Three-finder side swipe between apps lagging, swiping up for mission control and then side-swiping produces no lag I am experiencing something like a 1-3 second lag only when side-swiping with 3 fingers between apps/desktops.

However, if I first swipe up with 3 fingers to enable mission control, then everything is fine and I can swipe between desktops seamlessly.

I've noticed that if I run 3 fingers across the trackpad, then I'll eventually be able to switch between desktops.  At that point, if I keep the motion going I can switch between multiple desktops.

Any suggestions welcome - I've changed my display color profile and reset my nvram as other mojave threads have suggested.

EDIT: Changing my energy saving preferences to only use the dedicated graphics card doesn't show any differences. Using Mojave in light mode instead of Dark mode doesn't change anything either.

EDIT2: I've discovered that switching user accounts completely resolves the issue.

Posting this as an answer so that it's more visible.

I'm going to detail exactly what I did even if the steps seems unnecessary.

I switched between the two accounts a couple of times, noticing that the 3 finger side swipe between spaces wasn't working on my normal account but was working on my test account. I decided to duplicate my normal account and was reading about how to do this on my test account. I started up the migration tool and went through a couple of steps before running into an error. At this point I switched back to my normal account and the swipe was working again.


decrypt external hard drive mac os catalina I've got a LaCie 2TB external  SSD drive that i would like to decrypt. I tried the method found online of right clicking the drive in finder however there is no option to decrypt the drive there, I tried using the "diskutil cs revert" command in terminal and that didn't work either. I also tried doing it using disk utility itself and the option to decrypt wasn't there either. I'm running macOS catalina 10.15.4

What file system is your external drive?
I have an external APFS volume and there is the 'Decrypt' option in finder so I am guessing that feature is fs-dependent.


How can I add a voiceover to my Keynote presentation? I have a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.9.4 and Keynote 6.2.2.  I have a presentation done in Keynote with slide and music.  Now I want add a voice over.  Can I do that and if so how?

Go to Play → Record Slideshow and click the Record button at the bottom to begin.


How to reconnect to Airport Extreme hard drive without rebooting I put a mac formatted hard drive on my export extreme. I can connect just fine. If I leave the house and use the computer outside I'll get a message about the drive not available and the option to disconnect. I pick that. Then when I get back home the Airport Extreme still shows up in the finder but clicking it I get the message

  "AirportExtreme" can't be opened because the original item can't be found

Rebooting my mac fixes the issue but that's no good because I lose the state of all my apps.

Is there fix for this issue? Either (a) a way to make it just work like it's supposed to or (b) some command I can run to fix it?

Okay, I found one workaround which to option-click the Finder and pick "relaunch"


MacBook battery Not Charging I bought a new MacBook Pro sometime ago. I plug in the charger when using it.
But my MacBook shows Not Charging in the battery icon in the macOS task bar. But I have the charging cable plugged in.
Why does it show that? It appears my MacBook is fine, but I don't know why it shows me Not Charging.

The Not Charging message that you see is most likely displayed by the Battery health management feature build into macOS Catalina 10.15.5 and later, and is available on MacBooks with Thunderbolt 3 port.
The Battery health management features is intended to slow down the chemical ageing of MacBook battery by analyzing the battery temperature history and charging patterns, and intermittently stopping the charging.
You can toggle the Battery health management feature by going to System Preferenes app → Energy, and clicking on the Battery Health... button and unchecking Battery health management.

Apple recommends you leave it turned on, but lets you turn off the setting.
You can learn more about Battery health management by reading the following Apple Support document:

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT211246


Mirror desktop items on two monitors I don't want to mirror my monitors but I would like the files in ~/Desktop to display on both. Right now they only display on my primary monitor. Is it possible?

You can't make items appear twice on what is essentially the same desktop, but you can view the contents of your desktop as a folder.

The simplest method using default settings is to open a new folder in Finder,  Cmd ⌘   N  , then Desktop should be one of the Favourites on the Sidebar.


Cannot locate 173 GB backups on hard drive About my Mac Storage states that I have used 173 GB of my hard drive in backups.

Where are these?  My iPhoto library disappeared, and I have been unable to restore through Time Machine because it says I don't have enough space. How can I free the storage or find the backups to restore the iPhoto library.

OS X 10.9.5

Open the Terminal.app and type sudo du -k | awk '$1 > 500000' | sort -nr, this command will search for all Directories bigger than 500MB and sort them by size. So you should find the Location to your Backups.


Are iPhone sim cards locked specifically to the iPhone hardware? I've got an iPhone 3GS, on the UK network of O2

Can I take that sim card out, and put it into another mobile device (not iPhone) ? I don't have a spare device to try this hence asking here

More importantly, would the sim card actually work in a non-iPhone device or is it locked for iPhone usage only?

Thanks

No SIM card is locked to any phone. The SIM card will work in any unlocked device supporting the frequencies used by the carrier that issued the SIM card.


Does setting sharing & permissions on "Ignore ownership on this volume" disk do anything? I have a Mac Mini being used as a file server with an external hard drive used to store the shared folders.  If the "Ignore ownership on this volume" is not checked, I can control access for specific users using the System Preferences -> Sharing pane.

However, if I check the "Ignore ownership on this volume", all user accounts on the system (including network user accounts created with "Sharing only" option) can read/write to the shared folders over the network.  It appears that any sharing & permissions rules are completely ignored on this volume (which I suppose makes sense).

However, why does the system then allow me to add custom access rules to this volume?  Do these rules do anything on a volume with "Ignore ownership on this volume" enabled?

When you set a volume to ignore ownership the kernel sets the files on that volume to the user unknown. Files owned by the unknown user appear to be owned by any user that can access those files. Still the privileges grant what you can do with any file.


Is there a way I can share a disk image as a remote DVD drive? I would like to upgrade one of my laptops to Snow Leopard but the DVD drive doesn't work.

So can I share a disk image to use it with Remote Mac OS X Install tool?

If you can manage a cheap 8GB USB flash drive, try read these links

http://www.maciverse.com/install-os-x-snow-leopard-from-usb-flash-drive.html
http://osxdaily.com/2009/09/02/install-snow-leopard-from-external-firewire-or-usb-hard-drive-or-how-to-upgrade-to-106-without-a-dvd-drive/


Kiosk app for iPad that allows using a client side certificate My web application is demanding a client side certificate to be installed.

When opening the web app from a browser on my iPad, I'm prompted to allow using the certificate and all works well.

Do you know any kiosk app that will give the same functionality? I've tried several with no success, getting 403 error immediately.

It is not possible by any browser besides Safari due to keychain access.

The only solution would be then to develop your own app.


Is there any way to change the visual style of the interface buttons in OS X? For instance, in Tiger, the blue/grey "OK" or "Cancel" buttons in a window had a rounder radius. In Mavericks, they're more rectangular. Are the button images stored in a resources folder somewhere in the Library? Is there a safe way to change them?

Thanks!

There isn't a general one place to change these and when you do, it's typically with software additions that make the system less stable.

You would have better luck changing them on a per-application basis since that is less disruptive of injecting custom code across all applications. Even then, you'll find that some applications hard code their buttons and they only look like the system ones.


Is there a way to force the dark mode of Mac third-party apps that do not have it? I am a huge fan of dark mode, and I am wondering if there is a way to have dark mode on apps that have not implemented it yet.

Yes. However, note that apps which do not natively support dark mode will likely contain elements which do not coordinate with the new theme, so doing this will be less effective than if the developer were to update their app.

Quit your app.
Determine the app's bundle identifier: grep -A 1 CFBundleIdentifier /path/to/your/application.app/Contents/Info.plist
defaults write BUNDLE_IDENTIFIER NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool false

where you would replace BUNDLE_IDENTIFIER with the actual value from step 2 (e.g., com.apple.TextEdit).


DIY fusion Drive two identical volumes show up booting with option key? I've succesfully built a fusiondrive on my late 2009 iMac (256Gb Samung830+2TB HDD).
I set the size to 100%, so I have no recovery partion. However when I boot with the option key I get two identical volumes to chose from. Clicking one or the other brings me to the desktop. I've seen this reported elsewhere, but is it normal on a DIY fusion drive? My iMac runs fine and snappier and the drive shows up as one in Disk utility. Could indicate that some kind of special firmware on the SSD is needed to get a "fully" functional fusion drive?

Fusion Drive utilizes a component of OS X called CoreStorage to work. When you boot your Mac holding down Option, you are booting into a screen running in the low-level EFI environment, before OS X has started. EFI doesn't understand what a home-built Fusion Drive is, but sees two physical drives capable of booting into OS X.

I'm not sure of the mechanics of why factory-built Fusion Drives in the latest Macs act differently but my guess is that there is a firmware chip of some sort, like you said. Apple is known to put custom firmware on some of their hard drives.


I can't delete a calendar event I did not create I have a calendar event that I did not create but is recurring.  I have declined the request, yet it still shows up on my calendar.  Because I did not create it, I can't delete the event.

My first thought would be to disconnect the calendar (I'm assuming this is a shared calendar of some kind) on all your devices, and then reconnect the calendar to see if the reoccurring deleted event still happens.

If the event is still getting downloaded to your device and spamming you constantly, you may need to contact the creator of the event to remove it from the calendar or otherwise change some settings.

(Is the calendar causing you problems using Exchange, iCloud CalDAV or Gmail CalDAV? I tend to find Gmail CalDav really finicky with iOS devices especially.)


How to restore Applications & Files from HD Backup (Migration Asst won't read it) I recently had a problem with my MBP which wouldn't start up. After the chime it would shut down. I started using ⌘ cmd+R and ran Disk Utility. Had issues with my boot partition but no issues on my data partition.

Bought a new external HDD, created 3 partitions as Mac OS Extended Journaled:

Boot Partition
Original MBP Boot Partition Backup
Original MBP Data Partition Backup

I managed to get all the data saved so I'm reasonably confident I have everything backed up on the external HDD.

I erased my MBP boot partition and reinstalled Mountain Lion. The Data partition remained same and is still fine. Now I want to get all my files/libraries/apps back from the External HDD backup. Migration asst doesn't see Partition 2 and only sees the boot partition.

I'm sure there must be a way to migrate everything back but I can't find a way to do it.
How can I use Migration Assistant with a second partition, or can I use an alternative method to restore my data?

Manually, enable root user, and then you can move the files by hand.


Why is it that I can no longer access some folders in my old time machine backups and how can I get access? So I recently had IT reformat my Mac OS 10.6 laptop to put a 10.8 image on it. When I first got it back I could still access all folders in my old backups, including the Library folder under my old user account folder. Now when I go into it the system tells me that I don't have permission to access it.

I have tried sudo to get into it from terminal with no luck. I don't remember if this problem started after I enabled backups on my new install of OS X. But this is very irritating. Any ideas as to why this is? I can no longer access "/Users//Library" for example. I just get a red circle icon with a white dash in it.

I tried changing the owner with chown. I tried changing the permissions with chmod to 777. No luck so far.

Why is this happening and are there any solutions for it?

Thanks!

Have you tried repairing the disk permissions via Disk Utility?

If that doesn't work, try enabling the root account, logging in, and attempting to access the files.

  Use the "System Administrator" account to access the files:

  navigate to the folder "/System/Library/CoreServices/" and open "Directory Utility.app"
  Click the padlock
  in the "Edit" menu, choose "Enable root user"
  from the Apple menu, choose "Log out"
  log in as "System Administrator" (or "root") and you will have access to the files in "/Users/Abby"


How can I find out which generation my iPod belongs to? I have a iPod Classic 160 Gb. I have forgotten the generation. Is there any way by which I can find out the generation of the iPod?

See Apple's note on identifying which iPod model you have.


Open Terminal.app but hold open? I have a shell script that runs on my mac (./go), it opens a ssh session on a raspberry pi then runs a script which streams video from the raspberry pi to a UDP port on the mac.

I also need the mac to run a receive script (./tsplay) so it can view the streamed video.

The problem is that I have tried to use the command open -a Terminal.app ./tsplay before the SSH session is started, a new terminal window opens but it doesn't wait for stream data to come in and it exits  - [Process completed]

#!/bin/bash

source network.conf

rm remote.conf

if [ "$1" != "" ]
then
  sed "s/FRAMERATE=25/FRAMERATE=$1/" video.conf > remote.conf
else
  cp video.conf remote.conf
fi

open -a Terminal.app ./tsplay

date
echo "###### Network Settings ######" >> remote.conf
echo export TCPPORT=$TCPPORT >> remote.conf
echo export UDPPORT=$UDPPORT >> remote.conf
echo export RX_IP=$RX_IP >> remote.conf
echo export NOW=\"`date +%F" "%T`\" >> remote.conf

#echo exit >> remote.conf

chmod +x remote.conf

echo Copy script to $TX_IP
scp remote.conf $USER@$TX_IP:/home/pi

echo Run Script
ssh $USER@$TX_IP ./ustream
ssh $USER@$TX_IP

Why do you want to run tsplay in a Terminal anyway?  Surely it is a graphical app if it displays video? Why not do a sleep for a while to let the Pi start sending and then start tsplay to receive?

fi
...
(sleep 5; ./tsplay ) &
...
date


Create a Smart Playlist for iCloud Songs that have been downloaded Locally Is there a way to create a Smart Playlist in iTunes that will contain the songs in my library that have been downloaded locally?  I have to reduce the bandwidth used at my job but I can download files at night and I want to only play songs that are downloaded to my computer (plus I don't want to play all the songs I own :-)).

If you use the "location" parameter, and select "is on this computer", that will show only the ones downloaded—providing you don't have any other music.

This works for me, as I want to keep the storage on my MacBook Air to the minimum.


Select and copy part of the text from a link in Safari How can I copy only a section of text from a hyper link?

As in, if there is a link like below, how can I copy only  a part of the text that is linked?

  Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.

I want to copy only the "nothing particular" words from the above text.

How could I do that?

On Chrome I had an extension that let me select links like normal text by holding shift.

I hope there is a similar way for me to select the text of a link in Safari.

I made the extension.

Because I don't want to pay $100 a year for Apple's Developer program, this extension has to be reloaded each time Safari is restarted.

I never quit Safari though so I am safe ;)

To install and use it:

Make sure 'Show Develop menu in menu bar' is enabled in Safari preferences.

Clone my extension from GitHub

git clone https://github.com/theonlygusti/shift-to-select.git
open -a Finder shift-to-select

Open the Extension Builder, Develop > Show Extension Builder.

Add an extension.

Choose the one you cloned from GitHub


"Hold down power button until it turns off" - diagnose kernel panic? What could be wrong with my MacBook Air laptop displaying "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the power button until it turns off, then press the power button again.

The same message still appears even when I reboot.

If your Mac Kernel Panics every time you reboot, well that is a problem. Can you boot into safe mode?

Hold the shift key while booting and release when you see the Apple logo on screen. The boot process may take longer than it usually does. Could be a LOT longer. If that works then there is something you installed that runs at startup that is causing the kernel panic.

If that does not work boot into Recovery Mode (Command-R at boot) and reinstall the OS right over top of what you have now. With luck that will fix it. Be careful not to reformat the drive as that will wipe out everything. An OS reinstall should only give you a fresh copy of the operating system and leave your user files alone.


500gb take up space on my HD, but don't belong to any visible file or folder I've got a problem: 500gb take up space on my HD, but don't belong to any visible file or folder. This may have something to do with a disk image of 500gb I created and deleted some time ago. Is there anything that can be done with this except backing up the disk, reformatting and copying the contents back in? (That will take a lot of time.) The format of the disk is Mac OS extended, encrypted, journaled.

Did you emptied the trash after removing the image file (if it was removed in Finder).
Check in About this MAC > Storage, if this 500 GB is not used by Backups. If it is, that means that it might be local snapshot of time Machine backup including this file. See http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht4878


Horizontal line appears in fullscreen mode I have an issue when entering fullscreen mode in any application on my MacBook Pro with OS X 10.7.3, a white horizontal line always appears at the top of the screen (as shown in the picture).

What is causing that? I've never had it before and I can't figure out what I've done to cause it. Anyone that got the same issue or know what's causing this?

Do you have and programs running such as VMware or Virtual Box installed and running in Full Screen Mode in the background? It alsmost looks like a VM or remote desktop toolbar. Have any programs running that have tool bars such as pictured below.


Upgrade and jailbreak 8.1 -> 8.4 I have an iPhone 4s. Currently, iOS 8.1 is installed, but it isn't jailbroken. When my device is connected to iTunes, it says I can update to iOS 8.4.1.

What is the correct way to get a jailbroken version of iOS 8.4 onto my phone? Is it possible?

Yes, not only is it possible to upgrade and jailbreak, it's very easy.

Updating to iOS 8.4

Install the latest version of iTunes on your computer.
Tap here to download the iOS 8.4 .ipsw file (operating system).
Plug your device into your computer.
In iTunes, select your device.
In the Summary pane use the following on the Check for Update box.

Windows: Shift + Click
Mac: Option + Click

Select the .ipsw file and update.

Jailbreaking iOS 8.4

Download the TaiG jailbreaking software.
Connect your device to your computer using the USB cable.
Temporarily Disable Passcode from Settings > Touch ID & Passcode.
Temporarily turn off Find my iPhone from Settings > iCloud > Find my iPhone.
On Windows, launch the jailbreaking application as an Administrator. To do this, right click on the executable file and select the “Run as Administrator” option.
The software will take some time to detect your device. Once you confirm that it is showing the correct firmware version, deselect the 3K Assistant 2.3.0 (TaiG’s App Store), just below Cydia 1.1.18.
Click on the green Start button to proceed.
After the jailbreak is complete, your device will reboot automatically, and you should see the Cydia icon on the Home screen.


Can the Macbook be woke while closed? I set a schedule wakeup in the energy preferences. It doesn't seem to wake up. Is the Macbook capable of waking up, turning on wifi and then running cron jobs while shut?

I don't think so. Why do you need to awake your MacBook while the lid is closed? And why do you need to close the lid at all if you aren't transporting it anywhere outside your room? Leave the lid open if you aren't in moving. And your problem is solved.

You will get more from this link: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2208013?tstart=0

Hope this helps ☺


Is there a restriction on the folder/directory-like function? I have iPod Touch 4th generation with iOS 5.1.1. I am using the function that puts multiple icons together in a single folder/directory-like icon by moving an app icon on top of another. However, for the "Newsstand" icon, I cannot do it. Is there a restriction on the apps for this function to work?

The Newstand app is built to be a more or less a folder of it's own. As you probably have noticed, you can't put folders inside other folders. Because this is a native app on iOS, we don't really know why they did this, but I'm confident it is indeed because of it's folder type style.


What's the safest way to ship diskettes? I would like to have some original software shipped to me but I am afraid that it might become damaged in shipping.

The software are the original boot disks and disk tools that came with my first Mac SE and some miscellaneous original goodies. They are ~25 year old 400K low coercivity diskettes which is the reason for my concern. I don't know the strength of the remaining data and don't want it destroyed by security scans as it crosses national borders.

I am afraid of the possibility of magnetic fields further demagnetizing the already weak data on the disk. I have no idea how to recover the data if it is lost. I don't have 400k drives to recreate the disks.

I want to be able to use them on the elderly computer. They were matched for the first release of the model, became lost in a move long ago, and recently relocated.

How best to protect my treasures in transit. What precautions should I ask the borrower to take for returning my original diskettes to me?

Update: The disks are 3.25" (beige plastic hard shell case) 400K disks with no second notch (that indicate a high density, high coercivity diskette). The 400K drives do not recognize the 800K disks I have tried in the drive. It wants its boot disks to access the internal 10 MB disk. :(

Any time I shipped magnetic media, I used the anti-static bags that electronic components came in.  Granted, when you have access to an IT department, they are easily available; we would save them for reuse.  I still do, but my stash isn’t as plentiful as it used to be.

However, you can get reusable zip poly anti static pouches.  They will provide shielding from low level EM fields and are transparent enough that if your package is opened for inspection, the contents are easily identifiable.  I’ve never had any issue with data loss using this method whether shipping in-country or internationally.

You didn’t mention which format the diskettes were; if they were 3.5”  or 5.25” or even the large IBM 8” but typically you could copy the disks so long as the drive was capable of writing it.  For instance, the 3.5” 1.44MB FDD drive could easily handle the 720K disks.  We had a “copyboard” in an IBM AT that would duplicate anything including copy protected disks for Apple.  It didn’t even matter if the OS could read it so long as the drive could.

Along that note, I just recently ran across some Gateway 2000 MS-DOS 6.22 setup disks in a storage box that weren’t exactly put away with the greatest of care (about 25 years old).  I was able to image them and install MS-DOS onto a Virtual Box VM with no issue.  I’d bet your disks are still readable.  If at all possible, I’d make an image for safe keeping (I can walk you through it, but it’s technically a different question).  Oh, and those DOS disks were imaged using a Mac!


How do I compress a file into .xip format? I wanted to compress the Xcode.app I downloaded from the app store into .xip format. Is it the same as compressing it to .zip and renaming?

No, .xip files have nothing to do with .zip files - it's not the same format at all. .xip files are really a type of xar archive.
If you want to compress your own .xip file, you can do that with the xip command in macOS:
xip file1 file2 file3 archive.xip

However you cannot compress Xcode.app to a .xip file and send that to others and expect them to be able to just unpack it by double-clicking. The file will be verified to see if the .xip is signed by Apple - if it is not, it will not be automatically unpacked.


No Voice Recording for Incoming Video on QuickTime On Mac I have used Quicktime player on Macbook Air to record a Google Hangout video. I have noticed that it doesn't record the voice but only video. I am wondering if there are any settings that I am missing to make sure the audio also works with QuickTime.

If there are no settings, then I am thinking to record the video and audio in my iPhone voice memo together . Then is there a way to add the audio in the video recorder by QuickTime?

My options :

In this case you can't capture 2 recordings simultaneously with Quicktime. You have use additional Apps e.g Garage Band, Audacity, Audio Hijack or a iPhone to record your internal audio.

In previous Quicktime Pro Versions it was possible insert a audio sequence to a Quicktime Movie.

Here’s a quick how-to:

Open Apple iMovie
Import your Google Hangout Video Screen Capture
Add your audio recording to your iMovie project.
Export your Video


iPhone 4s text messages still appear in iPhone search results after being deleted I have deleted a number of text messages on my iPhone. But, when I scroll to the right and to do an iPhone search, the deleted texts still appear in the search results.

How can I get rid of them?

The messages are still stored in a cache database, with a field "removed yes" or "removed no", speaking in easy terms.
You can get rid of these, if you really have to by syncing your phone with iTunes.

If that doesn't fix your issue you can create a back-up and restore that backup.
Restoring should clean the cache databases and making a back-up first makes sure you get exact the same version back as you had previously.

However, I don't know if you use spotlight often -> I just disabled many results from appearing in Spotlight.

Settings -> General -> Spotlight


Add songs to Library when adding to playlist - greyed out This is related to the question mentioned here:

Can I add song to an Apple Music playlist, without adding them to 'My Music'?

According to both that answer and to Apple's own support, this should be possible. Basically I want to add music from "Apple Music" to playlists, so I can easily find it again. I often listen to their selected playlists and want to save the best songs from there, on my own lists.

However - the checkbox option mentioned in the above, is greyed out for me. I cannot deselect it. So if I try and add music; I get a message that I must enable iCloud Storage before I can add the music to my library.

Any ideas as to why this option is disabled?

The reason your Add songs to Library when adding to playlists checkbox is greyed out is because you haven't enabled the iCloud Music Library (see the checkbox above the one that is greyed out).

If you enable iCloud Music Library, then you can store your Apple Music songs and playlists in iCloud and access them across all your devices.

In summary, by ticking the iCloud Music Library checkbox, the Add songs to Library when adding to playlists checkbox will no longer be greyed out. Then you can enable/disable it as you wish.


Instagram upload picture problem While uploading pictures to Instagram I am getting the following error:

  Could not open photo. Please try again in a moment

The phone storage seems to be low, deleting pictures and restarting the have not been helpful.

Under iCloud Preferences, optimize iphone storage should be disabled. Turning it off and making sure that the pictures' originals are available(by opening & then trying to edit it) should resolve the issue.


Can't stream iTunes purchased movie from Mac to Apple TV I'm currently running into the infamous "Authorization is required. To play this content on your Apple TV, choose Authorize This Computer from the Store menu in iTunes on your computer, then enter the Apple ID and password used for the purchase." error.

This is a well known error, and has caused problems for people in the past. It seems the last time it was prevalent, Apple was having a server outage.

Here's what's happening:

I purchased an HD movie on my iPad
I can send this movie to the Apple TV via AirPlay with no problems at all
I can do a "Transfer purchases" to put the movie into iTunes on my Mac, and it plays  perfectly on my Mac
If I try to play the movie through "Computers" on the Apple TV, I get the above error.
I can also stream the movie from the Mac to my iPad using the iPad's "Videos" app and Home Sharing
If I start playing the movie on my Mac, I can use AirPlay to send it to the Apple TV

I've tried putting it on two different Macs, and I get the same issue. Other content requiring authorization (digital downloads, and a single SD movie I purchased from iTunes) work just fine.

Any thoughts? This is a brand new Apple TV, brand new iPad, and both Macs are running the latest version of iTunes.

I had something similar happen with a rented film.

The only thing that I can recommend that you try is that you contact the iTunes store customer support and explain your issue, they will most likely give you a refund and you can delete the movie and try re-purchasing it.


Couldn't Modify Partition Map using external disk Seems the most common relationship to this error is using Windows on a separate partition. Here is my problem. I have a 1 TB external disk that was used half for Time Machine and half for general storage, partition called Mac Swap. In order to make a more elegant back up, I replaced my Time Machine with a full 2 TB external disk. This allowed me to delete the old half (just rendered obsolete) and extend the Mac Swap half to a full 1 TB. But that is where I got stuck. I can't extend the partition, Mac Swap.

Command+S only works on the boot disk, right? /sbin /fsck -fy won't solve this.
But on the bright side, it seemed to repair a few minor errors on my boot disk.

Please help.

I found my silly error. The solution: in Disk Utility, I chose specifically the partition that wasn't able to increase in size, then I ran the verification. It turned up problems so I ran the repair command. Then I was able to increase the size of the partition. Mt external hard disk, Mac Swap, is now only one partition.

To be clear about my error, in case you're reading this for help. In Disk Utility, there is always both an icon for the disk as a whole and below it immediately there will be all of its partitions. If you run the verification on the hard disk as a whole, then it may not catch what's wrong on your partition.


Is there something like "Mac OS X manager" to control all Macs in one network? It's needed to control from a Mac (turn off, install software, etc.), all another Macs connected to the same network (in the same classroom). Is there a software for it?

Apple Remote Desktop http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/ might be what you are looking for.


How to Disable USB Auto-mount I use VirtualBox on my MBP and often need to mount my USB flash drive inside the guest.  The problem I'm running into is that the host OS (OS X Mavericks) immediately mounts the USB flash drive when I insert it.  When I try to unmount it (gracefully, through Finder), OS X complains that the device is in use.  Further research into lsof reveals that Spotlight and AVG are doing their thing with the flash drive.

Rather than fiddling with individual app settings, I'd like to just modify the host OS behavior so that the USB device doesn't auto-mount.  Any suggestions?

OS X has a mechanism, called the Disk Arbitration framework, through which programs can control what happens when disks are inserted or ejected.  It also provides an opportunity to intercept a disk insertion event and prevent the usual automatic mounting behaviour.

To change the behaviour, though, requires a third-party utility, since the Disk Arbitration framework is just a programming interface.  One good utility is Disk Arbitrator, a free (BSD-licensed) tool by Aaron Burghardt.

While Disk Arbitrator is running, you can choose to either veto the mounting of newly inserted disks, mount them read-only, or just let the normal automatic mounting happen.  After Disk Arbitrator exits, the normal mounting behaviour is restored.


Activity Monitor shows java process, jps shows only JPS My Activity Monitor shows a "java" process taking up 400 MB RAM.  jps and sudo jps show only JPS.  How do I find out what's running java?

In System Monitor select the process, go to the "i" icon and press it.

It should appear a new window with some informations, see process group.

If you could not understand what's going on, go to "Open files and ports" and you should see all the files, try to reach what application is using it and the job is done!


Backup to External in Recovery Mode (Terminal or Time Machine) Out of the blue, my iMac (late 2010, running El Capitan) started refusing to boot. The progress bar would take forever to reach 100%, and then it would just stop there once it reached it; all the while the fan running loudly.
I am able to boot into Recovery Mode, and I can even run Disk Utility (it doesn't detect any problems.) However, when I attempt to reinstall the OS, it tells me:

This disk has S.M.A.R.T. errors.
This disk has a hardware problem that can't be repaired. Back up as much of the data as possible and replace the disk.

I have an outdated Time Machine backup, made before I upgraded from Mountain Lion to El Capitan. Most of the data in the backup is the same, but there are a few GBs of new files I'd like to backup as well.
Since Disk Utility tells me everything is okay, am I able to somehow mount an external, and backup files? Possibly through Terminal? And If I were to use the drive with the old Time Machine backup on it, would I have to delete the backup before writing new data to the drive?
I'm not very computer savvy, but I can manage my way through Terminal with a lot of instruction. So please, try to answer in terms I will understand. Thanks.

Whatever you do, leave the faulty disk alone until you know what you are going to do. The risk that the disk breaks entirely any moment now is very high.

This answer assumes you don't have FileVault enabled.

Get an external backup disk that has enough capacity and connect it.
Press cmd+alt+R before the boot screen appears to enter internet recovery mode. This loads the recovery mode from the internet, which will be very slow. The advantage is that there is no stress on the faulty disk.

Method A – If you want to save individual files:

Go to the menu bar and select Terminal.
Copy the files you want to rescue using cp. For instance, if you have a folder rescueme on your desktop, you can use the following command:

cp -r /Volumes/mydisk/Users/myusername/Desktop/rescueme /Volumes/mybackupdisk/
This will copy all files and subfolders of rescueme onto your backup drive called mybackupdisk.

Method B – If you want to make a full backup:

Enter the Disk Utility tool
Select the Disk that you want to back up
In the menu bar select File > New Image > Image from “mydisk”
Select your options. E.g. you may want to compress the image to save some space on the backup disk.
Press Save and wait.

It is likely that some parts of your disk are not readable anymore. Therefore the method B may not work and you should first try to save the most important files manually (i.e. method A).

Method C - if you have another Mac:

Connect the two computers, e.g. with a Thunderbolt cable.
On your broken iMac, press T at the boot screen to enter target disk mode.
Now you can use the Finder to browse the broken disk and copy files.


Google Chrome Canary app fails to open I have Google Chrome Canary app installed on a MacBook Air running macOS High Sierra. When I click on the app icon in the Dock, it bounces once and then never opens.

Has anyone else run into this or knows how to resolve it?

I think the icon in the doc is not for the Canary app you just downloaded. The icon in the dock should be an alias to Canary. I would drag Canary from your Applications folder to the dock. This will create a new alias for the version of Canary on your machine. Try this new dock version to ensure it works. If so, delete the older icon from the dock.


Should I expect restoring Yosemite from a Time Machine backup to take forever? El Capitan was a disaster for Office Mac 2011, specifically Outlook. The recent Microsoft update resolved the problem with Outlook crashing, but it didn't fix the problem I had where email sent to me was disappearing into the ether.

After conversations with both Apple and Microsoft support, neither who had a resolution, the final advice was to restore to the previous OSX, Yosemite. I used Command +R to restore from a Time Machine image and after 6 hours with the startup bar stuck halfway, I stopped it and came back in to check the disk and it's OK. So I started the restore again, and it back at the same halfway point and has been there for 6 hours and counting. Should I ride it out? How long should this take? I'm running on a 2014 MacBook Pro. Any reassurance or advice is appreciated!

First things first, make sure you backup before all of this:

When you restore from a backup you are not restoring to a previous version of OS X, you'll need to backup, erase the disk, reinstall with Yosemite and apply your backup. If you need help with this please comment this answer, I'll give all the detail needed

Tiferrei


Get notified by notification centre when someone ssh's into my computer? I know that if I open Terminal and I type inwho, it shows who is logged in and at what time, etc. However, I am not going to be at Terminal all day and keep typing who. So, I would like a notification that appears when someone logs into my computer, or in this case, when someone ssh's into my computer. Is there some way to do this in Applescript? Thanks for your help!

Applications like Growl or GeekTool may be able to help you with this. Growl can send messages to the Notification Center or use its own notifications; when coupled with an external system application like Log Surfer, it may be able to provide the notification you seek.

GeekTool would be much easier to setup, but doesn't send info to the Notification Center. Instead, you can have it display the output from a standard UNIX command on your desktop. In particular, you could have it display the output of a 'who' command, and update that every few seconds.


locate isn't finding a file that exists The file in question is:

/Users/me/Library/Containers/com.dell.Toad/Data/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/com.dell.toadext.oracle.core/connections.xml

What is wrong with locate?

The locate database in built by the script /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb. The script is run by the user nobody in this line

tmpdb=`su -fm nobody -c "$0"` || rc=1

unless the user nobody has access to a directory then the content of that directory is not recorded in the database. A simple solution would be to use mdfind.

mdfind -name connections.xml


Housekeeping before upgrading to new OSX I would like to go for a fresh install, but I've got GB's of Mail archives, iCloud Photos, etc. Therefore I always end up doing just the upgrade on top of the existing OS.

This time I would like to spend sometime to go for a fresh install, then restore mail archives and photos. Can time machine help me with this? Any guides as to how?

It is certainly possible to backup your drive with Time Machine (or SuperDuper or whatever) wipe it and start fresh. This is something that is commonly done with Windows PCs as they continue to be subject to "bit rot" or the inevitable slowdown of a Windows system after a few years of use.

I, personally, have been just upgrading in place since back when the Macintosh Operating System was called "System #" and have rarely found that a clean install did much except take up a bunch of time. However other folks may have different experiences. It all depends on what you use your Mac for and what is installed on it.

If you have a nice fast USB 3 or Thunderbolt drive you could try installing the OS fresh on that and see if you see any real change (not attributable to it being an external device) in performance when booted from that fresh install.

Note that USB 2 drives will be slower and depending on the chipset and drive used in the USB 3 or Thunderbolt enclosure there will already be a performance hit, so take any results with a grain of salt.

Me, if I had to do a clean install, I would image my boot drive to an external drive. Wipe the partition and install the OS and apps fresh. Then use Migration Assistant to bring over your user settings/documents, leaving the apps installed on the old boot drive behind for the fresh installs on the fresh install of the OS. And allowing Migration Assistant to only bring over your settings and files.


How do I tell the MacPorts Python to look in /opt/local/lib for dylibs? I'm running a Python script with the MacPorts version of Python (2.7), i.e, I've run:

port select --set python python27

However, when I run my script, it can't find a dylib in /opt/local/lib:

ImportError: dlopen(/opt/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/grgsm/_grgsm_swig.so, 2): Library not loaded: libgnuradio-grgsm.dylib
Referenced from: /opt/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/grgsm/_grgsm_swig.so
Reason: image not found

The dylib in question resides here:

-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin    816036 Dec 16 11:24 /opt/local/lib/libgnuradio-grgsm.dylib

Setting export DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib/ doesn't help in this case (nor should it really be necessary for each user on the system to set that environment variable). I've already run update_dyld_shared_cache.

The Python module in question resides in /opt/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages so I made a symlink to it in /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/.

otool -L on the loading .so reports:

otool -L /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/grgsm/_grgsm_swig.so

/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/grgsm/_grgsm_swig.so:
libgnuradio-grgsm.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libboost_filesystem-mt.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libboost_system-mt.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libboost_thread-mt.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libgnuradio-runtime.3.7.8.1.dylib (compatibility version 3.7.8, current version 0.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libgnuradio-pmt.3.7.8.1.dylib (compatibility version 3.7.8, current version 0.0.0)
/opt/local/lib/libvolk.1.1.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.1.1, current version 0.0.0)
/usr/local/lib/libosmocore.7.dylib (compatibility version 8.0.0, current version 8.0.0)
/usr/local/lib/libosmogsm.5.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.0.0)
/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 120.1.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1225.1.1)

Notice that the library in question doesn't have a path.

Libraries are usually referenced using absolute paths on OS X, making it unnecessary to set any variables. Your otool -L output on the Python module should thus contain

/opt/local/lib/libgnuradio-grgsm.$version.dylib (...)

This path is copied from what Apple calls the "shared library identification name" in a library when you link against it. That means that whatever value is in the output of otool -L on the Python module is the same value that you get by running otool -D on /opt/local/lib/libgnuradio-grgsm.dylib (or just using otool -L and looking at the first line). If you do this on your machine, you will notice that it also does not contain an absolute path. That's the root cause of the issue you see.

First, this is a bug in GNU Radio, or MacPorts' packaging of GNU Radio. Please file a ticket so this can get fixed or addressed with the GNU Radio developers.

Second, there are a couple of ways to work around this issue for now:

Method A: Fix the identification name of libgnuradio-grgsm.dylib. This can be done using install_name_tool -id $correctID /opt/local/lib/libgnuradio-grgsm.dylib. Note that the absolute path to the unversioned dylib is likely not the correct value for this. libgnuradio-grgsm.dylib is likely a symlink to another symlink with the major version embedded. This path is the one that should be used as install name. After this change, rebuilding the Python module should solve the issue.
Method B: Fix the path in the load command of the Python module. Use install_name_tool -change libgnuradio-grgsm.dylib $correctID /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/grgsm/_grgsm_swig.so to do this. $correctID should be chosen as explained in Method A.


When using a dummy VGA projector, some of the software does not appear on my built-in retina screen So the reason I attached a VGA dummy to my mid-2014 retina Macbook is to solve this problem which it did. But now I have a new problem. From time to time, if I try to open a software, it won't appear on my retina screen. It reappears if I unplug the VGA Dummy. However, the problem does not appear consistently. Sometimes if I restart my Mac it disappears, at least for a while. And I am not a hundred percent sure, but it never happens with Chrome, only calendar, texshop or office softwares.
Please help me because this is seriously hampering my ability to work

I assume you use the VGA dummy as a secondary monitor, and most likely you have it configured as your primary monitor. Try this: Open Preferences -> Monitors -> Arrange and drag-n-drop the menu bar to your built-in retina display. Alternatively, you can choose to mirror your screen onto the (non-existent) external monitor, which should absolutely fix the issue.


Disable Left/Right Scrolling on Magic Mouse with Google Calendar I am a first time Magic Mouse user.  I love the vertical scrolling on web pages.  However, on Google Calendar, scrolling left-to-right makes the calendar move forward and back between months.  I'm constantly accidentally scrolling my calendar with the Magic Mouse.

Is there I way I can tell the Magic Mouse to not do the left/right scroll/swipe thing, but to still do the up/down scroll/swipe thing?  One a per application basis?  Or some other solution I'm not thinking of?  This uber complaint thread makes it seem like it's not possible to disable this feature in Google Calendar (although I'm happy to be corrected there).  10.12.5, if it matters.

There are tons of very old threads on the Google Forums around this but I finally turned up one which linked to this Chrome plugin which kills the scrolling in Google Calendar. Phew!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-calendar-scroll-di/nghndfiaocgpmcbeafglhknklfgddebe

As a side note, here's an interesting bit of debugging by Peter Torelli which clearly shows it's just lazy coding in GCal: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/HeZb8Wv8X5k


Creating a new iPhone contact from an email in a specific address book I have two e-mail accounts on my iPhone 4, one of which is my "work" Exchange account, and I therefore have two sets of address books ("From My Mac" and "Work").

From an e-mail, and also from the Phone's Recents list, if I select an e-mail address or phone number and then select "Create New Contact", I am not given an opportunity to select the address book that it should be added to. It always adds it to my work (Exchange) address book.

How do I select which address book I to create a new contact in? Alternatively (and less preferably) how can I move the contact after-the-fact from one address book to the other.

I'm not interested in solutions that involve having to sync with my mac every time, using iCloud, Google Mail or anything that I have to pay for.

Unfortunately, there is no built-in way to do this. However, there are some third-party apps that fill this gap. A free one that I've tested and works is OrbiContacts. The interface isn't especially pretty, but it does work.


How to properly register a file extension on mac so it will also work by running open from the command line? I have the following problem, I registered a file extension to be opened by a Mac Application by clicking on the file in Finder and selecting to always use the target application to open the files.

So far it works, BUT it doesn't work with >open filename.ext as it will say:

No application knows how to open /path/filename.ext.

Clearly open works differently than Finder.

If possible I would prefer a command line solution.

If you selected Always Open With from a context menu, it only changes the default application for the selected items. If you change the default application from an information window, it normally also has an immediate effect on open.

If it wasn't that, com.apple.LaunchServices.plist can also be edited as XML:

plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist

Applying changes requires restarting. Logging out and back in isn't enough.

You could also try using duti or RCDefaultApp.


How to set up Mac for multiple user remote access log in and a shared network drive? I have users who want to share a highpowered mac in a lab. It has a decent processor and a ton of RAM. They want to be able to remotely access this mac from both PC/Mac just like a user would be able to do for Windows using remote desktop. It is possible that two or more users (but no more than 4) would want to access this machine at the same time. It should have enough ram to handle this. They also want a drive on this mac that they can all share on their lab network.

Obviously, they want this to be as secure as possible. I am primarily a windows user, so any help would be much appreciated.

I suggest using Teamviewer software (https://www.teamviewer.com/en/index.aspx) and install on all computers wishing to access the Mac as well as the Mac itself - this has worked very well for me in the past, and as a bonus they will be able to access the Mac from mobile devices etc. if the need arises.


Disable geolocation in Safari I have tried to check "Decline without asking" (Translated).

Now, it won't show where I am on maps and so, but even though I use VPN, Google/Facebook/Youtube and other websites know that I am in Sweden? How can I disable this? Say, I want websites to assume that I am in the UK, or in the USA?

Your browser sends its list of preferred languages to websites. With other browsers, this is usually customizable, but not in Safari for macOS. On the Mac, Safari only sends the systemwide preferred languages.

To change it:  → System Preferences → Language & Region.
Beware that doing this will change the locale used by your operating system.

On the other hand, in iOS 10 the systemwide language is set separately from the app-and-website preferred languages. Both can be found under Settings → General → Language & Region.


What does Synchronize mean in Mail.app? In Mail.app, what does Synchronize actually do?  How is it different than "Get New Mail?"

Mail talks to the mail server to show you messages. Only IMAP accounts can be synchronized as that is a formal way for the server and the mail client on your mac to double check all messages to make sure everything is in sync between the two.

Get mail focuses on the Inbox and relies on the Mail app having a "correct" view matching the data on the mail server.

Synchronize allows for noise/errors/lost messages, incorrect statuses and other real life bumps and errors. It basically double counts and double checks each and every message to make sure things are 100% correct. Synchronize also checks all folders recursively to get everything accounted for - not just the subset of folders that are marked as having new mail.

Even more "deep cleaning" would be if you told mail to rebuild the account or the mailbox. That means that the local storage that mail uses on your mac has problems getting mail or synchronizing. It's the last step before deleting the account and starting over to download things cleanly from the server.

In a nutshell - synchronize should normally do nothing - but it will fill in any gaps as needed. (of course it will get new mail as part of a total synchronization - but it's going to be a lot slower and use more resources on the mac than just asking for new mail)


How does macOS route keyboard events? I'm mainly wondering about the media keys, but I think that the general question is interesting as well. I have an extension in Chrome that allows me to use the media keys on Youtube, Soundcloud and lots of other sites, I have Spotify installed, and off course, I have iTunes. It doesn't seem predictable what will happen when I press the "play" key, so in cases where it's not based on focus, how does OSX route keyboard events?

I'm not sure how OS X decides which app to send the command. It might have to do with launch order, or last visited order. What I know is that it's decided by rcd: Remote Control Daemon.

When a media key is pressed, Launch Daemon matches the LaunchEvents to com.apple.rcdevent.matching and calls up rcd. Then it just sort of hangs out in the background. You can see it in Activity Monitor. You can kill it and it wouldn't respawn. It just comes back when you press a media key again. The app itself is stored here:

/System/Library/CoreServices/rcd.app

It's launch daemon is here:

/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist


Huge TM backups - LaunchServices csstore file too big? For years, a typical TM backup for me is around 200MB. For the last week or two, it's grown to about 1.2GB even if I haven't been using the machine. I finally dug into why using tmutil compare and there is a file /private/var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/0/com.apple.LaunchServices-221-v2.csstore that is 870MB. This file is modified before every TM backup and thus it is backed up every time.

There is another file in that directory named com.apple.LaunchServices-175-v2.csstore that is 5 months old and only 27MB (if this is a useful data point).

Is this normal? Is something corrupt? Can this file be deleted safely and OSX will rebuild it "correctly" ? Any other advice to get my TM backups back to a normal size?

The launch services database is there to speed up the execution of things like telling which apps can open which file. On a clean system, one that you install an OS and don't import apps or settings or data, this database is very small.

You can inspect the contents of this database indirectly by calling a command lsregister which I make a symbolic link in /usr/local/bin so it's easy to call without typing the long System Library path to the framework tool:

ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister /usr/local/bin

On my work machine, the database is 85 meg when stored to the filesystem and I have a second account with a much smaller database (probably an admin account I never log in to lately and the system had fewer apps installed when I last triggered a rebuild of the caching database for that user).

sudo find /private/var/folders/zz/ -name com.apple.LaunchServices* -exec du -sm {} +

12  /private/var/folders/zz//zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/0/com.apple.LaunchServices-175-v2.csstore
75  /private/var/folders/zz//zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/0/com.apple.LaunchServices-221-v2.csstore

This matches up with the information that lsregister will dump (for me it's 137 thousand lines of text to dump the database and you can look through yours and see which apps take tons of space if you really need to know who is using the space by registering for every file type known to mankind and ruining your backup speeds)

lsregister -dump|head -9
Checking data integrity......done.
Status: Database is seeded.
Status: Preferences are loaded.
Seeded System Version: 10.13.6 (17G65)
Seeded Model Code: MacBookPro13,2
CacheGUID: CD230C46-C259-4B2C-BA4B-88AE7FE74557
CacheSequenceNum: 7684
Date Initialized: 7/10/18, 12:35:16 PM HST (POSIX 1531262116.000)
Path: /var/folders/p6/w8svns2s6pd8vj2gx04pc97h0000gr/0/com.apple.LaunchServices-221-v2.csstore

Or, you could purge some apps you might know are large in terms of mapping to file types or open a support case and provide a sysdiagnose to Apple for analysis if you have an incident / support engineering agreement - it appears to dump all the launch services data and one other app info text file that might be helpful to count apps that have registered (look for lsappinfo.txt inside the sysdiagnose results file).

The TL;DR answer will be:

Just skip backing these up if you are sure they are large and you don't care to dive into why. Add the folder to the exclusions graphically or by command line.
Remove any apps you don't need - then keep removing apps you can reinstall until the database size is more in line with what you want. You may need to manually rebuild the file to test if you don't want to wait for the next trigger to rebuild it.
Open a support case with Apple to determine if you have a bug or just need help identifying which apps are causing the slow performance of Time Machine due to a busy / changing / large file.

I've never seen this slow down a backup or cause issues, but enough people have reported it there's got to be some programs or situations where this would be a good thing to do.


Mavericks SSH keys and Keychain Before Mavericks I could use Keychain to store my SSH keyfile passwords

The connection between private key and Keychain was like this:

ssh-add -K /path/of/private/key

However now in Mavericks, the -K option has been removed.

Of course, I can skip the "-K" option and manually copy paste the password every time I start my computer... but I would rather use the keychain method again.

How can I use Keychain for my ssh private file passwords again? Is it down in a different way now?

Are you sure you aren't using ssh-add from another source?  On my Mavs, ssh-add—which is /usr/bin/ssh-add—does have the -K flag.  It's in the manpage, shows in the usage message, and is accepted.

Check which ssh-add to see if you're pulling in ssh-add from elsewhere due to your PATH.


mdworker process always at 100%, even when not indexing I'm trying to understand why mdworker is always at 100% even when (apparently) not indexing. If I open Spotlight, there's no message telling me that a drive is being indexed. If I run fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker, there's also no output.

Just to be sure, I've tried stopping and restarting the Spotlight service so it rebuild the db from scratch. I've let it run for about 12 hours but it's still running now at 100%. I've also excluded many folders from indexing.

Any idea what could be the issue? Is there any way to know what the process is actually doing?

Ok it seems to be fixed now. If it can help someone else, here's how to debug the issue:

Open the "Activity Monitor" application.
Click on the "mdworker" process.
Click on the "Inspect" button.
In there, click on "Open Files and Ports"
Somewhere in this window, check which files are open. Among others, look for the ".mdimporter" files (Spotlight plugins).
If one or more mdimporter file always seems to be open, you can disable it by renaming to something else. Open the terminal and run sudo mv /path/to/the/file.mdimporter /path/to/the/file.mdimporter.disabled
Then reboot your computer.

In my case, it was the file /Applications/Britannica 13.0/Ultimate Reference Suite.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/BritannicaBookmark.mdimporter that was constantly open. After renaming it, things are back to normal.


Auto logout results in severe login screen bug With auto logout enabled, I experience severe display errors at the login screen. These errors do not occur at the login screen right after boot. They appear only when the auto logout is triggered.
I wonder if it's a hardware bug. A major flaw has been discussed at discussions.apple.com (166 pages!!). However, that bug is different and happened with Nvidia GPUs. I have a AMD Radeon HD 6490M (early 2011).
Question

What causes this bug? (hardware? software?)
What measures should I take?

Problem solved
In System Preferences > Energy Saver the timers for display sleep and computer sleep must be greater than the time of auto logout after inactivity in System Preferences > Security & Privacy.


Remove "Other..." from Login screen I've just upgraded to El Capitan from Mountain Lion, and now an Other... icon appears right next to my usual user-account (admin account) on the login screen.
When I click on it, I can log in, as another user, but I only have one.

My first thought was, that it could be the root user, which could have been enabled (I don't know how though). But from the Edit menu, in the Directory Utility, it only says "Enable root user", which should indicate that the root user is disabled. I then tried to enable it, and disable it again, but the Other... still appears on the login screen.

I've even tried to disable it from Terminal using this command, with no luck:

dsenableroot -d

After some search on Google, I found a thread with people having the same problem.
A lot of them solved the problem by following this guide:

Enable the root user from Directory Utility and then log out.
Log in as the root user account and change the password.
Still on the root user account, disable and then enable root user from Directory Utility.
Log out from the root user account, and log back it to the usual account.
Now disable the root user once again.

I have done all this, but it still doesn't work, and I am almost going mad about it.

Anyone have any idea why this is happening, and how to fix it?

I finally found a solution!

After some more search I found this command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow SHOWOTHERUSERS_MANAGED -bool FALSE

..and it did the trick!


Outlook Spell Checker on MAC I am looking for a way to stop sending an email if there are any spelling errors on outlook 2016 Mac. I know you can do this on windows outlook. Can someone please shed some advise on this.

Many Thanks

The answer above is for Microsoft office in Windows. Not mac OS. I’ve looked up many articles across the web, and it seems check spelling before sending in Outlook for Mac is not available. It is available in the native mail application in Mac OS… Preferences compose check before sending.


Connection problems with Magic Mouse 2 while wifi is on (MBP2012) I have a modified mbp 2012 with a Samsung 256GB 850 EVO and 16gb ram. I recently upgraded my mouse to a Magic Mouse 2, but so far it isn't the best upgrade ever!

I'm having struggles to connect my mouse after shutdown of the mouse or MBP. I can only reconnect it to bluetooth after disabling wifi.

Are there any solutions to this problem without having to disable anything? I have heard of a possible solution involving  disabling of hotspot with an Iphone, but i have to use that sometimes.

Thanks for reading, and hoping for a reply :-)

Edit: I'm currently running macOs Sierra 10.12

Disabling the hotspot with an iphone seems like the only option. Had it running for a few months without any problems now.


Which exact processor model do the macbook pros have? The new 15 and 17 inch macbook pros only list the processor model as quad-core core i7.
However what is the fully model number of the processor?
Are the quad core processors really dual cores with hyperthreading or are they really quad core?
Do any of the models have hyperthreading?

As requested pasting info about the macbook pro model to enhance this page:

Model Name:   MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,2

Processor Name:   Intel Core i7

Processor Speed:  2 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores:    4

L2 Cache (per Core):  256 KB

L3 Cache: 6 MB

Memory:   4 GB

Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B04

The processor used in the early 2011 15" and 17" i7 models is the 2.2 GHz quad-core (2720QM) Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge with 6 MB on-chip L3 cache, so they have 4 cores and 8 threads.

Apple's MacBook Pro performance page makes it clear that Hyper-Threading is now standard on all MacBook Pro laptops.


How can I make iOS 4.3 apps go onto my iPod 2G? Last Christmas I was given an iPod 2G and it runs on iOS 4.2.1 and I have found it very hard to find apps that go onto my iPod, is there anyway I can make apps that run on iOS 4.3 an above go onto my iPod?

No. Unfortunately, due to hardware limitations, Apple has limited how far you can upgrade iOS on particular devices.

See this question for a similar situation. Perhaps this Q/A would explain things better as well.


localhost / userdir on macOS High Sierra There's a tutorial here Setting up a local web server on macOS 10.13 "High Sierra"

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-12034

localhost works but user shortname - fails.

What gives?

Like on Sierra vhosts seem to need to be activated

so:

  sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

and uncomment the following lines by removing the hashtag (#)

  .#LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so

and

  .#Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

then

  sudo apachectl restart

and you'll be good to go


How to fix slow Remote Desktop To Windows 7 PC? I'm using Remote Desktop for Mac on my base Retina MBP.

Remote Desktop is incredibly slow for connecting to my Windows 7 PC.

Why is to so slow?
Are there other alternatives that will work faster?

It's impossible to know why it may be slow without having access to more detailed info about your current setup.  However if you want to try alternatives to check whether it's consistently slow (and therefore perhaps infrastructure based) or just the MS app that's slow, then you can do worse than try to use CORD which is a nice open source remote desktop alternative that's free.


Why doesn't FileVault work on a RAID volume? At work, I said to my colleague that it was not possible to enable Filevault on a RAID volume. He was surprised and asked me the technical reason.

So I would like to know. It's strange because Filevault is at the software level while RAID is at the hardware level.

The previous answer I gave here was wrong (as is bmike's answer).

The previous answer I gave was that if you have this as a problem, a workaround is to create an encrypted disk image that covers the entire AppleRaid set. This works, in theory, but is so horribly slow (like more than 10x as slow as the raw disk access) that it is basically unusable, which led me to look at the diskutil command line utility in more detail. And what do you know --- you CAN do what is wanted, it just takes some work. You have to do it through the command line, and even there you can't do it with the simplest commands, but it can be done and it is 100% legitimate Apple supported, not some weird hack.

So, let's assume you have your Apple Raid volume, which you have created somehow, either through Disk Utility or through the command line.

Note: This process will format your RAID and encrypt it. Backup any data you want to keep (at least twice) before proceeding.

The first thing we need is to know the low-level OS identifier for the Apple Raid volume of interest, so type:

diskutil list

which will give you a list of the various hard drives, partitions and logical hard drives (eg Apple RAID volumes) on your system. Look at the list and figure out, based on name, size, whatever, which is the Apple RAID volume we wish to encrypt. Make sure you get the RIGHT identifier, otherwise you'll destroy some other volume. It's wise, when doing this, to disconnect (manually --- pull out the cables!) all hard drives not relevant to the problem, including, most obviously, your backup drives!

So the list tells us the device of interest is, say, disk7

Next we want to create a Core Storage LVG (Logical Volume Group) wrapper around the device. I'm not going to claim I understand Core Storage terminology, and why they use a different word for everything compared to Apple RAID, but far as I can tell, the LVG is essentially Core Storage's version of a logical hard drive. So type:

diskutil cs createLVG BackupImacLVG disk7

BackupImacLVG is the name we are giving to the logical hard drive we're creating.
This command will take a few seconds, then spit out a long string which is is the "name" (the UUID) of the LVG we have created. We use it in the next step.

We're not done. We now need to create the equivalent of a partition (which Core Storage calls a Logical Volume) on this logical hard drive.
Here is the next command:

diskutil cs createLV 8C5AED3-0CCF-4155-8E3D-DF7D9E68EE7B JHFS+ BackupImac 100% -stdinpassphrase

In the command above:
    8C5AED3-0CCF-4155-8E3D-DF7D9E68EE7B
is the LVG UUID we were just told (make sure you use your own), and
    JHFS+
is the file system we want to create in the partition.
    BackupImac
will be the name of the volume created in this partition.
    100%
says how much space we want to give to this partition. (There are a few different ways to specify sizes, but most people will probably use 100%).
    -stdinpassphrase
says that we want to use encryption.

The command line will then put up a prompt of:

Passphrase for new volume:

You enter the password, and you're done. (Note none of the helpful Apple FileVault UI here! No offering to save your password for you with Apple, no second request for the password to make sure you typed it correctly!)

The end result of all this is exactly what you would hope for and expect. An encrypted volume with all the performance of the previous AppleRAID volume. (And if you look at the diskutil man page, you will see that they explicitly list Apple RAID volumes as supported targets for diskutil cs createLVG, so this isn't some strange edge case that isn't officially supported.)

Disk Utility.app doesn't update its UI (it's really bad in this respect --- has been an ongoing problem in OSX) so quit it and restart it. You'll now see, along with your RAID slices, a new "hard drive" called BackupImacLVG (or whatever you called it) along with a partition called BackupImac (or whatever you called it), with a format of "Encrypted Logical Partition".

One thing to be aware of. The disk is mounted during the creation process without asking for a password (you gave the password in the command line).

Right after you are done, you may want to unmount the volume, power down the hard drives of the AppleRAID volume, power them on again, and see what happens. If you have done everything correctly, once all the slices of the Apple RAID have spun up and been detected by the OS, a window should appear on the screen asking you for the password so that the disk can be mounted.


Mac equivalent of Ctrl + Space to select an item on a list I want to select non-consecutive items on a list, without using a mouse/trackpad - there should be no clicks involved.

In Windows and Linux (at least Ubuntu) an item can be selected using Space/ button, which, in combination with arrows and Ctrl key allows me to select multiple items in any environment (file manager, IDE etc.) - e.g.

Enter a directory -> hold Ctrl -> down arrow twice -> press Space -> down arrow twice -> press Space.

Now I should have items 1, 3 and 5 selected.
Is there a way to do the same thing in OS X?

PS. Sorry for such a verbose description, but so far every answer I encountered advices using Command + Click, and this is something I don't want to do.

I don't think there's a native way to do this, but if you install Shortcat you can:

select the first item using arrow keys
activate Shortcat and type enough to focus on the next item you want
hold Command and press Return

By the way, if you're as keyboard-centric as I am, you should also look at Karabiner Elements.


Why is ~/Documents a symlink to itself, and how should this be fixed? I'm a programmer diagnosing a customer's issue with our software. We're having some problems writing into the user's Documents folder in macOS Mojave 10.14.6.*

It turns out that the customer's ~/Documents folder is a symlink to itself, causing ELOOP errors when calling file APIs, and a Too many levels of symbolic links error when attempting to view its contents in the Terminal with the ls command.

However, in the Finder, the folder displays normally, and appears to contain 15GB of contents.

The first time we saw this issue I wrote it off as an unsolved mystery, but this is the second customer we have seen in the past few years with a Documents folder that is a symbolic link to itself.

So my questions are:

How is this possible?
What can cause this configuration? Is there any legitimate reason it might be configured this way?
Is it safe to tell the user just to move all the contents somewhere safe, delete the folder, and then recreate it in the Finder?

* The path is obtained by passing NSDocumentDirectory into NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomain.

How is this possible?

It's easy to mess up when using ln on the command line. A symlink to self is legal (though nonsensical) so you wouldn't get an error when creating it.

  What can cause this configuration? Is there any legitimate reason it might be configured this way?

It's useless and should be removed. Once removed, they can create a new ~/Documents/ folder. If you're concerned about safety, keep in mind you can always drag things back from the trash.

  Is it safe to tell the user just to move all the contents somewhere safe, delete the folder, and then recreate it in the Finder?

If it's a symlink to self then it has no contents, because it's just a self-referential symlink. It's not a folder, it's just a recursive symlink. Finder is showing some folder that's named Documents but that doesn't mean it's showing ~/Documents/. You could create a folder with that name anywhere and add it to the Finder sidebar.

It would probably help to ask the user to cmd-click on the folder name at the top of the Finder window. That will show where it's located:


How to open boot camp Windows 7 machine in Hyper-V? I currently have a user with a boot camp unit, it has a Windows 7 Pro machine that I would like to extract and open in Hyper-V.  I am not sure how to do this or if it is possible.  Not sure how to ask the question but the end result would be this Windows 7 Pro machine would be running on a Hyper-V 2008 Enterprise x64 server.  I am completely familiar with Hyper-V but I am an Apple novice and am looking for specific assistance in getting the Boot Camp Windows 7 machine running properly in Hyper-V (latest version) (all updates and patches are installed).

Microsoft offers a free conversion utility that is designed to move/copy a physical system to a virtualized environment, specifically Hyper-V: Disk2VHD.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415


Is there an equivalent utility to Linux's tracepath for OS X? I'm attempting to determine the path MTU from my Mac to various sites, and can't find a built-in utility to accomplish this.

In Linux, I would use a utility like tracepath, but I"m wondering if there is some sort of equivalent available for OS X.

You can use the standard ping that the Mac OSX comes with to find pmtu.

ping -D -s <size> <host> shoud do the trick. Please note, the size is just the ICMP datagram payload size. To see the IP MTU, you need to add 8 bytes of the ICMP header and 20 bytes of the IP header (so for example, to send 1500 Bytes long IP packet, you need to specify size as 1472). Please note, -D is important here, as it sets the Dont-Fragment flag on.

You can also use ping -D -g <minsize> -G <maxsize> -h <sizeincr> <host> to run a ping sweep. This pings your host with packets starting from minsize up to maxsize in sizeincr increments. Again, same rule applies to your sizes - these are just for ICMP payload (so you need to add 28 Bytes to the size specified here for the full IP MTU size).

What you're looking for is an ICMP unreachable message back with a "Fragmentation needed but Don't Fragment flag on" sub-type back. The IP address of the sender of the above ICMP message is the host or router which has its MTU set to lower than the size of your packet, on the link which it would use to forward your packet further towards the destination.

Please note as well, that sometimes (badly misconfigured) firewalls or traffic filters will block all ICMP messages and in such case, you'll just see no response. To test which host dropped the packet, you could run traceroute to your destination and then repeatedly ping every hop on the way with '-D' and a size or a sweep to discover the local MTU of the link that hop is connected to. It will be the link between the last host you can ping and the first host you can't that will have a smaller MTU.

Again - this is all subject to routers handling ICMP, which they might not.

The PMTUD (Path MTU Discovery) protocol works in the same fashion. It uses TCP packets with DF flag on. The TCP sessions endpoints agree on their MSS (Maximum Segment Size, which is MTU less IP and TCP headers, 40B) - they choose the smaller of the MSS values advertised by each host in the TCP handshake. Then they send all traffic with DF flags on, and wait for the ICMP unreachable or a TCP ACK. The latter means the PMTU is sufficient, the former mean they need to drop MSS.

Hope that helps!


Automate Mouse and Keyboard interactions similiar to OneClick for MacOS 9? I need to batch a process that requires me to automate some key presses.  All I need to be able to do is hit the enter key, wait 5 seconds, hit the enter key again, wait 5 minutes, and then cmd + w to close the current window.

In the MacOS 9 days I would use OneClick by WestCode software:
http://www.macworld.com/article/15791/2000/12/13reviews2oneclick.html

Is there a similar tool for MacOS X, Snow Leopard specifically?  In this particular instance I do not need to can the focus of windows or anything else.  I just need to automate key presses within a program at various intervals.

Have you tried to use automator and its record actions feature? Described here


How can I upgrade Silverlight so that I can stream Netflix / How can I install/upgrade Silverlight so that I can run Netflix?

Go to this Microsoft link: http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight, and follow the instructions there.

It will auto-download a silverlight.dmg installation file, which you double-click to launch.


"Startup disk" in "About this Mac" I noticed that on when I go into "About this Mac" on my iMac I see a parameter named "Startup disk" while on my MacBook I do not... Is this because I have multiple disks in my iMac and only one in the MacBook?

Yes, it's because the Mac sees multiple bootable disks.

Or multiple bootable volumes on the internal drive.


OS X equivalent of Windows keyboard commands to access in-application menus? In Windows, I often use the keyboard commands to navigate through the menus in a program.  For example, in Photoshop, I can do Alt+F, then D to quickly Save for Web & Devices.  Or Alt+V, then D to Clear Guides.  This is great when there is no keyboard command for a menu item that I want to use, or the existing keyboard command requires too many fingers.

How can I translate this functionality to OS X (OS X 10.5.8 in case it matters)?  How can I navigation through an applications's menus using keyboard commands?

You can use Ctrl + F2, which moves the focus to the  symbol in the menu bar. Then use the arrow keys to move around, or just type the start of a menu name to highlight it. With a menu name highlighted, hit Space to expand it. In an open menu, you can type the start of a menu item to highlight it. Once highlighted, press Space again to “click” it.

So, to get to “Save for Web & Devices” in Photoshop, you could press Ctrl + F2, F, Space, Enter, S, ↓ until you focus “Save for Web & Devices”, then Space.

Of course, the built-in keyboard shortcut for that option is much easier to type: ⌥ + ⇧ + ⌘ + S.


How to get MacBook Air to automatically connect to company guest network? My company has a guest wifi network for use by non-company issued machines. Since getting my MacBook Air recently, I've wanted to bring it in and use it around the office.

I can easily connect to the (unsecured) guest wifi network but then the first time I try to access a website I get a login page where I need to use my company userid/password to gain access. This is kind of like it works in a hotel.

This works fine except if I put my machine to sleep and wake it up again, I need to re-login again. This re-login happens all day long. Very annoying. I'm wondering if I can configure my Mac to automatically login for me. Is there a way of configuring the wireless networking on my Mac to automatically pass my userid/password for when upon connecting?

If the login functions through a Webpage, it's probable that the closest you could come is to write a script to fill in the form for you.

If you're lucky, the login form might use a HTML GET request so you could to bookmark the page that logs you in. Pay attention to what redirects occur once you login. If you see something like this:http://example.com?name=fred&pword=qwerty, you can bookmark that and go to it to log in automatically.
This is unlikely, though, because it isn't a very secure choice for your company. The form probably uses a POST request.


Xcode command line tools install error trying to run homebrew I am trying to install homebrew but cannot due to an error popping up when I try to install command line tools. The error says that they cannot be downloaded from the install server.
I already checked the library to see if Xcode is there ..nothing. I'm running Catalina.
Note : I only want the command line tools, not the whole 10GB Xcode download, which I heard snoops on your system. Thanks in advance!

This question has my best answer for installing the tools.

Can't install Homebrew on macOS Mojave; installer doesn't recognize Command Line Tools

I prefer running it without Xcode or a developer account, but if your are super paranoid on security, perhaps downloading it from Apple developer wen site lets you validate the checksum and sizing before you install it? If you trust Apple updates for security, you should probably trust them for the Xcode tools, though.


iPhone locked for ransom: how to recover if it's offline? I'm trying to help a friend who got her iPhone locked for ransom through the "I lost my iPhone" feature.
The screen is locked and says "Dlya polucheniya parolya, napishite na e-mail: helpicloud3@gmail.com".
I got her to change her password and use the "sign out of all browsers" option on AppleID so now she should be the only one with access to it.
I thought that was over, but when she accessed the "Lost my iPhone" page to unlock the phone it said "Device is offline". We checked and the iPhone seems to have WiFi off and says "SIM locked" in the status bar, upper left.

I looked around for a solution, but found nothing. I searched the ransom message over google (https://www.google.it/search?q=Dlya+polucheniya+parolya%2C+napishite+na+e-mail:+helpicloud3%40gmail.com) and found 3 sites: two in Russian (still have to check them) and one in English (http://kilishek.com/index.php/2016/05/14/friday-13-my-apple-id-was-hacked/), where someone describes the same exact ransom happening the same exact day, but he had no problem in recovering the iPhone.

Can someone help me?

Edit:
Problem solved: the iPhone's SIM had the PIN activated and this prevented it from connecting to the cloud.

Contact Apple. Immediately.

This is probably a security breach of your friend's iCloud account. In order to lock your friend's iPhone, his/her iCloud password is required.
This could either mean that there is a security flaw within iCloud that is not known by Apple and has been exploited or that your friend might have leaked their credentials to a phishing scam.

You can contact Apple support right here:
https://getsupport.apple.com

Alternatively, because your friend's phone is being held for ransom, you might want to contact the local police and report a case.

You may want to try SvenS's answer and see if that disables the SIM lock, though I doubt it is the cause of the phone being locked.


How do I view my iCloud Photo Stream online? I set up iCloud when I installed iOS 5 on my iPhone and was excited about Photo Stream. I logged into icloud.com and found there are no photos. What gives? I was hoping that this would end the need to selectively pull photos off my phone, then upload, then share. But it looks like you can only sync between iOS devices and Lion (which I don't have). Is there a web interface or some other way to see these photos?

Update: Apple now allows you to share your Photo Stream with others. More info on the official Photo Stream page here

At the moment no. The only way to access your stream is from a Lion Machine using either iPhoto or Aperture, or from another iOS 5.0 device with Photo Stream enabled.

I am not entirely sure if Apple is going to allow a sharing portal, however at the moment I take the images I want to share and upload them to Flickr through iPhoto once they are in my Photo Stream.

I suspect they currently use Photo Stream as a personal backup and sharing solution between devices, and not global sharing.


Display virtual adapters in network settings I've configured a host only adapter in Parallels Desktop. If I type ifconfig in the terminal that network adapter is listed in the output like:
...
bridge101: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    options=3<RXCSUM,TXCSUM>
    ether fa:ff:c2:xx:xx:xx
    inet 192.168.12.98 netmask 0xffffffe0 broadcast 192.168.12.127
    inet6 fe80::c67:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx%bridge101 prefixlen 64 secured scopeid 0x14
    Configuration:
        id 0:0:0:0:0:0 priority 0 hellotime 0 fwddelay 0
        maxage 0 holdcnt 0 proto stp maxaddr 100 timeout 1200
        root id 0:0:0:0:0:0 priority 0 ifcost 0 port 0
        ipfilter disabled flags 0x0
    member: en11 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
            ifmaxaddr 0 port 19 priority 0 path cost 0
    member: en12 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
            ifmaxaddr 0 port 21 priority 0 path cost 0
    member: en13 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
            ifmaxaddr 0 port 22 priority 0 path cost 0
    member: en14 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
            ifmaxaddr 0 port 23 priority 0 path cost 0
    member: en16 flags=3<LEARNING,DISCOVER>
            ifmaxaddr 0 port 25 priority 0 path cost 0
    nd6 options=201<PERFORMNUD,DAD>
    media: autoselect
    status: active
    ...

Before I've upgraded to Big Sur, I was able to see those adapters also in the (visual) network settings of OSX. Now it is not listed there anymore. Is there a way to show them also in Big Sur?

Finally, I found the answer in the Parallels knowledge base (https://kb.parallels.com/125286):

Issue
After upgrading macOS to Big Sur, Connect Mac to this network
and Show in System Preferences options disappeared from Parallels
Desktop preferences > Network..
Show in System Preferences option can not be selected so Host-Only
network cannot be found from macOS System Preferences > Network.
Cause
These features are now hidden due to macOS Big Sur restrictions
(KEXT-less network mode): In macOS Big Sur Apple restricted usage of
kernel extensions and Parallels Desktop does not load them by default,
instead it uses macOS own built-in mechanism.
Workaround
Downgrade to Parallels Desktop 16.0.1 or earlier - make
sure the version is compatible with macOS Big Sur.


Applescript causes long error messages to be logged in system.log I have this very simple script...

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

tell application activeApp
    repeat 5 times
        display dialog "Hello world" giving up after 2
        delay 2
    end repeat
end tell

and it works fine, but every time the dialog is displayed the following errors are logged,

27/07/15 8:32:48 PM    AppleScript Editor[43002]   -[NSCarbonWindowFrame aspectRatio]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x116411470

27/07/15 8:32:48 PM    AppleScript Editor[43002]   HIToolbox: ignoring exception '-[NSCarbonWindowFrame aspectRatio]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x116411470' that raised inside Carbon event dispatch
(
.... trace ....
)

which is flooding my system log. This happens regardless of the active application.

Any idea why and how to stop the errors?

I just discovered that a nested tell will stop the errors, ie

tell application "System Events"
    set activeApp to short name of first process whose frontmost is true
    tell application activeApp
        repeat 5 times
            display dialog "Hello world" giving up after 2
            delay 2
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell

Still don't know why though...


Time Machine without Airport? I'm a very new Mac user. I just bought a MacBook Pro and I'd like to use the Time Machine backup. Unfortunately, it seems like I can only keep my laptop mobile by using an Airport router. I was hoping that I could backup to a HDD shared by my Window 7 desktop.

Is this pie in the sky? Is there a backup alternative that I could use that would give me the functionality I'm looking for?

Additional Information

I'm not looking to back up files per se. My documents, pictures, etc, are backed up on mirrored externals on my PC. I'm looking for a backup that will allow me to restore my applications and their settings should the Mac ever crash - installing and configuring a system is the most time consuming part of rebuilding a machine.

Time machine requires a specially formatted hard drive - it doesn't have to be an Apple drive and indeed can be anything you can connect to the machine, but it must be HFS+ and as such cannot be shared by Windows (FAT/NTFS).

My choice in this situation (I too have a W7 machine too) was to purchase a relatively cheap Western Digital Portable HDD from Amazon, let my Mac format that and use it exclusively for backups. I couldn't find anything to share them between machines at all.

If you're only looking to backup files, however, Dropbox may suit you well. It's free plan provides you with a 2gb folder that syncs between your computers (and the cloud).

I'm interested in what you said about an Airport router - your Macbook should be able to connect to any Wifi A/B/G network (so pretty much anything, for instance the free router your internet supplier provides).


Problems with using HP 27fw external display on a MacBook Pro when running macOS I am using a MacBook Pro 2017 running on macOS High Sierra. When I use it with the HP 27fw external display the quality of display output is not good. The fonts are not sharp and overall the resolution is not good. I have set the font smoothing when available option. Still the fonts does not appear correctly.

However, when using the MBP with windows the fonts are displayed correctly.

How can I troubleshoot this?

If by HP27fw you mean this display, then you may have gotten a fairly low end 27 inch display.

For example on my work PC (Optiplex 7060, Win-10) I have three Dell 24-inch displays that are set to their native resolution of 2560 x 1440. So, you ask, what does that have to do with my display on my Mac? Glad you asked.

The specs of that monitor say

  Recommended Resolution 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz (FHD)

And it makes no mention of any other resolutions that are supported.

So what you have here is a monitor that is 3-inches larger than one of my displays and yet it has a lower resolution.

While the display resolution of a monitor can have a lot of different available resolutions a good quality display that supports a resolution that will look good on your Mac at 27-inches is probably closer to 2560 x 1440. And if you want a really high end display at the 27-inch size look at a 5K display at 5120 x 2880.

I would say that you got a display that will work with your Mac, however it will not work well with your Mac and you need to get one with a higher native resolution to properly display the video output the Mac is capable of.


Upgrade to iOS 13 gets stuck at the Apple logo and the horizontal progress bar I restarted the iPhone, plugged in the lightning to supply the power, and started the upgrade from iOS 12.4 (I think it was) to 13.

It is stuck at the Apple logo screen with the horizontal bar, with the bar showing what is like 99%, and it has been like that for 1.5 hours now. What can be done?

P.S. To see what might be able to fix it. Please see my answer for the possibilities. Unfortunately, I waited for iOS 13.1, 13.1.1, and 13.1.2, and none could fix it.

You may want to read If you can't update or restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch on Apple's website. Essentially, You have two main options.

1. Force restart your iPhone

In other words, force your iPhone to reboot. How you do this will depend on your model of iPhone. Since you haven't specified this, refer to Force restart iPhone on Apple's website.

2. Put your iPhone into Recovery Mode

If you have an iPhone 8 or X follow these steps:

Connect your iPhone to a computer with a Lightning cable
Open iTunes on the computer
Press then release the volume up button on your iPhone
Immediately press then release the volume down button on your iPhone
Hold the side button, and keep holding it down till you see the Recovery Mode
screen (this appears after the Apple logo

If you have an iPhone 7 follow these steps:

Connect your iPhone to a computer with a Lightning cable
Open iTunes on the computer
Press and hold both the side button and volume down button on your iPhone
Keep holding them down till you see the Recovery Mode screen (this appears after the Apple logo)

If you have an iPhone 6S follow these steps:

Connect your iPhone to a computer with a Lightning cable
Open iTunes on the computer
Press and hold both the Home and Lock button
Keep holding them down till you see the Recovery Mode screen (this appears after the Apple logo)


Do OS-X app bundles always contain Info.plist - CFBundleExecutable? I wonder if OS-X app bundles always have a Info.plist - CFBundleExecutable configuration?

Thank you in advance for answers.

Yes see Apple's documentation on bundle structure

An OSX Application bundle must contain an Info.plist and expects certain keys including CFBundleExecutable whose definition is

  The name of the main executable file. This is the code that is executed when the user launches your application. Xcode typically sets the value of this key automatically at build time.


Phone shows 11 gb is used while only a little over 1 gb is used? I added all up all of the usage data on my iphone 5s(16gb) and it came up to a little over 1gb, while it says 11 gb is used, with only 1.7 gb is free.

You should go to Settings/General/Iphone Storage. It will give you a listing of items on your phone and their sizes. It takes about 15 minutes to create the table so be patient. You can see at bottom of screen that it is working.


Apps and games automatically in wrong language I have an iPhone 5 bought in Norway. The language setting on the phone is Norwegian, which means menus and such are all shown in Norwegian. The same goes for some "inherent" apps such as the iPhone weather app, which is also in Norwegian. I'm Norwegian, so that's all good.

However, I've been living in Kazakhstan for the past year, and gradually (and weirdly) my phone seems to have picked up on the fact that I live in a Russian-speaking environment and maybe that I sometimes write in Russian.

Now my Spotify app, all sorts of games and other apps automatically that I want to be in English have morphed into Russian, and there is no way to change the language to English.

My time zone is currently set to New York (I'm in the US at the moment), there is nothing in my settings saying I want stuff to be in Russian, but just now when I downloaded the game "The Island" the whole damn thing is in Russian, and there is no option to change language for it anywhere.

What to do to?

App's text localization works like this: The App retrieves the device's languages preferences order and appropriately displays the App's text in the first language that matches any of the ones that the App has implemented.

So, at some point you probably changed your device's language to Russian, an it stuck as the secondary language. This means that as the App lacks the localized text in your primary language, Norwegian in this case, it displays it in the next possible language based on your preferences.

Before iOS 7, English was the device's unchangeable secondary language, but now it gets reordered with every language change you perform. So, you'll just have to rearrange the languages in your desired order. To do so just:

Go to Settings / General / International / Language
Select English or any other language you'll be comfortable with as a secondary one.
Tap Done
Once the device's language has been changed, change it back to Norwegian