Why does my 3TB Seagate HD keep formatting as a Logical Volume Group This is really annoying. I have a brand new Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM hard drive that I am trying to format/partition in Disk Utility. Every time I change any settings or erase the drive, it changes it to a Logical Volume Group and subsequently changes the partition to a Logical Partition. Then I have to use Disk Utility in terminal and manually erase it.

This is really weird because I have two of these exact same drives and I zeroed out and partitioned the first one a couple of months ago without any issue whatsoever. I am not doing anything different than I always do when setting up my HDs.

I'm running OSX 10.8.4 on a 2009 Mac Pro.

Edit:
I am not trying to make a Fusion Drive. The drive will be partitioned as GUID Partition Table with 1 partition and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then when I erase the drive or change the number of partitions, or the partition map—any of these adjustments makes it instantly a Logical Volume Group. Again, to clarify, this is ONE drive, I shouldn't be able to make it a fusion.

I also have this issue... MacPro, 3TB drive (Seagate). I have to use the terminal:

diskutil list
diskutil unmount /dev/disk22
diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ "Macintosh HD" /dev/disk22

etc etc to utilize this drive correctly. (Sorry for all the commands. Posting them just in case it helps someone. Though anyone using those commands better know what they do first!)


Is it possible to disable a lost iPad? I lost my iPad somewhere, and was silly enough not to password-protect it. The device has direct access to my gmail and facebook accounts. Is it possible to disable its network usage remotely, maybe through iTunes or some other Apple service? I'd like to do something such as whenever that particular iPad connects to the Internet it would be either shutdown or disconnected from Internet.

Did you have Find My iPad activated via the iCloud settings on your iPad?

If so, then you will be able to do any of the following on your iPad:

locate it on a map
send a message to it
play a sound on it
remotely lock it
remotely wipe it

Just for the record, when you enable iCloud, options 2, 3, 4 and 5 above are automatically enabled.

If you have Location Services turned on, Find My iPad can also help you locate your iPad on a map as long as it's connected to the Internet.

If you had this activated, or aren't sure if you did, then follow these steps:

use the Find My iPhone app on an iPhone or another iPad or visit icloud.com/find from a computer with a web browser.
Log in to your iCloud account (this may or may not be the same as your usual Apple ID).
Once you're logged in, see if your missing iPad is listed under My Devices.
If it's listed, then that means it's been set up for Find My iPad (a good sign).
Now, if it's currently connected to the internet, you have two possibilities:

if you had location services activated on the iPad, you should see its location come up. Clicking/tapping on the icon will display the Actions option and tapping on this will give you the following three choices: Play Sound; Lost Mode; and Erase iPad.
if you didn't have location services activated on the iPad, it will display a message like "Online, no location available". In this case, clicking/tapping on the iPad icon will give you the following four choices: Notify When Found; Play Sound; Lost Mode; and Erase iPad.

If it's not connected, it will display as being "Offline". Clicking/tapping on the iPad icon will also display the following four choices: Notify When Found; Play Sound; Lost Mode; and Erase iPad.
Select the option you want.

For the benefit of others, there are other services to achieve what you want. However, all of these involve installing third party software on the device (and since you're asking the question it's safe to assume you haven't done this).

Regardless of whether you have Find My iPad activated, this would be a good time to reset your passwords for any online services, email addresses, etc. However, in doing so, you would be best to change your email passwords first to minimise the risk of any password reset info being intercepted on the iPad.


Are my two early 2015 Mac Air's different from each other? Both the Mac Air's are early 2015 models. One has High Sierra installed and the other has Catalina. I see Hyper Threading is missing in the High Sierra version and the text Dual Core is missing even though it has two cores. Are these two different processors? Which one is inferior?

They are the same.  The marketing name of the Intel CPU is something they put in "manually;" it's not queried from the CPU directly.
I wrote a post a while back on getting the CPU architecture where I make note of this:
How do I identify which CPU a MacBook uses?
You can get the "marketing brand string" but then you'll have to go look up that information from Intel's website.  If you use the command:
sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string

You should get a string back that contains:  i5-5250U (I don't have a 2015 MacBook Air to run it on for the exact string).  That CPU was used on the Early 2015 MacBook Air on both the 11" and 13" models.
As for Hyper threading, it is fully supported on the i5-5250U CPU and see How do I enable Intel Virtualization in a MacBook Pro? for additional details on how to check for Virtualization support.


How can I get rid of duplicate Sent, Draft, and Trash folders in my IMAP accounts? I use several IMAP accounts for e-mail, and, except for iCloud, all of them show duplicate folders for Sent, Trash, and Draft mailboxes:

These duplicate folders are (generally) always empty, and seem to have no special status (e.g. the absence of the special icons used in OS X or iOS Mail):

But there seems to be nothing I can do to get rid of them. Is there a way to delete these folders or configure my IMAP accounts so that I at least don't have to see them in my iOS and OS X Mail clients?

Addendum: Here's what the folders look like through the hosts webmail interface:

Set Mail to use your operator’s folders by opening them and selecting Mailbox>Use this mailbox for>[folder function].
Move all messages from old folders to the new ones
Delete the old, now empty folders.


How to remove configuration profile ios 10? Can't remove configuration profile installed from http://altel.kz/mconfig

When i go to "Settings > General > Profile > Altel internet" there's no DELETE button.

How can i remove that profile?

The profile's removal setting is set to ‘Never’, so the profile cannot be removed by the user from settings once installed.

If you have a backup of your device made before you installed the profile, you can restore the backup. Profiles are restored from a backup so if you make a backup now that will be no use.

You may be able to use Apple Configurator to remove the profile (available on the Mac App Store). Connect your device over USB and open the device in Configurator, then go to Actions → Remove → Profiles… and select the profile to remove.


How to install pip in OS X El Capitan? I am a new Mac user, and I need help trying to install pip in OS X El Capitan.

I ran this command, python get-pip.py and ended up with this error:

Exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/var/folders/hc/87zml1_52jd544j9cd71mqrh0000gn/T/tmp83m3F3/pip.zip/pip/basecommand.py", line 215, in main
    status = self.run(options, args)
  File "/var/folders/hc/87zml1_52jd544j9cd71mqrh0000gn/T/tmp83m3F3/pip.zip/pip/commands/install.py", line 317, in run
    prefix=options.prefix_path,
  File "/var/folders/hc/87zml1_52jd544j9cd71mqrh0000gn/T/tmp83m3F3/pip.zip/pip/req/req_set.py", line 742, in install
    **kwargs
  File "/var/folders/hc/87zml1_52jd544j9cd71mqrh0000gn/T/tmp83m3F3/pip.zip/pip/req/req_install.py", line 831, in install
    self.move_wheel_files(self.source_dir, root=root, prefix=prefix)
  File "/var/folders/hc/87zml1_52jd544j9cd71mqrh0000gn/T/tmp83m3F3/pip.zip/pip/req/req_install.py", line 1032, in move_wheel_files
    isolated=self.isolated,
  File "/var/folders/hc/87zml1_52jd544j9cd71mqrh0000gn/T/tmp83m3F3/pip.zip/pip/wheel.py", line 346, in move_wheel_files
    clobber(source, lib_dir, True)
  File "/var/folders/hc/87zml1_52jd544j9cd71mqrh0000gn/T/tmp83m3F3/pip.zip/pip/wheel.py", line 317, in clobber
    ensure_dir(destdir)
  File "/var/folders/hc/87zml1_52jd544j9cd71mqrh0000gn/T/tmp83m3F3/pip.zip/pip/utils/__init__.py", line 83, in ensure_dir
    os.makedirs(path)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/os.py", line 157, in makedirs
    mkdir(name, mode)
OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip'

OK if you're a new Mac user you really should start with getting to be acquainted with HomeBrew. Leave the python on the system as it is and use your own Python installation you get from HomeBrew.

See here: http://brew.sh/

Pip is provided if you install python with brew. I can really recommend using pyenv also and if you want to do Python development have a good look at the community variant of PyCharm (https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/).


Run Rosetta on macOS Sierra I'm wondering if there is any way to run Rosetta on macOS Sierra. In this post, someone mentioned that Rosetta may uses the Carbon framework, which appears to exist in up to macOS Sierra. Are there any missing frameworks in macOS Sierra that Rosetta requires?

I'll attempt to install Rosetta on macOS Sierra soon, and will update the question after doing so

Update: it turns out that Rosetta is a file named translate which is placed in /usr/libexec/oah/. When running /usr/libexec/oah/translate, either as when installed by the Snow Leopard Rosetta installer, and installed by Pacifist, I get Killed: 9. But, when running ~/Downloads/Rosetta/usr/libexec/oah/, which was extracted by Pacifist, I get the following:

$ ~/Downloads/Rosetta/usr/libexec/oah/translate
objc[21035]: Objective-C garbage collection is no longer supported.
Abort trap: 6

After looking more into Rosetta.pkg (which isn't actually located in Optional Installs.mpkg somehow), I noticed that aside from postinstall and preinstall scripts, there was a folder named postinstall_actions which contained a script named registerRosetta. Here are the contents of that script:

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$3" == "/" ]; then
    logger -p install.info Registering Rosetta
    /usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/translate
fi

So, I decided to backup /usr/sbin/sysctl and then try running part of the script. This is what happened:

root# /usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/translate
sysctl: unknown oid 'kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc'

I don't know about this stuff, but it looks like something is missing.

Update 2:
I've discovered this discussion about getting Rosetta to run on OS X Lion, which unfortunately seemed to stop in 2011, without having provided (as far as I could understand) a conclusion to whether Rosetta can be run on OS X Lion. I'm going to look into modifying macOS more, to make this work. I have no idea how much is going to need to be done, but I can hopefully get an idea by continuing where the discussion on InsanelyMac forums left off.

You can try installing Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) in VirtualBox. I was able to do this using an iMac (21.5 inch, Mid 2011) with High Sierra installed. I was able to install and use Adobe Create Suite 2 in a Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) virtual machine.  Adobe Create Suite 2 requires the installation and use of Rosetta.

VirtualBox is a free application.
I can not longer find the link to buy Snow Leopard from Apple. Used DVDs are available or you can refer to this answer.

Below is a link for the license for Snow Leopard. As far as I can tell, Apple requires the use of a Mac to run Snow Leopard. There is no mention of whether or not the Mac uses a virtual machine.

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/osx_snow_leopard_sec_upd.pdf


iOS Developer Account With VISA Debit Card Can anyone confirm whether Apple accepts VISA debit card to buy iOS Developer account that costs $99.

I can use the same card to purchase apps from the App Store but is this card can also be used to buy iOS developer account?

According to Apple iOS Developer website, only valid credit cards are accepted. Googling suggest attempted purchase using debit card didn't work, unfortunately.
It’s up to your bank to code whether the card is valid for Apple to charge in the region it decides to charge you for this product. Globally, many (if not most) debit cards will work for any Apple transaction, but some will not if your bank establishes a limit for transactions in the regional online store Apple uses for your transaction or otherwise restricts your card to local or country-specific ATM only. There are debit cards with very strict terms that will not work with Apple.


External hard drives keep failing A couple years ago, I learned my lesson. I had bought a WD My Book Thunderbolt external RAID. I didn't have a backup plan of course; it failed within a year, and I lost everything—this was about a year ago.

I went out and bought two 8TB Seagate Expansion Desktop Drives, one as my main storage, and one for backup. I signed up with Crashplan, a service that would backup my files to it's cloud as well as do the job of backing up to my local external backup drive.

A couple of months ago the backup drive died. Within the same week one of my wife's external drives died.

I invested in a Synology NAS and set up a RAID 6 to throw all my files onto, with plans to attach a 2nd external drive to back up the NAS—but of course, before I get a chance to back up my main Seagate drive to the NAS, my Mac is telling me it has a problem (unfortunately I didn't write down what it said), that it has been set to read-only, and I need to back it up before it fails completely.

It feels like this is happening a bit too often to blame on "Well sometimes ya just get a bad one!", and I'm wondering if I am overlooking other factors?

Could it be an electrical issue? My house is about 120 years old, but we had the knob & tube wiring replaced when we moved in and a new breaker box installed. All my computer hardware is plugged into a couple surge protectors which are in turn plugged into a UPS batter backup/surge protector.

Could there be a problem with my computer, doing something to the hard drives to mess them up?

Am I just overusing or overfilling the drives? My work is in graphic design, photography, and video editing, so I'm typically working with some big files, lots of caches, etc. Also I know when Crashplan was backing up to that one external it was telling me it was nearly full. Perhaps I need to be running First Aid on the drives, or rebuilding the directories with Diskwarrior on a regular basis?

It feels like this is happening a bit too often to blame on "Well
  sometimes ya just get a bad one!", and I'm wondering if I am
  overlooking other factors?

Yes!

Based on what you're doing, your using your drives not as a typical home user but more of a "pro" and you should be getting the hardware to match.  Most consumer (especially the entry level drives) have lower MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) numbers - higher is better - than their "workstation" or "NAS class" drives.  The higher end models also have longer warranties - typically 3 to 5 years.

There are some additional factors you may wish to consider:

Seagate drives are notoriously unreliable.  WD drives are better, but the really reliable ones are made by HGST.
Look to get a Thunderbolt enclosure, rather than a "consumer grade" USB drives.
Populate your Synology with NAS rated drives.  They are designed to run longer, cooler with greater reliability.

  Could it be an electrical issue? ... All my computer hardware is
  plugged into a couple surge protectors which are in turn plugged into
  a UPS batter backup/surge protector.

A battery backup is also a surge suppressor/protector so daisy-chaining one to the next is not a good idea - you could be creating issues if/when there are surges.  If you must add ports to your battery backup, use a power strip, not a surge protector.

Your Backup Strategy

It sounds like you're off to a good start with your backup strategy.  Here's a few points to consider:

Having RAID is good, but don't depend on it for backup.  RAID is designed to maximize data availability (up time), not be a backup.
The two USB drives attached to the RAID is a good idea.  However, you should be alternating backups between the two.  One for "odd" days and the other for "even".  This will require you to have to different backup jobs but it ensures your data is backed up to two different locations.  Also, to ensure you don't backup corrupted data....

Don't backup the backup!
Backup the actual data only!

Adding Crashplan is also an excellent idea.  Having this backup your files to an offsite location is a very smart thing to do.  Having a regimented backup workflow will ensure your access to data even if your NAS and both backup drives are inaccessible.


How can I type a backtick using a German keyboard? I am trying to type a backtick (`) using a German keyboard.

How can I do this?

It can be found at the top-right corner of the keyboard while holding down shift.  Type a space afterwards to exit dead key status.


Image dims when viewing in full screen in iphoto on thunderbolt monitor I'm using a Macbook Air along with a Thunderbolt Display. I am experiencing a problem in iPhoto wherein images are dimmed ONLY on the Thunderbolt display and ONLY in full view mode.

When using iPhoto, and when viewing in thumbnail mode, all of the thumbnails appear as they should w/rt color and brightness. But when I doubleclick on an image to bring it up in full view, the image is significantly dimmed -- As if a 20% transparent black layer were overlaid on top of it.

When I view the same images in slideshow mode on the thunderbolt, they appear just fine!

And when I view the same images in full view mode on the MB Air monitor, they also appear just fine.

The problem appears to be w/in iPhoto, as there is no systems calibration setting that I am aware of.

Does anyone have a suggestion about how to fix this so that the images appear unaffected on thunderbolt in full view mode?

I am seeing the same thing here with a MBA on the TB display. All fine on MBA display, and thumbnails on TB, but once you zoom up the photos on the TB display they become 'darker'.

If I export the photos out of iPhoto and display them in Preview/quicklook, they don't go darker. It is only iPhoto that is rendering the images with some colour profile.

I couldn't find an answer but a restart of the computer fixed the issue.

Using iPhoto 9.5.1 running OS 10.9.4 on MacBookAir5,2.


View your rated music, apps and etc. on the iTunes? I would like to ask, where could I find all my rated music, apps and etc. on the iTunes? Moreover, how could I unrate those items?

Thank you in advance.

Regards,
Arthur

Follow these simple steps to remove a review that you have written:

Sign in to the iTunes Store.
From the Store menu, choose “View My Account” (or click “Account” in the “Quick Links” menu on the right).
In the Settings section, click “Manage” next to “Reviews and Ratings”.

You’ll end up on this page:

Click “Remove” next to the review or rating you would like to remove.

Note: The review that you remove will not immediately disappear. Once removed, the text from the review will no longer be visible but may be retained in Apple’s systems indefinitely.

Source: Apple’s Knowledge Base


Black screen at MacOS login After starting my MacBook Pro 16” (2018) the screen stays black. Also the command strip is dark and without screen brightness controls. I can’t login. Keyboard has backlight on. What could be a fix for the problem?
I’m running Catalina 10.15.7.
I have tried SCM reset already. I can boot to recovery mode. There the screen works fine.

Reseting the NVRAM seems to have fixed the problem.


How to decrypt shared WiFi passwords? With the introduction of iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra, a new feature was added: Sharing WiFi Passwords.

This awesome and convenient feature comes with one draw back: The passwords are stored in Keychain encrypted.  From my decent knowledge of wifi networks, macOS must be able to decrypt the encrypted key into the plaintext password in order to use it to connect.

How can I decrypt the Keychain key to get the password in plaintext?

The summary answer is that the password doesn't need to be passed as the authentication can take advantage of a derived value that combines the SSID and the passphrase into a longish hexadecimal string (or value since everything is a number in the end) and stores that. You would need to reverse engineer or crack that intentional one way process to remove the password component of the end product.

Here is an article that describes your question.

Alright, for example here is the password I used:  SomeSnazzyPassphrase! And here it is in the keychain after iOS shares it to a Mac CEAF1EE4F3050D25F2EF057A66CFD4570559C95656450407136347B75960255E

Before we understand how to reverse it, we must understand how we got there.

First of all we're using a program called wpa_passphrase, which is used in combination of your SSID and Passphrase, to generate that long encoded string.

This is how we obtained the large "password" above: wpa_passphrase <ssid> [passphrase]
For example wpa_passphrase MySSID SomeSnazzyPassphrase!
And we have the PSK hashed created to be CEAF1EE4F3050D25F2EF057A66CFD4570559C95656450407136347B75960255E

Now as wpa_supplicant uses an AES-based cipher, reversing that isn't going to be easy.  In fact,  I'm just going to go out on a limb and say it's practically impossible.


AirDrop Not Working When Signed Into iCloud I seem to only be able to AirDrop to/from one of my Apple devices to another if one of them is signed out of iCloud. I have all my devices (iPhone X, 2017 iMac High Sierra, 2017 MacBook Air High Sierra) all signed in to my iCloud account (the same account). The devices cannot see each other in AirDrop unless I sign one of them out of iCloud.

For example, if I sign my MacBook Air out of iCloud, then my MacBook Air shows in my iMac's AirDrop and I can freely transfer files to it. Once I sign back into iCloud, it goes away.

Note: I can see and AirDrop to any of my colleagues' devices just fine across all of my devices. I just can't send to any of my own devices unless I sign out of iCloud.

I've tried all of the standard AirDrop troubleshooting (Making sure Bluetooth is on, same Wifi, update all devices, restart, etc).

I finally found a solution that worked for me. This seems unrelated but it definitely was my issue. It also fixed my issue with Apple Watch not being able to unlock my Mac. Below is what worked for me.

On your Mac:

Open up Messages App
Go to Messages > Preferences
Select Accounts Tab
Select Blocked Tab
Locate and delete any instances of your own phone number and/or email addresses
Close and wait ~5 minutes for iCloud to sync the changes across all your devices

On IOS:

Go to Settings -> Messages -> Blocked
Same as step 5 and 6 above

After performing those steps Airdrop worked perfectly across all devices and, as a bonus, I was able to unlock my Mac with my Apple Watch again (I was previously getting "your mac was unable to communicate with your apple watch" error / "IDS device not cloud paired").

Hope this helps others!


softlink to Network Location does anyone know a trick how to generate a Softlink to a Network folder (smb or nfs)

the idea is that there are some network folders i use regulary, but they usally not mounted .. the soflink i made is (of course) not avaiable because its going to /Volumes/share/... is it possible to trigger the remount via a folder action or something like this to avoid the mounting drama via finder.

currently i'm working arround this by executing a shell script that just mounts the share.

I have a similar situation, and for me it simply works if I drag the network folder in finder with Cmd + Alt held down to create an alias. If the network share is not mounted, it will automatically mount when the link is accessed either by Finder or with most native GUI applications (e.g., my iTunes folder is linked this way and starting iTunes will mount the share).

However, if you meant a symlink instead of an alias, you can certainly create the link (e.g., on the command line with ln -s /Volumes/dest /path/to/target) but it will not cause the automount to occur, but rather the directory will just seem to not exist if accessed without the share mounted.


ASUS Touch Monitor and Mac OS 10.13 I have on my desk an ASUS VT229, a multitouch monitor. I attached it via a docking station to my MBP (HDMI + USB port for touch recognition) and it works well with Windows (7 & 10, running in my VMware Fusion), but it works 50% with OS X.

Basically I can move mouse pointer (it also recognizes multitouch) but I cannot click :-P

Maybe there's something I can do to make it work better?

MacOS native HID driver does not support touch screens.  Some touch devices switch to single touch 'mouse' emulation when plugged into a non Windows system, many don't and stay in Windows HID multi-touch mode not supported by MacOS.  We supply a MacOS multi-touch driver that mimics a Apple track pad and much more.  Further details are available at www.touch-base.com
You might also check a product USB Overdrive, they don’t explicitly mention touch screens, but they have long provided quality software for Mac and input devices and are fully ready for Catalina. Further detauils on that are at https://www.usboverdrive.com/


How to send a pop up message from a Mac to Windows on same network? I want to use the equivalent of net send, but from a MacBook.
I want to send a pop up message from my mac to a windows machine on same network. Is smbutil the command to use?

Run the following command, then enter your message and press ⌃D to finish and send.

smbclient -M NETBIOSNAME -U FROMNAME

-U FROMNAME is optional


Add line over letter in Pages, Keynote In Cocoa programs in Mac OS it is possible, using the fonts palette, add line below the character (underline), in the middle of the character (strikethrough), changing the stile of the line: single, double, colour.

I need to add a line above a character (to represent antiparticles in particle physics). Is it possible to do without using drawing tools?

I need a line being possible to add above any character, not just ones that have lines in certain languages.

You can use Unicode combining character U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE. It can be found by searching in the palette from Edit → Emoji & Symbols (formerly Edit → Special Characters…), or by using a specialized keyboard layout such as the built-in Unicode Hex Input or my own custom one mostly designed for mathematics.

Here's some sample text with overlines, but note that the quality of the results may vary widely with the font, application, and operating system in use by the viewer.

  A̅ B̅ C̅ D̅ a̅ b̅ c̅ d̅ α̅ β̅ γ̅ δ̅ ε̅

Also, since the position of the overline depends on the height of the character, it will not necessarily align over multiple adjacent characters.

When using Unicode combining characters directly, you must type or paste them after the base character (and once you do so, they will be treated as one unit for editing purposes). This is the opposite of classic “dead key” combinations like Option-e a á where you specify the accent first.


The "allow apps downloaded from" setting won't stay selected All my (downloaded?) files restored from Time Machine are marked as "damaged". I assume the problem is similar to this one: All downloaded files cannot be opened as they are 'damaged and should be moved to the Trash' so I try to change the "Allow app..." setting.

I open Security & Privacy and see App Store is selected:

I click the padlock and check "App Store and identified developers":

(I also notice that "Anywhere" is no longer an option.)

I leave System Preferences and try to open my files, but still get the error. So I go back to System Preferences, Security & Privacy and the old option is still selected:

Since this is a new Mac and nothing was working anyway, I decided I had nothing to lose by wiping it and starting over. So I restarted it and held down Command + R. From the menu I selected to reinstall macOS. After waiting 40 minutes I was disappointed to see that this option did not wipe the drive, and my restored accounts were still there on the login screen. I was about to restart again and this time format the drive, but I thought What the heck, and logged into my account. Surprisingly none of the files I opened were reported as damaged! Everything seems to be working now.


How make changing to the /etc/hosts file take effect? I added some lines to my /etc/hosts file to resolve a private hostname, but every time after rebooting, the lines I added get lost. Should there be any setting options to make these changes take effect?

The Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client is known to show this behavior. It will reset your /etc/hosts file on reboot to the contents of /etc/hosts.ac.

If you use this VPN client, you should make your modifications to both files.

See this hint for more info.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20111011050950471


Clear Safari history & iTunes login I have installed Yosemite OS on my Mac and I encounter the following problem. Whenever I clear Safari history, then I always have to login to iTunes if I want to use the online services (e.g. internet music or online radio).

Is this a bug or that's the way it works?


View All Assigned Keyboard Shortcuts Is there a way (probably an app) that lets you see all global (and possibly local) keyboard shortcuts that have been defined? Something similar to ActiveHotkeys on Windows. I dislike assigning new keyboard shortcuts without being sure that they won't cause shortcut collision.

There is a very nice app that's freely available to show you all shortcuts when you hold down the command key a bit longer than normal.

http://www.cheatsheetapp.com/CheatSheet/

It works on Mavericks and several older OS and I've never had problems with it other than forgetting to quit it after I'm done discovering shortcut keys. It appears to be advertisement supported, so consider that if you prefer to pay to support developers as opposed to be part of what's being sold.


Does mac os x have any command tool like pidstat in linux? It can tell me the current status of a process, for example, whether it is still running or has been terminated.

I'm not sure there is a list of terminated processes, but for a list of processes and their current state you can use the "top" command. It's fairly user-friendly for a Unix tool.

There is also the "Activity Monitor" (in the /Applications/Utilities folder) that is basically top with a GUI.


Ethernet driver missing when installing Windows using boot camp I installed Windows 7 64 bit using bootcamp. The Ethernet driver is missing. Can't find it search on disk.  Where do I get this driver?

I have a Macbook Pro OS X

Didn't read instructions. Using boot camp assistant, I need to select option to download Windows drivers and burn them on CD. Then boot into Windows and insert CD which will launch an installer for the drivers.


Retrieve data after deleting from Trash in OS X I deleted some important data mistakenly from Trash but I need to retrieve it asap. Is there any way to retrieve it either in Terminal or manually?

If you have used Time Machine this will be rather easy:

Go to the Applications folder and open the Time Machine application. Browse to where the file used to live, go to previous backups until it appears, then choose "Restore" from the right-click menu.

Otherwise, if you are still using the same computer, then you really are in trouble. The chances of recovery with tools like Data Rescue go down every minute the machine is in use.


Set PATH variable so that it is detected in all applications, even outside terminal. (El Captain) My ~/etc/path looks as follows:

/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin

The Problem:

When I type echo $PATH into terminal, I get back:

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

And this persists for every application started in the terminal. For instance, if I type emacs, and then do:

M-x getenv PATH

My output is:

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

However, if I start up emacs using launchpad instead of terminal and once again enter M-x getenv PATH, my output is instead /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin.

As you can see my change to ~/etc/path, which was the addition of /usr/local/bin, is missing.

Another Example:

I use a Firefox plugin called vimperator which emulates vim functionality in Firefox. It has a feature that allows the user to edit webpage input in vim. However, this does not seem to work on OS X. On a hunch I type the command !echo $PATH into vimperator and see the following: /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin. Of course, since the symlink called gvim, which points to macvim, was created and placed into /usr/local/bin by brew, this behavior makes sense. What I don't understand is why the PATH is read the way it is.

Solutions that I have tried:

I have obviously restarted my machine.

EDIT (As requested by now deleted comment):

using sysctl user.cs_path in the terminal brings up:

user.cs_path: /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

The loginwindow process sets a user's environment. It sets the variables TMPDIR and PATH, consults Directory Services and sets SHELL HOME USER LOGNAME . PATH is set to /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin unless modified by launchd (in the more current versions of OS X). This is the PATH variable available to the user's processes unless modified by that particular process (cron as an example sets the PATH to /bin:/usr/bin).

Terminal emulator applications start your shell as a login shell thus the PATH is modified by reading the various shell startup file. Any process started by your shell now inherits the new PATH variable. Other applications using a shell do not read any shell config files and use those environment variables available in the current environment. An application may modify the environment by using the LSEnvironment key in their Info.plist.

As of Yosemite, you can change the PATH variable in the following form.

sudo launchctl config user path <path>

in your case you want /usr/local/bin at the front of the path.

sudo launchctl config user path /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

reboot your system and the new PATH will be set by loginwindow.


Does Photos get confused when tagging a person whose face is not visible? I want to tag the people in my photos, even if their faces are not visible. Does this confuse the facial recognition function and reduce the success rate? Is there another way to tag people?

In a sense, yes.  Photos uses facial recognition algorithms that improve their accuracy through acquiring more data with which to reliably match a person’s face.  This is why you are asked to mark wrong matches as well as correct ones, as this all helps the software produce more reliable results.

Tagging a person with no face will feed false data to the algorithm, which will then believe it should start searching for faces that look more like an elbow, or something.

The application itself during the earlier stages of tagging alerts you with a recommendation only to tag faces that are clear, and to avoid even blurry, out-of-focus faces, or faces that are turned to the side.

I, personally, ignore those two particular rules, and at the end, it is your decision how you choose to tag photos.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing what you’re doing if you’re content to match more photos manually than relying on the facial recognition engine to do it for you.

Addendum: One idea I can think of as an alternative means to tag people in photos without compromising the facial recognition effectiveness would be to use keywords, i.e. to create one keyword per person comprising a first and last name.  This will have the benefit of making the photos searchable by a person’s name in a similar fashion to searching for a face.


Spotlight does not seem to work in finding apps I have a Spotlight to search for the applications.

However, nothing shows up when I searched the application.

What might be wrong? I use Yosemite, and I made sure that spotlight works with this command.

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

A recent article on MacIssues suggests rebuilding the spotlight index in situations like this.

Briefly, the proposed solution is to go to the Spotlight preference pane (in System preferences) and add your disk drive to the privacy list, then remove it again.

The article also makes oblique reference to certain “Terminal-based approaches”. The obvious candidate is called mdutil. You can use the -E flag to erase the local metadata store for the named drive(s), or -i off followed by -i on to turn indexing off, then on. (Disclaimer: I have not tried this. Check the manual page.)


MacBook Air 2020 multiport not working properly The problem: One of the USB-C port of my multiport is not wokring, all others are working fine.
In detail:
The multiport has two USBC sockets, SD and micro-SD card reader and 2 "normal" USB (I think version 3.0) sockets. One of the USB-C ports does not work, but all other sockets do. I need at least one USB-C for an external display and the other to charge the MacBook Air from time to time, but since I cannot use both I need to disconnect the display to charge the notebook.
What I've tried:
The display and charging works fine on the one USB-C socket and also no problems if connected directly (I need the multiport also for the USB ports, that's why I still need it...)
The multiport should be working fine as I tried another one (same type) because the first did not work.
Is there any updates to do or driver problems I have to solve? I am not so experienced in this kind of field.

If both multiports behave the same way — that is, show the same flaw —  then it's likely the flaw is with the multiports' design or construction, or both, and not the fault of the Mac.


How to Run Homebrew's Caskroom/cask/pdfinfo? I run brew install Caskroom/cask/pdfinfo but I cannot find in my commandline. My PATH is

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/TeX/texbin

How can you run pdfinfo of Homebrew?

Homebrew cask installs pdfinfo in

/opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/pdfinfo/latest/PDFInfo.app

And then creates a symbolic link to this locations in:

~/Applications

You can run installed pdfinfo with:

open -a pdfinfo

or

open -a /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/pdfinfo/latest/PDFInfo.app

or

open -a ~/Applications/PDFInfo.app

Simply you can open app with double click on ~/Applications/PDFInfo.app icon.


How can I restore the persistent data for Mac's native Stickies app? I use the native Stickies app a lot. I've been using it on this Mac for like 5 years.

I don't know why, but when I upgraded to the latest MacOS (to 10.15.2, from whatever was the big release before it), all my sticky notes disappeared. It was like none had ever existed.

It appears that data isn't actually lost. The web tells me Stickies stores that data in a file at ~/Library/StickiesDatabase. That file exists, and both TextEdit and bash strings reveal that my note data is in there. It's embedded in an illegible binary file, whose format I know nothing about. I have way too many notes for it to be practical to manually copy-and-paste from that format, and I'm not even sure I can read it properly myself. Maybe if I could read it using bash or node, but I don't know anything about the file format.

Anyway, for whatever reason, when I run the Stickies app, it doesn't show that data in any of its notes. Simply putting the file in the location expected by the app is not sufficient, evidently. I don't know what is lacking, though.

I tried Stickies' File > Import Text, but that just loaded the raw binary format for all my old notes into a single new note, instead of really grokking the database and restoring the notes inside. After closing and re-opening Stickies with that one crazy one, all my notes were gone again. (I kept a backup of the original file.)

Is there any way to restore the data in that file? It's already in the proper location, and I certainly haven't hand edited. Or failing that, are there any good tools for parsing it?

Search for Stickies from the uppermost directory of your Mac (by navigating to Finder - Go - Computer or entering ⇧+⌘+C as a keyboard shortcut from Finder) and choose the directory Stickies at the bottom of the list from the screenshot.

In this directory there are rtfd files, from which you can view possibly all the contents that had been in the Stickies notes even though they have now disappeared when the Stickies App is opened. You can simply double-click them and typically they are opened in Rich Text Format by TextEdit App.


Using single Apple ID with multiple Apple Developer Program memberships My company has an Enterprise account to which I am enrolled under Developer role. The invitation was sent to my personal Apple ID.

Now, I want to enroll into Apple Developer program as an individual, just for my apps (have nothing to do with my company) using the same Apple ID.

Is it that possible or do I have to leave the team to create it?

A single Apple ID can be a part of more than one, different development teams.

You are enrolled in the Enterprise account as a Developer. You can easily use your Apple ID to enroll into Apple Developer Program as an individual.

Once your membership request is approved, you'll be the Agent in your personal team and Developer in the company's Enterprise team. When using your Apple ID to log into Apple Developer website or into Xcode, you'll be given the option to select the team of your choosing.


How could I mute all notifications in Microsoft Teams on macOS 10.15.6? Microsoft bypasses the standard notifications mechanism in macOS: there is nothing in System Preferences -> Notifications to control both the sounds and the incessant popups.
Has anybody found away around this lack of utility?
Thanks!

Open Teams preferences (⌘ + ,) and toggle notifications preview and sound:


Is there a possibility to recover rewritten backup copy of an iPhone from iTunes? Is there a possibility to recover rewritten backup copy of an iPhone from iTunes?

The thing is, I accidentally rewrote the former backup with current and now need to get the previous one.

Please help, this is really important.

Perhaps

If you do an iOS upgrade via iTunes and haven't backed up the phone locally "in a while", iTunes will do a backup and include the date and time in the name, so it won't overwrite an existing backup. You can see these backups in Preferences… > Devices. I don't know when iTunes decides to do an automatic backup, but that's a place to look.
The backups are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup on a Mac and \Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ on Windows 7, so if you back up that directory, you may have the desired backup on your backup device/service.

If you don't have the desired backup in either of those places then it's no longer available.


Possible to generate html/text/web version of calendar for sharing? My work uses Microsoft Exchange for our mail system. I've been using Outlook for Mac 2011. Occasionally tried Mail.

One feature I really miss from Outlook for Windows is the ability to paste my calendar (html code) into an email. This makes scheduling meetings so nice since the other person can see when I'm free. If the other person is on Outlook they can look up my schedule, but many people aren't using Outlook. I also know that it's possible to set up a website of one's calendar, but this feature is disabled in my Outlook version (my work does not support this feature).

What options are there to share my calendar using my Mac? I'm willing to consider other software/websites/etc. to easily share my calendar with non-Outlook people, but I would like to stick with our exchange server.

PDF
You can easily create a PDF of your calendar and attach that PDF file:

Open Calendar.app and go to the right date on your calendar
'File' -> 'Print' (or CommandP)
Select your settings and press 'Continue'
Press the button in the lower left corner that says 'PDF'
Now you can 'Save as PDF' or 'Email PDF'

PNG
You can also make a quick and dirty screenshot of your calendar:

Open Calendar.app and go to the right date on your calendar
Press CommandShift4, now release the keys and press Spacebar. Now a camera icon appears.
Click on your calendar once using the camera icon. A screenshot will be saved on your Desktop which you can attach to your email.


How can I find out which process was stopped by RansomWhere? I use RansomWhere, a tool to protect from ransomware. I have OS X Yosemite.

As far as I understand, RansomWhere just warns me whenever an app tries to encrypt data. It's up to the user to judge whether they trust a process or not. (And whether the application is one which should need to encrypt data.) The user is given the choice of Allow or Terminate each time there is a warning. It has warned me about several apps I trust and that I figure did need to encrypt data, and I have simply clicked Allow.

However, just now I got a warning about a process I don't know what was. The message said "is encrypting data", so I figuredd I had to hurry, so I just clicked Terminate immediately after seeing that I wasn't sure what the process actually was. After clicking Terminate, the dialogue box disappeared, and I heard nothing more from RansomWhere regarding the issue.

Now, I want to know what this process actually was and what was going on. I don't remember the details given in the message, just that I wasn't sure which process it was. I wish I would have taken a second to take a screenshot before pressing Terminate, but unfortunately, I didn't.

How can I find out which process this was and what was going on?

According to RansomWhere's own site the data is stored in

/Library/RansomWhere/installedApps.plist - a list of applications already present on the system.
/Library/RansomWhere/approvedBinaries.plist - a list of binaries explicitly approved by the user.
/Library/RansomWhere/whitelist.plist - a list of safe binaries (that often legitimately create encrypted files).
/Library/RansomWhere/graylist.plist - a list of system binaries that are not explicitly trusted.

However, because an app that was terminated is by design not remembered, it will not appear in any list.

  The following list summarizes the 'allow' and 'terminate' actions

  'allow'   Tells RansomWhere? it's ok to let the process continue running. This will be persistently remembered; you'll never be alerted
  about this binary again.
  'terminate'   Tells RansomWhere? to kill the process. As this action is a little more drastic, RansomWhere?, (by design) will not remember
  such actions. Thus if the terminated process is ran again, it will
  cause another alert.

You could check Console to see whether it generated an event at the time - I can't test that as I've never run RansomWhere.


IPhone 6s+ stuck in infinite loop screen I was playing on the computer today when I went to the toilet. After I came back, I saw a loading circle on my screen. I thought its just a update but that wouldnt make sense because I didnt click anything. Then I thought I can just wait some minutes but now its already 4 hours. Ive been looking for solutions but I got a specific problem!
I cant press the Home and Power Button at the same time since my Home Button is broken. And I cant find any solution how I can restart my phone otherwise.
I tried everything but I just cant restart it.

After 4 hours of waiting, the battery was finally empty.
Then I was able to normally start the phone! :)


How do I input ^ instead of ˆ In my iMac 21.5-inch computer (OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.1) I have a cordless keyboard.

At the top of the key 6 I have ˆ instead of ^.

This is a problem. I never have needed to use ˆ, however ^ I need to use it very often. For example, formatting formulas at Math Stack Exchange with MathJax.

Therefore I need to look it up in the Internet.

Is there a special shortcut for having an input of ^? Or is there a way to change my keyboard inputs?

You need to go to Keyboard Preferences and add a new keyboard.

Instead of using USA International keyboard you will need to use USA Keyboard.

So from

Use instead

When you are going to add a Keyboard you select English.
At the end of the list you will see both keyboards. Use the one that is not international.

Another option is to put the ˆ and before you press another key, press the space bar.


Getting to the Dashboard in Lion I'm trying to decide whether or not to upgrade to Lion.  I use the Dashboard a lot, and I value the ability to get to it quickly by hitting the button on my keyboard.  In Lion, it sounds like I would have to open Mission Control, then use my mouse to open the Dashboard.

Is this the only way to get to the Dashboard in Lion?  Does the old keyboard button still work?  If not, can I set a keyboard shortcut to open it without going through Mission Control first?

By default the Dashboard is on its own space, always the leftmost one. The Dashboard button still works and makes you jump right there.

Alternatively, you can disable this behavior in the General preference pane and revert to the Dashboard as an overlay, just as it was before Lion.


How many apps are the Mac AppStore? Is there a way to find out today how many applications are in the Mac AppStore approximately?

I use AppShopper.com to get information like this.  In the right sidebar of every page, it shows the total stats of all the app stores.  For example, as of 18 Sep 2011 at 5:10pm GMT, the sidebar shows:

Total Apps
Total Apps Approved: 595452
Total Available Apps: 462144
Total Available iPhone Apps: 411134
Total Available iPad Apps: 132388
Total Available Mac Apps: 6939


What's the differences between the iPod Touch calendar and the iPhone calendar? What's the differences between the iPod Touch calendar and the iPhone calendar?

There is no difference. What makes you think there is?


Two-finger scrolling stops working after a while I am running into a strange problem. After a few minutes of using Chrome or Firefox, two finger scrolling on my trackpad stops working on these applications.

Every time I restart these applications two finger scrolling scrolling works again, but then after a few minutes, it stops working. All my other gestures work fine (one, three and four finger movements) except two-finger scrolling.

I have no idea what is causing this. I haven't had this problem before until today.

I am working on the latest version of Mavericks on the latest MacBook Pro.

Any thoughts?

A simpler solution that seemed to work for me in Firefox:

open about:config

and then find the properties

browser.gesture.swipe.left
browser.gesture.swipe.right

and set them from Browser:BackOrBackDuplicate and Browser:ForwardOrForwardDuplicate to empty. It's a workaround for a known bug ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=927702 ).


Reply emails automatically with Mail & AppleScript & Automator There are dozens of conference call numbers stored at my computer. These numbers are all numbers, such as 40027683, no other characters. These numbers are saved in a txt file.

Some of my users may need a number when they are trying to make a conference call with their clients. So every time the users require for a conference call number via emails, I'll reply back with a number.

Is there a way to reply those mails which requires for concall numbers automatically? I would like to try Mail, AppleScript and Automator.

I would like to ask Mail to run AppleScript when a new email (The subject or message contents contain the keyword "concall") was received, here is an example:

The AppleScript which I wrote will be run to invoke the first number from the txt file. The next time when another message arrived, Mail will run AppleScript to invoke the second number of the txt file. Is there any way to make it happen?

Any suggestion would be much appreciated.

You can do it like this:

property the_numbers : {10000, 20000, 30000}
using terms from application "Mail"
    on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule
        repeat with i from 1 to count of theMessages
            tell application "Mail"
                set the_sender to sender of item i of theMessages
                set the_subject to subject of item i of theMessages
                set the_counter to item 1 of the_numbers
                -- make the outgoing message (the reply)
                set the_reply to make new outgoing message with properties ¬
                    {subject:"Re: " & the_subject, content:"Use this number-- " & the_counter}
                tell the_reply
                    make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:the_sender}
                end tell
                send the_reply
            end tell
            -- this is the step that deletes item 1 from the list
            set the_numbers to items 2 thru -1 of the_numbers
        end repeat
    end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

This works, but you'll have to do a little work to get your list of numbers into an AppleScript list. You'll put them up at the top, separated by commas, replacing my 10000, 20000, 30000.

I call the list of numbers "the_numbers". By calling it a property, we save the value of the_numbers from run to run. If you were to use my script as-is in place of your "Untitled 3" in the rule you've set up, the first time the script is called it will be working with {10000, 20000, 30000}. The next time it runs, the list will be {20000, 30000}. The next time it runs, it will be {30000}. It will also be {30000} for all subsequent runs. I am assuming/hoping that you have a very long list of numbers and you aren't going to run out.

A better script would let you know that the list of numbers was down to the last one.


Server options for late 2006 macbook I have an old late 2006 black MacBook. It has 2GB memory, and a 2GHz core 2 duo processor. I'm interested in using it on our home wifi network as a location for time machine backups (onto hard drives attached via USB) and a shared iTunes library (which an apple TV can access). The OS is currently Snow Leopard.

Should I install a server version of OS X (I think I need this if it's to be recognised as a time machine destination)? For a Mac running Mountain Lion, this only costs £13.99 from the App Store (in the UK). The MacBook cannot be upgraded beyond Lion. What are my options?

You are correct Mountain Lion will probably not run on it.  Also you need server software for it to be recognized as a time machine location.   Not sure if that was available in previous versions though.  OSX server is powerful,  but for simple use it is probably an overkill.  I have spent to many hours tinkering with mine while just using it for the uses that you state.

If you can get hold of an older version of OSX server and you are willing to tinker.. you could do all of that though


Enabling breaking news notifications on Sierra On a new system running MacOS Sierra, how to enable notifications for the NY Times, or any other news source?

A client saw that my older MBP running Yosemite gets breaking news from the NY Times, and asked me to set it up on his shiny new 2016 MBP running Sierra. No joy -- neither Safari nor Firefox pop up a notifications request from nytimes.com.

Further, notifications cannot be added manually in System Preferences/Notifications or in Safari's Preferences/Notifications.

Is there some other way to do this?

Thanks.

Try this!

[macOS Sierra v10.12.1  &  Safari v10.0.1]

Navigate to Safari>Preferences
Make sure Safari Push Notifications are enabled at the bottom of the Notifications Pane
Delete Safari Caches and make sure Cookies and Website Data are enabled in the Privacy Plane

-You may be able to get away with just deleting "nytimes.com"

Make sure JavaScript is Enabled in the Security Pane
Restart Safari and surf to nytimes.com

Please let me know if you still have any trouble!


El Capitan Preview PDF highlighter yellow color changed I originally upgraded from OS X Mavericks to El Capitan, and when I edit PDF files, my default highlighter is the bright yellow color (bottom example of the image). However, recently, after I changed highlighter color to red, and then back to yellow, the new highlighted yellow color (top example of the same image) is no longer the same as bottom one. And no matter what I do, the new yellow highlighter is no longer bright..just this dull tangerine like color :(

How do I go about switching back to the desired highlighting yellow color again?

Thanks

Note 1: My current version of Preview is 8.1.877

Note 2: The screen shot is based on APA Building Better Home brochure A530...

Someone was kind enough to write a code that would fix this problem.

I am reposting the code here, so that I can streamline the solution.

//compile with: clang -W -Wall changehighlight.m -framework AppKit
#import <AppKit/AppKit.h>

char cmd[2048];

int main(int argc,char **argv){
    if(argc<3){
        fprintf(stderr,"changehighlight Listname Colorname\nexample: Apple Orange / Crayons Lime\n");
        return 1;
    }
    @autoreleasepool{
        //prepare
        int ver=0;
        {
            int c;
            FILE *funame=popen("uname -r","r");
            for(;~(c=fgetc(funame))&&c!='.';)ver=ver*10+c-'0';
            pclose(funame);
            if(ver<12){
                printf("It looks like you are using Lion or former. This app is useless and might cause unexpected result. Are you sure to continue? [y/N] ");
                c=getchar();
                if(c!='y'&&c!='Y')return 1;
            }
        }

        //get color
        NSColor *color=nil;
        {
            NSString *listname=[NSString stringWithCString:argv[1] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
            NSString *name=[NSString stringWithCString:argv[2] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
            for(NSColorList *colorlist in [NSColorList availableColorLists]){
                if([[colorlist name] isEqual:listname]){
                    color=[colorlist colorWithKey:name];
                }
            }
            if(color==nil){
                fprintf(stderr,"color name looks invalid\n");
                return 1;
            }
        }
        NSData *data=[NSArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:color];
        NSString *desc=[data description];

        //do the hack
        strcpy(cmd,"defaults write \"");
        strcat(cmd,getenv("HOME"));
        if(ver==14){
            // Yosemite
            strcat(cmd,"/Library/Group Containers/com.apple.Preview/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist");
        }else if(ver>=11){
            // Lion,Mountain Lion,Mavericks and El Capitan
            strcat(cmd,"/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist");
        }else{
            strcat(cmd,"/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist");
        }
        // PVAnnotationColor_8:   highlight
        // PVAnnotationColor_9:   delete line (need to use right click menu)
        // PVAnnotationColor_10:  under line (not functional)
        strcat(cmd,"\" PVAnnotationColor_8 \"");
        strcat(cmd,[desc UTF8String]);
        strcat(cmd,"\"");
        puts(cmd);
        system(cmd);
        system("killall cfprefsd");
        return 0;
    }
}

/*
List of Colors with usual OSX configuration:

Apple Black
Apple Blue
Apple Brown
Apple Cyan
Apple Green
Apple Magenta
Apple Orange
Apple Purple
Apple Red
Apple Yellow
Apple White

Crayons Cantaloupe
Crayons Honeydew
Crayons Spindrift
Crayons Sky
Crayons Lavender
Crayons Carnation
Crayons Licorice
Crayons Snow
Crayons Salmon
Crayons Banana
Crayons Flora
Crayons Ice
Crayons Orchid
Crayons Bubblegum
Crayons Lead
Crayons Mercury
Crayons Tangerine
Crayons Lime
Crayons Sea Foam
Crayons Aqua
Crayons Grape
Crayons Strawberry
Crayons Tungsten
Crayons Silver
Crayons Maraschino
Crayons Lemon
Crayons Spring
Crayons Turquoise
Crayons Blueberry
Crayons Magenta
Crayons Iron
Crayons Magnesium
Crayons Mocha
Crayons Fern
Crayons Moss
Crayons Ocean
Crayons Eggplant
Crayons Maroon
Crayons Steel
Crayons Aluminum
Crayons Cayenne
Crayons Asparagus
Crayons Clover
Crayons Teal
Crayons Midnight
Crayons Plum
Crayons Tin
Crayons Nickel

"Web Safe Colors" 003366
"Web Safe Colors" 99CCFF
bla bla...

System alternateSelectedControlColor
System alternateSelectedControlTextColor
System controlBackgroundColor
System controlColor
System controlDarkShadowColor
System controlHighlightColor
System controlLightHighlightColor
System controlShadowColor
System controlTextColor
System disabledControlTextColor
System gridColor
System headerColor
System headerTextColor
System highlightColor
System keyboardFocusIndicatorColor
System knobColor
System labelColor
System quaternaryLabelColor
System scrollBarColor
System secondaryLabelColor
System secondarySelectedControlColor
System selectedControlColor
System selectedControlTextColor
System selectedKnobColor
System selectedMenuItemColor
System selectedMenuItemTextColor
System selectedTextBackgroundColor
System selectedTextColor
System shadowColor
System tertiaryLabelColor
System textBackgroundColor
System textColor
System windowBackgroundColor
System windowFrameColor
System windowFrameTextColor
*/

Save the code as changehighlight.m

Open up a terminal, browse to the same directory where you saved the file, and issue the command clang -W -Wall changehighlight.m -framework AppKit && mv a.out changehighlight

To restore the color, issue the command ./changehighlight Apple Yellow


Unexpected Progress Bar after login I just install macOS 10.13 High Sierra and after entering my password to login a progress bar starts running.

What's different is the background turns black and shows only a stark progress bar running.

I search on internet and some said it's about fileValt but i don't want that. I try with turn off fileValt this bar not show up and take less time to boot up. may be i'll try with re-install should be fixed this.

Is this something I can avoid or fix?

That is the boot process happening (or perhaps stuck and not happening ) between the file vault unlock screen and the full macOS being booted. If you powered off the machine during the last reboot, this full disk check could take a long time if you don’t have problems. If you do have problems, it might freeze or never finish.

This isn’t much different than the Sierra process, so the way to diagnose is the same.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201573

If you start up in verbose mode, you can see if it stops in a specific spot.

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25421


How to delete file or directory with accent character I have a directory within my iTunes folder structure that has an accent character in it which I am trying to delete.

If I do an ls on the directory I get this:

ls -al
ls: Radiů Disney_ Jams Vol. 2: No such file or directory
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   3 scott  staff  102 Jul 29 13:16 .
drwxrwxr-x@ 21 scott  staff  782 Jul 29 13:24 ..

I've tried rm -rf * but after that I attempt an ls -l I still get:
ls: Radiů Disney_ Jams Vol. 2: No such file or directory

Any way to delete the directory with offending filename?  If I attempt to delete the parent directory I get a "Directory not empty message"

If you look at this answer from Stack Overflow, you will learn that filenames on HFS must be in fully decomposed form, in which an accent on a letter is encoded separately from the letter itselves (and after the letter). In your case, the filename has somehow been snuck onto the filesystem in composed form instead, which confuses the filesystem to the point where it can see that the file is there, but still cannot find it. If Disk Repair cannot find and fix the problem, I much doubt that there is much you can do. There is an ancient File Name Encoding Repair Utility out there, but as it officially supports OS X 10.1 and 10.2 only, I would be rather hesitant about running it on a modern OS X if I were you. So your best bet is to hide the problematic directory somewhere it won't bother you.


Terminal command to remove custom icon from file (HFS+) Context

In Mac OS X / macOS you can select a file in the Finder, click Informations then click the icon, and paste any image/icon that is in the clipboard. Now this file has a custom icon made of this image.

To remove it, the usual way is to select the file, click Informations, select the custom icon then hit delete and it removes the custom icon, restoring the default one.

Question

Is there a way to remove these custom icons from these files without having to open a Finder window? For example with a Terminal command?

Why

A file has a corrupted custom icon, opening the Finder in this folder causes the Finder to beachball and the HDD to freak out. But I still can access the folder content, and this file, from the command line, if I don't first open a Finder window. So I'm thinking that I "just" need to access the metadata differently to remove the custom icon.

For files with a custom icon, macOS writes the icon data as a resource fork to the file.  Use the xattr command in the following form:

xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork /path/to/filename

For more information about the xattr command, in Terminal type the following command and press: enter

man xattr

Or just type xattr and then right-click on it and select: Open man Page

For folders with custom icon, in Terminal, change directory to the folder containing the custom icon, e.g.:

cd /path/to/foo

Once in the directory, use the following command to remove the custom icon:

rm Icon?

Note that you can also just use:

rm /path/to/foo/Icon?

However, you cannot use quotes, single or double, if the pathname has spaces and must escape the spaces with a backslash, \, e.g.:

rm /path/to/foo\ bar/Icon?

Quoting the pathname will just return the following error:

: No such file or directory

By default, Icon? is a hidden file and the ? in Icon? is actually a linefeed, \n, character.


In Bash, can I output text from cut into a new command? This might be a vague title, but it's hard to explain what I'm doing in a short title.

I have a tool that removes adware and it mainly runs in bash. Some of the programs I want to kill may have multiple PIDs or output files. Here's what I have and what I want to do:

lsof +D /Applications/appIDontWant.app/ | cut -d " " -f 2 1>

So I have this which gets the PIDs for the application and I can then output using 1> to a text or something, but what if I want to output the PIDs to a

sudo kill

? Would this be another time to use | ? (I'm vaguely familiar with pipe, but not great.)

Now, I do know that I can simply put

sudo kill appIDontWant.app

but that's just not any fun.

Assuming your command results in a number of PIDs

sudo kill $(lsof +D /Applications/appIDontWant.app/ | cut -d " " -f 2)

should do the trick.


Upgrade the hdd in the new mid 2011 iMac without buying an Apple certified hdd? It has been recently discovered that Apple uses a new 7 pin hdd connection in their mid 2011 iMacs. When a none Apple certified hdd is installed the fans kick on during boot and system fails to start. Is a way to override the check for an Apple certified hdd either through a software(ktext?) or hardware(jump pins) modification?

HDD Fan Control is supposed to effectively solve this problem, which they reiterated today at TUAW.

Check OWC's blog post about it and the comment by OWC's Grant from this morning: they're getting close to figuring it out.


Why the command line does not respect the PATH order on OS X? I added an ssh command inside ~/bin/ssh and modified the PATH to include it, before other paths.

When I do run which ssh it will respond with ~/bin/ssh but when I do run ssh it will just execute the /usr/bin/ssh instead.

I have no aliases for ssh.

What's the reason and how can I fix it?

Do not use which, use type. The which command in the default shell (bash) is an external utility which doesn't know about aliases and functions. On the other hand, type is an internal utility which will tell you whether its argument is an alias, a function, a built-in utility or an external command.

The which command is mentioned in tutorials and manuals only for historical reasons — 30 years ago the type command didn't exist everywhere, and some people have been slow to adapt.

For more details, including a discussion of historical and current shells, see Why not use “which”? What to use then?

$ type cp
cp is aliased to `cp -i'
$ type mkcd
mkcd is a function
mkcd ()
{
…
}
$ type type
type is a shell builtin
$ type cat
cat is /bin/cat

In zsh, it's ok to use which: zsh has both type and which as built-in commands.

Also note that if you just installed or removed a program, the shell may have memorized its old location. For example, if you just installed your own version of a program in a directory that is ahead of the system directories in $PATH, the shell may keep invoking the program that came with the system. This is only an issue in shells that were already running at the time of the installation or removal. To refresh the shell's memory with current data, run the command hash -r or hash COMMANDNAME.


Automator Service: Parent of input from files or folders I cannot find any information on this, so I hope somebody with experience can fill in the gap.

I am writing a simple Automator Service, and I can’t get past the first step.

The script is a Service
Service receives selected files or folders in Finder.app
Run AppleScript

The script is

on run {input,parameters}
    set test to container of input -- Can’t make container into type reference.
    display dialog test as string
    return input
end run

The input parameter has the selected file or folder, and all I want to do at this stage is to get the parent folder of the selected item. Everything I try, which is from countless near solutions on the web fail in this, telling me that I can’t make the container into a reference.

I have no idea what I should be doing, and I can’t find any information on this.

How can I get the parent folder using Automator?

The curly-brace portion of on run {input, parameters} creates a list and as such you need to address input as a list.

The following example assumes only one file or folder gets passed to the Service:

on run {input, parameters}
    tell application "System Events"
        set thePath to POSIX path of (container of (item 1 of input))
    end tell
    return thePath
end run

Can your Service receive more then one file or folder at a time? ... If yes, then you'll need to incorporate the code below.

The following example assumes multiple files or folders gets passed to the Service:

on run {input, parameters}
    set pathList to {}
    repeat with itemNum from 1 to count of input
        tell application "System Events"
            copy POSIX path of (container of (item itemNum of input)) to end of pathList
        end tell
    end repeat
    return pathList
end run

Reference: Getting the path of the parent folder of a file?


Can't resize shrunken boot partition to fill empty space I needed to make room on my Windows 7 partition to install a new program, so I did some searching on how to resize a partition and it told me to shrink the OSX side and then expand the Windows one into the free space from Windows.

That didn't work, so now I have a 245 GB boot partition (my main OSX one), then roughly 10 GB of free space, then a ~61 GB Windows partition.

I tried to just drag the corner down on the OSX partition and click apply, but all it does is unmount and re-mount Windows 7 without changing anything.

I don't really care whether I expand the Windows partition into the free space as I originally intended or just re-expand the Lion one into that dead space, but there's about 12 GB of space there that's not doing anything, and I'd like to use it.

Any ideas?

First, try to delete the Bootcamp partition using Boot Camp Assistant.
I had a similar problem, and Boot Camp Assistant didn't recognize any Bootcamp/Windows partition, but in Disk Utility, the size of total space of my 1 TB HD showed only 850 GB of total space. The other 150 GB (from a failed attempt to create a bootcamp partition) did not show in the Disk Utility or anywhere else.

Then, quite by accident, I created 2 additional partitions using the Disk Utility.  The total space of the 3 partitions showed as 850 GB. However, I then used the Disk Utility to delete the 2 additional partitions which I had created, and it allowed me to specify a resized single partition of 1 TB.  After I had deleted the 2 additional partitions and resized to a single 1 TB partition, the total available space showed up as 1 TB (or actually, 999.97 GB), which seems as though I recovered all of the unused drive space.  :)


USB Devices Disabled when no devices are connected using iMac 5K OS 10.10.3

When there are no USB devices connected to iMac, it keeps showing this.

I tried SMC resetting, booting through Safe Mode, and nothing is working to make this alert go away.

Has anyone had the same experience?

None of apple technical support instructions worked.
Called for Apple Care Service
Technician came with a brand new mother board
Replaced and problem fixed.

So basically it was hardware failure, which can't be answered here since the board was taken.


I need to restore my data from a non time machine manual backup My machine crashed and I made a manual backup to an external drive...how can i restore all my user data including mailbox data...am I screwed. I did not use time machine backup to back up my data just did a straight copy of the disk drive to a folder on my external drive

You can get your data back.  It might be fairly easy with migration assistant.

There is probably some way of coping the data back & getting your mac to boot.

What OS X are you running?

What you did was drag the Macintosh harddrive Icon on the desktop to the external folder?

You may want to post your question here:
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_technologies

Or the discussion for your OS X version.

Whatever the case, you will be able to recover your data.  You may have to copy over it folder by folder.

I believe that you can use migration assistant to move everything back.
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Migration Assistant

In that case, re-install the OS. Then run Migration Assistant

What is the state of your machine?  Is it working?  How did it crash?


Find Differences between Time Machine backups I would like to list all the changes between 2 backups in Time Machines for a specific drive. Is there anyway to do it?

The tmutil command-line tool has a compare option that does this. Just give it the file paths to the two snapshot folders on the backup volume, and it does the rest. The paths get rather long, so it's easier to cd to the backup parent, then just specify the snapshots. For example, compare the March 27 2016 10:11:12am and March 26 5:43:21pm snapshots of a computer named "Ipinak's Mac", on a backup volume named "Backup Disk", you'd use:

cd "/Volumes/Backup Disk/Backups.backupdb/Ipinak's Mac"
tmutil compare 2016-03-27-101112 2016-03-26-174321


iOS video player app with short skip forward/backward feature I like the feature that YouTube has in their mobile app where you can double-tap the left and right edges of the player and it'll skip ahead slightly in that direction. Netflix has a similar feature that I also like.

Both the scrubbing feature and the tiny player buttons in the iOS default Videos UI just feel awful in comparison.

Is there an alternative video player that has a similar "do this simple action to nudge the active timestamp in the video a couple seconds" feature?

I am using an iPhone SE running iOS 12.

You can use VLC for iOS.

The app has host of features (just like the Desktop counterpart). You can simply swipe to skip back/forward.


Can I attach 2 dual-DVI screens to a Radeon 5870? The card (ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB) has 1 dual-DVI port and 2 mini display ports.

http://i.imgur.com/iUOawq6.jpg

The dual-DVI is hooked up to a 30" 2560x1600 Dell screen. I also have a 27" 2560x1440 screen. Can I hook this new screen up to one of the display ports? Is there a way to get both screens working?
Both screens are Dual-DVI only - no other hookups.
thanks

Apple Store: Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter or similar.


How to write a Q with a dot above, for differential notation? I want to write a Q with a dot above. How can I make it happen? I need it in omni graffle.

thanks.

Q̇ can be made a part of keyboard input using the replace.

Then when you type your chosen word it will be replaced with the Q̇.

Here is a sample: I have chosen to call it qdot (genius :)

You can find another Q̇ on the web and use it (Paste) instead.

So now when ever you type "qdot" it will be replaced with your symbol. (works in most applications)


Change the default IMAP Inbox folder on Mail.app Ever since I started using Priority Inbox in Gmail I don't really care about my main INBOX folder on Mail.app. Is it possible to change the default INBOX folder to [Gmail]/Important?

This is a very old tip but I can confirm it works. There is also some useful information in the comments section with regards to this.

Forcing the default mailbox in Mail

Apart from this hack there is no other way to do this. I am assuming the global inbox functionality is the reason not allowing you to change it.


Running an installed app already paid for on an account not logged in I have an app I paid for on another mac under my Apple ID. Can I log into a different mac with the same Apple ID and install it, then log out with the app still working?

You do not need to remain logged in to Mac App Store to use an app installed from there.

You may be asked for your Apple ID password which was used to purchase the app when installing an update.


Replace Text Edit as the default text editor I've seen questions like this which don't quite solve my problem.

I'd like to make Sublime Text 3 the default file viewer/editor for all files that currently use textedit.

Most of these files can be command+i'd, but the ones that have no extension cannot. They give all sorts of permissions errors such as the ones in this image

Is there any way to just never use textedit, and instead set sublime as the default editor for all files?

Another option is to use duti (https://github.com/moretension/duti).

Run brew install duti, save a filetype like this as:

duti -s com.sublimetext.3 public.plain-text all

The changes should be applied immediately, so you don't have to restart like when editing com.apple.LaunchServices.plist.

To also change the default application for executable scripts with no filename extension, add a line like this:

duti -s com.sublimetext.3 public.unix-executable all

Some files are also considered 'public.data', not 'public.plain-text', so you can do this as well:

duti -s com.sublimetext.3 public.data all


In order to downgrade to Mavericks from Yosemite do I need to reformat my hard drive and use the internet recovery to reinstall Mavericks? From the research I just did, it seems that I had to upgrade to Yosemity using a different drive!? Where as I added Yosemity into the main drive. Am I right in thinking that I now can  only downgrade by reformatting the hard drive (loosing my data and so forth)?

Apparently I'd be able to reinstall Mavericks via the internet holding command-option-r. Does this mean I don't need to have a copy of the Mavericks installer? And since I am re-formating the main drive, would this method still work.

Basically, apart from losing my data, and the hours it will take, is there a chance that I format the main drive and something going wrong and ending up without an operating system?

As of today there is no known way to downgrade from Yosemite to Mavericks without erasing the drive.

Booting to the internet recovery mode altcmdR means that you boot to a netboot image containing a basic system downloaded from Apple/Akamai. You don't need the Mavericks installer. If you reinstall a system the system originally shipped  with your Mac will be loaded.

Boot process (takes 2 minutes connected to a 50 MBps-line):

Boot process finished:

Translation:
Festplattendienstprogramm: Disk Utility
OS X erneut installieren: Reinstall OS X
Starting Disk Utility looks like this:

Now you just have to repartition your Macintosh HD: 1 Partition & GUID partition table (available via Options)
If you stuck here unable to partition your drive because it's forbidden or greyed out, your Macintosh HD was probably converted to a CoreStorage Volume Group. Please check and execute the steps 10-12 of my answer to this question. Afterwards you have to start Disk Utility again and partition the drive to your needs.
BTW: SystemUSB is an attached thumb drive with a bootable system and disk2 (OS X Base System) is the netboot image you downloaded and booted to earlier in step 1.
Quit Disk Utility to get to the menu again (picture 2)
Start Reinstall OS X. Now probably Lion is downloaded to your newly created hard disk partition and installed there afterwards.
If you get a message like 'Could not find installation information for this machine' just restart your Mac to the internet recovery mode. (The netboot image seems to be very picky with the WLAN connection and it took me two attempts to get around this step)

If you choose the recovery mode cmdR the latest system will be installed. You need a working Recovery HD-volume though. Such volume won't exist on a brand new hdd.

In both cases a stable and fast internet connection will be convenient.

Using the internet recovery mode you won't end up with an 'unbootable' system (depending on the reliability of your internet connection) because your (maybe falsely partioned) hdd is never involved in the (net)boot process.

In your case (MacBook Pro early 2011) i would download 'Mavericks' with your App Store account, create a 'Mavericks Installer' thumb drive, boot to it and continue with step 2 outlined above. It's just faster and more reliable than first downloading and installing Lion and then Mavericks.


Can I link an image without embedding in Mac MS Word 2016? Earlier versions of Word for Mac let me link an image without embedding it, so that

a) the Word file itself didn't bloat, and

b) I could modify the image once, and have the changes show in every document that used it.

None of the web tips I've found applies to Mac Word 2016… the options they mention have gone from the Insert Picture interface. Is there an Easter egg hiding somewhere?

Insert → Field (from the menu or ribbon).
Choose Links and References → Include Picture.
Add double quotes to the end of the ‘INCLUDEPICTURE’ string and enter the URL of the image.

To prevent Word from caching the picture which would increase the file size, and to require Word to the image to be downloaded each time, choose Options…, then add switch \d.

  \d Graphic data is not stored with the document, reducing the file size.

Click OK on both dialogs to insert the image.
The image will need to be downloaded by Word, which will likely prompt you to confirm this.


Remap the §± key on my magic keyboard I have been provided with a Magic Keyboard with my new work kit and I'm not sure it is a default Australian keyboard.

Above the 3 is £ not # (although shift + press does use #) so the pound symbol is not used without control+press but it's there.

The big issue is that to the left of 1, there is no tilde/backtick (~/`) key. The tilde key is actually down to the right of the left shift key. In the typical tilde key position is ±/§ which is entirely useless to me. Considering how often I spend in terminals, the tilde key is very important to me and I have hit this § key a thousand times in the past 3 days.

Is there a way to remap this key? I tried Karabiner with no luck.

Note that the keyboard is in the prefs as an Australian keyboard.

This image is not the same as mine, I dont have the extra characters but it does show the location of the keys I am referring to. (Ignore the red highlights, that wasnt me).

This will require your participation :)

Download and run free Key Codes utility.
Press ± § key on your keyboard and write its HEX code from the utility screen.
Press ` _ key and write HEX code for it.
Open Terminal app and enter the following command (copy and paste it):

hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000032,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x700000035},{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000035,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x700000032}]}'

HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc is what you press on your keyboard and HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDstKey is what will be the result.
Pay attention to the bolded numbers endings!! You will need to replace them with actual readings from the Key Codes utility (Step 2 and 3). I wrote most probable values, but they may differ in your case.

As an alternative solution, you may want to try Flamingo app.

Reference to the hidutil usage is here: Technical Note TN2450.


Why does restoring a photo from Time Machine only restore the original in iPhoto and not the edited version? I have recently restored few pictures from Time Machine into iPhoto. I noticed that the Time Machine restored the files, but didn't restore the changes (editing etc.) I had made.

The point is that I am planning to reinstall the whole system on my mac and than to restore files using Time Machine. I would also like to have my photos with my changes. Do you have any ideas?

an complete TM restore restores your entire computer as the time when it was backed up.

my qualified guess is that when you restored your indevidual pictures, you restored the original file, and not the edited vertion,

give it another go, and make sure you choose your edited file if you want to be sure!


iPhone plays podcasts in seemingly random order Does anyone know why my iPhone has (suddenly) started playing podcasts in seemingly random order? I want podcasts to be played in the order they were downloaded (in iTunes), chronologically.

However, when I start listening to a podcast with more than two entries, the second entry iPhone plays is seldom the second in chronological order, but some seemingly random entry. Why is this and how can I fix it?

Update: Here's how the Music application's interface looks like on my iPhone:

I can't see a shuffle icon anywhere. The icon on the lower right hand side is the airplay icon. Here's a screenshot after tapping the "album art":

Here's a screenshot from while playing music:

There I can see a shuffle icon (finally), but it's not enabled (blue).

Did you have shuffle on while listening to music? If you did, the podcasts will also be shuffled.


How do I reorder my songs on an album? I upgraded to ios7 this morning, and now all my albums have their songs out of order. Does anyone know where the setting to change them back to album order is?

I can't find anything to indicate that shuffle is switched on (it does say "Shuffle" in the top right, but when I press it, it just changes to a highlighted "Shuffle All", which I don't think I want.)

Please use the

Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset All Settings.

to reset your settings after the ios7 installation.

that should take care of your problem.


Importing preferences from a Lion time machine backup to Snow Leopard I've recently installed Lion on my macbook, and did not back up any of my files. I did a Time Machine backup under Lion, and wish to go back to snow leopard.

What can I import from my time machine backup that will not crash snow leopard ? I think all the "i" apps (iCal, iTunes, etc) won't work, but what about system preferences and such ? Will that work or will it crash my system ?

This isn't something that Apple tests well (or perhaps at all) - so you might have some crashes, but in general these are minor or confined to one app.

If you do the downgrade, just be systematic about watching for crashes, keep all the backups. You can always trash the preferences if you have odd feelings or just trash them all after the restore to start "clean" with Snow Leopard defaults but all of your Lion data.

It would be much better to export the data from Lion and restore from your last Snow Leopard backup, but your time may be spent there for no need or you could be "committing" your time later to debugging things.

It really depends on how much changes you made and the details of what changed file by file, preference by preference. Some will not notice a thing, you'll want a little luck on your side if you try it, but perhaps not even need it.

Let us know how it goes!


Safari history disappears despite settings I like to have my browser history span years back so I can look at things which may have interested me a long time ago. To pursue this desire, I have set Safari to remove history items "manually" under the General tab in the Preferences. I have done the same thing for download list items. My intent was (and is) to not remove history items ever and to keep Safari from doing it automatically.

This seemed to be working fine for a while, and I still have history which goes back more than a year. However, I have recently noticed that the oldest days in my history are disappearing. At first I wasn't sure, but after conducting some tests I am sure. It seems to happen randomly and infrequently. I think that the Safari window also loses focus when it happens.

I am not sure how or why this is happening. The only thing I can think of is that there may be some hard-coded limit in Safari itself. Or perhaps it purges old history items when it reaches a memory limit.

I see that my History.db file is 80MiB in ls output:

  -rw-r--r--    1 my_username staff  80M Dec 29 13:02 History.db

Is 80MiB some sort of implicit limit for Safari?

Another troubling facet of this issue is that I cannot export my Safari history to another browser. Both Chrome and Firefox refuse to import anything from Safari except bookmarks. Moreover, I do not have many backups of my Safari history. Although, backups would not help too much anyway since a backup would lack my recent history.

So how can I get Safari to stop losing my oldest history items?

Some environment info:

My Safari version is currently 11.0.2 on macOS 10.13.2. Also, I am not using iCloud integration with Safari.

EDIT:

At the time of the bounty on this question, I will also consider accepting answers which offer a way to export my history to another browser (preferably Firefox or Chrome).

This is size limit imposed by Safari.

A sqlite database can obviously be larger than 80M; it is only limited by the amount of available storage space, but technically it has an upper file size limit of about 140TB

Other developers have noted that in (older versions of) Safari, the limit is capped at 50GB.  It's reasonable to assume that this limit has been increased in subsequent releases of macOS/iOS/Safari.

It also stands to reason that this size limit is imposed by (Apple) Safari because, by default, it is configured to synchronize with iCloud to other Apple devices many of which are constrained by storage availability (iPhones and iPads, for example).

We also know that iCloud's basic (free) storage allotment is 5GB and this must account for much more than browsing history.  Things like files, settings, device backups (where applicable) keychains, notes, etc. must be allocated space.  Synchronization of these items is set by default by Apple.

It wouldn't make much sense to allow an unlimited history  where History.dbcould outstrip the capacity of iCloud/iPad/iPhone.

Even though you're not using iCloud integration, the average user does and Apple will architect it's products around this premise and design their products accordingly.

Extracting Your History

You can pull your history items out of the History.db file with this (very) simple sqlite3 script

Create a "commands.txt" file and populate it with the following commands:

.mode csv
.once history.txt
select visit_time, title, url from history_visits inner join history_items on history_items.id = history_visits.history_item;

Then issue the command

sqlite3 History.db < commands.txt

This will create a CSV file called history.txt containing the time, title and URL of the history items.  This assumes you are in the ~/Library/Safari directory.  Keep in mind that the date/time of your history item will be in epoch time (although the epoch is different in this case) and will need to be ultimately converted.


Macbook hangs when booting up in single user mode MacBook Pro 2011 OSX10.12 keeps on loading after starting to boot it. Researched the web and tried various options. Following commands were not successful:

Safe Mode

I have done the following:

NVRAM rebset - nothing.
Recovery Mode - HD scanned and OK.
Verbose Mode - it kept on looping on the airport IO80211 line.
I logged into Single User Mode and disabled the WIFI. The loop disappeared, but there is a different error now, which seems to be kext file related:

busy timeout[0], (60s), kextd wait(1): with loads of random garbage after that.

Note that I am no programmer!

Below is what I did to fix a similar problem, but I already had the root account enabled, which made it a lot easier. If root is not enabled for you, you might be able to use single user mode to accomplish a similar result (move or rename the existing home folder).

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7502209

I had already tried resetting NVRAM and SMC. It turned out that the update to 10.11.4 didn't like my primary user account. I discovered this by successfully logging in as system administrator (root) while in Safe Boot mode. Root was already enabled using Directory Services.app (/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/). I needed to migrate my home folder to a new account. I logged in as root, then created a new user in Users and Groups prefpane. Then I used a combination of Terminal commands and the UI to replace the new user's home folder with the one I had used for the account into which I could not log in. This explanation may risk over-simplification, but what I did was this. While logged in as root, I deleted the former user  in Users and Groups leaving the home folder unchanged, deleted the new user's home folder, used the "mv" command to change the name of the old home folder to the name of the new user's home folder, then used a command something like "chown -R new-user-name /Users/new-user-name" to give the new user permissions to the stuff in the old folder. Then I was able to log in and use my stuff. I didn't worry too much about persistent caches, so I have a bit of cleaning up to do, but the old stuff is where it should be now and everything seems to be working.


iPad portable printer I have a project running on a iPad and my client have decided to print a document on his clients and with that I'll need to find a portable printer for iPad.

I have searched on Canon and HP and nothing portable was found.

Does anyone here knows about one?

This is a list of all the iPad compatible printers.
The only one that looks even somewhat portable is the first one.

HP Envy e-All-in-One series (D410a)
HP Photosmart Plus e-AiO (B210a)
HP Photosmart Premium e-AiO (C310a)
HP Photosmart Premium Fax e-AiO (C410a)
HP Photosmart e-AiO (D110)
HP Photosmart eStation (C510)
HP LaserJet P1102w Printer
HP LaserJet P1606dn Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CP1025nw Color Printer
HP LaserJet Pro M1212nf MFP
HP LaserJet Pro M1213nf MFP
HP LaserJet Pro M1214nfh MFP
HP LaserJet Pro M1216nfh MFP
HP LaserJet Pro M1217nfw MFP
HP LaserJet Pro M1536dnf Multifunction Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CM1415fn Color Multifunction Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CM1415fnw Color Multifunction Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CP1525n Color Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CP1525nw Color Printer
HP Officejet 6500A e-AiO
HP Officejet 6500A Plus e-AiO
HP Officejet 7500A Wide Format e-AiO
HP Officejet Pro 8500A e-AiO
HP Officejet Pro 8500A Premium e-AiO
HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus e-AiO

Edit: That data is from here: http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/airprint.html


Text Editor Graphical Glitch on Xcode 6.4 I'm experiencing a very odd graphical glitch with the code editor, initially I thought it was my machine's graphics going to pot but after further investigation it is definitely tied to Xcode and/or my project file.

This glitch appears to follow my project around, I have tried deleting derived data and userdata from the project folder, I've also made sure all of my fonts are the same (this was suggested in another thread for a similar sounding issue). Very often while editing code the below graphical error occurs, it is very frustrating. Has anyone else encountered this?

I've moved the project across multiple Macs and the problem persists, I would be really grateful for any insight on how to prevent this as I'm nearing the end of a very long project and this has pretty much put a halt to progress.

Go to Preferences->General tab and uncheck "Show live issues" under Issues. Notice that this is a work around to be able to continue working with Xcode, at least until they issue an official fix. This glitch seems to be noticeable when you have lots of lines of code (1000+).

After this, the glitch will still be happening but not while coding but during building phase. Not perfect but at least you will be able to continue working.


Purchasing music with two Apple accounts I purchased some music from iTunes some time ago but recently made a new Apple account when I bought an iPod Touch 4Gen. Now the music purchased on the old account will not play on the iPod set up with the new account. Any idea why? Is this because of some type of permissions issue?

Yes. The music is assigned to the old account. In order to play that music you will have to sign into your iPod with your old accounts credentials. There may be a way to merge accounts but I am unaware of that. Apple does this to ensure everyone on different accounts actually has to purchase music separately hence more profit for Apple.