What is spotlight indexing and should I turn it off? So I want to know what indexing really does, from my understanding it keeps tabs on where all your documents are at. I use spotlight all the time to look for different files or to open programs, and I still want to be able to do this. However, I have a feeling that indexing is killing my SSD.

If I decide to turn it off, what is that going to do for the stability of appfeatures and the OS?

Leave it on.

You use an OS that heavily depends on this, you need to allow it to index.

Yes, it keeps track of where all your documents & data are. After any major OS update it will re-index from scratch; the rest of the time it will just periodically tick away in the background, interfering with nothing and helping a lot of the system.

SSDs are more resilient than people give them credit for. Yes, the more you use it the faster it will wear out, but a bit of file indexing is going to perhaps shorten its life by 20 minutes or so, overall ;-)


moving solid-state drive to new macbook I have a MacBook Air, model 6,2 with an Apple 500GB SSD. I want to upgrade to a new MacBook Air but I'd like to transfer the drive to increase storage on the new MacBook to 500GB.

Is this possible at an Apple store?

You can't "transfer the drive" as you describe from a 2013/14 MBA to a "new" (assuming 2018) MBA because the SSDs on the new unit are soldered onto the logic board.

To transfer your data, you have the following options available, ideally, using Migration Assistant

connect your new MBA to old MBA over the network
utilizing a Time Machine Backup
put your 2013/14 MBA SSD into a USB enclosure

Can these things be done at an Apple store?  The first two definitely can.  It's highly unlikely they'll stock a USB enclosure.  Also, keep in mind that since you can't upgrade the SSD on the new MBA, you must configure it with sufficient capacity (minimum 500GB) to fully accommodate your needs.


How to record phone conversation in iPhone 4? Possible Duplicate:
  Is there an app to record the current phone call?

How to record phone conversation in iPhone 4?

Recorder
Recorder lets you record outgoing calls by using a 415 dial-in number, but for a fee ($2/hour, $13/8 hours).

Check it out on the iTunes store and purchase it for 99 cents


How can I sync all of my Email addresses (including Gmail addresses) using iCloud? I just got an iPad and I'm trying to sync all of my Email addresses across all of my devices, including my iMac and iPhone.

I already had an Apple ID and had iCloud set up for my iPhone and iMac, but when I went to set up my Email on my iPad it prompted me to create an @me Email address. So I did. But none of my Emails are syncing up with my iMac, and I thought the whole purpose of creating an @me account was so that all of my Emails would sync up through iCloud.

What I have is a couple of different Gmail accounts that I would like to sync up using iCloud. Is there any way to do this?

Practically speaking, the answer would be no - iCloud doesn't "sync" multiple email accounts (this is built into iOS). @me.com email address is just like gmail - it is just another email account. If you really wanted to, you could have all your gmail forward to iCloud's @me.com email account, but that wouldn't be practical.

To have your Gmail accounts synced into your iPad, open Settings, on your iPad, tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars, select Add Account, for a Gmail account select Gmail, and enter your information in there. Repeat the process for every mail account you have. (You should notice your iCloud account in the list of email accounts when you first open it)


Can I use Home Sharing with an iPod Nano 7th gen? I'm considering buying an iPod Nano 7th generation, but I want to be very sure Home Sharing will work with my iMac (OS X El Capitan) with iTunes 12.5 before I purchase one.

Can you tell me if this will work?

The iPod nano 7th generation does not have Wi-Fi, so Home Sharing is not available.


iPhone - prevent automatic hotspot tethering when connecting to computer How can I turn off automatic personal hotspot activation when connecting an iPhone to a computer (Windows in this case)?  I had it plugged in when downloading an iOS update and it downloaded the update over cellular data instead of home Wi-Fi.

I understand I can turn it off manually each time by going into settings, but how can I have it not turn on automatically so that I can only turn it on manually as desired to prevent accidental usage?

The problem isn't on your iPhone, it's on your Windows computer using the USB tether rather than Wi-Fi. You need to set the network interface priority on your Wi-Fi to be higher than the USB device, or the USB device to be lower, so that it will only use the tether if it isn't connected to Wi-Fi.

Make sure to connect the iPhone first. Directions for Windows 7 are here (these will likely work on newer versions as well):

How to change the network connection priority in Windows 7

Alternately, you could disable the connection on your Windows computer but you'll still have to manually turn it on each time so I think the above fix will provide the result you want.


What command line tool can I install on a Mac to play music? I want to install a tool different from mplayer on a mac to play music. I want to be able to play mp3 music files that are in a folder, either in order or randomly. I.e. I want to do something like
player files/*
player -shuffle files/*

with some key shortcuts to pause and skip to the next title.
What other command line too is there I can try?

There is already a command line tool installed. The command is afplay and you run it by typing:
afplay /path/to/audiofile.mp3

This link describes better how to use this tool. https://osxdaily.com/2009/10/27/play-mp3s-and-other-music-from-the-command-line/


Is the length of Facetime calls made with Apple Watch recorded? If I make a Facetime audio call with my Apple Watch, is there a record of the time date and length of that call stored on the iPhone.

It will, as you call with your phone to make the call.


How do I find out what my Apple vendor ID is? I'm doing some Apple iTunes Connect reporting via the Autoingest tool.  It requires that I not only specify login account info, but also a "vendorid".  I have no clue what our vendor ID might be.  Where can I find such info on Apple's site?

This number may be a bit harder to find since Apple re-designed iTunes Connect on Mon, Feb 17th, 2014.

Multiple vendors: If you go into the monthly financial section and have multiple vendors a drop down will show up in the upper left with this number.

If you only have one vendor: Download a monthly financial report. The vendor id is the long number at the beginning of the report name before the first underscore.


Some keys are not working on new Macbook with touch bar Few keys like i, k and l are not working for my login. These keys work at login screen and for other users. Had a conversation with Apple support online chat and we went thru the following but issue is not resolved yet.

We did the following

NVRAM Reset
System Management Controller (SMC) reset
macOS Recovery
Updated latest OS :macOS Sierra 10.12.5
Reinstall macOS using macOS Utilities

During the process, app representative asked me to create new login and try and it worked.

Wondering if you have seen this issue on your Macbooks. I have so much data in my login and I haven't thought about it moving data to new login.

Thanks

simply, switch to guest account,go to system preferences..see image attached.
Then switch back to user account and login using virtual  keyboard. I do it everytime.


iMac boots up at 9:30AM every day I don’t know why this is happening? In order to solve this problem, I have to turn of the power strip, which sometimes I can’t.

It keeps waking me up whenever it does.

Has the auto start been set ? Or wake on network activity - in the system preferences...

As the comment from Tetsujin , system preferences - energy saver - schedule ..


How to Format APFS drive using a PC so I can replace my Mac drive? I have an older iMac (Late 2012, A1418) that has a defective hard drive. I need to replace the drive and put in a fresh OS (Catalina).
I have the install media on a USB flash drive. My problem is that the drive needs to be formatted APFS and to do this I need another Mac running High Sierra which I don’t have.
Is there a way to format an external disk to APFS using a PC?

To answer your question, there are good windows software package to read and write to APFS, however you don’t need this and none seem to allow partitioning or setup like you ask.
The stand alone installer knows enough to run Disk Utilty and prep a drive, so you don’t need a formatted drive. When you run the installer it will detect the bare drive and offer to erase, format, partition and install the OS.
Just boot up the installer and connect the new drive. It can be internally connected or externally connected and the installer will do the correct erase and format for you.
Your Mac might even be able to boot to internet recovery to get Disk Utility to partition the disk with zero local bootable OS or installers. Here is a step by step guide that Apple keeps updated for this procedure.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904


Lion Recovery Terminal will not allow me to run TestDisk? Setup: Macbook Air (2011) running Lion with BootCamp (Windows 7).

Problem: I have somehow screwed up my partition table. When I boot I only can select Windows instead of Windows and Lion. However Windows gives a BSOD regardless of safe mode option selected.

My Attempt: I have booted into Lion Recovery and tried running Disk Utility to repair disk volumes but it fails. Also tried to reinstall Lion but unable to because Lion doesn't recognize disk volumes (however it does see that there are two main partitions but they are grayed out).

I have data on both partitions I would like to recover so I am trying to use TestDisk to rebuild the partition table, but when I launch TestDisk from my external thumbdrive I get "Illegal instruction: 4".

Have you tried booting from a Linux LiveCD (well, instead of a CD, you'll need a USB thumb drive, but it's the same idea)? From there you could copy data to an external hard drive and just wipe the internal hard drive and reinstall.

If you have another Mac laying around with Thunderbolt, you can boot your Mac into Target Disk Mode (hold down T while booting), connect the Macs together with a Thunderbolt cable, and perform any disk recovery from there. (You might be able to go to an Apple Store and use one of their Thunderbolt Macs to recover your drive; they can be surprisingly permissive at times.)


iMessages on iPhone 3G? Is there any way to use iMessages on an iPhone 3G?

I believe the latest OS it can upgrade to is 4 something, so that might rule out official support by Apple, but what about a 3rd party solution?

4.2.1 is officially the latest supported version for the iPhone 3G, but you can supposedly install iOS 5 on it with this method: http://osxdaily.com/2012/01/19/install-ios-5-on-iphone-3g-with-whited00r-5/

In the video, it shows the Messages app on the homescreen, so that ought to work for you.


How do I find out my iMac display panel's manufacturer? I've had problems with image retention on my late-2012 27" iMac for a few months now and Apple's "avoiding image retention" support page is useless for me.

On MacBooks, one can use this Terminal one-liner to check one's display manufacturer. Is there a similar command for iMacs? I realize that I'll have to return my iMac sooner or later because this is unacceptable, but I'd still like to know what panel I have before I do it.

It's an LG LM270WQ1 (SD)(F1).

One thread is here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5591164?tstart=0
And you can find replacement here: http://www.amazon.com/Apple-A1419-Screen-LM270WQ1-661-7169/dp/B00LEXN39W


How best to reintroduce files after clean MacOS install I'm having seriously annoying issues with my new MBP. Processes crashing extremely frequently, so that I now have to close about 7 or 8 crash reports before I shut down at night. Issue here: "normalizerd quit unexpectedly" constantly happening(!!)

I've spoke with Apple support countless times but had no resolution.

The fact this is a new device and it also happened with my previous device, I am linking this to files on my device that were brought across via Migration Assistant when I was transferring data to this new laptop.

I've created a new, test account to see if the same crashing appears - it doesn't. So I am going to do a clean MacOS install.

However, I am wondering - what is the best method of reintroducing files that I need to have on my device after the formatting is complete? I will be putting minimal files back onto the laptop, but there are some I simply have to bring across.

Is Migration Assistant the best? Or backup to Dropbox / Drive etc and download after formatting?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

"I've created a new, test account to see if the same crashing appears -
  it doesn't. So I am going to do a clean MacOS install."

If a new user account works fine, then there is nothing wrong with the system installation, and a clean OS install is unnecessary.

The problem is something in your original user account.

Either migrate to the new user account, or go back to the old account and find the problem in your user Library. It may be a Login Item or Launch Agent that is loading an unstable or incompatible process; corrupt caches or incorrect settings in preference files.

Test by removing files from your user Library, (restart/relogin if necessary), then check whether the problem remains. If it is fixed, put back half the files you removed, and test again. If not, remove the remaining half.

For your specific problem, you may want to remove things relating to CUPS, the printing process, Adobe CC or Preview. Anything in <user>/Library/Application Support/Adobe can be entirely removed: the apps will just revert to their default settings.
Anything named Adobe in <user>/Library/Preferences is also fair game, and the same for things with cups or print.
The same for <user>/Library/Caches.

The thing about migrating to a new user account is that it fixes the problem but doesn't solve it, and if it happens again, you'll have to move to a third new account, and so on.


safari "find" does not work for partial word Sorry but I don't know how to describe this problem. Let's see a simple example below.

Take this page as an example, when I search(cmd+F) "comp", safari is able to find everything about it; but if I search "omp", nothing can be found! (suppose I want to find strings containing "complete")

This can be inconvenient sometimes because I may forget the spelling of the first several letters of a word/string, or I may be only concerned about the postfix, namely, finding all strings with a given postfix(or 'midfix') and the prefix can be arbitrary.

Can someone explain this issue and is there a way to resolve it ?

This is by design. Clicking on the magnifying glass next to your search shows a menu that allows you to switch between Contains and Starts With, with the latter being the default.

There is a hidden setting to change the default to Contains.

Quit Safari. (Safari menu > Quit or Command-Q)
Open Terminal. (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
Copy/paste the following line exactly and press Return:

defaults write com.apple.Safari FindOnPageMatchesWordStartsOnly -bool FALSE

The next time you run Safari, substring matching (which is what you are trying to do) should work correctly.


Noob struggling to tell terminal to install scikit-image 0.16.2 for Pyxelate I'm using macOS Catalina version 10.15.7
I think this should be a very easy install, but apparently not.
At first, I spotted terminal told me I don't have Cython. Ok. I installed it, then it gave me a long ass error command, which I have no idea to solve. I barely know what it meant.
And Pyxelate can't take newest version of scikit-image.
Is that my clang's file isn't match the pip3? If so, how can I fix that? I really have no idea.
  13 warnings and 1 error generated.
  4 warnings generated.
  error: Command "clang -Wno-unused-result -Wsign-compare -Wunreachable-code -fno-common -dynamic -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -I/usr/local/include -isysroot /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk -I/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk/usr/include -I/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/numpy/core/include -I/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/numpy/core/include -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/include -I/usr/local/opt/sqlite/include -I/usr/local/opt/tcl-tk/include -I/usr/local/Cellar/python@3.9/3.9.1_6/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/include/python3.9 -c skimage/restoration/_unwrap_2d.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.15-x86_64-3.9/skimage/restoration/_unwrap_2d.o -MMD -MF build/temp.macosx-10.15-x86_64-3.9/skimage/restoration/_unwrap_2d.o.d" failed with exit status 1
  ----------------------------------------
  ERROR: Failed building wheel for scikit-image

ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: /usr/local/opt/python@3.9/bin/python3.9 -u -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/private/var/folders/34/x6521nrj71sb1tmxtpcxsj4c0000gn/T/pip-install-25qrnc9w/scikit-image_5d68c8ee27804ffa8db02d899fd06b99/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/private/var/folders/34/x6521nrj71sb1tmxtpcxsj4c0000gn/T/pip-install-25qrnc9w/scikit-image_5d68c8ee27804ffa8db02d899fd06b99/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' install --record /private/var/folders/34/x6521nrj71sb1tmxtpcxsj4c0000gn/T/pip-record-hddyaqi4/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile --install-headers /usr/local/include/python3.9/scikit-image Check the logs for full command output.

Ah, I've solved this myself.
I just downgraded to python 3.8 and forced installation by using --user.


Two thunderbolt ports on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro how do I configure one monitor to be in mirroring mode and the other in extended desktop mode? So its my understanding that I can have two flatscreen monitors as long as I use the right cables and each thunderbolt on my Mac will connect to each monitor for a total of 2 monitors and as long they meet the specifications listed in this post:
MacBook pro retina 15" mid 2015 - two monitors 4k@60Hz

However, how do I connect them to ensure it extends my workspace with different apps and windows on each display where I can move a document or application from one screen to the other? In other words, how do I configure one monitor to be in mirroring mode and the other in extended desktop mode?

It is not possible to configure such a setup with the standard macOS GUI.

However, I think you might have understood something, and you do not really need such as setup.

If you want to be able to have 2 separate, external, 4k@60Hz displays that you can use for working with various windows - while the laptop lid is closed - then you do not need such a setup. You'll just need to make sure that "Mirror Displays" is not checked in the Display settings in System Preferences.

If you want to be able to have 3 seperate displays, where one is the internal laptop display and then 2 external, 4k@60 Hz displays that you can use for working with various windows - then you do not need such a setup. You'll just need to make sure that "Mirror Displays" is not checked in the Display settings in System Preferences.

If what you really want is to have the laptops display and a secondary, separate workspace that is mirrored between the two external displays - that's not achievable with the standard macOS GUI. However, that would also be a quite uncommon setup.


Upgrade from Mac OS 10.6.8 doesnt work I have a MacBook Pro on OS 10.6.8 I have tried to upgrade to the current OS. The download appears to work fine, but when I select restart to install, the Mac starts to shut down, then just hangs.

I can only start the Mac again by holding down the on/off switch to turn off, and then turning on again.

What is the solution?

Do you have the required hardware for the system you want to run? Here is a list of requirements, I shamelessly copied these from support.apple.com
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard system requirements
To install Snow Leopard for the first time, you must have a Mac with:

An Intel processor
An internal or external DVD drive, or DVD or CD Sharing
At least 1 GB of RAM (additional RAM is recommended)
A built-in display or a display connected to an Apple-supplied video card supported by your computer
At least 5 GB of disk space available, or 7 GB of disk space if you install the developer tools

OS X 10.7 Lion system requirements
To use Lion, make sure your computer has the following:

An Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor
Mac OS X v10.6.6 or later to install via the Mac App Store (v10.6.8 recommended)
7 GB of available disk space
2 GB of RAM

OS X 10.8 Mountin Lion system requirements
To install Mountain Lion, you need one of these Macs:

iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
Xserve (Early 2009)

Your Mac needs:

OS X v10.6.8 or OS X Lion already installed
2 GB or more of memory
8 GB or more of available space

OS X 10.9 Mavericks system requirements
To install Mavericks, you need one of these Macs:

iMac (Mid-2007 or later)
MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, Late 2008), (13-inch, Early 2009 or later)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later),
MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later)
MacBook Air (Late 2008 or later)
Mac mini (Early 2009 or later)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or later)
Xserve (Early 2009)

Your Mac also needs:

OS X Mountain Lion, Lion, or Snow Leopard v10.6.8 already installed
2 GB or more of memory
8 GB or more of available space

OS X 10.10 Yosemite system requirements
Before you install Yosemite, make sure you have one of these Macs:

iMac (Mid-2007 or newer)
MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
Xserve (Early 2009)

Your Mac also needs:

OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, or Snow Leopard v10.6.8, already installed
2 GB or more of memory
8 GB or more of available disk space


Can I upgrade my iPad 2 to iOS 9 after the release of iOS 10? With the imminent release of iOS 10, I'm wondering if I should upgrade my iPad 2 to iOS 9 now. Specifically, I'd like to know if I will still be able to do that after iOS 10 is released? (Currently at iOS 7)

I know that I'll be forced to upgrade one day, as some app I like won't support iOS 7 anymore, but I'm also aware that it will make my iPad even slower, so I'd like to hold off as long as possible. But, I don't want to end up in a situation where I can't upgrade to 9 anymore, e.g. because Apple stops signing for 9 after the release of 10?

iOS 10 is not available for the iPad 2.

Because of that, you will continue to be able to upgrade to iOS 9.3.5 at any time in the future. Apple continues to sign the last available firmware for all devices, which will be iOS 9.3.5 for the iPad 2.

Examples of how the last supported version of iOS for a device continues to be signed: here


How do I create an easily accessible directory outside of /Users/? I want to sync/backup my entire Home (/Users/) directory to other computers using Bittorrent Sync.  Right now my Home directory contains my DropBox folder, which (at 17GB) I do not want to be part of this sync/backup.

I thought an easy way to do this would be to create a Dropbox directory at the /Users level, but even after I set the permissions of that directory to 777, the Dropbox app won't let me move Dropbox there.

I understand that an alternative is to exclude just the Dropbox directory from the Bittorrent Sync (I assume that's possible - I haven't tried it yet), but I think it would be cleaner to have an easily accessible but separate (outside my Home) directory. Is there any way to do this?

I changed my Dropbox directory to /links/Dropbox with no problems the Dropbox app created a subdirectory Dropbox there. I created this directory with New Folder from the Finder

links mark$ ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   3 mark      admin  102 25 May 17:18 Dropbox
drwxrwxrwx   3 mark      admin  102 30 Nov 20:10 V
drwxr-xr-x   5 mark      admin  170 30 Nov 20:32 VirtualMachines

and

links mark$ ls -l Dropbox/
total 0
drwx------@ 24 mark  staff  816 25 May 17:18 Dropbox


Battery percentage is wrong and cannot wake from sleep, have to reboot a lot MacBook Pro early 2013 3 Ghz Inte Core i7 running Mojave 10.14.6. Bought it used from Mac of All Trades about one year ago. Six months ago I replaced the internal SSD with a 1 Tb Aura SSD from OWC and cloned over the original contents. Everything has been great, no issues at all.
Starting about four days ago, I opened the clamshell to wake from sleep and nothing happened. I tried tapping keys for awhile. Then I tried pushing the power button, nothing. Held it for 10 seconds nothing. I thought it might've been lower in battery power than I realized so I connected AC power. Light goes green-orange like it should. I tried the power button again, and it boots up. I get to the login and everything is fine, the battery percentage does not show that is connected and charging. I disconnect and reconnect and no change: power is supposedly running on the battery even though it's plugged in. And then I notice that eventually the AC power plug glows green like it's fully charged but it's not showing that in the battery icon percentage.
Thinking there might be some kind of power management issue, I tried resetting the SMC. I shut down completely, disconnected AC, and pushed the key combination. Nothing! That freaked me out a little, so I tried again. This time it seemed to work. Once booted up, I see that percentage, charging, and or being on battery/AC still don't seem to be matching.
If I leave it to go to sleep, running on battery, I cannot get it to wake with clamshell opening or tapping keys. I have to either hold power until it chimes or reset SMC again. Coconut battery sometimes seems to be in sync with the battery gauge, sometimes it's not. Right now I have a green light on the power plug, but 89% charging in the battry icon and it hasn't changed in an hour.
I tried resetting the NVRAM, but nothing changed. I tried running the Apple Diagnostics but got an error message:
Error: 0x80000000000000003, Cannot Load 'EFI/Drivers/TestSupport.efi'
Status: 0x00000003

I don't know what to do here. It's very nerve-wracking to not know if this thing is going to wake up at all. Once it's up and running it's fine. I have regular Time Machine backups for my content, but this computer is my livelihood (college professor).
Any ideas?

This is the output from the requested Terminal command:
Charge Information:
          Charge Remaining (mAh): 4631
          Fully Charged: No
          Charging: Yes
          Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 5449
      Health Information:
          Cycle Count: 857
          Condition: Normal
      Battery Installed: Yes
      Amperage (mA): 1811
      Voltage (mV): 12480

As it put this in, the power plug is showing green while battery is stuck at charging 89%.

I just tried using a different power cord, the plug shows green like before, no change in the battery percentage (still 89% and "charging").
I also cleaned the MagSafe 2 plug and port before this and they are clean (I originally thought it solved the issue until it started up again).
You mentioned that it might be a bad battery, which seems likely due to the age and cycles this one has. Apart from the inconvenience of messing with reboots and such, is there any danger or data loss or complete failure until I can arrange for a battery replacement?

Ordered a replacement battery kit, replaced the battery, ran through the battery conditioning charging cycles, and the MacBook is better than before. I noticed the old battery looked swollen when taking it out, so it was definitely done for.
I think we can say this question is answered: battery was bad and needed to be replaced. Thanks for your assistance and guidance!


Late-2011 MacBook Pro’s and Snow Leopard Has any member here performed a software downgrade from the pre-installed Lion 10.7.2 to Snow leopard 10.6.8 on any late-2011 MacBook Pro (any size) and if it was successful or failed and what you found? Thank you.

I personally haven’t done this but from research it is possible:
This article helped

Method 1: If you have no cooked backup of your drive
This method will wipe your Mac but you can do a backup:

You should backup the locations where your documents, music e.t.c are stored to an external drive

Next insert the snow Leopard disk, restart your Mac and hold down c too boot to your dvd drive

Once the installer appears, go to utilities in the menu bar and click disk Utility

Find the drive in the sidebar where Lion is installed, select it and navigate to the Partition tab.

Click on the drop down menu under Partition Layout and select “1 Partition.” Hit Apply.

Now navigate to the Erase tab and make sure “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” is selected, then hit Erase to delete all data on the
drive.

Quit Disk Utility to get back to the Snow Leopard installer and proceed with the install.

Restore your User folder and documents from your backup.

Run Software Update to get  everything current, install your apps  from your original install media and  update those as well.

Method 2: If you managed to clone  your drive
A popular option for cloning your drive is Carbon Copy Cloner, which
is a handy utility to have for any Mac owner. Assuming you’ve done
that, follow the directions above to get your drive primed and ready,
but stop at step 6 and follow these instructions instead.

Attach the drive containing your  CCC clone to your Mac.

Open System Preferences, then  go to the Startup Disk preference  pane.

Chose your CCC external drive  as the startup disk.

Restart and launch CCC, then  choose your backup from the  “source” menu.

Select your Mac’s internal drive  as the destination.

Chose “Restore items from a  backup” from the settings pop-up  menu and hit the “Clone” button.


What file format should I use to format my new external HDD? I've just purchased a WD Elements external hard drive and plan to use it across Linux, OS X and Windows devices (read and write on every OS).

Is there any file format by which I could format my HDD so that I could read and write across all these OSs?

FAT32 works on every system, but files cannot be larger than 4GB in size.

There is exFAT, which works with larger files, but it isn't natively supported by Linux. You can however see this link how to get it working on Ubuntu for example (read and write support with this solution).


"The app isn't available, Try again." on TestFlight I'm trying to set up Internal Testing for my iOS app. I've submitted the build to the app store, and it is awaiting review happily. I have a group of Technical users in iTunes Connect with Internal Testing available, and I have invited them all to test the app.

However, when any of use click the button in the e-mail (using the Mail app on the relevant device), Testflight opens and then says "The app isn't available. Try again."

Googling for this error has been completely futile (it's a googlewhack!) - is there a simple delay before the app is available? It has been several hours. Has anybody else experienced this and can maybe tell me what step I have missed?

I solved the issue by removing all Internal Testers. Then I disabled Testflight Beta Testing on the Pre-release page.

Then I enabled Pre-release, navigated to Internal Testers and selected users to invite - and that invite worked fine.


Will 2GB ram run Yosemite smoothly cant upgrade my 2009 iMac 2009 20" with 2GB for a few months but need to upgrade to 10.9.4 to install Yosemite.

I am currently running 10.8.1 as a fresh install of Mountain Lion which runs fine, but I dont want to install Yosemite and have OS hang and beach ball on me.

Not running anything to intensive, at most; Sublime, Spotify, terminal, Firefox

A friend of mine recently upgraded his MacBook5,1 (2009 core 2 duo) with 2GB to Mavericks. It wasn't the most pleasant thing, but it actually didn't work out too bad for him and he even thinks there was a slight performance increase (I'm assuming due to the memory compression stuff being a touch faster than swap). I'm assuming that Yosemite isn't going to be much more stressful than Mavericks, so you can probably get away with it.

That being said, 2GB is absolutely too little these days if you're going to run more than one application. You are going to get beach balls, but perhaps slightly less than what you did with Mountain Lion. Again, I'm assuming this because of the memory compression introduced in Mavericks works faster than swapping to disk and with that little RAM you will be swapping out (or compressing) pages.


Install Windows 7 on external drive and boot it from a Mac I want to install Windows 7 on an external hard drive, and boot from it when needed.

Is this possible on a Mac? I have heard from some sources that it is not possible to boot Windows from external drives, at least on the new Macs. I found this quite surprising.

Any idea if this is true?

It is possible, but it's not straight forward. This detailed step by step guide (which I did) contains all you need to know to install and run Windows 7 or 8 from an external drive (USB3 or thunderbolt): http://bleeptobleep.blogspot.fr/2013/02/mac-install-windows-7-or-8-on-external.html

To sum up, this guide will help you:

Get the Windows installation pack from a DVD or ISO file
Partition and format your external drive to make it bootable
Deploy Windows on your external drive
Boot on your external drive
Install Windows
Download and install the bootcamp drivers (without even using the bootcamp assistant)


How to install Social Engineering Toolkit in mac I want to install SET from this link: https://github.com/trustedsec/social-engineer-toolkit. If I am right this is the github repository. I have brew installed can't I grab it with homebrew and then use all the tools like I do in Kali?

Or the other method downloading the zip file and compiling it....but I don't know either. Basically, teach me some way with which I can install and repository from github.

Thanks.

You don't need to compile the SET afaik, the install is:

    git clone https://github.com/trustedsec/social-engineer-toolkit
    cd social-engineer-toolkit
    python setup.py

now to start the setoolkit run

    ./setoolkit


Improved Terminal autocomplete funcionality (similar to Matlab's) If any of you ever used Matlab, you might have noticed the command window functionality in that program. I wonder if it is possible to enable the same functionality in Mac Terminal.

It works like this: suppose you have used two commands previously in this Terminal session. First you used a cd ~ and then a ls -la.

In every *nix terminal, including Mac's, if you hit the Up Arrow, it'll first show the ls -la command and, if you hit it twice, the cd ~ command. This is great. But, in Matlab, if you first type the letter c and then hit Up Arrow, it won't show you ls, but instead go directly to cd ~. This saves a lot of time when you have big commands and a long list of previously used commands.

Is it possible?

In a Bash shell, you can hit Control+R to do a reverse intelligent search in the history. Start typing the command and the shell will autocomplete with previously entered commands.

Then you can either press Enter to execute the command again, use the arrow left or right key to edit the command, or keep pressing Control+R to cycle through other possible completions.


2012 MacBook Pro SSD missing - Can't install macOS I'm trying to reformat a Mac that was handed to me by an employee after being wiped, and I'm starting to think they did too good a job.

At boot, you see the blinking folder + ? icon, indicating no bootable partition found:

Loading the recovery partition (after resetting NVRAM), I tried all this on both the Internet Recovery partition which was Snow Leopard and a macOS Sierra media installer via USB.

First, Disk Utility didn't show the drive:

From there, I tried diskutil list

Which didn't see the drive. Then I tried df -h

Failing anything else, I restarted and held 'd' to get into Apple Hardware Test:

Running the test reported "no problems found". The Hardware Profile tab did not report a hard disk, but I'm not sure it ever does (I don't have any other pre-2013 Macs to test on).

So, I'm left without many options. I can't boot into single user mode, because there's not an install into which I can boot. I don't know how to reformat/repartition a physical drive that's not reported by diskutil or df. And it's clearly not something I can fix with setting up a logical volume in CoreStorage (on the Sierra recovery image, that is) if the underlying physical disks are absent.

Can anything else be done, or is this all pointing to the SSD being dead?

The answer was that the SSD died. Replacing the SSD fixed it.


Windows 10 display looks too small I moved to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1 but the display at 2800x1800 looks too small in Windows 10. In Windows 8.1 the display was fine at 2800x1800. Also, before installing bootcamp drivers in Windows 10 the display was good(a little big and visible not too big, no back on top and bottom it was complete full screen clear display). How would I fix that?

Laptop: MacBook pro retina 15-inch.

Can't this be related to your MacBooks high screen resolution. Try with zooming your display in Windows. Zooming will make everything on the screen larger and will hopefully make everything less small for you.

The setting is in the control panel and display/resolution settings.

Also, check out this answer from the Apple support forum that gives a more step by step instruction: Link

  Right click on the desk and choose "Display settings"
  Click on the "Advanced display settings" link
  Click on the "Advanced sizing of text and other items" link
  Click on the "set a custom scaling level" link in the "Change size of items" paragraph
  Change to option in the drop down to 100%
  Log out and log back in


Stop iTunes from opening when a device is plugged in? Since re-installing OS X (10.8), every time I plug in an iOS device iTunes opens up and shows an error message:

  iTunes could not connect to the iPhone "..." because it is locked with a passcode. You must enter your passcode on the iPhone before it can be used with iTunes.

I plug in various devices all the time, just so I can charge them. I do not want them connected to iTunes, I definitely don't want iTunes storing a copy of the device's passcode (or however that works) on my mac, and some of the devices plugged in aren't even mine.

How can I stop this from happening? It doesn't happen when I'm booted into 10.7 on the same mac, with the same iOS devices.

I already have "Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically" enabled in Preferences.

EDIT: this particular device also has "Open iTunes when this device is connected" turned off, so it seems to ignore that setting.

Under System Preferences → Users → [you] → Login Items → select iTunesHelper, then click the minus sign and log out/into your Mac.

No devices will cause iTunes to launch (that's the whole purpose of iTunesHelper).


What does an Xserve amber flashing LED indicate? One of my Xserves has a amber flashing LED. I've pointed out the LED in question in the below image:

What does this indicate and what do I need to do about it?

Extracted from the Xserve User Guide:

  System identifier button and light:
  The yellow system identifier light flashes if a problem is detected. You can also turn it on or off manually by pressing the button, or turn it on remotely using Server Monitor. This indicator is useful for locating a particular unit in a rack with more than one Xserve. A second system identifier button and light are on the back of the Xserve.

So, a yellow light indicates an error. You should check the Server Monitor or the /var/log tab in the Applications/Utilites/Console  application.

Just so you know, this Button/Light thing, are on both sides of the Xserve.


High Sierra Disk Utility problems I am using High Sierra (10.13.2, all updates in, including the one for Meltdown).  When I do one of my regular checks for disk health using the first aid in Disk Utility the whole process is (1) incredibly slow and (2) recently freezes my laptop altogether.  Given that I have a a 500GB SSD with 160 GB space, I am well surprised both by the drop in performance and now, by the fact I need to restart my laptop.

In the latest shenanigans disk utility was so slow that it passed the point when the screen goes off, and after that it was impossible to turn the screen on again (the mouse pointer was responsive).  Am I to assume that disk utility takes, say, 30 minutes now to run and during the check the computer will be utterly unresponsive?  How do I speed this process up, if at all possible?

Disk Utility always ended up causing the laptop to freeze for a small while, but here we are talking an abnormal amount of time.

On HFS+, something is wrong for a less than TB sized Apple SSD to take 30 minutes to run a check. On APFS, it's slightly more complicated. Depending on how many snapshots you have, this might be normal but you'll need to get some details to know.

If you're on APFS - you'll need to look at the logs or enter to the command line to determine how many snapshots of the volumes exist. If your fsck is taking 2 minutes to run, but you have 30 snapshots - there goes an hour on a full fsck and no "problem" other than perception. On the other hand, an hour to check one snapshot and you're back in "this is taking longer than usual by dozens of times".

I would get all the files backed up before you try to run the repair since a slow check almost always happens when storage is failing (but doesn't always correlate and certainly doesn't cause the failure itself).

At this point once you're backed up, you can take the fast path or the slower one:

Fast path - download the OS installer you want (High Sierra or whatever) and wipe the drive. When you are booted from an external USB, repair the drive twice to see if the second pass is faster than the first.

If you have issues with a wiped / empty drive - you can seek hardware service knowing that your data is backed up.

The slower path is to still boot from another drive and just repair the drive. You might get a good read of the speedup or if your data and drive really take 30 minutes to check all the system structures.

Booting to single user mode also might help in the short term and run /sbin/fsck -fy twice from the black screen to see if trimming the free blocks can help the storage allocate storage more efficiently.

On my MacBook that's been running High Sierra for quite some time, the single mode filesystem check reports 19 snapshots and that matches up with Time Machine:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots / | wc -l

The above list of local snapshots belonging to Time Machine counts 18 lines of output. None of the snapshots are more than an hour old as my Mac runs normally on power, with the external time machine destination connected so the snapshots cover the last day or so. I have seen it grow to 35 snapshots when I'm traveling and not doing hourly backups to the main time machine destination drive. They clean themselves up as far as I've observed in all cases.


How to prevent TextMate from overwriting symbolic links? In a web project I have multiple environments and a .htaccess.<env> file for each of them. In each of the environments I've made a symbolic link from .htaccess to the right file.

Now, whenever I use TextMate to edit the file through the symlink, the link gets overwritten by a copy of the link's target file. How can I make TextMate to preserve the symlink?

Disable Atomic Saves in Advanced Preferences.

When atomic saves are enabled, TextMate actually writes to a new file on Save and then moves the file over (hence overwriting your symbolic link).

See http://manual.macromates.com/en/saving_files#atomic_saves for more info.


In which Macbook Xcode run smoothly? My primary goal to purchase new Macbook is to develop iPhone, iPad and Mac applications.

I want to know in which Macbook xcode will run very smoothly ?

I have two selection option Macbook air and Macbook pro

Please help me to choose any one

Most development work is typing and waiting for compilation to complete. This is possible on any modern Mac.

Both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro will run Xcode. Developing software can stress any Mac, including highly specified Mac Pros.

It is unlikely anyone can clearly and definitely answer your question. All answers, including mine will be based on opinion and personal experience.


Suppressing "reopen windows" dialog when restarting a crashed program in Mountain Lion Is there any way of suppressing the alert dialog that pops up when restarting a crashed program in Mountain Lion (10.8.2)? The alert's text reads:

"The last time you opened , it unexpectedly quit while reopening windows. Do you want to try to reopen its windows again?"

I want the OS to just open the program without asking me this, since the computer is being used in a kiosk-type application.

Thanks,

c.

defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none (or the option in Secrets) disables crash report dialogs but not the dialogs shown when reopening crashed applications.

Disabling Resume would remove them though. You can either check "Close windows when quitting an application" in the General preference pane or disable it in individual applications with defaults write -app "Application Name" NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false.


Can I use Air Display on multiple iOS devices at the same time? I use Air Display to convert my iPad in to an extra monitor when I'm not using it.  However, I have other iOS devices lying around, too.  Is it possible to use Air Display to turn multiple iOS devices in to extra monitors at the same time?

Question: "is it possible to use Air Display with more than one Ipad?”

Answer: "We only support one iPad at a time currently. We've talked about supporting multiple iPads at once and that may be something we support in the future. For now, we're sticking with one iPad. “

Source: Air Display Support Forum


Why does my iPad keep asking for my iCloud password? I keep receiving an iCloud pop-up message to insert my iCloud password every time i switch on my iPad and I'm unable to do anything on it, inserting the password doesn't help. What should I do?

Best way to solve this issue is going to your Settings

Go to iCloud
Log out
Log back in

Your issue should be solved now. If not, you might have installed apps via another Apple Id which is prompting you to enter its password.


How do I turn off/disable my trackpad on a MacBook Air? I am on a mission to become proficient with keyboard shortcuts, and I keep cheating by accident and using my trackpad. I want to be rigorous in my attempt to learn, so how do you toggle the trackpad on and off?

I found information on how to turn it off if you use a mouse, but that defeats the purpose of what I am trying to do.

In the spirit of learning keyboard shortcuts, if anyone knows how to set a keyboard shortcut to toggle the trackpad, that would be optimal.

To turn off the track pad you’ll need to attach a mouse or wireless trackpad but you don’t need to use it.

To turn off the trackpad when a mouse is connected:

From the  Apple menu go to System Preferences
Click Accessibility
Select Mouse and Trackpad on the left
Select “Ignore built-in trackpad when mouse or wireless trackpad is present”


How to fix an iPod Classic with a bad hard drive? I've an iPod Classic 160 GB bought in 2007.

I've never had problems copying songs into it, through iTunes, but from the beginning I never had much success using it as a portable hard drive. Whenever I tried copying large files, or many files, into it, it would hang and reboot after a while.

The same happens when I tried copying videos into it, also through iTunes, to the extension that iTunes complains that it can't read or write to the iPod.

Usually, restoring the iPod returns it to the state that I can copy songs again, but when I increase the usage to videos or large files the trouble starts again.

I'm pretty convinced it has a bad hard drive, but it is not covered by warranty anymore. Fixing it at a local Apple representative would cost as much as buying a new one, and the ifixit howto is pretty much discouraging, besides stating that video iPod use special hard drives and they don't sell them anymore.

I was hoping that mounting the iPod in disk mode and running a check disk would mark the bad sectors and allow me use it as a <160GB iPod, but I can't find what tool would do that on the Mac.

What do you recommend? How should I proceed?

You can try to diagnose if the disk has a problem with the diagnostic mode.

To enter the diagnostic mode, press the folowing key for 5 seconds when the apple logo appears after a reset :

"back"
"select"

In the diagnotic mode, you can navigate in the menus with the back/next keys and launch a bunch of test, inluding hard drive tests.

If the tests shows a disk problem, the solution is to change the disk. Buying a second-hand ipod disk from someone who breack his screen won't normaly be very expensive.


El Capitan with Network Authentication Change Password not working OS 10.11.4 : When trying to change password of my user i am getting the following error

The password for the account was not changed
The server is not available. Change your password when server becomes available

Things i verified

I am connected to VPN
I rebooted and left it alone on VPN for sometime
i am able to ping my Active Directory Domain and Forest as mentioned in the following screenshot when i am on VPN. and it's ping the IP it should be pinging which is my AD

Unbind  from AD and then binding to AD fixed my issue

Few Pointers

Bind & Unbind from Directory Utility not from the Users Group > Network Account Server > Edit
It's the same screenshot as shown above in the question
We also updated the Prfer this Domain Server to a new server instead of domain.com it was a specific server name


Can I get a SSL certificate for my domain name from Apple I have bought an Apple developer subscription. I've developed a small Safari extension. To publish it in the extension gallery it should be hosted at a web server. I leased a domain name and a virtual private server. Hosted a web server. Apple has given me a certificate to sign the Safari extension. Can I also get a SSL certificate for my domain name from Apple? After all I have an Apple developer subscription.

No, Apple does not issue SSL/TLS certificates for web hosting purposes. Apple's developer certificates are for code signing only.

LetsEncrypt and Caddy Server

LetsEncrypt provide free SSL/TLS certificates for use with your web site.

To ease the management your web site, consider Caddy for your web server. Caddy handles the certificate provisioning and renewal for you.

For non-commercial use, StartSSL, also offer free certificates.


Share Mac internet with iPad using USB I have read other questions here and can't make this work. I'm trying to Share Mac internet with iPad using USB.
Under settings->network I see which device is connected to internet, for example "wifi". Now under settings->sharing I choose this device under "share your connection from", and then in the "to computers using" I'm choosing "iPad USB". Then I select the checkbox next to "internet sharing" and it says "internet sharing: On". The iPad is connected to the mac. There's no internet in the iPad. Any ideas?

Edit: Sharing the same internet connection over bluetooth works, but I want over USB.

Turned out I had to trust the device. I tethered the iPad to the mac, went to Finder on the mac, clicked on the iPad menu item in the side bar, then it asked me if I wanted to trust the iPad, I said yes, and then on the iPad it asked for the lock password. After doing this usb internet sharing started to work. I hope this helps someone because this step was not mentioned in any of the other questions or the documentation.


"You must update to iOS 8.0" when trying to download apps on iPhone 4 I go to download my apps on my phone and it won't let me. It just comes up with this:

  This application requires iOS 8.0 or later.
  You must update to iOS 8.0 in order to download and use this application.

I go to update my software and it says there are no updates available. What should I do?

The last version of iOS that the iPhone 4 supports is iOS 7.1.2. You will not find any more software updates for the iPhone 4 beyond this.

This means you are unable to install any apps that require a more recent version of iOS (not all apps require iOS 8 and later), however it may be possible to download a previous version of an app that does support iOS 7 by adding the app to your purchase history using iTunes on a computer first.


How can I create a multipage PDF from JPG's in Preview? I just upgraded to Lion recently. When I was on Snow Leopard, creating a multi-page PDF document in Preview was simple:

I would open up the image
Save it as a PDF
Open up the PDF
Open up the panel that displays pages (on the left)(Menu:View/Thumbnails)
Drag and drop images on this "page panel" below the first image
Save the file again.

This would create a multi-page PDF file where each page is an image.

I've tried doing the same thing in Lion, but it doesn't produce the same results. Although in step 5 it appears as though a multipage document is created, after you save it, the file size becomes much bigger than the original one page PDF, but after opening it, all you can see is a single page.

Is there any way to do this in Lion?

This works for me on Mountain Lion:

Open all the JPG's in Preview so that the files are selectable within the one window, i.e. thumbnails of the JPG's are viewable in the selection pane located the window's left side.
Click in the selection pane and select all the thumbnails with Cmd-A.
Select File > Print... from the menu bar.
Select PDF > (from the drop down) Save as PDF... from within the Print Dialog.

Take it from there...


Laggy Magic Mouse with Macbook Pro I've had my Magic Mouse for about two weeks with a MacBook Pro 13", and I'm starting to notice quite a latency in the movement.

It gets really bad whenever any performance heavy operation is going on, that creates almost a half a second latency. This happens even for small things, like when a web page is being rendered, sometimes even while nothing is happening.

At first I thought batteries might've caused this, even though it was at 50%, so I changed them for new ones, which (subjectively) helped for about two hours, but it's still really laggy.

I also tried using the mouse on different surfaces, again it seems to work a little better on the table than on my mouse pad, but it's a little laggy everywhere.

Is this behavior normal for the Magic Mouse?

edit: I've been using my Macbook with 24" LCD at 1920x1280 resolution. When I plugged out the monitor, it seems that the mouse runs much more smoothly, even when I run applications like Photoshop.

Could the external monitor be causing such performance lag? But on the other hand, when I use it with USB mouse Logitech G5 there is no lag, not even on the 24" ...

I've had the same issue, starting with a late release of Snow Leopard, and now with Lion. The mouse works fine for a while and then it gets really laggy. Turning the mouse off (disconnecting bluetooth with the computer) and turning it back on fixes the problem, but it has happened at least a dozen times in the past week or so.

I've reported it as a bug to Apple, but it is hard to reproduce. I also have a MacBook Pro with an external monitor. I'm not sure if that is just coincidence, though.


Boot Camp will not allow removing Windows 8 partition I've used Boot Camp to install Windows 8 on my Air some time ago and I was trying to remove the windows partition to restore some space. Except Boot Camp gives me a warning saying "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition."

This is what my disk setup looks like.

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            80.0 GB    disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:         Microsoft Reserved                         134.2 MB   disk0s4
   5:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                40.3 GB    disk0s5

I'm pretty sure the Microsoft Reserved (disk0s4) partition is giving me the problem right now. I can't mount it or do repair on it from disk utility.

I've called Apple support to get help but they spent 10 minute explaining 10 different ways I can pay them to receive help.

Maybe there is a way to get this working but I and some technicians haven't found it. BootCamp got me hard headaches some times.

The fastest way would be to make a backup of your Macintosh HD (create a disk image) and partition the whole drive. Delete all partitions, apply, then create a new one and apply. Be sure to set the partition type to GUID.


macOS catalina no longer sends email if job outputs to stdout After upgrade to macOS Catalina 10.15, I no longer receive emails from crontab jobs. Sometimes it's desirable, but in most cases I need to see these errors, so I could act on failures.

I know I can add to | /usr/bin/mail -s "crontab job" user@email.com to cron job to restore this functionality, but it's a hard way.

Adding crontab to Full Disk Access -- did not help, but realistically it shouldn't have.

Did someone managed to fix this odd behavior?

This issue was resolved with the macOS 10.15.4 update released in March 2020.

After upgrade to 10.15.4, I started to receive emails from cron jobs I configured. Note, you have to set

MAILFROM and MAILTO environmental variables in cron in order to receive these emails.

Example:

MAILFROM=imac@home.domain.com
MAILTO=myuser@gmail.com

...

* * * * * sample_job


Installing ruby 1.9 on Mac OS X 10.7 I'm trying to install Kitabu on Mac OS X 10.7.4.

When I tried to use gem install kitabu --pre to install kitabu, I got an error

ERROR:  Error installing kitabu:
        kitabu requires Ruby version ~> 1.9.

And the preinstalled ruby is not version 1.9.

ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2011-12-28 patchlevel 357) [universal-darwin11.0]

Can I update preinstalled ruby to 1.9? If that's not possible, how can I install ruby 1.9 so that I can run it when gem is executed?

No don't update the Apple supplied ruby as that could affect existing ruby scripts and will get overridden in a System Upgrade.

To install ruby see the Download Ruby page from the ruby language website (the main page of which you should have bookmarked)

The two ways that you should consider are

Download the RVM. Then edit your .bash_profile to put the bin path
of the install at the front of your PATH.
Use a package manager (e.g. Macports, Fink, Homebrew) and put their
path at the front of your PATH ( I would use this only if you have C   libraries that you need as well)


RAW images not supported in Aperture after Time Machine restore After restoring from a Time Machine Backup all of the RAW images in my aperture library show as "Not supported", even though they did work on my old laptop (where the backup was made).

Here is what I tried:

Downloading and manually installing the latest Camera RAW
Repairing permissions for my Aperture Library
Repairing the Aperture Library itself
Rebuilding the library itself

And it still says "File type not supported"  The weird thing is after I rebuild or repair the database, the thumbnail will work, But expanding will then break it and all of the thumbnails will go back to the exclamation mark.

I have multiple backups, one time machine and one put on a windows server.

My camera is supported by Digital Camera RAW - Sony Alpha SLT-A57

It appears that this problem isn't with Aperture at all as the image files themselves are corrupt.  This isn't the solution to the problem, because this is just a side-effect of the main problem.


Recreate app icon on homepage I don't use any Apple gear, so sorry I'm struggling to find answers, as I'm not quite sure how to phrase my question.

My wife had a banking app on her phone, but our son managed to delete the icon from home screen (where all the app icons are). If she uses the search, it lists, and if we go to the app store, it gives the option to "Open" (and not "install"). So we assume it's still installed.

How do I add this back so she can access it without having to search or open the App Store?

Edit: To add, it's an iPhone 5

Thanks

Searching in Spotlight for an app will reveal its containing folder

Source


MacBook Pro: water damage improved screen's brightness! This isn't your typical water damage story.

One side of my 2007-model, pre-Unibody laptop got damp from rain in a backpack yesterday. When I opened it, the left quarter of the screen had a splotch of water damage.

The damaged area is brighter and more vibrant than the rest of the screen!

The screen has seemed dim for most of the laptop's lifetime. Not long after its first birthday I even disassembled the screen looking for the problem. I found a blown capacitor and supposed a backlight power issue, but later discovered that wasn't the case.

Now this seems to confirm it's some kind of optical effect. But what? I know plenty about optics and this doesn't make sense. The water must be filling a gap and providing better coupling between two layers, but there's no brightening if I press lightly on the screen. There's a little thin-film interference at the edges of the water layer where it tapers off. So the water layer is doing something.

The laptop will be fine in a few days; the water seems to be evaporating out through the screen. But I'm suffering this physics mystery.

The reason it's brighter is because water has a refraction index that is closer to 'glass' (as in the specific material used in the screen--I know it's not really glass per se) than air does. This means that less light is lost in the area between the LCD and the front glass (or between the LCD and the backlight--but not very likely) and thus the screen appears brighter.

You'd probably get a better explanation on Physics in terms of specifics, but this is the answer in a nutshell.


Is it true for application that are installed by "dragging" into the Applications folder, it can be copied to other Mac? Many apps are installed by the "drag it into the Applications folder".  Is it true that usually, if you copy that app (which is a .app folder`) onto another Mac that you have that has the same OS X version or higher version, then the App should work too?

(unless it is not supporting Rosetta apps due to backward compatibility).

Some apps are installed by running a program, and go through the "Where do you want to install to", and "Agree with Terms?", etc, etc, and probably those apps can't be properly installed by just copying the .app folder to another Mac?

(I need to do this because VLC 2.0.3 can't play some format of rmvb files, and I need to install 2.0.1 to another Mac and the downloaded file is missing, only the VLC.app folder is in the Applications folder.)

Apps that are installed through disk images that simply ask you to drag the app file into your Applications folder usually create all of the files it needs to run (i.e. preferences, miscellaneous plists, cache files, etc.) on your first run.  So, yes, these kinds of applications can be copied to other Macs without a problem (unless, of course, that application requires a license and the license is asked for on first run and stored in a plist).

Apps that use Installer.app (.pkg files, usually) are different in that they have a bundle of files that they need to install in order to run (like Office for Mac).  Note that they, too, can create plists and preferences on first run, also.  You can see what .pkg files install by opening their Package Contents.  So, you are right, usually the apps that use .pkg files can't be run on their .app alone (you can't just copy Word.app to another Mac and expect it to work; certain frameworks need to be installed so that it can work).

In the specific case of your VLC download, which does not use a .pkg file should run just fine when copied.


OS X Mavericks lost my mail folders! After loading Mavericks it appears one of my mail folders, a key folder holding tax data has become completely borked.  As you can see from the attached image I have duplicate home folders.  I have already tried to rebuild this folder with no luck.  Any other ideas?

Posted @ Apple:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5494468

Rule of thumb, use Time Capsule = Problem Solved.

I ended up migrated to Fastmail.fm => Away from Google.


Can I find out the last time a specific USB was connected to my MBP? I recently (within the last month) lost an external Hard drive - it had years of photos on it and I am devastated. To try and jog my memory, I am trying to find a way to find out the last time I connected it to my MacBook. Is this possible in any way using the system.log files?

Thanks in advance

If your MacOS version is 10.12 and later, you can use the advanced terminal log tool.

here is how to do the same with it (if you prefer)

log show  --last 35m  --info --predicate 'eventMessage contains "mounted"'

here it will search for messages containing the word "mounted", but only messages of type INFO (you could change it for ERROR or omit the --info flag to search all messages)

You can change the time, on the example I used --last 35m which means only on the last 35 minutes, but you can use it like --last 4h to search the last four hours for your criteria.

Example output, click to expand it:

If you know the service subsystem, you can filter just by it, like the example below (I created the example for timeMachine subsystem, for syntax demonstration)

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine" AND eventMessage contains "Failed"'

Use additional parameters like last hours, select kind of message, redirect the output to a file, etc...

The log console is very powerful and it can make queries like a database tool.

It is faster if you use the query syntax like above, but for some quick searchs you can also use 'grep', like the example below:

log show --style syslog  --last 15m  --info |grep '\[USB\]'

Show USB connection of my iPhone on my MacBook on the last 15 minutes: (using GREP to filter messages) and output style syslog

Statistics about the log database can be retrieved with sudo log stats (picture below) showing the date of the oldest message, date of most recent, and various other information and statistics.

Statistics (the command may take a long time to generate it, (> 5min ~ 10min)

How much data/days to store? How to customise:

for [MacOS 10.12 Sierra or newer] )

Storage parameters (such how much days to keep messages) can be changed/customised with sudo log config

  see sudo log config --help or man log

for [MacOS El Capitan, Yosemite or older] )

Log settings (such as how much log data to keep stored) can be customised by editing /etc/asl.conf. Default parameters of 50MB on average gives about 7 days of stored logs.

/etc/asl.conf


Internet Sharing from WiFi to Ethernet doesn't work in Mountain Lion After upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion, it seems like internet sharing no longer works.

With the settings:

Share network from: WiFi
To computers using: Ethernet

When Internet Sharing is enabled, the host can't access the internet, and neither can connected clients. Clients are given an IP address via DHCP, and the correct route is setup, but that's it.

It seems like the host can't access the internet because the bridge0 device is set as the default route:

# Before enabling internet sharing
$ route -n get default
   route to: default
destination: default
       mask: default
    gateway: 192.168.1.1
  interface: en1
      flags:
 recvpipe  sendpipe  ssthresh  rtt,msec    rttvar  hopcount      mtu     expire
       0         0         0         0         0         0      1500         0
$ ping 4.2.2.1
PING 4.2.2.1 (4.2.2.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 4.2.2.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=33.418 ms
…

# And after enabling internet sharing
$ route -n get default
   route to: default
destination: default
       mask: default
  interface: bridge0
      flags:
 recvpipe  sendpipe  ssthresh  rtt,msec    rttvar  hopcount      mtu     expire
       0         0         0         0         0         0      1500        -1
$ ping 4.2.2.1
PING 4.2.2.1 (4.2.2.1): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: Host is down
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
…

Additionally, disabling Internet Sharing leaves the routing table broken. I've got to manually add the default route back in before things start working again:

# After disabling internet sharing
$ route -n get default
route: writing to routing socket: not in table
$ ping 4.2.2.1
PING 4.2.2.1 (4.2.2.1): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: Host is down
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
…
$ route -n add default 192.168.1.1
$ ping 4.2.2.1
PING 4.2.2.1 (4.2.2.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 4.2.2.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=33.418 ms
…

Finally, checking the output of pfctl before and after enabling internet sharing doesn't show any (significant) changes. Should there be?

And various bits of info:

This is with OS X 10.8.2
Output of ifconfig when sharing is enabled (with irrelevant adapters p2p0, fw0, gif0, and stf0 removed):

lo0: flags=8049 mtu 16384
    options=3
    inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
    inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
    inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
en1: flags=8863 mtu 1500
    ether 60:c5:47:93:47:66
    inet6 fe80::62c5:47ff:fe93:4766%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
    inet 192.168.1.118 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
    media: autoselect
    status: active
en0: flags=8963 mtu 1500
    options=2b
    ether 3c:07:54:1a:83:89
    media: autoselect (none)
    status: inactive
bridge0: flags=8863 mtu 1500
    ether ac:de:48:11:fa:4e
    inet 192.168.2.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.2.255
    Configuration:
        priority 0 hellotime 0 fwddelay 0 maxage 0
        ipfilter disabled flags 0x2
    member: en0 flags=3
             port 7 priority 0 path cost 0

This is indeed quite broken in Mountain Lion. Once you've fixed up the default route as you describe in the question, you're still left with the problem that Mountain Lion is giving its bridge interface address to clients as both the router address (which is correct) and as the DNS server address (which isn't).

Verify that this is the problem by entering an HTTP server IP address into the address bar on a client web browser when connected through your Mac after you fix default routes, and it should load up fine.

My solution to this problem is to fix up the route as you describe -- which could be automated, of course -- and to keep BIND (aka /usr/sbin/named) running in the background on my Mac in a forward-only configuration, forwarding all queries to Google's public DNS servers. This doesn't fix the underlying brokenness in Mountain Lion, but it makes things start working for the clients.

A couple useful resources:

http://www.macshadows.com/kb/index.php?title=How_To:_Enable_BIND_-_Mac_OS_X%27s_Built-in_DNS_Server (how to fire up BIND on OS X)

http://gleamynode.net/articles/2267/ (how to configure BIND for forward-only operation -- of course you will not want to make BIND only listen on 127.0.0.1)

It would be far preferable for Apple to make this feature of their OS work as advertised, but in the meantime I've found this is a viable workaround.


Shift+C no longer working I am not sure why and quite saddened by this but I can no longer type a capital 'C' on my keyboard for my Mac mini running OS X Yosemite. I have run through all of the shortcuts in System Preferences->Keyboard->Shortcuts, but Shift+C is not listed there, anywhere...

What is causing this, and how to fix it?

Have you taken that keyboard to another computer or tried another keyboard on the Mac Mini?

The most elegant solution to your problem would be if it's a hardware issue on that specific keyboard.


What sets the language of iCal invitations? I am using Mac OS X 10.6 configured for English. I am using iCloud configured for English. Why are iCal invitations sent in German?

Go to appleid.apple.com and set the preferred language for your account.

iCloud calendar invitations will use that language.


iPhone shows album art but iPod classic doesn't When I plug in my iPod Classic to my car radio system, it doesn't show album artwork but when I plug in my iPhone it does. Is there a default I need to change?

Might have to do with how artwork is stored. iTunes can store it in the mp3/aac/whatever music file or in a separate database.

I noticed when exporting often the art is not included. A way to force iTunes to include the artwork in the file is to edit the file info in iTunes - like e.g. add a comment. Then the tag is rewritten with artwork also included.


Macbook Pro: One USB-C port only works for charging devices Is this possible:
I have two USB-C ports on my MacBook Pro 2019. One port works perfectly well. The other is odd to say the least.
After some testing, it seems as if the port "can't handle strenuous tasks" and by strenuous tasks, I mean running a USB-C hub with external hard drives plugged in it or using the port to go to an external monitor.
It does work when charging my iPhone or using the port to charge the MacBook itself.
So my assumption overall is that it does work, but only small, less strenuous tasks, if that's even possbile?
Can any USB-C knowledgeable people confirm this is possible? Could it be a software issue?
I've tried resetting stuff like the SMC etc. just haven't reinstalled macOS yet, which is the last thing I'd wanna do, it's on the latest version of Catalina at the moment.

You have a hardware issue.
And, unfortunately, it's a logic board problem.

The power rail not may not be delivering enough current to the USB bus
The USB controller for that side may be malfunctioning
The circuitry that connects the controller to the port may be problematic.

Unfortunately, without putting hands on with proper diagnostic gear it's impossible to know.  In fact, if you take it to Apple, they will simply change out the logic board rather than identify and fix the problem.
The one thing you should do is an reset the SMC.  There are different methods depending on your Mac model so be sure to read the steps carefully.
This is one of the actual few problems where an SMC reset is applicable - you're having power issues.  Re-installing macOS is the last thing you should do - booting into Safe Mode or Recovery will get you a clean version of macOS without the hassle of overwriting your system and risking your data.  You can also run Apple Diagnostics to see if there are any error codes.
Potential Workaround
If you can still transfer data, just not handle the "strenuous" tasks as you described, you may still be able to work with it if you use a powered USB hub.  It will supply the power to the USB bus that your logic board can't


Faulty iPhone 4S battery - how can I test a battery to measure its integrity? I bought an iPhone 4S two months ago. In the last couple of days I've perceived an average battery life of 12 to 18 hours with a light usage of the phone throughout the day.

I've followed every tip for battery preservation such as turning off Location services, I don't use Siri, I only download e-mails manually to the phone (no push or notifications), I set the auto brightness on, I try to keep only a few important applications running in background.

I would like to visit my carrier's technicians in order to get a replacement, but I would prefer to run some tests first to make sure that something's wrong with the battery.

Any suggestions?

I have always liked to test a battery by running the device until it shuts down and powers off.

When you connect it to the standard wall charger, it should take between 2 and 4 hours to charge. If your battery is done charging in an hour to 1:30, then it's not really getting the intended amount of current and should be replaced.

Similarly, if it won't charge fully (or very much close to full) in less than 4 hours - something also is amiss either with the charging, measuring or battery itself.

By timing the charge time, you eliminate any background task, GPS, WiFi drain, etc.. and just can see the time it takes a fixed amount of current to enter the battery and be stored chemically.


Is it possible to restore a deactivated iPhone 4s? I have an iPhone 4S running 6.1.3 that a friend gave me after upgrading to a newer model. It is deactivated, but is still fully functional on WiFi. I'm considering trying to jailbreak it, but I'm concerned that if there's an issue and I need to restore it from a backup, I won't be able to use it without activating it as a phone. Is it possible to restore a deactivated iPhone from backup?

Unless there's an active SIM in the phone or the IMEI is in use on a CDMA network (like Verizon or Sprint) then nothing will happen to it if you wipe/restore from a backup. It might say it's trying to activate but it actually won't. In the background, it'll attempt to "activate" but will just get a null response from whatever cell network it was trying to activate on. Feel free to use it like an iPod touch. If you DO want to use it as a phone, however, you just need to either put an active SIM in it or call up Verizon/Sprint (or whatever CDMA carrier) and give them the IMEI and follow their instructions to activate it on your plan/line/whatever.


Why does iTunes Match hang on Step 2? iTunes Match just became available in the Netherlands and I ordered it just now. The matching process is now in step 2, but it doesn't seem to make any progress. It was at 160 of about 4000 songs, than I restarted iTunes and now it is sitting at 221. I didn't actually see the progress happen from 160 to 221. It has been sitting at the same number of songs for several hours (apart from this "jump").

I also basically have the same issue on another Mac (just stuck at a different number), which mostly has the same iTunes library (but not quite).Actually, this Mac has just finished. The other one refused to continue matching while this one was doing it, so everything might just be a case of extremely slow progress, or some issue with the update of the progress report.

Does someone have any idea what is going on and how to fix it?

I have found this extremely elaborate post by "sapintel" on the Apple Support forums. Actually, inspecting the open files and ports as described here has shown me that iTunes is in fact opening and closing files, so it may just be a progress bar issue.

How to fix Step 2 and Step 3 Errors in iTunes: Music Media Formats, and Checking Firewall Blocks.

Step 1, 2, or 3 Hangs: Problems with Media Formats.
If you have heterogenous media formats in your music files, some of them will FAIL iTunes match, causing it to hang. This is a software error in iTunes match, which should mark the files as "Not eligible" instead of remaining stuck in an endless loop. These errors never occur if all the songs in the music library are unprotected AAC 256 kbps music files encoded by iTunes 10.5.1.

There are two basic ways to upgrade your song media formats to iTunes 10.5.1 AAC encoding - encode all of them at once, or do them selectively. In either method, you must delete the original version from iTunes and your file system. If you previously loaded them to iCloud, get rid of them there also.

You will be able to see a hung file in OS/X under Activity Monitor → iTunes → Inspect Process → Open Files and Ports. In Windows you will have to use standard Task Manager inspections.

In my iTunes library, I found that certain AAC (*.m4a) files which were encoded in before 2011 were stuck, and *.m4p Protected AAC files.

You may convert all files which were not encoded at 256 kbps AAC with a right-mouse click. Find them:

1) individually in iTunes as you discover them in Open Files and Ports trace, or
2) by creating a sort smart playlist that matches their pattern. For example, a playlist with bit-rate < 256k.

After converting them, you MUST delete the previous file(s) from your iTunes library, move the actual file to trash, and delete the trash. Archive the files if you wish. If any of them were already matched to iTunes Match, you must delete them there also.

After getting rid of older media formats, your Open Files and Ports window should no longer show any music file open in your iTunes library.

If you have converted your music library and Step 3 is still stuck with no file open, it is likely a Firewall problem. Check the last line in Open Files and Ports, and use the information in the last rows to check your firewall settings. The upload port is shown in this form, 192.168.1.1:53089 → 72.21.214.201:https. If you see this type of row, but nothing is being uploaded, a firewall or other issue is blocking that port.

In my case the block was created by my broadband modem settings. Check with the installation guide for your modem - typically they can be managed by a http:// address such as http://192.168.1.254/. Change the firewall settings as needed.


Youtube-dl is returning errors when grabbing from Mixcloud In short - I thought my earlier Python 3 enquiry would solve my problem with Youtube-dl but it didn't. I am working through a reddit enquiry I put in a couple of weeks ago and am now a bit stumped:

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/frq8kr/am_getting_errors_when_grabbing_things_from/

For clarification I'm just looking to grab some mixes whilst working from home during lockdown.

My mac is an aging 2012 iMac, am running 10.12.6, XCode is 8.2, Python have 2.7 that it was installed with, 2.7.16 and 3.7 something.

Youtube-dl is only appearing to pick up 2.7 however;

e.g. youtube-dl --verbose - returns the following;

[debug] System config: []

[debug] User config: [u'-o', u'~/Downloads/%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s']

[debug] Custom config: []

[debug] Command-line args: [u'--verbose']

[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out UTF-8, pref UTF-8

[debug] youtube-dl version 2020.01.01

[debug] Python version 2.7.10 (CPython) - Darwin-16.7.0-x86_64-i386-64bit

[debug] exe versions: avconv 11.4, avprobe 11.4

[debug] Proxy map: {}

Usage: youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

The error I'm returning is the following;

ERROR: Unable to download JSON metadata:  (caused by URLError(SSLError(1, u'[SSL: TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION] tlsv1 alert protocol version (_ssl.c:590)'),))

The thought in the thread was people were thinking it was the OpenSSL libraries that needed updating. I'd hoped downloading a newer version of Python would have solved that but it didn't appear to.

Am a little stumped now and outside of my level of expertise which is frankly limited at the best of times.

I would be grateful for any advice or suggestions.

I ran into the same error (2010 MacBook Pro) and updating to Python 2.7.18 seemed to fix the issue. You can update to 2.7.18 here. I used the macOs 64-bit Installer, but feel free to install whichever way is easiest for you.

Screenshot of running youtube-dl post update:

Hope this helps!


Is it safe to install Sierra with Apple Store blocked? I have tried to install El Capitan to the Mid 2011 İMac with 10.7.2 (Or maybe 10.7.5) and then it gave me do not cross icon at boot and it is useless now. I downloaded install os dmg file to my own drive and then added it to the applications

When I asked to my teacher why it didn't work. they claimed the government has blocked the App Store and it will never boot again.

What I want to do is. Trying to install High Sierra without internet connection so this won't happen again. Is it possible to do it? I can disconnect Ethernet but I am fearing the WI-FI reconnecting to the school WI-FI even if I delete the password and yet worse, The operating system refusing to work without authenication from App Store after offline install or maybe even breaking itself when I connect to the internet.

Is this safe? I already got Time Machine backup in the the Mid 2011 İMac I want to update and I want to use the newer applications again.

I am providing the whole solution as it might help other too. This was executed by myself a couple of months ago. As you will have a macOS High Sierra offically from App Store also, it is safe to run the following option.

First, you need one reference Macbook Pro or Mac mini whatever you can get.

From the reference machine, download macOS High Sierra from the
link below and follow the first step of clean install macOS Sierra on your USB:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-high-sierra/id1246284741?ls=1&mt=12

That link should open the MAS and take you to the macOS High Sierra download page.

Clean Install macOS Sierra on your startup disk

Create a bootable flash drive with macOS Sierra.
First, make sure your USB flash drive is formatted and named as “Untitled”.

•  To format a USB drive launch Disk Utility (Finder -> /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility).

•  Select your USB drive under External.

•  Click the Erase tab at the top of the Disk Utility window. Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the format list. Then, click the Erase button. When the process is complete, click Done, and close the Disk Utility window.

•  If your drive is named something else, you need to rename it (Open Finder -> right click on the USB drive and choose Rename).
Now, your USB flash drive is ready.

•  Launch Terminal

•  Enter the following text into Terminal:

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app –nointeraction

•  Hit the Enter key.

•  Terminal will ask you for an admin password (the one you use to log in). It won’t display characters when you type, so just do it. Hit Return. You’ll see that Terminal erases your drive. Then, Terminal will copy the installer file to your disk. This will take a few minutes. When the process is complete, the Terminal window will report "Done."
You can quit Terminal and your bootable macOS Sierra installer USB drive is ready for use.

On your main Apple device

Plug in the bootable macOS Sierra installer USB drive to your Mac.

Restart your Mac while holding the Option or Cmd+R. Make sure to keep it pressed!
When Mac restarts, you’ll see the macOS Startup Manager with a list of bootable devices that your Mac can start up from.
Use the arrow keys to choose your USB drive with macOS Sierra installer. Press Enter.
Select Disk Utility.
In the window, at the top of the left bar, select your Mac’s Main Drive (it looks like a MacintoshHD).
Select the Erase tab located next to the First Aid button at the top.
Near the center of the window, select the Format drop-down list and select Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) type.
Click Erase (Note: this will erase all your data from your main drive!) and give the drive some time to format.
When it’s done, close Disk Utility and select “Install macOS” from the menu.
Select your main drive and install the new macOS Sierra 10.12.

Follow these Sierra install instructions and enjoy your newly clean-installed macOS Sierra.

Note: A bootable installer doesn't download macOS from the Internet, but it does require the Internet to get information specific to your Mac model, such as firmware updates. If you need to connect to a Wi-Fi network, use the Wi-Fi menu in the menu bar.


How to make Energy Saver Schedule to Shutdown when logged out I have an iMac with the Energy Saver schedule to turn off at a specific time and then restart in the morning. It does not work if I am logged out. How do I make it work if no one is logged in?

You can use the pmset repeat commands in Terminal to accomplish this:

pmset repeat shutdown MTWRFSU 11:00:00 will shutdown at 11AM.

pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 23:00:00 will boot (or wake from sleep) at 11PM.


Wireshark keyboard layout is incorrect I just installed Wireshark Version 1.12.0 (v1.12.0-0-g4fab41a from master-1.12) on OSX 10.9.4 with XQuartz 2.7.7.

Wireshark is doing something zany with my keyboard layout, but other X11 applications are not affected.  I don't see a keyboard layout option in the Wireshark interface and Google searchs have been fruitless.

Example of what zany means:

The z key is now 5 (shift Z yields %).  5 is now i.  <tab> is b. <Space> is n.

There might be a pattern, but it's not obvious to me (the number of bytes in the key remap does not follow a pattern either).

Anyone have suggestions?

And solved: X11 builds a key mapping on install.  On my machine, I have another language installed, and my ~/.Xmodmap file was causing the issue.

By cross-referencing the virtual mapping for the keyboard located at /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Headers/Events.h with the .Xmodmap as follows:

keycode   8 =
keycode   9 = Escape NoSymbol Escape
keycode  10 = 1 exclam 1 exclam
keycode  11 = 2 at 2 at
keycode  12 = 3 numbersign 3 numbersign
keycode  13 = 4 dollar 4 dollar
keycode  14 = 5 percent 5 percent
keycode  15 = 6 asciicircum 6 asciicircum
keycode  16 = 7 ampersand 7 ampersand
keycode  17 = 8 asterisk 8 asterisk
keycode  18 = 9 parenleft 9 parenleft
keycode  19 = 0 parenright 0 parenright
keycode  20 = minus underscore minus underscore
keycode  21 = equal plus equal plus
keycode  22 = BackSpace BackSpace BackSpace BackSpace
keycode  23 = Tab ISO_Left_Tab Tab ISO_Left_Tab
keycode  24 = q Q q Q
keycode  25 = w W w W
keycode  26 = e E e E
keycode  27 = r R r R
keycode  28 = t T t T
keycode  29 = y Y y Y
keycode  30 = u U u U
keycode  31 = i I i I
keycode  32 = o O o O
keycode  33 = p P p P
keycode  34 = bracketleft braceleft bracketleft braceleft
keycode  35 = bracketright braceright bracketright braceright
keycode  36 = Return NoSymbol Return
keycode  37 = Control_L NoSymbol Control_L
keycode  38 = a A a A
keycode  39 = s S s S
keycode  40 = d D d D
keycode  41 = f F f F
keycode  42 = g G g G
keycode  43 = h H h H
keycode  44 = j J j J
keycode  45 = k K k K
keycode  46 = l L l L
keycode  47 = semicolon colon semicolon colon
keycode  48 = apostrophe quotedbl apostrophe quotedbl
keycode  49 = grave asciitilde grave asciitilde
keycode  50 = Shift_L NoSymbol Shift_L
keycode  51 = backslash bar backslash bar
keycode  52 = z Z z Z
...

we can see mismatches.  I assume that the other applications that I tested disregard the user customization.


Where does the stderr from launchd go? launchd items in /Library/LaunchDaemon may redirect stdin/stdout/stderr. E.g. I've got an item that says:

<key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/Library/Logs/rnamanagedocker_out.log</string>
<key>StandardErrorPath></key>
    <string>/Library/Logs/rnamanagedocker_err.log</string>

I do get the stdout in /Library/Logs/rnamanagedocker_out.log, but no /Library/Logs/rnamanagedocker_err.log is created while I am certain there is stderr output.

Any tips?

[UPDATE Jan 17] I have now noticed that I do get stderr in an expected output file. Either I was mistaken or there was some setup I cannot reproduce that got the stderr output lost. Probably the first (picnic, problem in chair, not in computer).

Your second key has a typo in it (has a > before the closing </key>)
                      *
<key>StandardErrorPath></key>
    <string>/Library/Logs/rnamanagedocker_err.log</string>


Size of my Cd-Rom (SATA) I have a macbookPro 15'' mid 2009 and I want know which size is my cd-rom (SATA)because I have to buy this "component"

where can I find this information ?
My Cd-Rom is 9,5mm - SATA/SATA ?

Your MacBook Pro has indeed a 9.5mm SATA SuperDrive.


Switch keyboard from terminal? Is there a command line equivalent to pressing ctrl-space to toggle the keyboard layout? (I need this because I want to use Karabiner to tap shift to toggle.)

Make an applescript:

tell application "System Events"
    keystroke " " using control down
end tell

PS. This is too slow, and allows more keys from the old keyboard to be entered before the switch is effectual.


How can I check warranty state of my iPhone? I’m from Maldives and I am buying an iPhone 6 plus from a shop in Male. They say that there is a 1 year Apple warranty but they aren’t providing me with any slips of the warranty.

How can I verify whether my iPhone is covered by warranty?

Apple provides an online tool to check service and support coverage using your device's serial number.  You can find the serial number on your iPhone by tapping Settings > General > About.

SelfSolve.apple.com allows you to enter an Apple serial number and then see what warranty options are available.
The device does not need to be registered in order to be checked.

See below for an example of a MacBook Air that is still covered under AppleCare.


Better Internet Sharing I'm using OS X Server as a server and access point using built in Internet Sharing. But it really lacks configuration options, IPv6, DHCP server settings and much more. Is there an alternative or an advanced configuration tool?

My needs:

IPv6 forwarding
Changing the configuration of the DHCP to deliver
different subnets
Changing 802.11 parameters such as supported modes,
SSID hiding, etc. The more comprehensive the better.

Mac OS X (I'm speaking here of Lion, Mountain Lion & Mavericks) is a pretty good system to build a secured network access. But I can't agree more with your analysis: it really lacks any GUI to manage configuration.

For example, to be able to manage correctly DHCP, I finally set up a
highly inelegant way to circumvent the way InternetSharing is blocking any attempt to configure it.
This method may cause problem with any MacOS X update, so I have
to remove my modifications before any OS update.

Here is the technic I used with a solid success on a small network: How to stop InternetSharing overwriting /etc/bootpd.plist .

I haven't yet tested my /etc/bootpd.plist to enable distributing IPv6
addresses, but I'm pretty sure it would be working by defining the
correct <key>net_range</key> entry.


How do I maximize the Safari window all the way? Possible Duplicate:
  How do you maximize windows?

The green maximise window button in Safari.app is doing a "smart" maximise instead of using the full area available. So in most cases, it only grows to the maximum vertical size but tries to work out what it thinks is the ideal width of the web page and grows only to that size horizontally (about 1024 pixels for Stack Exchange for example).

This doesn't work so well when using tabbed browsing extensively, as it only uses the frontmost tab to determine width and there might be another tab (open or soon to be opened in the same window) that would benefit from using the whole screen width instead. So I end up manually resizing the Safari window to it's full width a lot.

How do I get Safari to always maximise to full size, like TextEdit.app does? Preferably this would be the default, while option-clicking the green button gives me the "smart" behaviour, or the other way around.

I'm a bit surprised nobody has asked this question yet, but a search for maximising Safari showed nothing. Please do point me to it if I missed it!

The green button is in fact the Zoom button, and does not serve the same purpose as a Maximize button in for example Windows would. You can read more about the differences between Mac OS X window controls and Windows window controls here: http://www.davidalison.com/2010/11/window-controls-mac-os-vs-windows.html

In short, whereas a Maximize button's purpose is enlarging the window to take up the entire screen estate, the purpose of a Zoom button is to enlarge the Window based on the resolution and the user interface inside the window.

Some applications might implement an Option-click for a maximizing behavior, instead of zooming, but this is application specific and Safari does not have such a functionality. Instead, Safari will "zoom" the window based on the content of the window, which usually just means enlarging it vertically. If there are horizontal scrollbars, Safari might also enlarge the window horizontally to try and eliminate the scrolling.

As an alternative, you can use fullscreen mode in Safari which will always take up all available desktop space.

If that doesn't suffice, there are some additional window management tools you can install which facilitate window placement and scaling. I can recommend Moom, which is available in the App Store.


No sound in iMovie of video recording using the Screen Recorder I have an iPad (2018) 9.7-inch. I've recorded a video using the screen recorder.

When I play the video on the iPad I hear a sound.

When I import it to iMovie I don't hear any sound.

Even when I play the video in the sidebar I can hear the sound, but when it is in the timeline the audio is no present and I can't hear anything when playing it.

Using the latest OS version.

If your iMovie project appears to be missing audio tracks when you play, import, or export a project, try these steps first:

Make sure the audio track has not been muted in the timeline.
See if the volume in iMovie is set to its lowest, if this is the case, set the volume slider to maximum.
Make sure the computer's audio is not muted.
Quit and reopen iMovie, then check the clip to see if it now plays with audio.
Quit and reopen iMovie, then reimport the footage. Play the newly imported footage and see if you now have audio.
Check /Library/QuickTime/ and ~/Library/QuickTime/ for any third-party plugins. Remove them if present, log out, and log back in. Check to see if the issue persists. If not, check with the manufacturer of the disabled plugin to see if an update is available. Note: The tilde (~) represents your Home directory.
Check to see if any of the video clips you have imported are in the MPEG-1 format. MPEG-1 clips will lose audio when you export them as part of your iMovie project.

SOURCE: