Unable to connect Time Machine to WD MyCloud EX2 on Sierra I updated to Sierra yesterday and now my Time Machine backups to my WD MyCloud EX2 NAS aren't working any more. Scheduled backups get stuck in "Looking for backup disk..." in Time Machine preferences. Does anyone have ideas on how to resolve this?

Here is what I did to troubleshoot:

I am able to access the backup drive over the web interface
http://wdmycloudex2.local/ and that page mentions my firmware is up
to date and both the drives are healthy. I can also connect to smb://wdmycloudex2.local and afp://wdmycloudex2.local from Go > Connect to Server in Finder.
I went in Time Machine
preferences and turned it all off.
Rebooted WD NAS Confirmed
power-on test passed by going back to http://wdmycloudex2.local/
Went back in Time Machine preferences and tried to add the drive
back.

Time Machine fails with this error when I try to add the drive back:

Please try to connect to your disk using afp://yourserver.local

If it shows up in your Finder (CMD+K) you should be able to mount it in time machine.


Where does MplayerX keep its playback history? MplayerX, not only remembers what I've watched but also is able to resume playback at a later invocation.

For example, if I watch media-file abc.m4v for 4 minutes and then quit the program.  Then start MplayerX at a later date and open abc.m4v, it starts playback at 4 minutes.

I'd like to know where it stores the playback history.  I'd also like to know if I can retrieve that information.

Thanks!

MPlayerX saves playback positions in plist file ~/Library/Application Support/MPlayerX/bookmarks.plist


What causes the "Unable to download application" error on an iPod Touch? On some wireless networks, whenever I try to download or update an app I get the following message:

Unable to download application.
<Your App> will be available for download when you log in to the
iTunes store on your computer.

I assume it is some kind of firewall issue. Assuming it is, does anyone know what firewall ports are required to download apps via WIFI to an iPod Touch?

I had this twice on my iPod touch.

When it happened first, there was not enough free memory on the iPod.

The second time it was an app (yxplayer) not designed for the iPod. I even could not install it after I had downloaded it in iTunes. If I remember correctly iTunes told me that this app can not be run on an iPod touch. After i "upgraded" my iPod to an iPhone 4, I could install the app without any problems.


bi-directionally sync Google Photos on external drive I see in this post (Any way to auto download or sync all Google+ photos to my Mac?) that there's a good solution to bi-directionally syncing photos between my laptop and my Google Photos account (which would also sync photos uploaded from my phone, which occurs automatically).  B/c this storage can potentially become a bit large, I'd like to store my Google Photos on a 256GB SDHC card that is always plugged in to my computer.  The problem is, it appears I need the Google Photos folder to reside within my Google Drive folder, which is not on this external storage.

Is there a good way to point my local Google Photos folder to external storage without messing up my other Google Drive folders?

Move Google drives folder to the new drive
In Google Drive's settings, you should be able to select another directory.

I'm not completely sure if this works, as I've only done it this way:

Sign out of drive
Resign-in, and during the setup process, select advanced, and choose the folder location


How can I create 'gch.app' such that "open -a gch page.html" works like "open -a Google\ Chrome page.html"? I type open -a all the time from the terminal, and more often than not the application I want is Google Chrome.app, so I end up entering things along the lines of:

open -a Google\ Chrome some_file.html

I'd like to create a symlink/shortcut to /Applications/Google Chrome.app named gch.app or what have you, so I can open -a gch foo.html which is slightly quicker.

Admittedly it'd take months+ to recoup the amount of time it's taken me to ask this question...  I know I could create zsh aliases and/or bash functions for this kind of thing but I'm relatively new to OSX and want to learn.

My first intuition was to try things along the lines of:

ln -s /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app /Applications/gch.app

but no dice were had.

The application name is defined by the application itself, there is no easy way to use a different one for open. So in this case using an alias is probably the best option

alias gch='open -a Google\ Chrome'

Alternatively you could define Chrome as the default application for html files and just use open some_file.html.


Allow button not working in system preferences I am trying to install some software, (at this particular moment I want to install VirtualBox, although this issue has happened with other software), and I have to click "Allow" in System Preferences, in the Security & Privacy -> General window. When I click on it, nothing happens, and the button and message stays there.

I looked online, and all of the solutions say that there is some kind of program running that captures/forwards mouse clicks and such, and thus I am not "directly" clicking on the Allow button.

The problem is that I don't know of any programs that I'm running that do this.

I am on a Macbook Pro 13 inch 2016 with touchbar, running macOS High Sierra

I am not connected remotely
I have tried restarting my computer
I have tried running the installer through terminal, with and without the sudo command
I have tried right-clicking and clicking on "open" on the .pkg file
I have tried unlocking the system preferences page before clicking "Allow"
I tried re-downloading the .pkg file

This worked for me on High Sierra 10.13.4:

System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Select 'All Controls'

Then:

System Preferences > Privacy & Security > Press 'Tab' until 'Allow' is selected > Press 'Spacebar'

*Note: the Privacy & Security page may need to be unlocked before 'Tab' will work.

*Note: After open Security & Privacy and selecting General tab you should push tab key to select allow button after that push space bar key!

Hope this helps!

Credit to @dansanduleac's answer on GitHub


How should I encode my music for preserving the sound quality and be able to play it on iTunes and iOS? I have several CDs and other FLAC collections (classical music but not only). I want to add them to my iTunes library but I am looking for some recommendations regarding how I should encode them in order to keep the best sound quality and without running out of disk space.

I found Max conversion tool for converting them but there are too many formats and configurations to choose from.

Also I do want to use a format that is able to use keep tags, like MP3.

The winning response should contain a numbered list of formats compatible with iTunes and iOS, ordered descending by the sound quality:

Apple Looseless
format X, (extension), bitrate, vbr
format Y, (extension), bitrate, ...
...

Please specify the format name clearly, preferably including the codec, like "MPEG-4 AAC", "Apple Looseless", "MPEG-4 HE-ACC", "LAME MP3", "AAC ADTS", "MPEG-4 Audio versus Apple MPEG-4 Audio",

You can use X Lossless Decoder(XLD) too:

  X Lossless Decoder(XLD) is a tool for
  Mac OS X that is able to
  decode/convert/play various 'lossless'
  audio files. The supported audio files
  can be split into some tracks with cue
  sheet when decoding. It works on Mac
  OS X 10.4 and later.

because it's lossless it keeps the best sound quality.

Apple recommends using the following formats for your iTunes:

Audio files (AAC, MP3) with appropriate file extensions (.m4a, .mp3). For best results during playback, Apple recommends converting MP3 files greater than 32 megabytes (MB) to AAC format. For AAC audio files, Apple recommends the following specifications:
Audio Format: Baseline Low-Complexity Profile with AAC-LC (Music)
Data Rate: Up to 160 Kbps
Channels: Stereo in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov formats
Output Sample Rate: 48 kHz
Encoding Quality: Better


How can I get VMWare Fusion 6 to display in Unity with full resolution on a Retina display? As a long time (intimately familiar with 3.11) Windows user I finally made the jump to OS X. I was excited to take advantage of the massive resolution on my new MBP, and it's as awesome as I thought it would be.
However, Unity + Windows looks terrible. I realize Windows was not built to take advantage of such jaw-dropping resolutions, but I still want it to run at native resolution. I find myself enjoying the OS X environment, and reluctant to leave it for a full screen Windows VM; Unity is becoming a must.
I've tried checking the 'Use Full Resolution' setting to no avail.
(Not sure if it makes a difference, but I'm running the Windows 8.1 preview)
How can I prevent Unity mode from displaying Windows in a clunky-looking, zoomed-in, pixelated view?

I had the same issue with Windows 7 guest on a MBP 2013 retina display. It was solved for me by unticking the "Automatically adjust user interface size in Windows" checkbox.


How to move Preview window to other desktop in MacOS? I know how to do this with regular application windows, you just drag the window to the edge of the screen until it moves to the next desktop.
This does not work with the Preview window.
Is there a way to force it to the other desktop?

I use the "3-finger-pushup" method for this;

Make sure you have "Mission Control" enabled

Execute the "3-finger-pushup" move; the menu bar is replaced with a list of your desktops:

Select one of the app windows & drag it to any desktop you like.


Mucked up disablement of Notifications Center Tried to disable Notifications Center and remove it from the menu bar, unfortunately didn't copy the whole command:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents

Now I'm presented with a completely black screen when I login, and

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents

doesn't seem to help. What should I do now?

Rebuilding the user account didn't work.

From the launchtl man page, it looks like it might need the -F parameter to force loading.

launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchAgents

I can't tell if it needs sudo too, though it might, as the LaunchAgents folder is root:wheel rwxr-xr-x


Why is Pages autocompleting / autocorrecting entries in my table? Why is this unwanted feature stealing my tab key? I am using Pages 6.2 on macOS 10.12.5. Within Pages settings, Auto-Correction > Correct Spelling Automatically is disabled. I unchecked the Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Check Spelling While Typing menu item. I unchecked the Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement menu item. Within System Preferences, Keyboard > Text > Correct spelling automatically is disabled. Within Pages, if I select my document's table, open the Format pane on the right, and select Table, I don't see any options regarding spelling correction or autocompletion.

My Pages document consists of a table, with column A consisting of a list of languages, and columns B-K containing translations of the cardinal numbers zero through nine in that row's language. So this is a multi-lingual document, and any suggestions for spelling correction or text substitution are likely to be wrong, and are unwanted.

Let's say I go to row 8 (8A contains "Czech"), column B, and type zer, assuming that this is the exact text that I want to appear there. I see a popup below this cell containing two values: "zéro", "zero". I want neither of these. What key do I press to dismiss the popup? If I press Esc, sometimes the cell is cleared and sometimes my entered text remains as intended. If I press tab, instead of advancing to the next cell, a selection row appears within the unwanted completion suggestions popup. I can click on the next cell (8C), however I should be able to complete my entry without using the mouse. After all, I disabled "Correct spelling automatically" in both applicable locations.

I've found that I can press the right arrow key, then tab, to advance to the next cell without any autocompletion. However, this seems like more work than necessary given that I've disabled all autocomplete options that I can find. Since I am editing over 550 cells in this document alone, I want to do this as efficiently as possible.

I also did a quick test of Numbers 4.2, and I experience the same problem with unwanted completion suggestions appearing in a popup below the cell that must be interacted with before the Tab key will advance to the next cell.

Currently my best solution is to use the right arrow key to dismiss the autocomplete popup and advance to the next cell. However sometimes it requires one press, sometimes two. This is too inconsistent.


Unexpected changes to command line When I open up a command line on my Mac the welcome message is usually

Last login date
Johns-MacBook-Pro$

This now reads...

Last login: Fri Dec 18 23:48:34 on ttys000
Johns-MBP-2:~ johnw$

What does the -2 mean and why did this change? In between noticing these changes I moved between two different wireless networks; one being a regular Fi-Fi network, and the other being a portable hotspot off of a cell phone. I also downloaded a zip file. Could this be a virus? This doesn't appear so as running users only returns my name and running ac -p returns

root         0.05
johnw     7452.99
total     7453.04

Can someone please explain me to me why this changed? I do see setting hostname change in the console.

network changed: v4(en1!:my ip address from phone) DNS+ Proxy+ SMB
configd[24]: setting hostname to  "Johns-MBP-2"

Is this from changing internet connections or could this be from malicious software? Or is this because I changed Wi-Fi credentials and opened new terminal windows when I had previous ones open from when I was using the other Wi-Fi networks?

This is a bug in the implementation of iOS/OS X in my eyes. What used to be a good thing is now a pain in the behind.

Computer name keeps changing OSX 10.10 (14A389)
Why does an iPhone rename itself with (2)
My Mac mini's computer name keeps changing when it resumes from sleep

This has been something that people of Apple products have been dealing with since 2012 on a widespread basis. It's easier to fix on OS X where you can call the scutil command:

scutil --get ComputerName
scutil --set ComputerName "Whatever You Wish"

The only positive thing is that in some cases, people depend on host names so making the change visible in the terminal has some benefit for them, but it sure causes a lot of worry and concern when people see names they have chosen being ignored and reassigned/modified without any reasonable explanation as to why being presented to the user. On the practical end, there is absolutely no good way to prevent this renaming - either setting things up on the network router side or on OS X side given that the OS manage IPv4 and IPv6 and AirDrop and bluetooth networks and shuffle the network settings to accommodate many clients.


How do I delete photos just from my iPhone not my iCloud Photo Library I have iCloud Photo Library enabled on my iPhone and it is set to be optimised on my iPhone.

How can I delete photos off my iPhone OR is this optimise feature going to do this for me, to free up space on my iPhone?

Unfortunately, Apple does not provide that information when you are about to delete a picture or albums. It would be nice if Apple would give us a Help option in the photos app that can also be removed if desired. Furthermore, I am not an expert on this subject but I will provide a sensible answer from my research, rather than making a comment that DOES NOT answer the question. But Hey, everybody is entitled to there opinions and comments.

So here it goes:

How do you eliminate a photo off your iPhone without eliminating it completely from my iCloud Photo Library and other devices?

You can’t, and it’s a little counter-intuitive as to why. You have to twist your head around to how Apple thinks of cloud storage for media. When you use iCloud Photo Library, the “truth” of your library is in the cloud—that means that the accurate, full, current state of all your images and other media are always stored on Apple’s servers, and the various places you can download or view images (Web, iOS, and OS X) are endpoints. (The only point in which that’s not true is when you have images that remain to be uploaded from an endpoint.)

Thus, if you delete an image in any associated app, you’re telling iCloud Photo Library to remove that image from its “truth,” which means to delete it from the central repository and sync that change to all endpoints. You can choose to only store optimized (low-resolution) media in iOS and OS X, but you can’t delete images in one place and expect them to remain elsewhere. And you can’t maintain separate local albums in Photos that aren’t synced. (In OS X, you can use alternate, non-synced libraries, however, choosing them when you launch Photos. In iOS, you can use alternate photo apps that can have their own libraries, too.)

If you want the ability to delete images from an iPhone or any device without deleting it from all your devices, you have to disable iCloud Photo Library and use another form of sync or another service, like Dropbox, Google Photos, or Amazon Cloud Drive.

https://www.macworld.com/article/3058175/photography/the-problem-with-deleting-photos-from-your-device-with-icloud-photo-library-enabled.html


Sorting (album) artist in iTunes I was wondering how to list an album as another artist's work in iTunes "Artists" view.

I have an album whose artist and album artist are "eason and the duo band". I would like to list the album as "Eason Chan" by using the "Sorting" feature. However, the album still belongs to "eason and the duo band" in "Artists" view.

The Artist and Album Artist fields display whatever is recorded in the metadata. In this case, both of these fields contain eason and the duo band.

The only way to change what is displayed is to actually change what is recorded. Your screenshot shows that you already know how to access the metadata (i.e. using the Get Info/Song Info option or pressing commandI) to bring up the details.

You would need to do that and actually change the information stored there. To do this, make sure you're on the Details tab and edit the info in Artist and/or Album Artist. Once you've clicked OK to save the data, you'll find what is displayed for these songs/albums will also change.

As for the Sort As field, this dictates which field iTunes will use to sort the information, not what is actually displayed in the fields.


Is it possible to customise iOS 10's Control Center? I would like to customise the buttons on one screen. I need media, bluetooth/airplay, alarm clock, airplane mode, flaslight and calculator. That could fit neatly into one screen. Having different panels is annoying, as the Control Center was the kind of thing you could access without looking. Now I push the wrong buttons because I'm in the media panel instead of the basic controls or vice versa. Anyone know if this is possible?

No, it is not possible to modify the functions in Control Center prior to iOS 11.


iTerm2/Terminal full screen Why is it not possible to have iTerm2 or Terminal app take up the full available space on the screen. Let me show an example:

It's hard to see but if you look on the right and bottom edge, there is some extra space. It seems impossible to expand it to use that space. What is causing this?

I used apps that make the window take up the full screen size, such as Breeze. All other apps work fine, taking 100% of the screen space, except iTerm2 and Terminal.

Btw, I do know about native fullscreen but I would like to know why I can't make my terminal take up 100% of the space.

Hold down control and you can resize it to take the whole screen (although it won't necessarily add another row or column of text).

Also, in the beta version, there is an advanced preference to make this the default called "terminal windows resize smoothly."


Go2shell does not work with zsh I recently switched to zsh from bash, and Go2Shell doesn't work with zsh. When I click the Go2Shell icon from Finder, the iTerm window opened but the directory is the last dir in iTerm instead of the current dir in Finder.

How can I achieve the old function or is there a replacement of Go2Shell?

I solved same issue with Turn on System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Automation -> Go2Shell.app with Finder, iTerm.app or Terminal


USB pendrive/disk formatting clarification I have three doubts regarding USB pendrive formatting.

Is there is any simple/quick way to format the USB pendrive from MacBook Pro?

Now, I am doing this by Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility -> Selecting the disk -> Tap on "Erase" tab -> Tap on "Erase..." option.

I remember, I can do this by right clicking on the Disk's name and by select "Format" option in Windows.

But, Mac shows the below options when right clicking on the disk in Finder.

What is the difference between these two options?

I'm always deleting files in a disk by Right clicking on the file -> Selecting "Move to Trash" option.

Deleted file get hided from the Finder. But the size of the disk remains same. Is the file really deleted?

Not sure of a quicker way than that, my only advice is to not try to find direct correlations between Windows and Mac functions, some stuff is just different, for example the Eject options are similarly more work to find on Windows.
Erase will remove all files from the target volume, often via the expedient method of just creating new Table of Contents areas whilst technically leaving the old content there, just not addressable without specialist utilities.  Erase Free Space will actually hunt down files which should no longer exist, and rather than just remove the pointers to those file, will actually overwrite them with junk data (all zeroes for example)
Files in the Trash are often per volume, so delete a file on a USB stick, and it goes in the Trash area on that USB stick.  The file still exists, so the space is still allocated. Empty the trash to free up the space.  This (similar to above) will actually just remove the pointer to the file, unless you choose "secure erase trash" which will genuinely remove the file contents also.


Route command to use wildcard I have a bunch of routes to my LAN line that won't resolve through my WiFi (which is set as 1st order).

sudo route add 10.999.999.999 10.888.888.888

I have a lot more but that's just a sample. This works great but sometimes I need access to another Network asset which means I have to go add it to the list again.

Can I make it so I route any IP address starting with 10 gets rerouted through the LAN router?

Something like this:

sudo route add 10.* 10.888.888.888

THIS DOES NOT WORK

My Setup:

I have two internet connections.

WiFi - no firewalls - no access to network assets
LAN - firewalls - access to network assets

I set WiFi first in my order of precedence and I force certain domains through the LAN connection using my host file to resolve the IP addresses and a routes table to direct those IPs through my LAN router.

Basically I want my cake and eat it too.

Here is what I ended up with:

#! /bin/bash
sudo route -n flush
sudo route add -net 10 10.255.255.255
networksetup -setairportpower en0 off
sleep 2
networksetup -setairportpower en0 on

This flushes the route table, routes any traffic starting with the ip address 10. to my LAN connection's router, then restarts the wifi router (en0).

The correct form to add a net route is

route add -net 10 $GW

Obviously you have to replace $GW with the ip address of your gateway.


Unable to do a partial screen recording on OSX with quicktime I am using multi-screen: I am using the primary screen of my MBP plus two external monitors via displayport

When I start the screen recording, it is the message I see on my screen

I go on to select an area for recording

It is where I get stuck: there is simply no way I can start the recording after the selection. I clicked, tried to access the Quicktime app, tried some key combination. But nothing will get the recording to start.

How can I start a the screen recording for part of the screen?

You can record a selected area of your screen as follows:

Open the Quicktime Player app
Choose File -> New Screen Recording or CtrlCommandN
Now select the area you want to record
Press the button in the middle of you selected area that states: Start recording
To stop, there will be a squared stop button that appears in the menu bar

As your screenshot is missing this button, you might want te restart Quicktime Player or reboot your machine.


CPU throttled to 0.8GHz due to "GPU LIMIT PROCHOT" Suddenly my iMac (late 2013) started to throttle CPU to 0.80GHz, everything becomes super sluggish. It happens ~5-10 min after a fresh reboot, sometimes it goes back to full speed for short periods, but most of the time stays throttled.
I tried to reset SMC, it doesn't seem to help. Also did clean install of Sierra, also did not help...

powermetrics reports that throttling occurs due to "GPU LIMIT PROCHOT", even though temperature is normal on all sensors I could take a peek on.

$ sudo thermal levels
cpu: 180
gpu: 30
io: 30

$ sudo powermetrics
...
**** Processor usage ****

Intel energy model derived package power (CPUs+GT+SA): 2.48W

LLC flushed residency: 65.9%

System Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 27.52% (798.17 Mhz)
Package 0 C-state residency: 67.72% (C2: 9.36% C3: 2.08% C6: 56.28% C7: 0.00% )

Performance Limited Due to:
GPU LIMIT PROCHOT

Core 0 C-state residency: 83.91% (C3: 0.00% C6: 0.00% C7: 83.91% )

CPU 0 duty cycles/s: active/idle [< 16 us: 92.56/27.35] [< 32 us: 14.86/12.29] [< 64 us: 19.82/76.90] [< 128 us: 32.70/49.35] [< 256 us: 49.15/26.76] [< 512 us: 32.90/34.68] [< 1024 us: 27.15/21.80] [< 2048 us: 5.95/33.30] [< 4096 us: 0.40/36.47] [< 8192 us: 0.20/14.67] [< 16384 us: 55.49/0.00] [< 32768 us: 2.18/0.00]
CPU Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 27.52% (798.17 Mhz)

Core 1 C-state residency: 84.27% (C3: 0.00% C6: 0.00% C7: 84.27% )

CPU 1 duty cycles/s: active/idle [< 16 us: 125.26/30.32] [< 32 us: 6.94/8.92] [< 64 us: 16.05/82.65] [< 128 us: 45.19/44.79] [< 256 us: 30.52/32.31] [< 512 us: 34.29/40.83] [< 1024 us: 21.60/22.99] [< 2048 us: 10.11/30.13] [< 4096 us: 5.75/38.05] [< 8192 us: 9.32/22.99] [< 16384 us: 47.96/0.20] [< 32768 us: 1.39/0.00]
CPU Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 27.52% (798.18 Mhz)

Core 2 C-state residency: 82.53% (C3: 0.02% C6: 0.00% C7: 82.50% )

CPU 2 duty cycles/s: active/idle [< 16 us: 130.81/31.91] [< 32 us: 8.32/3.37] [< 64 us: 19.82/104.84] [< 128 us: 41.42/44.00] [< 256 us: 38.65/33.30] [< 512 us: 34.09/46.38] [< 1024 us: 27.95/20.02] [< 2048 us: 13.48/28.94] [< 4096 us: 6.94/41.03] [< 8192 us: 10.11/24.77] [< 16384 us: 46.38/0.20] [< 32768 us: 0.79/0.00]
CPU Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 27.52% (798.17 Mhz)

Core 3 C-state residency: 86.15% (C3: 0.00% C6: 0.00% C7: 86.15% )

CPU 3 duty cycles/s: active/idle [< 16 us: 105.64/27.95] [< 32 us: 5.95/0.99] [< 64 us: 13.28/80.07] [< 128 us: 39.04/35.48] [< 256 us: 29.93/25.57] [< 512 us: 32.31/36.07] [< 1024 us: 20.41/22.40] [< 2048 us: 4.76/26.95] [< 4096 us: 2.38/34.29] [< 8192 us: 2.58/22.59] [< 16384 us: 54.90/0.00] [< 32768 us: 0.79/0.00]
CPU Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 27.52% (798.17 Mhz)

**** SMC sensors ****
CPU Thermal level: 180
GPU Thermal level: 30
IO Thermal level: 30
Fan: 2471 rpm
CPU die temperature: 38.38 C
GPU die temperature: 41.00 C

I checked all sensors and there is not a single one reporting temperature higher than 42C. What are those thermal levels based on?

Desperately seeking for any pointers... Thanks in advance!

I'm posting this three years late, but I still wanted to offer my experience, perhaps to people still scratching their heads because of this issue.

What I've experienced is not entirely identical to the OP's case, namely the machine of concern is a MacBook instead of an iMac. However, the symptoms were highly similar: the system was not under much load, sensors read normal temperatures, yet the CPU throttles down to 0.8 GHz, slowing everything to a crawl. Resetting SMC and NVRAM does nothing, hardware test reveals nothing. I searched all over the internet for possible reasons but I wasn't able solve the problem.

The solution, at least for my case, was ridiculously simple. One day I decided to pop the back cover of my MacBook Pro open, and after a solid round of dust cleaning, the issue magically disappeared. So perhaps, try doing a routine cleaning, it might help. I'm not guaranteeing anything, but I do hope this might save a small portion of people some time.


How to rollback and override to a specific date within a Time Machine backup my situation is kind of weird. I've totally crashed my system yesterday after installing bootcamp/windows 8.1 (bad partition format). Fortunately, I have a full backup Time Machine on a Drobo 5D (firewired). Since Drobo 5D need specific drivers to read data, I could not reinstalling the OS from Time Machine Backup.

So I have reinstalled a fresh OSX El Capitan from scratch. After created the user and installing drobo drivers, I have bound the Drobo 5d Time Machine backup Disk to the Time Machine OSX service. I've done this because I though it was the way to do it... Error! When I went to restore, I have not seen my old data but just the new installation.

When I go to directly within Drobo Backuped Disk, I see All Past Folders AND new Folders.

I've tried to restore the backup user with migration tool App but no success, the same user as the fresh install, not the old one (with all my apps).

Now I think I've corrupted my backup. Is there a way to rollback this issue?

I've found a solution. Just delete the undesired folders. Delete and recreate the "latest" alias to the desired date (folder named by date). Boom! Backup is available from that datetime.


How to change PATH environment variable to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion that will be visible to GUI applications? I tried all methods I heard of for setting environment variables on OS X 10.8 but none of them seems to work.

To test, run a bash script from inside a gui application like Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA.

#!/bin/bash
set|grep PATH

Things I tested and that are not working even after reboot:

/etc/paths and /etc/paths.d/something
/etc/launchd.conf
~/.bash_profile
~/.MacOSX/environment.plist (binary plist made as recommended)
running launchctl setenv PATH $PATH from the command line, this was supposed to update the PATH for GUI apps, at least for current session. Guess what, no change.

It seems that PATH is always PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin for GUI apps.

With Mountain Lion /etc/launchd.conf is where you should set the GUI applications Path. Remember it's not a script file; it only supports launchctl commands so you should write something like:

setenv PATH /new/path:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

Note also that it doesn't support shell environment variable substitutions (like $PATH) so you'll have to set every path that you want to include. It's a good idea to keep the original paths that you've mentioned (/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin).

You'll have to reboot after changing (or creating) the file for the changes to take effect.


Is it possible to review an iPhone app from browser? I visited apps.apple.com while logged in and I see the ratings but I can't review. Is this possible to review an iPhone app from browser? It's very annoying (at the limit of mental breakdown) to write a proper review form a mobile device.

No, it's not something Apple puts up a web interface to allow reviews off device.

However, you can connect any USB keyboard to your iOS device using a USB adapter and most bluetooth keyboards work very well if you have one handy to try pairing.

I too find myself longing for a proper keyboard when writing due to years of habit forming. Bringing your preferred tool to iOS makes it much easier to compose even with the small screen in my experience.

Worst case, pen your review in iCloud version of notes / pages / wherever and save the text to the device so it can sync over or just be there on the storage and copy/paste if you can't find a better workaround.


Macbook Pro with Yosemite very slow I've upgraded my mac from Mavericks to official Yosemite. In the first day my mac was normally, but in the second day, it was unusable, very slow and it was not responding, The third day(now) still like that. I dont know what to do, I've already reset pram, reset smc, repaired disk permissions, tried to reinstall Yosemite and nothing changed. I think it can be the file vault that I had activated when I upgraded to Yosemite, but I can't even know the percentage of the process. My MacbookPro is a version late 2011, processor i5 2.4Ghz, 16gb ram, 500gb HD. I would appreciate if somebody could help me.

It seems to be a common issue with Yosemite, see e.g. a Mac Rumors thread.

In the last couple of days there also popped up several articles complaining about Apple’s current state of its software. You can find a good overview of the most common issues in this article (it’s also worth to skim over the comments as there are issues that aren’t discussed in the article).


Remove full name from login window In Mountain Lion, my full name is displayed at the bottom of the log in menu. As I want to sell my computer, I was wondering if there is a way to hide this? (it's the only place that you can see it as it is not the user name, and I can't change it in Sharing preferences).

I called Apple support, they told me there's a way to do it via Terminal, but they wanted to charge me for that. I looked up online, but I can't find a way to remove it.

Is this in the list of previously logged in users?

If you're selling your MacBook, you should consider re-installing the OS with a clean slate, rather than potentially leaving items behind.

You might find there's still a userid on the computer somewhere; you can remove it by running sudo dscl and then ls /Local/Default/Users to see if the username shows up there. delete /Local/Default/Users/name should get rid of it.


iOS reminders app not syncing with Yosemite I was working in the reminders app last night and noticed that it failed to sync across all my devices, which run the latest version of OS X and iOS. I've tried to sign out of iCloud on my iOS devices but it keeps asking whether I want to delete the content from my iPhone and wasn't sure what to do.

Try turning reminders in icloud off and back on. It might prompt for keeping the existing reminders locally when it is turned off in which case you can select yes. When you turn it back on, it might ask for merging reminders and select yes again. This has worked for me in the past.


Cannot install graphviz with macports I am struggling with macports trying to install graphviz tool:

... $ sudo port install graphviz
--->  Computing dependencies for graphviz
--->  Fetching archive for graphviz
--->  Attempting to fetch graphviz-2.40.1_1+pangocairo+x11.darwin_18.x86_64.tbz2 from https://packages.macports.org/graphviz
--->  Attempting to fetch graphviz-2.40.1_1+pangocairo+x11.darwin_18.x86_64.tbz2 from http://mse.uk.packages.macports.org/sites/packages.macports.org/graphviz
--->  Attempting to fetch graphviz-2.40.1_1+pangocairo+x11.darwin_18.x86_64.tbz2 from http://lil.fr.packages.macports.org/graphviz
--->  Fetching distfiles for graphviz
--->  Verifying checksums for graphviz
--->  Extracting graphviz
--->  Configuring graphviz
--->  Building graphviz
--->  Staging graphviz into destroot
--->  Installing graphviz @2.40.1_1+pangocairo+x11
--->  Activating graphviz @2.40.1_1+pangocairo+x11
--->  Cleaning graphviz
--->  Scanning binaries for linking errors
--->  No broken files found.
--->  No broken ports found.
... $ graphviz
-bash: graphviz: command not found
... $ which graphviz
... $ sudo port installed
The following ports are currently installed:
...
  graphviz @2.40.1_1+pangocairo+x11 (active)
...

Literally have no idea what did I wrong. Any help will be appreciated.

Sometimes when you install command line software, the software is actually a package that contains a collection of binaries (or library source files) and according to the Portfile description of graphviz, it's one of those packages:

  The Graphviz layout programs dot, neato, fdp, sfdp, twopi and circo
  take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and produce
  output in a variety of visual and text formats.

I personally don't use MacPorts but according to this answer it seems like you can view the binaries (and library source files) installed by a package through:

port contents installed_port_name


Is it possible to export Android OS data to iOS? Is there any way to export Android Data to an iPhone?

I got an old Android Phone, i want  to throw it away but i got very important data in it. Is there anyway to send that data directly into my iPhone 6s? Because i don't want to loose that data and i also don't want to have that android phone. Which software can help me in transferring data from Android to iOS?

I have got several things as my important data:

  Pictures, Videos and Contacts

Apple has an app in the Google Play store and a support article describing the required steps in details.

There's a nice page for switchers as well - https://www.apple.com/switch/ the one thing to pay attention to if you don't appreciate the marketing is the help from a live person through @AppleSupport and the Support App you can download on iOS once you've got your phone running. Try to transfer all the data within a day of getting your phone so you don't have two sets of photos and documents if you start making some on iPhone before you get everything over from the old phone.


Take a photo using Siri voice activation? I'm a new user of Siri since I recently upgraded to iPhone 6s. What I can't figure out though is if I somehow can take a photo using only Siri?

Obviously I tried and failed and my google skills doesn't find any information on the subject.

All I can accomplish is to get Siri to launch the camera app, which requires me to enter my passcode, and that is far worse than simply accessing the camera from the lock screen. It seems I'm missing something here.

My set Siri language is Swedish (if it differs?)

At present, Siri is unable to actually capture a photo on your iOS device, regardless of language. This feature can be suggested to Apple via their general Feedback form.

Saying "take a picture" will, as you mentioned, open the stock Camera app in Photo mode. This is the extent of Apple's functionality for this command right now.


How do disable control by iPhone headphones? I have bought 2 iPhone headphones from Amazon, good quality earphones with 5-star reviews, but unfortunately there seem an issue where it randomly initiates commands.

Music forwards, music rewards, Siri asks me if I have a question, all features that would be normally initiated by pressing your headphone buttons.

So the headphone mostly make listening music on the iPhone impossible, because of all the random control features being initiated.

How can I disable these headphone controls? The quality of the audio is pretty good and I'd like to keep using these headphones.

This is trivially accomplished by removing the third pin from the connectivity. You could buy an adapter for this purpose if you don't want to change headsets or get what appears to be a faulty switch in it repaired.

http://www.amazon.com/EZOPower-Headset-Adapter-Smartphone-smartphone/dp/B0046FMRGA/

Basically the green plug goes into your phone and the headphones go to the black end of the cable.


iTunes Library problem - how to search and delete for similar filenames with different extensions? An iTunes error (documented in this AskDifferent thread) has left my library folders full of duplicate files, but with different extensions. Over time, when I have found an album that iTunes can't find I have deleted the local files and downloaded from iCloud. This has left me with the downloaded m4a files but also the original 'lost' mp3's - the files were never actually missing, but the links in the iTunes database were corrupted somehow.

I could delete the entire local library and then download from iTunes Match/iCloud but it's a very large library and this could take many days on my internet connection.

Trying to convert the 'known' mp3's to m4a's and deleting any left over 'lost' mp3's would take far too long.

Could a terminal command or applescript search within a folder and match identical base file names but different mp3 and m4a extensions and then delete the corresponding mp3 file when found? It would need to do this recursively down into each folder and sub-folder within the music folder.

example
Music Directory:

Directory1:

file1.mp3
file1.m4a

Directory2:

Subdirectory1:

file2.mp3
file2.m4a
file3.mp3
file3.m4a

Ok - this was much easier than I expected. Work around that I used was to select a new location for library in iTunes and then Library > Organise Library.

This moved all the 'known' files and left all the old mp3's. I deleted the contents of the old iTunes library and then moved it back.


How to delete an app from iTunes Is it possible to delete an app from my Apple account; (not from my phone, from my apple account)?

No, once you've downloaded a paid or free app, it is registered as bought on that account.


I'm looking for a detailed tutorial on a clean install of Lion I've read online and saw that it appears to be impossible to install Lion on a clean/wiped/reformatted hard drive - is this true? I'd like to wipe my hard drive clean and then install Lion on it (new) and would prefer not to wipe and install Snow Leopard and upgrade to Lion.

Regarding the tutorials or detailed instructions on clean installing Lion - are there any that are (Most that I have searched online, including the one on Egg Freckles have been released [I]before[/I] the actual release date on Lion, and since I'm not that up to date on everything in the Mac world recently) detailed, and  I'd like to know if there is a comprehensive (new) tutorial regarding the clean installation of Lion?

The best guide is all written up on Apple's support web site.

A high level Introducing Lion Recovery covers the basics and the About Lion Recovery knowledge base article gets into the details.

Some macs can use internet recovery to perform a one step / internet net boot / bare metal restore. All the rest require a [USB bootable recovery HD. Apple provides an official tool to make your own bootable USB device. Detailed instructions from About Lion Recovery Disk Assistant cover using an existing hard drive as well as a USB device to make your Recovery HD.

Once you are booted into recovery - use Disk Utility to erase / zero / repartition your drive and you now have a clean Lion install.

The following Mac models can perform a total internet recovery or use USB media.

MacBook Air (Mid 2011) 13 inch and 11 inch
Mac Mini (Mid 2011) all models


Single user mode comes up with wrong boot disk For some reason Single User Mode is now booting to something other than my usual HD partition: The disk has no /Users directory; fsck -fy takes only 1.7sec; df shows the root device to have only 3.9M 512-blocks, etc.   It is also write protected.  When I tried to fix that by (1) running csrutil disable in the previous cmd-S-R boot, then (2) running mount -rw /, it only yielded a bunch of the following to stderr:

  disk2s1: device is write locked

  disk2s1: IO failed, error = 13

(6 of the first, 7 of the second, intermixed).

Well, fwiw at least I know it is using disk2s1.

ls /dev/disk* yields

  disk0 disk0s1 disk1 disk1s1 disk1s2 disk1s3 disk2 disk2s1

I thought of trying to mount one of the others but, (1) I can't find out what /dev/disk* to mount since diskutil list is not available in Single User Mode, and (2) even if I knew, since the file system is un-writeable I cannot mount any of these into /Volumes anyway.

So ... The Big Question: How can I get Single User Mode to boot on my standard boot volume?

System:

SW: running High Sierra 10.13.3

HW: 15" late 2011 MacbookPro 8,2. I can't look up more details since system_profiler seems to be unavailable in SingleUser mode, but iirc it is a 2.4GHz [sic] quad core i7 w 16GB-RAM, 512G-SSD.

Background:

(1) Why I need Single User Mode -- workarounds for wonky dGPU:

This machine has the 2011-MBPro's famously wonky AMD discrete graphics chip problem. After exhausting all Apple's motherboard replacement options over the years, I use workarounds the user community has discovered to get the system to use the integrated Intel graphics chip instead. These are done in Single User mode, basically whenever I reboot.  Without the workarounds, any usual reboots to the GUI (simple reboot, option reboot, safe mode,...) fail to a gray-screen mid progress bar, with the machine getting hot and fans running. The workarounds I currently use come from this link:
GPU problem - Boot Hangs on Grey Screen
These workarounds involve moving the AMD*300*.kexts around so the system does not use the AMD discrete GPU chip for graphics and setting nvram gpu-power-prefs so that it does not even power that chip up, else it runs full power doing nothing except warming up the room. Note that the nvram setting can be done while running from this weird write-locked startup disk. Moving the kexts however, cannot because of the write lock -- and this is the killer for me, leaving the machine unusable.
The workarounds had worked fine for 6 months or more now, tho tend to get messed up whenever there is a system update (not surprising). I believe there was a minor update a couple of days ago. Later that day a few hours after I closed my laptop, it mysteriously rang it's startup chime.  It has been flakey ever since.
This problem (weird startup disk in S.U.Mode) had me stuck for a day, trying things. Then everything worked for one S.U.Mode boot -- got to the usual boot drive. Not sure if it is something I did or if it was random. Anyway I ran fsck -fy which showed no problems, and ran my usual nvram gpu-power-prefs script and did a reboot. The GUI then came up fine, using the integrated graphics chip. (I fortunately did a backup during this time.) Next time the machine went to sleep though, it was broken again. I tried a reboot into S.U.Mode, but it used the small limited boot disk.

(2) I've tried resetting the SMC and NVRAM, to no avail. An extended HW check (boot w D key) shows no problems.  I do not have another machine with firewire ports to access the HD in target disk mode. (Glad I have a backup!)

(3) I have set nvram bootargs="-v", but everything scrolls by too fast to see what might be going on.

(4) I'm just trying to make this machine last until the 2018 MBPro's come out.

I was just working on my 2011 mbp. I think the solution is to downgrade it to Sierra. I was happily on OS Sierra doing my work, but my bloody itchy finger clicked install, and I had to redo the kernel stuff, but it still didn’t boot.

I took out my hard disk and booted it from another MAC, and it worked perfectly. So my Guess is the the kernels we’re looking for some hardware that the mac doesn’t have, so instead of figuring that out, i’lol got back to Sierra.

Oh, to access csrutil, I used cmd-R from my other machine, and opened terminal to disable it.


How can I programatically fill a flash drive with my latest photos from iPhoto? Suppose I want to fill up a flash drive with the most recent photos in my iPhoto Library.

I want to end up with an external drive that has all my photos in a single directory (no nested folders)
Those photos that have been modified, I want the modified version of the photo to end up on the drive.
Those photos that have not been modified, I want the original version of the photo to end up on the drive
I want to start with the newest photo and work backward in time, so when the drive fills up, the latest photos will be included on the external drive.
I fully expect that the external drive cannot hold all the pictures in my library. Any warning to this effect must be non-modally, and not prevent the script from proceeding to fill the drive with the newest photos in my library, then halt gracefully when the disk is full.
I want to do this programmatically (shell or AppleScript), without launching iPhoto.

Does anyone know how to go about doing this? I've written some shell scripts over the years, but none of them quite work the way I'd hoped.

I suspect the right answer will involve some copying and some "if" statements.

I have written a script to do this for you. It is available here. It works with system Ruby (1.8.6 in Lion) with no external dependencies. This is how you use it (also included in the README):

  This script looks for an iPhoto '11 album data file in

~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml

  This is the standard place for iPhoto to store the album data file, so
  it's very likely you have it here if you have iPhoto.

  Recommended use for the script is to copy it to wherever you wish to
  backup the files to, then invoke it on the command line:

$ruby iphoto.rb

  This will scan the album data file, sort the photos by date, newest
  first, then copy them to the desired destination until the drive is
  full. Alternatively, you can manually specify the path you wish to
  copy to as an argument parameter, in case you want to store the script
  somewhere else:

$ruby iphoto.rb /Volumes/Backup

  This script was written with exactly one user in mind; that is why it
  has no other options.

  I have tested this on exactly one iPhoto library: mine. It works for me, but YMMV.
  The number in front of the files is the "DateAsTimerInterval" value from the album data file. I don't know how to convert it to a "real" date, but sorting by it does sort chronologically, so it's good enough for the purposes of this script.


Where can I find Mojave Kernel Headers? I'm trying to get a hold of the Kernel Headers for 10.14 Mojave, but even though the Beta version (even two actually) was already released, XNU's repository (both here and here) is still only up-to-date with High Sierra.

I also tried getting Command Line Developer Tools but they only contain User Headers (and maybe a few but not a lot of Kernel Headers).

Anything else I could do? I don't really need the Kernel source as a whole, only its headers.

Apparently XCode command line tools doesn't install the headers by default anymore. However, it does provide a package in /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Packages. On my system it was /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Packages/macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14.pkg. I installed this package and then the headers showed up in /System/Library/Frameworks/Kernel.framework/Headers.


Apple TV Apps Question I shared an Apple Tv with my ex. We recently just broke up and she took the Apple Tv, even though it was linked to my personal Apple ID. I changed my password so my account can't be accessed anymore.

My question is, if I purchase and download apps through my iphone, such as a dating site like match.com, will those downloads be visible on the Apple Tv? Or since I changed my password, will none of my app information be obtainable? I want to confirm that they wont because I don't want to deal with the drama if so.

I appreciate the help and apologize in advance if this is a dumb question. I am not very technically saavy with electronics as it is very apparent.

Head over to iCloud
Login with your user name and password
Head into settings.
Scroll down to my devices.
Click on the Apple TV you wish to remove.
That should open a dialog. There is a blue circle with an X in it. Click on it. That will disassociate your ID with the Apple TV.


AppleScript: How to add currently-playing Apple Music song to a playlist? I've got a little AppleScript in Alfred that marks the currently-playing song as "Loved", it looks like this:

tell application "iTunes"
    set loved of current track to true
end tell

This script works great.

But! I'd like it to do one more thing, and it's not working: I'd like to add the track to a playlist called "Loved". Here's v2 of the script:

tell application "iTunes"
    set loved of current track to true
    duplicate current track to playlist "Loved"
end tell

This way, I'd have a way to find these tracks later (for example, I listen to Radio a lot, and would love to find those Favorites later on).

Here is the error message that AppleScript shows me when I run v2:

"iTunes got an error: Can only duplicate subscription tracks to library source."

Any ideas if there is a way to accomplish this?

A few caveats:

I'd like to avoid adding the track to my Library.
If there's a way to have a Smart Playlist that contains all songs that I've Loved (even those not in my Library), then great! As far as I can tell, though, that's not possible with Smart Playlists.

I've been cracking my head on this one as well and currently, there doesn't seem to be any way to add Apple Music tracks to a playlist. It's kinda unintuitive that there isn't a default way in AM to access all loved songs, but here we are. AM is getting better surely but slowely, so fingers crossed.

What I've done as a workaround in the meantime, is added a functionality that saves the song into a text file that is synced to iCloud. That way I can manually enter the songs whenever I have some time to spare and I can do it both on my iMac and Macbook.

tell application "iTunes"
    set loved of current track to true
    set songname to current track's name
    set songartist to current track's artist
    set textpath to "~/Library/Mobile\\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/AppleMusicToDo.txt"

    do shell script "echo " & quoted form of songartist & " - " & quoted form of songname & " >> " & textpath

end tell


What is the difference between on-the-go, save episode and download episode? When using the podcast app, I can view the details about a particular show and am presented with three options that all sound like what I want to do. I want to get the episode now over wifi, and then listen to the episode later with no data connection.

What is the difference between on-the-go, save episode and download episode?

On-The-Go will create a play list which can be found under My Stations / On-The-Go.

Save Episode will save an episode that you've already played under the Saved tab.

Doing Download Episode, on the other hand, will actually start to download the episode and move it into My Podcasts list.

So, while On-The-Go and Save Episode is a way of organizing the episodes you've already downloaded, doing Download Episode actually downloads it.


How can I power off an iPhone if the screen is not working (because it's broken or not detecting touch)? A known way to turn off in iPhone if the screen isn't detecting touch is to let go of the home and power buttons as soon as the screen goes black.
But this sometimes doesn't work, and instead the iPhone restarts.  I wonder why.

Well, the iPhone restarts because pressing the Home and Power buttons simultaneously for a longer period is actually the way to force a restart (on the iPhone 6S and earlier). I think you're simply holding them too long.


OS X copy paste into Terminal adds fdbf bfb9 b083 to beginning and end of selection For the life of me, I can't figure this out.

When using a browser (doesnt matter which), if I select text, then paste in Vim or Neovim, I see characters added to the beginning and end of my selection.

For example, I select "answer" from this page, then paste it over in Terminal I get:

??????answer??????
Saving this pasted data to file with .bin extension and then opening in Vim with this auto command helper:

augroup Binary
   au!
   au BufReadPre  *.bin let &bin=1
   au BufReadPost *.bin if &bin | %!xxd
   au BufReadPost *.bin set ft=xxd | endif
   au BufWritePre *.bin if &bin | %!xxd -r
   au BufWritePre *.bin endif
   au BufWritePost *.bin if &bin | %!xxd
   au BufWritePost *.bin set nomod | endif
augroup END

I get this output:

0000000: fdbf bfb9 b083 616e 7377 6572 fdbf bfb9  ......answer....
0000010: b083 0a

                       ...

So, you can see that I get

fdbf bfb9 b083

added to the beginning, and I get

fdbf bfb9 b083

added to the end.

Any ideas on what this is about?

The only recent major change I can remember is upgrading OS X to Yosemite, so sure that's potentially a large update.

I suspect Terminal is the source of the issue. I've been able to use iTerm2 without this problem.

Also, I have tried to select "answer" from this page and then in both iTerm2 and Terminal I run this command:

pbpaste|od -x

which gives me

0000000 6e61 7773 7265 0000006

So, the clipboard has "answer" and pbpasting it in both iTerm2 and Terminal gives the same output, but cmd-V pasting into nano, stock vi (with -u NONE), MacVim (with -u NONE) and Neovim all give me a the ?????? displayed and then on save, encode the fdbf stuff into the file.

Stumped!!!

Answered here:

https://superuser.com/questions/1045432/os-x-copy-paste-into-terminal-adds-fdbf-bfb9-b083-to-beginning-and-end-of-select/1047996#1047996

This error has to do with a feature known as bracketed pasted mode[1]. Neovim does not support it yet[2]. You get the error above if an application acts like it can support that mode, but fails to support it.

In neovim open a terminal window. With 'always' in the clipboard, run the following:

pbpaste | xxd

There should be no errors. Now run the following:

cat | xxd

Enter ⌘-v followed by Ctrl-D.

You should expect to see the errors. In the second case, input is being handled by the application, which wraps the input with special bytes. The padded bytes are sent as stdin.


Can't connect to internet on Wi-Fi since update to iOS 7.1.1 I recently updated to iOS 7.1.1 on my iPhone 5 and for the first couple of days everything was fine. Now, however, I can't connect to the internet on Wi-Fi.

The Wi-Fi is connected and the signal is there but when I browse on Google Chrome, access the App Store or even try iMessage it's not working.

Is this connected to the latest update? I've reset my network settings but that doesn't work, or switching the Wi-Fi on and off or switching the phone on and off. My 3G works fine.

I had the same EXACT problem when I upgraded my iPhone 4S to iOS 7. I had no wi-fi. I never got it to work, except, if I did the "freezer" trick with my phone, sometimes it would work for a little bit. This makes me believe it has to do with power use and heat.

I kept meaning to take it to the Apple Store to make them do something about it, but never got around to it. Then, when the latest iOS update came out, a couple days later, my phone started working fine again, and it has been ever since.

I think there is definitely something crazy going on with the power saving algorithms Apple uses. Did you get your iPhone 5 when it first came out? My iPhone 4s was one of the first ones. I stink the hardware changes during the production cycle, and sometimes us early adopters get left out when they start tweaking things.


Help with Mountain Lion installation on USB - Wont boot internally I'm hoping you can help me out with a strange issue I've been dealing with the past few days.  I recently purchased a 2008 Xserve.  I've been trying to get Mountain Lion on it without much luck, however I'm very close.  I know mountain lion is not 'supported' on this platform, but there is no reason it won't run.  I've replaced my mezzanine video card with a mountain lion (and lion) supported gt 120 from a mac pro.  I've installed mountain lion to a 500gb drive via USB off of my macbook pro, and edited the PlatformSupport.plist file to contain the proper board id from my Xserve.

Here is where the issue is: If I try to boot to Mountain Lion off this drive via USB on the Xserve, it boots and runs mountain lion buttery smooth.  When I place this drive into the first drive bay (internally) in the Xserve, it wont boot.  Its as though it cannot find the drive or boot partition.  It sits at a white screen and I eventually get a blinking folder with a question mark on it.  I feel that I'm so very close to getting this to work, and its driving me crazy.  Anyone have any insight?

Additional Information:

booting holding option or to the recovery partition while the drive is installed internally does not work either.
Installing Lion internally works fine, so I know its not a hardware issue.

I was able to get it to successfully boot by creating a Time Machine Backup, then restoring that to an internally formatted disk.


Personal Hotspot crashed, now unavailable I was trying to connect up using my personal hotspot.  I turned it on, and it seemed to start up normally.  I turned to my computer, which saw the connection, but couldn't successfully make a connection.  When I looked back at my iPhone, the option was completely gone.  I then went to the general -> network panel, and I see the personal hotspot, but the option just has the "wait spinner" going with no buttons.  This persists even after powering down and restarting the phone.

What do I need to do to get this back up and running.

A possible side effect is that I don't seem to be able to connect to my VPN, but that might be an unrelated issue with my VPN provider.  Not sure....

Personal hotspot only depends on the carrier and the OS of the device.

Assuming you have a backup (and it won't get overwritten during testing and activation of your newly wiped phone), you can restore the phone and set it up as new.

If that fixes the issue - you can then know it was software corruption. You'll have to decide if you want to slowly delete things on the phone after restoring from your backup or just start new and set it up again from zero, but you'll have determined that the carrier settings and the hardware are working.

Conversely, if it fails after a new setup - focus on hardware and the carrier for support.


What tools exist to rename (truncate) batches of files in OS X? I get bunches of files I need to rename. The original filenames normally have 7 digits - plus an optional character (or two), followed by a space then a whole string of other characters. I need to rename them to be such that the space and everything after it is replaced by '-z'.

For example: (original filenames)

3543679 ggry Hugh highs Bhutto.jpg

6789456 hfghh hfghh death.eps

8753674a hfryg gyjbff hfghh.png

4686536c Guggenheim.jpg

Would become: (renamed filenames)
3543679-z.jpg

6789456-z.eps

8753674a-z.png

4686536c-z.jpg

Anyone got any ideas how to automate this?

Try running something like this in Terminal:

cd ~/Some\ folder
for f in *; do mv "$f" "${f/ *./-z.}"; done


What happens, exactly, when an iPhone app is run on an iPad at 2x scale? When I run an iPhone app which supports retina displays on an iPad, does it have increased clarity when shown at 2x size? I've noticed text appears pixelated, but photos do not. Is there a complete list of how iOS handles this scaling?

I haven't found a detailed list of the exact behaviors. For the most part, it seems that everything is simply pixel-scaled (which is why text looks bad), except for images which were scaled down to begin with. I presume that the UIImageView class has some behavior to handle this automatically.

On Retina devices, Apple's built-in text and image rendering are aware of the scaling factor of the screen, and will render text and photos in high quality. But this doesn't seem to apply to iPhone apps run on an iPad. (See Apple's developer documentation on high-resolution screens for more information on that.)


How to assign per-song EQ for music on iPhones? Is there a way for the iPhone to automatically choose an EQ for songs, or if there was a way to assign an EQ for each song? I don't want to be constantly changing the EQ for each genre (e.g., hip hop, Latin, rock).

I have an iPhone and I am using the latest iOS.

Is this possible natively or with another service or player?

This can't be done on an iPhone alone with the stock Music app.

But if you're syncing music from a Mac with iTunes, you can apply EQ settings to songs in iTunes and those will sync onto the phone. https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/specify-equalizer-settings-per-song-in-itunes/

Be warned, this only works with EQ presets.

  In the Equalizer Preset pop-up menu, pick the setting you’d like for that song and click OK. Not only will the song always play with that EQ preset on your Mac, but the preset will carry over when you sync that song to an iOS device. If you create a custom preset in iTunes through the Equalizer window, however,  those changes won’t carry over to your iOS device. Also, if the EQ on your iOS device is set to Off, the device will not play the preset you’ve selected for any song.
  https://www.macworld.com/article/2090554/tweak-your-ios-audio-with-eq-settings.html


cannot log on icloud.com. 403 Forbidden I was trying to log on icloud.com using my Mac but a 403 forbidden page showed up after I typed my account and password. I was using Google Chrome. Currently there is no solution from what I searched. Any ideas?

That error disappeared after I upgraded my Mac OS system.


Apple Watch Heart Rate Glance Shows Same Number Every Time, Or Series Of Random Numbers, Also On Replacement Watch Whenever I check my resting heart rate using the Watch's heart rate glance, it does one of two things:

1) I see one low number (which sometimes seems accurate, e.g., ~70).

A couple of seconds later, the heart rate shown on the screen jumps up to 107 or 121.  It does this every single time; it either shows the lower number first then jumps, or goes straight to 107, or 121, but it's always the same number-107 or 121.

OR

2) I get a series of wildly fluctuating numbers, which are way too high, e.g., 138, 159, 174, etc.  It's usually something random and usually high numbers.  Taking my heart rate manually shows the numbers to be way off.

I tried doing an unpair (erase) of the Watch several times.  An AppleCare technician attempted to run a diagnostic on the Watch multiple times, but was only able to run a diagnostic on the iPhone (6S Plus).  He could not reach the Watch, which only went to the diagnostics' "Waiting" screen one time out of about ten tries.

So Apple shipped out a new watch.  Here's the kicker:

I immediately set up the new watch, and after the setup was complete, the exact same thing is occurring.

This issue has also persisted across (the first Watch) being paired with two different iPhones (a 6 Plus and a 6S Plus, both new), so I think that minimizes a physical defect in the phone being an issue.  The Watch was of course unpaired and reset in-between phone changes, multiple times.

I am interested, among other things, about the security aspect of this particular problem.

Edit:

I did see the articles about tattoos. I don't have any tattoos or scars. I wear it tight (it was fitted at an Apple Store). Furthermore, I found a new angle on this: with both watches, if I hold the watch in the air (not against skin or anything else), they give these same multiple BPM readings that look simulated. I work in a security-related field and call me paranoid, but I think the Watch has been rooted. I've ruled out two new Watches, two new iPhones, multiple resets (and set up as new), and now myself (and the watch dangling in the air, apparently)

If the watches are different, and the phones are different, then the only thing that appears to remain the same is you.

You don't mention, but have you ruled out the possibility of there being anything about you? For instance, I remember reading that tattoos could prevent the heart monitor obtaining a clear reading, and there was some talk about people with very black skin also having difficulties. Example article here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32537030

The other possibility is whether there is something with the tightness with which you wear it?


How do I download a Facebook messenger audio file? A loved one recorded an audio message on Facebook messenger for me; it looks like the image below. I'm trying to download it, but nearly all of the ways to capture it don't see that the file exists, and the one exception to that downloaded a file that nothing can open.

Can someone please tell me how to download this file such that it can be played? I have 10.9.5, if that makes a difference. Thanks!

UPDATE: The mobile website solution pointed out by others doesn't seem to work anymore. If you can get it to work, please update this answer again. For now, fallback to one of the methods described below.

UPDATE: As pointed out by others, you can open Facebooks' Official Mobile Messager Webpage and download directly from the interface:

Go to https://m.facebook.com/messages/
Find the audio file you want to download
Click on the dropdown menu on the right of the audio file
Press Download

These generic methods should work for most browsers. You just have to watch out for the fact that different browsers will use slightly different names for the same tools. I will outline the general solution bellow and indicating the exact tool names for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. (Feel free to edit this answer to add the names for other browsers!)
Method 1 (Network)

Go to the chat window that contains the audio file you want to download, using the Facebook's Messenger Official Website.

Open the browser's Web Inspector

All Browsers the keyboard shortcut opt+cmd+I,
Safari: Develop -> Show Web Inspector,
Chrome: View -> Developer -> Developer Tools,
Firefox: Tools -> Web Developer -> Toggle Tools;

Go back to the chat and press the "Play" button of the file you want to download.

Find the Network tab in the Web Inspector and you will notice that an audioclip-xxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxx.aac file has been loaded.

Double click on the file and it should automatically download to your default downloads folder (e.g. ~/Downloads). Alternatively, you should be able to right-click on the file and choose the "Download" option.

Method 2 (Resources)

Same as Method 1.

Same as Method 1.

Same as Method 1.

Find the Resources (see details bellow) tab in the Web Inspector and find the audioclip-xxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxx.aac file

Safari:

Tab: Resources
Section: All Resources
Folder: Other

Chrome:

Tab name: Application
Section: Frames
Folder name: Media

Firefox:

Please add here

Same as Method 1.


iCloud won't let me download some deleted iTunes TV episodes again I have purchased a bunch of TV shows iTunes.

The original files for these shows are no longer on my hard drive and I probably deleted them. They show up in the iTunes directory, but when I try to play, I get a dialog box that says "The TV show could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"  If I say yes, I get a file dialog. This is not useful, because the files are no longer on my computer.

Now, Apple tells me that if I've purchased a show and delete it from my disk (say, to save space), I can download it from iCloud:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/inside-itunes/2012/03/movies-now-available-on-icloud.html

So, I follow the instructions, go to the iTunes Store, go to purchased TV shows and select the program I purchased, but each episode only says "Downloaded", and there's no way to re-download the missing episodes.

This is not true for all shows. For some shows that are not on my hard drive, I see a little iCloud icon and am able to click & download the missing episodes.

It's possible that the un-downloadable shows were downloaded and deleted before iCloud supported downloading purchased episodes, but I don't know for certain if that's the problem. It just a hypothesis I don't know how to test.

Any thoughts on how to restore access to these deleted shows within iCloud?

Delete them from iTunes, so they don't show up in your TV section. But don't delete them from iCloud. Then they should appear with a download button on the poster for it if iTunes in the cloud is enabled (you will see a cloud in iTunes). You can either click that download button, or go to purchases in the iTunes store and download it from there.

I think what you must've done is deleted the actual file, but not deleted it from iTunes. Normally when deleting something in iTunes, it deletes from iTunes, and then asks you if you want to delete the actual file as well or not.


Maximum screen resolution with AirPlay Extend Display on the Apple TV 4k? What is the maximum screen resolution possible with AirPlay Extend Display on the Apple TV 4K?

I.e. is it possible to treat an Apple TV 4K connected to a 4k TV as an external Retina-enabled display with a physical 3840×2160 resolution mimicking a 1920x1080 display, but with better font clarity etc?

I had some luck with my lg 65 inch 4k display.  By turning off underscanning in the Apple TVs Airplay menu I have gone from having bars around my 'external' display and this seems to have increased the clarity of text.

However, I am still faced with only scaled options for 1080p and 720 on my macs display options for Apple TV.

I guess there could be two reasons for this...

Requires a High Sierra Software update to enable 4K mirroring

The network bandwidth required for 4K streaming may be a challenge to ensure a smooth experience and hence why it is still not possible.

it would be nice to have the option either way....if it came with a disclaimer that performance may be delayed at least id have a choice to put up with it or not....


What's the "Combo" OS X Update? What's the difference between the OS X Mountain Lion Update v10.8.5 and the OS X Mountain Lion Update v10.8.5 (Combo) packages?

I'm running OS X 10.8.4

Combo Update allows you to update from whichever Mountain Lion version you’re using. It means you can update from v10.8.1 to v10.8.5 immediately.

While OS X Mountain Lion Update v10.8.5 means you can only update from the previous version, which is only OS X 10.8.4.


Access to Keychain items is restricted I recently had to reinstall the OS on my MacBook Pro.  I used MobileMe to sync a bunch of my settings back to my computer (including Keychains), and now I can't see any of my Keychain passwords.  If I try to view an item and check the "Show password" or "Show note" checkbox, I get a little alert that says "Access to this item is restricted".  However, the Access Control tab for that same item has the "Allow all apps access" option selected, with the description saying "Access to this item is not restricted".

Things I've found/tried:

Keychain First Aid reports no errors with my keychain.
There is nothing in my ~/Library/Keychains/.syncinfo folder.
Creating a new default keychain a re-syncing from MobileMe does not fix the issue.

What do I need to do to fix my keychain?  I have a bunch of stuff in there (mostly application license keys) that I'd rather not lose.

I know this might sound unrelated but after moving my keychain from one machine to another I've had to fix permissions with Disk Utility in order to regain access to my keychain.

And in my experience it seems to be a bad idea to move your keychain from one machine to another when your password differs between machines.


Unable to load preference pane I installed TCPBlock and whenever I try to open the TCPBlock preference pane I get the error:  "Unable to load TCPBlock preference pane".  Does anyone know what might cause this?

TCPBlock and OS X 10.9

Comments associated with the last TCPBlock blog update suggest there may be problems with OS X 10.9, Mavericks, and tools like Clean My Mac.

Console

Use the Console.app utility included in Mac OS X to look for error messages. Console.app is located in: /Applications/Utilities

With Console.app running, try opening TCPBlock preference pane again. You will likely see a little flurry of messages.

Possible problems include the preference pane being built for 32-bit Macs only, and missing frameworks or dependencies.


iOS background image height width in Xcode for 1x, 2x, 3x I am trying to add a background image to iOS app. I am not sure about the dimensions of the image for the 1x, 2x, 3x. I want the background image working for all screen sizes.

Here is a nice graphic that displays all the screen sizes and background image sizes (courtesy of Reign Design):


Why can't I run the WWDC app? Today when I tried to use the WWDC app (version 5.0.1) on my iPad, I got a message saying that this version is no longer supported, and I need to get an update from the App Store.  But when I go to the App Store, it is not offering any update for the WWDC app.  What gives?  Maybe it's a temporary delay in posting a new version, or maybe there's a new version that does not run on my 3rd-generation iPad (iOS 9.3.5)?

I can't speak for Apple, but this is likely an intentional decision to walk away from the server side / api calls for the older version of the WWDC app.

One of the core messages for iOS 11 is that all 32 bit platforms and apps are done for developers, and Apple making a hard stop of functionality (programming in a message telling you your app is too old). Programming in a kill switch could be seen as reinforcing that experience for developers.

The temporary good news is despite this move, you can still watch WWDC 2017 content on iOS 9 in Safari. The news on 64 bit only requirements was covered in the Platforms State of the Union keynote (2017 session 102) I believe.


How do I open multiple links in new tabs in Google Chrome? I am using Google Chrome as my default browser on Lion.

What I want to achieve is, when I select handful of links from one web-page, I should have shortcut to open all those links in new tabs.

How can I achieve this

Try one of the extensions Snaplinks or Linky


OS X Server network sync issues I've been running an Open Directory environment for over a year now, and this issue has never, ever stopped plaguing my network. Users constantly have syncing errors, seemingly due to permissions issues. In this case its an iTunes file, but it has been anything from an .xls on the desktop, to items in the library.

Does anyone have an idea on how to resolve this issue?

Right now the only way I can get rid of the sync issue is to log into the server (running the latest Mountain Lion with OS X Server), navigate to the home folder of the particular user, and delete the file myself.

This is obviously an awful experience now that we are growing in terms of users :(

At a basic level, we're using an OD setup via Server.app and tuned with Workgroup Manager.

The hardware is a Mac Mini (Mid 2011):

Processor:2.3 GHz Intel i5
Memory:   8 GB 1333 DDR3
Software: OS X 10.8.3 (12D78)
Server App: 2.2.1 (12T162)

# of Users varies between 2-6

Client Machines

Mid 2011 iMacs
2.5 GHz i5
4 GB 1333 DDR3
OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63)

Server Error:

Server log error: May 21 12:06:26 server.name.com sshd[20492]: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /Users/nickrossi/Library/FileSync

Server log error: May 21 12:06:26 server.name.com sshd[20492]: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /Users/nickrossi/Library/FileSync

Server log error: May 21 11:52:41 server.name.com sshd[19924]: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /Users/brockmantella/Library/FileSync
    swupdateServiceLog = "/var/log/swupd/swupd_syncd_log";

From: http://unixsystems.blogspot.com/2012/06/fixing-ssh-daemon-authentication.html

If you see something similar to:
sshd: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /Your/Home/Path

You have a home directory permission problem.
change to that user if not already one and execute:
chmod go-w ~/
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

It will restore your permissions and you should be able to connect.


Amazon Music app won't launch Recently bought a new Macbook Pro to replace an older Air. Everything is working great except for the Amazon Music app. It downloads and installs just fine, but when I try to launch it using Spotlight, double-clicking in Finder or right-click + "Open" in Finder...nothing happens. The system log reports that:

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.amazon.music.87788[14329]): Service exited with abnormal code: 1

Not very helpful. I've tinkered with the Security & Privacy settings (i.e. "Allow apps downloaded from"), but that changed nothing. I've tried uninstalling the app and reinstalling it via Homebrew Cask. Nothing. I've tried un/re-installing the app various ways multiple times. Nothing.

The interesting part, and perhaps a glimmer of hope, is that if I flip over to the Guest user, I can open the app just fine.

Anyone have any idea what might be going on with my user account that would be impacting my ability to launch a particular application?

I just experienced the same symptoms. I resolved it by deleting ~/Library/Application Support/Amazon Music. The only file in that directory was a file called i18nUpgrade.txt with the contents Upgrade to i18n build.


Bose QuietComfort 35 Bluetooth Headphones crackling/choppy when connected to Mac? QC35's are linked to both my iPhone and my Mac but when I connect the headphones to my Mac (without pairing to my iPhone) the sound is choppy (brief & frequent loss in audio).

Sometimes pairing my iPhone fixes the problem but not always. What can I do?

UPDATE: I no longer experience these issues so it was likely fixed by a previous update. Open the "Bose Connect" app on your phone and make sure your firmware is up to date.

When experiencing issues on Mac, open the "Bose Connect" app on your iPhone and connect to your headphones from there (if not already connected).

The app correctly configures the headphones and eliminates all sound issues.


How can I detect that sound is being generated I wish to use a mac mini as a home theatre system.

I would like the mini to send commands to the power amplifier to turn on/off depending on whether there is any sound generated (like a screen saver but for sound).

Anyone have ideas on how this can be done?

UPDATE:

Power Amp is Cambridge Azur 650R, which can be controlled by IR or RS-232.

Amp manual says not to keep on at all times, and I wish to conserve energy.

I am looking for something equivalent to the 'Sleepwatcher' utility (for the display, that I will use with my projector), but which works for sound.

I have found that the HALLab utility, from apple's XCode developer kit, can show that sound is 'Running somewhere', so it's possible in software.

Anyone know of a tool that uses this? Or which library calls I could use to do the same thing as HALLab?

I don't know of any way to react to sound output in software, but:

This could be done as a stand-alone hardware device reasonably straightforward. I didn't find any ready-made products, but it wouldn't be too hard for any electronics hobbyist with some analog experience, I think (here's a design I found, for example; it could probably also be done with a single microcontroller, especially if the amplifier has an IR remote control). Let me know if you'd like me to expand on this possibility...


Does activating text forwarding between Apple devices forward old messages? If I turn text message forwarding on my iPhone to forward to Mac, how far back does it forward? In other words, does it only send to the Mac what was sent/recieved via text from the date the forwarding was turned on? Or does it download old texts deleted from iPhone as well?

Text message forwarding only applies to messages sent and received when the option is active. This is not retrospective and does not copy prior messages over.

Apple keep delaying the introduction of Messages in the Cloud which will sync all message history. At the time of writing, this functionality is not available.


How do I ssh to MacBook Pro thru Fios then Time Capsule configured as a Bridge? The title explains my configuration. I've done port forwarding on the FiOS router to my MacBook Pro but attempts to SSH from outside produce "network unreachable" (inside my home network SSH works fine).

Is the only way to get this to work by setting the Time Capsule configuration to DHCP & NAT then port forward from FiOS to the Time Capsule then port forward using the NAT configuration on the Time Capsule to the MacBook?

I really want to leave the Time Capsule in Bridge mode because traffic between my TiVo boxes and Macs/iPhone/iPad only work in that configuration.

I would remove any setup you made on the routers to set up DMZ host, port forwarding, ssh after making a backup / notes of how you have things configured.

enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) or Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) on the FiOS router.
Set up the AirPort in Bridge Mode
Set up iCloud on the Mac to have Back To My Mac enabled (you can turn it off later - but this lets you use Apple's diagnostic test to verify NAT-PMP/UPnP are working on your specific network topology and settings.
Power down the mac, then the AirPort, then the router. If any have battery backups, consider powering them down too. Start up the router, wait 60 seconds or so, then the airport, wait 60, then the Mac.

At this point iCloud preferences will show an error condition if you don't have inbound access to the Mac.

At this point you can go off Apple's Help in Finder - search for "Share your screen using Back to My Mac" - it should show you detailed steps and troubleshooting if it doesn't work. - https://help.apple.com/machelp/mac/10.12/index.html?localePath=en.lproj#/mh15597

To test remotely, use another Mac:

sign in to the same iCloud account on that mac
open terminal
Shell menu - new remote connection
select ssh
select the host that is remote

Observe the shell command like ssh -p 22 remoteMac.442113223.members.btmm.icloud.com.

If you can ssh in, then you know the router and the mac are set up to pass incoming ssh traffic on the default port 22 to the Mac connected to your router.

At that point, you can then think about making up tunnels or know if you are set up for IPv4 or IPv6 on the FIOS connection and routers.


Where do applications store local settings? Where does OS X store local settings for applications such as license keys, Skype favorite contacts, etc.

Yesterday I was troubleshooting an issue with an Apple rep and he had me delete a bunch of files and folders, one of which includes ~/library/caches/*  I can't remember the rest though.  Later I noticed NONE of my programs would launch because they required license keys to be input.  All of my EyeTV scheduled recordings were gone. Dock preferences were reset. It's been a nightmare.

If I can get the location of these files, I can just recover them from Time Machine.

Applications store their data in any or all of the following locations:

 ~/<individual application folders>
 ~/Documents/<individual application folders>
 ~/Library/<individual application folders>
 ~/Library/Caches/*/<individual application folders>
 ~/Library/Preferences/*/<individual application folders>
 ~/Library/Application\ Support/<individual application folders>
 /Library/<individual application folders>
 /Library/Caches/*/<individual application folders>
 /Library/Preferences/*/<individual application folders>
 /Library/Application\ Support/<individual application folders>
 /private/tmp/<esoterically named folders>
 /private/var/tmp/*/<esoterically named folders>
 /private/var/db/receipts/

Also, it is not unheard of for an application to store data within its own application folder structure.

Please note that Time Machine does not backup everything. It will automatically exclude such things as iOS device backups among other items such as caches, logs, and what's in the Trash. You can view what is excluded by Time Machine automatically with this command:

 cat /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist


photos library shows blanks after updating the library What happened

opened my fairly big (1TB) photos library (stored on an external drive, backup/copy on a different external drive)
Photos started to update the library (no problems, took about half an hour or less)
Browsed through the photos, realized that there were many blanks:

In full screen mode, the images appear blank:

This is the same for all media, i.e. Live Photos, videos and portraits. However, all media is still in the library package (opened the files in Preview, no problem there) and all metadata (location, tags, lens info, date) is fine, too. Further, these photos are not camera-, location-, face-detection- or file name-specific. They seem to be totally random, however all photos taken before march 2015 are fine (I am probably reading into this, but Photos.app was introduced April 2015).
What I have tried so far:

Repair the library
Restart the Mac
Reset SMC and NVRAM/PRAM
Run first aid on both external disks
Copied the backup onto my work drive, opened it and it was updated as well. No change there (the blank images seem to be the same for both libraries)
Waited about half an hour to display a blank image, no change
Tried to export the original image and video, both fail with unknown error (4), yet some Portraits seem to be exporting fine
Tried to export (not the original) fails with The process couldn't be finished. (Cocoa-error-1), this time including Portraits

More info about the system

MBP 15" from 2017 with macOS BigSur 11.2.1

Both external drives have about 1TB of free storage, their total size is 4TB

I have opened a library after the Big Sur update without problems, but I am not sure if I have opened this library on Big Sur

The backup I have copied has definitely not yet been opened on Big Sur

iCloud is not enabled on this library and it is not the system library

My question is: Does anyone know how I can effectively get these blanks to disappear, without having to manually reimport all photos?

I have a couple more options/ideas up my sleeve, however, they will take a lot of time, so maybe someone here already knows a better/faster fix/idea than the following:

Copy my currently not-updated backup to an older Catalina Mac, hope it can be opened there
As suggested in this thread delete the corrupted libraries, then copy them back (really unsure how this would help though)
Update macOS to 11.2.3

Update #1

I have updated macOS to version 11.2.3 to no avail.

Update #2

I have talked to Apple support. Further things that we tried, all to no avail:

Change the library to the system library
Create another admin account and  open the library there
Start into safe mode
Imported problematic images into a new library, there they show up as normal

Update #3

It seems like I actually have already opened this library on BigSur as I just tried to open it with a Catalina Mac, which resulted in an error message, saying I would need to update the OS.

Update #4

I talked to Apple support again. The engineers didn't come up with anything/they don't really offer database repair. Their "advice" was to manually rebuild the library and use TimeMachine so that there is not only one backup but the history included. I had issues with TM and external drives a couple years ago, thats why I didn't use it. This is one of the unfortunate cases where investigating the issues took so long, it would have been much faster now for me to rebuild it right away.

FYI, I have looked into the following posts:

Photos.app creates blank images after importing iPhoto library
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradmoon/2019/11/10/how-to-fix-a-damaged-macos-photos-library-when-the-repair-tool-fails/
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2227704-apple-photos-library-importing-blank-photos
https://recoverit.wondershare.com/mac-tips/repair-photos-library.html

However, none of these posts helped.

I hate to answer the obvious, but now that you are updated on the OS, I would try once to repair again and open a case with Apple. Worst thing is you spend a little time and someone here has a better answer in the mean time.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204967

In the past there was a repair and a rebuild, but it seems Apple has streamlined their advice before you seek their help. I would hate for you to take more drastic action if there is a bug they have to fix on the rendering and processing side. What if your library is (and was) intact and the code needs fixing?


Maximum Data Size of iMessage I was wondering how big a document (picture, voice, video) can be "iMessaged" from an iPhone. Also, would the iMessage data size be any different if you are iMessaging from within Mountain Lion.

Extracted from [Mountain Lion's Features][1] page:

  Send large attachments: Send high-quality photos, full HD video, or documents. iMessage allows attachments of up to 100MB.

The max file attachment size for the iMessage and Business Chat services is 100 MB.  Platform (iOS, macOS) doesn't matter in this case.  Both channels are IP-based, not carrier-based, so it's just WiFi or cellular data.


Is it possible to configure OS X  to use the domain-name supplied by DHCP option 15? I run a small home network, and have configured my DHCP server to provide a domain name with all responses. My MacBook Air (running 10.7.3) places the provided domain in the DNS search path, but does not set the local domain accordingly. Note, the actual domain name has been replaced with my.example.com in the output below, and IP/MAC addresses have been stripped. Diagnostic information below. I've poked around in System Preferences -> Network -> Wi Fi -> Advanced with no luck, other than statically setting the hostname, which obviously doesn't work if I roam between networks. Does anyone else have any other suggestions?

The search domain is set correctly in /etc/resolv.conf:

% cat /etc/resolv.conf
#
# Mac OS X Notice
#
# This file is not used by the host name and address resolution
# or the DNS query routing mechanisms used by most processes on
# this Mac OS X system.#
# This file is automatically generated.
#
search my.example.com
nameserver <DNS IP addr>
nameserver <DNS IPv6 addr>
%

However, hostname -f doesn't reflect the domain in the FQDN:

% hostname -f
myhost.local
%

Running tcpdump and forcing a DHCP renewal confirms that option 15 is present in both the DHCP request and reply, but seemingly isn't being used by OS X other than to set the DNS search path.

% sudo tcpdump -n -ien0 -vvvvv udp port 67
tcpdump: listening on en0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes
01:13:25.061622 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 255, id 26061, offset 0, flags [none], proto UDP (17), length 328)
    0.0.0.0.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: [udp sum ok] BOOTP/DHCP, Request from <my MAC addr>, length 300, xid 0x463f9f78, Flags [none] (0x0000)
          Client-Ethernet-Address <my MAC addr>
          Vendor-rfc1048 Extensions
            Magic Cookie 0x63825363
            DHCP-Message Option 53, length 1: Request
            Parameter-Request Option 55, length 9:
              Subnet-Mask, Default-Gateway, Domain-Name-Server, Domain-Name
              Option 119, LDAP, Option 252, Netbios-Name-Server
              Netbios-Node
            MSZ Option 57, length 2: 1500
            Client-ID Option 61, length 9: "myhost"
            Requested-IP Option 50, length 4: <my IP addr>
            Lease-Time Option 51, length 4: 7776000
            Hostname Option 12, length 8: "myhost"
            END Option 255, length 0
            PAD Option 0, length 0, occurs 8
01:13:25.068967 IP (tos 0x10, ttl 128, id 0, offset 0, flags [none], proto UDP (17), length 328)
    <srv IP addr>.67 > <my IP addr>.68: [udp sum ok] BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 300, xid 0x463f9f78, Flags [none] (0x0000)
          Your-IP <my IP addr>
          Client-Ethernet-Address <my MAC addr>
          Vendor-rfc1048 Extensions
            Magic Cookie 0x63825363
            DHCP-Message Option 53, length 1: ACK
            Server-ID Option 54, length 4: <srv IP addr>
            Lease-Time Option 51, length 4: 86400
            Subnet-Mask Option 1, length 4: <subnet mask>
            Default-Gateway Option 3, length 4: <my IP addr>
            Domain-Name-Server Option 6, length 4: <DNS IP addr>
            Domain-Name Option 15, length 13: "my.example.com"
            END Option 255, length 0
            PAD Option 0, length 0, occurs 11
^C
2 packets captured
1458 packets received by filter
0 packets dropped by kernel

Not understanding whats exactly your problem. Maybe this can help you.

If you set the search option, in your own config (network->advanced->dns->search domains) or by your dhcp server. You basically eliminate the need to add this part to a fqdn.

Example:

  search: foo.com

then,

  ping test

would try to resolve test.foo.com

So, in your case that would be test.my.example.com

Futhermore, setting your local name, you can change under:

  Sharing -> Edit...


Is there an OS X equivalent to the web debugging proxy Fiddler? I do web development on Windows for my day job, and I rely a lot on Fiddler, which is web debugging proxy.  What is an equivalent tool for OS X?

Stuff that's Free:

Burp Suite
WiireShark
ParosProxy
NetTool
LiveHTTPHeaders
Safari WebInspector Network Tab
FireBug

Stuff that Costs:

$1.99 -  HTTPClient
$15.00 - HTTP Scoop
$50.00 - CharlesProxy


Specify connection on launch for Microsoft Remote Desktop client I'd like to be able to connect to a specific remote desktop when I start Microsoft's RDT client.  I'm running the latest RDT 8.0.15 client on Yosemite.

How can I do that?

You can do this by launching from an .rdp file:
* Create the Desktop bookmark in the app
* Export the Desktop as an .rdp file to e.g. your Mac Desktop
* Double-click to start the app and connect to the Desktop.

AFAIK, there's no way to configure the app to launch a desktop at start.


I have deleted a bunch of music from iTunes on my Macbook Pro, but am not gaining any free space I am trying to clear off a lot of extra space on my hard drive. I started with about 90 gigs of music today when I had about 45 gigs of space left available. I just deleted almost 40 gigs worth of music from iTunes and emptied the trash. But it doesn't show any increase in available space.

I have been using the df -H terminal command to look at disk usage. This is the result:

Filesystem                          Size   Used  Avail Capacity    iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2                        249G   195G    54G    79%   47650435 13189307   78%   /
devfs                               188k   188k     0B   100%        636        0  100%   /dev
map -hosts                            0B     0B     0B   100%          0        0  100%   /net
map auto_home                         0B     0B     0B   100%          0        0  100%   /home
localhost:/klncoWvMIai4qlXuHftSwz   249G   249G     0B   100%          0        0  100%   /Volumes/MobileBackups
/dev/disk1                          3.3G   3.3G     0B   100% 18446744073707931462  1621231 1712789607586623232%   /Volumes/GSP1RMCPRXFRER_EN_DVD

I have also verified my disk, repaired it, and repaired permissions. Nothing is changing though.

I fixed the problem by resetting the PRAM and the NVRAM.