other. Plus Pathfinder started asking me to purchase & register! It took me a while to figure out this was from a separate instance which wanted its own license key!

Similarly odd: I have not yet been able to install the great little muCommander app (security violation in Mountain Lion?), yet with the backup drive attached, there it was in the dock and fully runnable.

I have routinely had drives with backup, bootable partitions attached and mounted (when running Lion); e.g. a 1T drive with 400G bootable backup and 600G data. I never have seen this behavior. Is this normal or dangerous? Might I have gotten inconsistent settings onto the 'clean' new system via Migration Assistant? Any other possible causes?

Edit: I later (Feb 2013) discovered a partial solution for this problem provided in a July 2012 post by Martin Bay
http://martinbay.net/reset-dock-os-x/      which I quote below:

  I’ve just installed Mountain Lion and wondered how the new dock would look like from a fresh installation – so had to figure out how to do that – no problem!

  To completely reset the dock back to the original settings do the following:

  Delete the files com.apple.dock.plist from /Users/”user name”/Library/Preferences. Remember to replace “user name” with your OS >X account name.
  Enter ‘killall Dock’ command in the terminal and press enter

  rm /Users/"user name"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

  killall Dock

This nicely cleaned up (removed the question marks in) my dock.

Finally (March 2013) answered the remainder of my question. Apparently Migration Asst. copies "Login items" = startup programs from the backup disk/system and places them in System Prefs/Users/Login Items, with the link back to the applications directory on the backup drive. So if my external drive was detached these items were 'Unknown' and if attached, they started upon login, from the backup drive. Solution: delete old items from Login Items. Ya live and learn.

Migration Assistant copies everything, including corrupted preferences.

If you want to have a truly clean system, what you need to do is do a secure reformatting of the hard drive that you will be installing the new system on, make sure that you only install applications directly using the installer from the original installation source (and if available, you should get it from the Mac App Store).

On Mountain Lion, the OS will recognise apps installed on an external drive in a previous system as installed on the System. You need to uninstall or delete those apps and then they will not be seen as installed.

As regards the apps you cannot launch due to the GateKeeper security in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, that is part of the enhanced security. If you try and launch those apps from within PathFinder, you will not be able to. The first launch must happen in the Finder, and if you get an error telling you that the app cannot be launched due to security settings in GateKeeper, then you launch the app by right-clicking on the app and selecting "Open" from the contextual menu. Then you will get a new dialog box that asks you if you are certain you would like to open the app as it is not signed/recognised.

You can disable that feature by changing the settings in the Security & Privacy Control Panel, and setting "Allow applications downloaded from:" to Anywhere. The default setting is "Mac App Store and identified developers"


How do I capture video in real time from a Canon 5D Mark II to iMac in Final Cut Pro? We really need your help.

We are shooting a movie and searching for a solution how to capture video from HDMI port of Canon 5D Mark II to an iMac 27 inch in real time. The iMac doesn't have an HDMI port. We have a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter, but it's not bidirectional so we can't use Mini DisplayPort for input.

Is there any way to capture video in our case? Are there other adapters that are bidirectional or something else?

You may be able to use the Log and Capture window (File>Log and Transfer):

However, this requires you to hook up the camera in such a way that Final Cut Pro recognizes. IIRC, the Canon 5D Mark II doesn't have a Firewire cable. The HDMI capture card might work, as long as FCP recognizes it.


Is there anything like /etc/hosts at user level in mac? I want to block some websites for my son who does understand difference between parental controlled vs "not working" sites.

He is addicted to youtube which I don't want him to use since there are lot of terrible and bad and disgusting videos out there.

I would use /etc/hosts but I sometimes have to go youtube. So is there anything I can use at user level?

There is nothing you can do to block specific Youtube content from within the system. But you have two options to avoid the problem:

Option 1: If you want to completely keep your son from visiting Youtube, create a new user account for him. Enable OS X's parental controls on that account and block Youtube.com. You will still be able to visit Youtube from your account. Set a password for your account. You can find instructions for setting up parental controls in OS X here.

Option 2: If you want to keep your son from watching videos that have been marked by the Youtube community as inappropriate for children, turn on Youtube's parental controls. Refer to the following instructions: Youtube's parental controls

Note: Both options, specially the first one, will make your son be able to tell that you are using parental controls. If you don't want him to know the only option is editing /etc/hosts, but it'll be easier to just let him know that you don't want him to watch specific videos or spend so much time on Youtube.


Display blank on formula error I'm making a timesheet.
I have =sum (A2-A1) but I have more than one task a day and not all times are used. The cells without time in them result in an error with the formula. Which, in turn, choses the day totals to show an error also.

How can I show a blank cell instead of the error?

Use the IFERROR() function.

IFERROR(SUM(A2-A1),"")

If the cell calculation is valid, the calculation is displayed.  If there is an error in the cell, then this just returns "". (blank)


How do I connect an external display to my Macbook Pro? I have a Macbook Pro (Late 2013). I'm trying to mirror the display on a LG M2035A. The monitor accepts VGA input. The monitor comes with a VGA cable. So, I purchased a HDMI to VGA converter, to connect to the monitor. However, my Macbook doesn't seem to detect the external display. I think my VGA and HDMI cable function properly, because when I connect the monitor using this to my laptop running Windows, it functions perfectly. Is there a workaround, or something I'm missing?

DVI is far, far superior in terms of the Mac sensing the capabilities of the display and in terms of quality. Go that method if you can.

If your VGA adapter isn't working with OS X, you could contact the adapter vendor for support. Not all of them are high quality and even the high quality ones don't work with all displays/projectors.


How to get iTunes to reconnect after buffering? If I am streaming internet radio and iTunes looses the signal it will try to reconnect and then just gives up and moves to the next track in the playlist of internet songs.

Is there a way to change iTunes config so that it continues trying to reconnect rather than just giving up? Like a time-out perhaps?

I am running iTunes 11.3.1.2 on Windows 7

It is not possible to change the time-out within iTunes easily. But there is another solution to your problem.

Create a playlist of an internet stream

Go to the iTunes Internet tab.
Select your radiostation
Get Info (File -> Get Info, or CommandI)
In the info screen, select the Summary section
Right click the URL next to Where:, 'Copy URL'
Now open this stream (File -> Open Stream, or CommandU, paste, OK)

This should create a new playlist "Internet Songs". As it only contains 1 'Internet Song', this should keep your from skipping to the next stream.


Is it possible to log out of 'mail' on the iPad? I set up my email into the iPad 'Mail' app, and I cannot find how you log out to prevent another user from opening and reading my mail.

Is it possible to log out of 'mail' on the iPad?

As far as I know, this is not possible. iPad is not made to be a multi-user device. I am in a similar situation myself as I share the iPad with my wife but haven't yet fixed it. Some alternatives:

Set a different account as default account in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars. It could even be a dummy account. At least it means email will not be sent accidentally from your address.
In Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > [Your email account], you can turn off Mail temporarily. It does not provide any security though, anyone can just turn it on again.
If you want to guarantee security, you need to use something like Gmail in Safari and login and logout every time.


What do you call the OSX Window Server, Window Manager, and Desktop Environment? In Linux we have three layers that represent the Window Server, Window Manager, and Desktop Environment. All of those three layers have more than one competing technology. I'm confused when talking about Apple products because I don't know what they call the software in their stack. I'm aware that they don't always have competing products and so I would like to know how they arrange their layers and what term I can use to refer to these Linux analogs. What is the Apple term for the technology that represents the

Window Server I assume it's XQuartz? (On Linux we have X11, Xorg, and Wayland)
Desktop Environment I know there is only but what is the right name to reference it? (On Linux we have Gnome, KDE, Xfce, or i3)
Window Manager I assume this is Aqua? (On Linux we have Qt, and Gtk)

I see a lot of terms like Aqua, Quartz, and XQuartz, and "Core Graphics", but I don't understand how they're organized with the traditional layers I am used to?

macOS has implementations of the X11 protocol as you're used to on Linux. This is called XQuartz, it is based on the same Xorg as you'll find on Linux.

You can use many of the same desktop environments on top of macOS and XQuartz as you can on Linux. It is the exact same programs, just recompiled on macOS.

The terms for these things on macOS are the same as on Linux as it is the same technology (i.e. built on the X11 protocol).

Wayland is a different display protocol than X111, and is not currently supported on macOS.

However note that "native macOS apps" do not use the X11 protocol, Xorg or anything like that. Instead they use the native Apple supplied systems.

Here the window server is the process named simply "WindowServer" on a default macOS installation.

The "Desktop Environment" does not have a single counterpart on macOS rather it is a combination of multiple macOS parts - most notably WindowServer, Dock and perhaps Finder.

Regarding the Aqua, Quartz and XQuartz:

Quartz is a 2D text and graphics rendering library. There's also a Quarts GPU accelerated compositor On Linux, the counterpart 2D library is Cairo or similar.
XQuartz is simply an X11 server built on top of the Quartz rendering library.
Aqua is the name of the Apple graphical user interface. It defines the looks of widgets/controls, menus, etc. The counterpart on Linux would be something like GTK and Gnome, or QT and KDE.