How do I unlock my ipad? HI I was given an ipad as a gift but my kids played with it and now it is asking for a pin no. every time i turn it on kids cant remember any pin no. so can anyone help me please?

You will have to restore your iPad to factory settings if you can't remember the password for it. If you didn't make a backup earlier, your data will be gone. Forever. You can find the instructions in this article: If you forgot the passcode for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, or your device is disabled


Automator task to open screenshots in Preview automatically I'm pretty new to Automator but it seems like it's possible - I just can't seem to get it to work.

I'd like to be able to take a screenshot and then open it up in Preview for easy annotation. If it's possible I'd then like to copy it to clipboard after saving but that's not 100% needed.

I've tried following a few articles but never received good results. The one that got me closest is here: https://andytaylor.me/2014/05/22/better-os-x-screenshots-with-shell-scripts/

I don't need Dropbox so I edited that part out and I modified it based on some other suggestions - here's what I have:

directoryname="Screenshots"
filename="shot_$(date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S').png"
path="$HOME/Pictures/$directoryname/"
mkdir -p "$path"
screencapture -o -i "$path$filename"
open -a 'Preview' "$path$filename"

When I run the Automator task it says that it was completed successfully but it just opens up Preview, it doesn't even allow me to do a screencapture. When I copy/paste into Terminal it hangs on the last line - but successfully allows me to do the screencapture.

@Feanux I was answering your question and then you deleted it but I see you reposted it, anyway I have made a Automator app that does this and will attach a screenshot (that was taken by Automator).
As you can see it takes two screenshots, one for clipboard and one for preview/save

UPDATE:


Can I upgrade my MacBook with more than 4GB of RAM? I have an Early 2008 13 inch MacBook updated to Lion. According to this Apple KB the max RAM I can add is 4GB.

I know the OS that came with the initial computer didn't support 64 bit. So is this 4 GB limit a hardware or software limitation? Can I add more than 4 GB now that I have Lion (I understand it supports 64 bit)?

You can add up to 6GB of RAM in your MacBook. You can see the list here.


How do I generate cryptographically random numbers on OSX? I need to generate several cryptographically random numbers in OSX and save it to a text file.

How should I go about doing this?

The /dev/random file on OS X is fairly good since it uses the Yarrow algorithm which many consider to be fairly secure in generating random numbers.

You can use dd to pull a character at a time off the stream and as long as you use caution in converting it into a number range you care to see in your text file, this is a fairly painless way to get some decent randomness.

dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null >> /path/to/your/file


Disable Time Machine Auto Cleaning According to Apple, Time Machine removes all but one backup for every month, all but one backup for every week of the last month, and all but one backup for every day of the last week.

I have plenty of space on my NAS (about 10 TB), and I'm currently using about 1TB of space, so space is not a concern.

How would I disable this automatic removal of old backups? Or is this impossible for Time Machine and I should use an alternative program such as rsync?

Time Machine Keeps Weekly Backups.

If you want to keep backups that are more regular than weekly, but less regularly than hourly then it's probably best to use a different solution. Time Machine doesn't have these settings (apparently not even in hidden settings).

Time machine keeps weekly backups as space permits. It also stores daily backups for the past month, and hourly backups for the past 24 hours.

Pros and Cons (case examples)

In the case that you create a file one day and then delete it about two days later, more than a month passes before you want to recover the file, and the weekly backup that is kept for that time period is not between the time the file was created and the time it was deleted, then a daily backup will keep the file and a weekly backup will not. This is the specific scenario where another backup solution will be desirable. However if you create a file one hour, delete it two hours later, and less than a day has passed, then Time Machine would have the file backed up, but a daily backup is unlikely to have it backed up.

I suspect that you'll find doing hourly backups with rsync will be more intensive for your computer than Time Machine's hourly backups.


How to unmount a locked volume? Sometimes, a volume refuses to eject because some program is using them.

Sadly, Finder doesn't give the identity nor gives a way to solve the problem.

So, how do you solve this problem in a clean way, without using a terminal ?

Using the terminal, I may find a way to eject it, but it's not reliable.

sudo lsof | grep volumeName certainly gives some information, but I don't feel like killing random processes in order to unmount a volume. Also, not everybody is willing to run command in a terminal.

I also don't want to force eject the volume. I think we shouldn't have to force the ejection when we didn't initially run the program that locks the volume.

Processes that are frequently involved are: mds and notifyd.

Killing mds does not guarantee that the ejection of the volume will be possible. mds process is respawned after getting killed, and continues preventing the ejection of the drive.

I also noticed that mds can be running and using files, and still not preventing the ejection of the volume, so I'm not even sure that it's mds fault.

I've found this solution that has worked reliably several times already today.

The process that, in my case, was responsible for the failure of the ejection was:

SystemUIS (as seen in top in a terminal) which is in fact SystemUIServer.

Here is how to kill it without a terminal: run Activity Monitor, find SystemUIServer (type UI in the top right search field), and stop it with the top left button (stop button).


Print really long webpages to PDF Safari or Chrome -- any quick solution? I have tried using Safari and Chrome to print really long webpages to PDF and both of them take awfully long... When I export the webpage to html and open it in TextEdit, it loads fine and even the Export to PDF is really fast...but the formatting isn't pretty with TextEdit's Print to PDF. Safari WebContent is processing really slowly and I wanted to ask if there is any other solution for printing awfully long webpages into pdfs quickly...

I use a free program called paparazzi https://derailer.org/paparazzi/
It will make log web pages in to a single pdf or Jpg of the appropriate size.


Is there any way of limiting the space devoted to log files? Is there any way of limiting the space devoted to log files?

I was running a little short of disk space and checked where it was used (if anyone is interested the following shows directories > 1GB) sudo du -hxd1 ~/Library/Developer | grep 'G\t'

I discovered ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter was using almost 2GB (much of this seems to have been migrated from a Mavericks installation - even less than useless). Manually pruning this seems to be inordinately time consuming. I would like to automatically limit this to a reasonable size.

The vast bulk of the logs are in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice either mobileassetd or JetsamEvent and refer to an iPhone or iPad, and seem to be of little value on the Mac.

Since we are talking about the result of application crashes, if such files keep on building up, I would pursue the reason of why this happens in the first place.  Once fixed, just dump the files manually and move on.

On a stable system, the folder ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter should be empty.  Having almost 2 GB of crash dumps means that there is (or was) something wrong.

As you probably know, log files and crash dumps can be used to diagnose issues on your computer in order to repair said issues.  Blindly removing them, will get you some disk space back, but the original issue will still be there and you will not be happy on the long run.

Due to the reason mentioned above (second paragraph of this answer), there is no automated task to limit the space for those files.  You could, if you are into scripting or Automator (or both), write a script or Automator Folder Action workflow (or a combination of both) and watch that folder's size and when reaching a threshold removing the oldest entries.


Emails being replace to Holiday in the United States? I recently started noticing that my emails were being replace to "Holidays in the United States" on the default Apple mail app. This is annoying because now I have to send emails from the browser. My name is correct in settings, does anyone know how to fix this?

I am on macOS Sierra.

This has been a bug with Apple mail for a very long time (Funny because the issue just came back to me today). There isn't a clear solution for this issue, but I just go ahead and refer to this thread when I get this issue:

My gmail name comes up as Holidays in the United States

What seems to be the issue is the syncing with Google Calendars. Variations of this bug can be found when your name is changed to one of your contacts.


Moving and upgrading an iPhoto library A few months ago I had an external drive with my iPhoto Library for iPhoto 4 on it failed. I was able to recover everything from the drive successfully and continued using the iPhoto library in its new location.

I've recently upgraded to a new computer and thought, I'd be able to just copy my iPhoto Library folder to the new computer, "iPhoto '11" do its upgrade and everything would work smoothly. That has not been the case. iPhoto wouldn't even open the library, so I tried using iPhoto Library Manager to rebuild the library. This helped to rebuild the library with about 1/3 of the photos, but couldn't find the rest because it was looking for them on the drive that had failed. I've tried rebuilding this on both the old and new computers with the same results. I have also tried modifying the AlbumData.xml file to reference the correct drive, but it still didn't find the photos.

Is there anything else I can try to get my library transferred?

I ended up hooking up the old drive again, and used iPhoto Library Manager to rebuild the library. It pulled the photos off the old drive and built a new library that appears to be working correctly. I'm not sure why I had to get the old drive involved, but it appears to have worked.


Should I use the adapter or the battery? I want to know when my MBP's battery was fully charged it's better to unplug my adapter and use my battery power or still let use adapter power?

I somewhere read that when MBP's battery was fully charged it's just use adapter for power and don't use battery, if it's true it didn't hurt adapter and reduce it's lifetime?

I have Macbook Pro 13" dual core(2.53)

Read what Apple has to say about notebook batteries:

Apple’s Batteries Page
Apple’s Notebook Batteries Page

EDIT for the lazy(es) who don’t want to read the links:

lithium-ion batteries need to be fully discharged and recharged at least once a month. Go ahead and create an iCal reminder…
Leaving it plugged won’t affect it, as long as you remember to do (1) every 30 days.
If you have to “store” and put your battery away for more than six months, you should definitely store the battery with a 50% charge. Reasons are listed in the corresponding link.
Pay attention to temperatures, they can damage and severely hamper battery operation.

I hope this makes everybody happy.

Now… as a final note: the new unibody stuff coming from Apple doesn’t have removable batteries, however, the battery design is the same… those are lithium-ion batteries, no matter how fancy they make it look. Macbooks do not have a nuclear core in there, so the same rules apply, except that… well, you can’t remove it for storage, so more than ever, remember the 30 day rule.


macOS not allowing me to reallocate free space! I had two partitions on my mac, both had macOS installed on it as a result both had a recovery partiton, now I deleted one pratition cause it got corrupted due to some script which I ran.

Now mac has only one partition which is the startup volume.

The problem is the previous partition created a free space upon removing it and it is not allocated to anyone, now when I try to delete the free space, Disk Utility fails to carry out the opertaion!

Both the partitons also created a public folder, which I don't know much about cause I never created it, now the problem is what should I do with this public folder should I remove it from my system preferences or should I keep it, I don't know what might happen/get deleted if I remove it from my iMac!

So basically two issues have arised as a consequence of the corruption and running a custom script for tweaking your mac!

I went through this https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/305lik/help_removing_the_free_space_partition/ post but it doesn't seems to be linked with my issue as I don't have any (No CoreStorage logical volume groups found - Terminal output for diskutil cs list; diskutil list)

And when I try to resize the disk via Terminal I get this error:

Sayans-iMac:~ sayanhussain$ diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 R
Resizing to full size (fit to fill)
Started partitioning on disk0s2 macOS
Error: -69742: The requested size change for the target disk or a related disk is too small; please try a different disk or partition, or make a larger change
Sayans-iMac:~ sayanhussain$

Ok so the error is now solved. What I did!

First I ran diskutil list to view all the active partitions, now I had only on partiton so added a new partiton via DiskUtility

Then I once again ran diskutil list, now I was able to see the newly added partiton

Now what I did ti remove the free space is that I merged both the partitions together

To merge two partitons I simply ran this command in terminal

Sayans-iMac:~ sayanhussain$ diskutil mergePartitions
Usage:  diskutil mergePartitions [force] format name
        DiskIdentifier|DeviceNode DiskIdentifier|DeviceNode

Merge two or more pre-existing partitions into one.  The first disk parameter
is the starting partition; the second disk parameter is the ending partition;
this given range of two or more partitions will be merged into one.

All partitions in the range, except for the first one, must be unmountable.

All data on merged partitions other than the first will be lost; data on the
first partition will be lost as well if the "force" argument is given.

If "force" is not given, and the first partition has a resizable file system
(e.g. JHFS+), it will be grown in a data-preserving manner, even if a different
file system is specified (in fact, your file system and volume name parameters
are both ignored in this case). If "force" is not given, and the first
partition is not resizable, you will be prompted if you want to erase.

If "force" is given, the first partition is always formatted. You should
do this if you wish to reformat to a new file system type.

Merged partitions are required to be ordered sequentially on disk.
See diskutil list for the actual on-disk ordering; BSD slice identifiers
may in certain circumstances not always be in numerical order but the
top-to-bottom order given by diskutil list is always the on-disk order.

Ownership of the affected disk is required.

Example: diskutil mergePartitions JHFS+ NewName disk3s4 disk3s7
         This example will merge all partitions *BETWEEN* disk3s4 and disk3s7,
         preserving data on disk3s4 but destroying data on disk3s5, disk3s6,
         disk3s7 and any invisible free space partitions between those disks;
         disk3s4 will be grown to cover the full space if possible.
Sayans-iMac:~ sayanhussain$


File duplication takes no disk space! I have a question that's probably not asked too often, because it has little negative impact on the user. I can't find it on The Google anyway.

So this question is for the edification of the curious-minded.

In my production environment I manually backup often. I have noticed that when simply duplicating files, they don't take up as much space as they used to in older versions of MacOSX.

As an experiment (because I am a nerd) I attempted to fill my hard drive by copying large files. Duplicating files barely changed the "capacity" / "available" numbers at all.

The duplicates are there.

Can someone explain this aspect of the OSX filing system to me? It's absolutely amazing!

Details:

not using Cloud
MacBook Air ca. 2017
MacOSX 10.14.6

Apple File System (APFS) and Clones

Copying a file creates a clone of that file. Clones take very little space. Only when a clone is modified, is significant additional space required.

  Clones

  Clones allow the operating system to make efficient file copies on the same volume without occupying additional storage space. Changes to a cloned file are saved as delta extents, reducing storage space required for document revisions and copies.[9] There is, however, no interface to mark two copies of the same file as clones of the other, or for other types of data deduplication.

See also iMore's Apple File System (APFS): What you need to know.

To understand how APFS works, see the Apple File System Reference.


Shortcut to mute tabs in Safari Is there any shortcut to mute one specific tab in Safari? Or to mute all except the current tab? Using only the MacBook keyboard.

You'll have to create your own keyboard shortcut that toggles the menu bar commands under Window (otherwise you'll see that there are no keyboard shortcuts listed there).

Keyboard Settings - Shortcuts - App Shortcuts - "+" - Safari, Mute This Tab, (insert desired shortcut)

Repeat for "Mute Other Tab" and "Mute Other Tabs" (multiple "other" tabs open).

NOTE: Play/Pause button works for YouTube (pauses last video interacted played/paused), possibly other sites as well.

Right clicking the sound icon in the address bar will give you this functionality too, but requires the mouse.


How can I get rid of Newsstand? After the upgrade to iOS-5, I got the Newsstand app "for free". I don't use it and I probably never will. Is there any way, short of jail breaking, for me to remove it from my iPad2?

I know that I can put it in a folder, but can I remove it entirely?

No. Like all iOS applications coming pre-installed, Newsstand cannot be removed from an iOS device. See the Apple Support Forums for corroboration.


Export iPhone or iPad Backup to an external hard drive Is there a way to transport the Data of an iPhone / iPad Backup and the saved apps to an external hard drive?

I'm using iTunes 12.3 on a MacBookProRetina with Yosemite

Yes - Apple documents the folder in which iTunes saves backups here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204215

Apple doesn't make tools to poke at those files and export the data, however.

The apps themselves are saved in the iTunes library - so you can move them easily. The data embedded in apps depend on how the developer of that app chose to store them. Many use sqlite and xml and other standard data formats, so it's not unreasonable to get at many of the files - some are even stored with odd names, but still the correct image and sound and movie file formats.


How does iPhone 5 get indoor altitude? As far as i know, there are only two ways to get altitude, by GPS or by barometer. GPS is not usable in indoor room, And iPhone5 doesn't have a barometer. But iPhone 5 can give a relative accurate altitude without barometer. How could it be possible?

The iPhone does have two ways to get altitude, but the barometer is not one of them. You can only use a barometer for relative altitudes, not absolute, unless you know the current atmospheric pressure at sea level. But as well as GPS, Apple maintains a database of the locations (presumably including altitude) of a vast number of wifi networks, so if the wifi is enabled it can determine the altitude from the database. Try turning off wifi on your phone, and see if it can still get your altitude.


How can I create a separate address book to sync to a different mobile phone? I maintain my husband's contacts database up to now on a PC using Outlook. I switched to Mac for my own use (Mountain Lion) and use Apple Contacts for my own Address book.

I would like to create a separate address book for him on my Mac which I would then sync only to his mobile phone and iPad. I wish to keep his contacts completely separate from mine.

Is this possible and how do I do it?

Create a separate user account for your husband. Your stuff will be different. Steps:

System Preferences > Users and Groups.
Click the lock icon in the bottom left and fill in your password.
Click the + below the left pane.
Fill in the credentials.
Log in to that account and start filling out the contacts.
If you want to copy over any contact, select the contacts in the address book and then File > Export. Save the files on a USB drive or a place not in your home directory.
Just open the files in your husband’s account. They will be added to Contacts.

If you are talking about an iPhone, another thing you could do is use iCloud. That would be much better and much more streamlined.


How to extract files from a broken non-bootable OS X without reinstalling OS X? What can I download/install onto a USB drive, have it boot off that USB drive and then copy the files I need to another USB flash drive?

The error message I get when booting is "Missing Operating system". I cannot reinstall OSX currently (no media for it).

The Mac in question is an iMac so I cannot easily take out the hard drive.

Did you try...
Internet Recovery ?
before resorting to
Target Disk Mode or
How to install OS X on an external drive connected to your Mac  or
Create a bootable installer for OS X Mavericks or Yosemite
- which, as already mentioned, needs another Mac


Problems with the key combination "$~1" in my DefaultKeyBinding.dict I have the next DefaultKeyBinding.dict in ~/Library/KeyBindings:

/*
    Key Modifiers
    ^ : Ctrl
    $ : Shift
    ~ : Option (Alt)
    @ : Command (Apple)
    # : Numeric Keypad
*/
{
    "$~1" = ("insertText:", "‖");
}

But when I press the key combination "$~1" (shift+alt+1) I get a little one "ı" and not a double bar "‖". Any solution?

It seems as you are using 'SHIFT'  the one is changed to "!"

try

/*
    Key Modifiers
    ^ : Ctrl
    $ : Shift
    ~ : Option (Alt)
    @ : Command (Apple)
    # : Numeric Keypad
*/
{
 "$~!" = ("insertText:", "||");
}


External microphone input volume too quiet MacBook Pro 13" 2016 Touch Bar version

Whenever I plug an external microphone it's really quiet, what's more changing the input volume in the Sound settings doesn't affect it at all - It's still very quiet but hearable at 0 Volume and exactly the same at full volume.

Is there any way for me to increase the volume of the external microphone?

PS. It's the same regardless of the device, all 3 different headphone pairs behaved the same

The command to set your microphone levels all the way up is this:
sudo osascript -e "set volume input volume 100"

Also check your microphones for dust in the mic hole and if there is a power source on the device you may need to plug it in. It may need the built in mic amp.
If that doesn't help possibly a 3rd party free app like Soundsource that gives you sliders to toggle Speaker/Microphone levels from the menu bar. I've never used it but found it referenced in the apple forums.


iPhone 5 says photo library is 7.1 GB but isn't and Storage Full prompt is shown My iPhone 5 tells me my photo library has 7.1 GB but in actuality it doesn't just 50 pictures. Can someone explain why I'm getting the "storage full" prompt?

Apps take up very little room and I deleted all videos and most pictures on my phone. Is there a cache that's taking up space?

Photo Library appears to be the culprit-files don't seem to be deleting though they don't show up.

Go into Photos > Albums > recently deleted.  Check that isn't full of pictures. You can delete them from there to permanently purge them.


iOS prompting for AT&T employees credentials on setup Very strange issue here. Around the time the 5s came out I went into AT&T to grab a new phone. For some reason I couldn't get logged into my apple account during setup so the AT&T employee completed the activation while using their account.

Ever since then when I did factory resets and after I entered my own apple credentials it would always ask me to log in with their account as well. Didn't bother me too much and I figured it was something particular to the phone.

However, I just bought a new 7 and the same issue has come up! After I log in with my account it asks me to log in with this strangers account. Obviously the accounts are linked in some fashion but I've checked every single account setting I can and I have no idea how this could have happened.

Anyone have any ideas?

Edit: It's not a used phone, but were new out of the box at AT&T. Also, doesn't sounds like it's an activation lock because it has followed me across phones. Definitely seems like an iTunes/Apple ID account issue.

Here's the popup that shows up right after a restore and when I open various apps following a restore. For what it's worth, this appears to be their personal email and not a corporate email:

This sounds like Activation Lock (Find My iPhone). That's a bummer, they shouldn't have signed in like that. If this is a new device I'd take it back and get another one, personally. Don't have them setup your phone afterwards.

If you don't want to return it, you'll need that Apple ID account name and password in order to complete setting it up and then signing out of iCloud to turn off Find My iPhone.


"last" command not working properly I read a few guides online that explain how to use the command last to have a list of user logins.

One of the easiest command is:

last -s yesterday -t today

which should show the list of logins from yesterday till today. But when I execute this command on a Mac I receive an:

last: illegal option -- s
usage: last [-#] [-t tty] [-h hostname] [user ...]

This is not how it is supposed to work.

Why -s is not recognised?

Always use man X directly on the Mac itself to see what is available for command X.  The reason is that OS X was originally based on BSD and not GNU (most likely to avoid the GPL) so you should not follow Linux tutorials for MacOS.


MacBook Pro Retina takes a few seconds to power on display after sleep I recently upgraded from a March 2011 15" MacBook Pro to a 2014 15" MacBook Pro Retina and was disappointed that the wake from sleep is much slower on the new computer.

Is there a way to speed this up?

Note, this is not from standby mode per Is a 3-5 second delay normal for a Retina MacBook Pro to wake up from sleep?

The problem can be replicated as follows:

wait in front of the computer
screen goes blank
immediately press a key
screen stays blank for 1-2 seconds then wakes.

Note, this delay happens if I wake from sleep after hours of sleep, too.  In my old MacBook Pro the screen powered on immediately on pressing a key to wake from sleep and if I was waking from sleep by opening the laptop lid the screen was on before the lid was open.

I have Yosemite 10.10.1, the old MacBook had Mavericks.

Any ideas?

Maybe the excerpt below can explain.

The full article can be found on OS X Daily, Is Your Mac Slow to Wake from Sleep? Try this pmset Workaround:

  If your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air feels slow to wake from sleep after it’s been sleeping for a while, there may be a fairly simple cause: standby mode. Standby mode allows a Mac to potentially have up to 30 days of ‘standby’ time, meaning it can sit in a prolonged sleep state for that long before draining the battery. Basically, standby (and sleep) works by dumping everything out of active RAM into a sleep image file on the hard drive, and then when the Mac wakes from sleep that sleep image file is copied back from the hard drive to RAM. You may have guessed this already, but the reason some Macs take a long time to wake from sleep is that process of copying contents of sleepimage back into memory, and typically the more RAM you have in a Mac the slower the process can be. As you can imagine, it can take a while to copy 8GB or 16GB of data anywhere, even when a Mac has a super fast SSD drive it’s reading from.


Create a new space using a keyboard shortcut in macOS Big Sur I am aware you can do it from Mission Control by clicking and there is no shortcut available in 'Keyboard'.
Are there any ways to do this by using a 3rd party program or Shell/ Applescript?
The solution presented here only doesn't work in Big Sur anymore.

Tested under macOS Big Sur and macOS Catalina using English (US) as the language, the following example AppleScript code works to programmatically add another Desktop:
do shell script "open -a 'Mission Control'"
delay 0.5
tell application "System Events" to ¬
    click (every button whose value of ¬
        attribute "AXDescription" is "add desktop") of ¬
        group 2 of group 1 of group 1 of process "Dock"
delay 0.5
tell application "System Events" to key code 53

Note that most likely works from macOS Sierra onwards. Prior to that, remove group 2 of group 1 of  from the code.

For other languages, including English, try the following example AppleScript code:
do shell script "open -b 'com.apple.exposelauncher'"
delay 0.5
tell application id "com.apple.systemevents"
    tell (every application process ¬
        whose bundle identifier = "com.apple.dock") to ¬
        click (button 1 of group 2 of group 1 of group 1)
    delay 0.5
    key code 53 -- esc key
end tell


Are 82°C to 98°C Temperatures extreme for a MacBook Pro? I've noticed that my 2018 MacBook Pro 15" with an i7 frequently hits 82°C while using Google Chrome and 98°C while playing video games. As an example, while running Minecraft with maybe 12 mods, Activity Monitor shows it using ~99% CPU with an energy impact of ~1000.

I got this MacBook in July and the issue started immediately. I contacted Apple Support who was quite unhelpful, telling me to reboot my computer and that they were "unable to find the safe temperatures" for my MacBook.

I haven't run into the MacBook throttling at all or shutting itself down, which leads me to believe something might be wrong with the firmware, or maybe the SMC. I haven't tried resetting the SMC yet, mostly due to concern over what specifically it will reset.

Since I'm not sure if these are extreme, should I be concerned for my MacBook Pro?

I'm assuming you have the Mid 2018 15" MacBook Pro with the Intel i7-8850H CPU. This CPU has a maximum junction temperature of 100°C.

That means that hitting 82°C while browsing or 98°C while gaming isn't a problem in itself. You're within the limits in the specification.

So unless you're actually experiencing some other kind of related problem besides that you think it is a high number, then there's really no issue at all - nothing to be worried about.


Does Thunderbolt 1 provide USB (3.0) functionality? Does Thunderbolt 1 provide USB (3.0) functionality? Or in other words: Is Thunderbolt 1 compatible with USB (3.0)?

I have a MacBook Pro 13'', Early 2011 (MacBookPro8,1) and a Laptop Docking Station (Sabrent DS-RICA), which only has a USB 3.0 B input. I would like to connect the two, but not directly via USB since said MPB has only USB 2.0 and I'm getting hard delays on the external screen via such a USB 2.0 connection.

So I'm thinking about connecting said docking station to the Thunderbolt 1 port of my MBP via an Thunderbolt 1 to USB 3.0 adapter (e.g. this pricy thing). But I'm not sure if this will do the job, because I've heard that Thunderbolt 1 does not transmit data in a way for a USB device to understand, even with this adapter... Now I'd like to check that info with the knowledge of this great community, thanks!

Does Thunderbolt 1 provide USB (3.0) functionality?

No.  Thunderbolt 1 does not provide any USB functionality.

Thunderbolt 1 and 2 provide only two protocols:  PCIe 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.1a and 2.0 respectively.  Thunderbolt 3 is (currently) the only one that supports PCIe 3.0, DisplayPort 1.2 (two streams), USB 3.1 gen 2, and power delivery.


Icons disappearing from cmd+tab application switcher When using my MacBook for a while (Sierra, 10.12.3) then using cmd+tab to switch applications, I sometimes lose application icons. In the screenshot below, it's limited to Chrome but multiple applications will disappear at a time.

I can get the icons back temporarily by restarting or running killall -KILL Dock but I'd like a more permanent solution.

I had the same issue, and after restarting Dock, I still couldn't see the app icons popping up when I pressed cmd-tab. However, if you could see the Dock restarted after following the instructions to restart it, then the problem might be your external monitor. Unplugging the video cable to my external monitor and plugging it back in fixed it for me.


Can't navigate Time Machine interface (going backwards/forwards in time) since upgrading to Mac OS X Yosemite Since upgrading to Mac OS X Yosemite, when I open Time Machine on a folder, I can't navigate backwards in time anymore, on any folder. The arrows are grayed out. Usually, this is because Time Machine needs a bit of time to load older backups, but I have given it a few minutes to load and it still does not work.

Strangely enough, the only time that there is no problem is when I restart my Mac. Once I restart, then I open a folder and open Time Machine, then I can navigate backwards in time, almost immediately, too. But after that, no folder that I open in Time Machine in the future will allow me to move back in time, until I restart once again, then I am able to only navigate a single folder.

Does anyone know how I can fix this?

Things I have already tried:

Repair Disk Permissions on Macintosh HD
Repair Disk on Time Machine drive.

Have you given this a try?

  While in Time Machine, press the key combination shift-command-C. The
  front window will show all mounted volumes. All snapshots should now
  be accessible. Select the one you want and navigate to the files you
  want to restore.


Downgrading OS X version from Mavericks to last OS upgrade? I had an Application I used a lot with kids in my family that ran on the Power PC Mac. It was an interactive Alphabet program by the Learning Company with talking cartoon Characters.  2 through 5 year olds loved it. It was based on a
Dr. Seuss's Book about the ABC's. Every letter was covered. The child could spend large amounts of time exploring each letter and little talking animations would come up. I upgraded my Mac laptop to Mavericks. Now the program will not work and there never was an upgrade of the program. How can I undo Mavericks and go back to the way my Mac used to be? I want that Power PC program back worse than an upgraded Mac.  Find me an ABC Program that Surpasses this Dr. Seuss program and I might reconsider downgrading. Can you please help me?

The last Mac OS which supported Power PC emulator (Rosetta) on x86 was Snow Leopard. You can back up your data using Time Machine, find distributive on your CD and install it.

UPDATE

As people said, you should copy your data directly without using Time Machine.


How to chian two External Monitors with Macbook Air 2017 13" About the Mac:

Mac OS Mojave
Version 10.14.4 (18E226)
MacBook Air (13-inch, 2017)

I wish to connect two external monitors with following specifications with my Apple device.

one pure HDMI
other VGA (converted to HDMI using a VGA to HDMI Adapter)

My device has one mini-display port. I have bought a (not an apple product) 3-in-1 mini-display port to (DVI, HDMI, VGA) adapter.

I have two options to connect.

1. Connect pure HDMI, VGA based monitors into one 3-in-1 mini-display port adapter. (FAILS!)
2. Connect the pure 3-in-1 Adapter to a splitter (another device that accepts one HDMI input and spilts into 4 HDMI outputs) using HDMI cable and then connect the two monitors using HDMI outputs. (WORKS!)

The second method is able to connect two monitors but my Apple device shows only one device connected in Display Settings and the two external monitors mirror each other but I want a chain display.

Any help?

The 2017 MacBook Air does not natively support dual external displays. When you connect a monitor through the mini-DisplayPort, you'll only get a single display. Even when using the splitter - you'll always get a single display mirrored across both monitors.

The 3-in-1 mini-DisplayPort adapter is meant for converting the DisplayPort signal to one of three other signals - but only one at a time!

I would suggest using your existing adapter to connect the HDMI monitor to the MacBook Air using the mini-DisplayPort on the MacBook Air. Then buy a DisplayLink VGA adapter for connecting the VGA monitor to the MacBook Air's USB-port. Note that this display won't have the same performance as the built-in display and the HDMI monitor - so if you're using this for intense gaming applications, you'll probably want a different computer.


I have a service listening on a port, how do I open the port externally? I have a service that is listening on a tcp port, and it is listed with this command:

>netstat -atp tcp | grep -i "listen"
tcp4       0      0  192.168.2.5.8070       *.*                    LISTEN
tcp4       0      0  *.postgresql           *.*                    LISTEN
...and more

but it is not accessible from other computers on the same network, and it is not listed with this command:

>nmap 192.168.2.5
PORT     STATE SERVICE
5432/tcp open  postgresql

(but e.g. PostgreSQL is listed).

I can access the webserver locally on http://192.168.2.5:8060 but not from other computers on the same network. How can I open the port externally?

The Firewall on System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Firewall is Turned Off.

On MacOS X greater than 10.8, you should allow incoming connections for this application.

Within:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Firewall > Firewall Options…

click on the +, and select the application to use.


Time Machine failing with (null) error I'm getting the following after about half an hour of Preparing Backup:

Setting security information: Operation not permitted
Error processing extended attributes: Input/output error Error moving - -- disk image from /var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/T/com.apple.backupd.WpUkVn/iMac.tmp.sparsebundle to /Volumes/TimeMachine/iMac.sparsebun...
Failed to
create disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/iMac.sparsebundle, status: 512
Backup failed with error 20: 20
Network destination already mounted at: /Volumes/TimeMachine
statfs call failed, error: 2 No such file or
directory

I had Time Machine working but now nothing. A few extra things:

I have completely formatted the partition.
I have tried deleting the Time Machine preference file.
I am using a router running Netatalk. I am aware that this is not a supported backup solution.

Thanks guys!

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), OS X El Capitan (10.11)

I also use netatalk/afpd, backing to a USB-mounted drive.  If I partition the drive on OSX first (hfsplus, no journaling), then mount it under Linux, chmod & chgrp it to the TimeMachine userID, and share with netatalk, then I get the same error you report (after "preparing backup", error is "Setting security information: Operation not permitted"), and backup fails every time.

However, if I stop netatalk, repartition the USB drive to a single EXT4 partition, mkfs.ext4, remount and chmod, chgrp, and share with netatalk, then I do not see this error and TimeMachine backups work fine.

I expect that the problem is userID/permission related, but since ETX4 is working for me, I have not pursued it.


Text Message showing up with wrong name on iPhone For some reason when my son sends my mother a text message it shows up with my name.  Texts from me show up in a different thread, but when I click on the "contact" from his it takes it to my contact.  I do not use Apple any more (my son does), but he does use the Apple ID I set up when I had my old iPod.  The only thing I can think is that is what's causing the problem, but I can't figure out how to resolve it.  Any suggestions?

Open settings, tap iMessage, then go to send and receive. From here, you may edit which messages are sent and received by her. See below for screenshots of the process.

Best of luck.


Sync multiple calendar together Simple question, big problem. I evaluate a solution to sync calendar together but not FULL calendar.. just part with cloud here is the spec : I have 3 person

person #1 = have a calendar with personal, professional, account, prospect
person #2 = have company and personal
person #3 = have company, internal, account

now, i like to be able to share personal calendar between person 1 and 2, company between person 2 and 3 and account between person 1 and 3... all the rest should be absolutely private !

I have research.. and i cloud and i cal share ALL and you HIDE some color in the calendar... that's NOT what i want... hide is not private...

so my research get me to : Google calendar with busy sync or BusyCal wich is an application that do the sync (i think !)

You guy's do you have solution, what have you try and what work ?

thanks in advance

I use BusySync... overall it works well.  It certainly accomplishes exactly what you're talking about.  I have several thousand events on my calendar, which appears to corrupt the database from time to time, as I have BusySync conflict issues, as they're called.  These errors are rare, and support from the company has always been a) speedy, b) comprehensive, c) able to solve the issue. I spent a substantial amount of time researching this years ago, well before iCloud and BusyMac were available... but at that time, BusySync was the only reasonable choice.  Since then, I haven't switched, because this solution still works well.

I recommend BusySync or BusyMac... both work the same way, it just depends which environment you prefer.

While you could use BusySync to host on a local server and that would be fine, working through Google is easy, free, and compatible (you can sync with other machines that don't use iCal or BusySync).  Google also allows for an easy web interface on the go, mobile integration, etc.

I hope that helps.


PowerPoint 2011: How to Insert image with "crop to fit" by default? I am preparing technical presentations with a lot of graphics using PowerPoint 2011 for Mac (version 14.4.9).
Whenever I insert an image, it is set to crop to fill by default (the most useless option in my opinion).
Here is how the default option looks like:

Then, it turns out that for every image, I have to manually set it to crop to fit and resize the container box correctly. Just to look like that:

Is there a way to override this default behavior to get the inserted images as they are without any funny cropping?

I tried to research the problem, but without any luck.

One way to do that is to use the "Placeholder" in PowerPoint.

Use View → Slide Master, then choose your layout.
Select "Insert Placeholder" and choose Picture.
Use the cursor to drag the picture to size and position it.

You can make multiple placeholders, but you do not have to use all of them if a slide does not require it.

From now on all new slides (with the chosen layout) will have the placeholders where you can insert a picture and they all will be cropped to auto fit the placeholder, or auto fill.

What you are trying to do is not possible. The Crop to fill will take the original and without shrinking it will use the center part and fill it in the preassigned Place Holder. The crop to fit will have to reduce the original to show it as whole in preassigned place holder.

Here is an example (left and right are place holders) while the middle is the original. So even if using the crop to fit as default the image size will be what your place holder was. Thus using the Crop to Fill is better option while using the Crop tool to move to the part of the image you wanted to show in full size.

The problem with your request is that the Crop to Fit will always require adjustment depending on the original image size.


Security Hardening Adobe Acrobat DC for macOS The Security Team is asking me to install the Adobe Acrobat DC (Version 2020.009.20067) package to our macOS laptops. (Mojave 10.14.6)
In addition to simply push the Adobe Acrobat DC package to our macOS laptops, I need to (no sure if it is a custom package, or custom settings, or configuration profile, or policy, or .mobileconfig, or etc.) trying to mimic and do my best to apply all the security hardening requirements coming from this website:
https://www.stigviewer.com/stig/adobe_acrobat_professional_dc_continuous/2018-04-30/MAC-3_Sensitive/
Unfortunately, if you open the above website, all the vulnerabilities solutions are for Windows OS only.
How do I achieve the same on a macOS system?
I was wondering if you have any official Adobe Acrobat Pro guide or pdf or recommendations or tools that can help me to achieve my project.
I did noticed when I install Adobe Acrobat DC on a macOS laptop, 2 .plist files are created:
/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.acrobat.pro.plist

/Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.acrobat.pro.plist

Are these the files that I need to manipulate in order to achieve my goal? If the answer is yes, reading the website above, how can I determine, just from the Title Description, from each Finding ID, which is the  value inside the. plist that I need to manipulate? It is kind of impossible.
If you were me, what would you do?
Thank you so much in advance for your help

I would start with one thing and that’s work on your time to patch in your environment. Measure how many endpoints are out of date and average time to get machines patched once Adobe releases an update (plan on 40 updates a year if you use the core CC suite - 15 if you just deploy acrobat).

You can control it.
It’s something one person can tackle.
It is your best defense to get ready to take next steps on how the quickly patched software is used.

If you don’t have federated ID services, get that next. Then look at Adobe Console to use SSO / federation and then decide if you just manage apps and lock everyone out of Adobe Updates and have a side channel for patching. JAMF and Munki and Fleetsmith (cough, Apple) are the three solutions I would evaluate if you know nothing about MDM. If you know everything about MDM - still evaluate them and then expand to include your current MDM or others that might fit your niche.
Security is a war of attrition and you will never have enough time to train, hire, manage but you can get better at evaluating your biggest gaps, work to close them and then repeat the observe, measure, plan, act, measure, react cycle.


What started the whole "i" movement? Possible Duplicate:
  What does the “i” in Apple product names mean?

What started the whole "i" movement and what does the "i" stand for when talking about iPods, iPhones, iMacs, iPads and iCarly (woops!).  I think it started with the iMac that came out in the late 90's, but still have always wondered where the "i" came from in terms of the product.  Thanks.

How about How did Apple choose the 'i' naming convention?

  We returned with five names, one of which we all loved: iMac. Each option came with a presentation board briefly describing why it was a good name. For iMac, it was obviously all about the i. Most important, it stood for Internet. But it also stood for other valuable i things, like individual, imagination, i as in me, etc. It also did a pretty good job of laying a solid foundation for future product naming. The “i” naming nomenclature became so pervasive Steve became the iCEO for a number of years. There was even a Time magazine story that cemented this title.


What do I really lose if I backup my iPhone to iTunes without transferring purchases? I don't want to waste tens of gigabytes of space on my laptop to store apps that I can just as easily download from the App Store.

Assuming I would have to recover an iPhone backup from iTunes to a brand new replacement iPhone, what will I lose if I don't agree to transfer purchases when making the backup?

I understand the apprehension!

In reality, though, you do not stand to lose anything. The only reason to transfer those purchases to your computer would be to save bandwidth and time by not re-downloading everything. You will still lose associated app data (e.g. login information, cache, etc.), but that would happen even if you did back up those apps to your computer.

In short, you will be fine without transferring purchases.

Hope this helps!


Is there a way of "re-locking" an internal FileVault 2 encrypted partition? As an alternative to using encrypted disk images, I created a FileVault 2 encrypted partition in Lion for some important data on the SSD in my MacBook Air. The password is not stored in a keychain. Once it is unlocked, I can unmount and mount it again without authenticating, even after logging out and back in again. Nothing short of restarting seems to lock this partition again.

Re-locking an internal encrypted partition while logged in is possible in other implementations of whole-disk encryption, and for FileVault 2, according to the man page for diskutil, specifically, for the command diskutil coreStorage unlockVolume,

  "This verb unlocks an LVF by providing that authentication; as the LVs are thus appear
  as dev nodes, any file systems upon them are automatically mounted. To "re-lock" the
  volume, make it offline again by ejecting it, e.g. with diskutil eject"

While this does work as it should with encrypted external drives, it does not seem to work on my encrypted internal partition. I can eject the logical volume, which is
/dev/disk1, but it does not get locked. Trying to eject its containing Logical Volume Family, Physical Volume, or Logical Volume Group, results in errors, even using administrator privileges. I tried variations, using unmount, unmountDisk, referring to the device UUIDs, with no luck. What am I doing wrong here?

Due to the limitations, you might want to use an encrypted disk image rather than whole disk encryption.

Come to think of it - why not use both?

You could always turn off FileVault if you felt it too much a hassle, but to get around the limitation you caught (thank goodness you did catch it),  consider using Disk Utility to make secure the parts of your data you need to force into a locked state when that disk image is unmounted. This will let you sleep your mac and not compromise that data by allowing it to be re-mounted without the appropriate passcode being supplied.


Why doesn't my iPod Classic show all the songs it holds? I recently bought a new iPod Classic 120GB, mainly to use on my Numark iDJ2 but also for general use.

I have it set so that all my iTunes songs are automatically pulled over to it and when I look at its contents on iTunes all my songs are there. However, if I unplug it and then search through it manually, some artists don't appear. (I haven't yet found a pattern.)

The only reason I mention my iDJ2 is that I have Numark's 'Librarian' software installed on my iPod so that the iDJ2 can categorize and play all of my songs. I don't see how it should be responsible for this problem though.

Any help much appreciated and let me know if you need any more info.

Could it be that some albums are tagged as "Compilation"? In this case the artists in these albums are not shown in the "Artists" submenu... Uncheck the "Compilation" check-box (or something like that - I don't use iTunes!) in the Information tab and they magically appear in the list.

PS. When you select an artist that "has" a proper album, the songs in the Compilation albums are also shown.


"powerd" process uses a lot of CPU Oftentimes, after I wake my Mac from sleep, powerd (which is the power management daemon? Which in particular deals with sleeping the Mac and waking it?) uses high CPU, usually around 25% to 50% on my i7 CPU.

Anyone know how I can find out what's causing it, and what I can do to fix it? It seems to be a problem with waking from sleep but I don't know what.

This problem started happening after I updated my Mac Mini to 10.10.2, a few weeks ago.

sudo kill -HUP $(pgrep powerd)

(I don't have an answer for 'why')


imagemagick fails with dyld: Library not loaded After wasting a lot of time until finally finding a solution, I decided to share this with the community.

The problem:

convert
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/little-cms2/lib/liblcms2.2.dylib
  Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/convert
  Reason: image not found
Abort trap: 6

This kept happening even after updating ImageMagick:

brew upgrade imagemagick

so what's the solution?

Looking at the error, we identify the missing file:

/usr/local/opt/little-cms2/lib/liblcms2.2.dylib

The first step is to make sure that the library is actually existing:

find /usr -name '*liblcms*'
find: /usr/sbin/authserver: Permission denied
/usr/local/lib/liblcms.1.0.19.dylib
/usr/local/lib/liblcms.1.dylib
/usr/local/lib/liblcms.a
/usr/local/lib/liblcms.dylib
/usr/local/Cellar/little-cms/1.19_1/lib/liblcms.1.0.19.dylib
/usr/local/Cellar/little-cms/1.19_1/lib/liblcms.1.dylib
/usr/local/Cellar/little-cms/1.19_1/lib/liblcms.a
/usr/local/Cellar/little-cms/1.19_1/lib/liblcms.dylib
/usr/local/Cellar/little-cms2/2.9/lib/liblcms2.dylib
/usr/local/Cellar/little-cms2/2.9/lib/liblcms2.a
/usr/local/Cellar/little-cms2/2.9/lib/liblcms2.2.dylib

So we can see that it does exist as /usr/local/Cellar/little-cms2/2.9/lib/liblcms2.2.dylib.

We need to create a symbolic link that will make convert find the missing file. It is possible that the brew installation script was missing to do that.

The way to create a symlink goes like this:

ln -s <exisiting file> <pointer to create>

So the final solution is simply this:

ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/little-cms2/2.9 /usr/local/opt/little-cms2

Let's verify:

convert
Version: ImageMagick 7.0.10-0 Q16 x86_64 2020-04-04 https://imagemagick.org
Copyright: © 1999-2020 ImageMagick Studio LLC
License: https://imagemagick.org/script/license.php
Features: Cipher DPC HDRI Modules OpenMP(3.1)
Delegates (built-in): bzlib freetype gslib heic jng jp2 jpeg lcms ltdl lzma openexr png ps tiff webp xml zlib
Usage: convert [options ...] file [ [options ...] file ...] [options ...] file
...

Mission completed :)


Is there a cost for submitting an application to the AppStore? I already own my developer programmer account for which I paid the $99 per annum.

I understand that it allows me to develop and test on the device(s) and to submit applications to the Store.

However, I wonder if there is another associated cost on the submission of the application, and per application.

I am also aware that the process could be rather long, so I am also asking, if, for any reason the application is rejected, are there any fees or cost related to re-submission.

Thanks.

So long as your USD99 annual membership fee for Mac Developer Program is current (and you don't break the Agreement or any NDA), that paid membership already covers the following typical software distribution costs:

set up your App ID for distributing your app
set up and download credentials needed to sign the app for distribution via the App Store.
keeping your tax information and deducting the appropriate withholding on apps sold for selected countries' App Store.
review of your app
hosting of your app (at App Store)

etc.


Update unavailable with this Apple ID? I recently updated to OS X 10.11, El Capitan. After the update one iPhoto (Version 9.6.1, Released Mar 20, 2015) update from the App Store is not getting installed. It shows:

Update unavailable with this appleID
This update is not available for this Apple ID either because it was bought by a different user or the item was refunded or cancelled.

If this particular update is not available, How to remove the 1 Update available message from AppStore and the red badge from AppStore dock icon.

2 Methods…

Sign out of the App Store then back in using the correct credentials for the iPhotos download, or
Delete iPhoto & use Photos instead, which is iPhoto's replacement.


Can I release our iOS app on Christmas iTunes Connect says:

  Make sure your apps are up-to-date and ready for the winter holidays. New apps and app updates will not be accepted December 23 to 27 (Pacific Time), so any releases should be submitted, approved, and scheduled in advance. Other iTunes Connect and developer account features will remain available.

If I have the app already approved by Apple before the deadline, can I still release it on Christmas if I use the "manual release" or "automatically release no later than" option?

This could be a question that no-one here can answer unless they've previously tried to do this over the Christmas period, so my suggestion would be to call the Apple Developer Program Support number for your country.

To find the number, refer to: https://developer.apple.com/contact/phone/

I just feel this is the best way for you to get a definitive answer.


Can you reinstall OS X on a FileVault 2-encrypted drive? I've been researching FileVault 2 to make sure that I understand it before I enable it on my Mac. While reading Macworld's Complete guide to FileVault 2 in Lion, I encountered an unexpected caveat (emphasis mine):

  It's probably worth mentioning that someone who steals a FileVault-enabled Mac can never shut down or restart the machine without losing access to the booted machine's startup drive. (Although they probably wouldn't realize this until after shutting down or restarting.) This also means they can't install updates that require a restart, let the battery run down to zero, or even wipe the hard drive clean and reinstall the OS to get a "working" computer.

This doesn't make sense to me. In my mental model of FileVault 2, a tiny decryption program stored on the hard drive is loaded during the boot process. This program asks the user for the key and uses it to begin decrypting the drive and start the OS. If you were to reinstall the OS, it would overwrite the decryption program and boot normally.

Why can't you reinstall the OS on a FileVault 2-encrypted drive?

If you don't care about the data, it's pretty standard (almost doesn't quality as "cli-fu" even); from Recovery HD, you can do it all in Terminal (Utilities > Terminal)

First, do a diskutil cs list to see the CoreStorage information on the volume. Grab the longish UUID of the Logical Volume Group you want to nuke (typically near the top of the output; scroll up). Now, diskutil cs delete UUID (where UUID is the LVG's UUID). Requires no knowledge of the key or an authorized user. Just blows the volume away.

Again, if you don't care about the data. A completely legitimate example of this is a laptop my predecessor used to test FileVault 2. Didn't use an Institutional key or a local one he left where anybody could find it, and his account was the only authorized user.


How do I connect a bass guitar to my iPad to use with Garage Band Garage Band for iOS has a mode to use real instruments. The documentation is unclear, however, how to connect those instruments to the iOS device. What options exist to connect an electric bass guitar to an iOS device to use with Garage Band?

Hope this will help?
http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/6-easy-ways-to-connect-your-guitar-to-your-iphone-ipad-or-ipod-touch-516544
Or even more specific:
https://gigaom.com/2013/02/09/four-ways-to-connect-your-instrument-to-garageband/
Or you meant something different?


Symbolic linking to Photos from another user I am running El Capitan Beta, but this question would also apply to Yosemite.

I want another account's (account B) "Photos" app to link to my primary account's (account A) Photos library without moving my library to an outside drive without permissions.  I can't point the Library from the Photos App in account B to to the Library in account A.  I have added Account B with full permission read and write with extended ACL permissions to account A's /User/AccountA/Pictures folder and Photos Library.  Verified with ls -le.

So... the best solution I see is to create a hard link from /User/AccountB/Pictures/AccountBLibrary -> /User/AccountA/Pictures/AccountALibrary so that it always points to that inode.  Can anyone see a reason NOT to do this or a better way to link the two without moving my photos library on Account A.

Edit: Well for one - you can't hard link a directory (which obviously pictures libraries are)... so to reword my question - What about soft link? (Symbolic) (Thanks fd0).  And now I can see - It produces the same error (because it isn't a hard link).  So... can I accomplish this?

The goal is to not duplicate photos (I use iCloud photo library, but I don't want to duplicate even "optimized" photos).

The iPhoto library is a package container not really a single file.  There are .plist, .db and other files in the package that might get altered differentially when you open via the different accounts.  This might contribute to the problems people mentioned.  Crazy idea, and I haven't tried it, but it might be better to recreate the package content on the new account using symbolic links to the folders that contain the actual photos on the old account.  This way all the .plist, .db and related files in the package can remain local to the new account, but you accomplish your goal of not copying the actual photos.  I definitely would back up the library before giving this a try.


Good application for detecting state (health) of SSD disk? On my MacBook, I want to see the health status of my SSD. How can I do this? Which app to use?

Command Line

Use built in diskutil to get the SMART status of your drive.  Anything other than "Verified" and you have issues

diskutil info disk0 | grep -i SMART

Smartmontools

A good open source command line utility is smartmontools.  This provides more detail reporting of the SMART attributes.

$ /usr/local/sbin/smartctl --attributes disk0
smartctl 6.6 2017-10-29 r4579 [Darwin 15.6.0 x86_64] (daily-20171029)
Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 1
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   099   099   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       5
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   095   095   000    Old_age   Always       -       21858
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       48
177 Wear_Leveling_Count     0x0013   096   096   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       66
179 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot   0x0013   099   099   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       5
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total  0x0032   100   100   010    Old_age   Always       -       0
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total  0x0032   099   099   010    Old_age   Always       -       5
183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0013   099   099   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       5
187 Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0032   065   044   000    Old_age   Always       -       35
195 ECC_Error_Rate          0x001a   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
199 CRC_Error_Count         0x003e   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
235 POR_Recovery_Count      0x0012   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       21
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       50124018873

Use smartctl -h or man smartctl for more complete descriptions of command line arguments and examples.

Disk Utility

Using the built in app Disk Utility (Applications>>Utilities), it will tell you give you the SMART status.  Again, "Verified" means it has passed with no errors.

DiskDrill (Free)

The free version of DiskDrill recovery software will provide you with detailed SMART reporting and by clicking on any of the status links ("Healthy" in the image), you get detailed SMART info


Why does iCloud have a different timezone for my calendar events than my devices do? I set an appointment on iCal from 19:30 to 22:00. In the iCloud calendar it shows as 18:30 to 21:00. In iCal on Macbook Pro, on iPhone 4S and iPad 2 it shows the correct time i.e. 19:30 to 22:00!

I have timezone support switched off and I have the UK as the timezone. How can it be that iCloud (where the devices get the times from) is showing incorrect times, yet all the devices are showing the correct time?

Has anyone else experienced this problem?

Each of your devices has a timezone setting, which you probably already set correctly.

What you probably didn't know is that iCloud.com has its own timezone setting. To access it, login to icloud.com, then click on your name in the upper right corner. Once set, you should see everything ok.

The “time zone support” setting you disabled has to do with creating events associated with a timezone, and is usually better left off.

NOTE: Once you change this you will have to logout and then login again for the changes to take effect.


I Have A 2013 MacBook Air that refuses to charge. I continue to use it once it says that it has no charge left. What do I do? I received this brand new laptop yesterday and today the charger isn't responding to being plugged in. (The lights aren't flashing as they should be). The battery icon on the upper right corner has a big X inside of it indicating that there is no battery charge left. However, I continue to use my macbook air as if it were charged normally. I don't know what to do. Please help.

It should not be on a "new" MBA but it is possible.

Reset your SMC (System management Controller) that has to to with Battery and charging.

Shut down the computer.
Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.
On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option(alt) keys and the power button at the same time.
Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.
Press the power button to turn on the computer.

If no sucess bring or send it back for repair.


Dig resolves a domain, but all other programs fail to find it Mac OS X Mavericks, no VPN, connecting via wifi.

This domain resolves to my IP address in the local network

$> dig mydomain.xx
;; ANSWER SECTION:
mydomain.xx.    3591    IN  A   192.168.10.18

I tested it on several computers and the resolution is correct, works with host and nslookup as well.

However, when using chrome, curl, ping, traceroute, or any other tool that will actually try to connect to the ip, it hangs and eventually fails.

pinging 192.168.10.18 works of course.

From another computer it works but it does not work from mine.

We have other domains that behave the same way for my coworkers, everything work except the access to my domain from my machine.

I'm using dnsmasq to catch all domains in .dev, but even with that disabled it still fails.

We use google dns as provided by our DHCP server.

What could cause the issue ?

Found it, it was a misconfiguration issue.

An old pow config file stayed in /etc/resolver, forcing the nameserver to be 127.0.0.1 for this domain.


Dialog pops up everyday for less than a second I'm running Mac OS X Lion, I've noticed that about once a day (at different times of the day) a dialog pops up in the center of my screen, then disappears within half a second. It doesn't stay on the screen long enough for me to read anything on the dialog. All I can tell you about it is that it has the big yellow warning icon, perhaps 2 buttons, and some text.

I would like to find out what application is causing this dialog to appear, and what it says on the dialog.

Any suggestions as to how I can go about doing this?

I was thinking of using some screen recording solution, and then when it happens to play back the recording. The software would need to have a really high frame rate in order to record the popup because it disappears so quickly. Any suggestions as to a product that would work and wouldn't use too much CPU?

Are there any other ways I could solve this problem?

I tried getting a list of running processes right after it happens, but there's more than 100 of them, and its not guaranteed that the dialog is still running after it pops up on the screen. Plus, I don't really have anything to diff the processes with to find the problematic process because as far as I can tell, my system is always running the process that causes the dialog to appear.

More info:

It's about the size of the standard unlock form in System Prefs (i.e. what pops up when you press the unlock icon and it asks for you password), but as far as I can tell, it doesn't have the two text boxes at the bottom.
It seems like the foreground app doesn't matter either. I've seen it popup when Safari is in the foreground, as well as other apps.

If you look at the Console application (/Applications/Utilities/Console.app), you can see system logs of errors and other activity. If you open it and view log entries for the time of the error, you may be able to find the source and purpose of the message.


Order e-mail by size Is it possible to sort iOS Mail.app by size? How can this be done, because it's default ordered by sent date.
I'd like to remove the biggest mails from my iPhone.

iOS Mail does not sort messages by anything but date.


Command to release the best amount of Kernel Task and Memory Ram I have an old MacBook Pro 2012/2013 and it has the El Capitan

Through the Utilities -> Activity Monitor tool I can get the following stats according the following behavior:

For example if the Mac is just started the Kernel Task has 500MB and Memory Ram has 2.0 GB, if I just open Firefox the two components increase (how is expected) lets say to 750MB and 2.5GB respectively. If I close Firefox (Cmd + Q), I would expect that the values return to 500MB and 2.0GB respectively. Well it does not happen how is expected, for example: the Kernel Task returns to 650MB (and not to 500MB) and the Memory Ram returns to 2.2GB (and not 2.0GB).

I have this behavior with other programs apart of Firefox.

Is there a command where I can free in general all the kernel task and memory ram? At least to the best acceptable minimum values according to the OS itself after to execute the command.

The goal is after to execute some "heavy" software development tools and servers (therefore when they have just been closed), release the best amount of resources of these two components.

There's no ordinary system command for that purpose - simply because it is not what you would normally want.

The memory used here will help the performance of your system by caching data that might be needed later. If it is not needed later, because you need to load something different in RAM, the caches will be released automatically.

However, you can simulate such a command by simply making a small program that allocates progressively larger amounts of memory until you have cleared up all caches. There's no real point in doing so however as it won't help your system run faster, or be able to run more programs or anything like that.


How to check which files have been copied to the main hard drive and which ones have not been copied? I formatted my MacBook main drive some months ago and, in order to not lose data, I created a .dmg image of the hard drive before the formatting procedure and saved it to an external device.

Then, some days ago, I started a kind of data restoring, coping most of the backup files back to the main drive.

Now, I would like to check if all these mentioned files have really been copied back to my Macbook. Due to this, I am looking for an application theoretically able to analyze the files (in particular, their name, hash, etc.) contained in my external drive and find corresponding files on my Macintosh hard drive; if a  corresponding file is not found, the file should be highlighted. If a similar application actually exists, can you suggest it to me?

If there is not an application with the features above explained, can you suggest me a brief Bash script or AppleScript able to do that? I'm not familiar with both these languages, but I have a little Batch scripting background and I was thinking about some statements - e.g. the for loop, md5, etc. - which generate a filename plus MD5 checksum list for both drives, and which find correspondances. What about this? Can you suggest me some examples?

Note: This is not the same as How to confirm that a file has copied to a new disk without any errors?. The new data structure on the main drive is a bit different compared to the previous one, which is stored in the external drive. Due to this, a standard folder/volume comparison with a dry rsync run is not exactly what I am looking for.

From my experience I may recommend Path Finder app (http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/).

It has very powerful Commands -> Folder Sync command that does exactly what you are asking for: shows synced files and those you may need to copy left or right. They are highlighted with different color.
App has free trial period (fully functional) and then asks for some money, but it's totally worth the price.

Red arrows just show some random directories. You can select your own, including those on different volumes. And you can compare file content is required.


iPhone XS Max stuck in bootloop, cannot get into recovery This issue started with a message saying that my storage space was almost full. I open settings and check storage, the estimate size does not show up. I go to photos app to delete a few photos/videos. I select a bunch and hit on delete, the images do not delete and the phone reboots into the Apple Logo.
It's been stuck on the apple logo boot loop for a while now.
Unable to set the iPhone to recovery mode by holding VOL UP + VOL DOWN + Power Button for 10 seconds.
Plugging the iPhone into my Macbook does not show the device connected.
What should I do next?
iPhone Model - iPhone XS Max 256GB
iOS Version - 14.4

this honestly sounds like your device's drive got corrupted entirely. you'd be better to send it to Apple for repair, i don't think there's anything an end-user can do without voiding any warranties or whatnot at best, destroying the device accidentally at worst.


Terminal shortcut keys I've recently immigrated from Ubuntu to Mac OSX Snow Leopard. I use the terminal (iterm2) extensively, and I am a great fan of shortcut keys.

The standard shortcut keys (which work in any GUI textbox) are:

⌘+← Jumps to first character in line
⌘+→ Jumps to last character in line
⌥+← Moves one word forward
⌥+→ Moves one word backward

How can I impose these shortcuts in iterm (or terminal)?

Are there any standard key bindings for these operations in Mac I should know and use?

The standard shell shortcuts (M- = meta = option or esc, C- = control):

M-b and M-f correspond to ⌥← and ⌥→
C-a and C-e correspond to ⌘← and ⌘→

⌥← and ⌥→ are bound to M-b and M-f by default on Lion's Terminal. On 10.6 you'll have to add them manually:

I haven't found any way to reassign ⌘← and ⌘→ in Terminal.


Color Display are not right I am Robert and have been using macbook Pro for quite sometime. However the color display had been a problem from the time of purchase. I tried different ways to calibrate but to no avail.
Finally tried Colorsync Utility option for repair and first aid. It indicated that the system has 4 bad profiles which the automatic first aid did not fix.
The bad profiles are;

Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles/RedBlueYellow.icc

Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles/smokey.icc

Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles/TealMagenta.icc

Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles/TotalLinkPreview.icc

I have been regularly updating the OS and now am on Yosemite...

Could someone help me to set it right please.

As you know those are Adobe ICC profiles, thus made by Abode to support they suite of Graphics products.

Some ICC's are specific to a Adobe product you are using and come as part of the installation package.

To find those ICC profiles, look in the original installation package.

In some cases you might see a problem where the ColorSync Utility claims a profile cannot be fixed.

ColorSync utility - Verify and Repair:

In cases where the ColorSync fails to repair a ICC profile, you will need to go to the profile in the Finder, get information on it, and ensure your username is added in the Sharing & Permissions section with both Read and Write privileges.

You can also use Terminal to find them.

find /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/ -name "*.icc" -exec sips --verify {} \;

When done, re-run the repair routine, and hopefully that will allow the profile to be fixed.

Or again use Terminal to try to Repair them:

find /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/ -name "*.icc" -exec sips --repair {} \;

Here is some more reading material.


Sharing internet connection from WiFi to Thunderbolt Ethernet doesn't work - no DHCP addresses are given out I can't seem to get my MacBook Pro to share the WiFi connection over Ethernet. Here is my configuration as it appears in System Preferences:

As you can see, my local Ethernet IP address is a self-assigned IP and the connected device does not receive an IP address.

I see the following messages in my Console when I try to enable Internet Sharing:

2/18/16 4:40:11.421 PM InternetSharing[9126]: missing dhcp parameters: start address 10.168.2.0, end address  or mask
2/18/16 4:40:11.422 PM configd[60]: sharing service over en5 failed

Clearly I have a misconfiguration somewhere. How do I fix this?

I was able to do this by manually configuring the address of the MacBook Ethernet port as 192.168.2.1 and manually configuring the device I attached to connect to 192.168.2.1.


Can I mix Apple stock RAM with OWC RAM? I have an iMac that shipped with 16GB RAM (using 2 out of 4 slots). I ordered two 16GB RAM modules from OWC. Instead of just replacing the RAM, can I actually add the OWC RAM to what's already in there? Will this cause problems, mixing the two brands?

Yes it will work, although it's always better to have the same latency and MHz kits.


Mid 2014 MBP w/ Nvidia to three 60in HD TVs? For a project I am working on, I'd like to connect my MBP to three 60in TVs.

I've read that it is possible to hook up to three external displays via these configurations:

2012 MBPR with extra graphics chip can drive 2x TB-DVI + 1x HDMI

2015 MBPR with extra graphics chip can NOT drive 2x TB-DVI + 1X HDMI but it CAN drive 1x TB-DVI + 1x TB-DisplayPort + 1x HDMI as one of the answers here indicates.

When reading around I've found that most people, when referring to external displays, are talking about displays that are in the 24-30in range. Is there any reason the configurations I stated above wouldn't work with three identical 60in HD TVs?

Thanks!

There is no reason that something that works with a 24" tv wouldn't work with a 60" tv of the same resolution. Size doesn't matter - only resolution.


Recurring "error code -50/invalid argument" resolved by reboot, better solution sought I'm using an old iBook G4 (PowerPC) running Tiger to serve iTunes to the house. For the past week or so, the mac boots fine, and then sometime during the day starts generating

An unexpected error occurred (error code -50).

errors when iTunes attempts to save its library file.

Checking reveals that the boot drive (main drive, in the laptop) behaves as if it is write-protected - I get the same error code when I attempt to create a folder on the desktop, for instance. If I attempt to create files via the terminal, e.g. via
    ls > foo.txt
I get an "invalid argument" error.

I've set the iBook to run in Target Disk Mode and run Disk Utility to repair the disk (from a Macbook running Snow Leopard) and get "The volume appears to be ok".

I don't have the option in Disk Utility to Repair Permissions in Target Disk Mode. When I ran Repair Permissions on the iBook itself, it came back with no errors, no permissions corrected, but did not in fact fix the problem.

Rebooting always solve the problem - for the next 5-10 hours or so.

Would Disk Warrior help, or some other software fix, or is it time to buy a new drive? (And, in any case, what's going wrong?)

Error 50 is a generic - iTunes has failed to write a file and the article listing specific store errors (expand the section on Specific Conditions and Alert Messages to reveal -50 in that section) deals with the usual problems where the store is failing or the network is failing.

If the error is bubbling up from the filesystem (or you get the error from Finder), then it's often an "illegal" character in the file or folder name. Look to remove or rename files with emoji, unicode characters or more mundane characters like : & or /

In your case, it's very likely the drive is the cause. You can and should look in the console app to see what other errors happen around that time. Look for I/O errors - disk0 - or just run disk utility and have it verify / repair the catalog file. This will confirm the guess that the drive is failing and the errors are not some software problem.

You could export the current library xml to the desktop and start over with a brand new iTunes library file just to rule out corruption in that file, but then you would have two problems at the same time - terminal unable to write a file and iTunes unable to write a file. Occam's razor (and my experience) says it's the filesystem/drive - not two identical software problems.

Spinning hard drives do track the sectors where a bad write has happened and try to keep track of them so the system won't notice files not vein written, but as a drive ages (or if this mechanism fails) you will get unrecoverable errors more and more.

Also - it's often hard to tell if the catalog structure is bad (which Disk Warrior, Drive Genius and plain old erase in Disk Utility attempt to fix assuming the drive works properly). But if the underlying hardware is failing, you'll need to move to a new drive.

I would just make another backup and zero the drive and look for errors during the zero / reinstall. If the errors persist, it's time for a new drive once the pain of reboots is more than the cost of a new part costs.

In your specific case of an old PPC machine where repair is invasive and the cables likely to be brittle, I would just re-install the OS onto an inexpensive and many GB external drive and run the mac from a cheap USB drive (most iBooks will boot from USB, but not all will) - leaving the potentially failing internal drive sitting unused, unmounted and spun down. It's rare for a failed drive to take down the machine so you can just leave it alone for minimal cost if you can tolerate the iBook running on an external drive.


System Services in Automator won't start For about a week it occurs that System Services created in Automator suddenly refuse to work.

It happens on all Services, system-wide, i.e.:

Open in Marked in Byword
Create Symlink in Finder
Subscribe To Comment Feed in Chrome

I'm not able to reproduce it, the only solution right now is to restart my Mac. System Services will work for a certain time and suddenly they will stop working again.

It also doesn't depend on the trigger. Via menu, via shortcut or via iCal, everything fails.

No output in Console.App.

Any ideas?

You could try running "Disk Utility.app", manually, and try to do the following:

Repair permissions.
Verify or repair disk.

If that doesn't work, you could try to narrow it down by starting from another volume with a different copy of the System Software.

That's worth a try I think.


Fastest way to convert .avi files for itunes? I've experimented with Handbrake and VLC and I'd like to know the fastest possible method to convert .avi file into a a file that is readable by itunes so I can stream it to my TV via my Apple TV 2.

The mentioned solutions require a couple of hours and I'd like to improve this. I'm working on a macbook air.

Thanks.

You're not going to find a magic bullet that can dramatically speed up your conversion. You really have two options: either reduce the quality of your target file, or throw more iron at it. Upgrading your hardware (including possibly putting more RAM in your machine) would help a lot.

The bottom line, though, is that the conversion app has to look at the whole file frame by frame and convert it, and that's an O(n) proposition--the time it takes scales linearly with the amount of data to convert, and there just aren't good ways for even a very clever program to shortcut that. Some programs may be fractionally more efficient than others, but in general, the algorithm takes as long as it takes to chew as much data as it has to chew.


Using The Terminal Command to Shutdown, Restart and Sleep My Mac? I'm getting more interested in using Terminal as an alternative way to address solutions on my Mac. I have seen this question entitled "Is there a better way to shutdown/restart OSX?".

I would therefore like to know:

How to shut down, restart and sleep my Mac using the Terminal command exclusively ?

The command you are after is shutdown.
This  informs all users that the machine is going to be shutdown and tells all apps to close files etc.
The command takes a parameter -h, -r or -s to shut down, restart or sleep the Mac.
The command has to be run as root so you need to use sudo.
e.g. to reboot the machine immediately
sudo shutdown -r now

e.g. to shutdown the machine in 60 minutes
sudo shutdown -h +60

From comments there are two things to be addressed
How shutdown works is by sending a sigterm to all processes which should then deal with that e.g. save open files etc. If they don't exit then they will get sent a SIGKILL which forces them to die with no chance to respond. The signals are not sent via the normal key message queue so Apps have to deal with this separately to the code that gets called from quit on the menu. A good app should call common code from both.
This other answer shows how to shutdown as if you hit the menu options. But note that apps can cancel this shutdown


Display Arrangement disappears with 3 external monitors with MacBook Pro I have been able to connect 3 external monitors to my MacbookPro. However when I started to arrange them in the Arrangement tab all monitors disappeared from the window. When I unplug one of the monitors the window fills again without any issues. Can't seem to get it working with all 3.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017)
Version 10.12.5

It might be that you have exceeded the maximum resolution that the graphics sub-system supports. From Apple's specifications for your Mac:

Video Support
Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors and:
Up to two displays with 5120-by-2880 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors
Up to four displays with 4096-by-2304 resolution at 60Hz at millions of colors
Up to four displays with 3840-by-2160 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors

You'll have to keep your resolution settings below the figures listed above. My guess is that you may have one or more monitors that exceeds the specific resolution on one or more displays.
If, however, they do not exceed those specifications I would say that should warrant a call to Apple tech support (free support for the first (I think) 90 days) and see if they can troubleshoot the issue with you.


iOS 11.1.1 lock screen always shows iTunes controls. How do I disable this bug / feature? After upgrading my iPhone to iOS 11.1.1, the locked screen shows iTunes music prominently covering my lock-screen picture, whereas before this never happened.

I'd like to disable this feature / bug, but I don't see any mechanism for doing so.

Does everyone's iOS 11.1.1 do this, or is it just a bug that randomly hits people?

I would like to see my picture, not iTunes, which I rarely use.  I also don't want to accidentally hit "play" and start random noises from my pocket.

Rebooting the iPhone resolved this issue, and it has yet to re-appear.

This appears to be a temporary manifestation of a bug, one which I was unable to find any references to online.


How can I automatically centre new windows in Yosemite? Is there a setting or third-party app for Yosemite which will make all new windows open in the center of my display? For instance, when I open a new Finder window, or launch an app.

I've found a wonderful app called Spectacle which lets me center windows (and do all kinds of other useful things) using keyboard shortcuts, but I'd like to automate centering if possible.

Can it be scripted using AppleScript ?
Any time your open a new App, it could call a script to center the Windows.
I do not know if this is possible with your tool, but it is with this one:
http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/


How to speed up "three finger drag" delay on release? It takes about 300ms after a three finger drag for it to take effect. I notice the delay because an actual click drag releases instantly

Anyone know of a hack to get rid of it??

You don't need to wait for the drag to be released before moving the cursor again. If you move the cursor with just one finger after the three finger drag, the drag will be released instantly.


Is there a way to insert automator output at the cursor? I have a simple script that generates different output every time it's run (e.g. generate a UUID).

Is there a way to write an automator script that simply inserts the output of a script at the current cursor location?

(I want to run this service from Thunderbird, if that makes a difference.)

Could your automator script copy the output to clipboard and then run this script to paste the clipboard contents?

do shell script "pbpaste > /path/to/your/clipboard-file.txt"

This topic covers the paste function in more detail https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9976338/applescript-to-paste-text-from-clipboard-into-a-file


Can't open an afp network share (but other machines can) I've spent the last few months (on and off) trying to get an afp networkshare to work using netatalk on OpenWrt. It takes a bit of work and it's easy to make mistakes so, when I couldn't connect to one of the shares from my MBP, I initially assumed that I made a configuration error. I created two shares that are essentially identical (except that one is for Time Machine and uses different user credentials) and the second share is fine. Strangely enough on my girlfriend's MBP both shares work fine.

Let's call my machine MBP-A and my girlfriend's machine MBP-B, both are running High Sierra. Let's call the share that's not working "TimeMachine" and the working second share "Data".

MBP-A can't connect to TimeMachine using Cmd-K in the Finder "The
share does not exist on the server. Please check the share name, and
then try again."
MBP-A connects to "Data" just fine. I get a prompt
for username and password, I enter them and the machine connects.
MBP-B can connect to both shares just fine. I get a prompt for
username and password, I enter them and the machine connects. I have
also been able to point Time Machine to the "Time Machine" share and
that is running a backup as we speak.
When I try to mount the problematic share in Terminal with

sudo mount -t afp afp://user:password@192.168.1.1/TimeMachine /Volumes/TimeMachine

it does mount it to a newly created local
dir called /Volumes/TimeMachine. I can see the available space in
/Volumes/TimeMachine in the Finder and can see that space decrease
because the other machine is making a backup to it as we speak. If I
want to enter the folder from the Finder, however, I get "The folder
“TimeMachine” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to
see its contents."

This leads me to believe that it's not a configuration problem on the server side as it works fine on the other machine but that it's a local problem on my machine. I thought it might have cached the wrong credentials but they are not in the keychain and the problem persists after a reboot.

Any ideas?

OK, it looks like I have found the answer. It's a problem in Finder.

Finder apparently doesn't understand that 192.168.1.1/Data and 192.168.1.1/TimeMachine, despite they are advertised separately under AFP that require different credentials, are two different shares.

If I connect to 192.168.1.1/Data, provide correct username and password, and browse that share, everything works. If I then connect to 192.168.1.1/TimeMachine, instead of asking for the credentials to access that share, it tries to reuse the credentials from the previous share. That obviously fails.

Unfortunately the KeyChain is also not able to distinguish between the two so you can't just save both sets of credentials there.

The solution is to create a mount script that logs in to 192.168.1.1/TimeMachine and mounts it directly after a reboot (before much else is done on the machine). Then reboot, go to the Time Machine settings, and point to this share as a network volume for TimeMachine. TimeMachine network drives do get their own key in KeyChain so you can have TM settings store the correct credentials in the KeyChain.


using Messages on a MacAir On my Mac Air, the return key sends the message, rather than moving my text to the next line. How do I move my text to the next line or can I change Preferences so that I can use the return key to advance to the next line and another command to actually send the message.


Target disk Macbook Pro HD not showing on Host Macbook Pro I'm trying to recover some data such as movies, pictures, etc from my brother's macbook pro before he takes it in for a depot repair. Anyway, like i've been told, I boot his macbook into target disk mode and connect it to my macbook via thunderbolt cable. After I unlock his hard drive it just doesn't show in my finder window. Is there something wrong on my end? Some sort of human error? Mind you the macbook is going in to get it's motherboard, fan and hard drive replaced. I figure it's due to one of those but just incase I just thought i'd reach out.

You mention "unlocking" the drive which would suggest your brother is using filevault (the drive is encrypted). If the drive/file system is indeed damaged, I find it unlikely you will be able to recover data.

If your brother happens to be using an "old design" MacBook Pro with a non-ssd harddrive, you can still pull the drive out quite easily and connect it externally to your macbook to have a look without the motherboard being a factor. You will not loose warranty by doing this, but do consult  ifixit (the best source of Apple repair guides online) to do this properly.


How can I get iTunes 11.1 to list songs by album and show cover art Before being forced to upgrade iTunes I originally had my music library set up so that I had all the songs listed, ordered and group by album and I could see their cover art, this made things easier as some of the albums I have are OST with multiple artists so I can easily find all the songs of an album and make it int a compilation, I was also at the time adding cover art to every album since most music off CDs are devoid of this

However after upgrading I can't do this, the songs section doesn't show the cover art and nothing is grouped like it was, the albums section has the cover art however everything is ordered by artist which is crap cause now I'm getting Mugen Souls, Darker than Black, Spice and Wolf and Puela Magi Madoka Magica all appearing before Accel World, also I don't see a track list unless I click on an album, also it appears I can't sort it

I was in the process of reorganizing my entire library and I can't revert back to a previous version of iTunes as I have to have version 11.1 because iOS 7 refuses to even allow the device to connect (thus why I had to upgrade, I would have if given the choice), so, how can I get iTunes 11.1 to shows a list of songs, sorted and grouped by album and showing the cover art

NOTE: I can't connect to the Internet

figured it out, it could be that i did this in the old itunes and because it was years ago i forgot and that updating itunes reset every setting

anyway, here are the steps i followed

click on the icon in the top left hand corner and select show menu bar (or Ctrl + B)
click on View > Show View Options (or Ctrl + J (you may be able to skip step 1 but i didn't use shortcuts))
Make sure Sort By is set to Album
Click in the checkbox beside Show Artwork
make sure that under the Music Section that the checkbox beside Album is checked, if it is not the albums will not be sorted alphabetically like they really should, while you can sort by what ever way want sorting by name will split albums and you'll only see the groups if 2 or more in the list have belong to the same album (ie. Check Mate and Cheese from Code Geass Lelouch of the Rebellion R2 - OST 2 will appear grouped and before Chemical Magical Cooking from Dream Eater Merry Character Songs - Kounagi Yui but separated from Guren which belong to the same sountrack)

Optional Parts (stuff i did because i like it)

Check in the checkbox beside Always Show - unless the size of the list of songs in an album group is greater than or equal to the height of the artwork it wont show, i would say 7 songs cause alot of Opening Soundtracks i have have only 4 tracks, with Always Show checked the list of songs in an album has 3 spots left
Set the Artwork Size slider to max (may have an affect to what i have explained above)

EDIT: these steps also work up to 12.0.1.26. Though when I installed it the default view for music was Albums. When you do step 2 make sure the view is set the view to Songs otherwise the options from Step 3 onward will not appear


Adding photos to iPhone from Mac using image capture Does anyone know of a way that I can put photos on my iPhone using image capture?

Add the pictures to your photostream in Photos.They will appear on your phone if you have Photo streaming turned on.