Deleting photos on the phone - does it affect them on iCloud? Can you delete pictures from an iPhone and still have it saved in iCloud? If so, how?

Whilst it does depend on where you delete the photo, it also depends on what you mean when you say 'iCloud'…

Here are three scenarios involving deleting photos on your iPhone, and the result of doing so:

Delete from Camera Roll

Deleting a photo from your camera roll only removes it from your camera roll. The photo is left intact on Photo Stream if it has already been uploaded. A photo not yet uploaded to Photo Stream will not be uploaded to Photo Stream after it has been deleted, even if partially uploaded.

However, deleting a photo from your camera roll, then using iCloud Backup, will delete the photo from your iCloud Backup. This means that the photo will not be restored if you restore a backup from iCloud. (If a photo does not exist on your iCloud Backup, and is deleted before it is uploaded, it will not be part of the next iCloud Backup).
Delete from Photo Stream

Deleting a photo from Photo Stream will only remove it from Photo Stream. It does not affect the photos in the camera roll, or even Shared Photo Streams - they keep a copy of the photo separately.

Since it does not affect the camera roll, it will not affect any iCloud Backups, both previous iCloud backups and future backups.
Delete from Shared Photo Stream

Deleting a photo from a Shared Photo Stream will only remove it from that Shared Photo Stream. It will not affect other Shared Photo Streams, the main Photo Stream, or your camera roll.

Since it does not affect the camera roll, it will not affect any iCloud Backups, both previous iCloud backups and future backups.


Yosemite WiFi dead chip I have noticed a weird WiFi bug with OS X Yosemite. This has never happened in any previous OS X that I have used. I have a Early 2013 Macbook Pro with Retina display 13 and I updated to Yosemite a day after it launched. I usually do not shut down my laptop and just keep it in sleep. After the update, sometimes when the laptop wakes up from sleep WiFi is completely switched off. On trying to turn it on I get the following message in console:

22/10/14 1:41:11.000 pm kernel[0]: ARPT: 1911.087562: wl0: _wlc_ioctl: dead chip, off[0] bar0[0xffffffff]

Upon restart the WiFI icon becomes a grey icon with a cross mark and says either "No hardware installed" or "WiFi not configured".

The only solution I have found till now is an SMC reset. But with the frequency of this happening is quite high and is frustrating to always shutdown and do an SMC reset. Is anyone else facing similar issues? And does anyone know of a fix without a restart ?

You may have hardware that is on it's way to being really dead.  The temperature of a marginal chip can cause it to be functional sometimes and non-functional other times.  When you resume from sleep, try letting the computer get warm, then try to enable WiFi.  The chip may need to get warm and then work.  This is obviously not a good long term solution but, if it works, it indicates that the chip (or the connection to the board) is flakey.


Problems with photo stream I have a large photo library and I do not want to buy extra space from Apple so that I can use the iCloud photo library. Instead, I want to use the photo stream to synchronize every photo taken from my iPad and iPhone to my Mac (because here I have the space). And occasionally, I want to send some photos to my iPad/iPhone from my Mac.

So my problems with the photo stream are:

What happens when a photo is added to the photo stream? In the OS X photos App, it will be downloaded and permanently saved in the library, even if it is deleted from the photo stream. In iOS however, it will be downloaded but when removed from the photo stream it will disappear from my iOS device as well. Can I somehow save it there permanently like under OS X?
Some photos are not downloaded to my Mac although they are listed under the photo stream album on my iPhone, with which I took them. They are not listed in the photo stream album under the Photos App in OS X. What could be the problem?

Any hints appreciated.

I'll try to answer your inquiries based on my experience.

In iOS, to be able to save an image from the Photo Stream (PS), you need to tap an image and select the Save Image action to make a copy of that image to the Camera Roll.
That may be a bug in iOS/OS X, I'm not sure, but that also happens to me especially with the most recent photos I took. But sometimes, after a couple of minutes, the Photos app on my Macbook Air will be updated. You can connect your iPhone to your Mac and just import those images that you can't see in your Photos app.


Rip audio file from video file in OSX I've got an mp4 video file. I'd like to take the audio from that video, and create an audio file. The output encoding could be AAC or MP3, it wouldn't make any difference.

Which applications would be easiest to do this, and what steps should I take?

Using QuickTime Player:

File /
  Export /
    Audio Only


iOS QR code scanner that can open URLs in the default browser I am in search for an iOS app that can open URLs in the default browser upon reading a QR-code. All I can find are apps that have their own in-app browsers. That's problematic since many of them are bloated with ads and won't work properly (I am using it for registration).

This seems to be standard on Android, so I really don't know what to look for. So basically, is there maybe some keywords to use to find these apps?

Is it technically possible on iOS for other apps to open up other apps, such as, in this case, the web browser?

If the native QR code scanner in control center and the camera app aren’t sufficient, I use https://qrafter.com for this on iOS. The pro version is inexpensive and very useful.

It's possible to hand off URL - just that it's up to the developer to implement that.


CD-ing a file to itself I wrote an application in Applescript to open a black picture and fullscreen it in preview. I need the app to "cd" to itself, no matter where it is. That means if it is on the desktop it can pull up that picture from within the apps files, and if the app is moved somewhere else, it can still pull that picture from within the app. Should the app just create a directory in the Application Support folder or is this possible?

If I understand the question correctly all you need is to get the current directory of the application.
Quick looking through SE answers pulls out this:

  set YourPathVariable to POSIX path of ((path to me as text) & "::")


Date and WiFi password resets after battery dies Weird thing has started happening, basiaclly when your lid is closed and the battery dies, normally your MacBook should "hibernate" itself, yet what started happening on mine is that it completely shuts down. After restarting, the WiFi password is forgotten and date/time are resetted to detaults (year 2000).

Can it be that the PRAM battery already died on a Mid 2010 MBP i7?

Best Regards,
Oskar

Yes, IMHO, that's the symptoms of a dead PRAM battery. You should simply change it, I don't think it cost a lot. But, you are right, that's indeed a rapid death...


How to speed up reading Blu-ray images? I have unencrypted .iso images of both DVD and BD (don't know how to check the UDF version used). When mounting and copying files off them, BD is around four times slower. Why? How do I speed it up?

The easiest solution to reach Blu-ray or DVD ISO on Mac is to digitize ISO image to readable file type for iMac, this is my suggestion.


Is it normal for a 27" iMac to have CPU core temperatures around 95C under 100% CPU load? I have a 2017 27" iMac with a 4.2 GHz Intel Core i7. It's been having some issues lately where every now and then the entire system will gradually freeze, forcing me to hard reboot the computer. So to see if there's a hardware issue, I started running prime95 in stress test mode to see if any errors were detected.

After running for about 20 minutes, I checked the core temperature readings for my CPU and they were all hovering around 95 C. Ordinarily I'd think that's way too hot but with the design of the iMac I'm not sure. I stopped prime95 and after my system was idle for a little while the core temperatures are now hovering around 60 C.

Is that temperature too hot, or is this normal for an iMac?

edit: After the system was idling all night the temperature went down to 45 C, which is of course a good idle temperature. So no worries there.

edit 2: After doing more research I've discovered this is a widespread issue with the Intel Core i7-7700k, and affects all iMacs that have it. Apparently Intel claims its temperature spiking to 90 C during normal use and hitting 100 C during heavy use is normal. Seems wrong to me, but who am I to argue with Intel?

Reaching a temp of 95°C is not surprising if the CPU is under heavy load for a prolonged period.

Prime95 can be useful for determining stability, but I'm not particularly a fan of it as a troubleshooting/diagnostic tool. The reason it's popular  for stability testing is because users will overclock their CPUs and then need a way to test how stable they are afterwards. So, for me, prime95 is the wrong tool for the job you're trying to perform (but that's a personal opinion). However, if you're wanting to use it, then you need to run it for at least 3hrs. If your iMac continues to run it without error, then it's passed the test.

If you're particularly concerned about your hardware, I'd start with using Apple Diagnostics to test your machine.

Run Apple Diagnostics

Follow the steps below to run Apple Diagnostics:

Fully shut down your iMac
Restart your iMac
Immediately press the D key and keep it down until you see the Diagnostics screen appear
Wait for Diagnostics to finish (this typically only takes a few minutes)
Once complete, one of two things will appear on the screen:

a No issues found message
a brief description of any errors found plus further instructions

If the diagnostics test does find errors, take a note of what they are

Note: If pressing and holding the D key at Step 3 doesn't work, start again at Step 1 and, at Step 3 press and hold both the OptionD keys instead. This will try and run diagnostics from the internet instead, so you will need to allow more time for it to complete.

Assuming the iMac passes this without error, I'd be more inclined to test your hardware in Safe Mode to see if you can recreate the issues you're having. If you can't, then you know it's most likely a software issue relating to a login item, corrupted font, or kernel extension.

For more info on Safe Mode, refer to: Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac.


Configuring OS X 10.7 Lion Server to serve Rails Apps via Apache I have a number of Rails Apps working just great under Snow Leopard, but would like to migrate these to Lion.

However, like many others, the rug has been pulled from under my feet by the changes that have been made to Mac OS X Server admin with Lion.

That said, it has been straight-forward to install Rails and get my Rails app responding via the WEBrick web server.

I'd now like to get Passenger (or equivalent) working and use Apache as the web server, with automagically launched rails apps, and associated goodness.

However, the changes made to Lion appear to break Passenger, as this relies on named virtual hosts to detect invocations, and kick off the Rails Apps under Apache.  I've tried using the method described in Apple's support note advice for Apache named hosts, - but I've had no joy :-/

It seems that I may need to bite the bullet and use the new Lion Server web app config mechanism to specify Rails dependencies, and launch the Rails Apps that way.

Has anyone had any success with configuring Lion Server to serve Rails Apps via Apache?

Any pointers and tips would be appreciated.

btw, I'm using a new Mac mini, so this is a clean install of Lion, and going back to SL isn't an option :-/

I've done some experimentation in order to answer my own question...

Firstly, I've only gotten the virtual named host kludge working with Passenger, not the new Lion scheme, but hey, it's a start...

Firstly, follow the Apple temporary fix, as linked in the question.

Then, the following works for me to support two virtual named hosts, implemented using Passenger and Rails. I derived this by taking the Lion virtual host example, and merging in my Snow Leopard config.

Disclaimer this works, but needs improvement.  I've not got SSL working yet.

Add the following in a file named 0000_any_80_.conf

## Example Virtual Host Configuration

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName bongle.example.com
    ServerAlias bungle.example.com
    ServerAdmin bongle@example.com
    RackEnv bongle_production
    RailsEnv bongle_production

    DocumentRoot "/Users/Nigel/Rails/bungle/public"
    CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/access_log" combinedvhost
    ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/error_log"

    <IfModule mod_ssl.c>
        SSLEngine Off
        SSLCipherSuite "ALL:!aNULL:!ADH:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXP:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM"
        SSLProtocol -ALL +SSLv3 +TLSv1
        SSLProxyEngine On
        SSLProxyProtocol -ALL +SSLv3 +TLSv1
    </IfModule>

    <Directory "/Users/Nigel/Rails/bungle/public">
        Options All +MultiViews -ExecCGI -Indexes
        AllowOverride None
        <IfModule mod_dav.c>
            DAV Off
        </IfModule>
    </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName burble.anothersite.com
    ServerAlias www.anothersite.com
    ServerAdmin bongle@anothersite.com
    RackEnv burble_production
    RailsEnv burble_production

    DocumentRoot "/Users/Nigel/Rails/burble/public"
    CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/access_log" combinedvhost
    ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/error_log"

    <IfModule mod_ssl.c>
        SSLEngine Off
        SSLCipherSuite "ALL:!aNULL:!ADH:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXP:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM"
        SSLProtocol -ALL +SSLv3 +TLSv1
        SSLProxyEngine On
        SSLProxyProtocol -ALL +SSLv3 +TLSv1
    </IfModule>

    <Directory "/Users/Nigel/Rails/school/public">
        Options All +MultiViews -ExecCGI -Indexes
        AllowOverride None
        <IfModule mod_dav.c>
            DAV Off
        </IfModule>
    </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

Additional contributions to improve this are welcome.


Email encryption options on an iPhone I've started taking security more seriously lately. (Why only now you may ask? Because I'm a trusting fool that's why.) I've now got emails signing automatically and encrypting where I have their key.

Previously I only did this when necessary, but I'm trying to breed a sense of change around me and taking my own medicine seems sensible. I have no issue with GPG in Thunderbird, Outlook, or on Android with K9 Mail & APG, but I have no idea how to handle GPG on IOS.

I can't accept there's no way, it seems ridiculous, or maybe I'm approaching the problem wrong and there is a more appropriate route than GPG that's better supported?

Try iPGMail.

More here.

Features (copied from iTunes app store):

  PGMail is an app that implements the OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880) and
  allows the user to create and manage both public and private (RSA and
  DSA) PGP keys and send and receive PGP encrypted messages.

  PGP Keys and Messages can be passed to iPGMail several ways:

  From the iOS Mail.app - The iOS mail application will pass PGP attachments to iPGMail directly, eliminating the need to do an awkward
  copy-and-paste. NOTE: PGP messages that are part of the main body of
  an email will still have to be copy-and-pasted, only properly tagged
  attachments can be passed automatically.
  Directly from the system clipboard. Copy-and-paste the PGP message text from any file, webpage, or message, and it can be imported and
  decrypted by the app.
  iTunes File Sharing - Connect your device to a computer and open up iTunes, in the "Apps" section, you can scroll down and select iPGMail
  under the File Sharing section and transfer files to and from the app
  to your computer.
  DropBox - Starting with iPGMail v 1.14, you can link iPGMail to a dropbox account and transfer files to and from your dropbox file
  space. This means you can encrypt and protect your dropbox files or
  share files with others through your existing dropbox Public
  interface.

  iPGMail supports PGP key generation (RSA) directly in the app and
  stores them securely using the iOS keychain for the application. Using
  your own private PGP keys, you can encrypt and/or digitally sign any
  messages. Optionally, your public key can be attached to any message
  you send from the app so that the recipient can then import it into
  their own keychain, either on the phone or on any computer with PGP
  support.

  iPGMail will import your private keys so you can reuse your existing
  PGP identity and keys on your iPhone or iPad. Both public and private
  keys can be imported through the interfaces listed above.

  iPGMail allows the user to search public SKS PGP keyservers to find
  registered public keys for other people with whom the user can then
  send email that is digitally signed and/or encrypted encoded in
  OpenPGP ASCII Armor.

  This app is ideal for securing your files or for sending secure email
  messages to specific parties without worrying about it being viewed by
  anyone other than the designated recipient.


Multiple Monitors, shared desktop Say I have two monitors, one an LCD on my laptop and the other a HD 21". I've disabled display mirroring as I want to use the extra space to view another window, however I want the items on the desktop of both screens to be the same.

Is it possible to mirror the desktop to both screens in this way?

No, as the second monitor is an extension of your desktop. An empty extension.

The mirroring would obviously give you the same desktop items on both monitors, but without the extra screen estate that you wish for. By desktop items, I assume you mean the dock and the file icons on the actual desktop.

You seem to want a hybrid of both modes, and unfortunately you can not do this. Also, it would lead to a rather confusing situation as you you would end up having duplicates of the same files on, what is effectively, the same desktop space.

I must admit though, the first time I connected a second monitor to a mac, I had expected two docks, one on each screen. But it just doesn't work like this.

I hope that this helps to explain it.


Desktop wallpapers disappear when switch from dual displays to single I started bringing my 2011 MacBook Air to work and hook it up to an external monitor for dual display setup. But when I unplug the display, the desktop wallpapers on the built-in LCD disappears and just show a solid light gray desktop. I have to log out and log back in to get the desktop wallpapers to show again. Is there a way to fix this?

Many apps also still behave as they were on the external monitor. Do I have to use "gather windows" every time I disconnect the external monitor?

I also observed the problem after upgrading my MacBook Air (2011) to Mountain Lion.  Not only unplugging the external display triggers the gray background, but also connecting to a display.

For the gray background problem, I use a quick-and-dirty fix: restart the Dock.
Invoke the following command in the terminal:
$ killall Dock

The Dock will be restarted after it is killed, and the wallpaper will appear again.


macOS: lossless PNG to PDF conversion I have several pages imported from scanner in PNG format. I use image editor to clean some noise, downscale to 100PDI, convert image palette to grayscale, etc. Finally I've got a bunch of PNG images of small size, looking good at computer screen still.

Then I need to save these PNG pages to a single PDF file for distribution. Earlier I was able to achieve this using Preview.app. However in macOS X High Sierra 10.13 this approach does not work any longer because Preview.app is trying to downscale PNG images by 30% to fit page size. After this transform the image is not sharp enough any longer.

In earlier versions of macOS X Preview.app generated PDF file without transforming the images.

Is there a way to make a PDF file from a set of PNG images using these images as-is (without any transformation)?

ImageMagic

You can use ImageMagick to convert your PNG images to PDFs.

convert -density 100 sample.png sample.pdf

See How can I convert a PNG to a PDF in high quality so it's not blurry or fuzzy? for a related question and answers over on the Unix & Linux site.

Installing ImageMagick and convert

To install the free and open source ImageMagick, and the included convert tool, you can use the Homebrew project.

Once brew is installed, use the following command to install ImageMagick:

brew install imagemagick

Online Services

Alternatively, you can use a web service to perform the conversion for you. Search for convert png to pdf to find such services:

http://png2pdf.com
https://www.zamzar.com/convert/png-to-pdf
https://cloudconvert.com/png-to-pdf


On how many devices with the same iTunes account can you share an app? I'm aware that you can sync an iPad with up to 3 different computers, but if you have multiple iPad devices with the same iTunes account, how many devices can you sync an app to?

As far as I know, there isn't a limit. As long as the account is associated with the device, then any apps from that account can be put onto that device. If you own more than one device, you don't have to purchase the app again. You could own one hundred iOS devices and pay for just one app.


Install MAMP (not PRO) For PHP And Mail Sending I first tried searching here at apple.stack but couldn't find a solution that seemed to work for me, so I'm trying my hand at posting a question. I already spent a few good hours trying to make it work, since I overall would like to keep using MAMP (again, not MAMP PRO) instead of switching to another package that might give me more road blocks..

History:

I'm a total newbie to Apple's OS.
I have recently moved to using a macbook pro with Lion OS installed for my PHP development.
I had come to a point in my development where I now have to send mail.
I created a gmail account since the project I am working on hasn't got a name yet so no domains have been purchased (meaning no other smtp server to use)
I installed MAMP (not PRO) and have been programming on the macbook pro up to this point
I have installed pear using: http://blog.stealth35.com/2011/07/27/install-pear-on-osx-lion.html
Then after following the advice: You may want to add: /usr/lib/php/pear to your php.ini include_path I have modified:

include_path = ".:/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/lib/php"

to

include_path = ".:/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/lib/php:/usr/lib/php/pear"

in this file: /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf/php.ini
I restarted the MAMP server and performed the test:

<?php
require_once 'System.php';
var_dump(class_exists('System', false));
?>

And got a bool(true) response.
When trying out the example here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php code at post: roberto dot silva at mexicoshipping dot net 24-Jan-2004 12:16
And still.. nothing.. roberto's post ended up giving me the following:

Warning: include(Mail.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/signupemailtest.php on line 24

Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening 'Mail.php' for inclusion (include_path='/usr/lib/php/pear') in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/signupemailtest.php on line 24

Line 24: include("Mail.php");

Which makes sense, because I can't seem to find the file Mail.php anywhere.

Has anyone experienced this and found a solution for it? I'm moving towards testing confirmation emails and signups, and this has killed my streak.. If I'm missing any other info please let me know. I haven't provided other code since I'm already stumped at the inclusion of Mail.php and so far, I have been able to follow: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78799 properly.. but so that it doesn't go off-topic, I'd just posting info about getting the mail extension/pear mail set up. Thank you for any help.

Not sure if you solved this, but you need to make sure the PEAR Mail extension is installed. Open your Terminal and enter: pear install Mail


Forbidden error setting up a PHP app on Mac OS X 10.6 I have enabled Web Sharing in OS X 10.6 and now I can access http://localhost/~myuser from the browser.

Now I have copied this PHP app to my ~/Sites/the_app folder, but when I want to access it in the browser I get a Forbidden error message:

  You don't have permission to access /~myuser/the_app on this server.

Any ideas how can I fix this?

Try to chmod 755 the folder and all of its parent folders.


Is there a file copy utility for OS X that's similar to TeraCopy for Windows? On Windows, I use TeraCopy for improved file copying. Are there any similar equivalents for OS X?

In particular, I'd like to see things like copy speed.

I looked around for something like TeraCopy a while back but everything I found was pretty horrid.  In the end I decided to just use cp and rsync on the command line.


Adding content via Siri to text files in Dropbox? Recently, I decided to move a series of lists I keep in the Notes app (Groceries, Shopping, Movies to Watch, Local Bands we follow, Local Restaurants we like, etc.) to a Dropbox folder that I share with my wife on her Android phone, which is an excellent way to keep files in sync on all my devices.  However, I quickly discovered the drawback - I can no longer add content using Siri to those notes!

I've started searching for ways to hack-in some sort of syncing, or even appending, content in specific notes to text files in Dropbox.  So far, every way I've investigated has drawbacks.  There are launchd/Lingon solutions, really hacky Applescript folder actions (forcing file updates by deleting & replacing files), one-way appending using cron jobs & applescripts, etc..

Whether I use dropbox or some other content sharing management system - I would still have the same issue of not being able to tell siri to add stuff to the files...  Plus, the solution would have to work offline because we get no internet access in the Grocery store and various other places where we'd like to access the notes.

Anyone have a reliable straight-forward way to sync the content of Notes with text files in Dropbox?

Thanks,
Rob

I do not think that it is possible. The notes app buries files deep in the mobile documents folder on the desktop.

I believe it uses some sort of IMAP protocol.


Will restoring my iphone require me to upgrade versions? I am trying to get rid of approximately 3GB of imessage attachments, by deleting the attachments from the backup file, and then restoring from that backup. My phone is an iphone 5, running iOS 7.1.2. And I do not want to upgrade to iOS 9. Will I be ok restoring it? Or is there an alternative message to free up some space? Thanks

My personal recommendation would be to jailbreak your iPhone and download a Cydia application called iCleaner, which is specifically-intended to free up space on your device by clearing junk files.  It even has the exact option that you seem to be  looking for -- to delete message attachments.  It has multiple options for this -- to delete ALL message attachments, or SMART (which I'm not 100% certain what this does, but you could look into it).  iCleaner is pretty much the equivalent of CCleaner for iOS.

I do know for a fact that all messages and attachments are stored in a SQLite database that requires root access.  Your Messages application only shows the previous [however many] messages from individual contacts, but you can see that you can go back to previous history by scrolling all the way to the top and refreshing (swiping down).  Many people don't realize that  if they keep their messages, they are taking up valuable storage space on their phone, because this includes all attachments (including photos, video, etc.).

The following is only speculation, but my assumption is that iCleaner's SMART option only deletes the old attachments that are not currently visible in your current message history -- the old stuff that is still contained in the database, but which you don't have access to unless you scroll all the way up and refresh (by swiping down) to see older messages.

To answer your specific question, if you have done a full backup to iTunes rather than iCloud, you would be able to restore your phone to exactly that previous state, including iOS version and would avoid having to upgrade.


Multiple users on one machine and Dropbox If UserA logs in to an OS X machine (at the GUI) and starts Dropbox, UserB logs in via ssh and adds a file to their Dropbox, will Dropbox work for UserB? Or does UserB need to log in via the GUI also, and then "switch" (not log out) to UserA?

DropBox does not support not-logged-in users. The solution seems to be the following:

Log in and start Dropbox from the command line:

alias dropbox='/Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS/Dropbox &'
dropbox # start it.

ps aux | grep -i dropbox # shows multiple instances running

The above technique seems to work. Error messages are sent when the second Dropbox launches:

already someone listening at socket

RegisterApplication(), FAILED TO establish the default connection to the WindowServer, _CGSDefaultConnection() is NULL.

But everything appears to work.


QuickTime Player will not play .mov file My QuickTime doesnt want to play a .mov file.  I tried to convert .mov to .mp4 format using cloud convert but it gave error message:

Converter error: oov atom not found . PCO11_059_RM.mov: Invalid data found when processing input.

I've got the latest OS X software, 10.11 El Capitan, which I'm assuming would give me the latest QuickTime Player.  Any clues?

Try VLC

Try playing the file using VLC. VLC tends to be able to play files and formats that do not work in QuickTime Player on the latest OS X.

Re-encode using VLC or Handbrake

If VLC works, then you can use VLC itself or a tool like Handbrake to re-encode the file to a format that works in QuickTime Player.

Many Formats in One

The mov file format is a wrapper and can represent many different media formats internally.

With the Finder, use Get Info on the mov file. What do you see in the More Info: section? As an example, in the screenshot below the movie is really a collection of photos with cross fades.


Carbon Copy Cloner circumvents FileVault authentication? I have a MacBook Pro on which I created a FileVault partition.  To access it, I click on the .dmg file, OSX asks for the password, then it mounts the partition in a readable form.  So far so good.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make backups of my MBP onto an external USB drive.  I recently decided to test the CCC image by plugging in the USB drive and booting the MBP with the startup manager (pressing Option during startup).  The backup image was offered as a startup volume, so I selected it.  The machine booted, albeit slowly.  So far so good.

I got to the log in screen, I logged in, and then navigated to my encrypted .dmg file.  I clicked on it.  Much to my astonishment and consternation, it duly mounted the partition without asking for my password.

Does this mean that
(a) the "encrypted partition" on my MBP drive isn't really safe?  Or
(b) the CCC image somehow circumvents the authentication mechanism?

[FWIW, I'm 95% certain that the FileVault partition was NOT mounted when I ran the CCC backup.  If it was mounted, I could see that as an explanation to what happened.]

Either way, it seems that something is really broken.  The whole reason for encrypting the partition is to protect the contents.  Just because it's on a backup drive doesn't mean it should be readable without authentication.

Can someone explain what's going on here?

UPDATE

I noticed the following in the CCC release notes:

  There is a bug in OS X Yosemite's diskutil command-line utility in
  which it will unlock and attach a FileVault-protected volume, but not
  mount that volume. This contradicts past behavior as well as the
  documentation for this utility. This update offers a workaround to
  this OS X Yosemite bug.

Should I assume this is the problem?  If so, what can I do to protect the data on the FileVault?

An encrypted disk image is not a FileVault volume, those are two different things. It sounds like you might have the password for the encrypted disk image in your login keychain. CCC isn't "circumventing" anything... And no, the diskutil bug in Yosemite is not related to this behavior.


Snow Leopard Server as a Parallels VM Basic question. I have a licensed copy of Snow Leopard Server, and I want to run it in Parallels 8 as a guest OS. Can this be done?

Yes, you can run Snow Leopard and Leopard Server as a guest. You cannot, however, run Leopard or Snow Leopard NON-server OS as a guest, as it is prohibited via Apple's EULA.

EDIT: See Parallels KB here.


How to downgrade from iOS 4.3.5 to iOS 4.2.1? Just got a defect report that application is crashing in iPhone3GS using iOS 4.2.1. No problems with iPhone3GS using iOS 4.3.5 or iPhone4 using iOS 4.1.

Question: How can I downgrade some device to iOS 4.2.1? Actually trying to upgrade iPhone4 running iOS4.1 to 4.2.1 using "restore" feature, if that makes any difference. Btw that device has never been upgrades, since iOS 4.1 was defined as lowest supported version.

Found iOS 4.2.1 restore file for iPhone4 using google. Trying to install it gives error note:

The iPhone "Device Name" could not be restored.
The device isn't eligible for the requested build.
[More Information / OK]

When following the More Information link I get to page with a checkilist. Here's my answers:

Yes, I'm admin
Using iTunes 10.4.1, which is latest available. Too new?
Using Snow Lion 10.6.8, but I guess this should be enough
No other USB devices connected
Security settings should be ok, this computer has never been used for jailbreaking

iPhoneUpdater log says something about "iTunes: Restore error 3194" and that "can't find SSOClient.framework". First is according to google related to jailbreaking i.e. some redirection. I don't think that's the problem here (at least etc/hosts file is clean, no changes there). No idea what the second error note means or whether it's just a side-effect of the first one.

Laptop is using Point Check harddisk encryption, but that shouldn't interfere in this way either. Right? Trying DFU mode didn't either help, not able to install 4.2.1.

What could be the problem? What could I try next? Is jailbreaking REALLY the only possible solution... Why would Apple want me to do that? No, forget the last question.

I'm using the device ONLY for development and got it (as well as the laptop) from customer. Could there be something about my login username not being allowed to update firmware, since device was first time used/registered/whatever by another username maybe in different machine?

Firstly, search Google for "download ios 4.2.1" and download the correct version for your device. If it's in a zip, unzip it, but you should end up with an .ipsw file.

Open iTunes and select your device on the left. Shift-Click (or Option-Click on Mac) on 'Restore' and select the file you downloaded.

This should allow you to install whichever version of ios you have the .ipsw for


How to hide folders on a windows portable disk when viewed on mac os x I have a portable disk with NTFS format, and use it keeping my private data in windows xp. Recently I connected it to Macbook and found that the folders I set "hidden" in windows still can be seen and read in mac os x. So, what can I do to hide these folders in Mac OS X? Also, I want these folders still to be hidden if the disk connected to other Macs.

There are two ways I know of.

You can start the folder's name with a ".", as in ".folder". This will hide them on any Mac, though other Windows can see them.

Or you can use the Terminal command "chflags hidden ~/Documents/folder", replacing that place with the path to whichever folder it is you want to hide. But I don't think this would hide them when connected to another Mac.

You might want to look into using an encryption service like TrueCrypt.


How could my Mac be turning the screen off when it's set to "never"? I have a late 2021 unibody Mac Mini, upgraded to Catalina. For some time I have had problems where the monitor will not wake up from sleep even though the Mac is running - I think it's a known bug in the hardware/firmware.
Recently I thought I had solved this buy setting the screen to never turn off:

I thought it was working but recently I am coming back to my Mac after several hours and frequently I turn the monitor on with its own power button to find the same problem. Every time I have to hard reboot the thing.
How can the screen still be put to sleep when told not to? How can I prevent it?

Try this:
sudo pmset -a standby 0

I think this has been helping with my 2018 MacMini (on Catalina) display wake problems. Standby is different from sleep, and not in the Settings GUI. standby 0 will make sure your Mac never goes into hibernation. (That command must be entered in the terminal, and will ask for your password. You must be using an administrator account, or one on which sudo has been enabled.)
There are also two workarounds for this that may be helpful.

Always turn the monitor on first, before waking the Mac (touching keyboard or mouse).

If you get the black screen, try putting the Mac to sleep and waking it again in a few seconds. You can put it in sleep by moving the mouse to the “sleep” corner set up in System Preferences, or with a key combination like Cmd-Option-Eject or Cmd-Option-Power (varies with keyboard type). Then wake it up after a few seconds by moving the mouse or pressing "Shift".


Most but not all of my Contacts are synching between my iPad, iPhone, and Macbook I have three Apple devices, a Macbook Pro Early 2011, an iPad, and an iPhone 5. The macbook appears to have all of my contacts synched but the iPad is missing a few and the iPhone is missing even more. Each device is connected to the same Apple ID and Contacts is turned on under the iCloud settings for each. I'm not sure what else I can do to get this straightened out.

Make sure that the contacts that are on the MacBook Pro are also in iCloud (www.icloud.com/#contacts) by acknowledging the amount of contacts listed. Including the ones that are missing from your iPad and iPhone. If so, then all you need to do is to turn iCloud Contacts off and back on for the iPad and iPhone.

If they aren't there then these contacts are saved to the MacBook's hard drive. To migrate them, you'll 1st need to make sure that you are on a supported MacOS version. I believe MacOS Lion 10.7.2 or newer is required:

  If you have already enabled contact syncing:

  Open contacts, then go to users and groups and choose only your On My Mac Contacts to display.

  Ensure that nothing is typed in the search field. You might want to backup all of your contacts before you begin. Click to select the first contact and shift-click the last to select them all (or Cmd + A to select all. Then go to File and then Export to vcard and then save it to your desktop (Do another Export and save it to Documents for backup). Delete all the contacts from Address Book (using your delete key). Make sure your iCloud account is your default account (contacts -> preferences > general). Select All iCloud contacts from users and groups. Drag the file you previously dragged to your desktop back onto Address Book.

  That should merge those Mac contacts with your iCloud contacts.


Resetting old MacBook Air to factory defaults I got an old MacBook Air. I know very little about it, because I got it as a workstation in a new job and nobody has any info about it.

I'm also a Mac newbie. These are the specs: it's running Snow Leopard, it has 128GB SSD, Core 2 Duo 1,86 GHz CPU and 2GB RAM.

I'm trying to factory reset it but don't know how.

Which MacBook edition is it? 2010 or 2011? How do I factory reset it? There is no USB in the box, just some CDs (and the computer doesn't even have an optical drive).

The simplest manner would be to use the Air's Remote Disc functionality to re-install the OS using an erase and install.


How can I take a screenshot on an iPhone while Guided Access is on? I’m trying to take a screenshot of a problem that’s occurring with Guided Access on my iPhone. Is this possible?

I’ve had no luck with the usual method of simultaneously pressing the Home and Power buttons. This limitation exists even before I tap the Start button within Guided Access. Just being within the initial screen keeps the screenshot function from working.

I tried to find an answer to this question via standard web search, but found nothing.

Note: I’m using a beta version of iOS 13, but I assume that this same problem exists in iOS 12 and earlier.

You can use the AssistiveTouch feature built into iOS. AssistiveTouch gives you a software equivalent of Home button which can be used to perform a variety of device operations.

To enable AssistiveTouch go to Settings app → General → Accessibility → AssistiveTouch.

Once enabled, you'll notice a gray colored translucent overlay button on your device screen. Tap on the AssistiveTouch button → Device → More → Screenshot to capture a screenshot without touching any physical button on your device.

The captured screenshot can be viewed in the Photos app normally.


Apple's 2FA and the notion of "trusted device" and "trusted browser" I’m going to try to split off and expand some more readily “answerable” questions that were initially part of a different SE post (Apple's new 2FA requirement for developer Apple IDs) that was put on hold because it got too complex and unwieldly.  Here’s one:

How are Apple’s 2FA “tokens” implemented?  If this has been spelled out in Apple’s docs I haven’t found it yet.

Here’s why I want to know.  I do not use SMS, period.  Mostly for privacy and security reasons.  Apple’s 2FA requires giving Apple a phone# to even begin the process of enabling it.  They’re good enough to allow you to use a landline # as well, so good for them, but I don’t actually maintain any phone# anymore, so this has been a showstopper for me to even get started, hence the unwieldy set of questions in the previous post.

If I knew for a fact that a single SMS in the beginning was the only SMS that would ever be sent, then I could just bug someone else to help me out once and that would be the end of it.  From that point on I could use my offline iDevice to generate Verification Codes (right?).  But if other actions I take will trigger add’l SMS authentication codes, that wouldn’t work.

Hence the need to know how a device or browser is understood to be “trusted” and/or how it might lose that trust.

I can already generate a “Verification Code” on my iDevice that I’ve now associated with the dev appleID, even fully offline, so that seems great.  I have some level of confidence that device will continue to be “trusted” as long as I don’t change the associated appleID.

But I have no idea how this works with a laptop that will never have an iCloud account (or even touch iCloud servers), but instead is just an Xcode dev machine.  The dev machine isn’t normally connected to the internet, and when it is, it’s protected by a very tight firewall.  Once every week or so, it’s allowed to connect (via proxy, VPN, or different physical loctaions) to Apple’s provisioning certificate servers to update certificates.  It’s hard to know how or if I can set up this laptop to be a “trusted machine” and maintain that trust.  First, it will have a different IP address nearly every time Apple sees it, but also, once 2FA is enabled for that appleID, are there different actions I might take that might change that trust, like updating Xcode, for example.

On very rare occasions, as in maybe 3 or 4 times ever, I’ve signed in via browser to the associated appleID account to set things up and remove a device once.  But cookies are immediately wiped, and I never allow any “local storage” (from any server), so I’m having a hard time understanding whether I would ever have what passes in an ongoing way as a “trusted browser” in Apple’s eyes.  And if it becomes untrusted, when might that trigger an SMS authentication, as opposed to simply generating a Verification Code on my offline iDevice?

[update]

I found this SE answer, which addresses part of my question above.

How does apple verify my list of trusted devices and browsers?

If a browser is only trusted based on a cookie, that's awfully ephemeral.  Many people, if not most, clear cookies on a regular basis.

Still wondering about what might affect "trust" of the machine(s) themselves.

A device is trusted if it holds the token string given out by Apple. For browsers this means that the browser has a cookie stored with the string. You're asked when logging in whether or not you want to trust that browser, and that will trigger storing the cookie.

If you clear the cookies, then obviously the browser will not be trusted anymore. Just because you have an habit of clearing your cookies on a regular basis, that does not make Apple's choice "awful" in any way. Technically cookies are probably the most secure way of storing this possible with standards compliant browsers. At least it is a very strong choice.

In order to avoid the browser loosing the trust, simply stop clearing that one specific cookie. There's no point in religiously removing every cooking, if you do not have a purpose for doing that - and especially not if it directly works against you.

In regards to SMS messages: You do not need to receive an SMS message in order to add a new trusted device. You can simply use the 2FA code from one trusted device to add a new trusted device. This is handled automatically by the system.

Regarding the many other questions you have put into your quite broad question: No, updating Xcode won't invalidate the trust. No, having changing IP address won't invalidate the trust.


Confounded by permissions problem on NFS share I'm setting up an NFS server (Ubuntu) to serve files to several Macs (10.7).

The way it's set up, I can log in from any Linux client and read/write over NFS exactly as expected. (I've set up ACL permissions on the server to cover multiple anonymous users and it works perfectly.)

I'm having trouble getting write permission from the Mac side, however. I've mounted the Mac Client about a million different ways, but still no dice.

I'm using the noowners option to mount, even, but that doesn't help either. (It shows the expected ownership and file permissions, and this is where I start banging my head.)

Check this out:

JAF-Mac:Arlington facemyer$ pwd
/Volumes/vianney3/Arlington
JAF-Mac:Arlington facemyer$ users
facemyer
JAF-Mac:Arlington facemyer$ groups
staff com.apple.sharepoint.group.1 com.apple.sharepoint.group.2 everyone _appstore localaccounts _appserverusr admin _appserveradm _lpadmin _lpoperator _developer com.apple.access_screensharing vianneynas
JAF-Mac:Arlington facemyer$ touch x
touch: x: Permission denied
JAF-Mac:Arlington facemyer$ ls -la
total 25444
drwxrwsr-x   9 facemyer  staff      4096 Jun  6 10:40 .
drwxrwsr-x  47 facemyer  staff      4096 Jun  6 10:44 ..
drwxrwsr-x   7 facemyer  staff      4096 Jun  6 10:40 2011
drwxrwsr-x   4 facemyer  staff      4096 Jun  6 10:40 2012
drwxrwsr-x   4 facemyer  staff      4096 Jun  6 10:40 2013

The really bizarre thing is that if I su to another user I created for testing this, it works as expected for that user. (I can view and edit the files as expected.)

Please tell me I'm not going insane, and that there's a reasonable explanation here...

Your noowners mention solved all of my issues. I would make sure all of your options are being applied w/ nfsstat -m -- mount_nfs likes to remove / add options and not list them when you just type mount I also am using launchctl configuration that runs a mount_nfs command, since automount was being unpredictable. I do see an s (setuid/setgid) up there in the permissions... I'm using nosuid...

Here's my working mount_nfs line, you probably can remove some of the options (some are duplicates), but I feel better having all the variations for some reason ;)

 mount_nfs -o "vers=3,noowners,nolocks,nolockd,nolock,nonlm,automounted,nosuid,hard,bg,noresvport,intr,rw,tcp,nfc"       <server>:/exports/myexport /Volumes/myexport

From ls -l from /Volumes:

drwxrwrwx  13 larry  staff   4.0K Jan 17 17:37 myexport

All folders within myexport are drwxrwrwx as well.

It's been an ongoing battle to get NFS and OSX working together but when it works it works flawlessly and fast.
AFP is on the way out, and Apple is sticking with Samba, which has always been a pain in my neck, whether the clients are OSX or Windows, there was always some sort of issue.


delete duplicate aliases created by itunes when adding songs stored in my external hard drive I have all my songs in my external hard drive, which is encoded in ntfs. When I add them to itunes, using File -> Add To Library ... it create an alias of each file in my /Users/<user_name>/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music  folder.

So far so good, but sometimes it gets confused and create 2 aliases for one same file (meaning the same file on my external drive). It also happens when I want to rescan a folder I have already added to iTunes, it will create a duplicate alias for all the files that were already there in iTunes.

So I end up with loads of duplicate aliases in my iTunes Music folder. It looks a bit like that:

<whatever the song name>.mp3
<whatever the song name> 1.mp3

So the second file is a duplicate. What I want to do is:

Delete the aliases from the finder
Delete the duplicates in itunes

As I have a lot of music, it would take a long time to delete everything manually. As I happen to be a software developer, I have written a script that deletes the duplicate alias files (in finder).

But then I end up with an iTunes library full of duplicates, that points to nothing since the alias as been deleted.

Is there a way to delete from the iTunes library all the files that can not be found ?

Try Dupin or Dupin Lite. Dupin is $15 from the developer's site, and Dupin Lite is $8 from the Mac App Store. I recently purchased the full version and used it to delete duplicates from a 57,000 song library. It did a very good job. It's filtering mechanism is highly customizable. It is not super fast, but it ran through my library in less than a day.

To specifically deal with your issue, you can set the rules to keep the file with the shorter filename. This will get rid of the commonly found "whatever the song name 1.mp3" file, while keeping the "whatever the song name.mp3" version.

Also, dougscripts.com should be your first stop for any iTunes maintenance scripts. I have found the following scripts especially useful in cleaning up large iTunes Libraries:
Artist - Name Corrector
Super Remove Dead Tracks
Search-Replace Tag Text v2.0
Track Parser
Remove n Characters From Front or Back


How to add the current slide number plus the total slides in Keynote? I am wondering how I could achieve something like that in the current version of Keynote for OSX:

For example the current slide is 3 and the total slides are 10.
And I want to show it like (3 / 10) and so on.

I could do it manually, but is there some automation for it?

Keynote has no such feature (counting the total number of slides).

Semi-manual solution: Add the total number of slides as a text-box " /10"in your Master configuration. Place it next to the automatic slide number that Keynote generates.


How to find tagged PDFs I have to organize a lot of PDFs and it's possible to add Tags to PDFs through the preview app (not the filesystem tags like red/blue/green). But how to find them? When I open the Spotlight and try to search for a special keyword/tag given to a PDF there is nothing.

According to this answer on Apple's forums, the syntax to use when searching for keywords in PDF's is like so:

kind:PDF keyword

If the keyword contains spaces use double quotes: kind:pdf "multiword keyword here"

Example of searching a PDF with the keyword 'proposal':

kind:pdf proposal

If Spotlight has indexed the file(s), they should show in the results.


How to rotate text in single cell in Pages on Mac? This is what I have now:

And this is what I would like to make:

Is there a way to do this?

The only way I have found to do this, (and probably the same as you have done to illustrate the question), is to insert a text box or shape and rotate the shape/textbox by 90 degrees. Probably not the solution you are after but a barely workable workaround


Question about Macbook Hard-driver replacement My OSX 10.8.2 crashed recently, I think I got a very good chance to replace my Hard drive as I need more storage. My question is: Can I seamlessly transfer my data (Include my iTunes music library and music playing history, iOS device synchronization record) to the new hard drive after replacing the hard drive WITHOUT using Time Machine? Because I got have no additional external hard drive for backup.

Thanks.

Yes.

For only a few dollars you can buy a Sata/usb external hard drive enclosure. Remove your old hard drive and put it into the enclosure. Boot your computer up using the external drive by holding down option when starting up and selecting your drive. Then download Carbon Copy Cloner (free). Using that you can clone over all your data to the new drive which you install in your computer. If you cannot boot, like that. Re-install 10.8 to the new drive in the data enclosure, then copy over all your data using Carbon Copy Cloner. If you want to backup your sync data and iTunes library, your iDevice backups are stored in your local library folder. "~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/" The iTunes library is stored in ~/Music/iTunes


How to disable mouse acceleration in Yosemite? I just upgraded to Yosemite and my current best interpretation of what's happening is that there's a new behavior that "helpfully" moves the mouse (and a window if you're moving one) closer to an edge of the screen when moving quickly enough.

I really dislike this, in great part because it causes very strange behavior when I'm playing a game.

Is this a setting that can be changed?

With additional testing, it looks like the mouse doesn't snap to the edge, but has tremendous acceleration in some cases (quick changes in direction?) which it didn't have before the upgrade to Yosemite.

It turns out Yosemite enables mouse acceleration by default. it can be disabled by typing this in terminal:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

After changing this setting in Terminal, you'll need to logout and log back in to your Mac.  Relaunching Finder will work too (option + right-click on Finder icon in dock -> Relaunch)


Command-Control-Arrow beeps (plays alert sound) in Lion I've noticed since upgrading to Lion that if I press Command-Control-Left/Right (and sometimes Down as well; see below), my computer beeps at me (plays alert sound).

It doesn't occur in all applications:

In Console, I can press any of the above key combinations, and there's no beep.
In Mail, it beeps if I press Command-Control-Left/Right, but not Up/Down.
In most every other application, every combination except Command-Control-Up causes a beep.

I can't seem to find any menu commands that it might be trying to invoke, although even if that were the case, applications such as NetBeans and PhpStorm are the proverbial monkey wrench here:  I have Command-Control-Left mapped to "go to last edit".  When I press that key combination, my Mac still beeps at me, but it it also does move the cursor to the last edit location.

What does Command-Control-Left/Right/Up/Down map to that my Mac is complaining about?

I've found a nice workaround.
Create the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with the following content:
<=10.10 Yosemite (Found on GitHub/Atom)
{
    "^@\UF701" = "noop:";
    "^@\UF702" = "noop:";
    "^@\UF703" = "noop:";
}

10.11 El Capitan through 10.15 Catalina (from Adobe/Brackets)
You'll need to create the ~/Library/KeyBindings directory first, and the @ and ^ characters are switched.
{
    "@^\UF701" = "noop:";
    "@^\UF702" = "noop:";
    "@^\UF703" = "noop:";
}


What's the best way to back up an external hard drive onto a Macbook? A friend of mine has a Macbook Pro, and an older 80GB external hard drive.

She is copying files from the external hard drive (which contains all her work) to the Macbook, but slowly because she's reorganizing the data at the same time.

I would like her to back up the external hard drive onto the Macbook, which has 750 Gigabytes of space, just in case something happens to the external drive.

Is there a quick, easy, preferably built-in way to do this? I would prefer a method that doesn't copy files separately (so as not to create a second location on the machine that contains all her work, gets indexed, etc.) but takes a disk image and stores it somewhere. The goal is just to have a quick snapshot in case anything goes wrong.

You can use Disk Utility to create an image of the external hard drive.

Plug in the external hard drive and then start Disk Utility--it's in the Utilities folder under Applications--and then select the external hard drive from the list along the lefthand side of the Disk Utility window.  Once you've selected the external drive, click on New Image at the top of the window and it will ask you where you want to store the image file.  Select a location and then let it do its thing.

Once completed, you can restore the image to the same or another external drive or you can simply double-click the image file to mount the disk and explore its contents using finder as you would normally.


Direct download of Bootcamp driver 6.1 for windows 10? Hi my macbook is a late 2013 15inch model. I just did a clean installation of Windows 10 ver 1607 (anniversary edition). It is the only partition on my macbook. So I don't have any access to OSX. Now I need to install the driver package, but I couldn't find it anywhere on apple support page. Is there a direct download link for the drivers? Thanks!

Update:

I don't have any OSX partition on my pc.
I don't need to read any HFS+ file system. That file system is buggy like hell.
The issue has been solved by installing OSX on a flash drive and run bootcamp assistant to download the drivers. Now my Windows 10 drive is running without any problem. And I was able to read the HFS+ partition on the flash drive. So this is not a bug for me.

just use https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier
found it on discussions apple forum
look for the LonerT's post Aug 25, 2015 7:24 PM in response to dioshy (quoting everything from there even though 2012 model is not your case but the solution still stands)

"1. Please see BootCamp 6 update not available on MacBook Pro mid 2012 with Windows 10 for the two methods supported by Apple to get BC6 drivers.

You can manually download BC6 drivers from Apple CDN using Brigadier (https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier) by specifying your model number available from How to identify MacBook Pro models - Apple Support .
Please also see Use Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp - Apple Support."
As a result you can get all of the Bootcamp packages for your/other macs.


What tool exists to identify the RGB value of a pixel? I need to get the RGB for a pixel that is in an image. Under Windows this is easy but is there a way to do this on Mac OS X?

I usually use DigitalColor Meter (in Utilities). As long as it's open, it gives you the RGB values of the pixel below your mouse cursor.


numbers: Copy/paste of cells messes up my formular When I copy a cell (see picture 1) and paste it (see picture 2) the pasted version of the formular is messed up.

As you can see there are some parts of the pasted formular which are not colored anymore. It seems as the text there got truncated.

Any idea what the cause of this is?

Peace!

when this has happened to me it has been a big pain, and happens more often than I would think, even copy/pasting from Apple's own templates after I've filled them out.

Sometimes it is because of the 'relativity' of the function.

Hover over the color-highlighted cell id (i.e. C7, or B7 in my example) and a little 'circle-down-arrow' will appear (in either the function area under the toolbar, or by bringing up a function pop-up by double clicking a cell).
click on it and you will see the 'relativity menu' in my image below that begins with: "(checkmark) (B7) relative"
You can get more info in help by reading in the built-in help menu:
"Distinguishing Absolute and Relative Cell References"

Sometimes however, the cause has to do with what the 'Cell Format' is in the relative cells in question that the pasted formula would reference

see the lower left portion of my image below (arrived at by clicking the inspector, then the [42] tab).

I can sometimes, but not always seem to solve my pasted formula woes by one or both of the above.

Also, just to be sure, the intended newly referenced cells do indeed exist, otherwise my solutions will not be applicable, as there are no such cells to which you can refer in your formulae!


75 gb of files in iMovie but no files showing up I have 75gb of storage used in iMovie but there are no files showing up there, How do I find these files?

If there is a "rubbish bin" like in iPhoto, you've got to get the bin empty to make actual room.


iPhone data usage broken down by app My iPhone 4 data usage suddenly spiked. From using 30-40% of my monthly allowance in the average month (3-400Mb out of a allowed 1Gb), recently I used 175% (1.75Gb) in a single day.

I have to assume that they numbers from my carrier are more or less correct. The figure shown in Settings > General > Usage more or less tallies with their report.

There are a few apps (DataMon, etc.) which will monitor usage as a whole, but I'd like an app which can break down my usage by which app is consuming the data. (Ideally 3G vs Wifi too.)

Does anything like this exist - or can it even exist? My iOS coding skillz are not strong, and I can't think how I could do this, but that certainly does not mean that no-one else can.

NB. I'm not too concerned about challenging the figure, I trust it to be reasonably correct based on past performance, but I'd quite like to be able to monitor the apps and decommission those which seem to be using a disproportionate amount.

I know this doesn't answer the question specifically, but are you sure you are on wi-fi when its available and not just solely on 3G? I've made that switch in the past and forgotten to go back. Also, have you installed any apps recently around the time the spike occrured?


How do I share my Internet connection with another MacBook via WLAN? My MacBook is connected to Internet.

I want to share this connection with another MacBook via WLAN.

How do I achieve that?

If you are using your WiFi to connect to the internet, you cannot use it to also create a local network for other computers. If you are networked via something not-Wifi (Ethernet, FireWire, USB, etc.) then you can share your connection via WiFi.

Go to System Prefs > Sharing.
Select your existing connection under Share your connection from:
Select Airport under To computers using:
Turn on Internet Sharing with the checkbox on the left.
The network name will be the name of your computer.


Where is the sudo group or is it replaced by group wheel On the Mac, there is no sudo group. But inside the sudoers file, there is something called the wheel and it says:

  root and user in group wheel can run anything on any machine as any user.

And it has %admin ALL = (ALL) ALL below it. Does group wheel take the place of the sudo group? If not, where is the sudo group?

The group admin is synonymous with the group sudo found on Linux boxes. Members of the group wheel have a special privilege where they can su (switch user) to root assuming that the member knows root's password. Since the root account is disabled, membership in the group wheel would be similar to membership in the group admin, if configured in /private/etc/sudoers. Since some Apple supplied command line tools require admin membership, the group wheel is a vestige from FreeBSD.


Network broadcast/multicast not sent by iPhone in personal hotspot mode Based on recent empirical findings, and based on various posts on the web, it seems that an application running on an iPhone with personal hotspot enabled cannot send broadcasts and/or multicasts out onto the personal hotspot's network.  Can anyone shed light on the cause of this problem?

The Application

I have an IOS application, built with cross-platform C++ code, that broadcasts and multicasts its presence onto the network it is running on.  The application works flawlessly when the iPhone is connected to a Wi-Fi network.  In this case, other devices on the network receive the broadcasts/multicasts, and everything functions correctly.  This can be verified easily by connecting a computer running WireShark to the network -- the broadcast/multicast packets can be seen in the packet trace.

Needless to say, the application works well on an iPhone connected to a local Wi-Fi.

The Problem

When I run the application on an iPhone that has its personal hotspot enabled, no broadcasts/multicasts are released onto the hotspot network.  This can be verified using WireShark, which shows no such packets in its trace.

Is there any constraint regarding using a personal hotspot as a network router capable of handling broadcasts and multicasts?

When I requested a web page on my "WireSharking" device using a browser, the personal hotspot responds correctly to all packets, returning the web contents.

Collateral Information

I have come across other Stack Overflow pasts that report the same, or similar, problems:

TCP connection not working properly when using iPhone as hotspot
Fail to send ssdp broadcast by personal hotspot

A good tutorial for writing such a broadcasting/multicasting application on iPhone is Michael Tyson's "The Making of Talkie: Multi-interface broadcasting and multicast".  Suffice it to say that my application conforms with all requirements (e.g., setting socket options SO_BROADCAST, SO_DONTROUTE, and IP_MULTICAST_IF where appropriate).

A reply to reference (1) above writes "Could it be because the personal hotspot introduces Network Address Translation?".  I filtered the WireShark traces to show only packets connected to the hotspot IP, and there is no evidence of the personal hotspot sending anything to a NAT address.

In summary

Can anyone explain why an iPhone running a personal hotspot does not broadcast/multicast packets, and how to solve the problem?

Many thanks in advance.

P.S.  I originally posted this query on Stack Overflow, and learned about this more Apple-oriented forum.

Quick-and-dirty workaround

I also ran into the same problem when developing an iPhone app that uses a UDP multicast message to discover devices on the network. Apparently the iPhone blocks multicast messages in personal hotspot mode.

However, iPhone seems to use the 172.20.10.0/28 subnet for devices on the personal hotspot network. This means that there are just 16 possible addresses. Of these, 172.20.10.0 is apparently not used, 172.20.10.1 is the iPhone itself, and sending messages to 172.20.10.15 fails with a 'not permitted' error. This means that only the following 13 addresses can be used by clients:  172.20.10.2, 172.20.10.3, ..., 172.20.10.14.

So my work-around is pretty simple: instead of sending broadcast messages only to to 224.0.0.0, I also send them to all the other possible addresses in the subnet (172.20.10.2 - 172.20.10.14).

Of course, to be future-proof in a production app you should probably check the list of network interfaces, check the IP and subnet, etc., but for my personal use this method is sufficient.


iPad uses for Computer Engineers? I've had my original iPad for a while now, but haven't used it that much (other than for couch browsing and stuff like that). I was wondering if there was a way I could be using it to it's full potential during my University run. I'm in computer engineering and that requires me to be programming alot (java, c, python, etc), building circuits, project management and stuff like that.

Is it worth buying a stylus (one that is precise and that can be used to draw circuits on the fly)? I was thinking of using it to program quick python scripts by VNC'ing into my desktop at home and using vim to edit.

Is anyone using the iPad for the same thing? Hopefully someone will know how to help me with this issue.

(Sorry if this is off-topic. I feel like I'm legitimately asking for help here)

You can turn your ipad to superb engineering/coding device with buffer editor. It's great code editor with vim support and it also supports autocomplete and syntax highlighting for many languages. You can find it from appstore https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buffer-editor-code-editor/id502633252?mt=8 or from http://www.buffereditor.com


Jailbroken iOS 8.4 iPhone 4S device is now disabled and requires to connect to iTunes I broke my iPhone 4S touch "screen and glass last year and left it unused because i bought iPhone 5 .. anyway.. recently I decided to fix it. I bought new touchscreen&glass and it works. However I entered few invalid passcodes and now my iPhone 4S says "iPhone is disabled. Connect to iTunes". Its running on iOS 8.4 jailbroken and if I restore it to 9.3.5 i wont be able to use it anymore ... as there is no jailbrake for it. I even believe I may remember my passcode if i had the oprion to enter it few more times .... so what I can do guys to be able to use it once again? Is there any way to try at least one more passcode that I believe should be the correct one or what basically i can so now ?

Per Apple:

If you enter the wrong passcode in to an iOS device six times in a row, you'll be locked out and a message will say that your device is disabled.
Unless you made a backup before you forgot your passcode, there isn't a way to save your device's data. You'll need to erase your device, which deletes all of your data and settings.


New powercord for MacBook I am considering going on eBay to try and buy a new powercord for my MacBook. I know that phones often advise that you only use the official charger, so I was wondering if the same warning applied for laptops and if so, I serious I should take the warning.

Apple owns a patent on the magsafe connector and hasn't licensed anyone else to make one, I'd be very wary of buying a third party one if you find one at all.

However, best I can tell a magsafe charger from any macbook seems to work with any other one, but if you get one with less wattage than your original it will charge slower.


My battery died while El Capitan was installing Like it says above, my battery died. And when I charged it again it din't work. I logged in, and while it's charging it just restarts again, and again, and again.
I tried reinstalling the OS, but my macbook wont connect to any internet. And because it's a MacBook Air, it doesn't have a adapter (I'm not sure how to call it), for the internet.

You can do Internet Recovery using a WiFi connection, if available.

If not, you have two other options:

1) Purchase an ethernet adapter and connect directly to your modem or router and perform the Internet Recovery.

2) If you have another Mac, you can download the OS and copy it onto a USB drive and install it on your MacBook Air.


How do I use Spotlight to find all MP3 that are encoded at 320 kbps? In order to save more space on my music collection, I want to use XLD to convert all my CBR (constant bit rate) 320 kbps MP3 to VBR (variable bit rate).

How do I use Spotlight to find all 320 kbps MP3 in a particular folder so that I can select all of them and open (and thus convert) in XLD?

PS

It was easy to find all Flac files since I just typed in .flac.

Obviously I can use iTunes to get a list of all songs that are 320 kbps MP3 but I can't open them from there.

Open up Finder and use the Spotlight/Search on the top right of the window.
Type .mp3 in the search bar and Finder will suggest you things like Filenames (Name matches: .mp3), Kinds (MP3 Audio), Downloaded from (...)
Select MP3 Audio type under Kinds section in the suggestion popup.
There is a secondary toolbar which appears below the main Finder toolbar and above the search results, which has options like Search (This Mac) (User home) (Shared)  Save button  (on right side) and + icon
Click on the Plus icon in the right most corner of this toolbar. This will give you a list of filters/attributes that you can apply to current search. For eg. Kind, filesize, created date etc
From the filter type menu choose "Other..." and enable "Audio bit rate" attribute.
Now select the newly enabled "Audio bit rate" attribute with equals condition and enter 320000 as the value.

You will see a list of files which are encoded with 320kbps bit rate.

To see files with 128kbps change the value to 128000


Using Windows to boot up a hard drive with Mac OS in a virtual window I have the latest Mac OS X Mavericks installed onto a hard drive which I can boot from. As I mainly use a Windows machine, is there a way to boot up the hard drive in a virtual window on Windows, without having to reboot and change the BIOS drive boot order to access OS X Mavericks?

First, understand that the Mac O/S is licensed only for use on Apple hardware, and as such doing what you want to do is not exactly legal...

Generally speaking it is possible to virtualize the Mac O/S. I, myself, have done this using Virtualbox and an older version of the O/S so I can run some older applications. That said this has been virtualized on Mac O/S, not in Windows like you want.

However it should (YMMV) be possible to take a VM created in Virtualbox on a Mac and copy the files to a PC and run them in Virtualbox on a PC.

However using an installation of Mac O/S on a physical hard drive, I kind of doubt it as PCs have no native way of reading or writing to HFS+ formatted disks. And it is likely that you have to install the O/S within the VM for it to work there.

Also you need special bootloaders and the like to run the Mac O/S on PC hardware. Such is called a Hackintosh and setting up the O/S to do so is a bit of a black art. But plenty of people do it. A bit of searching should pull up relevant links.

There are applications that will let you convert from physical (hard drive) to virtual (VM hard drive file) but I have no experience with that. It might work but depends on your interest in spending the time trying to get it to work.


macOS: Is there a way to maximize a window but does not go full-screen? I want to expand window of an app in macOS, but I don't want to go into fullscreen mode.
Is this possible somehow by clicking some button?
Oh nvm, I can double click the application bar.. and it expands fully.

Move the cursor to any one of the four corners of the Window. When the cursor icon changes to a diagonal bi-directional arrow, press and hold the Option key and double click.

This would maximize the window to occupy the entire screen without it entering into full-screen mode.


Disable scroll-induced antialiasing in Preview and other PDF applications Scrolling (with two fingers on the trackpad) in Preview.app (and TeXShop.app) annoyingly blurs PDF text and I would like to disable the over-compensating anti-aliasing. I like the anti-aliasing while not scrolling just fine.

The image below has two Cmd+Shift+3 screenshots from within Preview, the top half with two fingers still on the trackpad after scrolling, the bottom half after releasing them. The boxed snippets were manually enlarged in Photoshop.

I have disabled two-finger zoom and two-finger rotation in System Preferences > Trackpad, and unchecked "Use LCD font smoothing when available" in System Preferences > General.

I have also set various defaults values, to no avail (the values below are just one combination of many I've tried):

for domain in com.apple.CoreGraphics CoreGraphics -g
do
  echo $domain
  defaults read $domain | egrep -i 'scal|smooth|alias|scroll'
done
> com.apple.CoreGraphics
>     CGFontDisableAntialiasing = 1;
> CoreGraphics
>     CGFontDisableAntialiasing = 1;
> -g
>     AppleAntiAliasingThreshold = 128;
>     AppleFontSmoothing = 0;
>     AppleScrollAnimationEnabled = 0;
>     AppleScrollerPagingBehavior = 1;
>     AppleShowScrollBars = Always;
>     NSScrollAnimationEnabled = 0;
>     "com.apple.mouse.scaling" = "1.5";
>     "com.apple.trackpad.scaling" = "-1";

I would like for scrolling to always look like it does if I scroll slowly, and vertically. The ugly anti-aliasing (blurring) is most likely to happen if Preview registers any horizontal scroll (which is rarely intentional), and was more prevalent before I turned off the two-finder scroll.

I suspect the blurring of text is caused by a low-memory proxy being used to ensure high FPS during scrolling, especially on Retina machines, probably when using integrated Intel graphics.

Therefore I would suggest doing the following steps in the below sequence, in order to maximize available RAM and VRAM:

close all windows in all apps
quit all apps
disconnect any external monitors
close extra desktops in Mission Control
for machines with NVIDIA GPU, make sure your computer is plugged into the charger, or that Automatic Graphics Switching is turned off in Energy Saver
if on a non-Retina machine, set "Best for display" in the Displays settings
if on a Retina machine, set "Best (Retina)" in the Displays setting
restart the machine or open Terminal and type "sudo purge", the hit enter, then quit Terminal

Note: the purge command takes a minute or two to finish. I've found it can really help to clear up RAM. Restarting does the same thing. Sometimes RAM does not automatically get freed up like it's supposed to without these steps, at least on 10.8.5 and earlier. It may not apply to 10.9 and newer, but it can't hurt to try.

If you would please, both before and after completing the above steps, open Activity Monitor and take note of how much memory, CPU, and disk data per second is being used. Post your before/after figures for Physical Memory and Memory Used in the comments (or Free memory if it shows that). Also let us know if the steps resolved your issue.


Permanently remove icons from Dock I have Maps, Photos and iBooks icons returning to my dock after a reboot even though I removed them several times already. Is there some way to remove them? They seem to be set as defaults, can I change these defaults somehow?

This answers it partially.
When I encountered the same problem on El Capitan, these steps solved it.

Disable System Integrity Protection.
sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "delete:add-app" /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/com.apple.dockfixup.plist
sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "delete:add-doc" /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/com.apple.dockfixup.plist

Re-enable System Integrity Protection.

I referred to another discussion for PlistBuddy


Blue screen when attempting to reinstall Mavericks using USB I recently formatted my MacBook and used another MacBook Pro to create a bootable USB. Now, when I try to reinstall Mavericks on my Mac using the bootable USB, I get a blue screen in the process.

The first step is to make sure your MacBook is supported by Mavericks. Check this page here to make sure.

UPDATE

OK, having checked that it is supported by Mavericks but that it does not install from the USB, you have a few options. None of them is particularly straightforward, but here goes:

Burn a DVD and boot from that. This is probably going to have the same results as the USB drive, but it takes any USB-related issues out of the equation.
Boot into Internet Recovery mode (hold CMD+R, power on and keep CMD+R pressed until it starts to boot in recovery mode). Select the option to install the OS from there.
If both Macs have Firewire, put the MacBook into Target mode, connect the two machines, and run the installer on the MacBook Pro, specifying the MacBook's hard disk as the target for the installer. This will install OK, as long as the MacBook Pro is also supported by Mavericks.
Take the hard disk out of the MacBook and put it into the MacBook Pro. Install Mavericks on the MacBook Pro, then swap the hard disk back again. Once more - the MacBook Pro must be supported by Mavericks for this to work.

Good luck!


Failure to backup files from Mac partition while in Windows 8 partition I am running Windows 8 and OS X Lion using Bootcamp, and ran into an issue where OS X is no longer bootable (empty gray progress bar on startup).  Googling this error led me to believe it could be any number of things, but regardless it seems the best (least painful) way to solve it is to reinstall OS X.

I am able to run the Windows 8 partition with no problem, and thought I could backup my important files from OS X to an external hard drive and then use the Recovery partition to reinstall OS X.

The issue is that, when I attempt to copy files from the Mac partition (no issue with the Windows partition), the copy/paste dialog 'discovers' all the files and then silently fails without copying.  I have seen a few possibilities for this error, however in following their steps (take ownership of target directory, drag and drop instead of copy/paste), nothing seems to work.

I don't want to clone the partition in case if there is something bad that I would be copying along with the clone, leaving me in the same state I'm currently in.  If it is the case that the HDD is failing, I would still like to have the backup of the information I need.

I did manage to recover a fair amount of the files I needed through Windows, and if anybody else has this issue it is very helpful.  I never even considered this option among the many others, but somehow it managed to pull the majority of my files off and onto an external drive.

I loaded Windows PowerShell in Administrator mode and ran the following script (it was a script to only copy directories that have files, but without modification it worked successfully):

$path = 'C:\source\directory'
$destination = 'e:\destination\directory’

Get-ChildItem $path -Directory |
    Foreach-Object  {if (($_.enumeratefiles() | measure).count -gt 0)
    {
        Copy-Item -path $_.fullname -Destination $destination -Recurse}
    }


Are there replacements for the reg commad on Mac OS X 10.9 I believe reg existed on 10.8 and lower as documented here - https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/reg.1.html

However, in OS X 10.9 I only find man page but not the command. My requirement is to passively monitor the processor registers (dump them). It looks like 'reg' does that.

Is there an equivalent utility that I download somewhere for MAC OS X >= 10.9.

As far as I can tell reg is only available in Lion (/usr/bin/reg and /usr/share/man/man1/reg.1). I haven't been able to find it in any other system version in the 10.6 - 10.11 range.

Executing it in 10.10 works but I think some hardware data is missing. E.g my CPUs weren't recognized and I can't list any PCI device. Depending on the hardware your mileage will vary.


Finder Icon to Go to Enclosing Directory Finder icon to to navigate up one level to enclosing directory would make my life so much easier. Especially when I have to move up several directory levels.

I realize there's a keyboard shortcut, but sometimes I navigate via mouse only.

There's also a menu option, but that's more involved than just clicking an icon -- which has been available in Linux & windows forever.

I can't imagine why Apple would not include such a self-evident function, given that they're better in almost every other category of user experience.

There was once an app to create such an icon, but I don't think it goes with High Sierra (up to & including Sierra only).

info edited in from deleted 'answer'

You must have at some point removed this, as it's there by default.
You've also changed the toolbar to text view only, so it may have happened at that time.

Right click anywhere in that top bar & select Customise Toolbar... [It's also in the Finder View Menu.]

Drag "Path" back into the toolbar.

Clicking on it reveals the entire hierarchy.

You can also Cmd/click on the folder name/icon, top centre of the Finder window.


Mail.app: weird, huge numbers of messages in title bar, Time Machine quit working A friend has been having problems with Mail. Notably, Time Machine is no longer working within Mail, and Mail says it has huge and seemingly arbitrary numbers of messages in the title bar.

For example, while looking at a folder that clearly has just a couple dozen messages, the title bar says something like: "Inbox (6487431079 messages, 524981056 unread)". This is similar, with different numbers, for every mailbox. We ran out of time and I did not try it on a brand new mailbox.

This happened after my friend switched Internet providers, and all his old email disappeared. I tried "Mailbox --> Rebuild" to no avail. While in Mail, Time Machine showed no messages backed up since the switch, and no messages at all prior to the switch. He was using POP for both providers.

Using Finder, I looked through his backup disk, and found the old email and restored it manually, but it still has those strange numbers, and Time Machine does not work within Mail, although it still seems to be backing up his ~/Library/Mail folder.

I tried quitting Mail, deleting his ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.* files, and re-starting, but no change in the weird numbers.

He was quite behind in updates, and I cycled through Software Update until nothing else installed -- still weird numbers. (This is Snow Leopard.)

Is there some other preferency file I should be deleting to fix this? Any other ideas?

I remember solving an issue similar to this, one or two years ago. I don't have a Snow Leopard system handy so unfortunately I cannot be absolutely sure as to the process required. The steps below are what I would do for a Lion system with some notes attached where possible adaptations would be required.

As you suspected, the problem is due to a file becoming corrupt.

Solution:

Quit Mail if it is open.
In Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail and backup the folder contents
While still in ~/Library/Mail, open the subfolder called V2. Inside that folder there should be a folder called MailData, open that folder.
(If you do not see a folder called V2 or a folder called MailData, it is because the folder structure may have changed between OS versions. Proceed to step four in this case.)
There are a few possible files which may need to be removed from the User's mail folder. In the MailData folder (or if you do not have a MailData folder) search for and move the following files to the Desktop:

(I suggest removing them one at a time and relaunching Mail after removing each file. If it works, your job is done.)

DefaultCounts
LSMMap2
Envelope Index   --  (If you have to delete this file, delete the following two at the same time)
Envelope Index-shm
Envelope Index-wal

A possible pitfall to this method: There is a possibility all messages in folders could get marked as Unread. Depending on the users workflow, this could also be a problem; though a solvable problem through sorting read and unread messages temporarily into different folders and recombining later.


Re-numerate selected tracks in iTunes I often do the same job: select each track in selected set of tracks, open Properties of track and set the number of the track.

I am just wondring may be there is a script or plugin for iTunes to re-enumerate tracks.

For example, I have tracks:

Number of Track     Song Name
---------------     ---------
      1               Song A
      2               Song X
      5               Song Y
      8               Song S
     12               Song H

I want to select tracks 5,8 and 12 and enumerate them like this:

Number of Track     Song Name
---------------     ---------
      1               Song A
      2               Song X
      3               Song Y
      4               Song S
      5               Song H

Is there a way to automate this task?

Try this...

tell application "iTunes"
    set iSel to selection

    set n to 1

    repeat with trk in iSel
        set track number of trk to n
        set n to n + 1
    end repeat
end tell


How to put a long picture overlay on top without imovie making the image scroll This has to be the most annoying thing in iMovie. I just want a simple picture in picture. But iMovie crops the image and scrolls it!

I can't find any option to avoid this!!!

How annoying.

This could be due to a variety of issues and due to lack of details I don't exactly know what the problem is. So, instead I am going to answer your original question: How to put a picture in picture without any animations?

I am assuming both footage are on the timeline properly. I will refer to the top one as footage x and the bottom one as footage y.

Select footage x
Select the second icon from the left in your effects toolbar (when you hover it should say "Video Overlay Settings") (I say second because, although not shown in the picture, there is a wand enhancer icon before it.)

Make sure Picture in Picture is selected and the transition time is set to 0

Select the crop button in your effects toolbar

Ken Burns will most likely be selected and whats causing your issue. Switch this to Fit or if you need to Crop it set it to Crop to Fill
Select Footage Y and repeat steps 4-5

This should create a picture in picture effect without transitions or zoom-ins.

Images and References:

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22931?locale=en_US

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22921?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US


Why won't Facetime ring when somebody calls me? My volume is turned up, it's not on mute, alarms and other things that make noise work, it's not set to "do not disturb" or anything like that. If I happen to have the iPad open when a Facetime call arrives I can see it, but it's silent and not ringing.  Facetime works fine except if somebody calls me it won't ring.

Go to ‘Settings’, then to ‘Do Not Disturb’ and make sure it is set to allow all calls from FaceTime.

Go to ‘Settings’, then ‘Sounds’, and make sure you have a ringtone for calls / FaceTime set.

Finally, make sure your iPad is not in Mute mode by swiping from bottom of the screen upwards and tapping the ‘Bell’ icon to disable it (or, if you have an older device, and you have ‘Mute’ set under ‘General / Use side switch to...’, switch the side switch on). Having Mute mode enabled will prevent the device making any sound when called.


Not getting Messages effects on iOS 10.2 (14C92) I sent my wife a message from an iPhone 7 to her iPhone 6S. Both are running iOS 10.2 (14C92), but when she received my message, she got:

(sent with celebration)
(sent with love)

... instead of getting the cool effects I thought I was sending her. She can see the new emoji that come with the update, but not the new effects.

Not sure what happened, but eventually it just started working. Perhaps there's a glitch in the release.


Storing whatsapp message data in iCloud to free up space on phone? Ive got an iPhone 64gb running iOS 14
The storage is almost full and i noticed that Whatsapp is taking up almost 15gb. Most of this is photos / video from group chats etc.
I dont want to loose the photos and videos, but at the same time i dont want to store them locally on my phone, is there a way i can store them in iCloud ? Ideally i dont want to store the photos / videos to my camera roll, but would like to just unload some of the whatsapp data to the cloud.

What i think the best solution is: Go to Whatsapp -> Settings -> Chats. Enable Save to camera roll. From now, all your incoming photos and videos will be saved automatically into your Photo app. The name of the album with the saved photos and videos is called WhatsApp. But the incoming photos and videos are also saved locally in the WhatsaApp app.
So now you should enable iCloud Photos in Settings -> Your Name -> iCloud -> Photos. All your photo albums will be backupped in the iCloud. It is not possible to backup one specific album.
After the iCloud backup, the photos and videos are still saved locally on your phone in your WhatsApp app. To delete this, go to WhatsApp -> Settings -> Data and storage usage -> Storage usage and choose a chat. From here you are able to delete the media which is stored locally in the WhatsApp app.


How to sort photos inside a photo album in the Photos app on an iPhone by date [PC]? By default the photos in user-created albums are sorted by date added, NOT date taken. The user may rearrange the photos one-by-one (tap and hold).

I do NOT own a Mac.

I have had the same question for years. Unfortunately, iOS uses Date Added and not Date Taken from EXIF for sorting. They even added Collections but Camera Roll sorting is still broken.
To sort the photos you could use one of the methods:

Jailbreak. A number of tweaks allow organising photos one by one or sorting by name/date. You would also be able to edit each photo's metadata on device.
Sync them as an album from a computer. First, organise them by copying or otherwise modifying the date metadata, then sync the resulting folder through iTunes. This is limited to the synced album and will not fix the camera roll.
Direct import and Photos.sqlite rebuild. Having spent another year on this and currently in the process of moving my 5 year camera roll to a new device, the method I plan to use: same as above, prepare metadata on a computer (set every possible date field correctly, e.g. with Attribute Changer). Import photos into DCIM. Delete/rebuild Photos.sqlite. Delete DCIM.plist, or set it manually for iOS to know how to name photos when you take them.
Make changes to Photos.sqlite. This should work unless Apple modifies databases. This is sort of the best option available without resorting to mass EXIF editing/renaming, and will only work/make sense if underlying EXIF/file attributes in your photos is correct. If you can see metadata is wrong, this is useless. Details are here.
N.B: double check dates on PNGs/videQuickTime files and their exif is tricky).

Further investigation confirms this appears to work on iOS 11. Only points to note on later iOSs: clear out iCloud Photo Library folders CLOUD folders in DCIM, or just turn it off), and also delete the Mutations folder in PhotoData (holds edits AFAIK, if any have the same name as the new import you'll have weird conflicts).

Also, the way iOS generates ZDATEADDED appears to be dependent on indexing order and hence naming of the files.

So if you want the Camera Roll to be ordered correctly (without having to resort to SQL commands on the db) by EXIF/file data, you'd need to bulk rename pre-sorted (by date field of your choice) files in order, and then import. The easiest attribute to pre-sort by is Date Modified since all files will have it and it generally remains the same through all the manipulations described above. Obviously, you'd want/need to use something like Attribute Changer (Win) or Better Find Attributes (macOS) to first synchronise EXIF and file attributes.


Apps will not open, post OS X Mavericks update I recently upgraded my 2012 Retina MacBook Pro to OS X 10.9 Mavericks and shortly afterwards I updated the iWork apps to their latest version.

After they were all downloaded and installed, I noticed that in my /Applications folder there were, in addition to the newly updated iWork apps, the old iWork '09 apps in a separate folder. I had just assumed that this was just in case you still wanted access to the old iWork apps and so I deleted them.

For the first few hours, the new iWork apps were still working as expected. But, after deleting the old iWork '09 apps, I noticed that I could no longer open the Mac App Store. The icon in my dock just bounces once and then settles, unlike other apps which will bounce a couple of times and start.

I did some digging online but none of the results were recent enough for OS X Mavericks.
Many forum posts say to delete com.apple.appstore.plist as well as many other files but I can't seem to find any of these files anywhere on my hard drive.
I have contacted Apple but they want £35/$57 just to handle my support request.
The next morning, I noticed that the error that had caused the MAS to not open had extended to the iWork apps, as well as many other Apple apps including Calendar, Terminal and Photo Booth.

What I would like to know is how easily could this be fixed? To me, it feels like it would need to a complete fresh re-install of OS X.

I'm having the same issue on two of my machines. None of the core apps will launch (Mac App Store, Maps, Message, Photobooth, etc.).

One solution that worked for me for a short period of time:

If you hold Command+R on restart, it activates the recovery partition from which you can reinstall OS X Mavericks.
Unfortunately the "fix" doesn't last for long and you're either forced to rinse and repeat, or give up entirely.

There doesn't seem to be a genuine fix anywhere online that works for me.


brand new iPhone XS seems to run out of juice quite quickly - when should I charge it? I've been using a company iPhone for quite some time now, and I found it to be much better than my Android personal phone, so I decided to buy a 256 Gb iPhone XS. I like it much better than my Samsung, except for the battery - even if it's brand new, it runs out of juice pretty quickly (it may also be that I'm so happy with my purchase, that I end up overusing it - the UX is much better :-) What's the recommended routine for an iPhone? Should I charge it as soon as battery gets down to 20%? Sooner? Later?

Apple has a guide on how to maximize the performance of your battery.

Here are some of the key points:

Avoid extreme temperatures
Remove certain cases during charging(may cause excessive heat)
Store the device half-charged when storing long-term without usage
You may also want to check battery settings for what apps are using your battery and maybe disable background app refresh/location services for those apps
Make sure your display brightness isn't too high and enable auto-brightness if you want

Additional tip(not included in article): Keeping your device between 20%-80% helps your battery last longer. The website says keeping your device up to date also helps, but in many cases updating older devices reduces battery life.(the one exception to this is iOS 12 which actually improved performance and battery life)


iPhone app to manage MySQL databases Is there any app for iPhone where I can manage my server's MySQL databases?
Or any app to just create an entire MySQL database?

I've used MySQL QueryDB Client in the past. It has been my favorite iPhone app for MySql after testing out quite a few. It is certainly not perfect but it gets the job done when I need it to. I wouldn't recommend using this full time, only for backup.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mysql-querydb-client/id576948046?mt=8

Good luck!