Why are so many Mac downloads a .dmg just that contains a single .pkg? I've noticed that many downloads are a dmg (disk image) that contains a single pkg file (installation package). Usually the pkg seems to be already compressed since the dmg doesn't reduce the file size much if any.

Example:

MonoFramework-MDK-2.10.6_1.macos10.xamarin.x86.dmg is 119,242,061 bytes (119.2 MB on disk)
MonoFramework-MDK-2.10.6_1.macos10.xamarin.x86.pkg is 119,979,719 bytes (120 MB on disk)

A savings of 737,658 bytes, or 0.6% of the original file size.

Is there a reason not to just distribute the pkg? Is the 0.6% compression savings that important? Or is it just the way things have always been done on the Mac?

(Yes, I realize that 737,658 bytes times all the millions of downloads that dmg gets does add up, but it just always seems annoying to have that extra steps in there to mount a dmg, run the installer and then unmount the dmg. Maybe a better question is "why doesn't Mac OS X recognize a dmg with a single pkg inside it as just a pkg and simply install it without requiring all that mounting and unmounting?")

Technically, a .pkg is not a file, but a folder.  So  maybe collecting it into a single file is essential for downloading.


In Google Drive on iOS, how do you change sharing permissions to be anything other than "Private"? In Google Drive on iOS, how do you change sharing permissions for a file or folder from "Private" to "Anyone with the link" or "Public on the web"?  I only see a way to add named users.

I cannot find a way but I did find a work around.  Open google drive via web browser and change view to desktop.  This option is located at the very bottom of the screen.  It's irritating but at least you can do it on your iPad.


Latest update of Apple iPhone 6s version 9.3.2 will not let me use most of my apps I'm getting a "network error" code, no matter which Wi-Fi I am using.

How to resolve this issue?

Reset your Network Settings:

Settings > General > Reset and click "Reset Network Settings"


Photo Booth freezes for >30s whenever I open it I've had this problem ever since I upgraded from Mavericks. Whenever I open Photo Booth, the application seems to be stuck on startup and I have to wait for like 50 seconds for it to become useable. A few months ago, it used to be like 20 seconds but it seems like the waiting time gets higher all the time.

Im using a Macbook Pro Retina 15 inch Early 2013.

Do you have Dropbox? I found that if I quit the Dropbox app, most of these 'hangs' go away. Starting Chrome and Safari, Launching Mail.app all improved when I quit Dropbox. I still have Dropbox, and I restart it to get it to sync every so often, but I leave it off.

I have seen others with similar experience, but I don't use photobooth, so can not tell you if Dropbox is the cause.

Also, I found a noticeable improvement across the board from starting with a clean install of Yosemite. My 13" 2011 MacBook Pro was nearly unusable following an upgrade to Yosemite.


How do I wipe my MBP drive to default? My MacBook Pro fell and is kinda cracked so since I have warranty from BestBuy, I want to do a complete wipe of the HDD and essentially restore it like it was brand new before I return it. (They’ll probably do it too, but I want to do it myself just to be sure.)

I’ve backed up all my data and all I need to do is wipe it.

What is the best way to go about this? I want to erase but obviously leave it in a working manner with OS on it etc.

I thought I found the answer here, but that’s for an older OS and the MBA machine.

I’m running the latest update of Mountain Lion.

What you should do is similar in concept to the answer that you've quoted. The main difference is that your MBP will have the Restore partition on its drive instead of the USB solution for the MBA.

Follow the instructions on Apple's recovery partition page:

  Just hold down Command-R during startup and OS X Recovery springs into
  action. It lets you choose from common utilities: You can run Disk
  Utility to check or repair your hard drive, erase your hard drive and
  reinstall a fresh copy of OS X, or restore your Mac from a Time
  Machine backup.

Since you've already backed up your data, pick the erase and reinstall option, and you'll have a clean copy of OS X installed on the MBP before you bring the machine back for servicing/replacement.


Why do I keep losing my ‘text substitutions?’ I'm a heavy user of OS X's / iOS's ‘text substitutions’ or text replacements. I probably have hundreds of these.

At some point in the recent-ish past (last couple of years?), Apple silently started syncing them between devices logged into the same iCloud app; that was great, for a while.

Unfortunately, at some point, my Macbook lost all of my substitutions, for no apparent reason. They still existed on all my iOS devices, but now none of my completions (like ccommand or ooption or sshrug) worked on my laptop. This eventually fixed itself (again for no apparent reason) … but it's just happened again, immediately after purchasing and setting up a new Mac Pro.

As this is the second time, I'm starting to wonder if anyone else has seen this behaviour, or if they know how to go about fixing it without waiting on iCloud to Magically Fix Itself, as I did last time?

After removing the folder com.apple.InputMethodKit.TextReplacementService from the depths of the ~/Library heirarchy and restarting the computers my current list of Text Replacement shortcuts is available on two Macs that previously refused to synchronize. Both of these Macs legitimately run Sierra, but didn’t start life that way. The folder com.apple.InputMethodKit.TextReplacementService is buried somewhere inside ~/Library. Sorry, I didn’t make note of the full path — I found it using a Finder Search.
Update: A friend in the Ars Technica: Macintoshian Achaia forum reports that the path is ~/Library/Group Containers/com.apple.InputMethodKit.TextReplacementService

ᔥ A VooDoo fix for Macintosh Text Replacement Sync - Jeff Berg - Mini'app'les


What is the menu item Automatic Updates for iOS when you have to start them manually? So far, no iOS update has started automatically. Do you have to consider anything else?

Refer to the Apple Support document, Update your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

  Update automatically

  With iOS 12 or later, or iPadOS, you can have your device update automatically. To turn on automatic updates, go to Settings > General > Software Update, then tap Automatic Updates. Your device will automatically update to the latest version of iOS or iPadOS. Some updates might need to be installed manually.

Here's the conditions to be met for automatic updates to install:


File has different name in terminal and Finder I've just downloaded the driver for my preferred trackball from Logitech. In the Finder, the Installer's filename is Logitech Control Center Installer.app. In the Terminal, ls shows LCC Installer.app. How did this happen?

One possible reason for a different name is if the package has a localized name. This allows the name displayed in the Finder to vary depending on the language of the user, and it also can be different than the "actual" name of the file, as displayed in Terminal.


Why does my music not play through FaceTime? When I'm on FaceTime with my friend and we both want to listen to music, how come if I turn on my music on iTunes, the person I'm facetiming with can't hear it?

To prevent audio feedback, FaceTime will try to cancel any audio the mic picks up that is coming from the same device's speaker. For your friend to hear your music, play it from a different device than the one you are using for FaceTime.


Replacing an old used Iphone 5S to a new IPH5S Just got given the above from a friend who had this as an upgrade but doesn't want it. I already have an old IPH5 which has been well used so the new one is preferable. Can I just transfer my SIM from my old IPH5 to the new one?

Yes, this is possible.

However, if you want to keep all your data etc, you will need to do a full backup of your old iPhone (e.g. to iTunes on your Mac/PC) first and then connect the new iPhone to do a restore from the old backup. This assumes, of course, that the new iPhone has at least the same capacity as the old one. If not, you may run into problems.

Also, make sure your friend has followed Apple's advice on What to do before you sell or give away your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.


Using A Windows PC To Recover User Data From HFS Drive (dead Macbook) I'm a Windows guy. I've worked with Macs at times over the years as an IT guy, but they were always small parts of my environments and this is a new challenge for me.

A friend's Macbook is dead. Old, out of warranty for years, "loved", etc. Now dead.

I'm trying to pull the data off of the still-good HDD (150GB SATA drive) and am having trouble finding the actual user data on the drive.

The free trial of MacDrive mounted the drive quickly and easily and I've copied all the data from the drive to my working drives (so I'll still be able to access it once the trial expires). However, I cannot find any files that correspond to the data the user said was on her system.

Where do I need to look to find the user's files?

I though they might be in the \Users directory where there is a Shared folder with a few hundred KB of data, a Username folder that is empty, and a .Username folder which has 50GB of data mostly contained in \Users.Username\Username.sparsebundle\bands in progressive hexadecimal named files (files named 0 to fff) each 8192KB in size. So I'm pretty sure that's not what I'm looking for.

If you're seeing 50GB worth of sparse bundle bands, this suggests that the user has implemented FileVault encryption on the volume. To the very best of my knowledge, it is not possible to mount sparse bundles from Windows systems. You'll need a Mac system of equivalent OS version or newer to mount the drive and the user will need to supply the password used to encrypt the data.

This should help with mounting sparse bundles externally:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1974


Will any files or apps delete after updating to Mavericks? I'm downloading the update right now and I would like to know if any of my files or app gets deleted after this update... I'm sure many people here already installed the update so what can you say?

The upgrade to Mavericks overwrote the config file for the Apache web server (localhost). It also overwrote the environment variable giving access to Java.


Sync iPhone Associated with Library That No Longer Exists One of the iPhones in our household is associated with an iTunes library that no longer exists.  The computer that the iTunes library was on had to be wiped clean due to warranty maintenance.  There is data (music, photos, contacts, etc.) on the iPhone that we do not want to lose by associating it with a new iTunes library.

How do we create the new library association without data loss?

Your photos and contacts can generally be transferred to the new library without any problems via the initial sync to/from the new library. You will need to configure your target photo sync location (probably either iPhoto or a directory).

However, with music (and probably movies), transferring depends on the original source. If you purchased them through iTunes, authorize the computer/new library and transfer your purchases. However, if not all of the music was obtained via iTunes, you will need to transfer the music from the iPhone to the computer, or you'll lose them during the initial sync. This transfer can be accomplished by a number of different software programs. You can then manually add the music to the new library.

Finally, this wiki article contains a number of links that discuss methods to transfer data from iPhone to both PCs and Macs. Note: The software used in the wiki seem to be freeware, but I can't vouch for them, as I've never used those programs before.


How can I force all traffic for a single app through VPN / Proxy + Open Source? aka App Firewall? I'm looking for an app that is fully Open Source OR built-in to MacOS as I am trying to use this for security / privacy (to ensure that particular apps cannot make arbitrary connections)

I have looked into things like the built in app sandboxing via sandbox-exec which seems promising, but super hard to find documentation and I haven't seen an example that forces networking through a proxy / port.
Also socketfilterfw which seems to only control inbound connections.
pfctl seemed promising, but too low-level, I can't see how to isolate an entire app reliably.
I just found TSocks which looks great, but doesn't seem to be maintained.  Was rejected 9 years ago from homebrew for this reason.

VMs are too heavy for my use case.

I believe some refer to this as an "App Firewall", but the built-in MacOS AppFirewall doesn't support this use.

I saw this question "Is it possible to have per-app network/vpn/proxy settings" but the answers are 7 years old and include closed-source software like ProxyCap.

I have looked into things like the built in app sandboxing via sandbox-exec which seems promising

sandbox-exec (deprecated, according to its man-page) is a utility of restriction framework with allow-deny semantics meaning it won't help you to change an app to bind a specific IP-address only (which later could be used together with Pf).

There's a similar post where it's been claimed to be solved with Network Kernel Extensions but source hasn't been shared.

  I just found TSocks which looks great

tsocks (even if was available) relies on LD_PRELOAD mechanism which isn't really bullet-proof because it's based on pre-loading of shared library which would further tamper libc calls. Of course, together with sandbox it could be more-or-less secured of leaks, but in general it's too much tinkering. Network Kernel Extensions look more promising, as to me.


How to move to another full screen window of the same app I have two Safari windows, I put both of them into full screen. When I switch to another app (let's say Finder) by cmd-tab, then the next time I switch back to Safari by cmd-tab, I will be in the last full screen window that I was on.

How do I move from here to my other full screened Safari window? Is there any way to do this?

I know I can move to the right/left space by ctrl-arrow, but I have no idea where the other Safari window is (I'd have to guess).

EDIT: What I really meant is a keyboard shortcut, instead of Mission Control.

Just going into the main Mission control window will solve this, it will give a nice summary like view of all your open (fullscreen) windows. Another way to switch between fullscreen windows is selecting the "Window" menu item or the Safari icon in your dock and choosing the right window from there.

Edit

If you want to use a keyboard shortcut to accomplish this you can use an application that binds a keyboard shortcut to an Apple script, like FastScripts. The next step is placing the script in your /Library/Scripts folder and adding a shortcut to the script in the FastScripts preferences.

I'm not really good with Apple scripts, but this is a sort of working script that I made:

tell application "Safari"
activate
end tell

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Safari"
        tell menu bar 1
            tell menu bar item "Venster"
                tell menu "Venster"
                    click menu item 14
                end tell
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

The big problem with this script is this:
The line click menu item 14 will make the first window that you see when you click on the "Window" menu item active, and changing it to click menu item 15 will make the second window active. However, obviously, this isn't included in my code, and I don't have the time to work on it today, so you can either ask someone else how to do this or wait until tomorrow.


Can I test iPhone apps downloaded from iTunes in the iPhone Simulator? Is it possible to test iPhone applications which you downloaded from iTunes Store in the iOS Simulator?

Afraid not. The simulator runs on x86 architecture and the iPhone apps are published to run on ARM.


Is the Photos app destructive? I noticed the iPhone's photos app lets you uncrop images even after they've been saved.

Does this mean it uses sidecar files to store the actual edits? Is it non-destructive on JPEGs?

That's correct. So long as the original photo remains in the Camera Roll, Photos is able to undo edits. However, if you send it to another iPhone user, they will only have the edit itself, not the original, so they cannot revert back. Also, if the image is deleted from Photos, you cannot recover the original.

Note: Photo Stream does not support this. Any edits made to an image in Photo Stream will be saved to Camera Roll. Likewise, and edits made in Camera Roll that are uploaded to Photo Stream, Photo Stream will only have the revision and will not be able to revert.


Is there a way to have separate docks per display? I'm using Yosemite. I have 2 displays (each with its own space and both have the dock) and I have a application (app1) with various windows. These windows are distributed between these two displays: I have some of them in display 1 and some of them in display 2.

The problem is that: when I'm in another application (not app1), if I click the app1 icon in the dock, its windows are all activated in all displays (no matter in what display I clicked app1 icon in the dock).

What I want is: when I click app1 icon in the dock, activate the windows that are only in the active display. For example: suppose that none of app1 windows's are activated; if I am in display1 and click app1 icon in display1 dock's, only app1 windows that are in display1 are activated (keeping whatever was in display2 as it was).

You may also replace every reference I did to 'display' to 'space', because I'm using separate spaces per display. I saw a very similar (and old) post where people recommended DockSpaces, but I can't find this application anymore.

Any suggestions?

I do not have the Yosemite but on Mavericks works as follows:

  The trick is to assign a second Space to the desktop. You do that by
  pressing the Mission Control button on your Mac keyboard (F3) or
  whatever you've assigned in System Preferences > Mission Control, and
  moving the mouse to the upper right of the display until you see a
  Plus (+) icon. Click it to create a new Space.

After you've created a second Space, your dock option will change. Now you'll see this:

Now you can assign the app to the Desktop of your choice, typically either the desktop on display #1 or display #2.


Is there a free program for easily managing network locations? I move around from the office and elsewhere quite a lot. When I'm in the office, I need a static IP, elsewhere I don't. I have network locations set up, but it's extremely tedious opening up Network Preferences to change it essentially every day.

Ideally I'd like an app where I can just select from the taskbar menu, like I can with Wireless networks, or a way to apply the IP config whenever I connect to that specific network.

I've found paying apps, like Sidekick, which are massive overkill (I don't want to shell out £20 for an app I'll only use one function of), I just want a tiny utility. Is there such a thing?

Check out something called ControlPlane. I've been using it for a while now and it can automatically change a whole array of settings from networks to printers on your mac depending on where you are like sidekick, but its free and so much better.

Lifehacker and Mac AppStorm featured it not long ago.


Clone hard drive from 2017 Macbook Pro to 2012 iMac My Macbook needs to be sent to the store for repair and I plan on making a block level clone of it to an unused iMac that I have. My question is will the iMac be able to boot and not crash due to the hardware having changed very significantly.

The method I'm talking about is making a block level clone like dd so that the iMac's drive is identical to the Macbook's. NOT a time machine backup or simple copy of files over.

In the past I have often booted my main operating system from different Macs, while my MacBook was in repair. Sometimes you may have to redo some of the settings, such as Network preferences. Also, restoring the recovery partition (see also below) can be annoying.

First you need to figure out if your iMac is compatible with the version of MacOS you are using. In case you use Mojave, compatible iMacs are: "iMac introduced in late 2012 or later" according to Apple's support page. In case your iMac is such a model, you should be fine.

I suggest you simply try it by cloning your macOS to an external USB SDD or HDD and boot from it.

Clone the drive. I really like SuperDuper! which can be used for free. Alternatively, Carbon Copy Cloner (commercial) is also nice, because it can also clone and restore your hidden recovery partition. The recovery partition is not necessary for booting.
Connect the USB drive to your iMac.
Press the alt button before the startup sound.
Select the USB drive.

Please make sure your USB drive is formatted with the GUID Partition Map, as this is required for booting external drives.


Boot to Single User Mode with Startup Manager I need enter safe mode on my Mac after selecting select macOS with Startup Manager (option while booting). Pressing ⌘ + S has no effect.

The Mac currently uses Bootcamp for dual boot into Windows or macOS. By default it boots into Windows. I cannot change the default boot OS. Possibly because I don't have an administrator account in macOS.

The following link is what I'm trying to accomplish using safe mode:

I don't have administrator account on my mac

TL;DR How to enter macOS safe mode after selecting macOS in Startup Manager?

I am not sure how old your Mac is, but for Macs made in at least the last 10 years, this should work.

After booting to the Startup Manager, you can hold down the control key while selecting the operating system to boot. You should see the straight arrow change to a circular arrow. The selected operating system will now become the default.

Additionally, many Boot Camp arrangements allow the default boot operating system to be selected from the Windows Control Panel.


Deep sleep keyboard shortcut I have been a windows user for a long time now and I have been used to pressing just one key in my keyboard to hibernate the machine every night. I recently bought a mac mini and I press Shift + Command + Eject to put it to sleep and then it would go to deep sleep in a while. But I am wondering if there is a keyboard shortcut to do this or maybe change the default sleep to a deep sleep.

Mac mini late 2012 with standard HDD, i5, 4gb ram

The two keyboard shortcuts for sleep:
Display sleep: Shift+Control+Eject
Computer sleep: Command+Option+Eject

Source: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343

To change the default sleep mode to hibernate (in the terminal):

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

I don't think there's any way to preserve the normal sleep behaviour and have a separate keyboard shortcut for hibernation without writing a script that changes to hibernate mode when called and changes it back after, somehow, but this command does work on my MBP. There's a number of options for sleep that you can see with:

man pmset


Is Siri is new for every device with iOS 5, or just for the iPhone 4S? I have iOS 5 on my iPod Touch 4, and I can't find Siri on it. Does it have Siri?

Siri is only available on the iPhone 4S and only fully supported within the United States at the moment.

Unfortunately the page here on Siri does not make that extremely clear, apart from only mentioning the iPhone 4S. I can't find an official source on the Apple site other then that page that specifically says Siri is only available on the 4S.

Siri supports various languages, however some functionality, like local business searches, will only work in the United States at the moment.


How do I clear my Bash history in OS X? How do I clear my Bash history in Mac OS X?

I've entered a few "errors" and just want to clear them off. How do I do that?

To clear it, just delete the ~/.bash_history file. If you want to just remove the offending lines you can open ~/.bash_history in the editor of your choice. For me, this would be

emacs ~/.bash_history

and then going to the beginning of each bad line and pressing control ^+K.

Or your can just fill your .bash_history with empty.
Run this: (including the >)

 > ~/.bash_history


2019 MBP 16" 2.3Ghz i9 severe thermal throttling (Catalina 10.15.5) Brief Summary
2019 MBP 16" 2.3Ghz i9 shows severe thermal throttling

CPU Frequency hovers around 1.9-2.0 Ghz
Power draw doesn't exceed 30W
Max Temperature only 76ish degrees Celcius
Exporting a 5min clip on Adobe Premiere Pro which slams all 8 cores

I've attached screenshots below showing just how much the new MBP 16" i9 throttles.  I haven't really had a problem with it until recently... but there are 2 variables:
What's Changed?

Catalina upgrade to 10.15.5 recently
Applecare service replaced the logic board

Questions

Is it likely that the replacement logic board is not up to snuff?
I haven't heard any complaints online (reddit, stack exchange, apple support) of thermal throttling lately.  How does one test abnormal throttling?

Screenshots

terminal output after running pmset -g thermlog
intel power gadget showing the aforementioned stats holding steady despite high CPU Utilization.

Thermal throttling is normal behavior for laptops.  However, I did not expect the extent to throttling in everyday applications.
While Cinebench R20 shows robustness against thermal throttling, Adobe Premiere Pro thermal throttles right away.  The only explanation I can think of is that Cinebench R20 does not engage GPU while Adobe Premiere Pro does.  When CPU + GPU are both used in conjunction, thermal throttling happens immediately.
I suppose this is a limitation of laptops.


What do I use to jailbreak an iPhone 3G? I just bought a used iPhone 3G and I want to jailbreak it.

What tool do I use?

You may try Spirit

http://www.spiritjb.com/

I support "any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch on firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3, or 3.2 (not 3.2.1)".


Migrate a Time Machine backup in terminal /Volumes/Original_Time_Machine is no longer being backed up to, but contains old backups that I want to keep.

/Volumes/New_Time_Machine_Archive is an empty partition

Both of these are on separate physical hard drives.

I was thinking of doing this in the terminal.
Connect both physical hard drives, then:

cd /Volumes/Original_Time_Machine
cp -rp * "/Volumes/New_Time_Machine_Archive"

Would I be able to restore from this if I copy this way? Or is there another way I should do it?

Apple has fixed Finder in macOS 10.13.4 to preserve hard links so my answer is to use Finder to migrate your TM backup. They did not, however, fix cp. It still does not preserve hard links and doesn't have an option to do so.

I know the OP requested a way of doing it from the terminal but all my efforts to do so in macOS 10.13.3, where I had given up on Finder because it did not then preserve hard links, failed.

The rsync command suggested by @n1000 failed after more than 12 hours with out of memory, even though I have 16GB of memory. This is a known problem fixed in rsync v3+. However v3 sets all the user and group ids to 99 and was painfully slow. There were long periods with no disk and no significant CPU activity. I've found rsync very slow on other platforms too.

cpio did not preserve ownership.

pax got strange errors.

I came closest to success with tar:

cd /Volumes/My\ Passport
sudo bash
tar -cf - -T ~/TMFileList | (cd ../My\ Canvio;tar -xpvSf -)

where ~/TMFileList was created with

cd /Volumes/My\ Passport
sudo bash
find -d Backups.backupdb -print > ~/TMFileList

[I tried a tar -c | tar -x thing first but that was copying some hard links as separate files for reasons related, I guessed, to the order it was seeing the files. Which led to me making the depth-first list.]

However tar was taking an impractically long time. I killed it after 3 days. Some of this was because it was extracting files multiple times. The majority of this was, like rsync, due to long periods of inactivity for reasons I could not determine. What it managed to complete had correct ownership and hard links were preserved.

So I strongly recommend using Finder. Just make sure you have macOS 10.13.4. Follow the Apple support instructions in the link at the end of @n1000's answer.


Apple Developer Enterprise Program - Change Account Holder I have access to our company Apple Developer Enterprise Program account as Admin. The guy with the Account Holder role left the company a few weeks ago, but his Apple is still linked to the account as Account Holder.

How do I change my access type from Admin to Account Holder?

You'll need to gain access to the email account used for logging in as Account Holder.

Most likely, the email address domain used as Apple ID to login must be registered/created by your organization. You'll need to follow the proper chain of command internally and gain access to the email account via IT.

Once you have the access, either continue using it or assign the Account Holder role to your Apple ID.

You can refer to the Developer Program roles here:

Apple Developer Program Roles


Asign unallocated free space on external volume to (new) partition OSX I formated a external USB drive to mount with 10 different volumes. (Actually I forgot how i made this work)

The drive will not show as being partitioned in drive utility in OSX but show all volumes(MBR) on this drive as kind of individual ones which are not related like partitions are.

With diskutil in terminal I was able to delete the unnecessary volumes. But now I have a 2TB drive with only two volumes left, which share 400GB together. So the unallocated space is missing and I do not know how to reallocate it either asigning it to one of the volumes or by creating a new volume which takes all unalloacted space. Does anybody know what to do?

I would realy want to avoid erasing the whole disk, as the two volumes keep backups of different machines.

Disk

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk2
   1:                  Apple_HFS Name1                200.2 GB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Name2                200.2 GB   disk2s5

sudo gpt -r show disk2

       start        size  index  contents
           0           1         MBR
           1   390965066
   390965067   390965064      1  MBR part 175
   781930131  2345790390      2  MBR part 5
  3127720521   779308647

Is there any way to keep the two left volumes and allocate the free space?

Best, hirschferkel

Disk: /dev/disk2    geometry: 243201/255/63 [3907029168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: AF 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 390965067 -  390965064] HFS+
 2: 05 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 781930131 - 2345790390] Extended DOS
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: AF 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [2736755457 -  390965064] HFS+
 2: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused

The procedure posted in this answer relies on the use of the command gdisk. The command is not included with macOS. Included is the procedure for installing this command.

  Note: Disk identifiers (disk2 for example) and partition identifiers (disk2s1 for example) can be set arbitrarily by macOS. I tried to post the correct identifiers. Before executing a command, you may want to review the output from diskutil list to insure the correct identifier is being used.

Install gdisk

Download gdisk from the internet. I assume this will be downloaded to your Downloads folder.
Execute the command given below to remove the quarantine.

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/gdisk-1.0.4.pkg

Use the Finder application to install gdisk.

Convert a MBR Partition Table to a GUID Partition Table (GPT).

  Note: Not all drives using a MBR Partition Table can be converted to use a GUID Partition Table (GPT). The drive posted in the OP's question happens a drive that can be  easily converted.

Use command given below to determine the identifier for the drive. I will assume this is disk2, as shown in your question.

diskutil list

Execute the following commands to perform the conversion.

diskutil unmountdisk disk2
gdisk /dev/disk2
w
y

Below is an example.

$ diskutil unmountdisk disk2
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
$ gdisk /dev/disk2
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.4

Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Partition table scan:
  MBR: MBR only
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: not present

***************************************************************
Found invalid GPT and valid MBR; converting MBR to GPT format
in memory. THIS OPERATION IS POTENTIALLY DESTRUCTIVE! Exit by
typing 'q' if you don't want to convert your MBR partitions
to GPT format!
***************************************************************

Command (? for help): w

Final checks complete. About to write GPT data. THIS WILL OVERWRITE EXISTING
PARTITIONS!!

Do you want to proceed? (Y/N): y
OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/disk2.
Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Warning: The kernel may continue to use old or deleted partitions.
You should reboot or remove the drive.
The operation has completed successfully.

Eject the drive by executing the command given below.

diskutil eject disk2

Unplug the drive and plug back in. Execute the command below to see if the drive identifier has changed.

diskutil list

Add an EFI Partition

  Note: The defaults shown in the examples may not match what you will see.

Create the partition. Selecting a partition type of Linux prevents the partition from mounting before being formatted.

diskutil unmountdisk disk2
gdisk /dev/disk2
s
n
3
40
409639
8300
s
w
y

Below is an example.

$ diskutil unmountdisk disk2
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
$ gdisk /dev/disk2
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.4

Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.

Command (? for help): s
You may need to edit /etc/fstab and/or your boot loader configuration!

Command (? for help): n
Partition number (2-128, default 2): 3
First sector (34-3906250006, default = 40) or {+-}size{KMGTP}: 40
Last sector (40-409639, default = 409639) or {+-}size{KMGTP}: 409639
Current type is 'Apple HFS/HFS+'
Hex code or GUID (L to show codes, Enter = AF00): 8300
Changed type of partition to 'Linux filesystem'

Command (? for help): s
You may need to edit /etc/fstab and/or your boot loader configuration!

Command (? for help): w

Final checks complete. About to write GPT data. THIS WILL OVERWRITE EXISTING
PARTITIONS!!

Do you want to proceed? (Y/N): y
OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/disk2.
Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Warning: The kernel may continue to use old or deleted partitions.
You should reboot or remove the drive.
The operation has completed successfully.

Eject the drive by executing the command given below.

diskutil eject disk2

Unplug the drive and plug back in. Execute the command below to see if the drive identifier has changed.

diskutil list

FAT32 format the partition.

newfs_msdos -F 32 -v EFI /dev/rdisk2s1

Below is an example.

$ newfs_msdos -F 32 -v EFI /dev/rdisk2s1
512 bytes per physical sector
/dev/rdisk2s1: 403266 sectors in 403266 FAT32 clusters (512 bytes/cluster)
bps=512 spc=1 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf8 spt=32 hds=32 hid=40 drv=0x80 bsec=409600 bspf=3151 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6

Change the partition type to EFI.

diskutil unmountdisk disk2
gdisk /dev/disk2
t
1
EF00
w
y

Below is an example.

$ diskutil unmountdisk disk2
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
$ gdisk /dev/disk2
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.4

Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.

Command (? for help): t
Partition number (1-2): 1
Current type is 'Linux filesystem'
Hex code or GUID (L to show codes, Enter = AF00): EF00
Changed type of partition to 'EFI System'

Command (? for help): w

Final checks complete. About to write GPT data. THIS WILL OVERWRITE EXISTING
PARTITIONS!!

Do you want to proceed? (Y/N): y
OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/disk2.
Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Warning: The kernel may continue to use old or deleted partitions.
You should reboot or remove the drive.
The operation has completed successfully.

Add a New Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Volume

The free space before the original two volumes can not be added to either of these volumes. To reclaim this space, one or more new volumes need to be created. The procedure below creates one new volume.

Create the partition. Selecting a partition type of Linux prevents the partition from mounting before being formatted.

diskutil unmountdisk disk2
gdisk /dev/disk2
n
4
409640
69999999
8300
s
w
y

Below is an example.

$ diskutil unmountdisk disk2
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
$ gdisk /dev/disk2
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.4

Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.

Command (? for help): n
Partition number (2-128, default 2): 4
First sector (34-3906250006, default = 409640) or {+-}size{KMGTP}: 409640
Last sector (409640-3906250006, default = 3906250006) or {+-}size{KMGTP}: 69999999
Current type is 'Apple HFS/HFS+'
Hex code or GUID (L to show codes, Enter = AF00): 8300
Changed type of partition to 'Linux filesystem'

Command (? for help): s
You may need to edit /etc/fstab and/or your boot loader configuration!

Command (? for help): w

Final checks complete. About to write GPT data. THIS WILL OVERWRITE EXISTING
PARTITIONS!!

Do you want to proceed? (Y/N): y
OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/disk2.
Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their
partition table automatically reloaded!
Warning: The kernel may continue to use old or deleted partitions.
You should reboot or remove the drive.
The operation has completed successfully.

Eject the drive by executing the command given below.

diskutil eject disk2

Unplug the drive and plug back in. Execute the command below to see if the drive identifier has changed.

diskutil list

Format the partition Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This will also change the partition type to the correct value.

diskutil erasevolume jhfs+ Name3 disk2s2

Below is an example.

$ diskutil erasevolume jhfs+ Name3 disk2s2
Started erase on disk2s2 My2TB
Unmounting disk
Erasing
Initialized /dev/rdisk2s2 as a 33 GB case-insensitive HFS Plus volume with a 8192k journal
Mounting disk
Finished erase on disk2s2 Name3

Reclaim the Remaining Free Space

Add the remaining free space to the existing Volumes. Any free space that is remaining after entering these commands should be fairly small and is required to be reserved for use by macOS.

    diskutil resizevolume disk2s2 R
    diskutil resizevolume disk2s3 R
    diskutil resizevolume disk2s4 R

Below is an example.

    $ diskutil resizevolume disk2s2 R
    Unable to find disk for disk2s2
    $ diskutil resizevolume disk2s2 R
    Resizing to full size (fit to fill)
    Started partitioning on disk2s2 Name3
    Verifying the disk
    Verifying file system
    Volume was successfully unmounted
    Performing fsck_hfs -fn -x /dev/rdisk2s2
    Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
    Checking extents overflow file
    Checking catalog file
    Checking multi-linked files
    Checking catalog hierarchy
    Checking extended attributes file
    Checking volume bitmap
    Checking volume information
    The volume Name3 appears to be OK
    File system check exit code is 0
    Restoring the original state found as mounted
    Resizing
    Modifying partition map
    Growing file system
    Finished partitioning on disk2s2 Name3
    /dev/disk2 (external, physical):
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk2
       1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS Name3                   199.8 GB   disk2s2
       3:                  Apple_HFS Name1                   200.2 GB   disk2s3
       4:                  Apple_HFS Name2                   200.2 GB   disk2s4
    $ diskutil resizevolume disk2s3 R
    Resizing to full size (fit to fill)
    Started partitioning on disk2s3 Name1
    Verifying the disk
    Verifying file system
    Volume was successfully unmounted
    Performing fsck_hfs -fn -x /dev/rdisk2s3
    Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
    Checking extents overflow file
    Checking catalog file
    Checking multi-linked files
    Checking catalog hierarchy
    Checking extended attributes file
    Checking volume bitmap
    Checking volume information
    The volume Name1 appears to be OK
    File system check exit code is 0
    Restoring the original state found as mounted
    Resizing
    Modifying partition map
    Growing file system
    Finished partitioning on disk2s3 Name1
    /dev/disk2 (external, physical):
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk2
       1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS Name3                   199.8 GB   disk2s2
       3:                  Apple_HFS Name1                   1.2 TB     disk2s3
       4:                  Apple_HFS Name2                   200.2 GB   disk2s4
    $ diskutil resizevolume disk2s4 R
    Resizing to full size (fit to fill)
    Started partitioning on disk2s4 Name2
    Verifying the disk
    Verifying file system
    Volume was successfully unmounted
    Performing fsck_hfs -fn -x /dev/rdisk2s4
    Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
    Checking extents overflow file
    Checking catalog file
    Checking multi-linked files
    Checking catalog hierarchy
    Checking extended attributes file
    Checking volume bitmap
    Checking volume information
    The volume Name2 appears to be OK
    File system check exit code is 0
    Restoring the original state found as mounted
    Resizing
    Modifying partition map
    Growing file system
    Finished partitioning on disk2s4 Name2
    /dev/disk2 (external, physical):
       #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
       0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk2
       1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
       2:                  Apple_HFS Name3                   199.8 GB   disk2s2
       3:                  Apple_HFS Name1                   1.2 TB     disk2s3
       4:                  Apple_HFS Name2                   598.6 GB   disk2s4

Appendix

Descriptions for the gdisk commands is given below.

b   back up GPT data to a file
c   change a partition's name
d   delete a partition
i   show detailed information on a partition
l   list known partition types
n   add a new partition
o   create a new empty GUID partition table (GPT)
p   print the partition table
q   quit without saving changes
r   recovery and transformation options (experts only)
s   sort partitions
t   change a partition's type code
v   verify disk
w   write table to disk and exit
x   extra functionality (experts only)
?   print this menu


Remote File and Application access from iMac to Macbook (Not screen sharing) I use an iMac (2017, 27 inches) and a MacBook Pro (2013,13 inches) for software development and UI design. My work is remote 90% of the time and I use GitHub and other cloud services for sync.

Problem:
The problem I'm facing is that my iMac and MacBook both need to have the same software suites like Xcode, Adobe Suite, etc. to run the projects themselves. I have to keep multiple licenses of same software, not to mention my MacBook has only 128 GB and only 4 GB RAM, it takes a hell load of time to compile the same application too.

What I have tried:

Screen Mirroring: Numerous screen sharing services (Native
screen/file/remote sharing, Screens Viewer, Team Viewer, many others!) but the lag is HUGE and the aspect ratio is completely messed up to the point that I cannot see text.
Server OS: Bought MacOS server with a hope to have complete "native"
file system and application (Xcode, Photoshop) access from my MacBook
but it doesn't let me access the whole file system and 0 application
access even as an admin with login privileges granted.

Can anyone direct me to a solution that I can use?

Hardware
You have two vastly different hardware platforms.  One (iMac) has twice the standard memory of the other (MacBook Pro) - 8GB versus 4GB and two generations and (approx) 30% difference in clock speed.  You're also developing UI on a 27 inch screen then switching to a 13" screen
There's no getting around this discrepancy in horsepower.
Software Licensing
This shouldn't be an issue on two computers.

XCode is free and you can install it on multiple computers that is associated with your developer ID

Adobe CC products can be installed and activated on two computers simultaneously, but you can only use one at a time.

Remote Work
If your work is 90% remote as in you live out of a suitcase, your best bet it is get the most powerful MacBook Pro you can afford and utilize external monitors (hotel TVs perhaps?).
If it's remote as in you work out of your house, your current setup is fine - you just need to move your data to the cloud (iCloud, OneDrive, etc.)  and sync the data and install the apps on each Mac.


Show "Activity Monitor" in every "Desktop" I find much joy in monitoring my Apple computer's fan roll through monitoring CPU use.

However, I don't know how to make multiple "Activity Monitor" windows, each for one of my "Desktop"s.

I normally fought that by staying in "Desktop 1" as much as possible. However there are moments when I really really need several "Desktop"s, while at the same time being monitoring CPU use.

Got ideas?

Start Activity Monitor and an icon will show up in the Dock. Right-click the icon and you'll get a popup with one of the lists of actions is Options. Click on Options and select "All Desktops".


Delete CoreStorage Volume even as OS X won't acknowledge there is one? I installed Yosemite on an external 3TB drive. I made a specific 300GB partition on it to hold the system and a second for data. Installation worked fine. However, according to Disk Utility in both Mavericks and Yosemite there is only a little more than 800GB available on the whole disk.

When I run diskutil list; echo; diskutil cs list it says there are no CoreStorage Volumes, but I knew from the Yosemite installation that there is one.

How can I get rid of the CoreStorage Volume even as OS X won't acknowledge there is one? Do I dare to delete and erase the complete drive from Disk Utility in Mavericks? It seems risky as it can't even show me the lost partition space.

Here's the output:

/dev/disk2
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *801.6 GB   disk2
1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
2:                  Apple_HFS X Drive                 320.1 GB   disk2s2
3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk2s3

No CoreStorage logical volume groups found

I ran the command cat /dev/random > /dev/disk2 as user "su" and all partitions are gone now. At first, the available disk space was still only 801GB. After a while it showed up properly in Disk Utility as 3.0TB though and I was able to reformat it. Excellent!

Thanks to Topher Kessler for posting the proper commands in How to fix deep formatting problems with OS X drives!

CoreStorage is great technology. Apple info still leaves a lot to be desired.


In Excel, how do you delete line breaks? In Excel, how do you delete line breaks globally? It's totally messing up my text-to-column I need to do.

A more Excel way:
As line-break is CHAR(13), you could try something like this (assuming your text is in A1 and you'll put edited text in B1)

B1: =SUBSTITUTE(A1,CHAR(13),"")

or
B1: =SUBSTITUTE(A1,CHAR(13)," ")

Source: answers.microsoft.com


How to remotely view photos uploaded to iCloud? Is it possible to view the photos we upload to iCloud from icloud.com or somewhere else?

Are the photos available anywhere?

Enable the photo streaming, then you can view the photo from any device connected with your apple ID and have iCloud enabled.

Check the Photo stream page on apple.com : http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html


Import a Takeout of Photos? I have an iCloud account for my iPhone.   My computer is Linux.  I have in hand a Google Takeout of about 600 photos.  How can I import them into iCloud?  I would like to preserve the metadata that is now in [photo].jpg.json files.

There are also a handful of videos.  Importing those too "would be nice."

It seems you can join your JPEG files with JSON in bulk with exiftool.

See examples here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42024255/bulk-join-json-with-jpg-from-google-takeout


OSXFuse & VeraCrypt on Big Sur: OSXFuse seems to be missing on your machine OSXFuse and VeraCrypt were both working fine until the MacOS was updated to MacOS 11.0.1 Big Sur. VeraCrypt no longer opens.
After installing macFuse 4.0.2 (latest at time of posting), I tried to run the installer for VeraCrypt 1.24-Update7 but it gives an error

OSXFuse seems to be missing on your machine. VeraCrypt requiures OSXFuse 2.5 or above.

How can we get VeraCrypt to work on MacOS Big Sur?

This seems to be a general problem, see https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/general/thread/b7cd930cf7/?limit=25#6cb4 and https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/tickets/400/. A new version of VeraCrypt will be required which references the correct path and addresses any other issues related to Big Sur.


Did something wrong with partitioning my SSD I tried to make a partition for Windows on my Mac by using Apple's Disk Utility, because bootcamp already showed me that it didn't work for some reason. But now I'm stuck with a 70 gb hard disk, and I'm not capable of accessing the other part of the hard disk (I'm using a MacBook Air with 120 GB SSD).

I kind of expected Disk Utility to let me change the name and everything for this new partition I made (intended for Windows), but for some reason, the only thing that happens is that I can't access the rest of my hard disk anymore and there are no more partitions available.

I hope I've made clear what the problem is, I'm not a native speaker (as you might have noticed) so it's a little hard to write a question about a subject like this.

Here is the output of diskutil list:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD            120.5 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.1 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD           +120.1 GB   disk1
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2
                                 732FEE77-68E5-4934-AEA2-EB01DE4EA90D
                                 Unlocked Encrypted

I once had a simillar problem, the disk verification in disk util shown minors errors, but it wasn't able to fix them. As such, I couldn't delete a fat32 partition.
Here is what I did :

first i booted into safemode. The startup was long as it was fixing errors. (On boot, before startup chime, press and hold Shift)
after that i booted in recorvery mode (the same: on boot cmd+r)
when the recovery mode shown up, i did load the disk utility and deleted the partition.
It worked this way.

However, You Should always do backups of your data, especially if you are messing with partitions


My Mac would turn on but it would get stuck on the white screen upon startup after chime My Mac turns on but it gets stuck on the white screen upon startup after the chime. I have OS X 10.7.5

I have tried many things unsuccessfully like:

CommandR: Boot to OS X Recovery Mode => The window does not pop out.

Option: Access Mac Startup Manager => When I choose the Recovery disk, again it goes to white screen.

Option: Access Mac Startup Manager => Again it goes to white screen.

I reset CommandOptionPR: Reset PRAM => with no luck

I reset SMC, disconnected the battery cable and held the button for 5 seconds => No luck

Used CommandS: Single User Mode => Type fsck –fy and press Return

I typed  /sbin/mount -uw /:

hfs: Removed 2 orphaned  / unlined files and 0 directories

I tried:

touch /private/var/db/.AppleSetupDone
exit

=> This didn't work either

When I connected in Target Mode T via Thunderbolt cable to another Mac => I was able to scan entire disk drive and fixed any errors on disk => but now still unsuccessful with boot up.

When I was in Verbose Mode I noticed the following line:

SMC: :smcInitHelper ERROR: MMIO regMap == NULL - fall back to old SMC mode

BootCacheControl: Unable to open /var/db/BootCaches.playlist: 2 no such file or directory

Do you have any recommendations what I should try next?

Wow, it looks like you did almost everything already. What I have left for you are reinstalling your OS X and Reset PRAM.


What is causing slow Wi-Fi speeds on my Airport Extreme? I have a recent model (bought 1-2 years ago) Airport Extreme that, until yesterday, has worked flawlessly.

Starting yesterday, my wireless speeds have tanked. I first suspected my ISP, but that doesn't seem to be the problem - my speeds seem to be fine through my wired devices (albeit subjectively - I haven't measured), just not the ones connected via Wi-Fi.

My setup is:

A cable modem with a CAT-6 cable to the Airport Extreme.
A CAT-6 cable from the Airport Extreme to a cheap 8-port switch.
CAT-6 from the switch to a wall patch panel, which runs under the house to ports in 4 other rooms (where my wired devices live).

The devices that are wired (Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One) all seem to perform fine - I can stream video, download game updates, etc. at decent speeds. My Macbook Pro, Android phone, iPod and iPad are all affected by the slowness, though.

Thinking there was maybe some sort of priority given to streaming packets at some level, I also tried loading the Netflix player on my Macbook (connected via Wi-Fi), but that was also slow, leading me to believe that Wi-Fi, specifically, is the problem.

Some other pertinent details:

I have a 200Mbps plan via Time Warner, and a very recent cable modem (the model name/number escapes me) capable of close to 400Mbps. I've achieved the full speed of my plan regularly until yesterday. Nothing in my setup changed, so this almost certainly can't be a result of anything I've done.
Strangely, when I reset all of my internet hardware (modem, Airport Extreme, switch) and open a page in a browser on my Macbook, I briefly see fast Wi-Fi speeds. Within as little as a few seconds, though, my speeds drop severely (in the neighborhood of 0-5Mbps). I've even seen the same drop over the course of an online speed test - I can actually watch the "speedometer" needle gradually droop down to almost zero.
I need to try connecting my MBP straight to my cable modem to troubleshoot further - I'm sure that will tell me more - but the adapter cable I ordered is still in the mail.
I'll try a factory reset on the Airport Extreme tonight or tomorrow, but it would be nice to avoid that if possible.

Are there any common issues that can explain this? Any standard troubleshooting steps that I may not have considered?

1. Wireless interference
The most common cause of what you describe here is a common wireless
interference problem.
This probability is pretty high if your network loss of performance
was closely related with the move of wirelessly connected
computer or of pieces of furniture made of metal or glass (these cause
many radiofrequency reflections).
If you want to check this cause of your problem, download
iStumbler. Let it run for 10 minutes at the time when you have network problems. Then sort your neighbours network
by decreasing signal level. If your channel is the same one as one of your strongers neighbours, then change it for a channel which isn’t among their channels.
I have investigated very complex wireless interference problems since more
than 10 years with this exceptionnal quality software.
2. Use of the wrong network interface
The second most popular culprit for this kind of problem is the use
of the wrong network interface due to the infamous Automatic network
configuration.
To check pretty quickly if you are in this case, the easy method
is to make a new Network location (which in fact is not a location,
but a configuration) where the unique active interface will be
your wireless one (No BlueTooth, no Ethernet…). Make all the other
interfaces inactives (Make Service Inactive in the little dropdown menu).
The worst case I saw was a MacBook connected through the wireless network
but the one coming from the iPhone which was left configured as a hotspot.
I let you imagine the nightmare connection since the iPhone was fully
used… because the network on the MacBook was bad. In fact this was a 3G
phone connection overloaded…and shared.
3. Uninvited wireless scroungers
In urban environment, the third most popular culprit for your kind of
trouble is someone who either unwillingly or willingly connected to your
wireless network.
This is a potential problem if your wireless network is open, is using
one of the fake security functions named WEP or WPA, is using a weak
password like 123456 or password on WPA2.
To detect this, use first iStumbler once more.
And if you want to go further, check directly on your Extreme Base Station
who is connected on it. There is no better and clearer way to see these
scroungers.
Don't change your password at random as long as you didn't start a correct analysis. This won't help to understand a problem you might have
to face repeatedly as long as you don't see it and kill it. For example, if you are using a fake security function, a neighbour who was able to get your password in 6 seconds, will do the same with any password.


I updated my iPod 5 gen to iOS 9 and now it has a 6 digit passcode I updated my iPod to iOS 9 ( i think, its the current one right now 10/24/15) and my pass code was 5-6-8-9(4 digits) and now after updating it and recovering it through iTunes to prepare to sell it to someone it now has a 6 digit password. What do I do, how do I unlock it now because I really need it to sell it for the money.

Try a factory reset.  Probably has been hacked and someone else has control of the passcode.


Select all songs as compilations How do I select all songs as compilations in my iTunes. I don't want to modify each song one at a time, I have about 2000 songs.

Command+A -> Command+I -> Options -> Part of Compilation -> Yes -> OK

Not sure why you'd want to do this and I didn't test it because I don't want to do this to my library but that should be it.


How do I disable Ping? Although I do like and enjoy using iTunes, I'm not a fan of the new Ping service that Apple has embedded into it.

Is it possible to disable the Ping link under "Store", the Ping sidebar, and the Ping buttons next to each song? If so, how?

You can also restore the old arrow functionality

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-link-arrows 1

I also suggest the following:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks 1

  This setting switches the default
  behaviour of the arrow links. By
  default (well, by default in iTunes
  10.0.0 and before) the arrows would send the user to the corresponding
  page in the iTunes Store, but you
  could also hold down Opt and click to
  be redirected to the corresponding
  list in your own library.

  Now, to reset it all to Apple's
  defaults... you can either do the same
  lines as above but replacing '1' with
  '0', or you can delete the settings by
  changing "write" to "delete" and
  removing the 1 from the end:

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes disablePingSidebar

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes show-store-link-arrows

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks

restart when done.

I blogged about this when I read Tom Gidden's article


Why doesn't HandOff work when connected to VPN and is there a way to go around it? I have noticed that HandOff between mac and iPhone doesn't work when connected to VPN.

Steps to reproduce when using ExpressVPN:

install ExpressVPN native client on mac, connect to local wifi, then to VPN server, take note of server
install ExpressVPN native client on iPhone, connect to same wifi, then to same VPN server
try HandOff of webpage from Safari in iPhone to Safari in mac -> doesn't work, Safari on mac displays message "opening webpage from HandOff" but page doesn't load (stays blank, no 404 or other error shown)
disconnect from VPN in both mac and iPhone and retry same experiment -> Safari opens the page without problems

Actually, how does HandOff work under the hood? It seems to require both Bluetooth and Wifi. I guess Bluetooth is being used for the transfer itself while Wifi is used to check connection to iCloud.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681

I contacted ExpressVPN support and got some answers.

They have a security feature that prevents port forwarding between different devices connected independently to the VPN
A solution would be to connect both devices (mac and iPhone) to the router and connect the router directly to the VPN, in this way both devices share the same connection and can "see" each other


Repeat AppleScript if User Confirms a Pop-Up Dialog I built a script that selects and copies all text from the front Safari tab, closes the tab, and pastes the text into the front BBEdit document with a couple blank lines of padding.

I'll run it when I have several tabs I want to grab text from, dumping it all into one document, so I'll need a repeat option.

I don't want to hard-code the number of repeats, because that's unpredictable (and I don't want to close Safari tabs willy-nilly). So I want the script to complete once, pop up a choice of "Repeat?" or "Done!", and then repeat, including the pop-up, until the user chooses "Done".

I don't know how to code the repeat. Here's where I'm at:

tell application "Safari" to set the clipboard to (text of current tab of front window) as string
delay 0.1

tell application "Safari"
    close current tab of front window without saving
end tell
delay 0.1

tell application "System Events"
    tell application "BBEdit" to activate
    key code 36
    key code 36

end tell

tell application "BBEdit"
    activate
    paste
end tell

tell application "System Events"
    tell application "BBEdit" to activate
    key code 36
    key code 36

end tell

set theAlertText to "Repeat?"
display alert theAlertText as critical buttons {"Yes", "No"} default button "Yes" cancel button "No"
--> Result: {button returned:"Continue"}

--need repeat code here

First, you're making your life more difficult by using the clipboard and GUI scripting. BBEdit has a full scripting dictionary designed for working with text; I've modified your code to use it.

All you need is a repeat loop, and then a conditional exit repeat, as follows:

-- first find or create a text doc called 'Transcription.txt,' and select it
tell application "BBEdit"
    set target_doc_list to every document whose name is "Transcription.txt"
    if (count of target_doc_list) is 0 then
        set target_doc to make new text document with properties {name:"Transcription.txt"}
    else
        set target_doc to item 1 of target_doc_list
    end if
    select target_doc
end tell

-- repeat loop to run through Safari pages
repeat
    tell application "Safari"
        set page_title to (name of current tab of front window)
        set page_text to (text of current tab of front window)
        close current tab of front window without saving
    end tell
    tell application "BBEdit"
        tell window 1
            set end of contents of first text document to return & return & page_text & return & return
        end tell
    end tell

    tell application "Safari"
        set next_page_title to (name of current tab of front window)
    end tell

    set theAlertText to "Finished with page " & page_title & ". Next page is titled '" & next_page_title & "'. Continue?"
    display alert theAlertText as critical buttons {"Quit", "Process"} default button "Process"
    if (button returned of the result) is "Quit" then
        exit repeat
    end if
end repeat

This pulls the text of the current tab out of Safari and puts it into a variable, then adds that contents of that variable (padded with carriage returns) to the first document in the first BBEdit window. It then asks if you want to repeat with the next tab, exiting the loop if you say 'Quit'

You could modify this easily enough to skip over tabs, or to select the tabs to process in advance. Let me know if you want variations of that sort.


Apple Thunderbolt or HDMI for external monitor Is there anybody who can answer me this question?
I have a Macbook Pro Retina 15" quad i7 etc and I use some programs/applications wich need a lot of cpu and also the macbook heats up like hell.

I want to extend my display with a 23 or 27 IPS monitor.
Which is the best way, is it through HDMI or Thunderbolt to DVI or VGA adapter.
The main thing is that I use almost all the resources/performance to run those programs..so ...which of the two options does not affect my CPU/RAM and graphics performance because I don't have any left.

Adding another monitor cannot be anything other than more resource-intensive - every pixel takes resources to drive it & draw to it.

The 15" Retina screen resolution is 2880 x 1800
A standard 27" screen is 2560 x 1440 - almost doubling the number of pixels you're asking the machine to draw.
A 27" Retina 5k screen is 5120 x 2880 - almost four times the screen area you already have.

To come closer to actually answering your question…
In order of personal preference, I would choose
Thunderbolt > DisplayPort
HDMI
DVI
I would avoid VGA entirely these days.


Disable text box with preedit text when using an input source and searching in Finder This text box appears when I'm using a different input source than English, and quick search in any file list. So when I press A it should point to the file start with a, but instead it display a text box with preedit text.

The box is really annoying and sometime it doesn't disappear, doesn't accept any key press, and I can't even close it.

The box is annoying to be sure.  If you are in the Finder and have clicked upon an editable field, or are in a position to type keys that will result int he Quick Search as you have termed it, this box may appear.

If you are using an input keyboard that supports it, this box allows you to type in the "special" characters required by other languages, and use them for your search.

If you leave some characters in this box, and switch to the US input keyboard, this box will be amazingly persistent, yet will be uneditable while in the US Keyboard.

If you want the box to go away, select the appropriate non-US keyboard, delete the contents of the box, and when you switch back to the US keyboard, it will not appear.


Keyboard lag on iPhone SE When I use an app called Termius on iOS to SSH into my different machines, I am starting to get serious keyboard lag lately. I’ve already tried resetting the dictionary and I’ve restarted my phone.

Does anyone have an idea what is happening here?

I am running iOS 12.2.

Since you are facing the issue only with a single app, it most likely is a bug with the app, not with the iOS software or the hardware.

The resolution step would be to report the same to the developer of the app. The contract information can be found on the App Store page of the app. You can also try by running the app on other iOS devices if you have access to any.


My mail rules don't stay on I've setup one very simple rule that applies to messages from one sender... the rule works just like it should (most of the time).

Randomly, after I've restarted Mail the rule will be unchecked, so all of the new emails that were supposed to have been moved aren't. So I dutifully go i and check it back on when this happens, and drag the emails where they belong. this started when I up graded to Mavericks (a week or two after it was released). It has become very irritating by now, and I wanted to know if anybody else has had this problem and found a solution, or if somebody has a suggestion on what I could do to keep that rule checked off!

Sounds like your Mail preferences are not saved.

Try this (it is not same as using Disk Utility to repair permissions)

  You can use the ACL tool on the Recovery HD to do this:

  Boot into the Recovery HD using ⌘R.
  Run resetpassword in Terminal (available from Utilities → Terminal).
  Select your account from the drop-down list.
  Click the Reset button for Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs.

Source: grgarside — https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/110346/

If you are not comfortable doing it above way, there is a application called OnyX that will do it for you (and much more).


Touchbar Macbook Camera FOV Had thought this camera spec would be easy to find online, but it seems FOV / field of view just isn't mentioned these days for macbook cameras?

Does anyone know what the touchbar macbook camera's FOV is? (Also Official link if that exists)

There doesn't appear to be any published specs, but according to a protractor and quick test it seems to be around 50º.


Password protecting an Application I read the Question Is there a way to password protect individual apps? - but the answers focused too much on security issues.

I want to clarify my needs: I use a Software to write my personal diary. I just want to prevent people using my iTunes as a Jukebox and see that interesting icon somewhere and open it.

I don't want to create a special guest account or something like that, and I don't need a mechanism to prevent people from finding my diary files on the filesystem.

I just want to enter a password before the app starts. Is there a freeware solution without using terminal for every launch?

It's usually left up to the writer of the application to make a password work the best. If you forget to close the app or if you put your mac to sleep, any wrapper you construct will likely not secure the diary. Building the password into the app makes it far superior to a gateway app that asks for the password and then launches another app.

That being said, have you investigated these nice journaling software that include the ability to password protect your files?

Mac Journal by Mariner Software
Memories by Coding Robots
Diary by Michael Gobel

There are easily another 10 viable softwares on the App Store alone that serve this exact niche. Also - this review seems to cover some other options, but is about 12 months old now.


How to remove Landesk Core's proxy setting completely in OS X? today my Little Snitch detect my proxyhost has requested outgoing connection to Landesk Core even though it has been removed. How can I reset the proxy settings? (FYI, they are not in system settings.)

This is not a network setting, there are still likely components left behind. Probably the best place to ask this question would be landesk.com. For example

http://community.landesk.com/support/thread/16347


Terminal highlight color changes when window is not targeted I have a terminal profile in which I changed the highlight color (let's say, to green). I didn't like it so I changed it back to blue. Now, whenever I am targeting the window and I highlight, the highlight color is blue, but if I click on another window (the terminal is now a background window), then the highlighted portion turns back to green.

How can I change the highlight color so that it stays the same as when the window is targeted?

Here is my terminal configuration file.
The highlight color is Blue and is not changing to any other color when in the background.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>ANSIBrightGreenColor</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGFRZYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OVU5TUkdCXE5TQ29sb3JTcGFjZVYkY2xhc3NPECcw
    LjEwNTU1NTYxOTIgMC44Mzk3MTYzNzIzIDAuMDI1MzAxMTM3MgAQAYAC0hAREhNaJGNs
    YXNzbmFtZVgkY2xhc3Nlc1dOU0NvbG9yohIUWE5TT2JqZWN0XxAPTlNLZXllZEFyY2hp
    dmVy0RcYVHJvb3SAAQgRGiMtMjc7QUhOW2KMjpCVoKmxtL3P0tcAAAAAAAABAQAAAAAA
    AAAZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA2Q==
    </data>
    <key>BackgroundAlphaInactive</key>
    <real>0.45274769176136365</real>
    <key>BackgroundBlur</key>
    <real>0.04529918323863636</real>
    <key>BackgroundColor</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGFRZYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OVU5TUkdCXE5TQ29sb3JTcGFjZVYkY2xhc3NPEC8w
    LjA1OTE4MTQxNTkzIDAuMDU5MTgxNDE1OTMgMC4wNTkxODE0MTU5MyAwLjc4ABABgALS
    EBESE1okY2xhc3NuYW1lWCRjbGFzc2VzV05TQ29sb3KiEhRYTlNPYmplY3RfEA9OU0tl
    eWVkQXJjaGl2ZXLRFxhUcm9vdIABCBEaIy0yNztBSE5bYpSWmJ2osbm8xdfa3wAAAAAA
    AAEBAAAAAAAAABkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADh
    </data>
    <key>BackgroundSettingsForInactiveWindows</key>
    <false/>
    <key>CursorBlink</key>
    <true/>
    <key>Font</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGGBlYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKQHCBESVSRudWxs1AkKCwwNDg8QVk5TU2l6ZVhOU2ZGbGFnc1ZOU05hbWVWJGNs
    YXNzI0AoAAAAAAAAEBCAAoADWkFuZGFsZU1vbm/SExQVFlokY2xhc3NuYW1lWCRjbGFz
    c2VzVk5TRm9udKIVF1hOU09iamVjdF8QD05TS2V5ZWRBcmNoaXZlctEaG1Ryb290gAEI
    ERojLTI3PEJLUltiaXJ0dniDiJOco6avwcTJAAAAAAAAAQEAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAA
    AAAAAAAAAMs=
    </data>
    <key>FontAntialias</key>
    <true/>
    <key>FontWidthSpacing</key>
    <real>1.0030539772727272</real>
    <key>Linewrap</key>
    <true/>
    <key>ProfileCurrentVersion</key>
    <real>2.04</real>
    <key>TextBoldColor</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGFRZYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OVU5TUkdCXE5TQ29sb3JTcGFjZVYkY2xhc3NGMCAx
    IDEAEAGAAtIQERITWiRjbGFzc25hbWVYJGNsYXNzZXNXTlNDb2xvcqISFFhOU09iamVj
    dF8QD05TS2V5ZWRBcmNoaXZlctEXGFRyb290gAEIERojLTI3O0FITltiaWttcn2GjpGa
    rK+0AAAAAAAAAQEAAAAAAAAAGQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALY=
    </data>
    <key>TextColor</key>
    <data>
    YnBsaXN0MDDUAQIDBAUGFRZYJHZlcnNpb25YJG9iamVjdHNZJGFyY2hpdmVyVCR0b3AS
    AAGGoKMHCA9VJG51bGzTCQoLDA0OVU5TUkdCXE5TQ29sb3JTcGFjZVYkY2xhc3NPECcw
    LjQ0OTY2MTY2NjggMC43MjAwNDA1MTk1IDAuODg5OTk5OTg1NwAQAYAC0hAREhNaJGNs
    YXNzbmFtZVgkY2xhc3Nlc1dOU0NvbG9yohIUWE5TT2JqZWN0XxAPTlNLZXllZEFyY2hp
    dmVy0RcYVHJvb3SAAQgRGiMtMjc7QUhOW2KMjpCVoKmxtL3P0tcAAAAAAAABAQAAAAAA
    AAAZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA2Q==
    </data>
    <key>name</key>
    <string>Basic</string>
    <key>type</key>
    <string>Window Settings</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Download the file from here.


Is there a way in Terminal to highlight the row under the cursor? I need to read a long row of output in Terminal and was wondering if there is a way to have the whole row where the mouse cursor is positioned highlighted. Alternatively, would there be a way to highlight a row and control the highlight with the keyboard?

Thanks.

Yes - just put the cursor on the line and triple click it - and it will light up the whole line.  It works with apple terminal as well as iTerm.


How to hide Dock icons from another Mac? I have two Mac laptops logged into iCloud with same credentials. Now if I run e.g. Chrome then it will bring Chrome icon on the other laptop automatically.
That's a good feature to share data/work between them, but how do I disable this feature or hide the icon?
I'm running macOS Catalina 10.15.7.

It's called "Handoff."
And Apple says:

On your Mac: Choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, then click
General. Select "Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud
devices." On your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch: Go to Settings > General > AirPlay & Handoff, then turn on Handoff.


Asking for password when adding new folder in /Users/.../Sites/? My Mac's hard drive was recently replaced, and I copied my folders over from my old drive to the new one. One problem, however, is my sites folder. Originally, I had them located in /library/webserver/sites/, but now they're just in /Users/.../sites.

If I try to create a new folder within any of the subfolders, it will prompt me for my admin password. The same happens in Coda when I'm trying to add a new folder, but there it just denies me.

Basically, how can I fix the permissions on these files so that I no longer need to enter my admin password? The files are the same, if I try to save one of them, I also need to enter the password.

Update: TextWrangler is giving me the error -5000.

Update 2: So is Terminal: ERROR: Unexpected Error. (-5000)

Easy fix. Open Terminal.app and type the following command:

sudo chmod -R -N /Users/*/Sites
sudo chmod -R 744 /Users/*/Sites

(edit: Added -R to recursively change permissions)
(edit: Kudos to ughoavgfhwless for pointing out the -N flag to reset the ACLs)

You will be asked for your password. Enter it (keep in mind it won't show up in terminal). Now, assuming there isn't a more serious issue with your OS X installation, this will correct the permissions on all of the users sites folders. (If you installed OS X on a case-sensitive HFS partition, you need to make sure the case of the command matches the case of the directories. If you don't know about this, it's safe to assume you can ignore this and proceed with the above listed command.)

Good luck and happy chmoding!


Apple or BASH script to automatically install multiple apps I would like to create a script to install a group of programs. The PKG files reside on a Windows file share.

I current can install them one at a time through the Terminal using the following syntax:

sudo installer -store -pkg "/Volumes/{Path to package}" -target /

But when I try to include this into my installer.sh script I get a syntax error that part of the path contained in quotes is an invalid option. It seems that the double quotes around my path are not being included when passed into the shell.

So I tried escaping the quotes by adding a \ in front of each double quote and I get the same error. Am I supposed to escape my quotes some other way?

installer -store -pkg “/Volumes/ChiefGeneral/TechGeneral/Misc/Batch Install/X6/Chief Architect Premier X6.pkg” -target /
installer -store -pkg “/Volumes/ChiefGeneral/TechGeneral/Misc/Batch Install/X6/Chief Architect Interiors X6.pkg” -target /
installer -store -pkg “/Volumes/ChiefGeneral/TechGeneral/Misc/Batch Install/X6/Chief Architect Lite X6.pkg” -target /

Thank you.

Is it possible that the editor you are using to create the script is using "smartquotes" instead of regular double quotes, and so it's not treating the quoted material as a single parameter?

Try getting rid of the quotes and escaping the spaces with \ and see if that works. If it does, then make sure you're using a plain old text editor that won't mess with your quotes.


How can I transfer my contacts from iPhone to MacBook? I don't know why I'm unable to do such a simple thing, I have tried everything which I could find on Google search. I want to transfer all my contacts from my iPhone to my Mac so that I can manage duplicate contacts.

Why Apple doesn't allow  such an easy thing to be done with ease? Why I'm not allowed to move my contacts from iPhone to my computer.

Problems I'm getting:

The iCloud method: In my iPhone when I got to Settings -> My Name -> iCloud -> Contacts. The "Contacts" is already on, and I don't know what to do next.
The iTunes Method: When I click on "info"  in iTunes tab (after clicking on my iPhone icon) I get something written like "Your contacts are shared over air via iCloud" (I don't remember the verbatim).

Please help me.

The iCloud method: In my iPhone when I got to Settings -> My Name -> iCloud -> Contacts. The "Contacts" is already on, and I don't know what to do next.

You need two devices to sync. So on Mac too, in System Preferences > iCloud, turn on Contacts sync.

Check Contacts.app > Preferences to see that account is enabled.

I don't know about iTunes method.

  so that I can manage duplicate contacts.

That is not easy on Mac either. What I do is:

On Mac, export all contacts in a vcf file.
Upload it on https://contacts.google.com and then let it find the duplicates.
Sort out the duplicates locally and verify it again.
Select all contacts on the Google web interface & delete them.


Which is the correct way to obtain administrator access for the installation of Homebrew? I usually log in to OS X El Capitan without administrator rights. Homebrew upholds the principle that packages can be installed and used without administrator/root access, i.e. without using the sudo command.
However, it seems that administrator access is necessary for installing Homebrew. Running the script from my normal non-admin user's Terminal yields

  This script requires the user [user] to be an Administrator. If this
  sucks for you then you can install Homebrew in your home directory or
  however you please; please refer to our homepage. If you still want to
  use this script set your user to be an Administrator in System
  Preferences or `su' to a non-root user with Administrator privileges.

First, unfortunately, the homepage does not say much more about how to install in my home directory and what difference that actually makes from the usual way to install.

Second, running 'su' and entering my password yields

  su: Sorry

Then, running 'sudo su' yields

  [user] is not in the sudoers file.  This incident will be reported.

This did not feel right, either. (See also Why can't I run `su`? (and how should I do?))

Third, I simply opened a shell with my administrator account 'login [user-admin]' to install Homebrew. But when I later tried to install a package as the normal non-admin user/ran 'brew doctor', I did get a number of errors about directories not being writable. Again, a fix is suggested at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14527521/brew-doctor-says-warning-usr-local-include-isnt-writable but I was not too sure whether there is only one /usr/local on my computer, or whether there is one for every user so that the directories in question would actually be those of my admin user (and thus it might be weird to give my non-admin user access to those). Also, it were quite many directories (more than 10) which made me suspicous.

Forth, and finally, what I did was to give my non-admin user administrator rights, installed as that user, and then made the user a normal, non-admin user again.

Now, everything seems to be OK, but I wonder whether this was actually the/a correct way, since the script error quoted above didn't actually say whether I need to permanently have Administrator priviledges, or whether it is OK to only take them during the installation process of Homebrew itself.

The normal way to do things is as per your third choice ie use an admin account to install things.

However Homebrew's normal setup does not stick to normal Unix conventions of installing excutables as root or a special user which would allow equal access of the installed code to all users, it is designed so that you do installs as one user and so do not need to use sudo/su for anything. However to do this it needs to make /usr/local writeable by the normal user and you need admin rights to that as in the way you did in the end. I think Homebrew really is designed for a computer which only one person uses and has admin rights.

If you do not want to (or cannot) set your user to admin then there are two ways

As per the instructions you quote "If this sucks for you then you can install Homebrew in your home directory" Then the access to ~/usr/local is always for the user
A version of your 3. The Homebrew script leaves /usr/local and all under it owned by the user doing the installation. With the admin user you can change the owner to your normal user by chown -R usr /usr/local

Yes there is only one /usr/local in the file system. Each path is unique. The way to have the "same" directory for different users is to put the directories under your home directory e.g. ~/usr/local


How to know where and when my iphone was bought? Is it possible to look up where and when an iPhone was purchased, based only on the serial number or other unique info inside the phone?

I don't know of a public tool for looking this up. However, if you befriend an Apple Genius, I know that the system they use for creating tickets allows them to view the purchase date and sales channel it was purchased through. However, there is no way to tell direct location (i.e. Best Buy on Main Street in St. Paul), only the channel (i.e. Best Buy).

You can also deduce the purchase date yourself by going to Apple's Check Your Service and Support Coverage page. If you locate the expiration date for repair coverage, subtract a year from that to identify original purchase date. If AppleCare was purchased, subtract an extra year.


Can retina display features be enabled on older (non-retina) displays? I have an older iMac, without a true retina display. I want to be able to scale the user interface like the retina macs do, but I can't seem to find a way to do that.

Does anyone know a way to trick the computer into thinking it has a retina display, so the options are available in the Display PrefPane? That, or some utility that might let me access those settings.

Note, I'm not really talking about HiDPI mode, I've done that, it only has the option of pixel doubling. I want the variable scaling that is available on true retina displays.

I'm running mountain lion on a 2.5 GHz i5 iMac, about 1.5 years old.

I don't see how this would be possible, its a hardware limitation.

The 15in Retina comes with a resolution of: 2880x1800 but the resolution is set to 1440x900 by default and has its pixels doubled.

That is why when you do doubling of pixels you get a smaller resolution because there is only so many pixels on the screen in which everything can be displayed.

The Retina mac's scale the UI by removing the pixel doubling. The screen it self has a high densit of pixels, meaning that a particular window can take up a smaller area by filling in those pixels.

However with a 1080p there are far fewer pixels/lower density and it is not physically possible to scale things to fit.

Theoretically it is possible but would require real time rendering of everything which would take time + processor usage. As compared to the Retina which has a hardware solution.

It is not the best explanation but I hope it delivers the point.
--EDIT

UI is designed based on pixels, so a button is placed on a form and it dimensioned to take up say 100 pixels wide and 20 pixels high.
On a lower resolution screen it will look much bigger because of the density of pixels, as compared to a higher resolution
where the user has the option to allow the UI to take up single pixels so its small or more than 1 pixel so it looks big.

So with that 100 x 20 pixel button, on a 19in screen: At a resolution of 100 x 20 it would take up the whole screen because there are
only 100 pixels for the UI to be able to fill up horizontally and 20 vertically.
If you had a higher resolution screen the UI is able to take up less space because of the higher pixel density. So the same monitor with a resolution of 400 x 80 will have the button take up a quarter of the screen, and if you allow it to double its pixel then the button will take up 200 x 40 pixels, looking bigger but better/more crisp because of the extra pixels.

That is why higher resolution screens have smaller UI, because the pixels are super close together and theres a lot of them allowing us to decide how we want it scaled, ie. how many pixels we allow for each designed pixel.

When Developers design UI they set anchors on everything, that is why when you change the size of the form it dynamically adjust the size of the buttons, boxes etc.

When I say hardware rendering I mean the pixels are placed per pixels or simply multiplied by the current ratio. So at full resolution 1 pixel is 1 pixel on the screen. At a different resolution 1 pixel might be allocated 2 pixels.


Can I find my stolen iPhone if someone reset it and uses different AppleID? I recently bought an iPhone iOS 9.2.1. I am worried, if someone stole it, reset it and uses different AppleID, can I find it?

Just be sure to switch on Find My iPhone in Settings > iCloud
then not only can it not be reset by anyone without your AppleID & password, but can be

Pinged to play a sound [if you just lost it in the house],
remotely put into Lost Mode [which will enable you to put a message on the lock screen, with another phone number to be contacted at, if someone finds it],
or in extreme circumstances, remotely wiped [though this will itself then disable Find my iPhone].

All this can be done from another iPhone or on the iCloud web site at https://www.icloud.com/#find

See this question & answer to see just how impossible it is for a thief to be able to reset it once you've secured it - How can I bypass Activation Lock?


Deleting IOS 9.3.5 on iPad 2? sorry if this has been asked before.

I was told that IOS 10 won't download on iPad if IOS 9.3.5 is already installed. I have checked how to remove it so I can install IOS 10, but when I try follow the instructions given on most sites, I can't because it's not there in the list of storage to delete. Does anyone know why this is, and what to do about it?

You have been misled. If your iPad is capable of running iOS 10 (you don't specify the model) then you should see the update notification for it.

To check, follow these steps on the iPad:

Open Settings
Tap on General
Tap on Software Update
You will either get a message that it's checking for an update, or you will see a message informing you that you can update to iOS 10.x, or you will see a message stating that your software is up-to-date

Follow the above steps and let me know what you see?

[EDIT]

I've just realised you had referenced iPad 2 in your question title. This generation of iPad does not support any version of iOS above iOS 9.3.5. This is why you're not able to update to iOS 10.


How do I turn on color syntax highlighting in the macOS terminal app? When I use terminal it is monochrome, currently "Grass" yellow on green. I've tried several ssh clients: MacOS default terminal, Termius, and Core Shell. They all have the same result, no syntax highlighting.

Did I do something to turn it off? How can I turn it on?

Just have a look at this
https://superuser.com/questions/400360/syntax-highlighting-in-terminal-mac-os-x post. In my view, it comes with a lot of useful hints.


Why can I open a connection on port 80 for 0.0.0.0 but not other forms? My understanding of Linux/MacOS (I think they are the same in this regard) port permissions is that ports 1-1024 are only available to root, but above that, they are available to anyone.

However, I've run into some unexpected behavior when opening ports on MacOS 10.14.2. I'm using php -S (version 7.3.0) to experiment.

When I run the command with the following cases:

127.0.0.1:80
[::1]:80
mylocalipv4:80
mylocalipv6:80

it returns Failed to listen on ::1:80 (reason: Permission denied) as expected (where the IP/port given is shown).

However, if I run it with 0.0.0.0:80, it successfully starts listening, but I can't connect to it with curl, either using 127.0.0.1 or the actual IP of my machine.

If I run the PHP server with [::0]:80 it successfully starts listening, and I can curl it with curl [::1] and with my local ipv6 address.

I would have expected the last two cases to fail to start with permission denied. Why don't they?

From testing I can see that it is possible for a desktop macOS users to bind() TCP port numbers below 1024 (the so-called well-known ports). It works on both IPv4 and IPv6, and on the localhost/unspecified addresses.

The Darwin kernel source code is freely available - from there I can see that it has the functionality built-in to check for processes trying to bind/listen on ports <1024 and deny that. This is similar to the way Linux works. However, it is possible to disable this check when compiling the kernel by defining "IPNOPRIVPORTS". I assume this is what was done with the Mojave supplied kernel.

On Linux it used to be the case that it wasn't possible for non-root to bind low port numbers, but today you have various options of allowing non-root users to bind to low numbered ports. Such as for example using the capability NET_BIND_SERVICE.

On macOS you also have various options for restricting binding low-numbered ports. For example through kexts that does socket filtering, or through other means. Perhaps you have software installed, such as for example Little Snitch, that denied you permission when you were testing.

Please note that the various IP-addresses you have tried with have entirely different meanings:

 127.0.0.1 = IPv4 address that means the "localhost" (i.e. your own computer basically) - it is not available on the network
 [::1]     = the IPv6 equivalent of 127.0.0.1

 0.0.0.0   = IPv4 "unspecified address" - i.e. this is not an address in itself, rather it is a special value you give to bind() to let it know that you haven't specified a specific address that you want the port bind() on. Essentially this means that the port will be bound on all the IP-addresses you have.
 [::0]     = IPv6 equivalent of 0.0.0.0 (though usually written [::/128])

This can explain why some things failed and some things succeeded. For example you might not be able to bind to 127.0.0.1, but 0.0.0.0 works as it tries to bind the port not only on 127.0.0.1 but also on other IP-addresses you have.


Is there a way to force a game running in full screen to become a window? I am playing a game called Bookworm on the Mac, and it starts as a full screen game, and the only way seems to be from its Options to choose not to run in full screen.  What if a game doesn't provide such option, is there a way to make it become a window?  (force the game to run in window mode instead of full screen).

Yes and No.  The game has to support the ability to run in windowed mode.  If it doesn't support it, then it will not be able to do it.
Now, when it comes to games that don't have the option in an preference menu, they can sometimes still support the feature, they just don't advertise it.
There are a few games that require you to edit a preference file to enable/disable certain things. Usually contained inside the game icon, right clicking on the game icon and hitting "Show Package Contents" will open the game's directory and show you the files that make the game.  Be very careful when doing this because editing the wrong thing can break the game.  Usually if this option exists then it will be somewhere on the internet and you will be able to find out more about it by doing a search for that game.
One such game that supports this is Cave Story+, editing the preference file can enable certain game modes and unlock features.
Other games will work with a shortcut when running, usually:

opt/alt + enter
opt/alt + f
cmd + f
cmd + opt + f
cmd + opt + enter
cmd + enter

Now, if none of these are viable options, then you won't be able to do it.


How to record/stream iPhone 4 screen with iOS 7? I have an iPhone 4 with iOS 7 and I want to record the screen from the device, or stream the screen of the device on my MacBook Pro and record it with QuickTime.

How can I do that?

I have AirServer, but it works only with iPhone 4s+! No jailbreak on my device.

Unfortunately the use of such software has a pre-requisite of AirPlay Mirroring, which is not supported by an iPhone 4 at any OS level, hence teh requirement for an iPhone 4s minimum.  If you had a device that supports it, then it's pretty straightforward (take a look at this answer elswhere on AskDifferent) but with an iPhone 4, you are out of luck unless someone can suggest a way of enabling it with a Jailbreak hack.