MBP 2012 +, light projector, Home Theater system, HDMI spitter, no audio, puzzle? This issue relates to Mac Book Pro's and hdmi audio functionality.

I am trying to resolve an issue for a community hall. The hall has a light projector (BenQ) with small internal speaks, and a Home Theater box with surround sound system (Sony BDV-E290).

All hdmi ports and cables are hdmi 1.4.

Normally, a single HDMI cable connects the light projector to the hdmi (incl ARC - Audio Return Channel) port on the back of the Home Theater unit.

The Home Theater unit has the surround sound speakers connected to it.

One can play a video file put on a usb thumb drive and plugging it into the Home Theater unit. Both video on light projector and sound via surround sound speakers plays.

Connect MacBookPro mid 2012 Retina laptop, so as to play video using internet on this system using the hdmi port. Connect MBP via hdmi cable to a powered hdmi splitter. This is to enable one hdmi cable out of the splitter to go to the light projector, while a second hdmi cable plugged into the hdmi port of the home theater unit so it can play the hdmi delivered digital sound data.

With this set up there is no sound from the home theater unit speakers, only video on the light projector.

Despite checking all home theater, and MBP settings, reading manuals, and lots of net research re Mac hdmi, hdmi sound, hdmi standards, etc. I am very puzzled.

The below diagram illustrates this set up.

The question is, should I expect this to work?

Alternatively, am I missing some technical understanding of the hdmi and sound capability of the macbook pro, hdmi port, or hdmi splitter, or concept of hdmi delivered ARC return?

After several hours of research I do not understand what the problem is conceptually, or in practice.

I have confirmed that the audio data output via the MBP hdmi port is active, and all hdmi cables are working. I have confirmed the surround sound speakers are working. I have read (several times) the home theater instruction manuals and tried all settings to my understanding, and played with any other setting I could think of value.

One experienced mac person's solution is that I need to use an hdmi switcher, rather than an hdmi splitter, and use an hdmi audio extractor to stream off the audio data from the laptops hdmi cable. Then rather than the audio data being supplied to the home theater box via its hdmi port, input the audio data via a fibre Tosink audio cable into the audio fibre port available on the theatre box for 5.1 surround sound.

This I think should work. However, I am puzzled and questioning that I should need to do this.  Surely such a simple first solution should work. Yet, it does not.

Some relevant links:
HDMI ARC functionality Confirms my understanding and use of ARC via hdmi.
Apple MBP hdmi port audio functionality Confirms MBP hdmi port includes hdmi 1.4 and 5.1 surround sound consistent with home theatre box.

The below solution has now been implemented. It did work.

Can now plug in a laptop, access internet, play video, and have sound play via home theatre system.

This technical information is key to why this set up does not work.

  HDMI-ARC uses two pins on the hdmi cable an unused one and the hot detect pin, it is not part of the normal data stream and does not use the normal pins.
  It's basically a coax spdif connection in reverse.

The confusion has arisen it would appear, when the home theatre box manual mentions ARC return feature associated with the HDMI port in a way suggestive of it being essentially a two way hdmi port.

It would seem ARC does not deliver audio data by the standard way of hdmi video/audio data streaming protocols, or even by the same internal physical pins.

A TV set will return ARC signal, as it is designed to use this different standard for the return audio.

Apparently, ARC is part of the hdmi standard though, as was commented on another site.

  ARC is part of the hdmi standard .... it was an addition to HDMI to allow a TV to return audio back to an AVR., to replace a spdif coax or optical cable.

This missing technical understanding re ARC explains why a suggested solution was to add to the hdmi cable from the laptop at the theater box end, an hdmi audio extractor box, with a audio fibre Toslink (for 5.1 surround sound) or RCA for stereo sound, input to those available audio input connections on the back of the home theater unit.

The situation has been confusing. It would seem reasonable to assume the connection functionality of the home theater box would be inclusive of plugging in a laptop device, one accessing the internet for various audio visual media. Hence, when not working, the natural assumption is that there was something wrong with the numerous setting options, which is where I began, or the functional capacity of the hdmi laptop port or laptop settings.

However, it seems not so. The danger of unconscious assumptions!

A second part of the problem is that it the hdmi splitter should be an hdmi switcher, so that the hdmi video data can be selected as coming from the theater box or the laptop.

Diagram of expected solution set up below.

Credit and thanks to the guys on the Whirlpool site, as well as those commenting here.


Serial-Ethernet or Serial-WiFi (or Serial-Bluetooth?) on OS X I'm trying to connect a remote serial port to my MacBook Pro (and potentially other devices such as Windows or laptops, and Android tablets and smartphones) wirelessly.

I've come across Serial-WiFi and Serial-Ethernet adaptors (the latter could presumably be connected to a router and accessed via my existing wifi network), but I don't know how to access the serial port from my Mac.
So far as I can tell tese devices rely on drivers which simulate a COM port on the computer, and so far as I can tell none of these adaptors come with drivers which work on OS X.
I see that there are also Serial-Bluetooth adaptors, which I guess would also suffice for my purpose if they could be made to work, but I assume the same issue exists with these.

In case it helps; this is for connecting the NMEA 0183 outputs of various marine navigational instruments to my computer, for use by navigational sftware such as (primarily) OpenCPN. For those who aren't familiar with it, NMEA 0183 is a protocol enabling marine navigational instruments to share data with each other via ASCII data sentences broadcast over a serial interface. More details on Wikipedia.

If there's an alternative way to transmit this data to my computer over wifi, that would be equally acceptable.

Bluetooth may actually be the way to go. There's no standard for Serial-WiFi or Serial-Ethernet adapters (as far as I know), so you'd be at the mercy of the manufacturers who need to provide OS X drivers. On the other hand, most Bluetooth functions come from a set of standardized profiles that don't need specific device drivers. For example, a headset just needs to implement the correct audio profile to be able to work with anything that supports that profile. Bluetooth serial adapters implement the Serial Port Profile, and OS X supports it.

Once you have one of those devices and have it paired, it will show up as a standard serial port device like /dev/cu.bluetooth and /dev/tty.bluetooth, just like a Serial-USB adapter.

If the serial port doesn't get created automaticaly, it can be added manually in the Bluetooth advanced preferences. I also found an example of someone using SPP with a Mac here:
Using Bluetooth Serial Port on OS X Mountain Lion.


External usb webcam flickering (ripple effect) on MacBook Pro I'm new to Mac. I've bought an external usb HD webcam and I would like to use it with Mac.
Connectivity-wise, Mac recognizes the camera, I can use it from any application - so far so good.
The issue is - I'm experiencing a strong ripple effect due to ambient led lightning (50hz).
In windows, I could easily change the setting of video capture frequency to 50hz for any camera using windows settings (including the one in question) and this would resolve the ripple effect.
In Mac I just can't find the setting to do that.
After a short research - I saw a few suggestions to use an app like "Webcam settings".
I can't use it as a resolution in my case (for certain reasons).
Any ideas? Is there some config value that I can change manually?
Q: Am I positive it's the ambient lights? A: Yes it is the lights.
Q: Am I positive webcam/usb/other hw is OK? A: Yes it is OK.
Q: Does the vendor provide resolution? A: No, the vendor (Amcrest) did not provide a resolution yet.

I've found a temporary solution:
Open google meet and switch to the usb cam. That's it - it will adjust the capture frequency.


macOS Big Sur deadlock update This evening my macOS Big Sur requested a restart for an "important update". After macOS reboot, I get a screen made of a background with standard Big Sur wallpaper and a mid-size centred-view windows which is asking to me to connect to the Internet because this update cannot be done without access to a network.
I give my usual Wi-Fi connection, it didn't woks anymore: a popup with an icon representing a smoking appears telling me that the connection using Wi-Fi could not be established.
So I take Ethernet cable and plug it into my MacBook Pro and I tried to connect to Internet using Ethernet. Nothing to be done... and identical pop to the previous one tells me that connection could not be established.
The third and the last options is: "Cannot connect to the Internet". I choose this last one but a popup appears telling me that the update could not be done without Internet. I can choose between "Retry" or "Shutdown".
This I really weird and really frustrating. Today is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday and then is Sunday... I can't wait until Monday to call Apple assistance... I need my Mac BookPro fully operational urgently.
I tried to get into recovery mode (CMD+R at boot) and I see that I am to be able to connect to Internet. If I boot normally I get this hateful mid-size centred-view window related to this probably bugged update.
I have a good familiarity using Terminal, if anyone could give me some advices/tricks/workaround that require some command line... it will be ok.
UPDATE:
I tried to run S.O.S. Partition on my OS Volume (not data volume), but all appears to be fine.
It is possible to get the rid of this update and let the OS to boot normally?

If you need it urgently, since you can boot into Recovery, can you create a new volume and do a fresh install of macOS onto that? Then you can migrate your files over to that new volume and delete the old one.


How can I add static route? How can I add a static route "forever", that means without retyping add route in Terminal each time I'm using VPN? I found this solution for 10.6, but what if there is a nicer one for 10.7?

I would use Lingon to script this as a system startup - you can always use launchd to load or unload the job from the command line (or delete the route).

You don't need Lingon, it just makes it so much more friendly to assemble a plist that launchd likes to run.


Bind each keyboard layout to keys combination There is a nice possibility to bind each keyboard layout to separate keys combination and switch between them.

So you can assign, for instance, shortcut Alt-Shift-0 to "Select English", Alt-Shift-1 to "Select German", Alt-Shift-2 to "Select Arabic".

How to make this on MacOS 10.7.4?

Hurray! I found a way:

Add layouts in side bar
create an applescript

like this:

on changeKeyboardLayout(layoutName)
tell application "System Events" to tell process "SystemUIServer"
    tell (1st menu bar item of menu bar 1 whose description is "text input") to {click, click (menu 1's menu item layoutName)}
end tell
end changeKeyboardLayout

changeKeyboardLayout("US Extended")

3.Save it in /Library/Scripts

4.Bind it to the keys combination using FastScript


iMac Wi-Fi detects internet networks but it doesn't connect to any, but my other PC connects fine to them My iMac Wi-Fi detects internet networks but it doesn't connect to any, but my other PC connects fine to them.

It is a second hand iMac, it worked fine when I set it up, it connected for a day or 2 then no more. It still can detect the network but can't connect. With another PC of mine I can connect fine to the network I'm used to and the same one that the iMac worked with for the first 2 days.

Assuming you've already tried rebooting the iMac, you could try totally removing your Wi-Fi service, restarting your Mac, and adding your Wi-Fi service back again to see if that resolves the issue.

While you don't specify your version of macOS, the steps below should work:

Go to Apple > System Preferences > Network
Select the Wi-Fi service on the left-hand side
Click on the cog icon at bottom-left and select Make Service Inactive
Now delete the service by clicking on the minus sign (i.e. the - button) at left of the cog
Click on the Apply button
Exit Network preferences
Restart your iMac
Go to Apple > System Preferences > Network
Click on the plus sign (i.e. the + button) at left of the cog
In the pop-up window, ensure that Wi-Fi is selected from the drop-down menu
Click on the Create button
Make sure Wi-Fi is on

Let me know if this resolves the issue.


Why does Safari 6 scroll to the bottom of the page when viewing Google search results? When I use the pagination at the bottom of Google search results pages to browse through the results, Safari 6 on OS X Mountain Lion automatically scrolls to the bottom of the page. Doesn't happen with every page, just most result pages. Why does this happen?

I have the same problem. Mountain Lion has introduced a new way for quick scolling which brings quite strange results in Safari.

Here is the explanation extracted from this Macstories review of ML:

  On Mountain Lion, if you perform a quick scrolling gesture three times in a row the scrolling speed will ramp up to let you reach the end of a document quickly.


Live preview of changing image file I'm looking for a software recommendation that will allow me to view an image file that changes frequently, that ideally updates the display within 1 second after the file changes on disk.

Why? I'm working with a tool that generates images, and I want to rapidly test out different options. But it's frustrating to open and close the image after every single change. I'd rather just devote half my monitor to showing what the image looks like right now (latest version on disk) and the other half to working on my image generator.

I've already tried using macOS Quick Look, but it only picks up the first change. After that it doesn't show any more changes.

You can save the image file in a folder such that it is the only file in the folder. Whenever you generate a new image save it with the same name to the same folder. Then with the finder window open, have the file viewed using the 3rd view icon. See image below. My image file is a simple plot.

Whenever you generate a new image and replace the old image with new image the view will automatically update.


How to use Emacs shortcut key in Mac OS? I know Mac OS supports to some Emacs short-cut key to move cursor in text editor, e.g. Command + f/b/p/n to move cursor left/right/up/down, Command + v to page-down. In Emacs Meta + v is page-up, however the Option + v in Mac OS does not page up but instead print '✓'.

What should I set in Mac OS to make Meta + v works in Mac OS? My OS is Yosemite.

You have to open the Terminal Settings and then you can enable "Use Option as Meta key"


Login and Finder problems after Time Machine restore Following a keyboard problem on a MacBook Pro (2017 I think), I created 3 separate Time Machine backup (yes, I'm that paranoid) on 3 separate USB 3.0 drives.

After keyboard replacement I restored from Time Machine backup following this KB: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203981#macos (MacOS and files).

I took about 3 hours to do and after finishing it appeared to work, but then after typing in my password it just sits there with a spinner and username.

I gave it some 5-10 minutes, and it started spitting out notifications which I found strange since I expected this is not working without first logging in.
It turns out it is logged in, but I suspect Finder is unable to start as I can start spotlight (via command + space) and run applications like that without problems.

Safari starts and works with all the bookmarks, System Preferences open, Outlook is there with all emails and reminders, I can start terminal and ls files on my desktop, and yes there is files there. Everything appears to be fine, except the Desktop or Finder.

What I tried so far:

Run disk utility on backups and on internal disk after restoring – no problems
Restore from another disk – same result
Restore from a different point in time – same result
Restore from a different point in time from another disk – same result
Reinstall OS from Internet recovery and use Migration Assistant – errors out 3 minutes after starting migration with very useless generic "error, sorry", lots of people online complain this doesn’t work

Other things I noticed:
FileVault is off, I was on before. Is it trying to encrypt the drive, so it takes time to do? Is it indexing something?

I’m running out of ideas here, and I really want to avoid setting up everything manually.

It sorted itself out after about two hours of being stuck.
Leave it be I guess.


My System Preference window moved and isn't in the center anymore Since I updated my Mac, the System Preferences window no longer appears in the center. How do I return it to its default position (like shown below)?

In macOS Catalina you can use the following command in Terminal after closing System Preferences.app to delete the currently stored window position:

defaults delete com.apple.systempreferences "NSWindow Frame Main Window Frame SystemPreferencesApp 8.0"

This will delete the key including the window position.

Afterwards relaunch System Preferences.app and the key will be restored with a default position. The window will be centered in the East-West direction and slightly moved to the North. This is intended by Apple and indicates visual prominence.

In case the key name changes after a system update (e.g. to "NSWindow Frame Main Window Frame SystemPreferencesApp 8.1") you will get an error after entering the above command:

Domain (com.apple.systempreferences) not found.
Defaults have not been changed.

Then you have to search for the new proper key name by issueing:

defaults read com.apple.systempreferences

which will result in a long list:

...
NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows = 0;
"NSWindow Frame DestinationSheet" = "643 525 416 311 0 0 1680 1027 ";
"NSWindow Frame Identity Picker" = "673 573 357 263 0 0 1680 1027 ";
"NSWindow Frame Main Window Frame SystemPreferencesApp 8.1" = "9 476 668 548 0 0 1680 1027 ";
"NSWindow Frame NSNavPanelAutosaveName" = "463 333 799 448 0 0 1680 1027 ";
SecurityPrefTab = General;
...

The relevant key is the "NSWindow Frame Main Window Frame SystemPreferencesApp ..." key.

The "updated" command would then be:

defaults delete com.apple.systempreferences "NSWindow Frame Main Window Frame SystemPreferencesApp 8.1"


Two numbers on one phone I recently moved to USA for 10 months so I had to get an American number. Can I keep my old foreign number? If so how do I do that?

This is not actually a question about Apple.

The number is not associated with the phone, but with the subscription (your carrier's HLR maintains a relationship between SIM and phone number). Depending on your foreign carrier they may let you retain the number while not in use, or even forward calls to the US phone (at a cost).


Will it damage the battery if I use my MacBook Pro while playing WOW or just using it, while charging? I just received my first MacBook Pro as a birthday gift, and I am one of those people that tends to "baby" their electronics. I also tend to play World of Warcraft (WOW) quite a bit, but the problem is that is drains the battery very quickly. I have a 13 inch Retina Display.

If your computer says it's charging but the battery level percentage is still going down, then you're putting way too much stress on it. It's a rare occasion, but I have seen it happen once or twice.

If your battery percentage goes up, no matter how slowly, you should still be okay to use it while charging.

EDIT: Sorry, I don't know whether or not a charging-but-decreasing battery is actually bad for the hardware. I was just thinking that it's a situation that you should know could happen if you're doing a lot of battery-intensive processes. I don't know whether or not it damages your battery in the long run, just that it's possible that plugging your charger in won't actually charge the battery as quickly as you're draining it.


How can I restart a currently-running application with AppleScript? I've created an application with a "Run AppleScript" action in Automator.

I've created a Service in Automator which launches the aforementioned app.

The Service is triggered by a keyboard shortcut, assigned in System Preferences

The application presents a series of dialogs to the user. I would like to give the user the option of restarting the entire application mid-application.  For example, suppose that the following line was Line 100 of the code:

set buttonChoice to button returned of (display alert "Do you want to replace this entry?" as critical buttons {"Start over", "No", "Yes"})

   if buttonChoice is "Start over" then
      <this is where I need your help, Ask Different>
   end if

When I say "restart" or "start over," I mean that I want to return the user to the initial dialog of the application, that is, the very first line of code of the application.

Can this be done using AppleScript?

If needed, this is the location of the application file:

  /Applications/My Applications/My Log.app

The following code example assume that the Run AppleScript action starts with an on run command without any list, e.g. {input, parameters} and consequently ends the script with end run:

on run

    (*
            This comment represents the e.g. previous 99 lines of code.
        *)

    set buttonChoice to button returned of (display alert "Do you want to replace this entry?" as critical buttons {"Start over", "No", "Yes"})
    try
        if buttonChoice is "Start over" then
            return on run
        end if
    end try

    (*
            This comment represents the rest of the code in the script.
        *)

end run

Note that I tested this in macOS Sierra 10.12 and while it does appear to start over, because if you press the "Start over" button it loops until you select another choice, I'm not sure this is the best way to implement this. I say that because I do not know the structure and coding of the rest of the script and that may make a difference along with the fact that while testing other code on each side of this, I was able to crash the app depending on what was going on if I looped more then once at this point.

So with that said, I'm offering this as something to test throughly before implementing it in the final code.

I'd suggest just allowing the user to terminate the app with a message to manually restart by pressing the key-combo to trigger the service that starts the app over implementing a loop such as this.


iOS 8 CNA not triggering I'm in the process of implementing a captive access point and when testing with iOS 8, I don't get shown the captive network assistant.

When I use Android and BlackBerry, they're able to detect that they're on a captive portal.  It just seems like iOS which is the odd-one-out, refusing to display any kind of prompting for the user to sign into the network.

My portal is implemented by redirecting all traffic at an IP level to a local server, which then generates a genuine HTTP redirect to our portal.

iOS detects captive portals by attempting to access http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html or http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html with the user agent 'wispr'.

Should this page request not return "Success", but still return a HTML page, then it shows the captive portal assistant. Make sure that you are correctly serving your captive portal page to this URL.


Can you save a work session and reopen it later? Imagine you are working on a book, for which you need 5 precise internet tabs/pages to be open at the same time, Apple Pages, Dictionary, and, I don't know, a classical music CD in iTunes that inspires you.
And on the same day, you will also work on your finances and accounting, for which you will need Numbers, Calculator and three tabs open in a browser.
And you're also helping your kids put together a video for their school, so whenever you work on it, you need to have Final Cut Pro X, the TextEdit file corresponding to the project, and 4 images/visual resources opened in Preview.

These are tasks that might take a week or two to get done. So every time you're going to get to work on one of them, you're going to have to spend a long time finding the right documents, source files, and recreating the work environment that you need to be ready to work. And if you are interrupted, or wish to shut down your computer or close the task at hand, you'll have to go save and close in every application.

My question is, does anyone know of a way to simplify opening and closing all the files related to long term projects? Obviously no one turns on their computer to write a novel from A to Z. And no one does "just one thing" on a computer as well. Maybe there is an app that exists that launches a very precise work environment for you?

"Spaces" is good, but what I'm talking about would be a way to save every little setting within a space, and be able to close or reopen or name them (and Spaces has been replaced by Mission Control anyways).

The only way I think someone could do this is by creating aliases of the files related to one task, then select all aliases and reopen them each time (might not work for browser tabs?)

Let me know I would love an answer to this, as I often work on several long term projects in the same year and need to take breaks, or turn off and on my computer often.

For what you are asking, using the sleep image might be the best way.

Creating a little script one could do that with Sleep Image.

First you would imitate the sleep that would create a image of your current state.

pmset sleepnow

or

osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to sleep'

Next you would copy/rename the sleep image file so you can use it later.

They are located in the /private/var/vm/sleepimage

Be aware the sleep image files can be large in Gigabyte size, so make sure you have enough disk space.


iPhone App for Displaying Email on a Locked Screen with Exchange Support I have an app, "mail notifier" that sends notifications to my phone when I get a new email, it does not support Exchange though.

Is there an app that is similar that does support exchange, maybe an app that does 'local' notifications so there is not a reoccurring cost?

iOS 5 has added this feature to operating system, and no app is needed to accomplish this task.


Bowers & Wilkins P5 wireless headphones on OSX causing problems for other bluetooth devices I've been using a Microsoft bluetooth mouse with my MacBook Pro (Early 2015 El Capitan 10.11.5) without issue for several months. OSX Bluetooth Firmware Version: v119 c4633.

However, since pairing the Bowers & Wilkins P5 Wireless headphones via bluetooth the mouse has started to automatically disconnect. Both devices work simultaneously for a short period (~5 min) until the mouse drops connection. The mouse is then shown to be disconnected in the bluetooth system settings.

The headphones do not drop connection nor lose audio. Once the headphones are manually disconnected the mouse connection is restored.

How can I use both devices simultaneously?

I had a similar issue a few months back but it resolved itself when I upgraded to Sierra. Unless there's a reason for holding fire with the upgrade, I'd suggest giving that a go to see if this resolves the problem.

Do you have other Bluetooth headphones/devices, or perhaps another laptop to test with? Would be interested to see if a combination of other devices had the same affect on your Microsoft mouse. Although the disconnection only occurs when the P5 Wireless are connected, it sounds to me as though this could be a red herring!


Mercury Elite Pro Dual mini only getting 250MB/s read and write I have a Mercury Elite Pro Dual mini with dual 4TB drives in hardware RAID0 (the enclosure has a raid switcher).

I have formatted the drive to APFS.

I am connecting to a 2016 MBP w/TB using the supplied Thunderbolt 3 cable.

Could anyone tell me why I would only be getting MAX 250 MB/s read AND write, and how I could possibly remedy it.

The enclosure advertises up to 860MB/s

Enclosure: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-mercury-elite-pro-dual/mini

These are HDDs not SSDs inside? 250 MB/sec is good speed for a RAID 0 on two hard disk drives. The 860 MB number is probably calculated using maximum speeds reading data that is already in the hard drive's disk cache. Meaning you'll his that number for a millisecond, but once you start reading from the platter, you're limited to the maximum read speed of a physical disk.... times two.

I've had good lock with Mediasonic USB3 drive towers. I have their 8 bay but they make 4 bay too. four 2 TB drives in a RAID 0 (hardware or software) should give you much faster throughput.


Can not use the `gettext` which is installed by brew After I install the gettext in my mac:

I use the brew install gettext command installed it.

...
CPPFLAGS: -I/usr/local/opt/gettext/include

==> Summary
  /usr/local/Cellar/gettext/0.19.8.1: 1,934 files, 16.9MB

I can not use the gettext still.

$ gettext --help
-bash: gettext: command not found

That formula doesn't link - you can do it by hand if you require it:

  This formula is keg-only, which means it was not symlinked into /usr/local, because macOS provides the BSD gettext library & some software gets confused if both are in the library path.

The maintainers recommend:

  If you need to have this software first in your PATH run:
    echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/gettext/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

You can even get a more explicit warning by trying to link it manually:

  $brew link gettext.

  Warning: gettext is keg-only and must be linked with --force.

  Note that doing so can interfere with building software.

If you're sure you need it linked everywhere:

brew link gettext --force

See this SU thread for details https://superuser.com/questions/747324/brew-install-gettext-should-i-force-link-it


How to install python3.7 on a mac (mojave using homebrew I am running MacOS Mojave (10.14.6) and want to install python 3.7.
Currently I have python 3.6 installed:
$ python -V
Python 3.6.9

There seems to be python 3.7 available:
$ brew search python
==> Formulae
app-engine-python            boost-python3                ipython                      python-markdown              python@3.7                   reorder-python-imports
boost-python                 gst-python                   micropython                  python-yq                    python@3.8 ✔                 wxpython
==> Casks
awips-python                                              kk7ds-python-runtime                                      mysql-connector-python

If you meant "python" specifically:
It was migrated from homebrew/cask to homebrew/core.

So I tried to install python 3.7 as follows
brew install python@3.7

with a lot of output. I also executed the suggested line to have python 3.7 symlinked:
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/python@3.7/bin:$PATH"' >> /Users/me/.bash_profile

I sourced the file .bash_profile, but still python is only 3.6:
$ python -V
Python 3.6.9

I also ran the following command with an error:
$ brew switch python 3.7
Error: python does not have a version "3.7" in the Cellar.
python's installed versions: 3.7.6_1

and restarted the computer, but without success.
So how to install python 3.7 as the standard-python-installation on a mac? (Could be also python3.8 by all means).

The following procedure worked for me (in addition to the commands in the original question):
brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies python3
brew uninstall --force python#3.8
brew install python3

and adding the following line to .bash_profile:
alias python="python3"

For a Mac this was really easy! Only about 10 commands.


How to logout another user in 10.8? With 10.6 I used to kill the process loginwindow to logout another user, but with 10.8 I noticed that even if I do so, many processes from that user stay active.

So, is there a way to logout another user in 10.8, other than logging him in or manually killing all his processes?

As an administrator:

sudo su - user_to_be_logged_out
kill -9 -1

That will log out any user by ending all of the user processes. Use care to not issue the kill -9 -1 as root else some work would be expected to be lost as the system would immediately self-destroy all processes.

There are of course one line commands, but I like having a pause to look and make sure I switched to the correct user before issuing a powerful command like kill -9 -1 and I also avoid at all costs having sudo appear before that kill since I don't even want to kill all processes as root.


Is it faster to resize a Time Machine partition, or completely wipe it and back up again from scratch? I have a ~500GB Time Machine partition I'd like to shrink slightly. My internal source partition is around 400GB.

Resizing the partition would be extremely slow, since Disk Utility has to check all the hard links Time Machine is using behind the scenes. On the other hand, simply wiping it and backing up again from scratch would also be extremely slow.

Is one or the other generally going to be faster? Is there some disk size tipping point at which it becomes more economical to switch strategies?

(I'm using an SSD internally and a spinning hard drive externally, connected over USB 3. Both the source and the destination are encrypted. Also, I have a second backup disk, so if I wipe and back up again I won't be temporarily unprotected.)

Unfortunately, I cannot give a catch-all answer. So my suggestion is to resize the partition, and, chances are that that may be faster. But if I'm being truthful, there are too many variables to determine which method would be objectively better at which sizes and such. Sometimes, these things will just take their time and no matter how you do it, you will be spending a significant amount of time waiting, so yes. Just choose a method and wait it through.


Problem logging into Gmail from Thunderbird My wife has a problem with her gmail account, and as a security measure changed her password.
She has successfully logged in from her iPad and iPhone but Thunderbird on her MacBook seems to be caught in an authentication loop - we have signed on to google a dozen times.

I managed to enter her gmail account in Mail, so I am assuming there is some problem with Thunderbird.

All devices are using IMAP.

Can anyone suggest how we could reset Thunderbird - preferably without losing email on other accounts?

I deleted the account and created a new Account - unfortunately this failed with error Username or password wrong.

To simply reset the account, go to Tools > Account Settings. Choose the account, go to the bottom left of the screen (Account Actions) and click "Remove Account."

Then re-add the account from scratch.

If you are using the IMAP protocol, you will not have lost any emails.

Though to be safe, you can navigate to where the data is stored and back this up first (usually in /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/)

If pop3, do the same as above but you will have to put the backed up pop3 emails back when you are done.


Deleting content of /private/tmp moved on different HDD I have a Macbook pro with 2 internal HD (stock HD for data and data doubler + SSD in place of the optical drive, hosting the OS).  I'm now trying to optimize this setup to take into account the presence of the SSD, and I want to move the temporary folder from the SSD (/private/tmp) to the secondary drive (/Volume/MacintoshHD/private/tmp).

Following this (http://blog.alutam.com/2012/04/01/optimizing-macos-x-lion-for-ssd/comment-page-1/#ramdisk), here's what I did :

sudo ditto /private/tmp /Volumes/MacintoshHD/private/tmp
sudo rm -rf /private/tmp
sudo ln -s /Volumes/MacintoshHD/private/tmp /private/tmp

Everything is fine, but when I reboot, I expect the folder to be emptied as usual.  However, I found out that whatever files that were present on the previous OS execution are still present.

My guess is that whatever script emptying the /private/tmp folder executes before the magnetic HD gets mounted, which means that the link pointing to the tmp folder does not point anywhere then, and hence the failed deletion.

Any idea how to fix this?  Any other suggestion to move the /private/tmp folder to another drive and still preserve automatic deletion?

After doing some research, I ended up writing a shell script and using launchd to have it execute at boot time.

The script I use (/usr/local/bin/empty-tmp.sh) :

#!/bin/bash

# Delete files (other than directories) that haven't been modified in more than 1 day
find /Volumes/MacintosHD/private/tmp -not -type d -ctime +1d -delete

# Delete empty directores that have been created more than 1 day ago
find /Volumes/MacintoshHD/private/tmp -d -type d -empty -mindepth 1 -Btime +1d -delete

and the property list (in /Library/LaunchDeamons) :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.samric.emptytmp</string>

  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/bin/bash</string>
    <string>-c</string>
    <string>/bin/wait4path /Volumes/MacintoshHD/private/tmp/ && /usr/local/bin/empty-tmp.sh</string>
  </array>

  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>

  <key>LaunchOnlyOnce</key>
  <true/>
  </dict>
</plist>

Now the key is using wait4path to make sure the secondary HD (MacintoshHD) is properly mounted before invoking the script.  Failing to do so will result is the script not deleting any files since they won't be accessible.


Can I choose the name of a folder in Launchpad? When I drag two items into a folder, the system seems to choose the folder name for me.

Am I missing any way to choose a name or am I presently stuck with what the system chooses for me?

I know I am supposed to click once on the folder to open the drawer, and then click on the name (developer in this case), but those clicks don't work and I can't seem to edit the names of any of the folders in Launchpad.

Posted as an answer so I can have all the formatting benefits, instead of directly responding to your comment on @mwidmann's answer;

TUAW recently posted a writeup on how to "fix" your Launchpad database when problems begin to occur;

  Removing the database files from the user's Dock application support
  folder and restarting the Dock allows Mission Control and the
  Launchpad to re-build the database from scratch, updating the
  presentation with all the new applications.

  Here are HaiTeq's steps, with a few modifications on my part for
  safety. Admittedly, if you are not comfortable at the command line,
  this is not the hack for you.

  Launch Terminal: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
  Navigate to the Application Support folder in question: cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock
  Open the folder (open .) and drag all the .db files to the trash.
  Restart Dock: sudo killall Dock, and authenticate when the dialog prompts you for your username/password.

Source


Isolating power supply issue to USB-C cable Immediate Q:

Is there a way to test for faults (power supply and/or data transfer) in a possibly failing USB-C cable, by plugging each end into different ports on the same machine (2018 MBP) and sending traffic from one port to the other?

More info :

This question is about charging problems on a 2018 MBP with these new two-part chargers (with a separable USB-C that plugs into the machine on one end and a port on the power adaptor on the other).

Charging on my macbook is getting spotty, with

Instances where I plug in and get the nice normal beep that indicates you're getting a charge,
instances where I don't get the beep (and I get an icon change in the menu bar to say I'm plugged in, but also a note saying that the battery is not charging), and
instances where that beep strangely happens every few seconds.

Suspects are going to be

the USB-C cable to the power adaptor,
the power adaptor itself,
the power cable,
the USB-C ports, and
the motherboard.

My money is on the USB-C cable. The geniuses don't have any diagnostics for cables or adaptors, just for the motherboard and USB-C plugs. We ran what diagnostics there were and although they weren't conclusive, they supported my prior that the problem is somewhere in the cables. USB-C is the flimsiest of the cables, and gets the most abuse, so it's the prime suspect.

I can isolate the old-fashioned way, by borrowing some other new mac owner's power supply and cables, but

The issue is pretty come-and-go, making it hard to reproduce
It would generally be neat if the symmetry and "universality" of USB-C made it possible to test cables through recurrent connections from one port on a machine to another on the same machine.
If this recurrent intra-machine solution existed, it would also accelerate troubleshooting a lot.

Distal Q:

Beyond the specific wonky q. of testing a cable through within-machine connections, any advice on this power supply issue generally?  I'm still on warranty, and I was relieved to find that it will cover not just the machine and its adaptor, but the USB-C cables leading to the adaptor. But if I must go back to the Store or ship my machine, I want to go with confidence about what specifically is wrong.

Is there a way to test for faults (power supply and/or data transfer) in a possibly failing USB-C cable, by plugging each end into different ports on the same machine (2018 MBP) and sending traffic from one port to the other?

Unfortunately, no.  There is nothing that operates at the (using the OSI model as an analogy) application layer that will diagnose the physical layer connections.  To properly diagnose a cable, you need to, at minimum, use a multimeter to check for continuity and resistance on each conductor in the cable.  A better option would be to use an oscilloscope to check for noise and signal quality.

However, attempting to “break out” the individual conductors to get a probe tip in there (as well as the cost of the diagnostic equipment) far outstrips the idea of simply getting a known working cable and seeing if it solves your problem.  This should’ve been your first action.

  My money is on the USB-C cable.... USB-C is the flimsiest of the cables, and gets the most abuse, so it's the prime suspect.

Yes, I agree.  The easiest (and most effective) solution is to replace it with a known working cable.  I personally don’t use the cables included with my Apple devices because of their low quality.  Instead I get high quality reinforced (usually braided) cables like Anker USB-C cables.

Could it be the ports and/or logic board?  Possibly, but again, you can diagnose with items you probably have on hand.

Try a different port, especially on the opposite side.  The 2018 MBP has 4 ports, meaning separate USB controllers and power rails for each side. If the results are the same, look to the charger/cable
Try a known working charger and cable.  If the symptoms persist, it’s likely the computer
Try plugging in an accessory device like a flash disk.  If it works, your port is physically good.
Try charging/powering a downstream device (like a phone or even another USB-C Mac).  If it works, it tells you that the port is physically good and that the USB controller and power rail (for that side) are functioning.  The port wouldn’t be able to negotiate and deliver power otherwise.

As for diagnosing your USB-C charger, this is even easier; it’s not limited to charging Macs or even solely Apple products in particular.  Just try charging another device like a phone or tablet.   It’s ideal if you can test with a known working cable, but you can narrow down the issue to “the charger and cable” with what you have in your possession by attempting to charge something  different.


Can I disable tabs in the Finder? I frequently use command-click in the titlebar to open the parent folder of a folder in the Finder.  In Mavericks, instead of opening a new window with the same view style, it opens a new tab in "column" view.

Is there any way to disable Finder tabs?  I don't want them, ever, and especially not when command-clicking a titlebar.

Finder → Preferences → General → uncheck Open folders in tabs instead of new windows


Arranging Windows/Applications via presets Is there any software for OS X that can automatically arrange a workspace according to a preset?

By some sort of shortcut, I would like to launch applications and then place them in a certain way (position, size). It would be great if different arrangements are possible for multiple displays, if they are plugged in.

Budget: Anything from free to $15 USD (preferably free).

I'm not sure if it's the best option out there, but the application Stay offers this functionality, albeit in a limited way.

It's possible to configure default window sizes and positions for applications. Saving a state and restoring the state can be done with keyboard shortcuts.

I would however have liked to see more options and different presets, even combined presets with multiple applications in one layout.


How can I set the region in Terminal I want to change the Region via Terminal.
How can I do this ?

Ideally it would use a command (/usr/bin or sbin) or modify a plist (plistbuddy).

I'd love to avoid using osascript (AppleScript)

The region is stored in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences, as the second part of the AppleLocale variable.  Some examples of the AppleLocale variable:

en_US system language set to English, region set to US
ja_JP system language set to Japanese, region set to Japan
en_DE system language set to English, region set to Germany

You can get more info from Apple's Developer Library, which also has links to the ISO 639-2 codes that can be used.


What's the shortcut to switch between app documents in a Spanish keyboard? I know the shortcut to switch between app documents (or Finder windows) is Cmd+~, but in the Spanish keyboard to get a tilde you can't use a single key, you need to press Alt+Ñ.

I've tried pressing Cmd+Alt+Ñ but it doesn't work.

So how do I execute this shortcut with a Spanish keyboard layout?

You can find a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences, under Keyboard, then Shortcuts. If one isn't listed you can also bind it to whatever you like.


unable to install software update in macbook I am trying to install software update in macbook, but when it says downloaded completed and you need to restart your machine, I press Restart button but my machine does not restart, it just gets freezes; when I try to restart it from Apple menu it restarts but when I try to restart when software updater asks to restart it, it does not restart and blank screen appears without dock and topbar; just wallpaper appears.

I am new to Mac OS. So please help me to solve this problem and install updates successfully.

Thanks.

[ SYSTEM SPECS

Model Name: MacBook Model Identifier: MacBook4,1 Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz Number Of Processors: 1 Total Number Of Cores: 2 L2 Cache: 3 MB Memory: 2 GB Bus Speed: 800 MHz Boot ROM Version: MB41.00C1.B00 SMC Version (system): 1.31f1 Serial Number (system): W883401J0P2 Hardware UUID: 7206FFBC-00AD-5CA2-A5B7-0466AC96016B Sudden Motion Sensor: State: Enabled

]

[ ABOUT SOFTWARE

System Version:   Mac OS X Server 10.6 (10A433)
  Server Configuration: Advanced
  Kernel Version:   Darwin 10.0.0
  Boot Volume:  master
  Boot Mode:    Normal
  Secure Virtual Memory:    Enabled
  64-bit Kernel and Extensions: No
]

Try to reset the PRAM before this update with CMD, OPT, P,R while the computer starting up. If the procedure done well the Mac will restart immediately.

If this doesn't work, I will try the update in Safe Boot (Boot while holding the SHIFT key, don't worry about the graphical artifacts).


Are there any security risks with leaving guest account enabled? Mac OS X comes with a guest account enabled by default.  Are there any security risks with leaving it enabled?  Are there reasons to disable the account?

I'm not a security expert, but just browsing the web, I came up with this:

There are, however, some system directories, such as the Unix /tmp directory, that the guest account can write data to that may or may not be deleted at logout (or forced restart). The guest also has access to any installed applications, which could be used to perform malicious actions from your computer. If you must use the guest account, limit its access using Parental Controls. (MacWorld)

Following up on the /tmp directory vulnerability, I found this:

Almost every security professional known that /tmp is the first place that hacker will looking at to place their malicious software and scripts for further gaining root access. However, there several ways to protect system /tmp. In this article will show you a simple method making secure /tmp for Linux and Unix. (PatCup)

If you want some examples of how a malicious hacker could use the /tmp directory to their advantage, here you go:

It is a Unix tradition to use a directory called /tmp (or /var/tmp or even /dev/shm) to hold temporary files used by programs.  This prevents a user's home directory from getting full of old useless files.
Since everyone may write files into the /tmp directory, naturally there are some security concerns.  One feature of /tmp is that is has the text (or sticky) bit set, which means only the owner (or root) can delete or rename files in that directory.  However if an evil hacker can predict your filenames, they can create that file first (a denial of service).  They can also read your files, if created using a default umask value of 022.  Even if you immediately change the permissions, there will be a window of opportunity to access the file (sometimes called a race condition). (http://content.hccfl.edu/pollock/ShScript/TempFile.htm)

Once again, I don't know much about security so some of the info from the quotes might be incorrect.
Most of that was going over the vulnerabilities of the /tmp directory, but in the first quote it's implied that there are other System directories that could potentially be accessed from the Guest account. However, unless you have top secret government information, I doubt that it's too much of a risk to enable the guest account.


Import movies already on computer into iTunes I have a bunch of movies/TV programmes on my computer that I want to transfer to an iPad. As far as I know, the only way to do this is to first add them to iTunes (on a computer), then synch iTunes with the iPad.

Some of these movies are .avi files and others are .mp4 files. I've selected the Films section of the iTunes Library and opened the "Home Movies" tab. I've tried several ways of add the files including:

The "Add File to Library..." menu item (in the file menu)
The "Add Folder to Library..." menu item (in the file menu)
Dragging the file from windows explorer and dropping it into iTunes

For some reason this fails for all the files except one. The one that works is an .mp4, but strangely none of the other .mp4 files (or any of the .avi files) appear in iTunes after I try to add them to the library.

Is there some reason why this one particular .mp4 would work but not others? Is there another simpler way to transfer these files to the iPad? I'm using iTunes 11 on Windows.

This is from the Apple Support site:

  What video content works with iTunes and mobile devices?

  iTunes:

  Video content purchased from the iTunes Store.
  QuickTime and MPEG-4 movie files that end in ".mov", ".m4v", or ".mp4" and are playable in QuickTime Player.
  Video podcasts.
  iTunes Digital Copies.
  iTunes Store Movie Rentals (Requires iTunes 9 or later).

I've had luck converting non-compatible video for iTunes and i devices with Handbrake, a multi platform, open source video converter.


How to access the Menu Mnemonics of an X11 Program within macOS With the kind assistance of X11 Quartz background app I have an X11 app Dia diagramming tool running.

It is enticing to see those mnemonics apparently (?) available to use. I have a serious beef with macOS for not helping those of us who are keyboardists to have an option to work in that manner.

So, is it possible to access those mnemonics? I have tried various combinations of Option, Control, Control + Option, with/without Command plus the given letter.

I just noticed a related question on this site:

How can I get the Alt key to work in an X11 application?

It will take some time to try this out .. will report back in couple of days.


Prevent MacBook Pro from turning on by touching trackpad Recently got a new MacBook Pro and I really don't like the fact that it powers on by a simple touch on the trackpad.

(EDIT: By "powering on", I mean powering on from a completely turned off state, after having hit "Shut down...", not waking up from sleep mode.)

I'd like for it to power on only if I press the top right corner that corresponds to the finger print reader.

Is there a way to do that?

EDIT: to further clarify, some elements from the comments:

I should check again at home, but I've had my new MBP for more than a month now and unless I am missing something completely --- or I have been crazy for the last month --- clicking "Shutdown...", waiting for my computer to shutdown, and then clicking on the touchpad (or on any other key) actually turns the computer back on.
Now, maybe what happened is I never actually turned my computer off? Is there any setting that would make the computer not turn completely off when clicking "Shutdown..." ?
I guess what I would like is for my new MBP to behave more like my old Macbook air, i.e., 1) Actually fully shutdown when I click "Shutdown...", and 2) Only turn back on when I hit the "power one" button, which on the new MBP I always assumed was the "touch ID" button.

Same situation here - shut down the MacBook 2018, then wait a few minutes, touch trackpad or any of the buttons and it starts booting up. Very annoying.

Found the answer here Turn on (start up) your Mac Looks like it's the expected behavior. From their support page:

  Additionally, MacBook Pro (2018) and MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2018) turn on when you press any key on the keyboard or press the trackpad.

Which is exactly my case.


Making Homebrew and R.app live together happily I just upgraded to Mavericks (10.9.2) and after years of using MacPorts I decided to use Homebrew.  I successfully installed Homebrew, but brew doctor shows:

brew doctor
Warning: Unbrewed dylibs were found in /usr/local/lib.
If you didn't put them there on purpose they could cause problems when
building Homebrew formulae, and may need to be deleted.

Unexpected dylibs:
    /usr/local/lib/libtcl8.6.dylib
    /usr/local/lib/libtk8.6.dylib

Warning: Unbrewed .pc files were found in /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig.
If you didn't put them there on purpose they could cause problems when
building Homebrew formulae, and may need to be deleted.

Unexpected .pc files:
    /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/tcl.pc
    /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/tk.pc

Warning: Unbrewed static libraries were found in /usr/local/lib.
If you didn't put them there on purpose they could cause problems when
building Homebrew formulae, and may need to be deleted.

Unexpected static libraries:
   /usr/local/lib/libtclstub8.6.a
   /usr/local/lib/libtkstub8.6.a

All this stuff comes from R.app, from the OSX specific website.  Now, I prefer to use the standard R.app rather than the Homebrew version (for a number of personal reasons).  Can I safely ignore these warnings or there will be a problem?

You can install R with hombrew so you avoid conflict.

brew tap homebrew/science
brew install gfortran r


How to restore OS X to out of box / factory experience prior to reselling? I'm ready to resell my Mac, and I'd like to prepare it for the new user, giving them factory-like out of box experience. Even better, I'd like the system to be fully updated, yet come up with no user accounts, starting into the initial setup as if one just unboxed it. Of course performing the updates and software preinstallation requires to set up a temporary user account :(

The instructions below were tested on OS X 10.6 and 10.7.

Preflight

Back up any data you wish to retain.
Make backup copies of iLife applications (iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD).
Deactivate relevant licensed software such Adobe CS.
Unregister the machine from your iTunes account.

OS Cleanup

Boot from an external OS X install media, if you wish to completely wipe the hard drive. Boot from the recovery partition (hold ⌘-R on power-up) if you wish to retain the recovery partition as-is.
If booting from external media, use the Disk Utility to repartition the hard drive with one partition. Note: With SSDs, you ideally should first use a utility that lets you do a secure erase of the medium instead.
Use the Disk Utility to erase (zero out) the hard drive. This will take an hour or longer on a mechanical drive, and at least several minutes on an SSD. If it takes just a minutes, you didn't zero the disk!
Reinstall the OS X. Create a user account called factory.
Reinstall iLife either from media, or by copying it from the backup you've made in preflight.
Perform all system updates.

Restoring the Out-Of-Box Experience

Boot into the single-user mode by holding down ⌘-S during boot. A bare console will appear in a dozen seconds or so.

Remount the root partition in read-write mode.

/sbin/mount -uw /
Start the directory services.

OS X Lion and higher:

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.opendirectoryd.plist

Ignore the error related to com.apple.DirectoryServicesLocal.plist

OS X Snow Leopard:

launchctl load
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist
Access the directory services command line utility and remove the factory user:

dscl . (that's dscl, space, period)

list /Users shows the user list. The factory user should be there. That's the only one we care about. The usernames starting with an underline, those are system accounts that have to be left alone. Same goes for the  daemon, Guest, messagebus, nobody and root accounts.

read /Users/factory GeneratedUID shows the UID of the user, we'll need it below.

delete /Groups/admin GroupMembers <uid>, where UID is given above. Don't worry if you enter it wrong, you'll receive an error message. Press ↑ to go back and edit the command.

delete /Groups/admin GroupMembership factory

delete /Users/factory

exit
Remove the factory's home folder.

rm -R /Users/factory/
Remove the caches.

rm -R /Library/Caches/*
rm -R /var/vm/swapfile*
Remove the flag indicating that the initial setup has been done.

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
Reboot or shutdown.

reboot or shutdown -h now


MacBook Pro won't start up This is a 15" 2010 model that came with OS X 10.6 and now has 10.10 installed. After turning the computer on I can hear the startup chime and the power adapter indicator light lights up. The Apple logo and a progress bar appear, but after that there's only a blank white screen.

There are some pixel anomalies, what appears to be scanlines and slightly distorted colors that look like it's running in 16-bit color depth.

I have tried following the official instructions, i.e. reset the PRAM/NVRAM and SMC, tried booting in safe mode (same symptoms, but after that it seems to boot automatically in safe mode since the loading takes a lot longer).

Also I recently installed Homebrew if it might have to do with this.

Any ideas?

This was apparently some known issue because when I took the computer to be fixed, they simply replaced the motherboard for free.


Macbook keeps booting OSX Utilities instead of Mac OS X Here is my story I had a MacBook PRO 2010 with Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion since I bought it I've never reinstalled the OS until  now. I did a clean install following this instructions http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/clean-install-mountain-lion/

Since then I've had reinstalled twice. Everything works fine for couple of days until I turn on my mac and this image comes up:

What I'm doing wrong why now keeps showing this window instead of booting to Mac OS X.

Any ideas?

I had the exact same problem and my IT guy told me to reset my NVRAM.

Just hold down ⌘ CMD+⌥ OPT+p+r on restart and keep the keys held down until it  chimes 3-4 times. Then let go.

Worked like a charm for me. I off to back up my data now.

Apple page about resetting NVRAM.


How can I use common information across multiple masters in a keynote presentation? In short, how do I make a Keynote template/theme with custom data (unique to that presentation) shown on every slide, and also support masters for a variety of layouts, without the author needing to edit every master every time they start a new presentation.

From this question on setting a common background for all masters, I can see that Keynote does not provide the same "Inheritance of Masters" feature that Powerpoint provides, so every Master is effectively starting from scratch, and each slide can only use a single master as its base.

My problem with this is that I want to make a template for my organisation that includes the following metadata on most (or all, if need be) slides:

A company logo — an image, but the same every time
The presenter's name — different for each person
A name for the presentation / event — different for each file
Logos/names of collaborators/sponsors/etc — often different for each file

The problem seems to be that Keynote uses masters for slide layout as well as the theme, without allowing any separation of the two.

If users are to have an easy way of getting a Title Page / Section Title / Single column slide / Two-column slide / etc, each of these need to be a fully unique master, with all the above information on it. This means the user needs to add their name + event name + logos to every single master, each time they start a new presentation. And if they miss one, then it won't be obvious but a few slides here and there (with that particular master) will have the wrong metadata.

Expected Solutions — I'd expect Keynote to support something like the following, but it does not seem to...

Pages has a feature that lets you "merge" information into the document (e.g. custom fields or from address book), which would be perfect for this, because you'd just set the metadata for the file once and never have to touch masters.

Powerpoint offers "hierarchical" or "inherited" masters (not sure exactly what they call it), which means you can put the basic info common to everything on a single master, and then set up layout slides based on that master, so changing the event or author is at least a single edit of the master(s).

Another method I can imagine would be to allow multiple masters applied to a single slide, so you apply the base for the metadata and then a layout master for the arrangement of titles/columns/images/etc.

Keynote does not seem to provide any of these methods of achieving this... Have I missed something? This seems like a pretty poor design of slide masters to me. I'm hoping that this is just a case of Apple being too minimalistic in their design for me to have picked up the subtle, elegant solution... but would have expected it to match Pages so am not very hopeful.

I ran into this same problem and spent two days searching for it.

My eventual answer:  Install VirtualBox.  In a virtual machine install windows XP, then install office and power point.  This also gave me Access, an applicationf or which there is no good mac equivalent.


Collect data on CPU usage per core at regular time intervals? Following from question in comment here, is there any easy way to get CPU usage on a per core basis at a certain interval throughout the day? (e.g. every 60 seconds)
Notes

happy to use a script (e.g. ruby, python) and run it in the terminal
would be great if the output were a simple csv, but open to using more sophisticated tools/outputs if they exist and are easy to use
the ultimate goal is to take to plot a time series of per-core utilisation over the day (or week/month) (that is, a line chart with as many lines as cores)
In case it's of significance, I will try to run this on a MacBook Pro

Example output:
A csv that resembles:
time, core_1, core_2, core_3, core_4 (etc)
"2020-07-18 15:45:00 UTC", 15%, 12%, 0%, 1%
"2020-07-18 15:46:00 UTC", 100%, 100%, 10%, 3%
"2020-07-18 15:47:00 UTC", 10%, 2%, 0%, 0%
etc etc

There is a tool that can collect this information called glances, which is a command line based monitoring tool that can track all sorts of parameters.
It can be installed via homebrew:
brew install glances

You may need to tinker with the options to get something you're happy with, or parse the data downstream with a different tool, but it can output timestamped, percpu usage (in 60 second intervals) in the following way:
glances --stdout now,percpu --time 60

The results aren't quite what you outlined, but the output can be processed with other tools to get them into a format that you can use.


Why mbp keyboard light stays on while playing video in fullscreen? I noticed macbook pro keyboard light stays on while playing video in fullscreen, on youtube and vlc. Wouldn't be better if apple auto turn it off (since I'm not using keyboard while watching movies)?

I'm using latest macOS on mbp 15 retina.

Keyboard light works normally in other situations, if I stop typing for a while it goes off.

YouTube is a web-based video platform and VLC is a 3rd party program. These are not Apple-made applications and so may not be built specifically for the hardware you are using.

You can control the MacBook Pro keyboard lighting on your F5 and F6 keys for these 3rd party applications.


How unlocking via Watch uses the laptop password? During watch mac unlocking setup, iPhone prompts for laptop user password, but iOS security guide (last updated at May 2016) does not describes, how that password will be used.

Does iPhone needs it only for initial iPhone-Mac-Watch tethering, or maybe it saves password and uses it for every unlock?
Does it send password (encrypted or not) to iCloud services?
Do I have to provide new password to iPhone and Watch after I'll change it on Mac?

Apple has now transitioned much of the “enter your iCloud password” to be “enter the password for device X” for unlocking the keys in the keychain.

The rest of this answer is likely out of date, but was the best I knew in 2016.
I've tested most of your scenarios and don't believe the password ever leaves the Mac. Instead, Apple builds up a cryptographic key pair to sign packet exchange between the watch and the computer with anti-replay aspects and time of flight calculations to ensure the watch is really sending the packets now in real time before the unlock happens.
The anti-replay means that you can't record those packets and then play them later to unlock the Mac. Basically Apple leverages the iCloud security that is set up for two-factor authentication and keychain syncing to exchange the cryptographic keys needed to sign the data to establish a verified signal and prevent hacking into your Mac with a synthetic or bogus signal.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206995

The iOS 10 security guide is not out yet nor is the watchOS 3 guide. I'll update this post if I can find more technical details going forward.


Differential backup of a single file I have a single file, a database for Photos, that I regularly backup to an external, however instead of resaving the entire file is there a program that will only differentially resave the difference?

I'm on a Mac Pro 2011, running Yosemite 10.10.5.

A Photos library is not a single file, it's a package. However, the problem with differential backups of packages is that the contents relies on other parts of the contents. You can't restore part of a package—it'll break the entire package. The solution to this is just to replace the previous package backup on backup.


Discard email in Outlook 2011 Say I start a new email, and I decide to discard it. If I press Alt+W, a window prompts me with the following three options shown below:

Most of the time I want to "Discard Changes", but OS X does not let me use TAB to change my selection.
I have tried every key combination, but and the only thing that works is using the mouse to click on "Discard Changes".
I  would like to use my keyboard to confirm that yes , I just want to discard my email. Any way to do this?

To do this completely from the keyboard, go to System Preferences → Keyboard → Shortcuts and enable Full Keyboard Access to All Controls, or press ⌃F7.

You can then ⇥ between the buttons, and space to select.
↩ will always select the default button (in this case, Save).


How to turn off iPhone 3G without using power button? I've looked up various answers, but none of them worked. One involved squeezing the corner near the power button while pressing it, the other involved going into Settings > General > Accessibility but I don't have Accessibility menu for some reason.

I need to turn the phone off to jailbreak it. Anyone know of other methods? Perhaps a command in cmd might turn it off?

Yeah, I looked at what redsn0w asks you to do, and it needs me to press the power button again during the process of installation. I guess I can't jailbreak my phone =/


How can I regain an admin account on my iMac? I have seen this question several times but no clear answer. I changed the password on the admin user account and It saved it as a standard user. I just bought the Mac so I’m a newbie.

I have tried booting into single user mode so I can creat another admin user but my wireless keyboard driver isn’t loading quick enough before it boots up.
I have also tried changing the password using command+R and when I get to sign in with Apple ID it says not connected to internet and won’t let me do that either.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I was able to do this in Recovery mode, not single-user. In Recovery mode, you are not started up from your normal system volume, so files are not at their usual paths.

I had to go into terminal and type

rm /Volumes/"Macintosh HD"/var/db/.AppleSetupDone

Note: that if your main volume is named something other than "Macintosh HD", you need to substitute that at the appropriate place; also, there must be a space after "rm" and cannot be one before ".AppleSetupDone".

Also, standard dscl commands will not work as expected in Recovery mode. Once done exit terminal and restart. Upon restart I was able to select a new user with admin privilege.

What a beating !!


iOS 9.0.2 made my iPhone 5 stuck on "connect to itunes" screen I decided to download iOS 9.0.2 for my iPhone 5.
When the download finished it was stuck on a screen I have never seen before.
Here's a picture:

When I plug it into my pc, iTunes doesn't find my phone for some reason.

That image means that your phone is in recovery mode, basically it's asking you to hook it up to itunes so it can be reflashed.

That isn't something that normally comes up as part of an iOS upgrade, so i'm lead to believe that the upgrade was probably not successful.

Try rebooting the phone first. Hold down the volume down and home buttons until the screen blanks out. Does it come back or show the same message?

If it didn't work, and you're back to the same screen, you said that the phone wasn't recognized - try rebooting your machine first, then fire up iTunes. It should pop up a box saying that it's detected a phone in recovery mode:

If that doesn't work, the next thing to do is to put the phone in DFU (device firmware upgrade) mode. It presents to the computer as a different "kind" of device and may work around whatever's preventing the phone from appearing correctly to itunes.

If even that didn't work - something else has gone quite wrong, and you should contact Apple support.


iPhone : Does the FaceTime icon on the contact page mean that the person has an iPhone? I just added a new contact to my iPhone. When I look at the contact page there's a FaceTime icon (Under, next to that person's phone number). Does that mean that this person has an iPhone?

Broadly speaking, the presence of FaceTime row in a contact's screen means that the contact is registered with FaceTime service, which by extension means that the person uses/used one or more Apple products (Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod), which support FaceTime calling.

The person may or may not have an iPhone. Person's Apple ID is used to register with FaceTime. An email address is required to create an Apple ID. The mobile number gets registered/linked to the Apple ID if used with an iPhone where the user has logged in with his Apple ID.


Multiple Apple devices/One Bluetooth speaker I have my iPhone synced to a Bose bluetooth speaker.  I would like to sync my MacBook Pro to the same speaker.  When I open "Bluetooth" on the Mac, there are no options to add another device, and I'm getting a spinning wheel.  I have just restarted the Mac, but that didn't help.  How do I do this?

Press the bluetooth button for a while on the Bose speaker to let it become available for pairing, then it will appear in the bluetooth folder of your Mac.


How to render a specific character as transparent in terminal I'm looking for a way of rendering a single character / escape sequence as transparent in iTerm2 or, if there is one, any other terminal emulator. With transparent I mean that it should show the background behind the window rendering the terminal.

The reason behind this is a purely astethic one: I'd like to use this special character with tmux to render the split views so that my panes are separated by, frankly, my wallpaper. Using tmux for panes seems so much more flexible than using a (tiling) window manager for opening multiple terminals - but one of the asthetic drawbacks is that I cannot have a gap between the panes.

While I'm pretty much certain that there is no easy answer to that, I'm also very open to hear any pointers into a direction where a certain terminal application could be modified to support such a behavior in an easy way.

It doesn't look like iTerm supports this -- here are their proprietary escape sequences:

https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html

It seems like a great feature to add, if you're a programmer looking to contribute to iTerm2! Their github repo is here:

https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2


AppleScript: can I trigger the eyedropper tool upon opening the Mac colour picker? I'd like to be able to use an eyedropper tool on command. The built-in Mac colour picker is nice, so to that end, I set up a keyboard shortcut using BetterTouchTool to open the colour picker; it does so simply by running the choose color AppleScript command.
This is only a partial solution, because I still need to click the eyedropper icon to get what I want. Apart from the minor nuisance of an extraneous click, the problem is that the click itself changes focus away from the application I'm using. (For example, suppose I'm using the eyedropper to test the :focus state of an element on a website.)
Is there a way to tell my script to run the eyedropper tool after opening the colour picker? In other words, I would like to automatically click the button indicated in this screenshot:

Updated Answer
I download the trial of BetterTouchTool and resolved the issue in the following manner:

Added a keyboard shortcut assigning it: ⇧⌃P
Added the built-in Show Color Picker action to the aforementioned keyboard shortcut.
Added a Run AppleScript (async in background) action, to the aforementioned keyboard shortcut, with the following AppleScript code:

    tell application "System Events" to ¬
        click (checkbox 1 of ¬
            splitter group 1 of ¬
            window "Colors" of ¬
            application process "BetterTouchTool")

Note that this was done under macOS Big Sur and it works without issue after the initial setup and permissions setting as were prompted.
Now when I press ⇧⌃P the Color window opens and the color picker button is clicked, and it is active to select a color where the mouse pointer was when the keyboard shortcut was pressed.

Original Answer
I do not have BetterTouchTool, so using Script Editor I find that if one just runs the choose color command, the Colors window is modal and does not allow any additional code that would click the color picker button to run.
To work around this, the choose color command can be wrapped within an ignoring application responses statement. However, while this allows the color picker button to be clicked by additional code, one does not get back, e.g. {14896, 20151, 65429} from the choose color command when the OK button is cliched after picking the color.
Example AppleScript code:
ignoring application responses
    choose color
end ignoring

delay 0.5

tell application "System Events" to ¬
    click (checkbox 1 of ¬
        splitter group 1 of ¬
        window "Colors" of ¬
        application process "Script Editor")

This was tested under macOS Catalina.


iphone 6 water damage, screen black, responds to iTunes Was caught in the rain on Sunday last week, and on Monday afternoon my phone stopped working. Was checking my email and the screen slowly turned purple, then black w/ the backlight on. I let it sit for a few days near some silica gel packets but when I plugged it in to charge the backlight did not come on. Here's the current status of the phone:

The screen is completely dark, no backlight.
Connected to my computer iTunes recognizes the phone, but says I need to unlock it.
The phone does not vibrate when the ring/silent switch is toggled.
Doesn't respond to headphone button, doesn't ring when called, iCloud "find my phone" does not report the phone as powered on.
Holding down power and home iTunes says the phone is in recovery mode.

To my knowledge it never directly got wet but the liquid contact indicators say otherwise. :(

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I opened the phone up, pulled the logic board and scrubbed everything with IPA.

There were signs of corrosion in the upper-right corner of the logic board near and on the screen connectors, and on the backside near the wifi module, see below. I thoroughly cleaned all these. I also removed the black cover on the underside of the logic board but found no signs of damage. I have not removed the EMI shields, but looking in the corners with a microscope there doesn't appear to be any signs of water intrusion near those components. I also took the back cover off the screen, removed the home button and selfie camera but found no evidence of water damage there.

Looking for suggestions on what to try next. Thanks!

Here is the group I would have train you on how to repair micro electronics:

http://www.mendonipadrehab.com

Their youtube channel is quite amazing in terms of the details and parts list and education/advice they offer for free. What their class offers is supervised training and not simply education.


How can I buy an older version of Keynote that's compatible with 10.8? My work computer can't be upgraded to 10.9 yet, so I'm stuck on 10.8 for now. I've never used Keynote, but one of my coworkers wants to use it for a presentation we have to give. I just tried to buy it, but I'm getting an error that the current version (6.0) isn't compatible with 10.8. How can I buy an older version of Keynote that's 10.8-compatible?

I presume that you're trying to purchase iWork from the App Store.

You can purchase a physical copy of iWork '09 and install it.

If your Mac doesn't have a disc drive, you can use Remote Disk to do so.  You'll need access to another computer (either Mac or Windows) that has a disc drive.  Apple has complete directions for using Remote Disk here.


How can I share apps and music purchased on one apple ID between 7 devices? I have:

1 Macbook Pro for office use
1 Macbook Air for personal travel use
1 Mac Mini to run my home theater system
1 iMac that my wife and kids use
1 iPad v1 for the kids to play with
1 iPad v2 for myself
1 iPhone 3GS

I'm running into problems with iTunes telling me I've authorized too many devices. I have seen in some places people saying that I'm allowed to authorized up to 10 devices, 5 of which can be computers, but iTunes seems to be treating computers and other devices the same for me, limiting me to 5 no matter what.

Any ideas what might be wrong?

Maybe you have authorized Macs you no longer have.

Go to your account in iTunes, under Apple ID Overview you can see how many computers you have authorized and (once a year) you can deauthorize all, after that you should be able to reauthorize your Macs. (This does not affect iOS devices, as they do not count towards your 5 devices limit)


iPhone photos phantom storage (13 photos take up 13 gb) I have a storage problem on my iPhone X. I have iCloud photos and a massive cloud library of ~700GB which used to be all squished into my 64Gb iPhone X, taking up around 22Gb. I recently wanted to free up space to do a WhatsApp backup, but that required 13Gb of free space which I didn't have, so I decided to untoggle iCloud Photos and delete all my local photos except for my 13 most recent ones.
After hours of manually doing that, and emptying the recently deleted photos, I made sure that there was literally thirteen photos on my phone. But somehow Photos is still taking up 13Gb... What is going on???
My only possible explanation is that my Whatsapp takes up 12.5Gb, and the system is double counting the media on it. Could that be why? Then I'm in a dilemma because I need to free up another 5.5Gb according to WhatsApp to do a full backup

You should go to settings on your iPhone. From settings go to general and then go to iPhone storage. Underneath the total memory statement is a colored scale showing what apps and others are being used.  If you scroll down even further it gives you the amount of memory used by each app. You can check the size of Whatsapp on your phone.


Backup Plus Portable Drive won't Mount I plug my Backup Plus Portable Drive (Seagate) into my MacBook Air (10.13.3 MacOS High Sierra Version) into my USB ports, both of them.  The drive lights up, I can hear it running however it is not showing up in Finder.  I have searched the Web for all sorts of solutions however I am unable to find any and Seagate was no help.

thanks for any help, this drive holds valuable information that I need to at most get off of it so I can throw it into a fire pit.  Thanks again.

Open Disk Utility and see if your external drive appears. Find Disk Utility in Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. If your drive shows up but is not mounted, select the mount option which should mount that disk. To verify, click on the Apple logo in your screen's top left corner and select About This Mac.


Is it good practice to use OS X with a Standard user, and have a separate Admin account? I am currently using OS X with a Standard user that has no admin privileges in the OS GUI.

Note: My Standard user does however have sudo permissions in /etc/private/sudoers. This enables password protection when doing critical tasks in Terminal, while retaining flexibility.

For everyday use in the OS GUI, I keep a separate admin account. When necessary, I am asked to enter its username and password, e.g. for unlocking System Preferences or modifying /Applications.

Questions:

Is this good practice? Why/Why not?
What are the risks associated with this setup?

Yes, the less your user can do, the less it can break. You can easily choose a short admin user name and use an easy to type password for doing admin things.

It really depends on your threat model and how expensive tech-support is for you and your organization and whether you have data that's worth protecting. You can surely run admin users and use something like Time Machine combined with periodic off-site or off-line backups so that if you should lose data or have a system compromise, you can plan for how long it will take to restore your system to before it was changed.

Your permissions and planning seem prudent and I don't see any downside to your set up.


Replacing battery in mid 2012 15" MBP myself - using genuine Apple battery? I've got a mid 2012 15" unibody MBP, non retina (one of the last easily user serviceable ones).

I have used it every day since I bought it in early 13 and the battery is pretty weak now, a full charge lasts about 1.5hrs. (the 2:29 remaining shown in the screenshot seems inaccurate when you actually use the laptop)

If I click on the battery tab I get this service icon. Ideally I don't want to have to book an appointment, go to the apple store, lose use of my laptop for a day etc.

Can I purchase an official Apple battery directly from Apple and do the change my self? (I know there are lots of 3rd party batteries on Amazon / eBay, but I want a genuine part.)

According to several sites, which mostly point back to this iFixit page, "...Apple informs its own service personnel that 'batteries must be replaced with the top case assembly' and that 'the battery alone is not a replaceable part.'"

Also, iFixit found the following when trying to remove the battery:

Someone really did not want the battery in the MacBook Pro to come out of the upper case.
We tried valiantly with our iFixit 6 Inch Metal Ruler to free the battery from its aluminum confines, but to no avail. Rather than risk puncturing a lithium-polymer battery cell, we left the power source in place.
To complicate matters further, the TrackPad cable lies underneath the battery. Attempting to pry the battery off the upper case could easily sever the fragile cable, which would be bad.

It might be best to just take it to Apple to get the battery replaced.  It appears to cost US $200 for a new battery.


How do I manage locations for the Reminders iPhone app? I want to manage where my home, work etc is for the reminders app.

Where can I do that?

Your home and work geo-location are picked up from your contacts card in the Contacts app (on iOS devices). To manage where your home or work is, edit the relevant addresses in the Contacts app, under 'add new address'.

You can also edit other peoples addresses, add shops, the gym, clubs, etc, and it will use this data.


Weird MacBook track pad issue I just decided to dig out an old white mac book I have sitting around to poke around with.  I'm fairly certain it is a lost cause, but I thought I'd see if anyone has any ideas.

So I can move the mouse around the screen, but I cannot click anything on the screen.  Rebooting into Lion recovery I seem to be able to click, but I loose that as soon as I connect wifi.

Here's the kicker, using an external mouse I get the same behavior.  I can move, but clicking does nothing.

I think it's hardware, but I don't think it's the trackpad.

Any ideas?

This was supposed to be a comment, but it turned out too long.
It might be that the trackpad is slightly damaged so that the button is somehow pressed down constantly.
I have a black macbook that clicks every time I rest my hands anywhere near the area below the keyboard or around the trackpad. The plastic around that part of the case has kind of caved in and it affects the trackpad. If something similar has happened to your macbook, only that it is constantly pressing the button, you wouldn't be able to press any buttons with any mouse.
On my own macbook, all of this (the case caving in) started after almost the entire bottom edge of the top case was breaking off, like in the picture below, which is a common problem on many of the macbooks (picture through google).

Disabling the internal trackpad while only using the keyboard

Open Spotlight. The keyboard shortcut for this is usually
cmd+space.
Once in System Preferences you should be able to select "Accessibility" simply by starting to type it (or whatever it is called in the language on your macbook). Or you might have to press cmd+f first.
Navigate the Accessibility preference pane by shifting focus around to different tabs, buttons etc with combinations of tab and arrow keys.

When a checkbox is in focus, press space to check it.

The checkbox you are looking for is called something similar to Disable trackpad when external mouse is connected in the mouse and trackpad tab.


Cannot enter password to reset keychain I'm trying to reset my keychain (Yosemite 10.10.4).

When I enter my wifi password I get "A keychain cannot be found to store my_wifi_sid"
I click "Reset to Defaults"
I get "Are you sure you want to reset your keychain? This will delete all your saved passwords, keys, and certificates. You cannot undo this operation" and click "Reset"
I get "Please enter your login password. This password will be used to create your new keychain." with a password field.  Attempts to type in this field interact with whatever app is in the background (browser, desktop).  I can click the "Show password" checkbox.

This issue has also been reported at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6788761.  Upgrades did not help.

Deleting keychain folders via the command line ends up with the same result (not saving passwords and the above dialog).  This started about a month ago and does not appear to be associated with any system update.

Any tips on troubleshooting, logs to look at would be appreciated.

Update

tl;dr: disabling the Guest User and upgrading to El Capitan seems to have done the trick.

Not what I'd call an answer since I can't tell you which action is the fix, but here are two things,  one or both of which may have solved my problem.

I tried to log into the Guest User on this machine and learned that somehow I got a not-managed Guest User account.  This Guest User was asking for a password (which I did not know).  So I disabled the Guest User account.

Disabling the Guest User account seemed to solve this issue for some (but not all) of the users.  Next I downloaded the El Capitan installer to a thumb drive and installed it on my MacbookPro.  Now all of my keychain issues appear to be fixed.

I had the same problem.  Following the steps in this article helped me resolve my issue:

Open Keychain using Spotlight (⌘-Space)
Go to Keychain Access → Preferences
Click Reset My Default Keychain
Restart your Mac


How do I sort albums alphabetically in Photos.app? I would like to know if I can alphabetically sort albums in Photos.app. The iPhoto method for doing this did not work.

If you’re talking about sorting your list of albums alphabetically, go to View → Show Sidebar or press ⌘ cmd ⌥ alt  S. Then right-click Albums in your sidebar and choose Sort → By Name.

If you’re asking about sorting the photos inside an album alphabetically, right-click that album in your sidebar and  choose Sort → Keep Sorted By Title. Note that most photos won’t have a title, and Photos will next sort by date taken.


Can't navigate to folder alias on server in the save window After upgrading to macOS High Sierra, I can't save a file to the alias of a folder in the open/save dialog box on a server.

When browsing to the folder I want to save the file to, the folder aliases are greyed out, this problem doesn't occur on previous versions of macOS or when the folder alias isn't located on a server.

How do I resolve this issue?

I have the same problem and haven't found an answer yet.

The Problem: aliases and symlinks on the server are disabled in file dialogs for apps running from clients. Sole exception I've found is Apple's TextEdit on client, which can navigate through aliases that are on the server (with file dialog for open but not for save). Every other app, apple and otherwise, that I've tried on clients, including latest Apple Pages (version 7.1 (5683)) and Safari (Version 11.1.2 (13605.3.8)), find aliases on the server to be greyed out and disabled in file dialog windows, for both open and save. Aliases on the server work fine when double-clicked in Finder by clients.

This happens on server running macOS Sierra (10.12.6) with Server.app 5.3.1, and on server running macOS High Sierra (10.13.6) with Server.app 5.6.1.

Client macs are all running macOS High Sierra (10.13.6).

Things that work:

An alias that is ON the client can point to a file on the server: apps on the client such as pages can use that alias in a file dialog to get to the remote folder.
An alias that is on the server can be used in file dialogs by apps on the server.

My tests so far:

From client mac, make alias on the server for a folder on the server. Pages and Safari on client find that alias grey (unusable) in file dialog.
On server, make alias on the server for a folder on the server. Safari on server can follow the alias (which appears active, not grey) in a file dialog. Safari on a client can NOT follow the alias, which appears grey and unusable in file dialog.


Focusing On An Input Box Quickly Will Delete The First Two Characters Typed! If I focus on a user-input box, select what's in it, press delete, and start typing, the first two characters I type will get selected and deleted.
Let's say this is an input box:

Input Content

I put my cursor there:

Input Content |

I select:

|Input Content

I delete:

|

I type:

a|
b|
c |
cd |
cde |

When I type in an input box that I have selected in, the first two characters are selected and deleted.

I figured out the answer by myself.

Input boxes in web forms tend to lag a little, and so does my selection. If I select all the text in the input box, dragging my cursor from the end to the beginning, the selected area will lag behind half a second.

That lag is what causes the problem. When I start typing afterwards, the selection is still active, causing it to replace one or two characters if I type too fast.


An US iPad Air 2 warranty work in Brazil? Im about to go to US, and I was thinking about buying an "iPad Air 2", but Im worryed if, for some reason, Its needed to use the warranty. Could I do this in Brazil or would I need to send it back to US for that?...

...also, does the warranty work the same way for refurbished iPad Air 2?
Will the warranty be valid in Brazil?

Apple has fantastic warranty service. Now I can't actually speak for Brazil but I do know that they do have a very fast mail in warranty system. That should do the trick or if you have a local apple store you can bring your iPad into their. Apple warranty is worldwide.


iPad 2 iOS update not working I have an iPad 2 with an almost fully updated iOS 8.  I have an iOS update that is supposed to fix something about ringtones and security.  I have the prompt that is asking me to download it, but when I do so, after hitting around 80- 85%, it says "Software update failed" and asks me to try it again.

I have been "Trying again" for the past hour, running this around 8 times, and I have pretty much given up. Memory is still plenty on the iPad 1, so I don't understand what's the issue here. I have the iPad plugged in to the wall, and I have really fast Wi-Fi in here.

Unfortunately, Apple do not officially support iOS 8 on the original iPad (or, as you refer to it, iPad 1). This screenshot of the "iOS 8 is compatible with" section does not list your device:

It is strange that your device is trying to update to an iOS version beyond the maximum of 5.1.1:

It is one of three things:

A bug in the update software;
Your iPad is in fact a later iPad, or;
You are not running iOS 8

Could you provide a screenshot of your General > About screen,

to see both what iOS you are indeed running, and which device you have. Also, a screenshot of the Software Update page would be interesting.

 You can take a screen shot by holding down both the home and power buttons simultaneously.

You say that your icons are similar to those on iPhone. Have you jailbroken the iPad at all..?

Instead of trying to update over the wifi, which can cause memory issues, connect it to a Mac or PC and try updating via iTunes.


Removing formatting on PDF added with preview I'm reading a book in Preview (Lion) and i've highlighted some parts.

Is there any way to remove this formatting for printing or sending this book?

Go to Tools > Show Inspector (or use Command+i)
In this window, click the pencil icon
Select all your highlights (Command+a works here)
Hit delete


How do I remove an ssh private key from ssh-agent/keychain I followed some aws guide to add my private key to ssh-agent, using:

ssh-add -K "MyPrivateKey.pem"

However, I can't seem to remove the key using :

ssh-add -d "MyPrivateKey.pem"

which gives me the following error:

Bad key file MyPrivateKey.pem: No such file or directory

Unless I do  ssh-add -D which removes all of the private keys I stored (obviously not favorable option). I also find that macOS ssh key management is tightly bind with Keychain, but I haven't discovered any method to identify the specific ssh key from Keychain Access. I am running on Mojave 10.14.6

tl;dr How do I get  ssh-add -d to work on macOS?

After I post the question, I found the answer, the following command will generate the public key using the private key file:
ssh-keygen -y -f ./MyPrivateKey.pem > ./MyPublicKey.pub

then to remove it:
ssh-add -d "MyPublicKey.pub"

Reference


Time Machine and Storage I have a 3TB external HD that works both Mac and PC for storage. I understand the "best" way to back up the Mac would be partition the external as explained here: Time Machine - can it share external drive with Windows backups?

However I do not need to back up a PC, just the Mac OSX.

Does this allow to still be able to transfer files from the Mac and PC using the NTFS partition? I've never had luck with externals working both Mac AND PC, so I'm a bit nervous about reformatting it right away.

Sadly there is no one common format that works well for both Time Machine and any flavor of Windows.

Unless you are interested in buying filesystem support software to make Windows on a PC work with HFS+ or make OS X on a Mac work with NTFS, the best solution is to partition the drive into two sections.

I would select the GPT volume format (GUID Partition Table) and then make one part of the drive HFS+ for Time Machine and Mac only files. The other partition should be FAT/ExFAT so both the Mac and PC can read/write all files on that drive.

Or you could just keep the entire drive HFS+ and turn on file sharing. The Mac will re-share the entire drive over SMB so the PC can read/write to files on the drive indirectly, but without needing to be exposed directly to the file system implementation details. This of course is a poor solution if you really want only one computer attached to the drive and need to shuttle the files or the systems are otherwise incapable of being networked and/or having the Mac run all the time when the PC needs to access files.