How do I recover an "invisible" OS X boot option in BootCamp (running on a 2013 MBA)? Summary

Unable to boot into the OS X partition of a 2013 MBA which dual-boots OS X and Windows 8 via BootCamp. Could "Repairing Disk" via "Disk Utility" damage the working Windows 8 partition? What other utilities/actions should I try?

Detail

I have a 2013 MBA that was setup by the Ops department in a company I did some work for to dual-boot OS X (for me) and BitLocker-encrypted Windows 8 (for work on their codebase) via BootCamp. They had to wipe the OS X Recovery partition to achieve this. At some stage the OS X partition was working fine (I'm assured), but I'm only able to boot into Windows 8 now. To complicate matters my access to the account on the Windows partition is now disabled (so I can't do further diagnostics through it), but that's another story. The Ops department have had a look but it's beyond their experience with BootCamp.

On pressing Alt/Option on startup I can get into the BootCamp Boot selector; it lists only "Windows"
From within Windows 8, when I choose the BootCamp "Boot to OS X" option, it just starts up in Windows 8 again.
From within Windows 8, the BootCamp control panel lists two "Windows" related startup options, both of which appear to boot to the same
From within Windows 8 I could confirm there were 2 accessible disk partitions of approx equal size, one looked (to a cursory examination) to have the filesystem structure I'd expect from a Unix, from which I extrapolate that the files of the OS X partition are still in place and undamaged.
When I run Internet Recovery, Disk Utility lists 5 partitions. It is unable to mount any of them. disk0s2 and disk0s4 must be the Windows and OS X partitions as they are almost 50% of the total volume each (the others are all ~ 100MB), but both show up as MS-DOS (FAT), whereas presumably one should be a Mac OS Extended format? I tried to "verify" the first three, all got as far as "Checking file system" and then failed "Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk", some with extra info:

disk0s2 Format: MS-DOS (FAT):

** /dev/disk0s2
Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block 000000

disk0s3 Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled): [No extra explanation]
disk0s4 Format: MS-DOS (FAT):

** /dev/disk0s4
Invalid signature in fsinfo block
fix? no
** Phase 1 - Preparing FAT
FAT[0] is incorrect (is 0xD9058EB; should be 0xFFFFFF8)
Correct? no
FAT[1] is incorrect
Correct? no
** Phase 2 - Checking Directories
Root directory starts with cluster out of range(0)

disk0s5 Partition Type: DE94BBA4-... (corresponds to Windows Recovery Environment): unavailable for verification
disk0s6 Partition Type: DE94BBA4-... (corresponds to Windows Recovery Environment): unavailable for verification

My questions are

Could running "Repair Disk" damage the working Windows partition?
Does this sound like a common problem that can be easily fixed by doing X (my google-fu drew a blank)?
What other utilities/actions should I try that definitely won't damage the working Windows 8 partition?

I managed to run more diagnostics against the disks from the Windows side. From the BitLocker password screen, choose something like "Esc", "Esc", "Skip this drive", "Advanced", "Utilities", "Command-line" (please correct), then use manage-bde -unlock to unlock the BitLocker drive, and use various wmic commands to examine the disk partitions. Through this I confirmed:

disk0s2 is my OS X partition. There are some tools which can change Guids in the GPT; it seems this is what happened to my OS X partition. This explains why OS X doesn't recognize it, but when booted into Windows I could access the data in it no problem.
disk0s4 is my Windows partition. To the best of my knowledge, the Invalid signature in fsinfo block errors I was getting are due to it being fully BitLockered which means the encrypted bits on disk don't look like a valid partition. Windows can apparently recognize the signature and warn you on trying to read from a locked BitLocker partition.

These are all the possible solutions I came across (largely through Apple's very helpful Tech Support), including the things that didn't work for me and why:

Backup your existing partitions as images to an external drive via the "New Image" option in Disk Utility. I do have a 1TB backup drive, but it's NTFS formatted and apparently OS X can't write to NTFS disks by default (try this to enable NTFS write access on a standard OS X installation - but it doesn't work in Internet Recovery as the terminal gives you access to a read-only file-system only).
Backup your existing partitions as images to an external drive via [name of Windows program here]. I couldn't find any built-in Windows utilities capable of this, and due to my Windows login being disabled I couldn't access a full Windows environment to run any proper backup tools. I tried running them from the BitLocker command-line but I couldn't get any of them to work, I assume because the environment is heavily cut-down (and most of them insist on "installing" rather than just "running").
Backup your existing files by transferring them to another Mac via Target Disk Mode - I have no second Mac on hand to make this work.
Just run Repair Disk - it is reportedly very unlikely to damage anything. When I tried this it just said it couldn't repair the disk - possibly because the BitLocker partition doesn't look like a valid partition (see above). A bit of an anticlimax after agonizing over the decision for days...
If you have the Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block 000000 error, someone wrote a utility which can reportedly fix the GPT up again. I couldn't use it because I couldn't find a way to install all it's dependencies (e.g. Python...) in the Internet Recovery read-only file-system.
Just erase some/all partitions and start again - in the end I decided to take the plunge and erase the existing corrupted OS X partition, leaving the rest untouched (once I'd made myself relatively certain which one was OS X). Disk Utility makes it very straightforward to erase a single partition and install OS X on it.

Erasing the OS X partition and re-installing has now resulted in me being able to dual-boot OS X and Windows 8 via BaseCamp as desired. Next time I'm in Windows I'll have to check whether I do indeed have "MacDrive" installed, and remove it if I do.


Good free audio converter for OS X Lion? Am trying to find a simple audio converter to convert various m4a, wma, mp3, and flac files to standard mp3 128KB VBR (for an ancient mp3 player with limited storage).

I'm probably only going to use this once and this is the one thing it needs to do however if it comes with additional features that'd be great too.

After looking into it a bit more (I've come from Windows recently so I know mp3 very well) I've discovered the benefits of m4a files over mp3. So I think I'm looking for a program that supports m4a output as well. Just wanted to throw that in there.

Also if it helps any I'm using a Late 2006 iMac, Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, OS X 10.7.5.

Get ffmpeg via Homebrew, which can convert a lot of audio/video formats.

Converting your audio files then basically is done by running the following in Terminal

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -b:a 128k output.mp3

ffmpeg is usually able to deduce input/output format from the file suffix.

To run this over a bunch of files, cd to the top folder containing the audio files and run

find . -type f -print0 |
    xargs -0 -I '{}' bash -c 'f="{}"; ffmpeg -i "$f" -b:a "${f%.*}.128.mp3"'

This will create files ending in .128.mp3 for all audio files found (and throw a lot of ffmpeg errors for non-audio files in the same folders).


What does "CMD + <" do in AZERTY keyboard? What does CMD+< do in AZERTY keyboard layout? I'm trying to assign it to a program using apptivate, but it keeps telling me it is already assigned to a system-wide shortcut.

I've been looking around in the keyboard prefpane, but nothing uses this shortcut yet. I've also tried to use the shortcut in many different applications, but most of the time it does absolutely nothing, with an occasional error beep.

What can I do?

the shortcut is meant to go to settings of what ever program is running in the foreground (it will be the program in the upper left corner of your screen). However you can customize your shortcut settings in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard shortcuts


Can my web app use a UNIX socket on OS X Server? I'd rather have my Mavericks web app use a UNIX domain socket instead of a TCP port to effect a reverse proxy. I've tried using variants of the Apache syntax for UDS in the proxies section of the web app plist but nothing I've tried seems to please OS X Server.

Proxying to gunicorn over TCP port 8001 seems to work in the code below but I'd rather use sockets if I can - keeps my apps separate from OS X Servers' apps.

<?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>name</key>
        <string>com.iainhouston.django</string>

        <key>displayName</key>          <!-- Name shown in Server app -->
        <string>TDD Django test at /django</string>

        <key>installationIndicatorFilePath</key>        <!-- The presence of this file indicates web app is installed -->
        <string>/usr/local/python_projects/testwsgi3/hello.py</string>

        <key>requiredModuleNames</key>
        <array>
                <string>proxy_module</string>
        </array>

        <key>proxies</key>
        <dict>
                <key>/django</key>
                <dict>
                        <key>path</key>
                        <string>/django</string>
                        <key>urls</key>
                        <array>
                                <string>http://localhost:8001</string>
                        </array>
                </dict>
        </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

[Update: actual code posted above]

If you've tried this I'd be grateful to know how you got on.

It seems that the answer is No as OS X Server (3.2.1 as of today) comes with Apache 2.2 and from the Apache mod_proxy documents it seems that UDS support wasn't implemented in that release. I was reading a later version's documents.

Not wanting to recompile Apache on our production server, I will have to content myself with TCP ports - no real problem.


iTunes could not back up the iPhone because the backup could not be saved on the computer I keep getting the message “iTunes could not backup the iPhone because the backup could not be saved on the computer”.  I upgraded my computer, so it’s all brand new, huge hard disc. It runs Win 7 and has a brand new install of iTunes 11.1.4.62. I’m using an administrator account.

I can’t get any backup to work. Not from my iPhone 5S, not from my wife’s iPhone 4S nor from her iPad. The 4S did backup once or twice before I got the 5S. Since I reset it for my wife, nothing. The 5S is running iOS 7, the 4S iOS 6. I have googled it for a solution and tried deleting the backup directory and uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, no success. I Can't find anything else useful.

I get some backup files created in the Backup directory. It creates the long alphameric directory name and under it one called Snapshot. This directory contains many files with long alphameric names and a file called Status.plist.

Had the same issue with my 4S, and it was fine before.  Found the solution here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2529?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Basically had to copy my last backup to my homepage (drag/drop), delete the old backups (drag to trash), and then Sync and backup worked fine in iTunes.


How to programmatically get available wifi networks without airport utility? Is there a way other than using the airport command line utility to get the list of available wifi networks programmatically (for consumption by an application)?  Here is the context:

I have a command line application for managing wifi networks (https://github.com/keithrbennett/wifiwand, gem install wifi-wand) in which I get the list of available wifi networks using airport -s.

Unfortunately, because the network names are presented right aligned, there is no way to determine whether or not, or how many, leading spaces the name contains. There is a -x option to output the data in XML format, but in Ruby, parsing XML usually requires installing the nokogiri gem, which is legendarily problematic, and I don't want to impose that on my users. So I go through this weird and less than 100% reliable process to return the correct results in most but not all cases.

What are my other options, if any, for getting this information?

You could (mis)use awk to filter the result:

airport -s -x| awk '          { if (catch == 1) { print; catch=0 } }
                   /SSID_STR/ { catch=1 }'
<string>UPC Wi-Free</string>
<string>UPCE191589</string>
<string>The Cloud</string>
<string>UPCE191589</string>
<string>The Cloud</string>

Not very nice, but does the job :-)

OTOH, a SSID can be anything, it doesn't even need to be printable (see Is there a standard that defines what is a valid SSID and password?). So any attempt to handle SSID in text-based utilities will likely fail sooner or later.


My ethernet and Wi-Fi are connected but, i can't seem to connect to the internet In the morning of christmas, i was browsing the internet on a Mac OSX El Capitan version 10.11 laptop. My internet connection stopped working on my laptop. That is, Ethernet and Wi-Fi simultaneously. Initially, i thought i had ISP problems. So i restarted both the laptop and the router. Still nothing in Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Yet, i discovered other people had logged in were using Wi-Fi from the same router. Also, the internet works alright in recovery mode.

Before i continue i'm using a  MacBook Pro mid-2012 version and now i'm using macOS Sierra Version 10.12. I updated hoping that that will fix the problem. It didn't. In addition, i tried using a mobile network tethering to share a connection and that didn't work as well.

Here are some methods i've used to try and fix the problem. I followed exactly  what was done here after reading this sentence on this post Now I've tried the following, in different order and a number of times, to no avail:

After running, ifconconfig en1 on the terminal. This is what i got today.

en1: flags=8823<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX> mtu 1500
    ether 2c:be:08:e6:87:3c
    nd6 options=201<PERFORMNUD,DAD>
    media: autoselect (<unknown type>)
    status: inactive

At the moment, i want to try these methods to fix the problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpAfpPiRSaE&t=2s
Factory reset and reinstall OS. Since the network settings will be lost

I'm thinking of doing the second one.

I hope what i've pointed out will suffice to help me solve the problem. I would really appreciate your help to solve this problem.

Regards,
Ben.

The problem came back in the same computer. The connection was restored after rerunning the Windscribe app. In addition, this app was available in both instances where my internet connection disappears. It seems that it's activity without closing it correctly caused


Upgrade Mac OS X from 10.8.5 to 10.10.5 How do I upgrade my Mac OS X from 10.8.5 to 10.10.5?

I obviously can't use a 10.9 or a 10.10 Combo Updater.

To upgrade from 10.8.5 to 10.9 or 10.10 you had to "purchase" Mavericks or Yosemite in the Apple App Store previously. Purchase is overstated because it was free then. After launching the final El Capitan 10.11.0 in the public the possibility to get the former systems in the store is gone if they don't populate your purchase list.

The Combo Updaters only update a system to a later or the latest point release:

10.9.1 -> 10.9.5 or
10.0.0 -> 10.10.5


How to ssh in to a blowfish-based server from MacOS Sierra? We've got some embedded devices that we need to ssh in to sometimes in order to administer, but the devices' ssh server only supports the "blowfish" cypher.

This has been working okay, except that for MacOS 10.12 Sierra, Apple has removed support for the Blowfish algorithm, meaning that MacOS's built-in command-line ssh client will no longer connect to this device.

Given that we can't (easily) upgrade the embedded device to use a different cypher, what would be our best approach to connecting to this device from a Sierra-based Mac?  Is there some other ssh client we could use instead, or some way to re-enable blowfish support for the built-in client?

Manual page for ssh explains the -c switch, which is used for the cipher specification:

ssh -c blowfish-cbc your_host

should do the job.


What are Macbook Charge Cycles? Okay so i dont know what a cycle is.

Can you tell me that if I leave my macbook on charge all night, so at our place there our power outages so when my mac will start charging after the power comes back on will 1 cycle increase?

A charge cycle is defined as 1 full discharge and 1 full recharge.   It is defined in the UN Manual of Tests and Criteria, Subsection 38.3:

  Cycle means  one  sequence  of  fully  charging  and  fully
  discharging  a  rechargeable cell or battery.

This means that if you only discharge your battery 20% and recharge it, you would have do to it 5 times to be a full cycle.  A 50% drain and recharge would have to happen twice to be considered a cycle.  And so on.

So in reference to your question, unless your battery fully drained, you didn't go through a cycle.


How do I delete xpcproxy executable from /usr/libexec folder on my Mac? How do I delete xpcproxy executable from /usr/libexec folder on my Mac? When I dragged it to Trash, it did not delete, neither was Command+Shift+Del helpful

You don't say why you want to delete it, so I'll assume you know what you're doing.
/usr/libexec is a folder for programs that are used by other programs. xpcproxy is owned by root, and so you'll need at least root privileges (typically via sudo) to delete it.
In addition, you may have Apple's System Integrity Protection if your OS is fairly recent vintage. If you have SIP, you'll need to disable it before you can delete this file. THere are numerous guides (like this one for Catalina) explaining how to disable SIP, so I won't repeat them here.


Scripting Timemachine exclusion lists Is it possible to script the exclude lists for Time Machine when setting up a new machine?

For example, for a new machine I would like to setup the following exclusion list:

The tmutil command line tool, included with OS X, supports the ability to add and remove items from the exclusion list.

sudo tmutil addexclusion ~/.ivy2

See the tmutil manual page for more information about this tool's options.

As tmutil is a command line tool, it can be incorporated into AppleScripts using do shell script, combined with Automator workflows using the Run shell script step, or as part of a traditional shell script.


Why I cannot see application menus on the 2nd extension screen of Mac? I work with 2 monitors using the same Mac both at work and at home. At home I use the extension monitor with the 4:3 aspect ratio and I can see the application menus on top of the 2nd screen. At work I am using the monitor with the 16:10 aspect ratio and cannot see the application menus on the top of the 2nd screen.

What is the reason?

This happens to me when my second screen is a TV. Some screens chop off the edges of the screen.

Here are three things I'd try:

1 Mirroring

  Go to System Preferences » Displays
  Select "Arrangement"
  Click "Mirror displays"

Image via http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5019

This makes both monitors display the same screen, forcing them to be the same aspect ratio. If the aspect ratio is different, there will be blank space around the image.

2 Change screen resolution.

  Go to System Preferences » Displays.
  Try changing the resolution for your second screen.

The system will ask you to confirm if the settings work, so you don't have to worry about accidentally messing things up. Go nuts.

Image via this StackOverflow question, since I don't have a second display connected right now.

3 Change the settings on the monitor itself.

If the menu bar is still missing, try using the monitor's menu to change the crop settings.

This is isn't as likely with modern monitors, but it's a possibility (especially if you're using a CRT monitor or TV)

More notes

If you see a menu bar on top but it's blank, the options should appear once you click on that screen.


Cannot access certain MS Server 2003 Active Directory users with Mountain Lion Server's Server App The magic triangle is working perfectly for some users. Other users are invisible to the OD master's Server App. Workgroup Manager can access all the users while Server App can't. Viewing permissions through the Server 2003 interface, it seems like the permissions of an invisible user and a visible one are same. I ran SetACL on the directories of the two users and it found no difference.
How can I figure out the difference in the accounts/files that makes certain users invisible to Server App? Thanks in advance!

Our AD has 1000+ users. As it turns out, Server App could see all the users. It was hard to realize this for a couple of reasons: When viewing "Users from MyDomain", if I typed in a user's name, Server App would not recognize it. This behavior still occurs. It's only when I search under "All Users" that the name is recognized and labeled as a "User from MyDomain". I realized that Server App did recognize the account when I made a Local Network Group and tried adding a user to the group. When I typed in the same user's name (invisible when viewing Users), Server App recognized the account. This whole issue is just the Server App behavior on Mountain Lion and accounts on a Windows Server 2003 AD server.


Opening a local .mp3 file with AppleScript Editor So I have been trying to create an AppleScript application that when I click on it, it opens a mp3 file within the packages contents and resources. This is the only code I have within the script:

set filepath to (path to me as string) & "Contents:Resources:Jingle bells.mp3"

tell application "Finder"
    open alias filepath

but I receive a "script error" message saying:
error "Finder got an error: Can’t get alias \"Macintosh HD:Users:bobby.hay:Desktop:Song.app:Contents:Resources:Scripts:main.scptContents:Resources:Jingle bells.mp3\"." number -1728

I am trying to get the application to open Jingle bells.mp3 which is inside /Contents/Resources of my script.

Assuming that by "open" you mean play the mp3, the following script should do exactly what you want:

set myFolder to POSIX path of (path to me)
set contentFile to myFolder & "Contents/Resources/Jingle bells.mp3"
do shell script "afplay " & quoted form of contentFile

Above, we set myFolder to the POSIX path of .app file that is being run. Then we set contentFile to the POSIX path of the .app file plus the location in the internal directory which links to the file you want to play (Contents/Resources/Jingle bells.mp3 in your case). Finally, we use the shell command afplay (man page here) to play your mp3 file.

Hope this helps!

Best, Tom


System Integrity Protection prevents Trash from being emptied I have no idea how two files ended up in Trash, but I suspect AppDelete to be the culprit. Anyway, the first file is DeviceLink.framework and the other is MobileDevice.framework.

Any idea how to remove them from trash so I can finally be able to empty it?

Shutdown your laptop.
Press Command + R and then the power button to boot into recovery mode.
Click the Utilities menu and select Terminal.
Type csrutil disable and press return.
Close the Terminal app and restart out of recovery mode.
Login to your machine normally and launch the Terminal app on your Mac by either searching for it in Spotlight or locating it in the Utilities folder under Applications.
In Terminal enter this command sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/* it'll ask for your login password. That should clear your trash.

If that worked re-enable SIP.

Shutdown your laptop.
Press Command + R and then the power button to boot into recovery mode.
Click the Utilities menu and select Terminal.
Type csrutil enable and press return.
Close the Terminal app and restart out of recovery mode.


Mountain Lion, EFI and Intel SSD Toolbox Here's the problem:

I want to do a clean install of Mountain Lion on my (custom) Intel 520 SSD inside my iMac. The first time this SSD was setup, it was done by a certified Apple Retailer.

This time, I wanted to use the "Intel SSD Toolbox" to do a "secure erase" of the drive to get it back to full condition. However, to do this, there can be no partition on the drive, and currently the EFI partition is still present.

I searched on AskDifferent and via Google, but it seems removing this partition makes Mountain Lion complain while installing.

So my question is this: (How) can I safely remove the EFI partition so I can use the Intel SSD Toolbox and then install Mountain Lion? I figure the drive initially never came with any EFI partition and the Apple Retailer installed Lion (not Mountain Lion though) just fine, so there has to be a way to tackle this.

I am currently writing, and working on this from Windows 7, my Lion partition is already gone so I can't work from there

Delete the EFI partition, do your secure erase, then don't partition or format the drive from Windows 7. Instead, boot from the OSX installer disk or recovery environment, and use its version of Disk Utility to partition the drive, using the GUID partition scheme. Disk Utility will create the EFI partition for you if done this way.

To be clear: the EFI partition doesn't contain any useful data - in fact it's generally completely empty - but it's used by OSX and the Mac's bootloader for installing firmware updates. This is why the installer complains if it doesn't exist.


How to change company iOS Developer account name? Is there anyway I can change company name from my iOS Developer account?

Like this for example where it says "By TARDIS59" is there a way to change it to "By Ashley Richards"?

in any type of enrollment you cant change the sellers name, its permanent.

I would recommend you to contact Apple Developer Support and ask them if theres a way to change it, if its not you`ll have to buy a new enrollment and transfer your app.

Hope it helps!!


Codesign dialog does not allow "accept" Whenever I run codesign from the command line (or a pre-existing script tries to run it) – e.g. by running codesign -s "Local Developer" foo the following dialog appears.

Clicking 'Deny' cancels it just fine, but clicking 'Allow' or 'Always Allow' does precisely nothing. The only way to get rid of the dialog is then to click 'Deny', which is of course not what I want. What's going on here? How can I solve this problem?

N.B. There are no messages in the log (via Console.app).

So, the cause of this problem seems to be a change in behaviour of El Capitan regarding virtual events (program-generated user input events), and not allowing them to generate keychain approval. I think the BetterTouchTool program is getting in the way here. The solution is either to disable BetterTouchTool or use the keyboard to click the button.

N.B. Apple have detailed this "fix" in the SecurityAgent section of https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205375.


El Capitan, can't rsync, tar, cp certain files on Promise raid First off: I'm a Linux Admin, but have to do a few MacOS things around the place (had very little exposure to it previously).

One of the tasks I have is to take a backup-copy of a 10TB Promise Pegasus2 array attached to a mac-mini running el capitan 10.11.4.

I'm root on the mac (sudo -i from admin account).

I'm trying to rsync the data from the array to a backup server with ample storage (a Linux box). All went swimmingly till the process hit a certain 52MB file - on that one it just "sticks". No timeout, no error, nothing.

The perms/flags look like this:

ls -leO@  CCCBB15A-5DA6-433F-BD37-001CB6151E08.key
-r--r--r--@ 1 user  staff  compressed 54994229 17 Sep  2015 CCCBB15A-5DA6-433F-BD37-001CB6151E08.key
    com.apple.finder.copy.source.checksum#N        4
    com.apple.genstore.info       91
    com.apple.genstore.orig_perms_v1           1
    com.apple.genstore.origdisplayname        31
    com.apple.genstore.origposixname          31
    com.apple.iwork.documentUUID#PS       16
    com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineNewestSnapshot        50
    com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineOldestSnapshot        50
    com.apple.quarantine          22
 0: group:everyone deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

Which of these are responsible for root being "stuck"? :)

And, more importantly, what do I need to do to make it "unstuck"?

Edit1:
And this is what it does (indefinitely, by the looks of it) ... used dtruss.

stat64("Backups.backupdb/Chiltepin/2016-01-22-164610/Macintosh HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/502/24c/com.apple.documentVersions/805FC10B-F41B-4825-A0EB-41BE7505E79B.key/preview-micro.jpg\0", 0x7FFF5DEF6A08, 0x1000)       = 0 0
lstat64("Backups.backupdb/Chiltepin/2016-01-22-164610/Macintosh HD/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/502/24c/com.apple.documentVersions/805FC10B-F41B-4825-A0EB-41BE7505E79B.key/preview-web.jpg\0", 0x0, 0x0)      = 0 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0
read(0x3, "\0", 0x40000)         = 262144 0

Not a fast rate, mind you, looks like it tries once every 15 seconds.

Edit2:
The saga continues. I tried bsdtar & gnu tar (installed via homebrew) to generate a local tar ball of the volumes on the Promise array. Those processes, too, just get stuck, typically on files within Backups.backupdb which seem to be TimeMachine data? It's always a file with the extension .key. Is there ANY way at all to copy these? I assume it's a privilege thing as Disk Utility -> First Aid showed no problems with the file-system.

Edit3:
I still don't understand why a simple cp of the files that are acting up w/ any other means works, but that seems to be the status quo. Creating an image of the device in question seems to have worked, too. I am not confident that //restoring// from that image will work, though ... sigh

I'm not an expert by any means, but when I use rsync I use the flags -vaE --progress. I believe one of those flags (I don't remember which) allows you to copy files which may be corrupt and which the GUI (Finder) copy will get hung up on. So the syntax I use is:

$ sudo rsync -vaE --progress [source path] [destination path]

I'd try using one or more of those flags in the command. Let me know if this helps you at all.


When I purchase TV shows on my iPad 2, why are they automatically downloading on my Mac? I would prefer not to download these shows to my MacBook Air as

it doesn't have enough free disk space and
it leads to sync issues when I plug in my iPad.

They don't seem to recognize the shows as the same so I end up with duplicate copies of many episodes.

How can I configure iTunes to achieve this?

Perhaps you could try stopping iTunes from automatically checking for bought content to download. This way, if you buy something on your iPad you would have to manually download it on your Mac. This can be done by going to iTunes>Preferences..., then to the "Store" tab and unchecking "Always check for available files."

Hope it Helps!


I've mistyped my client's name while creating iCloud account on his behalf I've mistyped my client's name while creating an iCloud account on his behalf (for example: instead name.surname@icloud.com I typed nmae.surname@icloud.com), and before notice, the mistake, enrolled the account for Apple Developer Program.

Now, I need to fix this mistake but do not know if there is a way.

Thank you.

I would stop what I'm doing with the misnamed account, and contact Apple Developer Support. Apple's Developer Support contact page is here: https://developer.apple.com/contact/phone/


What's causing my screen to do this? I have a Mid 2015 MBPr ("About this mac" screenshot below)

Since I attached a 27" 4K Monitor (HP Envy) via one of the thunderbolt ports, the built-in screen occasionally (a few times an hour) appears like this:

This goes away after a few minutes, or if I do something like drag a window or try to screenshot it (hence the photo).

It happens for either Thunderbolt port I use to connect the monitor and doesn't happen if it's not plugged in.

What might be causing it?

There are some basic troubleshooting steps you could start with to help diagnose and/or fix this.

The first things I'd try are to reset both the NVRAM and SMC in that order. Before following the steps below, ensure you have no external hardware connected (so, unplug your external display) and make sure you use the built-in keyboard.

Reset the NVRAM

Here’s how to reset the NVRAM on your particular MBP:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then press the commandoptionpr keys. You have to make sure you press these keys before the gray screen appears or it won’t work.
Hold those keys down until your Mac reboots again and you here the startup chime.
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).

Reset the SMC

To reset the SMC on your particular MBP, follow these steps:

Shut down your computer
Keep the power cable plugged in.
Press at the same time shiftoptioncontrol (on the left side of the keyboard) and the power button
Let go
Turn your computer back on with the power button.

After resetting both the NVRAM and SMC, use your computer to determine if the issue still persists. If it does, try booting into Safe Mode as described below.

Boot into Safe Mode

Follow these steps to boot your Mac into Safe Mode:

Fully shut down your Mac
Restart your Mac
Immediately press the Shift key and keep it down
Let go of the Shift key when you see the login window (NOTE: If you have FileVault enabled you may need to log in twice).
Take a note of what happens (i.e. with your external display attached, do you still notice issues with your built-in screen?)
When ready, exit Safe Mode just restart your Mac as normal
Now test your Mac again to determine the current status of your problem

If your Mac is still having this problem after trying all of the above, I'd test your hardware by running Apple Diagnostics.

Run Apple Diagnostics

Follow the steps below to run Apple Diagnostics:

Fully shut down your Mac
Restart your Mac
Immediately press the D key and keep it down until you see the Diagnostics screen appear
Wait for Diagnostics to finish (this typically only takes a few minutes)
Once complete, one of two things will appear on the screen:

a No issues found message
a brief description of any errors found plus further instructions

If the diagnostics test does find errors, take a note of what they are

Note: If pressing and holding the D key at Step 3 doesn't work, start again at Step 1 and, at Step 3 press and hold both the OptionD keys instead. This will try and run diagnostics from the internet instead, so you will need to allow more time for it to complete.

Regardless, take a note of what happens and let me know how you went.


VMWare Fusion is opening .docx files in Wordpad I enabled the VMWare Fusion setting Open your Mac files and web links using Windows Applications. When I double click a .docx file in Finder, it launches Wordpad in the virtual machine, instead of Word. If I open the file again, it launches Word. If I launch it a third time, it opens Wordpad. It keeps alternating between these two programs.

On Windows, I tried right-clicking the file and going to the "Open With" command. It lists both Microsoft Office Word and WordPad as Recommended Programs. There doesn't seem to be an option to remove WordPad from this list.

When I launch the .docx file from inside Windows, it always opens it up with Word, leading me to believe that this is a VMWare Fusion bug and not a Windows bug.

Is there any way to have .docx files only open up in Word?

Take a look at these two questions:

Problem with "Always Open With" in OS X
How to setup a default program opening an unknown file extension?

It sounds to me as if the correct application will launch once you tell OS X which application it should use.


Can .html files sent as attachments be opened and run on iPhone5 (OS9.2) I write a simple front-end web page. Fully self-contained in the usual CSS3/JS/HTML5 format.  It works in XCode simulation. I e-mail it as an attachment to a (long suffering) relative with an iPhone5 (OS9.2). He cannot get it to run, or even open properly. Same story when we try the transfer via DropBox. Some files I've sent appear to open but stall at the first touchevent:  Mail intercepts the touchevent and concludes we are DONE.

We are both newbies. Are we missing something obvious? Is there a (legal) workaround this problem? Any advice or pointers will be enthusiastically received. Thank you.

Unfortunately, iOS devices do not support offline website or HTML viewing.

As an alternative, you could get your relative to purchase GoodReader from the App Store and have him open the file in that app, or use an FTP website-hosting service such as 000webhost.


Mac Not Saving Passphrase for SSH Keys I have tried everything for my passphrase to be saved for my SSH keys so that when I restart, I don't have to run any "ssh-add" command.

I have tried:

Saving my key in ~/.ssh
Saving my key in ~/.ssh/id_rsa (it is an RSA key)
Making a profile for it in ~/.ssh/config
Running "sudo ssh-key -k ~/.ssh/keyname" and "sudo ssh-key -K ~/.ssh/keyname" and those commands using the ~/.ssh/id_rsa directory whenever the key was in that place
Probably a few other things, but all I can remember at the moment

I renamed the key to "id_rsa", instead of the actual name of the key, which I thought I had already tried, but after I did that, it worked.


Apple iPhone 6s Airplane Mode Hardware Does turning airplane on and off constantly on my iPhone 6s ruin my hardware or ruin the iPhone in any way?

No, this will not harm your device in any way.

Airplane mode is a software thing, not hardware. Therefor, It cannot ruin your device.

To have more people confirm this: See this topic or this one


rMBP high battery drain, doesn't seem to sleep after HS upgrade I have a 2015 A1502 13" Retina MBP, originally running Sierra. Since upgrading it to High Sierra, it doesn't seem to sleep properly. Before, I could leave it in sleep mode on its battery for over a week and still come back to a decent amount of charge. Now it seems to only turn the display off - after leaving it unplugged for 24 hours (wifi off), I opened it today to find the battery at 25%. Power Nap is disabled. I do have Caffeine installed but that's also switched off.

I tried pinging it after closing the lid and continue to get a response from the Thunderbolt ethernet adapter long after it should be inactive, even with Wake For Network Access switched off. Ping follows a pattern, about 25 successful with sub-millisecond responses, then drops several, then the next successful packet takes >2ms, then back to normal <1ms for 2-3 packets, then back up to 2ms. Both computers are cabled at this point. On the other hand, it doesn't respond to SSH while in Sleep mode (as expected).

I don't think it's anything to do with the ethernet adapter as I also see the battery drain when the computer is completely unplugged. Obviously with no indicator lights or moving parts on the computer I cannot tell whether it's active or not, just relying on the screen to tell me.

I have a 2014 15" Retina at home and the battery on this is astonishing, managing 2 weeks in sleep mode and still usable when I come back to it. It's running Sierra. I'm very hesitant to upgrade it to HS in case I lose this ability. Is this a known issue with HS?

With power issues, you should first try an SMC reset.

Shutdown your MacBook Pro,
Connect the power adapter to the Mac,
On the MacBook Pro’s keyboard, hold down the Shift+Control+Option keys and the Power button at the same time,
Release all keys and the power button at the same time – the little light on the MagSafe adapter may change colors briefly to indicate the SMC has reset
Boot your Mac as usual.


2011 Macbook Pro - GPU dying? I have a 2011 MBP, 2.2 GHz, 8 GB, AMD 6750M, 512GB SSD that I installed myself. No AppleCare. Recently, I have had these weird glitches showing up shortly after I connect an external screen:

What makes me think that this is a GPU related issue is that it can be forced without any screen attached if I untick the automatic graphics option in OS X:
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7...%2018%2007.mov
If I leave it on, it works for a while and then glitches, but there have been times where the screen just goes black or some blueish pattern, after which I'm forced to shut it down and restart.
It's less noticable on Windows though, but still annoying since I primarily use OS X. I have tried resetting the SMC and PRAM and I recently reinstalled OS X.
This is not acceptible for a two year old laptop that I paid a lot for, as a student I don't want to pay for expensive logic board replacements. I will call the Apple Support on Monday. Any advice?

Since people are still commenting on this, I will post what happened as my answer:
I took the MBP to a different store where they concluded that it was a faulty HDD cable since I had installed the SSD myself and they assumed it got some kind of shock for me not wearing an ESD bracelet. (Although as far as I can remember, the friend of mine who installed the SSD for me did indeed wear the bracelet, however I probably didn't use it when I installed RAM 1,5 years ago)

It seemed to work fine for a while but after that, the glitches started to reappear, and it became so bad that the MBP couldn't boot into OS X or Windows (stuck on grey screen with glitchy stripes).

Once again, I took it to the shop, they concluded that it was a faulty logic board, which would cost me a fortune to replace. However, thanks to EU consumer laws, I have the right of up to 3 years warranty if I could prove that it's the manufacturer's fault. So they let me fill in a form and send it in along with my receipt. By the beginning of July, Apple finally approved to replace the logic board for free. For now, the MBP is working properly again.


Issues with iPhone 4 with music, apps, photos, etc. My iPhone 4 has never been synced to a computer but has music and stuff on it.  I'm scared that if I sync it to my new computer I'll lose my contacts, music, etc.  Does anyone know what happens when this is done?

There's absolutely no problem in syncing your iPhone with your new computer: your data will just get copied onto the desktop, but will stay intact on your device.


How can I make the face recognition process continue? Right now, if I go on the People section of photos.app, a message says it has analysed x photos, while the remaining y photos will be analysed when I'm not using the app and my Mac is connected to a power source.

What exatcly is meant by "not using the app"? Should it be open, but not the foreground application? Hidden? Closed? Can it run while the Mac is in sleeping? (I saw in the logs photoanalysisd   asking to run at priority Maintenance).

I'm asking because it's not making the progress I would expect andI'm having trouble understanding exactly how should I leave it.

According to this blog post Photos.app should be closed, as photoanalysisd is suspended while the application is open.
The explanation given in the Photos application is definitely too vague. Still, I have the same issue of not experiencing the progress that I would have expected (4.900 / 12.000 in seven days).


OneDrive folder keeps moving to bottom of Finder Favorites sidebar In my favorites sidebar, my OneDrive Folder keeps moving back at the bottom of the favorite list each time I reboot.

Can I make sure that it remains on top of my list of favorites on the sidebar of my Finder?

This was bugging me as well, until I noticed one of my Macs didn't move it to the bottom. The difference? On that Mac, OneDrive was installed via the App Store, whereas the others were downloaded from the OneDrive web site.

So I uninstalled OneDrive from those affected Macs, reinstalled it from the App Store, and made sure I re-enabled the Finder Extension. Now after a restart, the OneDrive folder stays where I placed it in the Favorites side bar! :)


How do I clone an installation of Windows 10 from macOS? I have an external SSD which has a working copy of Windows 10 on it. I would like to transfer this copy of Windows 10 onto a different SSD. However, I do not currently have access to a Windows computer.
How would I clone this installation of Windows onto the new SSD? I already have Paragon NTFS installed, which allows me to write to NTFS drives. What should my next step be?

I could drag and drop everything from the Finder into the new SSD. However, this might not copy over some hidden files and might not be a good option.

I could drag and drop after revealing hidden files, but that might also cause issues (?)

I could use rcopy to make sure everything gets copied over (including hidden files), although I don't see any difference between this and option 2.

Note: This question is not necessarily related to BootCamp—I would like to know the same for M1 Macs as well, which do not have BootCamp.

You can use the dd command to clone the disk as follows:

If the source SDD is larger than the destination SSD, start up your Mac in Windows 10 and shrink the partition on the source disk, as explained in this Microsoft document: Shrink a basic volume, so that its size is smaller than the destination SSD. Then restart your Mac in macOS.

Connect both SSD disks to your Mac
If you get a message similar to this when connecting the destination disk:

select "Ignore".

Launch Disk Utility (located in the Applications > Utilities folder).

Select the source disk and write down the device name.
In the screenshot below, the device name is disk2:

Select the destination disk and write down the device name:
In the screenshot below, the device name is disk3:

Select the source volume and unmount it.

Select the destination volume and unmount it. (This step will not be necessary if were prompted to select "Ignore" in step 1.)

Launch Terminal (located in the Applications > Utilities folder).

Run:
sudo dd if=/dev/diskX of=/dev/diskY bs=1m
where:
diskX is the device name of the source disk (in the example above, disk2)
diskY is the device name of the destination disk (in the example above, disk3)
sudo is a command that let's you run the dd with administrative privileges.
Type your password if requested.
It is extremely important that you don't mix up the device names of the disks! Otherwise you will overwrite your Windows 10 disk.
This may take a while, so be patient. You can check the progress of dd as explained in this answer: How can I track progress of dd

Test the destination SSD. You may want to extend the volume as explained in this Microsoft document: Extend a basic volume

More information
For more information on dd, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
For more information on sudo, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudo
For a very similar but command line-only method to clone disks in macOS using dd, see: https://pbxbook.com/other/dd_clone.html


How do I remove the 802.1X settings in Mountain Lion I made a stupid 802.1X settings file some time ago to test some things. Now I am unable to remove it, even though I think I have deleted the file.

The picture below shows the 802.1X profile to the bottom right. How do I delete this profile? I've tried removing the ethernet with the minus sign in the left menu, but once I try to make a new ethernet profile, that 802.1X setting shows up as the standard.

Here is the picture of the 802.1X settings:

Try System Preferences > Profiles. It listed my 802.1X profiles and I was able to remove them from there.

Alternatively, you can manually edit configuration files in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration (see this post) - grep the files located there for the name of your profile.

(Using OS X Mavericks)

 (Profiles is located in the second row from the bottom)


How to map CAPS LOCK key in Vim? This question has already been asked here. The accepted answer says it is not possible. Other answers provide a way to do it on linux but I have not check if it worked. I am most interested in knowing if there is a way to do it for mac (although you can post answers for linux as well).

I am only reposting this question here because the other question on SOF is more than five years old. Ideally, I would like to remap to <ESC> key to CAPS LOCK.

If you are using the X11 environment, you may achieve what you want
with the following commands:

xmodmap -e 'clear lock'

which means: from now on, Caps_Lock key isn't anymore a keyboard modifier
and fall back to a normal key

xmodmap -e 'keysym Caps_Lock = Escape'

which means: get the keycode of Caps_Lock and from now on assign it the
keysym of Escape.

Note: this receipe works on any Unix.


How to get color of pixel in coordinates 123, 456 in screen? My AppleScript app needs to get color of pixel in coordinates 123, 456 in screen.

I found a way to do this using only built-in components:

do shell script "screencapture -R123,456,1,1 -t bmp $TMPDIR/test.bmp && \
                 xxd -p -l 3 -s 54 $TMPDIR/test.bmp | \
                 sed 's/\\(..\\)\\(..\\)\\(..\\)/\\3\\2\\1/'"

Output is the color in hex, for example, ffffff for white.

The screencapture command takes a 1x1 screenshot of the coordinates, and outputs it in the bmp format to a temporary location.

The xxd command reads 3 bytes from that file at offset 54. 54 is the length of the header in the generated bmp file, and the next 3 bytes are the color of the pixel.

The sed command swaps the first two characters of the output with the last two. This is because the bmp stores the colors in reverse of the normal order - BBGGRR. This command swaps the order to the normal RRGGBB.


How can Tor Browser Bundle for OS X access my keychain? I would like Tor Browser Bundle for OS X to work with my keychain, so that after filling out logins and passwords on a website one time, I would never have to do it again later. This works with safari, but it doesn't with the Vidalia packed aurora (firefox) browser. What settings should I change?

In short: You can't. Firefox always uses it's own store for passwords and will never access the Mac OS X keychain at all. You either have to manually copy your credentials into Torbrowser/Firefox windows or use a third party software like 1Password that integrates across browsers.

Be aware that if you use a login on a website that hasn't been created over tor there is a good chance you're giving up your anonymity by yourself. Tor cannot protect you from posting your identity (by logging in with a username and password) by yourself!


Is my Macbook too old to edit videos? I got my Macbook Pro 15" around 2011 to edit videos for my film school. I carried my MacBook around with me using Final Cut Pro 7 with no problem for around 2 years. I stopped editing videos after I graduated, but time to time I tried using Final Cut Pro again, but it won't let me edit without a huge lag. (I always use an external HD when editing videos) I can't even play the preview especially when I have some effects on it. I also tried using Premiere but my mac just half-freezes. Is it because my Macbook is too old and the processing speed is too slow? I'm not trying to make a 2hrs long feature film, it's more like a short film. This MacBook still works great with other software, so I wish I can find a way to edit videos again with this MacBook.

P.S. I didn't update my OS yet. Should I??

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2 GHz

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Bought in 2011

Your MacBook isn't the weak link in the chain, it's your external hard disk. The 2011 machines don't support USB 3.0 so you're either using Firewire 800 or USB 2.0 - the fastest throughput you're going to see on FW800 is around 95MB/s for RAID 0 HDDs and SSD devices.

More RAM will help with overall speed, 16GB is supported, but fitting an SSD and using it to store the video files you're working on will give you a much more responsive system. I don't do video but I regularly work with 500MB+ still images and working from an SSD is a breeze, archived images stored on a couple of LaCie 2Big Quadras take an eternity to load in comparison (over FW800, USB 2.0 really is painfully slow).

As for your OS, I still have a lot of love for 10.6. It may not feature the latest, greatest technologies but it is lean, solid and fast. I've tried 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 on my photo machine and not found any performance improvements/benefits over 10.6, certainly nothing to offset the compatibility with older software offered by the Rosetta functionality. I'd advise you upgrade when the applications you rely on require you to do so, upgrading isn't otherwise going to offer any significant improvements for your current setup and workflow.

*Forgot to mention using storage attached to the Thunderbolt port - this is pretty much the only way of leveraging the full available speed of an external RAID 0 HDD or SSD. It's an expensive route, depending on budget, but it may suit your purposes. I'd still consider the internal SSD idea though, seeing 15 second boot times and applications opening in one or two bounces makes you realise how much of a bottleneck an HDD is...


Is a Thunderbolt cable usable between a MacBook and a non-Apple external display? A Thunderbolt cable has a Thunderbolt-connector on every end. A Thunderbolt-connector follows the Mini Displayport specifications and should be usable between Apple devices as such.

When I connect a Thunderbolt cable from my 2015 MacBook Pro (i7 4890k, AMD M370X, 16 GB, 512 GB) to my 4K-display (Acer S277HK), the display powers down immediately and I can't power it back up again until I've removed the Thunderbolt cable. Is this normal behaviour? Is the problem in the cable, the display or the display's mini displayport connector? Or are Thunderbolt cables generally not supposed to function as Mini Displayport to Mini Displayport cables?

No.  You cannot use a Thunderbolt cable to connect to a mini Display Port (mDP) monitor.

The reason you are seeing the monitor shut off is because you are sending it Thunderbolt AND Display Port signaling.  Remember, Display Port is, for a lack of a better word, embedded within the Thunderbolt signal.

Just using pin 1 for example, the Display is expecting ground while TB is sending HV Input.

This is why you need a mini Display port cable when hooking up a monitor and a Thunderbolt cable when hooking up a Thunderbolt device.


Would this memory work on a MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2011)? Can anybody tell me if this module: Transcend 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L Unbuffered Non-ECC CL11 204-pin SO-DIMM would work on my MBP?

My memory specifications currently: 10 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 (1x8GB) + (1x2GB)

I don't know if the 1600 MHz memory would work in that machine, but you can get an 8 GB upgrade that's guaranteed to work in your Mac for less than the product you linked to (click 'View more compatible memory upgrades' to see the single 8 GB module).


How to convert Audible AAX file audiobook M4B on a Mac using Terminal How do you convert Audible AAX files to M4B audiobooks

How to convert Audible AAX files to M4B audiobook.

Open terminal by pressing CMD + Space and then typing "terminal".

Once terminal is open, paste the following command: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)" and click enter.

Follow the instructions given (pressing enter, typing password, ect...)

Once Homebrew is installed, paste the following command: brew install ffmpeg and press enter.
Now paste brew install cask and press enter.
Paste brew cask install chromedriver and press enter.
Paste curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py and press enter.
Paste python get-pip.py and press enter.
Paste pip install selenium requests and press enter.
Paste git clone https://github.com/inAudible-NG/audible-activator and press enter.

10b. If you have a one-time password, please use git clone https://github.com/weliveindetail/audible-activator/tree/pause-enter-otp instead.
Paste cd audible-activator and press enter.
Paste sed -i '' 's,chromedriver_path = "./chromedriver",chromedriver_path = "/usr/local/bin/chromedriver",' audible-activator.py and press enter.
Paste python audible-activator.py and press enter.
Now, enter your Audible account username and password.
Enter your one-time password (if you have one) and go to terminal and press enter.
Terminal should print your 8 digit activation key.
Paste ffmpeg -activation_bytes <<<YOUR KEY HERE>>> -i (replacing <<<YOUR KEY HERE>>> with your 8 digit activation key), then drag your Audible AAX file into terminal, paste -c copy ~/Downloads/output.m4b and finally press enter. You can use any path/name instead of "~/Downloads/output.m4b".  The command should look like this:

That's it!

Also, this is not a duplicate... I hope that people can see how it is different than other posts about this topic.


Time Machine restore to new partition, different computer I split my macpro disk into 2 partitions. I wish to continue to use partition 1 as a 10.6.8 (Mountain Lion) system. I wish restore everything (O/S, data, etc.) from a Time Machine backup, from a MacBook Pro laptop running Mavericks to my second partition on the MacPro.  So I want to end up with a machine that can run either Mountain Lion or Mavericks.

When I rebooted into 10.6.8, I saw the second partition "folder" on the desktop. Now the 2nd partition does not yet have an O/S, but the last thing I expected was to see it on the Mountain Lion desktop!

What is happening here? Why am I seeing the second partition as if it were a part of 10.6.8?  Did I fail to partition the drive correctly?

To partition my drive, I booted from the reinstall disk, got into utilities, did not select the route that would erase everything and reinstall the O/S, but selected the route that would preserve the data on the drive and split the single partition into 2 equally sized partitions.

Thanks,

By default, the Mac will always mount all non-hidden partitions - so both partitions will automatically mount to both OSes, whichever you boot from, even when each contains a different OS.
You can set each to not mount when the other OS is 'in charge' by tweaking a file known as fstab in each OS separately; but we'll come to that later...
First thing to ensure is that your two partitions have different, recognisable names - it will save a lot of trouble later.
Then you need to get Mavericks onto the new partition.
On first boot after installation it will ask if you wish to Migrate from another machine. That's your time to feed it the Time Machine backup of your MacBook Pro.
By the time it's finished, your Mavericks partition will be a usable 'copy' of your Macbook.
To determine which it will boot into at any given time, you can set that in System Prefs > Startup Disk. That will set the default OS that it will boot into.
To boot into the other on just a single occasion, hold  Alt ⌥  at the startup chimes & choose it from the drive icons that will appear [You may also see Recovery at that point too]
Once you are sure that each will boot when requested, then you can set your fstab file to not mount the other drive in each case.
Changing the fstab file to hide a partition is just a 'simple task' of adding one line of text to a text file; one on each boot partition. This 'simple task' is unfortunately complicated by a couple of factors...
Firstly, because you don't 'own' the file the system will try to stop you from writing to it.
To get around this, we drag the file to the desktop & work on the copy that is made there.
It's also in a hidden location, so it's not easy to get to, so we need to start by making it visible…
Late Edit: Since perhaps High Sierra, you can enable hidden file visibility simply by key command from Finder -  Cmd ⌘   Shift ⇧   .  (stop/period), thus avoiding all the defaults write below
If you need to use fstab frequently, add yourself to the ACL, which saves having to work on a copy each time

Open Terminal [Applications/Utilities]

Type
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
& hit Enter [You can copy/paste]
Right click the Finder icon in the Dock & select Relaunch. This will make the Finder disappear, then reappear showing all the hidden files [We'll revert this at the end.]

In Finder, navigate to *current boot drive*/etc/fstab
etc is an alias, & the fstab file may or may not exist. If it doesn't we can make a new one.
Drag fstab to the desktop, it will make a copy. If no fstab file exists, you can just make a new file from Terminal by typing
touch ~/desktop/fstab
& one will appear on the desktop.

In Terminal - Type
diskutil info *partition name of other partition*
& hit Enter
We are looking for the UUID of the other partition here - the one you want to hide when you are booted into this one, so for instance from Mountain Lion you're looking for
diskutil info Mavericks HD

Find the line that says Volume UUID & copy the long number that looks like this 20F8C09F-9609-39BD-9C47-D82DCC98ECDE [Ignore the one underneath it that looks similar]

Open your desktop copy of fstab in TextEdit

Add a new line to the fstab file like this, but using your copied UUID -
UUID=C126C736-1585-3D12-9CF1-F95EFF0CF744 none hfs rw,noauto
Ignore any existing lines that may be present, just add your new one underneath.
Save.

Fix the ownership on the new version of fstab by typing
sudo chown root:wheel ~/desktop/fstab
Terminal will ask for your password before proceeding.

Delete the existing fstab file from etc/ & then drag the new one into place. Password will be required.

Repeat that process on the other partition, first by finding its own fstab file, then adding to it the UUID of your current boot partition - so each boot drive will hide the other one.

Once completed & satisfied that it actually works, hide the 'invisible' files again -
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
then relaunch the Finder once more.

If you ever need to see the other partition later, you can always mount it manually from Disk Utility.


What counts as "power failure"? The upper case of my (5,2) Macbook has stopped working so I'm not able to use the power button to turn it on. I'm currently using an external keyboard/mouse. Here's the problem- In order to tun it on, I have to short the power pads on the logic board which I think is pretty risky if not done properly. I wanna avoid the risk of making the mistake and frying the logic board.

under system preferences -> energy saver -> power adapter, I found "restart immediately after a power failure"

So if there is a "power failure', I should theoretically be able to turn the mac on the next time I plug in the magsafe adapter, right?

But what counts as a power failure? Is just taking the battery out while the magsafe adapter is still attached considered a power failure?

This is similar to functions found in the bios of PC's as described here. I don't believe that functions is supposed to be available on portables, but evidently it is for you.

What explicitly counts as a power failure is loss of power to the motherboard. So that means the battery would have to be removed while the MagSafe is not connected. If the MagSafe is connected, it would not count as a power failure.

The computer starts up again if the power was cut to it (Last State). So if you yank the power at the log in screen, it'll power back on however if you yank the power after shutdown, it'll stay shut down.


Why won't my MacBook Pro boot from a Linux Live CD? Whenever I try to boot up from a live cd, it starts to boot and then it tells me:

  No bootable file system available.

It's an Early 2011 MacBook Pro 13" 8,1 with the 2.3 GHz Core i5.

What's going on?

Macs use the EFI Firmware (BIOS for Windows).

You need to download a special Mac ISO that allows to boot on both BIOS and EFI Systems.

For Ubuntu 11.10 you can download the specific Mac image here:
64-bit Mac (AMD64) desktop CD

By experience I know that the following distros allow to boot on EFI systems using the "standard" ISO: Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint

Your questions is related to this here on askubuntu.


Safari not showing all Facebook icons sometimes when i login facebook the profile picture icons just won't load. I tried reseting safari, nothing. When i use chrome everything is ok. I googled it and someone said something about deleting a cache file but i could not find in library the safari cache file (i have no idea what it means, i guess some of you will understand).
I have the safari Version 7.0.2 (9537.74.9) and OS X 10.9.2. Anyone got an idea of how to fix it? Thank you in advance

To empty the Safari caches, first you need to have the Develop menu displayed in the menu bar (Preferences | Advanced | Show Develop menu in menu bar). Then on the Develop menu, click on Empty Caches.

You can also use the keyboard shortcut: option+cmd+e.


Why when I save a photo it displays a different date then the actual date I saved it This just recently started happening and I don’t know why!

I saved this photo today and it’s says I saved it in 2005!

The date and time in question doesn't usually refer to the last time it was edited or saved. Typically, it'll refer to the date and time the photo or screenshot was originally saved (i.e. originally taken).

Obviously I can't comment on the photo in your question, but my guess is that the time of 3:29pm and date of 23 March 2005 is what's in the metadata of the photo, and that it was originally taken by a digital camera of some sort at that time (obviously not with your iPhone).

Any photo taken with an iPhone (or any digital camera) will actually also store a whole heap of metadata. In addition to the date and time it was taken, it can capture the colour mode, size in pixels, depth, and so much more. When you then edit that photo with your iPhone (or digital camera) it'll also capture the date and time it was modified.

However, in the Photos app of your iPhone the metadata it'll display is the date and time the you took the photo (or the data and time it was originally taken by whichever digital camera it was).

Editing the photo doesn't change the metadata being displayed, not even if you opt to use the Copy or Duplicate options.


Different transparency for in-call menu I'm using ios7.1 and I was wondering if there's a way to change the transparency of the in-call menu?
When I use the dialer's keypad I have about 30% transparency (I can see the background but it's mostly covered in white), but when I'm in the middle of a call, the background is about 70-80% transparent, so if I have a light wallpaper, I can't see the menu or the numbers.

I'm looking for a tweak that will enable me to manually change the transparency or tweak it from iFile.
Second option: set a dark wallpaper only for in-call menu (is it possible?)

Thank you!

No, this is impossible using official iOS builds. This has never been possible in the past, and probably never will be a user-editable option on iOS. If your iPhone is jail-broken (which is implied by mentioning iFile) there might be a way to do this, but I'm not familiar with that.


How to run latest tvOS SDK on macOS 10.13? TL/DR: Is there any way to get the latest tvOS SDK, and hack it into my (slightly older) version of XCode, so I can do tvOS development on my machine?

Background:
I need to do some tvOS development.  My AppleTV is running tvOS 12.3.  My Mac is running 10.13.6.  The latest version of XCode that will run on macOS 10.13.6 is version Xcode 10.1, and when I try to connect to the AppleTV, Xcode complains that it is not compatible with tvOS 12.3, and tells me I should update.

The last time I tried to update my MacBook Pro beyond macOS 10.13, it failed halfway through, and Time Machine also failed to restore properly.  I lost half a week rebuilding my machine, and still run into things that are not quite right (e.g. execute bits inside app bundles).  I'm not eager to go through that again.

So I bought an external 2TB Western Digital hard drive, and tried to install Mojave on that.  After a day and a half of trying, I give up.  It's been nothing but a series of failures.

So, I'm now looking for some way to get the latest tvOS SDK (or at least one compatible with tvOS 12.3), and copy it into my current XCode, so I can get on with development?

This is obviously not supported and I don't know what wackiness may result from it, (some weird stuff happened when I did it myself) but this is where you find and put the SDK's for specific platforms in an Xcode version.

On the new Xcode (the one with the SDK that supports your device/OS/etc.) you can find the SDK bundle itself in

Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/AppleTVOS.platform/Developer/SDKs

Then extract (copy) the tvOS version you want to work with, as well as the simulators if you want to, and put them in the same path in the version Xcode that you currently run. Restart to see if they show up as targets.

As I mentioned, this isn't supported at all, and you might face more than trivial issues, but it's a starting point.


Is there any official reason why OSX does not have a native package manager? I’m new in the OSX world, after a few search on internet, I realized that all package managers for OSX are 3rd party tools.
OSX as a Unix-based system, I just can’t imagine that Apple hasn’t thought about a built-in package manager.

Is there any reason why Apple didn’t provide a packet manager ?
Does Apple (officially or not) support one of the existing 3rd party package managers ? I heard that the author of Homebrew is now working for Apple

Apple's primary audience are not command line users.

Apple provide the Mac App Store for distribution and updating of both their own and third party software. The store can be reached through Applications > App Store.app.

With regard to the history of Homebrew and Max Howell's employment by Apple, Max has since left Apple.


iPhone/iTunes play count & location updating Here's the scenario:

My phone holds my music list, and is synchronized with my home computer
My work computer also runs iTunes, and I plug my phone in there to play music by first having told it not to sync automatically, then selecting the device in the left pane and clicking on a song or podcast

Previously (say, iOS 5 and the appropriate iTunes version) I would do this daily, and when I got home to sync my phone any fully played podcasts would be marked as played at home, play counts of songs would be updated, and half-played podcasts would have their "play head" position synced to wherever I left off.  I could then pick up where I left off on my home computer if I wanted to.  On the work computer, when I'd click 'eject' on my device in iTunes I would see a brief "Syncing iPhone..." window pop up and that would update the play counts and position of anything that I'd updated while connected.  If I didn't eject, then that data would sometimes be lost, which is understandable (and I would always make a point to eject so I wouldn't lose my position).

Now (iOS 6, iTunes 10.7 (21)) when I get home all that information is lost and whatever the play count or status was on my home computer is written back to the phone.  I also note that if I start playing a podcast via my work computer over USB, and then open the video app on the phone (or the Music app if it's an audio-only podcast), it does not know where I left off previously and starts from the beginning or my home computer's "play head" position.

Any ideas?  I've restored the phone not that long ago, but starting from new isn't something I'd like to do because of the time involved in reconfiguring everything.  My current "solution" is to only start a podcast at work if I know I can finish it so I don't have to write down where I left off :>

Set the iPhone to Manually manage music, Does the trick for me.


View Shared Office 365 Calendar on iOS I'm trying to help someone who uses Office 365 at work with a Mac. Right now, she has to use the official Outlook app on all of her devices (MacBook, iOS, Apple Watch, etc.), but she'd like to be able to use the native Apple apps instead. This seems to work fine for everything except for shared calendars.

On the Mac Calendar app, you can set up delegate calendars easily, but I don't see a way to do that on iOS. Is there a way to view a shared (non-public) calendar on iOS?

No - the native OS X and iOS apps do not understand delegate calendars. Microsoft implemented them as a non-standard calendar extending the basic CalDAV format, so you would need to wait for Apple to code to Microsoft's standard or use another app to view those. (I can't recommend any apps, but you might start with Microsoft's ones if you are OK using native calendars for all but the delegate ones).


How can I remove my me.com address from Mail? I have a few email accounts set up in Mail. One of them is my xxxxx@mac.com email address. At some point (maybe after I switched to iCloud), Mail started including the xxxxx@me.com address in the list of potential from: addresses. Is there any way to convince it to not include the @me.com address? I don't ever want to use it.

Edit

Sorry, I may have been unclear. I want to continue using the xxxxx@mac.com address. I just don't want the xxxxx@me.com address in the popup list or to have Mail automatically enter it in the From field when I create a new message.

Go to Mail's Preferences / Accounts / Advanced and deselect the Activate this account checkbox. This should do the trick.


Hardware requirement for IOS compilation My company is moving to IOS Apps development and we are looking for a MAC's pc to compile the apps.  Basically we will develop at Window workstation, then compile at MAC.

Is the Mac Book Pro i5 or Mac Mini i5 power enough the the apps compilation(will only run as workstation to compile the IOS apps)?

How about Running OSX at window 10 HyperV, is it support?

Thanks
Louis

I use a 13" retina MacBook Pro for writing applications (for iOS or OS X) in multiple languages with Xcode. I find that my computer is, more often than not, enough to compile an application for release from the command line.

Of course, the general rule that the more powerful your computer, the faster it will get stuff done applies, so it's a matter of how much you're willing to wait.

Depending on the size of your uncompiled application, compilation times can take anywhere from a few seconds to ten minutes.


Keeping the mac awake when running certain applications? I need to keep my MacBook Air awake when running certain applications. But when I put the display to sleep, often the whole system suspends after a few minutes.

Specifically I run Air Video Server on the Mac to stream/decode videos to my iPad. But the Mac keeps sleeping and thus stopping streaming videos.

I tried to use Caffeine to keep the Mac awake, but it looks like it has lost its magic in Mountain Lion – it couldn't keep the Mac awake to continue running services after I put the display to sleep.

Wimoweh (another sleep-preventing app) couldn't detect whether Air Video server is running, so it's probably won't be useful in this situation.

So is there any other app that can keep a Mac running services with the display asleep? I'm not keen to install OS X Server on this laptop since it's more of a once-in-a-while thing and most of the time I need the Air to really sleep if it's unused.

I use caffeine to avoid the system to sleep, you can configure the time is "awake" as well: http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

Edit to update as caffeine hasn't been updated for a long time, Amphetamine seems to work OK https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12


How do I replace the hard drive in my circa 2008 iMac? My circa 2008 iMac hung up today and wouldn't reboot -- it just hung on boot with the Apple logo and the spinner. I booted the Snow Leopard DVD and ran Disk Utility on the drive. It told me the drive needed repairing but during the repair cycle stopped, and said the drive couldn't be repaired. That I should format it and restore from a backup.

So I did. Or, am doing. The restore from my TimeMachine drive is about 75% done now.

Even if this is successful, I'm nervous. I'm not sure if that drive failure was some sort of uncorrectable filesystem corruption that occured because when the iMac was hung up I hard stopped it with the power button, or if the drive is starting to fail.

I'd like to replace the drive in it just to be on the safe side. Is this hard to do? I couldn't find anything about this procedure on Apple's support web site. If I replace it is there a brand of drive that I should buy or is the OS accepting of anything I put in there? Is it a 2.5" or a 3.5" SATA drive in there?

If you're talking about an aluminum iMac, getting to the HDD involves removing the built in display monitor to be able to get behind it. YouTube seems to have several video walk-throughs that show the process (including this one; the link is to the first part). Additionally, a quick search turned up a site with written, step by step instructions. The process seems too complex to provide here.

If you're comfortable with this level of complexity in hardware repair, then the video or text walk throughs should help you. I suspect, all things considered, if you're not confident enough to perform the upgrade yourself just by looking at videos of others who have done it, then this probably falls into the class of "take your iMac to your local Mac service centre and get them to do it": yes, it will cost you money, but they can also guarantee their workmanship...


Free space on hard drive going up and down too much On my laptop with macOS Sierra 10.12.5 (but it was happening with previous versions of the OS too), I get pinged by the system that I have only a few GBs left, I clean up, reboot, go from 4 GB left to 30 GB left, and within a couple of days, not doing anything special (not downloading movies or anything space-hungry), I get told again I have only 4 GB left ... I went through that cycle a few times now, and I'm wondering what could be causing that behavior, and how I could stop it. Any idea or pointers to what I should look at on my HDD to try and understand this? (sleep images, sparse bundles...)

Note: this question is not about using a disk inventory app to find the large files that take up too much space on my HDD. What I am interested in is why I got from 30 GB after boot to 4 GB without installing anything on my Mac. I want to understand which process is doing that and stop it.

Install Homebrew (www.brew.sh)
In the teminal, use this command to install ncdu

brew install ncdu

then, run it

cd ~; sudo ncdu

You will get a nice overview of the size of all folders in your home directory, largest topmost. It should be easy to track your gigabytes.

If this does not give results, you can run ncdu for your whole disc as well. Just go to /Volumes/DISKNAME e.g.

cd /Volumes/MACBOOT; sudo ncdu

You should also make sure that no application is simply "eating ram" by running

top -o mem

In the top lines, if there are applications that have a "G" in the "mem" column, they use gigabytes of ram. Make sure this is adequate. You might have an application with a memory leak installed.


What do I need to know for setting key combination shortcuts I am running OS X Mavericks 10.9 and I want to create a new key combination shortcut for, lets say, 'Look Up in Dictionary'. Personally I think CommandShiftD or CommandOptionD would be nice.

When I choose for the latter nothing happens in the preferences 'Keyboard' window and my Dock hides. I expected this behavior but OSX gives me no notice of it, I might just have activated something else without knowing it.

When I choose for the first, it looks like it just works as aspected, my key combination gets set. But when I use the shortcut in Safari on a selected word, the page is suddenly added to my reading list (as CommandShiftD is the default keystroke to do so) and the dictionary does not open as expected.

This behavior leeds me to two problems about what do I need to know for setting key combination shortcuts.

Is there a way to see what key combination is already taken, and for what purpose?

As M-K describes the apple manual states yellow warning triangle appears when a short-cut is already taken, but as the screenshots show this is not the case in OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

Is there a key combination convention or rule for the different modifier keys? What key would be appropriate for what task? (e.g. when would I choose for Command or Shift or Option or Ctrl) or one of the function keys)

Below is my example of two different scripts (Run in Terminal and Launch Terminal) with the same keystroke (CommandF19) to activate them and no error

1. Is there a way to see what key combination is already taken, and for what purpose?

You can see if there is a conflict with your chosen shortcut. From "If a keyboard shortcut doesn’t work":

  Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, and then click Keyboard.
  Click Keyboard Shortcuts. A yellow warning triangle appears next to conflicting keyboard shortcuts.

2. Is there a key combination convention or rule for the different modifier keys? What key would be appropriate for what task? (e.g. when would I choose Command or Shift or Option or Ctrl or one of the function keys)

For dictionary lookups, Apple has already defined Ctrl+Cmd+D as "Display the definition of the selected word in the Dictionary app."

The OS X Human Interface Guidelines on Keyboard Shortcuts states the following about when to use these modifier keys and for what purposes. The recommended priority is to use Cmd frequently, use Option sparingly, avoid using Ctrl and use Shift for complementary functions of a common command (of course, you may observe that in certain instances Apple does not follow these guidelines).

Quote from the Keyboard Shortcuts page:

  As much as possible, use the Command key as the main modifier key in a keyboard shortcut. For example, Command-P uses Command to modify the P key. For a command that complements another more common command, you can add Shift to the shortcut. For example, the shortcut for the complementary Page Setup command adds Shift to the shortcut for Print to give Shift-Command-P.

  Use the Option key sparingly. If there’s a third, less common command that’s related to a pair of commands that use Command and Shift-Command, you can use Option-Command for the third command’s keyboard equivalent. Use combinations like these very rarely. You can also use Option for a keyboard shortcut that’s a convenience or power-user feature. For example, the Finder uses Option-Command-W for Close All Windows and Option-Command-M for Minimize All Windows.

  As much as possible, avoid using the Control key. Because the Control key is already used by some of the universal access features—as well as in Cocoa text fields where Emacs-style key bindings are often used—it should be used as a modifier key only when necessary.

  List multiple modifier keys in the correct order. If you use more than one modifier key in a shortcut, always list them in this order: Control, Option, Shift, Command.


Is there an .ogg plugin for quicklook? Is there one of these?

I could not find one with a basic search on google.

If not, is it possible to make it look and behave exactly like the default audio quicklook in objective-C?

Whenever I want a new Quicklook plugin, I look through three places:

quicklookplugins.com
qlplugins.com
And a specially crafted google search.

Neither of the third party quick look plugin sites list any results for 'ogg' or 'vorbis', and the link to bravobug.com in a MacWorld forum post no longer works either because the domain has been squatted, or the blog software has just become completely overrun by spam, which is also why I didn't actually link directly to blog post.

Xiph (the company responsible for OGG and so much more) created the XiphQT components forever ago, but they haven't been updated in years, and there's no updates to suggest QLPlugins or anything else of the sort.

It seems like this does not exist. Unfortunately.


Schedule Mic Recording Is there a way (automator maybe?) or program to make an iMac record the microphone input on a scheduled time (start and finish). I need it like some kind of security webcam but for audio

This post explains something similar to what you are trying to do. I think that you can easily modify the workflow so it fits what you need starting from there.

Quote:

  Set up your workflow Launch Automator and in the New Template sheet
  that appears, select Service and click Choose. Build a workflow that
  contains these actions: New Audio Capture, Start Capture, and Stop
  Capture (all under Movies). In the Start Capture action enable the
  Wait For Capture To Complete option. In the Stop Capture action enable
  the Close Movie After Stopping option. Configure the top of the window
  to read Service Receives No Input in Any Application. Save your
  workflow and give it an intuitive name such as Voice Memo.

  Voice memo window When you activate your workflow, the small Audio
  Recording window will appear. If you now click Automator’s Run button,
  QuickTime Player will launch, a new audio recording window will
  appear, and your Mac will start recording from the sound input device
  selected in the Sound system preference (from your iMac or MacBook’s
  microphone, for example). When you’re finished recording, just press
  the spacebar and your recording will be saved, the audio recording
  window will close, and you’ll find your voice memo saved as Audio
  Recording.mov in the Movies folder within your user folder.
  (Subsequent recording will be called Audio Recording followed by a
  number—Audio Recording 1.mov, for example.)


Use a USB sound card with multiple input lines in apps like Skype or Dictation? I need a way to make apps use the second input line from USB sound card. By default the all use input one. Does anyone know how to split the two input channels into two separate devices or alternatively merge the to inputs into one input channel?

It seems like OS X is treating the two channels as one Stereo channel instead of two separate inputs.

Background information

I have a lexicon Alpha sound card. It has two input lines, The first for instruments and the second for a microphone.  I'm able to see both lines in audio MIDI  setup. If I go into the system preferences I see both lines as one input device and I can see the sound bar move if I speak in the microphone or put jack table in the instrument plug.

If I use Skype or dictation or hangouts or any other normal app only the instrument input is used. If I use Audacity the input is recorded as one stereo channel with the instrument on the left channel and the microphone on the right channel only.

In Audio Midi Setup, you may have the choice of which is the primary input in non-ASIO applications…

Alternatively, it might be possible to rearrange the inputs if you use an Aggregate device

I've only used Aggregates for testing, experimentation, so I'm no expert - but it appears you can renumber the channel order by clicking the individual channels in the top section.


Pure Genius Or Pure Stupidity: Does An Old Mac G5 Make A Great BBQ? This question has some humor as well as practical implications for owners of Apple Mac G5s.

I came across this earlier on today as an alternative recycling option:

Source Macgasm

Is this really a viable option (if a little extreme) & what other recycling methods exist for an old Apple Mac G5 ?

Personally, I would lean against this for several reasons:

The aluminum used in the Mac Pro cases isn't food grade metal.
Some of the adhesives in the case were potentially noxious.

I realize it's tongue in cheek, but keep safe, people. :)

Edit:

The frame of the Mac Pro(s) are basically aluminum. So you can take it to your local metal recycler and have it scraped for aluminum in exchange for money.

You can also refer to Apple's recycling policies.

Ebay/Craigslist are other options, as there are system rebuilders who would love to make use of an old Mac Pro case.


Embed custom font in PDF file I inserted text into a PDF document with Preview in a custom font I had installed on my Mac. When I transferred it to my iPad and opened it with Notability, to my horror all the text had been removed. When I opened it in PDF Expert, it was there but the font had reverted to Helvetica. Naturally this isn't something I want, as I expect the recipient to see exactly what I'm seeing in a PDF file.
I presume this happened because Preview wasn't embedding the font into the PDF (although strangely the file size became significantly larger, suggesting that it had). What am I doing wrong, and what's the correct way to embed a font that you use in a PDF file?

It appears as though to embed a font in Preview (or at least to ensure that it shows up on an iPad when the iPad does not have the same font installed), you need to perform the following:

Go to File > Print...
Click PDF on the bottom let, and click Save as PDF
Save as a new PDF file

The new PDF file will have the font correctly embedded in it. You may also be able to export as a PDF (again) directly from Preview, although I have not tried this.
The reason that it doesn't get "embedded" upon saving likely has something to do with the text fields staying editable in the PDF. Once you export the PDF, you are unable to edit the text fields any longer in Preview, but the fonts are embedded.


Encrypt Time Machine backup images, not entire drive? I have multiple Macs (for multiple users) backing up to a single Time Capsule over our network with an external USB drive connected. In the case of the backups saved to the external drive, they're all saved in the drive's root directory.

My Time Capsule is protected with user accounts, and each user has their own account.

I'd like to configure Time Machine such that each user can only see their own backup file on the Time Capsule, not those of other users, when they open the Time Capsule in Finder.

I'm aware that there's an option to encrypt backups in Time Machine setup, but the language around it suggests that the entire disk will be encrypted with a single password; I don't want to do this. I simply want each user to only be able to see their own backup file when they open the Time Capsule in Finder, and I want them to be able to log into the Time Capsule with their own username and password.

Is this the actual functionality of encrypting backups? If not, is there another way I can accomplish this?

Apple tried encrypting each user's files in FileVault 1 and did away with that when FileVault 2 arrived.

The easy/recommended way to do this is make no user an admin so that they cannot get around the prohibition to look at other user files. Also, you will have to physically secure the backup drive or trust that no one breaks the policy to not access that drive.

One easy thing you could do is have each Mac encrypt the backups by ticking that switch to prevent some users from seeing files from another computer but that won't prevent same computer users that are admin and know what to type.  The downside there is for several computers managing the passwords becomes onerous to a less than ideal step up in privacy.

I would recommend you set up storage on a Mac mini server and have it serve up Time machine to each Mac so that you can control access better than using TimeCapsule. The performance will go up substantially along with the cost. The setup is fairly easy and there are inexpensive books to guide you if needed. AppleCare also supports server so hat is extremely inexpensive for three years of phone support for enterprise caliber support.


How can I sync and store data for offline access on an iPad? I am asking a question which, despite tons of Internet research and trying out many different options, I can't seem to find a solution to. I am a software engineer by the day, and a musician at night. I recently purchased an iPad with the goal of keeping my entire sheet music library on the device. I just can't figure out how to keep the music "synced" on the device! Here's what I'm looking to do:

I have a folder (with subfolders) filled with music. I can share these using basically any protocol: web-dav, ssh, FTP, Dropbox, you name it. I primarily use rclone to move files around and it's easy for me to set up a server with whatever protocol makes sense.
A requirement is that the data remain on my iPad offline (don't want to depend on Internet access at a gig!)
Also a requirement is to be able to sync an entire folder, rather than selecting files individually.
My preference is to self-host my data, rather than relying on a proprietary service. If I have to use a service, I do not want to pay a monthly fee just to be able to sync. This is why Dropbox Pro doesn't work for me - I don't mind paying a hosting provider to store my data, but don't want vendor lock-in.
I don't mind paying for an app to do this.

How can I achieve the above? This is what I tried on the iPad:

Dropbox: Would work beautifully, but I would have to subscribe to their Pro plan (in perpetuity!) and I'd rather pay monthly fees for a system without vendor lock-in.
Google Drive: You have to select individual files for offline mode, not a folder.
Nextcloud: I used to use it but found their sync to be very buggy! Maybe it has gotten better in the past 1 or 2 years.
Amazon Drive: Does not have an offline mode.

What should I be trying that I haven't yet?

I was able to use GoodReader for this. It allowed me to connect to a web-dav server that I was running, and then synchronize files as I update that directory


Mac: USB install not working My Mac Pro become bit slow, I installed a lot of things, I downloaded a lot of torrents but I did not find any particular problem, but I found it is better to reset all my Mac. So I went through steps prescribed on YouTube:

Shutdown Mac.
Press Command + R and power button.
I got a window contain, disk utilities, so I did erase all my Mac disk. After
I selected “Reinstall OS X”
After a couple of steps, It is asking for my Apple account user/password. I have given both. But it says “this service unavailable, please try later. ” I tried more than 20times, Same user/password I am using on my mac air also it working well.
For this issue, I find a solution online, that first login in iCloud or iTunes with Safari. After try again. I did same but no luck.

So, I plan to install with USB. For that, I followed different video from YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIbOg89KIUE).
That says

Take 8GB or more USB flash drive.
Reformat it as bootable USB, that I did.
Download “Install macOS Sierra” from App Store.
Copy it to USB drive. I did all that as he showed in the clip.
And connect that USB drive to the mac pro.
Press Option + Power button
I got two options on Mac internal hard disk second my USB drive,
I selected USB drive and press install.
Then I am not getting any thing just white screen, I waited for 10mins no response.
For this problem, I found a solution online, that says, give very generic permissions to that USB. I did and tried again even no luck.

Please help me how to reinstall my Mac Pro please.

My advice would be to boot back into OS X. Erase the USB stick and follow the commands given here using Terminal https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201372

This is Apple's method of doing it and I've found it far more reliable than using Disk Maker X or any drag and drop method. For clarity if your USB stick was formatted as Untitled, the command would look like this:

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app

Because you started the command with the word 'sudo' you will be asked to enter your user password, go ahead and do this and then wait. It can sometimes take up to an hour for this process to finish.

Next make sure have a backup before you proceed to do anything. Time Machine to a USB hard drive of equal or greater size than your hard disk will be good enough.

Once the above steps are done, restart your machine with the memory stick inserted and turn the machine on while holding the alt(option) key.

Select the Mac OS Installer and follow the instructions. If you're going for just a reinstall over the top of your existing files, simply select re-install Mac OS and let it run.

If you're going for a completely clean install (recommended if you're having issues) make sure you have backup of your system first then proceed to use Disk Utility to format your main hard drive (best practice is to call it Macintosh HD). Then go back to the installer menu and re-install Mac OS to the newly cleaned drive.


Is it safe to remove "rdmgrab" in Mojave I recently upgraded to Mojave. So far I haven't had any problems with it. However, when I restart the Mac, I get a pop-up saying '“rdmgrab” is not optimised for your Mac and needs to be updated.'

There is a process called rdmgrab that runs in the background. (There's another called rdmd, but I don't know if it's related.)

There is a file called rdmgrab in /opt/local/bin, a rdmgrab.plist and a few rdmgrab_[1811xx].log files.

I have no idea where this file came from. Does anyone have an idea what it might be, and whether it's safe to dump it?

I did a bit of searching on this. I don't suppose you have TeamViewer, LogMeIn, VNC or another remote viewer installed? Chrome desktop anywhere?

This could be related to that?

See this other stack exchange post:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/71344/strange-tcp-traffic-on-mac-os-x-from-rdmd

Thanks,
Ed