Install Tiger in VMware Fusion I've got 10.6 running on a 2006 MacBook Pro.  I want to run some older software that was meant for 10.4 and earlier, so I figured I'd install Tiger in VMware Fusion, but it isn't working.  Any idea how I'd go about it?

What I've tried:
When creating a new VM, there's no option for Tiger.  It only offers 10.5 server and 10.6 server.  I tried using the 10.5 server option with a Tiger disk image, but with no luck: gives me this error:

  Mac OS X is not supported with software virtualization.
  To run Mac OS X you need a host on which VMware Fusion supports hardware virtualization.

Any thoughts?

This article references VMware Workstation 6 as being able to run OS X with some hacks, but it's slow. But more importantly, that article runs down what I thought was the only known solution to running OS X in a VM: VirtualBox. So you aren't going to be able to do this with Fusion, but you can do it with VirtualBox.

Also: Apple does allow virtualization of OS X Server (check the date on that article - circa 2007). It honestly wouldn't stand much of a chance in the big, corporate IT world if it couldn't be legally virtualized these days.


RSS readers and malware I recently had an issue where some RSS feeds were causing my IT department to think my MBP was infected by ransomware and was connecting to a ransomware server.

Ransomware/malware can be 'caught' just by visiting a compromised website so one would like to think RSS readers, mine is Vienna, block the execution of all code in the pages they load. Is that so? My discussion on Vienna's GitHub page was far less than satisfactory on the matter.

So two things.  The first is to bring this issue to people -- I had no idea my RSS reader could be a potential source of exposure to malware.  RSS readers offer convenience, but apparently I need now to balance that convenience with the potential risks associated with malware.  I believe not many people are thinking of this issue and they might benefit from being aware of it.

Two, is there a way of sandboxing a RSS reader (ideally in the most complete way), so that it cannot be a source of malware?  is disabling JavaScript and plugins in the RSS browser enough (not really clear what plugins the internal browser has to start with...)?

I'm sorry you felt the response you got on the Vienna GitHub page wasn't satisfactory. The issue was caused by a compromised web server that was serving you an RSS feed and also performing a normal HTTP request to a ransomware site.

To add an answer to your second item, disabling JS and plugins in the internal browser should be more than enough. Attempting to reach a ransomeware site isn't a security issue in itself.

For Sandboxing, Vienna was patched in November 2016 (see https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss/issues/736) to prevent an XML exploit that allowed a malicious RSS feed to potentially read files outside of the application.
We hope to add the macOS native sandboxing in the future and that is an issue that is high on our list of improvements to make to Vienna and hopefully won't be outstanding for too much longer.


Unable to change clock separator I am using OS X Yosemite 10.10.3. In the Language & Region preferences, I clicked Advanced and set my clock format to 0-23:08.
However, the clock in the menu bar and in the Date & Time preferences is displayed with the . separator instead of :. The dot seems to be the default for my language format (which is wrong, we use :). Furthermore, if I modify the contents of com.apple.menuextra.clock.plist, they are overridden as soon as I restart SystemUIServer or relogon. For example:

defaults write com.apple.menuextra.clock DateFormat -string 'H:mm'
killall SystemUIServer
defaults read com.apple.menuextra.clock

results in

{
    DateFormat = "HH.mm";
    FlashDateSeparators = 0;
    IsAnalog = 0;
}

How can I change the clock separator?

I had the same problem, I solved it by go to Language & Region and choose the region that has the same clock separator (I chose Australia) and then you can go to Advanced and customize your own dates and times format. Hope it helps


Erasing partition doesn't give me free diskspace I'm using a Macbook Air and until today I had two partitions on it (not counting the restore partition). I had my OSX partition and an Ubuntu partition.

As I don't use Ubuntu anymore, I decided to remove the partition and resize my OS X partition to use the whole SSD again. However, this didn't go as planned.

After backing up my Ubuntu files to an external HDD I restarted my mac with Cmnd + R to go into restoration mode. There I erased the Ubuntu partition in the hope that would allow me to resize my OS X partition. Unfortunately, I don't see any extra space showing up inside the partition manager so I can't enlarge the OS X partition...

While searching Google I came across someone with the same problem. It was suggested to empty the trash and also searching your harddisk for .sparseimage files and removing them, however I found none.

Does anyone have any other suggestions I can try? I desperately want my space reclaimed :(

Edit: Some screenshots to clarify my situation:

Disk Utility with SSD selected

Disk Utility with OS X partition selected:

As you can see, the SSD has a total size of 120 GB. However, the sizes of the two partitions on it don't add up to this number (by far). So I must have some free space somewhere, but I have no idea how to get to it...

You will not be able to reclaim this space to your OS X partition unfortunately. That is because the Recovery HD partition is in between your OS X and (formerly) Ubuntu partitions. You have two options:

In the partitions tab, click the "+" and add a new partition. OS X will see this new partition as a separate drive, but it should be fully useable. However, it certainly complicates things vs. having a nice big single drive to work with.
Backup your Macintosh HD and wipe the entire hard drive (booting from another volume, such as Internet Recovery or Gparted on a disc). Then reinstall OS X, allowing it to properly recreate your partitions. This is more cumbersome but recommended.

When I partitioned my Mac for Ubuntu (using rEFIt) a while back, I ended up doing the second option to make my Mac "normal" again.


App Submission: Where do I put my EULA (End User License Agreement)? My video chat app submission recently got rejected, and these are the reasons they listed:

  We encourage you to review your app concept and remove the functionality that randomly connects users. Users must be identifiable with a profile and have the ability to initiate and accept chat requests from other users. It is also necessary that you put all of the following precautions in place:

  Require that users agree to terms (EULA); these terms must make it clear that there is no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users
  A method for filtering objectionable content
  A mechanism for users to flag objectionable content
  A mechanism for users to block abusive users
  The developer must act on objectionable content reports within 24 hours by removing the content and ejecting the user who provided the offending content

My question is, I thought every app uses Apple's EULA by default, so what is the first stipulation about (or is that just a reminder?)?

I downloaded a similar app called Cha Cha, which doesn't force the user to "Agree" to the EULA, I also downloaded another app called Cake, which does have the EULA when you sign up.

Should setting it to Apple's EULA good enough? If not, would putting a link to it in the description suffice?

When you choose the Custom EULA option on iTunes Connect, you can submit an EULA to a new field shown for the app on iTunes Connect, which is then shown under a separate button on the App Store product page.


MacBook Pro not booting after update to Mavericks I installed Mavericks (upgrading from Mountain Lion) on my MacBook Pro (from early 2011) and the install seemed to go fine. However, this morning while I was working on PowerPoint, it switched off with no warning at all (it was connected to AC power and battery was full). Then, it refused to boot. After the spinning bar under the logo, it just gave a gray screen and was completely unresponsive. I tried to boot into safe mode by pressing ⇧ shift while booting and it reached a blue screen with vertical black stripes and was again unresponsive.

Then I tried clearing the NVRAM with ⌘⌥PR and it again reached an unresponsive gray or blue screen if I waited long enough. Tried Internet Recovery but after downloading something for an hour it again gave the blue screen with vertical stripes.

Any idea what I can do? Can I use a Linux LiveDVD or something to extract some data I have on it?

ETA: Ran the hardware test from the included Applications DVD and it did not find any troubles. Trying to boot with a LiveDVD did not work. Did get to the stage where I select from the range of boot options but then the boot did not complete. Tried with Ubuntu and CentOS.

Most likely a hardware failure. See here: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/14/apples-2011-macbook-pro-lineup-suffering-from-sporadic-gpu-failures


Will new desktops with Thunderbolt capabilities work with existing 27" Apple Thunderbolt displays? Searched for the answer, apologies because I'm sure this must have been covered.

In 2012 we'll see desktop motherboards (and I suppose laptops but let's ignore that) to build Windows boxes that have Thunderbolt connectors.

If/when I buy such a motherboard and build a Windows box around it, will there be a way to connect 27" Apple Thunderbolt monitors that I already own?  I won't care if adaptors will be required, I'm just curious whether it will even be possible AT ALL?

The best guess is that it is going to depend on the computer. Carrying a DisplayPort signal through Thunderbolt is a feature but not necessarily a requirement for having a Thunderbolt port. But, yes, assuming that a given Thunderbolt port is carrying the  DisplayPort signal, there should be no reason why the Thunderbolt display will not work on that port as a display, regardless of the kind of computer.

Now as for other features included, it may depend on drivers for those features and how the host operating system recognizes what other things are included in the Thunderbolt display. For example, how customized the drivers are for each extra included device in the Apple Thunderbolt display is probably yet to be determined. For example the speakers, extra USB/FireWire ports, network card, etc. may not work if the host OS can't find a driver.

The specifics of how a motherboard-based Thunderbolt port can talk to any given PCI-Express graphics card installed in that board is also an interesting detail to address, hopefully the next generation Mac Pro will give an example of this since its implementation is questioned as well in the Thunderbolt wiki article as well:

  Because the PCIe bus does not carry video data, it is unclear whether a standalone PCIe card could offer a Thunderbolt port. The Intel Thunderbolt Technology Brief does not give a conclusive answer. Intel disclosed documentation where video stream is sent to a dual-Thunderbolt controller, with the video stream being only sent to one of the Thunderbolt ports, giving the assumption that video stream is not mandatory on Thunderbolt implementation.

It looks like many of questions will be answered in the future as more hardware is rolled out but here is a bit of speculation on the noted next generation Ivy Bridge Thunderbolt controllers.

  Another aspect that makes the DSL3510 interesting is that it supports multiple internal DisplayPort inputs. What this means is that it could in theory interface with a discrete graphics card as well as the integrated graphics from an Intel CPU. This is likely to be the chip used by Apple in its desktop systems, whereas the more power efficient DSL3310 will end up in notebook products.


Set Messages app to show Names and Pictures by default for all conversations I know I can set show names and pictures for conversations. How do I set this as default for all conversations? I set this and then exit messages and re-open it and it is back to only showing the pictures. I tried to delete the plist files from ~/Library/Preferences for iChat.

This looks like a bug. Mine when checked does the same.

So I set it again and I also changed the Show As Balloons to Show As boxes. Quit and re opened. This stuck.

I then Change back to Show As Balloons  Quit and re opened. Both settings stuck.

Tested on two Macs. Same thing

Further investigation which I think proves it is a bug

The show names and pictures or what ever you set in the app is actually being written out to the plist file.

The Dictionary SOTranscriptSettingsDefaultIMChatSettingsPreferences
  that holds this preference participantDisplay changes from number value 0 to 1 or 2.

The problem is the original default in the Dictionary SOTranscriptSettingsDefaultIMChatSettingsPreferences
is to only have the participantDisplay entry.

When you also change the  Show As Balloons setting to something else like boxes a new entry  transcriptStyleID is added to the Dictionary SOTranscriptSettingsDefaultIMChatSettingsPreferences. Which will have the string value of for example com.apple.iChat.Styles.Balloons.

Once both entries exist then the setting participantDisplay is actually actioned.

I used Defaults delete,write to remove and replace these settings and the results are consistent.


How can I make my Apple TV 4th generation show up as a device in iTunes on my Mac? I have an Apple TV 4th generation.

The iPads and iPods I am connecting show up in iTunes on my Mac. However, the Apple TV will not appear when I try to connect it using a cable.

How can I make the Apple TV show up in iTunes on my Mac, so that it's easier to push apps and media to it?

Unfortunately, you cannot push apps and media to your Apple TV (4th generation) using iTunes.

The only way to install Apps currently is via the tvOS App Store. I don't think you can use the internal storage on the Apple TV to store media in any way, it is just used to dynamically store data like apps and their downloaded or cached data.


Binding an AppleScript to a button in OS X I have asked a question here. But it is for adding a custom button in OS X Finder toolbar.
Suppose I have an AppleScript and I want to bind it on a custom button. And then I want to place that button on a toolbar - how that would be possible ?

You can drag and drop an AppleScript (script and application) to the Finder toolbar, which places the icon for the AppleScript in the toolbar just like any other button (though I prefer the menu bar's AppleScript menu for such things because I can have more scripts available in a smaller space). I don't think you can create a button out of nothing and bind an AppleScript to it, however.


Scilab Error: Need to install legacy Java SE 6 runtime Scilab v6.0.2 is downloaded from the official website and installed, but it cannot be opened with the error:

  To open "this Java application" you need to install the legacy Java SE 6 runtime.

I follow instructions in "More info" and on the Internet to download Java from Apple, but Java cannot be installed because "A newer version of this package is already installed", shown below:

My MacOS is Catalina v.10.15.3.
How can I escape this loop?

Thanks for the help in advance.

I tried downloading Scilab and it runs fine on my Catalina, where I've done the steps below to get another Java application to run.

Download and install a recent version of the Oracle JDK, like Java SE 13 from https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase-downloads.html#JDK13

Then open Terminal (it's in Applications/Utilities) and write

cd /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/

and press Enter. This changes the working directory to where the Java Virtual Machines are installed. Then do

ls

to get a list of the installed versions. Enter the Contents directory of the one you're using by writing something like

cd jdk-13.0.2.jdk/Contents/

Replace the version numbers if you have a different Java version installed.

Open Info.plist in any text editor (if you want to do that from Finder instead of Terminal, write open . to open the current folder) and search for these lines:

<key>JVMCapabilities</key>
 <array>
  <string>CommandLine</string>
 </array>

Replace those with these lines

<key>JVMCapabilities</key>
 <array>
  <string>JNI</string>
  <string>BundledApp</string>
  <string>WebStart</string>
  <string>Applets</string>
  <string>CommandLine</string>
 </array>

and save the file. Then try opening Scilab again.

Sources: https://crunchify.com/os-x-mavericks-eclipse-java-issue/
and https://www.awareim.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=48828#p48828


How can I stop QuickTime from opening WMV embeds? How can I stop QuickTime from opening WMV embeds?

Click on a .wmv file once, to select it

Then click Command + I (That's the Command key and the letter i key at the same time)

In the resulting dialog box, click the Open With arrow

In the pulldown menu select the app you wish to use to open .wmv

Click the Change All button to force all .wmv files to be opened with your selected application

You're done


How to copy pdf file to Books using File manager? I have many pdf books in iCloud, now I wanna read it with Books application, according to https://support.apple.com/en-qa/HT205751, It said can Tap the share button and Tap copy to Books. But When I using Files to share the pdf file, there is only Open in Books avaliable, there is no Copy to Books avaliable:

Go to the  PDF file of interest on your iPhone or iPad and tap on it to open it.. Go to the share icon at the top and click it. A pane opens and on the 2nd row of options, you'll see options like AirDrop, Messages, Mail, and others. Slide this row to the left and at the end of that row you'll see an option for "More". Click on that option. This brings up a new menu and you should scroll down this menu to the option "Open in Book". Click on this option. Your PDF will be displayed using Books. Tap on the page that is displayed on your screen and you'll get another share icon at the top of the display. Click on this share icon and on the panel that opens is an option to Copy to Books. Click this. Now a copy of the PDF is saved in Books.


How can I manually change default applications in OS X? I'm facing an issue with Transmission's "Set Default Application" button - it seems to do nothing. Magnet links still don't work, so this feature is broken for me. I have been able to use Magnet links with uTorrent prior to switching to Transmission, so I know there's no issue there.

Is there an app or any manual way to set/change protocol associations without having to use the target application to set it?

I'm using Transmission 2.42 (13013) running on OS X Lion 10.7.2.

RCDefaultApp is a Preferences Panel which allows you to edit the default application used for various URL schemes, file extensions, file types and MIME types.


What procedure should be followed post spilling fluids onto a MacBook keyboard? I know the first thing to do is dry with a towel the majority of the fluid. Next is to turn off the computer. Then flip over the laptop itself and whilst upside down cool dry the keyboard with a hairdryer for a few minutes. Also leave the computer upside down for a day or so. Is there anything I’m missing?

I'm writing this answer in the hopes to dispel the myths surrounding liquid damage repair.  Putting the device in a bag of rice, in the oven, in the sunlight, next to a radiator, heater vent, use a blow dryer, etc. are all nonsense "fixes" that gives you a false sense of security.  You can actually do more damage after drying things out and powering things on following these internet fixes.
No. Do NONE of this.
The only exception is to turn it off, immediately.

Do not use a towel to "wipe" it up as you're going to spread and "push" liquid deeper into cracks and crevices.  Put it on a towel and pat it dry with (preferably) paper towels.

Do not turn it upside down as gravity will pull that liquid across unaffected areas of the machine

Do not put it in rice or some other desiccant hoping that it will somehow fix the problem.  Rice can't fix anything but hunger pangs.

Do not put it next to a radiator, in the sunlight, or use a hair dryer.  Once you evaporate the liquid, whether by heating or just though the natural evaporation process, contaminants are still left over.

Why?
It needs to be cleaned.
A simple water spill isn't so simple.  The impurities in water are what makes water electrically conductive.  Pure (distilled) water cannot conduct electricity so it actually cannot harm your computer. The problem is water has salts and contaminants and it's this that causes damage to your Mac.
Removing all power and getting it to a competent technician within hours of the spill - not days is the only sure fire way to protect and contain liquid damage. Any other action rolls the dice and can allow capillary action to let liquid seep to every crack, crevice and corner of the device and cause corrosion and short circuits since the battery is still powering parts of the machine when off.
This also is a safety issue if the water gets into the charged battery.
Beverages of different sorts can wreak havoc, salts (metals) are conductive so thing can short out.  There can be acids (juice) or bases (milk) that can cause corrosion.  Corroded circuits can actually destroy components and the traces embedded within the PCB.  For a refresher, take a look at the Mythbusters episode "Salsa Escape" and see what running a small current through the acidic salsa mixture can do to steel.  Now apply that to the tiny "width of a hair" copper traces on a PCB.

How to clean a liquid damaged MacBook
If you don't have the technical skills, don't do this!  Take it in for service.
This needs to be professionally cleaned with an ultrasonic cleaner and electrical solvent.  This requires the logic board to removed, cleaned in the solvent and rinsed in 90% isopropyl  alcohol (not the 70% stuff as there's too much water content).  Then it needs to be dried and subsequently tested.
Can you use cotton swabs and isopropyl alcohol?  Possibly, but it's not reliable.  You'll have better results cleaning the case with this method than you will the PCB or electronic components.  Using alcohol or electrical solvent with a soft nylon bristle brush (toothbrush) will be much better.  You still will want to wash it completely with alcohol and dry with compressed air.
Now, while this will help with the logic board, liquid that happened to get into and in between components (i.e. the glass panes in a track pad) and subsequently evaporated will leave behind whatever residue was in the liquid. This may cause the component to become inoperable. The part might need to be individually cleaned or replaced.
TL;DR

Stay calm.  I know you've just watched your $3,000 baby get a shower from a $6 Starbucks Frap-a-something-chino, but a clear head will help you by not making the problem worse.

Turn off the machine.  No power, nothing to short circuit.

Using lots of paper towels, attempt to absorb as much as the liquid as you can.  Don't wipe; pat or blot; wiping can "push" the liquid making things worse.

Take it for service right away - time is a factor here.  Give the tech full details.  He/she has seen it all and there's no reason to be embarrassed - the more info they have, the better they can get right to the problem and rescue your Mac with a high degree of success.


macOS Catalina RAM usage - 2GB at boot? I am trying to understand why my almost factory settings 13-inch MacBook Air 2017 with 8GB RAM available takes 2.3GB to just boot. The result is that if I start having Chrome+Dropbox+something to write any document, the machine starts swapping up to 2GB of stuff, and I really hate it, because the hard drive is indeed SSD.

How do I manage Agents and Daemons on a MacBook? I am used to just open a whatever program that has the full list of services and tick them to enable or disable.
How come does macOS waste so much RAM?

I come from Debian, so basically this sort of wall I perceive between me and the core settings of my machine is horribly frustrating. Thank you.
EDIT:
first of all, I updated from Mojave to Catalina, to see if things improved. Following suggestions in the comments, I decided to add some screenshots of the activity monitor in different conditions:

the four screenshots represent:

the activity monitor right after a very plain boot (basically just the OS in I think almost factory condition)
after Dropbox app started
after I also opened Chrome with four tabs, and
Preview with two pdf's.

The pictures speak by themselves. I even tried to sum up the memory usage of Chrome and its child processes, and never goes beyond some 700MB. Most likely it also allocates something in the kernel space, and the wired memory takes 200MB more.
At now, it still did not start swapping, but I figured out that for some reason it places lots of stuff in the cache, and dropbox and chrome waste an incredible amount of memory for absolutely no reason (Dropbox is literally empty right now).

Memory is meant to be used fully then, only later once you have a “problem” does the OS optimize and compress based on pressure. Everything looks excellent, as designed and well in order in your examples. Even if you have some memory swapped, that’s no performance issue in practice. Only after excessive swapping and sustained memory pressure would any any slowdown be measurable or need for remediation on macOS that have the pressure graph prominently featured in Activity Monitor.
The only problem (if you can call it that) is taking older articles at face value and assuming this is not correct behavior. That problem is actually an opportunity to learn how the system is designed and what signals to pay attention to now when you are tuning for performance.
Here are some excellent places to get started on why Apple’s unix operating systems are not like others. Consider how many active hours of running OS Apple has with watchOS, tvOS, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all running the same kernel, same scheduler, and most 24x7 and need no active tuning or management under very strict RAM budgets.

Can I force my Mac to make better use of the inactive memory? (and I disagree with much of this - purge is bad unless you want to test and hobble all optimizations and see how slow running without cached files are until they cache in again or you reboot / tune the apps you run)
Isn't Inactive memory a waste of resources?
What is memory pressure, and how do I relieve it?


Is target disk mode a clean way to install (Mountain) Lion on a blank mac? Since I don't have an optical disc, and no USB thumb drives are available, but I do have a second mac, target disk mode over FireWire seems like the only way to install Mountain Lion (since this 2010 MBP doesn't have that permanent recovery mode in its firmware, and I was dumb and formatted the whole disk, instead of just the system partition, thus deleting the recovery partition).

But I'm thinking, when you install on a local disk on a MacMini, is some aspect of the installation MacMini-specific? After installing from the MacMini, will the OS be missing some MBP drivers, and include superfluous Mac Mini drivers?

You should be fine installing that way. The OS X installer is pretty flexible, and is designed to be able to install on external drives (which is essentially what a Mac in Target Disk Mode is). With the exception of the system disks included with Macs prior to Lion, which were machine-specific, OS X installs work on any Mac the OS supports. You can even boot a Mac from a different system's drive without issue, as long as it's not a version prior to that Mac's release.


24' iMac HDMI input solution? Are there any solutions available which will allow HDMI input on my 24' iMac?

Your possibilities port-wise for a 24" iMac are Ethernet, USB, and FireWire.

I've seen interesting stuff done with converting DVI video on another computer to send over Ethernet, but not at the quality I imagine you're looking for with HDMI.

USB suffers on video. It wasn't designed to handle consistent, high levels of data that represents video.
Let's skip this.

Now FireWire: FireWire's largest users are those who work with video data, and your 24" iMac has both a FW400 and FW800 port on the back. With this in-mind I went 'google-ing' and found this:

Thomson Grass Valley ADVC-HD50

Hope this ends up being a worthy solution for you, I had difficulty finding any alternatives.

Note: I wouldn't assume this thing will handle HDCP.


Can't play an Online game that requires Java Some games online require Java to play, however it says that I have a missing plug-in. I am worried that I might get the java-exploit if I downloaded Java, any advice ?

Apple is automatically disabling old versions of Java for security reasons. If you re-install Java you do certainly run a slight risk of exposing your computer to known "in-the-wild" exploits. This is a decision you are best suited to make. Are the games worth installing Java for? Are there alternate places to play the same games without using Java?

If you need to install Java, follow this link to get the latest version.


How to configure where Lion fullscreen apps open I recently noticed that when I fullscreen an app, it opens as a new space all the way to the right, after all my desktops. I don't think this is how it worked before -- I seem to recall that it used to open the fullscreen app immediately to the right of my current desktop.

Is there a way to configure this? Where are fullscreen apps opened on most users' operating system?

Look at System Preferences > Mission Control and see if 'Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use' is checked.

When checked, fullscreen windows open to the immediate right.

When unchecked, fullscreen windows open at the far right, after all other desktop spaces.

You can also rearrange desktop spaces by dragging them to the order you prefer in Mission Control.

(I'm running 10.7.3)


Set the WorkingDirectory to user's home in launchd? I understand that you can change a LaunchAgent's working directory with a WorkingDirectory key, but is there any way to set the Working Directory to a user's home directory reliably and portably within the plist? Can I do something like:

<key>WorkingDirectory</key>
    <string>~</string>

and have it work?

launchd doesn't know about shell mechansims like ~ or $HOME. Instead you can use one of the following

Specify the full path in the plist
Add cd $HOME at the beginning of the executedscript


If I replace an iPod Classic battery myself, will the music be preserved? I have an iPod Classic that needs a new battery; the old battery will no longer hold a charge.  I've been told that if I send it to Apple to be fixed they will restore the device and the music will be lost.

My question is this:

If I replace the battery myself, will the music/data stay on the hard drive?

I shouldn't have to restore it if all I do is replace the battery, right?

I would copy all the music, but there's some older music that I want to keep that iTunes won't let me sync (something about permissions, etc).

The iPod classic has no NVRAM/PRAM or settings that degrade when battery power is disconnected. Unless you want to roll the risk that opening the device causes irreparable harm into the definition of "replacing the battery" - you are safe to go. Just like you can pull a hard drive and place it in a new computer - same with the drives in a classic iPod - everything important is on the drive.

I would put this in the class of putting a spare tire on a car. Even if you've never done it before, you get out the manual and most people can do this themselves - especially if you are not in a rush. Likewise, those that really shouldn't attempt the operation generally have a good intuition that they are not up to the task.

I say, dive in and replace your battery once you've read up on which connectors are fragile for your specific model. Cracking the case is by far the hardest part of the surgery.


access iCloud backup app data How can I access the iCloud backup app data, i.e. the app data from my iPhone? E.g., I would like to make a local copy of it on my computer (without accessing the iPhone directly, i.e. really just the iCloud backup app data).

I don't believe there's an interface to the iCloud backup data that will let you pull it down to a computer. An alternative, if you're after a local backup in addition to iCloud, is to plug your iPhone in and use iTunes to explicitly back up the device (right-click the iPhone in the left-hand pane and select Back Up...

I have iTunes set not to sync with my phone, as I normally backup to the cloud, but I'll occasionally do an explicit iTunes backup for redundancy's sake.


No keyboard in recovery mode on MacBook Pro so unable to mount encrypted drive I have a MacBook Pro Mid 2010 running OS Sierra. I recently put a new SSD in, it is HFS+ Journaled and Encrypted. When I use Disk Utility's First Aid, it tells me, it needs to be repaired:

The problem is when I start in Recovery Mode, my SSD is encrypted so does not mount. When I click on it to mount it, the password box comes up, but the keyboard is not working at all. I have looked at other answers on the site but they seem to be for USB or wireless keyboards, not a laptop inbuilt keyboard.

Short of totally unencrypting the drive, so that I don't have this keyboard mounting issue, then re-encrypting it, what can I do to get keyboard working in recovery mode / mount this drive so the OS can do these repairs?

As a first step I would try resetting your NVRAM to see if that allows you to enter your password. It's unclear whether you'll be able to do this, since you need your keyboard to do so - but we actually don't know if the keyboard is the issue. In fact, since the USB keyboard didn't work, I suspect it's something else.

Reset NVRAM

Follow these steps:

Shut down your machine. Yes, a full shut down, not just logging out.
Press the power button and then press the commandoptionPR keys. You have to make sure you press these keys before the gray screen appears or it won’t work.
Hold those keys down until your Mac reboots again and you here the startup chime.
Let go of the keys and let your Mac reboot normally.

Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).

If you don't hear your Mac reboot and play the startup chime again, then try the above steps from scratch, but try using the USB keyboard instead.

Let me know how you go.

Use Terminal in Recovery Mode to unlock your encrypted drive

Okay, since resetting the NVRAM didn't change things I suspect that this may not be a keyboard issue, but something else related to entering the password. So let's test this theory by trying to unlock your volume via Terminal.

Follow these steps:

Boot your Mac into Recovery Mode
Launch Terminal (Utilities > Terminal)
Enter the filling command in Terminal: diskutil list
Now, because you have an encrypted volume you should see something like this:

Logical Volume DriveName on disk2s2
123E4567-E89B-12D3-A456-426655440000
Locked Encrypted

Now, to interpret the above example: DriveName will be the name of your drive, and the next line (i.e. the 123E4567-E89B-12D3-A456-426655440000 in my example) will be what is known as the universally unique identifier (UUID). This identifier will be a string of alphanumeric characters in a 8-4-4-4-12 format. The UUID is what you will need to unlock your encrypted drive.
Enter the following command in Terminal: diskutil coreStorage unlockVolume <uuid>

NOTE: Replace the <uuid> with the actual UUID for your drive.
You should now be prompted for your password
Enter the password (don't worry if you don't see the cursor move)
Press enter

NOTE: If you can't enter any commands in Terminal then we know the problem lies with your keyboard input. Either way, let me know how you go.


Can my iBook use any PC2700 DDR-SDRAM RAM? My iBook currently has a stick of 256MB DDR PC2700 RAM installed.

I want to bump this up to a gigabyte (because programs these days take a lot of RAM to link). I was wondering if an iBook G4 can use any brand of PC2700 or only RAM made specifically for iBooks.

For example, there was a time when graphics card needed to be specially flashed to work for Apple computers.

It does not need a specific ram (like any other computers).

But be sure to buy SO-DIMM ram and not DIMM.


Is it possible to hide an app from App Store search results? We'd like to launch an iPhone app on an invitation-only basis to begin with. We'd like invited people to be able to find the app in the App Store via an email link, but not have other people be able to find it easily. Is this possible?

This is not possible with the App Store as apps released there are available for everyone.

You can use Apple's TestFlight beta distribution with the  TestFlight app to distribute a version of your app to invited people.


All Yahoo Calendar Entries appear on iPhone a day earlier at 11pm-11pm All Yahoo Calendar Entries appear on my iPhone / iPad a day earlier at 11pm-11pm.
Problem continues on both iPhone5s, updated to iOS 10.1.1, and iPad. (I have both Yahoo and [paid] Yahoo Small Business Accounts.) Reinserting the correct day/time on  iPhone lasts for seconds before the entry reverts to 11pm a day earlier. Fortunately, the Yahoo calendar remains OK, but it is not practical to attend client meetings with an iPhone/Yahoo incompatibility.

It may be a time zone discrepancy.
Check that your Yahoo calendar timezone matches the timezone on your phone. For Hong Kong it should be UTC+08:00 on all devices. iOS devices may be updating your timezone automatically based on location.

To check the timezone on your device go to Settings > General > Date & Time.


Are there any Thunderbolt 2 external DVD drives? Sorry if this is off-topic or just a dumb question. I've got a Mac Pro with plenty of free Thunderbolt ports, but I'm using all the USB ports - are there any Thunderbolt external DVD drives available - I've been googling for about an hour but only found one really expensive Sonnet drive - which has way more functionality than I need.

You won't find a Thunderbolt 1 (much less and Thunderbolt 2/3) to an external DVD drive because there simply isn't any need to create one as USB 2.0 has more than enough bandwidth to accommodate even the fastest DVD drives on the market.

To understand why, we have to understand that the fastest DVD you will find is a 24x unit; most will be 16x.  The base write speed is 1x and a 1x speed is 1.32Mb/s so a 24x unit is about 31Mb/s.1

USB 2.0's transfer speed is 280Mb/s or about 35MB/s 2 so even the theoretical fastest DVD drive that you will ever find is less than the max limit of a USB 2.0 connection which, for all intents and purposes, has been obsolete since the beginning of 2009 (USB 3.0).3

There just isn't a need to create a DVD drive with a modern, high speed data transfer interconnect because it's a dying technology and it's fastest transfer rate doesn't even begin to exceed what is already backwards compatible with USB 3.0

1 Wikipedia Modern compact discs support a writing speed of 52X and higher, with some modern DVDs supporting speeds of 16X...

2 Wikipedia  USB 2.0 was released in April 2000, adding a higher maximum signaling rate of 480 Mbit/s (High Speed or High Bandwidth), in addition to the USB 1.x Full Speed signaling rate of 12 Mbit/s. Due to bus access constraints, the effective throughput of the High Speed signaling rate is limited to 280 Mbit/s or 35 MB/s.

3 Wikipedia The USB 3.0 Promoter Group announced on 17 November 2008 that the specification of version 3.0 had been completed...


How to deal with Carbon Copy Cloner backing up various OS versions of a given machine I've been backing up my MacBook Pro for 5 years using Carbon Copy Cloner. The full backup is on a partition of an external hard drive and there is a folder called _CCC_Archives which I believe stores the diffs over time.

I have upgraded the OS at least once and I'm wondering what the implications of this are.

Since upgrading from something like Snow Leopard to Sierra some of my music projects fail to open, presumably due to incompatible software. Is there some way to boot my MacBook using a backup from an older OS, capture and export some files, then reboot the MacBook to the newer OS that I'm running?

Note that I have never backed up the Mac since upgrading the OS because I did not want to corrupt my backup if it would in fact be irreversibly corrupted by this change. So the backup drive only includes backups using Snow Leopard.

The setting I use for backups in CCC is called:
"Maintain a backup (Archive modified and deleted files)"

And below this I see:

• Files and folders on "My Passport" that are not present on "Macintosh HD" will be archived.

• Previously backed up files on "My Passport" will be updated only if the size or modification date differs.

• Older versions of updated files will be archived.

• CCC will not prune archive content.

Based on the info in your question you should be able to restore an appropriate backup image to another external drive.

Once you've done this, boot your Mac into the Startup Disk Manager (i.e. press and hold the option key as you boot up) until you see the drive options appear. Select the disk you've just restored the Snow Leopard backup to and press enter to see if you can boot from it.

If it boots okay, then you can try to convert the files you want to use in macOS Sierra.

NOTES:

1 If your drive doesn't appear in the Startup Disk Manager, there are a number of possible reasons for this. If this happens to you, then while you're in the Startup Disk Manager you can try pressing the option+shift+command+. keys to see if your external drive has optional ROM firmware available.

2 If you can't boot up from the drive, refer to the Help! My clone won't boot! page for a detailed list of possible causes/solutions.


How can I track my stolen iPhone 4S phone? My iPhone 4S was stolen and I reported it to the police and my network.

By my iCloud account through Find My iPhone, I had request for remote locking. I don't know if the remote locking worked because I didn't get any mail.
After 1 week when I checked my iCloud account again, I saw contacts that I don't know and there are none of my previous contacts. (How is it possible if it's my iCloud account?).

How can I track my stolen iPhone 4S phone?

It sounds like whoever has your phone hasn't bothered (most likely doesn't know how to) to change the Apple ID and has entered their own contacts in. You should take this information to the police.

Then check if there's a contact labelled "Mum", call the persons mother and tell them that their child is a thief :-)

Best of luck!


hd video player for mac I just saw that VLC doesn't support 10-bit yet (i checked the link here and i don't see a 1.2 build) http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=94686

Is there any other good player that supports this?

The comments in the link you provide indicate the latest vlc-git nightly release should work with 10-bit mkv files.

On the VLC nightly build page, look for the first file with a file name that starts with "vlc-git-intel" or "vlc-git-intel64". Download the former if you want the 32-bit version, the latter for 64-bit. (Even though the vlc-git files don't indicate their version number in the file name, the latest nightly build, as of 10/6/11, is a version 1.2 build)

Be aware these are considered unstable versions, so you may come across unexpected bugs while using the software.

You could also try MplayerX, which I think should support 10-bit video.


El Capitan "Create NAT64 Network" - connection issues I am trying to test apps for IPv6 according to Apple's documentation at Supporting IPv6 DNS64/NAT64 Networks. I have difficulties connecting from the iPad to my app server.

My Network Layout:

The Fritzbox has IPv6 support turned on with 6to4 enabled, because my provider does not have IPv6. I ran a set of tests with IPv6 turned off. The result was the same (see list of test items below).

macmedia runs El Capitan and runs iTunes serving as a media server.

macsrv runs El Capitan and OS X Server 5 with DNS, DHCP, File Sharing, Web, Wiki.

My Test Process:

I can set up the NAT64 network as described in the Apple document (in "Settings" hold option key, press "Sharing", then "Internet Sharing" and release option key).

I ran some tests, one of them looked like this:

turn on NAT64 on macsrv
in iPad Air WLAN settings select NAT64 network
the blue checkmark appears in front of the network name
the blue i-icon delivers this:

IP 169.254.55.58 / mask 255.255.0.0
DNS 2001:2:0:aab1::1
all other fields empty

in Safari on iPad Air:

https://www.google.com/ -> takes a long time, eventually a message like: "Could not open the page, because the server does not respond any more."
http://macsrv:8989/ -> could not find server
http://macsrv.local:8989/ -> "It works!" (Just looked at the logs: The access in apache2 was logged with the IPv6 address of the en0 interface of macsrv)
http://192.168.1.11:8989/ -> Error like "Could not open page, because the iPad is not connected to the internet." (192.168.1.11 is macsrv)
http://[2001:2::aab1:129a:ddff:fe4f:38f8]:80 -> takes a long time, eventually a message like: "Could not open the page, because the server does not respond any more." (like google.com; the address is the IPv6 address of the en0 interface on macsrv)
http://192.168.1.115:8088/ -> Error like "Could not open page, because the iPad is not connected to the internet."
http://app.intra.admadic.com:8088/ -> could not find server (this is the same as 192.168.1.115)

Once I connected the iPad Air to the macrsv NAT64 network and it received the IP address 192.168.2.2. This happened never again.

When I start the NAT64 network on macmedia, the iPad cannot connect and the activity indicator keeps spinning forever.

NAT64 Details:

I looked for processes running when NAT64 is enabled:

/usr/libexec/InternetSharing
rtadvd -c /etc/com.apple.mis.rtadvd.conf -f -s bridge100
unbound -c /etc/com.apple.mis.unbound.conf -d

There are two config files related to com.apple.mis...:

/etc/com.apple.mis.rtadvd.conf:

bridge100:\
     nolladdr:maxinterval#135:mininterval#45:rltime#1800:addr="2001:2:0:aab1::":prefixlen#64:rdnssaddrs#1:rdnssaddr="2001:2:0:aab1::1"

/etc/com.apple.mis.unbound.conf:

server:
    chroot: ""
    pidfile: "/etc/unbound.pid"
    chroot: ""
    directory: "/etc"
    username: ""
    do-daemonize: no
    access-control: ::0/0 allow
    module-config: "dns64 iterator"
    dns64-synthall: yes
    dns64-prefix: 64:ff9b::/96
    interface: ::0
forward-zone:
    name: "."
    forward-addr: 192.168.1.11

I checked these conf files on macsrv and macmedia and they are identical in every detail.

Questions:

Q1. What could be the reason for NAT64 not working on macmedia?

Q2. Can I convince the NAT64 network to use my intranet DNS?

Q3. What could be the reason for NAT64 on macsrv to be sometimes working and sometimes not?

Q4. Why does the iPad get an 169.254.55.58 IPv4 address? (Shouldn't it only have IPv6 when connecting to NAT64?)

Q5: Do the com.apple.mis... conf files look ok? (having 192.168.1.11 as forward looks fine to me...)

If I get your network configuration correctly, your setup is completely hosed.

You need two separate (physical) networks:

one with IPv4 only (e.g. ethernet)
one with IPv6 only (e.g. local Wi-Fi)

Depending of the capabilities of your machines, the machine with two interfaces (ethernet and Wi-Fi) should be the server (DNS/DHCP etc.)/NAT64-router (= macsrv).

Since the iDevices don't have an ethernet interface and you try to test their IPv6/IPv4 functionality they should reside in the Wi-Fi section, which should be dedicated to IPv6 then. This local Wi-Fi network is not your Fritz!Box' Wi-Fi! You have to setup a personal hotspot on the NAT64 router!

To access a IPv4 server from your iDevices you may either use your normal router connection to the WAN or a dedicated IPv4 "server" (= macmedia) - both of them reside in the ethernet section "behind" the NAT64-router (= macsrv).
If macmedia doesn't have an ethernet interface just connect it to the Fritz!Box Wi-Fi, because technically the Fritz!Box Wi-Fi and the Fritz!Box ethernet are both in the ethernet section.

To access an IPv6 server use a web server on macsrv.

Since you don't need IPv6 on your Fritz!Box router, simply turn it off.


iMac monitor unexpectedly comes back on I turn the monitor off (using control+shift+eject) while listening to music on my iMac 27". But recently it has starting coming back on almost right away, which I assume is from the vibration of the speaker nearby. Is there some sort of sensitivity adjustment to avoid the monitor from turning on (until I turn it on myself)?

When you put the display to sleep, it turns back on when the computer detects a key press or mouse movement or mouse click. In your case, it seems like your speaker vibration is causing the mouse to move, and thus waking up the display. The best workarounds are to avoid mouse movement by moving the speaker away from the mouse or placing the mouse on a surface that absorbs the speaker's vibrations or reducing the speaker volume.

Note that you could reduce the sensitivity of the mouse by going to System Preferences > Mouse and then selecting a slower Tracking speed. But this would also likely make your system difficult to use - you'd have to physically move the mouse farther to move the cursor by a particular distance on the screen - and you may have to switch between two levels of sensitivity (slow and faster) often if you're not happy with the slow tracking setting for normal use.


How can I get an (iMovie-created) movie in the Videos app into iOS iMovie to edit it? I can't find any way to get a video in the Apple Videos app into iMovie on the ipad to edit it.

In my specific use case, I have a trailer I made in iMovie on my mac that I can see and watch in the videos app, but neither that nor any of the other videos there appear under "video" as a source for imovie.   (The only thing that does is a movie I took in the app itself.)

I already confirmed that location services are on and enabled for iMovie on the ipad.   Am I missing something?

As a rough workaround, is there any way to export from videos (without syncing)?  I'd be able to crudely solve my problem if I could get the video into dropbox.

iMovie only supports the H.264 format, and will only load videos from two places:

Camera Roll
Synced iPhoto Library via iTunes (Photos Tab → Sync Photos from iPhoto → Include Videos)

As you've noticed, videos in your iTunes → Movies folder will only sync to the Videos app, and will not appear in iMovie.

The process is not at all convenient, but here's a video detailing how to convert a video to the right format on a Mac, and then get it into iMovie on an iPad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF8-sDmD_1Y.  He uses an app called StreamClip Video Converter to convert to H.264.  You might be able to get away with exporting that format from iMovie on your Mac instead.  iMovie is picky about the format though.  If you have trouble, try to reproduce the settings in the video exactly.


Offline webreader for iPod Touch Do you know of a good app for iPod touch that let's me quickly take a bunch of webpages offline that contain some articles I want to read later when I don't have an internet connection? It would be cool if it could also strip out the noise like ads, navigation, header, footer and leave nothing but the actual article. Also when reading later it should give me as much real estate as possible for the actual content having absolutely no chrome visible just like the kindle app.

You're searching for Instapaper
(I don't feel the need to write the features list as you did it already in your question :)


How to sort mail.app conversations by subject rather than sender? Most of my work-related mail goes through a ticketing system. Whenever a customer or me or any of my colleagues sends a mail or replies to a mail, the ticketing system sends a copy of said message to my inbox.

When 'threading' or 'sort on conversation' was on in Snow Leopard's Mail.app, it used to group all mail with the same subject. This way I could easily spot when a ticket was not yet replied to be my or one of my colleagues.

Lion's mail.app seems to behave differently and seems to sort mail by Sender rather than Subject. Does anyone know of a way to make Lion sort conversations by subject rather than sender?

Right now it's very annoying:

You would expect all mails with subject test to be grouped together, but they aren't. I would expect that it respects the "In-Reply-To" header.

These are the relevant headers of the first mail with subject [#VZB-74211-323] test:

Message-Id: <DDEF4B55C73B450B8E5F90B15A4FC117@banteng.be>

Second mail:

Message-Id: <1342771382.500910b676bc9@cerb5.openminds.be>
In-Reply-To: <DDEF4B55C73B450B8E5F90B15A4FC117@banteng.be>

third:

Message-Id: <1342771377.500910b107688@cerb5.openminds.be>
In-Reply-To: <DDEF4B55C73B450B8E5F90B15A4FC117@banteng.be>

fourth:

Message-Id: <003CDBAA3CF04F8D8947DE9294E0E314@banteng.be>
In-Reply-To: <1342771382.500910b66b047@cerb5.openminds.be>

Surely there MUST be a hack somewhere or some plist to edit to fix this?

Ah!  I think I have actually found the answer.  In the Mail.app with Lion, it sorts by whether or not there is a Re: in the subject.  So all of those ticket emails up there, which start with the ticket tag, would thread correctly if they started with Re: [#tag] instead.  I am about to add Re: to my RT subject lines, to fix this problem for my own ticket traffic.


Reminders no longer separates items by line Having just upgraded to iOS 9, I've noticed that Reminders is no longer able to take a copied list like this:

  bananas
  oranges
  cereal

My wife emails me our grocery list in this format every week and now I can't use Reminders to check off items as I find them in the store.

How can I ask her to format the list and/or paste it so that each item will be separated as unique items to be checked off one-by-one?

I have tested a list just like you specified on iOS 9.0.1 (13A404) and used the notes app to make a note with the three items, one return, no special characters, spaces or line breaks added between the three items.

I then long pressed and selected all the text in the notes app, copied it, went to reminders and pasted it. Use care to paste into the list itself and not to paste into an empty reminder.

The behavior for me isn't a change as I'm getting multiple list items and not a list of three items.

If the above doesn't help your results, you might need to look in to the specific app that your wife is doing the copy operation to see how she is getting the text and double check exactly where it gets pasted. If it's a long enough list, you might try pasting it into notes.app to see if that helps or use notes.app to make the list in the first place.


Reply from same address as mail was sent to in Mail.app I have a single Gmail account that receives mails via forwards from 2 other addresses. The Gmail web UI allows me to reply with the address it was received on.

Is it possible to set up Apple's Mail.app to automatically use the recipient as the sender address in replies (without having multiple distinct Gmail accounts)?

I've set up aliases on the specific account, but Mail doesn't seem to automatically choose the correct one.

Apple Mail can only send replies from mail enabled accounts that you have set up in your system. I.e., you may have iCloud account set up in your system, but if you have mail option unchecked in System Preferences -> Internet Accounts -> iCloud, you won't be able to send any mail (including replies) from that iCloud account.
One possible workaround is to use 'Reply To' field which you can enable by pressing Alt+Command+R or from Main Menu -> View -> Reply-To Address Field. This will enable your recipients press reply button and send their reply to the address which you will enter into mentioned field.
Hope this helps.


Change the current iTunes song's rating after it finishes playing? I use smart playlists in iTunes.  For example: Play only songs rated 4 stars or higher with comments containing "mellow" (I use comments as tags, more or less, so that would be a mellow best-of playlist).

The problem: let's say I'm listening to that playlist and a song starts to play which I decide to drop to 2 stars.  The song disappears from the playlist instantly and the playlist stops.  What I'd like to happen is, I'd like the song to finish playing and then, after, have the rating change take effect, so that it disappears from the playlist after it finishes playing.

Note: I'm talking about the currently playing iTunes song, not the currently selected song.  Since iTunes is probably in the background, the currently selected song could be anything.

I'd prefer an Applescript solution, if possible.

Ideas?

with timeout of 600 seconds
    tell application "iTunes"
        set cur to current track
        repeat until current track is not cur
            delay 1
        end repeat
        set rating of cur to 40 -- 2 stars
    end tell
end timeout

This would select the next track and set the rating of the previous track to two stars:

tell application "iTunes"
    set cur to current track
    next track
    set rating of cur to 40
end tell


Is there a fullscreen Terminal app that is faster than iTerm? I am used to using the Terminal in full screen on Ubuntu. On Apple, the native Terminal app doesn't do full screen, and iTerm, which does, is very, very slow when you use a multiplexer like tmux in the Terminal. I'm using iTerm 0.10.

Does anyone know of an OS X Terminal program that can go full screen and that is responsive when running tmux?

Try iTerm2. It's supposed to be significantly faster than iTerm, but since I've never used the first version, I can't say for myself.

I have no complaints about it, that's for sure.


Still not possible to convert HFS+ Journaled boot to APFS? We're at High Sierra beta 9, and it still doesn't seem possible to convert an HFS+ Journaled boot drive "in-place" to APFS.

I tested this with a totally fresh install using a late 2014 27" Retina iMac, installing onto an external SATA LaCie Thunderbolt 2 drive that I partitioned into three parts: 500GB for Sierra, 500GB for High Sierra, and 1TB for future use.

While I was able to install the latest High Sierra 10.13 Beta (17A360a) on one of the partitions, I could not get the option to convert that HFS+ Journaled partition into APFS.

Supposedly, it can be done "in place" by booting to the 10.13 Recovery partition, starting the Disk Utility, and using the menu options to "Convert to APFS".  However, when I did that those options are grayed out when a partition containing an OS is selected.  Interestingly, if the volume DOESN'T have an OS, then that option is available

Awfully hard to test our software on a new file system if I can't convert the boot drive to the new file system...

UPDATE:  I was able to erase one of the external HDD partitions, reformat it to APFS, then install the High Sierra beta from the Recovery Partition.  It installed, it booted, and it ran through its setup processes.  For a very long time, it seemed it was doing something to the internal Fusion drives -- and I didn't see them mount on the desktop, but I think maybe Spotlight was trying to index them.  During this time, neither Safari nor System Preferences would open ("Application could not be opened)".  However, eventually, things settled down and I was able to eject my internal Fusion drive, and I was able to do things again.  So we'll see.

Awfully hard to test our software on a new file system if I can't convert the boot drive to the new file system

Since you have space to spare: convert an empty partition to APFS, then install 10.13 on the APFS partition. Or use SuperDuper or somesuch to copy your existing 10.13 installation to the new partition.


Where to find VNC access logs with IP addresses on Sierra? I'm looking for logs on attempts by someone to access one of my Macs on a previous day. I have remote management running and I allow VNC access. In the logs I have found, I see the attempts they made, but there's no IP address logged. Where can I see this?

An example of a console log I have is "system.log.0" (backed up the last day). I have tons of these log events from when someone was connected:

  (com.apple.screensharing[2323232]): Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch (3) API's

There is no other logged info.

Also, I don't have a "secure.log" file.

I just want to know what IPs were connected to my Mac during a specific time frame. Is there any other log or source of info in macOS Sierra I could harvest for this?

Beginning with macOS Sierra, there is a new unified logging system, which requires a bit more work to access than the old system.log, but includes far more details.

Use this command to show the last three days of access logs:
log show --last 3d --predicate 'processImagePath CONTAINS "screensharingd" AND eventMessage CONTAINS "Authentication"'

This will show timestamps, IP, username, and authentication failure/success for both VNC and Apple Screen Sharing connections.


Can I determine how the Flashback trojan infected my machine despite disabling Java? Apple's update on April 17, 2012 detected and deactivated the Flashback trojan.

Yet two weeks ago I had following the instructions here. After concluding that my Mac is not infected, I disabled Java.

I don't understand how Flashback could have sneaked in, especially after my guard has been up after an Arstechnica article, but that no longer matters.

How do I find out what kind of damage might have already been done? Will one of the log files contain a trace of what has happened?

I'd be surprised if the logs told you anything useful.

If you're concerned, you could install one of the free AV products for the Mac. Do a full system scan to ensure that all traces of the trojan have been removed.


LG Ultrawide 21:9, MBP 2017 no HiDIPI 2560x1080 I have a LG Ultrawide 34WN650 and a 2017 MacbookPro(Big Sur) with both Radeon Pro 560 4 GB
and Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB. I have purchased a USB-C to Displayport  cable, a USB-C to HDMI cable, QuickRes and SwitchResX.
Do you know how to get HiDIPI 2560x1080 resolution? QuickRes has a HiDIPI 1280 X 540 that does nothing when I click it. 1280 X 540 looks excellent but it is 16:9 not 21:9. I can't use custom resoultions in SwitchResX because they are "Not installed" after save and restart. The video and pictures are excellent in normal 2560x1080, but the fonts are extremely bad.
I have tried:

https://medium.com/@nvucuong/macos-blurry-texts-on-an-external-full-hd-monitor-d2a955c25607

https://www.chanhvuong.com/4403/fix-blurry-text-on-mac-using-external-non-apple-monitor/

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool true)

With the help of Stephan Madrau, the creator of SwitchResX I have found a solution for my problem:

half of the non HiDPI resolution is the HiDPI resolution, so I am using SCALED 3840 x 1620 non HiDPI --> 1920 x 810 HiDPI. It is a bit big.. but it is looking fresh and crisp.


Preview app not working properly in macOS Mojave After upgrading macOS to Mojave, Preview app is not functioning the same.
I am no longer able to delete, drag & drop or select several files and open in the same window.

Is there a fix for this or do I need to go back to Sierra?

Ensure in Preview's preferences, that either Open all files in one window or Open groups of files in the same window is selected. If that looks OK and you're still experiencing the issue:

Quit Preview
Move ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist to the Trash
Re-launch Preview
Re-check preferences & ensure Open all files in one window or Open groups of files in the same window is selected
Attempt to reproduce your original issue


Is my refurbished iPad 2 a Model A? I recently acquired a refurbished iPad 2 WiFi and, being an iOS developer, I would like to use it as a test device and load beta iOS versions on it.  Apple offers two different downloads, one for an "iPad 2" and one for an "iPad 2 (Model A)."  I'm not sure which one I can safely use.  This Ask Different answer states that iPad 2's with model number MC979 are not Rev A, whereas A1395 MC954 (black) or MC989 (white) are Model A's.  My iPad 2 has "Model A1395" written on the back, however in Settings -> General -> About, it lists the Model as FC769LL/A.  Is mine a Model A or not?

Apparently, the Version A is the iPad 2 that came out in March 2012 and was only sold in a 16GB version. It has a revised A5 CPU and it's Model Identifier is iPad2,4.

The two numbers you're referring to, provide different information.

The one on the back cover is the actual Model Number, which in this case is A1395, whereas the one retrieved from Settings / General / About is the Order Number, and holds information regarding when and where the device was made, its colour and storage.


How is "Show alerts from my contacts" for Messages in iOS Notification Center supposed to work? I've started using 2-factor authentication with a bunch of services. So, after I sign in, I get an authorisation code SMS'd to me. Now, if my phone is locked, I really don't want code appearing on the lock screen, but I generally like showing the SMS preview.

I noticed in Notification Center -> Messages, there is a choice:

Show Alerts from Everyone
Show Alerts from My Contacts

Now, I assumed that if I chose, "Show Alerts from My Contacts", but kept "Preview" on, if the SMS sender wasn't in my address book, I wouldn't see the Alert, and certainly not the Preview on my lock screen. However, I can't find any discernible difference between these two settings.

Every SMS I get from numbers NOT in my address book, I see the banner if the phone is unlocked, and I see the Preview if it is locked, and I see the Preview on the Lock Screen in the Notifications pulldown.

What gives? Am I misunderstanding the functionality of this setting?

It's an iPhone 5S, running 7.1 (11D167)

There's 2 different things here which are not pretty clear.

First of all, there's SMS and iMessage.

And like explained on this blog you can restrict iMessages from giving a notification if you decide you want contacts only (since iOS6). This does not work for SMS.

With iOS the name of Show iMessage alerts from changed, but the functionality remained the same.


iTunes charges when it's advertised as free Why does it advertise free for 3D tour of ancient Jewish temple then when I try to install the app it asks for credit card details

Verifying your credit card does not mean you are being charged.

If there is a change in your billing info, you have to verify it once on each device that uses that AppleID in order to continue downloading from iTunes. This does not mean you are being charged.


How can I (re)create development and build tools on a corrupt installation? On my previous computer I had Xcode working nicely; on my present computer, with Homebrew installed, gcc and make are present in /Developer/usr/bin but not /usr/bin. On the whole when I try to download and build http://JonathansCorner.com/download/tms1_4.tar.gz, I can find bits and pieces of the tools used to do things, but when invoked from its present path it doesn't recognize #include <stdio.h> type includes.

How can I reinstall Xcode, Homebrew, and anything else to get a fresh and working build so I can run make && make install?

Reinstalling XCode and updating Homebrew should be enough. To do this:

Try the uninstall-devtools script from this answer to remove older XCode versions. (If it doesn't work or you can't find it, don't worry about it.)
Delete the entire /Developer directory if it exists. This is where older versions of XCode live.
Download and install the latest XCode for your OS version. (The App Store makes this easy.)
Install the Command Line Tools. In XCode, go to the Apple menu, select Preferences, select the Downloads section, and click Install next to Command Line Tools.
Update the Homebrew definitions and packages with brew update && brew upgrade.

If any brewed packages still seem broken, brew rm them and brew install --fresh to reinstall.

Edit your shell config file (e.g. ~/.bashrc) to make sure /usr/local/bin is on your path. brew doctor can help diagnose this and other issues.

Note that tms is designed to install to /usr/lib by default, which you won't have permissions to do in a normal OS X setup even once you have all the tools installed, because the OS reserves /usr for its own use. You'll probably want to fiddle with the Makefile and tms.h to get it in to /usr/local or /opt, which are easier places to drop user-built packages.

If you're feeling ambitious, you could even do brew create http://jonathanscorner.com/download/tms1_4.tar.gz to make a Homebrew formula for TMS, making repeated installs easier.


how to stretch a single wallpaper image across multiple monitors I would like to stretch the same image across multiple monitors.. how do i do that?

Your picture actually is the perfect example of why this is incredibly difficult to do automatically.

You have 3 totally different screens [& for this the actual distinction as to whether one is a Retina or not is moot]

Visually you have one small, one large & one in portrait.

Bear in mind this is extremely rough...

If you divide the picture into 3rds, one third to each screen, then you get this...

The left monitor has what was a 'tall' ⅓ now squished to fit the screen.
Same for the centre monitor.
The right monitor has it's ⅓ give or take, about right.

The alternatives would be to eliminate any portion that doesn't fit,

or shrink it & leave blank space around it.... (but I'm sure you get the idea by now ;)

Really, the only way to do this & have reasonable control over it is to do it manually, then set each portion to each screen.


Installed reFIT on Lion and now I can't login I installed reFIT on my new MBP, and now, unfortunately, OSX can't get past the login screen. When I try logging in, it simply bounces me back to where I started, the login page.

Since I can't get in to OSX, I can't delete the /efi folder as recommended. Is there any way for me to fix this so I can at least get back into OSX to fix things?

If you disable journaling for the Macintosh partition (in order to access files from within Linux) this should work:

hold ⌥ upon boot
select Recovery HD OR boot from Mac install DVD/USB
open Disk Utility. Select Macintosh HD. Hold ⌥ and click on File. Select Disable Journaling.
boot from a Linux Live CD. Open root terminal.
delete /Library/StartupItems/rEFItBlesser on the Mac partition
delete /efi on the Mac partition

If journaling was already disabled on the Mac Partition, move to step 4.


Found in diagnostics on an iPhone 6s Plus. Any idea what it means? {
    "is_simulated":true,
    "app_name":"Google Maps",
    "timestamp":"2016-06-10 17:10:20.20 -0500",
    "app_version":"4.18.0",
    "slice_uuid":"5fc56151-7941-332f-afaa-3b7fd611e204",
    "adam_id":585027354,
    "build_version":"4.18.81882",
    "bundleID":"com.google.Maps",
    "share_with_app_devs":false,
    "is_first_party":false,
    "bug_type":"109",
    "os_version":"iPhone OS 9.2.1 (13D15)",
    "name":"Google Maps"
}

Incident Identifier: BFFF8177-5800-4AF8-8C80-660970D75897
CrashReporter Key:   0987bf660de545f3fb71e8ee071b1a44a2449887
Hardware Model:      iPhone8,2
Process:             Google Maps [3080]
Path:                /var/mobile/Containers/Bundle/Application/0BACCEBA-2901-4E5E-8D95-6C453559E446/Google Maps.app/Google Maps
Identifier:          com.google.Maps
Version:             4.18.81882 (4.18.0)
Code Type:           ARM-64 (Native)
Parent Process:      launchd [1]

Date/Time:           2016-06-10 17:10:20.20 -0500
Launch Time:         2016-06-10 14:47:28.28 -0500
OS Version:          iOS 9.2.1 (13D15)
Report Version:      105

Exception Type:  00000020
Exception Codes: 0x000000008badf00d
Exception Note:  SIMULATED (this is NOT a crash)
Highlighted by Thread:  4

Application Specific Information:
<BKNewProcess: 0x14ce18820; com.google.Maps; pid: 3080; hostpid: -1> has active assertions beyond permitted time:
{(
    <BKProcessAssertion: 0x14ce1a5a0> id: 3080-A369F80A-9505-4726-9D07-20E2364D6EE6 name: GTMSessionFetcher process: <BKNewProcess: 0x14ce18820; com.google.Maps; pid: 3080; hostpid: -1> permittedBackgroundDuration: 180.000000 reason: finishTask owner pid:3080 preventSuspend  preventIdleSleep  preventSuspendOnSleep ,
    <BKProcessAssertion: 0x14ce0fdf0> id: 3080-6B151A60-9AA9-4447-8C1C-9C4B2C47B031 name: GTMSessionFetcher process: <BKNewProcess: 0x14ce18820; com.google.Maps; pid: 3080; hostpid: -1> permittedBackgroundDuration: 180.000000 reason: finishTask owner pid:3080 preventSuspend  preventIdleSleep  preventSuspendOnSleep
)}

Elapsed total CPU time (seconds): 5.020 (user 5.020, system 0.000), 3% CPU
Elapsed application CPU time (seconds): 0.024, 0% CPU

Filtered syslog:
None found

If you look at the exception code that points to:

  0x8badf00d: Reads as “ate bad food”! (If you squint your eyes and replace the digits with alphabetic characters. :p) This code indicates that an application was terminated by iOS because a watchdog timeout occurred. Basically, the application took too long to launch, terminate, or respond to system events.

There's a nice article explaining this.


how to turn off hyperlinks in text messages on iPhone I received a text message from my wife and on my end the phrase the crickets was underlined, and when I tapped it, it took me to a Wikipedia article on Buddy Holly's band The Crickets.
When I asked her if she had done something special on her end to cause that, she said no, and in my own text to her the words were turned into a hyperlink too.  This is happening automatically.
She was referring to the insects, not to the band.
What is this inane feature called and how is it turned off?

Settings -> Siri and Search -> Messages, turn off Siri & suggestions .

It is not present in Messages-> Siri(absent), otherwise it were intuitive, like Safari -> Siri(Present).


Will DVD Studio Pro work on an Intel Mac? I am looking at using DVD Studio Pro on an Intel MBP.
1. Which version will work?
2. How much control do I have over the DVD?

This is kinda two questions, so if needed I can split it. Just let me know.

DVD Studio Pro 4.1 is the first Intel comparable version of the software. I believe that came with Final Cut Studio.

You have great control over DVD authoring. The best if not only solution on the Mac. Menus, scripting, tracks, etc.


Reload all fonts without restarting an app On Mac, when you edit the design of a font and want to reflect the change in an app (i.e. display glyphs in an updated design instead of old one), you'll usually have to restart the app. Is there a way to quickly get the change reflected in all apps without restarting? I'm currently editing a font frequently and restarting apps every time is a pain.

One thing I noticed is that when I edit a font, and type the updated glyphs first time in hours, apps do reflect the change and display the glyphs in a new design instead of an old one without restarting. So I suspected that commands like purge, killall -KILL SystemUIServer, and killall -KILL Dock might be relevant (I run those commands a couple times a day) so I tested but they didn't work.

I also tried

sudo atsutil databases -remove
atsutil server -shutdown
atsutil server -ping

but it didn't have any effect either.

OS: Mountain Lion 10.8.3

Someone may have a better solution, but here's an explanation and potential workaround.

The problem you're having is that you're editing a font already loaded by your applications. In other words, while macOS has been able to dynamically add fonts to application menus since the onset of Font Book (although it often didn't work well until Mac OS X Leopard was released in 2007), it's not able to trigger the fact that the font itself has changed.

My best guess at a workaround is to just use Font Book to Disable the font and then to Enable it again. This should force all your open applications to register the change because the font has been enabled again.

As an aside, you may find this page of interest to you: Font Management in macOS and OS X.


How to recover deleted files from OS 10.5.8? I'm not very experienced with Macs, so please pardon my mistakes. I'm assisting a coworker with a client of ours who recently let go of one of their employees, and in the resulting meeting the person deleted all their documents & threw the laptop onto the floor, cracking the screen and likely damaging the hard drive.

The Mac appears to boot normally, and boots into a profile like normal, but we have no documents of any kind to access. My worker tried MacKeeper, but after running for over a day it crashed. Edit: MacKeeper disappeared because my coworker uninstalled it & deleted it, so I removed this part of the paragraph.

In any case, for Mac OS all I'm seeing for data recovery is paid software. I was hoping to be able to inspect the file system and/or attempt recovery in Parted Magic, or run TestDisk/PhotoRec on it, but I cannot boot to Hiren's on this computer (which doesn't surprise me). Is there a Mac equivalent to Hiren's I could look into?

There should be a way of recovering the data if the profile/system can load successfully. I use Data Rescue 3 (tried but NOT affiliated with the company/developer) which recovers files directly from the hard drive and is actually quite good.

I believe Data Rescue 3 (link here) has a free trial and also a paid version, although it is quite expensive.

Can you access system files or any documents you have created at all?


How do you set the maxopenfiles limit in Yosemite? How do you set a soft limit for maxopenfiles in Yosemite?

I installed Yosemite last night, and now it's ignoring my settings in my /etc/launchd.conf file:

$ cat /etc/launchd.conf
limit maxfiles 32768 65536

$ launchctl limit maxfiles
    maxfiles    256            unlimited

I created a /etc/sysctl.conf file with the following contents:

kern.maxfiles=100000

If I run sysctl kern.maxfiles after restarting it does show the new value there.


Stop gmail + terminal from pasting rich text Since some recent update, when copying stuff from Terminal into Gmail compose window, it's pasted as formatted text, retaining all my terminal colors and fonts.

How to stop them (Chrome, Gmail, Terminal or whoever is to blame) doing that? This is really annoying.

Either change Gmail composition to plain text or use Paste and Match Style.


How do you disable VI-like behavior in macOS terminal? When I open a terminal and type
asdf asdf asdf asdf

And hit control-u, the line gets wiped. If I type that line again, but then use option-left to skip a word back, then control-u doesn't wipe the line at all.
To begin with I was having trouble with option-right not skipping words forward. So I thought I fixed it with these terminal settings. But honestly I have no idea what these ascii codes do, and what state my terminal gets into.
Do ascii codes that skip words forward and back without breaking the terminal exist? What are they?

FYI Looking at set -o I see that VI mode is off.
macbookpro% set -o | grep ' on'
combiningchars        on
interactive           on
login                 on
shinstdin             on

I found a lot of clues here: https://coderwall.com/p/a8uxma/zsh-iterm2-osx-shortcuts
This is what I put in my .zshrc to fix things.
bindkey "\033f" forward-word
bindkey "\033b" backward-word
bindkey "\033[H" beginning-of-line
bindkey "\033[F" end-of-line

Alongside these terminal keyboard settings:

For some reason, the control (^) key modifier can be set, but does not activate the codes in the terminal. So I'm only using option and shift.
I found a similar solution here which mentioned you can see the key codes by running cat. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12382499/looking-for-altleftarrowkey-solution-in-zsh
Initially I used whatever key codes I wanted. That was a mistake, because even though they worked on my local mac, they didn't work when I SSH-ed into a linux machine. Using less /etc/inputrc on the remote bash I found these existing shortcuts:
# allow the use of the Home/End keys
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line

# mappings for Ctrl-left-arrow and Ctrl-right-arrow for word moving
"\e[1;5C": forward-word
"\e[1;5D": backward-word
"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word
"\e\e[C": forward-word
"\e\e[D": backward-word

Also, my local bash had different settings. To find those out I used
bash-3.2$ bind -p | grep of-line
"\C-a": beginning-of-line
"\eOH": beginning-of-line
"\e[H": beginning-of-line
"\C-e": end-of-line
"\eOF": end-of-line
"\e[F": end-of-line

Which made me settle on the terminal keyboard settings you see at the top. Because they worked in all 3 settings (local zsh, local bash, remote bash).


Make Time Machine-like backups of Photos onto external drive I don't need to backup my whole disk but I want to backup my Photos once a month. From what I've read, Time Machine seems to work amazingly well so I was hoping for a similar solution for Photos.

I want to be able to delete the Photos library on my internal drive but keep the files "alive" on an external one. I use the "new" photos app introduced like half a year ago and migrated my library back then accordingly.

It would be perfect if I could do that with 2 separate external drives.

Is there any software that gets this job done? Maybe even something from Apple? Most stuff I find wants you to backup to iCloud or doesn't really go with the user deleting the files off his internal drive.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: El Capitan, MacBook Air 2013, the external drives both are NTFS but I would also accept reformatting them if that was necessary. I use 3rd party drivers for NTFS access which work fine for me.

You will need an external drive formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) to use as a Time Machine backup. TM cannot use a NTFS formatted disk as the backup destination.

Unfortunately, Time Machine cannot use an NTFS drive as a backup source, either. Time Machine relies on the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system on all drives acted on to do its work. (This isn't strictly true as you can create and backup to sparsebundle files on a network drive mounted with NTFS, but this is not in the scope of your question.)

Thus you need two Mac OS Extended (Journaled) external drives - one for the TM backup; one for the Photos Library. If you know how to use Time Machine, you can stop reading. If not, keep going.

In System Preferences > Time Machine, Click the Select Disk... button and choose this external disk for Time Machine backups. One the disk is selected, click the Options... button at the lower right, which brings up the window where you can exclude items from backups. Normally, all connected disks (internal & external) are backed up, except for the Time Machine disk. You can drag (or click the + sign) and add Macintosh HD (or whatever else you may have named the boot HD) to the list of excluded items. This will enable you to backup only the external HD with the Photos library.


Connecting iPhone to HC-05 Bluetooth module I wanted to know how I can connect my iPhone to HC-05 Bluetooth module. Is there any apps for it or/and How can I create an app for it?

Thanks in advance

As far as I know, they are using different BT profiles so It's not possible. HC-05 is using SPP which iOS does not support.


Automate URL Redirection in Mac OS Automator I would like some assistance to write an AppleScript to automatically redirect amazon.com to smile.amazon.com. I tend to always forget to use smile. With this automator I will never forget to. Unfortunately I am new to using the tool.

REVISED SOLUTION

This following solution is to be used with Google Chrome.

Paste this following AppleScript code into a new Script Editor.app document then save it as a "Stay Open" application.

Double-clicking this new application in Finder, will launch Google Chrome if it is not already running.  It will immediately then start monitoring the URLs of every tab in window 1 of Google Chrome.  Whenever the URL of any tab starts with https://www.amazon.com, is detected, it will automatically be redirected to https://smile.amazon.com .  When Google Chrome is no longer running, the application will quit on it's own.

The first time you open your new applet, be sure to choose the option for allowing it to run... on any system dialogs which may pop-up on first launch.

This AppleScript code works for me using the latest version of macOS Mojave.

on run
    tell application "Google Chrome" to launch
end run

on idle
    if application "Google Chrome" is not running then quit me
    tell application "Google Chrome" to tell window 1
        try
            set amazonTabs to (tabs whose URL starts with "https://www.amazon")
            delay 0.1
            if amazonTabs is not {} then
                set URL of item 1 of amazonTabs to "https://smile.amazon.com"
            end if
        end try
    end tell
    if application "Google Chrome" is not running then quit me
    return 0.5
end idle

on quit
    continue quit -- allows the script to quit
end quit

Due to some comments on the original code of my solution using too much of the computer resources, I believe the above code no longer produces those issues.

Safari Version

on run
    tell application "Safari" to launch
end run

on idle
    if application "Safari" is not running then quit me
    tell application "Safari" to tell window 1
        try
            set amazonTabs to (tabs whose URL starts with "https://www.amazon")
            delay 0.1
            if amazonTabs is not {} then
                set URL of item 1 of amazonTabs to "https://smile.amazon.com"
            end if
        end try
    end tell
    if application "Safari" is not running then quit me
    return 0.5
end idle

on quit
    continue quit -- allows the script to quit
end quit

To be able to control Safari using AppleScript, be sure to enable "Show Develop menu in menu bar" in Safari's Preferences.

You'll also need to select "Allow JavaScript from Apple Events" in Develop menu bar item.


Why does the Messages.app alert me to new messages quicker than my actual iPhone? The notification center clearly posts its alerts visible on my screen faster than my iPhone alerts me.

Does the path of my incoming texts change when I have the Messages.app configured to sync with my phone or does the Messages.app just alert faster, or is something else going on?

As you are active on your compy, it gives you first opportunity to answer from there. Only if you don't bring Messages to the front does it then ping the phone.

Personally, I like it - I can type a heck of a lot faster with 8 fingers than 2 thumbs ;)

& now it can do SMS too, fabulous.

BTW, if you don't like it, I've never seen any option to change that behaviour. It may auto-switch if you start answering on the phone instead, but I haven't specifically checked for if it does that.


Disabling "Exchange Password Required" Temporarily I have an Exchange account, that only works behind a corporate VPN on my
personal laptop.

As soon as I'm disconnected from the VPN this appears

If I click close, it just keeps on popping up.

I just want it to stop pestering me when I'm not connected to the VPN.

Outlook is (for comparison purposes) a glorified IMAP client. EG it keeps everything on the server and Outlook is just viewing and changing data on the server.
So what you need to do is to tell Outlook to stop looking on the server for changes, which it does every few seconds.
Fortunately there has been an option in Outlook for a long time to allow you to do this.

With Outlook active click on the Outlook menu
Select "Work Offline"
Enjoy your notification free existence

When you reconnect to your VPN you just have to go back to that same menu and select Work Online. With no dipping into network or notification settings, easy peasy.


How do I export event video from iMovie 9.0.4 to my external hard drive? I need to export video events to my external hard drive. I am using iMovie version 9.0.4. How do I do this.  All the instructions I'm finding on the web are for later versions of imovie.

Are you referring to an exported movie (i.e. all the bits stitched together) or just the events that you've collected that you would make up a movie project with?

If it is the former, then it is simply right clicking on the project and there should be an "Export movie..." option. I believe there is a menu bar item for this as well.

If you're referring to the latter, then I think it is as easy as just making a copy of the actual events from your hard drive to the external drive. You should be able to go to an individual event, right click and there should be a "Reveal in Finder" or some such option. You should then be able to just drag this event to the external hard drive (either as a move or a copy).

From memory, iMovie '09 doesn't care if you move the events or projects around on your hard drives. The only thing that might need attending to is that you'll have to re-launch iMovie for it to recognize that there is a movie or event on the other hard drive. You probably need to have the folders 'iMovie Events' or 'iMovie Projects' (can't remember how they're named right now, but you'll see them in your home directory) on those drives for iMovie to recognize it.

In short, you should be able to create a directory on your USB external drive like:

/Volumes/USB_External/iMovie Events

...and then copy whatever subdirectory from your /Users/myusername/iMovie Events/ folder to the external one.


how do I get an alert if our upload bandwidth used crosses a threshold? I need an alert when someone on our home network LAN is doing too much uploading. This is just one wifi router for a small home network.

I could keep an app running on one Mac (running Sierra) that would oversee this and ideally when upload bandwidth crosses a threshold of Mbps:

throttle upload
pop up alert on the mac
send an email alert

Is there a tool that could do this?

You want an edge router to shape the traffic, set quality of service and optionally have alarms. These are extremely reasonably priced for the features they allow.

https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Networks-ER-X-Router/dp/B0144R449W/

Some of the alerting won't be needed since you can shape the actual traffic rather than go react to it.


Two entries with identical name and inode in same directory? I have just seen the most remarkable thing in a deep corner of my large archive disk: a single directory containing two entries (subdirectories) with the same name and same inode number.

% ls -liaF path/to/directory/with/duplicate/entries
total 56
1227293 drwxr-xr-x  1 jdlh  staff    264  3 Jan  2016 ./
1227288 drwxr-xr-x  1 jdlh  staff    264  3 Jan  2016 ../
1227364 drwxr-xr-x  1 jdlh  staff    264 20 Feb  2009 .externalToolBuilders/
1227364 drwxr-xr-x  1 jdlh  staff    264 20 Feb  2009 .externalToolBuilders/
1227367 -rw-rw-rw-  1 jdlh  staff    859 20 Feb  2009 other_files

There are two entries named externalToolBuilders/ in this directory. They appear to share the same inode number, so they refer to the same thing, not just to two things which share the same name.

When I try to copy this directory to another file system volume using Finder, I get an error that "a directory with the name .externalToolBuilders already exists". The copy aborts at that point. I can refer to both entries with a single wildcard like diff -rq .ext*, and the command treats this as expanding to two arguments.

However, I can use some command line commands like cp -r, referring to the duplicate subdirectory, and only one of the entries gets copied.

It looks like this directory was expanded from a .zip archive. It is possible that the .zip archive was constructed incorrectly to have two entries with the same name, that the archive utility did not catch the mistake, but that Finder did.

[Update after more investigation: the problem is observed in directories which were not expanded from a .zip archive. The problem is observed in several locations, but all observed examples are on a volume hosted by a QNAP Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance, served to Mac OS through netatalk AFP support.]

Has anyone seen this on a Mac OS file system before? I find it most curious. How can it be constructed at will? Are there known drawbacks of it? How can one clean it up?

I finally figured out the underlying cause. The following is adapted from my blog post with my findings.

I connected to the shell of the original server's underlying Linux operating system. I looked at the corresponding directory in the server's underlying file system. This is what I saw (bowlderised for confidentiality and simplified for clarity):

% ls -la /share/Volume/path/to/directory/with/duplicate/entries
total 56
drwxr-xr-x  1 myuser  everyone      4096 Jan  3  2016 ./
drwxr-xr-x  1 myuser  everyone      4096 Aug 24 00:21 ../
drwxr-xr-x  1 myuser  everyone      4096 Aug 24 01:32 .externalToolBuilders/
drwxr-xr-x  1 myuser  everyone      4096 Feb 20  2009 :2eexternalToolBuilders/
-rw-rw-rw-  1 myuser  everyone      4096 Feb 20  2009 other_files

The crucial observation is the directory name, :2eexternalToolBuilders. It begins with the string ":2e", while the other directory entry begins with the string ".". From the point of view of the underlying operating system and file system, there are no duplicate entries in this directory. The two "externalToolBuilder" directories have different names.

The layers of software on top of the server's operating system — quite probably the netatalk AFP software — interpret the prefix ":2e" as standing for ".". When presenting the underlying directory entry :2eexternalToolBuilders through AFP to my Mac, it rewrites the entry's name to .externalToolBuilders . It fails to notice that there is another entry named .externalToolBuilders in that directory. The result is that my Mac sees, in the original server, a directory with an unexpected, and rule-violating, duplication.

I suspect that the use of prefix ":2e" in place of prefix "." is a convention from old Server Message Block (SMB) file server software.  SMB allowed Mac OS files to be stored on underlying Windows file systems. The Windows file system of the time did not permit filenames with a leading ".". "2e" can be read as a hex ASCII code for period ".". The colon ":" can be read as an escape character, meaning that it plus the following two hex digits should be presented as the character represented by the digits. Thus ":2e" in an underlying directory entry name stands for "." in the directory entry name presented by the server.

It turns out that the data on the original server was old enough to have been copied forward through multiple versions of server and server software. Sometimes I accessed it through SMB, and other times through AFP. I expect that the directory :2eexternalToolBuilders was created first, and the companion directory .externalToolBuilders was created later. They coexisted, especially for old data which I didn't access. Only when I used Finder to copy the directory did the conflict become apparent.

I speculate that the inconsistent behaviour I saw on my Mac, looking at the volume presented through AFP, is caused by Mac OS utilities treating directory entries differently depending on whether they look up a specific name in a directory, or enumerate all names.  The software no doubt assumed there can be no duplicate names among the entries. Utilities looking for a specific name will find one or other of the duplicates, and stop. There is no reason to look for another of that name, because none should exist. Utilities enumerating all names, or all names matching a wildcard, return all matching entries, not caring that some are duplicates. The duplicate inode number can be explained by the software enumerating all names, then for each name, using that name to look up the inode number corresponding to that name. The software returning inode numbers would of course end its search with the same directory entry both times, because it was looking for the same name both times.

The solution for me was to patrol the underlying filesystem of my original server, looking for cases of duplicates separated by "." and ":2e" prefixes. I found about five cases, with names like .externalToolBuilders, .svn, .libs, and .metadata. I used shell command to merge all files into the entry with the "." prefix, then delete the entry with the ":2e" prefix. This removed the duplication, and let the Finder copy succeed.


iTunes reload ID3 metadata I used an external program to mark the ID3 "BPM" metadata of 8,000 music files.  How can I get iTunes to reload metadata from those files?

Right now if I just begin playing a file it will recognize the new metadata, but there must be some way to force iTunes to do this in bulk.

Try breaking the ITL file & make iTunes rebuild it.
Don't just throw it away, & don't launch iTunes until there is a broken .itl file in place - that will not produce the desired result...

First, move the existing iTunes Library.itl to the desktop, just in case.
Don't touch the .xml, just the .itl file.

It can be found in ~/Music/iTunes/

Then…

Delete the existing ITL if you left a copy in the iTunes folder.
Open Terminal & enter this touch ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Library.itl That will create an empty ITL file, broken enough for our purposes.
Launch iTunes. It will now notice something is 'wrong' & start rebuilding the ITL file, using your existing XML file. The message is 'Importing ‘iTunes Music Library.xml’ This will take some time, maybe 15 minutes or so, depending on your Library size.

Breaking it rather than not having any .itl file there at all makes the difference between several minutes & several hours for the rebuild, & also how much playlist & other metadata is successfully kept.

You may find some album artwork missing - it never seems to be a truly perfect solution, but your play counts, playlists etc should all survive intact.