Where can I cancel my newsstand subscriptions? I recently subscribed to a newsstand magazine. The confirmation e-mail stated that my subscription will be renewed automatically. I don't want this, but I can't find the option to turn this off. It's not under 'Purchases'...

So where can I manage my subscriptions? Is there a generic way to do this in the iTunes store?

Go to Settings then choose Store.  There you will find a list of your current subscriptions, which you can turn to "off" if you no longer wish to subscribe to a given product.

Some users have indicated that there are still issues, such as unsubscribing, then going back into settings --> store and finding they are still subscribed, but this seems to be rare, and I expect it will be resolved.

There are also usually contact options to reach the developer of the product in the newstand store, just like contact options in the app store.  You can contact the developer directly for support if their app doesn't seem to be successfully unsubscribing.

Most newstand subscriptions should have an interface to unsubscribe in the app itself, or under the app in Settings.

Due to the way subscriptions work in the App Store, though, a developer would have to add a non-recurring subscription option to their app.  I imagine most won't - they will only offer their subscriptions under the app store's auto-renewal process.

You should contact the developers directly if you wish them to add a non-recurring purchase option.


Keyboard shortcuts with a single key? Some apps (e.g. Tweetbot) have single-key keyboard shortcuts.

However, when trying to set shortcuts in System Preferences, we’re not allowed to do the same. Is there a user-facing way of achieving this?

It is possible to do, both natively and easily. Mac OS X hints has a hint (also check Lri’s comment) on how to set up keyboard shortcuts from the command line. We can use this to create single-key shortcuts.

You’ll need to know the application’s bundle ID (unless you want to set global shortcuts, naturally). For special keys, @ is ⌘; ~ is ⌥; $ is ⇧; ^ is ctrl. You can also check other values.

I’ll use Tweetbot as an example, setting “New Tweet” to ⌥+N, and “Reply” (on the multi-shortcut example) to R.

For one-shortcut commands, you can use the form:

defaults write com.tapbots.TweetbotMac NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "New Tweet" -string "~n"

For multi-shortcut commands, use the form:

defaults write com.tapbots.TweetbotMac NSUserKeyEquivalents '{
  "New Tweet"="~n";
  "Reply"="r";
}'

For system-wide shortcuts, use -g, instead of a bundle ID.


How to revoke permission given in System Prefs > Security & Privacy > 'Allow' I recently installed a particular application that required me to go to System Preferences > Security and Privacy > General, and then give it permission by clicking the Allow that had shown up for it.

I would now like to revoke that permission. I do not see a list anywhere of apps that I have previously given this permission to. How do I go about doing this? Thanks!

You can access the list of permissions granted by using terminal.

Type: spctl --list to view all applications.

Finding the app that is causing issues that you want to revoke the permission can be done with:
spctl --remove --label "UnwantedApp"

spctl help can give more context options


"This UPX compressed binary contains an invalid Mach-O header and cannot be loaded." I'm trying to launch an older app in macOS Sierra. It worked fine in El Capitan, however since the update to Sierra it crashes immediately on launch with the error…

  This UPX compressed binary contains an invalid Mach-O header and cannot be loaded.

Using Homebrew in El Capitan, I installed UPX and used it to try uncompressing the binary, however this tells me that the binary is not compressed in the first place.

$ upx -d /tmp/Run.app/Contents/MacOS/Run
                       Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
                          Copyright (C) 1996 - 2013
UPX 3.91        Markus Oberhumer, Laszlo Molnar & John Reiser   Sep 30th 2013

        File size         Ratio      Format      Name
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
upx: /tmp/Run.app/Contents/MacOS/Run: NotPackedException: not packed by UPX

Unpacked 0 files.

This is the crash log from opening the app in Sierra.

Crashed Thread:        0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGKILL)
Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note:        EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Reason:    EXEC, [0xc] This UPX compressed binary contains an invalid Mach-O header and cannot be loaded.

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0   libsystem_kernel.dylib          0x00007fffcffeabb2 __posix_spawn + 10
1   libsystem_kernel.dylib          0x00007fffcffe5ef2 posix_spawn + 386
2   xpcproxy                        0x000000010dbb2d75 0x10dbb0000 + 11637
3   xpcproxy                        0x000000010dbb3992 0x10dbb0000 + 14738
4   libdyld.dylib                   0x00007fffcfebc255 start + 1

How can I get this app to open in Sierra?

Revised answer:

For hiding traces, pirates zeroed the UPX markers out of the compressed binary, so it's not possible for macOS Sierra to decompress the binary.
(Try with: hexdump -C YourApp.app/Contents/MacOS/YourApp | grep -C 1 UPX and see, that there is most likely no output.)

However, jreiser from UPX accepted the challenge and addressed this issue with implementing a more robust search for compressed code.
v3.92 will be possible to make these apps running again when decompressing the executables with upx -d YourApp.app/Contents/MacOS/YourApp.


What are the pros and cons of using iTunes to manage my iPod? I've heard people talking about using alternative software to manage their iPods.

My iPod came in the post today and I was wondering what the pros and cons of using iTunes (as opposed to popular alternative) were.

Pros: All works. Easy to use. Easy to Configure. Does Backups of your data. Allows iTS purchases. Handles everything for you. And every other iTunes feature that you might consider important (AirTunes for example).

Cons: iTunes might be a “heavy” application for some machines with limited RAM. Even if all you want is a music player, iTunes is all or nothing.


Under what conditions is internet required to watch a rented/downloaded movie on iPhone/iPad? I've had some issues before when trying to watch a rented/downloaded movie on a plane when I have no internet connection. Get the message that internet is required to authorize.

Under what conditions is internet required to play a rented movie (already downloded)?

Note: I typically download to my mac then transfer the movie to the iPhone/iPad using iTunes then night before. Not sure if that makes a difference.

I've successfully watched some movies but have had issues with others. Seemed like if I followed Airline instructions to completely power down my device, then it will give me an error if I try to playback later.

I often start the movie just before the flight when I do have internet and then pause it. Not sure if that is helping or hurting. No, not past the 24 hr mark at any time. I use this technique with the thought that if I authorize it once, then it won't try to authorize later. Maybe the powering down forces a re-authorization?

Note: I absolutely can't believe that I have to ask this question.

You always need an internet connection to start the rental period in my experience. Only a few packets need to transfer from the device to the server - so you are not streaming the movie.

Think of it like a credit card authorization - without the central server "charging" the rental, the 24 hour playback window can't start properly.

Your experiment that some rentals play is interesting and hopefully someone has a deeper packet analysis to present, but the safe bet is to not rely on a rental if you don't have in-flight WiFi to start the rental period and authorize the movies you intend to have "activated for watching" during the flight.


Restore libxml2 to Yosemite Ok, so here is the deal. I was working on two projects at the same time and I mistakenly:

rm -rf /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib

I have another copy of libxml2 thankfully (the other project, homebrew install libxml2). That copy is in /usr/local/opt/libxml/lib. For the life of me I can not get cp /usr/local/opt/libxml2/lib/libxml2.2.dylib /usr/lib to work. It always says:

/usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib Read-only Filesystem

Please can anyone help? I have tried cp -S, -R, -F and I can't get it to cp or mv. I just need to write that lib back and I should be good to go. I don't know what I was thinking when I did that. Running Yosemite 10.10.2, Late-2011 mbp. Libxml2 from homebrew is 2.9.2 I think if it makes a difference.

Enter /sbin/mount -uw / and copy 'libxml2.2.dylib' from '/usr/local/opt/libxml/lib/' to '/usr/lib/'

Restart your Mac and restore the original file:

Download Pacifist (i think it's a 14-day trial) and the Yosemite System Installer

Right-click the 'Install OS X Yosemite.app' -> 'Show Package Contents'

Mount ./Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg

Open the mounted 'OS X Install ESD'

Open ./Packages/BaseSystemBinaries.pkg with Pacifist

In the new Pacifist-window navigate to 'Content of BaseSystemBinaries/usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib'

Right-click libxml2.2.dylib and install it

Restart your Mac


Display a webpage in Mac lock screen I want to leave my Mac locked, but display a web page (representing a web-based dashboard) in the lock screen. The idea is to leave this web dashboard showing 24x7 but without letting anyone else get access to the rest of the system.

You can download this screensaver which allows you to specify the site you want to display (found there).
Turn on the password to make your screensaver to be the lock screen:

Open "System Preferences"
Go to "Security & Privacy"

Check "Require password [immediatly] after sleep or screensaver begins"


Black screen with cursor instead of login window Last night my mid-2010 Mac Pro woke up and probably installed some update (Mavericks). After this, every time I boot, black screen with cursor appears instead of login window.

I've tried blindly enter password and log in but with no results.
Power button doesn't respond, I can't even sleep or shutdown the machine.
I've cleared NVRAM, but it doesn't help
Safe mode doesn't work (mac restarts before progressbar go to 100%)
Disk repair tool found some minor problem (invalid count of folders in some directory - one extra) - no results
I've reinstalled mavericks (In the Command+R menu during boot), still not working.

What else can I try?

I have some data in encrypted home folder, so I want to recover some of the files.

Ok guys - I had the same issue with my 2008 iMac and Apple support just walked me through the fix...

Shut the computer down by holding the power button for 10 seconds
Restart the computer and press shift at the same time until you see the progress bar start moving
Once you reach the point where your screen goes dark and you see the cursor, type the first letter of the username for your computer, then hit Tab, then type your password, then hit Enter.
After a moment, you should see the spinning beach ball
Your screen should then move on to something along the lines of "Completing OSX Installation" (I can't remember the exact wording).  Let it finish.  After that it should go to your normal desktop and the issue should be fixed. (If your screen goes pitch black during this process, hit the space bar.  I thought it wasn't working, but the screen was just sleeping).

Apparently it's an issue with an automatic update that never quite got past the login screen.

Hope this helps!


nrpe (icinga) client service doesn't load/run I just wrote following .plist file, which I put into /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, unluckily loading/running doesn't seem to work, and I have no idea what's wrong:

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/
PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>UserName</key>
    <string>admin</string>
    <key>GroupName</key>
    <string>staff</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/usr/bin/nrpe</string>
      <string>-c</string>
      <string>/etc/nrpe.cfg</string>
      <string>-i</string>
    </array>
    <key>Sockets</key>
    <dict>
      <key>Listeners</key>
      <dict>
        <key>SockServiceName</key>
        <string>5666</string>
        <key>SockType</key>
        <string>stream</string>
        <key>SockFamily</key>
        <string>IPv4</string>
      </dict>
    </dict>
    <key>inetdCompatibility</key>
    <dict>
      <key>Wait</key>
      <false/>
    </dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>org.hasfailed.nrpe</string>
  </dict>
</plist>

I used the installer referenced here: http://tbartelmess.github.io/NRPE-OSX/

Upon calling

launchctl load org.hasfailed.nrpe.plist
launchctl start org.hasfailed.nrpe

the following error shows up in my /var/log/system.log:

Sep 11 10:21:11 tc-mac com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (Listeners): assertion failed: 14F27: launchd + 30557 [C0446878-E8D0-3461-A226-91FF1C2B2DA6]: 0x30

If you have already installed NRPE-OSX there is no need to create a second LaunchDaemon.

The installer creates - besides a user nagios and group nagios - a file named com.nagios.nrpe.plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons with almost the same content as yours.

In addition you probably didn't change ownership of the file to root:staff and UserName/GroupName (admin/staff) in the plist are presumably false.


Is it possible to hide tracked changes popups in Pages? When working in a Pages document that contains change-tracking content, popups like this will appear as you work in the document, whether or not tracking is currently turned on:

I find these very distracting, and I have not found a way to turn them off without accepting or rejecting all changes.

Kind of annoying but it works.

In your document, in the menu bar, go to View>Show Comments & Changes Pane then under View Options select Hide Changes.

Note: You must keep this pane open or the popups will come back, although you can move it off screen or shrink it to a minimal size.

If you would also like to hide the coloring you can Select the Gear icon   and then select Final


macOS Catalina software updates issue During parallel downloading Xcode and installing homebrew, I stopped installing Command Line Tools for Xcode. Now I can see in Software Update two items related to that. With different versions. After clicking Update Now I can see a progress bar. But finally, the message doesn't go and it proposes me update that 2 items again.

I recommend to download the Command Line Tools 11.2 from More Downloads for Apple Developers. An Apple ID is required.

Install it manually and afterwards the pending (and obviously not installing) updates in Software Update will vanish.

As an alternative a direct d/l link: Command Line Tools 11.2


Is it possible to turn down the frequency on a LG 5K Ultrafine and will it help reduce GPU heat? My MBP15" often overheats (forcing fans to full) when plugged into my LG 5K Ultrafine. I understand that it runs at 60Hz and that this puts strain on the GPU. Since I'm mostly coding/browsing I wanted to test out 30Hz to see if it reduces the heat levels, but I don't see any way to control this in the UI. Is this some hidden advanced menu or CLI method?

Clarification: My machine is not shutting down, so Apple's fan speed logic seems to work fine in my case. I'm looking for ways to reduce the heat output so that high fans speeds are hopefully not required at all.

It's not possible to change the frequency and the physical resolution of this display.

IMHO changing that will not lower the thermal load of your MBP, because once you connect an external display the "external" GPU will be used and it has at least 10W of consumption. This is very apparent in the newer 16" MBP, where I measured ~20W of base load with no matter how many or what kind of monitors are connected.

edit: You can change the resolution (by option-clicking the Scaled label) or control-clicking Display preferences to show additional resolutions), but (at least on my setup) it barely makes any difference.


Shared devices not appearing in Network I've encountered a somewhat strange problem on my Mac. Recently, all the devices listed in the 'Shared' section of the Finder sidebar have all disappeared and has been replaced an 'All..." option.

Strangely within this option the shared servers don't even appear there. Instead there is a folder called 'Servers' and within that are two shortcuts that lead to the root drive of my Mac (which is named "glados" on the network).

However, on another mac on my network, things seem all fine and dandy there. It even picks up the troubled Mac (which appears as 'Javan's MacBook Pro' thanks to bonjour) and appear in both the sidebar and the Network folder.

Before shots get fired, Yosemite has nothing to do with this. I've troubleshooted for hours and hours and have come to the conclusion that it is not the cause.

I've verified that the network settings are the same on both Macs (and they are) and I've even used a program called 'Bonjour Browser' to scan the network for the AFP share service on both Macs and both can detect each other (and themselves) on the network.

So I'm pretty sure its not a network issue since the iMac can see the MacBook fine and the MacBook can 'technically' see the iMac.

Also, if I manually connect to a shared drive on one of the PC's or the iMac via 'Connect to Server' the connection is fine and appears on the sidebar (however its named as the IP address of the shared drive and is only temporary as it disappears as I disconnect, which is totally useless)

I've reverted back using Time Machine to when the MacBook was running Mavericks and the problem still existed. So it leads me to believe somethings gone wrong with some sort of preferences file perhaps? I've tried deleting com.apple.finder.plst in the ~/Library/ directory and relaunched but that didn't help either.

I'm fresh out of ideas, and other existing forums on the rest of the internet haven't seemed to fix it. If anyone has a remote idea any help would be appreciated! Thanks internet! :D

PS. Soz for the screenshot overload.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I have made sure that all 3 options are checked in the Finder Preferences for the shared sidebar (Back to my Mac, Connected Servers and Bonjour Computers)

I found a fix.  I had the same problem after installing OS X Server.

Simply put, I did the following:

Go to ~/Library/Preferences and find the file com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
Copy the file for backup purposes and open original with Xcode
Leave the following items and delete the rest:

finderprojects
favoriteitems
systemitems
savedsearches

Go to the Apple Menu > Force Quit... and relaunch Finder (which really did nothing but I did it)
Shutdown/Restart your Mac so the changes to take full effect.

Now I can see my network devices under Shared in the sidebar.


Can't find installed software Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but I've tried all sorts of things, and need help.

I needed to use some software from the Internet, so I got some installers for them. All of them are .dmg and have .pkg installers. I went through the installers and installed them, but after installing them I can't find them anywhere. Could someone please help me find them?

Logs tell me they were installed:

Jun 27 15:10:55 myMacBookAir installd[15594]: Installed "u-he TyrellN6" ()
Jun 27 15:24:43 myMacBookAir installd[15594]: Installed "Crystal" ()
Jun 28 11:07:11 myMacBookAir installd[15594]: Installed "Serum" (1.017)

When I use Spotlight, all I find are the .dmg files. I running OS X El Capitan.

I did look in the Applications folder, they were not there.

Try hitting Command+L (which should open the installation log details) while you're running the installer pkg and you should see the installing target path in those logs.


Can iPad SSL/TLS traffic be inspected during DEP enrollment? I am planning for hundreds of iPad devices that should enroll into MDM using a DEP certificate setting but the network in use inspects SSL/TLS traffic using man in the middle technique in order to decide if outgoing traffic is allowed or not.

Will this inspection prevent enrollment?

The DEP program as well as iOS security design out of the box will likely foil your attempts to enroll a device using networks where you need to install custom CA/certificates.

iOS does not automate silent installation of trust certificates without being enrolled in MDM or supervised. You would be preventing this initial enrollment unless you have what amounts to an illegal cert that makes your MITM servers look like Apple owned and operated. I say illegal in the sense that comodo, symantec and others are in hot water from Apple, Google and other OS vendors for issuing certificates to entities that are not what the certificate says.
Once you have the devices entered into your MDM, you can then push wifi profiles and your CA certs and then join the networks where you are "inspecting" SSL/TLS and other encrypted traffic between iOS and Apple or at least attempt to decrypt/re-encrypy/inspect that traffic.
DEP runs at a point in the OS setup that users can't even accept a custom certificate - this runs before the home screen is initially presented to users as part of the setup script / out of box experience.

This is documented at https://www.apple.com/business/dep/ and https://ssl.apple.com/business/docs/DEP_Guide.pdf and I would reach out to your Apple contact that established your "sold to" account for assistance in this.

https://help.apple.com/deployment/programs/#/

I wouldn't want to surprise Apple with what you're doing and risk them shutting down your DEP. Also they have engineers that can guide you if other large customers have the same "inspection" needs that you do and there are either undocumented ways to get around the design or otherwise clear only the initial traffic to Apple and then inspect things once the devices are enrolled.

You will have detailed legal agreements with Apple when you sign up for DEP, so you'll want to read through them as well since Apple vets organizations quite thoroughly, you can probably get excellent help directly from Apple if you've already jumped through all the hoops to be qualified for DEP in the first place.


Running Windows 10 from bootable DVD without installing on hard disk? I am trying to boot from a Windows 10 DVD, but it says something about installing it.

I don't want to replace my existing OS with Windows 10. I just want to use some software with it. How do I do that?

In order to use Windows you must first install it, you can't just boot from a CD and expect it to work. While that may be possible with some varieties of Linux, it is not with Windows (or macOS).

In order for us to help you you absolutely must provide the model of Mac you have and what version of macOS is installed on it. Edit your question and put that info there.


Is there any particular cleaning solution for the MacBook Pro? Is there any cleaning solution for the MacBook Pro?
How should I clean my MacBook? Which fabric should I use to clean it?

I use a dry microfiber cloth on my screen. I found them in a two-pack of washcloth-sized at Dollar General.

If you want a cleaning solution, the Apple Store folks, at least in Madison WI, fully endorse iKlean and use it on their display models every night. I can't vouch because I haven't used it, but I figure Apple knows Apple well.


USB Flash Drive as a main hard drive (Macbook Pro Retina 13" Mid-2014) My hard drive on my mac has died. It became clear as I had the hard drive replaced at a repair shop that the problem is somewhere on the motherboard, thus uneconomical to fix. However, the repair shop tested that a USB drive still works.

As I see it the only option is to get a SDXC hard drive, or a USB 3.0 powered one. The SDXC doesn't support UHS-2, therefore the maximum bandwidth will be around 150MB/s.

As I have researched this I've come to the conclusion that the write/write speeds on high-quality flash drives reach above 300MB/s(for example Sandisk Extreme Pro ), which is comparable to a high quality external SSD, but a lot more portable.

My question is therefore: Is this bandwidth between the hard disk and the CPU  sufficient for the operating system to run smoothly, or is it a completely lost cause?

As I have 16GB of RAM I expect it to work out, am I on the right track or completely lost?

Thank you!

As you have 16GB of RAM your CPU will be mostly playing with it and very rarely access the USB drive, unless you constantly access stored information on the disk.

Common users do not do that.

So I have Firefox, Chrome, Skype, Mail, open and my access to the SSD is minimal.

see Data read/sec and Data written/sec.

As I constantly use all of those aps, there is no data exchange with my SSD.

However in your case the OS X engine also resides on the external disk, so I can not tell with certainty.


How do I stop the sync attempts for an app? Whenever I sync my iPhone with iTunes, the phone tells me:

iTunes Sync
1 item could not be synced. See iTunes for more information.

And iTunes tells me:

The app "The Elements" was not installed on the iPhone "[...]" because not enough free space was available.

This makes sense, because the app "The Elements" is very large. But I don't want it on my iPhone anyway.
How can I stop the attempted sync of this specific app?

Go to iTunes and select the device.

Select the Apps tab.

Press the Will Install button so that it removes the status and returns to an Install button.

 →  →
Press Sync.


“ActivityWatch.app“ wants access to control “System Events.app“ dialogs I installed ActivityWatch on my Mac (OS version: Mojave), and every minute or so it launches a dialog saying “ActivityWatch.app“ wants access to control “System Events.app“.

How can I get rid of these dialogs?

Here is what I did that fixed it:

Quit ActivityWatch from the menu bar.
sudo chown -R root:wheel /Applications/ActivityWatch.app
In System Preferences / Security and Privacy / Accessibility, added ActivityWatch to list of applications authorized to control computer.
Restart ActivityWatch.


Why can't I change Apple ID email? The Apple ID account servicing page makes provision for changing the email address associated with an account. Not just the "contactable at" address, but changing the primary address, using the option "Change Apple ID".
I want to do this for my five-year-old son's Apple ID - change it from the existing hisname@icloud.com to a Google Account hisname@gmail.com.
I have already added hisname@gmail.com against "Contactable At".
When I begin to change the primary address, I see the following pop-up, as expected (since I am the parent of the account-holder)...

The only problem is, that consent notice is never sent. Rather, the input form just updates to display the following error in red, including the bold HTML tags...

Could not send request to Robert.
Your Apple ID change request could not be sent at this time.

As a test, I have attempted to change the Apple ID address to test@mydomain.com (I can use any wildcard prefix at my domain). That time, the consent verification WAS successfully sent.
So, why won't Apple accept hisname@gmail.com?

From comments (& this took me years to figure out initially;)
You can't change an Apple ID address to one that is already in use as a 'Contactable at' or 'Recovery' address.
Once removed from there, then it will allow you.


Strange icon in all system password boxes on Mojave 10.14.6 For a few days, I've been seeing this very strange icon every time a system password box shows up. I have no idea what it means? Does anyone know? I do not have capslock on.

This seems to be a "Numlock" icon. Rebooting the machine made it disappear. What made it appear in the first place remains a mystery...


How to include secondary drives' files into 'All My Files' feature I have a dual drive setup (SSD as boot, HDD for storage in my Mac).
I would like to know how I can include files form my HDD into finders features like 'All My Files'

'All My Files' is a Smart Folder, that is, a saved Spotlight search, named myDocuments.cannedSearch:

and located in /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/MyLibraries. You probably shouldn't modify it, as it is a system file.

However, you can create your own Smart Folder using 'All My Files' as a template:

Select 'All My Files' and click 'Show search criteria':

Choose 'This Mac' to search the entire computer:

Click Save and specify a name, for example 'All My Items Everywhere', and a location for your Smart Folder (the default in ~/Library/Saved Searches should be OK).

The Smart Folder will appear in the sidebar.
Select 'All My Items Everywhere', right click and arrange by kind:

to get a similar output as 'All My Items':

The downside of creating your own Smart Folder is that you can't configure the Finder so that new windows display 'All My Items Everywhere'.


Restrict OSX applications from using the network I tether my mac to my iPhone regularly and find it works well.  However there is (obviously) a limited amount of bandwidth availible and I've got things like 'OS X's update service, dropbox, evernote, and a variety of other things are clamouring for a chunk of the bandwidth.  Is there a handy (terminal is fine) way of saying;

'right now, only Firefox gets to use the WiFi?'

You might be interested in TCPblock app.

  TCPBlock is a lightweight and fast application firewall for Mac OS X
  10.6 or later developed by delantis.com. The Mac OS X firewall protects you from connections that come from outside of your computer.
  But what about the software from your computer that opens new
  connections to the internet? With TCPBlock you can prevent selected
  applications on your computer from opening connections to the network.
  TCPBlock is implemented as a loadable kernel module which contains all
  the blocking logic. You can configure it in the System Preferences
  TCPBlock preference pane or with the tcpblock command line utility.
  All the configuration changes are made persistent in a configuration
  file on the hard disk. At system boot time the TCPBlock kernel
  extension reads its configuration from disk and is ready to go.


How can I type unicode characters without using the mouse? I want to type unicode characters with the keyboard.  I'm looking for a solution with no mouse usage.  For example, below I have a line with the unicode "PILE-OF-POO" character:

The codepoint for PILE OF POO is U+1F4A9 and on a linux operating system I can create this character by typing:

Ctrl+Shift+u,

1,
f,
4,
a,
9

space

How can I do something similar on a mac keyboard?  Other answers I've searched involve fiddling with menus and switching input sources.

Press CTRL+CMD+space to bring up the characters popover.

Then type in the code point and press the down arrow to select the symbol.

Then simply press ENTER and you are done.

This also works with the names of the symbols (e.g. arrow).

Additional information:

Note the icon in the top right of the character popover.  It changes the popover to the full Character Viewer, which cannot be navigated by the keyboard.  Click the icon in the top right of the Character Viewer to return to the popover.  Many thanks to @Tom Gewecke for this information.


Pages: "Spelling and grammar" option disappeared I am writing a document in French and I can't change the spelling language from English to French. I usually manage to do that (Edit > Spelling and grammar), but it isn't working this time around: The "spelling and grammar" option seems to have been replaced with "spelling", and when I click on "spelling" the window that opens up doesn't allow me to change the language. It only allows me to specify whether I want to check the spelling in the entire document or in the main text body. I hope you can help.

Start up Pages on its own and create a new blank document and then go to the Edit menu and see if it is correct, with Spelling and Grammar.  If so, try going to Pages > File > Open and see if your French doc also can be opened and works right.


Free presentation helper that shows keystrokes Are there any free standalone presentation tools that shows which keys are pressed on screen?

KeyCastr is not available as build for users without Xcode. Only a community fork (git://github.com/bignerdranch/keycastr.git) is working on OS X 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

Mouseposé is commercial.

Related to the Windows 7 Question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3529329

OS X comes with such a tool.

To activate it, you should go in System Preferences --> Keyboard and select Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar, see screenshot below.

Then in the top menu bar, ext to the clock, you should have a new icon.

Click on it and select Show Keyboard Viewer, now each time you press a key, the Keyboard viewer will briefly display that key. You will have something similar to this:

I hope this was what you were looking for.


How to recover Mountain Lion's dmg file after installation? I downloaded Mountain Lion from App Store and installed it.

I have not set Time Machine and I installed Mountain Lion one hour ago (since posting this question).

The dmg file is not in Applications folder anymore.

How to recover Mountain Lion's dmg file after installation?

After Mountain Lion is installed, your Mac auto-deletes "Installer Mountain Lion.app". So before installs or upgrades like that, you must make a backup (compress it and move file compressed to anywhere, where you put storage data).

And now, you need to download "Installer Mountain Lion.app" again from the App Store.


MacBook cannot connect to non-SSL websites I have the late 2013 MBP 15″ with Retina and recently I've been unable to connect to websites not using SSL with either Firefox or Safari. This includes other applications that use HTTP such as the Twitter official app and the App Store.

These sites work fine using the Tor Browser Bundle, and other machines on my network seem to have no issues. This problem persists across other networks and ISPs (Tested with Verizon fios and Time Warner cable.)

If I attempt to traceroute an unencrypted site (for example, honda.com) it ceases to progress after hitting vlan38.dca2a-fdisa-sw2-msfc1.netsrv.digex.net (164.109.3.146)

Edit: Problem persists with both Root account and freshly created non-administrative user account.

Edit2: All proxy settings have been disabled, both in wireless settings and Firefox. Problem persists.

I've fixed this problem awhile ago on a customer's machine, in that instance I believe it was an issue with the WebKit framework.

I'm assuming you don't have access to an external bootable drive, (if you did, boot off it and test).  Try booting to your Recovery HD and see if "Get Help Online" works.  If it does we know the problem resides in your OS, I recommend backing up your machine and performing an install of your OS, note a clean install should not be necessary unless an archive install fails to resolve the problem.


Is it dangerous to interrupt the post-OS X update optimizing? When I log in after every OS X update, I get a push notification saying that my computer is being optimized and that performance and battery life may be affected until it's complete. Is it dangerous to restart my computer again immediately after getting this notification? (I have to reboot in order to make my manual Continuity activation work.) And if so, how can I tell when the process is done?

No, it is not dangerous. Pretty much every single task is queued and persisted if needed. Unless you have a foreground task that has a nice "x" button to stop it, you can reboot, shut down, sleep etc. with no trouble at all. System tasks in OS X are designed to be fully automatic, autonomous and out of the way for the user.

When it is complete you might get another message from the notification center, but it will probably just silently be done and your system will 'feel' much faster.

Most of the post-install optimisations are things like Spotlight indexing and LSServices doing it's thing.

If you want to see if your system is doing something in the background, you can open up activity monitor and leave it idle for a bit so OS X detects that you aren't doing anything and then takes a little bite more CPU power and memory to do system tasks until you come in and start doing things again. You will probably see processes like "mds" using a significant portion of your CPU time. It is part of spotlight and collects information on where everything is so you can use the search function to find your stuff.


How do I stop the Adobe Creative Cloud app from auto-launching on login? How do I stop the Adobe Creative Cloud app from auto-launching on login? I don't see any option of stopping this, and for some reason it's not in OS X's user login options.

It is loaded by default by /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist.

If you run

launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist

that will disable it for your user.

To turn it back on

launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist


"Installation requires downloading important content..." error message preventing me installing macOS Big Sur My device is a late 2013 Macbook Pro and just a week ago I had been running macOS Big Sur.
I wanted to pass on my device to someone else so I followed the steps in the below links to make sure all of my data was erased and the device is set back to factory settings:

What to do before you sell, give away or trade in your Mac
How to erase a disk for Mac

The device is now running OS X 10.9.5 as expected. However, when I download macOS Big Sur from the App Store and try to install it, a message appears saying I cannot continue (see below image). The message says:
Installation of macOS could not continue

Installation requires downloading important content.
The content can't be downloaded at this time.
Try again later.

I have tried and checked the following:

Checked Apple System Status and everything is fine.
Restarted the device via Safe Mode and issue still presents itself.
Restarted the device and used both CMD+R and CMD+ALT+R modes to install but same issue returns.
Erased and formatted the HD to AFPS, reinstalled OS X, same issue. Since then, I've reformatted via the recommended option (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)).
I have a good strong connection via Wi-Fi.

Though some of the above may work for others, it hasn't worked for me. I've probably tried erasing my HD and reinstalling OS X about 6 times now.
I don't know where I may have gone wrong, I made sure I followed each step specifically and carefully. I've been able to install macOS Big Sur just a week ago, and now, after following Apple's official guide to essentially 'factory reset' my device, it is not installing.

...

Update

As suggested in comments and responses, I upgraded from Mavericks to Catalina (through El Capitan then High Sierra then Mojave).
Now in Catalina, it gives a new error message of "Update not found" when trying to update to macOS Big Sur, and shows that it is currently running the latest macOS (see below screenshots).
I have tried to update via Internet Recovery mode, but that returns the original error message of "Installation of macOS could not continue".

I had the same error "Installation of macOS could not continue" while trying to install macOS 11 "Big Sur".
I had to install Catalina first (see the "Download macOS" section of this support article for instructions) and then the upgrade to Big Sur worked fine.


Problem with Photoshop CS6 Freezing up on OSX Mavericks I have a iMac we purchased last year (27inch, 32GB Ram, 512GB Flash Storage, OSX 10.9 Mavericks) with Adobe CS6 installed on it. About 2 months ago our Graphic Designer started having problems where when she went to save a Photoshop file the Mac would freeze up and just show the spinning pinwheel, after this happens we are unable to to even shut the system down and have to resort to holding the power button until it shuts off. Now this doesn't happen every time and we went almost a month with a problem but it has started back up and is happening multiple times a day. We have tried re installing CS6, creating a new profile for the user, deleting the library folder, saving to the desktop instead of a network location but nothing has seemed to do the trick. I'm a Windows Sysadmin so I'm out of my depths here and my poor Graphics Designer is getting really upset. Has anyone out there every had something like this happen??
                         Forever Grateful for any help that could be given -Giles Marsha

I would use opensnoop to figure out what it's doing when it hangs.

I've used the following command to watch a process and log the results to my desktop while watching the results live.

Once your figure out which file it's hanging on, you might be able to determine what the next step should be.

  ps aux | grep -i Photoshop | head -n 1 | col | cut -f 2 | cut -d' ' -f
  1 | xargs -I {} sudo opensnoop -v -p {} | tee -a ~/Desktop/logfile.txt


Are these unix exe files and others 32-bit code, & should I do something about them before moving to Catalina? I am running Mojave 10.14.6  (on a late 2013 MacBook Pro), waiting to upgrade to Catalina.  Checking for 32bit applications lead to a list containing

/System/Library/Frameworks/DiscRecording.framework/Versions/A/Resources/draudiotool
/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKitScripting.framework/Versions/A/AppKitScripting
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/vmutils.framework/Versions/A/vmutils
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreMediaPrivate.framework/Versions/A/CoreMediaPrivate

(which seem to be mostly Unix executable files), some dynamic libraries, a few apps, and then some items like this

/sbin/autodiskmount
/usr/sbin/pictd
/usr/lib/libnetsnmp.5.2.1.dylib
/usr/bin/qc2movie

Are these 32-bit code files that are going to block the use of apps, even if the apps are 64-bit?  Will installing Catalina remove them, or should I delete them first?  I can delete the apps (don’t need or can upgrade them), but is there anything I can do ahead of time with this list?

The content of /System as well as all files in /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/lib and /usr/bin is part of a macOS installation and will be replaced/upgraded if/when you upgrade to Catalina.


Running uname -m Gives x86_64 On M1 Mac Mini When I run uname -m in zsh (run via Terminal.app) on my M1 Mac Mini, the output is x86_64, instead of the expected arm64. This is occurring both in zsh and in bash. This is causing issues with installing native ARM wheels with pip, which thinks that I am running an x86 system. I couldn't find any information online about this, and am wondering if it is a bug, or something that I have overlooked. Any ideas of what is going on? Is this expected behavior? I am running macOS 11.3.1. The following other information is output by uname:
uname: Darwin
uname -a: Darwin macmini.local 20.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 20.4.0: Thu Apr 22 21:46:41 PDT 2021; root:xnu-7195.101.2~1/RELEASE_ARM64_T8101 x86_64
uname -p: i386

I can reproduce what you are seeing on our Macs on 11.2.3 and 11.3.1 - we get arm64 / arm / arm64 reliably back despite different shells and homebrew (or lack thereof) setups on each.
bmike@mini ~ % sw_vers
ProductName:    macOS
ProductVersion: 11.3.1
BuildVersion:   20E241
bmike@mini ~ % /usr/bin/arch
arm64
bmike@mini ~ % /usr/bin/uname -p
arm
bmike@mini ~ % /usr/bin/uname -a
Darwin mini 20.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 20.4.0: Thu Apr 22 21:46:41 PDT 2021; root:xnu-7195.101.2~1/RELEASE_ARM64_T8101 arm64

Choosing rosetta to run terminal changes this for a stock Mac. Quit and start again terminal.app, and I then get i386 / i386 / x86_64 the same as you reported.

https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/37723/rosetta-2-extension-attribute

If you look below, you'll see it enabled which will launch a shell that reports what you are seeing as opposed to the results "out of the box" that I showed above.


dragging browser tabs to new window moves old window Happens periodically with chrome, not sure about other browsers.

If I have a window with multiple tabs and drag one of them either to create a new window or place it in another, usually to my other monitor, the original window gets moved as well, typically about half of the distance.

This just started happening out of now where, the only thing that has changed on my computer recently was I reinstalled chrome after having flash issues with video.

Since this is not a OS X error, and is instead a browser error, you should submit it like this: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95315?hl=en

Hope this helps!

(Note that this bug is nonexistent on Safari, latest beta)


IPod touch 4th generation, USB connector is broken and password is lost - how to reactivate? The USB connector of my iPod was broken some time ago. I was not able to connect the device to a computer or to charge it. Now - a few month later - an iPod repair store told me that it is not possible to repair the USB connector because it has a fixed connection to the mainboard. But they were able to make some pins working again. Now I can charge the device, but a connection to iTunes is not possible.

Now the problem is that I do not remember the unlock password. I tried some of my most commonly used, but after a few failures the iPod gives me only one PIN try and then locks the device for ten minutes. Resetting with iTunes is not possible because of the missing physical connection. Is there a way To make the iPod work again? There is no important data on it that has to be saved.

Unfortunately, you cannot reset a PIN without iTunes.

The last thing that you could try is going to Genius Bar and hope that they can help.  Apple Stores have been known to completely replace broken devices, in some cases even if they aren't under warranty.


What iPhone app will allow one person to track the location of another in real-time? With the permission of the person being tracked, of course!

I'm running in a marathon and want my family and friends to be able to see my location on a map in real-time (or very close to it).

Are there any apps that can do this?

I'd also like to be able to turn on and off the "broadcast" of my location.

Find my Friends by Apple.

More info here.


Is there a way to rename my subscriptions in Reeder? Using version 1.2. I can't seem to find a way to do anything other than add subscriptions, folders and delete subscriptions. Is there any way I can just rename my existing subscriptions?

It is not possible to manage the feeds inside Reeder.app. Nevertheless it will synchronize all changes made to feeds within Google Reader. So if you want to rename a feed, open the webpage of Google Reader and go to the preferences.

In the prefs, choose the Abonnements tab (at least this is the German headline) and rename the feed.

If you now head back to the Reeder.app and synchronize your feeds the changes will be reflected and the feed will be renamed.

Please remember that this workaround will only work until July 1, because Google is shutting down the Reader service.


OS X 10.10.4 (14E46) - How do I get 'å' character on US keyboard? I've just moved from an older US MacBook Pro running Mavericks, and I've been able to write the Norwegian 'æøå' characters by using alt-', alt-o and alt-a.

On my new US MBP running Yosemite, all of these work, except for alt-a, which just writes '¯' instead of 'å'. I know of the option to hold down keys to get a list of alternative characters, but the alt-variation is much faster to work with, and I'd really like to get it to work. I've installed the latest OS X update.

Switching input from U.S. Extended to U.S. International solved this for me.


assigning keys on bluetooth apple keyboard I have assigned the right "alt" key on my 2013 MacBook Air to act as a forward delete - using DoubleCommand. Works like a charm. I then installed an apple bluetooth keyboard to use on an external monitor connected to the MacBook Air. How do I make the right "alt" key on the bluetooth keyboard also act as a forward delete?

Using KeyRemap4MacBook, you could save a file like this as ~/Library/Application Support/KeyRemap4MacBook/private.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <item>
    <name>custom</name>
    <identifier>custom</identifier>
    <autogen></autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::OPTION_R, KeyCode::FORWARD_DELETE</autogen>
  </item>
</root>

Then open the KeyRemap4MacBook application, press the ReloadXML button, and enable the setting.

This only remaps Apple Wireless Keyboards:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <devicevendordef>
    <vendorname>APPLE</vendorname>
    <vendorid>0x05AC</vendorid>
  </devicevendordef>
  <deviceproductdef>
    <productname>WIRELESSKEYBOARD</productname>
    <productid>0x0255</productid>
  </deviceproductdef>
  <item>
    <name>custom</name>
    <identifier>custom</identifier>
    <device_only>DeviceVendor::APPLE, DeviceProduct::WIRELESSKEYBOARD</device_only>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::OPTION_R, KeyCode::FORWARD_DELETE</autogen>
  </item>
</root>


Lock Mac mini but keep secondary display running I am configuring a dashboard on a TV display to show latest sales stats, etc. and am running this off our existing build 'server', a Mac mini. The Mac mini is connected to a standard monitor and a TV using AppleTV. What I'm after is a way to keep the Mac mini running in the background, with the standard monitor, USB keyboard and mouse disabled but to keep the main TV on showing a chrome browser with our dashboard app in it.

I'm pretty sure I'm asking for something impossible but I wondered if anyone had any suggestions?

I would use status board and an old iOS device to run the status board, but perhaps that's not the suggestion you are hoping to get. OS X doesn't allow one screen to opt out of locking - the current user is all or none in terms of keyboard input.

You could also develop custom kiosk software. But I've only seen that lock all the screens - not one.


Add AppleScripts to Git repository I have a few AppleScript files that I would like to share with the community on GitHub.

The files are located in two distinct directories:

~/Library/Scripts
~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Outlook Script Menu Items

With this structure preserved, I could edit the files in situ, without having to constantly move files to/from a unified, script directory.
a
Questions:

Can a single repository contain multiple, unrelated directories?
If a contributor forks my repository ($ git clone https://github.com/username/applescript.git), will the directory structure be preserved?

** edit 1 **

Logistically speaking, how and where would I create the local Git repository?  Seems like adding it to ~/Library/Scripts would be the easiest.
Do the individual applications even recognize scripts that have been located in the ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/* folder?  Or is this merely for organizational purposes.

Unfortunately, Outlook for Mac 2011 does seem to recognize the scripts located in the ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Outlook folder, aliased (haven't tested a symlink) to the ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Outlook Script Menu Items folder.

** edit 2 **

The scripts referenced by a symbolic link are not recognized by Outlook's AppleScript menu.

$ cd ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Outlook Script Menu Items
$ ln -s ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Outlook Outlook

I recommend keeping git out of your ~/Library folders, both to keep things simple for people using your scripts, and for stability's sake (I'd argue that the Library's contents should be considered an implementation detail of OS X that you can't rely on not to change on you in future versions).

Instead, I would just copy all the scripts in their textual form into a separate folder for the git repo (~/applescripts, for example), share that, and include instructions for where the user should install the scripts in your README file.


I have a recovery partition but OS X doesn't use it for recovery I need to start my El Capitan OS X in Recovery Mode to run csrutil disable.
When I restart holding cmdR the Mac directly boots to Internet Recovery Mode. But I need a local recovery partition because the online version doesn't provide csrutil!

I check if I lost my local recovery partition but it seems present.

➜  ~ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            250.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

Any suggestion what I can do to re-enable my recovery partition?

If can not boot to your recovery partition, there are two alternate ways to enable/disable SIP.

Create a USB flash drive installer. You can plug the flash drive
into the USB port and restart with the alt/option key held down. To
create the flash drive, you will need to download El Capitan from
the App Store. You do not reinstall El Capitan. Instead you use
the instruction given here to create the flash drive.
The other alternative would be to install rEFInd. During
booting you can select to enable/disable SIP. You would not have to
actually install rEFInd to your internal disk. You can install rEFInd
to a flash drive as well. See here for more information.

The advantage to the first method is the flash drive completely replaces your Recovery Partition. In other words, everything you can do once booted from the internal recovery partition will be available when booted from the flash drive. Of course, this requires downloading all of El Capitan which is several Gigabytes in size. If you have a slow internet connection speed, then the second method, involving installing rEFInd to a flash drive, would be a more favorable option.


What is "automatic movie mode" One of the new features listed in the iOS 6 release notes is

automatic movie mode for improved video sound quality

What does this feature do?

The new feature analyses the video that you are currently watching and it adjusts the Equalizer automatically so that the sound quality is optimal for the current movie scene.

Anyway many people think it's intrusive and that it actually decreases sounds quality. Others like it.
It's up to you I think.


Can you blindly navigate the boot selector screen with a non-flashed video card? I have a Mac Pro with a non-flashed video card. Yes, the video works just fine when the machine is booted (HD 270x). Since the card is not flashed, I obviously cannot see the boot screen.

The problem I have is that I also have Boot Camp on the machine for a Windows 7 installation. I used to simply have a simple Automator generated application for blessing the BOOTCAMP partition and rebooting the machine. However, with the upgrade to El Capitan and the associated System Integrity Protection (SIP) you can no longer simply bless the partition and thus my application no longer works without disabling SIP.

I'd prefer to have SIP enabled, so short of finding an EFI ROM for the Radeon HD 270X (automatic answer accept if you have one! ;-)) I figure I could live out my days navigating the boot screen in the dark.. what, two right-arrow keys and a 'return' wait a few mins? Should be easy, no? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work and instead appears to get stuck to the point that I need to reboot AND zap the PRAM to get back to normal!

My question is, am I just mis-navigating the boot screen and the PRAM zapping is just because somehow I messed up? Or is it that telling the Mac to go to the boot screen (Option key during startup) got it stuck somehow because it didn't see a video card it could use? Better yet, is there another way I can still use Boot Camp with a non-flashed PC video card?

thanks

Better yet, is there another way I can still use Boot Camp with a non-flashed PC video card?

Whenever you want to reboot into Bootcamp, open System Preferences and then the Startup Disk preference Pane. Select your bootcamp partition from the list, and then hit restart.

Your computer will automatically reboot into Bootcamp. This setting only affects the next reboot, which means that whenever you're done in Windows, you can reboot normally to get back to macOS X.

You can expedite this process slightly by creating a shortcut to the Startup Disk preference pane.


What SMS apps exist on the iPhone that support ascii emoticons, not emoji? This is an open question, but it is a logical followup of my previous question asking for an emoticon keyboard app.

It appears it is not possible to define a system-wide keyboard that supports ASCII emoticons. Instead, specific applications can provide a custom keyboard or another way to easily input emoticons.

So what replacements for the SMS app do provide shortcuts to input ASCII emoticons? For use by people unfamiliar by all those weird punctuations.

I am looking for something similar to the Messaging keyboard on Android. (Thanks to VxJasonxV)

The app should not require a jailbreak.

Bonus points for apps that also display ASCII emoticons graphically.

UPDATE: Now iOS does allow system-wide third party keyboards, so this question is no longer really relevant. However I keep it alive because the answer "no third party app can do SMS" is still correct and useful.

Apple does not allow SMS nor Phone replacement apps in the App Store, so this will never be possible without jailbreaking. Since you indicated you would prefer not to jailbreak, you will not be able to do this.

The closest you will be able to get would be to use a third-party SMS service which may either cost or perhaps force you into using a different phone number for SMS specifically with that app. You will need to review third-party apps available to see if they provide a custom keyboard to do what you wish to do.

Long story short: Built-in? Not possible outside of jmlumpkin's suggestion.


How to sync iPhone Voice Memos to the Mac via USB without using iCloud? I have no interest in iCloud for syncing sizeable data like Voice Memos. It is quickest for me to just connect my iPhone to my Mac via the USB cable and do my syncing that way.

Many changes have occurred in recent times, with iTunes now completely replaced on the Mac.

On Catalina 10.15.2 and iOS 13.3, this is what it currently looks like:

There are many Voice memos on my iPhone:

But on my macOS Finder I do not see a mention anywhere of Voice Memos being present on my iPhone:

Similarly, in my Mac's Music.app there is simply nothing showing up as detected on my iPhone:

As for Voice Memos.app, there appears to be no connection to the iOS counterpart whatsoever, it is empty:

Has Apple abandoned USB transfer functionality between the iPhone and the Mac?

How can I do this? Do we now have to use third party tools like AnyTrans despite these both being Apple devices?

If you do have any voice memos stored on your computer whether from backing it up the old way in iTunes or via iCloud, you can go and hunt for the files inside your computer. However, Apple does not recommend messing with them directly. However, if you do want to find them and be able to, for example, drag and drop them onto a hard drive, you need to search for: "com.apple.voicememos" in Finder. These files are kept hidden in a Libary under your user name. To see them you need to clip Command+Shift+.
Good luck...!


Use Automator to copy single folder to multiple locations I have several website project folders in a structure like this:

Client Work

|- Client 1
  |- client1site
    |- admin
      |- core

|- Client 2
  |- client2site
    |- admin
      |- core

|- Client 3
  |- client3site
    |- admin
      |- core

The diagram above just shows the key folders, there are others. There are also more than 3 clients, but the structure is the same for all.

The core folder is part of a CMS, and is identical on all sites. This is updated regularly.

I would like to be able to use Automator to copy a single instance of this core folder, stored somewhere else on my computer (can be anywhere), and replace all of the instances of /admin/core in my Client Work folder.

Is this possible?

Thanks for any help!

Yes this can be done in Automator.

Create a new Workflow and add a Get Specified Finder Items action adding the core template folder to it.

Add a Copy Finder Items action, one for each of the Client sites.

For each Copy Finder Items action, do the following

Check the [✓] Replace existing files check box.
In the To: list box, select: Other…

In the Choose dialog box:

Navigate to the admin folder of the appropriate Client (number).
Click the Choose button.

Having done this for each Client the workflow will then copy the core template folder to the admin folder of each Client folder, thus replacing it and it now having the contents of the updated core template folder in each of the Client folders at the designated location.

If you want to be able to know, more easily, which Client the Copy Finder Items action is for, do the following instead:

Check the [✓] Replace existing files check box.

In the To: list box, select: New variable…
In the Variable Options dialog box:

Change the text for Name: to an appropriate designator, e.g.: PathToClient1
In the Path list box choose Other…, then navigate to the admin folder of the appropriate Client (number).
Then click the Choose button.

By creating a variable name for each Client folder there is no ambiguity which Copy Finder Items action is for which Client folder. Although this does assume you select the proper target folder for each. ;)

Folder structure before Automator workflow:

Automator workflow:

Folder structure after Automator workflow:

Folder structure after updating the core template folder and running the Automator workflow again:


Bluetooth issue on iPhone with iOS 10 After I updated my iPhone 6 to iOS 10 I started having issues with calls using the Parrot MKi9200 Bluetooth car kit.

When I am talking on the phone through the Bluetooth kit the connection keeps dropping. Every minute or so it tells me that the connection was lost, and after a few seconds it connects again. This happens both when I am using regular phone calls and VoIP calls. However, when I am playing music or streaming a YouTube video there are no issues.

Most of the websites that talk about Bluetooth problems on iOS 10 suggest resetting the network settings. I have done this as well as re-pairing the Bluetooth device, but neither has helped my situation.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

***I have phoned Parrot and it is an Apple softwear problem due to the software update. Ring Parrot and they will talk you through how to reset your phone settings and the Parrot.

***I have the exact same problem between iPhone 6 with upgraded ios10 and the Parrot MKi9200 car kit.

Seems the bluetooth problem is with the iPhone 6 and Apple do not have a fix yet. The MKi9200 seems to be working in every other way and only caused difficulty immediately after iPhone upgrade to ios 10. Apple have not confirmed yet and seem to be ignoring this issue as they do not have any announcement.

Meanwhile, try plugging extra cables to convert to USB for plugging into the wired connection - hopefully this helps you - it takes a few extra cables and converter male to female. Answer just now until Apple get their finger out and fix the problem they created. Just wish Apple and Microsoft test everything prior to release. A lot of people using the same kit.

All the best.


iPhone hotspot via USB doesn't work iPhone 3GS, iOS 6.01
Macbook Mac OS 10.6.8

The iPhone 3GS hotspot works fine via Bluetooth, connected to my iPad.

If, instead, I tried it with my Macbook via USB (can't do it via Bluetooth for another reason), if I open the network preferences I can see the iPhone but it says that the cable is not connected or the device is not responding. Of course the cable IS connected and iTunes correctly sees the iPhone.

I've never tried tethering before on my macbook. I haven't tried other solutions.

Any clues?

Somewhere around late 2014 is got very reliable for me. I don't know if iOS changed, OS X changed or both, but before then I continued to have the problems you describe with Mountain Lion 10.8.4 and earlier.

Of late, this has been quite solid and at worst, toggling the connection in network preferences on OS X fixes any connection issues with iOS hotspot being solid in general.

Before the fixes, the problem seems to be a timing issue.

What I've found is that if the connection light doesn't show green, I want to disconnect the device and turn off tethering on iOS. After waiting 5 seconds or so, I turn on tethering again on iOS and be sure to leave the tethering screen showing. (don't leave the settings app) I then reconnect the device and listen for it to signal that it's connected with the chirp iOS makes when connecting to a computer. If the light doesn't go green in system preferences, I toggle the Personal Hotspot off, count a few seconds and turn it on.

Occasionally, something just isn't correct on the Mac end and I switch to Wi-Fi tethering and delete the interface in System Preferences and then start over with the set up.

I wish I could say this worked reliably for me, but it seems to be fidgety and prone to errors and lock up.


How to setup iPads to be shared by multiple users? My school has iPads for use for students. Currently, each student has their own iPad, with their own password, and own files on it.

But I've seen other schools instead have laptops where students can log into any laptop (or desktop computer in the building), and use it. They just enter their unique username and password, and they see their own desktop settings and files. Only an Internet connection is required.

Is there a way to setup iPads to be used in the same manner?

iPads, by their nature are single user devices. One could go on and on about why that is or is not a good thing. But the fact remains that currently iOS does not offer multiple logins, like you can get on any Windows PC, or any Macintosh.

Apple does offer Apple School Manager that may give you some or most of what you are looking for. Perhaps someone with actual familiarity with this program could chime in or provide a more complete answer, but that link should at least get you started.


2011 macbook pro not responding to startup commands My macbook doesn't respond to any commands at startup (command + s, command+r, shift, command+alt+p+r). It wants to go straight to the apple logo then to a blue or white screen. Applecare is no longer on it. What should be my next step?

Since the shift key or option key should be recognized by the system well before the Apple logo arrives, you can conclude that you have a failed keyboard.

Plugging in any USB keyboard and booting in safe mode (shift) or single user mode (command s) should let you know if the keyboard has issues.

Now the Apple and blue screen are good. They mean that the core OS and hardware are fine and that the start process is hung starting your user. My guess is you need to boot to internet recovery (or an external drive) and then repair some damage to the user files or the drive itself. Then you can delete the .AppleSetupDone file and make a new admin account to see if the Mac can work.


Change global system property for file.encoding Due to a conflict between the mac osx lion 'file.encoding' system-property and my java application, i have to change the setting from MacRoman to UTF-8.
What is the best way to reset this system property globally for all users on this machine?

Regards
mmm...

You've got it the wrong way round, the issue is not the OSX default encoding which is UTF8, but Java's default encoding under OSX which is MacRoman

Apples Mac Developer docs on Java see the section 'Character Encoding'


Can I update Mac OS 10.11 to 10.11.6 using a dmg of the update? My internet connection is lame  and the last time I tried to update with the download through App store, it downloaded and restarted but said that the verification of the update package was unsuccessful . I don't want to do that again .

So, I have manually downloaded the update package (1.55 GB) from http://supportdownload.apple.com. Now how do I update Mac OS , and also I don't want the verification failed kind of error. I also do know that this happens at some cases when OSx needs to be installed through the recovery section and you sure can fix it changing the systems date, but how do I do it in this case?

You can get the dmg file from here: https://support.apple.com/downloads/macos

While downloading the dmg please check the system requirement. Because you will need a combo dmg file if you are upgrading from say 10.11 to 10.11.6

On detail page of the dmg there is a System Requirements button at the bottom, please check the system requirement from there.

Screenshot

Source: Ask Different


IPhone App or OS function to stop all apps I am looking for a good way to stop all apps in the background without manually stopping each of them individually. Something straight from the OS would be preferred, but I would not mind using a management app either.Some apps are taking a lot of battery and I would like to kill them with as few as possible steps in the evening.

Since you mentioned GPS apps specifically, you can turn off Core Location ("Location Services") in the settings app.

Each app runs in it's own sandbox and is totally oblivious to other apps. There's no way with public APIs to know of other apps, so a "task killer" such as you might have on Android isn't possible on iOS.

Generally, a well-written app will not use excessive background resources. If you can find out which app is sucking resources, I'd recommend sending a support ticket into the developer and let them know what's going on. From my own personal experience as a developer, I'd love to know what I'm doing that makes my users upset, so this is win for both you and h(im|er).

The bottom line, though, is that you're stuck manually killing them. :(


Why am I getting an “invalid active developer path” when attempting to use Git after upgrading macOS? After upgrading to macOS Big Sur, I tried to run git from Terminal but it kept giving me the following error:
xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools), missing xcrun at: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/xcrun.
How do I fix it?

Solution

Open Terminal, and run the following:

xcode-select --install

This will download and install the Command Line Tools package and fix the problem.

You do not need Xcode, you can install only the Command Line Tools here, it is about 130Mb.

If the above alone doesn't do it, then also run:

xcode-select --reset

Further reading

The problem is that one needs to explicitly agree to the license agreement.  As a follow on step, you may need to reset the path to Xcode if you have several versions or want the command line tools to run without Xcode.

xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app
xcode-select --switch /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

I found the solution in this question, Command Line Tools not working.

You may get an error message: "Can't install the software because it is not currently available from the Software Update server". In this case xcode-select --reset works as pointed by akozin.


iCloud password prompt on OS X Yosemite startup Whenever my MacBook Air starts up from shutdown (or on restart), once the Finder has started, it prompts me for my iCloud password, like this:

As you can see there is no title or anything to identify the app or process requesting the password. However, through the use of a clever Python script (unfortunately I can't remember where I got it from) I was able to determine the process requesting the password:

UserNotificationCenter (/System/Library/CoreServices/UserNotificationCenter.app)

If I click Cancel twice (it pops up again after the 1st Cancel) it doesn't reappear and there are no apparent issues. All my iCloud services (Photos, Music, Contacts, Calendars, Keychain) seem to sync and work just fine.

I used Activity Monitor to dump the processes open files and the only file of relevance I can see is /usr/share/icu/icudt53l.dat although I have no idea what it is.

The problem only started happening about a month ago, and there's no obvious change that occurred on my machine that I can think of that might have caused this.

EDIT: obviously I tried entering my iCloud password, without success.

If you have another Apple device, such as an iPad or iPhone, and you deleted iCloud off of it, it can disrupt every device you have, and you will just need to log in again, possibly generating App-Specific Passwords for your Mac. This happened to me around the same time, but I can't remember if it was the result of the upgrade to OS X 10.10.4 that broke the connection of it was when I deleted iCloud from my iPad (I was lending it to someone).

You may need to log iCloud in with your Apple ID password, or if that does not work, log in to your Apple ID and generate an App-Specific Password for iCloud.

The same problem cropped up for iMessage/Facetime as well. There you definitely need to generate an App-Specific Password, however I think I resolved the issue with iCloud by entering my Apple ID password. Once it sets in your Keychain, you shouldn't see the pop up again.


Finder / spotlight / mail search not working For the second time in a relatively short period I am having issues with the search function on my macbook.

Whether in spotlight, Mail app, or Finder search results return nothing. If I reboot the search works fine again. Unfortunately this now seems to be a recurring problem.
It's also a recent problem that I never had before, first noted it a few weeks ago.

Macbook on macOS Sierra 10.12.3.

Any one has this experience? What could it be? How can I prevent it or fix it, without having to restart everytime?

-- edit --

Following the feedback in the comments, I ran Disk Utility. Disk utility indicates there are errors but doesn't seem to repair them. Final message in DU:
"file system check exit code is 8"
I have already tried to reindex Spotlight, that didn't solve the problem.

I can also confirm that if you run out of disk space Apple Mail spotlight can become unusable.  My solution is slightly left field but has the advantage of being utterly reliable - rather than trying to rebuild OSX spotlight or force mail to reindex mail, I instead archive mail into EagleFiler (https://c-command.com/eaglefiler/).  EagleFiler maintains its own separate search index so is unaffected by system spotlight issues which I find difficult and time consuming to resolve.   Double clicking a mail message in EagleFiler will open it (and any attachments) in Mail.


How to fix HP Officejet 7210 scanning in Mountain Lion? I have a HP Officejet 7210 printer/scanner. I used to use Preview to scan, using File/Import from scanner. However, since upgrading to Mountain Lion, the option is greyed out.

Previously, the option had a sub menu where I had to select 'Include Networked Devices'. Afterwards, the printer, which is connected via Ethernet, showed up and I could scan. Now, there is no submenu anymore.

Image Capture also says no scanners are connected, and going through printers/scanners in preferences and clicking 'open scanner' shows a dialog with the 'scan' button greyed out.

Does anyone know how I can make HP Officejet 7210 scanning work again, either with Preview, or with some other software?

Suddenly, the printer now appears directly in the menu of Preview. I have no idea what changed. So the takeaway is that 'Include Networked Devices' doesn't exist anymore and is always on. If your printer doesn't show, close the programs, turn off your printer, and try again. It might show up later.


I can't send email to groups now that I have added iCloud to Outlook; groups aren't found anymore I had email groups set up in Microsoft Outlook. They were great. When I added iCloud, it moved all my contacts out of Outlook and put them in iCloud. But now when I want to send a group email, my email (still using Outlook) can't find my groups anymore.

I tried to make new groups in iCloud, and they seem to be there, but still are not found in Outlook. The old groups still show up in Contacts, but aren't apparently usable. I have them but can't get to them! Help!

You might be facing the synchronization problem:

Microsoft chose not to support CalDav and CardDav in Outlook for Mac, unfortunately these are the services required by iCloud.

Although MS did add these to Outlook for Windows they did not add them to Outlook for Mac.

In short you can't subscribe (not sync) to iCloud from Outlook for Mac (although you can if you use Outlook for Windows)

Use Outlook, or use iCloud, not both.


Java class file could not be launched on startup I'm not sure what happened but now when I boot up my Mac I get this message that pops up every time:

"The Java class file "myClass.class" could not be launched.
Check the Console for possible error messages."

This class file is part of a larger program I'm developing.

I checked the console and found the message with sender [0x0-0x1b01b].com.apple.JarLauncher and the message says java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: ....

I failed to find the Jar Launcher or anything Java related in /Library/StartupItems and ~/Library/StartupItems but that's all I thought to do.

Any ideas on why I'm getting this message and what to do to get rid of it?

Finally found it in System Preferences -> Users -> Login items.


How to find out which app is sounding a bell, and how to silence it? When I put on my headphone I can hear an app keep making a sound (a short bell, perhaps. It's hard to describe in writing) very frequently, almost like once or twice every second.

I have been going thru all app in 'Notifications' in System Preference and uncheck 'Play sound for notifications', for example:

but it does not seem to stop it.

The only way to completely silence it is by turning on 'Do not disturb' in notification centre.

By my observation it seems to be closely correlated to Mail's downloading messages activities

So where can I completely turn off the sound?

It turns out the sounds came from the Mail app. It is the 'New messages sound'

By switching it to None I can get rid of the frequent bell sounds.


How bad is it to run an ancient Mac Pro with an unsupported OSX? I have an ancient (c. 2007?) Mac Pro running OSX 10.7.5 at work. It's so old, Software Update no longer allows me to update to a newer operating system. I use a lot of software provided by MacPorts, and I'm finding I'm having issues that may be related to not being able to update. I'm no longer able to update certain software, either. I use it to ssh to when I'm not in my office, so it's open to the network (though I expect that it is protected to some degree by my institution's network).

Unfortunately, I lack the funds to purchase a newer model!

I know running an outdated computer has problems:

Software vulnerabilities don't get patched, exposing me to hacks (eep!)
Possible instabilities with 3rd party software that might install on my system but not work with my system.
The most current versions of some software packages won't install
I miss out on some of the new features of the newer OSs (e.g. Messages)

I'm primarily concerned with the first problem listed.

Question

What are some other risks, and how can I evaluate and/or navigate them? Is it really, really bad for me to run it like this--so bad that it might be advisable to install and use Linux instead (as described here)?

If you have the 2007 Pro 1.1, 10.7.5 is the end of the line for you. But depending what you need to do, it's not all bad. I have a 2010 pro and run only Snow Leo, 10.6.8 most of the time.
The only thing you can do is monitor what apps no longer function, and save up for an upgrade. $600 or so to jump to 2010 pro.


Lost password to Apple ID and Find My IPhone I have Find My iPhone turned on and I know what Apple ID it uses. But lets say I forgot the password to my Apple ID and lost my phone? Will I still be able to find my iphone or activation lock it if I reset my Apple ID password on the Apple website? Or will I have to relog with that Apple ID on the device?!

First let's solve the Apple ID problem. You can start the password reset process from the official Apple ID website, this also can be done any device as long as you have a web browser:

Step 1:Go to this Apple ID site and under “Manage your Apple ID” choose the “Reset your password” option
Step 2:Enter the email address associated with the account and answer the security questions as usual to complete the password reset process

Second Lost iPhone problem:
You can use Find My iPhone to find your device and take additional actions that can help you recover it and keep your data safe.

Step 1:Sign in to icloud on a Mac or PC, or use the Find My iPhone app on another iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
Step 2:Find your device. Open Find My iPhone, and select a device to view its location on a map. If the device is nearby, you can have it play a sound to help you or someone nearby find it.
Step 3:Turn on Lost Mode. Using Lost Mode, you can remotely lock your device with a four-digit passcode, display a custom message with your phone number on your missing device's Lock screen, and keep track of your device's location. If you added credit or debit cards to Apple Pay, the ability to make payments using Apple Pay on the device will be suspended when you put your device in Lost Mode.

If you use Family Sharing, any family member can help locate another member’s missing device. Just have your family member sign in to iCloud with their Apple ID, and you can find any device associated with that Family Sharing account.


SSD lost size after erasing NTFS to HFS+ I bought SSD Samsung 850 Pro drive
from my friend and it was NTFS formatted. I used macOS Disc Utility to erase it and after doing this the disc has 24 GB only (instead of 1TB). Any solution how to resize it to its previous capacity?

In my opinion you didn't buy a 1 TB SSD but a 1 TB + 24 GB SSHD (a hybrid drive similar to Apple's Fusion Drives). At least 46949230 blocks à 512 Bytes amount to ~24 GB.

I haven't been able to find a model though (except for an SSHD option with the same sizes in some Dell laptops).

If the HDD part isn't visible at all, it's probably incompatible with macOS' disk framework.


My Macbook 7.1 (Macbook white mid-2010) 10gb ram, 250gb SSD Samsung 850 EVO overheats with few apps open My Macbook 7.1 (Macbook white mid-2010) with 10gb ram and 250gb SSD Samsung 850 EVO overheats with very few apps open. It overheats for no particular reason. It cools down for no particular reason too. It goes from 89 to 65 in seconds regardless of applications usage that I do. Why is this happening?

Without seeing your Activity Monitor, it's tough to say what your CPU is doing.  However, a 24 degree temp swing in a couple of seconds is a lot.

Have you tried AHT (Apple Hardware Test)?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257

My thinking is that you may have a bad temperature sensor (or it's getting bad info).

If that's the case, there are folks who repair things like this, or it just may be a good reason to upgrade your Mac.  There is a guy in NY that does really good work (I am not affiliated) repairing these boards:  https://mailin.repair/


Send audio output of MacBook to iPhone for remote listening Is it possible to send audio from music in iTunes, or from movies on Netflix, or video game sounds, etc., from my MacBook and receive and listen to the audio on my iPhone? I'm thinking of this working like wireless headphones, except with a really long cord. If there is a way could you let me know how the solution works, I'm interested in creating my own script/app to do this if it's not too daunting.

If its important, I'm running an old 2009 MacBook, running Snow Leopard.

Yes, using Airfoil for Mac (also available for Windows) and the companion app Airfoil Speakers Touch you can stream any audio from your Mac to your iOS device.

I haven't tried it much myself, and reviews are mixed, but you can try it for free before shelling out the money for it.

This can also be used to send audio from a MacBook to a bluetooth headset connected to an iOS device. Something which is very difficult otherwise.


How can I delete the Time Machine backup files on a Netgear ReadyNAS? I use a Netgear ReadyNAS as a Time Machine server. I recently bought a new Mac, and I want to delete the old backups. How do I delete them? It's not possible from the Time Machine interface.

In Finder, click Go => Connect To Server...
In the Server Address field, type "afp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" (IP address) or "afp://your-ngnas-name.local"
Connect using the credentials you use to connect to the Time Machine service.
Finder will open a window in /Volumes/ReadyNAS. You should see a list Time Machine's .sparsebundle files.

At this point, you can delete a .sparsebundle. It's also possible to Ctrl+Click on a .sparsebundle and select "Show Package Contents" to browse inside.

UPDATE Sometimes files inside the sparsebundle package or the package itself will be locked, preventing deletion. To unlock: Get Info > General > Locked > uncheck.


Is frequently toggling airplane mode on/off harmful to iPad hardware? I want to try to save my iPad batteries, so I turn on the airplane mode when I don't use the iPad during the day and at night. I could toggle airplane mode on/off for more than 12 times in a day.

Do you think it's worth it to put iPad into airplane mode when I don't use it during the day? and is frequently toggling ipad airplane mode on/off harmful to iPad hardware (shorten hardware life)?

Technically the answer is yes. However, the "damage" is insignificant. It is like asking if I use my iPhone to make phone calls will it wear out faster? And the answer is yes. But it is far more likely that your device will become obsolete long before it be worn out from constant "Airplane" mode toggling.

I would recommend putting your device in "Airplane" as much as possible to get maximum battery life from your device. Keep in mind you can have your device in "Airplane" mode and still be connected to WiFi, so be sure to turn off WiFi when not needed as this will also increase your battery life.


keyboard shortcuts lost on iOS 8 upgrade After up grading to iOS 8 i lost ALL my customized "keyboard shortcuts"... be it over a hundred of them.

I spent ages setting them mostly for work and now have NONE. Tried upgrading to the latest update iOS 8.0.2 but still none.

Because of this issue I have not upgraded the 2 iPads and one other iPhone 5s to latest software - and they all still have my customized keyboard shortcuts

Any thoughts?

It has been reported that upgrading iCloud to iCloud Drive corrects the issue and makes the shortcut both reappear and sync properly.

If that doesn't work (or if you have iCloud Drive already on), try rebooting your iPhone.


What's a more graceful way to hide private information during a live demo Sometimes I give live demos from my Macbook, whereby I plug in an HDMI cable and show my screen on a projector.

During such demos, I sometimes might need to look up a login password which I keep stored in an encrypted file.

What's a better way besides unplugging the monitor to privately copy this password into the pasteboard without flashing my entire password file on the big screen?

You could hit Command + F1 which toggles display mirroring. Then use the laptop screen  to do the copy and paste. That way the users still see your main desktop, while you work on your laptop screen.


Split Input Channels Using SoundFlower and AULab I want to split my stereo input channels so I can Eq one of them. They both would then go to the built-in output. I've installed SoundFloser and AU Lab on Mac OS 10.12 Sierra. I've read through the help pages for AU lab. I couldn't find anything specific to my need. With all the options, it looks like it should be possible. I've tried selecting two mono inputs. I get two left channels as input. I didn't see any way to change the source of the mono input, but I could have missed it.

I could be done using Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack which is ostensibly an audio recorder but has really comprehensive routing capabilities too.

You build your path just by drag & drop, it makes the connections for you.

Route a source to two different Channels plugins, kill left in one & kill right in the other - that way each will pass only a single side of the stereo pair.
In front of that you put two EQ plugins, then route both to a single output, headphones/speakers etc.

It's fairly expensive for a one-trick pony, but it's extremely useful if you need the trick it can do.

I posted more examples on https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/203009/85275

BTW, remember to switch it on once you've built it ;-) Button bottom left goes white & the numbers go orange & start to count time.
As a side-effect, launching any specific Hijack preset will launch any apps assigned to it.


Can't SSH into my Mac from Linux I seem to be having a problem with trying to ssh into my Mac from a Linux desktop. I have two users on my Mac and can ssh between them, but other computers seem to be the problem.

I enabled remote login in System Preference > Sharing. It tells me to try "ssh username@192.168.x.x", but when I try that it does not work, likewise when I try using ssh -p22.

Later I generated an RSA file using ssh-keygen in the Linux desktop and added it into the Mac's authorized_keys file. Please note that I am able to ssh into the Linux desktop without any problem.And my firewall is off on the mac.

I do not even get prompted to enter the password, it just does nothing for some time and then later displays:-

ssh -p22 username@192.168.x.x

ssh: connect to host 192.168.x.x port 22: Connection timed out

I know I am connected to the internet. This is the verbose output:

OpenSSH_7.2p2 Ubuntu-4ubuntu2.2, OpenSSL 1.0.2g  1 Mar 2016

debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config

debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 19: Applying options for *

debug1: Connecting to 192.168.x.x [192.168.x.x] port 22.

debug1: connect to address 192.168.x.x port 22: Connection timed out

ssh: connect to host 192.168.x.x port 22: Connection timed out

Does anyone have an idea what the problem may be? What other steps can I try to resolve this?

If you're getting timeouts, that has nothing to do with your authentication mechanism - whether password, or key based.

The timeout means either you can't connect to the Mac at all, or it's not accepting traffic on port 22 (the SSH port)

Some things to check -

Have you checked your firewall is off on the mac? System Preferences -> Security -> Firewall
Can you ping the Mac from the Linux desktop? A simple ping to the Mac will verify that they're on the same network and can communicate.

Fix your network issue before you try to fix your authentication.


Folder selection in Finder's column view I'm running 10.8.4 on a MBA, and I've run into a little inconsistency in Finder's behavior. I have two accounts on my machine, an admin account and a user account. In both accounts I have Finder set to open new windows in the home directory in column view.

If I open a new window and try to select a subfolder with a keystroke (eg. D for Desktop), it only works in the admin account. In the user account it seems to be interacting with the home directory's enclosing folder instead of its subfolders. So if I type S it selects /Users/Shared rather than /Users/user/Spoon.

I know it's a small thing, but it messes with my workflow, and I'd like to know why the inconsistency. Any ideas?

Update: I tracked down the cause, with a little help. Someone recommended I look at System Prefs > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. I did, and noticed the Full Keyboard Access radio button at the bottom of that page, where you choose whether the Tab button cycles through all controls, or just Text boxes and lists. I remembered that I'd set it to "all controls" in the standard user account, but not in the admin account. Sure enough, changing it back to the default "Text boxes and lists only" fixed the behavior.

Just a thought, but do you have Show Hidden Files turned on in the User account and not admin? Could paste this in a terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO

and see if it makes a difference.


Stop Mail from previewing pdfs and images in the body of an email Is there a way in the Mail.app to prevent it from previewing pdfs and images in the body of an email.

So that instead you just a get a normal file attachment ?

It seems that the display of images (including PDF documents) can be disabled using this Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing 1

The display of images/PDFs can be re-enabled by using this command:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing 0


How does macOS Sierra securely pair with Bluetooth keyboards without a code? I have a late 2014 Mac Mini running macOS Sierra 10.12.5. When I paired it with my Bluetooth keyboard, I was not prompted to enter a sequence of numbers.

How does macOS validate and secure connections between Bluetooth keyboards without prompting for a code? Does it just use trust-on-first use? Is it possible to force macOS to use a pairing code?

TL;DR answers to questions

  How does macOS validate and secure connections between Bluetooth
  keyboards without prompting for a code?

It's not just macOS - your keyboard is connected and encrypted at the firmware level - if it wasn't you wouldn't be able to perform an NVRAM reset before the OS loads.

However, you don't need a code because modern Bluetooth keyboards use an authentication algorithm to pair and a generated authentication key based on public keys to secure the data transmissions.

  Does it just use trust-on-first use?

No.  It verifies its identity using an algorithm and 128-bit generated keys.

  Is it possible to force macOS to use a pairing code?

Why?  This would be going back to pre-2009 pairing methodologies.  This would be the equivalent of enabling WEP shared keys on modern WiFi networks.

Bluetooth Pairing

The process you described for pairing a Bluetooth device (a keyboard in your example) uses an old (Bluetooth 2.1) method of authentication called Simple Secure Pairing (SSP).

Basically, SSP has 4 association (pairing) models:

Numeric Comparison.  Both devices have input and display so the user can simply select "Yes" or "No" to pair the device
Passkey One device has input capability (like a keyboard) and the other has display capability (like a computer).  The device with display capability shows a 4 to 6 digit number and the device with input capability enters it.
Just Works  This is for devices with no display or input capability (like headsets) where you can't see or enter a passkey.
Out of Band (OoB) This is for devices that support an additional common wireless technology (NFC) where the devices have to be in very close proximity to each other.  One device must "tap" the other device before pairing will occur.

The most important thing to note is that SSP is NOT the encryption key; it's merely the pairing mechanism to identify each other.  Encryption is handled through a public key.  The code you enter is to make sure that's the device you want to connect to; it's not the security.

Since Bluetooth 3.0 (April 2009), Bluetooth devices uses an AMP key for authentication which automates the above process.

  AMP Key Derivation
  AMP link key is derived from the Bluetooth link key. A Generic AMP Link
  Key(GAMP_LK)is generated by the AMP Manager in the host stack whenever
  a Bluetooth link key is created or changed

  Authentication

  The Bluetooth device authentication procedure is in the form of a
  challenge–response scheme. Each device interacting in an authentication
  procedure   to as either the claimant or the verifier. The
  claimant is the device attempting to prove its identity, and the
  verifier is the device validating the identity of the claimant. The
  challenge–response protocol validates devices by verifying the
  knowledge of a secret key — the Bluetooth link key.

Encryption

There are 4 modes of encryption

Mode 1 - No encryption
Mode 2 - Individually addressed traffic is encrypted based on keys which are based on the link keys
Mode 3 - All traffic is encrypted using keys based on the master key
Mode 4 - (Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR) mandates all traffic is encrypted except for service discovery

Bluetooth keyboards using Bluetooth 2.1 (keyboards from 2009 and beyond) and up encrypt all their traffic.

SOURCE:  SP 800-121 Rev. 2, Guide to Bluetooth Security (May 2017)


Is it bad to call sudo on 'sudo brew services start --all'? I had a bug running redis and I stopped all servies with sudo brew services stop --all and installed redis fresh.
Now I wanted to start all servies again with sudo brew services start --all
but I'm not able to use Laravel Valet (a program to show a website with .test domains) at all.
I get errors like:
the "user" directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:1

So that is my question: Is it bad to call sudo on 'sudo brew services start --all'?

Yes, it is bad, at least according to the Homebrew FAQ:

Why does Homebrew say sudo is bad?
tl;dr Sudo is dangerous, and you installed TextMate.app without sudo anyway.
Homebrew refuses to work using sudo.
You should only ever sudo a tool you trust. Of course, you can trust Homebrew  But do you trust the multi-megabyte Makefile that Homebrew runs? Developers often understand C++ far better than they understand make syntax. It’s too high a risk to sudo such stuff. It could modify (or upload) any files on your system. And indeed, we’ve seen some build scripts try to modify /usr even when the prefix was specified as something else entirely.
We use the macOS sandbox to stop this but this doesn’t work when run as the root user (which also has read and write access to almost everything on the system).
Did you chown root /Applications/TextMate.app? Probably not. So is it that important to chown root wget?
If you need to run Homebrew in a multi-user environment, consider creating a separate user account especially for use of Homebrew.

Moreover, Homebrew services are built and configured to run with user accounts, if you run them under the root account you risk to have configuration problems as you experienced. Also, as you should already known, running internet facing services, under a root account is a major security risk.