Problem in defaults command when adding app with blanks in name to dock I would like to add an app to my dock via a command.  I'm able to add an icon to the dock when there are no blanks in the path.  I get an error message when I have a blank in the path.

The command syntax came from jonn8's post here:

https://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=13548

works:

mac $ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '<dict><key>tile-data</key><dict><key>file-data</key><dict><key>_CFURLString</key><string>/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo/YahooWeather.app/</string><key>_CFURLStringType</key><integer>0</integer></dict></dict></dict>'
mac $

note: You need to restart the dock to see the change.

fails.  I tried various forms of the command:

mac $ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add 'tile-datafile-data_CFURLString' '/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo News, Send & Weather2/YahooWeather.app/''_CFURLStringType0'

2019-02-20 14:30:36.132 defaults[10804:2010845] Could not parse: tile-datafile-data_CFURLString.  Try single-quoting it.

mac $ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add 'tile-datafile-data_CFURLString/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo\ News,\ Send\ \&\ Weather2/YahooWeather.app/_CFURLStringType0'

2019-02-20 14:31:45.327 defaults[10807:2011376] Could not parse: tile-datafile-data_CFURLString/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo\ News,\ Send\ \&\ Weather2/YahooWeather.app/_CFURLStringType0.  Try single-quoting it.

mac $ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add 'tile-datafile-data_CFURLString/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo\ News\,\ Send\ \&\ Weather2/YahooWeather.app/_CFURLStringType0'

2019-02-20 14:33:01.617 defaults[10810:2011938] Could not parse: tile-datafile-data_CFURLString/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo\ News\,\ Send\ \&\ Weather2/YahooWeather.app/_CFURLStringType0.  Try single-quoting it.

mac $ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add 'tile-datafile-data_CFURLString/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo%20News,%20Send%20&%20Weather2/YahooWeather.app/_CFURLStringType0'

2019-02-20 14:34:31.043 defaults[10815:2012590] Could not parse: tile-datafile-data_CFURLString/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo%20News,%20Send%20&%20Weather2/YahooWeather.app/_CFURLStringType0.  Try single-quoting it.

Yet when I drag an app with blanks in the name I get via:

defaults read com.apple.dock

 autohide = 0;
    largesize = 66;
    "last-messagetrace-stamp" = "571873654.853677";
    magnification = 1;
    "minimize-to-application" = 0;
    "mod-count" = 732;
    orientation = bottom;
    "persistent-apps" =     (
                {
            GUID = 1620538228;
            "tile-data" =             {
                "bundle-identifier" = "com.apple.ScriptEditor.id.YahooWeather";
                "dock-extra" = 0;
                "file-data" =                 {
                    "_CFURLAliasData" = <00000000 00e80003 00010000 d876e512 0000482b 00000000 00208447 00208474 0000d872 b3e50000 00000920 fffe0000 00000000 0000ffff ffff0001 00100020 84470014 5ea40013 f6360000 0078000e 00220010 00590061 0068006f 006f0057 00650061 00740068 00650072 002e0061 00700070 000f001c 000d004d 00610063 0069006e 0074006f 00730068 00200053 00530044 0012003f 55736572 732f6d61 632f446f 776e6c6f 6164732f 5961686f 6f204e65 77732c20 53656e64 20262057 65617468 65722f59 61686f6f 57656174 6865722e 61707000 00130001 2f000015 0002000a ffff0000>;
                    "_CFURLString" = "file:///Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo%20News,%20Send%20&%20Weather/YahooWeather.app/";
                    "_CFURLStringType" = 15;
                };
                "file-label" = YahooWeather;
                "file-mod-date" = 3633311607;
                "file-type" = 41;
                "parent-mod-date" = 3633311607;
            };
            "tile-type" = "file-tile";
        },

I recommend using dockutil for this. You can either download and install this directly from github, or you can install it using Homebrew with the command

brew install dockutil

Once installed, you can use a command like this to add an app with spaces in the path

dockutil --add '/Users/mac/Downloads/Yahoo News, Send & Weather2/YahooWeather.app'


Siri - Change language without completing the setup I was playing with Siri and somehow I came up with the idea to change the language of Siri to Japanese, then I tried going through the set up (I managed to do so in Russian & totally forgot that Japanese is way different than English/Russian), but because my Japanese is non existent  I cannot complete it.

Now I don't have the option of changing the language and I cannot read the following text.

Can I reset the settings without resetting the phone itself?

Edit: So I cross posted this question on reddit.com. The 4th line to say is:

  Hey Siri, kyou no tenki wa?

And the fifth one is:

  Hey Siri, watashi desu.

That got me through the set up. One minute later @drivec's edit came up and I tried to replicate my problem with choosing Chinese to see if his solution works. Sadly, it doesn't.

Now I'm heading to reddit again to find a thread for Chinese language learners... Still open to suggestions how to change the language of Siri.

Select Setup “Hey Siri” Later. Then navigate to Settings > Siri & Search, and toggle on Press Home for Siri. A pop up will appear in your system language. Select the top option to confirm you want Siri on. Then, you can customize Siri’s language and voice. You can now enable “Hey Siri” in the language that you would like.

You will be unable to change the language for Siri until the Press Home for Siri option is enabled.


OS X Mountain Lion: Change resolution automatically when on battery I have a rMBP running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

I normally use the display at a 1680x1050. Is there a way to have the display automatically change resolution to the default retina when on battery, and revert to 1680x1050 when power is reconnected?

Your best bet would be to use ControlPlane (free) to detect when the power source has switched, and then fire off a shell script to change the resolution.

There's no built-in command line utility for changing the screen resolution, but someone came up with one that works well. You can download an installer here.

Then it's just a simple matter of setting ControlPlane to run screenresolution set 1440x900 or 1650x1050 as appropriate. Note that you may want to experiment with the screenresolution get command first to double check how it handles retina resolutions.


How to get access to an admin account without an admin account without losing data My wife just left me, but changed the password to the admin account on my iMac just to spite me, and I have no way of contacting her. I have a separate managed account for my brother when he was staying with us not too long ago, and she didn't change the password to that. She also signed in with her Apple ID so I can't reset the password, and I don't know her Apple ID password to reset it, nor do I have access to her email. Is there anything I can do to get access to the admin account?

Break a password
search for Mac Password Reset Software
Access user account data
If the fileVault was not enabled then you can access your account data by connecting your disk to another computer.
Contact Apple Support
You are not the first one in this situation. Apple Support should have already an answer for this question


Mac Pro 3.1 with GTX 770 won't boot I was given a MacPro 2008 with 1 CPU, 1TB hard-drive, no wifi and 6GB of memory.

I patched via DosDude1's patch tool so enable NVME.

Current Specs: 2x4core 3.2Ghz. Wifi, 32GB of RAM, PCIe/NVMe Samsung 512GB.

Updated the OS to Mojave.
All is well. the machine is fast.

Tried to install the GPU (GTX 770), which is supposedly natively supported in Mojave

Slot 1- New GPU

Slot 2- PCI/NVMe

Slot 3- Old GPU

With OLD out and monitor plugged into NEW - Nothing
With OLD IN and NEW in , monitor plugged into OLD - Hangs at status bar 50%
OLD IN, NEW OUT - Boots no problem

There are no drivers for NVidia 3rd party cards in Mojave.
Support ended at High Sierra.

MacVidCards - Which driver should I install for my new GPU? is pretty much the authority on this topic.

You can get to Mojave if you have a supported* ATI/AMD GPU with Metal capability, otherwise stay on High Sierra.

*Recommended GPU list, again from MacVidCards - I want the best graphics card for my Mac Pro, where do I start? No 3rd party drivers are needed for AMD cards, they still have Apple support - but only to Mojave, no further, for Mac Pro 3rd party cards.


Mountain Lion - Umlauts with english keyboard layout i have small problems with my keyboard typing umlauts.
On Lion i could type umlauts with " followed by the vowel
This is no longer possible. The only possibility i noticed is to type
umlauts now by alt+u followed by vowel.

Can i revert this to " + vowel

There are a few means of typing diacritical marks.

Input Sources Method

You can enable a German Language layout by opening Language & Text in System Preferences, going to the Input Sources, and checking the box next to German. This isn't quite the same as your previous set up, but it allows you to quickly type ü, ö and ä with the [, ; and ' keys respectively. If you check the Show Input menu in menu bar box, you can quickly switch between different layouts, if you want the standard English layout most of the time. The menu also lets you open the Keyboard Viewer, which will show you all the changes of the German layout.

Create a Custom Keyboard Layout

If the German Layout isn't exactly to your taste, you can use Ukelele to create a custom layout.

Open Ukelele, and click File → New From Current Input Source to start a new layout based on your current one. To make the ' key be your umlaut key (so that you press it, followed by a vowel to create the character), click the Create button, click the ' key (or whichever key you want; you can add modifier keys if you wish), then in the dialog that pops up, select Choose an existing dead key state and select State 4. If you want to rebind another key so that you can still type the ' character, double click the key you want to change, and change the output to '.

You'll then want to change the name of your layout so you can distinguish it. Set Keyboard Name… under the Keyboard menu will do this for you. You can also set a custom icon if you want.

Once you've finished with your layout, save it to your the ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ folder (or the /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ folder if you want it to apply for every user on your system). You should then be able to select it in the Input Sources section, as above.

Other Methods

By default on Lion and Mountain Lion, you can hold down a vowel to get a pop-up menu that gives you the various diacritics you can apply to that letter, like so:

You can either click on the one you want, or type the corresponding letter. This functionality is enabled by default, but can be disabled by running defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false in Terminal. To enable it, replace false with true.

The other common method, as you have discovered, is to type option ⌥u, followed by the vowel you want. This works on OS X going back to at least 10.4, possibly earlier.


Change installed AppleScript version Is there any way to change the installed version of AppleScript?

After mistakenly identifying my version of AppleScript as 1.0 by using a 15 year old script (turns out that just checks the version of the script you are currently running, which is implicitly 1.0) and trying to figure out how to upgrade, I was wondering how/if it's possible to change the installed version of AppleScript?

You can not change the version of AppleScript installed with OS X. AppleScript is a core part of the operating system.

If you are running the latest version of OS X, then you have the latest AppleScript.


Restore MacBook AIr (mid 2011) partitions I just messed up my partions on my harddisk.

The situation:

Installed windows 7 using bootcamp (NTFS).
After that i wanted to ceate a shared partition, on wich both MAC OS and Windows can write.
In windows 7 Disk Management i took 5 GB off the Bootcamp partion, and created a FAT32 partion from it.

Now when i boot only the windows partition is visible when i reboot (no macosx or restore) When i try to start windows it gives a short BSOD (acnt read t) and then reboots again.

I guess i should create some sort of bootable restore USB stick.
Any ideas how to get me going again ....please....

Hold down Command+R while booting it, and it should run Lion Recovery, either from your recovery partition if it still exists or directly over the Internet. See here for details.


Is this S.M.A.R.T. data normal for a 2013 Macbook Air SSD? I have had a Mid 2013 13" Macbook Air for a couple of years but have barely used it as I am more of a Windows person. However, one of the things that has bothered me a bit since owning it is that the Unexpected Power Loss Count attribute on the SSD is constantly spiking, going up by several thousand per hour. It makes no difference whether the laptop is plugged in or not.

I have disabled the Put hard disks to sleep when possible and I think it may have reduced the problem a little but I'm not 100% sure.

Currently I am running OS X 10.9 Mavericks. The SSD is listed as Apple SSD SD0128F which is known to be a SanDisk model. Here is the data from an app called SSD health:

Disk Utility has similar values although they are displayed in hexadecimal.

Whilst I realise that the raw values are not necessarily something to trust, it is nevertheless my understanding that increasing values for this attribute can indicate some kind of problem and can indicate a risk of data loss. Certainly this seems to be the case on Windows machines where the raw value is normally kept very low and associated with machines not being shut down properly or a driver issue.

I was hoping someone with a Macbook Air and similar Sandisk SD0XXXF type SSD could check their data to compare it to mine. The laptop is coming up to the end of its two year warranty so if there is an issue I would like to get it fixed soon.

Fundamentally the SMART data of your 2013 Macbook Air SSD is normal comparing it with my Apple SSD SD0128F (inside a Fusion drive).

Probably some attribute names (namely Unexpected Power Loss Count and Program Fail Count Chip) provided by your SMART app are false:
Using two different SMART utilities here, the ID# 174 has the attribute name Host_Reads_MiB and the ID# 175 has the attribute name Host_Writes_MiB in both applications, which mean all read / written Mebibytes (~ 1.05 MB) in the life time of the SSD.

In your case that would translate to ~773 GB read and ~367 GB written.
Considering 3 power on hours (ID 9) of the SSD this results in 71.6 MB/s read and 33.9 MB/s written constantly - which seems a bit high.

The values here are 14,894,386 and 20,658,326 which equal 15.6 TB read and 21,7 TB written. With 698 power on hours this results in 6.2 MB/s read and 8.6 MB/s written constantly.

You may test this by making notes of the two values (ID174/175), executing a full restart and comparing the new values with the old values:

In my case (Mavericks 10.9.5) on the SSD the ∆ host_reads_MiB is 1820 MB and the ∆ host_writes_MiB 291 MB. On the HDD the ∆ Total_LBA_READ is 475 MB and the ∆ Total_LBA_Written 22 MB. Taken together ~2.3 GB are read and 313 MB are written while restarting a Mac - which seem legit values.


I Installed Server.app on Yosemite to enable caching, but see many server processes in Task Manager (_xcsbuild and _devicemgr and _calendar processes) _xcsbuild and _devicemgr and _calendar processes seem to be the bulk.

None of them are using significant rescues but there are dozens.

How do I identify the launcctl jobs and turn them off?

You can stop the _xcsbuild "session" by running sudo xcrun xcscontrol --shutdown. This will also stop it from starting at launch.

Although it's probably a better idea to use xcscontrol, the individual launchctl tasks are:

com.apple.xcsd.plist
com.apple.xcscouch.plist
com.apple.xcsredis.plist
com.apple.xcscontrol.plist

You can also delete all the remaining data by running sudo xcrun xcscontrol --reset.

I'm still looking myself for _devicemgr and _calendar, but just this one is enough to let you shut down/reboot without the warning.


Display a text message on macOS Desktop background I would like to display a message, for example, the OS Version, the installed tool versions etc on the Desktop background of macOS.

I understand that the lockscreen text can be edited, I am not talking about that. That is not what I am interested in.

I know there is a way because I have seen my colleagues at my previous job do this.

NOTE: I want to do this from command line.

It is possible using NerdTool or GeekTool. You can create custom ones writing command line codes or display content from logs.

Find inspiration for code from here and mac AppStorm made a great article with lots of crazy geeklets .


Reverse search is not working on mysql terminal on my mac I was using the mysql in ubuntu terminal. Reverse search was working fine on my ubuntu terminal. Recently I switched to mac, on mac terminal reverse search works fine normally but when I logged in to mysql the reverse search was not working.

Please suggest some answers I will be using reverse search frequently.

Reverse search is a bash functionality where you search your command history on the fly. More on reverse search can be found here

Reverse search as triggered by Ctrl-R is a functionality provided by bash and which searches within the shell's command history. Once you start mysql you rely on the keyboard combinations available there, you can't use the bash shortcuts while mysql is running.

If you want to use reverse search with mysql you need a version with readline support compiled into it.


How can I convert AC3 audio files to AAC? I had a friend with a BluRay drive extract the audio from my copy of a concert BluRay disc into AC3 files which he returned to me, but now I'm not sure what the best way would be to convert those AC3 files into AAC files.

I've read that it's not possible to go directly from AC3->AAC, but instead have to use WAV as an intermediary; AC3->WAV->AAC. I can probably figure out how to do this, but why should I be the one to make two steps? Is there software already available (free preferred, but not required) that will simply let me plug in an AC3 file and get an AAC equivalent out?

When I say AAC equivalent, that means identical channel setup to the source AC3 files by default, but perhaps also preferences to constrain it to 2 channel or anything else I'd like.

I've already tried using Handbrake and Max to no avail.

VideoLAN can do this. Select "Streaming/Transcoding Wizard" from the File menu. Choose "Transcode/Save to file". On the next page click "Choose" and open your AC3 file. On the next page tick "Transcode audio" and choose "MPEG 4 Audio" and choose the desired bitrate. Click "Next", choose "MPEG 4 / MP4", click "Next" again and "Choose..." where to save the file. "Next" and "Finish".

The file VideoLAN creates has the extension .mp4, change it to .m4a and there you go.


How to disable URL sharing On macOS High Sierra (perhaps also earlier version of macOS), I noticed that when I open a URL in a webbrowser (tested with Safari and Opera), that on other Macs in the local network, the Docks shows an additional icon of the local browser on the left hand side. When I click this icon, it opens the URL that is open on the other Mac.

I have three questions: How does this (technically) work, how is this feature called, and how do I disable it?

As for the technology, I assumed that the URL of the frontmost browser window would be shared using a discovery service (DNS-SD, formerly Bonjour), but I couldn't detect it with a Bonjour browser. My second thought is that it is some kind of AirDrop technology, but I couldn't find it there either. So I'm not sure if this is sharing on a local LAN, or sharing using the same iCloud account.

It's called Handoff & is part of Continuity, enabling seamless working between all your devices.

As far as its underlying structure, Continuity uses Bluetooth, WiFi & internet connectivity, all linked via your iCloud account.
Handoff itself requires Bluetooth, so works at short distance only.

  Turn Handoff on or off

  Note: If you don’t see a Handoff option on your device, it doesn’t
  work with Handoff.

  On your Mac: Choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, click General, then select “Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices”
  (below “Recent items”). To turn it off, deselect the option.
  On iPad, iPhone or iPod touch: Go to Settings > General > Handoff, then tap to turn on Handoff. To turn it off, tap the option.
  On Apple Watch: Open the Watch app on iPhone, go to My Watch > General, then tap to turn on Enable Handoff. To turn it off, tap the
  option.


TimeMachine Keychain backup Does timemachine backup all keychain access keys for xcode security?  Or does that need to me configured to work correctly?

We want to back up a IOS App build machine.

All keychain files on the system get backed up to Time Machine.

They are of course each encrypted by different keys for different users so once you restore them, you may or may not be able to get into them as long as you remember the appropriate passwords. Do note that when you reset the password of an account using admin tools (or bringing the keychain to a different OS) - the keychain password is preserved to protect the contents. You really need to use the original password to unlock the files.

I've had no issues backing up Xcode and Xcode server using Time Machine. I would also use the Xcode preferences account pane to explicitly export your developer keys and accounts and store them on USB media and/or burn to DVD and store them offsite in a bank vault/cloud storage/whatever to keep those keys secure and available even if you lose your office due to a flood or fire.


how to restore Desktop files from iCloud Basically I signed out and in my apple Id to fix some handoff issues....
But I just noticed that all my files on Desktop DISAPPEAR !!!
I have the desktop folder in my iCloud but not sure what happens..
I restarted the laptop but won't fix..
Trash bin doesn't have the files from desktop either...
2018 Macbook Pro, OS: latest Big Sur

System Preferences... -> iCloud -> Options -> iCloud Drive -> Select the checkbox for Desktop & Document Folders.


What's the best way to test the battery life on a MacBook Air? I just recently got a MacBook Air and noticed that its battery life is much lower than Apple's estimate of 7 hours.

Since it is not the same, I would like to benchmark my battery life right now (while the battery is fairly new) so that in the future when the battery feels like it isn't holding as much charge, I can know if it's due to the battery life diminishing, or if it's simply my perception that the battery is not holding as much as it used to.

For example, say I find out that my MacBook Air only holds 5 hours of battery life today. A year later, I may notice that the battery isn't holding as much power, and decide I want to benchmark it. I test it again, and find out that its still holding 5 hours of battery (it just seemed like it was holding less). So while it's less than the 7 hours promised by Apple, my battery hasn't actually degraded at all, since it matches the same benchmark I used before. Thus, there is no point of replacing its batteries.

I have several programs running in the background (BetterTouchTool, KeyRemap4MacBook, DropBox, iAntiVirus), which I expect to be running throughout my MacBooks life. Do you think that when performing these battery benchmarks I should quit these applications or leave them running? My guess is that I should quit as many applications as possible to reduce the chance that one of them won't behave exactly the same between benchmarks.

Ideally I want the benchmark to not last a long time so that I don't waste time benchmarking, however, at the same time, I don't want to overheat the battery which could cause permanent damage.

Ideally the benchmark should not require me to be present at the computer and use it constantly (this would mean that I would need to temporarily disable the sleep timers), since then it wouldn't actually reflect a reproducible benchmark (e.g. if I need to use Facebook for 5 hours constantly during each benchmark, its VERY unlikely that I will do the exact same thing during both benchmarks... not to mention that Facebook's code a year later may be less or more efficient, causing more or less battery usage). Thus, I'm thinking an automated program which keeps using the battery at a consistent rate would be the best tool for the job.

Also, how would I know how long the battery lasted? I don't want to sit near the computer and constantly monitor if it's still on or not. I want to be able to set it and forget it. Then after recharging it, it will inform me of how long the battery lasted.

Do you have any suggestions for things that might help perform these kind of benchmarks?

Actually, an Apple battery gives you the percentage of its original capacity that it currently has. You can access that number through the free CoconutBattery app.

If you want to do your own benchmark, I recommend using BOINC and supporting a grid computing project, like SETI@home. These basically use 100% of your CPU from the moment you turn the program on until the moment you turn it off. This drains the battery pretty quick. Just be careful to check temperatures to make sure the computer doesn't overheat, especially with a MacBook Air. You probably should quit extra apps, but it shouldn't matter too much.


Why do I have to "transfer purchases" from my iPad when syncing to iTunes? I just started syncing my iPad to my desktop iTunes and it's taking a very long time to "transfer purchases" from the iPad. I was under the impression that iTunes remembered all my app downloads and purchases via iCloud (and verified I could see them in iTunes) so I don't understand why iTunes would need to transfer anything off my physical device.

What exactly is it doing and why is it necessary?

This process assumes that iCloud is not enabled.

It is possible to update apps on the device without doing so in iTunes. For this to work you will need to have enabled automatic downloads.

If you sync your iPad with iTunes without transfering purchases you coukld end up with older apps and losing the updates.

With iCloud there is no need for you to sync with iTunes, so if a device is plugged in iTunes would assume that you do not use iCloud and will transfer all the updated apps to the computer.

All in all it is more of a safety precaution if you are already using iCloud.


Mac Mini 2018 (w/T2) Ignores Cmd-R, Option, and anything else on reboot I have a 2018-era Mac Mini (Macmini8,1) running Catalina 10.15.7.
I am unable to get the system to recognize any commands I hold down during system reset. I have tried both my existing wireless keyboard (Microsoft with a USB dongle) and a plug-in USB keyboard. Regardless, if I hold down Option during boot, I get no menu. If I hold down Command-R, I get no Recovery mode. If I hold down Command-Option-P-R I do not get the behavior that indicates the NVRAM has been zapped. In all cases, I boot directly into the normal OS and log-in screen.
I did try the command line technique, but this did not solve the problem I'm after, as it's not possible to adjust the System Security Tools when you do it this way. :-(
Advice welcome--thanks!

I'd try an Apple keyboard.
One of my Mac Pros has a Logitech Windows keyboard, which it completely ignores if I want to do diagnostics. I have to use one of the Apple keyboards to get it to listen.


Do you need the username and password to remotely manage all admins via ARD? Or do you only need the username and password of one admin? I share a computer and we are both admins, but I am worried that the other admin could access my files via Apple Remote Desktop. Is that the case or would he need my password to access my user account and files via ARD?

It would be necessary for the admin trying to access remotely to know each password for the account. Your files would not be viewable, unless you were to specifically grant the other admin access via ARD or specific shared folder.


AirPods 2nd Gen. with firmware 2A364 dropped volume level in non-iOS Devices When I bought new Airpods 2nd gen, the firmware it came with was 1A673. The volume level on my android phone (OnePlus 6T) when connected was quite loud and everything was good.

But when I connected my Airpods to my iPad with iOS 13.1 the firmware on these got updated to 2A364 and then when connected to my android phone, music volume started getting low. I tried with other android phones too.

But the thing is during the phone calls the volume comes out loud but low only on music or videos.

How do I fix this?

I have the same issue and considering its an apple device, there isn't really any way to downgrade them. You're probably going to have to wait until apple fixes the bug.


Can't see bootcamp anymore after OS X install My mac pro (first gen) previously had a whole disc dedicated to Windows/bootcamp. I've now added a new disk to the machine. On this new disk I have installed OS X 10.6.

Now when I boot the machine, it loads straight into OS X without offering me the Windows option. Help?

Is the Boot Camp disk readable from OS X?  That's the first step. After making sure that your Mac can actually read the disk,

Hold down Option while booting to show a boot menu, or
Install rEFIt


My Macbook keeps two versions of iWork after updating I have updated the iWork applications from '09 to 2013. After updating, I do not know why Apple doesn't automatically delete the old version. So now, I have two versions on my Mac.

What's the best way to uninstall or delete the old version - should I just simply move it to Trash or use some uninstall application?

Would there be any effect with my old iWork files if I delete the old iWork version?

Since the apps have been rewritten, there have been some features missing from the new iWork that was in iWork '09. In addition, documents created with older iWork apps will be permanently updated to the new one, and the new files can remove certain features that existed in the documents created using iWork '09. Due to this, if you need to share files with people who are still on the old iWork that make use of such features, then you would need the old version of iWork to do this. This has brought about the opposite question…

When opening one of my files that I created using the iWork '09 Pages in the new Pages, some things were broken:

iWork '09 can be uninstalled simply by deleting the iWork '09 folder, however for a more complete uninstallation you can use an app such as AppCleaner to remove the preference files and other associated files, however beware that using such an app will probably not be able to tell the difference between the two versions, so any settings that you have set in the new iWork apps will be deleted if you attempt to clean the associated files. If you installed iWork '09 through a retail CD, the app data is not sandboxed, and you can tell whether the data is related to iWork '09 or the new iWork by checking the location of the files - if they are in the sandbox, they are for the new iWork. Unfortunately, this doesn't work if you installed iWork '09 through the Mac App Store. If you don't care for your settings in the new iWork (i.e. you haven't run it yet) then there should be no problems running AppCleaner since there should be no preference files for the new iWork yet.


Make Time Machine use two drives from Terminal My desire is to have two identical Time Machine backups on two different locally attached drives. My first thought was a clone via Carbon Copy Cloner, but it won't do it, because Apple won't let third parties copy the filesystem that is being used for Time Machine backups (that's what the "error"-message says before I can even start the clone).

The reason why I need a command line approach is because I want to include the two backups in task-chain in Carbon Copy Cloner.

Everything I have been trying in that direction fails (no help found online so far), as Time Machine would always start backing up to the same drive over and over again. So what I can say so far: tmutil is not the way to go, no matter what options I choose. But maybe I missed something?

If I manually start the backup by clicking "backup now" in macOS (High Sierra 10.13.6 by the way), Time Machine will backup to drive 1 first, if I click it again (after backup has finished), backup to drive 2. By the way: same bevaviour if I set a schedule via Time Machine Editor.

So I am looking for a Terminal-way to imitate the macOS-approach to start the backup, as it seems this is the only way to make Time Machine use two different drives. tmutil only uses the last destination, again and again. Even if I setdestination to drive 2. But again: maybe I missed something.

I don't think using terminal to configure Time Machine to back up to 2 different disks is necessary.  If you have Time Machine setup currently to back up to one external disk, you can go back to the Time Machine preferences in System Preferences and select a different drive to back up to.  After doing this you will be presented with the option of using both drives for Time Machine backups or change the existing drive. If you select the option of using two separate drives, the Time Machine backups will alternate destination drives for each backup.  At least these are the options I am presented with, while using two separate 3 tb Time Capsules.


Can I make Calendar on OS X automatically show me more upcoming weeks when focusing on today? In Calendar on OS X (I’m using Mavericks), in month view I can hit CMD-T to focus on today’s date.

When I do this, Calendar shows me all weeks in the current month. Near the end of the month (like we are now), this means I see the current week, the next week, and four previous weeks.

It would be more useful if Calendar showed me the current week and the next five weeks instead — I’m not particularly interested in what I’ve done recently, but seeing what I’m doing over the next few weeks would be good.

Is there any way to change the date range Calendar shows in month view when I focus on today?

I do not know about Automatic.

But if you just move (scroll) the today to the first line of the Month view, you will see the following 5 weeks.

Making it automatic is a problem, since the Month view is what it says. It has been set to show the month, while Today is a variable.


What will be changed if I install Configuration Profile on my iOS device? In some site offers and forces me to install Configuration Profiles on my iOS device. iOS will warn me it'll change something important but the site is talking nothing will be changed. Of course I can't trust the site. Because it feels something like ActiveX on IE, and the site is lying.

But now, some people (including my boss) pushes me to use the site. So I want to know exactly what will be changed when I install the Configuration Profile.

Unless the web site is part of a registration to allow you to run a custom app, your hesitation might be well founded.

Configuration profiles are used for two main purposes:

To allow you to load applications that are not approved on the Apple App Store.
Restrict what you do on the phone just like parental controls can restrict a mac from doing certain things.

That profile contains a secure certificate that tells the iPhone to trust and run applications that are tagged by an enterprise developer for in-house development. This is really nice for companies to make a program that doesn't match what Apple wants to sell or provides more security than selling it to the general public. The second half can mean the enterprise can issue a remote wipe, enforce password lock restrictions, prevent you from installing apps, and many many more diverse settings. You can get documentation on these restrictions at the Apple Enterprise Site and by downloading the iPhone Configuration Utility for free and playing with it to create your own profiles. You have no way of knowing what's in the profile unless you download it to your computer and have a look using the Configuration Utility. You can make a profile that changes no settings and just allows special apps to load and run.

If you ever want to remove a profile and find it's locked you out, you can always restore your device in iTunes losing all the data and programs and the profile in one fell swoop.


Confused by location of spinning circles on iphone6 I am trying to upload my entire iPhone 6 content to the icloud.  When I fire up my phone there is a spinning circle to the right of the wifi symbol but in the left half of the screen.  When I just turn on the screen but do not unlock it, and it is plugged in to charge, the spinning circle is now in the right half of the screen to the left of the "Battery Charge" and "Bluetooth" symbol.  Is something different being indicated by the slight change in position of the spinning circle?

I see this on my phone when the carrier name on the left is quite long, and icons on the left can get "pushed out" to the right of the time display.


How to save sent messages in same folder as message being replied to? One of my favorite features back when I used Outlook was the option to save sent emails in the same folder as the message being replied to. For example, if I had moved a message to folder A and was replying to that, my reply was saved in A, not Sent. (If I replied to a message in my Inbox, my reply went to the default Sent folder.)

This made it really easy to see an entire thread when I came back to it later. This workflow is a huge time-saver for me and is the only thing I miss from Outlook. Right now, I manually move sent messages to the folder with related messages which is tedious. Is there a way to recreate this feature from Outlook with Mac Mail? (I'm using Mac Mail 6.2 on OSX 10.8.2).

Mail can be extended to mimic pretty closely the feature you mention from Outlook.

OS X provides a feature called services that can be used to extend the functionality of an application (see http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/learn/index.html for more information).

I will use Automator and AppleScript to create a service that moves sent messages to the folder of the message being replied to, and then assign the standard reply keyboard shortcut (⌘R) to the service:

Close Mail.
Open Automator in folder Applications and choose Service:

Select Utilities under Library and drag Run AppleScript to the empty pane on the right:

Configure the service to receive no input in Mail:

Replace the contents of the Run AppleScript action with:

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Mail"
    try
        (* Get selected messages or exit *)
        set messageSelection to selection
        set selectedMessage to item 1 of messageSelection
        set replyMessage to reply selectedMessage opening window yes
        set messageID to message id of selectedMessage
        set currentMailbox to mailbox of selectedMessage
    on error
        return
    end try
    repeat
        (* Wait until reply message is sent *)
        delay 2
        try
            if replyMessage is not visible then exit repeat
        on error
            exit repeat
        end try
    end repeat
    synchronize with (account of currentMailbox)
    (* Wait while reply message is being sent *)
    delay 10
    (* Loop over all sent messages *)
    set sentMailbox to sent mailbox of application "Mail"
    set allSentMessages to messages of sentMailbox
    repeat with sentMessage in allSentMessages
        if source of sentMessage contains messageID then
            set mailbox of sentMessage to currentMailbox
            return
        end if
    end repeat
end tell

return input
end run

Save with a descriptive name like Reply and Move Sent Message to Current Folder. The service will be saved to ~/Library/Services/. This is what the service looks like:

Open System Preferences, select the Keyboard preference pane and then the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
Select Application Shortcuts, press the + button and change for application Mail the shortcut assigned to menu item Reply to ⌥⌘R. We change it to avoid conflicts when assigning ⌘R to the service below:

Select Services, scroll down to the service you previously added and set the keyboard shortcut to ⌘R:

Open Mail. Notice that Reply's shortcut is no longer ⌘R, but ⌥⌘R:

Also notice that there is a new service, accessible with ⌘R:

Now select a message in a folder, press ⌘R, type your reply and send it, in a few seconds you should see the sent message appear in the folder.

The script has some limitations and side effects:

The service can't tell canceled and sent messages apart. So, if you press ⌘R and then change your mind and close the window, the service will continue executing and check your Sent folder for matching IDs.
AppleScript doesn't offer any means of getting a list of replies to a message. My workaround is to get the message id of the message being replied to and search it in the sent messages.
The sent message can't be moved while being downloaded. AppleScript doesn't return any error message if that's the case, so I added a 10-second delay. A 5-second delay was not reliable in my tests, adapt it to your needs if necessary.
While the service searches the Sent folder, Mail slows down.


Command line "open DIRNAME" fails (but "open FILENAME" is OK) In a terminal (or xterm, or emacs) window, the command:
  open dirname
(where dirname is . or /tmp or /home/fred) doesn't open the the specified directory in Finder.  However:

Opening a non-directory file works fine, for all sorts of file types.
"open dirname" used to work.  Alas I can't identify what had changed, but AFAIR there was no OS upgrade or bash upgrade.
It doesn't work as root or as normal user.

GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin15)
Model Identifier:   iMac8,1
System Version: OS X 10.11.6 (15G22010)
Kernel Version: Darwin 15.6.0

from man open:

 -R  Reveals the file(s) in the Finder instead of opening them.

So try open -R '/home/fred'

(Technically you don't need the single-quotes around /home/fred unless there are spaces or special characters, but it doesn't hurt to use them anyway.)


Does OS X or Xcode have applications to manage cheat sheet/commands list? I'm learning coding on OS X, as I'm a beginner, I have to read cheat sheets and I have bunch of files like that, Git commands, Ubuntu Server commands, Node.js modules command and so on.

Today I saw my friend using Cloud9, it's Cloud IDE, it has a small area called "Commands" where he can search and read tiny description about it, also keyboard shortcut.

I know that feature is so specific to Cloud9, but do we have similar functionality in some app on OS X, where I can create and store my usually cheatsheets? I don't need 100% exactly the same, just same same is ok.

Update:
I'm going to write my own app, I will let you know if I can archive anything.

Try Dash.

  Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash stores snippets of code and instantly searches offline documentation sets for 150+ APIs ... You can even generate your own docsets or request docsets to be included.


MacOS keeps asking for System Keychain Keeps asking me for my keychain password. Here's what I've tried!

Reset my default keychains
Enter my login password
Says "Created a new empty “login” keychain with no password. Please change password using
Edit.
Changed the login keychain. Can access that fine.
Restart mac
After logging back in there are several prompts for the login keychain which I get past
When opening keychain access again, I unlock the keychain system. It prompts for domain pw.
If I try to change the access controls to allow all apps to access the vpn, it asks for the system keychain again, which I don't know.

I don't know what to do. Can someone please help!

Delete my keychain cookies and after I was good. Took two seconds to fix after me spending hours to troubleshoot it myself.


Extracting WhereFroms Data to a File I see a number of posts on how to delete the WhereFrom extended attributes data, but I would like to do the opposite and extract the information into a file.

I download Creative Commons photos from Flickr and provide photo credits on my blog.

I would like to set up a Folder Action that extracts the WhereFrom URL from the photo into a file, that way I can easily copy-paste the URL into my blog photo credit. It would also give me an archive of all my downloads.

I tried to reverse-engineer some of the delete scripts on StackExchange but didn't have any luck.

Try this in a Run Applescript Action:

    on run {input, parameters}
    set filePath to "/Users/UserName/Documents/WhereFroms.txt"

    repeat with i from 1 to number of items in input
        set this_item to item i of input
        tell application "Finder" to set displayedname to displayed name of this_item
        set this_item to this_item as string
        set this_item to POSIX path of this_item as string
        set theFroms to (do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemWhereFroms " & quoted form of this_item)
        set allFroms to (do shell script "echo " & quoted form of theFroms & "| cut -d'(' -f2- |cut -d')' -f1 ")--strip crap

        set WhereFroms to "File: " & displayedname & return & "From:  " & (allFroms & return & return)
        do shell script "echo " & quoted form of WhereFroms & "  >> " & quoted form of filePath
    end repeat

end run


Mac Battery malfunctioning in just 2 years It's just been 2 years since I have been using my MacBook air. I use it for mostly for reading books, videos on YouTube or movies. The battery shows "service needed". The battery cycle count is just 312. I have shown it to the service center and they told me that the battery needs replacement.

Now I don't understand what has happened to the battery. My usage of the laptop is just normal. Also I did leave it attached to the charger even after 100% charging but that is only more  beneficial for the battery as many posts here state too.

Then why has the battery started malfunctioning when apple promises 1000 cycle counts and it's just been 312 counts.

What can be the issue. Was the battery that I originally got faulty.

Your battery needs to be replaced.  Period.
There’s a very similar question that already addresses this question

Macbook Pro Battery 0% and wrong date

However, you have a few statements in your question that should be addressed.

My usage of the laptop is just normal... I use it for mostly for reading books, videos on YouTube or movies

It doesn’t matter.  The battery has no idea (and doesn’t care) what you use it for.  Whether you read eBooks, write code or crunch numbers, your battery will do the same thing which is use a chemical reaction to move electrons.

Also I did leave it attached to the charger even after 100% charging but that is only more beneficial for the battery as many posts here state too.

This s fallacy perpetuated by well meaning but misinformed folks throughout the Internet.  Leaving your charger plugged in doesn’t mean your battery is still charging.  If you see the green light (MagSafe chargers) or get the “100% charged indicator” and your charger is still plugged in, it doesn’t mean the charger is still jamming electrons into the battery.  The SMC will “disconnect” the charger electronically to stop charging.  If you’re using the Mac, it will draw most, if not all the power from the charger first, battery second.  The battery itself has an overcharge/undercharge protection circuit to also protect it.
You having to manage your Mac’s battery charging process - a machine that can literally recognize your voice and fingerprints, and produce some if the most brilliant videos on the fastest performing SSDs on the market somehow can’t manage a simple task like charging it’s battery is simply baffling.

Then why has the battery started malfunctioning when apple promises 1000 cycle counts and it's just been 312 counts.

Apple promises no such thing.  The expectation is that a battery “should” have a life expectancy, on average, of 1000 charges.  It’s the typical bell curve with some batteries lasting less and others lasting more.  Granted, 2 years and 312 cycles is on the narrow, left side if the curve, but it’s not improbable nor unheard of.  It’s just less common.
Why does it fail so soon?  Any number of reasons, but likely a manufacturing defect.  These are “man-made” devices so they’re not perfect.  Each battery is composed of individual cells, you may have had one or more cells go bad. Maybe the SEI layer that is both necessary to conduct the electrons across the cell but also detrimental in that as it builds, capacity dies, has built up to the point that it can't function any more.  Only a lab with specialized equipment and high power microscopes can tell.

Was the battery that I originally got faulty.

No exactly.  The warranty of a Mac in the US 1 year.  You can purchase Apple Care for an additional 2.  I have a saying that that if a company is willing to warranty something for X years, means it is expected to last X+1 years.  Using this “theory”, a new Mac with AppleCare including battery coverage is 3 years.  The expected lifespan of a battery is 3 to 5 years.  Seems to fit.
That doesn't mean there are outliers.  There are some that last 6+ years meaning Apple couldn’t be happier.  There are some that last only a couple of months meaning Apple is on the hook for a replacement much sooner than they were expecting.
TL;DR
The battery died prematurely.  It happens as it’s a manufactured product.  Unfortunately it happened sooner than you expected but there’s no “fault” to be assigned.  It’s definitely a bummer and very inconvenient but there was nothing you did (most importantly) nor anything Apple did that caused it to fail.


How to access ~/Library from network booted OSX Would you tell me How to access ~/Library of my local disk from network booted OSX

"~/Library" is the short path for "/Users/UserName/Library" where "UserName" is the name of the user.

"/Users/UserName/Library" is the short path for "/Volumes/VolumeName/Users/UserName/Library" where "VolumeName" is the name of the volume.

"/Volumes/VolumeName/Users/UserName/Library" is the full path of a user library.

If you want to access a user library from a different volume than the start / boot volume, then you must use the full path.

Select "Go To Folder" in the "Go" menu of the Finder, enter the full path and confirm.

Please note that you might get a permission error if you (aka the current user) do not have access to this folder.


iPhone 3 cannot login with existing Apple ID Phone: iPhone 3 or iPhone 3GS
iOS: 6.1.6

I tried to login to App Store , iCloud and iTunes with an existing Apple ID, it shows the below alert:

I’ve done that multi factor login from my MacBook to iPad and vice versa. But on my iPhone it does not work. It doesn’t give me an option to type in the 6 digit verification code. What should I do? I don’t mind resetting it.

You need to enter:

[Your Password][Your Verification Code]

into the password field (without the brackets).

For example, if my password was TerriblePassword and my verification code was 123456, I would enter:

TerriblePassword123456

Source: Apple's Support Page (Thanks @redarm!)


All USB sticks mount as readonly, FAT32 or VFAT. Rebooting mounts them read-write I'm using Mac OS 10.12.6 Sierra.
Recently I've found that whenever I (rarely) reach for a usb stick to transfer images or files, they mount readonly for me. I can't seem to figure out how to mount them read-write, or what causes this.

Also the main solution I found has been to reboot the macbook pro 15 and then it'll use usb sticks normally as read-write.

It seems something to do with waking from deep sleep… but I'd like to find a way to kick it into "normal operation" without rebooting. OR to prevent it from abnormal behavior to begin with.

I read an apple forum about this, A user in the forum said that if you format the pen drive to FAT32 in Disk utility you might solve your problem. Make sure you have a backup of all the contents in the pendrive because erasing it will remove all files.


What pointing devices can be used with iPadOS 13? For reasons that are beyond incomprehensible to me, Apple is not supporting Apple pointing devices for use with iPadOS 13.  Nor are they providing a list of supported devices.  I spent a great deal of time trying to get my trackpad to work before discovering the fine print that Apple won't even support its own hardware.

Googling 'bluetooth pointing devices compatible with ipad' does not yield any useful results.

How can I know what to buy without wasting immense time and money through trial and error?

Update: I am not asking how to enable the feature.  That is readily available in the search results.

I have used multiple Logitech Bluetooth mice and they have all seemed to work just fine (my daily driver is the MX Vertical).

I do believe any generic bluetooth mouse works just fine (and by generic i mean it at least has a scroll wheel, 2 buttons and a laser at the bottom)


What are these characters from the OS X keyboard? I've never seen these characters before and never seen them in action either.

Does anybody know what they are and what they're used for?

Maybe somebody has this drop of trivia lying around...

Option+Shift+6

  ﬂ

Option+Shift+5

  ﬁ

These are U+fb01 and fb02, Latin Small Ligature Fl and Fi.  They are in Unicode really only because they were contained in legacy 8 bit character sets like MacRoman, but should no longer be used for anything.  In modern technology such ligatures are created by fonts on the basis of the underlying codes for the separate characters, which is what should aways be input in place of option shift 5/6.


All my files and pictures got lost or deleted while installing the OS X El Capitan software All my files and pictures got lost or deleted while installing the OS X El Capitan software! Is there a way to get at least my iPhoto Library back? I have not made a back up before.

Thanks for your help!

You can try a recovery software like wondershare recovery data or Disk Drill (i think you can download free trial), Those soft will be able to detect lost data (even deleted). There are many other soft you can test, but those two are great !

Hope this will help,

Peace


Should services be turned off prior to performing updates? Let's say you want to upgrade your OS X server from Yosemite 10.10.1 to 10.10.2. Should you turn off OS X Server services prior to the upgrade?

Should you also turn off when upgrading from Server.app 4.0 to 4.1?

I can't seem to find any Apple documentation that suggests to do it but then again, Apple documentation seems limited in a lot of regards.

Most likely an upgrade like that will behave like Java updates do in macs. It will replace the software in the background and won't start using the new software until you restart the program.

In terms of best practices, I would say go ahead and update it with services still running and as soon as it's done, restart the machine to give it a fresh run.


iCloud backup from old 4S to new 4S? I just got a replacement for my 4S. Before, I did an iCloud backup and thought I could just restore from that. But with the new phone, it says there's no backup to restore from available.

Any ideas?

Backups are generally portable across any and all iOS device. Could the new device be at a lower software level? Try an over the air update to ios 5.0.1 and also be sure everything is exact in the account. xxx@mac.com is not always the same as xxx@me.com.


dnsextd messages in console I'm running OS X 10.10.1 and keep getting thousands of lines like the following in the system console log.

12/16/14 2:57:02.937 PM dnsextd[9384]: ConnectToServer - 10 failed attempts.  Aborting.
12/16/14 2:57:02.937 PM dnsextd[9384]: UpdateSRV: ConnectToServer failed
12/16/14 2:57:02.937 PM dnsextd[9384]: main: SetUpdateSRV - Socket is not connected
12/16/14 2:57:02.938 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.dnsextd[9384]) **Service exited with abnormal code: 1**
12/16/14 2:57:02.945 PM dnsextd[9447]: dnsextd starting
12/16/14 2:57:02.945 PM dnsextd[9447]: main: setrlimit - Invalid argument
12/16/14 2:57:02.945 PM dnsextd[9447]: Using default file descriptor resource limit
12/16/14 2:57:02.945 PM dnsextd[9447]: started_via_launchd
12/16/14 2:57:02.946 PM dnsextd[9447]: ConnectToServer: connect - Socket is not connected
12/16/14 2:57:02.946 PM dnsextd[9447]: ConnectToServer - retrying connection
12/16/14 2:57:03.809 PM dnsextd[9447]: ConnectToServer: connect - Socket is not connected
12/16/14 2:57:03.809 PM dnsextd[9447]: ConnectToServer - retrying connection
12/16/14 2:57:05.447 PM dnsextd[9447]: ConnectToServer: connect - Socket is not connected
12/16/14 2:57:05.448 PM dnsextd[9447]: ConnectToServer - retrying connection

It seems dnsextd is always exiting with error code 1. Has anybody had the same issue? Any ideas on how to fix this?
I've tried rebooting, stopping/starting dnsextd from launchctl, but had no luck.

As the man page says "dnsextd is a daemon invoked at boot time, running alongside BIND 9, to implement two EDNS0 extensions to the standard DNS protocol."

My guess is that you are getting these errors because dnsextd is running on your Mac and trying to talk to BIND, but BIND is not running. You can check this by running the following command. If it comes back blank, then BIND is not running.

pgrep named

I think the solution to this problem is to just turn dnsextd off using the below command. Unless you are running this Mac as a DNS server for other devices then I'm not sure why you'd need either running.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dnsextd.plist


Can I request Apple to expedite the approval of a new version of my app to rectify a critical bug If my app is live and users are facing a critical issue, can I upload another build and ask Apple to make it live within a day or two?

Yes; there's a feature called Expedited app review precisely for these cases. From my personal experience, it takes usually about 24 hours to complete, but that's no guarantee.

From the linked page:

  Expedited App Review

  If you face extenuating circumstances, you can request the review of your app to be expedited. These circumstances include fixing a critical bug in your app on the App Store or releasing your app to coincide with an event you are directly associated with.

  Urgent Bug Fix

  If you've submitted an update to fix a critical bug in your app on the App Store and you are requesting an expedited review, be sure to include the steps to reproduce the bug on the current version of your app.

  Time-Sensitive Event

  For apps associated with an event, we recommend you plan and schedule the release of your app in iTunes Connect. However, if your app is still in review and the launch of your event is quickly approaching, you can request to have your app review expedited. When submitting your request, it's important to include the event, date of the event, and your app's association with the event.

  Please Note: Expedited reviews are granted on a limited basis and we cannot guarantee that every request will be expedited.

It's a (partly) automated process, you can just sign in and request one on the Developer Portal.


Application development ON the iPod Touch? I have a pretty long commute to work and own an iPod Touch. I figure it would be nice to do some simple programming on the way. I'm not picky on which language to code on. Also, I usually have no internet connection on my commute so developing and editing on the cloud is out.

I've been looking through the app store but haven't found any apps that offer a "development environment" or an editor with a compiler. It's also not clear to me if I can access the iPod Touch's OS itself and do some coding on it.

Is any development ON the iPod Touch possible? Does an app for this exist?

I don't think there will be any with a compiler, due to iOS and App Store restrictions. The best thing on an iPhone or iPod I think would be a text editor to write code (I use Nebulous and its Dropbox syncing) and an SSH app (I use Prompt) to compile and run the code. Though it might be tough to keep a connection during a commute for SSH.

If you need a computer to SSH to, you could use an Amazon EC2 app to create and use a box on the go. I haven't done that yet, so I don't have a good recommendation, but it's on my list of things to try.

Also, if you have an iPad, Textastic is a fantastic code editor, but it's not available on iPhone or iPod.


When I try to sync my iPad, I get an "Unknown Error (-39)" It still seems to sync most things - the error occurs late in the sync toward the end of the last step, which seems to be photo-related, and my apps are up to date, etc.

The main thing I've noticed that's off is my pictures - when I open the pictures app, I get a message saying:

  iTunes Sync Needed - High Resolution
  images synced via itunes are missing.
  Connect your device to the computer
  you sync photos from and launch iTunes
  to sync them.

Since the issue seems like it might be photo-related, I tried repairing my Aperture library's permissions and database - no help.

Any ideas?

Try turning off photo sync completely, syncing, and then turning it back on.


AirPods blinking orange as long as they are both in the case, one of the pods don’t work My AirPods keep blinking orange. When I take one out and shut the case, on opening it back it’s a stable green, if I return the pod back it starts blinking orange again, and if I connect to my device only the right pod works. I’ve tried to reset with the button at the back of the case to no avail.

Try wipe off the metal end of the problematic AirPod, and then used a Q-tip to clean the bottom of the case where the metal end of the AirPod made contact with the case. If this doesn’t work..well... contact Apple to advise that your product is not working properly upon receipt:

•   http://www.apple.com/contact/
•   Contact - Official Apple Support
•   https://twitter.com/applesupport
•   http://www.apple.com/retail/geniusbar/

:)


Is it possible to display all of the Service titles in the context menu? When one has more than three Services in a context menu, what occurs is that they are automatically kept within a "Services" sub-menu. The user then must hover over this sub-menu before they may click on the desired Service title.

Is it possible to show all 4 Service titles in the context menu?

To show all Services on the Context Menu in Finder, do the following.

In Terminal, use the following commands:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences NSServicesMinimumItemCountForContextSubmenu -int 100001
killall -HUP Finder

Now all applicable Services in Finder's Context Menu should appear without being in a Services Sub Menu.

To revert to default behavior, use the following commands in Terminal:

defaults delete .GlobalPreferences NSServicesMinimumItemCountForContextSubmenu
killall -HUP Finder

Note: I've only tested this in OS X 10.8.5 and OS X 10.11.6 and it worked in both, so I'd assume it should work in the OS X versions in between. I've also tested this it in macOS 10.12.2 and it works, so I'd assume other versions of macOS 10.12.x it should work.

Update Note: This should also have an affect on other Context Menus in Applications other then Finder. However, applications that are running at the time this change is made must be restarted for this to take effect. After this change has been made, applications opened afterwards will be affected immediately.  You can also just logout/login for the change to take effect globally, all at once.


Error: SHA256 mismatch with brew install I tried to install an application with homebrew:

$ brew install poppler

And then towards the end of the installation, I notice the following error:

==> Downloading https://github.com/GNOME/gobject-introspection/commit/4a724ac699f0c34fba2fb452cfadea11540325e8.patch
######################################################################## 100.0%
Error: SHA256 mismatch
Expected: 047c350bad2d222f1037c3ce1889444ebc1095df76120188037c4eb2900848c4
Actual: 928403cf8eb092c664791f5e08cff1199ac9e945d8d5fd21c455c688efbc6dd5
Archive: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/gobject-introspection--patch-047c350bad2d222f1037c3ce1889444ebc1095df76120188037c4eb2900848c4.patch
To retry an incomplete download, remove the file above.

What happened here? Dos this error prevent the application from completing installation?

I had a similar issue with brew install.

Try running rm ${file_above} && brew install poppler


Garbled screen graphics after wake up Macbook from full battery drain A couple times now when my Macbook Pro running Yosemite was left unplugged overnight (with the screen open) I have come back to it like this
(That's the drained battery symbol that indicates you need to plug in your Mac)
The graphics continue to be garbled like that when it starts up after some charging. The problem is resolved when the computer restarts.

My question is: should I be concerned by this? I have never seen this on other Apple devices. My device is still under warranty, so I could take it in, but if it's not really a problem / won't get worse than this, maybe not worth the effort.

I have a 2008 15" MacBook Pro that does the same thing. Every time the battery drains, and I plug it back in, the screen will be completely distorted (but will go back to normal after reboot). Apple has replaced my logic board twice for this problem, and it still occurs. It's just an annoyance, as the laptop is still running great 7 years later. I wouldn't worry too much about it, unless it begins to happen while using the OS.


Macbook Air 2017 unable to connect to wifi networks with different country codes I just got a used Macbook Air for a pretty good price, but it has problems with wifi. The previous owner said it would connect to some networks, but not others.

It connected to my phone hotspot just fine, so I figured the wifi-card isn't actually broken.

Here at home, I was unable to connect to my router. I tried using wireless diagnostics and one of the things it told me is that there was a conflicting country code. I gather that, for wifi, the Macbook gets its own country code from the first wireless network it sees. The first time I tried, the laptop had the country code 'JP', and was unable to connect. Then, I tried again, and it had the code 'GB', and was also unable to connect. The third time, I sat down next to my own router, and got the code 'NL' and I was able to connect just fine.

With my own Macbook Pro this has never been an issue and I have always been able to connect to every wifi network.

It seems like the country codes are the issue. Why is the Macbook Air unable to connect to wifi networks of a different country code? Is there something I can do about this, or will this be an issue forever?

It is simply not true that the MacBook Air is unable to connect to WiFi networks of a different country code. So - no reason can be given.

Your observations have lead you to believe that the above mentioned is true, but something else is really at play. One of the things that "sounds odd" in your description is that you say that "GB" doesn't work, but "NL" works perfectly fine. The definition of what GB and NL allows in terms of WiFi is exactly the same - so there's no difference of having a GB or NL country code when connecting to a WiFi network.

I think you instead have some sort of configuration issue with your Mac. You can try fixing this by opening System Preferences, then click Network and click the "Location" drop-down and choose "Edit Locations". Now add a new location, and setup your WiFi from scratch with that location.

Try using that Location and see if that solves your WiFi issues.


Why won't Siri recognise my home address? How on earth do you get Siri to remind you to do something when you arrive at a location in iOS 6?  It worked fine in iOS 5 but I've never got it to work on iOS 6 - it just always seems confused about what I'm trying to do. What is the correct syntax?

Siri has been pointed at my own contact record in settings and that record contains my correct address under "home".

EDIT:
I've noticed that siri also can't answer the question "How do I get home". It just says "I couldn't find an address for Nick - home".

Oddly, if I totally delete my "home" address and ask "how do I get home?", Siri says "I don't know what your home address is, Nick. Tap your name if you'd like to add it." and shows me my contact record. This is different to what it does if my home address has been set on my contact record.

The fact that it behaves differently if the address is keyed or not makes me think it's definitely finding my home address on my contact record, but for some reason doesn't want to use it. If I tap my address on my contact, it shows my correct location on the map so it's geocoding it correctly to coordinates, so I really don't see why this doesn't work.

This is what's happening:

OK I've found out the answer myself.

It turns out that although the Maps app can geocode (find the location of) my address, Siri can't. It must be using a different geocoder to the Apple Maps app.

After much faffing, I found the easiest way to fix this is to drop a marker on my house using the Apple Maps app and then add this to my own contact record as "home". This fixes the problem and allows Siri to know where home is. However it then means my address is incomplete if I use it for other purposes or in other apps). The only way round this seems to be add it back and tag it as "address" (NOT "home") as a second copy of the same address. Really messy.

Clearly this is a bug in Siri which will hopefully be fixed one day (I won't hold my breath). I don't recall having this problem in iOS 5, so I think this was introduced in iOS 6.


Zooming in macOS iBooks I am reading an .ibooks file which I downloaded from the iBooks Store in the macOS iBooks app. On iOS, to zoom in on the text you can simply double tap or use a pinch gesture. However, it doesn't seem like you can zoom in on an iBook in macOS iBooks with those same gestures on the trackpad. Choosing Window > Zoom only affects the size of the window, and unfortunately not the size of the text.

So, is there any way to zoom in on a book in macOS iBooks?

It's not natively supported in the iBook app to zoom or change text size of .ibooks files

However I found a way to zoom in. It's maybe not the most elegant solution. But it can be very useful. I also suggest you play with the Zoom settings to get the mode that's best for you.

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click Accessibility, and then click Zoom.
Select “Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom.”

To zoom in use alt + cmd + =
To zoom out use alt + cmd + -


List of specific apps on my iPhone with Siri integration How do I see that list and the commands I can use for each app?

These two options may help, although it's not exactly what you're after.

One

When using Siri, at the bottom left of the screen, you'll see a '?'. If you tap on the question mark (?) Siri will list the apps you can use with Siri and tapping on an individual app will list some examples for you.

Another way to access this screen is to just say something like "Hey Siri, what can you do?".

Two

Go to Settings > Siri > App Support

This will list 3rd party apps that you can allow to process requests via Siri. For example, if you have LinkedIn installed, it should be listed here.

Summary

As far as an exhaustive list of apps and how they can be used with Siri, I do think this is an unrealistic expectation. After all there are over 2 million apps currently in the App Store. How would you make this work in a practical sense? How could it be populated/maintained in a timely and useful manner? I'm not saying it'd be impossible, just that it's not really practical and the benefits would not justify the effort involved.

Instead, as developers take advantage of the Siri APIs the onus is really on them to highlight and 'sell' the virtues of their product. I know that's what I'll be doing.


USB storage not detected anymore I have a USB key that was working and now cannot be mounted anymore. The device is detected but is not mounted. After a one minute or so it moves to not detected state.
The command ioreg -p IOUSB -w0 -l returns the following just after the connection. After a while, the device disappears from the list.

+-o USB Flash Disk@14100000  <class AppleUSBDevice, id 0x100007502, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (7 ms), retain 19>
|   {
|     "sessionID" = 140116672718152
|     "iManufacturer" = 1
|     "bNumConfigurations" = 1
|     "idProduct" = 4096
|     "bcdDevice" = 4352
|     "Bus Power Available" = 250
|     "USB Address" = 10
|     "bMaxPacketSize0" = 64
|     "iProduct" = 2
|     "iSerialNumber" = 3
|     "bDeviceClass" = 0
|     "Built-In" = No
|     "locationID" = 336592896
|     "bDeviceSubClass" = 0
|     "bcdUSB" = 512
|     "USB Product Name" = "USB Flash Disk"
|     "PortNum" = 1
|     "non-removable" = "no"
|     "IOCFPlugInTypes" = {"9dc7b780-9ec0-11d4-a54f-000a27052861"="IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOUSBLib.bundle"}
|     "bDeviceProtocol" = 0
|     "IOUserClientClass" = "IOUSBDeviceUserClientV2"
|     "IOPowerManagement" = {"DevicePowerState"=0,"CurrentPowerState"=4,"CapabilityFlags"=32768,"MaxPowerState"=4,"DriverPowerState"=4}
|     "kUSBCurrentConfiguration" = 1
|     "Device Speed" = 2
|     "USB Vendor Name" = "General"
|     "idVendor" = 2316
|     "IOGeneralInterest" = "IOCommand is not serializable"
|     "USB Serial Number" = "04IUVY6CK9W0QCJJ"
|     "IOClassNameOverride" = "IOUSBDevice"
|   }
|
+-o USB Flash Disk@14200000  <class AppleUSBDevice, id 0x100007700, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (7 ms), retain 18>
    {
      "sessionID" = 142173080787396
      "iManufacturer" = 1
      "bNumConfigurations" = 1
      "idProduct" = 4096
      "bcdDevice" = 4352
      "Bus Power Available" = 250
      "USB Address" = 31
      "bMaxPacketSize0" = 64
      "iProduct" = 2
      "iSerialNumber" = 3
      "bDeviceClass" = 0
      "Built-In" = No
      "locationID" = 337641472
      "bDeviceSubClass" = 0
      "bcdUSB" = 512
      "USB Product Name" = "USB Flash Disk"
      "PortNum" = 2
      "non-removable" = "no"
      "IOCFPlugInTypes" = {"9dc7b780-9ec0-11d4-a54f-000a27052861"="IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOUSBLib.bundle"}
      "bDeviceProtocol" = 0
      "IOUserClientClass" = "IOUSBDeviceUserClientV2"
      "IOPowerManagement" = {"DevicePowerState"=0,"CurrentPowerState"=4,"CapabilityFlags"=32768,"MaxPowerState"=4,"DriverPowerState"=4}
      "kUSBCurrentConfiguration" = 1
      "Device Speed" = 2
      "USB Vendor Name" = "General"
      "idVendor" = 2316
      "IOGeneralInterest" = "IOCommand is not serializable"
      "USB Serial Number" = "04P6O04UC8YSC6QU"
      "IOClassNameOverride" = "IOUSBDevice"
    }

Device 140116672718152 is correctly detected and works correctly (it's an USB key of the same type) and device 142173080787396 is the problematic one. It is detected and listed but after a while it disappears from the list. Is there a way to reset the USB key firmware or something like that? I cannot connect on another laptop the key. I think it's not working since I have disconnected without eject during a transfer but I'm not sure about that.

In short, it's time to throw it away & get a new one.

If a USB key encounters a write error, then it will attempt to lock the device into read-only mode. If it tried to do this as power was being removed it may have failed to complete that task & be left in an uncertain state.

This is, to all intents & purposes, irreversible.

The solution is to discard it & copy your data to a new USB key.

If for any inconceivable reason it was the only copy of that data, then your recourse would be to a specialist recovery company.

The same applies to such as SD cards, as well as USB flash drives.
Once they start to go bad, they are not worth the effort of fighting them to try squeeze a little more life out of them.
Discard & replace.


Is it possible to exclude an app from the Screen time activity? My statistics are skewed because of navigation applications (Maps/Waze), and I wish they were more accurate. Is it possible to exclude an application from Screen Time?
I tried to add Maps in "Always Allowed" but it still counts when I'm on the app.

Always Allowed doesn’t exclude an app from Screen Time, all it means is the app isn’t subject to any restrictions.

At the moment there is no way to disable a specific app from Screen Time, you can turn it off if it really annoys you or when Screen Time is displayed deduct the time from the app from the total time if you want to exclude the app manually.


Animate a pie-chart in Keynote Suppose I want to compare two situations via two pie-charts. I know I can grow a pie-chart per part in an animation or on click. But I would like to be able to transition that pie-chart to new numbers and it grows or shrinks the appropriate parts automagically.

Clarification: I would like to animate between these two pie-charts:

I also wanted this effect , and am getting close to what I want by setting the first slide transition to 'Magic Move' with zero delay and Start Transition on 'Automatically', and then duplicating the first slide about 25 times, and incrementing each segment data value on each slide to get close to 'smooth clock winding' action on 'Play'


Keychain management command-line utility I'am trying to fully automate the process FileVault setup on multiple OS X user machines.
E.g. to have a Bash script as a result.
One of the steps is Institutional Recovery Key (IRK) generation. This key is required to access encrypted hard disk without user credentials.
The generation command sudo security create-filevaultmaster-keychain create a public-private key pair.
But only the public one must be installed on the user machine.
I can delete it using Keychain Access utility.
But this is a GUI utility and cannot be called from the Bash.
So, how can i remove the private key from the keychain-file from the command line?

Or maybe there are already working scripts for this task :)

P.S. I've already read this but find no answer:
IRK management
security command man

I haven't tried recovering data with it yet but I think the following works:

security create-filevaultmaster-keychain ~/Desktop/FileVaultMaster.keychain

security export -k ~/Desktop/FileVaultMaster.keychain -t certs -o ~/Desktop/FileVaultMasterPublic.cer

sudo fdesetup changerecovery -institutional -certificate ~/Desktop/FileVaultMasterPublic.cer

In my case FileVault was already enabled so I just added it after the fact.


How do I remove multiple owners from a file/folder? While trying to set up MAMP/PHPStorm, I CHOWNed the OWNER of my Sites folder to _www from myUser. Since this did not resolve the problem I was experiencing, I attempted to CHOWN myUser /Users/myUser/Documents/Sites... which worked, except Get Info shows both as owners, and ls -l reports _www as the (primary?) owner. I could not modify the folder contents, even though myUser is one of the owners.

When I ls -leO@ as suggested in this answer, I see the following:

drwxr-xr-x+ 31 _www  wheel  -  1054 Dec 5 12:38 Sites
  0: user:myUser allow list,add_file,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,
  writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity

I sudo chown :staff Sites thinking this will give myUser more clout, and then sudo chown myUser: Sites which works in removing _www, but I'm left with:

MacBook-Pro:Documents myUser$ ls -leO@
...
drwxr-xr-x+ 31 myUser  staff  -  1054 Dec 5 12:38 Sites
  0: user:myUser allow list,add_file,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,
  writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity
...

I've read the MAN page for CHMOD and ACL as suggested in this answer, and I've tried chmod -a#0 Sites and variations with no success. How do I remove the ACL/xattr?

I'm not sure how to do it from Terminal, but you could use a tool like BatChmod to redo the file permissions (and clear ACLs).
http://www.lagentesoft.com/batchmod/


Internal microphone extremely quiet I have a 2018 MacBook Pro running Mojave. Midway through a Zoom meeting, people were suddenly not able to hear me. I checked System Preferences and saw that my internal microphone was selected as the input, but it wasn't picking up my voice (though it picked up the sounds of me typing or tapping). After turning my input volume to max and disabling ambient noise reduction, I was still only barely audible.

I have tried resetting my PRAM and SMC, but to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It sounds like a hardware failure, however if you have the ability create a boot drive for yourself and try starting up off the fresh volume to test the microphone, that would be ideal.

If you don't have a boot drive ready yet, you can try creating a test user account to try the microphone under.

Check the drive using disk utility, just in case as well.

I have a faulty microphone on an iPad that acts the exact same way -- physical taps and bumps will be picked up but nothing standard. I suspect the microphone unit fell out of place, something shorted out, or something physical damaged it.


How does iOS and apps deal with low to no disk storage? I was trying to determine why all apps were crashing on a phone when I looked at the storage and saw it was completely at-capacity. I tried restarting and exiting all background tasks to no avail. The entire 32GB of storage was shown as being used, and as soon as we deleted an app that took up a sizeable chunk of disk, everything started working again. And many people have the same issue.
This, however, goes against my intuition as to memory management coming from a computer science background — iOS does not swap pages to the disk, so we wouldn't need to reserve space on disk for this. In addition, it's not an issue with RAM as exiting all running background apps didn't change anything, nor did restarting the phone.
I understand that the kernel would kill processes if it were an affair with RAM contention and resident pages in RAM getting too high, but that's not the case here. So my question is then, if there is no swapping to disk, and it's not a RAM affair, what is the most likely cause for apps to all completely crash like this without even starting up? I'm assuming they're not all trying to write to disk on startup...

This is a design decision that is made to handle situations where operators of the device choose to ignore low storage space warnings or are not present to see them and react appropriately.
From your comments, you described that the system works well enough to let you inspect storage, choose to delete apps and data and continue working - that’s the case in my experience. The system sacrifices the ability to launch new apps, install updates and do other non-critical functions when storage space is close to empty.
In most cases, the system is able to send a sequence of disk space “warning” and disk space “critical” signals to the OS, the first party apps and third party apps requesting they purge any cached storage, but in the end, you can overload the filesystem and this is the last ditch attempt to get the device in the hands of someone that will realize that files or apps need to be deleted to resume normal operations.
For the nerds that program, there are entire API and processes around this to let an app know how much space is available for opportunistic storage and critical storage:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsurlvolumeavailablecapacityforimportantusagekey

One of the better articles on this is:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsurlresourcekey/checking_volume_storage_capacity

In the end, it’s up to the programmer of an app if they want to check and let you know they may stop working or if they want to be simple in design and let you figure out if your device is full in other manners. Neither decisions is completely right or completely wrong. The OS will nag you about low storage, so most apps let that handle education these days and they just postpone large downloads when things get tight.


Macbook Pro won't shut down I recently bought the 13"Macbook Pro retina (mid 2014). When I try to shut the laptop down, it doesn't work. I tried by manually closing all open applications but nothing happens when I press Apple Menu > Shutdown. I also tried by pressing control+option+cmd+off but same results.

To find out which app is preventing the shutdown use

alt + cmd + esc

Try to force quit it from that screen.

If all fails hold the Power button for 10 seconds.

That is the most crude way to shut down and as last option.


iTunes automatically pauses when VLC plays a file I noticed that if I have some background music on iTunes and I start playing a VLC video, iTunes automatically stops the music.

Although this can be a very useful thing, I would prefer to have control of it, for example in my case I would like to keep listening the background music when I watch a non-music video.

Is there an option in iTunes to disable pausing? I tried to look at the iTunes options but I didn't find any, perhaps it is a setting which cannot be changed?

After a long search, I have realized that the setting to pause iTunes is not in iTunes, but it is on VLC. So it is not iTunes pausing the music because it detects another media player, but it is VLC which is pausing iTunes when playing files.

To disable this, just open the preferences of VLC and click on the following items:

Show All -> Interface -> Main interfaces -> macosx

After that, on the Control external music players field, you can select among Do nothing, Pause iTunes and Spotify and Pause and resume iTunes and Spotify. I selected the first option :-)

I share this knowledge here in Q&A style in case someone else was struggling with this.


How do I use a numerical variable and a loop in automator? Since scripting is not that powerful in case of Preview.app, I am trying to find the solution with Automator. Here's the problem:

I've got a protected pdf file of 130 pages. It happens that I can't print it, but I can save it page by page as jpg file. The problem is when I save it as jpeg, it closes the original file and opens the newly created jpeg file. So the task is pretty much simple (with the proper knowledge of variables and loops).

I need to make a loop, that would open my pdf file with Preview.app, go to page number i, save the document as i&".jpg", wait a second and close Preview.app.

I can't find any example of building a loop.
The Russian translation is disgusting (and I am not aware of a simple way of making it English once again), which makes the task even harder.
I can't find any example of using variables as a parameter of the recorded 'Type' command.

After googling for a while, it looks like the best solution for this simple task  is to do that manually...

Intheory, s.o. could copy this or clone this file, name it document.wflow and put it inside a folder structure like this /pdfToJpeg.workflow/Contents/document.wflow and open it in Automator.

This is the structure of a .workflow file when you look at Package Content.

This workflow will ask for a file to select, extract any page as pdf, rename each file like page_01.jpg and convert it from pdf to jpg.

Please be patient, its Automator, but you can invoke it step by step from Automator.app.

This is how workflow looks like:


What to do about a bad video card in a 2010 Mac? It seems it was just 2013 when Yan asked a question about a Mac showing a strange display. I'm now getting exactly that display, on a Mac that seems to me to be around the same vintage as Yan's, 2010.

The responses to Yan's question talked about plugging in an external monitor. But if the video card is bad, won't the image in the external monitor be just the same one Yan photographed? In other words, doesn't the video signal to every monitor emerge from the same bad video card?

What can I do to retrieve the files from my Mac without allowing anyone else access to these files? I would be willing to replace the Mac if that would somehow facilitate. Is there really a way to just plug in another monitor, or some other new hardware, into the old Mac? If I have to take the Mac to the shop to replace the video card, will that allow the repair shop access to my files? Is there a way to get the files from the Mac without replacing the video card? What are my options?

This answer is based on the assumption that you've got an iMac, however, the general solutions (not anything iMac specific) presented here will work for virtually any Mac model.

Use Target Disk Mode

If you can boot your computer (even if the screen is dead) put it into Target Disk Mode by booting it while simultaneously holding the T key.  The computers need to be connected by a Thunderbolt or FireWire cable.  The iMacs from this vintage (through late 2011) all came with a FireWire port.  Thunderbolt didn't come onto the scene until 2012.

FireWire Cable
Thunderbolt to Firewire Adapter - Only necessary if using a newer Mac with Thunderbolt ports

Once connected, you can boot the computers and copy the files over.

Remove the Hard Drive

Since your graphic card has died and they are quite expensive on the secondary market, it makes sense to simply extract the drive and connect it to a USB adapter to copy the files over.

The iMacs through late 2011 all came with the removable glass where you could simply use a couple of suction cups to pull the glass off.  The display panel was held in with 12 Torx screws.  Once removed, you have access to all of the components.  Ifixit has an excellent step-by-step guide to do this.

* Source:  iFixit.com. Photo credit: Sam Goldheart and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Remove the HDD and connect it to another Mac with a USB to SATA Adapter with Power.  The drives in the iMac are 3.5" so they need a 12V supply - more than what a USB port can provide by itself.  If you have a spare 3.5" drive enclosure, that will work as well.

Again, once connected, you can copy your files over from the drive to your connected computer.


Migration Assistant fails on FireWire Mavericks-to-Mavericks migration I have the following setup and am attempting the use Migration Assistant over FireWire:

Source machine: Early 2009 24-inch iMac running OS X 10.9
Destination
machine: Latest MacBook Pro Retina running OS X 10.9
Connection:
FireWire 800 - Thunderbolt Adapter

But on both ends of the process Migration Assistant gets stuck "looking for other machines".

I also have made FireWire networking active on the source machine (I assume it comes active on the new destination machine), and turned off LittleSnitch, which I normally have running.

What am I missing? Are there other settings somewhere (unmentioned anywhere in Apple's documentation) that I need to check? I've also tried using a direct Ethernet connection to connect my machines, but have a different set of issues there.

I have the same setup except my iMac sports Thunderbolt.  I had the same
problem and never solved it, but I did find the following work-around helpful:

Place the iMac in Target Mode by going to Apple|System Preferences|Startup Disk, make sure your startup disk is highlighted, select Target Disk Mode and confirm.  Connect the computers by Firewire or Ethernet. Start Migration Assistant on the MacBook Pro, allow it to change your system, and select the iMac's startup disk.
From there it is easy sailing - choose what you want and how to handle the user accounts and you are home and dry!  Don't forget to eject all connected iMac drives before unplugging the cables.


Does Mac keeps a history of all actions I have done with files/folders similar to terminal? 2 days ago I accidentally deleted my work folder which include many projects aI have worked on them for last 2 weeks and I didn't packed them up at all.

I used Dr.Cleaner to clean up "un-wanted" files, but it seems (i don't remember exactly) I deleted many files permanently and my work folder is one of them.

After that I used my computer for many operations (read/delete/add/copy and past files and folders), for about 12 hours until, I discovered the sad news.

Unfortunately I didn't use Time Machine, I didn't backup manually at all, and I didn't have any software installed prior deletion to help me to recover what I have lost.

I stopped doing any internal operations (mentioned above) to avoid overwrite the physical part on my hard drive (hoping to recover that area using 3rd part software).

Right now I'm using "Wondershare Data Recover", "Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery" and "Disk Drill" to recover what I have lost, but nothing promising yet.

I don't know if I just gave up and accept the fact my work file is gone. Or there are other way to help recover these files or at least understand it's history??!!

My question is, Does Mac keeps history of all action user does for every file/folder? Similar to Terminal (bash/zsh)?

Also, I'm looking for Dr.Cleaner log file (if there's any) that keeps history of it's all action and operation. I can't find it at all. Does it have one?

Last thing, after all of that, do I still have a chance to recover my lost folder??

Thanks!

To your first question:

Yes it does keep record of lots of stuff--lots of records.

Open the Console log and have fun looking through it.

To your other questions:

Only if you realize the mistake immediately some stuff is recoverable.

It also depends how full your disk is (theoretically), so the deleted information would not be immediately overwritten.


Find files in current folder without spotlight I have often read about how good the MacOS finder is, but I cannot for the life of me work out how to get it to actually find something.

Is it possible to type in a partial file name in the Search Box and get it to highlight matching files in the current folder?

I can find files in the shell, and I also have EasyFind and Find Any File, but surely the MacOS finder can do a simple thing like that … ?

I don’t want to use Spotlight, as it doesn’t do the job simply, and I am looking for files on unindexed volumes.

This should work out of the box, actually.

Open Finder Preferences and set the default search location to "current folder"

In the search box of Finder start typing the name of the file (or a part of it) to get matching files/folders


Git: command not found during Git installation (Mac OSX 10.6) I am trying to install Git on my Mac (OSX 10.6) following the official Git tutorial.

I had no problem until I had to set my username and my email.

Every time I tried I got -bash: git: command not found

I tried echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile + restarted the Terminal. It still doesn't work.

What do you think I should do to solve the problem?

I've never used the OSX GIT installer before and don't really want to.

Edit 1: the command issue is fixed

Edit 2: the result of the command /usr/bin/grep PATH .* is

.bash_history:echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile
.bash_history:echo $PATH
.bash_history:echo $PATH
.bash_history:echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile
.bash_history:echo $PATH
.bash_history:echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin
.bash_history::$PATH' >> ~/.profile
.bash_history:echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin
.bash_history:echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin
.bash_history:echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin
.bash_history::$PATH' >> ~/.profile
.bash_history:echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile
.bash_history:echo $PATH
.bash_history:echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile
.bash_history:echo $PATH
.bash_history:echo $PATH
.bash_history:echo $PATH
.profile:export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH
.profile:export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH
.profile:export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH
.profile:export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH
.profile:export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH
.profile:export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:$PATH

Where did you install git to? Different install methods will put it in different places. Double check your install process. On my machine i have it in /usr/bin/

You need to ensure your PATH contains the directory that the git lives in.

You can either run locate git to search for it, you'll probably have to build your locate database if you haven't already.

Of you can just try a few typical places

/usr/bin/git --version

Once you know where it is installed, can modify your PATH file by editing .profile or .bash_profile to add the appropriate value.


What is changing ComputerName? So there is a this thing called computer name that can be set either via Preferences -> Sharing, or sudo scutil --set ComputerName "My Name"

When I use

sudo scutil --set ComputerName "My Name"

and then use

sudo scutil --get ComputerName

I get something stupid like "My Name (2)". My question is: What is changing the name?

Because there is a question Computer name keeps changing OSX 10.10 (14A389) which asks how to overcome automatic change, and some hah are being suggested.

I don't want to hack things, I want to know what is changing the name, so then in perspective I can just kill it.

UPDATE: Updating to 10.10.4 fixes this problem. In this point release discoveryd is replaced by the previously ousted mDNSResponder.

The originally supplied answer follows...

This is caused by an interaction with a daemon called discoveryd (that is present in Yosemite OS X 10.10.0 to 10.10.3) and the sleep proxies that are present within Apple TVs and Airports.

I outlined a workaround here; which is basically disabling "Wake for Network Access", which is also suggested in the post you linked to. You could also stop using your Apple TV/s and Apple Airport/s if you are in a position that allows you to do so.

9to5Mac reports that discoveryd has been dropped in OS X 10.10.4 beta and replaced with the previously ousted mDNSResponder daemon. So this problem should be fixed in OS X 10.10.4.


How do I change the font in all pages in Pages app at once? I want to change font everywhere in a pages document in one go without doing it manually for every page.I would like to know how can I do this.

First select all of the document by pressing Command+A. Then click on Format > Style on the Pages toolbar at the top and choose the font you wish on the sidebar on the right.