How do I move a VirtualBox Windows VM from Windows to Mac I want to copy a VirtualBox VM from Windows to Mac OS and not sure how to do it.  I have researched online and VirtualBox forums only hit one solution that is for a very old version of VirtualBox.
Likewise checked as below:
One recommendation over at Stack Exchange(https://superuser.com/questions/633431/whats-the-recommended-way-to-move-a-virtualbox-vm-to-another-computer) but it's 7-years old, so not something to trust with much newer versions of VirtualBox.
It's a VDI with no snapshots so it's pretty clean.
I tried one of the old solutions just for the heck of it, namely to copy the VDI to the folder on the MAC where indicated to move it in the old posts and Virtualbox errors out that it can't find the VDI.

The answer was in this post:
https://superuser.com/questions/995193/fatal-could-not-read-from-the-boot-medium-system-halted-in-virtualbox
It's really hard to figure is it superuser or Mac or whatever.
This nailed it.


Pages "Send via email" doesn't work after upgrade I just upgraded to Mountain Lion. So far, so good. Great upgrade. I also upgraded to Pages '09 latest version: 4.2.

"Send via email" option works on Pages if and only if Mail.app is not running. If Mail.app is already running, when I choose PDF, Word or Pages option to send the document to someone, it does nothing.

It's pretty annoying since it's a feature I used to use regularly.

Anyone else with the same issue? Any suggestions?

I've got the same problem. Postbox seems to be the answer. Removed it and now Send via Mail works again.


On my iPhone I can't give my apps access to the camera, microphone, etc iOS Version: 11.3

My iPhone won’t allow me to give any apps camera, microphone, or library access.

I’ve gone to their individual settings for the apps and there’s no options. If I go to Camera in privacy, I don't see the options.

Furthermore, I notice all of my contacts are gone. None have any names nor can I give them any. If I try going to the Phone app, the tab for contacts has disappeared too!

In the Calendar, the option to add dates is grayed out and all the dates of the automatic holidays and such are gone too.

I’ve had the phone for just over a year and it only just started doing this.

I’ve made sure that I don’t have restrictions on, I’ve reset locations and permissions, and I’ve reinstalled apps. I really don’t know what else to do.

How else might I try to resolve this?

Sometimes a simple reboot, or even a forced reboot may work. If not, try going to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Location and Privacy and see if this fixes the problem.

Information extracted from Digital Zen. Additional information on this page, too.


How to delete all the music from the iPad I'm planning to sell? I am selling my iPad as I have a new one. How do I erase all my music so there is nothing in the music app? I've deleted the music but the albums are still there.

You should do more than just remove the music.

Settings -> General -> Reset -> Erase All content and settings.

Effectively this sets the iPad back to the out of box state, so that the new owner can fully configure.  You may be prompted for an iCloud password if you have installed the Find My Iphone app.


Can't transfer purchases from iPhone to iTunes in iOS 9 After upgrading to iOS 9, I can't transfer purchases from my iPhone to iTunes. It happens to just start the process, then it finishes without transferring anything. However, I can still transfer purchases from my iPad with iOS 8.4 like before.

iPhone 5c, iOS 9
iTunes 12.3
MacBook Pro 13" with Retina Display Mid 2014, OS X El Capitan

Apparently, not many people happen to use this "transfer purchases" feature so it didn't get any real attention. I used it a lot, I used to update my apps on my iPhone, transfer them to iTunes and updated my iPad apps using iTunes. Still, I can update my apps using iTunes and update apps on all my devices.

Actually, this is not a problem.
Transferring purchases from devices with iOS 9 has been disabled by Apple. This is the response they gave to submitted bug reports regarding this issue:

  Apple Developer Relations 18-Sep-2015 02:51 PM

  This issue behaves as intended based on the following: Apps are no
  longer transferred from iOS 9 devices. We are now closing this bug
  report. If you have questions about the resolution, or if this is
  still a critical issue for you, then please update your bug report
  with that information.

As NetherLinks explained in the comments, it's because of the App Thinning feature Apple introduced in iOS 9. Basically, a different version of each app is downloaded on each device. So, apps downloaded on an iPhone cannot be used on an iPad. See image below taken from App Thinning page in iOS Developer Library.


How to remove an application that doesn't show up in Finder, but is listed in System Information? I want to uninstall the ConnectWiseControl Client, located in the Downloads folder, as shown by System Profiler:

This app doesn't show up in Applications, and if I try to delete the app manually, by removing it from Downloads folder, it stays listed in System Profiler.

How can I safely delete the ConnectWiseControl Client, so that all traces of it are gone?

System Information does continue to list apps, even if they've been removed. (Even after a refresh with Command R.)

If you've checked that the application is not at the filepath listed, then don't worry.


How do I force Safari to save password for ALL websites? Just seems safari can be picky with what website password gets saved. Like I can save my password for stackexchange but I can't do the same for macrumors.com.

I've looked at Safari preferences and nothing stands out. Can you please help? Thanks

In some cases it is the website itself telling the browser to not save the passwords. There are a number of ways a web programmer can implement this and a number of ways to get around it.

I used to use a little JavaScript "bookmarklet" that tried to turn off any JavaScript on a website that told the browser to not save the password. It worked about a quarter of the time. Barely worth the trouble.

More recently I have moved to a 3rd party password manager (1Password) that will save the password for any website.

Editing a preference file is chancy and annoyingly "manual" but possible (EG worth looking into if it is possible) depending on how geeky you want to get. And checking for preferences that say not to remember a password for a specific site in Keychain or Safari itself is worth checking on. But my bet is on a website telling your browser not to remember passwords.


iMessage deleted by the other iphone removes it from my thread on my iPhone? If someone I am iMessaging with on the iPhone-4S sends me a message and they delete it; will it also delete on my phone??

The short answer is No.

As long as you are on two separate phones (not using the same Messages app on one phone - practically impossible, theoretically possible), it will stay entirely separate from your Messages thread.


I disabled SIP and removed System Python. Now Xcode won't let me export apps I was pissed about having 20 different versions of Python on my Mac, so in an effort to clean it up I deleted every single instance of it. I disabled SIP and cleared out the system default one.

I then used Home-brew to install Python 3.7, Python 3.6, Python 2.7 (The versions I use).

However Xcode now gives an error when trying to export apps. It went from saying that it couldn't find python:

ipatool failed with an exception: #<RuntimeError: Couldn't locate python in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/local/bin /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/libexec /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/local/bin /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Tools /usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin>
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/ipatool:180:in `locate_tool'
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/ipatool:160:in `unicode_equal?'
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/ipatool:1882:in `block in MakeFileSystemNode'
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/ipatool:1882:in `each'
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/ipatool:1882:in `detect'

So I then copied over python 2.7 from home-brew into that directory and renamed it "python". I now get a different error, instead it says: The operation couldn’t be completed. No such file or directory. The error logs show nothing of importance.

Thank you.

The reason that version is protected by Sip is because it is essential for your system to work. Out of all the python you can remove, that one is not on the list.
Normally python is relatively local, as in, everything lives in a single directory, but just replacing a couple files from the brew install to the OS install are not very likely to give you a working version of Python.
The rest you must have installed yourself.

I'd say restore your MacOS and then use brew to install the additional versions you need. Even 2.7, as the OS one is not very good for anything but the OS itself.
Same as you shouldn't pip install stuff globally but always in a virtual environment so that you don't get dependency crap with OS required items, or worse, OS items that fail to function due to broken dependencies.

Sorry, not the answer your looking for I'm sure, but the best I can give.


How can I open a new Finder window on every click on the Finder Icon? is there anywhere a script or a workaround, or even just a .plist file, where i can manage to open a new finder window by clicking on the finder icon in the dock?

When a Finder window is already open, a click on the Finder icon just shows me the opened window, but doesn't open a new one.

Can anyone help?

You can do this using Hyperdock.

I do this for most of my software (Finder, Terminal, Chrome, etc...). Clicking on the application icon sends the application a Command + N.

It's non-free though.


Can I search for folders of a certain size (say more than xxx mb) I am cleaning up a bit. I know how to search for files of a certain size (see below). Is there a way to search for folders above a certain size? Shell commands are ok, but gui is preferred.

To search for files above a certain size:

If you don't see the "file size" option, select "other", it will be there.

then:

This is great for files, but it does not include directories/folders. Also, please don't delete files that you do not know what they are for. Some are low level system files and can cause problems.

I recommend using a disk space analyzer application for this purpose, specifically because of the concerns you bring up.

Some options include DaisyDisk (Free to try, Full Version US$9.99) or  GrandPerspective (free), OmniDiskSweeper (free)


Create calendars directly from iPhone I have a friend whose iPhone (latest gen, relatively recent iOS but I don't think it's fully up to date) doesn't have any calendars on it.  I don't think it's ever been sync'd, and even if it had, she has Windows 7 (which doesn't by default come with a calendar app), and she doesn't have Outlook.  So my idea was to sync the device with a calendar app to force it to create a calendar, but that's obviously not going to work here.

UPDATE: She just called me to say she restarted the phone and the default cal came back (???).

But the question stands:  is it possible to create a calendar without doing any sort of sync whatsoever, just directly from the phone?  How?

Since I've enabled iCloud a while ago, I'm not sure if that'll work the same way for local calendars.

You should see a button that says Calendars in the top left corner in iCal on your iPhone. Tap it, then tap Edit. You should now be able to add a calendar and assign a title and color.

Please let me know if this works for you.


Make a bootable Lion disk for fresh start I just bought a used MacBook Pro from a friend. He left the OS discs in Iraq so he did not have them to give to me. The laptop is currently running 10.6.8.

I would like to start with a fresh install. If I upgrade to Lion and then follow the instructions here to make a bootable disk, can I wipe the system and start fresh?

Yes. I've done this before multiple times.

Pay attention to the following during the installation:

Enter Disk Utility to format the disk.
In the tab select partition. Then click on option and select: Format as GUID

Otherwise the drive won't be bootable.


How to format an SD card to fat32 with custom Allocation Block Size I would like to format an SD card to fat32 with 64kb Block Size. Disk utility seems to do use 32kb by default and there is no option to change this. Is there a terminal command to do what I want to do?

To format a disk with custom (FAT) allocation block sizes use the -c option with e.g. sudo newfs_msdos -F 12|16|32 diskXsY. -F is the FAT type (usually FAT32 here).

First get the disk identifier with diskutil list and the block size of the disk with diskutil info diskYsX | grep "Device Block Size".

To get the -c factor divide the wanted allocation block size by the device block size: e.g. 65536/4096 = 16. Acceptable values are powers of 2 in the range 1 through 128.

Assuming the device block size is 512 Bytes in your case, the factor is 65536/512 = 128 and the resulting command is:

diskutil umount disXsY
sudo newfs_msdos -F 32 -c 128 diskXsY

An additional -v name option will also add a name for the volume.


Will a bootable USB made with boot camp work on PC? I just finished building my PC. It has no optical drive but I made a bootable usb with my iMac. When I plugged it in my PC motherboard recognized it, I chose to boot from the USB but it takes to me a blank screen.

To troubleshoot, I tried it on my Asus laptop running Debian. I selected the usb to boot and it just boots up Debian. So something is not working with the USB. Any suggestions? Is it possible that making a bootable USB with boot camp won't work on PC?

It is my understanding what the Windows flash drive installer created using Boot Camp can only be used on select Mac computers. The flash drive can not be used on PC's. This post Will bootable usb created by bootcamp on mac work with PC? describes the same problems you are having. (Look for Technicallity's solution.)

The iso file you have can be setup in one of three ways. First, is a legacy BIOS boot which usually assumes the use the MBR disk partitioning scheme. Second, is a UEFI boot which assumes the use of a GPT disk partitioning scheme. Third is both types where you are prompted to select your choice when booting. If you need to changing the boot setup, that I can help with. For example see here.

It would be easiest to have another Windows machine available to create the bootable flash drive. I assume you don't have one?

Based on the limited information you have provided, here is how I would proceed. (Don't feel bad, no one ever gives me enough information.) This is a rough outline.

Get a machine running Windows to assist you. That you already have.
It called your Apple. Assuming you do not have a Fusion drive, it is
relatively easy to install and later remove Windows from any Mac
computer. For your Apple, I do not have enough information to say
how easy.  I would install but not activate Windows. This will give
you 30 days of free use. You will then be able to use the same
Windows 7 to install and activate on your new PC.
Get and use the official Microsoft tool for creating Window 7
installation flash drives. The tool can be found at Windows USB/DVD
Download Tool. Don't let the name fool you. The tool does not
download software. It is used to create bootable install media after
you have downloaded Widows 7.
Determine whether you are going to use a legacy BIOS or UEFI boot
method. From my understanding, if the UEFI option is available, you
have to configure the boot setup to select it. (I have never seen an
EFI boot. I have always used the legacy method.)
Determine if your iso has to be modified using the Microsoft
oscdmg.exe tool. This tool is used to change the install boot
method.
Create the bootable flash drive and install Windows on your new
computer.

Anyway, I figure I am right only 10% of the time. Most likely someone else will have your solution. If you have further questions or would like to proceed, add a comment below.


IMAP account stopped working after upgrade to iOS 9 - problem with CAcert certificate? After upgrading my iPhone 6+ from iOS 8 to iOS 9, my IMAP email account stopped working. When the Mail app tries to connect to the server, it fails and displays an alert with the title "Cannot get Mail" and the message "The mail server x.y.z is not responding. Verify that you have entered the correct account info in Mail settings.".

I did check the account info, and it is indeed correct. Interestingly, I do not get any error messages from the settings app when I try to save the account. I have tried entering wrong information on purpose (wrong username, wrong password, wrong TCP port), and whenever I do that and try to save the account, the settings app shows an alert "The IMAP server x.y.z is not responding.". So I am really sure that the information I have entered is correct.

Moreover, I have two other iOS devices in the household (an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4S) which are configured to use the same account and which are still on iOS 8 - from these devices the account works properly, so I also know that the problem is not something basic like the IMAP server is down.

I have tried various things (see below), but without success. The only thing I know for certain is that the problem is somehow connected to TLS and/or certificates. Taking into account the information from this AskDifferent question I suspect it's a problem with the CAcert certificate, but I am not sure.

Do you know anything about changes in iOS 9 regarding the handling of certificates (untrusted or otherwise)? Or do you have other clues that might help me solve this problem?

Information about the server:

The IMAP server runs on a Debian machine over which I have full control
The IMAP server is Courier IMAP
The IMAP server accepts connections on the standard IMAP port 143
The IMAP server requires STARTTLS to enforce that all traffic is encrypted via TLS
The IMAP server uses a wildcard certificate
The IMAP server provides the whole certificate chain to the client
The root CA is CAcert.org (link to root and intermediate CA certificates)
Because CAcert.org is not, by default, in the trusted CA store of iOS 9, I have manually installed the root and intermediate CA certificates on the iPhone 6+
Courier version = 0.73.1 (/usr/bin/imapd --version)
OpenSSL version = 1.0.2d (/usr/bin/openssl version)

What have I tried?

The first thing I did is, I deleted the entire account configuration in the iPhone's settings app, then created a new account and re-entered the configuration details. No success.
I upgraded various packages on the Debian machine, including Courier and OpenSSL, to make sure that the server has the "latest and greatest" security capabilities. No success.
I read somewhere that iOS 9 might require TLS 1.2 on the server side, so I double-checked that the IMAP server indeed offers that version of TLS to its clients. It does. This is the command I used for verification: openssl s_client -connect mail.herzbube.ch:143 -starttls imap. If you run this you will see a block with information about the SSL session towards the end, this block contains a line that shows the TLS version that is used (Protocol  : TLSv1.2). Note that in order to get TLS v1.2, your client-side version of OpenSSL must also support this. For instance, OpenSSL on my Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.3) laptop is too old, i.e. it is only version 0.9.8.zd and does not seem to understand TLS 1.2, so I get Protocol  : TLSv1.
I deleted the CAcert root and intermediate certificates on the iPhone, then re-installed them. Nope, didn't help.
I temporarily disabled the requirement for TLS on the server-side, and this solves the issue, i.e. now the Mail app can connect, login and get emails from the server. Obviously this is not a real solution, since I don't want the traffic to the IMAP server to be in clear-text, but at least now I know that the problem is somehow connected to TLS (and/or certificates).
I updated the iPhone to iOS 9.0.1. No success.

It turns out that in my case the problem is not the CAcert certificate, nor the TLS version - it's the enryption ciphers offered by OpenSSL on the server, or rather, that some of them use parameters that are too weak.

When Apple shipped their iOS 8.4 update a while ago, they made improvements to their TLS library coreTLS in order to prevent the so-called Logjam attack. It is safe to assume that these improvements are also part of iOS 9. As Apple mentions in this technote, coreTLS no longer accepts export-strength ephemeral DH cipher suites. In my case, this is not the problem, though, because my server does not offer such ciphers to its clients.

What Apple "forgot" to say in their technote is that they also added new requirements for the remaining DH ciphers. In this, they probably followed the Guide to Deploying Diffie-Hellman for TLS, which is an "official" document with recommendations made by the people who discovered the Logjam attack. Specifically, coreTLS now requires that DH cipher suites use a minimum DH group size.

The "DH group" is a parameter for DH ciphers whose strength is measured by its size in bits. The guide referenced above mentions that modern browsers now require a minimum DH group size of 1024. Apparently coreTLS has also adopted this requirement, because this is what I discovered on my server...

The Courier IMAP server has the following line in its config file /etc/courier/imapd-ssl:

TLS_DHPARAMS=/etc/courier/dhparams.pem

When I examine the DH params file, I get the following output:

$ openssl dhparam -in /etc/courier/dhparams.pem -noout -text
    DH Parameters: (768 bit)
        prime:
            00:e0:01:64:54:ec:1c:17:86:f3:02:81:08:44:75:
            67:e6:ab:5c:dd:61:0a:a6:49:1e:23:48:98:29:e9:
            48:36:d3:6b:9c:0f:0f:89:7d:7b:7a:17:1f:03:f3:
            53:4f:cf:d7:4d:a3:8f:00:6e:af:fb:e2:95:e6:45:
            71:c3:8b:74:d2:b4:8c:7c:7d:4b:e1:11:12:eb:7e:
            31:fb:c2:ff:f0:60:3d:07:69:d8:36:19:43:03:00:
            52:43:5b:99:21:5f:c3
        generator: 2 (0x2)

As can be seen, this DH group only has a size of 768 bits, which is definitely not up to modern standards.

To solve the problem I created a new DH group with increased size. I followed the advice in the "Guide to Deploying DH" and created a group with size 2048 bits:

openssl dhparam -out /etc/courier/dhparams-2048-bit.pem 2048

Change permissions of the new file so that they match the original file's permissions:

chmod 600 dhparams-2048-bit.pem
chown daemon:daemon dhparams-2048-bit.pem

I then updated the Courier IMAP config file:

TLS_DHPARAMS=/etc/courier/dhparams-2048-bit.pem

and restarted the server

/etc/init.d/courier-imap restart

After that the Mail app worked fine. Problem solved.

PS: Above I said that the coreTLS changes were shipped with iOS 8.4, yet in my question I claim that I have iOS 8 devices that do not have any IMAP connection problems. Both statements are true, but as I now realize I forgot to mention in my question that those iOS 8 devices are still using iOS 8.1.x. Sorry for that.

Additional Protocol tests: I played around with the Courier IMAP setting TLS_STARTTLS_PROTOCOL, in order to force the client (iOS 9 Mail app) to a specific TLS protocol version. Strangely enough I discovered that neither TLSv1.2 nor TLSv1.1 seem to work (SSL3 also does not work, but that's OK). The only option that does work is

TLS_STARTTLS_PROTOCOL=TLS1

(this remains true even after I upgraded the DH group size)

I tested the same settings with iOS 8.1.2 - there the Mail application is able to connect with all 3 protocol versions (TLSv1.2, TLSv1.1, TLS1), and even SSL3.

This is really, really weird. Although it's hard to believe, at the moment it seems as if iOS 9 Mail app can only use TLS1. Despite improvements in security on the DH cipher front, not supporting TLSv1.2 would be a bad regression, IMO. It might also be that my server is somehow misconfigured in a way that I don't recognize at the moment. It would therefore be useful if someone else could make similar tests to either confirm or discard my findings.


Macbook Air - Blinking folder at startup on occasion I have a Macbook Air (mid 2012) which has some various problems. The main problem is that the computer will occasionally display a blinking folder at startup. Whenever that happens I do one of the following things, until I can boot into the computer again that is.

Reset the NVRAM
Try to boot into safe mode
Repair the start up disk
Choose the right disk as the start up disk
Various keys getting bashed

Besides the blinking folder problem, 3 beeps can be heard at start up.

I have tried to reinstall the OS a couple of times, but that hasn't helped at all. So my solution is to keep the Macbook running with Amphetamine, basically never shutting it off to avoid these problems. But this is quite troublesome whenever wanting to travel with the computer, so I was wondering if any of you have any ideas how I could mitigate all these problems?

Thanks in advance

Three startup tones indicates that the RAM installed in your Mac is not passing an integrity check:

  Three successive tones, then a five-second pause (repeating): RAM doesn't pass a data integrity check. If you recently replaced or upgraded your computer's RAM, check to see if it was installed properly.

From: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202768

Misbehaving RAM can contribute to a host of problems, including, (but not limited to,) the startup problems you've been experiencing.


Putting line-breaks in the (Mountain) Lion lock screen message On Mountain Lion, in the [Security & Privacy] pane of System Preferences, you can enter a lock screen message that gets displayed on the login/lock screen.
Sometimes, you might want to put a line break or a paragraph gap there. You might think that you could do this, hence the large text box, however you can't - even if it looks like you can. Enter or Shift+Enter doesn't enter a line break. I know it's possible, because iCloud does it when you lock your computer with Find My iPhone.
Is it actually possible to enter line breaks in your lock screen message?

Press Ctrl+Enter for a new line (or Option+Enter, which seems to work as well).


Need @icloud.com address associated with my Apple ID I had to replace my iPhone and I can log into my Apple ID using my Gmail account. But some features on the iPhone are requiring my @icloud.com login.

How do you recover that specific account? I have been through Apple support to recover my Apple ID account, to at least restore my contacts and other settings. I want to pair my apple watch to my current iPhone, and it is requiring that i insert my @icloud.com ID to verify the Apple Watch.

Use your Apple ID (Gmail) to log into Manage Your Apple ID website.

Now, once you have successfully logged in, you should be able to see your @icloud.com ID under Contactable At heading within Account section.


com.apple.quarantine extended attribute gets re-added each time I open the file I have a file called tasks.taskpaper that I associated with FoldingText. When I open the file, the dialog pops up with text

  “tasks.taskpaper” may be a script application. It was created by
  FoldingText and will be opened by FoldingText. Are you sure you want
  to open it?

And, indeed, the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute is associated with the file:

$ xattr -l tasks.taskpaper | grep com.apple.quarantine
com.apple.quarantine: 0002;53b0afc9;FoldingText;

I can remove the attribute:

$ xattr -d com.apple.quarantine tasks.taskpaper
$ xattr -l tasks.taskpaper | grep com.apple.quarantine
$

But when I open the file with FoldingText again, I get the popup dialog again, and the attribute has somehow been re-added to the file:

$ xattr -l tasks.taskpaper | grep com.apple.quarantine
com.apple.quarantine: 0002;53b0b0dc;FoldingText;

How can I get this to stop happening?

Note that I'm running on Mavericks and I installed FoldingText (2.0.2) using the App Store. Also, the file is in a Dropbox directory.

You need to add the direct path to the file  in your command to remove it permanently:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /complete/path/to/tasks.taskpaper

If this fails, there may be multiple instances. Attempt to globally remove it amongst all versions:

find . -iname '*.taskpaper' -print0 | xargs -0 xattr -d com.apple.quarantine


Can I download apps larger than 50MB while using Personal Hotspot? Can I download apps larger than 50MB while using Personal Hotspot? If so, isn't the limitation on iOS itself rather arbitrary? I can just use personal hotspot to download larger files to my computer and then sync them back over to my device.

So, is this possible?

2 x Yes :-)

Yes, it's possible to download apps (or anything else) larger than 50 MB when using the iPhone as a Personal Hotspot
Yes, the limit is arbitrary and probably mainly exists to reduce the load on 3G data networks


How does one remove FUSE from a MacBook? How do you remove FUSE? I have FUSE on my MacBook Pro (don't remember why I needed it or installed it) and when I installed Mojave Beta I keep getting this message upon startup. As there doesn't seem to be a compatible version yet, how do I get rid of it? Thx.

In System Preferences >> Fuse, there's a "Remove Fuse" button.

Clicking remove should remove it completely.  Also, App Cleaner might be a good bet.


iTunes media keys not working in Mac OS X El Capitan My media keys had stopped working in iTunes on my Macbook Pro. They were working fine in VLC. I tried checking for the usual suspects:

iTunes preferences
Google Chrome Play music extension

Neither of them was the case for me.

I created a new user account on my Mac and the media keys worked fine on that one. So I tried copying the com.apple.itunes files from the Library of that account into the main account. This didn't help neither. What should I do?

Finally, I ran the following 2 commands in my terminal:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist
launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist

Worked like a charm!


Cannot install Windows on my Mac I have a 2008 Macbook running Lion. I started up Boot Camp and it gave an error saying the startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition.

I looked at Disk Utility and there was a partition named Lion which was taking up all 250 GB of space and I cannot resize it.

Also the OS X installation has no recovery drives or images, so the normal methods wont work.

Is there any way I could install Windows 10 on this machine without having to resort to VM or a clean reinstall?

I am sorry For not Responding For the Last few days.Unfortunately i had to format and reinstall Lion to install win 7.The hard drive was set up in such a way that it could not create a Boot Camp partition  even if only 20GBs of the 250 was used.

After Formatting the Drive as A journaled mac OS partition,I was able to install Win 7.

BTW i Could not make any changes to the drive before formatting.New partition,Restore etc. were all grayed out.


Make Speech in Safari read different languages It would make sense when I have Safari read Japanese text (for example on this page) by clicking Edit then Speech then Start Speaking, that it would recognize Japanese language and switch voice to a Japanese voice.

However, it reads the text in the default U.S. voice and says "Hiragana Letter Hu, Hiragana Letter...".

In the Voice Utility app, I have selected default voices for Japanese:

I'm sure there's a way for the System to recognize a language and attribute the appropriate Speech Voice, without changing the whole OS' language (just the same way iPod Shuffle can automatically read out the names of the tracks in different languages), but how do I do this?

I would say this is a bug in macOS, so I've reported it.

But there's a simple workaround: use Automator to create a simple Service to speak the selected text in a voice of your choice.

You may also want to make sure to download the enhanced quality versions of the voice you choose to use through System Preferences > Accessibility:

If you select some text and option- or right-click to bring up the context menu, choose the Services menu item and you will see your custom Speak (Japanese) service that you can choose to read the text in that language with your chosen voice:


Mac shared folder can't be accessed via afp if it's on another HD I have a folder on a second internal HD that I share from my Mac mini (running 10.12). I usually connect to it through SMB, but I need to use AFP due to using an older Mac. However, I cannot get the folder to show up while connecting via AFP, it only shows via SMB. I have tested and found that any folder shared from my internal SSD/boot drive is accessible via AFP, but not any folders from my internal HD.

Any idea what's going on and how I can fix this?

The issue was solved by turning off and back on File Sharing in the OS X Server app. Not sure why restarting and turning on/off the System Preferences checkmark didn't solve it.


Why does storing photos on iCloud also consume storage space on iPhone? If I have all my pictures stored on the iCloud, why are they taking up so much room on my phone? I thought the iCloud was designed to free up storage on your actual device?

Even when your photos are stored in iCloud, the Photo app will still have a low resolution version of the image on the iPhone so that you can see what photos you have in the cloud. These images are quite small, but will still consume space on your iPhone. If you have selected 'optimise iPhone storage' the app will try to intelligently select photos the be available on your phone (possibly recent pictures, maybe ones you have looked at several times etc).
All these things will take some space ... but it will be a fraction of the space all of the full resolution pictures would take.


How to use tmutil delete on Big Sur, APFS I'm using macOS 11 Big Sur and APFS. I sometimes want to remove old backups to save space. I don't want Time Machine taking up the entire external drive.
% tmutil listbackups
2020-10-18-001052.backup
2020-11-06-124150.backup
2020-11-15-173211.backup

% sudo tmutil delete 2020-10-18-001052.backup
Total deleted: Zero KB

I think I have to pass a "path" to tmutil delete. How do I get the path? Or how do I otherwise delete one of the backups listed by tmutil listbackups?

The Big Sur syntax changed, but you need to specify the volume and the timestamp with -d and -t:
sudo tmutil delete -d /Volumes/Time\ Machine -t 2020-11-18-100936

You don't need to specify the Backups.backupdb folder or the backup machine.  I had done tmutil setdestination /Volumes/Time\ Machine previously (where Time Machine is the name of your drive.)


Is it possible to upgrade the drive in a Time Capsule? The Time Capsule has limited space, and the price difference from 2TB to 3TB is absurd: another $200 for a single additional terabyte.  (I'm sure they'll increase that with the next round of Time Capsules, whenever they release those, but I don't know when that'll be, and I'd rather vote with my wallet to tell Apple their Time Capsule is overpriced.)

So how hard would it be to crack open a Time Capsule and upgrade the drive to something a little larger?

By all means - vote with your wallet. It's trivial for a trained technician to replace the hard drive on a Time Capsule. Rather than put the rubber covering back on the base, you can use inexpensive silicone bumpers to raise the capsule up from it's shelf. Most feel iFixit has decent repair guides if you care to DIY.


Added music not showing neither in the library, nor in the recently added I've got a 1040 MP3s to add to iTunes (not bought before).

I dragged them to the iTunes window, it processed/copied something (only 953, huh, why?), they even appeared in the iTunes Media/Music folder and in the iTunes Music Library.xml file. But I can't find no one of them neither in the library, nor in the recently added. Interesting thing: there is a new album cover on the cell with the name of the artist existed before. And if I search a random song in the search bar I'll find it but I can't go to it or add to the next playing.

I haven't the iTunes Match option.

What is happening?

It took a time for iTunes to process a huge bunch of files so now they appeared in the library. However, there is no progress bar or something like this to recognize when it'll finish.


Which one consumes more bandwidth: YouTube app or web browser? What uses more data: YouTube App or using it via a browser it (i.e. in Safari)?
This question rose up on how the mobile carrier charged me. My data plan has 45 GB/month, but unlimited YouTube data.
Is it the same data usage (browser vs app)? How does the carrier company know which method I'm consuming that data?

You will want to confirm with your carrier, but it won’t matter if you connect via browser or via the app.
Remember, the owner of any network knows what IP address, thus what customer, connects to which server and how much data is transferred to/from that connection.  This is just looking at it from the most basic perspective and not taking into account that there are tools that can detect the type of content being transferred.
They know that your IP is connected to a YouTube server regardless if you use the app or browser and won’t throttle/count the data from those servers against your monthly allotment.
The reason I recommend contacting your carrier is because they may have an agreement with YouTube that stipulates using the app for the unlimited data (i.e. you can’t block adds or better tracking, etc.). So technically, it doesn’t matter; they know how much YouTube data you consume; it may be a contractual (business) issue that requires you to use the app.


How do I type the prime and double prime characters on OS X? When typing in feet and inches, the prime ′ and double prime ″ symbols are used, e.g. 5′ 5″. How do I type these characters?

Using the Character Viewer, search for "Prime". You can then click "Add to Favorites" for more convenient access.

In Mavericks, the following shortcut is helpful to bring up the character viewer:

  Control + Command + Spacebar

Click the button in the top right corner to switch between the "Characters" window and "Character Viewer". Note: to get that button or the search bar to appear, you'll need to scroll up.


How can I list my open network ports with netstat? I would like to list my open network ports in Terminal with built in commands. As what I know, netstat is the command to use. But I'm struggling to get any useful information out of it.

How can I list my open ports with netstat? Any specific flags that helps me in this case?

netstat -anvp tcp | awk 'NR<3 || /LISTEN/'
Active Internet connections (including servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q  Local Address          Foreign Address        (state)     rhiwat shiwat    pid   epid  state    options
tcp46      0      0  *.62981                *.*                    LISTEN      131072 131072  34548      0 0x0100 0x00000006
…

sudo lsof -PiTCP -sTCP:LISTEN
COMMAND     PID      USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
BetterTou 34548 grgarside   20u  IPv4 0xa42a1d0ade5d3585      0t0  TCP *:62981 (LISTEN)
BetterTou 34548 grgarside   21u  IPv6 0xa42a1d0ad67f7a5d      0t0  TCP *:62981 (LISTEN)
…


Can I get older (recent) versions of Keynote? I have just updated Keynote to 10.0, and have noticed some loss of features.

In particular, it seems the "typewriter" animation has been replaced with "keyboard".

I recall having the option with typewriter (perhaps other animations too, I forget) to animate text by letter, so that they appeared at random. That is now gone.

Can I either retrieve that feature, or else download the 9. Keynote from before this latest update?

Any questions I have seen similar to this so far are trying to get really old versions. I just want to go back one version.

If you have a Time Machine backup of your drive, then the previous version will be on that.

The Mac App Store will give the date of the latest update: restore a version from earlier than that.


Disable Active Noise Cancelling on Powerbeats3 From my experience, it seems like Powerbeats3 uses some kind of Active Noise Cancelling, but I can't find it documented.
How can I disable it if that's the case? It's paired to my 2017 MacBook Pro running macOS High Sierra.

Powerbeats3 do not have active noise cancellation.
They only have passive noise cancellation and there's been no published plans to add ANC to them in the future.
There's nothing for you to enable/disable for these headphones.


Rotation lock on a iPhone 5 How can I find the rotation lock switch on a iPhone 5?  It is lock and does not rotates the pictures when I rotate the phone.

If you're running iOS 6: Double-tap the home button. Swipe to the right (as if scrolling left). There's a button with a rotating arrow with a lock that toggles rotation lock.

If you're running iOS 7 or 8: Swipe up from the bottom of your screen to open Control Center; you may need to unlock your phone first. The rightmost button on the top of Control Center is a similar rotating arrow with a lock.


Setting a firmware password Currently trying to use a script (preferably shell) to setup the firmware password on a fresh OSX install. I obviously found this:

http://osxdaily.com/2014/01/06/set-firmware-password-mac/

which would work during a manual install, but we would like to automate this as much as possible. I can't seem to find any documentation on writing a script to setup a (dynamic) firmware password.

My question is:

Is it possible to use a script or program to setup a dynamic firmware password on OSX 10.8/10.9? If so, do you know how? Do you know of any documentation?

If you mount the hidden "Recovery HD" partition in Terminal:

sudo diskutil mount Recovery\ HD

and then again mount the "BaseSystem.dmg" by double clicking it:

then you should be able to use the setregproptool, located inside "Firmware Password Utility.app":

To get to the folder containing setregproptool right-click (or Control click) "Firmware Password Utility.app", select "Show Package Contents" and navigate to Contents/Resources.

Alternatively to the description in this link:

Set a firmware password from the command line - (see post from "Sep 13, '11 05:04:00AM ")

you can copy the "Firmware Password Utility.app" to a more acceptable location (for example on your local drive) and then use it from there.

These are the options of setregproptool:

$ sudo Firmware\ Password\ Utility.app/Contents/Resources/setregproptool -h
Password:
setregproptool v 2.0 (9) Aug 24 2013
Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Apple Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Usage: setregproptool [-c] [-d [-o <old password>]] [[-m <mode> -p <password>] -o <old password>]

-c              Check whether password is enabled.
                        Sets return status of 0 if set, 1 otherwise.
-d              Delete current password/mode.
                        Requires current password on some machines.
-p              Set password.
                        Requires current password on some machines.
-m              Set security mode.
                        Requires current password on some machines.
                        Mode can be either "full" or "command".
                        Full mode requires entry of the password on
                        every boot, command mode only requires entry
                        of the password if the boot picker is invoked
                        to select a different boot device.

                When enabling the Firmware Password for the first
                time, both the password and mode must be provided.
                Once the firmware password has been enabled, providing
                the mode or password alone will change that parameter
                only.

-o              Old password.
                        Only required on certain machines to disable
                        or change password or mode. Optional, if not
                        provided the tool will prompt for the password.


With iCloud photo storage enabled, do the photos get saved locally on the device and uploaded to iCloud? My wife has an iPhone 6s and I am trying to understand the way in which the device uses local storage. Her photos are very important to her and as such, I want them to be backed up safely. So we pay for extra storage on her iCloud account and her photos go there. Are they also stored on the device? Also, can they be deleted to make more available space on the local device but remain on the iCloud?

I am not very familiar with iOS devices.

iCloud Photo Library is not a backup solution, it's a sync solution.

It can be used as a backup but I don't recommend it.  There's other solutions, like Dropbox or BackBlaze, that can serve as an offsite backup (using the 3-2-1 backup strategy).

When you use iCloud for photos, all the photos will be synced to each device signed-in with that iCloud account.  Deleting a photo/video on any of those devices will also delete it from all the other devices when they re-sync.  See this Apple Support site for more info.

  iCloud Photo Library uses your iCloud storage to keep all of your photos and videos up to date across your devices. You can make more space in iCloud when you delete photos and videos that you no longer need from the Photos app on any of your devices.
  You can also choose to save space on your device when you turn on Optimize device Storage in Settings. With Optimize Storage on, Photos will automatically free up space when you need it by replacing original photos and videos with device-sized versions. All of your original, full-resolution photos and videos are safe in iCloud and you can download them at any time. Learn more about managing your photo and video storage.


Logitech wireless mouse not working with gigabit ethernet adapter plugged in? I am seeing baffling behavior with my wireless mouse (connected via USB) and my gigabit ethernet adapter plugged in simultaneously.

If my mouse is plugged in and working fine, if I plug in my gigabit ethernet adapter (even without the ethernet port plugged in) to EITHER thunderbolt port, my Logitech m510 mouse stops working completely.

I have plugged in my external monitor to both thunderbolt ports, and it doesn't affect my mouse at all. What the hell is going on here?

The reason you are seeing the symptoms present when you connect an ethernet adapter to the TB port and not when you connect a monitor to the TB port has to do with what is being passed over the TB cable.

TB multiplexes at least 2 signals over the same connection.  In this case, video and PCIe.  Yes, basically the same PCIe bus that you would find looking inside any computer is now on that cable.

Thunderbolt Technology Brief

So, basically speaking, when you are connecting the DP to TB, you only get video.  When you connect the ethernet adapter, you are connecting to PCIe.  When you daisy chain devices, you get both.

Your mouse stops working because the ethernet adapter is generating noise that is interfering with your receiver.  It is the PCIe "signals" that is creating this noise within the ethernet adapter.  It is not interfering with the USB port - just the wireless radio reception/transmission of the receiver.  I know this for a fact because:

1)  I experienced it myself. I have a Logitech Anywhere MX (non bluetooth) and bought a TB to Ethernet adapter.  I had the same issue.  I changed out my TB to Ethernet adapter to a more reputable brand and the problem went away.

2)  I found this answer on Logitech support forum

3)  Plug in a USB hard drive.  If it was interfering with the USB, the hard drive would fail as your mouse does.

The reason that when you move it from one port to another it "sorta" works is because you have lessened the wireless interference, not eliminated it.

Here is the Apple Ethernet adapter that I bought that solved my issue.

If you want to confirm this, buy a USB extension cable to move your unifying receiver to another location (sometimes logitech includes this with their mouse).  Or, plug in the unifying receiver into a hub away from the ethernet adapter.  The problem should go away.


Can iTunes be loaded onto my iphone7? Sorry for my ignorance. I want to play my iTunes library of songs on my iPhone when in the car like I do when on my PC at home. Is it possible?

Yes. Open iTunes and the help in the app describes the steps to sync content to iOS.

Or start here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201253


does the thunderbolt display have a cooling fan? My recently purchased 27" Thunderbolt display is overheating. Is there an internal fan that should be coming on?

Yes, the Apple Thunderbolt Display does have a fan.  See: Apple Thunderbolt Display Teardown

It's a brushless fan, so it might be rather quite when running at lower speeds.

I have a Thunderbolt Display and I can't recall having heard it as I usually hear the fan from my MacBook Pro above all.

Cropped image from link above:


MBP, El Capitan - Keyboard not working, but I can get to safe mode? My keyboard is currently not working (literally nothing appears on a password screen when I start typing, both in safe mode and in normal mode). I am currently typing this on an external keyboard. I have tried:

NVRAM reset
SMC reset
Removing the password from the password screen
Trying another user account, no go.
I would really prefer not to wipe the system.

I just want to know if this is a hardware thing or just a software one. I would like to believe that it's just software because I can get to safe mode (pressing Shift), do NVRAM reset (ShiftOptionPR), and get to the recovery partitions all on the internal keyboard.

How can I fix this?

Update: Hardware diagnostics (pressing D on the internal keyboard whens starting the machine) did not find something wrong with they keyboard

Update: I don't think this is a duplicate of Keyboard key stuck or not being recognized; how to fix as I am able to boot to recovery/safe mode.

Since the hardware diagnostics test did not find anything wrong with the keyboard, this is more than likely a software glitch.

Take your laptop into an Apple Store, they always help out with things like this.


Is there any way to force CLI "softwareupdate" to display & install updates other than the latest one? I'm currently trying to install updates for Mac OS Catalina using softwareupdate CLI tool.
I successfully upgraded a 10.15.5 installation on a VM to 10.15.6:
softwareupdate -iaR

I tried installing 10.15.3 in a separate VM and I noticed if I list the available updates, the only one being displayed is the latest:

Which is inconvenient since I would like to manage updates selectively.
Any way to force this to display more updates? I know creating a temporary file in /tmp/ forces the command line tools update to be displayed, for example.
I was thinking as well of just downloading the specific update dmg from Apple Downloads.

We script softwareupdate  to pick from some or one of the advertised installs but not to pick a “n-1” patch version like you are asking.
I don’t think you can pull 10.5.5 from the command line now that 10.5.6 is out. Hopefully someone smart and clever can let me know if I’m wrong here.
I would grab the files from the download link and script them if that’s your main goal. Apple is being asked by the Macintosh admin community to allow a delay so we can pause / delay the latest for 2 weeks or 4 weeks, but that functionality isn’t shipping yet. The command line tools are a special case where you can fake things out as far as I can tell from working with Apple Engineering on this the past year or so (and talking with peers in the macadmin community).
The consensus “long term / stable solution” seems to be to get some machines in the beta program / seeding program so you can test these releases before they ship and then hop on updates on your fleet a week to three past when the general availability. Then you can just not update when a new one or blocking one arrives - as opposed to try to pick something that’s not the latest.
We like to let machines update as soon as they can and only block a new update due to known issues / inability to have a backup / restore checkpoint if we run into issues. Then once we know we’re good, we push an update to catch up the machines where people don’t self update on day 1 of an update being available.
Don’t under estimate Apple’s clear goal to get everyone to patch securely and rapidly. User experience is poor when an update breaks things, but also degrades when too many patches are in service and bugs not fixed.


Messages app: I can't delete individual texts from conversation as the Trash icon disappears On an iPhone, when I want to delete parts of a conversation from the Messages app, I tap and hold an individual message.

This displays Copy | More…. I tap More… and tick the relevant text messages to delete. The trash bin appears in bottom left corner and I can delete.

However, it only works the first time after the phone was switched on. If I want to do this a second time, pressing More… and ticking the relevant text messages to delete, the trash bin in the bottom left is missing, whereas the camera button is still displayed.

I can still delete the entire conversation (which I don't want to do), or switch the phone off and back on again - then it works just once and vanishes again.

Anyone else encountered the same problem?

iPhone 5s, iOS 8.1.3

Yes, I'm having the same problem.  IOS 8.1.3 on an iPhone 5.  But killing/restarting the message app will bring the trashcan back for "a while", then it disappears again.


How to automate changing the settings when you connect the mouse? I want to change option in System Preferences "Scroll direction: natural" every time I plugin mouse to my MacBook.

And switch back when mouse is disconnected.

This should happen automatically. How it's possible? Automator or applescript?

You can use Keyboard Maestro:

Repeat script with 'is disconnected'.
You may need to change the USB device name.
AppleScript from shell script: Toggle Natural scrolling from command line with reload


How to use MacBook pro internal mic and EarPods mic simultaneously? Is there a way that I can add two audio inputs, where one is the built-in internal mic, and another is a wired earphone mic plugged into the headphone port?  When I plug in the earphone/mic, I lose access to the internal mic.

I found some tutorials introducing "Aggregate Device", but I can't make it work with those two mic's.

You will need to use an external device one way or another if you want to either the internal mic or your headphone mic. Though, for decent recording I don't recommend either as they are (barely) designed for the most basic recording tasks.

The problem lies with the headphone jack.  There's a physical switch inside the port itself that disconnects the internal mic so, if you choose to use that port, the internal mic will get disabled.

If you want to aggregate two mics, here are some solutions:

Get two USB mics.  Any decent quality USB microphone will do.  You can then aggregate both into a single input.
Use a USB DAC. This is like a USB sound card for your laptop with both input and output.  You can use a mic with with a phono plug to a 2.5mm plug with the right RCA adapter which are very inexpensive.
Use a dedicated USB mixer. Personally, I wouldn't use anything "built-in" and instead opt for a mixer that allowed me to fine tune the gain on individual microphones.

I personally use the second option mostly as a USB DAC for connecting my Bose Wave radio to my iMac for quality sound, though I do use it on occasion when I want high quality recordings (either via microphone or line input)


How do I pin notes to the top of the list in Notes.app? In Notes.app (the default notes app that ships with Mac OS X since 10.8), is it possible to pin notes to the top of the list, regardless of existing sort order?

You can pin notes to the desktop (i.e. open notes in separate windows) but I'm talking about a feature akin to Simplenote's pinning that simply places notes at the top of the list.

In the screenshot below of Simplenote, you can see the dot to the left of the 'Reminders' note indicating that it's pinned to top. On the right, you see the 'Pin to Top' feature. Does this exist for Notes.app and if not, how can a solution be hacked to support it?

How about creating another folder, call it 'pinned' and keep your notes there. Works for me, anyway...


Is it possible to hide the address bar and status bar in iOS 7 Safari? Is it possible to hide the address bar and status bar in iOS 7?

In a landscape app I'm currently using the below code to do it for previous iOS versions and it work well even on IOS 7: when opening the page it goes full screen and stay so.

JS:

window.addEventListener("load",function() {
    // Set a timeout...
    setTimeout(function(){
        // Hide the address bar!
        window.scrollTo(0, 1);
    }, 0);
});

HTML:

<!-- For iOS web apps -->
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black">
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-title" content="AMC Walking Dead Story Sync">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">

The fact is that on iOS 7 iPhone and iPad when tapping the bottom of the screen the address bar and status bar appear and the only way to get rid of it is to change the phone orientation and then change it back to the previous orientation.
Is there anyway to avoid that manipulation?

There is a method: <meta name="viewport" content="minimal-ui”>
(but it only works on iOS 7.1 - not on 7.0 nor 8.0)

source: StackOverflow

More details, from iOS 7.1 beta 2 change log and release notes:

  Safari Notes

  A property, minimal-ui, has been added for the viewport meta tag key
  that allows minimizing the top and bottom bars on the iPhone as the
  page loads. While on a page using minimal-ui, tapping the top bar
  brings the bars back. Tapping back in the content dismisses them
  again.

  For example, use <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=1024,
  minimal-ui”>.

update: I confirmed this method works in iOS 7.1 (official final release).
You can confirm for yourself with my web app, which uses the meta tag solution described above.


How can I spread a wallpaper out to 2 displays? I have an early 2011 MBP powering 2 Thunderbolt displays. I have downloaded the proper resolution wallpapers from Digitalblasphemy's site (5120x1440), but can't figure out the setting to spread the wallpaper across both displays.

How do I spread the wallpaper across both displays?

Natively in Mac OS X, you cannot spread a wallpaper over two displays in this fashion. You'll need to use Photoshop or your preferred photo manipulator to split the image in half and apply the wallpaper to the individual displays in System Preferences.


Downloading iPhone Contacts via USB My father bought an iPhone within months of passing away.  I need to get his contacts off before handing it down to another family member. His paid email account that was associated with his iCloud and iTunes account has been shut down, so I can't download the app that would help me backup his contacts easily.

His phone seems to sync fine with my iMac in that it brings up his photos whenever I plug it in and asks if I want to download them.  Is there some way to sync and save his contacts in the same way?

Assuming you know his iCloud account details (which you will need anyway in order to remove the activation lock to give the iPhone to a new user) you can download the Contacts as a series of vCards directly from https://www.icloud.com/#contacts

Click the Gear icon bottom left, 'Select All', then 'Export vCard…' It will download a single file, called [First Contact Name] and [number] others.vcf
e.g. "Fred Smith and 27 others.vcf"
It will also try to import them immediately into Contacts on a Mac, but you can cancel that operation if that's not your desired result.


How do I troubleshoot Airplay devices not showing up? I use the Airplay feature of my laptop at work and at home.

With no change that I'm aware of, my laptop can no longer see Airplay devices (Apple TVs) to connect to at work.

Other people's at work have no problem.

I have no problem at home.

What could cause Airplay to suddenly not work, only for me, and only at one location?

Turning Bluetooth on has fixed this.

Having Bluetooth on at home is never required. Apparently there is a Bluetooth discovery feature in AppleTV (I suspect they have recently been configured differently at work).


Time machine backed up size keeps increasing This is the first Time Machine backup I've done after factory resetting laptop (Macbook pro 2019 Catalina 10.15.6).
The backup started off displaying a sensible amount of backup to run (e.g., "backing up 0 MB of 20 GB"). Then after hitting or getting close to that total, the backup size increased, i.e: Backing up 22.00 GB... Backing up 25.00 GB... and continues like this infinitely.
How can I solve this issue?

There are some details missing from your question, but here's my guess based on what you've said:
The "factory reset" probably looks like a first-time backup to Time Machine, and so it is backing up your entire HD/SSD. If you back up tomorrow, the amount of data will probably be much less.
In other words - this may not be an issue at all - simply Time Machine doing what it was programmed to do.


Programmatically convert formulas to their values in Numbers I have a couple of Numbers documents with multiple sheets each which containi quite a lot of formulas (enough to slow down most typical actions on the spreadsheets such as text input and, most disturbing, scrolling).

Every row on these tables corresponds to one day. Most formulas on any given row only operate on that row, menaing that when I've inserterd all the data for the corresponding day they become useless (they output will not change anymore). I will never need to change the input data for days in the past.

So, I was wondering whether it was possible to replace the formulas with their results in all rows belonging to a date in the past, maybe with some kind of macro which I could execute once in a while, or in general any way different than manually copying and pasting.

My goal with this hypothetic macro would be to reduce the "processing weight" of this spreadsheets and at the same time fix the results of formulas regarding past days, protecting them from accidental modifications of the corresponding input.

You probably can automate the conversions you have described to some extent with AppleScript but sorry that I don't know how.

Until you figure this or another automated solution you might use the following keyboard shortcuts in the given order to select multiple rows and copy & paste them in-place as values. These are likely to reduce the time you spend on such conversions if you are not already using them.

Go to the first cell in the last row you wish to convert to values,
Press Shift ⇧+Command ⌘+Right Arrow → to select all of the row,
Select as many rows as you like by pressing Shift ⇧+Up Arrow ↑ ,
When finished, copy all the rows by pressing Command ⌘+C,
Paste all the rows in-place as values by pressing Shift ⇧+Command ⌘+V.


iPad freezes and won't turn back on I'm having troubles with my iPad. While using my iPad it suddenly froze and later it shut off altogether even though the battery was 90% charged.

When restarting I looked at the screen and there was a small loading icon but no Apple logo. The loading screen just kept going and the iPad won't turn on.

The catch is, I can't use my restart button because the button is broken. This iPad is also old (probably an iPad 2).

What can I do to try and get it to restart?

If you iPad is currently spinning trying to boot and you don’t have access to the power button there isn’t much you can do at the moment. Hopefully allowing you Device to continue to try to boot will drain the batteries. This will allow your device to shut down, then start charging and hopefully it will boot up. Start charging with your computer so you can tell if your computer is recognizing the device while it’s booting. Going to About my Mac > System Profile > USB will show you if your device is registering with your computer.

If not, and you are comfortable following an ifixit tear down, you could take it apart to see if you can either clean up the power button (it’s probably dirty) or manually press the power-button if the little lever is broken on the button, which you could use for DFU or Recovery.

Search for your models water sensors, usually in the headphone and charging jack to see if there is water damage.


What are only necessary processes (minimal set) for OS X work? What are only necessary processes (minimal set) for OS X work?

What are the differences in the sets for different versions (Lion minimal set, Mountain Lion minimal set)?

What are the processes that are not needed for the OS X operates?

I know the descriptions of the processes (here: http://triviaware.com/macprocess/all), but I don't know what is the minimal set of pprocesses to start the OS X (Mountain Lion) with GUI, (e.g. without dashboard, without notification center).

Update:

I would like to have a minimal set of processes/services for the system can boot and launch the minimal graphical desktop environment (like KDE/Unity/GNOME in Linux world) + possibility to launch the terminal (simple bash) + possibility to launch/quit processes + process monitoring + (optionally) finder. All the other processes needed I can find out using additive approach/cycle (try to do an action - find out needed processes/services/libraries - add it)

Try something like launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist and see what stops working. launchctl unload doesn't make any permanent changes, so the plist is loaded again when you log out and back in.

Some processes that might be disabled if you are trying to simplify the UI:

Dock: Also disables Mission Control, Launchpad, Dashboard, full screen windows, the application switcher, and the Notification Center sidebar, and makes desktop backgrounds gray.
Finder: Also removes the window of the desktop. Doesn't affect Quick Look or file dialogs.
mds and mdworker: Disables Spotlight indexing and makes the Spotlight menu, mdfind, mdls, and for example searching in Finder and Mail stop working.
NotificationCenter: Disables notifications and removes the Notification Center icon and sidebar.
pbs: Removes services from the Apple menu, context menus, and the keyboard preference pane.
SystemUIServer: Removes menu extras and the Spotlight menu but not status menus or the Notification Center icon.

This concatenates the man pages of processes that have man pages:

MANPAGER='col -bx' man -a $(ps -eco comm= | grep -v -e ^- -e ' ' | sort -u) > /tmp/man.txt


iCloud storage full: "Not Enough Storage". Backups exceed 5GB Just like everyone else, I get the notification that my iCloud is full and no backup can be made. iOS gives me the suggestion to upgrade my storage on my iCloud account. Because I only want to store my settings, phone numbers and other 'light' stuff, I see no reason to upgrade. I think a few gigabytes should be more than plenty to backup my device(s).

What is taking all the space on my iCloud?

First I checked on my Mac - OS X Mavericks

On OS X I have checked the following in 'System Preferences' -> 'iCloud':

Backup 4.44 GB
Documents 550.7 MB
Mail 5 MB

Okay, my major storage exists of the type 'Backup'. I Guess these are the backups from my iPad and iPhone, but System prefs gives me no further clue. Lets look at my iPhone

I got out my iPhone - iOS 8.4

I go to 'Settings' -> 'iCloud':

iCloud Drive ON
Photos ON

iCloud Photo Library OFF
My Photo Stream OFF
iCloud Photo Sharing ON

Mail OFF
Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Safari, Notes, Passbook ON
Backup, Keychain, Find My iPhone ON

Then I go to 'Settings' -> 'iCloud' -> 'Storage':

Total storage 5.0 GB
Available 15.9 MB

I go to 'Settings' -> 'iCloud' -> 'Storage' -> 'Manage Storage':

  LAST BACKUP FAILED

  An additional 5 GB of storage is required. To
  continue backing up this iPhone do one of the following:

  Change your backup options
  Delete some data
  Buy more storage

Also, it gives me the following use of my data:

Backups:

iPhone backup of 4.3 GB
iPad backup of 137.4 MB

Documents & Data:

Some documents with a total of 534.6 MB

Okay, so all my storage goes to 'Backups'. Lets select the iPhone backup (and here is where I get lost...)

'Settings' -> 'iCloud' -> 'Storage' -> 'Manage Storage' -> 'iPhone Backup':

  BACKUP OPTIONS

  Choose the data you want to back up.
  An additional 5.0GB is required to back up
  this iPhone

Next Backup Size 5.0 GB ⚠

Photo Library 2.3 GB OFF
WhatsApp 550 MB OFF
Keynote 238 MB OFF

There is no space requiring stuff to backup and still is it taking 5.0GB... What does my phone want to backup that takes 5.0 GB of space? Is there a way to visualise this? I only want to backup some settings and contacts, no major stuff...

How can I backup my stuff with the default 5 GB?

What to do when you do not have enough storage because your backup size is too large:

Delete the current backup on your iCloud for that specific iOS device.
Your iCloud backup is now automatically turned off, so turn it back on.
A new backup is made and has a reasonable size.

Theoretically your phone could crash in the short while you do not have a backup, so you could run an iTunes backup first.


Apple Mail Statistics from Terminal I have a small question regarding Apple Mail App. I would like to use the Terminal in order to extract information regarding my e-mail habits. In particular, I would like to have a list of the day/time when an email was sent from my Mac using the Mail App even if that sent email was deleted. Thank you!

Mail keeps a lot of metadata in a SQLite database stored in ~/Library/Mail/V6/MailData/Envelope Index (the V6 changes from time to time with major macOS releases). It's not officially documented and a quick web search didn't yield a lot of results (https://javarants.com/build-your-own-mail-analyzer-for-mac-mail-app-747143e94ccc, https://labs.wordtothewise.com/mailapp/). But you should be able to reverse-engineer the schema using either sqlite3 or any of the GUI-based SQLite tools (just make sure to use a copy of the database to play with).


can I change the iphone 5S text tone swoosh on sending to a more noticable sound can I change the text tone swoosh on sending to something louder/more noticable on my iphone 5S, if so how? Thanks

See the Settings.
Sounds: see under "Sounds and Vibration Patterns".
Self explanatory.


Deleting WhatsApp chat history from work Mac How do I delete all the WhatsApp chat history and logs from my Mac but keep them on my iPhone which is linked with my Mac?

WhatsApp can be used on a Mac either using the macOS app or using Web app running on any modern Web browser.

Unlike the mobile app, in the desktop app the chat history is not stored locally on computer and is fetched from the WhatsApp servers. In-fact, the desktop app/Web app requires the mobile counterpart to be online in order to work.

To remove traces of any cached chat history from your desktop computer, simply log-out from WhatsApp macOS app or the Web App. You may also choose to uninstall the WhatsApp desktop client and clear Web browser history to ensure all the traces are removed.

The logout can also be performed from the within the WhatsApp mobile app if you don't have physical access to the desktop computer.


Why is the Location Services icon always present? I updated my iPhone 4 to iOS 5 last night. In iOS 4, the purple GPS arrow appeared next to the battery indicator when an app I was using (or had running in the background) was actively accessing my location data. Now, it seems to be on all the time, even when I have no apps running.

Does this icon now simply denote the fact that I have Location Services turned on, instead of notifying me that they are being used (like it used to)?

It's a new feature in ios 5 called "region Monitoring"

The reason it's active even if the app is closed is that this feature runs in iOS 5 core and notifies all apps that are registered when they have entered or left a specific geo-fence.

Reminders does that when you use a location based reminder.

Although the location icon appears at all time. This actually has very minimal impact on the battery due to apple really optimizing this feature by using cell and wifi mostly.


port selfupdate fails after upgrading to next OS X version port selfupdate fails with the following error message:

port -d selfupdate
can't find package machista 1.0
    while executing
"package require machista 1.0"
    (procedure "mportinit" line 487)
    invoked from within
"mportinit ui_options global_options global_variations"
Error: /opt/local/bin/port: Failed to initialize MacPorts, can't find package machista 1.0

What can I do to fix it?

After upgrading to Lion one needs to reinstall macports as noted here:

Migrating a MacPorts install to a new major OS version or CPU architecture
An installation of MacPorts and the ports installed by it are only designed to work on a single OS release and a single CPU architecture. If you upgrade to a new OS version (e.g. from Leopard to Snow Leopard) or migrate to a new machine with a different type of CPU (e.g. PowerPC to Intel), you may get lucky and have your ports keep working, but in general, things will break. If you are only upgrading Xcode (e.g. 4.1 to 4.2 on Lion) but not the major OS version or CPU architecture, you do not need to reinstall ports as described below.

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration


How to remove Mail.app data after opening it to configure it to not open in the future? Sorry about the title. I followed these answers as suggested by some users on Ask Different. They've solved my problem.

However, when I opened up Mail.app to inform it I want to use Google Notifier as default, like so,

in the time it took to do this many emails downloaded to my Mac's Mail.app client.

How do I safely remove these emails and 'close' my Mail.app 'account' so to speak. I have no need for a local email client.

Before following these instructions, I suggest disconnecting from the internet so that you don't download any more messages.

Open Mail and go to the Accounts tab in the preferences, then select your account if necessary.

The first thing you should do is ensure the account is set up as IMAP and not POP. If you used the Gmail type to set it up, you should be safe, but I believe Gmail also supports POP access. If it is set up as a POP account, you don't want to simply remove the account from Mail, or you will lose the messages you accidentally downloaded. See below for a way to get those messages back to the server.

Once you have made sure you won't lose your messages, you can simply press the minus button in the bottom-left corner, below the accounts list. As Calum said, this will delete messages in the Inbox, Sent, Trash and Junk folders, as well as folders which are stored on the server instead of your computer. You will have to delete the others manually.

If you want to make sure you don't leave anything on disk, open the HOME/Library folder in Finder. Delete the Mail and Mail Downloads folders from there. This will remove any messages and account data which Mail left behind.

If you have Gmail set up as a POP account, you can get your messages back onto the server by forwarding them to yourself. Before reconnecting to the internet, remove the password from the account information. That way, if Mail tries to check for new messages, it will have to ask for your password and you will be able to cancel it. You will still be able to send messages.

Reconnect to the internet. Find the messages you want to save and click the Forward button in the toolbar. Finally, send them to your Gmail account. They should now be on the server again, although you will need to be careful if you reply to them as it will replay to yourself instead of the person who originall


how do you backup iphone when some of the apps have the old style appleid? i have an iphone 4s.  some of my apps where installed with my original apple id from years ago. at some point apple required/changed everyone to use email as their apple id.  Now when i try and back up my phone it asks for password, but it never succeeds because of the mismatched appleids. i cannot complete a backup in itunes.

anyone elese run into this issue?

Have you tried HT201272 app store download ID incorrect (does not match settings ID)? (In short: Logout on your iPhone then re-sync via cable with iTunes)


I deleted my Apple ID Calendar on iCloud, how do I get it back? On my iPad, I accidentally deleted my calendar named with my apple id, thinking i didnt need it. Now, it wont allow me to sync my phone or the iPad with Cloud Calendar... it doesnt even appear as an option in the iTunes sync on my PC.. only Outlook is a sync option. How can I restore that apparently important calendar so I can sync between all my devices again??

Thanks!
Christie

You can log into iCloud.com from any computer and recreate calendars. Once that empty calendar populates to your devices, you can re-enter any appointments by hand or load a backup file containing the events as works for you.


Can I install TextMate 2 and keep TextMate 1? I would like to try TextMate's new version but since it is a beta release with some bugs and unfinished features, I don't want to use it everyday. Is there any way to install TextMate 2 and keep Textmate 1?

No need to use /Applications or ~/Applications, you can put text mate 2 in any folder you wish.

For example if you have Textmate in /Applications/Textmate.app, create a folder in /Applications/TM2/Textmate2.app


MacBook Pro 15" Touch Bar running hot I just got a MBP 15" Touch Bar with sierra.  I am using it for web development (Webstorm) and graphic design (Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer). When using the graphic design tools, my MBP can start getting hot... up to 88°C. Now this happens with within 30 minutes or more of using the software. I have to stop my work and wait for it to cool off.

I have even put my Mac to sleep and went to the store and when I came back my Mac was pretty hot. It seems like sleep mode did not work.  Keyboard lite was on when I got back from the store.  I put it to sleep again and the same behavior happened.

I also have a 2015 MacBook Pro 15" and it does not run as hot as the latest 2016 MBPs. Am I missing something?  Is this normal for new MacBooks?   I have checked the apple pages for temperatures but they only provide ENVIRONMENT temperatures and that is it.

The normal operating temperature range for silicon is much higher than is comfortable to the touch.  The heatsinks & fans are directly below the top of the keyboard along the hinge opening.  I too have found the upper edge of my MBP to be uncomfortable to touch -- typically when I'm debugging using the F() keys.
My recommendation would be to use a product that allows you to manually adjust the fan speed in order to run the fan at a higher-than-minimally-necessary speed to lower the temperatures accordingly.
I personally use iStat Menus.  In that tool, under 'sensors' is a button to 'Edit Fan Rules'.
Incorporating feedback from the OP to create a more comprehensive answer:
Alternatively, if you believe you may have a hardware issue, a trip to the Apple store might be warranted.  The OP had a hardware issue that, while mitigated by the iStatMenus approach, really required a hardware solution, including multiple trips to the Apple store, to ultimately resolve.


Keychain prompt - Switch to other window via keyboard Whenever the Keychain prompt pops up, the window has the focus, and I haven't found a way to switch away from it via the keyboard. I know entering my password dismisses the window, but sometimes I'm just browsing the web, and Mail.app will trigger that window, forcing me to change focus.

Is there any way to switch out of that window via the keyboard?

I'm afraid as a security precaution it is not allowed to be switched away from the password prompt. Otherwise malicious apps will be given chance to record your inputs.


Switch AirPods from macOS to iOS 11 Using my AirPods with my Mac is easy:

Check the Show volume in menu bar checkbox in System Preferences > Sound.
Ready the AirPods near the Mac.
Click the Volume menu bar icon, and choose your AirPods.

How to regain control of the AirPods in iOS 11 such as on an iPhone?

The swipe-from-bottom controls have changed radically. So the old iOS 10 approach is gone.

Supposedly, in the new swipe-from-bottom controls, you can use the Apple Music widget to gain control of the AirPods. That's annoying as I am not an Apple Music customer, so the extra taps are out-of-my-way. But anyways, that approach fails. Here is a screenshot of iPhone > Control Center > Apple Music widget > Upper-right corner icon > list of devices, showing iPhone and AppleTV but no AirPods.

With the AirPods near your iPhone (or I put them in my ears and pick up the phone).

Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to show the Control Centre.
Tap on the top right corner of the Music control to show the list of devices.
Tap on "Basil's AirPods".


iPad 2 stuck connecting to router Yesterday I was looking through my mail, then suddenly I no longer had connection to my router. My son's iPad 2 was working well and any other computers and laptops could still access the Internet fine. Thinking this was only temporary and was late at night already, I waited for the next day to see if it resolved itself the next day. It did not. I hard rebooted the iPad 2, restarted the router, and tried to refresh the WiFi list by making the iPad 2 forget my home network and retyping the password. No success. I did an All Settings reset through the General menu and the problem continues to persist and I am thinking I might have to reformat the iPad 2 or sent it to the Apple Store as a last resort.

When I check the WiFi settings, it is able to see the name of my router and many others, and when I attempt to connect to it, it simply is attempting to connect, but is simply stuck there.

Any other methods to try would be appreciated.

You might want to try restoring your router to factory defaults. I had a similar problem (multiple wireless and wired devices successfully connected to the router except an iPhone and resetting the iPhone did not resolve the problem) that was fixed by resetting the router to factory defaults.


How do I enable Find My Mac in a Macbook Pro (Mid 2009) running OS X 10.7.2? After updating my system to Mac OS X 10.7.2 I was able to activate all features of iCloud, except for Find My Mac that stays greyed. It says "Recovery partition required".

I have a Macbook Pro, Middle 2009 model, and it was updated from Leopard to Snow Leopard to Lion.

Searching Apple's support website I could find articles on how to create the Recovery HD in an external drive, but I can't find how to create the partition in the internal drive. I have enough free space to repartition, and I have already created a 1 GB partition at the end of the free space (Apple recommends 1GB when creating the partition in an external drive).

I understand the Recovery HD is necessary for Filevault 2 too, so there must be a way of creating it after installation, but I can't find how. Anyone knows how to do that?

Here's a way to manually create the Recovery HD partition, but it seems complicated for a novice user.

If you don't feel sure about your self into doing this, then I suggest you to re-install Lion.


How to open SSH socks proxy at startup? I use remote socks proxies for occasions when I need an IP from various locations.  There is one that I use far more than any others, to the point that I would like a connection to be opened by default when my client machine boots.

Currently I have to open terminal, execute an SSH -D command, type in a password, and then the proxy is live.  I would really like to automate this at startup somehow, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it.  I'm intermediate with CLI stuff but a novice with shell scripting and so forth, so I really don't even know where to begin.

Is there an easy way to have this SSH connection start automatically at client startup?

So far in my searching for a solution, I have found this and am running as an automator workflow using the Run Shell Script module:

ip=aa.bb.cc.dd   #replace with your unix server's ip
username=yyyyyyyyyy #your ssh username
password=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx #your ssh password
command=ssh -D 2002     #what do you want to do with remote server
arguments=-Cq     #arguments for your command
expect -c 'spawn ssh $username@$ip ; expect password ; send "$password\n" ; interact'

It seems to work, in that Automator gives no errors and reports Workflow completed.  However the proxy is not accessible from a browser, so clearly something is wrong.

I'm using Mavericks, latest updates.

You need to pass the arguments to the ssh command you are running, not to some variables:

ip=aa.bb.cc.dd   #replace with your unix server's ip
username=yyyyyyyyyy #your ssh username
password=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx #your ssh password
command="ssh -D 2002"     #what do you want to do with remote server
arguments=-Cq     #arguments for your command
expect -c 'spawn $command $arguments $username@$ip ; expect password ; send "$password\n" ; interact'


Can iCloud stream my library on a 8GB iPod Touch? I'm considering getting an iPod Touch for my car exclusively. Will iCloud allow the 8 GB version to play my entire library?

iCloud on it's own will not provide any library functions, the closest chance you have is if your car is in range of your Wifi network and you occasionally Wifi Sync it from iTunes.

Otherwise, your other opinion is iTunes Match. You can use this to allow your iPod to download any songs in your library (with just a few caveats) for playback on the iPod touch. Note that you can download a song by tapping the cloud icon, but tapping normally on an un-downloaded song will download it and stream/play it at the same time.

This means that you have limited effectiveness of updating your iPod touch, as you will only be able to do so when near a Wifi Access Point. You will always have access to downloaded files no matter your network state, of course.


Can I search for applications compiled against X11/Xorg for MacPorts? Similar to this question on building against native xQuartz vs MacPort's Xorg, is it possible to search for just applications built against Xorg?

For example, I want to know what Web Browsers are available (if any) that I can run inside of my i3 Window Manager that I installed with Mac Ports? Is there a method to find this out (with port) without installing them?

https://www.macports.org/ports.php?by=category&substr=x11 seems like a good place to start :-)


Reason for the need to reboot my iPad this is my first question here so go easy on me. Truth to be told it's not really a question, more like a curiosity.

I noticed that after prolonged use of my 1st generation iPad without rebooting it (shutting down & turning on) some games started acting wonky. The first problem was with iBomber Defence Pacific which started crashing in the transition menus (thankfully not in the game). After a while I couldn't enter the game at all as it was crashing constantly. I got quite frustrated but I left it as it was...

Then I purchased Angry Birds Space and I noticed I couldn't pause the game. So I googled my problem and someone suggested to reboot the iPad.

And bam, that solved it. But the question is why? I mean, I periodically manually close the running apps and as much as I know this clears them out of the memory. Is there a bug which leaves stuff sticking around which slowly but surely clog the device's RAM?

Just wondering... :)

Most probably it was that rebooting your iPad reinitiated  the memory. The thing is some apps have poor memory management schemes. So due to those bad "memory dumps" you device's memory becomes used for nothing. So When you reboot the device, the problem is solved


Share notes with other people on a mac I am writing a note on my mac. I want to share this note with other people on my mac.

this means specific users on my mac should be able to read and write to this note.

how can I do this?

What you can do is go to your home folder, press "command + up" and open the Shared folder. This folder is fully accessible to all users. The files themselves though need to be made readable and writable to everyone. You can do this by right clicking on the file and opening "Get Info", scrolling to the bottom and changing permissions till they're how you'd like them. You can add users to the list for more fine-grained permission control, or just allow everyone to read and write it for simplicity.

EDIT: Sorry, I'm crazy tired. Some of the original post wasn't true...


Does a TIme Machine backup directory contain full or incremental data? I'm having trouble browsing another Time Machine disk. (The regular Time Machine interface doesn't show anything at all.) I can, however, browse the external Time Machine disk's directories. I plan to put the restored data on a second external drive.

Can I restore the entire user folder from the last directory and feel that I've got all the files from the last time machine backup? Or are the contents in that directory an incremental backup?

They're a full backup, in the sense that it contains everything that was in that directory when that snapshot was taken. But it's also sort-of incremental, in that for files (& entire directories) that didn't change between snapshots, it re-uses the same file/directory from the earlier snapshot via hard links.

This means there's only one copy of the unchanged item on the backup disk, but it's in each snapshot that it's valid for. Not just linked from each snapshot, actually in each snapshot. This can be rather hard to visualize, so just treat it as filesystem magic, and don't worry about it too much.

Net result: you can make a Finder copy of the folder from backup, and it'll include everything. Caveat: Time Machine puts some special extended attributes and permissions on the backed-up files, and there's a possibility these might cause trouble. Unfortunately, I don't know the details here...

Also, please don't try to modify the backup (delete items, move/rename them, etc), of you may mess up the backup system's structure.


Is there a way to disable all scrolling online? (for desktop) I am looking for a solution primarily for macbook and desktop use and in a web browser - possibly an extension or plug in.

I have an inner ear condition and scrolling makes me dizzy.

It is a long shot but is there anything at all I can do to not have to look at the scrolling page? Is there any browser extension or similar that would revert the scrolling experience back to a page by page view? Or any other way you can think of which would allow me to do page-by-page scrolling?

I think what you're most likely interested in is disabling a certain animation.
I'm on Mojave, but the following command supposedly works since Mountain Lion (I tested it with Numbers and Safari):

defaults write -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled -bool NO

In case you don't know how to enter this: Open the Terminal application (it's in Applications - Utilities, or you just open it using Spotlight) and enter the command there. You will need to restart an application for it to have an effect (e.g. Safari won't only change behavior after you do that).

This should affect all applications unless the developers did some weird custom stuff to move around a scroll view.

What it does is, I think, exactly what you want: It disables the scrolling animation when you press the "PageUp" and "PageDown" buttons.

Actually I guess it disables animations during scrolling in general, but when using the scroll wheel or the regular arrow keys the jumped distance is so small that subsequent jumps result in a "manual animation" anyways (animations are after all just a row of still images with small differences shown quickly one after another).


What would be a stable OS upgrade for my mid/late 2007 Mac Book Pro? Can anyone advise what a stable OS version would be for my mid/late 2007 Mac Book Pro? I am running Snow leopard 10.6.8 and know I can upgrade to Yosemite but have my hesitations after reading many comments on blogs. I've started to notice the effects of Snow Leopard being fazed out and want to upgrade but don't want to kill my machine while doing with a OS thats too much for it. I also don't want to lose apps in the process due to incompatibility.

My basic specs are as follows:

Processor: 2.6 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 4GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Drive Capacity: 320GB (27GB available)

I need to upgrade to use apps like Teamviewer 10 for example (as it's not supported on 10.6.8) but as it is my machine has slowed down and hangs despite repairing the permissions, using maintenance in OnyX, using Preferential Treatment and DiskWarrior (I've not repaired the disk in DiskWarrior yet despite my graph showing 39% errors). I just don't want to upgrade too high and completely affect my computers performance. I am correct in assuming this? Any thoughts would be most appreciated!

Thanks

Paul

I actually have the very same machine. I started with Snow Leopard, since it originally had 1GB of RAM. After a bit of playing, I decided I liked the newer UI better and upgraded to Lion. Lion is a LOT better on this machine, very snappy, and has support for newer software from the Mac App Store. Unfortunately, some pre-Unibody MacBooks CANNOT be upgraded past Lion without hacks. Main reason being the graphics unable to keep up with the later 'beauty' introduced into the operating system.


Can you dictate Emoji on iOS? iOS (and presumably OS X) understands the underlying Unicode descriptions for Emoji icons. When reading iMessages back to you, Siri can use these descriptions to translate Emoji into words.

For example, Siri is able to describe all of the following:

 is read aloud as "happy face with open mouth"
❤ is "red heart"
 is "sushi"
 is read as "poop"

Is there a way to do this in reverse? That is, when I dictate to Siri or keyboard Dictation, translate what I say into an Emoji? Something like:

  Let's go to the movies exclamation point emoji happy face with open mouth

and iOS would dictate that as:

  Let's go to the movies!

I've tried various command words but have not been able to find a way to do it. It may not be possible. Does anyone know for sure?

No, you can't.

Because there is 2 different keyboard sets, what can't be mixed in one dictation process. That could be the same like you'll try to dictate on 2 different languages in one time. That's hard enough.

But... It's just now, and who knows what kind of updates we will get with new iOS versions and new devices.

By the way. You can use some common text emotions on english keyboard. At least one:

:-)

All that you need to say, it's just: "Smiley".

Two more I know of the top of my head:

:-(    =   'frowny'

;-)   =   'winky'


Claim warranty on a MacBook I need to know if I can make a warranty claim on a MacBook if there are oxide deposits on its motherboard. I live in a cabana close to the beach, so I am worried.

note: I don't have the Apple Care package with me. But my MacBook is just 8 months old.

Yes you can claim apple care service with out the paper work, all you need is the serial number of the MacBook to verify coverage.

Now if it's cosmetic and not causing any problems with your Mac Book it's  really a judge ment call on Apple if they want to replace it. Contact Apple and non demandingly ask about what they can do about the oxidation.


What are the risks of connecting a MacBook to an insecure wireless network? What privacy and security risks am I exposing myself to when I connect my MacBook to an open insecure wireless network?

Are there any risks that are worse or better when compared to a Windows PC that's connected to an insecure wireless network?

The primary concern is that any HTTP communications (and other non-secured communications) could be intercepted, including cookies, which often contain your login information. Note that secure communications (HTTPS) have other methods to keep your information safe, so financial communications are usually safe.

The secondary concern is that your Mac can be directly attaqued by any
other computer within a 50 m radius. If your Mac doesn't have its firewall on, then this attack may lead to some file access (through guest account), and some remote control (through Apple Remote Desktop, VNC or more secret system vulnerabilities).

This security risk exists equally whether you are using OS X, Windows, Linux, or any other operating system, and there are no additional risks (nor less) on any platform.


iPhone automatic updates is a puzzle I'm trying to understand the automatic download on iPhone.

On Apple's documentation it specifically states:

My setting is set to download apps automatically:

However, I have tons of apps waiting to be updated:

In the "More about Automatic Downloads" section:

  If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch has an Internet connection and you
  turn on Push Notifications, your content automatically downloads to
  your device. On an associated device that doesn't support Push
  Notifications, your content automatically appears in your iTunes
  download queue. You can manually download the content in iTunes.

I had turned off push notifications for the App Store and automatic updates stopped working. After I turned it on again it started working as usual.


How to convert to millions in Mac:Numbers? I understand in Microsoft Excel you would use the format string $#.##,," M"

so that

12,271,359 would appear as 12.27M

I am alittle confused with the Numbers app on Mac (the excel equivalent) and I do not have Excel on Mac.

Thanks!

In Custom Format,  Number…

Keep the default [#,###] it will auto-add
Drag in a decimal [.##]
Drag in a Scale [K] & use the drop menu to change to millions