Reinstall/restore Apache httpd in OS X How to reinstall or restore Apache httpd in OS X? I want to do that because I deleted httpd.conf file (both /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and the original at /etc/apache2/original/httpd.conf).

If you've just removed the httpd.conf, here is the contents my /etc/apache2/original/httpd.conf (OS X 10.9.1):

#
# This is the main Apache HTTP server configuration file.  It contains the
# configuration directives that give the server its instructions.
# See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2> for detailed information.
# In particular, see
# <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/directives.html>
# for a discussion of each configuration directive.
#
# Do NOT simply read the instructions in here without understanding
# what they do.  They're here only as hints or reminders.  If you are unsure
# consult the online docs. You have been warned.
#
# Configuration and logfile names: If the filenames you specify for many
# of the server's control files begin with "/" (or "drive:/" for Win32), the
# server will use that explicit path.  If the filenames do *not* begin
# with "/", the value of ServerRoot is prepended -- so 'log/access_log'
# with ServerRoot set to '/www' will be interpreted by the
# server as '/www/log/access_log', where as '/log/access_log' will be
# interpreted as '/log/access_log'.

#
# ServerRoot: The top of the directory tree under which the server's
# configuration, error, and log files are kept.
#
# Do not add a slash at the end of the directory path.  If you point
# ServerRoot at a non-local disk, be sure to point the LockFile directive
# at a local disk.  If you wish to share the same ServerRoot for multiple
# httpd daemons, you will need to change at least LockFile and PidFile.
#
ServerRoot "/usr"

#
# Listen: Allows you to bind Apache to specific IP addresses and/or
# ports, instead of the default. See also the <VirtualHost>
# directive.
#
# Change this to Listen on specific IP addresses as shown below to
# prevent Apache from glomming onto all bound IP addresses.
#
#Listen 12.34.56.78:80
Listen 80

#
# Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) Support
#
# To be able to use the functionality of a module which was built as a DSO you
# have to place corresponding `LoadModule' lines at this location so the
# directives contained in it are actually available _before_ they are used.
# Statically compiled modules (those listed by `httpd -l') do not need
# to be loaded here.
#
# Example:
# LoadModule foo_module modules/mod_foo.so
#
LoadModule authn_file_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_file.so
LoadModule authn_dbm_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_dbm.so
LoadModule authn_anon_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_anon.so
LoadModule authn_dbd_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_dbd.so
LoadModule authn_default_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_default.so
LoadModule authz_host_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_host.so
LoadModule authz_groupfile_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_groupfile.so
LoadModule authz_user_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_user.so
LoadModule authz_dbm_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_dbm.so
LoadModule authz_owner_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_owner.so
LoadModule authz_default_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_default.so
LoadModule auth_basic_module libexec/apache2/mod_auth_basic.so
LoadModule auth_digest_module libexec/apache2/mod_auth_digest.so
LoadModule cache_module libexec/apache2/mod_cache.so
LoadModule disk_cache_module libexec/apache2/mod_disk_cache.so
LoadModule mem_cache_module libexec/apache2/mod_mem_cache.so
LoadModule dbd_module libexec/apache2/mod_dbd.so
LoadModule dumpio_module libexec/apache2/mod_dumpio.so
LoadModule reqtimeout_module libexec/apache2/mod_reqtimeout.so
LoadModule ext_filter_module libexec/apache2/mod_ext_filter.so
LoadModule include_module libexec/apache2/mod_include.so
LoadModule filter_module libexec/apache2/mod_filter.so
LoadModule substitute_module libexec/apache2/mod_substitute.so
LoadModule deflate_module libexec/apache2/mod_deflate.so
LoadModule log_config_module libexec/apache2/mod_log_config.so
LoadModule log_forensic_module libexec/apache2/mod_log_forensic.so
LoadModule logio_module libexec/apache2/mod_logio.so
LoadModule env_module libexec/apache2/mod_env.so
LoadModule mime_magic_module libexec/apache2/mod_mime_magic.so
LoadModule cern_meta_module libexec/apache2/mod_cern_meta.so
LoadModule expires_module libexec/apache2/mod_expires.so
LoadModule headers_module libexec/apache2/mod_headers.so
LoadModule ident_module libexec/apache2/mod_ident.so
LoadModule usertrack_module libexec/apache2/mod_usertrack.so
#LoadModule unique_id_module libexec/apache2/mod_unique_id.so
LoadModule setenvif_module libexec/apache2/mod_setenvif.so
LoadModule version_module libexec/apache2/mod_version.so
LoadModule proxy_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_ftp_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_ftp.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule proxy_scgi_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_scgi.so
LoadModule proxy_ajp_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_ajp.so
LoadModule proxy_balancer_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_balancer.so
LoadModule ssl_module libexec/apache2/mod_ssl.so
LoadModule mime_module libexec/apache2/mod_mime.so
LoadModule dav_module libexec/apache2/mod_dav.so
LoadModule status_module libexec/apache2/mod_status.so
LoadModule autoindex_module libexec/apache2/mod_autoindex.so
LoadModule asis_module libexec/apache2/mod_asis.so
LoadModule info_module libexec/apache2/mod_info.so
LoadModule cgi_module libexec/apache2/mod_cgi.so
LoadModule dav_fs_module libexec/apache2/mod_dav_fs.so
LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so
LoadModule negotiation_module libexec/apache2/mod_negotiation.so
LoadModule dir_module libexec/apache2/mod_dir.so
LoadModule imagemap_module libexec/apache2/mod_imagemap.so
LoadModule actions_module libexec/apache2/mod_actions.so
LoadModule speling_module libexec/apache2/mod_speling.so
LoadModule userdir_module libexec/apache2/mod_userdir.so
LoadModule alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_alias.so
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so
#LoadModule perl_module libexec/apache2/mod_perl.so
#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
LoadModule hfs_apple_module libexec/apache2/mod_hfs_apple.so

<IfModule !mpm_netware_module>
<IfModule !mpm_winnt_module>
#
# If you wish httpd to run as a different user or group, you must run
# httpd as root initially and it will switch.
#
# User/Group: The name (or #number) of the user/group to run httpd as.
# It is usually good practice to create a dedicated user and group for
# running httpd, as with most system services.
#
User _www
Group _www

</IfModule>
</IfModule>

# 'Main' server configuration
#
# The directives in this section set up the values used by the 'main'
# server, which responds to any requests that aren't handled by a
# <VirtualHost> definition.  These values also provide defaults for
# any <VirtualHost> containers you may define later in the file.
#
# All of these directives may appear inside <VirtualHost> containers,
# in which case these default settings will be overridden for the
# virtual host being defined.
#

#
# ServerAdmin: Your address, where problems with the server should be
# e-mailed.  This address appears on some server-generated pages, such
# as error documents.  e.g. admin@your-domain.com
#
ServerAdmin you@example.com

#
# ServerName gives the name and port that the server uses to identify itself.
# This can often be determined automatically, but we recommend you specify
# it explicitly to prevent problems during startup.
#
# If your host doesn't have a registered DNS name, enter its IP address here.
#
#ServerName www.example.com:80

#
# DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve your
# documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but
# symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations.
#
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"

#
# Each directory to which Apache has access can be configured with respect
# to which services and features are allowed and/or disabled in that
# directory (and its subdirectories).
#
# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of
# features.
#
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</Directory>

#
# Note that from this point forward you must specifically allow
# particular features to be enabled - so if something's not working as
# you might expect, make sure that you have specifically enabled it
# below.
#

#
# This should be changed to whatever you set DocumentRoot to.
#
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
    #
    # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
    # or any combination of:
    #   Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
    #
    # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
    # doesn't give it to you.
    #
    # The Options directive is both complicated and important.  Please see
    # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options
    # for more information.
    #
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

    #
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
    # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
    #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    #
    AllowOverride None

    #
    # Controls who can get stuff from this server.
    #
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

</Directory>

#
# DirectoryIndex: sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory
# is requested.
#
<IfModule dir_module>
    DirectoryIndex index.html
</IfModule>

#
# The following lines prevent .htaccess and .htpasswd files from being
# viewed by Web clients.
#
<FilesMatch "^\.([Hh][Tt]|[Dd][Ss]_[Ss])">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
    Satisfy All
</FilesMatch>

#
# Apple specific filesystem protection.
#
<Files "rsrc">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
    Satisfy All
</Files>
<DirectoryMatch ".*\.\.namedfork">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
    Satisfy All
</DirectoryMatch>

#
# ErrorLog: The location of the error log file.
# If you do not specify an ErrorLog directive within a <VirtualHost>
# container, error messages relating to that virtual host will be
# logged here.  If you *do* define an error logfile for a <VirtualHost>
# container, that host's errors will be logged there and not here.
#
ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/error_log"

#
# LogLevel: Control the number of messages logged to the error_log.
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
#
LogLevel warn

<IfModule log_config_module>
    #
    # The following directives define some format nicknames for use with
    # a CustomLog directive (see below).
    #
    LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
    LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common

    <IfModule logio_module>
      # You need to enable mod_logio.c to use %I and %O
      LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %I %O" combinedio
    </IfModule>

    #
    # The location and format of the access logfile (Common Logfile Format).
    # If you do not define any access logfiles within a <VirtualHost>
    # container, they will be logged here.  Contrariwise, if you *do*
    # define per-<VirtualHost> access logfiles, transactions will be
    # logged therein and *not* in this file.
    #
    CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/access_log" common

    #
    # If you prefer a logfile with access, agent, and referer information
    # (Combined Logfile Format) you can use the following directive.
    #
    #CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/access_log" combined
</IfModule>

<IfModule alias_module>
    #
    # Redirect: Allows you to tell clients about documents that used to
    # exist in your server's namespace, but do not anymore. The client
    # will make a new request for the document at its new location.
    # Example:
    # Redirect permanent /foo http://www.example.com/bar

    #
    # Alias: Maps web paths into filesystem paths and is used to
    # access content that does not live under the DocumentRoot.
    # Example:
    # Alias /webpath /full/filesystem/path
    #
    # If you include a trailing / on /webpath then the server will
    # require it to be present in the URL.  You will also likely
    # need to provide a <Directory> section to allow access to
    # the filesystem path.

    #
    # ScriptAlias: This controls which directories contain server scripts.
    # ScriptAliases are essentially the same as Aliases, except that
    # documents in the target directory are treated as applications and
    # run by the server when requested rather than as documents sent to the
    # client.  The same rules about trailing "/" apply to ScriptAlias
    # directives as to Alias.
    #
    ScriptAliasMatch ^/cgi-bin/((?!(?i:webobjects)).*$) "/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/$1"

</IfModule>

<IfModule cgid_module>
    #
    # ScriptSock: On threaded servers, designate the path to the UNIX
    # socket used to communicate with the CGI daemon of mod_cgid.
    #
    #Scriptsock /private/var/run/cgisock
</IfModule>

#
# "/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables" should be changed to whatever your ScriptAliased
# CGI directory exists, if you have that configured.
#
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables">
    AllowOverride None
    Options None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

#
# DefaultType: the default MIME type the server will use for a document
# if it cannot otherwise determine one, such as from filename extensions.
# If your server contains mostly text or HTML documents, "text/plain" is
# a good value.  If most of your content is binary, such as applications
# or images, you may want to use "application/octet-stream" instead to
# keep browsers from trying to display binary files as though they are
# text.
#
DefaultType text/plain

<IfModule mime_module>
    #
    # TypesConfig points to the file containing the list of mappings from
    # filename extension to MIME-type.
    #
    TypesConfig /private/etc/apache2/mime.types

    #
    # AddType allows you to add to or override the MIME configuration
    # file specified in TypesConfig for specific file types.
    #
    #AddType application/x-gzip .tgz
    #
    # AddEncoding allows you to have certain browsers uncompress
    # information on the fly. Note: Not all browsers support this.
    #
    #AddEncoding x-compress .Z
    #AddEncoding x-gzip .gz .tgz
    #
    # If the AddEncoding directives above are commented-out, then you
    # probably should define those extensions to indicate media types:
    #
    AddType application/x-compress .Z
    AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz

    #
    # AddHandler allows you to map certain file extensions to "handlers":
    # actions unrelated to filetype. These can be either built into the server
    # or added with the Action directive (see below)
    #
    # To use CGI scripts outside of ScriptAliased directories:
    # (You will also need to add "ExecCGI" to the "Options" directive.)
    #
    #AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

    # For type maps (negotiated resources):
    #AddHandler type-map var

    #
    # Filters allow you to process content before it is sent to the client.
    #
    # To parse .shtml files for server-side includes (SSI):
    # (You will also need to add "Includes" to the "Options" directive.)
    #
    #AddType text/html .shtml
    #AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml
</IfModule>

#
# The mod_mime_magic module allows the server to use various hints from the
# contents of the file itself to determine its type.  The MIMEMagicFile
# directive tells the module where the hint definitions are located.
#
#MIMEMagicFile /private/etc/apache2/magic

#
# Customizable error responses come in three flavors:
# 1) plain text 2) local redirects 3) external redirects
#
# Some examples:
#ErrorDocument 500 "The server made a boo boo."
#ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html
#ErrorDocument 404 "/cgi-bin/missing_handler.pl"
#ErrorDocument 402 http://www.example.com/subscription_info.html
#

#
# MaxRanges: Maximum number of Ranges in a request before
# returning the entire resource, or one of the special
# values 'default', 'none' or 'unlimited'.
# Default setting is to accept 200 Ranges.
#MaxRanges unlimited

#
# EnableMMAP and EnableSendfile: On systems that support it,
# memory-mapping or the sendfile syscall is used to deliver
# files.  This usually improves server performance, but must
# be turned off when serving from networked-mounted
# filesystems or if support for these functions is otherwise
# broken on your system.
#
#EnableMMAP off
#EnableSendfile off

# 6894961
TraceEnable off

# Supplemental configuration
#
# The configuration files in the /private/etc/apache2/extra/ directory can be
# included to add extra features or to modify the default configuration of
# the server, or you may simply copy their contents here and change as
# necessary.

# Server-pool management (MPM specific)
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-mpm.conf

# Multi-language error messages
#Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-multilang-errordoc.conf

# Fancy directory listings
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-autoindex.conf

# Language settings
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-languages.conf

# User home directories
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

# Real-time info on requests and configuration
#Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-info.conf

# Virtual hosts
#Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

# Local access to the Apache HTTP Server Manual
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-manual.conf

# Distributed authoring and versioning (WebDAV)
#Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-dav.conf

# Various default settings
#Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-default.conf

# Secure (SSL/TLS) connections
#Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf
#
# Note: The following must must be present to support
#       starting without SSL on platforms with no /dev/random equivalent
#       but a statically compiled-in mod_ssl.
#
<IfModule ssl_module>
SSLRandomSeed startup builtin
SSLRandomSeed connect builtin
</IfModule>

Include /private/etc/apache2/other/*.conf

Permissions:

-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel    18K 23 Oct 19:37 httpd.conf

…although it might be worth doing a permissions repair in Disk Utility.


How to run script using cron or launchd for Guest user account in El Capitan I could not find a way of executing a script for the Guest account during login which executes every minute. They say using cron daemon is deprecated so it looks like I will be using launchd with .plist files.

Scenario:
I have a public iMac I want to allow the general public to use the guest account and have it force log out every half-hour. I wrote a ruby script to check the login time and figure out time remaining.  I can have it display a banner notification every 10 minutes using osascript and then make it log off my account. Problem is when I try to implement it for the Guest account it doesn't work.

The problem is when I am placing the .plist file inside /Library/LaunchDaemons since it runs after login and also runs as root. Running as root is important since I can have the privilege to shut down processes when time runs out. I need it to  execute once every minute. This it the current plist file that does work when I login as my own username "owner" but not guest. Using org.user.plist

My original .plist file looked something like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
        <string>org.user</string>
    <key>Program</key>
        <string>/usr/local/bin/notify-custom</string>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Update 1 (Not a solution yet) .plist file which runs every 10 seconds for both Guest and my username

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
        <string>org.user</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <string>/usr/local/bin/notify-custom</string>
    <key>WatchPaths</key>
        <array>
            <string>/Users/Guest/Library</string>
            <string>/Users/owner/Library</string>
        <array>
    </integer>
</dict>
</plist>

As a test to make sure the osascript notification banner pops up I have this code inside /usr/local/bin/notify-custom

#/bin/bash

#Using whoami would have shown me logged in as root under LaunchDaemon .plist
loggedinUser=`finger | awk 'NR==3{print $1}'`
#I need to manually run terminal and type sudo as guest for nextline to work
sudo -u $loggedinUser /usr/bin/osascript -e 'display notification "Test" with title "Banner Notification"'

Solution is below.

In my opinion the following should work - it does in my VM! -  launched as /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.user.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>org.user</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/usr/bin/touch</string>
        <string>-f</string>
        <string>/Users/Guest/Desktop/test.txt</string>
    </array>
    <key>UserName</key>
    <string>Guest</string>
    <key>GroupName</key>
    <string>_guest</string>
    <key>InitGroups</key>
    <true/>
    <key>WatchPaths</key>
    <array>
        <string>/Users/Guest/Library</string>
    </array>
</dict>
</plist>

As example task I use /usr/bin/touch -f /Users/Guest/Desktop/test.txt.

The trick here is that the complete content of the Guest folder is deleted after a log out. After a new Guest logs in the whole content is recreated from scratch. As soon as the folder /Users/Guest/Library is created, the example task (touch ...) is started due to the WatchPaths key.

Since the task/script/app has to be executed as guest you can't use launch agents because the path /Users/Guest/Library/LaunchAgents/ simply doesn't exist.

Use a launch daemon instead and run it as Guest/_guest. Your ruby script /usr/local/bin/notify-custom has to be world readable/executable? of course.

I also tried to run the task every 60 seconds - which works properly but throws some errors after the guest's log out. Probably it's better to implement the whole thing in the ruby script. Depending on your script your mileage may vary though.

If you have two different tasks to execute (e.g show a banner every 10 minutes with Ruby and a timer to force log out after 30 minutes) it's probably better to create two different launch daemons.


What is the OS inside the Time Capsule? What is the OS of the Time Capsule ?

The AirPort Time Capsule (the official name, with my emphasis added on AirPort - see below for the reason), runs NetBSD, according to the Examples of use section for NetBSD on Wikipedia. It cites two sources - one being an answer from superuser.com (not very useful in this case), and another an article on wifinetnews.com, that states:

  A source unconnected with Apple provided convincing proof that the AirPort Extreme uses NetBSD as its embedded operating system...

The AirPort Extreme Base Station, AirPort Express Base Station and the AirPort Time Capsule all run the same firmware (that's why the AirPort in all the names). This can be seen in the firmware downloads available for these products - it's the same download for all these devices. Of course, nobody has jailbroken these devices yet, so we do not know if or how the installation process chooses specific bits for the underlying hardware. But the OS cannot be different with the same firmware download (it does not make sense for these devices to have such a scheme).

See the recent AirPort update 7.6.4 page for understanding the above correlation.


Can older iPhones (with iOS 11) display HEIF images? Consider the scenario of restoring a backup taken on an HEIF/HEVC capable device (e.g. the iPhone 7 or newer) to an older device (e.g. an iPhone 6s, running iOS 11).

Will images and videos taken on the new device and accessed on the old one be:

Not restored at all?
Restored, but not displayable (i.e. taking up space, accessible for sharing/uploading etc., but not shown in the gallery)?
Be fully compatible, and displayed/decoded in software?

Is there a difference between images and videos? (I could imagine that images are decoded in software on older devices, for example.)

There wouldn't be a problem with that. The older iPhone would be able to convert the image back to a readable format.

More info here.

Edit: This will be an issue if trying to view the videos on a mid-2014 MacBook Pro or older. There is ways around it, but only the 2015+ editions can automatically convert them.
I have recently found this out while trying to view videos from my iPhone 8 on my mid-2014 MBP.


Move Spotlight dialog in Yosemite Don't hate me but I love using Finder's spotlight feature.

In Yosemite they changed Spotlight (I like the changes) but they moved the spotlight dialog position to the center of the screen. I want to move it back to the upper right side of my screen (where it used to live).
Also is there a way to darken the background of spotlight results.
Spotlight gets lost among the mass of windows I have open.

Thanks in advance!
C

Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has discovered a way to move it back other than to downgrade your OS. I do not understand your second question!


Is it possible to change display resolution with a keyboard shortcut? I use different screen resolutions based on the activity I'm doing during the day.
For example when I'm coding I prefer to have more space available.
Is it possible to associate a keyboard shortcut to change the scaled display resolution ?
(see the attached screenshot)

Yes you totally can achieve this without running additional apps.  On my system I created two different scripts.  One script for adjusting the display resolution higher and one adjusting display resolution lower. On my system I just enabled both scripts as dictation commands but if you create a new Service through Automator, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to those services..

First, here are the two scripts I started with.

This one is for making the display resolution higher: if my display resolution is already at the default position

tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal anchor "displaysDisplayTab" of pane "com.apple.preference.displays"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences" to tell window "Built-in Retina Display"
    click radio button "Scaled" of radio group 1 of tab group 1
    click radio button 4 of radio group 1 of group 1 of tab group 1
end tell
quit application "System Preferences"

Running that script will result in this:

This next script is for making the display resolution lower: if my display resolution is not set at the default setting

tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal anchor "displaysDisplayTab" of pane "com.apple.preference.displays"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences" to tell window "Built-in Retina Display"
    click radio button "Scaled" of radio group 1 of tab group 1
    click radio button 3 of radio group 1 of group 1 of tab group 1
end tell
quit application "System Preferences"

Once I made sure both scripts work correctly, I then opened up Automator and created a new service for the display resolution higher and added the appropriate script as shown in the following image.  I saved this file as rez_higher.workflow

From here, I opened up system preferences/keyboard/shortcuts/services. I located that new service I created and assigned it a keyboard shortcut

After this, just follow the same procedures to create a new workflow and service for the display resolution lower


All cores in CPU are 100% utilitized when copying file over network When I copy a large file over our local, gigabit Ethernet network, my 2016 MacBook Pro is unusable as kernal_task consumes all of the CPU resources.

Here's my Mac specs:

Here's an snapshot of the utilization. It peaks over 400% at times:

It is normal for the CPU utilization to be this high on an network file transfer?

If not, what steps can I take to reduce CPU utilization so that I can use my MacBook while transferring lark files?

That's mainly the unfortunate tale of thermally inept design. The kernel_task uses up so much because the temperature has risen too high. Install a sensor app and confirm, install Intel CPU PowerGadget to confirm again. Widespread and common problem.

Thunderbolt chips get hot and are inadequately connected to the cooling system and so the system tries to slow things down by occupying the CPU with meaningless cycle sucking to prevent a halt and catch fire situation.

To mitigate this, you might try to disconnect other peripherals, install a fan control software that is set to max rpm, use external cooling solutions (stands, pads, fans, AC), stop all other processes causing calculations that translate into heat. If you are daring and think you know better than Apple's 'designers' on how much heat your machine should be able to stand, you may also override this with some hacking. (This is not recommended.)


How do I remove or delete an @me.com email? I currently have 2 Apple IDs, one that uses my Gmail account and I have been using this one for a while now, this is the one I want to keep.

When iCloud came out, I registered an @me.com email for free to reserve my name. But when I did this it registered a separate Apple ID rather then attach to my other Apple ID.

This is ridiculously frustrating, all I want to do is remove or delete one of my Apple IDs or @me.com email to make it available to my original Gmail account.

How would I do this? I don't see anywhere allowing you to delete your account.

You cannot move, merge, or delete an Apple ID once it is created. Once it is created, it is a permanent account.

More info available here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HE37?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US


Can I answer an incoming phone call on my Apple Watch using Siri command? Is it possible to add a Siri command like "Answer the phone" when I have an incoming phone call on my Apple Watch?

The use case is to be able to do that while doing any surfing-like activities with Apple Watch being in the water-locked state.

This seems to be now possible with just "Hey Siri" and "Answer the phone".
It is also possible with iOS v14.5 and compatible headphones. In Siri settings enable:

"Allow Siri when locked"
"Announace Calls" -> always

And now you can answer by saying "Answer" when there's an incoming call. Doesn't work with Apple Watch though.
Ref: https://lifehacker.com/use-siris-ios-14-5-update-to-answer-calls-with-your-voi-1846774139


iPhone and iPad says IMAP server is not responding after password change, but works on other devices I’m having a bit of a brain-scratcher with my parents’ phones and iPads. My stepmum received a notification that a attempt by someone to log in to her Google account (with the right password) had been blocked, so I started changing passwords for the accounts variations of that password were used.
One of those accounts is an IMAP e-mail account associated with their website. The mail server is a simple, bog-standard IMAP server run by the host – no hosted Gmail or anything like that, just plain IMAP. Note: The problems described here also apply to the outgoing SMTP server, which is on the same domain as the IMAP server.
The e-mail account had been working on her iPhone and iPad for years – but when I changed the password in the website admin panel and then updated it in Settings → Accounts on the two iDevices, they both said “The mail server imap.server.com is not responding. Verify that you have entered the correct account info in Mail settings”, and I haven’t been able to get it to work since. All settings and credentials (username/password) have been confirmed in the host’s admin panel and are correct. The error is never “Incorrect username or password”, always that the server does not respond.
Three points that boggle my mind:

I’ve tried completely removing the account, restarting the device and adding it as a new account; it then says “Cannot connect to server using SSL” when setting up the account. Saying yes to its suggestion of trying without SSL doesn’t help; still can’t connect.

Setting up the same account (with completely identical settings and credentials, all verified to be correct in the host’s admin panel) works fine on my and my dad’s iPhone and iPad, even accessing the Internet on the same network as the devices where it doesn’t work.

The host has previously been of the format server1234.servercluster.com, with the subdomain corresponding to which actual server the website is hosted on in the host’s server park (i.e., if they move the site to a different server, you’ll have to change your e-mail and FTP hostnames too). Recently, they’ve added aliases of the format m123456.servercluster.com, where the subdomain is an unchanging identifier that remains the same across server transfers. Both hostnames work just fine on me and my dad’s devices; neither works on my stepmum’s.

As far as empiric evidence goes, then, it seems that changing the password breaks the account – even after deleting it completely – if the account has previously been installed on the device, but the same account can be added to a new device with no problems.
I spoke to the host, who were as baffled as I am. Their only suggestion was that perhaps there was a cached SSL certificate that was screwing things up, which does sound like it’s along the right lines, but I don’t see how it can be right, given that the server’s SSL certificate hasn’t changed: it’s the same as it was a few days ago when it worked fine, before the password change.
What might be causing this? Something cached somewhere on the device (and if so, how do I get rid of it)?
A last option would be to completely reset the device, but I’d really like to avoid doing that as it would take me ages to get everything back the way it was.

So I never figured out what exactly the problem was here, but the culprit must have been some sort of cached something on the devices.
A few days ago, I once again edited the accounts on the devices – and lo and behold, suddenly it worked on both the iPad and the iPhone.
So whatever it was that was cached (?), it must have been flushed (?) after a certain amount of time had passed, and then things worked as usual. All it needed was a bit of time.


Keyboard shortcut to switch between Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres, Videos, Playlists in iTunes? I wasn’t able to find keyboard shortcuts for switching between Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres, Videos, Playlists in iTunes. This is the only thing that is missing in order to have a complete keyboard experience.

Are there any shortcuts for this? And if not, can they be created and how?

You could assign shortcuts to scripts like this:

tell application "System Events" to tell window 1 of process "iTunes"
    if exists radio button 4 of radio group 1 of splitter group 1 then
        click radio button 4 of radio group 1 of splitter group 1
    else -- if the sidebar is not shown
        click radio button 4 of radio group 1
    end if
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
    set view of browser window 1 to user playlist "Music"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to tell window 1 of process "iTunes"
    if exists radio button 4 of radio group 1 of splitter group 1 then
        click radio button 4 of radio group 1 of splitter group 1
    else
        click radio button 4 of radio group 1
    end if
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
    set view of browser window 1 to (get user playlist 1 where special kind is none)
end tell


How would I password protect a USB Thumb Drive? I'm putting some sensitive information on a USB thumb drive and I'd like to password protect it so it can only be accessed with a password I set. I used to be able to Erase with Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) from Disk Utilities but that doesn't seem to be an option anymore. Is there still a way to do this?

You may need to change the 'Scheme' drop-down to GUID Partition Map. I just fired up Disk Utility and the encrypted format seems to only be available when that is selected.


How to enable password lock on Notes in iOS 9.3? I recently got iOS 9.3 for my iPhone, but I'm not finding an obvious way to password-lock my Notes. This feature was advertised by Apple as part of the iOS 9.3 package, but is it only available for certain devices, similarly to Night Shift?

I'm using an iPhone 5C, but the problem also seems to be occurring on my iPad Air 2.

The relatively difficult-to-find solution to the problem is to go to the Note you wish to lock:

in the top-right corner, tap the "Share" icon
on the bottom row, there will be a lock symbol with a caption that says "Lock Note".
select that symbol
you will be prompted to create a password that locks this note, but remember that this single password will secure all your protected notes, not just the note you're on.

You can also use Touch ID to secure your notes. Remember that if you secure the note, it will no longer be accessible by devices running versions of OS X older than 10.11.4, or devices running a version of iOS different from 9.3 or higher. Next time you try to open that Note (or others that are locked with the passcode), you'll be prompted for your password to unlock it.

You can change the Notes password by going to your Home screen, then Settings > Notes > Password.


Is it possible to set the output language of shell commands to anything other than English? Am I correct in my assumption that shell commands such as cp, man, ls, etc. always print their messages in English regardless of system and user settings, and also standard shell messages like "command not found" are not localizable?

In System Preferences > Language & Text, I tried changing language, region and input source to a different language/locale. I also tried running sudo languagesetup. Nothing seems to affect the language of shell commands, so I guess it must hard coded to English, but I couldn't find any reference on the internet. If this is not correct, how do you change the shell language in OS X?

If you change LC_MESSAGES, it changes the language of error and help messages shown by bash, but only a part of them are translated for many languages:

$ export LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8
$ aa
bash: aa: Kommando nicht gefunden.
$ help alias
alias: alias [-p] [Name[=Wert] ... ]
    Definiert Aliase oder zeigt sie an.

    Ohne Argumente wird die Liste der Aliase (Synonyme) in der Form
    `alias Name=Wert' auf die Standardausgabe gedruckt.

    Sonst wird ein Alias für jeden angegebenen Namen definiert, für den ein
    Wert angegeben wurde.
    A trailing space in VALUE causes the next word to be checked for
    alias substitution when the alias is expanded.

    Options:
      -p    Print all defined aliases in a reusable format

    Rückgabewert:
    Meldet Erfolg, außer wenn NAME nicht existiert.

Terminal and iTerm 2 set LANG (which changes all actual locale variables like LC_MESSAGES) based on the region selected in System Preferences by default.

Some GNU/Linux distributions come with man pages in other languages than English, but OS X doesn't. Some Homebrew packages add localized man pages to /usr/local/share/man/ though:

$ LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8 man -w ps2pdf
/usr/local/share/man/de/man1/ps2pdf.1
$ LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8 man ps2pdf|head
PS2PDF(1)                         Ghostscript                        PS2PDF(1)

NAME
       ps2pdf - konvertiert PostScript nach PDF mittels ghostscript
       ps2pdf12 - konvertiert PostScript nach PDF 1.2 (kompatibel zu Acrobat 3
       und spAxter) mittels ghostscript
       ps2pdf13 - konvertiert PostScript nach PDF 1.3 (kompatibel zu Acrobat 4
       und spAxter) mittels ghostscript

You could for example copy /usr/share/man/de/ from a Ubuntu VM to OS X, but only a small part of the man pages are translated:

ubuntu:~$ find /usr/share/man/de -type f|wc -l
113
ubuntu:~$ find /usr/share/man/man* -type f|wc -l
2857


Is it possible to only run one application as non-retina whereas everything else is retina? I have a Macbook Pro Retina 15" (Mid 2014). For whatever reason I noticed that one application (Netbeans) is a lot faster (the interface) when it runs in a non-retina screen (noticed this when I connected a second non-retina display).

I don't really like using a second display. And I also really like the retina graphics. Is it possible to only run one application (Netbeans) as non-retina whereas everything else is retina?

OSX Yosemite 10.10.5.

Select Netbeans in Finder, right click and press "Get Info" (or press Cmd ⌘-I on the keyboard). In the window that pops up, check "Open in Low Resolution".


How to contact Apple if somebody has created an AppleID using an email address of mine. Before you downvote this question consider that I'm not the first to run into Apple's odd recursive authentication loop.

Frustrated Apple User sums it up as:

  So Apple could do nothing and this guy is allowed to use my email as
  his apple ID as long as he wants and I will receive emails from Apple
  when he uses his device, etc.

It's an established problem with Apple authorization and authentication.  (My account is gmail, but it's basically the same underlying problem.)

While probably not a phishing attack, it certainly could be malicious.

Apple wrote:

  Thanks for contacting us. I'm sorry that you weren't able to reset
  your Apple ID password. I’ll do everything that I can to get your
  issue resolved. If you haven’t already, you can try resetting your
  password online at: http://iforgot.apple.com For more information on
  resetting your security questions, see this page:
  https://support.apple.com/HT201485 For security reasons, I can't help
  you access this account via email.

So far as I know my account has been hijacked.  I say my account, because it's my e-mail address which is used to login.  So far as I know this is some variant of a malicious social engineering attack.

How do I contact Apple by chat?

When I try to contact Apple through Chat I get:

and so cannot proceed with resetting the password.

Notably, signing up for a mailing list has better authentication and authorization.

Or, an e-mail address for Apple would be a good way to enter into a dialogue with them.  Do they have an e-mail address?  Their e-mail to me came from appstore_emea@apple.com but they've already explained that they won't reset the password via e-mail.

When I try to contact Apple support through their website it goes in a loop where they want my Apple ID and then challenge me with secret questions.

At best it's annoying.  At worst it's some sort of attack.  This has been going on at least since 2016, we're almost in 2019.

This is the e-mail, or a portion of:

Welcome to iCloud.
Your Apple ID is <me>@gmail.com.
iCloud keeps all your photos and videos, documents, contacts, and more up to date automatically, so you always have access to the latest versions on all your devices.

How to contact Apple if somebody has created an AppleID using an email address of mine.

This particular answer is meant to address the qualifier (emphasized)  portion of the question.

Unless your email address is not 100% solely in your control, this cannot happen.

Why? Because immediately upon creating an AppleID, you are immediately asked to confirm the account and an email is with with a code only; there are no links to click or addresses to reply to.

To be perfectly clear, an AppleID cannot be created unless someone physically types out the confirmation code in the boxes on Apple's AppleID website.

What this means

If "someone", whether nefarious or innocent intentions, created an AppleID account with your email address they either had:

access your email account
access to a trusted device that's no longer in your possession (sold, gifted, or stolen)
you confirmed the account and forgot about it.

What is Apple going to do?

Nothing, unless you can authenticate with the credentials the account creator provided.

email address
Birthday
Phone Number (required in some countries)
3 different security questions with 6 options each as to the question being asked (18 different permutations)

Apple needs to validate who you are before it will even contemplate making a change.  The reason for the extra verification credentials is for the simple reason email addresses and phone numbers change; your birthday and the city where your parents met (one of the questions) will not.

  So far as I know my account has been hijacked. I say my account, because it's my e-mail address which is used to login. So far as I know this is some variant of a malicious social engineering attack.

It could be your account and equally as likely it's not.   We (here on Ask Different) and Apple only have your word that the email is in fact "yours."  How do we know that you haven't compromised the legitimate AppleID account owner and you're attempting to hack their credentials? How secure would AppleID be if they allowed anyone to merely claim an email address was theirs and to reset the password?

(It's not an accusation, it's an academic exercise)

I can already hear your argument:  It's my email account.  Ok, let's look at it from Apple's prospective:

Given the security process, your email must have been compromised when it was created
Given that you can't authenticate any other security credential, but claiming you've got access to email means email is potentially compromised now.

From Apple's perspective, it's not their problem.


Keyboard and Trackpad stop working on brand new Macbook Pro with Mavericks? I just got a brand new Macbook Pro (2.4 GHz Intel Core i5) with OS X 10.9 Mavericks preinstalled. It's working great and I love the retina screen, but I've had a recurring issue daily where the Keyboard and Trackpad suddenly become completely unresponsive.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what I'm doing when it happens, but generally I'm in the midst of using Google Chrome and navigating around. It happens in the midst of use, not while I'm away from the computer. Some time after using the laptop for anywhere from 30 minutes to over an hour they just become unresponsive. I can't move the cursor at all with the trackpad. And none of the keys on the keyboard are functional at all. I can't change volume. I can't adjust screen brightness. No letters work. I can't use Command+Tab to switch between applications. The only thing that surprisingly works is hitting the Power button on the keyboard. This will shut off the screen. Then when I try to hit the Power key again it will prompt me to log back in with my password, but I still can't type or move the cursor.

The only thing that gets me back up and running is to hold the power button down until it completely shuts down. Then I have to boot everything back up and it works fine again for awhile until it happens all over again at some indeterminate time.

I'm not running any virtualization software so that's not an issue.

This is a known issue, and a fix is coming.

  Symptoms

  Apple is aware of rare circumstances where the built-in keyboard and
  Multi-Touch trackpad may become unresponsive on 13-inch MacBook Pro
  with Retina display (Late 2013) computers and is working on an update
  to resolve this behavior.

  Resolution

  If you experience this issue, reset the keyboard and trackpad by
  closing the computer’s display for approximately one minute and then
  open it.

Sources: MacRumors.com, Apple Knowledge Base


Why cannot discover user in Airdrop when open personal hotspot? When my iPhone opens the personal hotspot, I cannot find other users via Airdrop. What is the theory behind it?

AirDrop is different than a personal hotspot.

A personal hotspot is for sharing your internet connection.

AirDrop has separate controls, located in the control center.   You must also turn on Bluetooth and wifi.

Official Apple doc with screenshots.


MBA randomly drops internet connection Using 2017 MBA with High Sierra. Randomly drops the internet connection. Sometimes several times per hour, sometimes once a week. Most of the time it also drops the WiFi connection.

Have tried turning WiFi on and off
renewing DHCP lease
rebooting things

All of these work or not on a random basis.

I rule out the WiFi network itself since all my other devices maintain the signal with no problems (2017 iMac w/High Sierra, 2007 iMac w/ Sierra, 2006 MacBook w/OSX 8.6?, original iPad, and iPhone 8), even when situated at the same physical location.

When the MBA drops the WiFi the toolbar icon at top drops out. But the Network panel in system preferences recognizes that the WiFi network exists and has a strong signal but is not joined.

There are no other competing networks in my area.
I also removed saved networks previously used when away from home.

This random action does not seem to be correlated to sleep mode, long stretches of inactivity, keyboard actions, or anything else i can identify.

It might be an incompatibility with your access point or issue with the driver. I had my driver crash several times, leaving the network stack unresponsive and requiring restart. This happened during a short power surge, leading to the router "almost" restarting (it's a Mikrotik router, the radio was down for a second, but not the whole router). Everything else reconnected (several iPhones, iPad and few other devices), but not my MacBook (at the time it was running 10.13 17A405)

Check your access point/router logs for a drop reason (if it provides any).

When this happens, you might do a wireless diagnostics report (option click on wifi icon, tap on ) and then search trough the files for some suspicious lines. After you collect several of them, open a bug report.

Another lead would be kernel based third party firewall solutions.


How to disable restore/resume/saved-state for a specific application in Yosemite For most applications I like the OSX feature of remembering which documents were open.  But it drives me nuts in Preview.

In past versions of OSX there was a simple preference that could be altered for each application:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/177469/18486

This no longer works in Yosemite.  Is there an alternative?

After some playing around I found a workaround, not sure if there's something better:

Open Preview, close all documents, close Preview.
cd ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/com.apple.Preview.savedState
chmod -w .
chmod -w *

There will be similar folders for other applications.


How does the iPad expose its host name over the network? When I connect my iPad to the wifi network at work, I can ping it by name: ping my-ipad. Clearly the router is somehow exposing it via DNS, or something like that.

But when I connect my iPad to the wifi network at my home, I don't get this. Even if I go into nslookup and explicitly set the DNS server to my router, I get an unknown host error when trying to look up the iPad.

I'm using the same Mac and same iPad in both cases.

How does the iPad broadcast its name? Perhaps my home router just doesn't support this feature, whatever it is, but I'm hopeful it's just some option I can toggle - so what settings should I be looking at (or for) on my home router?

I don't want to edit the hosts file on my Mac (I can't guarantee the IP address of my iPad will always be the same), and I don't want to jailbreak the iPad.

The iPhone can be found by name using Bonjour. The name will be my-ipad.local
This name is the name in theIOS device with spaces and some punctuation removes as in @TheX's answer and then local as the domain telling devices to use Bonjour lookup. this name is not held in the router, Bonjour asks devices to call out their name on the network.


Samsung SSD 840 speed issue Can any one explain me this ? I re-install BlackMagic but it ain't change a thing.
I'm running 10.9.3 and there is only one partition on the SSD.

With the terminal :
MBP-Thomas in ~
○ → dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 35.587628 secs (30171773 bytes/sec)

 MBP-Thomas in ~
○ → dd if=tstfile  of=/dev/zero
2097152+0 records in
2097152+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 11.061699 secs (97068437 bytes/sec)

 MBP-Thomas in ~
○ → cd /

 MBP-Thomas in /
○ → sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024
Password:
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 33.653468 secs (31905830 bytes/sec)

 MBP-Thomas in /
○ → dd if=tstfile  of=/dev/zero
2097152+0 records in
2097152+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 11.582934 secs (92700332 bytes/sec)

Which is also pretty bad...
Result of iotop :
MBP-Thomas in ~
○ → sudo iotop -C 5 12
Password:
Tracing... Please wait.
2014 May 29 12:07:16,  load: 1.38,  disk_r:      4 KB,  disk_w:   9124 KB

  UID    PID   PPID CMD              DEVICE  MAJ MIN D            BYTES
  501    284    277 cfprefsd         ??        1   2 R             4096
  501    284    277 cfprefsd         ??        1   2 W            16384
  501   3905     46 lssave           ??        1   2 W          9326592

2014 May 29 12:07:21,  load: 1.43,  disk_r:      0 KB,  disk_w:      0 KB

  UID    PID   PPID CMD              DEVICE  MAJ MIN D            BYTES

2014 May 29 12:07:26,  load: 1.40,  disk_r:     40 KB,  disk_w:   1960 KB

  UID    PID   PPID CMD              DEVICE  MAJ MIN D            BYTES
    0      1      0 launchd          ??        1   2 R            40960
    0      1      0 launchd          ??        1   5 W            40960
    0      0      0                  ??        1   5              74752
    0      0      0 kernel_task      ??        1   2 W           888832
    0      1      0 launchd          ??        1   2 W          1077248
    0      0      0                  ??        1   2            1200128

2014 May 29 12:07:31,  load: 1.36,  disk_r:      0 KB,  disk_w:     12 KB

  UID    PID   PPID CMD              DEVICE  MAJ MIN D            BYTES
  501    352    296 node-webkit      ??        1   2 W            12288

2014 May 29 12:07:36,  load: 1.33,  disk_r:      0 KB,  disk_w:      0 KB

  UID    PID   PPID CMD              DEVICE  MAJ MIN D            BYTES

2014 May 29 12:07:41,  load: 1.31,  disk_r:      0 KB,  disk_w:      0 KB

Update :
Ok. Now it says that writing speed is 27.4MB/s (27379034 bytes/sec) and reading speed is 4.45GB/s (4499797299 bytes/sec)
WTF ?

I have also experienced slow performance on an SSD and it was due to other active processes writing to the disk continously.

Have a look at question on superuser on how to monitor OSX disk activity: https://superuser.com/questions/89266/whats-causing-all-the-disk-activity-on-os-x

Basically run this either this command form Terminal:

iotop -C 5 12

or this other:

fs_usage

To locate any process that is writing to the disk continously.

Another thing to try is booting from a clean install of OSX on an external USB disk, and the benchmark the internal SSD.

I would also determine if the SDD is running the latest Samsung firmware. You can download the latest version from this Samsung support page: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/downloads.html

Beware that it is recommended to have a backup of the data before attempting to update the firmware.


Is there a way to make Adium open links with Google Chrome? When someone sends me a link in Adium I'll click it and Safari will open up. I'd like links to be opened by Google Chrome instead.

I've had a look around the web and in the preferences but for the the life of me I can't figure this simple one out.

Any clues?

NB: My default browser is Google Chrome.

EDIT

I'm running version 1.4.1 (i.e. up-to-date). I use this SkypePlugin. Apart from that it's plain vanilla Adium.

Try to disable the Skype plugin, it must be tempering with the way Adium handles URLs opening.


Forgot my password to a disk image (.sparseimage) I'm in trouble right now.

I used Disk Utility to create a sparse image and I cannot remember the password, when I created the file I didn't select to remember in keychain.

Now, I try to enter the possible value but it doesn't work.
Is there any recommend way to crack the password or give some hint or some app that might be worked on this stuff.

I really need to use the data in that file.

CrowBar is somewhat out-of-date.

Probably the most comprehensive and up-to-date free password-recovery package is JohnTheRipper. Among many other formats, it can test .dmg's as well.

Note that JtR does not "break" the encryption, it just automates and speeds the process of trying thousands (or millions, or trillions) of dictionary-based and random passwords in hopes of eventually hitting the correct one that decrypts your data.

JohnTheRipper is a command-line tool and requires one to be pretty well-versed in standard shell syntax, etc.

If you don't want to compile JtR yourself, there are also free unofficial pre-compiled Mac OS X binaries available.

The latest "jumbo" and "magnum" community-contributed versions can handle .dmg files, sparse-images through OS X 10.7. If you dig around in the recent patches you can even find code to handle OS X 10.8 passwords.


Printing to a Local Printer While Using VPN I use Cisco's AnyConnect VPN client for Mac to access my work network from home. While using the VPN I am unable to connect to my home printer. Is there any way around this? Is it possible to add my home printer while using VPN?

This largely depends upon the settings that your network administrator has set up for your VPN connection.

It is possible for them to require that all traffic travel through the VPN tunnel, at which point, no, you will not be able to connect to a networked printer in your home.

It is also possible for them to allow traffic that is not bound for your organization, to be transmitted outside the VPN tunnel, at which point you should be able to access your network print and other network resources in your home.

I would check with your network administrator on this...  he/she will be best able to help you out.


Install automator service via command line I would like to automate my Mac installation flow for services. The following is my script:

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf ./tempWorkflows
mkdir tempWorkflows
for filename in ./*.workflow; do
    cp -R "$filename" ./tempWorkflows/"$filename"
done
for filename in ./tempWorkflows/*.workflow; do
    open $filename
done
rm -rf ./tempWorkflows

It basically copy all my *.workflow and open it. However, for open $filename, it prompts and asking for a confirmation:

Is there a way to add --no-prompt or similar flag for the open command?

EDIT:

I am using El Capitan 10.11.3

If Automator is closed then open Automator and select Application under Choose a type for your document, then click the Choose button. If it's already open the choose File > New and select Application under Choose a type for your document.

Add a Run Shell Script Action to it.

Copy and paste the shell code you presently have into the Run Shell Script Action.

Add the following lines of code after: open $filename

sleep 1
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to click button "Install" of window "Service Installer" of process "Automator"'
sleep 1
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to click button "Done" of window "Service Installer" of process "Automator"'

Note: You should also add an appropriate cd line above the rm -rf ./tempWorkflows line you presently have in your code, e.g. cd /some/directory/path where it's the pathname of the location your .workflow files are located for processing by your script.

Save the Automator Application as Install Automator Service.

Next:

Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Accessibility > Privacy

Click the Lock icon to make changes and type in your password, then click the Unlock button.

User the [+] to add the Install Automator Service or drag and drop the application bundle into the window.

This will now allow the Install Automator Service application to run your shell code and use the AppleScript code to click the Install button and subsequent Done button on the Service Installer dialog box in the process of installing your Services.


Uninstalling all instances of apache, php and mysql So When I first got my mac mini, I installed things like apache, mysql and php - not knowing that apple either came with these or had a tool called mamp that would allow you to run these.

I thought this was like ubuntu and I could install and run everything my self. I soon got frustrated and installed mamp on top of what ever I was doing, which wasn't working, and got that to work - Unfortunately a side affect of that was, every time I updated a file or folder on the mamp server, I had to stop, start mamp just for the changes to take affect.

This isn't normal.

So my solution is to uninstall apache, php, mysql AND mamp and then just install mamp and get it working as it should.

How would I do this?

Just delete or move the apps from the app folder s long as they don't have their own un-installer. If that doesn't work, back up your mac, reinstall the OSX, and copy the data you want from your back up file.


App Store apps can't be opened after upgrading macOS 10.12 to 10.13 I updated my Mac from 10.12.6 "Sierra" to 10.13.6 "High Sierra".
Now every app that was installed using the App Store is not able to run anymore.
They all give me the following 2 screens:

All apps show up like they are not installed:

If I install them like here (5th item in list):

Then it still won't work. I have signed out of the App Store completely and signed in again - that resolved nothing. If I go to another tab, or re-open the App store then it shows up again like I didn't install it.

If I launch the apps from a terminal then I get:
Killed: 9
Which seems to be the code for a SIGKILL

SIGKILL
Default action: Abnormal termination of the process.
Description: Kill (cannot be caught or ignored).

I tried fixing with chmod +x for the executables, but it does not fix the problem.
At this point I don't know what to do except reinstalling my whole OS.
Can someone help?

Ok, I got so sick of it that I decided to reinstall my OS.
I even formatted the HD, and I did not restore from any backup.
While at it, I moved to 10.14.6.
When that installation was freshly done, the first thing I did was security updates and a reboot.
After that I wen't to the App Store and tried to install the app again.
The error from yesterday was gone but to my surprise I got the following error:

Then I followed all the steps here except the Upgrade to macOS Catalina:
https://www.saintlad.com/we-could-not-complete-your-purchase-app-store-on-mojave/

Check Network Connectivity
Verify Apple ID in App Store & iTunes
Accept iTunes New Terms & Conditions
Clear App Store Cookies and Cached Files
Clear App Store Temporary Files
-U-p-g-r-a-d-e- -t-o- -m-a-c-O-S- -C-a-t-a-l-i-n-a-
Get Support from Apple

When I was on the phone, I clicked to get the same error as in the picture to make sure I didn't confuse it with yesterday error's message. And yes I still got the error. Later in the conversation he asked me to try another app, which I had done before. But magically it worked now, and suddenly all worked.
So yeah, I recommend people to call Apple, and let them do whatever it is they are doing to fix this problem.


where do I get openGL driver monitor? I stumbled upon this interesting documentation from Apple mentioning OpenGL Driver Monitor. So I searched for that tool but is nowhere to be found. How can I get that tool?

In the latest version of Xcode (4.4), OpenGL Driver Monitor and similar tools are no longer included. You need to download "Graphics Tools for Xcode" from Apple's Mac developer downloads (requires free developer account).


How to specify between identical menu command names when making custom shortcuts. I commonly set custom keyboard shortcuts in System Prefs.

I tried setting a shortcut (command-shift-a, mirroring command-shift-j to move to junk) for Mail app to move messages to archive, since the default shortcut is rather weird (command-control-a).

But the menubar command is "Message / Archive", so what I enter in "System Preferences / Keyboard / Shortcuts / App Shortcuts" becomes simply "Archive". Thus it's getting confused with "Mailbox / Go to Favorite Mailbox / Archive".

Is there a way to specify which is which, to avoid the naming collision?

I found the answer on MacStories and SuperUser.

Colliding menubar command names can be specified via their nesting tree, using ->. Thus the shortcut name in my original question becomes Message->Archive.


moving from machd to mac os lion 10.75 how do i update my macbook air Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5  to a more up to date version as I need to install remote access. When I try currently it says
Microsoft Remote Desktop can’t be installed on “Macintosh HD” because Mac OS X version 10.9 or later is required.

please help

Go to the Mac App Store, then click on the updates tab and download & install the latest update


OSX and installing Windows applications with Wine First time post here, so I do hope this goes in the right place.

I'm having a problem installing and running a Windows application on OSX. I've Googled quite a lot and tried various apps, but now I'm using Wine on OSX 10.9.5

To keep this question simple, Wine appears to have worked and the Windows install shield ran without (I think) any problem.

There's now a .lnk file on my desktop. If I run this using Wine, nothing appears to happen. If I look in the lnk file I see a typical path -

\Program Files\ and then name of application.

I cannot seem to find this path anywhere in OSX. I wanted to locate the executable and run it directly in Wine.

All I really want to do is run this Windows app, it's a simple enough program and really just a one off for me, so was trying to avoid heavyweight or expensive VM solutions.

I would really appreciate just any help on locating the \Program Files\ path, or another easy way of running a Windows application on OSX. I'm not very technical in this area so really am stuck!

Thank you for any help

Your Program Files should be here: ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files which you can't see in the Finder (files/directories that begin with a period are hidden) unless you use the "Go to Folder..." feature in the Finder, but you can see it in the Terminal and launching your app with wine will be easier from the Terminal as well.


Sending a .zip file from MacBook Pro desktop I made my Xcode project into a .zip file. Can I send it via email as an attachment? Would it work that the person I send the project to, can unzip my file and see my entire Xcode project?

Yes. That will work.

If it's too big to email, use a cloud service (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) and email them the link.

Even if it's not too big for an attachment, you might consider sending them a link so they can download at their convenience, rather than having you 'push' the file into their inbox.


Why doesn't the disabling of the Caps Lock key have any effect? On Mac OSX High Sierra v10.13.5 (17F7) on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013), using an external bluetooth connected Mac keyboard in the System Preferences, under Keyboard, there is Modifier Keys... and I've set Caps Lock to be Control, but it remains functioning as Caps Lock key.

How can I get this to take effect?  I never want the Caps Lock to lock capitals.

It was right before me, there are distinct settings for the built-in keyboard and the external keyboard.  Setting it for external works!  Not sure why I'd want them to behave differently or why it doesn't default to external keyboard when that is the one being presently used though.


This disk does not have enough space to restore your system Backstory: I upgraded from a 1TB SSD to a 2TB hybrid drive, by restoring the system from a Time Machine backup — no hassles there. A few months later, disappointed by the new drive, I want to swap back to the smaller but faster 1TB.

I boot into Recovery, choose the latest Time Machine backup, and it prompts me to select the destination to restore to. But when I click on "Macintosh HD" (the only choice there, with space available shown as 998.97 GB) a notice appears saying "This disk does not have enough space to restore your system" and I am not able to proceed further because the Continue button remains grayed out.

I'm sure the backup is only around 350 GB in size. This was achieved by adding certain large folders (e.g. photos) to Time Machine's list of excluded folders.

I have googled for this error message, and found several other cases similar to mine, but no great solutions. It seems that the use of excluded folders may be a common feature of this issue. One person reported that after actually deleting those unwanted folders from their original hard drive and doing a final backup, they were able to proceed with the restore onto a smaller capacity drive. It's good to know such a workaround exists, but in my case I do want to keep those folders on the current drive, but just not restore them to the new drive.

Anyone know what's going on here? Or where the (clearly incorrect) information about the backup size is being obtained from?

The machine is a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2011). I haven't seen any reports of this issue more recent than 2014, so I maybe it's something that's been fixed in later models' firmware.

I found the answer here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29397749/this-disk-does-not-have-enough-space-to-restore-timemachine

  For updating a date backup file size:

  Use Disk Inventory X for finding the size of the backup date folder
  "/Volumes/Drive/Backups.backupdb/xxx\ MacBook\
  Pro/2014-11-19-174311/Machintosh HD"

  Open Terminal go to the folder of the backup date folder "cd
  "/Volumes/Drive/Backups.backupdb/xxx\ MacBook\ Pro/2014-11-19-174311/"

  Enter the cmd "xattr -l Macintosh\ HD/"

  It will show a bytes value like this "2123231232" next to
  "com.apple.backupd.VolumeBytesUsed"

  Use Google Convertor GB to Bytes for convert the GB value to bytes and
  vice versa.

  Check the value shows in terminal and disk inventory x same.

  If different, use the convertor with disk inventory x value and get
  bytes value.

  Use cmd "xattr -w com.apple.backupd.VolumeBytesUsed 219637221376
  [Machintosh HD folder].

  Again use the cmd "xattr -l Macintosh\ HD/" for the value is updated.

  That is it.. Now your are ready to go..


Apple Mail keeps crashing after Sierra update After updating to Sierra, directly after. The Mac Mail keeps crashing. I am trying to send an email and poof it crashes. It crashes randomly as well. Any way to re-install the app or do something without reseting my Mac?

Crashed Thread:        15  -[ComposeBackEnd _saveThreadUpdateAccount:mailbox:]  Dispatch queue: NSOperationQueue 0x600001648df0 :: NSOperation 0x608001e5b7b0 (QOS: USER_INTERACTIVE)

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

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'This method must be called on the main thread'
abort() called
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException

Log: http://pastebin.com/v2Gvw3J9

Have you guys tried Rebuilding the Mailbox?

Mail App -> Mailbox -> Rebuild


Sleuth Kit Autopsy won't run I am trying to install Autopsy on my macbook but I cannot get the application running. I followed the instructions from this site:

  Press Command+Space and type Terminal and press enter/return key.
  Run in Terminal app:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" < /dev/null 2> /dev/null

  and press enter/return key. Wait for the command to finish.
  Run:

brew install autopsy

How do I open the application and get it up and running for Mac?

I had this same issue; there doesn't seem to be any documentation on how to actually run the software. Just type "autopsy" into the terminal.


macOS Catalina USB keyboard doesn't work after being taken out and in again After I upgraded to macOS Catalina on my MacBook Pro from 2013, my USB keyboard stops working every time I unplug it and plug it in again. Every time, I have to reboot with the keyboard plugged in to make it work again.

Is anybody else experiencing this issue and has a way to fix it because it is super annoying.

Info about my mac: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)

Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac

Shut down your Mac, then turn it on and immediately press and hold these four keys together: Option, Command, P, and R. You can release the keys after about 20 seconds, during which your Mac might appear to restart.

Test after this.

If this doesn't help then at last try to:

Reset the SMC on Mac

First, shut down your Mac and Press Shift-Control-Option on the left side of the built-in keyboard, then press the power button at the same time. Hold these keys and the power button for 10 seconds. Release all keys. And, Press the power button again to turn on your Mac.

Start up in safe mode

Start or restart your Mac, then immediately press and hold the Shift key. The Apple logo appears on your display.

Release the Shift key when you see the login window. If your startup disk is encrypted with FileVault, you might be asked to log in twice: once to unlock the startup disk, and again to log in to the Finder.

To leave safe mode, restart your Mac without pressing any keys during startup.

This will release some kernel panic that might help to fix your issue too.


system storage full after migrating to new iPhone, old phone has plenty of free storage I have an iPhone 11 128GB with around 30GB of used storage.
Most of the photos are uploaded up into 200GB iCloud which is full at the moment.
I got an iPhone 12 and transferred data & settings over from iPhone 11, device to device as described here https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210216. The transfer itself took around ~30min.
What I ended up with, is an iPhone 12 with 122GB of storage is use, photo library taking around 90GB of it. My assumption is that for whatever reason a LOT of the photos from iCloud got stored locally on iPhone 12. The phones have same amount of photos in the libraries.
How can I get rid of the photos that that are currently LOCAL on iPhone 12, while they are living in the iCloud (uploaded from iPhone 11)?

You most likely have selected keep originals in the photos settings.
Open the settings app and scroll down or search for photos. Then under the iCloud section there should be listed the following options:

Optimise iPhone storage
Download and keep originals

Select the first option and your iPhone will offload older photos and only store them in iCloud. Only new photos and often viewed ones will be stored locally, so you can save a lot of space on your phone. Alternatively you can select this option if you go into [your name] -> iCloud -> Photos as described on AppleSupport.


iTunes 11 - View Selected Songs' Playtime After upgrading to iTunes, I can't seem to find a way to know how much time the selected songs take to play. This used to be at the bottom of every window of iTunes.
The only way I can find this now, is in the playlists, shown as for example 29 songs, 1.2 hours.

Any way to get the old bar at the bottom back?

Click View → Show Status Bar, or use the ⌘/ keyboard shortcut.


Time Capsule first backup is slow (like a week to complete) I haven't seen "my" answer to this problem so I am posting both Q & A here.

I am doing initial WiFi backup of 265GB on a 16" MacBook Pro, running system 10.15.1, to a 2TB Time Capsule. I have done full backups many times before: they have been slow, but not like this. Today's backup includes long stretches of no network activity, punctuated by brief – but small — bursts.

The progress bar declines to offer a prediction, but my estimate is about a week.

I have rebooted, erased the Time Capsule (via AirPort Utility, not Disk Utility) twice and re-started. Apps like Music and Photos were closed anyway. Tried the throttle hack (https://www.imore.com/how-speed-your-time-machine-backups). Pored through dozens of outdated suggestions online.

What finally got it rolling? Answer to follow.

After about six hours of waiting for Godot, I tried this experiment: put the Mac to sleep (power not connected) and see if (still sloooow) backup proceeds while sleeping. It did not. (I let it sleep for a half hour, so the presence or absence of progress would be more apparent.) But... on re-awakening, the backup was more than 10x faster.

Also, I found that when power is connected, backup does continue while sleeping. (PowerNap feature, checkbox in System Preferences > Energy Saver panel.) So while both laptop and I were asleep, 90% of the backup completed.

Solution? I don't know how general it is, and this is post-hoc reasoning, but my suggestion is: try putting your Mac to sleep for a while, with power disconnected. On awakening, it might just be 10x faster.


Fish shell installation using homebrew - iconv libiconv error I am trying to install Fish shell using homebrew using command:

brew install fish

But the installation fails with the following error:

==> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/fish/2.1.1 SED=/usr/bin/sed
checking for library containing setupterm... -lncurses
checking for library containing nan... none required
checking for library containing iconv_open... no
checking for library containing libiconv_open... no
configure: error: Could not find an iconv implementation, needed to build fish

I tried searching around but no clear solution was found. System configuration:

$ brew --config
HOMEBREW_VERSION: 0.9.5
ORIGIN: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew.git
HEAD: f03104755df8cbfb720254bd88ac7594a3837d36
Last commit: 11 hours ago
HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /usr/local
HOMEBREW_CELLAR: /usr/local/Cellar
CPU: quad-core 64-bit haswell
OS X: 10.10.1-x86_64
CLT: 6.1.0.0.1.1413057044
Clang: 6.0 build 600
X11: N/A
System Ruby: 2.0.0-481
Perl: /usr/bin/perl
Python: /usr/bin/python
Ruby: /usr/bin/ruby

Could you please help to fix this? Thanks!

In the log that you posted above the following three lines suggest that you have MacPorts installed.

checking for /opt/local/include include directory... yes
checking for /opt/local/lib library directory... yes
checking for /opt/local/bin command directory... yes

It also appears that brew is checking there before checking in its regular file locations (/usr/local, etc). Something under /opt might be confusing brew and preventing it from compiling fish.

This can be mended by following MacPorts uninstall guide: guide.macports.org/#installing.macports.uninstalling


MacBook HD "Other" all of a sudden almost full As you can see in the below image, my HD "Other" category is almost full. A couple of days ago, I randomly kept getting a popup saying that my disk was almost full. Then I went in and noticed the issue in the image. I ran the repair disk utility and got all my software up to date, to no avail. Haven't found any help on Google. Any ideas?

Not sure whether you've already found this, but there are a number of other people having the same issue on the Apple Discussion Groups. There seems to be quite a lot of good information in that thread so I recommend reading it through, but the consensus seems to be that its hidden local backups/snapshots that's causing it.

A few people also used DaisyDisk to find, then delete, hidden space on the hard disk.


How do I pass a password to hdiutil attach? How do I pass a password to hdiutil attach?

I have an encrypted sparsebundle  (test.sparsebundle) and it's password is "test", with no quotes.

I'd like to automate opening that file.

I have tried

echo "test" | hdiutil attach -stdinpass test.sparsebundle

and

echo test | hdiutil attach -stdinpass test.sparsebundle

But it returns

hdiutil: attach failed - Authentication error

Ah! A little more digging, and careful reading of the man page. I need a null terminated string.

So

printf '%s\0' 'test' | hdiutil attach test.sparsebundle -stdinpass

works.


I can enter Time Machine even though the backup disk is unplugged! I have been using for some time Time Machine to backup to an external hard drive. I have just noticed todqy that even when my external hard drive is unplugged I can enter the Time Machine and go a few days back.

How is it possible? Is it a new feature introduced by Sierra?

No - local backups were introduced with Lion. You can enable and disable them manually and they are turned on when MacOS detects a hard drive and portable Mac are separated or likely to run separately. The backups clear when you run low on space so most people never need to manage them.

How to wipe huge .MobileBackups folder?


How do you uninstall .pkg file? Most apps come packaged in a .dmg file, where once mounted all you have to do is copy the .app, special directory to you Applications folder and that's it. Nice and clean, if you ever want to uninstall the app, you just remove it.

However, what about .pkg files? I know there are some commercial solutions, but really, that's not to satisfactory.

Each .pkg file generally differ in where they install the files, so unlike a .app bundle, there is no generalized way to uninstall the contents of a .pkg file.

A .pkg file is an installer package. It is run with the help of the macOS built-in Installer app, and allows the installation of the files contained under the package under various directories as programmed by the developer of the software.

Here's are a bunch of approaches that can be tried:

Check the .pkg file and any associated files provided by the developer. Sometime, such software package also come with either a dedicated or a built-in uninstaller. Running the uninstaller generally takes care of uninstalling the files/apps installed by the package.

If you don't find any obvious uninstaller, consider contacting the developers of the app and ask them.
Use a 3rd party utility such as AppCleaner to uninstall the .pkg installed app. It gives you a simple interface to look through and select from all the installed apps, locates all the files associated with an app, and let you uninstall the app(s) completely.

From the app website:

  AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.

  Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily.

  AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them.

  Simply drop an application onto the AppCleaner window. It will find for the related files and you can delete them by clicking the delete button.

Prefer using Homebrew Cask to install the desired GUI app(s), if the developers is distributing them via Homebrew. To use Homebrew Cask, start by installing Homebrew and then run brew cask to install Homebrew Cask.

To see if an app is available via Homebrew Cask, simply run the following command to search the Homebrew database:

brew search <app_name> --casks

where <app_name> is full or partial name of the desired (GUI) app.

Homebrew Cask lets you easily install an app by running:

brew cask install <app_name>

To uninstall an app installed via Homebrew Cask, run:

brew cask uninstall <app_name>

To unconditionally remove all files associated with the given app which is installed via Homebrew Cask, run:

brew cask zap <app_name>

Make sure to update the Homebrew's local repository of all the available packages by running the following command, before attempting to search for and install packages:

brew update


How can I get files on my iPad into my Dropbox? Let's say I get a file in an email, or have it stored in GoodReader, or find a link to it on the web, and want to put it into my Dropbox using the ipad app.

It seems like the only files you can add from the app are photos and video.  Am I missing anything?  Goodreader is a great example of how an app can "pull in" compatible files from emails, etc, but I can't find any similar capability in the Dropbox app.

I believe that whilst this capability is not included in the official dropbox app, it is possible to accomplish using GoodReader for iPad.

Open GoodReader on iPad and expand the section in the bottom right of the main screen which says "Connect to Servers"
Tap "Add"
Tap "Dropbox"
Enter your details and click add
Now tap the server you just added (I called it "Dropbox")
In the bottom right hand corner of the popover that just came up is a button saying upload. Tap it.
Select the files you want to upload and tap "Upload"

You will only need to do steps 5-7 the second time


How can I install both Windows 7 and Windows 8 on a Mac Mini 2012? I'm a developer, and I'm working on a cross-platform app that have to run on Mac OS X, Win7 and Win8. Unfortunately it's impossible to test my app in VM due to some hardware restrictions, so I have to install all of them on bare hardware.

I've bought Mac Mini 2012, but unfortunately I cannot find out how to install all 3 OSes on it. Boot Camp only allows to install single instance of Windows.

Is it even possible to have Mac OS X, Win7 and Win8 on the machine (with and without Boot Camp)?

I have done this myself. First install REFIt, an utility for dual/triple booting. It adds a useful selection of OSes on startup. It also includes a EFI/MBR fixing tool which is very useful. You might need to restart 2 times. Using the Disk Utility, add 2 more partitions to your disk. Format them FAT or FAT32. Restart your machine, and this time, assuming you have installed REFIt, instead of choosing OS X, navigate to the partition inspector (the hard drive icon). Just apply the settings it suggests.

Reboot your mac and put the windows 8 disc in. The setup will allow you to format the partitions. Format both of the partitions. Install to the first partition. After installing drivers (optional) etc on win8, restart and install win7 to the other partition.

Sometimes the Win8 will find Win7 installed and integrate the bootloader. That means that in REFIt, choosing either one of Win7/Win8 won't boot. Choosing Win7/Win8 from REFIt will give you the option to boot Win7 or Win8. Hope this helps.

NB: Your Windows partitions won't be named. REFIt won't know which is win7/win8. Or you can name it when you've installed the first Windows.


Finding an app or file? I need to install the newest version of Perl on Macbook running Yosemite.  It currently has Perl5.18 built in.  I understand that the system sometimes needs this version and it shouldn't be altered.

I did successfully install the latest version of Perl but I can't find it using Finder or Terminal.  It did not overwrite the 5.18 version but went somewhere else.

How can I locate it?

Thanks

You can use locate to see where a Perl binary is installed

locate bin\/perl  | grep perl\$

for example

$ locate bin\/perl  | grep perl\$
/Users/corti/perl5/perlbrew/perls/5.20/bin/perl
/Users/corti/perl5/perlbrew/perls/5.20t/bin/perl
/opt/local/bin/perl
/usr/bin/perl

By the way, I would strongly suggest to use Perlbrew to install an additional Perl version.


Using MacPorts bash, tab completion no longer lists hidden / dot files I used MacPorts to install bash (bash @4.3.8_0). I switched Terminal to use /opt/local/bin/bash as the command to startup.

However, now when I type vim ~/.<tab><tab>, it no longer lists dot files. If I switch back to using the default Mac OS X shell command, it works by listing the hidden dot files.

Does anyone know what settings I need to switch?

I've tried adding set match-hidden-files on in my ~/.inputrc as well as running shopt -s dotglob but neither seem to have any effect.

There is an issue filed for this in MacPorts Trac. The real issue is that auto completion does not work for any paths starting with ~ (tilde) — try vim .<tab><tab>.


How can I download Swift? I've been trying to get my hands on Swift, but I can't seem to find it.  Is it released yet?  If not, when will it be released?

To use Swift, download Xcode 6 and start using it to develop iOS 8 apps.  Mac apps will become available with the release of Yosemite. More resources are available here: https://developer.apple.com/swift/resources/


iOS Mail: Emails are listed in wrong order I've recently migrated my email from Google Apps to the free version of Google - however my iPad and iPhone mail apps are ordering my emails in some completely illogical order.

At the top I have new unread emails, then I have emails from October 2013 which then goes backwards down to 2011. Somewhere scattered in those messages are the emails from November 2013 to today.

Other email clients (both on iOS, Windows and the web) don't have this issue, so how can I resolve this?

More details

I can temporarily resolve this if I scroll down to the very bottom of the emails (so loading them all) and then return to the top. At which point all my emails are displayed in the correct date order.

However overnight iOS (presumably) flushes the bottom emails from memory and in the morning I'm back to seeing unread emails at the top followed by the ones from 2013. The ones that I've previously read are now buried somewhere in the list.

Clients that don't have this issue: Gmail (web), GMail (iOS app),
Outlook (Windows), Windows 10 mail (Windows) and Thunderbird
(Windows).
Clients that do have this issue: iOS Mail for iPad, iOS Mail
for iPhone.

I've tried importing my emails between Google accounts in multiple ways, none of which have made any difference to the iOS Mail clients:

Getting the new Gmail account to pull emails via POP3 from the old email account
Using Thunderbird to link both old and new accounts and then transfer the emails between the two via IMAP
Same as #2, but using a local folder as an intermediary - as suggested by this answer.

Bizarrely, when I did #2 for "Sent Items", iOS Mail presents them in the correct order!

Finally, this has nothing to do with threading of emails. I've tried turning that on and off and it makes no difference.

Does anyone know how I can fix this?

Not sure if anyone will still read this but this question was still pretty high in rank on Google search.
I'm moving a large amount of mails from Gmail to self hosted solution, and also noticed this issue. I believe this is not caused by "Apple isn't looking at the same date for sorting that webmail or Outlook uses", rather it's because how the app interacts with IMAP servers.
In IMAP servers, all messages in a specific folder has a unique identifier (UID, see RFC 3501 for more technical details). It's a monotonic increasing number, and the UID is assigned to each mail in the order of it's addition to the mailbox in most cases.
The issue is when migrating emails, sometimes it's not guaranteed that the old mails are inserted in chronological order, so they may be partially "out of order" in terms of UID (in my case, the new mailbox is already receiving new mails when old mails are still being imported by imapsync).
My best guess is iOS mail app is only fetching tailing UID range of a folder, and in a normal mailbox it's just fetching the latest mails. However, in the above situation, it may gets mails that could be very old, but for all mails it's already fetched they will be in right chronological order. The time gap is simply because the app didn't actually have those mails downloaded. When you load more mails, the "missing" mails will be eventually downloaded and shown in right order. (I should have verified this by sniffing but didn't, but this should be the most possible explanation.)
The reason Outlook was fine in @Rick Rothwell's case may be that Outlook actually stores all mail headers locally (IIRC) so it can just reorder the mails locally to show them in chronological order. I've checked Roundcube's source code and it uses IMAP SORT command when fetching mails. However that command supposedly is not supported by some servers, and that could be why iOS mail app was not using it.
To fix the issue, I think the most direct approach is to just move the mails to another temp folder then move them back, while making sure that the moving operation is applied in chronological order (older ones first). As the UID of the mails are tracked per-folder, moving them across folders would give them new UIDs, and by making sure that they are assigned UID in right order there would be no issues in iOS mail app (or any other client that has this issue).


My Apple devices always seem to slow down over the years It seems like every time I buy an Apple product the speed of it always slows down. I bought an iPod a year or two ago and the speed at which it launches apps and runs the apps have slowed down. Is there any way to fix this? Like buy an iPhone and it will never slow down?

You have several options to fight against the slackening of your devices (or the perception of it):

don't install apps (especially apps bloating over time because of feature updates)
don't use faster and newer devices of the same kind (or better: the older your own devices get, ask friends or colleagues to lend to you their much older and slower devices more frequently and use them and you will happily return to your own "faster" device)
get old faster than your devices (or reduce the perception of speediness or responsiveness artificially)
take Zen lessons


Allow SMS without other data I am out of my home country, so data is pretty expensive (~ $20 USD/mb). However, I do have an international SMS package.

In iOS 7, if I turn Data Roaming off, I cannot send or receive SMS.

If I turn Data Roaming on and:

disable Cellular Data for all apps
disable background updates
disable push data

I can still see my data usage ticking up at ~100kb per minute. AT&T obviously distinguishes between SMS and data, but it seems iOS 7 does not...

Is there a way to ensure I can send and receive SMS but keep all other data usage disabled?

There is no reason why SMS should be tied to your data package.  Turning data roaming off, indeed just turning data off (if you are not currently roaming and merely want to prove this) should still allow you to send and receive SMS messages as these are sent through the voice connection, not the data one - it's exactly how phones have always been able to send a text before anyone ever had data connections.

So the problem is almost certainly something to do with your config or usage, rather than how the SMS systems works.  I would ask you to check who you are sending to and from (are you using email addresses rather than phone numbers in messages, either as recipients or your sent from address?), and whether you have Settings > Messages > Send as SMS *ON*


no pop up when right click There is no pop up menu when I right click. I have set right button to secondary button as in the following picture.

Using ctrl+left click, there is a pop up menu so I can copy/paste selected or do some other tasks.

What I am doing wrong? I am using 10.6.8 on iMac.

If indeed you have a Mighty Mouse as pictured in that screenshot, it's possible that the capitative sensors aren't properly detecting the right click action.

The most common cause of this was still having your left-click finger on the mouse, or resting very close, which I recall confused the sensors a bit. Try right clicking with only one finger touching the mouse and see if that helps. If not, it's possible that it's simply a hardware failure.


How can I make OSX to upload files to icloud? As you can see from the screenshot, some of the files have the 'download from icloud' icon to the right of the file name, but some of them (from DSCF6758.RAF onwards) are not.

The folder is on the iCloud Drive.

I still have plenty of space in the iCloud.

At the moment my SSD drive is low on free space (only 5% free space left)

How can I trigger the upload process on these not-yet-uploaded files?

The menubar app Bailiff lets your pin files on your drive and evict them without needing to wait for the background processes to do the work for you.

https://eclecticlight.co/cirrus-bailiff/

Once you’ve got the files removed, you still need to wait for snapshots to purge. The df command isn’t going to show you purgeable content, so this tool. It might not be sufficient to fix what you’re trying to do in the end, but it does do what you asked.


How to make audio+video channel syncing (when doing splitting ) more user friendly? I Have an audio track and the video track and want to split them both at the same point with cmd+b. I have to manually select Channels with the mouse in order for the split to be applied to the audio. But when I press cmd+b later the audio is not split and I have then reselect with the mouse, is this the only way?

is this the only way?

No, nor the friendly way.

Using the Control button to maintain the current position.

Place the line marker where you want to split the clips.
While holding the control button > click on the movie clip > select
Split Clip.
While still holding the control button down > click on the audio track > select Split Clip.

That's it.


How to transfer/copy Notes from one iDevice to another without using restore method? I tried using iCloud account.  But it did not seem to work.  basically, I signed into iCloud on both iDevices with same Apple ID.  And making sure Notes was set to on.  Newly created notes will show up on both devices.  But I also need the current local previously created notes to sync as well.

Any suggestions?

With iOS 9:

Open the Folder containing the Notes you want to move.

Click the Edit button. It is faint. You might not see it right away.

You will see a column of selection circles ⭕ appear, and also the words Delete All and Move All.

Tap the circles for your target Notes, then Move To ..., and the destination.

All done.


Show file info in last finder column Before 10.14 the last finder column always showed filesize, date modified etc. by default.

In the new version this information is blocked by the useless "more" button.

Is there a way to have this information always visible with the default finder window size?

Before 10.14

After 10.14

You can change the preview settings in Finder for each of the various kinds of documents via the View > Show Preview Options menu.

Just un-tick the "Show Quick Actions" option for text files (see top of window) to get rid of the Quick Actions toolbar in the preview area.