Fixing Macbook Pro keyboard key The e key on my keyboard started to feel weird. After some attempts to clean it, I’ve decided to remove it and noticed the membrane is the middle was loose. I’ve only noticed this is atypical because the instructions I found on removing keys mentioned it should be held in place.

After cleaning the key, it’s (considerably) better but not perfect, and I wonder if the loose membrane is to blame. Is there a safe way to fix it?

By “safe” I mean a method that is unlikely to break it. The key isn’t perfect but it is usable, so I won’t follow a method that risks breaking it, as I wouldn’t have the money to send it in for repairs.

This is an older retina Macbook Pro (late 2015 15-inch) with the scissors (not butterfly) switches.

There's a good chance the loose membrane is to blame and affixing it in place would solve the issue. Before continuing, you can verify if the membrane is the issue or it's something else by powering the laptop on with the key and membrane removed, opening some kind of document on the computer, then using a toothpick or other small (non-sharp) object to push down the center location. If that regularly causes an e character (or whatever key is at issue) to be input in to the document, the keyboard electronics are in good shape.

With that done, try holding the membrane down (by its edges) in place over the switch location, while using your fingertip to depress the membrane in the center. You should see  e characters being emitted as before. This is the location you want to affix the membrane.

Additionally, double-check that the scissor-spring part of the key is in good shape. Grit or broken plastic in that part would also explain the key feeling off, so verify that it's in good shape before proceeding. (If it's not obvious, remove a working, known-good key and compare them.)

Putting the Membrane in Place

You might not love this suggestion because of its permanence, but I think your best bet is using cyanoacrylate (super glue). I can't absolutely guarantee it won't harm the membrane, but I think it's very unlikely.

Power off the laptop.
Clean the area that you'll affix the membrane to: isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol or acetone on a Q-tip should do the trick. You likely also want to clean the rubber membrane.
Run a small bead of cyanoacrylate around the outer edge of the membrane.
Carefully place the membrane in the centered location you found above when testing the keyboard. Gently hold in place for a minute or so until the super glue has set.
Wait for it to fully cure. Overnight should be enough, a day should be absolutely safe. This might be overkill, but it would really suck to bump it out of alignment by rushing this part.
Power the laptop on, test it out by gently depressing on center of membrane: it should register keystrokes like before when you tested the keyboard.
Reassemble the key, you're done!

The upside to the above approach is that it (should) result in a permanent fix. But that also makes it feel risky, because if something goes wrong, it's extremely difficult to undo. A modified approach would be to put the membrane down in place without cyanoacrylate on it, then carefully put a bead around the edge, touching the outer edge of membrane and the metal where you're affixing it. If it turns out things went bad, acetone (nail polish remover) can break down cyanoacrylate, so you could carefully undo the process with some Q-tips and patience. But I think this approach would be less strong and easier to mess up, even if it has the upside of being (semi-)reversible.

Also, be careful when you're using the cyanoacrylate that it doesn't drip down off the metal (I think it's metal, not 100% sure, whatever the cross bar the membrane/switch sits on) and into the area below. Keep some acetone and Q-tips handy in case you need to clean up any accidents quickly.

Finally, I can't guarantee this will work and won't have an impact on the membrane -- I just don't know the exact chemical interaction. But I'm pretty sure you'll be okay and solidly affixing the membrane in place is the best chance of solving the issues you're seeing. But, you know, you follow instructions at your own risk, etc, etc.

Good luck!


How do I avoid inadvertently switching workspaces? I keep accidentally dragging windows into other workspaces on my Macbook Air running OS X Lion.

Can I disable dragging into other workspaces or make doing so more difficult?

There's a hidden preference for adjusting the delay in seconds:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-edge-delay -float 0.5
osascript -e 'quit app "Dock"'

It can be set to an arbitrarily high value to disable dragging windows to other spaces.


MacBook Pro with Dual Monitors I have a MacBook Pro 2011, i7, 8 GB RAM, Apple SSD, but I don't know if the display is Retina or not. I also got two monitors. I am using a Thunderbolt cable to connect the first Monitor. Can you please tell me what is the name of the port between the Ethernet and the Thunderbolt port and if it's possible to use it to connect the second Monitor? This is the photo of the MacBook Pro.

The port between the Ethernet port and the Thunderbolt port is a FireWire 800 port.

On the MacBook Pro 2011 17" the Thunderbolt port supports up to two Thunderbolt displays.

As to using the FireWire port to support a display I do not know for sure other then this article essentially says no.

  USB and Firewire for two or more displays?

  Apple famously championed the Firewire standard a few years ago but
  you simply can’t attach a monitor via Firewire. Firewire can receive
  video signals from the likes of digital video cameras but isn’t
  designed to output them.


How to change NTP server in airport express? Is it possible to change NTP server in AirportExpress? Is there any other way to control this device than Airpot Utility?

Although the GUI has lost a lot of functionality, there is a workaround.

In AU, select the device and click 'edit'. Under the File menu export the config, which you can then edit, and import it using the same menu. The relevant tag is

<key>ntSV</key>
<string>time.apple.com</string>

You will need to be very careful with your editing or you may render it unbootable! You will need to restart for the config change to take effect. I've done this with a Time Capsule: I expect that this is possible with Airport Express too, but do not have access to one to experiment with.


Need better performance: best alternative for Lion's built in VNC server? I'm connecting to my work's iMac through VNC. On the client side I use JollysFastVNC (on my Mac at home) and as server I use Lion's built in VNC server.
The appearance is just great but the overall performance sucks.
I would prefer less quality and gain a bit of performance instead.
Unfortunately Lion's VNC server only allows high-quality connections. Only thing I can adjust is the color depth.

Is there a better free VNC server for Lion?

TeamViewer

It doesn't use VNC, but it works very well. You can adjust the settings for better speed, quality, etc:

And you don't have to set up any port forwarding on your firewall, it all goes through the TeamViewer servers. I highly recommend it.


Three displays with Mac Mini 2012 I've read on Tom's Hardware that Intel HD Graphics 4000 supports three displays. Is that information valid for 2012 Mac Minis too? Does anyone have any information on what the Mac Mini's capability is with regard to maximum number of displays, resolutions and port limitations?

With regard to display ports, what would a DisplayLink type of connection be categorised as?

Three displays will not work in a supported, OS X only solution. You can use two thunderbolt attached displays or one HDMI and one thunderbolt.

Apple maintains a knowledge base article listing which Mac models support either one or two external thunderbolt displays.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4885

In the section for OS X, the 2012 mini is listed in the category of two full monitors with a footnote explaining HDMI and thunderbolt.


How can I reformat a USB I used by USB to add as iso file into it.

sudo dd bs=4m if=my.iso of=/dev/disk1

Now I want to get the USB back to normal. but the erase button in Disk Utility is disabled. How can I reformat this

The following page has a lot of explanation on it but I've provided the quick steps below. Side note, try verify and repair and fix permissions in the app first to see if that does it.

Erase disk via terminal

Start in terminal with this command:
diskutil list

Next verify and repair the usb drive with this command putting the disk name I where it says {volume name} (no brackets):
diskutil verifyVolume /Volumes/{volume name} diskutil repairVolume /Volumes/{volume name}

If good so far, try erasing with this command, replacing disk identifier with the name from the list in the first step (eg disk2):
diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ Test /dev/{disk identifier}


VirtualBox doesn't start on MacOS High Sierra I installed VirtualBox from here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads on macOS 10.13.3 and I am an admin on the computer. When I try to run the application it does not start. I tried to reinstall the application, but nothing changed. What am I doing wrong?

These two commands solved my problem:

sudo chown root:admin /Applications
sudo chmod o-w /Applications

I didn't have the right permissions.


Mac crash after installing XCode I tried installing XCode on my MacBook Pro, but for some reason, it suddenly crashed. After a reboot, I saw a message my computer had to restart because of some system failure. After this message, I get the following text on my screen...

Does anyone have any idea what this text means and what to do about it?

From the loaded kernel extensions in the backtrace, we can see that com.apple.iokit.CHUDKernLib is the bundle identifier of the kernel extension that is causing the kernel panic.

That makes sense, as the CHUD tools are part of the older Xcode installs.

If you're comfortable with the command line, what I would do is start up in single-user mode by holding down Commmand-S right after you start up your machine.

At the prompt, type the following and press return:

mount -uw /

This will mount the filesystem in read-write mode so you can make changes.

Then type the following 4 commands, pressing return after each line.

Make an "ExtensionsDisabled" folder to move the CHUD-related kernel extensions to:

mkdir /System/Library/ExtensionsDisabled

Change the current directory to the kernel extensions folder:

cd /System/Library/Extensions

Move the 3 CHUD*.kext kernel extensions to the disabled folder:

mv CHUDKernLib.kext CHUDProf.kext CHUDUtils.kext /System/Library/ExtensionsDisabled

Reboot:

reboot

If you're not comfortable with the command line, you could start up in safe mode and delete (or disable by moving elsewhere) the following 3 files:

/System/Library/Extensions/CHUDKernLib.kext
/System/Library/Extensions/CHUDProf.kext
/System/Library/Extensions/CHUDUtils.kext


Can't delete partitions after attempting BOOTCAMP on my iMac 5k I recently tried to install a bootcamp instance of Win 7. The install failed for some reason. This left me with a partition that I can not access via Disk Utility

If you notice..the +- can not be selected and hence I can't delete the partition and recover the space on my drive

I tried to follow the instructions posted here by klanomath but have had no success.

It could be because I have 2 CoreStorage logical volume groups about which I have no clue as to what it is

Klanomath...can you please help me out???

diskutil list--

diskutil cs list--

sudo gpt -r -vv /dev/disk1--

Something went totally wrong and your Logical Volume Group is fragmented. You have to rebuild your Fusion Drive from scratch:

Preparation:

Backup "Macintosh HD" to an external drive with Time Machine
Detach any external drive (especially your external Time Machine backup drive)
Restart to Internet Recovery Mode by pressing alt cmd R at startup.
The prerequisites are the latest firmware update installed, either ethernet or WLAN (WPA/WPA2) and a router with DHCP activated.
On a 50 Mbps-line it takes about 5 min (presenting a small animated globe) to boot into a recovery netboot image which usually is loaded from an apple/akamai server.

I recommend ethernet because it's more reliable. If you are restricted to WIFI and the boot process fails, just restart your Mac until you succeed booting.

Alternatively you may start from a bootable installer thumb drive (Yosemite) or a thumb drive containing a full system (Yosemite).

Rebuild Fusion Drive

Booted to Internet Recovery Mode open Utilities → Terminal in the menubar and enter:
diskutil cs list to get the CoreStorage listing.
Copy the second Logical Volume Group UUID, it's the seventh listed in the listing of diskutil cs list.
Then delete the second Logical Volume Group with diskutil cs delete LVG2UUID.
In your case: diskutil cs delete E0E4516A-DE3A-4B62-BE6A-855A760F5E3E
Copy the Logical Volume UUID it's the sixth UUID listed
delete the Logical Volume with diskutil cs deleteVolume LVUUID.
In your case: diskutil cs deleteVolume 00CDC215-F00D-4AD4-BA78-A2B220278688
Copy the first Logical Volume Group UUID, it's the first listed in the listing of diskutil cs list.
Then delete the first Logical Volume Group with diskutil cs delete LVGUUID.
In your case: diskutil cs delete 8FCBCB92-43CC-45A2-A058-58CAF79B93B4
Enter exit and quit 'Terminal'
Open 'Disk Utility'. Enter 'Ignore' if you are asked to fix the drives.
Choose your SSD and partition it: 1 Partition Mac OS X Extended (Journaled),
hit the Options button and choose GUID Partiton table and hit OK and Apply.
Please check that the size is ~121 GB

Example:
Beware! Since I took the screenshots in a virtual machine which couldn't be booted to Internet Recovery Mode i had to create two example disks with different disk identifiers and sizes. So don't use my UUIDs and disk identifiers recreating your Fusion Drive.

Choose your HDD and partition it: 1 Partition Mac OS X Extended (Journaled),
hit the Options button and choose GUID Partiton table and hit OK and Apply.
Please check that the size is ~3 TB

Example:

Quit Disk Utility and open Terminal
Enter diskutil list

Example (your disk identifiers and sizes are different of course: Your volume SSD probably has the Identifier disk0s2 and the size 121 GB and your volume HDD probably has the Identifier disk1s2 and the size 3.0 TB):

Enter diskutil cs create "Name" IdentifierSSD IdentifierHDD
In your case probably diskutil cs create "Macintosh HD" disk0s2 disk1s2.

Copy the resulting LVGUUID

Example:

Enter diskutil cs CreateVolume LVGUUID jhfs+ "Macintosh HD" 100%.

Example:

Enter diskutil cs list
Check the size of your Logical Volume. It should have the size ~3.121 TB

Example:

Quit Terminal
Open 'Disk Utility' and check your newly created volume for errors
Quit 'Disk Utility'

Restoring "Macintosh HD" from Time Machine backup (alternatively you may reinstall OS X and migrate your users and apps - see below)

Attach your external Time Machine backup drive or check this answer if you use NAS or another network share.
Open 'Restore from Time Machine Backup'

Choose the appropriate Time Machine backup and restore your system
The messages on your screen may differ slightly (different names and backup source)

Reboot to your restored system.
Unmount and detach your Time Machine backup drive
Open 'Terminal' and enter 'diskutil list'
Check if your 'Recovery HD' is listed.
If your 'Recovery HD' is missing, usually reinstalling your current system with the latest available system installer (e.g. 'Install OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)' if Yosemite is currently installed) will recreate it without loosing any data. AFAIK Recovery Partition Creator 3.8 will NOT create a Recovery HD on CoreStorage volumes.
After reinstalling the system with the latest available system installer open App Store and install the latest security fixes.

Reinstalling Yosemite from scratch and migrating apps & data from Time Machine backup

Choose "Reinstall OS X"

Choose "Macintosh HD" as destination disk
after the download, installation and a restart the Setup Assistant will ask you - beyond other questions - to migrate users, apps and other data
attach your Time Machine Backup drive and wait a few seconds
choose "Migrate from Time Machine backup" (or something similar - i don't remember the precise message.)
finish the migration
start App Store.app and install the latest updates.


Sharing contacts with husband who has separate Apple id My husband and I have separate Apple IDs. We have family sharing and are able to share our calendars. But we want to share our contacts in a way that is easily accessible on all our computers and devices (Mac OS and iOS.) We keep our computers and devices up to date so we are running recent if not the latest versions of OS and iOS. I have not found a way to share our contacts in the Contacts app without constantly tweaking or creating a third Apple ID, which is too fiddly for me. Is there a third party option that would meet our needs?
Thanks.

Create a Gmail account. Add the shared contacts to that account. Load the account in both devices (no email, notes or calendars, just contacts). You now have your shared contacts account. You can manage them easily on a Mac (copying contacts, moving from each iCloud account to the shared account) or with a little more difficulty directly on the Gmail interface.


In-app purchase from Japanese app So I tried to buy some in-app offers from a app that I downloaded in a different app store region, after putting in my billing information it won't go through. I'm using a US debit/credit card.

Is there anyway to go around the problem like buying a iTunes card then use it for my iTunes account to buy in the in-app offer?

Yes that is possible. You can buy gift cards from other country iTunes Stores.

One quick search and I found https://japancodesupply.com/, where you can buy Japanese iTunes Gift cards. When you order it takes approximately 1 minute to send you an email with your code.

There are many other websites that offer iTunes Gift cards from other countries. So do a quick search, check the credibility of the website and buy a giftcard.

I'm not affiliated with japancodesupply.com


Adding an Apple TV to the Home app in tvOS 11.4 tvOS updated yesterday to 11.4 on my Apple TVs, and on startup asked what room each Apple TVs is in. However, it didn't show the list of rooms I have defined in my Home app. It showed a generic list of room names. I selected one, expecting that I could access it and change its name in the Home app, but now the Apple TV is in limbo somewhere and not accessible to the Home app. And there doesn't appear to be any user interface in tvOS to bring that room selection back up.

How can I regain control of my Apple TVs in the Home app?

Addendum: here's a pattern (perhaps) that I hadn't noticed before: My Apple TV 4s did show the correct room list and allowed proper linking. The Apple TV 4Ks did not, and those are the subject of this post. They do show as Home Hubs in the iOS Home app, show up as Airplay destinations, and have all other indications that they should work.

Addendum #2: I factory reset one of the misbehaving Apple TV 4Ks and it allowed proper room selection. It also has a room selection menu in the Airplay settings. The misbehaving Apple TV 4K does not have that menu choice in Airplay to get to any Room settings, so I'll probably factory reset it too. I suspect a bug at this point, but it's not clear why it triggered for some Apple TVs but not others.

Addendum #3: Factory reset of the remaining unit corrected the problem. Why this happened to multiple 4K units and not to any Apple TV 4s is a mystery.

Was the Apple TV your home hub? If so then you can check and see if you see Homekit as Connected:

On your Apple TV, go to Settings > Accounts > iCloud and make sure that your Apple TV shows HomeKit as Connected. If you don’t see HomeKit, then your Apple TV isn't connected as a home hub.

Set up Apple TV as a home hub

On your iOS device or Mac, set up two-factor authentication for your
Apple ID. Then go to iCloud and make sure that you have iCloud
Keychain turned on.
On your Apple TV, go to Settings > Accounts and make sure that
you're signed in to iCloud with the same Apple ID as your iOS
device.
After you sign in to iCloud, your Apple TV automatically sets itself
up as a home hub. To check the status of your home hub, go to
Settings > Accounts > iCloud and look under HomeKit to see if your
home hub is connected. Learn what to do if you don’t see HomeKit.


Number pad does not work in vim and less I am working from an iMac running Yosemite and using this keyboard.  The number pad works in the terminal, but when I open vim or less it does not.

For example using less, if I type for the number 8, I get ESCOx, not an 8.  In vim 7.2 (in command mode), it inserts an x.  How do I fix this behavior? I got this keyboard specifically for the number pad.

If you are using Terminal (not iTerm or others), there is a setting that might help. Turn off this setting (sorry, it's in german. But the location should be the same):

If you are using iTerm, there is at least a fix for vim: You can remap the keys to get this to work. Just add the following lines to your ~/.vimrc (Create it, if it doesn't exist.)

inoremap <Esc>Oq 1
inoremap <Esc>Or 2
inoremap <Esc>Os 3
inoremap <Esc>Ot 4
inoremap <Esc>Ou 5
inoremap <Esc>Ov 6
inoremap <Esc>Ow 7
inoremap <Esc>Ox 8
inoremap <Esc>Oy 9
inoremap <Esc>Op 0
inoremap <Esc>On .
inoremap <Esc>OQ /
inoremap <Esc>OR *
inoremap <Esc>Ol +
inoremap <Esc>OS -
inoremap <Esc>OM <Enter>

Source: a comment in the vim wiki.


How do I "authorize this computer" with the latest version of Music (which doesn't have an Account menu anymore)? When I try to download a file from the cloud (I'm using Apple's match/subscription thing) it just says

This computer is not authorized.
You must authorize this computer before you can use Apple Music or iTunes Match on this comptuer

I am logged into my Apple ID/icloud etc on this Mac. Everything else seems to work fine. Photos sync, iCloud files, etc. Apple's Help menu for "authorize" even still says to do so under the "Account" menu... but Music 1.0.6.10 (along with the latest MacOS) does not have an Account menu.

If you enable "iTunes store" under the Disable settings, that removes the Account menu entirely. Box unchecked, and then I can simply authorize the computer exactly as you'd normally do.
*derp* Why on earth did I turn the parental controls on?


Trackpad working poorly on Macbook, why? I have a Macbook 2007. It has worked very well until now, the trackpad does not respond at all, it simply stopped working. How can I debug this?

Here is what I would do to troubleshoot it (with the help of an external mouse):

Go to System Preferences, then select Trackpad, and make some change on that screen.  Try your trackpad again.

If that doesn't work, reboot.

If that doesn't work, and if you're using BootCamp (or VMware Fusion, or Parallels), try booting into the other operating system that you have installed on your Mac and see if your trackpad is recognized there.

If that doesn't work, try cleaning off your trackpad.  Give it a good vacuuming, get any dust out from around the edges.

If that doesn't work, then (if you're comfortable) it's time to dig into the innards of your Macbook.  One option is that your battery could be impacting this.  If your battery life on your Macbook has also gone down, the battery itself could be physically bulging out, and it could move your trackpad enough out of alignment that it won't work any longer.  If that's the case, then you need a new battery.

If your battery is fine, then it could be that you need a new trackpad.  I bought a replacement trackpad from eBay for my old Macbook, and that got me an extra year's worth of life out of that Macbook.  It was a bit fiddly to replace, but it worked.


Keyboard shortcut for powering down MacBook Pro with Touch Bar? I received my new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar today and quickly realized that the shortcut ctrl+alt+cmd+power (documented here under 'Sleep, log out, and shut down shortcuts') no longer works for quitting all apps followed by shutting down.

Can this shortcut be reinstated or is it replaced by something similar?

In System Preferences → Mission Control

Change "Show Desktop" to F10
Change "Show Dashboard" to F11

In System Preferences → Keyboard, open App Shortcuts.

Click + to add a new shortcut.
Leave Application as "All Applications".
In Menu Title enter exactly this phrase (without quotation marks): "Shut Down…"
Click cursor in the Keyboard shortcut field, then on keyboard hold "fn" key then select "F12" on Touch Bar

Holding "fn" key and selecting "F12" on Touch Bar will bring up the shutdown prompt.
Holding "fn" key and selecting "F10" will show desktop, holding "F11" will show dashboard.


Can I view iMessage history from an iPhone set up as a new device? I set up a new iPhone as a new device (not from a backup) but using my same Apple ID for iCloud and so on. Can I view my old iMessages on this phone?

If I restore from backup, the messages appear. I set up the phone as a new device because I was getting some strange syncing behaviors.

I would really like to have my old conversations available. Any way to do this? Are they in iCloud somewhere? Thanks!

You can only restore your data (messages are part of your data) by restoring from backup. That should work fine, assuming that the backup iOS version and the new phone iOS version are the same. If your data backup is from an earlier iOS revision than your new phone, all bets are off.

Restoring your data from backup shouldn't introduce sync problems as the operating system of the phone is not part of the backup scheme.


Free U2 album doesn't show up in music library, just iPod In yesterday's (sep 9th 2014) Apple event, Tim Cook anounced Apple would offer as a gift the album "Songs of Innocence" by the Irish rock band U2.

The iTunes Music Store said album was already "purchased" but it offered no way of downloading it with the purchase button. Instructions said that I would find the album in my library with an iCloud icon indicating the album was in the cloud and I just needed to click that icon to download the album. But the in-the-cloud-album was nowhere to be found in my library.

I updated iTunes to the most recent version to validate that it wasn't a problem with the version I had.

Finally I was able to download the album in the iTunes Store app in my iPod touch. It was in more->purchased->Music->Various with an download button. I downloaded my gift. And I could play the tracks with wi-fi off, proving that the tracks were were in fact downloaded to the iPod.

But when I synced (several times) the iPod with my iTunes library, the album fails to appear in my Library, and only exist in my iPod.

The questions:

Has someone experience this problem ?
Is it made that way on purpose so the free-album could only be played on iDevices and not in the Mac/PC ?
Is this a bug ?
How could I get around this in order to have the album in my music library in my Mac ?
How do I get the PDF booklet I'm supposed to get with the album ?

Edit after accepted answer:

Wrong instructions leading to my confusion

Literal translation: Simply go to the Music app in your iOS device or to your music library in your Mac or PC and find Songs of Innocence in the Album or Artist tab. Your music is in iCloud: touch the list to begin to listen or the cloud icon to download them.

If anyone have this screen capture in english feel free to add it. Maybe the bad instructions are only in the spanish version.

They are referring to the "Purchased" under the "Quick Links" section on the right of the iTunes Store Home Page. Once you do this "Songs of Innocence" will be added to your "Purchased" playlist on the left.


Is there a tool similar to powertop for macOS I am looking for a tool similer to powertop for macOS. I'd like to see which processes have the largest power use (activity monitor shows apps but not servers like nginx and node and I'd like to see the power use of those server processes too). Any suggestions?

In addition to the Energy tab in Activity Monitor, there is the command-line powermetrics that gives you more detailed information, such as CPU wattage and C-States. Try the --show-process-energy option for the same Energy Impact metric as Activity Monitor.


What does -HUP do when used with killall? Sometimes when I'm running a killall command from Terminal, a co-worker would suggest or edit my scripts to show killall -HUP.

What does the -HUP part do?

The -HUP option is the signal that's sent to the processes by the killall command. It can be a little hard to tell, but the relevant entry in the killall manual is:

-SIGNAL     Send a different signal instead of the default TERM.  The signal may be specified
            either as a name (with or without a leading SIG), or numerically.

The difference between the default TERM signal that killall sends and the HUP signal depends largely on the program you're sending the signal to. At the program end, they receive a different interrupt signal value. So the program can catch the interrupts and decide, based on the value, if they should do one thing or the other.

The TERM signal (historically the "terminate signal") is usually sent to a program to request its termination (which is a politer version of forcing its termination with the KILL signal). The program is free to catch and ignore the TERM signal. It doesn't have to terminate if it doesn't want to and it can completely ignore this signal.

The HUP signal (historically the "hangup signal") is usually sent to a program to request that it restarts and re-reads all its configuration in the process. The actual behaviour of the program depends on the program-specific implementation. Not all programs catch HUP and they aren't required to by convention or dogma. For example, the Apache web server will catch a HUP signal and re-read all its configuration files but it won't restart any processes.

If you want to truly terminate the processes and not worry about whether they're going to catch and obey the signal uses the KILL signal. It cannot be caught or ignored and results in process termination.

For a good review of available POSIX signals see this Wikipedia article.


Why is removing hard-linked files so slow in Lion? $ ln src/* dir
$ rm dir/*

If src/ contains a few hundred files, the rm operation takes many minutes. If I open the directory in Finder, I can see the files vanishing one by one. This operation used to be virtually instantaneous in Snow Leopard, but is excruciatingly slow in Lion. If I copy the files instead of hard-linking them, removing them is still instantaneous.

Can anybody tell me what has changed to warrant this slowness?

I think I figured it out. It seems to be Mobile Time Machine that's causing the slowdown. Apparently it's dutifully taking a backup of the files while they're being deleted. If the files are "original", it can simply move them to the Time Machine vault, but if they're links it has to copy them instead, which takes much longer.


How to redirect MacBook Pro audio to my TV? I just connected my MacBook Pro 2013 to my TV using HDMI. The visuals are working, but the TV does not get the audio from my MacBook. How can I redirect the audio from my MacBook to my TV?

Hold the Option key and click on the Volume/Sound icon on your Menu Bar.  When you're connected via HDMI, you should have an option show in the local menu to select that connection to feed the audio through rather than the standard audio output.


Apple Watch Series 2 is reporting way too much exercise Twice in the last week my Apple Watch (Latest WatchOS 4) has reported massive amounts of exercise, when in fact I hadn't done any those days.  Like many hundreds of minutes of contiguous, non-stop workout.

I've rebooted both the watch and phone, and recalibrated my fitness data in the Watch app on the phone.  I've also deleted the two offending days' worth of data from the Health app, but the Activity app still shows the achievements for those "record" days.  So two questions:

Why is this happening/How can I prevent this from happening?
How can I remove the achievements so that I have a chance to actually earn them again in the future?

Turns out that this was being caused by a timer app I had installed, called "Intervals".  I'm not using it as a fitness timer, but it defaults to recording every use of the timer as exercise.  According to the developers of the app, there are individual settings within each timer to turn this off, but apparently those aren't quite enough. There is also a "low power" setting within the timer, that needs to be enabled to completely prevent fitness tracking within the app.


Using terminal to get current fan speed? I would like to view the current fan speeds of my MacBook and iMac using terminal. I've found that running spindump then cat /tmp/spindump.txt | grep "Fan speed" will show it, but that's very slow and processor intensive. I would like a faster and more efficient way of doing it.

I'd rather not install 3rd party software, but I will if it's the only way.

Does anyone have any suggestions to how I might accomplish this?

Thanks

smcFanControl

You mention in your comments having smcFanControl installed; this open source project includes the command line tool smc. You can use smc to get fan speed information via Terminal.app:

smc -f

See the smc manual page for more options.

Since Mac OS X 10.5, you need to use a third party piece of software to access the fan speed information. It appears no tool, installed by default on OS X, exposes this information through the terminal.

The open source project Fan Control includes a command line tool that provides fan speed information. This article, OS X: Current CPU temperature on command line, talks about the project and how to extract the fan speed:

smc -k TC0D -r | sed 's/.*bytes \(.*\))/\1/' |sed 's/\([0-9a-fA-F]*\)/0x\1/g' | perl -ne 'chomp; ($low,$high) = split(/ /); print (((hex($low)*256)+hex($high))/4/64); print "C\n";'

Avoid spindump

spindump requires administrator privileges and when run manually, spindump samples user and kernel stacks for every process in the system. This is a computationally expensive process, even when run for one second.

Alternatives

Other tools and applications exist, including Temperature Monitor. See Can I get the CPU temperature and fan speed from the command line in OS X?

Pre-Mac OS X 10.5

This article, get sensor information, shows how to use ioreg to extract the fan speed information with:

ioreg -c IOHWSensor | grep -B3 -A11 '"type" = "fanspeed"'

The above article and the script it contains was designed for Mac OS X 10.4.3.

See also:

Reading hardware information from command line with built-in tools.
Determining Fan Speeds


Change App Store currency I have recently changed the App Store region to South Korea, as I'm currently living here. I'd like to know if there is any way to change the currency of the App store without changing the country of the store?

I think it cannot be done but my husband insists that I have to change it because Apple charges more in KRW than USD.

I am using an iPhone 7.

I'd like to know if there is any way to change the currency of the App store without changing the country of the store?

The App Store uses the currency of the country which you are using to access the App Store. It is not possible to choose the currency at your will, i.e. using South Korea App Store while choosing to pay in USD.

The difference is rates appears due to the exchange rates used by Apple.


Deleting Songs off your ipod How do I delete songs of my iPod using iTunes?

This may vary slightly depending on what type of iPod you have, but generally if you want to delete arbitrary songs on the iPod (without having to modify any playlists etc. in iTunes itself that you are syncing from), you need to have the device set to "manually manage music" on the device Summary tab. Then, you select the device from the top bar when it is connected, and open the "Music" tab, and you can select and delete songs from the list.


Is it possible to save a song "station" in Apple Music? When I play a song in Apple Music and select "Start Station" to begin an ad-hoc radio station based on that song, is there a way to capture the results for later, i.e. to replay the station or turn it into a playlist?

Or can I only return to the original song and hit Start Station again?

Here's what I found to kind of do this:

Once you play a song and start a "station," that song will be saved to the "Recently Played" section of Radio. So if you want to start that "station" again later, just go to Radio, choose the song from the "Recently Played" section and the station will pick up again.

Hope this helps.


Mouse click event being fired on right mouse-down AND right mouse-up I've run into an interesting issue while trying to migrate to MacOS.

Whenever I go to right-click something, a click event will be fired on the initial mouse-down event, and then a click event will be fired on the mouse-up event.

As an example, you can right click (hold the click down) to bring up a context menu, and then release the click while hovering over a menu item, and the menu item will be clicked.

Is there a way to force the OS to wait for a mouse-up event before it fires another click event?

It's frustrating coming from Linux and Windows environments that wait until a mouse-down AND mouse-up complete before firing a click.

It's timing-dependant.

If you click & hold, then mouse-up will activate the currently-selected menu choice, or move outside the menu & release to dismiss.

If you click & immediately let go, it will then stay open waiting for a new click, either on your menu choice, or outside the menu to dismiss.


IPhone Notes App is not loading all my notes but I can search for them from Home screen I am using the Notes app on iPhone 7 plus running  iOS 10.2.1. I don't use icloud.
However, a few days ago, the Notes app stopped loading all my notes. My notes app shows nothing.
However, when I search for a note using Spotlight Search, I can see the search result. When I tap on it, it opens the Notes app and showing an endless loading animation on the top of screen. Again, it doesn't load the notes.

Is there any way to fix this problem and recover my notes either by transferring them to a Mac/PC or just fix the Notes app to load all my notes?

You need to make sure you are looking in the right folder. When you open Notes, you should see the word Folders near the top of the window to the left. Tap on Folders and it will list all the Folders in Notes. Select the folder you want and the Notes app should display all the notes in that folder.


Does restoring from an iCloud backup enforce installation of the latest iOS? I accidentally deleted a lot of text messages on my iPhone 5 and would like to restore from iCloud by choosing "Erase all content and settings" and then restoring from a backup made last night.  However, my iPhone is running iOS 6 and I would not like to update to iOS 8.  If I restore my phone from the iCloud backup using "Erase all content and settings" will iOS 8 be installed or will it restore the iPhone with iOS 6 as it was last night?  I would try it out, but I would prefer to find out before rather than after...

No. Erase all content and settings keeps your current iOS. As long as you don't use an iCloud backup from a device with a newer iOS version you will be fine.


How can I add funds to Apple Pay Cash without a debit card? For example, can I add funds to Apple Pay Cash from my Apple ID funds? Or my credit card?
According to the only answer to this related question, it is possible to add funds to Apple Pay Cash from a credit card, which incurs a 3% fee. How can I do this?

The linked post is almost 4 years old - a credit card  is not accepted currently. There is also currently no way to add money from your Apple balance or other external sources.
Apple Support:

You can only add money from a supported United States debit card or prepaid card that's in Apple Pay.


Fake Chromium showing on launchpad and won't uninstall My colleague has noticed there is a Chromium icon on their launchpad screen but it's not possible to remove it. We've tried dragging it to the Trash but nothing happens.

There is no app listing in /Applications

Is it a virus? If so what's the best way to remove it?

Check System Profiler → Software → Applications to see if you have it installed somewhere else. You can see where it's installed to by looking at the "Location" tag.

If it looks fishy, I'd recommend downloading Malwarebytes and running a scan to see if there's anything fishy.


Add vibration to incoming Signal messages (iOS) Similarly to incoming iMessages I want vibrations on incoming Signal (https://signal.org/) messages.

Is this doable as of now?

On IPhone SE the only options under Signal->Notifications are enabling/disabling Sounds and Badges. Not even the default ding/bell sound is modifiable.


Can I charge a DC 5V - 2.15 A power bank with an Apple Macbook charger? Can I charge the following power bank with a macbook chager?

Power bank input: DC 5V - 2.15 A  (Input port: Micro USB)

Macbook charger: Apple 29W USB-C Power Adapter: 5.2V @ 2.4A, 14.5V @ 2A

(with USB > Micro USB cable)

thanks

Yes, that is entirely possible. The power bank accepts standard USB power, and the MacBook charger with USB-C will be just that when you add the USB-C to micro-USB cable.

Note ofcourse that it won't charge faster than the standard charger. Even though the MacBook charger is a 29W charger, it won't charge your power bank at the full rate (instead it will charge at somewhere between 2.6W and 7.8W - most probably at 4.68W).


What is your view using mac pro 8 core 8 GB system for software development? I have never used Mac system before but I am considering switching to Mac Pro 8 core 8 GB model. Currently I am using Linux box based on Dell Core 2 Duo with 4GB ram (that is maximum it can have). I am running into performance issues and sluggish application startup especially Natilus file maanger. Usually I have multiple applications running at same time.

I also need to run windows virtual machines for software testing.

If I invest in Mac Pro system:
Would I get much better performance?
Would I be able to run Windows as virtual machine within Mac Osx?
Would the learning curve be easier in terms of radically different UI on Mac Osx?

What about SSD disk on mac pro? Does it make very visible difference in performance when running applications?

One huge benefit I will get is to be able test web applications under mac osx/safari and as well as be able to develop for iphone and ipad.

You will definitely get a performance boost by upgrading from the Linux box to the Mac Pro. However, I don't believe that you'll see a huge difference in terms of actual performance between that Mac Pro and, say, an iMac with a 3.6Ghz i5 and 6 or 8 GB RAM.
As long as you're not doing a lot of gaming or other graphics-intensive or math-intensive things, the iMac should seem to the user almost as fast as the Mac Pro.
There's no harm getting the Pro, but I think you may as well save yourself the money...

As for running a VM, that's easy. You can even, with Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, run Windows apps and Mac apps side-by side.
Other software to look into is Boot Camp (free, supplied by Apple, restart required to switch systems) and Sun/Oracle VirtualBox (free, no restart required, some features missing).

As for the learning curve: It's not too bad. Lots of people make the transition. IIRC, 50% of Mac purchases are first-time Mac users. Apple offers a Switching 101 guide to help you out. Also, if you're used to Linux, you'll catch on quickly. Besides, most of the CL stuff is the same, so you'll always be at home there.

As for SSDs: They're really, really fast. You can see various tests and comparisons run by manufacturer OWC here. For best shock value, watch their video where they race an SSD machine with an HDD one to boot and open apps from CS5. It's pretty amazing...

A cordial welcome to the world of Mac!


How to share an AirTag with family members I have an AirTag. I would like my wife to be able to see where it is.
We are part of a family in terms of AppleID (if I download an app, she can also install it).
Is there a way she can also access the AirTag’s location?

You cannot share the location of an AirTag with other people.
The only privilege currently granted is indefinite silencing of AirTags owned by family members:

If the AirTag is attached to an item you're borrowing, you can tap
Pause Safety Alerts to turn off "AirTag Detected" notifications for
one day. If you're borrowing an AirTag from a member of your Family
Sharing group, you can turn off Safety Alerts for one day or
indefinitely.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227


Can I download iphone apps from the online iTunes without having access to the iTunes program? I'm not going to have access to my iTunes on my home computer nor my iPhone today. But I would like to download a few apps that are on sale today only (like this one). Is there a way to do that? Or maybe not download them, but earmark them in my account to download later?

You can't buy without iTunes or an iOS device.

You can borrow someone else's device (iOS or computer) and sign in with your account to do the buying and then cancel the download / delete the app.

You could also gift them to yourself, but that is a bit more work and doesn't save you from getting to the point where you would just buy the apps.

As a last resort, you could call a friend and have them gift it to you and pay them later.


OS X: Any PDF to Kindle format converter to read technical material on Amazon Kindle? I like to read course material on Kindle. I merge all lecture slides with Automator and then send them to my Kindle email. Earlier, I have used Readle's Documents app (a spinoff of PDF Expert) where I had a search. If no OCR, then DjVU Reader in OS X to PDF and then ABBYY's FineReader Express to add OCR. Kindle has one failure with this: it cannot search despite the OCR of the PDF. It needs to be in a correct format: PDF is not a correct format but some Kindle's own format.

  So does there exist any app in OS X to make material such as lecture slides suitable for reading in Kindle? Lecture slides are technical containing mathematical formulae.

It requires many steps already over OS X with Automator, DjVU Reader, ABBYY -- to make searchable in one way. I am trying to find an easy way with Kindle and Apple OS X.

Calibre is commonly used to convert ebooks (including PDF) from one format to another.  There is no guarantee that it does exactly what you want, but try it with your PDFs.


Mac Appstore online search? Is there a website for the Mac Appstore than I can search to see what apps are on it?

(I don't have a Mac, and I'd like to see if an open-source project is on the Mac Appstore.)

Yes luckily there is, it is called fnd with the URL address https://fnd.io/


Lost bluetooth connection with mouse I have a big problem with bluetooth on my Mac Book Pro.

I bought my first MacBook about month ago. For the first week everything was ok, but then my mouse began to lose connection with the computer. This happens very often (on average every two minutes) and is very annoying.

I'm pretty sure that is not Magic Mouse fault, because I tried connect standard bluetooth mouse and the problem also occurs.

It looks something like this: works with the mouse, suddenly the cursor disappears. even though I move the mouse, nothing happens on the screen (the touchpad works correctly). After about 20 seconds a message about lost connection with the mouse appears and after 10 seconds a message that the mouse has been connected.

And now the strangest thing: When bluetooth headphones are connected to the computer and I play audio, the problem does not occur. When the headphones are connected but I don't play music, the problem occurs but much less often.

Could this be a problem with the bluetooth module? It is worth noting that the bluetooth keyboard works flawlessly. Please help, because it prevents me from working.

Devices:

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019)
macOS Mojave 10.14.6
Apple Magic Mouse 2
Apple Magic Keyboard
Headphones Phillips SHB3075 Bass+ Bluetooth

This shouldn't make a difference since you're talking about an Apple Magic Mouse 2 and not a 3rd party Bluetooth mouse, but one thing I have seen that does work in some cases is to make sure the mouse is the first Bluetooth device paired to your computer.

To do this you will need to reset both the macOS Bluetooth Device List and Bluetooth Controller. However, this will reset all connected Bluetooth devices, including your external keyboard and headphones.

In other words, this will remove all existing pairing information for Bluetooth devices, so each will need to be reconnected.
I have some steps you can follow, but I strongly suggest you read all of the steps first before commencing (or perhaps print out the instructions / view them on another device).

Before starting, ensure you have the Bluetooth icon showing in the menu bar. If it is not there, open System Preferences > Bluetooth and enable the option Show Bluetooth in Menu Bar.

Also, since you're trying to resolve an issue with a Bluetooth mouse,  you will need to use your built-in trackpad to follow these steps:

Hold down both the Shift and Option keys and at the same time click on the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar. Once the menu is showing, release the keys.
From the Bluetooth menu, choose Debug > Remove All Devices
Hold down both the Shift and Option keys again and at the same time click on the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar.
From the Bluetooth menu,  choose Debug > Reset the Bluetooth Module
Shutdown your MacBook Pro
Ensure your Magic Mouse is fully powered off
Restart your MacBook Pro
Connect the Magic Mouse to your MBP via the USB cable
Now switch on your Magic Mouse
Now click on the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar and choose Open Bluetooth preferences...
When the Magic Mouse pairs with your Mac, it appears in the list of devices
Exit System Preferences

Now test the Magic Mouse long enough to see if it works okay. Once you're satisfied it is, you can go ahead and pair your other devices.

Let me know how you go.


Recommendation for simple project/task time tracking app I'm looking for a very simple app to allow me to track my time on particular user-defined projects or tasks.

However, my requirement is slightly different to those in questions such as Is there a good time automatic time tracking tool for Mac OS X as I don't need something that will automatically track my time spent in particular applications such as Time Sink or Time Track Pro. Rather, what I want to be able to do in a rough "must have" to "nice to have" order is:

Add user-defined projects/tasks to a list each with its own timer
Manually start and stop project/task timers as I switch projects
Idle timer to stop recording activity if I leave the computer for a period of time
Access the app from the menubar (ability to hide dock icon would be a bonus too)
Create subtasks from the main project/task

So, apologies in advance for the following, but in my head the interface might look something like the following, but again I'm totally open to suggestions:

Project          Time
---------------------
Project X        0:32   <Start/Stop Button>
Project Y        4:00   <Start/Stop Button>
Project Z        1:25
    Subtask 1    1:00   <Start/Stop Button>
    Subtask 2    0:25   <Start/Stop Button>

For example, Harvest looks perfect for what I need, apart from the fact that there's a $12 per month cost. I'm not against paying for an application, but I'd like to avoid ongoing charges if possible.

In the end, I found Timecop that does almost everything I wanted: simple project tracking with a variety of configurable reports spanning days, weeks, or months.

Honourable mentions go to Tictoc which does a very similar job to Timecop, and Timing (which also has a free, Lite version). Timing is different in that its a "traditional" application tracker, however, you can create custom projects and drag applications into them, right down to the document level. So you can attribute different documents in a single app to different projects, which is great if you're working on two different projects in Xcode, for example.


My Automator Workflow fails because it fails to find the git command within the 'Run Shell Script' command? Need help I have an Automator workflow and one of the actions is to clone a repository. Here's the code for the 'Run Shell Script' action. The command is run within the Bash shell /bin/bash if that matters:

SOURCEDIR="${3/\/Volumes/}"

cd "$2"
REPOURL="bob@somedomain.com:$SOURCEDIR"
WORKINGDIR="$1"

# Capture any errors with cloning process in log file
git clone "$REPOURL" "$WORKINGDIR" &> ./log.txt

// For debugging
echo "exit code: $?"
echo "PPID: $PPID"

open .

Now the Automator App runs fine on my machine. The path to git on my machine (A Macbook Pro) is: /usr/bin/git (I believe I installed git on my machine through Xcode)

But on my co-worker's machine (Also a Mac Pro) the Automator App fails. In fact, the output of the log.txt file says: bash: git: command not found

Now on my co-worker's machine the path to git is: usr/local/git/bin, which, yes, is different because he installed git through the Google Git Installer for Mac OS X, but I didn't think it should matter because in the script the git command is not absolute path to the command and further more my co-worker can run git normally from a Bash script but when invoked directly from the Terminal.

So what gives? Why does the automator workflow work for me but not for my co-worker?

There must be something fundamental about Bash or Unix that I'm not understanding here but I'm lost.

Scripts run via Automator use the default search path which usually does not include /usr/local/bin. In your case an easy fix would be to put

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

somewhere at the beginning of the script.


How to view public Exchange calendars from iCal? In my company, people use shared Exchange calendars to organize their work. They see all the public calendars in Exchange after they login. Sadly, this doesn't work for me on Mac: after adding the Exchange account in System Preferences I see only my own Exchange calendar and none of the shared ones. I read here about using delegation, but I don't know what e-mail to type there, as others see these calendars just as "public". Any hints?

The above doesnt' REALLY work for people, especially not with Outlook 365. Here's the way that worked for me:

With iCal open go to the menu bar at the top of the screen and select iCal, it's to the right of the Apple Symbol in the upper left corner.
Select Preferences
Once the Preferences window comes up select the Accounts section then select the Exchange account to bring up its information.
Now select the Delegation tab.
Under the list is a + sign. Click this to add a calendar.
Begin typing the user's name as above and the auto-completion will begin. Once you've found the correct user's name select it to add it under the Users column.
Under Accounts I can access: you will now see that user's name. You can enable or disable their calendar from displaying by checking or unchecking the boxes under the Show header.

I found these instructions from the USC website.


AppleScript - Error: Expect End of Line found end of script I'm an AppleScript novice and receiving the above error in what should be a very simple AppleScript. I believe it is somewhere in the set statement but unable to ascertain. Would greatly appreciate any guidance or suggestions.

using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule
set attachmentsFolder to (("Macintosh HD:Users:John:Dropbox:John & Julie:Wirecard") as Unicode text)
tell application "Mail"
    -- Save the attachment
        set savePath to attachmentsFolder & (name of theAttachment)
            try
                with timeout of 1800 seconds
                    save theAttachment in file (savePath)
                end timeout
            end try
end tell
end perform mail action with messages

Delimit the ampersand using a backslash like so:

(("Macintosh HD:Users:John:Dropbox:John \& Julie:Wirecard")

From: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11233682/opening-a-file-with-an-in-the-middle-mac-terminal


How to update the program "preview"? Im Using Mac OS X 10.6.8 and I do regular updates via "apple-symbol / Software Update ...".

For Viewing an printing PDFs, I use a program called preview. The version installed on my computer is "5.0.3 (504.1)". On Wikipedia I found, that the current version is 7.0. How can I Update to this version?

The version is linked to your OS level, you are using an older version of Preview because you are using an older OS.  The latest version is available as part of the latest OS.  Luckily, this update is now free, so long as your machine is compatible - looks for OS X Mavericks in the App Store


When using Spaces, is there a way to set each "desktop" background independently? For instance, say I had a few sweet background images I wanted to use to identify each one.

There's no built-in feature in OS X for that but there are two applications that can do that for you, Hyperspaces and SpaceSuit.


Is there any way to change the directory bash works out of, so as not to junk up my Home folder? Granted they’re generally invisible files, but it’s like every application wants to store a million configuration files in my home directory. I like to keep my home directory neat and tidy. Ideally I’d like to make a folder called bash and store all the bash, shell, etc files in there. Like every app leaves a trail of one line files in my nice, clean home directory.

This is my working directory:

Where I want it to look like this with a nice, neat little folder for the shell to do whatever it wants.

Anyway... sorry if I sound pissy but I just got a new MacBook and I literally had to spend 40 minutes playing 52-pick-up in my home directory with all the files terminal apps left everywhere.

I’m actually surprised Apple allows this. It just let’s the shall spill it’s crap all over the nice, neat home directory. I wish Apple would make it so you need a password to even create a directory there.

Is there any way to change the directory bash works out of.....

This is a misunderstanding of what Bash is.  Bash is a Unix shell that's a command line interface to the operating system.

It doesn't "work out" of your Home folder.  When you start a non-login, interactive shell, it starts you out in your HOME folder as a matter of convenience.

For simplicity sake, Bash is just a "portal" (Terminal window) into the operating system; nothing more.

  ...so as not to junk up my Home folder?

Your HOME folder is becoming "junked up" because whatever you're installing is using the default location $HOME for it's support files.

Just looking at a sample of the files/folders, things like JUNK, New Folder with Items, doc, core, layers, news, etc. are either files created by applications sourced from somewhere other than the App Store or created by the user.

  ...but it’s like every application wants to store a million configuration files in my home directory.

Apps usually store their files in ~/Library or more granular, in ~/Library/Application Support (this is the Library directory in the individual user's HOME directory).  There are exceptions...iCloud, and Adobe Create Cloud store files in the HOME directory.  I personally put my VirtualBox VM's in my HOME directory instead of my ~/Documents directory.

  I’m actually surprised Apple allows this.

Thank goodness they do!  I wouldn't welcome any OS that restricts me from modifying MY home directory the way I want it to.

That said, it's important to note that this is not an "Apple thing."  This is a BSD and more generally a Unix thing.  Your HOME directory is a predefined variable in the OS and many applications and scripts use this directory to store it's files.

As stated before, App Store apps (the ones with oversight by Apple) conform to a standard place for their support files.  Things you download from Github...well, you're at their mercy.

  ...Where I want it to look like this with a nice, neat little folder for
  the shell to do whatever it wants.

You could do this, but bear in mind that the app you installed will be looking for it's support files in directory defined by the environment variable HOME.  Move those files somewhere else and you could break the app.

To make this work, you would have to let the app know (by modifying it) that it's files are located in $HOME/bash.

TL;DR

You're expecting HOME to be a pristine place that doesn't get touched; that's an ill conceived expectation.  Use the HOME directory for what it's designed for - a user support directory and focus on keeping ~/Documents, ~/Downloads, ~/Music, nice and clean.


MacBook 2007 charger I have a MacBook I bought in 2007 and the charger recently died on me. (I'm assuming the computer itself is still working).

I did some research and ordered from Amazon a Magsafe1 60W charger, but when it arrived the connecter is too large for the port.

Any ideas what the correct charger should be? These are the details of the MacBook, purchased in Aug 2007

13-inch MacBook (White) - 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Part Number: MB062
Keyboard (English) & Mac OS (English)
Country kit
2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
SuperDrive 8x (DVD +R DL/DVD RW/CD-RW)
1GB 667 DDR2 - 2x512MB SO-DIMMs
120GB Serial ATA drive (5400rpm)

The adapter that you should get is the 60W Magsafe with "T" Connector.  From Apple's Support site:

That said, I would get an Apple 85W adapter instead of the 60W.  You will have more versatility if you decide to upgrade your MacBook to a different model down the road.  You won't do any damage, 85W just means that's the maximum power draw the adapter will support, not that it will push that amount to your computer.


Is it possible to use AirDrop and Sidecar with a mac on a VPN? I need to use a VPN on my mac from time to time. While I'm doing so, it interferes with  the ability to use AirDrop and Sidecar. My VPN has the ability to whitelist certain apps, so is there a collection of 'apps' that AirPlay and/or Sidecar uses?

I think Sidecar doesn't work with a wired connection when the VPN is on. I've tried whitelisting e.g. Finder but that's not enough, I'm not sure what else could be useful.

(This solved my similar issue with Airdrop, not tested Sidecar yet.)
I do not have VPN at router but on individual devices, so VPN broke my iCloud copy/paste and airdrop. It may be because they were not "sharing" the same wifi network anymore, as in, they had two different data tunnels, and the only solution I found was to deploy VPN at router or to turn off VPN.
I dig Mullvad VPN Mac app preferences, and found that there is an option to enable "Local network sharing" that allows local network access to connected devices. I turned it on and voila, I had my airdrop back. I believe that major VPN providers' Mac app has this function, and if you toggle this function, you can get your problem solved.
ps.: I strictly use Wireguard protocol, not OpenVPN. Not sure if it has anything to do with it, just saying...


How can I edit "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.nfsd.plist" In Catalina? I need to edit this file to allow Kodi access to my NFS shares. Before Catalina, I was able to go into recovery mode and disable SiP, make the change and re-enable it.

I just upgraded to 10.15.3 and this method no longer works. I read somewhere that the edit needs to be done through terminal from within the recovery mode but I have no idea how to do this.

If anyone can help, it'd be much appreciated.

Quit all apps!
Boot to Recovery Mode either with cmdR (while booting) or in normal GUI mode from within the shell (Terminal):
sudo nvram "recovery-boot-mode=unused"
sudo reboot

The two sudo commands will reboot your Mac immediately to Recovery Mode without further user interaction (i.e. no cmdR shortcut necessary while rebooting)
In Recovery Mode you are already super user: no sudo  required and thus not even included in the base system. The security measures introduced with El Capitan (SIP) and Catalina (read-only system volume) are not effective.
In Recovery Mode open Terminal (menu bar > Utilities > Terminal), mount the volume in read mode:
mount -uw /Volumes/[name_of_main_volume]

Example with the default name Macintosh HD:
mount -uw /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

Then enter:
/Volumes/[name_of_main_volume]/usr/bin/nano /Volumes/[name_of_main_volume]/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.nfsd.plist

Example with the default name Macintosh HD:
/Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/usr/bin/nano /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.nfsd.plist

Replace
        <array>
            <string>/sbin/nfsd</string>
        </array>

with (here I assume you are following the instructions here and want to add -N to the plist)
        <array>
            <string>/sbin/nfsd</string>
            <string>-N</string>
        </array>

and hit  ctrlO to write the changes to disk and  ctrlX to exit nano.
Enter
nvram -d recovery-boot-mode #according to user3439894 and other users you don't have to execute this command
reboot

to reboot normally.


AppleHighlightColor syntax I'm changing my highlight color via a command I find in Mathias Bynen's dotfiles like so:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleHighlightColor -string "0.764700 0.976500 0.568600"

I'd like to change it to something other than green, but I don't understand the syntax that is used for the color configuration (i'm a web developer so anything behind hex or rgba is dark magic to me).

First, what is the color specification?

Second, is there any documentation behind AppleHighlightColor?

To get the values for AppleHighlightColor try the following:

Pick your desired color
Get that color's RGB values
Take each value and divide it by 255
Put them into the string in order R G B

So, the color:

Red: 255 => 255/255 = 1
Green: 152 => 152/255 = 0.5960784314
Blue: 89 => 89/255 = 0.3490196078

would end up as:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleHighlightColor -string "1 0.5960784314 0.3490196078"

Be careful, it's the hightlight color only so you don't want to pick something dark as some (all?) apps don't change the highlighted text color - dark highlight color + black text = hard to read.


Emacs GUI won't start when launched from the Terminal When I type

brew install emacs

at the Terminal, the following message displays:

Warning: emacs 25.3 is already installed

However, when I type

emacs &

the only thing that happens is that the following message is displayed:

[1] 21302

but the Emacs GUI isn't launched. I have another apple computer where typing

emacs &

launches the Emacs GUI. How can I make the Emacs GUI launch by executing a command from the Terminal?

macOS Sierra Version 10.12.6

The installation command should end with the option --with-cocoa:

brew install emacs --with-cocoa

But first execute

brew uninstall emacs

or else Homebrew will refuse to reinstall Emacs.

As an alternative to brew install emacs --with-cocoa, Homebrew recommends running

brew cask install emacs

(you get this recommendation in the end of the brew install emacs --with-cocoa run). However, I've found that this doesn't work, and ends with the following error message:

  Error: It seems there is already an App at '/Applications/Emacs.app'.

Acknowledgements

This answer is essentially copied from here.

Update as of July 23 2019: The --with-cocoa option is not supported any longer. Follow these steps.

brew uninstall emacs
rm -rf /Applications/Emacs.app/z
brew cask install emacs


Is it required that I upgrade to Sierra Forgive me for what is probably a very silly question, but I just got my first Mac.  I used to use PCs with Ubuntu because my friends got me using it because I didn't like Windows 8.

I'm not strong with computers, I didn't like Ubuntu and all the problems that i needed a expert to help with so I went to Apple.

Now some of my friends are telling me I must upgrade to sierra while others are saying to wait.  I like El Capitan because it's working well.

Do I have to upgrade?  Is it required?

No, you are not required to upgrade to macOS 10.12, Sierra. While the upgrade is free, it is not compulsory.

Many, including myself, recommend waiting before upgrading. This additional time after a major macOS launch gives time for problems and regressions to be discovered.


How to debug USB storage issues on a MacBook? I'm trying to diagnose the USB key of a friend of mine, who says it works in his Windows but not in his Android tablet (Samsung).

When I plug a USB key in my MacBook nothing happens. The device does not appear neither in Finder nor in DiskUtil, for example diskutil list does not show it.

I looked if something is logged in /var/log/* when I insert or remove it, the only thing I see is this message in /var/log/kernel.log:

May  4 19:38:38 mymacbook kernel[0]: USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): 0x1307 0x163 0x100

I'm plugging the USB key directly in a USB port on my MacBook. I tried both of USB ports, same result. I don't know how the USB key was formatted.

Any ideas how to proceed in diagnosing this?

In the past using Macosx El Capitan, I would sometimes see
the message USBMSC Identifier (non-unique) in dmesg
after I had disconnected my external drive and tried to
reconnect it later unsuccessfully.

My blackbox perspective of what was happening is that upon
the attempt to reconnect, the already cached mac id of the
usb device was recognized as already existing, but interpreted
as a different device, so the "reconnect" failed.
In that case, I disconnected the external drive from USB again,
powered down both the drive and the computer, waited a short while,
then reconnected the drive and booted.  The id was found as
unique again and the mount of the external drive succeeded.

I see the same log message upon another error in
Sierra 0.12.6, however. I'm seeing the USBMSC Identifier (non-unique
log message when I'm not able to mount an external drive which
has the same vendor ID as another previously connected external
drive, but different complete mac ids.
I haven't been successful at getting the OS to recognize the
second drive as unique yet.
I haven't tried to mount the drive using another OS yet, but thought
the "reset" scenario above might be helpful.


Connect 30" Apple Cinema HD Display to 2018 Mac Mini I am trying to run an Apple Cinema HD Display (30") from a 2018 MacMini.

I have tried all kinds of HDMI- to DVI adaptors but so far no luck. I have also tried these connectors with a MacBook Pro with HDMI and although the computer recognises that there is a display attached (and gets the name of it etc) the display remains blank.

I've seen people doing this with USB-C, first converting to DisplayPort and then converting that to DualLink DVI... but I'm not sure if this same setup would work for HDMI, or what connectors are needed.

Maybe HDMI-DisplayPort then DisplayPort-DVI?

Re connecting a Mac mini 2018 to 30" Apple Cinema Display*:

* Apple Cinema Display 30" refers to TFT-LCD model (M9179LL/A) only! This does NOT work for the LED apple cinema displays.

You need the following:

Power Adapter of the Apple Cinema Display
The apple mini display port (mini DP) to Dual Link DVI adapter (sold second hand only, 30-150 USD) apple number MB571LL/A A1306
and
USB-C to Mini Display Port adapter from LMP (https://lmp-adapter.com/?s=16138) (ca. 30 USD from new.)

This combination runs smoothly at 2560x1600


The disk “Vol” couldn’t be ejected because “Terminal” is using it I have connected an External hard disk to Mac and just issued command df -h in terminal. When I tried to eject drive it shows the error. After closing terminal, I could eject it. But is that really needed ? I didn't open any files in external disk. df -h just shows disk usage of all drives. Then how come terminal uses the drive and prevent from ejecting?

The disk “Vol” couldn’t be ejected because “Terminal” is using it

If you cd- change directory to the mounted filesystem then you must cd out of the filesystem before you can eject it. As an example

cd; diskutil eject /Volumes/<volume name>

cd: changes the current working directory to your home folder

diskutil: ejects the filesystem

There is one case where the tab needs to be closed. Sometimes the initial working directory is on the volume. (This can happen if you open a new tab from an existing tab that is visiting the volume.) When this happens, two processes are initially using the volume: login, and the shell it launches. cd will change the working directory in the shell, but won't affect the login process. The only way to make login stop using the volume is to close the tab.

If you're not sure which tab(s) to close, you can use lsof:

sudo lsof -a -c login /Volumes/<volume name>

This command will show the process IDs (and other info) for all login processes that have open some subdirectory of the volume. With the process ID, you can either:

(if Terminal is configured to show the TTY name in the title):

get the controlling terminal with ps (ps -o tty -p <login pid(s),>)
find the relevant tabs from the Window menu
close them

more simply, shut down the relevant login by sending it/them a SIGHUP (kill -HUP <login pid(s)>)


Macbook pro internal HD not detected I had a problem with my bootcamped MBP and I tried to format the HD. I wasn't able to format any of the partitions so I tried the following based on https://www.macissues.com/2014/04/05/how-to-fix-deep-formatting-problems-with-os-x-drives/:

cat /dev/random > /dev/disk0

Now, when I boot from a USB to try to re-format the disk and make a clean install of OSX, I do

diskutil list

But my /dev/disk0 is not showing up.

Please help!

You are not seeing the drive because has no more partition on it.  What you have done is written every sector, including the super important ones like the partition table, with random numbers.

When you boot USB (I am assuming you are booting an OS X installer off of USB), you need to launch Disk Utility.  It will be under the "Tools" menu.  Partition your disk with GUID partition map and reinstall OS X.


Emacs macos keyboard handling problem I'm looking for "unity-win7" like solution, where I can run cmd+num for activating browser, console, editor etc...
I found Activator and Services in osx, however, I can't use cmd+num because many app like chrome and iterm2 use them to activate tabs.
So I set up Launch Services via Activator on chd+shift+num, and it works everywhere, except Emacs)
It looks like Emacs handle keyboard before Services, so, for example, after cmd+shift+1, it expects "Shell command".
What I need is to make this hotkeys (cmd+shift+num) somehow transparent for emacs.

Add the following line to your .emacs

(global-set-key “\M-!” nil)

and similarly for the rest of the shifted numbers.

(If you don’t have a .emacs, make a text file called that in your home directory.)

This will unbind whatever functions are attached to those key combinations, so they’ll get passed out of Emacs and off to the rest of the system.

However, if there’s any command there that you use, you’ll need to bind it to a different key combination. Even if you activate things with Escape then the key, that’s just an alias for Meta.

You can see what command is bound to a key with C-h k, then you can bind that function to another key in your .emacs

For instance, if I wanted to move query-replace-regexp, which I have on M-%, I might add these lines:

(global-set-key “\M-%” nil)
(global-set-key “\C-%" 'query-replace-regexp)

Your other option would be to change what key to use as Meta, but that would probably be a lot more trouble.


re allocate the Boot recovery partition space to the main system I am very new to apple,
I tried look up answer but was afraid to mess thing up more and loose data so decided to ask for precise answer here.

I have hard drive on my mac of 750GB, and decided to divide it to 2 partitions, 450 and 300 but then I deleted the 300G but these 300 GB now have been added to the Apple Boot recovery HD and I can't use it.

I will attach a photo through the terminal.
Please let me know how can I reuse that space and add it to the main system hard drive.

I'd make a backup of your system and then format the partition altogether.

You cant merge the boot recovery with the Mac partition. It's separate so that you can troubleshoot the mac if you need to reinstall it which is what I recommend.

As for resizing the MacOS boot partition to a smaller size, you can try this fix from this question: https://superuser.com/a/985499/841637

  To fix:

  Boot into the OS as normal.
  Open a terminal.
  Repair the disk diskutil repairVolume /dev/disk0s3 (where disk0s3 is your volume)
  Verify the disk diskutil verifyVolume /dev/disk0s3
  Resize the partition diskutil resizeVolume /dev/disk0s3 650M
  Boot into the recovery mode
  Open the terminal, don't use the Disk Utility
  Resize the actual disk diskutil resizeVolume /dev/disk0s2 200G (where disk0s2 is the actual disk you want to resize, 200G is your
  size)

Just make sure that your drive volume names are in place of the volumes inserted in the list above.

See if you are able to do this.


apps/music/photo sync **after** clean install of iOS 7 I am preparing to upgrade to iOS 7.0+ via a clean install. From what I've read, this method is best to minimize the chance of taking a hit on battery performance. If I understand correctly, a clean install wipes my phone and puts it into a "brand new, just out of the box state."

My question is - do I just re-sync my clean phone using iTunes to get my music and photos (stored in iPhoto) back on my newly upgraded phone? If this isn't correct, can someone please respond with the best method or direct me to a site that will offer the instructions?

Yes. When you do a clean install of iOS 7 no to your device, iTunes will prompt you to set up your device. When asked to restore from backup, choose Set up as new iPhone. This will mean that you don't restore your data and preserve your 'fresh' install.

Use the tabs across the top of iTunes to select exactly what you would like to sync back to your device. Apps that you sync to your device using the Apps tab in iTunes do not restore the app data, unless the app data is stored in iCloud, or through some other method of syncing data (i.e. Dropbox content that is pulled from Dropbox servers).


How to create a macOS Sierra iso installer successfully? I want to test Sierra before fully installing it on my computer by creating a Sierra iso installer, which I can use on Virtual Box. When I attempt the first step below (mount the installer image) I get an error from hdutil that the resource is busy. Does anyone have suggestions on how to safely do this?

  error: hdiutil: attach failed - Resource busy

steps:

Mount the installer image

hdiutil attach /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg -noverify - nobrowse -mountpoint /Volumes/install_app

Convert the boot image to a sparse bundle

hdiutil convert /Volumes/install_app/BaseSystem.dmg -format UDSP -o /tmp/Sierra

Increase the sparse bundle capacity to accommodate the packages

hdiutil resize -size 8g /tmp/Sierra.sparseimage

Mount the sparse bundle for package addition

hdiutil attach /tmp/Sierra.sparseimage -noverify -nobrowse -mountpoint /Volumes/install_build

Remove Package link and replace with actual files

rm /Volumes/install_build/System/Installation/Packages cp -rp /Volumes/install_app/Packages /Volumes/install_build/System/Installation/

Unmount the installer image

hdiutil detach /Volumes/install_app

Thanks for your time!

I was facing similar issue when I upgraded to Sierra. Adding -force flag resolved issue. Try hdiutil detach -force /Volumes/install_app it might work.


My Instagram photos on my iPhone The pictures on my Instagram (not my account) are all blurry, and the videos won't work. Not all pictures and videos do it though, just some.

Welcome to Ask Different!

I had this issue when I updated to iOS9 (though I think I could play videos, I don't remember). All it was is I missed the Instagram update. Here is the question I asked: Why have pictures on Instagram got blurry since my iPad has been updated to iOS9?


Unable to manage mobile account settings I'm trying to manage my mobile account settings after migrating my local account to a network account.

The problem is that the settings button is greyed out.

How can I change this in order to get my local account syncing with my home server?

note: the lock icon is "locked" in the screenshot, however even unlocked the settings button is still grey

This is something you'll have to change in Workgroup Manager on your home server (assuming you're using Mac OS X Server).

What you'll need to do is:

Open Workgroup Manager from /Applications/Server
Authenticate as a server administrator
Find your user account and go to the Preferences tab
Go to Mobility
Change all the managed preferences from Once or Always to Never:

Log out and log back in on your client computer and you should be good to go!


Change Menu-Bar Font? Is there a way to change the menu bar font/font color/font size?
I don't want to change the menu bar color, just the font.

Short answer, no. It's been asked many times on many apple forums.

If you just need bigger text, the only sort of solution is to reduce your screen res.


Key re-mapping or how get HEX for button i have new macbook air  13". There is "><" button under Esc. I want to rebind this button to semicolon ";". How? Or please tell me, how can I find Hex for this button, than I can change it by my self in defaultkeybinding.dict :) Thanks

DefaultKeyBinding.dict wouldn't work in a lot of applications, and "<" = (insertText:, ";"); wouldn't change ⌘< to ⌘;.

You could try using KeyRemap4MacBook and saving this as private.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<item>
<name>test</name>
<identifier>private.test</identifier>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::BACKQUOTE, KeyCode::COMMA, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L</autogen>
</item>
</root>

KeyCode::BACKQUOTE is the same key code as < on ISO keyboards.

The test folder has an XML file with all the predefined remappings.

Another option would be to create a keylayout file with Ukelele.


Why is my iOS not detecting Bluetooth device names? I am trying to list of bluetooth devices from my app.

My Bluetooth is enabled in settings but doesn't detect device names.

The BT device that you are looking for has to be in discovery mode, or set to always discoverable in order to be visible to such device searches.


Can a MacBook Pro be tracked when disconnected from the Internet? My MacBook was stolen. I just want to know if I can find it even if the thief shut it down permanently.

On my MacBook I have an automatic session opened and the Airport is turned on by default.

I want to know if I can trace it even if the Airport-detected WiFi hotspots but the thief didn't connect it to the Internet.

What will happen if the thief turns off the airport and only works offline?

There is no way to trace your MacBook Pro if the thief does not connect it to the internet, because at the very least the MBP needs to 'dial in' to announce it's location.

Since you did not enable "Find my Mac" and did not install any other recovery software, you might want to check in with some other services installed on your MBP.

Dropbox for example shows the last connected IP address for any given device you linked to your Dropbox account. If you use Dropbox, force a sync by making a change in your Dropbox folder. If the thief connects to the internet and Dropbox syncs the changes, you'll know the IP address he was connecting from. You can find this information on the Dropbox website, in your account settings.

Gmail is another popular service that allows you to see recently connected IP addresses. If you set up a Gmail account in Mail.app for example, you might want to check this information. You can find a link on the bottom right of your Inbox page.

Have a look at all possible cloud-based services you installed on the MBP, possibly others allow viewing a list of recently connected IP addresses as well.

However, if the thief does never connect to the internet, this will not help you either. There is also a possibility the thief reinstalls the OS from scratch to prevent the MBP from dialing in.


Changing OS X account login image I tried to change the my login account picture.  But the options that are there are only default, recent and camera and no option for edit.

I am left with no options to select picture from any files other than take a picture of myself with the camera or use the default pictures or use the recent picture used from the default.

Anyone got any idea?  It sucks.

If the options of Defaults, Recents, Photo Stream, Faces, Camera & Linked are simply not sufficient, there's always the option of simply dragging any new picture straight on top of your existing picture, or into Recents…


Force launchd to re-read environment variables Is there any way, short of rebooting, to force launchd to re-read environment variables newly defined in /etc/launchd.conf?

Can it be done with launchctl(1)?

There is no way to do this, "launchd" is the master process, the equivalent of "init" in other unix systems, the only way in any other daemon would be to perform some sort of kill -HUP to reload config files etc, but this operation is not permitted on launchd.  If you look it up in the process table it is the number 1 process, every other process that is currently running is in some way a child of it, so a reboot is the only way to achieve this.  You may have further luck in setting those environment variables in another area that is more inclined to allow restarts.

    Dans-iMac:etc stuffe$ ps -ef | grep launchd | grep -v grep
    0     1     0   0  9:40am ??         0:09.47 /sbin/launchd
   65    18     1   0  9:40am ??         1:53.64 /usr/sbin/mDNSResponder -launchd
  213    73     1   0  9:41am ??         0:02.55 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/usbmuxd -launchd
    0    85     1   0  9:41am ??         0:00.08 /System/Library/CoreServices/ODSAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ODSAgent -launchd
   89   230     1   0  9:41am ??         0:00.01 /sbin/launchd
  501   238     1   0  9:41am ??         0:00.23 /sbin/launchd
  501   933   238   0 10:53am ??         0:00.01 /System/Library/CoreServices/AirPort Base Station Agent.app/Contents/MacOS/AirPort Base Station Agent -launchd -allowquit

EDIT:

Of course, missing the obvious solution that you can add the relevant variables into the config file, and then just run the commands manually in order to escape the need for a reboot, nothing that only newly start programs will take account of any changes.  I found this page which explains it in more detail:

    Environment variables set in launchd will be available to all programs on the system. However since $HOME/.launchd.conf is not
    supported, this approach is used for global environment variables
    only.

  The /etc/launchd.conf file contains a list of commands to be run by
  launchctl during startup. However environment variables set in
  /etc/launchd.conf cannot have spaces and cannot reference other
  environment variables; launchctl when run in Terminal does not suffer
  these limitations. Do note that /etc/launchd.conf does not exist by
  default, so we will need to create it.

  A reboot is necessary to load the contents of /etc/launchd.conf.
  However if you were to run the corresponding launchctlcommands in
  Terminal, you can alleviate the need for the reboot. Just remember
  that if you only do the launchctl commands, and do not put the entries
  in /etc/launchd.conf, it will not persist after reboot.

  If you want to have a system wide environment variable that uses
  spaces or be dependent upon another environment variable, you can put
  the launchctl commands into one of the files Terminal reads. You will
  have to quit and relaunch Terminal to access the newly set variables.


Remove Find my iPhone lost mode passcode lock from every wake If I have set my iPhone with the lost mode/password lock, how do I get rid of the password lock every time I wake up or turn on my iPhone with Apple IOS 8.1?

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2700 explains that you should click the Lost Mode link again to change the status on the phone.


Time capsule speed issues Whenever I browse my Time Capsule's AirPort Disk, it seems very slow in simply listing the files it has. I am looking in directories with upwards of fifty music files in each.

Scrolling is really slow. I have turned of Icon Preview in the View Options etc. But it's still slow.

Anyone know how I can speed it up?

Thanks.

This is the nature of wireless networks and Apple's AFP protocol. I'd reccomend either connecting to a wired network to browse your music, or using the command line to find what you're looking for, as Finder adds a deal of latency to the file-listing process.


How to move file from one users account to another? Permission denied. I'm trying to move the file of a virtual machine from one users account to the other. So basically I want to move /Users/joe/Win7.vm to /Users/jane/Win7.vm but I can't figure out how to do it through Finder because I can't get to the root directory (/). I tried moving it using the mv command in Terminal and it said permission denied. Is tried sudo mv but it just said "sorry". I also tried changing its permission (chmod) but it wouldn't let me (and when I tried sudo chmod, it literally said "sorry").

I'm logged in as administrator.

Its a permissions issue. To resolve simply, first copy the file to /Users/Shared/, then copy again from there, then try to troubleshoot your permissions issues afterwards. You are logged in as administrator, yet you still are lacking the authority to escalate to root or change permissions, and that is odd. Even as admin, you would still need root access to move a file belonging to one user to another users' account. In Terminal, try sudo bash and enter your password when prompted. To use mv command, the syntax is mv /path/to/origin/file /path/to/destination/directory/

Also, changing permissions with chmod doesn't change ownership. You use chown for that.


MacBook Air mid 2011 Geekbench results too low My MacBook Air from mid 2011 recently only scores about ~1800 on geekbench vs 5300+ that it was before.  I'm starting the benchmarking right after reboot, and the CPU seems initially calm. Any points?

I went to the Apple Service, where the guy has booted from an external hard drive and run the Repair Disk Permissions task from Disk Utility. That solved the issue!

Note: I did run Repair Disk Permissions before while trying to solve this problem, but it apparently couldn't fix some of the files due to that the disk was mounted. So, booting from an external disk is crucial here.


Is there a way to update parallels without using automatic updates? I need to be able to download updates to Parallels on one machine and then distribute the update to multiple, other machines, on a separate network.

Is there a way to do this? I've tried to both search kb.parallels.com, as well as Google this.  I can't find anything explicitly stating whether this is or isn't possible.

If I can download updates from an external source for manual installation, where do I go to get these updates?

If you want to download updated version on one computer and use it on other machines, download and install the latest Parallels Desktop 7 update:

Download the update from http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/download/dr/
Run the downloaded file and re-install Parallels Desktop. Note: only Parallels Desktop application will be reinstalled, no Virtual Machines will be affected.


Identifying alert sounds I've been hearing this unfamiliar "alert" sound – kind of like a badly played guitar string slapping against the frets. After the sound occurs I don't see any new badges or any other indications that something happened…

I've been though all of the stock sounds in System Preferences > Sounds > Sound Effects and while Basso sounds close (hard to say for sure since I can't make the sound happen on demand) I don't think it is the one.

So the question, in three parts:

Is there any way to identify the source of alerts?
If I knew the name of the sound, would that help? (Should I / could I go looking for places where Basso is used?
Can "non-stock" sounds be used for alerts?

I'm running the 10.12.3 beta on a Mid-2014 MBP.

SE Chat plays a twanged rubber band sound when someone pings you with @yourName in a room you have open.

You can change that pref by clicking the speaker icon at the top of the chat room.


How to prevent multiple login windows? Whenever my rMBP wakes up from sleep, it shows a log in page with my user name. The page has a metallic gray background. After I enter my password, another page opens up with my wallpaper along with my user name again, and I have to enter the password one more time.

Output of diskutil list for /dev/disk0 is:

#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.4 GB   disk0s2
3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

How do I disable multiple login windows each asking for a password when my laptop starts or wakes up from sleep?

Disable File Vault if you don't want this two step log in process. You can be sure FileVault is off by seeing the following from terminal:

Mac:~ me$ diskutil cs list
No CoreStorage logical volume groups found

Alternatively, you could disable and re-enable the File Vault encryption and watch for the prompt where it asks if the OS user should be permitted to unlock the drive with the user's password.

If you select yes from that, the user will show up on the first login screen and both unlock the FileVault protected volume and log in with the same credentials.


Command Tilde in Finder, prevent focus on Desktop at end of cycle Say I have 2 finder windows open, A and B.

I begin focussed on A, then ⌘ + ~ to focus on B, finally ⌘ + ~ once more, and it still leaves B in front, but B is now slightly grayed out (same style as finder window A when it's behind other finder windows).

This 3rd location is focussed on the Desktop, how do I prevent the Desktop from receiving focus on ⌘ + ~? I only want actual Finder windows to receive focus?

It is selecting the Desktop, and any icons on it.


MacBook Pro 2017 Geekbench Before and After Spectre and Meltdown Patch I was just wanting to see the impact on speed due to the patches for the recent Intel CPU Bugs.

I have run the update already, but was wondering if someone could run a Geekbench test on macOS 10.13.1 and 10.13.2 for a by-the-numbers comparison to how the CPU ran before and after the update (preferably on a 15” 2017 machine)

Industry testing is/has already been done and will continue as this issue is flushed out.   According to a just released press release directly from Intel, Industry Testing Shows Recently Released Security Updates Not Impacting Performance in Real-World Deployments, the following OEMs/Manufactures have stated the following:

  Apple: “Our testing with public benchmarks has shown that the changes
  in the December 2017 updates resulted in no measurable reduction in
  the performance of macOS and iOS as measured by the GeekBench 4
  benchmark, or in common Web browsing benchmarks such as Speedometer,
  JetStream, and ARES-6.”

  Microsoft: “The majority of Azure customers should not see a noticeable performance impact with this update. We’ve worked to
  optimize the CPU and disk I/O path and are not seeing noticeable
  performance impact after the fix has been applied.”

  Amazon: “We have not observed meaningful performance impact for the overwhelming majority of EC2 workloads.”

  Google: “On most of our workloads, including our cloud infrastructure, we see negligible impact on performance.”

Apple also goes on to further expand on the testing stating that:

  Our current testing indicates that the upcoming Safari mitigations
  will have no measurable impact on the Speedometer and ARES-6 tests and
  an impact of less than 2.5% on the JetStream benchmark.


Tips to speed up a Mac Mini? I recently purchased a used MacMini3,1 (Late 2009) with a 2.26 Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and 2 GB of memory. The seller shipped it to me with Snow Leopard installed, and it ran smooth and fast. I just upgraded it to Lion and it's very sluggish. Would adding more memory fix this, or possibly upgrading to Mountain Lion make the computer run better? I installed Yosemite and it was unusably slow. I realize the computer is old, but does anyone have a solution?

The 2GB RAM is the biggest bottleneck here, no matter what you use the Mac Mini for. No recent Mac has been shipped with less than 4GB installed. Although memory management has gotten much better from Mountain Lion > Mavericks > Yosemite, you need to increase the RAM to at least 4GB.

Secondarily, you may be able retrofit a SSD to replace the slow internal HD.

I and my staff upgraded >200 Mac Minis of this vintage from 2GB to 4GB a number of years ago, in anticipation of upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion & then eventually Mountain Lion. It enabled us to push the use of these computers another 2 years or so.

We've purchased all our RAM from DMS for more than a decade. RAM and HD/SSD retrofits can be found at a number of places, most notably Other World Computing.

(Disclaimer: We are institutionally satisfied, (and I am personally satisfied,) with both of these company's products, and have no vested or financial interest in either company.)