What does it mean for consumers that Apple has released MacOS kernel as open source? https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/01/apple-open-sourced-the-kernel-of-ios-and-macos-for-arm-processors/

Does this mean we'll see other Computers (which are not Apple built) run the MacOS?

If not, then what would happen?

From what I understand, Unix kernel is released too, and Linux was created. Should the same happen to Apple's kernel?

Clarification:
Apple has always released the kernel of MacOS in an open source form.  The kernel is named Darwin. Darwin has a target of x86.  It can be ported to other processors, but the open source variant of Darwin that Apple controls and releases was only available for x86.
However, iOS, which uses ARM processors, has used Darwin since its inception.  Apple has never released the ARM port of Darwin, even though they obviously have one since they're using it in millions of iOS devices already in consumer hands.
This announcement is that Apple is now releasing the ARM pieces of Darwin that they previously withheld.
Darwin is just a kernel, it doesn't include most of what makes the MacOS or iOS operate as a consumer expects them to.  A kernel is not a complete operating system.
Further, Darwin is not a complete kernel.  Apple doesn't release many portions of it.

What does it mean for consumers that Apple has released MacOS kernel as open source?

Not much, initially.  It will not affect the availability of hardware or software, upgrades, and probably won't even have a substantial impact on jailbreaking or similar alternate uses of apple devices.

Does this mean we'll see other Computers (which are not Apple built) run the MacOS?

It does not affect the availability of non Apple hardware devices running Apple software or operating systems.  What's already available won't become more or less available or more or less legal.

If not, then what would happen?

The most likely explanation, and how consumers will benefit, comes from an earlier release of code Apple usually holds close to its chest, "Apple confirms iOS kernel code left unencrypted intentionally" which suggests:

Apple has begun to shift towards greater transparency, particularly on security issues, in the wake of its battle with the FBI over unlocking an iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter. When the FBI attempted to compel Apple to unlock the phone, CEO Tim Cook penned a rare open letter to Apple’s customers, explaining his decision to resist. “We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government,” Cook wrote. (The FBI eventually dropped its request after paying a third party to break into the device.)
Opening up the kernel’s code for inspection could weaken the market for security flaws like the one the FBI is presumed to have used to get into the San Bernardino iPhone. If flaws are revealed quickly and widely, it will reduce the prices law enforcement and black markets will pay for them — and it could mean quicker fixes for Apple’s customers.

So the consumer benefit is that more eyes, specifically security researchers, will be on the code and hopefully this will bring to light weaknesses in security, allowing Apple the ability to improve security for customers rather than finding out their security is broken when a government or third party is able to take away someone's rights without due process.
Whether this plays out positively, though, depends on researchers volunteering to comb through the code.

From what I understand, Unix kernel is released too, and Linux was created. Should the same happen to Apple's kernel?

Apple started with the original BSD code, which, using the BSD license, doesn't require that companies or individuals release their changes to the code to the people they distribute compiled software to.  Indeed, they chose this over the Linux kernel specifically so they could keep certain intellectual property secret (among many other reasons, of course).
So they do not have a legal obligation to release all their code. Some of the software they use does have other licenses, such as GPL, which does require they keep it open source. Much of these are available from Apple now.
This does, however, also point to another possibility: many kernel pieces are released so developers can develop MacOS hardware and specialized software.  This is much deeper into the system than app developers are allowed access to for iOS devices.
This release, then, suggests one or both of two strong possibilities (and this is complete conjecture):

Apple is preparing to release MacOS computers using their A series ARM processors.
Apple is preparing to allow developers to make deeper-level software for iOS devices.

I'd say MacOS computers using ARM processors is more likely, as the latest A11 chip, used in the iPhone 8 and X, beats the latest Intel i5 chip, used in the 2017 Macbook 13".  Apple still has a ways to go before they can replace Intel processors along their whole line, however we may see, within a year or two, low end MacOS computers with A12 or A13 chips, replacing the Intel chips previously used.
This would provide significant benefit to Apple (particularly its bottom line).
However, without an official statement there's no way to know what reasons Apple has for releasing the ARM portions of its already largely open source Darwin kernel.
The consumer will be impacted very little, if at all, and if so only indirectly.


Deleting a partition in Disk Utility fails. (Error: -69879) This is the output in Disk Utility:

  Disk Utility cannot modify this disk because it contains CoreStorage
  physical volumes. Use command line distil instead.

  The selected partition won't be changed.

How do I remove the partition?

It's completely empty now and I've cleared it by formatting it but I want to completely remove the partition and merge the free space back into the bigger partition.

I've tried doing this but it doesn't work in Terminal:

diskutil eraseVolume format name device

diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ awer disk1s4

It didn't work:

Started erase on disk1s4 asdf

Unmounting disk

Error: -69879: Couldn't open disk

Never mind - problem solved.

Turns out that the whole drive's partition table cannot be modified if one partition has encryption on, since CoreStorage is on. (The one that I had on was the encrypt feature for Time Machine.)


Can I use both Thunderbolt ports to get higher resolution/framerate I have a mid-2014 Macbook Pro (Iris Pro 1536) with an AOC U2790B. It can only run 4k at very low framerate so I downscale it.
I seem to recall reading a long time ago about using both Thunderbolt ports at once to drive a single monitor. Is that possible with my setup?

The problem is not the speed of the connection, a Thunderbolt 2 port has the bandwidth for a display size and refresh rate of at least 4K@60Hz or 5K@30Hz.  Using two Thunderbolt connections to a single display requires a display that supports this, and this is a feature that I recall was short lived as there are now cable and connector standards readily available for supporting 8K displays with refresh rates of at least 60Hz.
The problem is not a lack of bandwidth.  The problem is that the GPU in the laptop doesn't support more than 4K@30Hz.  To get better than this means adding an external GPU, or getting a new computer.


Time Machine tries to connect when I'm away from home Recently when I'm away from home, my MacBook Pro keeps displaying the following message "There was a problem connecting to the server" and the name of my AirPort Extreme with a hard drive connected.

I'm running OSX 10.7.4, and it's only done this for the past two weeks or so.

The only thing I can think of which has changed was the 10.7.4 update itself.

It's quite irritating, but doesn't actually harm anything. Any idea how to stop it happening though?

I have done two things in this case.

1) Connect a hard drive to change the destination - even if I don't connect that drive often, the local drive check seems faster than a network check. You can then re-establish the network backups to no ill effect when you return home. Having many Time Machine destinations is nice to have a second copy and works well for me.

2) Log into your Time Capsule and sign in again to MobileMe / iCloud and then delete that "find my mac" functionality. This seems to lessen the Time Machine "seeing" the remote drive but has an obvious downside of not being able to re-connect as well to your "home" AirPort / Time Capsule while on the road.

For advanced debugging, you could also run tm_diagnose and pore over the logs collected to see if any error conditions are present in the extremely undocumented and verbose logs that the diagnostic command collects. I would caution people without a UNIX or software background that "errors" in system logs are often not errors in the sense that something is broken - but more for the people who write and maintain the code to remember to clean some thing up or a minor "assumption" was not proven out in practice. There can be lots of false positives when looking at unix logs, but also a lot of learning how things work under the hood.


iPhone camera consolidating geotags for multiple photos I recently took a bunch of pictures around a location, expecting that each picture's precise location would be recorded so I could place them on a map. This has worked before.

What I found when I got home is that all the photos seemed to have the same location (which was slightly southeast of any location I photographed).

I'm wondering if the iPhone camera is now either rounding off geographic coordinates to a lower precision, or giving all photos taken around the same place and same time the same coordinates, or both, and if so, if this is particular to the Camera app or universal to all apps using the camera.

Extra info

This is on an iPhone 6s running 11.2.1. When I've done this before, it would have been on an iPhone 5 running whatever version of iOS would have been current circa January 2016.

Check the GPS time on your photos. This is the time of the GPS fix used to tag your photos. I.e. the time at which iPhone determined your location. It is possible that your iPhone failed to get a GPS fix while you were photographing. In that case it can decide to use the last known location. You would find that all your photos share the same GPS time.

Many possible reasons: High buildings, narrow streets, etc. can sometimes impair GPS reception. The iPhone GPS could have had a software problem that was later resolved by restarting the phone. Your iPhone may have been on low power mode.

I recently hiked Kilimanjaro and had set my iPhone to low power mode while on the mountain. It seems this had the effect of iPhone powering up the GPS much less frequently. I have photos where the GPS fix predates the photo by several hours.

I also saw what I consider to be a bug: iPhone seems to have discarded more recent GPS fixes in favor of better (but older) fixes. I have a few situations where one photo has a rather recent GPS fix and photos taken hours later were tagged with a GPS fix from the previous day!


Changing MAC Address and undoing changes I was trying to change my MAC address. I saw an answer that suggested I disassociate my device with this:

sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport -z
sudo ifconfig en0 ether d4:33:a3:ed:f2:12
networksetup -detectnewhardware

My question is: will this be permanent? How would I go about undoing this?

Also what's the difference between en0 and en1?

To your first question "is it permanent"--

No it is not, it will revert to the original when you restart.

The reason is a MAC address is given to a network adapter (card) when it is manufactured. It is hardwired or hard-coded onto your computer's network interface card (NIC) and is unique to it, so when you restart system will get the hardwired MAC address from the network card.

However there are ways to keep it permanent, but that is another question and method.

To your second question:

OS X uses en0 and en1 to identify the network type.

Depending on the configuration those could be:

en0 for the Ethernet (cable) interface

en1 for the WiFi interface

But it is better to look up your specific configuration.

To find out the currently used MAC address run ifconfig en1 | grep ether or ifconfig en0 | grep ether in your Terminal app.


Finder Tags just show list of tags, not tagged files? I like the idea of Finder tags and I want to use them. I tried tagging files in Finder. Then I clicked the tag in the sidebar and... it just shows a list of all my tags... instead of the documented behavior listed on Apple's website as well as user forums. Please pardon my impudence for daring to question the absolute wisdom of the Mac user interface and its documentation, but is there anything outside of the listed instructions that I need to do in order to get tagged files to show up? I just wanna use tags.
And... question dismissed and deleted in 3, 2...

You need to have the tags in the sidebar match the tags on your files.
If you only use files you tagged yourself, on that Mac, then this is rarely an issue. If you have tags from other users, or share across your network with the same colours but different definitions, you need to dig deeper & click "Show all tags" or change which tags show in your favourites.
Tags are in Finder Prefs [prefs for any app can be invoked with  Cmd ⌘   ,  [comma] or from the menu item that shows the App Name, in this case Finder.
If you have inherited files from other users or other machines, these labels may not match what you are expecting. A visit to this pref will "re-think" what all the tags are. You may find the tags are 'similar but not identical'. You need to set visibility by checking the box & also you can drag into your preferred sidebar order.
Here's a [rather awkward] screenshot showing that I have 2 'orange' tags with 2 different names [amongst others]. Files tagged as 'Imminent' are not part of the group tagged as 'Orange'.

If you click "All Tags" then you do get an alphabetical list of all tags in the next column. Clicking any one of those will then show the files tagged in that group.


Retrieving an Application from TimeMachine I have a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.11.6
Time Machine Software:

Need to retrieve, only, an application (Simplibudget) from "Time Machine".
This would be a backup that is about six months back, with other more recent backups of this application in front of the one I want.
Have attemped but no success.

The application you can download from the App Store again. Once you bought it, you can download it for free again.

The data/settings from that application you should find in the 'Application Support' folder. If you didn't clean this folder yourself there is a great change it is still there. If it is gone, follow these steps:

Finder > Menu 'Go' > 'Go to Folder...'
Type in: ~/Library/Application Support/
Activate Time Machine
Find the 'Simplibudget' folder


"Call/Cancel" popup in Google App A few days ago I was using the Google iOS app (not Chrome, but the specific "Google" app that you can download in the App Store) to go to shady website in an attempt to stream a movie online. Stupid, I know. I didn't download anything, and I didn't think I clicked on anything, but I started getting a prompt to call a number.
As far as I could tell, it wasn't any of the obviously fake ones that tell you to call a number because your phone is compromised or anything. It looked like the legit prompt that pops up when you click on a number in iOS where it has "Call 808-xxx-xxxx" on the top row and "Cancel" on the bottom row at the bottom of your screen. This is the prompt that comes up if you click on a number in any app.
Anyways, it popped up a thousand times and stopped when I killed the app. How does that exploit work? Did the webpage just trick my phone into thinking I clicked on a number a few dozen times? Is there any chance I got a virus from the website? Things have seemed fine since. Is there any way to tell if you have a virus aside from just the normal weird symptoms?

It seems more likely that this call button was actually just a part of the website. If so the fake button probably was an off-white color rather than pure white.
If your phone isn't jailbroken I wouldn't worry about it. Clear your browser cookies to be on the safe side but it's probably fine.
If you see any suspicious ads on your home screen or profiles being asked for you to trust then you should worry. If so reset your phone to factory settings  or to an iCloud backup.
I recommend using Safari for these activities and blocking popups. Make sure to use a VPN.


Activating my unlocked iPhone 4S using a Friend's SIM temporarily So I bought an unlocked iPhone 4S and im stuck at activation. I just want to get into the phone, get some apps and other stuff via Wifi.
My friend has an unlocked iphone as well, can I put his SIM into my iPhone to get through activation and then remove it ?

Will that affect my phone or soon to have SIM ? Will that affect his SIM or his iPhone ?

Thanks !

Yes. No it won't affect your phone.

An iPhone requires a SIM to activate. If the phone was locked to a specific carrier, it would require a SIM from that respective service provider. Since your iPhone is factory unlocked, any SIM (provided it's a micro-SIM) will suffice for activation. SIM cards to do not affect your device. You could get SIM cards from Fido, Rogers, Bell, AT&T, and Verizon and use each one every hour if you wish. This is why "world phones" (devices that are not locked to a specific carrier) are appealing to those that travel. They can use one SIM card in North America, for example, and another one in Asia during their travels.

SIMs only allow your device to connect to the carrier's towers, that is all. That's what SIMs are for, to talk to the carrier and say, "Hey, I'm authorized to be here." Older technology (CDMA) required direct device activation. This meant having to call the carrier and get the device activated. Should you change your device, you would have to call again to activate the new one. SIM cards (for the newer GSM network) solved this problem by registering the SIM and not the device. Once a SIM is registered, any device its plugged into has access to that network.


What are all these extra hidden files (with hash digests) that I can only see when running "ls"? Since upgrading to Yosemite, there seems to be an extra class of hidden files that are 'more hidden'. They are visible when I run ls, but not in my Finder (even though regular hidden files are visible on my machine).

For example, I can see .DS_Store in Finder, but then when I run ls in my terminal I can see extra versions:

.DS_Store
._.DS_Store.4ohM2f
._.DS_Store.b03KXd
._.DS_Store.zFFTiN

I suspect they might be some kind of revision history being saved for Time Machine, but I haven't set up Time Machine on my computer.

What are they and how do I get rid of them?

I will offer one example involving files with the prefix ._.

I have two volumes named Steelhead2 and Shark3. The volume named Steelhead is hfs+ formatted and the volume named Shark3 is ExFAT formatted. Consider the file iprogram.txt which has extended attributes. I can display these attributes using the ls command as shown below.

Steelhead:Steelhead2 davidanderson$ ls -l@ /Volumes/Steelhead2/iprogram.txt
-rw-r--r--@ 1 davidanderson  staff  22668 May 26 10:22 /Volumes/Steelhead2/iprogram.txt
    com.apple.FinderInfo       32
    com.apple.TextEncoding     15

Using the Finder, I copy this file to an empty folder named dots on Shark3. Again using the ls command I get the following.

Steelhead:dots davidanderson$ ls -la@ /Volumes/Shark3/dots
total 1024
drwxrwxrwx  1 davidanderson  staff  131072 Jun  8 10:46 .
drwxrwxrwx  1 davidanderson  staff  131072 Dec 31  1979 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 davidanderson  staff    4096 Jun  8 10:47 ._iprogram.txt
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 davidanderson  staff   22668 May 26 10:22 iprogram.txt
    com.apple.FinderInfo        32
    com.apple.TextEncoding      15

Partitions formatted ExFat can not have extended attributes. So OS X created the file ._iprogram.txt to contain these attributes. Next, I create a new folder named dots on Steelhead2 and use the Finder to copy just iprogram.txt to this folder. Using ls, I get the following.

Steelhead:Steelhead2 davidanderson$ ls -la@ /Volumes/Steelhead2/dots
total 48
drwxr-xr-x   3 davidanderson  staff    102 Jun  8 11:12 .
drwxrwxr-x  26 davidanderson  staff    952 Jun  8 11:11 ..
-rwxrwxrwx@  1 davidanderson  staff  22668 May 26 10:22 iprogram.txt
    com.apple.FinderInfo       32
    com.apple.TextEncoding     15

Since Steelhead2 is hfs+ formatted, there is no need for a ._iprogram.txt file. Finally, returning to the folder /Volumes/Shark3/dots, I will remove the file ._iprogram.txt and enter the 'ls' command, as shown below.

Steelhead:dots davidanderson$ rm /Volumes/Shark3/dots/._iprogram.txt
Steelhead:dots davidanderson$ ls -la@ /Volumes/Shark3/dots
total 768
drwxrwxrwx  1 davidanderson  staff  131072 Jun  8 10:46 .
drwxrwxrwx  1 davidanderson  staff  131072 Dec 31  1979 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 davidanderson  staff   22668 May 26 10:22 iprogram.txt

The extended attributes are gone.

You are correct, these ._ prefixed files are hidden in the Finder. Even if you use defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE, these files remain hidden.

If you find ._ files in your hfs+ formatted partitions, some operation did not get synchronized property. Try using the command dot_clean to remove these '._' files. For more information either enter man dot_clean or see dot_clean -- Merge ._* files with corresponding native files.


How to fix non-bootable OS X, after Boot Camp problems? I accidentally removed the "Recovery HD" partition, when I was installing Windows, and now my OS X system is not booting anymore.

How do I fix this, without wiping the entire disk, and starting from scratch?

I started out with Boot Camp, and when I was partitioning the disk during the installation of Windows, I didn't knew which partition I needed to choose, so I booted back into OS X. When I got back in the installer of Windows (with a different resolution), I wasn't able to reformat the partitions, as was instructed in the Boot Camp manual, so removed the last two partitions (I though Boot Camp created two partitions for Windows; one for booting, one for the OS). But still, I was unable to install Windows. When I rebooted the system, OSX was not booting anymore. Trying to get into the OS X recovery mode, it revealed that the recovery partition was gone, because it started Internet Recovery.

It seems that the recovery partition is required for OS X to boot. Is that the case? And if so, how can I get it back, without doing a reinstall (or something like Missing Yosemite Recovery Partition). If not, how can I get the system booting again?

Specs (maybe useful)

MacBook Pro 15" (late 2013)
FileVault enabled

Eventually, I fixed it by following a guide I found online (cannot find it anymore). I took a live cd with [TestDisk](http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk), and ran that. It found the deleted partition, and I recreated it withgdisk`. That worked like a charm ;)


How accurate is System Report on RAM speed? I have successfully replaced 2 * 4GB DDR3 1333 MHz RAM (Samsung) with 2 * 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM (CnMemory). Everything runs fine and System Report is displaying the RAM is running at 1600 MHz.

Now I wonder how accurate this report is. I have learned the RAM clock rate is determined by the Front Side Bus (FSB), so I would have expected the new RAM to still work at 1333 MHz instead of now 1600 MHz.

So does System Report report the accurate clock rate of the FSB or does it report the advertised maximum clock rate from the DDR3 RAM somehow?

(I should have done a memory benchmark before the switch, but I really didn't expect these better results).

This depends mostly on the capabilities of the FSB and the RAM itself.  If, for example, you install a 1600 MHz stick next to a 1333 MHz chip, most FSBs will time at 1333 for both, if it is even capable of doing so.  Most FSBs also have a maximum clock speed as you indicated in the comments.

The FSB is not likely fudging the numbers.  There is a chance the 'limit' imposed by KB HT1270 is a soft one.  Though my 2008 MBP had a limit of 2x2GB I ran it for years with 2x4GB sticks.  I couldn't say for certain regarding your specific model, but I'm inclined to disregard this list.

Don't go crazy though, there are some hard limits on the size that will be accommodated, which you've likely reached with your 16GB.

Additionally, in my experience, transitioning from 1333 to 1600 typically doesn't produce noticeable speed increases, though the doubling of the capacity would.  If you're noticing this under moderate load with no paging, it's likely the effects are psychosomatic. :)


Make Finder Windows Tiny Is it possible to set OSX to allow tiny finder windows? The minimum window size on 10.9.5 is 452 x 294.  On a 30" monitor, 452 x 294 is still much larger than I need; wasting screen real estate. On some unix systems the window manager allows the windows to be quite small.

Is this possible on OSX? I've googled, searched Stack Exchange. I'm not finding anything.

This window would be just as useful at half it's current size:

Try View menu…
Hide

Tab Bar
Path Bar
Status Bar
Sidebar
Toolbar

Doing that I can get a window down to this...
about 318 x 224


iPhone 3g with IOS 4.2.1 cycles wifi, cannot connect I'm trying to fix the WiFi on my friends iPhone 3g. It sees all the networks, but I only get "Unable to join network " when I try to connect. So I jailbroke it ;) and installed WiFiFoFum just to see if I could get some more details. And it seems like the phone cycles the wifi drivers or something.

When WiFiFoFum scans the networks, they show up in a list. It does this once every ~3 seconds (it shows a loader when it does). But every 3 or 4 scans, all networks disappear, stay away for about 3 or 4 scans, then pop in again.

Of cource this could be a flaw with WiFiFoFum, but it's very coincidental in that case...

Any suggestions? I'm planning on going in with SSH to see if I can figure out closer what is happening. Should I look for anything special?

EDIT:

Some more info.. I have tried unsecured, wep, wpa and wpa2 protected networks, no difference.

Eliminate the possibility of a software problem by (first backing up and then) restoring to a clean default OS install. It you still can't connect in that state, it's time for a visit to the Genius Bar or a call to AppleCare.


Best way to sync file between iphone and mac I have recently moved from Android to iPhone 7 plus 128 GB and I thought to use this space by transferring files from my Mac to iPhone.

However, I don't know how I dod it. It was easier for Android, just plug the phone and drag-drop.

This may seem like a stupid question but any help is appreciated. I just want to transfer my music files and PDFs (ebooks, other documents).

I would encourage you to adopt iCloud sync unless you can’t allow these files to have their “truth” copy be stored online.

https://www.apple.com/icloud/

In the past - the cloud sync had some cases where it wouldn’t work for very common situations, but now those reservations are all edge cases in my eyes.

You can use your documents folder / desktop folder and expect everything to sync up to the cloud. This includes finder color metadata, smart tags, as well as content and normal metadata (last opened, created, size, etc...)

On iOS - the files app is somewhat basic, but I expect it to iterate rapidly as people decide how to use it and Apple adapts the layout and training so people can use the tools.

The underlying sync seems quite solid in my experience the last 2 years with improvements made each month along the way. I have about 120 GB of files stored and am delighted with the performance now that I have an always-on Mac Mini running iCloud content caching on my home and work networks. Restores of 128 GB to a full iPhone that used to take day(s) now takes hour(s) with most of the restore functional after 60 minutes. You don’t need caching, but it’s there for power users or people with slower network access speeds or worried about restores pushing them over a data usage limit.


AppleScript referencing tabs suddently breaking on Chrome I've been successfully using a script for a long time, which uses Chrome to calculate execute some javascript and return the result.

tell application "Google Chrome"
    tell window 1
        tell tab 1
            [do something here]
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

Today, after many months, I tried editing the script but the AppleScript Editor is refusing to save it (even without any changes, e.g. after typing a space and then deleting it...), showing an error message:

Syntax Error
Expected end of line but found number.

while highlighting the 1 of tab 1 as being the offender...

What is wrong with the latest version of the applescript editor or of Chrome? Any ideas how to work around this problem?

I can actually get your example to work with no problems, just doing something simple:

tell application "Google Chrome"
  tell window 1
    tell tab 1
        get URL
    end tell
  end tell
end tell

That makes me think the problem might be in the "do something here" section of your script—I've never found Applescript's error messages to be very reliable.

That said, you could also try shortening your code:

tell application "Google Chrome"
  tell active tab of first window
    [do something here]
  end tell
end tell

Using my earlier, super simple example, this works for me:

tell application "Google Chrome"
  get URL of active tab of first window
end tell

I should also note that I'm using Script Editor 2.7 (176) on Yosemite 10.10.1


How to use Mouse's Right Click Manually on keyboard? I'm using MacBook Pro. My Apple mouse that I only got last year when I right click on the mouse, nothing happens. I'm supposed to get a delete message so I can "move to trash" or "remove reference" my files. Since my right click on mouse isn't working. How do I get the delete followed by "move to trash" or "remove reference" to appear by clicking what on keyboard?

Use option click.

You can set your mouse to use right click in the System Preferences. Go to the  logo at the top left of your screen to get there. Or click the icon on your dock.


Can I connect an iPad and an Eye-Fi Card? I have the Eye-Fi Pro X2 Card and an iPad. I just wonder if there is a way to transfer pictures from my camera wirelessly without going through the Internet or a real wireless network - basically I want an ad-hoc connection between the iPad and the card.

I do own the iPad camera connection kit which works, but that kinda defeats the purpose of an Eye-Fi Card in the first place :)

Apparently, it's coming soon to Eye-Fi cards, and they will have firmware upgrades for all existing cards..

http://www.eye.fi/press-releases/great-images-and-instant-gratification-with-eye-fis-direct-mode-the-mobile-solution


Transfer of Snow Leopard license from broken MacBook Pro I use a Mac Pro with Lion installed and I own a broken MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard on it. Am I allowed to install Snow Leopard on the Mac Pro in parallel to Lion? The MacBook Pro is totally dead and useless.

If it is a retail copy of Snow Leopard, then yes. If it is a machine copy, then probably not.

It's unlikely you'll have any problems installing it from a licensing perspective, there is no serialisation in Snow Leopard. You may run into strange problems down to the incorrect build of 10.6 for the hardware though as discs that come with machines are machine specific.

Snow Leopard is cheap though, you should buy it if you think you need to!


USB Drives always need to be formatted to delete items I have a MacBook Air running Lion. Issue is I cannot delete things from USB sticks. The icons disappear but if I try to copy something on I get a not enough space error message.

I can format the stick to delete everything, but it seems I must do this every time.

Can anyone help me out?

The next time you have your USB stick plugged in, open up Trash in the Finder, and you'll see the items that you have deleted in the trash. So, although you are "deleting" files from your USB stick, they are still there, and taking up space. You need to delete the trash when the USB stick is plugged in. This will solve your problem, as long as you remember to regularly empty the trash.


Can I create an OSX image to install after a disk format/7-pass I often do a secure pass (usually 7) once a month on my Macbook, for privacy reasons and my job.

But, it's annoying that I have to continue to reinstall my applications each time. It is possible to some how create an image of a OS with my applications already installed?

Surely this must be possible because large companies would likely have a master disk so every installation has the pre installed software needed.

How is this possible?

Im running an early 2014 MBP.

funny, i just did this the other day.

you can use disc utility to clone drives at any time (the "restore" tab, far right). instructions here: http://nyacomputing.com/how-to-create-a-bootable-clone-of-your-mac-hard-drive/

so the next time you wipe your drive, perform your fresh install of OS X (assuming current mavericks, 10.9.5) and install all your apps just the way you like them. when you have everything configured just right, use disc utility to clone the system drive to an external.

so what do you do next time after you wipe your machine, to get it all back to normal? using OS X's new "recovery mode" (available from lion 10.7 on, just boot while holding cmd+R) it's possible copy your clone back onto the system drive, but without being run 'inside' your current OS X installation. recovery mode is run from an invisible, secure partition on your boot HDD.

you use the restore function, but in reverse. copy your clone over to your system HDD.

cheers,


Replaced iPhone 8 Battery, Now Home Button is Dead My battery life was getting pretty poor, but my phone was fully functional otherwise. So I ordered a new one on ifixit it and replaced it.
It was not the first iPhone battery I've replaced and it was pretty easy to do. But when I reassembled it, the home button is now dead. Dead in every way. It doesn't perform any function when you push it, it doesn't read you fingerprint, and it gives no taptic feedback.
Important to note, I did not disconnect any of that stuff to do the battery. I dislodged the screen, tipped it up, and easily did the battery without taking all those parts out.
I did turn the phone on before reinstalling the display. I read afterwards that that can disable the home button on older iPhones, but I'm not sure if that applies to the 8.
I did take the phone apart again, twice. Checked all connectors, they're all great. Theres nothing obvious I can see. I did several hard resets, no affect. I also removed the battery again for a few minutes to fully reset the device.
Any other ideas what could have happened, and how I can try to fix?

You have a couple options.  For diagnosing the issue you could buy a new display to see if that is the issue, or buy a new home button called the JC home button.  It will not restore Touch ID, but it will tell you if the screen cables are broken, or the home button itself.
Before you do any of that, try using the old battery again to see if your home button works again.  Also take off the display and reseat the display cables.
I have replaced several batteries on iPhones and have never had that issue, so I'm guessing a cable isn't seated correctly or a ribbon wire got torn.


24" imac from 2008 as a monitor for macbook pro The iMac does only have a mini displayport output. And it does it not have target mode, but if I upgrade my iMac's OS to X Yosemite, will target mode come with it? If so, Will I at that point be able to use thunderbolt-connection or something to get my iMac to work as a second monitor for my macbook pro?

I'm afraid not.
It is hardware-dependent, not software.

The earliest model to support Target Display Mode was the Late 2009 iMac.

See : Use your iMac as a display with Target Display Mode


Unable to Run Update From 10.7 Lion to 10.11 El Capitan I recently reinstalled OS X, which with my MacBook Pro (2012 Model) meant that it grabbed Lion from internet recovery. It successfully installed, and I installed some updates, but when it comes to upgrading to Mavericks or El Capitan, the App Store crashes, the download shows up in the Launchpad screen, but never downloads or even tries to download, and I'm left wondering why. Every google search reveals something similar, but nothing exact.

I've tried signing out and signing in again, I've tried enabling debug and clearing cookies and resetting the app store, I've even copied and deleted the com.appstore.plist and com.apple.appstore.plist.

I'm at my wits end here. If not for the fact that I use OS X, I would wipe it and install Linux in it's stead. Any help would be appreciated.

UPDATE:

Per the request of J.C., I've run the download with the console open to get some diagnostic information. Here are the two lines that show up in the console when I start the app store and download El Capitan.

5/6/16 10:24:02.302 AM com.apple.SecurityServer: Failed to authorize right 'system.install.apple-software' by client '/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PackageKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/installd' [266] for authorization created by '/Applications/App Store.app' [259]

5/6/16 10:24:02.324 AM com.apple.SecurityServer: Failed to authorize right 'system.install.software' by client '/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PackageKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/installd' [266] for authorization created by '/Applications/App Store.app' [259]

Alright, so it turns out that a stick of RAM had gone bad, but OS X didn't see that it had gone bad. I ended up testing both sticks to make sure that one of them worked, and now I've successfully installed Lion, and upgraded it to El Capitan. Thanks for the suggestions.


How to downgrade to OS X Yosemite 10.10? (Have not yet upgraded) I have a 2015 iMac 5k running OS X Yosemite 10.10.x. I've always been nervous about upgrading an expensive machine. Now I am curious about upgrading, but I would like to find an option that would allow me to roll back to my current set up if I did.

I am aware of several options referenced online, and which I used to be familiar with, but I wonder which are relevant to me and which really would support rolling back to OS X Yosemite 10.10.

Time Machine: I take backups to an external USB, but I am not clear whether this keeps an OS backup, whether there is an option to restore the OS and, if so, whether that would also restore files. I suspect an OS downgrade is not possible and that Time Machine's forte is file and app backups.
Recovery Partition: I recall, from an exercise with a MacBook Air, the notion that my machine might have a Recovery Partition. Does it? If so, which OS is stored on it - e.g. The one shipped, or the current one? If I upgrade, what does the Recovery Partition then contain? How is it restored and, again, can you restore only the OS underneath files, and/or would this erase the whole disk?
Recovery Disk Assistant: I recall this and I think I did it with a MacBook Air - the idea that you can make a bootable USB disk containing your OS, and can restore it. This seems to appeal as it seems to be a way to snapshot my current OS. But is it still a thing? I recall reading it was Lion-specific (?). How is it made/restored - through?
OS X Recovery/macOS Recovery: I believe booting to this contains options "Restore from Time Machine Backup", (see above) "Reinstall macOS" (really, only the OS, and from where?), "Get help online" and "Disk Utility" (for manually erasing the drive and then picking one of the aforementioned options?)
Bootable Installer: Now I see pages about creating one of these for Mavericks or Yosemite. Looks more technical, on the command line. But again seems to employ using an external drive to make a backup, and restored via macOS Recovery after selection via Startup Manager or Startup Disk preferences (?).
Over-the-Internet OS download - I can't recall in which scenarios an OS version would be pulled from the internet rather than from either a partition or a USB source, for example.

What is right for me?

I am concerned about upgrading to Mojave or lower (?) and having no way back. It is often the case with Apple that, whilst docs make clear something is possible, there is a catch - eg. Not being able to roll back THAT for, or a feature supported/deprecated only for a particular version. Which of the above options are supported by which OS version is a bit of a black box, in my opinion.

Ideally, I'd have an option to roll back the OS underneath the files or, failing that, to roll back to a snapshot of both.

Now I am curious about upgrading, but I would like to find an option that would allow me to roll back to my current set up if I did.

You can use Internet recovery to rollback to the factory installed version of macOS. From the Apple Support document, How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery:

macOS Recovery makes it easy to reinstall the Mac operating system, even if you need to erase your startup disk first. All you need is a connection to the Internet. If a wireless network is available, you can choose it from the Wi-Fi  menu in the menu bar. This menu is also available in macOS Recovery.
Shift-Option-⌘-R
Install the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available.

Do note to keep a Time Machine backup of handy. Once you have restored the original OS, you can recover data using the backup. Also, it's best to test the sanity of the backup before actually reinstalling the OS.


Mavericks Mail will not save preferences I have the updated version of Mail, and still having Gmail problems, but one problem at a time here… Currently the headache is that it will not save any preferences: window layout, junk mail filtering off, etc. Every time I quit and re-launch it is back to default settings. Any suggestions?

Make sure that all the permissions are correct on your home folder.
You can use the ACL tool on the Recovery HD to do this:

Boot into the Recovery HD using ⌘R.
Run resetpassword in Terminal (available from Utilities → Terminal).
Select your account from the drop-down list.
Click the Reset button for Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs.


macos disable power cpu throttling I have a faulty battery in my Macbook Pro. Battery status is stuck at 2% and shows as "no charging".
I believe this is causing my CPU to be throttled, pmset -g thermlog outputs this:
Note: No thermal warning level has been recorded
Note: No performance warning level has been recorded
CPU Power notify
    CPU_Scheduler_Limit     = 100
    CPU_Available_CPUs  = 8
    CPU_Speed_Limit     = 50

Since the battery is already dead, I just want to either disable the battery or disable the throttling feature.
Is there a way to do this via software? I know I can probably open the laptop and unplug the battery but want to first try a software alternative.

It makes sense that the machine will throttle if the battery is dead, because the charger is not capable of delivering on-demand high power throughput - that's the battery's job.
The fix is… a new battery.
I don't know whether this is technically bypassable, but if you do, then whenever high power is required, the mac will just hard-crash.


Trackpad tap to click malfunction I have been having issues with my trackpad lately and I believe that I have a broken trackpad sensor, but I thought I would ask here to see if it was something to do with the software instead of the hardware.

Lately my trackpad has been acting like tap to click is on even though I have disabled it. If I place my finger on the trackpad it believes that I am holding the button down even though I have not clicked. It also acts as if I am dragging windows if I place my pointer over the top bar of a program and hold my finger down, it allows me to drag the window.

Does this sound more like a worn out trackpad? Or is there somewhere in the software that has gone wrong.

Steps I have tried so far.

Removing all launch agents and daemons and booting without any external drivers loading.
Enabling and re-disabling tap to click in system preferences.

Hardware:

  Model Name:              MacBook Air
  Model Identifier:        MacBookAir5,2
  Processor Name:          Intel Core i5
  Processor Speed:         1.8 GHz
  Number of Processors:    1
  Total Number of Cores:   2
  L2 Cache (per Core):     256 KB
  L3 Cache:                3 MB
  Memory:                  4 GB
  Boot ROM Version:        MBA51.00EF.B02
  SMC Version (system):    2.5f9
  Serial Number (system):  C02JQESPDRVC
  Hardware UUID:           8B45B512-A976-5FB4-877F-5E2F3D448BCB

Thanks,
Skylar

I suggest you book an appointment with an Apple genius.

I have had a Magic trackpad for my iMac for a couple of years.

But stated to get the same issues you have around the time I installed 10.8.5 ( or one of the later updates )
 An additional issues was in any app that text could be selected the track pad would do so randomly and of it's own accord.

I thought it could be be the software and tried all manner of things.
Killing the plist included.

But the problem persisted into my install of 10.9.

I finally took it to a genius two weeks ago who agreed the issue was most likely hardware.

They replaced the Magic trackpad with a new one and I have not had any problems since.

So I think to save yourself some time and frustration book an appointment.
Also  because it is a trackpad on a MacBook Air  they should be able to run proper diagnostics and they should be able to sort it one way or other.


SSH to sleeping MacBook If my MacBook (2011 MBA) is sleeping (with the lid closed) is it possible to connect to it via SSH?

Sadly no, it is not possible to go out of sleep with the lid closed as mentioned by XQYZ at https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/15564/8289


How to make an AppleScript to automatically translate emails from a foreign language and redirect them to yourself? I receive many emails in Japanese everyday (I am living in Japan). Some are spam but some are important. I would like to have an AppleScript to do the following

Translate the email (with google translate for example)
Forward back the translated email to my own email account

In this way, I will save the time to translate every email every day to understand which one is important and which one is not...

I think this can be done with AppleScript. I can make a rule in Mail to run an AppleScript every time that I receive a message from a certain mail account. I checked and it worked. But the problem is I am not able to write the AppleScript. I am not familiar with AppleScript, and honestly, I don't know where to start!

Edit:
Alternatively, the translation can be also done with another software, which can be installed locally. Free or non free software does not matter.

I've created an automator workflow that uses AppleScript and Bash to do what you want.

There are two steps to implementation:

install translate-shell
create an automator workflow (very easy)
create a shortcut [optional]

You could probably use steps 1-2 to make a more specifically tailored applescript to copy the entire email and translate it, but I made a sample workflow that you could use just in case.

1: installation

translate-shell uses a number of different engines to translate using terminal. You don't have to understand most of this, just that you'll be using terminal to install it.

Go to the github page and install it: There are many ways to do this, but here is one

install homebrew: in terminal, type the following line: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)" and hit enter
install gawk: in terminal, type brew install gawk and hit enter
install trans-shell by typing in the following lines (see the website for troubleshooting):

git clone https://github.com/soimort/translate-shell
cd translate-shell/
make
make install (if this line doesn't work, try sudo make install and then type in your password.

Everything should now be installed in step 1

2: create an automator workflow – this is where the applescript is

Open automator (all macs have it pre-installed)
Select "Quick Action"
click the button that says "Workflow receives current 'Automatic (text)'" at the top and change it to 'text'
in the search bar "Name" search for "run applescript" and then double click the action that appears.
paste in the following script exactly as shown:

on run {input, parameters}
    tell application "System Events"
        key code 8 using command down
    end tell
    set theText to the clipboard
    set theTranslation to (do shell script "export PATH=\"/usr/local/bin:$PATH\";/usr/local/bin/trans -b :en " & quoted form of theText)
    display dialog theTranslation
end run
the applescript copies whatever text you have highlighted and uses a bash command to have translate-shell translate the text to English and display it.
save the workflow wherever and now you should be able to highlight any text in any app, right click > services > "your workflow name" to have a dialogue pop up with the translated text

3: Create a shortcut

If you'd rather highlight and use a shortcut, just create a shortcut to activate the workflow and translate any highlighted text. It's well documented in many places, but here's one stack exchange post where you can find the information.

Notes:

please let me know if you have any issues. Automator sometimes fights with apple's permissions, so you may have to grant it approval etc. I imagine, however, that if you know what applescripts are, you have run into this before.
I had a decent bit of trouble installing translate-shell and also tried using this command: brew install --HEAD translate-shell which is worth a shot
I often just use Keyboard Maestro for things like this. It works very well.
don't forget to mark the answer if this works :)
credit:

https://github.com/soimort/translate-shell/wiki/AppleScript
https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/gui-for-translate-shell/8868


How to run /sbin/fsck -fy on the recovery partition if filesystem is unknown Disk utility says that there is an unknown filesystem on my harddisk. The main (and only OS) partition seems okay, though.

I also checked this via /sbin/fsck -fy in terminal.

Unfortunately, this command just checks /dev/disk0s2, which is the main partition. I would like to check disk0s3 since I suspect my recovery partition to be broken.

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *4.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS iMac HD                 4.0 TB     disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot                         577.3 MB   disk0s3

I take no responsibility for what happens to your mac. The command line can destroy your working computer. Fsk can fix things better than disk utility though.
If you agree, open terminal on your the mac.

To repair disks first find their disk identifiers. They are all different.
In the terminal type without quotes "diskutil list"

In the left-hand column, you will see all identifiers for the drives unmounted and mounted. it will look like this disk2b1, put this in the the diskabc position below.

In the "sudo /sbin/fsck -fy /dev/diskABC"

Type your password for best effect! You will not see the characters of the password so type well.


Can I show keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) on Mac OS X? When I right-click on a link in Firefox in Mac OS X, I get a menu like this:

Now most of these items have keyboard shortcuts, so I can quickly press a single key instead of moving the mouse to a specific item. For example:

t = Open Link in New Tabk = Save Link As... etc.

However I have no easy way of finding out what they are.

Is there a way to highlight or visualize these shortcuts, for example by underlining them like this:

 (photoshopped example)

This is also how Windows does it. Something like that possible on Mac as well?

P.S. This doesn't specifically relate to Firefox, just took this as an example but I would love to see keyboard shortcuts in general.

You can see system keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts (or by searching Google).

For keyboard shortcuts that correspond to menu items, they can be seen in the menus at the top of the screen, across from their corresponding commands.

Regarding the contextual menu, I just tested with the Desktop, Google Chrome and Apple's Messages. Pressing a letter takes me to the first item that starts with that letter. (For items that start with the same letter, also type the second [and third, etc.] letter to jump to the correct item.)

I don't believe Firefox's behavior is normal on Mac, so I would say filing a bug report with Firefox would be the most appropriate course of action. I'd think changing to how the rest of the OS works would be ideal. Short of that, putting the shortcut right-aligned across from the corresponding item would work best, since that would match how menu bar menus work.


How much does Hardware Growler affect performance? I'm interested in knowing how much Hardware Growler affects performance.

My MacBook's performance at some of point in time became terrible and I could not figure out the reason. The Beachball of Death was spinning most of the time and I was thinking of getting a new machine because the current one was almost unusable.

I thought that the problem was related to hardware as the Activity Monitor was not showing any intensive CPU usage. Finally, I had a brainwave and removed Hardware Growler and all my performance problems went away.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem or would be helped by this observation.

If anyone knows the exact reason why this would be that would be a bonus.

Seems like I just had the same effect on Mountain Lion. The computer was so slow that I started to prepare for a reinstall of ML. The machine just hung for minutes just as described here. When I disabled Hardware Growler (newest version from the Mac App Store), performance went up again as if it were a fresh installation!
I will keep an eye on this...


How can I run an app, when using the full path? I need to start an app from another app with just one command on macOS. So, I can't use cd to get to the right path.

I just need to run the app with the full path like: /my/path/to/app/myapp -parameter1 1 -parameter2

Is this even possible on macOS? (I would like to avoid to install the app.)
So cd and then execute is not possible because of:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4884681/how-to-use-cd-command-using-java-runtime

Just at the dot at the beggining of the multilevel path : ./my/path/to/app/myapp Dot refers to the current dir. Or you can use absolute path from the root of your disk without the dot like /Users/Me/my/path/to/app/myapp Or if it is a jar file (you mentioned that it is Java app) you can start it as java -jar /my/path/to/app/myapp


How to import miniDV videos without iMovie over USB? I have an old Panasonic camcorder (model PV-GS35) that uses miniDV. It has a USB port for connecting to a computer. However, I cannot for the life of me get it to connect to my MacBook Pro running Mojave. iMovie does not see the camcorder. I have tried LifeFlix DV Importer and iSkySoft Video Converter. Nothing sees the camcorder.

I've Googled this to death and cannot find anything that will work. I've also looked here, on StackExchange with no luck. Does anyone have any ideas how I can get video off of the miniDV and into a digital file? Besides a miniDV conversion service? :)

Thanks for any suggestions.

It's most likely that the support that was built into macOS (OS X 10.1 through 10.3) is no longer available in current versions of macOS.  From the PV-GS35 User Manual (page 45):

  For Macintosh  OS:  Mac OS X v 10.1 – X v 10.3  CPU: iMac, iBook or Power Book G4, Power Mac G4 or Power Mac G5  RAM:
   64 MB or more
  The USB equipment operates with the driver installed as standard in OS.

The driver is obviously obsolete given that the only listed support is for PPC based Macs. It's a very good bet you're not going to find driver support for Intel based machines.

Unfortunately, this device doesn't show up as a camera and you will need software to not only extract the images/movies, but to control the camera as well.  I ran into this very same problem with a Sony camcorder and the only way I was able pull the videos off the camcorder via USB (to ensure the highest quality) was to light up a Windows computer, install the software and extract my videos.    The other option is to use a video capture device and get it via the analog input/outputs.


How can I enlarge the cursor? My mom is a devoted Apple laptop user. She's 95, and she finds it increasingly hard to find the cursor, so she lets her thumb wander around on the trackpad until she can spot it moving around. While doing so, she wreaks havoc with her dock and other things. Is there a way to make the cursor larger, red, or something so she can see it better?

Go to System Preferences/Universal Access, select the Mouse & Trackpad tab and set the mouse cursor as big as you want.


"SecurID" will damage your computer? Today I've just started getting a warning dialog when I try to run the RSA SecurID app:

This is a Java app I believe. I use it to authenticate when I connect to my company's private network. I've been running Catalina (10.15.3) for some time but this has only just started happening today (after a reboot, FWIW).

Unlike previous Gatekeeper interventions there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to circumvent this warning and run the app, which is problematic as I can't work remotely without it.

UPDATE:

As suggested in the comments below, I downloaded and installed SecurID 4.2.1, and I now get a similar error message:

I had this same issue come up today - there must be some definition added to these scanners that's picking up the SecurID app. On one laptop, I was able to resolve it with just step 2 and 3 below but on another, I had to do the first as well. Since you're getting the stauto32.framework error, you'll probably need both steps like I did.

Step 1 - Delete the existing stauto32.framework folder - found  at /Library/Frameworks/stauto32.framework

Step 2 - Download and run the 4.2.1 installer for the software token from RSA to upgrade or ensure the right things are all installed where they should be

Step 3 - open the info panel of the SecurID application in the Applications folder and check the 'Override Malware Protection' box

After that, when you run the app, it will ask for your password to access its various pieces stores in the Keychain and will also request access to a couple disk folders used in importing new tokens.

I hope that works for you as it did in our case!


Menu bar finder scripts always missing I've added several automator applications to the scripts editor folder and I'd like them to be available at all times in the menu bar dropdown menu.

However they're only available in the Finder Scripts section of the dropdown menu only when the Finder window is open. If I close all finder windows then the Find Scripts section disappears from the drop down menu.

How can I keep my customs applications / scripts visible at all times in the dropdown menu?

My first thought would be to create them as Automator Services (or Quick Actions in macOS Mojave and above).

Doing this will then add them to the Services menu available within all apps. For example, if you created a Service called Duplicate Folder, you coudl run that from the Services list within any Application menu (e.g. Finder > Services, Safari > Services, TextEdit > Services, etc).

Create a service using Automator

This is an example of how to create a service in Automator that runs an AppleScript code:

Launch Automator (usually found within your Applications folder)
Go to File > New
Select Service and click Choose (Note: in macOS Mojave and above, select the Quick Action option)
In the top right hand of the window that appears, ensure that "No input" is selected from the Service receives drop-down list
Ensure the In drop-down list is showing "Any application"
In the second column containing the long list, find "Run AppleScript" and double-click on it
This will add the Run AppleScript window on the right
Now, replace the (* Your script goes here *) bit with your script
Save the service using a meaningful name

Now you should be able to run that service from any application as described above, that is from the Services list within any Application menu.

Of course, at Step 6 you can select different options depending on what type of script you want to run.


RAM upgrade for a macbook pro late 2011 I have a macbook pro late 2011.

At this moment I am running the basic 2x 2GB 1333MHz rams ,but I want to upgrade.

Now,I have read on some forum that this macbook can run 1600MHz rams even though Apple sold it with 1333MHz rams.

Any ideas what's up with this?I am a bit confused at this point as I don't know what to buy.

Also, are Kingston memory sticks good?I had a kingston SSD a few months ago and it was just great ,but don't know about rams.

You can go with 8GB or 16GB. I have 16GB in my late-2011 MBP 15 inch. As I recall they are Crucial 1333mhz. No problems, she runs fast and sweet.


Yet another path question I created a Ruby file called Player.rb in the following path:
Jwan/studio_game

Jwan is my name so I think Jwan is my user file.

How do I permanently add the path to the terminal so I don't have to type in pwd and cd commands everytime I open the terminal?

Also, what does the code below do. I tried finding the answer myself but I do not understand what the code below does. What parts of the code below do I replace?

export PATH=/users/ophir/android-sdks/tools:$PATH

First of all I'd confirm that path. I believe the full path might be "/User/Jwan/studio_game". Type ls -al /User/Jwan/studio_game into a Terminal window and see if it lists your file.

Assuming that works, then within the Terminal you could use the following command to add that location to your PATH variable. Then open a new Terminal window (or a new tab within the existing one) and the change should have taken effect.

  echo export PATH='/User/Jwan/studio_game:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile

And just to explain that command...

echo says to write whatever follows to standard output.
export says you want to export a variable.
PATH is the name of the variable you want to export.
$PATH refers to the existing variable.
>> redirects standard output to a file. >> appends to the file if it exists, or creates it if it doesn't. > on its own would replace the file if it already existed.
~ represents your home folder which I assume is /Users/Jwan.
.bash_profile is a file that is loaded whenever you open a new Bash session that can be used to run various commands to set up variables the most common being the PATH variable.


Deleted almost everything from MacBook Air (2014) and still no storage? Last night, I was working on Photoshop and it said my scratch disc was full which, after looking it up, meant my startup disc was full. I went through and deleted a good 95% of my photos, all the apps I never use that MacBook doesn't deem necessary (because Chess is very necessary), a lot of my documents, etc., etc., etc. After that, PhotoShop worked for me.

I was working on it again today, and it said my startup disc is almost full once again? Hardly anything has changed last night. What does this mean/what do I do?

Reinstall macOS

It looks like cached system files are what's causing your storage problem. Reinstalling macOS will not delete any personal information or files, but resets all system files and restored deleted system apps.

here's what Apple says about reinstalling macOS. I've reformatted the directions below to make your life easier:

Start by pressing the appropriate key combination for what you need. I suggest Command-R:

Now, using macOS utilities, select Reinstall macOS:

Simply wait until the download and install is complete and your cached files should be cleared, solving your problem.


Opendirectoryd too many corpses being created I had this problem when I was on High Sierra, so I copied my files on a hard drive and installed El Capitan. I'm just curious now — was that error recoverable? What I did: reset VRAM, reset SMC, repair startup disc, reinstall MacOS, fix file system and nothing helped.

This solution worked for my MacBook Pro: https://mrsystems.co.uk/blogs/news/too-many-corpses-being-created

Steps from the article:

  boot and hold cmd-R to start up from macOS Recovery
  If Filevault is on, mount the disk with Disk Utility and password
  Run these two in Terminal
  cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/var/db/caches/opendirectory
  mv ./mbr_cache ./mbr_cache-old
  Restart


Does the iPad 1 have voice control? I have the iPad 1, and I'd like to use Voice Control on it. However, I can't seem to bring it up the normal way (holding down the home button). Does the iPad 1 have Voice Control?

No, voice control is not native to iPad 1.


Is making an IPA possible to extract resources like sound files from AppStore Apps? Yesterday my brother in law ask me a notification sound of the Photo Lab. I guess if I could download this application and change the ipa extension to zip and extract it, then I can find the notification sound that my brother in law ask me.

So: Is it possible to have ipa file of this app?

Actually: I wanna have the notification sound of Photo Lab

Install Apple Configurator 2 from the Mac App Store.
Open it and go to account at the top and sign-in using your Apple ID (the same Apple ID as on your iPhone):

Download the app on your iPhone
Connect your iPhone to your Mac and click Trust on the Trust This Computer prompt and enter your password
Let Apple Configurator 2 load your device as follows:

Go to add then app and select Photo Lab in the list
It will say the app is already installed and will display the following message, don't touch anything just leave the message open:

Go to Finder, go ⇧ + ⌘ + G and paste the following:

~/Library/Group Containers/K36BKF7T3D.group.com.apple.configurator/Library/Caches/Assets/TemporaryItems/MobileApps

Move this to your desktop
Rename the .ipa to .zip and unpack it. The .caf files are in Payload/pho.to.app.

(Alternatively, if this doesn't work you can email it to a Windows computer download 7-zip and extract it there)
Go to the .app file
Look for the relevant files, I looked through all the files and found two of particular interest:

ff7_notification.caf
beuty_notification.caf

I think these are the right files.

To save the hassle I have uploaded them to my Google Drive


What would happen if I deleted AdSheet.app and iAdOptOut.app (iOS) I have an iPhone 6s, jailbroken running iOS 10.3.3. In /Applications/, there are two apps, one named AdSheet and the other names iAdOptOut. What would happen if I deleted these with terminal? Would I no longer get adds?

If you deleted those apps, you would only not be able to get ads provided by Apple's AdSheet API. Apple doesn't support this API anymore, so it would only affect a very limited number of old(er) apps.


How to monitor CPU core usage? I have a Macbook Pro 15" with the quad core i7. I am looking to see what if any performance decrease I could expect moving to a 13" Macbook Pro with a dual core i7. To that end I thought Activity Monitor might be able to show how many cores are being utilized while I run through various tasks (VMWare, Photoshop, etc ..).

Does anyone know how to display core usage via Activity Monitor?

You can get a graph per core to show by going to Window on the menu bar and selecting Cpu Usage or Cpu History. There is also an option under the View menu to place a similar graph in Activity Monitor's dock icon.

If you're using a reasonably new Mac, Hyper Threading is enabled, so you'll see twice as many graphs as you have physical cores.


iPhone mail doesn't show email address anymore I used to be able to click the name of the sender or the recipient and it brings up the contact information with the sender/recipient's email address highlighted in blue if I have multiple email addresses saved for the contact. It doesn't do this anymore. How do I enable it again?

Clicking on the sender or recipient name from within an e-mail header of the iOS Mail app opens the contact information page. This is extremely unfortunate because sometimes a contact can have several e-mail addresses associated with it. In these cases, it is impossible to determine the recipient/ sender e-mail address from within the iOS mail app.

The only fix for this issue is to use a different mail app which doesn't coddle its users in such helpful ways.


Which encryption algorithm do external hard drives use? if external data carriers are encrypted via the Finder, which encryption do you use?

They are encrypted with the AES encryption algorithm.
After you have encrypted the external disk, you can open Terminal and run this command to check the encryption:
diskutil cs list

It will show the disk, and then something like this in the output:

    Encryption Type:         AES-XTS

Here AES-XTS means that the main encryption algorithm is AES, and that the XTS block cipher mode is used.
The XTS block cipher mode is used primarily to prevent that identical blocks of data (for example "never used space") encrypts into the same encrypted value. This is done by actually having 2 AES keys and a process where the data is continuously "tweaked" specifically to avoid such a problem.
If you have chosen to format the drive as APFS and not HFS+, then it won't show up when running the above mentioned command. You can check if that is the case by running:
diskutil apfs list

This will show the disk as being APFS formatted. However, it won't show you which encryption type is being used on the drive.


How to connect Apple Magic Mouse to iPhone iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 10.3.2 public beta 5. Is it possible to connect Apple Magic Mouse 2 to my iPhone without jailbreaking? I've managed to connect Apple Magic Keyboard 2 to iPhone earlier.

Without jailbreaking, iOS does not have mouse support.


Mac office 2011 keep asking me to save doc that I didn't make change Sometime I just open a doc for viewing, Mac office 2011 keep asking me to save doc that I didn't make change. I've been experiencing this gimmick for the last 12 months. And it got to stop since it was so annoying.

My office build id 14.0.0 (100825) FYR

This is in fact not supposed to happen if you haven't changed a thing in the  document. I have experienced this myself some time ago, if I remember correctly.

To troubleshoot this, I recommend deleting the Word preference file and, of course, to install the current Office 2011 update. 14.0.0 is the 'virgin' first release. Those are usually laden with bugs, quirks, and vulnerabilities which only get corrected with subsequent updates – the current update version is 14.2.3!

Quit all Office applications.
In the Finder, go to the top menu bar and choose Go > Go to Folder (or press Cmd-Shift-G.) Then type or copy-paste following exact folder path into the input field:

~/Library/Preferences
Drag the files com.microsoft.Word.plist and com.microsoft.Word.plist.lockfile into the trash. Then launch Word again to check if the problem is gone.

To update Office: Open Word, go into the Help menu and chose 'Check for Updates'. You can also download update packages and install them manually –  download from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/download


Java applications (eg.Netbeans&Eclipse) constantly quit unexpectedly After upgrading to Lion and installed the Java runtime for Lion, Netbeans and Eclipse became very unstable. They quit unexpectedly very frequently.

I tried reinstalling Java, I tried reinstalling Netbeans & Eclipse, I tried different versions of both programs. I cleared caches, deleted related files and folders, etc.

I posted a crash report here.

versions tried:

java version "1.6.0_26"
Eclipse 3.6.2
Netbeans 6.9
Netbeans 7.0
Netbeans 7.1

Anybody got a suggestion?

I use Eclipse (64 Bits) latest Indigo version on Lion and I don't have those crashes.

Your Crashlog comes from a Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) which is usually:

A bug in the code (failure to release/retain/etc.) when coding in obj-c (very common).
A Memory problem (RAM) (hardware).

Given that Eclipse is written in Java (which has Garbage Collection and therefore doesn't suffer from EXC_BAD_ACCESS, as far as I know), I'd say you check your RAM, you might be having a hardware problem that manifests when "memory intensive" (to put it nicely) programs execute.


macOS Catalina File Structure: Cannot remove > sudo rmdir /sw
rmdir: /sw: Read-only file system

> mount | grep read
/dev/disk1s5 on / (apfs, local, read-only, journaled)

> sudo mount -o rw /
> mount
/dev/disk1s5 on / (apfs, local, journaled)
> sudo rmdir /sw
rmdir: /sw: Operation not permitted

root />$ mkdir a
root />$ rmdir a
root />$ rmdir sw
rmdir: sw: Operation not permitted
root />$ rmdir opt
rmdir: opt: Operation not permitted
root />$ rmdir mnt
rmdir: mnt: Operation not permitted
root />$ rmdir home
rmdir: home: Operation not permitted

What exactly is preventing me from removing these directories even with SIP disabled?

Apple documented that the system will be read only publicly during wwdc.

https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2019/710aunvynji5emrl/710/710_whats_new_in_apple_file_systems.pdf

You can read more in the public videos and apple developer / beta / seeding discussion forums and possibly in whatever release notes came with how you obtained your beta build of macOS.

I don’t have a system to test, but use the same ls command as on Mojave and earlier to check flags and you might find these are protected via SIP and you would need to disable SIP to make temporary changes as an admin. The video says you can disable SIP and make changes, but the protection is engaged again after every restart and updates should be expected to replace and repair any altered files.


How to make brew installed software take effect over the manually installed one? I have an older version of software that I once manually installed through installation package (version 0.6.6 -- I write it down here for later discussion purpose, but the version number is not relevant to this question).

Now I found brew is better why to manage the update/upgrade etc. So, I use brew to install the software by doing brew install terraform (version 0.6.9 -- again, I write it down here for later discussion purpose, but the version number is not relevant to this question), which is all good so far.

However, when I do terraform version to query the current effective version, I found it's still the old version.

My question is how I can make the brew installed software take over.

A side question is that which I try to find out terraform's location, by run which terra (hit tab now), which I normally do for other software, the tab won't do the auto complete action for me. Why is that?

The easiest solution would be to simply delete the old version of the software.

If you want to keep both, you'll need to change your $PATH environment variable so that the location of the new version appears before the location of the old version. Do this by editing ~/.bash_profile.


Can a book stored in Kindle be saved as a file on my iMac. Would like to open in Calibre I bought a Kindle version of a reference book from Amazon. The Kindle reader for the iMac is not my favorite application and I would like to load the book in Calibre and possibly save as a PDF. Or just read it using Calibre. Does anyone know if this is possible?

In a word yes.

you can connect your Kindle to your Mac and browse through the filesystem and find the books folder and copy the files out.

I have found, however, that the files stored on the Kindle itself are kind of similar to a macOS package format. EG a folder full of files. Rather than deal with that I just logged onto my Amazon account, went to my Kindle purchases and selected a book I want to download. Books being rather small things as downloads go they come across quickly.

And then you have an ".azw" file which is got Amazon's DRM on it. Which means you can only read it on a Kindle signed in to your Amazon account or a Kindle app on another device that is signed in to your Amazon Account.

That can be bypassed, but is beyond the scope of what we can do on AskDifferent. But if you want a hint, google for something like remove DRM from azw files with Calibre. It's not simple but once set up you don't even have to think about it.


Installing HomeBrew `.app` on M1 I am using MBA M1 with macOS Big Sur v11.2.1.
Recently discovered that the program mpv is now available natively for M1 macs through brew. When I do brew install mpv then mpv is surely installed and it is indeed native to M1. But the problem is that there is no .app for it and everytime I want to run a video I have to necessarily open terminal and do mpv \path\ to\ file which I want to avoid. So, searching around I found that the new way to do this is to use the --cask option. But when I do an install using the said option, mpv is the Intel version.
How do I get the native version to work as a regular app? As I understand it, cask option is merely combining all the files into an .app format and it should not really affect anything. In fact, one should be able to do this fairly easily, without using cask, given the right kind of information. Please help me get this working.

Your last point of cask combining the files misses one key step. Someone else has to do the work to assemble and package that app. Homebrew doesn't do that assembly automagically.
I've installed mpv on three machines and your results are the same as I get - Intel Big Sur has a cask, M1 does not. Both get the command line binary.
Unless and until someone sends a pull request to add an M1 version of the cask for this package, you'll want to use a different tool or installation method.


iTunes Connect data not updating since 2 days? UPDATE: "Please note that data for Feb 3rd and Feb 4th is currently incomplete.  We are working to correct the issue and apologize for the inconvenience."
Sometimes pops up now. In the notification, only the 3rd was mentioned before, but now apprently they updated the message.

former question:

The statistics in iTunes Connect seem to be stuck on the 2nd of February. Am I the only one to experience this? Haven't found any other recent posts about this yet.

I already tried another browser, this is what I see:

I've have the same problem on the webpage but on the iPhone app the service works fine.


Is it possible to use a Google Voice Number for Apple Two Factor Authentication I keep getting prompts to 'upgrade' my account security to use 2 factor authentication.
The reason I am hesitating using my real phone number for unlocking my devices is because I don't want to be in a situation when I am traveling internationally and am unable to unlock my computer.
So far it seems I have only a few options :

Get another Apple device, like an iPhone SE or the base model iPad, for the sole purpose of unlocking my account and take it with me everywhere I go internationally.

Use a Google voice number which I could associate with a local number while travelling, to help me receive a 'roaming SMS'.

If I can figure out a reasonable solution to this, I may consider changing the security settings.
I wish Apple would just provide an app based authenticator like Google and Microsoft.
EDIT:
It seems from the answers and comments that computer accounts and iCloud (online) accounts are kept separate despite the push for 2 factor authentication.
This is really encouraging, but I will do some more research on the changes before switching.

Unlocking your computer when using 2-factor authentication for iCloud does not require being able to receive a text message at all.
When you enable 2-factor authentication for the very first time, you'll be asked to enter a phone number where you receive a confirmation code via either text or voice (your choice).
Now in the future when you want to login to for example www.icloud.com, the 2-factor code will popup on your computer automatically. It will not require receiving a text message or voice call.
This works using a similar technique as app based authenticators like the Google Authenticator app and the Microsoft Authenticator app, namely that a secret is stored on your device and that enables you to generate 2-factor codes on this particular device. It does not however follow the TOTP standard like those two authenticator apps.
Only when that secret is lost (for example by wiping your hard drive), and you haven't got access to any other device that can generate the 2-factor code for you - you'll need to request a new confirmation code by text or voice.
If you want to guard against that (rare) situation, you can definitely use a Google Voice number to receive the voice delivered code.


I found an iPad on the street, how can I find its owner? I have found an iPad on the street last night, it's an iPad Air (Wi-Fi Only) according to the model number (A1474).

How can I find its owner?

The iPad is locked. There's no SIM card to help me find its owner. There's another question on this site about an iPhone. But it's 6 yr old and may be outdated.

I thought about leaving it to the police, but according to what I read, they won't deal with it.

Go to a place with a no password (open) WiFi. If your lucky the iPad is setup to connect automatically. Once it’s connected hold down the home button to activate Siri. If you are lucky and the iPad is set up to allow you to do this ask some of the following questions to help identify who the user is.

Send a text to [random common name like Bob, John, Sam, Mike, Josh] I found this iPad and am not sure the owner if you could reply with owner and his/her contact info I colors return the iPad
Send an email to [random common name] with same message as above
What’s [common name]’s phone number? (Can be contacted separately)
Who am I? What’s my number? What’s my email? Where do I live?

Hopefully one or more of these will work and allow you to get in contact with real people who know who owns the iPad


Disable tracking location by app, and other privacy features I own a macbook and a old Android phone that needs to be replaced.
To protect my privacy i had installed X-Privacy on my phone. Among other things, this allowed me to turn off location tracking by applications that do not need location and that cannot be trusted with it, specifically Whatsapp.

I am thinking of buying a iphone next, but a second hand, because i do not need a flashy phone. It will be easier getting my pictures from the phone to the computer, if nothing else.

My questions are:

From which version onwards does iphone support turning off location access for specific apps? I'm under the impression this is possible on new iPhones, maybe i'm wrong.
What other privacy related features can i expect? For example can i prevent an application that does not need it from accessing my contacts?

In iOS…

Apps get no permissions when you install them.
Apps on iOS can never use features like Location Services without a run-time OS-level prompt for access.

iOS itself controls all access to such features, for all apps including those built-in to iOS and those downloaded from the App Store. No app can access functionality without you explicitly providing permission when running the app and the app requesting it. All privacy settings on iOS are per-app (with a system-wide off switch too).

iOS expanded the privacy controls in iOS 8 (September 2014) released as a free update to iPhone 4s (2011) and later. iOS privacy controls determine access to Location Services, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Photos, Bluetooth, Microphone, Speech Recognition, Camera, Health data, HomeKit, Media (Apple Music), Motion & Fitness.

About privacy and Location Services in iOS 8 and later - Apple

  Apps from the App Store may request access to things such as your location, contacts, calendars or photos. You’ll receive a prompt with an explanation the first time a third-party app wants to use this data, so you can make an informed decision about granting permission. Even if you grant access once, you can always change it later in Settings.

Manage Your Privacy - Apple


In iPhone Configuration Utility error while exporting Configuration Profile I create a Configuration Profile for VPN in iPhone Configuration Utility but when i try to export that profile i get error on console

*** -[__NSPlaceHolderArray initWithObjects:count:]: attempt to insert nil object from object[0]

I got the solution of this problem by myself.
What i was doing wrong is select sign the profile but i don't have any certificate installed to sign it. So i just select None from drop down menu and the problem has gone.


Is it possible to see the running timer on the lock screen in iOS 14? In iOS 13, a running timer was shown on the lock screen, so picking up your iPhone was enough to quickly see the remaining time without needing to unlock it:

In iOS 14.0.1 this feature is gone, so in order to see the remaining time on a timer you need to unlock your iPhone, find the Clock app, and switch to the Timers tab.
Is it possible to see the remaining time on the lock screen in iOS 14?

If you Force Restart your iPhone, the timer will magically appear on the Lock Screen. I hadn't noticed this, but verified the problem after applying this solution.
Answer found at Apple Community.


Quicktime records a green screen When I record a screen with a standard QuickTime Player functionality, I get a completely green video. I'm using Mac OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, and a Retina MacBook Pro 15".

Does anybody know what is the issue and how it can be fixed?

Try the following:

Turn off computer
Reboot Mac into Recovery (press and hold Command+R when you hear the chimes until a screen loads)
Select "Disk Utility"

Select your "Macintosh HD" volume on the left and press "Repair Disk Permissions"

Once that has finished, reboot your computer

If this doesn't work, call Apple Support


Zulip desktop app has "no available windows" I have the Zulip desktop app installed on Mojave 10.14.6, and I often cannot open any Zulip windows. When I right-click on the Zulip icon in the dock and select "show all windows", I just see the message "no available windows." I have tried quitting and restarting the app, selecting "unhide" from the menu, reset (cmd-R), hard-reset (shift-cmd-R), and various other menu options (such as toggling which organizations to show), with no effect. I have even restarted my laptop without being able to recover.

I was able to recover the app once by uninstalling and reinstalling, but it soon disappeared again.

Is there any way to fix this in Zulip specifically or other apps in general?

Zulip was in "minimized" mode. To show any windows, I needed to click on the tray icon in the upper-right and select one of the menu options.

In the Zulip "Settings" menu, the "Always start minimized" option was enabled; I have now disabled it.


MacBook Pro4,1 upgrade OS X from Snow Leopard compatibility with iPhone 5S I've been meaning to upgrade the OS X on my Oct 2008 MacBook Pro4,1 (2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM) forever. I just purchased an iPhone 5S and don't want to get ahead of myself.

Three (maybe four) inter-related questions:

What is the highest OS X upgrade to run smoothly on my MacBook Pro4,1? It is still running OS X 10.6.8. and I just loaded iTunes 11.1.1 and I'm still able to backup the new iPhone 5S running iOS 7.1.1 directly to computer.
What is the highest pairing of OS X AND iOS AND version of iTunes, that will run smoothly on my computer and still allow me to backup my iPhone to the computer?
If I upgrade phone to iOS 8.1.1, will I need to upgrade iTunes to ver. 12 and will it run on OS X 10.7.x or will I need to upgrade to 10.8? I thought I saw somewhere that 10.7 was highest OS X to run on my MacBook Pro4,1?

According to EveryMac That machine can run any OS up to Yosemite.
Whether it will run it smoothly or not is a different matter.
Whatever the figures might say, I've never known a machine to run faster on a newer OS, with perhaps the exception of the jump from Leopard to Snow Leopard…. or the memory handling from Mountain Lion to Mavericks. I've yet to try Yosemite myself...

As far as I'm aware, you'll need the latest iTunes to get the latest iOS, so your phone at the moment is stuck in limbo. If you ever need to restore, you'll find Apple will no longer sign iOS 7 on any device that is capable of running iOS 8.

I don't know whether iTunes 12 will run on Snow Leo; there's one way to find out, but all the steps you are about to take are going to be pushing you firmly in the direction of Yosemite.
Edit: iTunes 12 needs 10.7.5 at minimum.

Another stumbling block is going to be actually getting hold of any OS other than Yosemite. Apple removes previous OSes from the App Store - though you'll find the listing for it, it won't download unless you have previously 'bought' it.

TL:DR
Apple want you to move to Yosemite, iOS 8 & iTunes 12.
Trying to avoid any part of that is going to involve finding some dodgy download of Mavericks etc, or finding a friend who already has the installer.
Your phone will be in limbo on iOS 7, might work for now, but can't be restored without iOS 8.
iTunes 12 requires a higher OS than you have.


Can I ensure keyboard commands don't get trapped by browser scripts? Is it possible to tweak Safari to ensure command key combinations like ⌘H or ⌘L go to Safari as opposed to Safari's window contents?

This comes up for me most often on this site because the editor window (like where I'm typing right now) captures these keystrokes to make headings and links, but in general, it seems like a security hole to allow sites to capture command keystrokes.

Please note that I'm looking for a way to do this without disabling JavaScript altogether.

For whatever it's worth, I'm running Mountain Lion.

The only surefire way to avoid having JavaScript trap keyboard input is to disable JavaScript in the browser.

I understand you'd like to leave JavaScript on, but it is designed to pass near total control of raw key presses to the browser and not to the app once the OS hands it input data. This means you would need a specific code solution for each implementation of keyboard filtering on potentially each individual page/site to ensure arbitrary key chords like Command H get sent to Safari instead of JavaScript.

See these links for an overview of how key presses are handled:

http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#keys
http://unixpapa.com/js/key.html
http://unixpapa.com/js/testkey.html

The last link is a tester to show you the raw events and you will see that even a brief ⌘Q can be trapped by JavaScript if the website developer wishes to do so.


Skype is showing the wrong last messages I have a conversation between three users. When I look into this conversation the last messages are from Friday, which is wrong. These messages are always at the bottom (appears at last). So always the same messages appears at last despite there are newer messages.

I tried to reinstall Skype but it is still the same. Has anyone also experienced this kind of problem? What can I do?

I use Skype for Mac (as I presume you do), and I've had to troubleshoot contact status issues. In my notes are the following comments with respect to keeping a "detailed log:"

Type in any chat line:
/setupkey *Lib/LogLevel 4
Then quit and restart Skype.
Then type in chat line:
/resynccontacts

Other commands:

/resynclivecontacts

So you probably don't need the detailed session log, but try the resync commands.

For a more advanced method, here is another procedure from my notes:

Quit Skype completely
Access https://m.hotmail.com in any browser
You should see a "403" error page
Restart Skype and verify the contacts are loading

Does that help? I'm sorry that I can't elaborate on the commands and techniques, since these were methods that I found without supporting explanation.


How to see all windows of an application within a space? I am a fan of the exposé feature in Mac. I work in multiple spaces dedicated to each for respective projects.

However, I would want to see all windows belonging to a particular application on that Space alone. Is there a way I can enable such a thing?

How to see all windows of an application in the same space alone ?

Edit: Added image to display windows of an application which belong to different spaces but shown together:

Apple doesn’t design finder and expose to do this. It’s a design decision, so they might add a switch if enough people convince them it’s worth coding, but in the mean time, programmers have utilities to help.

Front and Center app on the Mac App Store

Here’s a very in-depth write up of how this used to be the default and now is not, if you’re into the history of user interface choices or just want to know a little more about the author(s) of the tool.

https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/front_and_center

Also, this tool doesn’t show you fake proxy windows on the space, it surfaces the actual windows. If you need something to re-arrange the windows, look to Moom or Divvy - they are long time, super excellent and powerful window management applications to super charge your control and automate window placement in a way that Mission Control (exposé) does.

https://manytricks.com/moom/
https://mizage.com/divvy/


MacBook Pro constantly freezing/pausing for fractions of a second I've got a 2008 MacBook Pro (Late 2008/Unibody, MB471LL/A, MacBookPro5,1, A1286) with 6GB of memory and a 160GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD running 10.6.7 (1OJ869). Around a month ago I noticed the machine is constantly freezing all the time for a fraction of a second, it's really regular and barely noticeable in general use. It's more obvious when scrolling down a long page in Safari (5.0.5) but really noticeable when playing YouTube clips, there's constant pauses. The odd thing is that video played by VLC (1.1.9) is totally smooth. I'm thinking it might be a Flash (10.3 r181) thing as it seems Safari-bound.

I can provide any diag information if anyone would like to help me out (ps -a, top etc. just ask). Thanks in advance.

EXACTLY that symptoms had my friend, he noticed it mostly in Excel an in the gaming - random freezing, first about a half second, later (1-2 months) became worse between 0,5-30 sec.

It was a HW problem. He bring his notebook to apple service, something (don't remember what) got changed and everything is OK now.


Code markup in Apple Notes app I am currently running macOS Sierra (10.12.6) and was wondering if there is an easy way to format code (like there is for Title, Heading, etc.) in Apple's Notes app?

I'm open to any workarounds to achieve this. I would like to have syntax highlighting as you would see in a text editor (like Atom or Sublime).

Notes in macOS High Sierra includes a Monospaced format.

In addition to the existing format types such as Title, Heading and Body, there is a new format named ‘Monospaced’. This format is a variation of the Body format but with a monospaced font family.

macOS High Sierra Hidden Features, Notes.app


Can't restore mavericks backups in time machine I'm trying to restore a time machine backup onto a new machine, however the only options are backups done prior to mavericks. The backups done under mavericks don't come up but I am sure they are on my external hard drive.

Having similar problem.  After several calls regarding a slow iMac, I was told to erase the main disk and restore from my back ups.  Last backup was in Sept which I recall was when I upgraded to Mavericks.  My Time Machine disk does have my very latest backup its just the recovery process can't see it!

The solution I've been given is:

Do latest restore possible (last Mountain Lion backup)
Install OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)
Copy latest user folder from time machine and replace the current user folder to recover the latest documents and files.

Not ideal and takes a long time!


how to export the SMS, picture, video from iOS device programmatically I wanted to export the SMS, picture, video from non-jailbroken device using programmatically or using ideviceinstaller.

someone kindly help on this to accomplish this task

Thanks in advance

There may be other ways to do it (and there are for photos and videos such as putting them on iCloud Photo Library), but if you want to access these all together, a good program you can use is iExplorer.

That looks to do everything you want to do.  It's not free, but I think they have a free trial you can use.


How to create new message in iChat without sending, using Automator to grab selected text I am trying to create a service that grabs the URL of some link, then create a blank iMessage with that URL in the body. Basically, I want to recreate that Message share feature in Safari in Mountain Lion, but with Reeder.app, specifically. "Copy Link" from the context menu doesn't always work, esp. when sending to a iphone, the URL drops, and all you get is the alias.

I've set up an Automator with Applescript, and I can definitely send a message to a buddy, if those things are specified. I'd prefer to populate that in iMessage, since I won't always be sending to the same person.

Below works, using set input as a proxy for automator's url grabbing at the moment.

set input to "http://aol.com"
tell application "Messages"
          set theBuddy to buddy "camelot@mac.com" of service "iCloud"
          send input to theBuddy
end tell

Also tried

tell application "Messages"
    set theBuddy to buddy "*" of service "iCloud"
    set input to invitation message of text chat of service "iCloud"
end tell

Both from https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3923965?start=0&tstart=0

You have to do it with UI scripting :

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Messages"
    set input to "http://aol.com" as text
    click button 1 of group 1 of splitter group 1 of window 1
    delay 1
    keystroke "Buddy@provider.com" -- type the reciever
    keystroke return -- validate the previous input
    keystroke tab -- move to message input
    keystroke input -- type the message
end tell