How to enable iCloud Photo Library on new computer without losing existing photos in iCloud We got a new iMac and would like to enable iPhone Photo Library on it so it can download photos onto it from our existing iCloud Photo Library. However, since this is a new computer, our Photo library on it is empty, so before I enable iCloud Photo Library, I wanted to make sure my iCloud Photos are safe.

If we enable iCloud Photo Library on our new iMac with the empty photo library, will it download our existing photos or will it try to sync the empty library to iCloud and possibly wipe out our photos?

You can safely enable iCloud Photo Library. When you do that, Photos will always treat the iCloud content as canonical. It will download everything from it to the device, and if that device has additional content, it will upload that content, merging it with iCloud, so that new content will also be available to other devices as well.


How to restart SMB client on macOS Catalina? (Finder not connecting to shares) Once in a while Finder stops connecting to SMB shares.

Finder → Cmd+K → Connect → It shows a window like this infinitely:

What I've tried already:

I have tried connecting to multiple shares (Linux, Windows), Finder didn't connect to any of them
Connecting with alternative client works. For example, Kodi media player includes its own SMB client and it connects just fine.
Connecting from other running Mac works too
Reset Finder settings by deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
Kill Finder with killall Finder command
Add username and password explicitely into the Cmd+K connect to server dialog: smb://myusername:mypassword@192.168.1.2/MyFiles

I assume this is a macOS SMB client issue.

This issue will go away with reboot. I'd like to fix the issue without restarting macOS – how can I restart SMB services only?

I had the same problem, solved it by launching Activity Monitor and stopping netbiosd process, it gets restarted and then the connections started working immediately.
It's possible that I also stopped NetAuthSysAgent process as well, so if it doesn't work for you with the netbiosd process only, try stopping NetAuthSysAgent as well.


Macbook Pro won't boot up While using my Macbook Pro (2012) yesterday, the screen suddenly went black and turned off - instantly.  I turned it back on, can see the Apple logo bu the progress bar sticks at around 40%.  The MacOS version is El Capitan, 8GB RAM and 500GB SSD.

I tried rebooting while hold CMD + R: I see the Apple logo, the progress bar gets to about 80% then it restarts again. All I get then is a blank grey screen.

Next I tried OPTION + CMD + R: this time it asks for my WiFi network, then I see the spinning globe icon.  It finishes downloading files, reboots and again goes back to a blank grey screen.

Tried to run Apple Diagnostics, by holding down D during a reboot - all I got was the blank grey screen. So I googled some more and found that if you reboot, hold OPTION + D then it connects to the internet to run the hardware test.  The hardware test completes successfully with no errors, using both the standard and "extended" set of tests.

The next step was to run Verbose mode using CMD + V.  I tried to capture this on my camera as it chugged through a load of debug messages. Too much to list out, but I will show what look like errors:

** /dev/rdisk1 (NO WRITE)

** Root file system
   Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-305.10.1).
hfs: Received 6 orphaned / unlimited files and 8 directories
BootCacheControl: Unable to open /var/db/BootCache.playlist: 2 No such file or directory
Warning: couldn't block sleep during code updates
Warning: proceeding w/o DiskArb

bash: /etc/rc.server: No such file or directory
bash: /etc/rc.installer_cleanup: No such file or directory

fInterfaceSnapshots is missing [ this is repeated 10 times ]

** GPU Hardware VM is disabled (multispace: disabled, page table updates with DMA: disabled, non-contiguous VRAM: disabled)

Airport: Link Down on en1. Reason 8 (Disassociated because station leaving)
Got incomplete channel sequence length 0, should be 16
en1: channel changed to 1
en1: IO80211Interface::postMessage bssid changed

Previous shutdown cause: 3

DSMOS has arrived
in func createVirtualInterface ifRole = 1
IO80211VirtualInterface::createIOReporters p2p0 provider 0
IO80211InterfaceMonitor::initWithServiceAndName(): Unable to get fProvider
Unable to create IO80211InterfaceMonitor

Have you looked into LangLangC's suggestion in this post: GPU problem - Boot Hangs on Grey Screen. Apparently, this fix works for NVDIA as well as Radeon chips. If you have another Mac, you can use target mode to access the failed MacBook; this post has some advice on that: Single-User-Recovery-Mode on High Sierra 10.13.6.
Also, this post might help you: https://www.justinsilver.com/technology/os-x-el-capitan-10-11-1-hanging-on-boot-fixed/#os_x_fix.
Good luck!


Bad Mac Mini 2012 passes AHT, but ASD shows several errors/failures. Logic board failure? I have a 2012 Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.8 that doesn't boot properly. Sometimes the USB ports don't work after boot and/or the Mac mini crashes after bootup. Graphics are not crisp when output from HDMI; instead resembling an old CRT TV.

Before I did a clean install of 10.8 via Internet Recovery, it had a kernel panic/boot loop.

So far I've:

Reset both NVRAM and SMC
Run AHT extended tests (without problems).
Found and ran the correct ASD, which consistently shows these seven errors:

  FireWire Controller (test #20) - Reset PCIe Link Error Registers...
  ERROR--12114 [Cannot find the PCIe capabilities register] -- TEST
  FAILED

  FireWire Controller (test #21) - Read PCIe Link Error Registers...
  ERROR--12114 [Cannot find the PCIe capabilities register] -- TEST
  FAILED

  AirPort (test #8) - Hardware Register Check Test... ERROR--12100
  [IOConnect error reading from PCI address space] -- TEST FAILED

  AirPort (test #9) - Wireless Module PCIe Root Port Hardware Register
  Test... ERROR--12100 [IOConnect error reading from PCI address space]
  -- TEST FAILED

  SATA:SATA PCI Register Test (test #1) - SATA PCI Register Test...
  ERROR--12105 [PCI driver IOService open error] -- TEST FAILED

  Thunderbolt (test #30) - Thunderbolt PCIe Gen2 Link Width Verification
  Test... ERROR-- 11 [Can not get PCI Link Width] -- TEST FAILED

  Thunderbolt (test #31) - Thunderbolt PCIe Gen2 Link Speed Verification
  Test... ERROR-- 13 [Can not get PCI Link Speed] -- TEST FAILED

Despite FireWire and Airport showing up in failures, the Mac mini works great in Target Mode and Wi-Fi seems to work fine too. Don't know what PCI errors mean practically, though I did some research about PCIe.

ASD for the EFI passed with no problems.

Do those errors mean this logic board is fried and I should sell this Mac mini for parts, as I assume?

The logic board is rather dusty and dirty, but doesn't appear to be a liquid spill. No idea if that could realistically cause a short.

Background:

I tried to upgrade my problematic 2009 Mac mini on the cheap by getting one on eBay. It was listed as powering on but not booting, but I thought I had a decent chance of making it work with a good HD, good RAM, and clean install.

This machine is toast. Short of putting it on a test bench, it’ll be hard for you to figure out what’s wrong with it, and from where I sit somewhere on the planet, even harder. This computer deserves a final resting place in an electronics recycling bin.


Inconsistent disk capacity reports in OS X - I'm missing 365GB of my 2 TB Coincidentally I have noticed that the disk capacity reports in "About this Mac" and the Terminal when running diskutil list both report inconsistent capacities for an external hard disk drive.
This is an 2TB external hard drive. However, when adding the capacities of all partitions I get a value which is significantly below:
0.2+885.2+0.1+400.0+0.1+300.0+0.1+49.5=1635.2 (GB)
How is this possible? Where did the remaining ~365GB go?
This disk had been formatted and used under OSX Mountain Lion.
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         885.2 GB   disk2s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk2s3
   4:          Apple_CoreStorage                         400.0 GB   disk2s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk2s5
   6:          Apple_CoreStorage                         300.0 GB   disk2s6
   7:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk2s7
   8:       Microsoft Basic Data EXCHANGE                49.5 GB    disk2s8
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Time Machine           *299.7 GB   disk3
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Media                  *884.8 GB   disk4
/dev/disk5
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Time Machine 2         *399.7 GB   disk5

Unformatted space.

eg, I have a 500Gb disk with just a 27Gb partition:

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                       0xBF                         26.8 GB    disk0s1

You can confirm this in Disk Utility or a tool like iPartition.

In Disk Utility click on the drive itself, not a partition of it. Then, under the partitions tab you should see each partition, and then the greyed out freespace available on the drive. You can select it and it'll show you how much you have.


Mac OS X Time Machine recovery lost Data I did a backup with Time Machine on a Netgear ReadyNAS to save complete System(OS X Mavericks). Because I have installed OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Now I recovered this backup. But I lost about 200 GB of 360GB.

Has anybody an idea to recover this lost data from SSD?

This answer you provided in the chat above is important:

  Music, Pictures and Movie of my user account haven't restored. No, I didn't find those folders on the time machine disk.

If those folders are not present on the Time Machine disk as you indicate above, then they weren't being backed up by Time Machine. You have lost this data and there is no way to get it back.


Has someone set up an HP DeskJet 812C with SnowLeopard or Lion? My parents have an old printer: an HP DeskJet 812C. I upgraded the OS on their iMac to SnowLeopard before checking if the printer was compatible. Unfortunately, it isn't. There's a Gutenprint driver for this printer, but the documentation looked rather involved. I didn't have much time to dedicate to the task.

Can someone simplify the gutenprint setup process for me? Has anyone successfully used an 812c with SnowLeopard or Lion?

They decided to not bother trying to get Gutenprint to work; they bought a new printer.


Will Thunderbolt Cinema displays work with Mini DisplayPort equipped macs? Is it possible to plug a Thunderbolt cinema display into a Mini DisplayPort-equipped Mac and have it work?  This question suggests that it's possible and that it's pretty much the same cable, but I don't see any explicit confirmation anywhere.

Plugs are the same, cables are not. The thunderbolt cables contain chips and firmware.

I haven't used the new Thunderbolt display, however I am aware of the following:

MiniDP Macbook -> MiniDP iMac 27: works fine.
Thunderbolt Macbook -> MiniDP iMac 27: works fine.
MiniDP Macbook -> Thunderbolt iMac 27: does not work
Thunberbolt Macbook -> Thunderbolt iMac 27: works fine.

This is in my experience and confirmed from various Apple KB articles. So I believe it's likely you won't be able to use the Thunderbolt display on a MiniDP machine, as that is certainly the case with the iMac 27" models.


WDF VIOLATION Blue Screen after Upgrading Mac to Windows 10 May 2019 Update (1903) Edition UPDATE: I have tested the Windows 10 November 2019 Update (1909) Edition and so far this problem has not occurred. Also, after installing the Window Support Software, the Apple Software Update application provided a download of a "Boot Camp Update Version 6.1.9".

I did an upgrade on my iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011) from a previous version of Windows 10 to the current version. The Windows 10 May 2019 Update (1903) Edition ISO file was downloaded from the official Microsoft website. Afterwards, the Mac would get the following "Blue Screen of Death" error message.

The Windows Support Software was downloaded by using the BootCamp Assistant. I confirmed the files are the same as the files that can be downloaded from the Apple website Boot Camp Support Software 5.1.5621. I installed Windows 10 to legacy BIOS boot.

  Note: The Windows Support Software download by using the Boot Camp Assistant can vary depending on the Mac model.

Below is some information about my configuration.

iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011)
iMac12,1
High Sierra Version 10.13.6
BootCamp Version 5.1 (Build 5621)
Windows 10 May 2019 Update (1903) English Edition.
Win10_1903_V1_English_x64.iso

I also tried a clean install of Windows 10 and this made no difference. The error still occurred. How can I avoid getting this error message?

After some investigation, I found the error occurs after installing the Windows Support Software. After some trial and error experiments, I determined the offending file in Windows Support Software is named BootCamp/Drivers/Apple/BootCamp.msi.

Note: I have tested the Windows 10 November 2019 Update (1909) Edition and so far this problem has not occurred. Also, after installing the Window Support Software, the Apple Software Update application provided a download of a "Boot Camp Update Version 6.1.9".

I found a solution which involves using a newer version of the BootCamp.msi file. I did this by downloading the Windows Support Software on a iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013). Since not everyone reading this will have a newer model Mac, I have provided a alternate method for retrieving this file. This method was derived from Chris F Carroll's answer to the question: How to download Bootcamp drivers without Bootcamp assistant? The nice thing about this answer is the Window Support Software is downloaded directly from Apple without the use of any third part tools.

The Windows Support Software for the iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013) can be downloaded by following the steps given below.

Click on this link to download the BootCampESD.pkg file directly from Apple.

  Note: If this link is broken, then post a comment and I will try to update the link.

Double click on the  BootCampESD.pkg file in the Finder application to start the "BootCampESD Installer".
Follow the instructions. This will save the WindowsSupport.dmg file to the /Library/Application Support/BootCamp folder.
Double click on the WindowsSupport.dmg file in the Finder application to mount the disk image. The volume label will be Boot Camp.
Use to Finder application to locate the BootCamp.msi file in the BootCamp/Drivers/Apple folder of the device labeled Boot Camp. This is the Windows installer for Boot Camp Version 6.0 (Build 6136).

Below are two methods for solving the problem. I tried both and decided I preferred Method 2. Here a assume you have already used the Boot Camp Assistant on the iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011) to download the Windows Support Software to a flash drive.

Method 1: Replace the existing BootCamp.msi file.

Replace BootCamp.msi file in the BootCamp/Drivers/Apple folder on the flash drive with the new file. After the Windows installation completes, install the Boot Support Software by executing the setup application in the BootCamp folder on the flash drive. In some cases, this application may start automatically.

I do not think this method resulted in all the drivers being installed. However the missing drivers where downloaded and installed after running "Windows Update" and "Apple Software Update".

Method 2: Upgrade Boot Camp immediately after installing the Windows Support Software.

Copy the new BootCamp.msi file to the root folder on the flash drive. After the Windows installation completes, install the Boot Support Software by executing the setup application in the BootCamp folder on the flash drive. In some cases, this application may start automatically. You should first first encounter the window shown below. Follow the instructions to install the software.

After the Windows Support Software finishing installing, you will get the window shown below. Click on the "Finish" button.

If you get the popup window shown below, click on the "No" button.

Next, open a "Administrator: Command Prompt" window and enter the command given below.  Here, the assumption is made that the flash drive has been assign the drive letter D. If your flash drive has been assigned a different drive letter, then make the appropriate substitution.

D:\BootCamp.msi

You should encounter the window shown below. Follow the instructions to install the software.

When the popup window below appears, click on the "OK" button.

After the Windows Boot Camp Installer finishes, you will get the window shown below. Click on the "Finish" button.

If you get the popup window shown below, click on the "Yes" button. Otherwise, manual restart the Mac.

  Note: If you are in audit mode, do not use the "System Preparation Tool" to restart.

Final Notes

When first executing "Apple Software Update" you may be asked to update "Apple Software Update" itself. If you happens, you should uncheck all other updates and just update "Apple Software Update". Otherwise, you may get an error message saying another update can not be installed. I my case, there were two updates of the "Apple Software Update" to download and install.
You may wonder why not use a more current Boot Camp Installer. I did
try the BootCamp.msi that comes with the Windows Support Software
for the iMac (21.5-inch, 2019). This is the Windows Boot Camp
installer for Version 6.1 (Build 7438). I found this version to be
missing the ability to adjust the screen brightness. If you want to
try this version, then click on this link to download the
BootCampESD.pkg file directly from Apple.

  Note: You can upgrade from Version 5.1 to either 6.0 or 6.1. However, you can not upgrade from 6.0 to 6.1.


iTunes: Move files off a network drive I have somehow screwed up my iTunes database such that iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml contains network paths:

<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Volumes/media/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Media/Music/Unknown%20Artist/Unknown%20Album...</string>

Most of the files are where they belong, in file://localhost/Users/Shared/..., but not all. Furthermore, all of the files are located on the local disk, e.g. /Volumes/media/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Artis/Album/Track.mp3 has been copied into the local directory /Users/Shared/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Artis/Album/Track.mp3.

I used File > Library > Organize Library..., and enabled the Consolidate files checkbox (along with Reorganize files in the folder "iTunes Media"), but this did not move all of the network-located files onto the local disk.

iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml itself appears to be a write-only file, based off the contents of the binary file iTunes/iTunes Library.itl, so closing iTunes, editing iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml to correct the paths, and restarting iTunes doesn't fix the issue.

Is there a way to update the iTunes database so that it uses local file paths instead of network paths for some of the files? (This impacts 9888 entries out of 11449 entries within iTunes.)

I have a similar/identical issue with iPhoto, in which some files are network located, and some aren't, and I don't know how to consolidate them to all be on the local machine...

Reset the iTunes Library

Open the iTunes music folder in Finder ( it’s in your home folder / Music / iTunes) and drag iTunes Music Library.xml and iTunes Library.itl out on the desktop. This will reset iTunes next time you start it, but don’t start it yet. We’ll be working on the xml file, while the itl file is just there for backup.

Change the location of where iTunes keeps the music

In the iTunes preferences > Advanced, click on “change” next to the “iTunes music folder location”, and select your hard disk.

Look inside iTunes Library to see what the problem is

If your iTunes library is huge, it’s a good idea to use Terminal to look at the first few lines, which you can do easily with

  head -n100 /Users/ME/Desktop/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml

(you can just type “head -n100 ” and drag the file onto Terminal to let OS X type out the name for you)
The output will be something along the lines of

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
      <key>Major Version</key><integer>1</integer>
      <key>Minor Version</key><integer>1</integer>
      <key>Date</key><date>2012-08-13T21:09:21Z</date>
      <key>Application Version</key><string>10.6.3</string>
      <key>Features</key><integer>5</integer>
      <key>Music Folder</key><string>file://localhost/Volumes/HD1T/Music/</string>
      <key>Library Persistent ID</key><string>C326B89DCF4457DF</string>
      <key>Tracks</key>
      <dict>
          <key>41557</key>
          <dict>
              <key>Track ID</key><integer>41557</integer>
              <key>Name</key><string>Fifths (Jazzanova 6 Sickth Mix)</string>
              <key>Artist</key><string>Ski</string>
              <key>Album</key><string>Jazzanova: The Remixes, 1997-2000</string>
              <key>Grouping</key><string>where:de</string>
              <key>Genre</key><string>ambient-synth-90s</string>
              <key>Kind</key><string>MPEG audio file</string>
              <key>Size</key><integer>19718194</integer>
              <key>Total Time</key><integer>482925</integer>
              <key>Disc Number</key><integer>2</integer>
              <key>Disc Count</key><integer>2</integer>
              <key>Track Number</key><integer>1</integer>
              <key>Track Count</key><integer>10</integer>
              <key>Year</key><integer>2000</integer>
              <key>Date Modified</key><date>2008-12-05T14:26:06Z</date>
              <key>Date Added</key><date>2012-07-14T07:42:37Z</date>
              <key>Bit Rate</key><integer>320</integer>
              <key>Sample Rate</key><integer>44100</integer>
              <key>Play Count</key><integer>12</integer>
              <key>Play Date</key><integer>3321087305</integer>
              <key>Play Date UTC</key><date>2009-03-28T10:15:05Z</date>
              <key>Rating</key><integer>80</integer>
              <key>Album Rating</key><integer>80</integer>
              <key>Album Rating Computed</key><true/>
              <key>Artwork Count</key><integer>1</integer>
              <key>Persistent ID</key><string>E5B52C3DE807B7DC</string>
              <key>Track Type</key><string>File</string>
              <key>File Type</key><integer>1297106739</integer>
              <key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Users/ME/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Media/Music/Ski/Jazzanova_%20The%20Remixes,%201997-2000/Fifths%20(Jazzanova%206%20Sickth%20Mix).mp3</string>

You need to look out for the file:// bit of the xml. Here it is telling me that it is looking into /Users/ME/Music/, i.e. my home folder instead of my external hard disk.

Use sed to fix the path and create a new xml file

sed is a nifty unix utility which you can use from Terminal. It can open a file, go through it line by line, change things on each line, and then put the result in another file.

sed 's/file:\/\/localhost\/Users\/ME\/Music\/iTunes\/iTunes%20Media\//file:\/\/localhost\/Volumes\/HD1T\//'  < /Users/ME/Desktop/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml  > /Users/ME/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml

Here’s a breakdown of what the command does.

sed calls the sed command - it stands for Stream Editor

’s/…/…./’ sed will itself need instructions, which are strings hence the ’ (apostrophe). s/a/b/ means “if you find an a, substitue it with b”

file:\/\/localhost\/Users\/ME… this is the string we are looking for. Note that given that forward slashes are used by sed for s/…/…/, if you need them in the string you have to escape them with backward slashes

file:\/\/localhost\/Volumes\/HD1T\/ the string we are replacing with

< /Users/ME/Desktop/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml The less than sign means “use this file as input” - in this case, the xml file I had dragged to the Desktop

>  /Users/ME/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml and this means “create this file as output”. We are asking sed to recreate the xml library file from the one on the desktop, but changing some bits around as it does so

Create a broken iTunes library

Now this is important - if you just start iTunes now, with the new .xml file there and no .itl file there, nothing will happen. iTunes will ignore the xml file, and just reset to an empty library. But if iTunes finds a broken .itl file, it will use the .xml file we just fiddled with to recreate the .itl file. The easiest way to create a broken .itl file is from terminal:

  touch ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Library.itl

which will create an empty file - broken enough for iTunes.

Restart iTunes

Now iTunes will finally pay attention to the xml file - it will show a dialog saying ‘Importing ‘iTunes Music Library.xml’…” This may take a while, even though it isn’t actually copying mp3 files around.

Source: http://gotofritz.net/blog/howto/fixing-itunes-cannot-find-music/


10.8.4 pretending updates don't exist I just upgraded to 10.8.4; I had to do this by downloading the update .dmg from Apple as my computer has decided on its own to opt-out of software updates. Both the App Store and softwareupdate report that there are no updates available even though I know full well that there is a Java update and iTunes is not the latest version. What is wrong with it?

Do you have a non admin user account? Then available system updates and updates for Apple software will not show in the Mac App Store when invoking Software Update. What you can do is the following: Open Mac App Store, click on „Updates“ and then press cmd-R. A dialogue will open asking for your admin name and password. Then all available updates for OS X and Apple software will be listed.


Using grep on Mac-style text files When I run grep on a text file, I get nonsense results. It seems as if the whole file is printed out but on one line overwriting itself.   I read that on the Mac, text files use \r instead of the normal \n as a line ending.  That would explain it, but how to make grep treat \r as if it were \n?

I'm using Snow Leopard OS X, and am quite new to using Apple anything, but a long-time Linux programmer.

You can't change grep's behavior, but you can change the file it sees:

tr '\r' '\n' <file | grep foo

Also, \r line endings are legacy these days; OS X officially uses \n, although there are still things that haven't been updated.  In particular, AppleScript still hasn't quite caught up, which also shows in its using pre-OS X file paths by default and requiring POSIX file to indicate OS X native paths; also, many Carbon applications still use \r, Carbon being a transition framework from Mac OS 9 to OS X.


Yosemite Activity Monitor: '% CPU' column blank for certain processes (clang compiler) I have been a bit confused recently when installing some software updates using MacPorts. Some of the packages required compilation, and as expected the CPU usage (and fans) went up, as indicated in the CPU load graph in the attached screenshot.

However, when I looked into the Activity Monitor for the CPU usage of clang (which was the main activity at that point as verified by MacPorts' verbose diagnostic output), it showed up with blank %CPU usage. Other processes showed up just normally, as did some other MacPorts related processes. I checked also in the shell activity monitor 'top' and it showed clang at 0% CPU usage, even when run in Superuser mode using sudo.

Is this normal behaviour?

Why would this happen?

Is there another way of seeing the real CPU usage?

Should I be worried that I might have some kind of root kit installed? This messing with the displayed properties of running tasks would -- to my knowledge -- be a possible indication for something like this going on.

I have found that sometimes processes can spawn and die so fast that Activity Monitor has trouble keeping up, and doesn't manage to get all the information displayed in time. It isn't a major issue, and it is a normal behavior, if a somewhat incorrect one.


Is it legal to use WINE to play PC games on Mac? I've always been a Mac fan and the way game developers treat Mac users is just sad.

No big games (with the exception of Portal 2 and Starcraft 2) have been released for Mac this far. I've always been into gaming, but playing Starcraft 2 over and over gets really boring once you think about all the possibilities you would have if Mac ran Windows games natively.

I know there are several ways to play Windows games on a Mac.

You use Boot Camp on your Mac to run Windows. The problem here is: Should I buy a Mac just to install Windows on it? (I believe you have to own a copy of Windows, too which costs additional money as well.)
You buy Parallels Desktop (costs money!) which doesn't require you to reboot your Mac every time you want to use Windows. This program also requires you to have a copy of Windows (money!).
You can install custom "wrappers" which allow you to run or install Windows software on your Mac. The wrappers require an installation program like Wine(Skin), Cider, CiderX and so on. Wine is free, but you still need to have a copy of the game.

My question is: can I play the games that I bought for PC on Mac the 3rd way? Would this be legal?

My Problem with the first two is that they both would cost me a lot of additional money - it's like paying for one game about 5 times.

I take issue with your premise: NO BIG GAMES (with the exception of Portal 2 and Starcraft 2) have been released for Mac this far.)

Evidently, you're unfamiliar with Steam. I don't know what your definition of "big games" is, but in my mind Civilization V, Counter-Strike, Assassin's Creed 2, etc. qualify. Best part about Steam is that if you buy a game, you can download it for Windows and/or Macintosh.

Yes, if you want to play Windows PC games the best option is to use Boot Camp. And yes, you have to buy Windows to install in Boot Camp. Of course, if you were to purchase a Windows PC you would also have to buy Windows.

So, I'm not sure what you expect here… Apple should throw in a copy of Windows for free? Apple should spend money and resources to incorporate Wine or Cider into the OS and go through the tremendous support and legal headache while simultaneously cutting its developers off at the knees by allowing Windows applications to flood the ecosystem? — not that it would ever happen… ;)

Apple's last OS update, 10.6 was a $30 upgrade. 10.7 Lion will also be a $30 upgrade. Seems to me your beef should be with Microsoft's pricing of Windows. (Oh, and lazy/cheap game developers of course. heh.)

To answer the central question: Wine and Cider are both legal, since they use no code or binary data from Microsoft's implementation of Windows.


Auto-Populate A Pop-Up Menu in Numbers 3.5 I'm trying to steer clear of Excel, despite my sister's nagging, and I've done pretty well to create a Quote and Invoice workbook in Numbers. The problem I am having is working out how to automatically populate and update a pop-over menu.

In Excel, I can choose to create a list based on a range of cells, which is pretty much exactly the function I require. However, in Numbers I can only seem to create plain text items in a pop-up menu and not reference any cells.

For a little bit more info, I have a separate sheet in my workbook that contains item codes, descriptions, and prices. I can reference them normally in the other sheets. I want to be able to select a cell in one sheet and have a list / pop-up menu come up with all the item codes from the other sheet, and have it automatically update if I add a new one.

Is this possible or will I have to switch to that horrid beast Excel?

I had the same sort of problem and with some help from people within the Apple Support community I came up with this solution. Hopefully it will work for you.

This is my list of players in sheet 1. In your case, the Players name would be the item codes.

Here is sheet where I want to information copied to.

The P# corresponds to the number next to the Players name in Sheet 1. If I enter a 1 and a 2 the names are filled in to the column to the left of the box.

This shows the formula required to transfer the players name from sheet 1 to sheet 2.

To take it a step further, when I fill in the Players winnings in Sheet 1 it also fills it in all the "Earnings" cells for that player in Sheet 2 using the formula shown below.

My list of players goes to 300 but the last 20 or so are empty. That way I can still add more names or in your case, item codes, to it.

This may be more complicated than you require but hopefully it helps you.


Address Book won't restore contacts from .abbu My Address Book won't restore contacts from my address book archive (.abbu).  I sync my address book with iCloud.

A couple weeks ago, Address Book told me there were some inconsistancies in my contacts.  It said that 12 of my contacts were outdated. The "updated" versions that it presented were actually versions that were older by several weeks or months.

I told Address Book repeatly to ignore the changes so it kept on asking me.
I exported my correct contacts as a .abbu file.
I also back up with Time Machine so I should have a good copy there.
I deleted a "bad" contact from my Address Book, and then tried to import the .abbu file, the contact I deleted appeared for a second and then disappeared.
I then deleted my entire Address Book.
I tried again to import the .abbu file.  All the contacts appeared for a  second and then disappeared.

This happen when iCloud was added in perferences and syncing and when it wasn't.  Deleting the file AddressBook folder in ~/ApplicationSupport/ also didn't help.

It was caused by iCloud.  Went offline, opened .abbu file, exported as vCards, went online, cards removed themselves.  Deleted iCloud account from Mac, added vCards, readded iCloud to Mac.   Fixed.


Use Siri To Launch App I am trying to use Siri to launch an app.  So I say "Open Hipchat", however Siri interprets it as "Open Hip Chat".   Which she then doesn't find it because the app is named "HipChat" and not "Hip Chat".

Any way to help Siri understand that "Hipchat" is one word and not two?

Siri finds hip chat for me on my iPad and iPhone.

The space doesn't matter.  I wonder if some other thing is wrong with your spotlight index, or if you've run out of free space on the device.

You might need to troubleshoot other apps and Siri or go through some of the generic troubleshooting steps like powering off the phone, restoring phone, etc.


Mobile Safari updates for older iOS versions I am aware that Safari for iOS is updated whenever iOS is updated.

For devices that cannot update to iOS 11:

Can the Safari on those devices ever be update to recent versions (outside of the iOS upgrade)?
Does the Safari for those devices receive any updates at all (e.g. security)?

No. Safari only updates with iOS releases. If there is a very serious security concern Apple might release another (iOS) update to a previous version, that adds security fixes to Safari, but never Safari by itself, and no new features.

On MacOS however you can still download Safari updates for newer OSs.


macos: How would I find the top fastest growing files and directory How would I find the top fastest growing files and directory subtree to see what's gobbled
up all the space on macos?

Easy and free is the How to free up storage space on your Mac guide

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996

Make a screen shot of the two top images once a day for three days running or once a week, you can see growth and then know where to focus your cleanup efforts. DaisyDisk is nice, too but start for free is my advice.

If you like command line tools, ncdu is the ticket and https://brew.sh is a popular option to get it and other similar tools installed and patched over time.


How to reliably restore photos on iPhone 4S? I've been asked to help restore photos and videos from an iPhone 4S, after a reset. No iCloud backup. I see a lot of software that claims it can do this, and paying a fee is just fine. But does it deliver? Has anyone done this?

Ideally, I would like to dump the user accessible flash to an image file and use tools like photorec and magicrescue to carve the JPG files out. The video files are of lower priority.

What have all of you done to recover lost data on iPhones?

Thanks!

iPhones are hardware encrypted.

If you reset the phone from scratch, everything that was on there before is gone.
 Once the hardware key is erased, the data is not recoverable by any means.

That's what backups are for.... iExplorer et al can scour backups & the current phone system... but not encrypted, overwritten devices.


iPod touch bad battery performance after updating to iOS 4 Hey, I own an iPod touch 2g which worked great until I updated to iOS4. After I did the update, it takes just a few hours for the battery to run out. Even if I´m not doing anything with it. I noticed that if I turn off wifi the battery life is great. So I´m hoping you guys can help me with either a solution to this issue and get it to work normally even with wifi on, or some way to get the wifi turned off when blocking it.

Some things I already try: - fully discharge the vattery and then charge it to 100% - restore the iPod - Updated iOS again to 4.1 now

Thanks in advance!

Try to completely disable Push Notifications in the Settings application. This might lead to the iPod not trying to maintain a WiFi connection all the time and thus increase battery life.


Multiple macs self-assigned IP on ethernet (wifi okay though) I have a small CAT-6 ethernet network featuring a Cisco 18-port switch and an Asus router acting as DHCP server.

Various devices connected to the switch (e.g. printer, NAS) connect to the DHCP server successfully to receive addresses in the 192.168.1.* range.  My Macbook Pro and Mac mini also connect over wifi to the router to receive DHCP addresses in the same range.

The Macbook and the Mac Mini (both latest Mavericks) fail to connect via the switch when using ethernet and end up with self-assigned 169...* addresses. With the Macbook Pro I've tried this with three different USB to ethernet dongles, including an Apple model. Setting the ethernet parameters manually doesn't seem to help access the switch either.

This makes me think there's some configuration with ethernet under Mavericks that doesn't match my setup with the 192.168.1.* range?  I'm assuming the Cisco switch is not the problem as other devices seem to connect through it fine.

Can someone give me a hint as how to work out what's going on?  Does Mavericks always try and look for DHCP servers in the 10.0.0.* range instead?

Thanks,

Stu

I'll answer and accept this question as I'm certain now that the problem is the interaction between modern Macs and my Cisco switch. I can kind of fix the problem by:

Setting the Mac ethernet "hardware" tab to manual 1000T/full duplex
Setting corresponding switch ports to 1000T/full duplex
Turning off the switch green ethernet facility
Making sure switch is at the latest firmware release

This seems to work well until the Mac sleeps, then the connection is lost again. I'm still trying to work out how to work around that issue.


kernel_task filling up disk Something weird just happened.
I got a warning that my disk was running out of space. I knew that it had like 15GB free before and wondered where all the free space went.
I checked Activity Monitor which showed me that kernel_task wrote around 16GB of memory to disk. I kept observing and noticed that it went up at a rate of around 1GB per minute.
This went on until there were 0 Bytes left on my disk. This made my macbook basically unusable. I couldn't even open Web pages and when i tried to shut it down, it froze.
I did a forced reboot and the lost memory is back now. kernel_task is not writing to disk like crazy as before either. Anyway, I'd like to know what happened there. Any clues about what could've caused this?

This happened to me once. I used Daisy Disk to figure out where the disk usage was coming from.

In my case, there was a problem with the coresymbolicationd cache, which was growing indefinitely, and continuing through reboots and reinstalls of the latest Combo Update.

After deleting /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd, everything returned to normal.

Next time this happens, I recommend taking a look with that utility.


Best way to run WINE on OS X? What is it?

(I know, oh so subjective.)

So let's make that, what's the most effective and pain free way to do it? I realize those may be contradictory conditions.

The easiest and most pain free way is to use homebrew

https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

Once you follow the instructions to install homebrew on this page (which include installing Xcode), you can then simply type

brew install wine

And this will download and compile wine and all its dependendencies.


iMac 27" model 2010 - speaker weird after exchange of logicboard I exchanged the logicboard and now the speakers don't work well.

If plugged in both on the logicboard then the right speaker (the one without the subwoofer) makes distorted sounds.

If I plug out the other speaker then the right speaker sounds good!!!

Left speaker plug in only: no Sound at all.

I checked the restistance. It is similar on both speakers. Between 1 and 2 pin it is 5 ohm and between 3 and 4 it is 10 ohm. So apparently, all is fine with th speakers itself.

I also tried to reset PRAM and SMC.

My problem was that I accidentally screwed the cable of the left speaker with a screw from the housing. I resolved the issue and sound is okay!


2007 battery replacement for 15" pro. 85w now 60w? Help! I'm looking at a replacement battery A1175 for my 2007 15" pro (specs here: http://support.apple.com/kb/SP17), which is listed as 60w. My original battery charger was 85w. Is this going to work?

That looks like the correct part. On the page where you linked the battery at the top right is a phone support and live chat Pre sales and apple will ensure you have the right part.

If there were no losses (there are and they are not negligible) and there were not a cutoff in the charging circuitry, then this battery would get charged fully in less than an hour from an 85 watt adapter. The circuitry limits the charging rate to prolong the batteries so you should expect between 2 and 4 hours to charge that "60 watt hour" battery. The extra "capacity" serves to run the device and peripherals and have extra to spare and still charge that battery when needed.


Macbook Pro 11,3 No longer has a serial number THE ISSUE:
Mac OS No longer has a serial number and shows "Serial Number (system): Not Available" in system profiler.
STEPS TO PRODUCE THE PROBLEM:

I had a botched filesystem runnig mac os Catalina 10.5.7, and so i decided to do a clean  install, and then do an internet recovery. To be sure my ssd was totally clean including the efi partition, i zero'ed the drive with dd. Then, booted to internet recovery, which oddly booted up to Big Sur recovery even though i never upgraded to Big Sur. I decided to install Big Sur anyway via internet recovery, and after the install, i noticed that in "About this mac" as well as through a terminal command, that my serial number was labeled as "unavailable", and is no longer recognized in the MLB of the "Mail logic board."
Furthermore, i noticed that my icloud automatically signed my mac out from my icloud interface in the settings panel on my iphone. I never signed myself out before erasing.

EXPERIMENTS AND QUIRKS:
One more strange quirk is that apparantly, this somehow also deactivated all of apples DRM (digital rights management) for any of the apps that i had purchased. I concluded this, because after the clean install from internet recovery, I DID NOT SIGN INTO ICLOUD. Then, instead of importing my files with migration utility, i simply dragged and dropped my digitally purchased app store apps from my time-machine backup, onto my clean install. After removing time machine drive, i opened the apps, and low and behold, all of them worked perfectly without asking me to sign into icloud, or log into the app store. How is this possible?
MY IDEAS PERTAINING TO THE ISSUE:

Supposedly, once a certified apple technician burns a serial number into your logic board, it is impossible to remove unless you have specialized software that contacts apples servers with a registered signature and encryption key, and waits for apples servers to send authorization to write or remove the serial number from the logic board. Assuming that apples technology is impenetrable, then you would have to assume that someone stole apples special software and one of their keys, and used it on my logic board remotely to deserialize my mlb.

The other possibility, is that apples hardware and logic boards are flawed, and they can erase their oen serial numbers. other than that, im out of ideas.

MY QUESTION:

Can someone explain how i lost my serial number, and explain the weird quirks (missing drm, unauthorized deregistering my mac from icloud) that are happening as a consequnce?

Then, can someone please tell me how I can get my serial number burned back into the mlb so that i can use imessage on my mac again?

I found a website with some software called BlankBoard Serialzer at https://www.macintoshrepository.org/26584-blank-board-serializer?ns=1
Could anyone tell me if this sofware is safe to use and if I should use it to re-burn my serial number into my mac?

Thanks for any help! Check screenshots below!

Question 1a:
We don't know all the steps you have taken (and you may not remember all of them very clearly) in your reinstall.  So hard to say why.  The most common causes are some hardware change, but you say this does not apply in your case.  Of the steps you mention using dd is the only unusual step - I would have used Disk Utility in Internet Recovery.
Question 1b:
You have already discovered that some Apple services require a valid serial number. iMessage and various DRM are tied to your serial number and UUID as well as Apple ID.  As an aside, loading a valid serial number is a tricky and important step in getting a Hackintosh to run iMessage.
Question 2:
The best solution is to take the MBP to an Apple Store where they may well fix your problem for free - just say it happened during a macOS upgrade (which is true in your case).
Question 3:
The Blank Board Serializer is an Apple tool and can be used to fix your Serial Number.  It is important to find the version which is compatible with your MBP - I can't help you there.
Have a read of these three links which describe the process which must be following very carefully - the first one has lots of comments from those who have succeeded (or not) using this method.
Roger Sen
What causes Mac to lose its serial number
How to fix missing serial number
Warnings:

However you fix this (either via Apple or yourself) make very sure you enter the correct serial number belonging to your Mac.  You only get one chance to get it right.
If you do it yourself, be prepared that you might get it wrong and brick your MBP.

Additional warning:

Read @DanRan's own solution and heed the warnings about the need to unregister the Mac and unauthorise from any services which have been used with the incorrect or blank serial number.


Is there a way to either save/copy/or email an entire iMessage conversation? Is there a one (or a simple) step process to either email myself, or cut/copy, an entire (like year long) iMessage conversation without having to buy an app/software or to go through and keep marking post groupings through "more" so I can send to my email?

I read about finding a hidden library folder in the question pertaining to the bulk download of pictures in iMessage. This did not really help.

Also, when I log into iMessage from my Macbook, my iPhone messages that predated the purchase do not show up. Even assuming it did, however, I still want to move the conversation out of iMessage so I can paste it into a word doc for posterity.

I'm only aware of how to do this natively on macOS

Sign in to Messages on OS X
Select the conversation you want to save
File -> Print -> Save
(optional) Use whatever pdf editing software you choose to extract, copy, transform the PDF version of the conversation

There are third party solutions like PhoneView by ecamm to do this as well, but I don't know of an archive method on iOS. I'm a very happy customer of PhoneView - I sent them my money and have been satisfied by their continued updates of the product and the value.


MacBook Pro refuses to boot/recover, hangs at "white screen" I am somewhat new to caring for Macs, but one has been left in my care and I have not been able to restore it to working order yet. Here are the symptoms:

The MacBook Pro would hang with a "white screen" during the boot process. A bit of boot splash would show up, but the gray background would at some point just hang.
Booting recovery mode did not work, as far as I remember.
Boot from a Ubuntu 14.04.2 USB stick works, provided one attaches "nofb nomodeset" to the kernel commandline (though I put that one down to insufficient driver support). I have no idea whether or not these usually work out-of-the-box.
Using parted from the aforementioned stick, I was able to see three partitions, one EFI Boot, one large main partition and one labeled Recovery. It seemed strange that the recovery was recoognized as HFS+, as I expected, but the "main" partition was not mountable and did not show a filesystem type.
I also discovered that the drive in question was an OCZ Vertex3 256 GB, which I assume is not standard? The previous owner could have upgraded it.
At this point, I decided to wipe the drive and try with a fresh installation. I removed the SSD from the MacBook, pulled a full disk image from my desktop just in case (which went without any read errors) and used hdparm to do an SATA enhanced erase, leaving me with a "fresh" disk. Then I put it back in.
I started internet recovery, which loaded, showing me the global and everything. Afterwards, it rebooted, showing me the Apple Logo. But then I run into the original "white screen" again.
I've tried resetting the NVRAM on boot, which succeeded because it turned the boot chime back on, but even then, running internet recovery again just causes it to hang on the white screen.
There seems to be either very high CPU or GPU usage on the white screen, as the fans start wailing pretty intensely, also the body gets very hot in a very short time.
For funsies, I installed Ubuntu onto the MacBook, which works (after smoothing over a few hiccups, fortunately I have lot more experience doing that).
Recovery mode (Cmd+R) and Apple Hardware Test (D?) I have not been able to run. The former suffers the same white screen issue as described above.

Currently, my only vague guess is a GPU issue, that may be circumvented by Ubuntu by using the not completely feature complete open source radeon drivers. But that is a wild guess. Any input is appreciated.

If your MacBook Pro was built around 2013, this is most likely a hardware fault to do with the actual GPU itself. It happened to me so I took it to Apple, they ran some diagnostic application on it and basically gave me a new, updated model. Apparently the problem is well known to them. I have some documents on the subject. I will edit/update this post if/when I manage to find the paperwork.

http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/


Some texts automatically underlined in iPhone 5 with iOS 7.1 I am using iPhone 5 with iOS 7.1, My problem is text automatically underlined on some buttons in the application

Is there any settings available to remove the underline? Or how to fix this issue ?

This is a change to show which button labels are pressable.

You should go to Settings > General > Accessibility and turn on/off Button Shapes and then revisit the app in question. You should only see underlines and shapes when this control is on, and this is to indicate what buttons that look like text are actually tappable for those with accessibility needs.


Mobile Safari requires external Javascript from another domain which is blocked or failed to load When using Mobile Safari on my iPhone (4, iOS 5.0.1) to view this site, I am not able to log in using the top right drop down arrow that is seen on the mobile view.  Nor am I able to enter the full site rather than use the mobile version.  Both of these buttons "click" (in that they highlight as if pressed when I touch them) but nothing happens at all.

At the bottom of the page is a notice that reads "Apple requires external JavaScript from another domain, which is blocked or failed to load."

However, when I follow a link to this site within Twitter, using the in-app webview without loading it directly in Mobile Safari this error does not show, and I am able to log in and enter the full site without any issues.

I don't know when this started happening, but I am sure it used to work, and other users of matching kit report that it works for them.  It's possible that this happens on other sites that use JavaScript, but this is the only one I have noted it on thus far.

To fix it, I have already tried the following:
1) Clear History
2) Clear Cookies and Data
3) Turned JavaScript on and off
4) Hard reset the phone
5) Removed all Website Data

Turning on the Developer Toolbar showed lots of JavaScript errors, specifically:

undefined, typeerror, can't find variable $

This indicates that $, the "root" variable for jQuery was not set and therefore jQuery was not loaded.

Further, the error ajax.googleapis....ery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js - syntaxerror - parse error showed that the cached version of the jQuery library was corrupted and this is the reson why jQuery's $ was not loaded.

Force quitting Safari and clearing the cache again resolved the issue.


How do I connect a Mac to an analog TV? Is it possible to connect my MBP with a Thunderbolt port to an old CRT TV? I think the TV has composite inputs at least, and maybe S-Video too.

I'd also like to use other computers with the same TV, including one with a Mini DisplayPort and one with a DVI output (I think).

I do video-editing and it's helpful to see my work on a TV.

The latest Mac models with either Thunderbolt or Mini DisplayPort can't directly output composite/S-Video (older Macs with micro-DVI could do this when using the right adapter).

Therefore you need a converter box (powered via USB or separate power supply) that takes a VGA signal and converts it to composite or S-Video, which can be connected to the TV. You need to get one that can supply the correct video signal for your TV (PAL/NTSC/SECAM), although most will support all of those. These converters are available in a wide price range - generally the more expensive, the better the quality (of the signal).

You will also need a Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter to get a VGA signal from your Mac (this also works with the Thunderbolt MBP). For the computer with DVI output you will hopefully have a graphics card that can output a VGA signal, in which case you merely need a DVI to VGA adapter. If it outputs only DVI, you're in trouble, as you'll need another converter that converts this digital signal to a VGA one.

Alternatively you could get a USB graphics card that outputs TV signals directly, although I can't seem to find one right now. This would be act like an additional monitor, which may be preferable.

In case your TV has SCART inputs (Europe mostly) instead of composite/S-video, you'll also need a SCART adapter, although this may be included with some of the products mentioned above.

The whole setup would look like this:

Mac -> Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter -> Converter box -> [SCART adapter] -> TV


An app or script to watch folder and display new images in full screen? I'm teaching a photography class and would like to use a cheap setup to display photos taken by the students in real time.

I have a macbook pro and an iphone. I also have an eye-fi card but it's an old one and doesn't work with ad-hoc networks so that's out of the question.

I'll likely be using RemoteSnap on the iphone connected to an ad-hoc wi-fi created by the mac. With this setup, the photo jpgs end up in a folder.

How can I haev every new photo in this folder to appear on the screen (in full screen)?

Thank you!

The other simpler alternative is to accept that you are already in fullscreen quicklook mode, and use the following Applescript in the above Automator action to simply select the newest file.

tell application "Finder"
    set the_folder to container of (item 1 of input) as alias

    if window 1 exists then
        set the target of window 1 to the_folder
    else
        reveal the_folder
    end if

    select input as alias
    activate
    activate window 1
end tell

If you are already within a fullscreen quicklook, then effectively you are showing the newest file screen. It is akin to pressing "up" or "down" while in fullscreen quicklook on an already populated directory.

Take your first picture, enter fullscreen quicklook mode, take successive pictures.


Can an individual add their own email tracking pixel to Apple Mail? Can an individual add their own tracking pixels to, for example, their email signature and have this be effective in a mail client that doesn’t offer read receipts? Like Apple Mail or Spark, for example?

If so, how does one do that?

You can add HTML img tags (linking to your tracking pixel) by manually editing your Mail.app email signature files. Of course these will only work if the recipient's email client loads remote images.

Signature Location

The .mailsignature files will be in one of two locations depending on whether or not the email using the signature is an iCloud account.

If the account is an iCloud account, the .mailsignature files can be found here:

~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~mail/Data/MailData/Signatures/

If the account is not iCloud, the .mailsignature files can be found here:

~/Library/Mail/[Vx]/MailData/Signatures/ (where [Vx] is a version dependent on your current install, in Mojave mine is V6).

Editing .mailsignature Files

You may want to create a new signature (and associate it to your desired account). It will then show in these folders as the most recently modified .mailsignature.

Edit this file in a text editor that can view the HTML code (replace anything in the  tags below the "Mime-version: ..." line).

For the simplest example, your file could look like:

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/html;
    charset=us-ascii
Message-Id: <C29....>
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 12.4 \(3445.104.11\))

Important Note for non-iCloud Accounts

If you're not using an iCloud email account, you MUST lock the .mailsignature files after editing, or they will be overridden.

Using the .mailsignature Files

Once you've edited the .mailsignature file, quit Mail and reopen. You can now select the .mailsignature you edited.

NOTE: Images from  tags will not appear in either the compose window or in the Signatures tab of Mail preferences, but they WILL appear in messages you send (if the recipient loads remote images).


No entry for system.log in /etc/newsyslog.conf In How can I extend the time when system.log gets turned over? and How to find recently connected external disks? it says that /etc/newsyslog.conf should have an entry for /var/log/system.log that I can edit to change how often this log file is rotated and how many old versions are kept. But on my system there's no entry for this file. The contents of my file are (omitting the big block of comments at the top):

# logfilename          [owner:group]    mode count size when  flags [/pid_file] [sig_num]
/var/log/ftp.log            640  5     1000 *     J
/var/log/hwmond.log         640  5     1000 *     J
/var/log/ipfw.log           640  5     1000 *     J
/var/log/lpr.log            640  5     1000 *     J
/var/log/ppp.log            640  5     1000 *     J
/var/log/wtmp               644  3     *    @01T05 B

I also looked in the files in /etc/newsyslog.d, none of them contain system.log, either.

So how does system.log get rotated now, and is there a setting I can change to control it?

An answer was posted in this ServerFault question.

Configuration of system.log moved in 10.9 to /etc/asl.conf. It should have a section like:

# Rules for /var/log/system.log
> system.log mode=0640 format=bsd rotate=seq compress file_max=5M all_max=50M
? [= Sender kernel] file system.log
? [<= Level notice] file system.log
? [= Facility auth] [<= Level info] file system.log
? [= Facility authpriv] [<= Level info] file system.log

The line beginning with > system.log is analogous to the old newsyslog.conf line.

After editing the file, do:

sudo killall -HUP syslogd

to make it reload the configuration file.


Why doesn't my Mac go to sleep when closing the lid or through the task bar when plugged in? I noticed that when I close to lid of my MacBookPro 2008 edition. My computer does not go to sleep. I also observed that this occurs when the Mac is plugged in. When I unplug, everything seems to be working fine. Does it have something to do with Lion? I already tried changing the energy settings in System Preferences.

Oddly Resetting my Sharing preferences did solve my problem. All I did is go into the System Preferences Settings.
1. Chose Sharing.
2. Uncheck everything that is checked.
3. Close System Preferences.
4. Open Systems preferences back up.
5. Go back into Sharing
6. Check everything you want checked
7. PROBLEM SOLVED !!! (For me at least) I have a 2008 MacbookPro running Max OS X 10.7.2


Low Battery Alert for Mac OS X El Capitan I have Macbook Air, Mac OS X El Capitan.

There is no warning box shown before the battery is near %15, like it did for Mountain Lion. So I can not notice and my computer goes sleep simply when the battery is off.

And even if it did I generally miss it because I use it external monitor attached to my Macbook Air. And because I play Spotify, I may miss the warning sound, too.

Is there warning box for low battery on El Capitan? If not, is there any utility or software that may help for external monitors and even playing music?

Default Warning

The battery indicator in the menu bar will turn red when the battery is low. There will also be a critical low power warning when the computer needs to emergency shut down.

See Apple's About Mac notebook batteries page, in particular this section:

  The low battery warning doesn't display

  If you don't receive a warning when your battery has a low charge, generally reported at or under 15%, it may be because the battery menu bar icon is disabled. Follow these steps to enable the battery status menu item:

  Open System Preferences.
  Click Energy Saver.
  Enable the "Show battery status in menu bar" check box to display the battery status menu item.

  Note: Portables using OS X Mavericks v10.9 or later display the low battery warning when the battery has approximately 10 minutes of power remaining. Earlier versions or OS X instead report it at 15% or less.

Third Party: Power Manager

Software such as Power Manager can be used to trigger scripts, sounds, and actions when the battery level drops:

More advanced abilities such as stopping music from playing and integrating the warning into your workflows is possible. Battery levels and changes are exposed through Power Manager's AppleScript interface.

Disclosure: I am an engineer who works on Power Manager. So, feel free to ask technical questions about the product.


Remove characters preceding the second underscore in file names I have a bunch of files and I would like to remove all characters preceding the second underscore in the file names. An example is shown below. How do I do this using bash commands?

[From]

021_D05_53715-F.ab1
021_D06_53936-F.ab1
022_C06_53935-F.ab1
030_C08_53993-F.ab1
048_A12_54057-F.ab1

[To]

53715-F.ab1
53936-F.ab1
53935-F.ab1
53993-F.ab1
54057-F.ab1

Bash can figure out where the last underscore is using a regular expression match, then you can use its substring extraction to get the part of the filename that you care about. Something like this:

#!/bin/bash

file="021_D05_53715-F.ab1"
pos=`expr "$file" : '^.*_'`
newfile=${file:$pos}
echo "$file -> $newfile"


Can Someone Explain Why These Scripts Work? I'm a brand new AppleScript initiate. I was at a Developer Summit and needed to stop messing with my windows so much. So I looked up scripting the window sizing and positioning. I was on my MacBook Pro and so I wrote the following code and placed in Automator as a Service whic I then saved to HardDrive>Users>User>Library>Services.

tell application "System Events"
    set myTargetApplication to name of the first process whose frontmost is true
end tell

tell application myTargetApplication
    --  This line is what we use when we need to grab that bounds of a window.
    -- set currentBounds to bounds of the first window
    set bounds of the first window to {61, 46, 1261, 777}
end tell

I would write the script in "Script Editor" and test it with the commented out line uncommented and the line after it commented. Then I could position the window like I want and get the settings I needed to apply. I got the settings, and pasted them in the line right before "end tell" and they worked.

I set this as a service and now I can make ANY window (from Service) size to what I needed.

I arrived home and connected to my dual monitor, a 32" Acer, and everytime I would run the script in my big monitor it would JUMP to the MacBook Window.

So I tweaked this and that, tried several things, looked things up, and during a run did this:

tell application "System Events"
    set myTargetApplication to name of the first process whose frontmost is true
end tell

tell application myTargetApplication
    --  This line is what we use when we need to grab that bounds of a window.
    -- set currentBounds to bounds of the first window
    set bounds of the first window to {1299, 38, 3182, 1062}
end tell

I did the same thing in Automator... saved as a service... and now they work.

EXACTLY LIKE I WANT.

I am not COMPLAINING... I'm just lost...

I don't see WHY they work. I'm hoping someone can point out what makes them work so I can better understand AppleScript.

Thank you in advance

The smallest rectangle containing both "real" monitors is your virtual desktop.

The upper left corner of the monitor containing the menubar is the (0|0) coordinate. Moving rightwards and downwards increases the numbers.

If you have one monitor (1920|1200) the upper left corner is the (0|0) and bottom right corner has the coordinate (1920|1200) and the whole desktop is described by {0, 0, 1920, 1200}

If you have two equally sized monitors (1920|1200) arranged side by side and the left one is your main monitor the coordinates of the complete desktop are  {0, 0, 3840, 1200}. If the right monitor is the main one: {-1920, 0, 1920, 1200}.

If you have two differently sized monitors (1920|1200) and (2000|1400) arranged with an off-set (e.g. the bottom right corner of the small monitor (1920|1200) is right next to the upper left corner (0|0) of the other monitor and the left one is the main one) then the desktop is described by {0, 0, 3920, 2600}. If the right one is the main monitor the whole desktop is represented by {-1920, -1200, 2000, 1400}.

So your window {1299, 38, 3182, 1062} in the arrangement marked in bold would look like this:


Where are the dictionaries of Mac OS X's built in password assistant? Mac OS has a built in password generator. It is a little bit hidden behind the key icon in System Preferences / Accounts / Change password. The memorable option is quite nice as it even conjugates words (my screenshot shows the German version):

My question is: Where does this helper get its words and even variants of words? Is there a complex dictionary where it can look them up for the specific language?

I've only used OSX in it's English settings. OSX has an inbuilt dictionary for system-wide spellcheck, definitions etc. I imagine it uses this for memorable passwords, with the Size slider determining the limit on the size of the words that are plucked from said dictionary.


Transfer my iPad to different user account on same computer? I'm trying to transfer ownership of my iPad to a different user account on a different computer. Obviously this is basically the same thing as transferring it to a new computer.

I don't want to lose all my apps and have to remember what I had installed. I thought I might be able to make a hard backup and move it over to the other account, and wipe and restore the iPad on there, but the backup seems to persist the information about which user account / iTunes combination owns it.

Is it possible at all to move my iPad onto a new computer without endless pain and manual work?

There's no option to 'transfer purchases' when I try to sync the iPad. Both are using the same Apple ID on the iTunes store.

Why not tether the iPad to iCloud, then it doesn't need a computer at all? If you do that and turn on backups, you can then set it to manage music (or media, if you do videos too) manually, and then you can drag stuff on and off from either computer, and none of your purchases will be lost.

When you plug into the new computer it might ask you to authorise your account but you can have up to five devices or something so that shouldn't be a problem.


automatic save before "Run in Terminal" in BBEdit I am a new BBEdit user, with a long experience as TextWrangler user.
In TextWrangler, I am used at running python scripts with the command "Run in Terminal", and in TextWrangler the default behaviour is to save the file before sending it to the terminal.

I noticed that in BBEdit, v11.1.2, if I give the "Run in Terminal" command for an unsaved file, the "autosave" option is not there, so I end up sending the "temporary file" for execution, which is in a temporary folder, and things "go wrong" (the script is in the wrong directory, and I need to access relative folders paths).

I looked in the preferences, but I didn't find yet where to set as default to save before running the file.

I have also searched with google, but to no avail.

Is it a "hidden" preference, to be given in the command line?

Contact Barebones, the developer's of BBEdit, about recreating this Text Wrangler behaviour in BBEdit.

Barebone's support is at support@barebones.com

They will be able to help.

BBEdit 11 Release Notes

The BBEdit 11 release notes mention the following:

  The #! menu has been rearranged, and some behaviors for running #! scripts have been changed, as follows:

  "Run…" has been changed to "Run with Options…". This brings up a dialog which lets you control what is done with the script output. The options to "Run in Debugger" and "Run in Terminal" have been removed, since you can do that explicitly from the #! menu itself (and scripts run that way don't get their output back into the application anyway).


How to disable Spotlight indexing when on battery? Every time I add a few MBss of files to my SD disk, Spotlight starts eating battery (per Activity Monitor Energy Impact) for one to several days indexing them.

How can I make indexing to turn off automatically when on battery power, and enable again when Macbook is powered from an AC outlet?

jherran's answer helps you with disabling Spotlight indexing, but does not address the part of the question about toggling automatically when AC power is connected or disconnected.

You could use sudo mdutil -i off / and sudo mdutil -i on / in conjunction with a listener for when AC power is disconnected. Using something like ControlPlane will satisfy your requirement for automatic toggling. It supports "Current power source" as an event to listen for. It is free and open source.

You might be against using a third party solution. To roll your own, try writing a script that loops checking pmset -g ps | grep -c 'AC Power' with a sleep interval in between. If AC is connected, it outputs 1 (0 otherwise).


VM running Sierra 10.12.3 in Parallels 12 stops responding to the mouse Update: Still a problem in Parallels 14.0.1 ☹

I have a host MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) running Sierra 10.12.3, using Parallels Desktop version 12.1.3, with a virtual machine running as the guest OS the same version of macOS Sierra 10.12.3.

When I switch from an app on the real Mac, going back into the VM, I often find the mouse pointer no longer has any effect within the VM. I can see the mouse pointer within the VM. But clicking on menus has no effect, dragging on window titles has no effect, clicking within the various apps’ windows has no effect.

At that point, the VM becomes useless. My only option is to choose Actions > Restart on the Parallels app (on the real Mac) to reboot the VM. After restart the VM works normally… until I use an app on the real Mac and then return back to the VM. Then no more reactions to the mouse.

What is the trigger for this bug?
Is there a fix or workaround? Some way to regain the mouse pointer functionality within the running VM?

The mouse pointer is able move between the VM macOS and the host macOS. The mouse continues to work when used on apps on the real host macOS. The problem is that when the mouse is inside the VM macOS, clicking has no effect.

I am not alone in seeing this bug. See the Parallels forum site: Mouse Problems - P12 - Host MacOS Sierra - Guest OS X El Capitan

  'll be working away in the VM and suddenly the mouse will not interact with any of the screen elements in the VM any more. I know the focus is still in the VM because, if I was working in a text file, for example, I can still type in the file. But I can't click on anything, move any of the windows around, click any menu items, etc. It even happened once when a drop-down list appeared and I couldn't select anything in the list. I can still move the mouse cursor around, though.

A workaround with this is to open Apple Remote Desktop, and screen share the Mac VM. At least doing that will keep me from losing work that I have started in the VM.

I have contacted Parallels support about this many times. It happens on both of my Macs, and it has been going on since I upgraded to Parallels 12 last year. It's still happening with Parallels 13. Several people at Parallels claim that this is something that the engineering team is looking at, but if they are, it's low priority to them.


How do I turn a Safari Webarchive file into a folder? I understand a Safari webarchive is a single file with the source code and other resources from a web page concatenated into a single file. I found a Macworld article from 2006 describing a program that does just this, but the link to the program is no longer current.

Is there any currently available software that can convert a Safari webarchive file into a more standard format?

Is there any currently available software that can convert a Safari
  webarchive file into a more standard format?

If you are comfortable with command line, there is a tool textutil on Mac OS for converting webarchive file to txt, html, rtf, rtfd, doc, docx, wordml, or odt.

Example:
textutil -convert html /Users/USERNAME/NAME.webarchive

For converting webarchive file to pdf, try "Wondershare PDF Editor for Mac". http://www.wondershare.com/pdf/how-to-convert-webarchive-to-pdf.html


AppleScript quicktime to record iPhone screen I am looking for a an Apple Script to tell Quicktime Player to start a new recording of the attached iPhone (so record an app doing its thing) and with the specified audio input.

Is this even possible?

Thanks

Is it possible? Maybe. First I tried:

 tell application "QuickTime Player"
    set current camera to video recording device named "My Name's iPhone"
    end tell

and I got an error that the current camera could not be set to that. I also tried to set it back to "FaceTime HD Camera" and QuickTime Player did not like that either.

Next I tried:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    set theRecording to new movie recording
    set theDocument to its document "Movie Recording"
    tell theDocument
        set current camera to video recording device named "FaceTime HD Camera"
        start
    end tell
end tell

But still got an error when trying to set the current camera property.

So the closest I could come was to set the camera and audio manually, and QuickTime Player should remember those settings. So then you can just use this script to start the recording. Although to be honest, it doesn't really do what couldn't be done with the same amount of button clicks in QuickTime Player itself!

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    set theRecording to new movie recording
    set theDocument to its document "Movie Recording"
    tell theDocument
        start
    end tell
end tell

That does not completely answer your question, since I could not set the video and audio sources for the new movie. The AppleScript dictionary for QuickTime Player that the "current camera" property of the document "new recording" should be able to be set by AppleScript. So possibly someone smarter than me can figure out how to set it.


How can I prevent my bluetooth headset from preempting the internal mic on connection? How can I prevent my bluetooth headset from preempting the internal mic on connection?

Every time I connect my headset I am forced to go into sound preferences to set the mic back to the internal microphone.

macOS Sierra 10.12.3

You must go to System Preferences > Bluetooth, select the headset device and click the X on the right side to remove it. When you need to use the headset again, it will need re-pairing. (Screenshot below shows my Apple Trackpad, for which new batteries are imminently needed!)


Move Dock to another screen edge when unplugging monitor When I exclusively use my laptop screen I prefer to have the Dock on the left edge, but when I plug in my external monitor I'd like to move the Dock to it instead.

Since my external screen is to the right of the laptop, the Dock will only appear on it if configured to appear on the bottom or right edge of the screen. As long as it's set to the left edge it remains on the laptop screen.

How do I accomplish this automatically whenever the external screen is (dis-)connected?

The solution mentioned here has nasty side-effects like unminimizing all my windows after killing the Dock:

defaults write com.apple.Dock orientation -string bottom
killall Dock

Use ControlPlane to run the following shell script whenever the state of the monitor connection changes:

move dock to bottom.sh:

#!/bin/bash

osascript -e '
tell application id "com.apple.systemevents"
    tell dock preferences
        set screen edge to bottom
    end tell
end tell
'

Duplicate the file, where you replace bottom with left.

Set up ControlPlane

Create two ControlPlane contexts: Laptop screen only and External monitor.
Enable the 'Attached Monitor' evidence source.
Create two 'Attached Monitor' rules – one negated -- that switch to the corresponding context with 100% certainty when they fire.
Create two actions that run the two shell scripts On arrival to their corresponding contexts.


Apple Reminders make no sound I make use of Apple Reminders on my iOS 10 iPhone SE but there never is any sound when the reminder is due. Do not disturb mode is turned off but it doesn't seem to matter. Anyone else who has had this issue?

This same issue drove me mad, not to mention almost making me miss an appointment, until I found the answer by accident. There are two places where the option to set the sound for a reminder appears (no, me neither).  The obvious one is:

Settings>Notifications>Reminders (allow notifications)>Sounds

Unfortunately, this is the wrong one.  The right one is in:

Settings>Sounds>Reminder Alerts

The phone will always follow the setting in Sounds, not the one in Notifications.  The same applies to calendar alerts.  Sigh.


Stop Chrome loading videos in background tabs? As I'm sure we're all aware, Chrome by default loads background tabs as soon as they're opened - youtube videos autoplay, ads load, it's a mess. To my knowledge (and following from this thread) there is no way to change this natively, and no plans to implement it in the future.

I've tried searching around for apps/extensions that prevent background tabs from being loaded until they're navigated to, with very limited and mediocre results. The closest solutions seem to be:

Muting tabs that are making sound
Suspending background tabs after minimum 5 minutes

Neither of these prevent the video from loading the first place, and still leave me with a lot of bandwidth-sucking and restarting the video when I get around to the tab. First-world problems, I know, but after a few weeks of this it gets under your skin.

I'm hoping my search-fu just isn't strong enough to find a solution - is there any way to give Chrome behavior similar to Safari or Firefox, where the tab just doesn't load until you navigate to it? I'll accept apps, extensions, terminal hacks, anything that works.

Until Chrome comes up with that function like FF, the closest you can get to it is to Disable lots of bandwidth and storage consuming apps.

That can be done here:

Also go to your chrome://plugins/

and disable all Plugins you do not want.

That will not stop the background loading of the page but will limit the what, and you can still use them at your desire (it will ask you).

And it looks like this example of not loading some advertisement at the top of a page.


My iphone for the first time vibrate twice for one message I was talking in face time with my husband and he sent me a message to I message, my phone vibrated but there wasn't a sms or notifications for the sms.

After 3 seconds my phone vibrate again and then show the sms.

The question is how can iphone 5 vibrate twice for same sms.

Normally you could disable the "Repeat" in

go to settings > notifications >  select messages  > scroll down to repeat alerts > select never /.


How to Sync Notes El Capitan to iOS 9 via IMAP Yes, I know Apple says this will no longer work. But it continues to work just fine on iOS 9 devices. Both iPad and iPhone iOS 9 devices continue to sync via my IMAP account. I enter or modify a note on iPad and I see the change on iPhone immediately, and vice versa. And my web mail client see the Notes folder with the updates. All sub-folders are visible in iPhone and iPad and in the web mail client...but not on Mac OS X.

How can I fix my Mac Notes configuration to reenable syncing via IMAP? I don't need the new features of Notes on El Capitan... I need basic synchronization of simple notes between all devices. I can't use iCloud or any other for-profit web service, I need to sync through a specific IMAP server for compliance reasons.

I've tried restoring the old Notes app, but Apple disallows this during the Time Machine restore function.

Thanks

For anyone else stumbling over this because Notes.app stopped syncing IMAP based notes in El Capitan 10.11.3, the solution which worked for me is the following:

Firstly, check that the IMAP Path Prefix is correct for the account. This can be done in System Preferences / Internet Accounts / (select your account) / Advanced or in Mail.app / Preferences / Accounts / (select your IMAP account) / Advanced. In my case, this was set correctly to INBOX, but sometimes requires different values, or no value at all.

Secondly, the solution given above by @rene actually works, but it's in French, so here's a step-by-step approach that worked for me.

Open Terminal.app to get a command prompt
Change directory to the following folder:

bash> cd ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/

Make a backup the file NotesV6.storedata so that you can restore it in case something goes wrong

bash> cp NotesV6.storedata NotesV6.storedata.old

Open NotesV6.storedata with sqlite3

bash> sqlite3 NotesV6.storedata

A new sqlite prompt will appear - you can always exit by pressing CTRL-D

sqlite>

(Optional) You can examine the table that we need to fix by entering the followoing command

sqlite> .schema ZACCOUNT

The ZACCOUNT table contains all accounts which Notes.app is accessing. However, in my case, the IMAP based account entry was missing information about username (field ZUSERNAME), hostname (field ZHOSTNAME) and path prefix (field ZSERVERPATHPREFIX). This is the information we need to update.
You can dump the whole table by invoking

sqlite> select * from ZACCOUNT

but it's probably easier to select a few relevant fields and identify the Z_PK id of your account

sqlite> select Z_PK,ZFULLNAME,ZPARENTACACCOUNTIDENTIFIER,ZUSERNAME, ZHOSTNAME, ZSERVERPATHPREFIX from ZACCOUNT;

This produced the following output for me:

1||
4|Exchange|EF792FA7-AAAA-CCCC-5678-123456789012|||
5|IMAPaccount|187229D1-BBBB-DDDD-1234-098765431287|||

As you can see by the field divider lines (|) at the end of the last line, fields for username, hostname, and prefix are empty for the IMAP account (Z_PK id 5) which is what needs to be corrected.

Update the table entry by invoking:

update ZACCOUNT set ZUSERNAME='email@example.com', ZHOSTNAME='imap.hostname.com',ZSERVERPATHPREFIX='INBOX.' where Z_PK=5;

You will of course need to set the correct field values and also adjust the Z_PK id with the correct reference, which you identified above.

As soon as I'd updated the table, Notes.app started magically syncing the notes from my IMAP based accounts.


How can I eject a Time Machine drive quickly? I have a Time Machine drive for my laptop...

I bring the machine to work. Every morning I right-click "Eject" the drive, and it takes forever or just doesn't eject.

I'm in a hurry, so I either sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now or if I'm really in a rush just yank the drive (then get scolded by the OS when I log back in later).

What would be a better way?

MacBook Pro mid 2012 ; OS 10.12.1 (Sierra)

There is a 3rd party app named Mountain that gives you control over all your connected volumes. It's not free, selling for $7 but they have a free trial period so you can test drive it. Mountain creates a menu item that user can use to mount, unmount, eject or load volumes. I can't guarantee it is faster than your method but I use it to mount or unmount stubborn drives.


How to increase keyboard key repeat rate on OS X? I know how to set the key repeat rate using System Preferences > Keyboard but it looks that the fastest settings is not enough.

Is there any way to speed up even more?

I do not know if others encountered the same issue, but I'm using a MacBook Pro, model 2010.

You can also change the preference keys by running the following in Terminal:
defaults write -g InitialKeyRepeat -int 10 # normal minimum is 15 (225 ms)
defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 1 # normal minimum is 2 (30 ms)

The changes aren't applied until you log out and back in. KeyRepeat can't be set between 2 (30 ms) and 1 (15 ms) though.
I also use KeyRemap4MacBook. I've set the repeat rates to 40 ms and the initial repeat rates to 150 ms.


Homebrew: how to switch between GCC versions `gcc49` and `gcc`? I foolishly uninstalled GCC 4.9 after brew upgradeing to GCC 5. However I need both versions and I need to be able to switch back and forth. I thought I could just do brew switch 4.9.2 but the old version of GCC was installed to the folder Cellar/gcc49/4.9.2 instead of Cellar/gcc/4.9.2, so Homebrew doesn't know where to find the old version.

How can I force Homebrew to install both versions in Cellar/gcc?

That is, I have:

brew list --versions gcc
# gcc 5.1.0
brew list --versions gcc49
# gcc49 4.9.2_1

But I'd like to have:

brew list --versions gcc
# gcc 5.1.0 4.9.2_1

You can’t, those are different formulae, and Homebrew doesn’t allow you to install a previous version of a formula.

The workaround is to remove gcc, then go back in Homebrew’s history (remember that it’s a Git repository), get the gcc formula as it was before the 5.1.0 upgrade, install it, then upgrade gcc to get the latest version.

The 5.1.0 gcc upgrade was done in Homebrew commit 9cf3d4da1148c0a0d2f42c2fbe75f9a557339bab:

$ cd $(brew --prefix)
$ git show -s 9cf3d4da1148c0a0d2f42c2fbe75f9a557339bab
commit 9cf3d4da1148c0a0d2f42c2fbe75f9a557339bab
Author: David Christenson <david@the-david.com>
Date:   Sat May 2 18:58:17 2015 -0600

    gcc 5.1.0

    Update to latest stable release, add option and patch for JIT, remove CLooG dependency,
    refactor language selection, add HEAD, use HTTPS mirror.

You need to checkout the parent commit:

$ git checkout 9cf3d4da1148c0a0d2f42c2fbe75f9a557339bab^

Then get the gcc formula and save it somewhere:

$ brew cat gcc > /tmp/gcc.rb

If you’re lazy I put this formula online here. You can now go Back to the Future:

$ git checkout master

Be sure you removed the current gcc:

$ brew rm gcc

Now install the 4.9 version, either from your local copy:

$ brew install /tmp/gcc.rb

Or from my online copy:

$ brew install https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bfontaine/eacd18e2c413005a7526/raw/320a73fc6e1bbf0009a08e6bd90e9d32c3409007/gcc.rb

You should now have a working GCC 4.9 install. Now, upgrade to get the 5.2:

$ brew upgrade gcc

Done.

$ brew ls --versions gcc
gcc 4.9.2_1 5.2.0


Time Machine Backup to a Windows computer Is it possible to do a time machine backup from a MacBook Pro to a Windows 7 PC?
(i.e. use Windows 7 as a time capsule)

There was a lifehacker article on doing exactly this by creating a sparse HFS+ bundle on the Windows machines.  You could use a Linux machine or Amazon S3 using s3fs + encfs too.

Time Machine requires an HFS+ filesystems backup disks like this sparse bundle because Time Machine uses Apple's unusual directory hard links.

Linux could theoretically read the HTF+ sparse bundle but Windows sounds doubtful.


Mac App To Make External HDD Bootable Instead of using DiskMaker, is there another app to make Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 (ppc) bootable without creating a bootable usb? I want to copy all the contents of the Mac OS X Install DVD straight to the external HDD and make it bootable when I put it into another machine.

As far as I can see the Apple supported "createinstallmedia" command does not work with macOS versions prior to Mavericks.

However it is possible to restore the MacOS installer disk image (inside the installer .app package) to a USB thumb drive.

Using Disk utility format the USB drive with Mac OS Journaled format
Right-Click on the .app package for the version of MacOS that you want to create a bootable installer from and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu that appears.
Copy the .dmg file therein to your desktop. I forget what it is called but is will be several GB in size and the only one there.
Select the recently formatted USB key on the left side of Disk utility and find the "Restore" command. It may be in the Edit menu (Mojave) or an icon on the Disk Utility title bar.
Select the .dmg image file you copied to the desktop to restore from and click the restore button.

That will image the USB key using the installer .dmg file as the source. It will take 10 minutes or so but when you are done you will have a bootable USB key to install that version of macOS from.


Lost all files after installing Yosemite I upgraded to OS X Yosemite and I have lost all my files or I don't know where they are or how to get them.

I didn't realise that upgrading would delete all my files. Is there a way to go back to retrieve these files? All my business files, pics and personal files are gone.

The Installation of new operating system will normally not touch your files.

What it might have happened is you created a new user account and all your files are in the old user account.

If you have admin privileges you should be able to see the old user account in sys pref users and switch to it.


Moving hard drives from one Mac to another I have Mac Mini server with one 500Gb HDD (with system) and another 1 Tb SSD (with data). The computer shows no sign of life, and my Time Capsule, unfortunately, is also dead. So, I have bought the same model of Mac Mini, but unfortunately with lower disks capacity (250 and 750 Gb).
So the question is, can I just physically replace the disks in working Mac by the other from my old not working Mac? Will they work or there is some kind of protection that will block the system? Are there any pitfalls?

To save any potential issues with firmware changes over the years, make sure the new Mac is running the same or newer macOS as the old one was.

Mojave, for instance installed a firmware update to many machines at the time. I'm not certain this would cause any real issues if it wasn't present, but it would save any uncertainty.

Once you've done that, then yes - as the Mini Server is pre-T2 security - you should be able to simply swap out the drives with no ill-effects whatsoever.

if you have an external UDB dock that would take your system HD & the new machine's 750GB SSD, I'd consider using something like Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the HD to SSD, for the added speed.


Updating SSL root certs on old Mac (running Lion) My father-in-law reported an "Invalid SSL certificate" suddenly started appearing on his online banking website.

After verifying it's not a website issue (it loads correctly on other computers), I understood that the root certificate of the website certificate is not being trusted probably because too new and the Mac is not being updated anymore.

Is my understanding correct?
If yes, is there a safe way to download new root certificates that are being added to recent Macs?

Yes, if the certificate is being accepted by other, newer machines, the issue it does seem likely that your father's machine isn't receiving updates to its root certificate trust store.  I wasn't able to  verify that Lion isn't receiving those but I think it's a fair guess.
Well, that's a harder question to answer.  If you look here and here, it does seem like it's possible to do, but you'd need to find the keychain files from a newer OS and pull them into Lion.  It's really just a guess as to whether the steps in that answer would work for you since it's 10.8.  I actually would advise figuring out which certificate shows up as expired on your machine (or which root certificate is missing/untrusted), and downloading that specific certificate and appropriately trusting it, first.  But if you want to, you could also backup your system and give that second answer a shot.  Hopefully you have access to a more recent macOS installer you can extract files from.


Preview document history I seemingly open 5 documents for every one document I close in preview (I do a lot of reading with preview).
Is there a way to have preview reopen all of the documents I had opened last time it was closed (for example, when I want to restart my computer to grab an update), regardless of the number of opened documents? Sometimes the history just isn't enough for me or the history doesn't reflect what I presently have open.
If not, can you suggest an alternative?

Acrobat Reader has an option to open PDFs from the last session. You may give that a test drive since it's free. Launch Acrobat Reader and go to the file menu. 2nd option down reads "Reopen PDFs from last session". This may do what you want.


Silencing “Your disk is almost full” notification Since none of the solutions found here Silencing "Your disk is almost full" notification worked for me on Mojave, I simply disabled the daemon:
sudo mv /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/StorageManagement.framework/Resources/diskspaced /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/StorageManagement.framework/Resources/diskspaced.disabled

Brute force, I know, but unloading/removing/disabling using launchctl didn't work and I got annoyed.
Is there a more elegant way to turn off Apple's constant nannying alert messages?

Put mac on do not disturb - this worked for me w/ Mojave


Pages on iOS custom paragraph styles & templates? On Pages 1.6 for iOS, is there any way I can:

Change the paragraph styles in the document to custom ones

i.e. The default 'blank' template has Helvetica as the body style. Can I change the body style to, say Helvetica Neue Light? Or the colour of the Title style?
If so, is there any way to add this template to the list of provided templates (possibly using something like iExplorer to copy it over)?

Being able to just change paragraph style is good enough, and I think it would be a bit hard to satisfy point 2, what with Apple's lock on the iOS filesystem. My current solution is to create the templates in Pages on Mac, and copy them over, then create a new document by copying from iTunes every time I need to use a custom template.

Edit

If it's not clear from the above, I'm more interested in a solution to point 1 to point 2. It's point 1 for a reason. I already have a half solution to point 2, so I don't really need any further half-solution answers for point 2.

You can create a symlink of the actual pages template directory on your Mac in your Dropbox so that you don't have to maintain two copies of your templates, and then use Dropbox to open the template files in Pages to make a new doc based on the template.

Though template files are saved as .template, Pages for iOS still opens them correctly. You can create the symlink with the following command:

ln -s ~/Library/Application\ Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/My\ Templates/ ~/Dropbox/Pages\ Templates